The John Templeton Foundation asks "Does the Universe have purpose?" Several answers are given, but the whole project suffers because everyone has a different understanding of purpose.

On one hand, there is transcendent purpose: that there some benevolent being or force standing outside of the universe (and sometimes reaching in) which created it and guides it; a larger something in which our own consciousness is reflected. On the other hand, there is immanent purpose: that there are features of human experience which are profoundly important and positive which we can get behind.

One thing you notice about transcendent meaning is that people never get around to telling us what God's purpose or plan actually is. In fact, many people say we will never truly understand God's purpose, even while they insist that there definitely is one and we just need to have faith. Our inability to know the plan is taken as a reason to engage in spiritual or religious practice, with the understanding that by submitting ourselves to God's will, he will align us with his purposes.

There's something very unusual about this move. The problem with the modern, scientific, disenchanted world is supposed to be the absence of purpose, but purpose is also absent in the religious worldview! It has to be absent, because if we could discover it on our own, what need would there be for God?

If religion doesn't provide purpose, what does it provide? What need in humanity is met when we are told there is a Plan which we are all part of? It uplifts us, fills our lives with cosmic significance, and provides the possibility of ennobling some of everyday actions. But perhaps this problem of purpose only comes up because of certain assumptions about our relationship to God. If we assume that we were created by God in the Garden of Eden thousands of years in the past, we are left struggling to account for the future. What was God's intention in creating us, in those ancient times?

I want to claim that the anxiety over the "meaningless" scientific worldview is not as it is advertised. We are not anxious because we feel no purpose, but because we believe that there is purpose, but science seems to cut us off from it. This is an outcome of our belief that the sacredness in our lives comes from our genesis, but we are cut off from its true significance, so we turn to God the author.

The interesting thing about evolution is that it is understood to mean that our existence is an accident, and that means God could not exist, but these two things are not connected. We could easily take the fact of evolution to imply that God created the universe without knowing in advance what would happen -- we might say that the universe exists because God wants to find out what happens next. This seems reasonable to me, but there seems to be something deeply unsettling about this idea from the religious perspective. What is the point of a God who doesn't have a Plan?

But this objection seems to come from not truly understanding that evolution does not imply that our creation was accidental, but that creation (as a single event) didn't happen at all! There was no sacred genesis that demands a sacred Plan to give it meaning. Or to put it a different way, we find instead an uncountable number of tiny Creations that have occured in every moment, from the universe's first to this one right now. In grasping this idea, we become aware that we are witnessing our own sacred birth in every moment. The creation of the universe occurs in us and all around us, so we are unavoidably implicated in the numinous of the now, rather than cut off from an ancient Genesis whose significance we struggle to recover.

We fight against injustices which cry out to heaven for vengeance. We are moved by a flaming indignation against these: racism, oppression, sexism, or leftist attacks on the family or Christian faith. This indignation comes to be fuelled by hatred for those who support and connive with these injustices; and this in turn is fed by our sense of superiority that we are not like these instruments and accomplices of evil. Soon we are blinded to the havoc we wreak around us. Our picture of the world has safely located all evil outside of us. The very energy and hatred with which we combat evil proves its exteriority to us. We must never relent, but on the contrary double our energy, vie with each other in indignation and denunciation. This is the dialectic of sacred killing..

Another tragic irony nests here. The stronger the sense of (often correctly identified) injustice, the more powerfully this pattern can become entrenched. We become centres of hatred, generators of new modes of injustice on a greater scale, but we started with the most exquisite sense of wrong, the greatest passion for justice and equality and peace.

A Buddhist acquantaince of mine from Thailand briefly visited the German Greens. He confessed to utter bewilderment. He thought he understood the goals of the party: peace between human beings, and a stance of respect and friendship by humans towards nature. But what astonished him was all the anger, the tone of denunciation, of hatred toward the established parties. These people didn't seem to see that the first step towards their goal would have to involve stilling the anger and agression in themselves. He couldn't understand what they were up to.

...

Nothing gave Nietzsche greater satisfaction than showing how morality or spirituality is really powered by its direct opposite; e.g. that the Christian aspiration to love is really motivated by the hatred of the weak for the strong. Whatever one thinks of his judgment on Christianity, it is clear that modern humanism is full of potential for such disconcerting reversals: from dedication to others to self-indulgent, feel-good responses, from a lofty sense of human dignity to control powered by contempt and hatred, from absolute freedom to absolute despotism, from a flaming desire to help the oppressed to an incandescent hatred for all those who stand in the way. And the higher the flight, the greater the potential fall.

– Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

Shame plays a huge role in our psyche, and it's a major area of concern in therapy. It seems like I'm constantly hearing about how our Western culture plays a huge role in making us feel shame and guilt, and I guess the unspoken suggestion is that Eastern cultures or Buddhist cultures don't have this, or at least not as much. There's an element of truth to this. Its true that some parts of our culture - the religious, traditional part - emphasizes sin and morality, guilt and shame. But we'd have to have an absurdly romanticized and distorted view of Buddhism to say that the same is not true in those cultures too.

In general, Buddhism seems to take a generally positive few of shame, seeing it as the basis for morality and right conduct. The sutras speak of Hiri (shame) and Ottappa (fear), and the Buddha says that these two states protect the world.

"Hiri has a direct connection one’s own virtues and integrity, while ottappa is also linked to the virtues and good name of one’s parents, teachers, relatives and friends."

This is a profoundly perspective than the modern, secular Western viewpoint, and has much more in common with traditional Christians such as Mormons and Southern Baptists. It's easy to whitewash Buddhist teachings and say "Well, they couldn't have meant the same thing as Christians!" But I think they did. Consider this:

The texts give the example of two iron balls. One is smeared with excrement and the other is red hot. A person offered these two iron balls refused the first because it is disgusting and rejects the second out of fear of being burned. Not taking the ball smeared with excrement is like the quality of hiri or shame in one’s mind. One finds immorality disgusting when one compares it with integrity. Not taking the hot ball is like ottappa, the fear of committing an unwholesome act out of fear of the kammic consequences. One knows that one might end up in hell or in states of misery. Thus one avoids the ten types of unwholesome behavior as if they were these two iron balls.

Of course, the Buddha did not think that all shame and guilt was good. He listed 4 areas where shame was not good: one should not feel shame in working at a job; in learning from a teacher; in eating food; or having sex with one's husband or wife. But the important point here is that these are considered "imitation shame", unlike the genuine article which is considered not only good, but absolutely essentially to the Noble Eightfold Path.

Out of these simple observations, we find a few important ideas:

1. We shouldn't whitewash traditional Buddhist teachings. Eastern cultures in general place an extremely high value on shame and guilt, and there is no doubt that many in Eastern cultures regard Western liberation from shame as obscene.
2. Perhaps they have a point. It may well be the case that shame for one's immoral actions is a good thing, and we are too quick to discard it. Truth, integrity, morality and character might be important parts of spiritual life.
3. On the other hand, the kind of shame that Buddhism recommends seems debilitating. In our individualistic culture, we only have our self-esteem to fall back on. We can't rely on family and community to give us a sense of identity and belonging; it is something we must create for ourselves.
4. Western Buddhism should be able to integrate the valid insights from traditional culture and modern psychotherapy. The middle way is a constantly evolving path, as new extremes become apparent, and new, more creative ways of resolving tensions present themselves.
   

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Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4

If you've ever wondered what people mean when they say reductionism, read this interview with Stuart Kauffman in New Scientist.

Perhaps the purest and simplest version of reductionism was voiced in the early 19th century by the mathematician Simon Pierre Laplace. He envisioned a "demon" - an intelligence which, if supplied with all the current positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe, could, using Newton's laws, compute the entire future and past of the universe.

In 1993, Michael Crichton predicted the death of the mass media. It looks like his prediction is coming true.

A new edition of Integral Review is out. Highlights:

• A reflection on a retreat with Adyashanti - the author has some critical things to say about Adyashanti, but the piece is positive overall. My favorite part is when Adyashanti says that his retreats tripled in size when he changed his name from Steven Gray!
  
  
• A review of the novel The Seeker Academy by L.D. Gussin. The story follows Grace Hudson, spiritual seeker, on her journey through various New Age retreats and workshops, encountering "narcissism, spiritual elitism and emotional dysfunction". Gussin also gets into some of the pre-rational beliefs, and advocates a return to reason and critical thinking in spirituality. This is not something you hear often enough, so it's going on my reading list. The book is not just a slam against New Age though: "despite these and other shortcomings, this seeking can be of value, that there is truth to be found."
  
  One thing about the book that is fascinating and also kind of sad is that the author sent review copies to a bunch of spiritual magazines and only one printed a review. The author addresses this on his blog in a three part series - yes, three parts complaining about a lack of reviews. On one hand, this seems excessive and a bit whiny - there's so many books out there now, it's hard to get noticed, it's not a conspiracy to supress your genius, etc. But on the other hand, it would not surprise me that this also speaks to an unwillingness on the part of spiritual leaders to accept this very valid critique.
  

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We build our churches on the holy sites of other cultures and install our own gods. Notre Dame sits on a holy Druid site. "Ours is the true God," we say by doing so. But this usurpation is also a kind of acknowledgement, a perverse honoring of the more ancient culture: a holy site is a holy site, just as a holy day is a holy day. In the same way, our scientific view of the origins of life overlies ancient creation myths. That is why I feel we must use the God word, for my hope is to honorably steal its aura to authorize the sacredness of the creativity in nature. May we find the creativity in nature sacred whether we are atheists or believers in a God who breathed life into this universe of ceaseless creativity.

- Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred

I always wondered what all those extra arms were for.

Reading "The Power of Coincidence" from Psychology Today:

One thing that always strikes me about claims of synchronicity is how content-free they are. From the article, Elizabeth Targ died at 11:11pm, 111 days after she was diagnosed. I have a friend who sees the sequence 0-1-2-3 everywhere she goes. Accepting for a moment that any of these examples are more than just coincidences, that they are meaningful: what, in the end, do they mean?

Jung believed the existence of synchronicity demonstrated the validity of the collective unconscious, but it could be used to support virtually any spiritual, religious, metaphysical or psychological theory - UFOs, law of attraction, I Ching, faith healing, etc. Since we still need other methods to validate our theories, its hard to see what synchronicity offers here.

On a more personal level, it's claimed that synchronicity is a signpost that indicates when one's actions are aligned with God's plan - a kind of cosmic seal of approval. If so, I would expect people who frequently experience synchronicity to be more successful, more effective, more creative, more world-changing and more spiritual (however you define that) than most people. A person like this might even be a modern-day prophet and I would think that these individuals would be able to make enormous strides in solving the many crises that our world faces today.

As far as I can tell, this is not the case. In the end, if synchronicity is real, the thing that's most extraordinary is how much like the rest of us its adherents are.