My brother sent me this obit of George Leonard from the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/us/18leonard1.html?emc=eta1). The name wasn’t familiar to me, and as I read it I was amazed to see how much we owe him.
Continue reading George Leonard: “We have heard enough of despair”
Henry Reed is an author, lecturer, psychologist, and teacher. This book review appeared in the January 2010 issue of Venture Inward, the magazine of Edgar Cayce’s A.R.E. (www.EdgarCayce.org) It’s a good reminder that it’s always easier to see the mote in the other person’s eye than the beam in one’s own.
Those who know me, know that I am not a worshipper at the altar of science. It has its place as an interpreter of reality, as an extender of our mental boundaries, but for at least the past 200 years it has functioned as if it could tell us the most important things: who we are, what we are here for, what the purpose of life and the universe is.
It can’t do those things, but the atrophy of religions in our day and the failure (finally!) of beliefs in social, economic, and/or political utopias (ideologies, in a word) left a vacuum, which scientists were as eager to fill as they were unqualified to fill it.
Nonetheless, when I find a report from scientists that confirms what I already believe, I’m happy to pass it along, with the caveat that the results of a study are no more than the results of a study. If another study tomorrow disproves this one, are we supposed to jump hoops to re-form our beliefs to meet the newer study? Apparently many scientists think so. I wish them well, but I’d rather anchor my beliefs in something a little more permanent, a little more solid, than this new variant of “the latest thing.”
This is from Science Daily http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091208155309.htm
For the past several weeks, we have been looking at a new way of seeing who we are. A couple of loose ends today, and then next week we’ll start looking at what the implications are for the way we lead our lives. Subsequently, we’ll look at society and the individual, and then what the guys call the challenge of our time.
This is an excerpt from Robert Clarke’s book The Royal Line of Christ the Logos, forthcoming from Hologram Books.
Many years ago I had fallen into a very deep and prolonged state of depression. I had lost all belief in religion, in there being any deeper spiritual meaning to reality, and what loomed threateningly large to me was nature with its savagery and largely unconscious cruelty, the devouring of life by other life etc. Nature, I knew, has its beautiful and delightful side, but the stark brutality and immense suffering that forms so large a part of it had become devastating to me. (As Jung says, dig up a square foot of earth and it will contain thousands of minute creatures devouring one another.)
Continue reading Robert Clarke on the sickness of our modern world
In response to my post titled When Science and Religious Beliefs Conflict, my friend Jim Price proposed a way of reconciling opposites.
Fundamentalisms and alchemy
Jim Price
I feel I have something important to say about scientism. Of course, scientific authority needs to be questioned. Religious authority needs to be questioned. De-mythologize, label the imprints of the human condition, and then elevate the conversation.
I agree there is a thing we might label as scientism. There is bias in every human endeavor. But if it is really true that 40% of Americans believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old (and I find that hard to believe), then this nation is in a bit of trouble. An unsophisticated public is easily manipulated by various authorities. Blind faith leads to Fundamentalisms.
Fundamentalisms are probably the biggest problem in the world today, be they religious, scientific, left, right, or center. Pointing fingers may be traditional. But what is needed is some good old-fashioned alchemy. This science/religion split is another opportunity to distill from the tension of opposites.
Continue reading Jim Price on scientism, fundamentalism, and alchemy
I don’t usually insert anything even vaguely political in this blog, though I have plenty of comments in my newsnet email list that I send around to long-suffering friends. But President Obama’s speech to the Nobel Peace Prize committee transcends politics and statecraft, and makes points that too many people prefer to forget.
Peace, after all, is not merely the absence of war, and it doesn’t come about merely by people wishing for it. Peace is necessarily borne on the back of soldiers, for otherwise it would be at the mercy of the first person taking control of a country and insisting on it being either his (or her) way or else. One would think that Hitler and Stalin would have taught the world that lesson, or good old revered Comrade Chairman Mao, who taught that “power comes from the barrel of a gun.” But it’s hard for some people to give up their dreams of living in a perfect world among perfect people.