{"id":449,"date":"2012-05-31T08:58:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-31T16:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=449"},"modified":"2012-05-31T08:58:00","modified_gmt":"2012-05-31T16:58:00","slug":"beyond-religions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=449","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Religions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Book Review: Beyond religions: ethics for a whole world<\/a><\/em>. By the 14th Dalai Lama. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2011).
     Pleased to discover this book as it speaks to the beginning convergence of psychological literacy and what His Holiness calls \u201cthe education of the heart.\u201d I think we need this and the book describes a goodly number of finer discriminations, such as between foolish anger, occasional useful anger, and always-destructive hate. Learning that emotional tendencies are not good or bad in themselves but rather in context and modulation is itself an important step in maturation. I\u2019m pleased because the Dalai Lama has become a world figure in a number of realms. He won a Nobel Peace Prize, and he has been a champion of inter-spirituality. Now he is moving laterally to include a trans-religious frame.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m pleased because I think he resonates well with my idea that religion is the social organization of the spiritual impulse. Many people find that the framework of their religions have served them well, helping them to feel both more securely connected to their ground of being and offering them useful moral guidance. Others have found their own religious backgrounds lacking for various reasons. Yet pure science has not been an adequate substitute because it lacks the softer ethical elements of kindness, tact, empathy, and related subtleties that are based not on evidence but intuition.<\/p>\n

I have long advocated a renewed synthesis of spirituality and everyday psychology. The latter offers a more secular foundation that nevertheless overlaps with spiritual-ethical teachings, as in a way this book does also. I am stimulated by the phrase, \u201ceducation of the heart.\u201d In another blog-post I comment on ways this might be done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Book Review: Beyond religions: ethics for a whole world. By the 14th Dalai Lama. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2011).      Pleased to discover this book as it speaks to the beginning convergence of psychological literacy and what His Holiness calls \u201cthe education of the heart.\u201d I think we need this and the book describes a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,11,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-literacy","category-spirituality-and-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}