Hello Iain,
I am glad to see you come back to this, as I thought that you probably were put off by my last response.
I read through your article, but must say that I was overwhelmed by the amount of information and the way that the ideas were expressed. But the real problem is that the understanding that you come from is so opposed to that of the Buddha’s (as I understand it), that I don’t know how and where to begin.
Although you do admit in your article, that science and psychiatry have not even begun to study consciousness, and that this is what is in fact needed. Your own tendency to reduce consciousness as being result of brain function is as far as I can see, one which will never lead to any direct understanding ever taking place.
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/interfaith-dialogues/34716-emotional-links-genetic-health-biological-heaven.html
Indeed this is one (or more) of the sixty odd kinds of “wrong view” pointed out by the Buddha in his “Discourse on the All Embracing Net of Views”, which is one of the most important discourses that he gave. So although you have tried to praise the Buddha for his wisdom, I don’t think that this has in fact happened. Indeed in reducing mentality to being product of brain function, and religion on the whole as a kind of survival mechanism, you do not contribute to the cause at all.
One reason I started to participate in this forum is to encourage people to begin viewing ‘morality’ as being mental realities arisen due to causes and conditions that have nothing to do with man-made values or anything that science ever puts forward. I have noticed these two tendencies, one to taking good and evil as being more or less arbitrary and two, as a product of evolution / survival mechanism.
But the fact is that we are drawn again and again to moral considerations, regardless of whether we understand or misunderstand it, is to me, evidence of its ultimate nature. That we talk about good leading to good results and evil to bad results, is because this is in fact a reflection of a “Law” which must ultimately exist. That consciousness arises to experience different object through the five senses and the mind, by causes and conditions that can be known within that very experience, is evidence that this ‘brain’ is just an idea proliferated upon and wrongly made to associate with ‘mentality’. Similarly, all mental realities such as feeling, perception, attention, concentration, attachment, kindness, shame of wrong doing, shamelessness, jealousy, conceit, moral restraint, anger, faith, mindfulness, understanding etc., these can be seen to rise and fall away by cause and conditions that have nothing to do with this concept of ‘brain’, is again a reflection that the scientific materialistic outlook is a very misleading one.
To me it is evident that science deals with only the Caloric and Germinal orders, and that the Moral, Psychical and Natural phenomena sequence is outside of its scope. And since it is a fact that without ‘consciousness’ nothing is ever known, the two orders that science touches upon must in fact be known, not through any real understanding, but only by way of its shadows.
So you see, we come in from quite opposed understandings. I can talk to a person who is inspired by religion based on his faith / confidence in goodness, even though he may not understand that these are in fact impersonal elements arisen by causes and conditions not within the control of will. Your position however is one which is hard for me to find a crack through to then know which direction to take. But I’ll wait for your response and see. In the meantime, I’d like you to read that particular thread that I referred to in my last response. This will give you a better idea about my own approach and perhaps you will be able to find a good place to start a discussion….