U.G. states, "I am not anti-rational, just unrational." Explain, as if to a skeptical peer, how this distinction is crucial to understanding his criticism of "the guarded citadels of human culture."

From the book

h. He is not interested in offering solutions to problems. His concern is to point out that the solution is the problem! As he often observes, "The questions are born out of the answers that we already have." The source of the questions is the answers we have picked up from our tradition. And those answers are not genuine answers. If the answers were genuine, the questions would not persist in an unmodified or modified form. But the questions persist. Despite all the answers in our tradition we are still asking questions about God, the meaning of life, and so on. Therefore, U.G. maintains,…

force of human action is power and not rationality. In fact he holds that rationality is itself an instrument of power. The rationalist approach is based on faith in the ability of thought to transform the human condition. U.G. contends that this faith in thought is misplaced. According to him, thought is a divisive and ultimately a destructive instrument. It is only interested in its own continuity and turns everything into a means of its own perpetuation. It can only function in terms of a division between the so-called self or ego and the world. And this division between an illusory self…

er of greeting, or a system of religious and political values, or the art and literature of a society. By "culture" U.G. means the value system, the normative structure of human communities. There is a difference between the talk about culture and the talk about cultures. U.G. is not referring to any particular culture. He thinks that there is not much to choose between different cultures. All cultures are variations on a common theme, the perpetuation of a social order by fitting individuals into a common value system. This is the reason why U.G. does not discriminate between Eastern and…

hat there is nothing inside of us that will reincarnate after death. "There is nothing inside of you but fear," he says. His concern is to point out that the demand for the continuity of the "experiencer" which underlies questions about death has no basis. In his words: Your experiencing structure cannot conceive of any event that it will not experience. It even expects to preside over its own dissolution, and so it wonders what death will feel like, it tries to project the feeling of what it will be like not to feel. But in order to anticipate a future experience, your structure needs…

tuation. The rationalist approach is also committed to the concept of causality. U.G. rejects causality as a shibboleth. He maintains that events are actually disconnected, and it is thought which connects them by means of the concept of causality. But there is no way of knowing whether there are actually causal relationships in nature. This leads him to reject not only the notion of a creator of the universe, but also the hypothesis of a Big Bang. He maintains that the universe has no cause, no beginning, and no end. There seems to be some similarity with the Buddhist approach on this issue.…