Return Of The Unclean Spirit

[des]

>>Piaget pioneered the whole notion of "cognitive development." If you liked Piaget, you might enjoy James Fowler's Stages of Faith -- kind of a Piaget-ish approach to faith development, how people view God, meaning, etc. at various levels of understanding. I read it in college, back before I actually got it.

 

Prob. would like it. I really got into that cognitive development stuff back, you know 25 years ago (yikes that sounds awful).

 

 

>So that's  what I wrote the paper on-- how we as adults retain some animistic thinking at some level. And it is more "poetic" isn't it? Which is truth on a very deep level.

 

Well, that's the $1,000,000 question, isn't it!

 

Why, you buying? ;-P

 

 

>Is the "poetic" sense of somehow belonging to God and to the universe in some way, really "truth on a very deep level," or just a comforting lie that happens to have evolutionary survival value? At last, the question that logic can't answer. You know the answer, but not in your mind.

 

Yes for sure.

 

 

--des

[mystictrek]

For what it's worth I've been thinking of a different interpretation of the parable itself.

 

[...]

 

Sometimes our attempts to fight evil using "common sense" result in

multiplication rather than elimination. This theme is explored in many ancient myths. The Sorcerer's Apprentice tries to destroy the enchanted broom by cutting it in half with an axe  and it becomes two. Hercules tries to kill the Hydra by cutting off its head but two heads grow in its place . In the current war on terror it seems the more terrorists you kill the more there are  

Excellent observation -- especially the idea that to really eliminate evil from a situation requires a deep understanding of it that goes far beyond "common sense." It makes me think of the Taoist idea of understanding one's enemy well enough to make him essentially defeat himself -- which I take to be one of the many meanings of the Cross.

 

Also, and this ties into my original thoughts on the parable, a deep understanding of one's enemy always involves a deep understanding of oneself -- many times they are one and the same. I think our attempt at eliminating terror has been so miserable precisely because, as a society, we utterly lack this kind of deep, spiritual self-understanding. I'm not saying that terrorists are simply victims of socio-economic injustice and everything is our own fault, or something stupid and reductionistic like that. But on a deeper level, the repression and denial of evil in ourselves does create an inner split that manifests itself as polarization in the global community, and differentiation and self-identification of people into roles of good/us and bad/them. Surface "common sense" ideas about guilt and blame are utterly hopeless to diagnose such realities....

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I just pasted this exchange at a Conservative-Liberal Debate List at Yahoo. I wonder what kind of response I will get. I called you Wise Person #1 and Wise Person #2. And you are both very wise!