I thought I’d highlight a few posts that you might find interesting.
Eric Raymond’s Dancing with the Gods describes his experiences with the neo-pagan movement and how he finds ‘channeling a God’ a useful fiction to achieve certain states of mind where he can do things that he can’t normally do.
In Defense of “Spiritual”—Sam Harris defends using the term spiritual to refer to certain experiences obtained through meditation, psychedelics or other means that allow a person to transform themselves.
This blog post (The Making of Buddhist Modernism) makes some quite interesting point about how “Western Buddhism” is a world apart from Traditional Buddhism and is better termed as Buddhist Modernism as it was developed in Asia in response to Western ideas, but only later imported into the West. Another useful post is Epistemology and Enlightenment which takes a skeptical look at many enlightenment claims.
Daniel Dennet’s work on Heterophenomenology also seems quite relevant as it provides a more scientific approach to the project of understanding our raw experience (phenomenology). It’s discussed briefly in the following book review and seems highly relevant to meditation.
Atheism 2.0: Alain de Bois arguing that we can lift various concepts from religion including sermons, rituals and physical actions backing up ideas.
The concept of metis (Greek for “practical wisdom”) is also crucially important as it allows us to understand how religion or rituals can have value that even the practitioners don’t fully understand. I’d start with this SlateStarCodex article before reading The Use and Abuse of Witchdoctors for Life as SamZDat is sometimes rather tricky to understand.
Buddhism and “fit”—seems to take a more rationalist approach which looks to religious traditions as tools
I thought I’d highlight a few posts that you might find interesting.
Eric Raymond’s Dancing with the Gods describes his experiences with the neo-pagan movement and how he finds ‘channeling a God’ a useful fiction to achieve certain states of mind where he can do things that he can’t normally do.
In Defense of “Spiritual”—Sam Harris defends using the term spiritual to refer to certain experiences obtained through meditation, psychedelics or other means that allow a person to transform themselves.
This blog post (The Making of Buddhist Modernism) makes some quite interesting point about how “Western Buddhism” is a world apart from Traditional Buddhism and is better termed as Buddhist Modernism as it was developed in Asia in response to Western ideas, but only later imported into the West. Another useful post is Epistemology and Enlightenment which takes a skeptical look at many enlightenment claims.
Daniel Dennet’s work on Heterophenomenology also seems quite relevant as it provides a more scientific approach to the project of understanding our raw experience (phenomenology). It’s discussed briefly in the following book review and seems highly relevant to meditation.
Atheism 2.0: Alain de Bois arguing that we can lift various concepts from religion including sermons, rituals and physical actions backing up ideas.
The concept of metis (Greek for “practical wisdom”) is also crucially important as it allows us to understand how religion or rituals can have value that even the practitioners don’t fully understand. I’d start with this SlateStarCodex article before reading The Use and Abuse of Witchdoctors for Life as SamZDat is sometimes rather tricky to understand.
Buddhism and “fit”—seems to take a more rationalist approach which looks to religious traditions as tools