"There's no mystical energy field controlling my destiny"

Buried in the subtext of Star Wars is a vaguely buddhist philosophy which for better or worse then gets mixed up with a bit of good old wizard-style magic. In the quiet bit in the middle we get a brief exchange between Han Solo and Ben Kenobi which nicely encapsulates the standard interaction between "eastern" mysticism and "western" modernism.

I'm not going to indulge the inner fanboy any further, but just steal the quote which occurred to me as I am reading Anger by Thich Naht Hanh. Buried in this rather meandering and repetitive text is what I believe is some very sensible advice for dealing with anger, (and probably other 'negative' emotions as well.) However the presentation, like many of these sort of books, sometimes indulges in the rhetoric of 'new-age' mysticism (which is really just old-world magic tarted up to pull in post Aquarian punters). There is much that I find compelling in buddhist philosophy, but I wish I could engage with it without having to translate it into the 21st century. What I need is the philosophical opposite of "buddhism for dummies"; Maybe something more like "buddhism for gearheads."

Even Mr. Wilber falls into this quite a lot, and it's one of my biggest stumbling blocks with his integral philosophy as well. Occasionally I get the feeling that he could couch his philosophy in such a world view, but he hasn't. Perhaps this is because he feels he has to write for the public rather than for academics or the like. So still I pine for a discussion of buddhism that doesn't betray its iron-age origins.