|
Saturday, July 30, 2005Stuttaford's picking on Deepak, who explores death as an illusion produced by our consciousness' clinging to the past."Death can be viewed as a total illusion because you are dead already. When you think of who you are in terms of I, me, and mine, you are referring to your past, a time that is dead and gone. Its memories are relics of time passed by. The ego keeps itself intact by repeating what it already knows. Yet life is actually unknown, as it has to be if you are ever to conceive of new thoughts, desires, and experiences. By choosing to repeat the past, you are keeping life from renewing itself."You think that's wacky? Check out this guy: He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it. (Matthew 10:39)Does not the second quote indicate the renunciation of "I, me, mine" and a life bound up in the comfort of known experiences in favor of a path to a new, unknown but renewing life whose alternative is a death foreordained if not technically arrived? The dirty secret of the New Age is not that its totally unheard of nonsense, but that a lot of it is a reformulation of ideas that have been on offer for centuries, not to say millenia. Chopra delights in connecting Christian theology to Buddhist conceptions of the universe and his connections aren't always that farfetched. I don't know if Stuttaford is a Christian. If he is, he ought tred carefully, as the Christian faith (which is mine, if not his) has a lot of goofy ideas that no sane person would contemplate unless faith impelled him to consider them long enough to realize the truth within. What's worse, since the New Age draws a lot on the old ones, making fun of its precepts without looking at them seriously engenders the risk of making a case for the risibility of your own faith. We all know that Deepak needs to lighten up sometimes. But in his casual dismissal, Stuttaford comes off as being every bit the "I know better than this idiot" sort he perceives Chopra as being. Reading HuffPo, I expect to find people who take their worldview for granted and casually dismiss those with whom they disagree without bothering to argue or consider the point. The Corner, though, should do better. (As for the humorless, self-righteous TurkeyBlog, let's not even go there!) 
posted by gbarto at 5:53 PM |
Archives
|
Day By Day© by Chris Muir.Old TurkeyBlog here.
