Friday, April 30, 2010

Vedic challenge of reclaiming the deathless state

JACKSON, MO (KFVS) - Are today's youth losing their religion? A new study suggests they are. A group called Lifeway Christian Resources
A recent front-page story in USA Today caught my eye: "Survey: 72% of Millennials 'more spiritual than religious.'" According to a survey produced by
'Mushy' millennials in the news GetReligion (blog)‎
Honk if you've heard the phrase “more spiritual than religious.” That, not “WWJD,” appears to be the mantra of today's young people, even those who call]

I still want to argue for promiscuous interrelations among objects, rather than seeing them all as vacuum-sealed; but here, my only qualification would be that I think that every entity makes a “decision,” as Whitehead puts it, as to which “relation partners” (Harman’s phrase, not Whitehead’s) it responds to, and which it ignores. In Whitehead’s parlance, this ignoring another entity could take the form either of what he calls a “negative prehension” (which is a decided refusal) or of the fact that the other entity has only a “negligible” influence on the entity that is making a decision. So, while I think that “to be affected by something outside us” is the general case, rather than a special one, in practice the degree to which an entity is affected is fairly minimal…
I still differ with Harman in thinking, following Whitehead (who in this case is himself following William James), that the existence of an entity is punctual, and that the endurance of an object through time needs to be understood as a succession of entities, with a large measure of inheritance accounting for the continuity. This is why (as I said at the OOO conference last week — but this part of my talk still needs some revision) the question of whether an entity remains “the same” over time is a relative one, a matter of degree.]

Savitri Era Religion is intimately connected with the history of the 20th century. As an antidote to dominant intellectual waves and widespread cultural upheavals sweeping from time to time, it has proved its worth. Metaphysical inquiry, the world over, wallowed in the luxury of rhetorical ostentation and forgot the original objective, but Savitri Era Religion never lost sight of its goal. The Vedic challenge of reclaiming the deathless state is still the foremost priority for man today. [TNM]

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