[Industrialblog,
February 23, 2007]
Mysticism, rationality and psychology, or The Sailboat
Yesterday I introduced How I Think About Everything, or Why Smart People Can Be Dumb. In a way, I was getting at the idea that it's inevitable that smart people will be dumb unless they take very specific steps.
To sum up yesterday, I described three elements of how our thinking is constructed — psychological (or character), spiritual and rational.
Each of these can act on each other and can influence each other. Where most moderns go wrong is in ignoring spiritual practice — that leaves them thinking and acting within a binary opposition (reason/emotion) that is false. Both reason and emotion can be influenced by the spiritual realm. Similarly, our mysticism can be informed or misinformed by reason and emotion. And of course cognitive psychologists have long seen a connection between what we think and emotion — that is, you can reason yourself into major depression. That is, reason impacts emotion.
Perhaps an analogy would make it clear. Say your character is the hull of a boat, reason is the sail, and spiritual practice are your navigational charts. Let's say you are a well-educated person and impeccable in your use of reason. Now let's say you are an emotionally health person, stable, virtuous, and the like. You're a good person and you reason well. But you don't believe a word about spirituality. Chances are, you will put all sorts of bells and whistles on your hull — hey, maybe make it a catamaran, and you'll get a great, colorful sail and really get that boat moving.
You may go from island to island, coast to coast, river to river, and have one adventure after another. You may learn new languages, make love to beautiful women (or men), discover hidden treasures, battle great sea monsters, and wonder at the lightning in the sky. It sounds great.
Yet, eventually, it's not enough. You run out of wind, or the boat gets wrecked in a storm, or you may have seen enough and are content to tell stories, and park the ship in a harbor, and stay there until you sink or salvaged for spare parts.
Now let's say you believe all the right things, and engage in the right spiritual practices, and you have a degree of mental stability, but you have no reason. You'll look at the navigational charts, point the boat in the right direction, and sit there while the wind whistles past your boat. Eventually, someone on the same journey may give you a tow or show you where the sail is. Or, you have the right charts, you just read them wrong, and end up hung up on this or that rock.
Now, imagine you are a rational person, and engaged in the right spiritual practices, but you have serious character or psychological problems. In that case, you are on the right course, and the sail is up and catching the wind, but the hull keeps taking on water. You end up having to keep stopping to repair the hull, or going into drydock.
Finally, imagine your character is fine, you rationalize well, but you've got the wrong spiritual practices. You are now confidently following the wrong course, and could end up just about anywhere.
And note one more thing with this metaphor — you're still dependent on the wind. That is, grace. You have ride grace to adventure, or to heaven and have adventures on the way, or just squander it altogether.
*************
One thing in AA I learned is that there are many very rational things you can say and do that will keep you drunk. One is the substitution of lower-alcohol beverages or even mixer for higher-alcohol beverages. It makes sense, right? Less alcohol means less drunkenness. A perfectly reasonable idea.
Except for this: The issue of control. People who don't have a problem usually don't spend a lot of time thinking of ways to prevent themselves from getting drunk. Social drinkers may think, "Oh, I should switch to mixer now," but they're not doing so as a way of controlling their drinking; they're already in control. They're doing so because they've had enough, thank you. This is an example of emotions' using reason.
************
I'd like to talk a little about mysticism. What mystical experiences usually do is either reveal something about God, or reveal something about you. In AA, I had a lot of mystical experiences, almost all of which revealed that my thinking, while rational within its own context, could not withstand a broader context. Perhaps that's what mysticism is — the pulling back of the camera lens to a wider angle, even to the point of removing your self from your own thinking. I dunno. I just thought of that this second. But the rest of this stuff I've been thinking about for about 20 years.
What are some mystical experiences?
I think the first one is the fear of God. Some call this the experience of the numinous, but if fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, it is also the beginning of mysticism. It is an experience, perhaps of the imagination, that there is a Being out there that cannot be deceived and cannot be dealt with except on His own terms. That no matter what you think, no matter what you do, you don't get to pick the terms of dealing with this Being. That whatever is, is — and your perception doesn't equal His reality. And then there's this sense that He's not playing around. You just may face Judgement and Eternal Perdition; you may face forgiveness, acceptance and love — but whatever you face from God, you face from God. There's no denying whatever it will be, and God decides, not you.
Fear of God is a good first step down the mystical path. The No. 1 reason I hear bullshit from people is they don't fear God. We're not talking about a groveling sense of "God don't kill us." It's more like a profound knowledge of and respect for the differences in love, knowledge and being, and that the thing out of God's mouth will be The Truth. But this mystical experience is not a thought, it is something experienced in mystical terms, and thus known in an entirely different way than an argument-in-language. It is written on your very soul.
More later.
To sum up yesterday, I described three elements of how our thinking is constructed — psychological (or character), spiritual and rational.
Each of these can act on each other and can influence each other. Where most moderns go wrong is in ignoring spiritual practice — that leaves them thinking and acting within a binary opposition (reason/emotion) that is false. Both reason and emotion can be influenced by the spiritual realm. Similarly, our mysticism can be informed or misinformed by reason and emotion. And of course cognitive psychologists have long seen a connection between what we think and emotion — that is, you can reason yourself into major depression. That is, reason impacts emotion.
Perhaps an analogy would make it clear. Say your character is the hull of a boat, reason is the sail, and spiritual practice are your navigational charts. Let's say you are a well-educated person and impeccable in your use of reason. Now let's say you are an emotionally health person, stable, virtuous, and the like. You're a good person and you reason well. But you don't believe a word about spirituality. Chances are, you will put all sorts of bells and whistles on your hull — hey, maybe make it a catamaran, and you'll get a great, colorful sail and really get that boat moving.
You may go from island to island, coast to coast, river to river, and have one adventure after another. You may learn new languages, make love to beautiful women (or men), discover hidden treasures, battle great sea monsters, and wonder at the lightning in the sky. It sounds great.
Yet, eventually, it's not enough. You run out of wind, or the boat gets wrecked in a storm, or you may have seen enough and are content to tell stories, and park the ship in a harbor, and stay there until you sink or salvaged for spare parts.
Now let's say you believe all the right things, and engage in the right spiritual practices, and you have a degree of mental stability, but you have no reason. You'll look at the navigational charts, point the boat in the right direction, and sit there while the wind whistles past your boat. Eventually, someone on the same journey may give you a tow or show you where the sail is. Or, you have the right charts, you just read them wrong, and end up hung up on this or that rock.
Now, imagine you are a rational person, and engaged in the right spiritual practices, but you have serious character or psychological problems. In that case, you are on the right course, and the sail is up and catching the wind, but the hull keeps taking on water. You end up having to keep stopping to repair the hull, or going into drydock.
Finally, imagine your character is fine, you rationalize well, but you've got the wrong spiritual practices. You are now confidently following the wrong course, and could end up just about anywhere.
And note one more thing with this metaphor — you're still dependent on the wind. That is, grace. You have ride grace to adventure, or to heaven and have adventures on the way, or just squander it altogether.
*************
One thing in AA I learned is that there are many very rational things you can say and do that will keep you drunk. One is the substitution of lower-alcohol beverages or even mixer for higher-alcohol beverages. It makes sense, right? Less alcohol means less drunkenness. A perfectly reasonable idea.
Except for this: The issue of control. People who don't have a problem usually don't spend a lot of time thinking of ways to prevent themselves from getting drunk. Social drinkers may think, "Oh, I should switch to mixer now," but they're not doing so as a way of controlling their drinking; they're already in control. They're doing so because they've had enough, thank you. This is an example of emotions' using reason.
************
I'd like to talk a little about mysticism. What mystical experiences usually do is either reveal something about God, or reveal something about you. In AA, I had a lot of mystical experiences, almost all of which revealed that my thinking, while rational within its own context, could not withstand a broader context. Perhaps that's what mysticism is — the pulling back of the camera lens to a wider angle, even to the point of removing your self from your own thinking. I dunno. I just thought of that this second. But the rest of this stuff I've been thinking about for about 20 years.
What are some mystical experiences?
I think the first one is the fear of God. Some call this the experience of the numinous, but if fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, it is also the beginning of mysticism. It is an experience, perhaps of the imagination, that there is a Being out there that cannot be deceived and cannot be dealt with except on His own terms. That no matter what you think, no matter what you do, you don't get to pick the terms of dealing with this Being. That whatever is, is — and your perception doesn't equal His reality. And then there's this sense that He's not playing around. You just may face Judgement and Eternal Perdition; you may face forgiveness, acceptance and love — but whatever you face from God, you face from God. There's no denying whatever it will be, and God decides, not you.
Fear of God is a good first step down the mystical path. The No. 1 reason I hear bullshit from people is they don't fear God. We're not talking about a groveling sense of "God don't kill us." It's more like a profound knowledge of and respect for the differences in love, knowledge and being, and that the thing out of God's mouth will be The Truth. But this mystical experience is not a thought, it is something experienced in mystical terms, and thus known in an entirely different way than an argument-in-language. It is written on your very soul.
More later.
First, spiritualism should be both the chart and the astrolab/sextant/gps. If you have no charts and no positional equipment, you may at best go from Island to Island, but the Islands are all basically the same. What you definitely won't do is go from continent to continent.
You might go from England to Ireland. But you won't go to Iceland or Cuba.
Though actually, I think that this is really the job of reason, at least as I gather that Thomas Aquinas would have defined it (which is much more broadly than you are); I think that in some ways there's less of a distinction between spirituality and reason than you're drawing. Though I see why you're drawing it in light of the way that atheists have defined reason entirely in terms of materialism.
For whatever odd reason, modernity (and thoroughly modern persons) seem often addicted to monocausal, or at least "mono-factoral" explanations— trying to reduce everything to within the confines of a single underlying factor. (Note, emphasis on the word "reduce": as in reduction, as in reductionism.) Usually this amounts to reducing everything to exclusively rational terms. Or else it amounts to reducing everything to exclusively emotional/affective terms.
Even when both terms are retained, there tends to be a disconnect between them. An insuperable disconnect, in which one's rational side doesn't know what one's affective side is doing. Like I say, "split brain." Or the disconnect can run the other way around; but for some reason, it usually runs in the direction of rationality being blinded, and hoodwinked, by the affective side. Which often leads eventually to "the return of the repressed," with rationality/rationalism hoodwinked and thoroughly blinded all the way.
And then there is the reconnecting third, with healing in its wings, which you limn in terms of mysticism and spirituality. You know, there's a long intellectual and cultural history which is in line with that. Schiller's Spieltrieb which connects and unites the Formtrieb and the Sinnestrieb. Coleridge's imagination (and not just "fancy") as the tertium aliquid which mediates between perception and conception. Peirce's irreducible semiotic Third, which mediates between the qualitative/affective First and the hard, reactive, actual, factual Second. Pirsig's notion of "Quality," in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Dick's A Scanner Darkly ("You mean the two hemispheres of my brain are... competing?" Both in unison: "Yes"). The Cartesian-dualist split diagnosed, and cured or exacerbated, by the ontological lapsometer in Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins. "Don't start me talking, I could talk all night, my mind goes sleepwalking..." (Quote: Elvis Costello)