Smith: [meditation] may it clarify & enlighten this issue. Quest: You gave no reason to explain what meditation has to do with "spiritual gowth." Smith: Discussion is fine but... Quest: Always listen for the "but" when someone says "Bla bla bla is fine." You know bla bla bla is NOT fine and you find out why after the word "but." Smith: [Here's what comes after 'but':] "...if you want to learn to swim you have to Quest: So discussion isn't fine because it won't enable one to learn what one needs to know to understand. What WILL enable one to understand, so you say, is the acquisition of a motor skill. Well, I can agree that practice swimming is what needs to happen to acqure SKILL swimming. But I cannot agree that in order to UNDERSTAND what the word SWIMMING means in a discussion about swimming one must learn to swim or even practice swimming. Discussion that is sustained and coherent is adequate to clarify the meaning of words sufficiently to know what one is talking about. Of course there is MORE meaning to the word "swim" for someone who also has experience swimming. But if one cannot describe the meaning of the word "swimming" in a discussion, the reason for this failure may be due to many things OTHER THAN lack of practice or skill in swimming. The reason may also have to do, for instance, with another skill deficiency: the deficiency found when one does not sustain coherent discourse needed to clarify a word's meaning. Smith: Any skill requires training & practise & it isn't about adhering to any doctrine or dogma - religious or scientific. Quest: So motor skills aren't about adhering to any religious doctrine or dogma. That's clear enough for most motor skills, but there are some exceptions such as those among those amazing Eastern monks who acquire extraordinary motor skill and body control as part of their religious doctrine and training. But what I see that remains most problematic with your posting, Smith, is why one would need to learn a motor skill or even the consciousness-control or other body skill such as meditation in order to understand the meaning of the word "spirituality" or "spiritual gowth." You are evidently saying no more than that "spiritual growth" is part of the process occurring in the acquisition of competency meditating. Why is not any other control of one's consciousness or of one's body in any other way also not a case of "spiritual growth"? How about learning new words while reading a dictionary--that's an increment in one's capacity to control consciousness. How about learing to use a pipe wrench? Or how about learning to fix a motorcycle? See "Zen an the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence," by the brilliant author Robert Pirsig, to see that I am not joking about this. Is everything we do or learn spiritual growth? Or are only the things we do that make us feel good or that are good for us part of spiritual growth? If anything we or our minds can achieve or even do is the same as spiritual growth, then the term "spiritual growth" is a case of obsurantism. It refers to the ineffable! In that case, it is not within the domain of subjects that can be studied with a scientific psychology, for one of the many functions of scientifically studying psychology is to leave referents to the ineffable to poets and artists and reilgionists. I must wonder what purposes are served by obscuring psychological science with quasi-religious concepts that cloud meaning rather than clarify it. The unconscious aim may be to eventually do away with the scientific study of psychology and with the professional practice of psychology. In fact, this is my own hypothesis about the purpose of this new-age obscurantism in psychology. It is problematic when a profession that presents itself to the public as applied science advances the cause of quasi-religious obscruantism. This may sell in the client marketplace of today, but the public is smarter than that in the long run. If such obsurantism continues to make inroads into the psychological professions, then sooner or later psychological professionals will have succeeded in undermining the justification given to the public for their right to professional licensure. If they continue the practice of using obscure quasi-religious terminology that makes their pronouncments about the allegedly ineffable into incoherent or trivial assertions, they will be acting to destroy their profession in the long run if they also think the public is not smart enough to see that "this ain't applied science." To understand the meaning of words, we can use discussion quite sufficiently to achieve that aim when intelligent persons who are old enough to use language in sustaned and coherent discourse. The great achievements of science have so much influence in our lives today because the things that underlie the concepts of science are NOT really so ineffable after all. Thus nonscientists and ordinary citizens can use language to see precisely what science is all about in laypersons' terms--referring to things that are surely not ineffable. There may indeed really BE ineffable experiences, but by their very nature they are, by definition, not able to be subjected to either an objective or a scientific inquiry and thus have no place in the the daily practice of psychological practiioners who are licensed health professionals. They have no place there BECAUSE the public expects these profesionals, by virtue of their licenses, to be applied scientists. In the daily practice of poets or religious prophets, references to "spirituality" and other discourse about the ineffable make sense; because they make sense for those professions, nobody in these professions needs a license to sell that kind of discourse as a public-health professional. Thankfully we still DO have freedom of religion in the United States such that nobody ever needs a license to sell one's theories of the ineffable to public clients. This is a wonderful freedom that we should protect and cherish. But when we require health professionals to have licenses because they sell their services as public health professionals, we have a big problem when what they sell is theories of the ineffable using quasi-religious ambiguous terminology. In the long run, this problem may be solved when the licensure laws are removed, as probably they should be by now. Then the pretense will be over, and everyone can sell his or brand of religious freedom without the burden of a professional licensing ordeal with its pretense of an applied science behind the license. Tides have a way of knocking us down when we don't see them coming. Some day the obscurantist fad will be over, the tide will turn, and then psychological professionals will have to face the problem of what they have really achieved by doing away with respect for scientific method, for logic, and for clarity of understanding that can come from sustained and coherent discourse that always strives to make effable that which was formerly wrongly thought to be ineffable. ,,,,,,,,
get in the water & put in the hard yards."
It is obscurantism because it says nothing while claiming to say everything and pretending to have some specific meaning that language cannot clarify.
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