agreed... it's the right direction to go... but it's a case-by-case thing. for example, I'm glad I was able to Steven Bachelor room, and acknowledge his contributions, but I wouldn't want to look past the silliness of the atheistic Buddhism.
I really appreciate you taking the time to answer this Alex. I was going to send this as a personal email originally, but when I saw a few comments that had similar sentiments to the show, I thought I'd do it here so you had a choice to answer publicly or not.
What I like about your show is the huge heart you walk into every interview with. While holding the caring position you then hold a boundary with the scientific community that is admirable. There are a few times that I've thought your aggressive nature of confront with them might cause more confusion though and thus put them in a defensive posture, possibly losing the thread of the conversation. Certainly though they should be used to that, having their ideas challenged.
I would question though your thought process in challenging (or not) some of your case by case decisions. You become the judge and jury as to the veracity of the person's point of view and don't feel that some of them have the tolerance to have that viewpoint questioned? Shouldn't you logically approach all the interviews in somewhat of a similar manner, challenging each at least at some level? Couldn't there spiritual perspectives be questioned at a level of usefullness in theirs or other's lives. I say this because I've had many years of spiritual experiences that had value for me in a multitude of ways (and I can express most of those). I hear some of the comments from the "new age" spiritual people and they seem to be parroting what's in their socially acceptable group though many have never taken the time to personally figure out why that might be important for them. Challenging these thoughts may make them come to your interviews more prepared and ready to answer a couple challenging questions. I would hope their spiritual journey's have enabled them to be able to be a bit more challenged.
ok, but collectively this seems to be the big issue... i.e. the one that generated the most impassioned social discourse. and to Drew's point... by analogy... you may not have much of an opinion on drunk drivers, but when your family is destroyed by a guy with 3 DWIs driving on a suspended licence this "social issue" becomes real personal.
Again, I'd love some definitions here: Collectively? What does that mean? I think our history is replete with instances of collective madness. I don't know about you but I find life a crazy thing. There are all sorts of experiences for us to have. Actually I think there are as many experiences as there are people. If you feel connected to that collective action group, knock yourself out. Just know that many other injustices have been done in the name of justice. I think that was one of the beautiful things about the rule of law, though it's a long ways from perfect.
right. a friend of mine offered a terrific refinement on this idea... what if we changed "discrimination" to "discernment." so, I'm not interested in getting in the whole race discrimination thing, I am about making more refined decisions about how to handle injustice and social equality. part of that requires honestly looking at our history.
One of the things I think about almost every day is how life spews out into the world everyday, from trees, veges, animals, stars, planets, parasites to people. That's what happens in this universe. The wild thing is from what we can tell there are no 2 things that are created equal. So if you're trying to create social equality I'd say you're going against nature. I would say historically that more murder and mayhem has been done in the name of righting social injustice and creating social equality than maybe even religion - could be a neck and neck race though.
My intent here Alex is not to spend days of your time or paragraphs of your blog space in challenging you. That said I think some of your spiritual concepts have not been challenged by you or those that are feeding them to you. I was at Findhorn in the 80's when free love was going on. What a failed spiritual experience that seemed to be, unless that is you were interested in experiencing the pain that came with bad breakups. I've been in retreats in Nepal where everyone sat around nodding the same ideas. It seemed that to question these ideas was not loving or spiritual. That's just not true and is furthering stupidity. These spiritual perspectives can stand on their own. I used to work on people's health from a distance. There's a way to measure that and only apply it if it brings the person receiving the work a change. You have had that experience. You don't need a double blind study to tell you that your health changed because of it. In my experience though, each person needs to find out for themselves if these spiritual practices create changes for themselves or not. They have to question their life experience.
How about instead of "looking at our history", we look to our own personal history and clean it up. Have you every stolen something from a store or anyone else in your life? If yes, can you clean that up? Have you caused others pain in this life that you can clean up? Have you borrowed money that you didn't pay back? Have you not been there for someone who you told you would be. Maybe it's easier cleaning up the culture's history (whatever that means) than our own personal lives.
Thanks again for the dialogue. I appreciate your willingness to be challenged.