The ‘old truths’ are under siege, and, if there is any new truth, it shifts and reforms so quickly that it is like trying to catch your shadow. The West is trapped in its Enlightenment paradigm of truth: reason-logic-science will lead us to it. The West’s technological and economic ascendancy (now under threat from the rising stars of the Orient in particular) have engendered enormous backlash, even while those reacting to it adopt its main characteristics.
Author Archives: VJM
The Third Way, 15: I, We, You
The sticking point for we poor, ignorant, superstitious humans, who seem to long for spiritual connection with one another and all the rest of the creation (even as a product of the Big Bang it is a creation, just not one attributed to a ‘Being’), is that we exist as persons with a personality and personal identity. (I hesitate to use the term ‘individual’ with all its increasingly negative and self-absorbed connotations.) We may try to subdue and even strive with yogic might and main to erase this ‘illusory self’, but we are still locked into the locus of our particular point of reference within life and the river of time, place, and experience.
The Third Way, 14: The Quiet Revolution
The Third Way means that a “Quiet Revolution” (to borrow a phrase from Quebec history) must take hold at the grass roots level, because, in ‘the way of the world as it is,’ those who hold the reins of power never (or as rarely as hen’s teeth) give it up willingly.
The Third Way 13: Points of No Return
Points of no return abound in life. Every choice is made at the expense of some other possible choice. In the case of most everyday choices, the consequences of one choice over another are almost always trivial, but occasionally even a trivial, almost unconscious choice may have drastic, even life or death, consequences. Everyone who has lived for some time discovers this.
The Third Way, 12: Comedy of Errors
we should stop slandering the poor Neanderthals, who, anthropologists now tell us, had larger brains than we do and were just as intelligent, did not drag their knuckles, and did not talk in inarticulate grunts, having fully evolved vocal capacity.) To undo our Neanderthal slander, we should have our Parliaments and Congresses, and perhaps the UN, move official apologies to them and all their descendants, along with legislation for appropriate compensation.
The Third Way, 11: Imagine
Back to John Lennon and what he represents as an icon of our age. We know that ‘Sir John’ was murdered by a deranged man seeking his Andy Warhol moment of notoriety. He was much lamented and mourned by millions of fans and the cultural glitterati of the sixties and seventies. His death was also symbolic—the end of a sort of Don Quixote quest to idealistically set the world to rights by symbolic windmill tilting. Lennon did not, as the poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) put it, “Go gentle into that good night.”[i]
The Third Way, 10: Point of Departure
“I have ruled out … any possibility that the problem of evil can be solved in terms of developmental progress or evolution. If the world gradually gets better and better until it turns into a utopia—though we should in any case be appropriately cynical about such a possibility—that would still not solve the problem ofContinue reading “The Third Way, 10: Point of Departure”
The Third Way, 9: The Aloof God
My belief or disbelief in His reality has no more effect on Him than the ant believing I am here has on my being here. That is why Qohelet says “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth (KJV Translation).” After all, youth may be the only days you ever have.
The Third Way, 8: Escape from Vanity
Saying that this ‘meaning-seeking’ is a mere residual effect of evolution just won’t cut it. The instinct to survive is the strongest of all, we are told. Other species have survived by developing (or being endowed by God with) superior strength and speed, special cunning, or unusual adaptations. But none of them have ever sought to understand “WHY?” It is probable that no other species (at least on earth) is cerebrally equipped to undertake such a quest. That in itself raises the question why humanity is so uniquely endowed.
The Third Way, 7: The Sins of the Fathers
we must part ways with the post-modern, post-Christian delusion of innocence and join King Solomon [sic] in searching out real wisdom and truth—about who and what and where we are, not according to another mythology constructed around the (not-so) new tale of evolution and progression and utopia.
