Descarte was brilliant, but few philosophers think he was right today. In particular Oprah Winfrey has become a keen meditator, promoter and disciple as has Goldie Hawn. It is though significant that such distinguished psychologists as her and Crook moved to adopt the key Buddhist practice of meditation.  In fact John Crook resigned early from his university post to devote himself to Buddhist teaching and practice until his death last year (2011) In his final book he described himself as a Buddhist Humanist. We also have given her a name and we all treat and think of her as a little person of enormous value.  If for some reason we did not have these very strong inbuilt reactions and if we were not to carry out the extremely demanding patterns of care needed both now and for years to come, her chances of survival would be negligible. However, a Buddhist does not think he can achieve the highest level of self-discovery through Buddha, in order to clear others’ sins and bad behaviors. We also have to accept, as Gotama was the first to point out, that we have no soul, self or substrate of consciousness and that means when we die our present being and consciousness ceases – even as our actions, thoughts, achievements and mistakes continue to have consequences and ripple on in and through the lives of others. Philosophy of Education1977) While seeing that both ideologies and religions are prescriptive belief systems, religions have a focus on the transcendent (in both senses).   This work also lead me to conclude that theism and supernaturalism are so imbedded in the Christian tradition that I could no longer operate at ease within it and I decided that for me the only honest step was to resign from the Anglican priesthood. This is believed to help a person achieve nirvana and release him/her from the cycle of rebirth, which is the ultimate goal in Buddhism. Dictionaries say happiness is a range of emotions, from contentment to joy.  She is not sure. It is achieved by overcoming ignorance and desires. It is about an important metaphysically but also abstract concept concerning actions and their consequences. His memory is sharp and he can name every relative he has met. They are looking for or do not want to leave a Church they see as a supportive and compatible community that they relate to. Your email address will not be published. At the end of all his study however he draws his own conclusion which is that what unites all religions and separates them from secular ideologies and belief systems like humanism and atheism is that they speak of the supernatural as a higher reality and this he sees not as something negative and flawed about traditional religion as Kee, Cupitt and Batchelor do, or simply as a description of how religions work, but as a pointer to the ultimate reality, or should I say The Ultimate Reality? I have no difficulty in saying that I wholeheartedly accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Saviour.”  He does not however regard himself as a fundamentalist and has written books criticising fundamentalism – which I have not read.  For my response to this account of his religious experience see http://www.johnbaxter.org/rs/supernaturalism/ section 15 Resurrected and Born Again. The basic answer is the Buddha’s teaching, the dharma, and especially the Four Noble Truth, the Eightfold Path, and the Three Marks of Existence. Buddhism defines the path to spiritual enrichment through meditation and insight. More than 3,000 Buddhist monks in 100 monasteries throughout Southeast Asia have learned the Transcendental Meditation technique, as a result of the work by a revered Japanese Buddhist monk, Reverend Koji Oshima, who is a longtime TM practitioner and certified TM teacher.. The best of a flurry of “Death of God” books around at the time it was a demanding read in which Kee, a very bright young academic theologian, carefully analysed all the main figures from the 19th to the 20th century who had tried to modernise Christian theology and came to very negative conclusions about how consistent and believable they had been. I was put off by Crook’s emphasis on koans the enigmatic short sayings much used in the Zen tradition. I can give a precise day when Christ came to me and began to transform my life with his power and love. In discussions of religion and culture I am surprised how often a simple fact is ignored. Why is it so pervasive?  As a post-Christian my thinking is set out in the article  Christianity and Supernaturalism and in my second more recent article Clearing the Way for Rational Non-theistic Religion (on my site www.johnbaxter.org) I argue that the big issue is not whether or not there is behind the cosmos some sort of ultimate intelligence we might call God –  because that is something we cannot know for certain one way or the other – but whether or not supernaturalism is credible or a serious barrier to understanding what the world we live in is like. Instead of it being stultifying or unbearable I found the experience extremely powerful, helpful and fascinating and afterwards wrote it up with care.  It will soon be on my site. Buddhists strive to follow the footsteps of Buddha in seeking to reach nirvana and achieving that state of transcendence that brings about freedom from the cycle of death and rebirth, desire, and suffering. To do so is to fail to recognise that transcendent experiences are open to all in this wonderful mysterious world if we are ready to open up and look, and that this can happen at any time in our lives and is not restricted just for those “granted the gift of faith.”. Who knows. Since the Pāli Nikāyas contain much more information about the teachings of the Buddha than about his life, it seems safe to postulate that the early disciples of the Buddha were more interested in preserving his teachings than in transmitting all the details of his life. Only someone who is prepared to take exercise and train can ever know the enjoyment and sense of well being that comes with achieving physical fitness.  The unfit just do not know what they are missing. It is that each person is thought of as having an immortal spirit which is in but not the same as the brain. Hinduism and Buddhism are divided into many different sects with a wide variety of beliefs. Materialism creates negative effects in the modern world, including environmental damage and spiritual barrenness. Frankly it seems to me this option so beloved of many members of the religions including Christians and Buddhists, is no longer an option for those prepared to look hard at the accumulated evidence.  As regards all the Christian claims of non mental “miracles” let us not forget that we have no more than doubtful, second hand hearsay evidence for believing such events as the empty tomb and the “nature miracles” actually took place. Although transcendence is defined as the opposite of immanence, the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.  As a result we live in a sea of memes ready for our brains to replicate –and they do. The first complete biographies of the Buddh… More time and more research will tell if the strong claims for the success of mindfulness training continue to be vindicated or if perhaps it might morph into something rather different. Whether or not the duality between this world and some otherworldly goal accurately reflects the original views of the historical Buddha, it is similar to what is found in most of the other spiritual traditions that developed around the same time, during the Axial Age (roughly 800-200 B.C.E.) It also involves accepting for yourself five basic moral precepts as a guide to behaviour. Rather to my surprise I found all the speakers were pre-occupied with attempting to refute the criticisms Kee had made of contemporary theologians. (Is this what  Gotama was getting at when he spoke of the chain of Dependent Origination?) Still, that does not mean training in mindfulness meditation is not worth while and will not be increasingly adopted as more and more people come to experience for themselves the benefits it brings them.  Elizabeth remembers the occasion because between her contractions I was reading a book which turned out to have a profound effect on my life. Mark Williams is an English clinical psychologist and academic. To achieve a higher level of inner strength is everyone’s responsibility. In a lecture in 1976, Ram Dass said that “psychedelic chemicals have a capacity to cut through places where you are attached and clinging, to set them aside and show you a possibility. According to Nichiren Buddhism, attaining - or revealing - enlightenment must be expressed and becomes evident in one’s behaviour, the higher level of behaviour as a human being, with compassion and wisdom - the deeper one’s enlightenment, and happier one can be. Siddhartha was also a social reformer of sorts. Further, author Stephanie Flood proposes five creative ways to achieve self-transcendence inspired by Buddhism: Explore basic meditation techniques —even if you’re an experienced meditator! He mimics our behaviour and replicates it in play voraciously, setting out wooden bricks as a village populated by members of the family. John Burton in his elegant paper Physics and Spirituality (http://www.johnbaxter.org/rs/physics-and-spiritualiy-by-john-burton/) in which he summarises recent thinking in the sciences gives us two good reasons to surmise that “there might be some giant intellect outside our Universe which is beyond human knowledge.”  These he summarises as, “The existence and intellectual enormity of mathematics and the possibility of multiple universes and recycled universes.”  At the same time he also gives us good reasons for thinking that this conclusion is not and may never be certain. Why do I say this?  Because who can possibly know what is an “objective spiritual reality which we apprehend by non-sensory perception” as opposed to a powerful subjective experience such as seeing a vision, hearing a voice or undergoing a conversion experience (as he says he did) or having a new and sudden experience of insight as I on my first retreat did? At this time I also got to know Dr John Crook, then lecturing and researching in the Psychology Department at Bristol. They learn to watch and become more aware of how the mind gets caught up in patterns of rushed, angry and obsessive thinking and how to learn to mentally stand back and become more aware of themselves.  The course is very carefully structured to introduce each stage gradually and participants besides their weekly three hour sessions are given tasks and expected to practice meditation daily and report back on how they have found their practice. A Time to Live and a Time to Die, Sherborne Abbey Symposium on Assisted Dying, THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE A SAFE, PAINLESS DEATH, The War on Drugs and Incarceration in America. By overcome non-virtues (negative deeds -> hatred & desires) & follow Eightfold Path & through meditation may gain nirvana, unions w/ universe & release from cycle of rebirth He is of course usually referred to simply as the Buddha, the awakened or enlightened one. Self-transcendence is the source of compassion, which means to suffer with others. And what do I mean by supernatural? He has written a string of academic and popular books and has become quite a star with widespread celebrity endorsement.  Â. In 1979 he launched a programme to teach what he called mindfulness meditation. If we make meditation a daily part of our lives, if we set aside a half-hour or hour every day to sit and watch the contents of our experience, we begin to notice certain regularities in the way our minds function. This can be applied to non-Buddhist clients and practitioners to enrich mental wellness, including a reduction in death anxiety . According to Kees Waaijman, the traditional meaning of spirituality is a process of re-formation which "aims to recover the original shape of man, the image of God. This meant nearly four weeks in a wheel chair, extreme pain and little sleep.  The mindfulness course however really helped me to recognise and deal with my emotional reactions to what was happening in my body and helped me deal with the pain – not by fighting it, but facing it – and my recovery, with the help of a remedial gymnast trainer was I am told remarkably complete and rapid. There’s a huge divide in society because opposing sides refuse to listen to each other. Precisely because there are multiple names for God, the prideful self is prohibited from thinking that it can capture or possess God. He also set up the Oxford University Mindfulness Centre housed in an impressive building where his development of Kabat-Zinn’s eight week training course is now being run. Precisely because there are multiple names for God, the prideful self is prohibited from thinking that it can capture or possess God. According to karma theory, every action has a consequence, which will be felt in either this or a future life (Shattuck, 1999).  The fruit of this work is to be seen when in 2004, the year her retired, he wrote an impressive and for many an influential work, The Case For Religion.  As Stephen Batchelor said to me the power of our old enemies Greed Hatred and Delusion which Gotama saw as the mental forces stacked against mindfulness and awareness are pretty resilient. This was lead first by Ajahn Sumedho and then Tan Amaro ( now Ajahn Amaro and abbot of Amaravati.). This states that if you have creatures that vary ( variation) and if there is a challenging environment for them to live in so that most of them die, (selection) and if the few that survive pass on to their offspring what helped them survive, then they will be better adapted to survive (heredity) and then you MUST get evolution or design out of chaos without the aid of mind. We might think of happiness as an ephemeral thing that floats in and out of our lives, or as our life's essential goal, or as just the opposite of "sadness."  Had I given up on my strong sense that there is no god and my complete rejection  of the supernatural, of a non-physical sphere of being, or the existence of a soul or a set of spiritual beings or of an all encompassing and aware divine spirit?  Certainly not. Stephen Batchelor certainly has stirred up many Buddhists, including some leading Western Buddhists who accuse him of throwing the baby out with the bath water in his rejection of “real “ rebirth and Nibbana as a non-physical spiritual reality as opposed to an experience of deep insight and awareness of the wonder of  the present moment. Kabat Zinn has said that while Galileo was an Italian, that does not make his theory that the earth goes around the sun an Italian theory, it is simply scientifically true and the same goes for Mindfulness. Buddhism is not strictly a religion in which one worships a higher power that governs the world. As Research Scientist at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge he decided to go to America and see if what Jon Kabat-Zinn was doing was truly scientific or based on hype. On the other hand, we can’t ignore the values that Viktor Frankl pointed out to experiment self-transcendence. Mindfulness is an introduction to insight, which needs to be applied to navigate challenging times. This cycle will only end when the being achieves Nirvana, the supreme state. Mental energy is the force behind right effort; it can occur in either wholesome or unwholesome states. We arrive at egolessness through a different path than Buddhism, but with the same effect. In sum, self-transcendence is a transformative way of making us complete.  He can identify himself in photographs unaided and so is quite obviously self-aware. I did not get deeply into this however, only going to a single meditation session which was when I met and spoke to Susan Blackmore. His field was Ethology, animal behaviour, and he also “was the first scientist to try to tell the story of the Evolution of Human Consciousness in a groundbreaking book of that title published in 1980, at a time when, somewhat paradoxically, the academic discipline of psychology avoided the issue of consciousness almost entirely.”( http://www.westernchanfellowship.org/lib/wcf////johns-life/. It struck me that a very down to earth and recent experience I have been having illustrates many of the points we need to consider. For him it remained a path worth following in the here and now.  Just what he meant by this however, I found unclear and quite confusing but his use of the word transcendence I found had resonance. They I fear often seem in the name of “faith” to be in danger of denying the very values or truth, openness, respect for persons and compassion for those who suffer that can make the Christian path worth while. At the same time soul, spirit and self can be used in a different non-supernaturalist or metaphorical way so soul, spirit or mind can be seen as that which is most important and valuable, as most characteristic about someone, as that which can be seen as the root or fundamental pattern of their personality.  This way of talking and thinking about our “spirits” sees us as mortal body-brains that have evolved into consciousness through our interaction with other body-brains and the world we are part of and makes no claims to us having an existence beyond or outside this world. On 19th September 2012 at a meeting of London Insight(http://www.londoninsight.org/resources/audio-downloads/) Mark Williams and John Peacock addressed a packed meeting with the title Mindfulness (sati) and MBCT, The Meeting of Two Cultures. It is the transcendence of all arthas. Rev. On the other hand, rejecting materialism entirely is unrealistic and leads people to be overly idealistic and unable to deal with the challenges of daily living. I have termed this constitutive characteristic “the self-transcendence of human existence.” It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other th… I was a keen jogger and this approach immediately made sense to me. No longer was atheistic  communism the threat to world peace.  Now all could see a dangerous clash of cultures fuelled again by simplistic, uncritical fundamentalist religion, Islamic, Jewish and Christian. Certainly Beau  exhibits all the attributes of full self-aware personhood and consciousness. The first complete biographies of the Buddh… In Buddhism, the concept of an all-knowing God does not exist. She was keen to discuss it and on getting home explained and retold the story with surprising accuracy and maturity to the rest of us. Zen Buddhism is a story that masters choose because it is very direct in a way that can challenge a person's spirit to be brave enough to see. Transcendence or transcendence? Some replicators  – say teachings about the need for generosity, or developing a habit of checking evidence carefully and honestly, or examples of acting with compassion and generosity may contribute to human well-being and the advancement of knowledge. God is described as "a personal God, unknowable, inaccessible, the source of all Revelation, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent and almighty." When the group of five ascetics 2 abandoned the Buddha, he saw it as a stroke of luck, because he would be able to continue his practice unhindered. This can be interpreted as seeking Awareness, Truth and Community.  Jon Kabat –Zinn and Mark Williams both make very optimistic claims for what the practice of mindfulness meditation could achieve. From nano-particle to galaxy all our observations have lead us to conclude that there are no exceptions to this. Who knows where it and Consciousness Studies,  Memetics and Neuroscience working with or against each other will take us in our brave new Googled world where ideas and practices fly around globally at an ever increasing rate. He also described himself thus,( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Ward)  “I am a born-again Christian. You certainly can practice Buddhist meditation whatever your religion or lack of religion, be you atheist, Humanist, Jedi Knight or born again Christian and whether you see transcendence to be something supernatural or secular.  What a future for Lola Beau and Eleanor. Buddhism does not reiterate the fact that there is a permanent migration of the souls. Certain thoughts return again and again, certain themes come up again and again. For her brief periods awake she gazes about, eyes unfocused, reacting to light. If we apply what memetics has to say to Lola, Beau and Eleanor we see them developing from a standing start (Lola) to become ever more efficient and productive “meme machines”. His acceptance of “real” miracles as objective non-mental events is also a denial of the assumption of the scientific method that we inhabit a totally consistent cosmos and I fear brings back the shaman. (Sura 6:133, Yusuf Ali), According to Vincent J. Cornell, the Qur'an also provides a monist image of God by describing the reality as a unified whole, with God being a single conc to yourself. In the Buddhist philosophy, the best path to enlightenment is somewhere in between the luxury of many in the upper castes and the poverty of the most devout Hindu holy men.  When one looks at the books, media and video games on offer for Eleanor as those for adults we see they are not just works of fiction like Oliver Twist but instead many are stories that make use of the supernatural, as in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series,  Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and many, many more. This non-dualism then sees no ghost in the machine, no soul and is generally the approach of contemporary neuro-science which is enlarging our understanding of how our brains function and is investigating how consciousness actually works, often with the help of the latest brain scanners which are getting increasingly precise in what they can track down. Still, while currently making great strides in doing so the neuro-scientists I am told are very aware that we are only  at the start of the most fascinating and mysterious project science has ever confronted. In sum, self-transcendence is a transformative way of making us complete. In his paper he (I thought very plausibly) argues that what the text is actually saying when it refers to the “unborn” and the “uncompounded” is that it is possible to reach a state where one is not constrained by greed, hatred and delusion – quite a different thing. Later that year, 1972, armed with the notes I had made on Kee’s book I attended a conference for RS teachers in Oxford put on by the Theology Faculty.  It was entitled The Intellectual Foundations of Christian Belief. 1. This means that the developments that have taken place in our understanding of logic and mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and the workings of matter in space and time we must recognise apply throughout the knowable universe – however much some may wish it were otherwise. This value involves dedicating deliberately to … Ever since reading Kee  – in fact before that, I have been interested in looking hard at the place of supernaturalism and theism in the Christian tradition. He writes: “Revelation can be seen as the self-disclosure of objective spiritual reality, which we apprehend by non-sensory perception. Apply what memetics has to say to Keith Ward and we might see that the study of the religions shows us how waves of replicators are sent out by the religion founders and their disciples and these go through a process of selection and further modified replication. Buddhists think that there are billions of solar system and that Earth is not the only place with living beings. In Buddhism, transcendence encourages the process of dis-identifying from our lives, because focusing on escaping the world one tends to accept it as it is.Buddhist transcendent meditation has a significant impact on more than just one level: psychological, social, linguistic, and more. Remember the bhikkhu describes the secular approach as adding up to no more “ than  psychologically oriented humanism tinged with Buddhist philosophy and a meditative mood”. Next there is Eleanor, Beau and Lola’s cousin.  She is eight and at primary school. The effect then of the Mindfulness movement not just on health care but on schools and society, on our understanding and on the practice of the religions, on Buddhism and yes on Humanism is just beginning. The more I listened to them however the more I found them unconvincing. Here are the f… Oshima adds that transcendence provides the natural basis for the monk’s subsequent prayers and practices. This sort of revelation is not likely to be inerrant or even very clear, since we can be  aware of a reality that we cannot describe very accurately, and which appears to us as it does largely because of the limitations of our faculty of  perception. The whole of life and my experience may not be like this, but this is what it is all about.” Such experiences of happiness, fulfilment, and meaning, such tastes of “nibbana,” “the kingdom of heaven”or transcendence we find right here in this world without I think any necessary recourse to a mythical, supernatural fantasy world, or belief in one. It could lead us over the cliff and we should never forget that. He vowed to put an end to all evil, by practicing moral prohibitions to counter the poison of greed. that while widely adopted by the adherents of different religions in an attempt to cope with the march of critical science and secularisation, is applied by each one of them as pretty much or exclusively true only for themselves (eg Jews and Muslims arguing over Jerusalem and the Temple Mount hardly see each other as sharing belief in the same God) and results in a rejection of dialogue and openness in favour of “faith” and a spurious certainty. 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