Another find from the archive, as I prepare to re-launch my University. This was written about 18 years ago but still feels remarkably fresh. It's about one of my lifelong concerns - that people still need to exercise their minds and learn to think. And that the spiritual movement summarised by the name New Age has become a major part of the problem, rather than its solution. It is not the average person's fault that the central importance and correct development of the mind is not taught in schools or encouraged in daily life. But in an age where fashions for "critical thinking" and political memes create the illusion of thought, the difference between emotional reaction and insight needs to be stated again and again! Anyway, back to my thoughts in the year 2000...
THE ART OF THINKING
People are sold a very sub-standard product in the New Age. There is virtually no one teaching what needs to be taught: the true art of learning and of developing the mind.
Every year, the standard of 'new releases' gets worse; virtually all 'New Age' books are a mixture of 20th century materialistic psychology, trite self-help maxims, and watered down spirituality, all topped off by sentimental hippie-lingo.
Has the New Age been totally neutralised by the Establishment? Where is any sense of true political awareness? How did this disastrous sabotage occur?
Certain Buddhist and Hindu teachings have been disastrously distorted into a doctrine of spiritual brain-death; and how convenient this is for the Powers That Be! And this does not merely apply to naïve believers. Materialistic science is a contemporary religion, and people will believe virtually anything if told that it is 'scientific'. The prevalence of 'magic' technology everywhere gives people ever less incentive to develop common-sense and critical thinking.
[NB - THIS WAS WRITTEN LONG BEFORE GOOGLE OR FACEBOOK!]
I am not advocating some mystical veneration of abstract thinking and mystification, like the obscurantism of Heidegger or other word-possessed philosophers. What we need is founded in the normal power of rational judgement, which is the basis of science, although some scientists are bad thinkers, dogmatically attached to their belief-system without checking or questioning it, as devoted to Group Think as any mediocre Scholastic of the Middle Ages.
Thinking means being able to survey the evidence, weigh up arguments and reach some kind of conclusion, without pretending to know more than you really do.
Anyone who doesn't want you to be able to think is no friend of yours. This includes that attitude in some some hippie circles where it's regarded as bad form to ask where your money is going (maan).
Of course, thinking is not the only human power, and ultimately it's not the highest faculty we have. But in today's world, we cannot get be without the self-reliance, responsibility and maturity that goes with being able to think. We cannot live in the world without it. Ultimately, there is no love without action, and no action without thinking; for, without thinking, there is no individuality, and without individuality, there is no you and me.
THE ART OF THINKING
People are sold a very sub-standard product in the New Age. There is virtually no one teaching what needs to be taught: the true art of learning and of developing the mind.
Every year, the standard of 'new releases' gets worse; virtually all 'New Age' books are a mixture of 20th century materialistic psychology, trite self-help maxims, and watered down spirituality, all topped off by sentimental hippie-lingo.
Has the New Age been totally neutralised by the Establishment? Where is any sense of true political awareness? How did this disastrous sabotage occur?
Certain Buddhist and Hindu teachings have been disastrously distorted into a doctrine of spiritual brain-death; and how convenient this is for the Powers That Be! And this does not merely apply to naïve believers. Materialistic science is a contemporary religion, and people will believe virtually anything if told that it is 'scientific'. The prevalence of 'magic' technology everywhere gives people ever less incentive to develop common-sense and critical thinking.
[NB - THIS WAS WRITTEN LONG BEFORE GOOGLE OR FACEBOOK!]
I am not advocating some mystical veneration of abstract thinking and mystification, like the obscurantism of Heidegger or other word-possessed philosophers. What we need is founded in the normal power of rational judgement, which is the basis of science, although some scientists are bad thinkers, dogmatically attached to their belief-system without checking or questioning it, as devoted to Group Think as any mediocre Scholastic of the Middle Ages.
Thinking means being able to survey the evidence, weigh up arguments and reach some kind of conclusion, without pretending to know more than you really do.
Anyone who doesn't want you to be able to think is no friend of yours. This includes that attitude in some some hippie circles where it's regarded as bad form to ask where your money is going (maan).
Of course, thinking is not the only human power, and ultimately it's not the highest faculty we have. But in today's world, we cannot get be without the self-reliance, responsibility and maturity that goes with being able to think. We cannot live in the world without it. Ultimately, there is no love without action, and no action without thinking; for, without thinking, there is no individuality, and without individuality, there is no you and me.