From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Nov 28 2004 - 23:02:50 GMT
Sam and all MOQers:
Harris said:
"While Eastern mysticism has its fair share of unjustified belief, it
undoubtedly represents humankind's best attempt at fashioning a
spiritual science. The methods of introspection one finds in
Buddhism, for instance, have no genuine equivalents in the West. And
the suggestion that they do is born of a desperate attempt on the
part of Westerners to make all religious traditions seem equally
wise. They simply aren't."
Sam Norton replied:
I just don't think that's a defensible point of view - I can't see a better
way of describing it than as a prejudice, ie an opinion formed without a
full acquaintance with the facts of the matter. ... I think there's a very
interesting and fruitful discussion to be had, linking the MoQ with what is
good in the western tradition, but that can only be had when these sorts of
prejudices have been removed.
dmb says:
I'd like you to consider the possibility that this opinion is not based upon
prejudice, that it is well founded and well informed. Make a game of it, if
you must. Consider the idea that the Catholic church has a long history of
rejecting mystics like Eckhart. (Keeping in mind that we are talking about
the kind of mysticism described by Pirsig and other philosophers and NOT
necessarily what is called "mystical" within the church.) Consider the fact
that mysticism is rejected by scientific materialism, that the word itself
has come to mean something like "cryptic nonsense" in the popular
imagination and mstics are seen as plain crazy. Consider the fact that
mysticism has always existed as an underground movement within the West.
Consider the fact that an Anglican priest can discuss the topic for years
and still not understand what a mystical experience is. Your hostility
toward this kind of mysticism doesn't quite say it all, but is perfectly
consistent with what I'm saying and with what one would expect from a
christian priest. All of these sorts of things are a pretty clear indication
that the West very much has a blindspot when it comes to mysticism. Our
culture has a prejudice against it that goes way back, one so deep that it
is expressed in both the religious and secular points of view. As Pirsig
puts it, enlightenment is distributed throughout the world but the West
tends to filter it out the way we filter out the Dharmakaya light and such,
see?
And I'd like you to consider the possibility that your rejection of Harris's
opinion is not based upon a fair comparison of mysticism East and West, but
upon a fondness for your own culture and your own church and that accepting
his point actually requires that we OVERCOME our prejudices. Like Harris and
Alan Watts, the former Anglican priest who left the church over this issue
and spent the rest of his life trying to reconcile East and West, the people
who make this claim come from the Western traditions originally but then
look East to find something more. And of course of number of them have had
mystical experiences and need the East to help them explore its meaning.
That's been my experience. Pirsig talks about this cultural resistance near
the end of Anthony McWatt's Epilogue...
"The hardest thing for me to deal with since the publication of Lila has
been the complete disbelief of many that quality is or can be anything
real...
The solution to this cultural resistance to the MOQ may come from the Orient
where quality is a central reality. But there the problem is reversed. A
famous Japanese Zen master who read ZMM told me he thought it was a nice
book but he didn't see anything unusual in it. He was quite puzzled at its
success. Another Japanese tourist to America said, 'This book is not
interesting to Japanese people because we already know all of this.'
Schopenhauer said that truth is that short interval between the time an idea
is a heresy and the time it is a platitude, but the MOQ has managed to be
both a heresy and a platitude simultaneously, depending on which culture you
view it from." (Pirsig, 1995b)
Thanks,
dmb
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