23.11.08
Cohen stalking Huffington
11.23.08 Fourth instinct, secularism and religion
Posted in New Age, Science & Religion, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 3:19 pm by nemo
Arianna Huffington at EnlightenNext, audio
In our highly polarized political climate, it is rare to find an individual who is as familiar with both sides of the aisle as Arianna Huffington is. A bestselling author, a nationally syndicated columnist, and named by Time magazine as one of the one hundred most influential people in 2006, Huffington’s eclectic career has always defied convention—and partisan categorization. She was once married to a Republican congressman. She ran for governor of California as an independent. And her popular internet newspaper, The Huffington Post, has a decidedly liberal bent. But while we’ve long admired Huffington’s broad political perspective as well as the passionate dedication to political and cultural change that has defined her career, it is her interest in the relationship between spirituality and politics, articulated in her book The Fourth Instinct, that compelled us to take a closer look.
Being interviewed at Andrew Cohen’s rag is a dubious opportunity. Cohen is constantly trying to snare celebrities in his ‘postmodern’ project (for world domination, I guess).
The combination of politics and ’spirituality’ is a big debate, one might mention here only that the attempt to get ‘beyond left and right’ smacks of the ‘non-dual verbiage’ peddled in the name of Vedanta by Cohen and Ken Wilbur.
A. Huffington’s ideas of a ‘fourth instinct’ (I doubt if there is such an instinct) are reasonable enough (I haven’t read the book), but the problem these days is that a massive movement, or set of such, to organize the ‘impulse to transcendence’ is now bombing out in the long list of burnt out gurus, since the seventies.
The Integral movement with Wilbur voluminous hot air texts is the next effort to organize everyone’ s fourth instincts, and the result isn’t going to go anywhere, as far as I can tell.
One needs to ask what is going wrong with these movements.
Actually a study of the eonic effect, and what we mean by evolution for man, will suggest why these movements are so often unable to achieve lift.
The rise of the modern was itself a great evolutionary transformation, and these confused efforts by postmodernists to negate the rise of modernity in the name of a new spiritual age can’t succeed against its momentum.