Tattva-viveka
mind as sixth sense
Nitaisundara Das - September 2, 2008 3:11 am
In the Gita the mind is considered a sense. I have just been thinking about how one would make the case for this.
The 5 gross senses all take in information, and it is information which the other senses cannot perceive to the same degree. I say to the same degree because one can infer texture with sight for example, but it is less sure than actually touching the object.
The mind does not gather it's own information, so I don't see the similarity there.
The one similarity I do see is that the mind can certainly enjoy. This is where I think it becomes relevant in preaching, because one must make the point that the mind enjoys and we act in pursuit of such subtle enjoyment.
Perhaps the reason it is considered a sense is because it perceives all the other senses and enables us to enjoy them? That is, without the mind; taste, smell, etc would mean nothing.
Any thoughts?
Vrindaranya Dasi - September 2, 2008 3:56 am
The mind perceives the input of the five senses, as well as thoughts, and to a certain extent it can recreate the experiences of the other senses. For example, you can think in pictures or sound.
The senses are our faculties of perceiving and without the mind you can't perceive anything.
Another definition of senses is "conscious awareness or rationality--usually used in plural *finally came to his senses*" Think also of the common meaning of sixth sense: " : a power of perception like but not one of the five senses : a keen intuitive power"
Swami - September 2, 2008 5:04 am
Runes’ Dictionary of Philosophy allows us to use the term “empiricism” to include the
entire conscious content of the mind and not merely the data of the senses:
“That the sole source of knowledge is experience . . . . Experience may be
understood as either all conscious content, data of the senses only or other
designated content”
Prahlad Das - September 2, 2008 5:22 am
Runes’ Dictionary of Philosophy allows us to use the term “empiricism” to include theentire conscious content of the mind and not merely the data of the senses:
“That the sole source of knowledge is experience . . . . Experience may be
understood as either all conscious content, data of the senses only or other
designated content”
Interesting. Karma may be able to be empirically proven using this definition of empiricism.
Swami - September 2, 2008 2:14 pm
Interesting. Karma may be able to be empirically proven using this definition of empiricism.
Yes, the Buddhists have tried to do this. They reasoned that the meditative states of their adepts constituted materially evolved (nothing supernatural) states of mind in which the direct experience of reincarnation/paranormal and thus karma therein should be included within the realm of empirical evidence. But they failed to convince true empiricists because the experiences of their adepts were not falsifiable.
Citta Hari Dasa - September 2, 2008 6:03 pm
Yes, the Buddhists have tried to do this. They reasoned that the meditative states of their adepts constituted materially evolved (nothing supernatural) states of mind in which the direct experience of reincarnation/paranormal and thus karma therein should be included within the realm of empirical evidence. But they failed to convince true empiricists because the experiences of their adepts were not falsifiable.
Since the mind is accepted to empirically exist could the argument be extended? Could we then say that the power of perception has to come from somewhere, and not from the mind itself, since it is just a perceptual organ? Or would it just be like the karma issue above--unconvincing due to its unfalsifiability?
Swami - September 2, 2008 7:19 pm
Since the mind is accepted to empirically exist could the argument be extended? Could we then say that the power of perception has to come from somewhere, and not from the mind itself, since it is just a perceptual organ? Or would it just be like the karma issue above--unconvincing due to its unfalsifiability?
Most hard empiricists "think" the mind is the brain. According to them its power of perception is not something other than matter. No one has proved otherwise to an empiricists satisfaction. Gathering empirical falsifiable evidence may not be a perfect way of knowing, but they think it is the best one at hand.
All we can offer them is spiritual practice and experience. But they are not inclined to take that up nor do they think the proposal reasonable. But one must be a reasonable person to move away from animality and the call of the senses, and this is what spiritual practice calls for. Are you an animal, a rationalist, or a rational animal. If the third then what is your method for becoming rational. Simply denying anything that cannot be empirically validated? Is that the sum and substance of rationality? Our method is different and it has as its goal the pure rationality that underlies love. And it has results. One moment of samadhi will change any empiricist forever.
Gaura-Vijaya Das - September 2, 2008 8:51 pm
Most hard empiricists "think" the mind is the brain. According to them its power of perception is not something other than matter. No one has proved otherwise to an empiricists satisfaction. Gathering empirical falsifiable evidence may not be a perfect way of knowing, but they think it is the best one at hand.
All we can offer them is spiritual practice and experience. But they are not inclined to take that up nor do they think the proposal reasonable. But one must be a reasonable person to move away from animality and the call of the senses, and this is what spiritual practice calls for. Are you an animal, a rationalist, or a rational animal. If the third then what is your method for becoming rational. Simply denying anything that cannot be empirically validated? Is that the sum and substance of rationality? Our method is different and it has as its goal the pure rationality that underlies love. And it has results. One moment of samadhi will change any empiricist forever.
Yes GM I liked this point which you made in your Gita commentary on param drstva nivartate.
What to speak of samadhi which I never had but even few semblances of a higher spiritual experience are enough though hard empiricists equate these experiences with psychedelic drug experiences.
Swami - September 2, 2008 9:24 pm
Yes GM I liked this point which you made in your Gita commentary on param drstva nivartate.What to speak of samadhi which I never had but even few semblances of a higher spiritual experience are enough though hard empiricists equate these experiences with psychedelic drug experiences.
I think that if they experienced them themselves they would think differently, as do those who have experienced both.
Gaura-Vijaya Das - September 2, 2008 9:29 pm
I think that if they experienced them themselves they would think differently, as do those who have experienced both.
I never did drugs so I didn't experience both. 
Citta Hari Dasa - September 2, 2008 9:48 pm
Most hard empiricists "think" the mind is the brain. According to them its power of perception is not something other than matter. No one has proved otherwise to an empiricists satisfaction. Gathering empirical falsifiable evidence may not be a perfect way of knowing, but they think it is the best one at hand.
All we can offer them is spiritual practice and experience. But they are not inclined to take that up nor do they think the proposal reasonable. But one must be a reasonable person to move away from animality and the call of the senses, and this is what spiritual practice calls for. Are you an animal, a rationalist, or a rational animal. If the third then what is your method for becoming rational. Simply denying anything that cannot be empirically validated? Is that the sum and substance of rationality? Our method is different and it has as its goal the pure rationality that underlies love. And it has results. One moment of samadhi will change any empiricist forever.
Simply denying anything that cannot be empirically validated sounds a lot like 'neti, neti.' Difficult to arrive at anything positive through a process of negation. I doubt too many people who practice neti neti actually arrive at genuine Brahman realization, at least unless they ask the important question: "If I am not this and not that, then what am I?"
I read something interesting recently, that great scientists like Einstein (and others) utilize both the rational and the intuitive aspects of consciousness to solve problems or to flesh out theories. Einstein imagined himself riding a beam of light in his efforts to understand the nature of light, and later used the insight he gained from that exercise to formulate his paradigm-shifting E=mc2 equation. The point being that he used a nonrational process--intuition, imagination--to gain insight and then used a rational tool (mathematics) to express that insight. Our problem of course is that we are dealing with more subtle realities than physical light and so there are no instruments to perceive them with other than purified consciousness itself.
Babhru Das - September 2, 2008 11:12 pm
Simply denying anything that cannot be empirically validated sounds a lot like 'neti, neti.'
It's that idea that moves some to re-label "science" as scientism: a belief that the only things worth knowing are those that can be known through the mind and senses, dismissing anything that doesn't answer to this criterion.
I read something interesting recently, that great scientists like Einstein (and others) utilize both the rational and the intuitive aspects of consciousness to solve problems or to flesh out theories. Einstein imagined himself riding a beam of light in his efforts to understand the nature of light, and later used the insight he gained from that exercise to formulate his paradigm-shifting E=mc2 equation. The point being that he used a nonrational process--intuition, imagination--to gain insight and then used a rational tool (mathematics) to express that insight.
This reminds me of mathematician Andrew Wiles describing his discovery of a proof for Fermat's last theorem. After seven years of doing nothing else but working on this problem, including coming up with a proof that turned out to be faulty, the proof came to him as if through revelation. He chokes up when he describes the beauty he saw in that moment.
Citta Hari Dasa - September 3, 2008 12:32 am
One moment of samadhi will change any empiricist forever.
I just came across this very interesting talk by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who had a stroke that completely changed her view of reality.
Swami - September 3, 2008 2:14 am
Yes, there is an emerging call to “rational mysticism” worth being acquainted with. Below is an excerpt from “Free Inquiry.” It is a reply by Sam Harris, author of “The End of Faith” to the editor (Flynn), who wrote a review of his book. The book is extremely critical of religion on scientific and other grounds, but at the same time it concludes with a positive take on Eastern mysticism. Indeed, Harris calls it rational as opposed to belief or faith oriented. I have looked at his book and happened to open it to the section on mysticism by chance. As it turns out, Harris himelf, with a doctorate in neuroscience, subscribes to the mystic’s reality, understanding it to be a transcendent experience of ultimate reality.
The final chapter of my book, which gave Flynn the most trouble, is devoted to the subject of meditation. Meditation, in the sense that I use the term, is nothing more than a method of paying extraordinarily close attention to one’s moment-to-moment experience of the world. There is nothing irrational about doing this (and Flynn admits as much). In fact, such a practice constitutes the only rational basis for making detailed (first-person) claims about the nature of human subjectivity.
Difficulties arise for secularists like Flynn, however, once we begin speaking about the kinds of experiences that diligent practitioners of meditation are apt to have. It is an empirical fact that sustained meditation can result in a variety of insights that intelligent people regularly find intellectually credible and personally transformative. The problem, however, is that these insights are almost always sought and expressed in a religious context.
One such insight is that the feeling we call “I”—the sense that there is a thinker giving rise to our thoughts, an experiencer distinct from the mere flow of experience—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. Our conventional sense of “self” is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation, analogous to the discovery of one’s optic blind spots. Most people never notice their blind spots (caused by the transit of the optic nerve through the retina of each eye), but they can be pointed out with a little effort. The absence of a reified self can also be pointed out, though this tends to require considerably more training on the part of both teacher and student. The only “faith” required to get such a project off the ground is the faith of scientific hypothesis. The hypothesis is this: if I use my attention in the prescribed way, it may have a specific, reproducible effect. Needless to say, what happens (or fails to happen) along any path of “spiritual” practice has to be interpreted in light of some conceptual scheme, and everything must remain open to rational discussion. How this discussion proceeds will ultimately be decided by contemplative scientists. As I said in my book, if we ever develop a mature science of the mind, most of our religious texts will be no more useful to mystics than they now are to astronomers.
What words should we use to acknowledge the fact that the happiest person on this earth at this moment might have spent the last twenty years living alone in a cave? Any experienced meditator knows that this is a serious possibility. (Indeed, I consider it not only possible, but likely.) What can we say about the fact that the conventional sources of human happiness—association with family and friends, positive engagement with society, diverse experiences of physical pleasure, etc.—might be neither necessary nor sufficient to produce happiness in its most profound forms? This is not New Age mumbo jumbo. What secularists like Flynn tend not to realize is that there are genuine, introspective insights that can be terribly difficult to acquire. The lack of general accessibility does not render such insights at all suspect. The average person could spend the rest of his life trying to determine whether string theory makes any sense (and still fail); this is not a measure of whether string theory is mumbo jumbo. As any serious practitioner of meditation knows, there is something to the claims that have been made by mystics over the ages. And yet, the fact that such claims have always been advanced in the language of one or another religious ideology continues to confound secularists.
Flynn condemns my book simply because I have found no better words than spiritual or mystical to denote this rarefied terrain. As Flynn concedes, I took great pains to distance myself from the unfortunate associations these terms carry in our culture, deluded as it is by absurd religious certainties. Still, Flynn felt that my caveats were insufficient, and he would have had me employ words like “meditative” or “attentional” to describe the experience of human consciousness shorn of the illusion of the human ego. The problem, however, is that there is a kernel of truth in the grandiosity and otherworldly language of religion. It really is possible to have one’s moment-to-moment perception of the world radically transfigured by “attentional” discipline. Such a transfiguration, being both rare and profoundly positive, may occasionally merit a little poetry.
Vrindaranya Dasi - September 3, 2008 4:08 am
I just came across this very interesting talk by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who had a stroke that completely changed her view of reality.
Wow. That was powerful. Thanks for posting it.
One could argue from this that the experience of meditation is simply the silencing of the left hemisphere of the brain, and therefore not transcendental. Thoughts?
Nitaisundara Das - September 3, 2008 4:29 am
Wow. That was powerful. Thanks for posting it.
One could argue from this that the experience of samadhi is simply the silencing of the left hemisphere of the brain, and therefore not transcendental. Thoughts?
Interesting thought....I'll take a stab.
Perhaps the angle that would need be taken is to analyze how chaste her experience was to the texts and people who have proposed the concept of samadhi in the first place. Was her behavior leading up to it in line with those previously defined guidelines? Has her behavior since then been in line with the ways we are told one who has experienced samadhi would act? I highly doubt she passed through the first 7 stages of Patanjali's system. What little I know of SB, I know it says, at least at one point, the following in relation to samadhi:
atho mahā-bhāga bhavān amogha-dṛk
śuci-śravāḥ satya-rato dhṛta-vrataḥ
urukramasyākhila-bandha-muktaye
samādhinānusmara tad-viceṣṭitam
TRANSLATION
O Vyāsadeva, your vision is completely perfect. Your good fame is spotless. You are firm in vow and situated in truthfulness. And thus you can think of the pastimes of the Lord in trance for the liberation of the people in general from all material bondage.
I know both of these arguments use pramana that the other party would not accept, but their use hinges on the idea that her experience must conform with that of those who brought the concept forth.
I was pleasantly surprised that that woman could talk in such an undefined way and be so expressive without being heckled by what I assume is an empirically ruled crowd.
Citta Hari Dasa - September 3, 2008 4:58 am
Wow. That was powerful. Thanks for posting it.
One could argue from this that the experience of meditation is simply the silencing of the left hemisphere of the brain, and therefore not transcendental. Thoughts?
We would say it's the other way around: it's the silencing of the left hemisphere that allows transcendence to be accessed by the meditator. Of course the argument could then be "But where is the evidence that there is a transcendent state that exists beyond the mind that can be accessed? Is it not the belief in and expectation of experiencing such a state that leads to one's experience of it in meditation? After all, the various religious adherents experience what they believe in, not what other paths describe." Interestingly, we would agree with this last point: the practice determines one's experience. But that's at a high level, not at the basic level of meditation.
There probably isn't much evidence to counter such an argument with, other than some common themes in the descriptions of the meditative state, i.e., a strong sense of the unity of being, that one feels more expansive, that one perceives oneself to be independent of the body, etc.
The question then is: is the meditative state a result of brain activity, or is it the meditative state that induces changes in brain function?
Clearly it works both ways; there is no doubt that a change in chemistry creates certain kinds of experiences, as well as what we experience changes our internal chemistry.
Anyway, some thoughts, albeit a bit disjointed.
Swami - September 3, 2008 12:06 pm
Wow. That was powerful. Thanks for posting it.
One could argue from this that the experience of meditation is simply the silencing of the left hemisphere of the brain, and therefore not transcendental. Thoughts?
I think science will be come a mystic before mystics become scientists. It seems clear that she is now a "believer." I think that the only ones who would question whether her experience was not what she experienced it to be (transcendental) would be those who did not have such an experience.
Gaura-Vijaya Das - September 3, 2008 12:57 pm
I think science will be come a mystic before mystics become scientists. It seems clear that she is now a "believer." I think that the only ones who would question whether her experience was not what she experienced it to be (transcendental) would be those who did not have such an experience.
I agree GM. A reductionist has provided no room for God to prove his existence. Even the experience we are having right now by visualizing the world, is governed by chemicals, does it make it unreal or why does it make it more authentic than experiences which mystics have? Just because more humans(who are small proportion of the universe anyway) have it and you can objectively measure the properties of the objects people look at. When man understands all natural laws to explain the universe then he disproves God by saying as he has understood everything and there is no need to attribute anything to God. If man isn't able to understand many things like in current cosmology then he says that God is not there as he is not accessible to intellect. Then I ask these people what does God have to do to prove his existence? This is the most important question I ask a scientifically minded person. Even a scientist will not let himself be examined as a toy by other scientists then how God can be subject to such tests to the extreme? Many people are just too rigid; they don't want to agree.
Only thing they have in their favor is that science is a little much more uniform than world religions and it has aided in sense gratification and comfort of humans.
Nitaisundara Das - September 3, 2008 2:39 pm
I think science will be come a mystic before mystics become scientists. It seems clear that she is now a "believer." I think that the only ones who would question whether her experience was not what she experienced it to be (transcendental) would be those who did not have such an experience.
I questioned the transcendental nature of her experience. It seems analogous to an altered state of consciousness via intoxicants. Chemicals and neurons and all those things acting up. It clearly sounds like she experienced a stroke, and then experienced the "transcendental" oneness etc. Not that she was blissfully in "nirvana" and it caused her brain hemorrhage. Am I wrong here? I've read some on near death experiences and they too seem to be a product of the gunas. No?
Gaura-Vijaya Das - September 3, 2008 3:42 pm
I questioned the transcendental nature of her experience. It seems analogous to an altered state of consciousness via intoxicants. Chemicals and neurons and all those things acting up. It clearly sounds like she experienced a stroke, and then experienced the "transcendental" oneness etc. Not that she was blissfully in "nirvana" and it caused her brain hemorrhage. Am I wrong here? I've read some on near death experiences and they too seem to be a product of the gunas. No?
The question is how do you distinguish between the two experiences through reductionism as all experiences a human has will have corresponding chemical secretions in the body. Even goswamis would have had some chemicals in the body which scientists could have seen. So will you deny their experience on the ground that the same chemicals can be injected through drugs?
Citta Hari Dasa - September 3, 2008 3:54 pm
I questioned the transcendental nature of her experience. It seems analogous to an altered state of consciousness via intoxicants. Chemicals and neurons and all those things acting up. It clearly sounds like she experienced a stroke, and then experienced the "transcendental" oneness etc. Not that she was blissfully in "nirvana" and it caused her brain hemorrhage. Am I wrong here? I've read some on near death experiences and they too seem to be a product of the gunas. No?
Altered states of consciousness brought on by the ingestion of psychedelics, for example, can have much in common with the experience of genuine mystics. Or perhaps a better way of saying it is that they ostensibly look very similar. But an important thing to note is that ingesting a chemical is not a sure recipe for having mystical experience. As is widely known, the psychedelic experience is nowhere near uniform--some have positive experiences while others have the infamous "bad trip." Brain chemistry is clearly a big factor but is not the whole story. Guru Maharaja once said that drugs basically amplify whatever is already in a person's mind, and I think this is perfectly accurate; I have seen it in myself and in others. The drug (or in the doc's case, the stroke) is merely a catalyst for something that is already there. I think that in the case of the brain doctor she had something in her background that predisposed her to being open to mystical experience, and the stroke was a vehicle for her to have that experience, because not everyone who has a stroke experiences what she did. So is mystical experience a product of the gunas? I would say that the gunas are definitely involved--how could they not be, since we are embodied and all of our experience involves the brain and perceptual systems--but that does not mean that the mystical experience is therefore a product of material conditions.
Nitaisundara Das - September 3, 2008 4:53 pm
I think that the only ones who would question whether her experience was not what she experienced it to be (transcendental) would be those who did not have such an experience.
I was merely trying to clarify this statement. It looks to me like GM is definitively saying here that her experience was transcendental. That was what I was questioning. Otherwise I understand and agree with the questions and points you both presented.
I think the crux here is whether the experience is descending or ascending but I see the dilemma in trying to distinguish the two. The only thing I can think of again is my first idea: that one must examine how the pre-experience and post-experience personality compares to those given in the texts that originally brought forth these ideas.
Prahlad Das - September 4, 2008 5:52 pm
By the literal meaning of the word "transcendental" I think she did have that sort of experience. I think we have to be a little generous with the word transcendental. She did say that she experienced "nirvana" a sort of at-oneness with everything around her. How she got to that point may precisely be a descending method (can we ever truly say that she wasn't graced in a descending way?). We are all waiting, not necessarily for a stroke to happen, but for realizations to occur. From her position, her situation was very "REAL" and wasn't just explained away by chemical analysis. This was apparent by her presentation. She may have traveled untethered through a portion of the Brahmanda. She became acutely aware of the pervasiveness of Consciousness.
As much as an empiricist will say these sorts of experiences are caused by chemical and biological sequences, a spiritualist can say that these sequences are a product of a sort of priming for the experience. The seed/tree argument all over again. The question will always remain, "What caused what?". It will then become a question of what one deems as REALITY.
The interesting thing is that she deems the perspective awarded by her experience a REALITY.
A person involved in empiric understandings seeks to have their questions answered their way and is not satisfied with esoteric experiences which are not falsifiable. Persons who have experienced esoterically or persons who are open to the idea that spiritual occurrence is possible seem to be the only ones who can allow for it.
Swami - September 8, 2008 1:35 am
I was merely trying to clarify this statement. It looks to me like GM is definitively saying here that her experience was transcendental.
What I meant to say is that without having the experience one does not have the context to describe or understand it as anything other than something within one's own limited experience. Empiricists will readily deny that such experiences are what experiencers say they are, but if they themselves have such an experience I suspect they will speak differently about it.
Was this person's experience transcendental? I don't know. Perhaps her brain issue was also grace infused (out standard), perhaps not. But one thing to note about it is that while it was largely ineffable, the experiencer spoke articulately about what it was not. It was shifting away from the conventional sense of self, an identity that when spoken about humorously (my busy important life) drew laughter from the audience. The audience intuitively knew that their sense of importance based on their material identity was really not that important in the big picture of life. The speaker's experience involved an ego death of sorts,a nd this ego death was something that the audience intuitively identified with as something of ultimate value.
This is important. We might be lead to believe from the video that in the future science will have machines that we can hook up to and get a transcendental buzz from without all the effort of ego effacing spiritual practice. This would be merely a brain stimulation, nothing spiritual. However, the fact is that those who have such experiences report that they correspond with an ego death, a shift way from selfishness. And having had such an experience they want to move in that direction because it is euphoric, noetic, etc. To me this says that an ego effacing lifestyle is desirable and rational. So if science makes such a machine, it will end up promoting the values and lifestyle of a transcendentalist, a lifestyle that seeks to situate one in an ego-less state and vantage point from which to live one's life. Ego death is rewarding in ways that words cannot do justice to. This is the message.
Swami - September 8, 2008 2:03 am
Earlier on this thread I mentioned and quoted Sam Harris. He is one of the so called Four Horsemen of the drive toward atheism. Ironically he is to me an unwitting Trojan Horse. In opening the door to the idea that Eastern mysticism is rational, etc. he ends up saying to the careful reader that the core of religion is true. What genuine spiritual practitioner would conclude otherwise? Fundamentalism is objectionable, but mystical spiritual experience is desirable, attainable, and indeed, to a degree measurable.
Harris may be impersonal in his mystical leaning, but this really says nothing against acintya bhedabheda, for it is more the nonduality of spirituality that interests him and this of course underlies acintya bhedabheda, vadanti tat tattva vidas tattvam yaj jnanam advayam.
He openly admits that as far as he knows he has no rational reply to the research of Ian Stevenson on reincarnation (as much as he is familiar with it), or that the only rational reply is that Stevenson's evidence is credible. He also finds other evidence of the evidence of the paranormal credible. If this was to break in the world, materialism would be permanently cracked and we would have more than a Copernican revolution on our hands.
Vrindaranya Dasi - September 8, 2008 2:17 am
I questioned the transcendental nature of her experience. It seems analogous to an altered state of consciousness via intoxicants. Chemicals and neurons and all those things acting up. It clearly sounds like she experienced a stroke, and then experienced the "transcendental" oneness etc. Not that she was blissfully in "nirvana" and it caused her brain hemorrhage. Am I wrong here? I've read some on near death experiences and they too seem to be a product of the gunas. No?
Perhaps she experienced prakrti nirvana as opposed to Brahma nirvana.
Swami - September 8, 2008 2:41 am
Perhaps she experienced prakrti nirvana as opposed to Brahma nirvana.
Yes, good point. No grace required.
Vrindaranya Dasi - September 8, 2008 3:08 am
If this is the case, it makes an interesting statement about Buddhism for the thoughtful person.
Nitaisundara Das - September 8, 2008 3:32 am
I wasn't clear in my thinking, I was actually meaning prakriti nirvana, assuming that is the most common understanding of the word.
Gaura-Vijaya Das - September 8, 2008 11:27 am
Earlier on this thread I mentioned and quoted Sam Harris. He is one of the so called Four Horsemen of the drive toward atheism. Ironically he is to me an unwitting Trojan Horse. In opening the door to the idea that Eastern mysticism is rational, etc. he ends up saying to the careful reader that the core of religion is true. What genuine spiritual practitioner would conclude otherwise? Fundamentalism is objectionable, but mystical spiritual experience is desirable, attainable, and indeed, to a degree measurable.
Harris may be impersonal in his mystical leaning, but this really says nothing against acintya bhedabheda, for it is more the nonduality of spirituality that interests him and this of course underlies acintya bhedabheda, vadanti tat tattva vidas tattvam yaj jnanam advayam.
He openly admits that as far as he knows he has no rational reply to the research of Ian Stevenson on reincarnation (as much as he is familiar with it), or that the only rational reply is that Stevenson's evidence is credible. He also finds other evidence of the evidence of the paranormal credible. If this was to break in the world, materialism would be permanently cracked and we would have more than a Copernican revolution on our hands.
Ian Stevenson wants to keep a low profile and not be used as a pawn by religious organizations to promote their beliefs. But the fact remains that the research is pretty good and scientists have to come up with some weird psychic ideas to explain those incidents.