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Ch. 7 - Experiments in ConsciousnessPlease use this thread to discuss Chapter 7 - Experiments in Consciousness. You're also free to create and use your own threads.

I guess this is Harris' attempt to propose emperical spirituality as an alternative to religion? Kinda new agey for me. I took a Psychology of Consciousness course in College and nearly slept through it in its entirety. It was based more on philosophy than emperical evidence. Harris keeps suggesting that east texts like Buddism are backed up by emperical fact but does not cite examples and sources. The final chapter is a short mish mash of ideas of consciousness and spirituality that really don't go any where or prove anything topped off by this bizarre line:Quote:"Mysticism is a raiontal enterprise. Religion is not."The last paragraph tries to bridge the gap between the rest of the book and the last chapter, meh. The last chapter has nothing to do with faith, religion, terror, or reason. I really have no opinion on the last few pages other than that it really doesn't fit. Every chapter seemed to get worse and less relevent, so I should not be surprised to find myself wondering when Chapter 7 would finally end. This books has been a real disappointment considering my innital impression that I would really enjoy Mr. Harris's work.

Sounds like Harris would have done well to read Gershom Scholem's essay on the relationship between mysticism and authority. The gist is that mysticism takes the form of its vision from the symbols provided by the orthodox religion of the time.

Harris uses the term mysticism interchangably with a few other terms and freely admits it during the chapter. I think he suggests it to me any odd phenomenon that can be emperically measured. Harris discounts wild stories like UFO abduction but leads the door open to weird phenoenon that can be scientifically tested. But things that can be emperically measured and scientifically tested are not classified as mysticism and odd phenomenon, no?

The term mysticism has a pretty well-defined range of uses in most religious study. It sounds as though Harris is using it in a pretty unorthodox manner. I don't know that there's anything in common between the way I understand the term and the way that Harris employs it, so I can't really say anything more until I get my hands on the book. (Update: of the four copies at the university library, one is checked out until next month, one is on hold, one is in storage at a satellite campus a few hundred miles from here and one is lost. To tide me over until a copy becomes available, I've checked out "At the Origins of Modern Atheism" by Michael J. Buckley, which looks to be of some interest.)

This chapter was a bunch of pointless ramblings about mysticism as way of understanding the philosophy of the mind. Though I understood his words, they didn't add up to much.Strangely, Harris finds value and rationality in mysticism. However, in an earlier chapter he slammed pragmatism and relativism, taking the stance of a hard-nosed black-or-while realist. Those views seem contradictory, since pragmatism and relativism are somewhere in the middle of the philosophical continuum from rationalism to mysticism.

I too did not think this chapter fit into the rest of the book and I also think that it is tending to give some bolster to mysticism. I really do not understand why it was put in the book at all. To me, mysticism and spirituality go hand and hand with faith (the faith of religion to be more precise) in that it is reaching for something apart from the physical existence and supernatural underpinnings.I do not think that the human experience is anything more than physical systems living out a life. Yes, we have some abilities that sets us apart from the other species of this world, but I have yet to see how that makes us any more special than any other species...or any 'better' in any way, aside from our proclamation that it is so.Mr. P.