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Politics : To be a Liberal,you have to believe that..... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (1498)	9/9/1999 2:24:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6418

I would caution that the difference between speculative science and spiritual thought is that the science recognizes its speculative nature until a test can be devised. Indeed that is the purpose of uttering these blue-sky models (even with all sortsa impressive numbers attached, including fractions) - "somebody please tell us how to test it". Most spiritual thought works in the other direction - a concept or precept is handed down from spiritual authority and is then assayed in the spectacularly inconsistent kiln of the individual human heart. The most directly mystical "schools" might be an exception. But consider the LSD revolution. Here is a substance (!) that directly gooses the mystical spirit-aware portion of our brains, and ten million people became practicing mystics overnight. The lasting take-home lesson from all this is that no new, durable spiritual traditions have come out of these ten million mystics as they slowly grew too old to stress their brains and bodies like that. (The "new age" is too amorphous and is fading too fast; it is a sort of generic animism that feels right to the aging LSD generation.) What the individual takes out of a mystical experience is a rearrangement of what he brought in. I have observed a practically invincible tendency among those who have had epiphanies, psychedelic or not, to fit them into the doctrinal frames they had before. Give a Jew acid and he won't meet Jesus or Krishna. Elvis he might meet ... Sammy Davis Jr. if it's a "bad trip" :-)