Blurb from Original 2011 Website
This New Year’s weekend, Krista Tippet is interviewing the Dalai Lama, whom I’ve never met but whom I have heard speak at a couple of different conferences. They will probably be discussing his latest book, Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World, in which he draws a marvelous analogy, one I really liked.
We like tea, but we need water.
He’s using it to compare the need for some workable spiritual and ethical system with the desire for that system to be my system, the one I was raised with and feel comfortable in. He says that religious traditions are like flavors. They increase your pleasure and the depth of your engagement with ethics, but it is the ethics themselves which are nourishing.
These analogies about culture may not sound like science, but what is science but philosophy with experiments, flavored by humility? Every field starts out vague and undefined, and grows more specialized and powerful as it becomes more quantitative. Check out this very cool paper, which takes something traditionally considered artistic, ineffable, squishy, and shows the hidden connections between foods that make up a cultural culinary style, in a very intuitive way, through the chemical compounds they contain.
http://www.nature.com/srep/2011/111215/srep00196/full/srep00196.html
Happy New Year, y’all.
Updates from 2021
It’s continually amazing how much the context of the moment shifts our perceptions. In 2011, solitude was a rare and precious thing for me, and an upper respiratory infection no big deal.
References from the episode
VSI Episode 29