and one more thing, john doe

[Kyle]

On 10/10/05, John Doe <tristero69 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> It's funny how they get all their
> skeptical ammunition out to attack science, but never
> do it to Eastern Mysticism...like, why not? What's
> good for the goose is good for the gander...
>

You should have seen me in my high school health class, which consisted 99%
of Eastern Medicine. I thought this was probably the worst excuse for a
class that I've ever experienced (it was required, for God's sake), not
because it taught the thought but because it attempted to put it in the same
class as pure science... and to this point I completely agree with you (I
don't think I was around yet for the first mention of Eastern Philosophy vs.
Science, I joined pynchon-l a couple of days ago). On top of that, after I
graduated she won the State of Illinois Health Teacher of the Year, somehow.
Some examples of our classroom activities - we held certain items (like
plastic, milk, a beer can) in one arm while an 'expert' put pressure on the
other (if your arm gave way, you were 'weak' to this 'substance' (though
contact was made with the container and not the contained)), our teacher
stood in front of a white projector screen with the lights off, and we were
prompted to 'unfocus our eyes' so that we could see her Chakra (spelling on
that might be off, for obvious reasons), and we held a paper clip that was
attached to a string and tried to will it to move, all of which a
frighteningly high amount of people actually bought. It got to the point
where I thought that the class might just be some brilliant experiment to
prove the Placebo Effect, and if this is the case then she certainly
deserves that Teacher of the Year award if not just for her ability to shape
the minds of giddy teenagers. Certainly, Eastern Philosophy is not one
entity (I find myself occasinally entertaining the idea of life being an
illusion and the possibility of separation from material dependency, while
almost blatantly disagreeing with overly permissive works like The Bhagavad
Gita and 'applied' Eastern Medicine that seems, to me, to be entirely
concerned with finding delightful, mystical answers), but you're right; the
two (Science and Eastern Philosophy) can hardly be compared in either
scientific standards (making EP look childish) or EP standards (making
Science look overly restrictive or useless in its 'Just Zoom Out For A
Moment' ideology). It's like the argument against the Big Bang and Evolution
that basically argues that the two are so unlikely probability-wise that
they're a non-possibility, while this ignores the fact that the chances of a
benevolent God exisiting and creating an enitre world cannot even be
statistically calculated. And the same goes for those who say that the
statistical possibility of God is nonexistent and therefore impossible. I
have to say though, I almost always find myself exclusively leaning toward
Science.

--
-kyle b
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20051011/fc742451/attachment.html>