Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id TAA23284 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 23 Mar 2001 19:14:21 GMT From: <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2001 13:17:09 -0600 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: The Demise of a Meme Message-ID: <3ABB4CD5.14022.8C6349@localhost> In-reply-to: <20010323105240.E520@reborntechnology.co.uk> References: <3AB9F107.24707.4CDB9B@localhost>; from joedees@bellsouth.net on Thu, Mar 22, 2001 at 12:33:11PM -0600 X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On 23 Mar 2001, at 10:52, Robin Faichney wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 22, 2001 at 12:33:11PM -0600, joedees@bellsouth.net wrote:
> > > > And, of course, there are the differing practices. Dervishes
> whirl, > shiites flagellate, a whole lotta people pray and another
> whole > bunch chant (some of each with burning incense and ringing
> bells), > quite a few sit and meditate (one-pointed concentration, >
> transcendental meditation, zazen), Holy Rollers speak in tongues, >
> and some kentuckians drink strichnine and shake snakes. But >
> everbody does something to hook in.
>
> So what do you think they're hooking in to, Joe?
>
> (I'm tempted to think there's a possibility of an intelligent
> discussion of religion here, but I'm trying to resist, having had such
> hopes dashed so often before.)
>
There are a couple of ideas; #1 the idea of expanded or
transcended awareness (which assumes that a) our everyday
waking consciousness is inadequate for the pursuit of self- and
reality-understanding and b) there are ways in which we can
augment or extend it, one of which is focused concentration, a
second is repetitive ritual and a third is the disruption of normal
consciousness), and #2 the idea of seeing beneath the apparent to
the real (which assumes the unreality of the apparent).
As to the first idea, philosophers have also pursued this
objective via the phenomenological reduction, or epoche, which
concentrates one's attention on one's perceptions and the
phenomena that appear to them by putting in brackets the question
of whether they represent any reality or not, and attending to those
phenomena precisely as they appear, with no presuppositions as
to either there existing an underlying reality, or there not existing
an underlying reality. The idea is that mistakes are usually made
in the hermeneutic interpretation of phenomena, where
presupposition-based impositions intervene, not in the pure
perception of phenomena, which are the appearances that they are
(it is undeniable that perceive silver stuff way ahead of me on a
straight summer road; whether I take it to be water or heat
distortion is interpretation, not perception). In fact, Both D. T.
Suzuki (who was charged with explaining Zen to the West via his
essays and books - Gyomay Kubose (EVERYDAY SUCHNESS,
THE CENTER WITHIN, ZEN KOANS) and Sokei-An (THE ZEN
EYE), although they also obviously wrote, were charged with
physically setting up schools here) and William James (one of the
founders of pragmatism and a strong influence on Husserl, the
founder of phenomenology) both used the same term to describe
their respective methods - radical empiricism. This is why I
referred to Stephen Batchelor's cultural-accretion-cleansed
Buddhism as Existentialism; it would have been more precise to
term it existential phenomenology. His first book, ALONE WITH
OTHERS: AN EXISTENTIAL APPROACH TO BUDDHISM,
explicitly acknowledges this connection, and another of his works,
THE FAITH TO DOUBT: GLIMPSES OF BUDDHIST
UNCERTAINTY, illuminates the central position of the existential
concept of contingency within Buddhist thought. BUDDHISM
WITHOUT BELIEFS is actually the performance of the
phenomenological epoche upon Buddhist doctrine itself.
As to the second idea, that the apparent is not real, it has both
Eastern and Western roots, from Plato's Cave to Maya. However,
it is itself false and a delusory misinterpretation of the perceived
that violates both logic and the phenomenological epoche. If one is
to strictly adhere to the phenomenological epoche, one cannot
assume EITHER the reality OR the unreality of the perceived, but
must remail agnostic concerning it. Whatever may underly
perceptions, however, we can say one thing about it; that is, that
the whole in-itself must noncontradictorally contain the for-us
component as a part or aspect. In other words, whatever the
ultimate reality of the cause of any particular perception of ours
might be, it must be so that, when confronted with our perceptual
apparati, our perception results. If this mereological maxim
(mereology - the philosophy of wholes and parts) does not hold,
then any perceptual connection between mind and world is
invalidated, both science and spirituality are unsound and useless
disciplines, and we are condemned as a species to total mass
ignorance - a difficult conclusion to accept, considering how
technologically successful we have been at using our minds,
informed via our perceptions, to guide our physical manipulation of
that intersubjectively shared world, and how linguistically
successful we are in sharing with each other those ideas we
individually perceptually glean about it, and how commonly we find
those peceptions intersubjectively corroborated.
> --
> Robin Faichney
> Get your Meta-Information from http://www.ii01.org
> (CAUTION: contains philosophy, may cause heads to spin)
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
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>
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This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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