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Rationality of Mystic Insight
Contents
Rational spirituality: need to
co-revise multiple fields
Book alert: Rational Mysticism -
entheogen-positive
Transcendent rational justification
for using the irrational ego
Horgan (Rational Mysticism) and
Pinchbeck
Rational enlightenment: Erik Davis
on Lovecraft
Commit to trying harder to master
critical rationality
>Reading
the book "Dying to Live" by Susan Blackmore has initiated me to the notion
of drugs as enlightenment tool. I don't bar any ideology, means or tool from
the subject, as long as they are rational or used rationally. A subject such as Rational Spirituality is
bound to revise a lot of false perceptions, including the area of drugs.
>Yours
in Reason,
>Francois
>http://www.insolitology.com/personal
>http://www.objectivethought.com
>http://www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/atheism
The
orthodox view is that:
o Mystic insight and enlightenment are
nonrational.
o There is a moderate amount of free will.
o Entheogens are much less legitimate than
meditation.
o The figures in the Bible are literal
individuals.
The
gnostic or fully mystic view is that:
o Mystic insight and enlightenment are
rational.
o There is no free will; the idea is
nonsensical so there can't be a moderate amount.
o Entheogens are much more legitimate than
meditation.
o The figures in the Bible are purely,
essentially mythic allegories for the intense mystic altered state.
Freke and
Gandy, in books such as The Jesus Mysteries, tend toward the latter set of
ideas, though not so centrally as I do.
I haven't settled on the labels for those two sets of axioms -- such as
orthodox/gnostic, conventional/superior, or exoteric/esoteric. It is important to put forth an entire set
of different axioms together, as well as also establishing each "new"
axiom independently.
At this
point, there are enough books that assert these "new" axioms
individually, but due to the lack of an orchestrated set, an integration of
these, the current treatment of any one "new" axiom is limited. Only when an integrated systematization of
the axioms is available can we find the best and strongest formulation of each
individual axiom. I am deciding to make
my trademark approach the framework-first approach, putting more emphasis on
the whole set of axioms than on any one of them.
If I write
an article focusing on one axiom, I want the other axioms to be clearly and
explicitly present too. I won't
suppress the other axioms when focusing on one; instead, I'll fully utilize the
other axioms so that I focus on the axiom at hand but against a background
consisting of the other axioms clearly expressed. Each article should be strongly holographic, clearly implying the
whole set of axioms. I will be a
package deal, because frameworks are more important than individual axioms.
Francois
Tremblay wrote:
>I
have read your site about ego death and found it to be very interesting.
>I have
a Suite 101 column on Rational Spirituality and I thought you would be
interested in checking it out. I have added a link to your site from there
also.
>http://www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/rational_spirituality
>www.insolitology.com/personal
High on my
wish list is to convince Earl Doherty of the profundity of the Christian myth,
now that it is becoming understood in terms of systematic theory, or science.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22earl+doherty%22+puzzle
Rational
Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality
John
Horgan
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0618060278
2003
This book
appears to be (hopefully) good, solid, realistic, skeptical, relevant, and
grounded. I read his book The End of
Science. He seems to put LSD pretty centrally
in the spotlight, as should be, for the scope of this book.
Transcendent
rational justification for returning to using the irrational ego after
discovering its essentially illusory nature
>>When
a mind intellectually appreciates and feels what an elegant solution this is,
or amounts to, or would be, then the practical problem of self-control arises,
and ego death occurs, and rationality concludes that ordinary perfect
rationality must leap into transcendent perfect rationality to regain, and to
discover a rational justification for, the illusion once again of being a
free-willing egoic control agent with an open future.
>There
is much too much mind control suggested by those words. What brings one out of [the control-system
breakdown that results upon attaining ordinary] perfect rationality, a perfect
rationality which is better understood as truth, is not clear at all. There is no ability on the part of the mind
to do any such thing; it happens all on its own, with the sense is that it is
all regulated by motion. There is no
choice in that process at all, and to hint at any type of control on the part
of the mind is untruthful.
There is
an unaccustomed leap of thinking involved when the mind moves from ego-shaped,
ordinary perfect rationality (at the end of its rope, followed to the end of
the road) to transcendent perfect rationality or perhaps
"trans-rationality". The
mind, though it is actively moving, experiences being passively lifted into the
higher mode of thinking.
This
transformation or central moment of regeneration is initiated by the frozen
spacetime block or some hidden controller outside that block, rather than being
attributed to the ego as prime director.
This is the moment of feeling lifted up to receive a new worldmodel
descending from on high. Passive
language predominates here.
The mind
changes from containing a worldmodel that is shaped as an ego actively
perfecting its rationality (and thereby ultimately and metaphysically losing
control of self-control), to being shaped as a relatively passive member of the
Ground of Being through which a transcendent rationality is conveyed from a
hidden source that is emphatically not the egoic agent.
This is
the moment of the mind's conversion from thinking in terms of being an active
ego to being a passive member of the Ground or the One, or the timeless block
universe. There are mental actions all
throughout this, but what changes is the attribution of action.
One moment
I sense that I as ego am working on my near-perfect rationality, and I bring it
to perfection, but thereupon, I die and lose the scepter of self-control, now
seeing myself as only conventionally being an ego-agent that is driving and
controlling the action.
This is
often a frightening unstable mental state, this postulation of frozen future
and no individual self-control, during which the hidden higher controller could
inject any idea into the loose and flexible mind, and all the mind's egoic
control efforts are recognized as being futile -- it doesn't make any logical
sense to try to stop the thought-injection, any more than a puppet could act
against its controller.
The mind
may thrash about, grasping at its donkey of rationality to try to save and
restore the mind's stability, but no egoic rational action can fix the
instability problem that was created by following rationality to its logical
end point. That kind of action-oriented
perfected egoic rationality concludes that there is no way for it to save
itself.
Something
higher is needed, and then, that higher thinking cannot be considered to be the
property of the ego: higher, transcendent, restabilizing and "saving"
rationality appears in the mind but the mind doesn't attribute that move, that
discovery of the transcendent potential, to the ego. The transcendent potential is experienced as descending like a
crown or new operating system from above, from outside the ego/world system.
The mind
is given control again; not that the egoic mind *takes* control again. The mind receives the higher
worldmodel. Speaking exactly, the mind
does create the higher worldmodel -- but during this creative act, the mind is
not ego-shaped, so the mind does not give the active ego agent, now seen as
essentially illusory, credit for discovering the higher worldmodel.
The lower
mind brings itself to an end as an actor taken for real, and the higher mode of
the mind lies waiting in the timeless future, waiting for the donkey to arrive
or arise to the requisite high state.
This can be pictured as a sinner climbing up, then the demons falling
out of him while he is lifted up and crowned by the savior. It's not hard to find parallels in other
religions, concerning activeness becoming passiveness while grappling with
demons and compassionate deities.
This issue
of the order of salvation is central to theological debate. In what sense does the sinner actively
"accept" the faith and grace to be passively saved? An action of transformation or turning
occurs in the moment of salvific regeneration, and it has something to do with
the will of the regenerate sinner, but Reform theology doesn't want to give any
credit to the ego as an active agent causing its own salvation.
Action
happens in the mind. Thoughts move in the
mind during the moment of satori, enlightenment, or salvation, or mentally
reentering the holy land. The contested
key issue is whether those thoughts are to be credited to an ego-agent or to
something that transcends the ego agent and is somehow over or underlying or
prior to the ego agent.
One way to
express this is to say that the egoic mind is the lower mind and is accustomed
to crediting the mind's movements to the ego, but during transformation, the
lower mind's work of reason disproves the logical integrity and viability of
the model of control that defines the lower mind. At that point, the higher mind kicks in or drops in or is
manifested.
How active
is this higher mind that the mind discovers in itself? The first thing and main thing to be said
about the activeness of the higher mind is that it is *not* the kind of egoic
independent prime-mover, self-mover action that characterizes and defines the
lower mind. Can we say that there is no
action the mind can do to attain higher rationality and regain control? That way of talking doesn't work and can't
explain the dynamics.
The better
way of talking that can explain the dynamics is to break the individual mind
into lower mind and higher mind. There
*is* a choice that the individual higher mind can make, and there *are* actions
that the higher mind can make, but it is most important to remember that the
mode and origin of this kind of choice and action are specifically not imagined
to be that of the freewilling, self-driving ego-agent.
This
higher mind possesses control of a sort, but remember that all relevant mental
constructs regarding space, time, self, and control are redefined and
reconfigured in the transcendent mental worldmodel, compared to the egoic
mental worldmodel. Transcendent control
exerted by the higher mind is most emphatically not the kind of control
imagined in the egoic mind, so the word "control" has a less correct
and more correctly conceived meaning.
The egoic mind
has an inferior notion of what its control involves. In reality, there is no control of that kind. But in the resurrecting mind, that's being
lifted up, control is happening there and choice is happening there -- it's
just no longer credited to the essentially illusory ego-agent. The concept of
control and choice is deeply revised.
I take all
this for granted, having essentially explained it before. The point I was elucidating in my original
posting was that the salvific moment of regenerative transformation of thinking
(centered around the will), involves moving from one kind of perfect
rationality to a more transcendent kind of perfect rationality. Ordinary, lower perfect rationality, when
brought to completion, kills the ego that was the donkey the mind rode in
on. "The law kills."
I was
focused on comparing the two kinds of "perfect rationality", not the
two states of control or seeming control.
Transcendent, higher perfect rationality takes into account something
fatally important that lower perfection failed to account for: the need for
imperfection and illusion and convention; the practical need for the ego
illusion.
The
*truly* perfected rational mind must willingly re-embrace a lie, the lie or
convention of egoic agency, to regain the practical sense of being a stable
control-agent. "Love, mercy, and
forgiveness saves." We have
sacrificed the illusory lower self, but we have forgiven its error and we
continue to use it, with that lie of ego being now redeemed, cleansed, made
righteous and fully rationally and morally justified.
I was
unable to catch Horgan's presentation and prepare questions.
James
O'Meara wrote:
>Horgan
said that he was not interested in putting his drug experiences into some new
framework, but more interested in using drugs to destroy existing
concepts. (Loose cognition?)
Loose
cognition, brought most easily and reliably by entheogens, enables a certain
kind of dismantling of existing concepts, and enables discovering a set of
classic concepts, such as loss of sense of self and gaining sense of unity;
loss of sense of flow of time, and gaining a sense of timelessness.
>Wilber,
for someone who talks about no-ego and being enlightened, struck him, during
their meeting, as about the most egotistical control freak he had ever met.
I don't
know what it means to seem like an egotistical control freak, and I don't know
if I would judge Wilber this way if I interviewed or interacted with him. What is your notion of acting like an egotistical
control freak? The phrase seems like a
completely vague put-down. Certain
people like to put others down as "egotistical" -- it is some type of
projection.
I suspect
that the idea of "being egotistical" is somehow noxious itself,
putting forth a polar value system that, any way you spin it, sets up everyone
to lose. I suspect the main function of
accusing someone of being egotistical is to boost one's own egoic righteousness
points. I think it's harmful to equate
a style of humility and self-deprecation with spiritual evolvedness.
Conducting
oneself with a style of humility or a style of egotism are both almost entirely
irrelevant to the core of ego transcendence.
I promote a conception of "ego" and "ego
transcendence" that is in conflict with the popular notions of egolessness
and egotism. The kind of humility that
is relevant is metaphysical humility, and self-control humility, not
interpersonal, social humility.
The whole
realm in which the accusation of egotism exists is the mere realm of social
interaction, which is only somewhat related to metaphysical ego death and
mystic insights. Mystic revelation
should be held above the realm of social interaction -- at any rate, they are
distinct and shouldn't be just conflated as though the main point of mystic
insight is that one ought to act in a style of humility.
>He's
not interested in "enlightenment" as continual fireworks, but just
living a better life.
Few people
seriously think of enlightenment as being about continual fireworks. Most people assume that enlightenment helps
live a better life. So there's nothing
distinctive about the above characterization.
My position is that enlightenment classically entails a series of
entheogenic fireworks sessions, leading from a switch from one standard mental
worldmodel to another specific standard worldmodel, without necessarily
bringing about all sorts of improvements in one's typical day.
Enlightenment
can be a moderate help in the project of living a better life, but many aspects
of living a better life are only shallowly or dimly spiritual.
>He has
no use for ESP and other "psychic" phenomena
Psychic
phenomena would lead to a more complicated worldmodel or explanatory framework
of esoteric knowledge, so I formally reject them in my core model of mystic
insight.
The
characterization of Pinchbeck reminds me of why I have stopped reading such
books. There is a developing split
among entheogenists regarding all things dippy: it is hard to protect the
entheogen theory of religion as the most rational explanation of religion,
requiring the entheogenist to affirm the best part of religion while rejecting
the most parts of religion and supernatural and the psychic realm.
Even
Wilber accepts psychic phenomena. I
don't -- because they tend to complicate a model of mystic knowledge, as
Wilber's theory is in some ways hazy and complicated. I'm *eager* to reject unnecessary hypotheses, glad to disappoint
people, ready to be at odds with what so many people want to be the case. I'm not eager to accomodate people; it's
essential to my strategy to draw the wagons closer and boldly hold some
*specific* set of ideas: I know what I believe and what I don't believe.
Other
people are willing to fudge and hedge their bets, but their worldview becomes
to fuzzy edged to evaluate, like so many spirituality books that just ramble
and blow smoke without letting themselves be pinned down. My theory can perfectly be pinned down, or
so I strive for. Wilber's actually has
much of that quality to: he is summarizable. I dislike spirituality which is evasive and not summarizable.
Horgan's
book was good to read once, and would be interesting to reread to characterize
it, but really probably isn't quite worth the trouble.
Steiner
has written a bit that's worth reading, but so much is flakey, rather than
simple and useful for a simple theory of mystic transformation.
>In
general, it was not til near the end that I realized that Horgan looks and
sounds exactly like Timothy Leary, circa jailtime. Maybe it was the blue workshirt.
>Pinchbeck,
on the other hand, is very Woody Allenesque, with that "I can afford to be
self-deprecating since I know so much more than you" air.
>In
fact, however, he seems VERY interested in squeezing his experiences into some
kind of framework, provided it is as foreign and irrational as possible. He thinks of himself as a shaman, these
days, and is "terrified" by Mayan prophecies, and those of some
prophetess he talks with these days. He
finds Moslem anti-modernity types to be "crazy but profound," as
opposed to rationalists.
>In
general, he seems to have no concept of scientific method or rationality at
all, as show by his inability to handle questions from the audience about,
well, if there was any REASON be believe what might be hallucinations or bias.
For example, he knows that poltergeists are real, because one day a mirror fell
off his wall. (I'm not making this
up). If an old woman tells him the
world is ending, he's scared. In general, if he experiences it, it's real, and
you just have to deal with it.
>For
what it's worth, then, he now claims to be very "into" Rudolph
Steiner.
Calling
Cthulhu: H.P. Lovecraft's Magick Realism.
How H.P. Lovecraft, reclusive New England skeptic, gave birth to the
hippest of today's postmodern pantheons.
A study of the magick in the master. "For Lovecraft, it is not the
sleep of reason that breeds monsters, but reason with its eyes agog."
http://www.techgnosis.com/lovecraft.html
-- I read the article in Gnosis. This
online version has additional text. I
hold that the most direct and efficient path to enlightenment is through reason
in combination with entheogens, seeking the mysterium tremendum of the
self-control breakdown vortex. This
article portrays Lovecraft's writing with the same kind of emphasis.
Too-elementary/common
questions, refusal of critical thinking:
>Analysis
and debate about enlightenment is a continuation of hierarchical and historical
religious and political systems of domination.
Ken Wilber
has written much lately criticizing the irrational and extremist fear of making
hierarchical distinctions. When people
try to avoid hierarchy, terrible and oppressive results are inevitable. Hierarchical distinctions are good and are
an unavoidable given; the only possible task is the work of constructing the
right kind of hierarchy. People are
irrationally terrified of all debate, all dispute, all judgments and
evaluations, all assertions that one thing is better than another.
Beware of
the extremes, such as killing people for having the wrong belief and the
opposite extreme of hating all rankings and fearing all debate and disputes. These two extremes can even meet -- killing
someone for having the audacity to judge one idea or one person as better (more
legit, more correct, more insightful) than another.
>It is
contradictory to assert that there is no-free-will/no-separate-self while also
asserting that some people are enlightened and others are not.
That's a
bald assertion, without any justification attempted; it cannot persuade. I can only guess the train of argumentation
- but I can't guess; people ought to communicate explicitly.
There is
no free will, and there is no separate self.
Some people (or minds) are enlightened (after maturing), and other
people (or minds) are not enlightened.
Most people go through adulthood without ever maturing into
enlightenment. If you say that everyone
is enlightened, or that no one is enlightened, I totally disagree and can't see
how we could even converse.
Enlightenment
is a simple, specific, bounded set of principles, normally encountered during a
series of altered-state experiences. A mind
is enlightened if it contains clear knowledge of this small set of simple,
rational principles, and has deepened that knowledge through altered-state
experience, and has deepened that experience through knowing the rational
principles.
Any mind
that lacks a firm grasp of that small set of rational principles is
unenlightened. The knowledge that is
enlightenment is a systematic understanding and mental worldmodel that
postulates no individual free will and no separate self (as elaborated
elsewhere). No-free-will/no-separate-self
is both a matter of rational comprehension of a specific coherent worldmodel,
and something that can be experienced in the intense mystic altered state.
There is
no good reason to lack either leg -- rational comprehension of the set of
principles, or experience of the sense of no-free-will/no-separate-self. They are both easy and shouldn't be thought
of as rare or hard to attain. It
appears that they were more or less routinized during the Hellenistic era, so
that they were familiar givens in the common conceptual vocabulary, though I
think my modern systematization is clearer, more compact, and more explicit --
more systematic.
>How
can consciousness, that from which all things come, not be enlightened, or be
only partly enlightened?
That's an
elementary question that indicates abandonment of the basic ability to
distinguish between large-scale all-encompassing consciousness and individual,
local, personal consciousness.
This kind
of completely muddled and careless use of concepts is like the worst aspects of
Alan Watts' use of language that conflates different meanings into one
undifferentiated term, with such confusing and jumbled results as "the
enlightened person realizes that everyone is enlightened, as the universal consciousness
penetrates all".
It's
exactly that type of thinking that I have come to replace, that sloppy type of
thinking, which flagrantly and willfully throws overboard all sense of
linguistic precision and care, "abusing" language in the most
malevolent and sabotaging sense, with a delight at abusing language and making
it look inept.
Language
has been unjustly framed. There is no
way can anyone successfully mentally construct enlightenment in their mind when
they are totally sloppy and inept at making such elementary linguistic
distinctions as between the universal consciousness and the individual personal
consciousness.
God is
enlightened, but that when he forgets himself in apparent multiplicity, some
virtual separate selves are unenlightened, while others are enlightened (after
blossoming into maturity). Ken Wilber
makes this same elementary mistake as Watts in some places. The greatest crime, folly, sin, error in the
pursuit of enlightenment is sloppy use of language and failure to differentiate
between meanings of a term.
The real
condition of attaining rational and simple enlightenment is that we must learn
to always ask "in what sense is everyone enlightened, and in what sense
are only some people -- at a later phase in their life -- enlightened?" One of the absolute top mistakes that blocks
the clear and simple thinking that leads to coherent transcendent knowledge is
willfully sloppy use of language.
People
ought to try much harder to use linguistic and conceptual precision. That entrenched "poetic
paradoxical" mode that has become attached to mystic theorizing has got to
be put in its place, superceded by a wholehearted commitment to trying very
hard for transcendent precision, transcendently mastering language and
concepts.
I'm
especially concerned about the bad attitude toward language: authors despise
language and willfully abuse it, when the only way to ever think clearly is to
greatly honor and respect language (and concepts) and commit to mastering it
with the utmost precision and skill.
I don't
plan to spend much time responding to elementary questions, especially ones
that are based on a refusal of making elementary conceptual distinctions, such
as the distinction between one individual person's mind and another's, or
between the universal mind and individual minds.
Why do the
great thinkers about mystic theory and transcendent knowledge seem to delight
in falling all the way back down to willful seeming inability to make the most
trivial, elementary distinctions, reveling in getting lost in poetic confusion
and then claiming that the confusion is outside of them?
Some
subjects warrant repeated analysis, but it would be a waste of time for
everyone if I needlessly go over the most obvious and elementary points of
distinction. I suspect that my time is
being deliberately wasted; people are throwing absurd, ridiculous questions at
me insincerely just to get attention, when they already know the answers or
know that they could reason them out for themselves instead of reveling in
being deliberately dense.
It's not
rocket science to define some reasonable specific sense in which we can rightly
say that some people are enlightened and some people are unenlightened.
Anyone
reading this discussion group surely could define the solution, *if they wanted
to make the attempt*. I'm not going to
spoonfeed people the totally obvious and elementary, just to give them
attention.
I am going
to ignore the inferior postings and questions.
It's competitive. The most
competent postings and questions will get more attention; the low-grade
questions and postings will be ignored.
If you have seriously and sincerely grappled with a question, then you
should post it, and state that you tried, but were unable to formulate a
reasonable answer to your own question.
I'm not going to do people's elementary thinking, communication, and
idea-elaboration for them.
Please try
harder to communicate clearly, state your train of reasoning, and try to
reasonably formulate possible solutions to your own questions. Be mentally sharp; transcendently *master*
conceptual language and precision. If
you aren't willing to commit to that effort, you can't construct a robust
systematic understanding of transcendent knowledge in your own mind.
The work
is up to you; if you commit to the hard (or not-so-hard) work of making
distinctions, judging which ideas fit together best, and strive to build a
simple systematic model of transcendent knowledge in your own mind, it can be
done -- though everyone says it's impossible, that's just a gleefully defeatist
attitude; it's actually easy.
It's
either impossible, in which case defeatist abandonment of the work of critical
rationality is warranted, or it's easy, in which case those who want to succeed
must make up their mind to use and refine critical rationality for all it is
worth, and reach a not-so-difficult state of mastering transcendent
rationality.
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