As globalization strips the veil from the last inviolable topos of earth and real-time surveiilance renders every square unit of the planet physically transaparent in its utilitarian Google Maps and Star War strategies, the sacred plexuses of the earth also multiply in their resistant cultural geographies of surreal uptopia.

Peter Bishop teaches Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Australia. Bishop's entertaining and erudite analyses of contemporary material culture pry open the spaces where spirituality, imagination, cultural history and material practices intersect. In this first chapter from his book, The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred landscape, he presents the makings of a theory of sacred cultural materiality - the spiritual, psychological, aesthetic, cultural, historical, political, economic and geographic transactions which establish the utopian spaces of contemporary spiritual desire. - DB   more »

Imho, this is an important article about the pluses and minuses of religion, an interview with a former nun who has had many deep experiences of what she writes. Highly recommended. ~ ronjon

Karen Armstrong is a one-woman publishing industry, the author of nearly 20 books on religion. When her breakthrough book "A History of God" appeared in 1993, this British writer quickly became known as one of the world's leading historians of spiritual matters. Her work displays a wide-ranging knowledge of religious traditions -- from the monotheistic religions to Buddhism. What's most remarkable is how she carved out this career for herself after rejecting a life in the church.

At 17, Armstrong became a Catholic nun. She left the convent after seven years of torment. "I had failed to make a gift of myself to God," she wrote in her recent memoir, "The Spiral Staircase." While she despaired over never managing to feel the presence of God, Armstrong also bristled at the restrictive life imposed by the convent, which she described in her first book, "Through the Narrow Gate." When she left in 1969, she had never heard of the Beatles or the Vietnam War, and she'd lost her faith in God. ...   more »

I'm reading this book now and am quite impressed by it. Highly recommended!

~ ronjon

---

I have often wondered about the interface of key Buddhist concepts and major scientific ideas. This book is the result of that long period of thinking and of the intellectual journey of a Buddhist monk from Tibet into the world of bubble chambers, particle accelerators, and fMRI. ...   more »

The Dalai Lama has always taught enlightenment — but what few people know is he says that path includes lessons in modern science. -- And Emory [University, USA] will now assist Tibetans to realize His Holiness’s vision.

“It has been His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s lifelong vision to find a way to converge spirituality and science,” said Geshe Lobsan Tenzin Negi, chair of the Emory-Tibet partnership.

Next summer, faculty including religion professor John Dunne and biology professor Alexander Escobar will journey to the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, India, to educate Buddhist monks and nuns about modern science. ...   more »

I got to know the remarkable Helena Norberg-Hodge, the Founder of ISEC, back in the 70's, when she was setting up the Ladakh Project, for which she shared the 1986 Right Livelihood Award, otherwise known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize.' –- Her selfless, Buddhist commitment to protecting the indigenous peoples of the Tibetan high plateau from Western commercial development deeply impressed me. I'll always remember her inspiring photos of the unique and glowing faces of the Ladakh people who hadn't yet been exposed to Western culture. Knowing Helena, I can unreservedly attest to the quality and integrity of ISEC. ... ~ ron   more »

This informative list of annotated links compiled by Resurgence Magazine includes interesting initiatives in the areas of Activism, Agricultural Development, Ecology, Economics, Education & Community, the Internet, Political & Corporate, Publishing, and Scientific Principles. The few I’ve had a chance to check out so far look like they’re indeed doing important work; e.g., ISEC (the International society for Ecology & Culture), which I’ll post more info about in my next article. — Recommended.   more »

This is an unusually long article for SCIY. It's copyrighted by Eric M. Weiss, and was his dissertation for his Ph.D. at CIIS, the California Institute of Integral Studies, with a concentration in Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness. I'm taking the liberty of posting it here because, in my opinion, it's one of the most thorough and insightful treatments of the core concern of SCIY; the multiple & interpenetrating relationships between science, culture, and consciousness, placed within the contextual framework of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga. - Warning: This is challenging material, but I believe working through it and contemplating its implications is well worth the effort. - My deepest appreciation goes to Dr. Eric Weiss for his extraordinary and groundbreaking work. ~ ron

...Here we are, at the dawn of the Twenty First Century, and I have awakened to find myself living in a science fiction novel. If this novel were to be written from the standpoint of the 23rd century, looking back to the beginning of the 21st, it might start something like this:

At that time, the certainties of science had faltered. The great charism of the men in white lab coats had faded. The bastions of materialism had crumbled from within, and the civilization that it had fostered was losing its way.

Meanwhile, three centuries of rapacious assault on the biosphere were, at last, showing decisive results. The globe was poisoned, people were sick, species were being slaughtered by the tens of thousands, global temperatures and global sea levels were both beginning to rise. A civilization was ending, and in its death throes, it was bringing to a close the Cenozoic Era. The Earth was preparing for a fresh creation.

Looking back, too, we can see that the promise of the new civilization had already begun to shine. The iron cage of the material world, in which the species had been trapped for centuries, was starting to dissolve. Here and there, the experiences of the subtle worlds were breaking through. A few intrepid explorers had seen the promise, and had just begun to glimpse the vast freedoms and the limitless horizons that we now enjoy, but the darkness was still thick and Kali was dancing wildly across the face of the globe. This is the story of those early pioneers…   more »

Sri Aurobindo is not just the "foundational thinker" of "Integral Theory" – in Anderson’s back-handed compliment “To adapt a meme attributed to Whitehead: if European philosophy amounts to a footnoting of Plato, Integral theory may very well amount to a conversation about Aurobindo.” As I proceeded to read I could see how this is possible if one takes Sri Aurobindo’s Vedantic darshan, Purnadvaita Vedanta (inseparable from its corresponding yoga, Purna Yoga) as a western style speculative metaphysics purporting to be a Theory of Everything, an ideology which maintains itself as Truth through the Will-to-Power and becomes the defining hegemonic ideology of late Enlightenment Neoliberalism through the production of its world-subjects, something perhaps possible. But to attribute the foundation of such an ideological field to Sri Aurobindo is, certainly a new wrinkle to the abuses/misuses of his text which seem to be multiplying lately (as for instance through left and right perceptions of it as the foundational text for Hindutva). ...   more »

There is inevitable great difficulty in translating from noumenal experience to the realm of discourse, from raw reality to abstract concept. Experience is the forerunner of all spiritual teachings, though similar experiences may come to be articulated differently; the Vedas say, "The Truth is one, only the sages call it by different names." In any given exploration of higher states of consciousness, the version set down in words is of necessity an arbitrary, and perhaps nebulous, delimitation of states, their characteristics, and their bounds...
... the Tibetans recognize two levels of religious doctrine and practice: "The Expedient Teaching" and "The Final Teaching." The Expedient Teachings are the multitude of world religions, each shaped by and for the people who adhere to it; the variance among faiths is accounted for by these shaping factors. But the Final Teaching at the (often esoteric) core of all faiths is essentially one and the same. The typology of techniques which follows here is aimed at the level of Final Teaching, where doctrinal differences fall away, the unity of practice coming into focus. Religious systems differ by virtue of accident of time and place, but the experience that is precursor to religion is everywhere the same. The unity in Final Teaching underlying the various techniques is inevitable: all men are alike in nervous system, and it is at this level that the laws governing Final Teaching operate. ...   more »

As Suzuki (1958) points out, in every religion it has been the core experience of an altered state which has preceded and been foundation for the subsequent structures of institution and theology. Too often it is the latter that have survived rather than the former; thus the modern crisis of the established churches might be seen in terms of the disappearance in our age of personally experienced transcendental states, the "living spirit" which is the common base of all religions. Still, for each being who enters these states without a guide, it is as though he were discoverng them for all the world for the first time. A biographer of Sri Aurobindo, for example, notes (Satprem, 1970, p. 256):
"One may imagine that Sri Aurobindo was the first to be baffled by his own experience and that it took him some years to understand exactly what had happened. We have described the ... experience ... as though the stages had been linked very carefully, each with its explanatory label, but the explanations came long afterwards, at that moment he had no guiding landmarks."
This paper begins in Part I with a detailed discussion of the 'Visuddhimagga' account of Gotama Buddha's teachings on meditation and higher states of consciousness––perhaps the most detailed and extensive report extant of one being's explorations within the mind. ...   more »

"As one would expect from Buddhist practice, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, believes that there is a place for compassion in all aspects of life, even within the hallowed halls of science. In his most recent book, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, he uses logic and specific examples to build a case for adding compassion, a broader view, and some degree of subjectivity into what many see as the otherwise sterile, reductionist practice of modern science. But how can this be done? In his far-ranging treatise, the Dalai Lama explores this question as it applies to physics, neuroscience, genetics, and ethics. Using a classic Buddhist approach, he does not provide answers, but--through comparisons and contrasts of Buddhist analytic thought and the scientific method--challenges us to think of our own solutions. ..."   more »

I've copied here part of the prior ongoing discussion re "Derrida, Death and Forgiveness" by Andrew J. McKenna. This part begins with Rich's posting about Herbert Guenther's book "From Reductionism to Creativity, rDrogs-chen and the New Science of Mind," and continues through a fascinating dialogue re systems theory, the Vedas & the Vedantic Method, Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and Integral Yoga. - I noted Debashish's comment that he finds a lack in Buddhism (or Guenther's version of it) related to the "Divine Maya of Supermind." -- However, my personal impression is that the Buddhist ontology/method now has significantly more influence on Western intellectuals and opinion makers (especially Tibetan Buddhism, perhaps because of the work of the Dali Lama) than does Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, which most Westerners have little or no awareness of.

My questions are:
1) Is Buddhism in fact somehow lacking in its ontology and/or its methods, compared to those presented by Sri Aurobindo as Integral Yoga? If so, why has it become so much more well known in the West than Integral Yoga?
2) Is there anything those of us who are partial to Sri Aurobindo's approach can do to increase its influence in the West?
3) Is there a possible integration between Buddhism and Integral Yoga, perhaps along the lines hinted at by Debashish as a "gnosis ... which involves entire realms of practice through transformed ontologies (the triple transformation) ?" ~ ron   more »

I'm posting the following interview with Peter Senge and Margaret Wheatley, by Melvin McLeod, the Editor of the Buddhist magazine Shambhala Sun, to provide a bit more depth on Peter's views than given by my partial transcript of his 5-minute 'QuickTalk' that I posted a few days ago ...

Increasingly, we’re directly incorporating into our work different practices that have been around for a long time, such as various types of meditation. It started with the work on dialogue. We found that dialogue often involved silence, and so maybe we needed to actually cultivate the capacity to sit in silence. And guess what? That started to look a lot like traditional forms of meditation or contemplation. ...   more »

This is the official website of the Dalai Lama.

His Holiness’ first commitment is the promotion of human values such as compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment and self-discipline. All human beings are the same. We all want happiness and do not want suffering. Even people who do not believe in religion recognize the importance of these human values in making their life happier. His Holiness refers to these human values as secular ethics. He remains committed to talk about the importance of these human values and share them with everyone he meets. ...   more »

This is a fun site, for when you want to take a quick break from staring at your computer screen. -- Beware: Zen stories can blow your mind ...   more »