American Philosophy since Ralph Waldo Emerson has had a strong connection to Eastern Enlightenment traditions. Emerson was reading the Bagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, and Zoroastrian texts as they were being translated in the west for the very first time in the early 19^th century. He passed these on to his disciples and Henry David Thoreau for instance read Eastern teachings voraciously. 

In the first decade of the 20^th century, William James's ideas of Radical Empiricism, which see a world of pure experience in which each moment expands reality into the next moment, so impressed the Japanese Zen Master D.T. Susuki that he sent James's papers back to his teacher in Japan to read.

In the middle part of the 20^th century Thomas Merton and Jack Kerouac picked up the baton of Eastern thought. Merton, the beloved American Catholic monk, became very close with D.T. Susuki as well as the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. Merton spent a great deal of time in the last years of his short life in the East famously meeting His Holiness the Dali Lama and Chatral Rinpoche another Tibetan Buddhist Master.

Kerouac whose novels were written in a "stream of consciousness" style that harkens back to William James's Radical Empiricism, embraced Buddhism with other famous members of the Beat Generation. He wrote his novel Dharma Bums intending it to be in part a serious work of Buddhism, but was disheartened when the novel was not taken seriously by the Western Buddhist community of the time.

This progression of American philosophy set the stage for the explosion of the East meets West spiritual movement that erupted in the1960's and 1970's. Out of that influx of Eastern Enlightenment teachings into the post-modern west emerged Andrew Cohen's teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment of which I have been a practitioner and later a teacher for the past 16 years.

Besides writing this blog I host a weekly webcast in which I discuss the philosophy of Evolutionary Enlightenment and other contemporary spiritual ideas. On a recent webcast I, along with my co-host Carter Phipps the managing editor of EnlightenNext magazine, tackled the subject of Karma.

I used as the basis for that discussion some ideas that I found online in articles written by an American Buddhist teacher named Ken McLeod. In those articles McLeod describes how he feels that the term karma has been popularly misinterpreted in the West to mean "the law of cause and effect." KcLeod goes on to describe how a more accurate translation of the term Karma from the Tibetan would be "growth." I found McLeod's articles profound and the idea of karma as growth very aligned with Radical Empiricism. Incidentally, McLeod calls his particular work "Pragmatic Buddhism."

For those who want to read Ken McLeod's articles on Karma there are three links here that will take you to them.

Karma

Karma and Growth

Karma Doesn't Explain Anything

Read More of my thoughts on American Philosophy at: http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/

I have often heard and have at times gotten into arguments about whether the process of evolution has directionality.  And this argument has seen lots of air time in the media recently. I realized the other day that there is a fictional dialog that lives in my head about this topic that misleads me about the actual source of disagreement.

If you picture the argument in your own mind's eye you are likely to see that on one side there is a strong-Darwinian materialist claiming that the universe is like a blind clockmaker who stumbled upon this world through a process driven by nothing but chance. On the other side is a romantic fundamentalist claiming that monkeys cannot write Shakespeare and therefore there must be some intelligence guiding the evolutionary process.

What I realized was that no one actually denies (as far as I can tell) that there is an apparent directionality behind the universe's unfolding. Evolution clearly happens in a particular direction. For instance you can't imagine animals evolving on a barren planet before any plants appeared. Plants needed to come first - that is directionality.

What people do argue about is the mechanism of directionality. Darwin's hugely significant discovery was a theory that satisfactorily explained the apparent directionality of the evolution of species. That theory he called "Natural Selection by Chance Variation." Essentially it states that the individuals of any given species are born with variations in characteristics. Some of these variations have survival advantages and are passed on genetically to offsprings. Over time successive generations will become more uniformly adapted to the environment. And at times one species transforms into a new one through this same mechanism.

Darwin had this insight and then sat on it for 20 years before publishing his findings in the book, "On the Origin of Species" and only then because another scientist published a paper explaining a dangerously similar theory. One of the reasons that Darwin's theory was and is so controversial is that he explained the evolution of species, which meant the development of man, without needing to appeal to any form of intelligence or God. He could explain man's development through purely mechanical means.

Darwin could see that evolution had directionality and he could explain that directionality through a process resting on chance variation and survival. There are good arguments against Natural Selection being the only mechanism through which evolution occurs and many find it necessary either for logical or sentimental reasons to theorize that some form of intelligence must be behind the process. But they are not arguing for or against directionality - they are arguing for or against telos.

Telos is a Greek word meaning purpose. And this is where the problems start. Darwin found a mechanism for evolution that was devoid of purpose. If there is no intelligence behind evolution then there is no ultimate purpose, no final destination or goal that we and the universe are heading for. This leaves many of us with an uneasy feeling because it goes against our deeply felt conviction that there is a purpose to life, that there is meaning to existence. So this is the actual point that the argument pivots on, not if there is directionality to evolution - for surely there is that - but if there is purpose. OK, let the argument continue.