Re: Evolutionary hypotheses about religion

On Feb 14, 11:07 am, slothrop <slothrop1...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


I read the Art of
Happiness a couple months ago and it seemed pretty clear that he did.
Did I read him wrong? He didn't seem to be talking in very
sophisticated terms, maybe I took his metaphorizing too literally or
something.



An aside here:

It is important to recognize the difference between "esoteric"
Buddhism and "exoteric".

The book that you refer to is, by definition, an attempt to reach an
outside audience; it is NOT a teaching being passed on to students.
It is, therefore, "exoteric", not "esoteric". As such, it is indeed
"not sophisticated". After all, it's very POINT is to reach as many
people as possible and expose them to the barest rudiments of Buddhism
at whatever level they can understand -- it is simply NOT an attempt
to instruct them or teach them sophisticated lessons in Buddhism. The
really sophisticated symbolic stuff comes AFTER one becomes a student,
and demonstrates an ability to actually understand it.

A good example of this is the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which can be
(and is) read at different levels of understanding, each of which is
very different from the other, yet which are equally "valid" ways of
looking at it.

To the least sophisticated, the Book of the Dead is simply a literal
description of what happens to our "soul" after we die, and is full of
rituals and demons and such. This is the "exoteric" level, the one
that is embraced by most people because they aren't ready to
understand the deeper levels. It's the same sort of level of
understanding that, for instance, the fundies have about the Christian
Bible.

At a different level of understanding, though, the "esoteric" student
learns that the Book of the Dead is NOT about what happens after we
die -- it's about how we live our lives BEFORE we die. At this level
of understanding, all of the various demons and devils and such found
in the story are viewed in purely symbolic terms, as is the "journey
to the underworld" itself -- it's a metaphor for the journey of LIFE.
The esoteric student is shown how each symbolic portion of the story
teaches a particular lesson about some particular portion of life, and
how to deal with it.

Those symbolic explanations of the story are NOT taught to outsiders
or non-students. This is not because the explanations are "secret" or
"forbidden" -- it's simply because the teachers don't want to waste
their time trying to teach these symbolisms to people who are not
ready to understand them (in exactly the same way that advanced
calculus isn't taught to everybody -- only to those who have the
necessary previous knowledge and experience to understand it). In
many cases, the "secret" lessons are not even secret -- they are right
there in plain view. A good example of this is the Buddhist "Wheel of
Life", which can be found in any Buddhist temple. Any passerby can
look at it, but only those who have been taught its symbolism know
what it MEANS.

A good example of the same use of this "two different levels of
understanding" is George Orwell's book "Animal House". To one who
doesn't know history, it's just a fairy tale about talking pigs who
live on a farm, and to the unsophisticated, this is the only meaning
they will be able to get out of it. However, at a different level of
understanding, the book is a devastating criticism of a particular
inhuman (note the symbolism there) political and social system -- and
indeed at an even higher level of understanding, it is a critique of
EVERY inhuman political and social system.

It does seem to be a characteristic of all the best literature that it
can be read at many different levels of meaning, none of which has
much to do with the others. One can read a great piece of literature
many many times -- yet never reading the same story twice, and getting
something different out of it each time.

One could also point out that the very same "esoteric" and "exoteric"
readings are true of the Christian Bible. At the least sophisticated
level (the level at which the fundamentalist Christians read it), the
Bible is simply a literal descriptive narrative of events and people
that are to be taken as historically "real".

At a different level of understanding, though, (the one practiced by
most Christians other than the fundies), all of the people and events
in the Bible are seen as symbolic metaphors for things that happens to
us in our own everyday life, and how to deal with them. They are not
meant to be literally true, any more than Aesop's Fables are meant to
be literally true. They are, instead, "stories with a point".

The fundies (and the evangelical atheists who accept the fundie
interpretation) view the Bible literally, at the least sophisticated
level. They therefore miss an entire level of deeper lessons. It's
rather akin to reading Aesop's Fables as simply a story about a
talking rabbit that races a talking turtle (and then complaining that
the whole story is nonsense because "turtles can't talk"). It misses
the whole point.


================================================
Lenny Flank
"There are no loose threads in the web of life"

Editor, Red and Black Publishers
http://www.RedAndBlackPublishers.com




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