David B,
You say that soul and spirit are the upper levels of the "oldest idea".
The pre-modern inference that soul and spirit are not just manifestations
of mind but transcend and include mind, body, and matter is NOT confirmed
by contemporary scientific research, unless you take every crackpot
metaphysical theory on the Internet to be science. There is no doubt that
people have religious experiences. I've had them. No one seriously denies
their empirical existence, but the pre-modern inference drawn from them is
not scientific.
Scientific materialism causes neither social values nor subjective
realities to be dismissed. However, this is the misconception created
by having so little scientific success in these areas. It is the profound
failure of psychology to make headway in our understanding of the mind
that makes us feel the mind is divorced from reality. And this is really
not a problem for the man on the street so much as it is for the
semi-classically trained intellectual, who is painfully aware of this
failure.
So David, when you say "Its huge. We're talking about nothing less than
the dominant worldview of the modern West", I think you are oblivious
to the fact that most people are oblivious to this worldview. An
astounding majority of people, particularly in the U.S., believe not just
in God, but in guardian angels. That's because there's no concerted effort
by the Western worldview, even in academia, to suppress these things. So
we have the TV hits "Touched By An Angel" and "The X-Files", and the Star
Wars "Force".
Most everyone, presumably brainwashed by scientific materialism, nevertheless accepts social values and subjective experience implicitly,
and there's no reason they should not. In particular, there's no
scientific reason they should not.
You'd expect folks on this discussion group to buck what you call the
modern Western worldview. Indeed, they seem to. They've admitted recently
how impressed they are with how astrology, or better yet, the Enneagram,
explains human behaviour, or how psi-forces can change past events, or
how human memory does not exist in the brain, or anywhere. And Pirsig
himself harkens back to a period in history when most cultures believed
in (non-ectoplasmic) spirits. I could go on and on, but my point is that
this isn't really any different from the non-scientific beliefs of the
public at large. And you want to return to some semblance of pre-modern
thought. Why bother?
Finally, when Wilber says that subjective truths are collapsed into dirt -
literally, he is not just crudely misrepresenting materialism but also his
own view - that existence advances through a spectrum of matter, body, and
mind. A biologist would be offended if his view were so caricatured, just
as Wilber would of his own.
Glenn
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