The origins of religious mysticism
Mankind has a predilection to attribute mystical origins to things it does not understand. Often we would take the unknown process ... personify it with an avatar ... and give that avatar a name and mystical powers. Thor, Ra, Mercury ...
Sadly, the avatar and the mysticism take on a life of their own aside from the effect and the process they were designed to explain. Then when science or rationality provides an actual, repeatable, observable explanation the mysticism and avatar are left for no reason. This is the god process.
In far eastern societies man's views on those gods generally evolved with his understanding. Hindu culture held the gods out as paragons of the virtues they desired and used them for modeling their behaviors. That modeling altered conduct while the rituals and mantras and readings and prayers guided and focused their thoughts.
It's interesting to note here that any time you think about a concept your mind links points in your brain that you associate with that concept. This means neurons are firing to send signals through dendritic pathways in the brain connecting those points. Due to the properties of the cells holding those pathways together each time a signal pulses through them their resistance is decreased. This makes current flow more readily through it and, by physics, more frequently. Thinking something a lot makes you think of it more easily and more often.
Biology also provides an assist by creating superneurons in pathways really well traveled. These neurons are express lanes between parts of the brain vice the normal lattice of connections the signals would usually encounter. It's a snowball effect. You can pair physical actions to the process also which makes it embed more readily. Same with writing it down or chanting it. The point is prayer and rituals have a biological basis for focusing thoughts which alters probable actions and feelings. No mystic explanations necessary.
Western and Abrahamic beliefs, however, tended to double down on faith. Their gods WERE all-powerful and no reasoning would undercut that. Believe it or perish in hell or suffer some other lesser destiny. If it wasn't working well enough it was because you lacked faith - not that the boundaries of the science involved were taxed to their limits. This made people worry themselves into belief.
Both east and west were rewarded in ways for their reverence to the divine ... but only the east had a scientific basis. The west used guilt and oppression and still does to this day. So hate on religion if we must, but also recognize its' strengths and power and the basis behind them.
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Interesting analysis. Odd isn’t it, that Christianity, coming from the East, has come to be associated with the West, while Hinduism was established mainly by Aryans. The Bhagavad Gita resonates with me deeply while the Bible seems alien, cruel and unsophisticated.
The ancient Indians retained their bevy of gods and goddesses, and their rites and ceremonies, but they superimposed upon that tradition a religious philosophy par excellence IMO. Besides that, they developed meditation, a useful technique for people of all religions around the world.
I think I understand what you are saying. By keeping the mind on some sort of religious icon through chanting, prayer, meditation, etc. our thoughts and actions are influenced for the better.
WilliamFleming
Level 8
July 30, 2019
1
@Allamanda “The point is prayer and rituals have a biological basis for focusing thoughts which alters probable actions and feelings. No mystic explanations necessary.”
That seems plain to me, and it’s stated in a simple, elegant way much better than my summary.
@Allamanda I am totally confused. What premise are you talking about?
@Allamanda Maybe he means that chanting, meditating, etc. give measurably positive results and that the eastern traditions required no belief and are not about belief. Therefore the eastern religions were more “scientific”, even though they were formulated before the advent of science as we know it.
Another factor here is that the school of Hindu thought, Advaita Vedanta was not set forth as a religion, but as philosophy, psychology and metaphysics, addressing the deepest and most profound enigmas of existence. While not science per se as we know it, it represents the highest form of human thought at the time IMO, and in some ways it has not been surpassed.
The Bible, in comparison, is not scientific in the least and does not address the deep mystery of conscious awareness, personal identity, and ultimate reality. To require belief in such an assortment of unbelievable mythology reveals the shallow perspective and lack of awareness of early church leaders and the simplicity of their followers.
What the hell DID you mean Jeff?
I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that Eastern woo "has a scientific basis". It has roughly the same configuration as western religion in terms of the majority being at least somewhat open to adapting religion to modern understanding, and a minority with outsize influence not being open to it. The Buddhists in Myanmar for example would represent the fundamentalist / authoritarian wing of that religion, and while they don't deploy religious faith in exactly the way we do in the west, it is still basically operating on unsubstantiated assertions of truth.
I agree that monotheism inherently has an "our way or the highway" element in that there can only be one "true god" and only one correct understanding of same. However, this doesn't mean that, e.g., Buddhists do not fight each other over the one true understanding of Buddhism, or that they don't fight other religions for supremacy. They just lack as much of an inherent NEED to do so. But they do it anyway.
mordant
Level 8
July 30, 2019
1
I will tell you right off that calling it "woo" is very ignorant and myopic.
@JeffMesser We could, if it made any sense at all, have a butt-kicking contest about who has the more accurate or nuanced view of eastern religion, but all I meant to refer to with that term was the parts of eastern religion that speak to their supernatural / fanciful cosmologies, not their legitimate insights into human nature, which are in my view generally better and more positively actionable ones than the more negative conclusions of western religions with their concept of original sin and utter depravity and so forth.
Maybe despite my using your forbidden trigger word, you could address the points I actually made, though?
@mordant as a secular buddhist I found the se asian buddhists just as close-minded as the southern baptists were of my youth. This became especially true when I started demystifying some of their concepts by describing them in normal terms. Take karma - it's not some mystical arbiter sitting in the heavens judging your actions as moral or immoral. It's nothing more than cosmic momentum of the many factors that follow making the decisions and taking the actions taken. Now, that does leave the moralistic decisions of the community as an avenue of ill, but overall it makes karma more purely cause and effect without the whole "moral retribution" avenue.
As for further ties I still contend that the double slit experiment shows awareness as a key component with neither mass not form for breaking the EPR paradox. If we consider each particle at opposite ends of the universe being entangled then the only way to explain the instantaneous action in violation of Einstein's relativity (faster than the speed of light) is that they are connected. It would have to be a connection by a media shared by both and all things. That is space. All of space is connected. Nothing is actually solid. If we consider a potential open by awareness and met by a response from a particle elsewhere you could have instantaneous spooky action at a distance despite a universe apart. The medium, according to the Mundakya upanishad, is awareness. Thats certainly an accommodation to modern science, unlike the Abrahamic religions and mormonism/scientology, and is more than woo. It amazes me when people label something in some derogatory fashion like "woo" with no idea what actually sits behind it.
@JeffMesser Thank you.
The only thing involved in entanglement is the internal quantum state of the particles. Since no external information is transmitted, counterintuitively, relativity is not violated.
The Dali Lama has, uniquely among religious leaders to my knowledge, said that if science contradicts religion, it is religion which must accommodate science, not the inverse. I agree with him, since stating, for example, that "awareness" or consciousness is a medium that connects all matter is sheer speculation (or, if stated as truth, unsubstantiated assertion). I am not saying that might not be true, but I am not aware that Buddhism explains the mechanism or evidences its conclusions; it simply states it as fact or dogma. It also does not explain how it is not a category error, since noting that the universe contains conscious entities does not make it valid to suggest that the universe is therefore conscious. It also does not follow that consciousness can be discarnate.
Such teachings still use the failed epistemology of religious faith. I durst not call it the w-word, as apparently I owe respect to those who promulgate such things, which they haven't actually earned. So call it something benign like mysticism if you like; the point, in my view, still holds.
By the way, my view does not demand that I hate on Buddhism specifically or religion generally. I have a lot of respect for Buddhist philosophy and borrow from it. Seen as the original self-help philosophy, and separated from its cosmology and supernatural assertions, it has things to teach us.
@mordant The Buddha also made the same point when he said we shouldnt be too attached to even our understanding. As for the entanglement issue ... we don't know how that works so your conjecture is no more valid than my own.
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