Book: Sceptical spirituality
The everyday ‘self’ is not an illusion, for godsake!
Why this absurdist fashion to pretend it is?
Who benefits from this nonsense?
Well, I suppose we all do, by telling ourselves that, armed with new supposedly scientific and mindfully meditative facts, we are closer to God/enlightenment/liberation/salvation than we were before. We can walk the streets with a spring in our steps. In fact all we’ve achieved is to sell ourselves an amazingly stupid bit of counterfactual fluff.
What’s going on here? What’s actually being said?
Something like this: we are all possessed of a ‘brain’, which turns out — thanks to those amazingly perspicacious people in neuroscience — to be an ‘illusion creating organ’, feeding us a constant diet of illusory illusions — there is next to nothing out there, in reality and in real life, but our ‘brains’ make us think that there is! Fantastic! We think we are doing stuff with stuff, but in fact we’re not. Nothing’s happening. And maybe we don’t even think that we’re doing stuff, because that’s an illusion as well! All this ties in quite neatly — as of now — with mistaken understandings of various oriental philosophies, such that we can tell ourselves that…
