Anthroposophy is a philosophy founded by Rudolf Steiner that postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world that is accessible by direct experience through inner development. More specifically, it aims to develop faculties of perceptive imagination, inspiration and intuition through the cultivation of a form of thinking independent of sensory experience,[1][2] and to present the results thus derived in a manner subject to rational verification. Anthroposophy aims to attain in its study of spiritual experience the precision and clarity attained by the natural sciences in their investigations of the physical world.[1] The philosophy has double roots in German idealism and German mysticism[3] and was initially expressed in language drawn from Theosophy.

Anthroposophical ideas have been applied practically in many areas including Steiner/Waldorf education, special education (most prominently through the Camphill Movement), biodynamic agriculture, medicine, ethical banking, organizational development, and the arts.[1][4][5][6][7] The Anthroposophical Society has its international center at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland.

Modern critics, particularly Michael Shermer, have termed anthroposophy's application in areas such as medicine, biology, and biodynamic agriculture to be pseudoscience.[8][9] Anthroposophy has also been termed "the most important esoteric society in European history."[10][11]

The early work of the founder of anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, culminated in his Philosophy of Freedom (also translated as The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path). Here, Steiner developed a concept of free will based on inner experiences, especially those that occur in the creative activity of independent thought.[1]

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Steiner's interests turned to explicitly spiritual areas of research. His work began to interest others interested in spiritual ideas; among these was the Theosophical Society. From 1900 on, thanks to the positive reception given to his ideas, Steiner focused increasingly on his work with the Theosophical Society becoming the secretary of its section in Germany in 1902. During the years of his leadership, membership increased dramatically, from a few individuals to sixty-nine Lodges.[12]

By 1907, a split between Steiner and the mainstream Theosophical Society had begun to become apparent. While the Society was oriented toward an Eastern and especially Indian approach, Steiner was trying to develop a path that embraced Christianity and natural science.[13] The split became irrevocable when Annie Besant, then president of the Theosophical Society, began to present the child Jiddu Krishnamurti as the reincarnated Christ. Steiner strongly objected and considered any comparison between Krishnamurti and Christ to be nonsense; many years later, Krishnamurti also repudiated the assertion. Steiner's continuing differences with Besant led him to separate from the Theosophical Society Adyar; he was followed by the great majority of the membership of the Theosophical Society's German Section, as well as members of other national sections.[12][13]

By this time, Steiner had reached considerable stature as a spiritual teacher.[14] He spoke about what he considered to be his direct experience of the Akashic Records (sometimes called the "Akasha Chronicle"), thought to be a spiritual chronicle of the history, pre-history, and future of the world and mankind. In a number of works,[15] Steiner described a path of inner development he felt would let anyone attain comparable spiritual experiences. Sound vision could be developed, in part, by practicing rigorous forms of ethical and cognitive self-discipline, concentration, and meditation; in particular, a person's moral development must precede the development of spiritual faculties.[1]

In 1912, the Anthroposophical Society was founded. After World War I, the Anthroposophical movement took on new directions. Projects such as schools, centers for those with special needs, organic farms and medical clinics were established, all inspired by anthroposophy.

In 1923, faced with differences between older members focusing on inner development and younger members eager to become active in the social transformations of the time, Steiner refounded the Society in an inclusive manner and established a School for Spiritual Science. As a spiritual basis for the refounded movement, Steiner wrote a "Foundation Stone Meditation" which remains a central meditative expression of anthroposophical ideas.

Steiner died just over a year later, in 1925. The Second World War temporarily hindered the anthroposophical movement in most of Continental Europe, as the Anthroposophical Society and most of its daughter movements (e.g. Steiner/Waldorf education) were banned by the National Socialists (Nazis);[16] virtually no anthroposophists ever joined the National Socialist Party.[17]:250

By 2007, national branches of the Anthroposophical Society had been established in fifty countries, and about 10,000 institutions around the world were working on the basis of anthroposophy.[18] In the same year, the Anthroposophical Society was called the "most important esoteric society in European history."[10]

Anthroposophy is an amalgam of the Greek terms (anthropos = "human") and (sophia = "wisdom"). An early English usage is recorded by Nathan Bailey (1742) as meaning "the knowledge of the nature of man."[19] Authors whose usage of the term predates Steiner's include occultist Agrippa von Nettesheim, alchemist Thomas Vaughan (Anthroposophia Theomagica), and philosopher Robert Zimmermann.

Steiner began using the term in the early 1900s as an alternative to the term theosophy (divine wisdom), a term central to the Theosophical Society, with which Steiner was associated at the time, and to a long tradition of European esotericists. Steiner probably first encountered the word "anthroposophy" in the work of Zimmermann, some of whose lectures in the University of Vienna he had attended while a student.[20]

Anthroposophical proponents aim to extend the clarity of the scientific method to phenomena of human soul-life and to spiritual experiences. This requires developing new faculties of objective spiritual perception, which Steiner maintained was possible for humanity today. The steps of this process of inner development he identified as consciously achieved imagination, inspiration and intuition.[6] Steiner believed results of this form of spiritual research should be expressed in a way that can be understood and evaluated on the same basis as the results of natural science:[4] "The anthroposophical schooling of thinking leads to the development of a non-sensory, or so-called supersensory consciousness, whereby the spiritual researcher brings the experiences of this realm into ideas, concepts, and expressive language in a form which people can understand who do not yet have the capacity to achieve the supersensory experiences necessary for individual research."[21]

Steiner hoped to form a spiritual movement that would free the individual from any external authority: "The most important problem of all human thinking is this: to comprehend the human being as a personality grounded in him or herself."[21] For Steiner, the human capacity for rational thought would allow individuals to comprehend spiritual research on their own and bypass the danger of dependency on an authority.[21]

Steiner contrasted the anthroposophical approach with both conventional mysticism, which he considered lacking the clarity necessary for exact knowledge, and natural science, which he considered arbitrarily limited to investigating the outer world.

In Theosophy, Steiner suggested that human beings unite a physical body of substances gathered from (and that ultimately return to) the inorganic world; a life body (also called the etheric body), in common with all living creatures (including plants); a bearer of sentience or consciousness (also called the astral body), in common with all animals; and the ego, which anchors the faculty of self-awareness unique to human beings.

Anthroposophy describes a broad evolution of human consciousness. Early stages of human evolution possess an intuitive perception of reality, including a clairvoyant perception of spiritual realities. Humanity has progressively evolved an increasing reliance on intellectual faculties and a corresponding loss of intuitive or clairvoyant experiences, which have become atavistic. The increasing intellectualization of consciousness, initially a progressive direction of evolution, has led to an excessive reliance on abstraction and a loss of contact with both natural and spiritual realities. However, to go further requires new capacities that combine the clarity of intellectual thought with the imagination, and beyond this with consciously achieved inspiration and intuitive insights.[22]

Anthroposophy speaks of the reincarnation of the human spirit: that the human being passes between stages of existence, incarnating into an earthly body, living on earth, leaving the body behind and entering into the spiritual worlds before returning to be born again into a new life on earth. After the death of the physical body, the human spirit recapitulates the past life, perceiving its events as they were experienced by the objects of its actions. A complex transformation takes place between the review of the past life and the preparation for the next life. The individual's karmic condition eventually leads to a choice of parents, physical body, disposition, and capacities that provide the challenges and opportunities that further development requires, which includes karmically chosen tasks for the future life.[22]

Steiner described some conditions that determine the interdependence of a person's lives, or karma.[23][24]

The anthroposophical view of evolution considers all animals to have evolved from an early, unspecialized form. As the least specialized animal, human beings have maintained the closest connection to the archetypal form;[25] contrary to the Darwinian conception of human evolution, all other animals devolve from this archetype.[26] The spiritual archetype originally created by spiritual beings was devoid of physical substance; only later did this descend into material existence on Earth.[27] In this view, human evolution has accompanied the Earth's evolution throughout the existence of the Earth.

The evolution of man, Steiner said, has consisted in the gradual incarnation of a spiritual being into a material body. It has been a true "descent" of man from a spiritual world into a world of matter. The evolution of the animal kingdom did not precede, but rather accompanied the process of human incarnation. Man is thus not the end result of the evolution of the animals, but is rather in a certain sense their cause. In the succession of types which appears in the fossil record-the fishes, reptiles, mammals, and finally fossil remains of man himself the stages of this process of incarnation are reflected.

Anthroposophy took over from Theosophy a complex system of cycles of world development and human evolution. The evolution of the world is said to have occurred in cycles. The first phase of the world consisted only of heat. In the second phase, a more active condition, light, and a more condensed, gaseous state separate out from the heat. In the third phase, a fluid state arose, as well as a sounding, forming energy. In the fourth (current) phase, solid physical matter first exists. This process is said to have been accompanied by an evolution of consciousness which led up to present human culture.

The anthroposophical view is that good is found in the balance between two polar influences on world and human evolution. These are often described through their mythological embodiments as spiritual adversaries which endeavour to tempt and corrupt humanity, Lucifer and his counterpart Ahriman. These have both positive and negative aspects. Lucifer is the light spirit, which "plays on human pride and offers the delusion of divinity", but also motivates creativity and spirituality; Ahriman is the dark spirit that tempts human beings to "...deny [their] link with divinity and to live entirely on the material plane", but that also stimulates intellectuality and technology. Both figures exert a negative effect on humanity when their influence becomes misplaced or one-sided, yet their influences are necessary for human freedom to unfold.[1][4]

Each human being has the task to find a balance between these opposing influences, and each is helped in this task by the mediation of the Representative of Humanity, also known as the Christ being, a spiritual entity who stands between and harmonizes the two extremes.[4]

The applications of anthroposophy to practical fields include:

This is a pedagogical movement with over 1000 Steiner or Waldorf schools (the latter name stems from the first such school, founded in Stuttgart in 1919)[29] located in some 60 countries; the great majority of these are independent (private) schools.[30] Sixteen of the schools have been affiliated with the United Nations' UNESCO Associated Schools Project Network, which sponsors education projects that foster improved quality of education throughout the world.[31] Waldorf schools receive full or partial governmental funding in some European nations, Australia and in parts of the United States (as Waldorf method public or charter schools).

The schools have been founded in a variety of communities: for example in the favelas of So Paulo[32] to wealthy suburbs of major cities;[32] in India, Egypt, Australia, the Netherlands, Mexico and South Africa. Though most of the early Waldorf schools were teacher-founded, the schools today are usually initiated and later supported by a parent community.[33] Waldorf schools are among the most visible anthroposophical institutions.[33][34]

Biodynamic agriculture, the first intentional form of organic farming,[34] began in 1924, when Rudolf Steiner gave a series of lectures published in English as The Agriculture Course.[35] Steiner is considered one of the founders of the modern organic farming movement.[36][37]

Steiner gave several series of lectures to physicians and medical students. Out of those grew a complementary medical movement intending to "extend the knowledge gained through the methods of the natural sciences of the present age with insights from spiritual science."[38] This movement now includes hundreds of M.D.s, chiefly in Europe and North America, and has its own clinics, hospitals, and medical schools.[1]

One of the most studied applications has been the use of mistletoe extracts in cancer therapy,[39] but research has found no evidence of benefit.[40][41]

In 1922, Ita Wegman founded an anthroposophical center for special needs education, the Sonnenhof, in Switzerland. In 1940, Karl Knig founded the Camphill Movement in Scotland. The latter in particular has spread widely, and there are now over a hundred Camphill communities and other anthroposophical homes for children and adults in need of special care in about 22 countries around the world.[42] Both Karl Knig, Thomas Weihs and others have written extensively on these ideas underlying Special education.[43][44]

Steiner designed around thirteen buildings in an organicexpressionist architectural style.[45] Foremost among these are his designs for the two Goetheanum buildings in Dornach, Switzerland. Thousands of further buildings have been built by later generations of anthroposophic architects.[46][47]

Architects who have been strongly influenced by the anthroposophic style include Imre Makovecz in Hungary,[48]Hans Scharoun and Joachim Eble in Germany, Erik Asmussen in Sweden, Kenji Imai in Japan, Thomas Rau, Anton Alberts and Max van Huut in the Netherlands, Christopher Day and Camphill Architects in the UK, Thompson and Rose in America, Denis Bowman in Canada, and Walter Burley Griffin and Gregory Burgess in Australia.[49][50]

ING House in Amsterdam is a contemporary building by an anthroposophical architect which has received awards for its ecological design and approach to a self-sustaining ecology as an autonomous building and example of sustainable architecture.[51]

Together with Marie von Sivers, Steiner developed eurythmy, a performance art combining dance, speech, and music.[52][53]

Around the world today are a number of banks, companies, charities, and schools for developing co-operative forms of business using Steiner's ideas about economic associations, aiming at harmonious and socially responsible roles in the world economy.[1] The first anthroposophic bank was the Gemeinschaftsbank fr Leihen und Schenken in Bochum, Germany, founded in 1974.[54]Socially responsible banks founded out of anthroposophy in the English-speaking world include Triodos Bank, founded in 1980 and active in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Spain and France. Cultura Sparebank dates from 1982 when a group of Norwegian anthroposophists start to grow the idea of having ethical banking but only in the late 90s the bank starts to operate as a savings bank in Norway. La Nef in France and RSF Social Finance[55] in San Francisco are other examples.

Bernard Lievegoed, a psychiatrist, founded a new method of individual and institutional development oriented towards humanizing organizations and linked with Steiner's ideas of the threefold social order. This work is represented by the NPI Institute for Organizational Development in the Netherlands and sister organizations in many other countries.[1] Various forms of biographic and counselling work have been developed on the basis of anthroposophy.

There are also anthroposophical movements to renew speech and drama, the most important of which are based in the work of Marie Steiner-von Sivers (speech formation, also known as Creative Speech) and the Chekhov Method originated by Michael Chekhov (nephew of Anton Chekhov).[56]

Anthroposophic painting, a style inspired by Rudolf Steiner, featured prominently in the first Goetheanum's cupola. The technique frequently begins by filling the surface to be painted with color, out of which forms are gradually developed, often images with symbolic-spiritual significance. Paints that allow for many transparent layers are preferred, and often these are derived from plant materials.[17]:381382, 1080, 1105

Other applications include:

For a period after World War I, Steiner was extremely active and well known in Germany, in part because he lectured widely proposing social reforms. Steiner was a sharp critic of nationalism, which he saw as outdated, and a proponent of achieving social solidarity through individual freedom.[1] A petition proposing a radical change in the German constitution and expressing his basic social ideas (signed by Herman Hesse, among others) was widely circulated. His main book on social reform is Toward Social Renewal.[1]

Anthroposophy continues to aim at reforming society through maintaining and strengthening the independence of the spheres of cultural life, human rights and the economy. It emphasizes a particular ideal in each of these three realms of society:[1]

According to Steiner, a real spiritual world exists, evolving along with the material one. Steiner held that the spiritual world can be researched in the right circumstances through direct experience, by persons practicing rigorous forms of ethical and cognitive self-discipline. Steiner described many exercises he said were suited to strengthening such self-discipline; the most complete exposition of these is found in his book How To Know Higher Worlds. The aim of these exercises is to develop higher levels of consciousness through meditation and observation. Details about the spiritual world, Steiner suggested, could on such a basis be discovered and reported, though no more infallibly than the results of natural science.[6]

Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe. Anthroposophists are those who experience, as an essential need of life, certain questions on the nature of the human being and the universe, just as one experiences hunger and thirst.

Steiner regarded his research reports as being important aids to others seeking to enter into spiritual experience. He suggested that a combination of spiritual exercises (for example, concentrating on an object such as a seed), moral development (control of thought, feelings and will combined with openness, tolerance and flexibility) and familiarity with other spiritual researchers' results would best further an individual's spiritual development. He consistently emphasised that any inner, spiritual practice should be undertaken in such a way as not to interfere with one's responsibilities in outer life.[6] Steiner distinguished between what he considered were true and false paths of spiritual investigation.[58]

In anthroposophy, artistic expression is also treated as a potentially valuable bridge between spiritual and material reality.[59]:97

A person seeking inner development must first of all make the attempt to give up certain formerly held inclinations. Then, new inclinations must be acquired by constantly holding the thought of such inclinations, virtues or characteristics in one's mind. They must be so incorporated into one's being that a person becomes enabled to alter his soul by his own will-power. This must be tried as objectively as a chemical might be tested in an experiment. A person who has never endeavored to change his soul, who has never made the initial decision to develop the qualities of endurance, steadfastness and calm logical thinking, or a person who has such decisions but has given up because he did not succeed in a week, a month, a year or a decade, will never conclude anything inwardly about these truths.

Steiner's stated prerequisites to beginning on a spiritual path include a willingness to take up serious cognitive studies, a respect for factual evidence, and a responsible attitude. Central to progress on the path itself is a harmonious cultivation of the following qualities:[61]

Steiner sees meditation as a concentration and enhancement of the power of thought. By focusing consciously on an idea, feeling or intention the meditant seeks to arrive at pure thinking, a state exemplified by but not confined to pure mathematics. In Steiner's view, conventional sensory-material knowledge is achieved through relating perception and concepts. The anthroposophic path of esoteric training articulates three further stages of supersensory knowledge, which do not necessarily follow strictly sequentially in any single individual's spiritual progress.[61][62]

Steiner described numerous exercises he believed would bring spiritual development; other anthroposophists have added many others. A central principle is that "for every step in spiritual perception, three steps are to be taken in moral development." According to Steiner, moral development reveals the extent to which one has achieved control over one's inner life and can exercise it in harmony with the spiritual life of other people; it shows the real progress in spiritual development, the fruits of which are given in spiritual perception. It also guarantees the capacity to distinguish between false perceptions or illusions (which are possible in perceptions of both the outer world and the inner world) and true perceptions: i.e., the capacity to distinguish in any perception between the influence of subjective elements (i.e., viewpoint) and objective reality.[6]

Steiner built upon Goethe's conception of an imaginative power capable of synthesizing the sense-perceptible form of a thing (an image of its outer appearance) and the concept we have of that thing (an image of its inner structure or nature). Steiner added to this the conception that a further step in the development of thinking is possible when the thinker observes his or her own thought processes. "The organ of observation and the observed thought process are then identical, so that the condition thus arrived at is simultaneously one of perception through thinking and one of thought through perception."[6]

Thus, in Steiner's view, we can overcome the subject-object divide through inner activity, even though all human experience begins by being conditioned by it. In this connection, Steiner examines the step from thinking determined by outer impressions to what he calls sense-free thinking. He characterizes thoughts he considers without sensory content, such as mathematical or logical thoughts, as free deeds. Steiner believed he had thus located the origin of free will in our thinking, and in particular in sense-free thinking.[6]

Some of the epistemic basis for Steiner's later anthroposophical work is contained in the seminal work, Philosophy of Freedom.[63] In his early works, Steiner sought to overcome what he perceived as the dualism of Cartesian idealism and Kantian subjectivism by developing Goethe's conception of the human being as a natural-supernatural entity, that is: natural in that humanity is a product of nature, supernatural in that through our conceptual powers we extend nature's realm, allowing it to achieve a reflective capacity in us as philosophy, art and science.[64] Steiner was one of the first European philosophers to overcome the subject-object split in Western thought.[64] Though not well known among philosophers, his philosophical work was taken up by Owen Barfield (and through him influenced the Inklings, an Oxford group of Christian writers that included J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis).[65]

Christian and Jewish mystical thought have also influenced the development of anthroposophy.[66][67]

Steiner believed in the possibility of applying the clarity of scientific thinking to spiritual experience, which he saw as deriving from an objectively existing spiritual world.[59]:77ff Steiner identified mathematics, which attains certainty through thinking itself, thus through inner experience rather than empirical observation,[68] as the basis of his epistemology of spiritual experience.[69]

Steiner's writing, though appreciative of all religions and cultural developments, emphasizes Western tradition as having evolved to meet contemporary needs.[13] He describes Christ and his mission on earth of bringing individuated consciousness as having a particularly important place in human evolution,[1] whereby:[4]

Spiritual science does not want to usurp the place of Christianity; on the contrary it would like to be instrumental in making Christianity understood. Thus it becomes clear to us through spiritual science that the being whom we call Christ is to be recognized as the center of life on earth, that the Christian religion is the ultimate religion for the earth's whole future. Spiritual science shows us particularly that the pre-Christian religions outgrow their one-sidedness and come together in the Christian faith. It is not the desire of spiritual science to set something else in the place of Christianity; rather it wants to contribute to a deeper, more heartfelt understanding of Christianity.

Thus, anthroposophy considers there to be a being who unifies all religions, and who is not represented by any particular religious faith. This being is, according to Steiner, not only the Redeemer of the Fall from Paradise, but also the unique pivot and meaning of earth's evolutionary processes and of human history.[4] To describe this being, Steiner periodically used terms such as the "Representative of Humanity" or the "good spirit"[71][72] rather than any denominational term.

Steiner's views of Christianity diverge from conventional Christian thought in key places, and include gnostic elements:

Rudolf Steiner wrote and lectured on Judaism and Jewish issues for much of his life. In the 1880s and 1890s, he took part in debates on anti-semitism and on assimilation. He was a fierce opponent of anti-semitism and supported the unconditional acceptance and integration of the Jews in Europe.[74] He also supported mile Zola's position in the Dreyfus affair.[74] In his later life, Steiner was accused by the Nazis of being a Jew, and Adolf Hitler called anthroposophy "Jewish methods". The anthroposophical institutions in Germany were banned during Nazi rule and several anthroposophists sent to concentration camps.[75]

Steiner emphasized Judaism's central importance to the constitution of the modern era in the West but suggested that to appreciate the spirituality of the future it would need to overcome its tendency toward abstraction. Important early anthroposophists who were Jewish included two central members on the executive boards of the precursors to the modern Anthroposophical Society,[76] and Karl Knig, the founder of the Camphill movement. Martin Buber and Hugo Bergmann, who viewed Steiner's social ideas as a solution to the ArabJewish conflict, were also influenced by anthroposophy.[77]

There are several anthroposophical organisations in Israel, including the anthroposophical kibbutz Harduf, founded by Jesaiah Ben-Aharon. A number of these organizations are striving to foster positive relationships between the Arab and Jewish populations: The Harduf Waldorf school includes both Jewish and Arab faculty and students, and has extensive contact with the surrounding Arab communities. In Hilf near Haifa, there is a joint Arab-Jewish Waldorf kindergarten, the first joint Arab-Jewish kindergarten in Israel.

Towards the end of Steiner's life, a group of theology students (primarily Lutheran, with some Roman Catholic members) approached Steiner for help in reviving Christianity, in particular "to bridge the widening gulf between modern science and the world of spirit."[1] They approached a notable Lutheran pastor, Friedrich Rittelmeyer, who was already working with Steiner's ideas, to join their efforts. Out of their co-operative endeavor, the Movement for Religious Renewal, now generally known as The Christian Community, was born. Steiner emphasized that he considered this movement, and his role in creating it, to be independent of his anthroposophical work,[1] as he wished anthroposophy to be independent of any particular religion or religious denomination.[4]

Anthroposophy's supporters include Pulitzer Prize-winning and Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow,[78] Nobel prize winner Selma Lagerlf,[79]Andrei Bely,[80][81]Joseph Beuys,[82]Owen Barfield, architect Walter Burley Griffin, Wassily Kandinsky,[83][84]Andrei Tarkovsky,[85]Bruno Walter,[86] and Right Livelihood Award winners Sir George Trevelyan,[87] child psychiatrist Eva Frommer[88][89] and Ibrahim Abouleish.[90]Albert Schweitzer was a friend of Steiner's and was supportive of his ideals for cultural renewal.[91]

Though Rudolf Steiner studied natural science at the Vienna Technical University at the undergraduate level, his doctorate was in epistemology and very little of his work is directly concerned with the empirical sciences. In his mature work, when he did refer to science it was often to present phenomenological or Goethean science as an alternative to what he considered the materialistic science of his contemporaries.[11]

His primary interest was in applying the methodology of science to realms of inner experience and the spiritual worlds (Steiner's appreciation that the essence of science is its method of inquiry is unusual among esotericists[11]), and Steiner called anthroposophy Geisteswissenschaft (lit.: Science of the mind, or cultural or spiritual science), a term generally used in German to refer to the humanities and social sciences;[92] in fact, the term "science" is used more broadly in Europe as a general term that refers to any exact knowledge.[93]

[Anthroposophy's] methodology is to employ a scientific way of thinking, but to apply this methodology, which normally excludes our inner experience from consideration, instead to the human being proper.

Whether this is a sufficient basis for anthroposophy to be considered a spiritual science has been a matter of controversy.[4][94] As Freda Easton explained in her study of Waldorf schools, "Whether one accepts anthroposophy as a science depends upon whether one accepts Steiner's interpretation of a science that extends the consciousness and capacity of human beings to experience their inner spiritual world."[95]Sven Ove Hansson has disputed anthroposophy's claim to a scientific basis, stating that its ideas are not empirically derived and neither reproducible nor testable.[96]

Carlo Willmann points out that as, on its own terms, anthroposophical methodology offers no possibility of being falsified except through its own procedures of spiritual investigation, no intersubjective validation is possible by conventional scientific methods; it thus cannot stand up to positivistic science's criticism.[4] Peter Schneider calls such objections untenable on the grounds that if a non-sensory, non-physical realm exists, then according to Steiner the experiences of pure thinking possible within the normal realm of consciousness would already be experiences of that, and it would be impossible to exclude the possibility of empirically grounded experiences of other supersensory content.[6]

Olav Hammer suggests that anthroposophy carries scientism "to lengths unparalleled in any other Esoteric position" due to its dependence upon claims of clairvoyant experience, its subsuming natural science under "spiritual science", and its development of what Hammer calls "fringe" sciences such as anthroposophical medicine and biodynamic agriculture justified partly on the basis of the ethical and ecological values they promote, rather than purely on a scientific basis.[11]

Though Steiner saw that spiritual vision itself is difficult for others to achieve, he recommended open-mindedly exploring and rationally testing the results of such research; he also urged others to follow a spiritual training that would allow them directly to apply the methods he used eventually to achieve comparable results.[6] Some results of Steiner's research have been investigated and supported by scientists working to further and extend scientific observation in directions suggested by an anthroposophical approach.[97]

Anthony Storr stated about Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy: "His belief system is so eccentric, so unsupported by evidence, so manifestly bizarre, that rational skeptics are bound to consider it delusional.... But, whereas Einstein's way of perceiving the world by thought became confirmed by experiment and mathematical proof, Steiner's remained intensely subjective and insusceptible of objective confirmation."[98]

As an explicitly spiritual movement, anthroposophy has sometimes been called a religious philosophy.[99] In 2005, a California federal court ruled that a group alleging that anthroposophy is a religion for Establishment Clause purposes did not provide any legally admissible evidence in support of this view; the case is under appeal. In 2000, a French court ruled that a government minister's description of anthroposophy as a cult was defamatory.[100]

Anthroposophical ideas have been criticized from both sides in the race debate:

The Anthroposophical Society in America has stated:

We explicitly reject any racial theory that may be construed to be part of Rudolf Steiner's writings. The Anthroposophical Society in America is an open, public society and it rejects any purported spiritual or scientific theory on the basis of which the alleged superiority of one race is justified at the expense of another race.[104]

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Last updated13:56, August 4 2017

123RF

Not all movement is good movement when it comes to weight loss.

If you want to maximise your workout and lose weight faster, you might want to rethink your workout routine.

We consulted with DrLuiza Petre, board-certified cardiologist and weight management specialist, to get you the worst exercises for fat loss (and what to do instead).

It's important to remember that not all exercises lead to weight loss.

MURRAY WILSON/STUFF

CrossFit isn't for beginners. If you're not in tip-top shape, it's best to opt for a less intense workout.

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READ MORE:* 'Dramatic' weight loss possible without counting calories* Why is exercise useless for weight loss?* Expensive meal plans not needed for weight loss* 10 best exercises for weight loss

Extended cardio sessions can lead to muscle loss if they're not balanced with strength training.

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"In fact, there may be more bad exercises than good ones when it comes to losing weight and building muscle."

Instead, give strength training a chance. The not-so-simple workout can do wonders for your fat loss plans.

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Yup, they're great abs. Nope, you're not getting them by doing 500 crunches a day and nothing else.

"If you do any kind of strengthening or toning exercises to stay healthy and to remove inches, I encourage all efforts, for more reasons than just weight loss," she adds.

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That being said, if you want to slim down, don't put your body through stress just to reach your goals.

ALTER EGO

An average 68kg person will burn only 150 calories in an hour of doing regular yoga.

"The key to all weight loss goals, and health improvement at the same time, without bringing your body to the risk of injury, is balance," Petre says. "Start with a good, healthy balance of strength training and a bit of cardio to build your endurance so you can continue shedding pounds and reach your goals."

WORST: CROSSFIT

"CrossFit-style workouts are exploding in popularity around the world and are often promoted as the best way to get in shape and improve health," Petre says.

MARY FITZGERALD/STUFF

Boot camp: A great way to share the pain and shed the pounds.

"I don't want to be controversial, but if your goal is to lose weight and improve health, CrossFit is the number one exercise you should avoid. It's too intense for many people, and often includes high-risk activities."

"The number one rule about losing weight through exercise is that you can't exercise to lose weight if you're injured," she adds.

"If you're a fit, active, and athletic individual, CrossFit might be the best workout for you, but if your body is not already in top shape, don't unnecessarily risk injury. You're likely to lose more weight if you combine a healthy diet with a moderate exercise program that's more sustainable."

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Lifting weights has been shown to increase resting metabolic rate, which means you continue to burn calories after working out.

WORST: YOGA

"Yoga represents the polar opposite to CrossFit, but this doesn't mean that it will shed those layers of fast food on the body," Petre says. "In fact, a 150-pound [68kg] person will burn only 150 calories in an hour of doing regular yoga, compared to 311 calories for an hour of walking at 3mph [4.8kmh]."

"Increasing your physical activity is a good first step towards losing weight," she says. "It's true that yoga can help you gain strength and tone up, but if you aim to shed pounds, you want to work as much of your body as possible to lose weight and stimulate your metabolism."

WORST: EXTENDED CARDIO SESSIONS

"If you're only doing cardio and not balancing with strength training, it can lead to muscle loss, which is not ideal," Petre says.

"Strength training builds lean muscle mass, which increases both your metabolism and decreases fat. The more muscle you build, the more calories you burn on a day-to-day basis."

"From a cost-benefit angle, extended low-effort exercise, such as steady state cardio, can burn more fat in relative terms, but not in absolute amounts," she adds.

"What counts the most is your overall calorie expenditure, not the fuel source. But before you switch to high-intensity training, remember that this type of exercise is not without a risk of injury. Preserve muscle mass by keeping your cardio workouts to approximately three 30-minute sessions per week."

WORST: PILATES

"Pilates, like yoga, has a lot of health benefits that will help you live better, ranging from improved flexibility and balance to deeper relaxation, but fast fat burn is not one of them," Petre says.

"Because it helps you gradually build and strengthen your muscles, it can be a great way to prevent getting injured while training. However, you need to do heavy compound weightlifting on the big muscle groups along with cardio to maximise fat loss, and Pilates does not incorporate either type of exercise."

WORST: SPOT REDUCTION EXERCISES

"Many people want to lose fat from one specific part of their bodies," Petre says. "But, due to human genetics, we cannot pick and choose areas to burn fat from. This means that if you wish to trim down your midsection, performing only abdominal exercises is not going to give you the results you want.

"The same is true for every other body part and muscle group. Why? Because the only thing exercises target is your muscles, not the fat that is covering the muscles.

"You can lose that fat only by creating caloric deficit through a combination of diet and exercise. In other words, you should consume less calories than you burn, forcing your body to burn your own stored body fat for energy instead."

BEST: TABATA

"Tabata is a dream come true for anyone whose biggest excuse for skipping a workout is lack of time," Petre says.

"It's designed to be just a few minutes of high-intensity interval training that consists of 20 seconds of hard effort, followed by 10 seconds of rest, repeated eight times.

"The best thing about Tabata is that you can perform these short trainings with your own body weight in the comfort of your own home. Simply pick four exercises, such as jump rope, squats, squat jumps, and mountain climbers, then do each for 20 seconds as hard and fast as you can.

"It will raise your heart rate, pump up your muscles and increase your fitness level."

BEST: BOOT CAMP

"You'll definitely lose extra weight and boost your cardio fitness with this type of training," Petre says.

"Boot camp training takes the military workout out of basic training and into gyms and homes everywhere. Typical boot camp workouts combine intense aerobic exercise with muscle building, resistance exercises, and challenges that boost flexibility and coordination.

"These workout programs are so popular because they work every muscle group, don't require any equipment, and can be done anywhere. Daily boot camp training burns fat and builds muscle, therefore increasing weight loss and supporting maintenance of a healthy weight."

BEST: STRENGTH TRAINING

"If weight loss is a goal, incorporating strength training into your routine is essential," Petre says. "The key to shedding pounds is a strong foundation, and the best way to build muscle is with weights.

"Lifting weights has been shown to increase resting metabolic rate, which means you continue to burn calories after working out. The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn throughout the day. By increasing your base metabolic rate [BMR]and burning more calories at rest, you also increase your calorie deficit, which is necessary for weight loss.

"While it's true that cardio-only routines get your heart working harder and help your body burn calories, strength training is what will give your weight-loss goals that extra boost," Petre adds. "This doesn't mean that cardio training should be completely ignored.

"Weight lifting, cardioand your diet combine to make your body burn fat for fuel instead of muscle. Practice these types of training three times a week to burn around 1 to 1.5 pounds of fat per week."

BEST: HIGH-INTENSITY INTERVAL TRAINING (HIIT)

"High-intensity interval training is a form of exercise characterised by periods of hard work followed by brief periods of recovery or rest," Petre says.

"You can perform it using various cardio formats, gym equipment, and weighted or bodyweight exercises. When you do high-intensity interval training, your body and metabolism function at a higher rate of burned calories for hours afterwards. It means you're burning calories while watching your favourite TV show in the comfort of your home.

"According to the American College of Sports Medicine, this type of workout routine tends to burn anywhere from 6-15 per cent more calories compared to other training methods, thanks to the calories you burn after you exercise.

"High-intensity interval training can be performed up to fourtimes per week. The only downside is that it takes your body quite a bit of time to recover, and you can physically only do it for 20-30 minutes at a time before you become too exhausted to continue.

"If you listen to your bodyand pay attention to results, this type of workout will take your training to the next level."

BEST: STRENGTH-BASED CIRCUIT TRAINING

"Compared to traditional strength training, strength-based circuit training will help you lose more fat while still building muscle," Petre says.

"Since you're performing high-intensity movements with short rest periods, you will also get the added benefits of metabolic conditioning. It's slightly less intense than HIIT or Tabata as it's less about short bursts of maximum effort and more about completing quality exercises with good form over a longer duration set.

"Strength-based circuit training is very effective at helping burn fat," adds Petre. "It provides both strength and cardio benefits, it takes less time than a normal strength workout, and focusing on the entire body in a single workout maximises calorie burn and movement function."

- This story original appeared at Rodalewellness.com.

-MCT

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The five worst exercises for fat loss - and what to do instead - Stuff.co.nz

What is the best way to live a happy and successful life? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Katherine Killoran, who learned about life and living from medical school and my cancer diagnosis:

Establishing healthy habits is a good start. When you feel well, it's easier to be happy, successful and get the most out of life. Often diet and exercise are the first things that come to mind when thinking of healthy habits. There is an avalanche of opinions on what is a healthy diet. I think it depends on the individual both regarding personal preference as well as metabolism. But whether your diet is vegan, vegetarian, paleo, Mediterranean or labeled something else, it comes down to real food. Cook for yourself with quality ingredients and eat at home. Enjoy your food, and if possible share with others. You will undoubtedly be healthier and happier.

I always thought I had a reasonably healthy diet until I was diagnosed with cancer and considered more carefully what I was eating. I feel better and am happier when I eat real food that I cook at home. Maybe it's age; maybe it's because I am more aware, but my body lets me know when I don't eat well. I do enjoy cooking and strive to eat a wide variety of vegetables every day. I think most of the food we cook at home is delicious, so I am not sacrificing anything to eat well.

Get some exercise. Exercise reduces depression and increases pain tolerance. Do it outside if you can. Being outside makes you happier and also helps reduce depression and anxiety. Make sure it is an activity that you like. The more it feels like work, the less beneficial it is for you and the less likely you are to do it. Sweat. The harder you work the less time you need to put in.

I am an exercise addict. I tend to go overboard. I can count the days during chemotherapy that I did NOT exercise on one hand. It, for sure, helped me feel better during a time when feeling crappy was the norm. I continue to enjoy being active and have added high-intensity intervals to my various activities - swimming, biking, running, and lifting weights. It's hard to know for sure, but I am confident it has improved my speed, strength, and overall level of fitness.

Sleep. While not everybody needs a full eight hours of sleep every night, most people need more than six. No surprise, when you are well rested, you think and perform better, which helps you accomplish more, be happier and more successful.

Stress and lack of sleep were major issues for me. One week after I was diagnosed with cancer, when my priorities were put in place by necessity, I was sleeping better than I had in several years. I think anxiety and lack of sleep contributed to my diagnosis in the first place. But even with a recent cancer diagnosis, better sleep helped me to happier.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, diet, exercise, and sleep, everyone knows that. However, it's your relationships that may the most important. At least that's the conclusion from the Harvard study of adult development. This study started in the 1930s and is still going on today more than 75 years later. It followed 724 men from two very different backgrounds. One group was composed of Harvard students, and the other was poor, underprivileged, boys from Boston's inner-city.

Some of the original participants are still alive today in their 90s, and the study is now following the children from the initial group. This study tracked these men interviewing them, reviewing their medical records, talking to their wives and families to determine what factors resulted in health, happiness, and longevity. It wasn't money, success or a healthy cholesterol level at age 50 that best predicted good health and happiness at age 80. Instead, it was how satisfied the men were with their relationships. Being more socially connected to family, friends, and community led to happier, healthier people who lived longer. Robert Waldinger is the current director of the study; you can listen to his TED talk here.

Another example of the remarkable power of relationships and community on health and longevity is known as the Roseto effect. Roseto is a small town in Northeastern Pennsylvania. In the 1960s, a local doctor realized there was an exceptionally low rate of heart disease in Roseto -- virtually non-existent compared to some of the surrounding towns.

The inhabitants smoked cigars, drank lots of wine, ate meatballs, sausage, and plenty of cheese, while being exposed to potentially toxic gasses and dust in the slate quarries, not exactly the usual recipe for good health.

However, the community was very close knit. The was no crime; people supported each other, meals were a reason to get together and celebrate. There was a strong work ethic with everyone in town working toward a similar goal, a better life for their children. Their children did go on to have more material things and traditional success but not necessarily a better life. As the supportive community began to break down the rates of heart disease and premature death increased, equalling the rates of the surrounding towns.

The people of Roseto were Italian immigrants. Their lifestyle, with an emphasis on close, supportive relationships, appears to have protected them from chronic disease and is similar to the way of life along the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean diet is considered to be one of the healthiest in the world. A British cardiologist, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, is making a film about Pioppi, Italy called the Pioppi protocol. Pioppi is on the Mediterranean, and it's inhabitants are among the world's healthiest, often living into their 90s. In his film, Dr. Malhotra contends that it is the Mediterranean lifestyle, not just the diet that cultivates good health, happiness, and longevity. People eat well, savor and enjoy their food. They are social and connected to their community. They spend time outside, moving, engaged in activities they enjoy.

Take care of yourself. Eat well. Move daily. Get enough sleep. Maintain and nurture your relationships. In doing so, you will inevitably increase your energy and enjoyment from life. When you take care of yourself, not only do you have more energy which will give you more time to focus on success, but you feel well, so you are better equipped to enjoy the time you have.

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Diet, Exercise And Sleep Are Great, But One Thing Will Improve Your Life Even More - HuffPost UK

Recently, Naveen Jain discovered that he was pre-diabetic. In response, his doctor recommended that he cut down on carbohydrates and starches, such as potatoes, bread, and rice. After several weeks of consuming primarily legumes and lentils, Jain's blood glucose levels were static; as a stool sample analysis later revealed, he actually needed to eat more carbohydrates, not fewer.

Jain received this advice after taking a microbiome test, a service from his new company, Viome, which offers to sequence bacteria in the digestive tract to get a better picture of one's overall health. Based in Bellevue, Washington, Viome combines the results of a simple stool sample with artificial intelligence to make custom suggestions for a user's diet and lifestyle, and potentially flag if the person's at risk for certain illnesses. Indeed, a growing body of research suggests that microorganisms in the human gut may play a critical role in health and disease, and it's a trend that startups are hungrily seizing on.

Earlier this week, Jain's business confirmed that it had raised $15 million in funding, in a round led by the venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, with participation from Bold Capital Partners. In total, Viome has raised $21 million in funding; it generates revenue through the sale of beta tests to thousands of customers, according to Jain. The company operates on a subscription model, charging $595 annually for two tests, or $59 per month. Users send their stool samples to the company's lab, and can also conduct at-home blood and urine tests.

"How we respond to what's happening inside of our gut is the key to understanding aging and health, and the prevention of chronic diseases," Jain tells Inc. in an interview. The company has 45 employees, four of whom are licensed physicians.

Viome is also the first official venture to emerge from BlueDot, the innovation factory that Jain founded back in 2015.

Ambitious though this latest endeavor may seem, it's nothing new for Jain. The billionaire entrepreneur is best known for having launched InfoSpace, the search behemoth that contributed in part to the dot-com bust of 2000. Jain has since gone on to start companies including Intelius, a public-records database, as well as Moon Express. The latter is the first private venture to win government approval to launch a rocket to the moon. He wants to mine the surface for materials such as iron and manganese, as well as gold and other precious metals. The interim goal, Jain explains, is to win the coveted Google Lunar X Prize for missions in 2017; at present, he says, the startup is on track to launch its lunar rocket by December.

The ultimate goal, though, is even loftier: "I'm thinking about what the best thing is I can do to help humanity," Jain says. "Saving humanity from extinction is the goal for Moon Express, and eliminating chronic diseases is the goal for Viome."

Still, the health care business is an expensive one. Jain notes that Viome's profit margins are incredibly slim, so the startup is generating very little money. Over time, it aims to drive down the cost of tests to as low as $10--or free--at which point he said it would generate sales off of the recommendations it makes, instead.

To be sure, many analysts are skeptical of microbiome testing. Viome does not, at present, have FDA approval. Therefore, it's A.I.--however smart--can make recommendations only about diet and exercise, not about medical issues. (Jain insists that the business doesn't need FDA approval for what it's offering at present, thoughhe affirms it will seek this down the line when it begins work to diagnose and cure diseases.) Some scientists doubt that the tests will have the ability to detect illnesses, or make the kinds of recommendations their creators have promised.

"The enthusiasm of their manufacturers simply goes well beyond where the science is right now," noted Rob Knight, the leading microbiome researcher and professor at the University of California, San Diego, in an interview with Technology Review. And Adam Drewnowski, a professor of nutritional sciences in the University of Washington's epidemiology department, says there's little hard science to show that the microbiome in fact influences specific conditions. "It's very new and very controversial," he told Inc. "There are some very interesting links that are currently being established. But to [suggest] at this point that microbiome imbalance causes something like Alzheimer's, I would think, is something of an overstatement."

Meanwhile, Viome faces competition from other microbiome startups, such as San Francisco-based uBiome, which is either fully or partially covered by most health insurance companies. (Viome does not work with any health insurers.) UBiome makes the SmartGut test kit, which costs $89.

What sets Viome apart, Jain says, is the technology it's using to the power the kits. The company pays to license information from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which analyzes RNA, or ribonucleic acid, to identify species and strains beyond bacteria, including viruses, yeast, mold, and fungi.

Jain is well aware that he's no expert in medicine. "I'm not reinventing the wheel," he explains. "I'm simply making [this technology] available to the consumers that can help and benefit society."

The entrepreneur adds that he spends roughly 60 percent of his time focusing on Viome, and the other 40 percent he splits between operations at Moon Express--preventing human extinction, that is--and at Singularity University, where he is a board member.

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When He's Not Charting a Course for the Moon, This Entrepreneur Is Planning Big Things for Your Gut - Inc.com

Buddhism, religion and philosophy that developed from the teachings of the Buddha (Sanskrit: Awakened One), a teacher who lived in northern India between the mid-6th and mid-4th centuries bce (before the Common Era). Spreading from India to Central and Southeast Asia, China, Korea, and Japan, Buddhism has played a central role in the spiritual, cultural, and social life of Asia, and during the 20th century it spread to the West.

Ancient Buddhist scripture and doctrine developed in several closely related literary languages of ancient India, especially in Pali and Sanskrit. In this article Pali and Sanskrit words that have gained currency in English are treated as English words and are rendered in the form in which they appear in English-language dictionaries. Exceptions occur in special circumstancesas, for example, in the case of the Sanskrit term dharma (Pali: dhamma), which has meanings that are not usually associated with the term dharma as it is often used in English. Pali forms are given in the sections on the core teachings of early Buddhism that are reconstructed primarily from Pali texts and in sections that deal with Buddhist traditions in which the primary sacred language is Pali. Sanskrit forms are given in the sections that deal with Buddhist traditions whose primary sacred language is Sanskrit and in other sections that deal with traditions whose primary sacred texts were translated from Sanskrit into a Central or East Asian language such as Tibetan or Chinese.

Buddhism arose in northeastern India sometime between the late 6th century and the early 4th century bce, a period of great social change and intense religious activity. There is disagreement among scholars about the dates of the Buddhas birth and death. Many modern scholars believe that the historical Buddha lived from about 563 to about 483 bce. Many others believe that he lived about 100 years later (from about 448 to 368 bce). At this time in India, there was much discontent with Brahmanic (Hindu high-caste) sacrifice and ritual. In northwestern India there were ascetics who tried to create a more personal and spiritual religious experience than that found in the Vedas (Hindu sacred scriptures). In the literature that grew out of this movement, the Upanishads, a new emphasis on renunciation and transcendental knowledge can be found. Northeastern India, which was less influenced by Vedic tradition, became the breeding ground of many new sects. Society in this area was troubled by the breakdown of tribal unity and the expansion of several petty kingdoms. Religiously, this was a time of doubt, turmoil, and experimentation.

A proto-Samkhya group (i.e., one based on the Samkhya school of Hinduism founded by Kapila) was already well established in the area. New sects abounded, including various skeptics (e.g., Sanjaya Belatthiputta), atomists (e.g., Pakudha Kaccayana), materialists (e.g., Ajita Kesakambali), and antinomians (i.e., those against rules or lawse.g., Purana Kassapa). The most important sects to arise at the time of the Buddha, however, were the Ajivikas (Ajivakas), who emphasized the rule of fate (niyati), and the Jains, who stressed the need to free the soul from matter. Although the Jains, like the Buddhists, have often been regarded as atheists, their beliefs are actually more complicated. Unlike early Buddhists, both the Ajivikas and the Jains believed in the permanence of the elements that constitute the universe, as well as in the existence of the soul.

Despite the bewildering variety of religious communities, many shared the same vocabularynirvana (transcendent freedom), atman (self or soul), yoga (union), karma (causality), Tathagata (one who has come or one who has thus gone), buddha (enlightened one), samsara (eternal recurrence or becoming), and dhamma (rule or law)and most involved the practice of yoga. According to tradition, the Buddha himself was a yogithat is, a miracle-working ascetic.

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Buddhism, like many of the sects that developed in northeastern India at the time, was constituted by the presence of a charismatic teacher, by the teachings this leader promulgated, and by a community of adherents that was often made up of renunciant members and lay supporters. In the case of Buddhism, this pattern is reflected in the Triratnai.e., the Three Jewels of Buddha (the teacher), dharma (the teaching), and sangha (the community).

In the centuries following the founders death, Buddhism developed in two directions represented by two different groups. One was called the Hinayana (Sanskrit: Lesser Vehicle), a term given to it by its Buddhist opponents. This more conservative group, which included what is now called the Theravada (Pali: Way of the Elders) community, compiled versions of the Buddhas teachings that had been preserved in collections called the Sutta Pitaka and the Vinaya Pitaka and retained them as normative. The other major group, which calls itself the Mahayana (Sanskrit: Greater Vehicle), recognized the authority of other teachings that, from the groups point of view, made salvation available to a greater number of people. These supposedly more advanced teachings were expressed in sutras that the Buddha purportedly made available only to his more advanced disciples.

As Buddhism spread, it encountered new currents of thought and religion. In some Mahayana communities, for example, the strict law of karma (the belief that virtuous actions create pleasure in the future and nonvirtuous actions create pain) was modified to accommodate new emphases on the efficacy of ritual actions and devotional practices. During the second half of the 1st millennium ce, a third major Buddhist movement, Vajrayana (Sanskrit: Diamond Vehicle; also called Tantric, or Esoteric, Buddhism), developed in India. This movement was influenced by gnostic and magical currents pervasive at that time, and its aim was to obtain spiritual liberation and purity more speedily.

Despite these vicissitudes, Buddhism did not abandon its basic principles. Instead, they were reinterpreted, rethought, and reformulated in a process that led to the creation of a great body of literature. This literature includes the Pali Tipitaka (Three Baskets)the Sutta Pitaka (Basket of Discourse), which contains the Buddhas sermons; the Vinaya Pitaka (Basket of Discipline), which contains the rule governing the monastic order; and the Abhidhamma Pitaka (Basket of Special [Further] Doctrine), which contains doctrinal systematizations and summaries. These Pali texts have served as the basis for a long and very rich tradition of commentaries that were written and preserved by adherents of the Theravada community. The Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions have accepted as Buddhavachana (the word of the Buddha) many other sutras and tantras, along with extensive treatises and commentaries based on these texts. Consequently, from the first sermon of the Buddha at Sarnath to the most recent derivations, there is an indisputable continuitya development or metamorphosis around a central nucleusby virtue of which Buddhism is differentiated from other religions.

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The teacher known as the Buddha lived in northern India sometime between the mid-6th and the mid-4th centuries before the Common Era. In ancient India the title buddha referred to an enlightened being who has awakened from the sleep of ignorance and achieved freedom from suffering. According to the various traditions of Buddhism, buddhas have existed in the past and will exist in the future. Some Buddhists believe that there is only one buddha for each historical age, others that all beings will become buddhas because they possess the buddha nature (tathagatagarbha).

The historical figure referred to as the Buddha (whose life is known largely through legend) was born on the northern edge of the Ganges River basin, an area on the periphery of the ancient civilization of North India, in what is today southern Nepal. He is said to have lived for 80 years. His family name was Gautama (in Sanskrit) or Gotama (in Pali), and his given name was Siddhartha (Sanskrit: he who achieves his aim) or Siddhatta (in Pali). He is frequently called Shakyamuni, the sage of the Shakya clan. In Buddhist texts he is most commonly addressed as Bhagavat (often translated as Lord), and he refers to himself as the Tathagata, which can mean both one who has thus come and one who has thus gone. Traditional sources on the date of his deathor, in the language of the tradition, his passage into nirvanarange from 2420 to 290 bce. Scholarship in the 20th century limited that range considerably, with opinion generally divided between those who believed he lived from about 563 to 483 bce and those who believed he lived about a century later.

Information about his life derives largely from Buddhist texts, the earliest of which were produced shortly before the beginning of the Common Era and thus several centuries after his death. According to the traditional accounts, however, the Buddha was born into the ruling Shakya clan and was a member of the Kshatriya, or warrior, caste. His mother, Maha Maya, dreamt one night that an elephant entered her womb, and 10 lunar months later, while she was strolling in the garden of Lumbini, her son emerged from under her right arm. His early life was one of luxury and comfort, and his father protected him from exposure to the ills of the world, including old age, sickness, and death. At age 16 he married the princess Yashodhara, who would eventually bear him a son. At 29, however, the prince had a profound experience when he first observed the suffering of the world while on chariot rides outside the palace. He resolved then to renounce his wealth and family and live the life of an ascetic. During the next six years, he practiced meditation with several teachers and then, with five companions, undertook a life of extreme self-mortification. One day, while bathing in a river, he fainted from weakness and therefore concluded that mortification was not the path to liberation from suffering. Abandoning the life of extreme asceticism, the prince sat in meditation under a tree and received enlightenment, sometimes identified with understanding the Four Noble Truths. For the next 45 years, the Buddha spread his message throughout northeastern India, established orders of monks and nuns, and received the patronage of kings and merchants. At the age of 80, he became seriously ill. He then met with his disciples for the last time to impart his final instructions and passed into nirvana. His body was then cremated and the relics distributed and enshrined in stupas (funerary monuments that usually contained relics), where they would be venerated.

The Buddhas place within the tradition, however, cannot be understood by focusing exclusively on the events of his life and time (even to the extent that they are known). Instead, he must be viewed within the context of Buddhist theories of time and history. Among these theories is the belief that the universe is the product of karma, the law of the cause and effect of actions. The beings of the universe are reborn without beginning in six realms as gods, demigods, humans, animals, ghosts, and hell beings. The cycle of rebirth, called samsara (literally wandering), is regarded as a domain of suffering, and the Buddhists ultimate goal is to escape from that suffering. The means of escape remains unknown until, over the course of millions of lifetimes, a person perfects himself, ultimately gaining the power to discover the path out of samsara and then revealing that path to the world.

A person who has set out to discover the path to freedom from suffering and then to teach it to others is called a bodhisattva. A person who has discovered that path, followed it to its end, and taught it to the world is called a buddha. Buddhas are not reborn after they die but enter a state beyond suffering called nirvana (literally passing away). Because buddhas appear so rarely over the course of time and because only they reveal the path to liberation from suffering, the appearance of a buddha in the world is considered a momentous event.

The story of a particular buddha begins before his birth and extends beyond his death. It encompasses the millions of lives spent on the path toward enlightenment and Buddhahood and the persistence of the buddha through his teachings and his relics after he has passed into nirvana. The historical Buddha is regarded as neither the first nor the last buddha to appear in the world. According to some traditions he is the 7th buddha, according to another he is the 25th, and according to yet another he is the 4th. The next buddha, Maitreya, will appear after Shakyamunis teachings and relics have disappeared from the world.

Sites associated with the Buddhas life became important pilgrimage places, and regions that Buddhism entered long after his deathsuch as Sri Lanka, Kashmir, and Burma (now Myanmar)added narratives of his magical visitations to accounts of his life. Although the Buddha did not leave any written works, various versions of his teachings were preserved orally by his disciples. In the centuries following his death, hundreds of texts (called sutras) were attributed to him and would subsequently be translated into the languages of Asia.

The teaching attributed to the Buddha was transmitted orally by his disciples, prefaced by the phrase evam me sutam (thus have I heard); therefore, it is difficult to say whether or to what extent his discourses have been preserved as they were spoken. They usually allude to the place and time they were preached and to the audience to which they were addressed. Buddhist councils in the first centuries after the Buddhas death attempted to specify which teachings attributed to the Buddha could be considered authentic.

The Buddha based his entire teaching on the fact of human suffering and the ultimately dissatisfying character of human life. Existence is painful. The conditions that make an individual are precisely those that also give rise to dissatisfaction and suffering. Individuality implies limitation; limitation gives rise to desire; and, inevitably, desire causes suffering, since what is desired is transitory.

Living amid the impermanence of everything and being themselves impermanent, human beings search for the way of deliverance, for that which shines beyond the transitoriness of human existencein short, for enlightenment. The Buddhas doctrine offered a way to avoid despair. By following the path taught by the Buddha, the individual can dispel the ignorance that perpetuates this suffering.

According to the Buddha of the early texts, reality, whether of external things or the psychophysical totality of human individuals, consists of a succession and concatenation of microelements called dhammas (these components of reality are not to be confused with dhamma meaning law or teaching). The Buddha departed from traditional Indian thought in not asserting an essential or ultimate reality in things. Moreover, he rejected the existence of the soul as a metaphysical substance, though he recognized the existence of the self as the subject of action in a practical and moral sense. Life is a stream of becoming, a series of manifestations and extinctions. The concept of the individual ego is a popular delusion; the objects with which people identify themselvesfortune, social position, family, body, and even mindare not their true selves. There is nothing permanent, and, if only the permanent deserved to be called the self, or atman, then nothing is self.

To make clear the concept of no-self (anatman), Buddhists set forth the theory of the five aggregates or constituents (khandhas) of human existence: (1) corporeality or physical forms (rupa), (2) feelings or sensations (vedana), (3) ideations (sanna), (4) mental formations or dispositions (sankhara), and (5) consciousness (vinnana). Human existence is only a composite of the five aggregates, none of which is the self or soul. A person is in a process of continuous change, and there is no fixed underlying entity.

The belief in rebirth, or samsara, as a potentially endless series of worldly existences in which every being is caught up was already associated with the doctrine of karma (Sanskrit: karman; literally act or deed) in pre-Buddhist India, and it was accepted by virtually all Buddhist traditions. According to the doctrine, good conduct brings a pleasant and happy result and creates a tendency toward similar good acts, while bad conduct brings an evil result and creates a tendency toward similar evil acts. Some karmic acts bear fruit in the same life in which they are committed, others in the immediately succeeding one, and others in future lives that are more remote. This furnishes the basic context for the moral life.

The acceptance by Buddhists of the teachings of karma and rebirth and the concept of the no-self gives rise to a difficult problem: how can rebirth take place without a permanent subject to be reborn? Indian non-Buddhist philosophers attacked this point in Buddhist thought, and many modern scholars have also considered it to be an insoluble problem. The relation between existences in rebirth has been explained by the analogy of fire, which maintains itself unchanged in appearance and yet is different in every momentwhat may be called the continuity of an ever-changing identity.

Awareness of these fundamental realities led the Buddha to formulate the Four Noble Truths: the truth of misery (dukkha; literally suffering but connoting uneasiness or dissatisfaction), the truth that misery originates within the craving for pleasure and for being or nonbeing (samudaya), the truth that this craving can be eliminated (nirodhu), and the truth that this elimination is the result of following a methodical way or path (magga).

The Buddha, according to the early texts, also discovered the law of dependent origination (paticca-samuppada), whereby one condition arises out of another, which in turn arises out of prior conditions. Every mode of being presupposes another immediately preceding mode from which the subsequent mode derives, in a chain of causes. According to the classical rendering, the 12 links in the chain are: ignorance (avijja), karmic predispositions (sankharas), consciousness (vinnana), form and body (nama-rupa), the five sense organs and the mind (salayatana), contact (phassa), feeling-response (vedana), craving (tanha), grasping for an object (upadana), action toward life (bhava), birth (jati), and old age and death (jaramarana). According to this law, the misery that is bound with sensate existence is accounted for by a methodical chain of causation. Despite a diversity of interpretations, the law of dependent origination of the various aspects of becoming remains fundamentally the same in all schools of Buddhism.

The law of dependent origination, however, raises the question of how one may escape the continually renewed cycle of birth, suffering, and death. It is not enough to know that misery pervades all existence and to know the way in which life evolves; there must also be a means to overcome this process. The means to this end is found in the Eightfold Path, which is constituted by right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right meditational attainment.

The aim of Buddhist practice is to be rid of the delusion of ego and thus free oneself from the fetters of this mundane world. One who is successful in doing so is said to have overcome the round of rebirths and to have achieved enlightenment. This is the final goal in most Buddhist traditions, though in some cases (particularly though not exclusively in some Pure Land schools in China and Japan) the attainment of an ultimate paradise or a heavenly abode is not clearly distinguished from the attainment of release.

The living process is again likened to a fire. Its remedy is the extinction of the fire of illusion, passions, and cravings. The Buddha, the Enlightened One, is one who is no longer kindled or inflamed. Many poetic terms are used to describe the state of the enlightened human beingthe harbour of refuge, the cool cave, the place of bliss, the farther shore. The term that has become famous in the West is nirvana, translated as passing away or dying outthat is, the dying out in the heart of the fierce fires of lust, anger, and delusion. But nirvana is not extinction, and indeed the craving for annihilation or nonexistence was expressly repudiated by the Buddha. Buddhists search for salvation, not just nonbeing. Although nirvana is often presented negatively as release from suffering, it is more accurate to describe it in a more positive fashion: as an ultimate goal to be sought and cherished.

In some early texts the Buddha left unanswered certain questions regarding the destiny of persons who have reached this ultimate goal. He even refused to speculate as to whether fully purified saints, after death, continued to exist or ceased to exist. Such questions, he maintained, were not relevant to the practice of the path and could not in any event be answered from within the confines of ordinary human existence. Indeed, he asserted that any discussion of the nature of nirvana would only distort or misrepresent it. But he also asserted with even more insistence that nirvana can be experiencedand experienced in the present existenceby those who, knowing the Buddhist truth, practice the Buddhist path.

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Two friends, a touch of Buddhism and one new South End restaurant Charlotte Business Journal This South End restaurant aims to bring something different to Charlotte. Think eclectic American fare, a name with ties to Buddhism and two friends driven by a passion to create a unique dining experience. That restaurant, called Bardo, is targeting a ...

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An author owns a snappy title, and then the snappy title owns the author. Robert Wright, having titled his new book Why Buddhism Is True, has to offer a throat-clearing preface and later an apologetic appendix, in order to explain exactly what he means by Buddhism and exactly what he means by true, while the totality of his book is an investigation into why we think there are whys in the world, and whether or not anything really is. Wright sets out to provide an unabashedly American answer to all these questions. He thinks that Buddhism is true in the immediate sense that it is helpful and therapeutic, and, by offering insights into our habitual thoughts and cravings, shows us how to fix them. Being Buddhistthat is, simply practicing Vipassana, or insight meditationwill make you feel better about being alive, he believes, and he shows how you can and why it does.

Wrights is a Buddhism almost completely cleansed of supernaturalism. His Buddha is conceived as a wise man and self-help psychologist, not as a divine beingno miraculous birth, no thirty-two distinguishing marks of the godhead (one being a penis sheath), no reincarnation. This is a pragmatic Buddhism, and Wrights pragmatism, as in his previous books, can touch the edge of philistinism. Nearly all popular books about Buddhism are rich in poetic quotation and arresting aphorisms, those ironic koans that are part of the (Zen) Buddhist dcortales of monks deciding that it isnt the wind or the flag thats waving in the breeze but only their minds. Wrights book has no poetry or paradox anywhere in it. Since the poetic-comic side of Buddhism is one of its most appealing features, this leaves the book a little short on charm. Yet, if you never feel that Wright is telling you something profound or beautiful, you also never feel that he is telling you something untrue. Direct and unambiguous, tracing his own history in meditation practicewhich eventually led him to a series of weeklong retreats and to the intense study of Buddhist doctrinehe makes Buddhist ideas and their history clear. Perhaps he makes the ideas too clear. Buddhist thinkers tend to bridge contradictions with a smile and a paradox and a wave of the hand. Things exist but they are not real is a typical dictum from the guru Mu Soeng, in his book on the Heart Sutra. You dont have to believe it, but its true is another famous gurus smiling advice about the reincarnation doctrine. This nimble-footed doubleness may indeed hold profound existential truths; it also provides an all-purpose evasion of analysis.

Still, the Buddhist basics are all here. Sometime around 400 B.C.E.the arguments over whats historically authentic and what isnt make the corresponding arguments in Jesus studies look transparenta wealthy Indian princeling named Gotama (as the Pali version of his name is rendered) came to realize, after a long and moving spiritual struggle, that people suffer because the things we cherish inevitably change and rot, and desires are inevitably disappointed. But he also realized that, simply by sitting and breathing, people can begin to disengage from the normal run of desires and disappointments, and come to grasp that the self whom the sitter has been serving so frantically, and who is suffering from all these needs, is an illusion. Set free from the selfs anxieties and appetites and constant, petulant demands, the meditator can see and share the actualities of existence with others. The sitter becomes less selfish and more selfless.

Buddhism has had a series of strong recurrent presences in America, and, though Wright doesnt stop to trace them, they might illuminate some continuities that show why his kind of Buddhism got here, and got true. Its first notable appearance was in late-nineteenth-century New England, where, as Van Wyck Brooks showed long ago, Henry Adams was drawn especially to the lands of Buddha. Another New England Buddhist of the day was William Sturgis Bigelow, who brought back to Boston some twenty thousand works of Japanese art, and who, when dying in Boston, called for a Catholic priest and asked that he annihilate his soul. (He was disappointed when the priest declined.) These American Buddhists, drawn East in part by a rejection of Gilded Age ostentation, recognized a set of preoccupations like those they knew alreadyWhitmans vision of a self that could shift and contain multitudes, or Thoreaus secular withdrawal from the race of life. (Jon Kabat-Zinns hugely successful meditation guide, Wherever You Go, There You Are, is dotted with Thoreau epigraphs in place of Asian ones.) The quietist impulse in New England spirituality and the pantheistic impulse in American poetry both seemed met, and made picturesque, by the Buddhist tradition.

The second great explosion of American Buddhism occurred in the nineteen-fifties. Spurred, in large part, by the writings of the migr Japanese scholar D.T. Suzuki, it was, in the first instance, aesthetic: Suzukis work, though rich in tea ceremonies and haiku, makes no mention of Zazen, the hyper-disciplined, often painful, meditation practice that is at the heart of Zen practice. The Buddhist spirit, or the easier American variant of it, blossomed in Beat literature, producing some fine coinages (Kerouacs Dharma Bums). Zen, though apparently an atypically severe sect within Buddhism, came to be the standard-bearer, so much so that Zen became an all-purpose modifier in American letters meaning challengingly counterintuitiveas in Zen and the Art of Archery or the masterly Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, where you learn how not to aim your arrow or how to find a spiritual practice in a Harley. It was this second movement that blossomed into a serious practice of sitting lessons and a set of institutions, the most prominent, perhaps, being the San Francisco Zen Center.

Though separated by generations, the deeper grammar of the two Buddhist awakenings was essentially the same. Buddhism in America is simultaneously exotic and familiarit has lots of Eastern trappings and ceremonies that set it off from the materialism of American life, but it also speaks to an especially American longing for a publicly productive spiritual practice. American Buddhism spins off museum collections and Noh-play translations and vegetarian restaurants and philosophical books and, in the hands of the occasional Buddhist Phil Jackson, the triangle offense in basketball.

The Buddhist promise in the American mind is that you can escape and engage. Ten minutes a day toward Enlightenment is the sort of slogan that has inspired the current generation to unimaginably large numbers of part-time meditators. (Among whom I number myself, following guided meditations recorded by Joseph Goldstein, a seventysomething Vipassana teacher who has the calming, grumpy voice of an emeritus professor at City College, though my legs are much too stiff for the lotus position and I have to fake it, making mine in every sense a half-assed practice.) Dont just sit there, do something is the American entreaty. With Buddhism, you can just sit there and do something.

Wright, like his Bay Area and Boston predecessors, is delighted to announce the ways in which Buddhism intersects with our own recent ideas. His new version of an American Buddhism is not only self-consciously secularized but aggressively scientized. He believes that Buddhist doctrine and practice anticipate and affirm the modular view of the mind favored by much contemporary cognitive science. Instead of there being a single, consistent Cartesian self that monitors the world and makes decisions, we live in a kind of nineties-era Liberia of the mind, populated by warring independent armies implanted by evolution, representing themselves as a unified nation but unable to reconcile their differences, and, as one after another wins a brief battle for the capital, providing only the temporary illusion of control and decision. By accepting that the fixed self is an illusion imprinted by experience and reinforced by appetite, meditation parachutes in a kind of peacekeeping mission that, if it cannot demobilize the armies, lets us see their nature and temporarily disarms their still juvenile soldiers.

Buddhism, alone among spiritual practices, has always recognized this post-hoc nature of our reason, asking us to realize its transience through meditation. (Not much really there, is there? Joe Goldstein murmurs about thought in one of his guided meditations.) Meditation, in Wrights view, is not a metaphysical route toward a higher plane. It is a cognitive probe for self-exploration that underlines what contemporary psychology already knows to be true about the mind. According to Buddhist philosophy, both the problems we call therapeutic and the problems we call spiritual are a product of not seeing things clearly, he writes. Whats more, in both cases this failure to see things clearly is in part a product of being misled by feelings. And the first step toward seeing through these feelings is seeing them in the first placebecoming aware of how pervasively and subtly feelings influence our thought and behavior.

Our feelings ceaselessly generate narratives, contes moraux, about the world, and we become their prisoners. We make things good and bad, desirable and not, meaningful and trivial. (We put snappy titles on our tales and then the titles own us.) Wright gives the example of a buzz-saw symphony as a small triumph of his emancipation: hearing a buzz saw whining in the background, what would usually have been a painful distraction became, robbed by meditation of any positive or negative cues (this is a pleasant sound/this is an unpleasant one), somehow musical. Meditation shows us how anything can be emptied of the story we tell about it: he tells us about an enlightened man who tastes wine without the contextual tales about vintage, varietal, region. It tastes... less emotional. All the states of equanimity come through the realization that things arent what we thought they were, Wright quotes a guru as saying. What Wright calls the perception of emptiness dampens the affect, but it also settles the mind. If it isnt there, you dont overreact to it.

Having gone the full Buddha route, Wright gives us accounts of meditation retreats, and interviews with enlightened meditators; he explores sutras and explains dharma. Given that hes more product-oriented than process-oriented, Wright tends to reflect on the advantages of meditation rather than reproduce their pleasures. Meditation, even the half-assed kind, does remind us of how little time we typically spend in the moment. Simply to sit and breathe for twenty-five minutes, if only to hear cars and buses go by on a city avenuelistening to the world rather than to the frantic non sequiturs of ones monkey mind, fragmented thoughts and querulous moods racing each other aroundcan intimate the possibility of a quiet grace in the midst of noise. The gong with which Goldsteins meditations begin on YouTube, though a bit of Orientalia, does settle the mind and calm its restlessness. (Yet many sounds of seeming serenitybirds singing, leaves rustlingare actually the sounds of ceaseless striving. The birds are shrieking for mates; even the trees are reaching insistently toward the sun that sustains them. These are the songs of wanting, the sounds of life.)

Wright has, for the purposes of his book, tied himself to a mechanical view of the constraints that operate on the human mindthe same one that he has posited in previous books, rooted in the doctrines of evolutionary psychology. This is the viewto which Wright is, as a Buddhist might say, overattachedthat our deepest desires are instincts implanted by natural selection in our primeval past. Whether or not evolutionary psychology is a real or a pseudoscienceopinions varyone can believe that human beings are afflicted with too much wanting without thinking that we are that way because once upon a time those cravings helped us have more kids than our neighbors. Even if our desires were implanted by evolution rather than inculcated by culture, theyre still always helplessly double: altruistic impulses encourage us to look after our tribe; genocidal ones encourage us to get rid of the neighboring tribe. Pair bonding is adaptive, but so is adultery: fathers want to care for their offspring and see them thrive; they also want to have sex with the woman in the next cave in order to cover all genetic bets. Desires may arise from natural selection or from cultural tradition or from random walks or from a combination of them allbut Buddhist doctrine would be unaffected by any of these whys. If every doctrine of evo-psych turns out to be falseif its somehow all culture and inculcationit wouldnt affect the Buddhist view about our need to get out of it.

Other recent books on contemporary Buddhism share Wrights object of reconciling the old metaphysics with contemporary cognitive science but have a less doctrinaire view of the mind that lies outside the illusions of self. Stephen Batchelors After Buddhism (Yale), in many ways the most intellectually stimulating book on Buddhism of the past few years, offers a philosophical take on the question. The self may not be an aloof independent ruler of body and mind, but neither is it an illusory product of impersonal physical and mental forces, he writes. As for the minds modules, Gotama is interested in what people can do, not with what they are. The task he proposes entails distinguishing between what is to be accepted as the natural condition of life itself (the unfolding of experience) and what is to be let go of (reactivity). We may have no control over the rush of fear prompted by finding a snake under our bed, but we do have the ability to respond to the situation in a way that is not determined by that fear. Where Wright insists that the Buddhist doctrine of not-self precludes the possibility of freely chosen agency, Batchelor insists of Buddhism that as soon as we consider it a task-based ethics... such objections vanish. The only thing that matters is whether or not you can perform a task. When an inclination to say something cruel occurs, for example, can you resist acting on that impulse?... Whether your decision to hold the barbed remark was the result of free will or not is beside the point. He calls the obsession with free will a peculiarly Western concern. Meditation works as much at the level of conscious intention as it does at the level of unreflective instinct.

Batchelor wants to make Buddhism pragmatic not just in the idiomatic sensepractical for daily usebut in the technical philosophical sense as well: he thinks that the original doctrines of Buddhism were in accord with the ideas of truth put forward by neopragmatists like Richard Rorty, for whom there are no firm foundations for what we know, only temporary truces among willing communities which help us cope with the world. Buddhism, in his view, was long ago betrayed into Brahmanism; the open-ended artisanal practice of meditation became a caste-bound dogma with truths and ceremonies. It is a process of fossilization hardly unknown to other spiritual movementsthere was a time when Hasidism was all about spontaneity and enthusiasm, and a break from too much repetitive traditionbut in Batchelors view it led to a needlessly ornate and authoritarian faith, while his own brand of Buddhism has been restored to its origins.

Batchelor also tackles the issue, basically shelved by Wright, of whether Buddhism without any supernatural scaffolding is still Buddhism. As a scholar, he doesnt try to deny that the supernaturalist doctrines of karma and reincarnation are as old as the ethical and philosophical ones, and entangled with them. His project is unashamedly to secularize Buddhism. But, since its Buddhism that he wants to secularize, he has to be able to show that its traditions are not hopelessly polluted with superstition.

Here Batchelors pragmatic turn, made tightly on a sharply curving road, begins to fishtail more than a little. He insists that reincarnation is just an embedded doctrine in the ancient Pali culturea metaphor like all the others we live with, a cosmological picture that works well, not unlike the metaphors of evolutionary fitness and cosmology that are embedded in our own culture. The centrality of reincarnation doctrines shouldnt be held as a mark against Buddhist truth.

Can we really tiptoe past the elaborate supernaturalism of historical Buddhism? Secular Buddhists try to, just as people who are sympathetic to the ethical basis of Christianity try to tiptoe past the doctrines of Heaven and Hell, so that Hell becomes the experience of being unable to love, or Heaven a state of being one with Godnot actual places with brimstone pits or massed harps. Batchelor, like every intelligent believer caught in an unsustainable belief, engages in a familiar set of moves. He attempts to italicize his way out of absurdity by, in effect, shifting the stresses in the simple sentence We dont believe that. First, theres We dont believe that: there may be other believers who accept a simple reward-and-punishment system of karma passing from generation to generation, but our group does not. Next comes We dont believe that: since reincarnation means eternal rebirth and coming back as a monkey and the rest of it, the enlightened Buddhist tries to de-literalize the that to make it more appealing, just as the Christian redefines Hell. In the end, we resort to We dont believe that: we just accept it as an embedded metaphor of the culture that made the religion.

Then theres the shrug-and-grin argument that everyone believes something. Is it fair to object that most of us take quantum physics on faith, too? Well, we dont take it on faith. We take it on trust, a very different thing. We have confidenceamply evidenced by the technological transformation of the world since the scientific revolution, and by the cash value of validated predictions based on esoteric mathematical abstractionthat the world picture it conveys is true, or more nearly true than anything else on offer. Batchelor tap-dances perilously close to the often repeated absurdity that a highly credulous belief about supernatural claims and an extremely skeptical belief about supernatural claims are really the same because they are both beliefs.

A deeper objection to the attempted reconciliation of contemporary science and Buddhist practice flows from the nature of scientific storytelling. The practice of telling storiesimagined tales of cause and effect that fixate on the past and the future while escaping the present, sending us back and forth without being here nowis something that both Wright and Batchelor see as one of the worst delusions the mind imprints on the world. And yet it is inseparable from the Enlightenment science that makes psychology and biology possible. The contemporary generation of American Buddhists draws again and again on scientific evidence for the power of meditationEEGs and MRIs and so onwithout ever wondering why a scientific explanation of that kind has seldom arisen in Buddhist cultures. (Science has latterly been practiced by Buddhists, of course.)

What Wright correctly sees as the heart of meditation practicethe draining away of the stories we tell compulsively about each moment in favor of simply having the momentis antithetical to the kind of evidentiary argument he admires. Science is competitive storytelling. If a Buddhist Newton had been sitting under that tree, he would have seen the apple falling and, reaching for Enlightenment, experienced each moment of its descent as a thing pure in itself. Only a restless Western Newton would say, Now, what story can tell us best what connects those apple-moments from branch to ground? Sprites? Magnets? The mysterious force of the mass of the earth beneath it? What made the damn thing fall? Thats a story we tell, not a moment we experience. The Buddhist Newton might have been happier than oursours was plenty unhappybut he would never have found the equation. Science is putting names on things and telling stories about them, the very habits that Buddhists urge us to transcend. The stories improve over time in the light of evidence, or they dont. Its just as possible to have Buddhist science as to have Christian science or Taoist science. But the meditators project of being here now will never be the same as the scientists project of connecting the past to the future, of telling how and knowing why.

Both Wright and Batchelor end with a semi-evangelical call for a secularized, modernized Buddhism that can supply all the shared serenity of the old dispensation and still adjust to the modern worldBatchelor actually ends his book with a sequence of fixed tenets for a secular Gotama practice. But does their Buddhism have a unique content, or is it simply the basics of secular liberalism with a borrowed Eastern vocabulary? What is the specifically Buddhist valence of saying, as Batchelor does, that the practitioners of a secular Buddhism will seek to understand and diminish the structural violence of societies and institutions as well as the roots of violence that are present in themselves? Do we need a twenty-five-hundred-year-old faith from the East to do thisisnt that what every liberal-arts college insists that its students do, anyway, with the help of only a cultural-studies major?

All secularized faiths tend to converge on a set of agreeable values: compassion, empathy, the renunciation of mere material riches. But the shared values seem implicit in the very project of secularizing a faith, with its assumption that the ethical and the supernatural elements can be cleanly severedan operation that would have seemed unintelligible to St. Paul, as to Gotama himself. The idea of doing without belief is perhaps a bigger idea than any belief it negates. Secular Buddhism ends up being... secularism.

Can any old faith point a new way forward? No doctrine is refuted by the bad behavior of the people who believe in itor else all doctrines would stand refutedbut the stories of actual Buddhism in large-scale practice in America do not encourage the hope that Buddhism will be any different from all the other organized faith practices. One of the best books about Buddhism in contemporary America, Michael Downings Shoes Outside the Door (2001), takes as its subject the San Francisco Zen Center and its attempted marriage of spiritual elevation with wild entrepreneurial activity. Downings novelistic and nuanced account focusses on the charismatic, Bill Clintonish master of the Zen Center, Richard Baker, who got embroiled in a Bill Clintonish sex scandal. American Buddhism seems as susceptible to the triple demon of power, predation, and prejudice as every other religious establishment.

A faith practice with an authoritarian structure sooner or later becomes a horror; a faith practice without an authoritarian structure sooner or later becomes a hobby. The dwindling down of Buddhism into another life-style choice will doubtless irritate many, and Wright will likely be sneered at for reducing Buddhism to another bourgeois amenity, like yoga or green juice. (Batchelor refers to this as a dumbing down of the dharma.) Yet what Wright is doing seems an honorable, even a sublime, achievement. Basically, he says that meditation has made him somewhat less irritable. Being somewhat less irritable is not the kind of achievement that people usually look to religion for, but it may be as good an achievement as we ought to expect. (If Donald Trump became somewhat less irritable, the world would be a less dangerous place.)

If there is something distinctive about a Buddhist secularism, it is that the Buddhist believes in the annihilation of appetite, while the pure secular humanist believes in satisfying our appetites until annihilation makes it impossible. Appetite, though, has a way of renewing itself even after its been fed; no matter what we do, some new gnawing materializes. Dissatisfaction with our circumstances, the frustration of our ambitions, something no bigger than a failure to lose enough weight or to have an extra room to make a nursery out of: even amid luxury, the ache of the unachieved seems intense enough. It is these dissatisfactions that drive so many Americanswho cannot understand why lives filled with material pleasure still feel unfulfilledto their meditation mats.

Secularized or traditional, the central Buddhist epiphany remains essential: the fact of mortality makes loss certain. For all the ways in which science and its blessed godchild scientific medicine have reduced the overt suffering that a human life entails, the vector to sadness remains in place, as much as it did in the Buddhas time. Gotamas death, from what one doctor describes as mesenteric infarction, seems needlessly painful and gruesome by modern standards; this is the kind of suffering we can substantially alleviate. But the universal mortality of all beingsthe fact that, if were lucky, we will die after seventy years or sois not reformable. The larger problem we face is not suffering but sadness, and the sadness is caused by the fact of loss. To love less in order to lose less seems like no solution at all, but to see loss squarely sounds like wisdom. We may or may not be able to Americanize our Buddhism, but we can certainly ecumenicize our analgesics. Lots of different stuff from lots of different places which we drink and think and do can help us manage. Every faith practice has a different form of comfort to offer in the face of loss, and each is useful. Sometimes it helps to dwell on the immensity of the universe. Sometimes it helps to feel the presence of ongoing family and community. Sometimes it helps to light a candle and say a prayer. Sometimes it helps to sit and breathe.

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What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can't - The New Yorker

Robert Wright

Hachette Book Group

On this weeks episode of my podcast, I Have to Ask, I spoke with Robert Wright, the best-selling of author of books including The Moral Animal, Nonzero, and The Evolution of God. Those books covered subjects such as the evolutionary roots of human behavior, globalization and technologys positive influence on our relationships and lives, and how religious belief has become increasingly tolerant over time. His new book is called Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. It seeks to explain why Buddhism is so valuable, both to the world and to Wrights own life, and how its core insights reflect real truths about evolution and human psychology.

Below is an edited transcript of part of the show. You can find links to every episode here, and the entire interview with Wright is also below. Please subscribe to I Have to Ask wherever you get your podcasts.

Isaac Chotiner: I should say, in the interest of full disclosure, that my first paid job in journalism was at bloggingheads.tv, which you were the founder of.

Robert Wright: You realize youve just undermined the credibility of this entire conversation?

I didnt make enough money that Im in any sort of debt to you.

Thats true. Well, then, I may have the opposite problem in this conversation.

Can you just talk a little bit about what Buddhism is, and specifically, the variety of Buddhism that youre talking about in this book?

Well, first of all, theres religious Buddhism, which this book isnt about. This book is about what you might call the naturalistic or secular part of Buddhism. Its not about reincarnation, and its not about prayers, and so on. It is about the central claim of Buddhist philosophy, which is that the reason we suffer, and the reason we make other people suffer, is because we dont see the world clearly. Buddhist practice, including meditation, can be seen as a program for seeing the world more clearly.

You write in the book that you wondered if there was a way to put the actual truth about human nature and the human condition into a form that would not just identify and explain the illusions we labor under, but would help us liberate ourselves from them. One of the things that youre doing in the book is youre talking about these illusions, and youre explaining how science gives us some reason to understand why we have these illusions and that Buddhism and science, in this sense, coexist or teach us the same thing. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. I had written in the past about evolutionary psychology, and one thing that struck me is that actually, the human mind was not designed by natural selection to see the world clearly, per se. Thats not the bottom line. The bottom line is like: What psychological tendencies got the genes of our ancestors into subsequent generations? Often, [that] involved seeing the world clearly. You want to have a pretty clear visual picture of the world, generally, but not in all respects. If having a mind that is deceived or that has a distorted view of things will get genes into the next generation, then distortion will be built into the mind.

What would be an example of that?

Buddhism makes two really radical-seeming claims, when you drill down on what Buddhists mean by, We dont see the world clearly. One thing they mean is that we dont see ourselves clearly at all. In fact, Buddhism goes so far as to say, Were confused about the very existence of a self. There is a sense in which the self doesnt exist, which is pretty radical. Then, theres also a claim about how deluded we are about the world out there, that the people and the objects we see, we tend to have a distorted view of, we attribute to them a kind of essence that isnt there. Both of these claims may sound strong, but I think theres a lot more to be said for them than you might imagine. I think evolutionary psychology explains why we do suffer from these particular distortions.

One of those distortions concerns things such as our love of chocolate.

Chocolate, which I remain a fan of, as I was before I started meditating. Here, we get to another of the kind of central claims of Buddhism, very central, that in a way, is related to the other things Ive said about what Buddhism is. The idea that at the root of suffering was like, thirst, craving, for not just food, but for material attainments, for status, for sex, for everything that we crave. The illusion there is that lasting gratification will ensue, or even that it will endure for very long. It actually tends not to, right? We tend to pursue things as if they will be more deeply and enduringly gratifying than they are. The Buddha stressed their impermanence, that they would evaporate, and I think evolutionary psychology, again, explains why they evaporate.

Well, sure. Organisms have to be motivated, from natural selections point of view, to do things, to nourish themselves, to do whatever will get genes spread, like sex, but they cant be enduringly happy with these things, or they wouldnt sit around and get busy. Its a dog-eat-dog world out there. The fleetingness of pleasure is a product of natural selection. Were learning more about the brain chemistry of it, and I talk a little about that. Thats another example. The idea, in general, with mindfulness meditation, which is the kind I focus on in the book, is to, rather than be driven by your feelings, examine them and decide which feelings you think are offering good guidance and which arent.

If I really want to eat my second ice cream sundae of the day, you, in the book, you dont think that the way to do that is to repress it, necessarily, but to think about why I have that desire for it, and why, in fact, it may not make me that happy to have a second ice cream sundae. Is that correct?

Well, not just to think about it, and in fact, I came out of my study of evolutionary psychology very aware that knowing about the problem of human nature by itself doesnt solve the problem. Mindfulness meditation is a practice for getting better at seeing whats driving you and deciding consciously whether you want to be driven in exactly that way.

Righteous indignation is a powerful motivator. We just need to be mindful that our conception of whats righteous is warped.

Thats why, I think its interesting that Buddhism, a couple thousand years before Darwin, diagnosed the human predicament in ways that make a lot of sense in terms of evolutionary psychology and also came up with a prescription, a program that is not trivially easy to follow, by any means. Then again, its a difficult problem, but a program that I think works in a kind of pragmatic, therapeutic sense. Beyond that, it can take you into really, I think, interesting philosophical, and I would say, spiritual territory. Ive been on meditation retreats, a number of them, where you really just do nothing but meditation all day, no contact with the outside world. In that context, you can really go to some interesting places.

One of the things that you write about in your book, just to move off things like chocolate, is anger. You talk about why, in a certain way, we sometimes get pleasure from anger. In some incident of road rage or something, being angry really brings us some sort of joy. Again, its not long-lasting. I was wondering, in your own life, how do you feel like Buddhism has helped you with anger?

Im as prone to rage as the next person.

I worked for you, I know this.

I was actually ... I forget, was I a very well-behaved boss?

I contend that there are worse bosses. Some of them occupy very high positions, even as we speak.

Rage is an interesting example, because it, in a certain sense, made more sense in the environment of our evolution, a hunter-gatherer environment, than it makes now. The point of rage, from natural selections point of view, is to demonstrate that people cant mess with you. If you disrespect me, if you try to steal my mate, whatever, I will fight you. Even if I lose the fight, I have sent a signal to everyone in my social environment that I am willing to pay the price to make sure that people who exploit me suffer.

In a modern environment like road rageand there actually recently was an actual death by gunshot in a road rage caseit doesnt even make that much sense, because theres nobody whos ever going to see you again whos witnessing the rage. Theres no point at all in a demonstration of your resolve.

It's not going to help you on Tinder if you put on your profile that you just shot someone on the freeway, either.

No. There could be active downside, beyond the risk of getting shot. One thing an evolutionary perspective can do is highlight the absurdity of some of our feelings and so reinforce the idea that its worth learning how to examine them carefully and cultivating the ability to not be driven by them, should you choose not to.

How has that worked for you? You talk in the book about a former colleague who would make you angry sometimes to think about.

I do not mention that persons name.

I was just meditating once, this was during a retreat, and for some reason, he came to mind. You know, I dont have a lot of just bitter enemies. I would say there are two or three people in the category I would put this person in. I was meditating, and I dont know why I started thinking of him, but just suddenly I had a very charitable view. Suddenly, I was like, imagining him as a gangly, awkward adolescent, like, not fitting in on the playground, and developing the various tendencies that, in my view, are not entirely commendable, and in any event, have rubbed me the wrong way. It was just the first time Ive ever thought of this person in a charitable way. Thats some kind of testament to the kind of distance you can get on your more reflexive reactions to things.

How do you feel about anger and rage in terms of people who, say, are reading the newspaper now and seeing whats going on in the world? What do you think the appropriate response is?

Very interesting question. Im thinking about, and I may have done this by the time the podcast airs, who knows, trying to get the phrase mindful resistance off the ground. Maybe, I dont know, a podcast called Mindful Resistance that competes with yours or something, who knows. I, personally, think that the reaction to Trump is excessive, for tactical purposes, that I dont think we realize how often our outrage actually feeds his base and serves his goal of keeping support at least high enough that he cant get impeached, for example. I just think in a lot of ways, and Im as prone to this as the next person, clicking retweet on something that actually doesnt have much nutritional valueits a real challenge. Righteous indignation is a powerful motivator, and it can be harnessed for good. We just need to be mindful that our conception of whats righteous is kind of naturally warped. You need to very carefully examine, I think, your commitments, kind of, your value commitments or whatever, to make sure that youre not being led astray by the parts of human nature that tend to lead us astray, or that youre not just overreacting in a counterproductive way. It absolutely is a challenge.

To be honest, Ive known people who went so far down the meditative path that, although they had the same views that they had about social justice or whatever, the same views theyd ever had, still, they seemed a little more complacent than I thought was optimum. I think thats an actual danger. You want to think about it. I dont think Im anywhere near there. My problem, in general, with politics and ideology, is keeping my rage below the counterproductive level. I need meditation even to do that.

Do you think youve gotten a better sense of why people like Trump?

Three of my four siblings voted for Trump. On the other hand, Ive pretty much avoided talking to them about it, so I dont claim that Ive gotten a lot of insight there. I do think, there is the natural tendency to want to demonize the people on the other side of the fight. It is natural and easy to say, They are racist, they are stupid and so on, and I just think its more complicated than that. There are some true racists, but I think youre not serving your own cause when you succumb to the tendency to demonize people in that way, because I think if youre going to undermine Trumps support, youre going to need to understand what the source of that support is.

Thats a very pragmatically political way of looking at it, though, that if you want Trump to lose in 2020 that you have to reach some people who voted for him, and so on. What about from a larger sense of, just put aside the political consequences for a minute. Do you think that what we need is more sympathy for people who vote in different directions and so on?

One term I would use is cognitive empathy. Not necessarily feeling their pain or even caring about them, just understanding what the world looks like from their point of view. Again, I think meditation can really facilitate that. It can break down your natural tendency to want to dismiss or demonize them. Once you do that and understand what their situation in life is, and what their frustrations are, you may then feel deeply that, yeah, some of these problems they face should be addressed. Cognitive empathy may lead to sympathy, but I think the first step is just to see the situation clearly. Our brains naturally discourage that.

As Slates resident interrogator, Isaac Chotiner has tangled with Newt Gingrich and gotten personal with novelist Jonathan Franzen. Now hes bringing his pointed, incisive interview style to a weekly podcast in which he talks one-on-one with newsmakers, celebrities, and cultural icons.

You started this podcast by saying, Im not talking about religious Buddhism, per se. When you close the book, you talk about this very subject, and you ask, Is the type of Buddhism Im practicing in fact a religion? I was just wondering, how do you feel about it, sitting here today? Is the type of Buddhism youre practicing a form of religion?

It kind of feels like that to me. I certainly consider it spiritual in some reasonable definitions of that term. The thing I say in that chapter about religion is, William James said, Generically, religion certainly centrally involves the idea that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme interest lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves to that order. Buddhism, set aside the religious part, but just philosophical Buddhism does posit the existence of a kind of order. A couple of kinds, but one kind is that there is a natural convergence between seeing the world more clearly, seeing the truth, becoming happier, and becoming a better person.

Thats three different things, right? Clarity of vision, happiness, and moral edification, becoming a better person. The assertion by Buddhist philosophy is that, conveniently, those are all the same thing. If you get on the path, including a meditative path, and seriously pursue it, you will be making progress on all three fronts. At least, they will tend to coincide. I think thats basically true. There are people of great meditative attainment who are bad people. Thats possible. But I think, by and large, this kind of amazing claim about the way the universe is set up, that you get kind of three for one, I think is true.

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Mindful Rage - Slate Magazine

(Editor's note: This is the third article in a four-part series exploring how chaplains of different faiths serve all Soldiers. The final article explores Islamic chaplains.)

FORT BLISS, Texas -- Last year, a devout Christian Soldier deployed in Kuwait knocked on the door of Army Buddhist Chaplain Capt. Christopher Mohr and entered his office in silence, closing the door abruptly behind him.

The Soldier did not say a word. Mohr could see that he was emotionally frazzled and too distraught to speak. All of a sudden, the Soldier broke down and began crying hysterically. He explained to Mohr that his significant other had been sexually assaulted back home.

Mohr just listened calmly and let the distraught Soldier vent. The Soldier was livid and felt guilty for not being at home to protect the one he cared about.

After several sessions over the next few weeks, Mohr helped the Soldier make peace with himself.

Mohr, 36, is one of three active-duty Buddhist chaplains in the Army, but more importantly, he said, he's one of about 3,000 chaplains in the total force.

Mohr said that he felt called to the Army to serve and minister to Soldiers of all faiths. He said that first calling still drives him regardless of faith or denomination.

In July, Mohr was transferred to Fort Bliss, Texas, where he now serves as the battalion chaplain for the 93rd Military Police Battalion.

Among the challenges Mohr sees at his new post will be getting to know the military police mindset while understanding the very different mission set that the military police have, compared to the combined arms unit that he was assigned to where he served as the battalion chaplain for the 2nd Battalion, 70th Armor Regiment at Fort Riley, Kansas.

"At Fort Riley, I knew of 30 Buddhist Soldiers," Mohr said. "With a somewhat higher population at Fort Bliss, I will likely have more Buddhist Soldiers to serve."

Mohr said at Fort Riley, he held Buddhist services for his very small congregation weekly, or as frequently as possible when in the field.

"I welcomed anyone who wished to attend my services even if it was just out of curiosity. My job is to provide religious support to anyone who asks."

Mohr accepted a direct commission into the Army eight years ago to serve as a Buddhist chaplain because he saw a spiritual need that he felt he was capable of meeting.

SERVICING ALL SOLDIERS

Mohr has conducted various command ceremonial functions upon request, such as offering invocations and benedictions at changes of command and at prayer luncheons.

If he is asked to perform a task that he was unable to perform, such as conducting a Catholic Mass or a Catholic wedding, for example, he will refer such requests to a chaplain who could. Mohr said that this is a key concept in the Chaplain Corps, and one he enthusiastically supports.

Other examples of Mohr serving Soldiers without regard for differences in faith included providing a Jewish Soldier with Kosher Meals-Ready-to-Eat during his unit's recent field training. Mohr coordinated with supply personnel to ensure those meals were available during training.

He also said that during this past Memorial Day, he was honored when he was asked to offer the invocation and benediction at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.

One of Mohr's greatest honors so far occurred a few years ago when the California Army National Guard asked him to conduct a military funeral for a Buddhist Soldier. The Soldier's family, who was also Buddhist, specifically requested that a Buddhist chaplain conduct the service.

UNIQUE BUDDHIST EVENTS

Mohr said that he conducts services on post for key Buddhist holidays such as:

-- Enlightenment Day, observed in February in some parts of the Buddhist tradition

-- Buddha's Birthday, observed on April 8 in some parts of the Buddhist tradition, and Vesak, a combined observance of the Buddha's birth, enlightenment, and passing, which is usually held in late April or May in many Buddhist countries

-- Ullambana, an observance for the departed and those who are suffering, is held in July or August.

It can be challenging to find ways to conduct unique, meaningful Buddhist events like the yearly Lantern Floating, he said. The event is similar to the much larger Lantern Floating conducted each Memorial Day in Hawaii, which includes music and a ceremonial ignition of the Light of Harmony, that leads up to the floating of lanterns onto the Pacific Ocean.

COUNSELING

Mohr figures that he has served the spiritual needs of about 150 Buddhist Soldiers since he was commissioned in 2009. He has provided spiritual support and comfort to injured Soldiers as often as necessary, and this year alone, he has helped nine suicidal Soldiers work toward resolving the issues that brought them to their darkest places.

Mohr said that when most non-Buddhist Soldiers meet him for the first time, they are often cautious and curious. "That usually shifts pretty quickly to a place of trust and openness as soon as they realize I'm a Soldier and here to help them if they need it."

Mohr said that, typical of all chaplains, most of his days are filled with a mix of staff meetings, ministry of presence, being present where Soldiers are training or working and addressing concerns or issues that they bring up, and spiritual guidance or counseling sessions wherein a Soldier's issues are given full attention in a more formally confidential setting.

"However, you never know when a request for help from a Soldier or an Army couple seeking to plan their wedding will take precedence and shift the entire plan for that day," Mohr explained.

Mohr said the highlights of any day are when he gets to work with fellow chaplains to "deliver relevant, meaningful ministry experiences." These would include a spiritual fitness run conducted with Christian chaplain peers or bringing another chaplain to visit his unit to conduct worship services in the field.

EDUCATION

After Mohr graduated from Menasha Senior High School in Menasha, Wisconsin in 1999, he attended the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh from 2001 to 2004 and earned his bachelor's degree in Religious Studies focused on Buddhism, and the Japanese language and culture. From 2002-2003, Mohr spent another year in an exchange program at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan.

In 2011, Mohr received a master's of divinity in Buddhist Chaplaincy from the University of the West in Rosemead, California.

ARMY SERVICE

Mohr accepted a direct commission in 2009 as a chaplain candidate, and was assigned to Joint Force Headquarters in the Wisconsin Army National Guard.

He graduated from the Chaplain's Basic Officer Leadership Course at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, in 2009, and transferred to the California Army National Guard to complete his education. There he served as a chaplain candidate with the 1st Battalion, 185th Armor at San Bernardino, California. Mohr's duties included working under the supervision of a senior chaplain to learn the Army structure and how to operate in a military unit.

In 2012, Mohr accessioned as a chaplain after meeting DOD requirements. He was then assigned to the 224th Special Troops Battalion in Pomona, California, serving there until 2013.

Mohr returned to the Wisconsin Army National Guard in 2013 and served with the 32nd Brigade Special Troops Battalion in Wausau, Wisconsin, until his entry to active duty in 2014.

Mohr is grateful to the Army, saying that his supervisors and colleagues have made the difference by providing time, space, and resources. They have helped him reserve facilities, promote Buddhist services to others, and make available many of the resources he needed.

Despite having a degree in religious studies, Mohr said he was unaware of the chaplaincy until he spoke to a recruiter at a job fair. To be directly commissioned as a chaplain candidate, Mohr obtained both his bachelor's degree, and ecclesiastical approval from his endorsing body, while completing an application process, background checks, and a physical evaluation.

Once commissioned, Mohr worked toward the DOD's requirements of all chaplains, including a 72 credit-hour master's degree, endorsement, ordination, and two years of ministry experience.

SPRITUAL ROOTS

Mohr's Catholic mother encouraged him from an early age to explore religion, beliefs, faith, and his spiritual identity.

"I came into the Buddhist faith after being invited to visit the head temple of a small religious order of the Shingon school of Buddhism," Mohr said. "This school focuses on applying Buddhism to our daily lives and focusing on providing ministry and altruistic service to build harmony within the community where we live. This model fits my particular religious inclinations. It made sense to me when I saw their embrace of the interfaith environment."

Mohr formally became Buddhist at the age of 22.

He explained that Buddhism is a religion that sprung up from roots in ancient India. It is a religion and teaching that encompasses a variety of traditions, beliefs and spiritual practices based on teachings of Buddha.

Mohr was ordained through the International Order of Buddhist Ministers, and endorsed by the Buddhist Churches of America. He practices in the Shinnyo-en tradition, a minor order of the Daigo Temple Lineage in the Shingon school of Esoteric Buddhism.

While grounded in Buddhism, Mohr said he puts "a heavy emphasis on functioning in an interfaith environment, and my education, denomination and endorser encourages this as well."

"I feel at home working with a wide array of faiths, faith practices, and communities," he said.

In July, Mohr spent 12 days visiting Cambodia. He estimates that they visited about 10 Buddhist temples throughout the country. On his return, Mohr brought back two statues of Buddha. One will be used in Buddhist worship services at Fort Riley and the other at his new post at Fort Bliss.

"Chaplains are amazing people serving Soldiers, dependents, DoD civilians and retirees, but every once in a while you meet a chaplain who personifies, not only Army values such as respect, honor, integrity and selfless service, but also the values and characteristics of their religious faith," Roxanne Martinez, director of religious education, Fort Riley, Kansas, said. "As a Buddhist chaplain, he embodies the qualities of Buddhism: loving kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity, as well as generosity, love and wisdom. "His talks and teachings on Buddhism were talks that people of all faiths could reflect on in their day to day lives."

Martinez said that as an Army director of religious education, she had the pleasure of supporting Mohr in his services for the Buddhist community.

Mohr has a special affinity for "tankers and infantryman" whom he says are some of the most loyal and decent humans he has ever met.

"They are willing to go the extra mile and shoulder more than their fair share of the burden to help whenever they are able," Mohr said.

"One of Buddhism's core teachings is practice equanimity or mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation," Mohr said. "In Buddhism, this means to remain centered in the midst of whatever is happening, but it also means that one is to practice a calm compassion when working with people of all faiths."

Mohr hopes to someday serve both as a brigade chaplain and a family life chaplain.

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Buddhist chaplain serves all spiritual needs - United States Army (press release)

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The rapid development of so-called NBIC technologiesnanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive scienceare giving rise to possibilities that have long been the domain of science fiction. Disease, aging and even death are all human realities that these technologies seek to end.

They may enable us to enjoy greater morphological freedomwe could take on new forms through prosthetics or genetic engineering. Or advance our cognitive capacities. We could use brain-computer interfaces to link us to advanced artificial intelligence (AI).

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Nanobots could roam our bloodstream to monitor our health and enhance our emotional propensities for joy, love or other emotions. Advances in one area often raise new possibilities in others, and this convergence may bring about radical changes to our world in the near-future.

Transhumanism is the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technologythat we should embrace self-directed human evolution. If the history of technological progress can be seen as humankinds attempt to tame nature to better serve its needs, transhumanism is the logical continuation: the revision of humankinds nature to better serve its fantasies.

As David Pearce, a leading proponent of transhumanism and co-founder of Humanity+, says:

If we want to live in paradise, we will have to engineer it ourselves. If we want eternal life, then well need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like only hi-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the world. Compassion alone is not enough.

But there is a darker side to the naive faith that Pearce and other proponents have in transhumanismone that is decidedly dystopian.

There is unlikely to be a clear moment when we emerge as transhuman. Rather technologies will become more intrusive and integrate seamlessly with the human body. Technology has long been thought of as an extension of the self. Many aspects of our social world, not least our financial systems, are already largely machine-based. There is much to learn from these evolving human/machine hybrid systems.

Artificial intelligence GLAS-8/Flickr

Yet the often Utopian language and expectations that surround and shape our understanding of these developments have been under-interrogated. The profound changes that lie ahead are often talked about in abstract ways, because evolutionary advancements are deemed so radical that they ignore the reality of current social conditions.

In this way, transhumanism becomes a kind of techno-anthropocentrism,in which transhumanists often underestimate the complexity of our relationship with technology. They see it as a controllable, malleable tool that, with the correct logic and scientific rigour, can be turned to any end. In fact, just as technological developments are dependent on and reflective of the environment in which they arise, they in turn feed back into the culture and create new dynamicsoften imperceptibly.

Situating transhumanism, then, within the broader social, cultural, political, and economic contexts within which it emerges is vital to understanding how ethical it is.

A customs officer in Bulgaria displays Captagon pills in Sofia, 12, 2007. Pills could give advantages to peoplebut only those who can afford them. Reuters/Nikolay Doychinov

Max More and Natasha Vita-More, in their edited volume The Transhumanist Reader, claim the need in transhumanism for inclusivity, plurality and continuous questioning of our knowledge."

Yet these three principles are incompatible with developing transformative technologies within the prevailing system from which they are currently emerging: advanced capitalism.

One problem is that a highly competitive social environment doesnt lend itself to diverse ways of being. Instead it demands increasingly efficient behaviour. Take students, for example. If some have access to pills that allow them to achieve better results, can other students afford not to follow? This is already a quandary. Increasing numbers of students reportedly pop performance-enhancing pills. And if pills become more powerful, or if the enhancements involve genetic engineering or intrusive nanotechnology that offer even stronger competitive advantages, what then? Rejecting an advanced technological orthodoxy could potentially render someone socially and economically moribund (perhaps evolutionarily so), while everyone with access is effectively forced to participate to keep up.

Going beyond everyday limits is suggestive of some kind of liberation. However, here it is an imprisoning compulsion to act a certain way. We literally have to transcend in order to conform (and survive). The more extreme the transcendence, the more profound the decision to conform and the imperative to do so.

The systemic forces cajoling the individual into being upgraded to remain competitive also play out on a geo-political level. One area where technology R&D has the greatest transhumanist potential is defence. DARPA (the US defense department responsible for developing military technologies), which is attempting to create metabolically dominant soldiers," is a clear example of how vested interests of a particular social system could determine the development of radically powerful transformative technologies that have destructive rather than Utopian applications.

U.S. army soldiers in a joint military drill together with Serbian and Bulgarian soldiers, at Koren military training ground, Bulgaria, July 15, 2017. DAPRA is currently working to create metabolically dominant soldiers. Stoyan Nenov/Reuters

The rush to develop super-intelligent AI by globally competitive and mutually distrustful nation states could also become an arms race. In Radical Evolution, novelist Verner Vinge describes a scenario in which superhuman intelligence is the ultimate weapon." Ideally, mankind would proceed with the utmost care in developing such a powerful and transformative innovation.

There is quite rightly a huge amount of trepidation around the creation of super-intelligence and the emergence of the singularitythe idea that once AI reaches a certain level it will rapidly redesign itself, leading to an explosion of intelligence that will quickly surpass that of humans (something that will happen by 2029 according to futurist Ray Kurzweil). If the world takes the shape of whatever the most powerful AI is programed (or reprograms itself) to desire, it even opens the possibility of evolution taking a turn for the entirely banalcould an AI destroy humankind from a desire to produce the most paperclips for example?

Its also difficult to conceive of any aspect of humanity that could not be improved by being made more efficient at satisfying the demands of a competitive system. It is the system, then, that determines humanitys evolutionwithout taking any view on what humans are or what they should be. One of the ways in which advanced capitalism proves extremely dynamic is in its ideology of moral and metaphysical neutrality. As philosopher Michael Sandel says: markets dont wag fingers. In advanced capitalism, maximizing ones spending power maximizes ones ability to flourishhence shopping could be said to be a primary moral imperative of the individual.

Philosopher Bob Doede rightly suggests it is this banal logic of the market that will dominate:

If biotech has rendered human nature entirely revisable, then it has no grain to direct or constrain our designs on it. And so whose designs will our successor post-human artefacts likely bear? I have little doubt that in our vastly consumerist, media-saturated capitalist economy, market forces will have their way. So the commercial imperative would be the true architect of the future human.

Whether the evolutionary process is determined by a super-intelligent AI or advanced capitalism, we may be compelled to conform to a perpetual transcendence that only makes us more efficient at activities demanded by the most powerful system. The end point is predictably an entirely nonhumanthough very efficienttechnological entity derived from humanity that doesnt necessarily serve a purpose that a modern-day human would value in any way. The ability to serve the system effectively will be the driving force. This is also true of natural evolutiontechnology is not a simple tool that allows us to engineer ourselves out of this conundrum. But transhumanism could amplify the speed and least desirable aspects of the process.

For bioethicist Julian Savulescu, the main reason humans must be enhanced is for our species to survive. He says we face a Bermuda Triangle of extinction: radical technological power, liberal democracy and our moral nature. As a transhumanist, Savulescu extols technological progress, also deeming it inevitable and unstoppable. It is liberal democracyand particularly our moral naturethat should alter.

The failings of humankind to deal with global problems are increasingly obvious. But Savulescu neglects to situate our moral failings within their wider cultural, political and economic context, instead believing that solutions lie within our biological make up.

Yet how would Savulescus morality-enhancing technologies be disseminated, prescribed and potentially enforced to address the moral failings they seek to cure? This would likely reside in the power structures that may well bear much of the responsibility for these failings in the first place. Hes also quickly drawn into revealing how relative and contestable the concept of morality is:

We will need to relax our commitment to maximum protection of privacy. Were seeing an increase in the surveillance of individuals and that will be necessary if we are to avert the threats that those with antisocial personality disorder, fanaticism, represent through their access to radically enhanced technology.

Such surveillance allows corporations and governments to access and make use of extremely valuable information. In Who Owns the Future, internet pioneer Jaron Lanier explains:

Troves of dossiers on the private lives and inner beings of ordinary people, collected over digital networks, are packaged into a new private form of elite money It is a new kind of security the rich trade in, and the value is naturally driven up. It becomes a giant-scale levee inaccessible to ordinary people.

Crucially, this levee is also invisible to most people. Its impacts extend beyond skewing the economic system towards elites to significantly altering the very conception of liberty, because the authority of power is both radically more effective and dispersed.

Foucaults notion that we live in a panoptic societyone in which the sense of being perpetually watched instills disciplineis now stretched to the point where todays incessant machinery has been called a superpanopticon." The knowledge and information that transhumanist technologies will tend to create could strengthen existing power structures that cement the inherent logic of the system in which the knowledge arises.

This is in part evident in the tendency of algorithms toward race and gender bias, which reflects our already existing social failings. Information technology tends to interpret the world in defined ways: it privileges information that is easily measurable, such as GDP, at the expense of unquantifiable information such as human happiness or well-being. As invasive technologies provide ever more granular data about us, this data may in a very real sense come to define the world and intangible information may not maintain its rightful place in human affairs.

Existing inequities will surely be magnified with the introduction of highly effective psycho-pharmaceuticals, genetic modification, super intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, nanotechnology, robotic prosthetics, and the possible development of life expansion. They are all fundamentally inegalitarian, based on a notion of limitlessness rather than a standard level of physical and mental well-being weve come to assume in healthcare. Its not easy to conceive of a way in which these potentialities can be enjoyed by all.

A man moves his finger toward a robotic hand at the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots in Madrid on November 19, 2014. AFP

Sociologist Saskia Sassen talks of the new logics of expulsion," that capture the pathologies of todays global capitalism."The expelled include the more than 60,000 migrants who have lost their lives on fatal journeys in the past 20 years, and the victims of the racially skewed profile of the increasing prison population.

In Britain, they include the 30,000 people whose deaths in 2015 were linked to health and social care cuts and the many who perished in the Grenfell Tower fire. Their deaths can be said to have resulted from systematic marginalization.

Unprecedented acute concentration of wealth happens alongside these expulsions. Advanced economic and technical achievements enable this wealth and the expulsion of surplus groups. At the same time, Sassen writes, they create a kind of nebulous centerlessness as the locus of power:

The oppressed have often risen against their masters. But today the oppressed have mostly been expelled and survive a great distance from their oppressors The oppressor is increasingly a complex system that combines persons, networks, and machines with no obvious centre.

Surplus populations removed from the productive aspects of the social world may rapidly increase in the near future as improvements in AI and robotics potentially result in significant automation unemployment. Large swaths of society may become productively and economically redundant. For historian Yuval Noah Harari the most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: what should we do with all the superfluous people?

We would be left with the scenario of a small elite that has an almost total concentration of wealth with access to the most powerfully transformative technologies in world history and a redundant mass of people, no longer suited to the evolutionary environment in which they find themselves and entirely dependent on the benevolence of that elite. The dehumanizing treatment of todays expelled groups shows that prevailing liberal values in developed countries dont always extend to those who dont share the same privilege, race, culture or religion.

In an era of radical technological power, the masses may even represent a significant security threat to the elite, which could be used to justify aggressive and authoritarian actions (perhaps enabled further by a culture of surveillance.)

In their transhumanist tract, The Proactionary Imperative, Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska argue that we are obliged to pursue techno-scientific progress relentlessly, until we achieve our god-like destiny or infinite powereffectively to serve God by becoming God. They unabashedly reveal the incipient violence and destruction such Promethean aims would require: replacing the natural with the artificial is so key to proactionary strategy at least as a serious possibility if not a likelihood [it will lead to] the long-term environmental degradation of the Earth.

The extent of suffering they would be willing to gamble in their cosmic casino is only fully evident when analysing what their project would mean for individual human beings:

A proactionary world would not merely tolerate risk-taking but outright encourage it, as people are provided with legal incentives to speculate with their bio-economic assets. Living riskily would amount to an entrepreneurship of the self [proactionaries] seek large long-term benefits for survivors of a revolutionary regime that would permit many harms along the way.

Progress on overdrive will require sacrifices.

The economic fragility that humans may soon be faced with as a result of automation unemployment would likely prove extremely useful to proactionary goals. In a society where vast swaths of people are reliant on handouts for survival, market forces would determine that less social security means people will risk more for a lower reward, so proactionaries would reinvent the welfare state as a vehicle for fostering securitised risk taking while the proactionary state would operate like a venture capitalist writ large.

At the heart of this is the removal of basic rights for Humanity 1.0," Fullers term for modern, non-augmented human beings, replaced with duties towards the future augmented Humanity 2.0. Hence the very code of our being can and perhaps must be monetised: personal autonomy should be seen as a politically licensed franchise whereby individuals understand their bodies as akin to plots of land in what might be called the genetic commons.'"

The neoliberal preoccupation with privatization would extend to human beings. Indeed, the lifetime of debt that is the reality for most citizens in developed advanced capitalist nations, takes a further step when you are born into debtsimply by being alive you are invested with capital on which a return is expected."

Socially moribund masses may thus be forced to serve the technoscientific super-project of Humanity 2.0, which uses the ideology of market fundamentalism in its quest for perpetual progress and maximum productivity. The only significant difference is that the stated aim of godlike capabilities in Humanity 2.0 is overt, as opposed to the undefined end determined by the infinite progress of an ever more efficient market logic that we have now.

Some transhumanists are beginning to understand that the most serious limitations to what humans can achieve are social and culturalnot technical. However, all too often their reframing of politics falls into the same trap as their techno-centric worldview. They commonly argue the new political poles are not left-right but techno-conservative or techno-progressive (and even techno-libertarian and techno-sceptic). Meanwhile Fuller and Lipinska argue that the new political poles will be up and down instead of left and right: those who want to dominate the skies and became all powerful, and those who want to preserve the Earth and its species-rich diversity. It is a false dichotomy. Preservation of the latter is likely to be necessary for any hope of achieving the former.

Transhumanism and advanced capitalism are two processes which value progress and efficiency above everything else. The former as a means to power and the latter as a means to profit. Humans become vessels to serve these values. Transhuman possibilities urgently call for a politics with more clearly delineated and explicit humane values to provide a safer environment in which to foster these profound changes. Where we stand on questions of social justice and environmental sustainability has never been more important. Technology doesnt allow us to escape these questionsit doesnt permit political neutrality. The contrary is true. It determines that our politics have never been important. Savulescu is right when he says radical technologies are coming. He is wrong in thinking they will fix our morality. They will reflect it.

Alexander Thomasis aPhD Candidate at theUniversity of East London.

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AI and Transhumanism: Could Quest for Super-intelligence and Eternal Life Lead to a Dystopian Nightmare? - Newsweek