[MD] Food for Thought

[Case]

dmb,

Thanks for the clarification. You put a lot of effort into this. You even
seem to have typed rather than cut and pasted the quotes. There is something
on the back of the cover of the Woodstock album to the effect that the
imperfections (in the album it was the recording quality, here it is your
typos) in should be taken as a sign that the craftsmanship is genuine. 

I am relieved to see you are not espousing the sort of mysticism that
involves some kind of cosmic consciousness. And I can see that Pirsig is
indeed predisposed to this sort of thing. But as you predicted I do not see
much value in this.

The realization that Thou art That sounds all fuzzy and profound but it
really doesn't take much effort or thought to bring about the realization.
All of ones experience is confined to the space inside one's head. All that
we see, all of the categories and pigeon holes we channel our experiences
into are us. We are the sum of our experiences. This is as much a matter a
scientific fact as it is mystical revelation. But it does not deny the
existence of a reality outside our skins. When for example James says, "But
thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are." I do not
think he means that things are ephemeral. My point about James was not that
he should not be read as philosophy but that to read him as only a
philosopher is to miss his point.

The idea of experience prior to or beyond language is a similarly not
transcendental. It is no mystery that much if not most cognition is
nonverbal. While there maybe some personal benefit to recognizing and
exercising these functions, I see no basis for ascribing cosmic significance
to them. Language may indeed be the way that we fundamentally divide the
undivided but we also make these divisions based on experience. It is hard
to see why we would Value the undivided over the divided since they are both
kinds of experience.

In essay 2 of Essays on Radical Empiricism: A World of Pure Experience,
James says, "My description of things, accordingly, starts with the parts
and makes of the whole a being of the second order." Which is rather the
reverse of what you are advocating on his behalf.

One of the reasons to divide things into language is so that we can
communicate them. To claim that experiences that can not be communicated
have some metaphysical superiority over ones that can, similarly does not
make sense. The difficulty in communicating mystical experiences is
legendary and it would seem prudent to be skeptical of information
communicated about that which is beyond communication. I would suggest they
teach us more about the fundamental nature of psychology than of reality.

To claim to have arrived at Truth through such experience is much like
Bohr's complementarity of Truth and clarity. Such an ultimate truth would be
nearly devoid of clarity in much the same way that seeking clarity through
science may indeed point one away from Truth. I recommend bifocals.

As for the universality of belief in the Perennial Philosophy one finds all
sorts of beliefs that are similarly held; ghosts, phantom limbs, angels and
demons. Universality of belief is not a standard for correctness of belief.

There are various ways to induce mystical states from years of meditation to
psychedelics, from the spinning of the Sufi to the fasting of Christians.
But as Bertrand Russell observed, "From a scientific point of view, we can
make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the
man who drinks much and sees snakes."

The chief bone of contention in this debate is whether mystical experience
is superior to a theistic experience. I have tried to tell you many times I
see no more basis for denying your belief in the experience of oneness than
I see for denying a Christian's belief that he has experienced the presence
of God. They are equally valid ways of describing indescribable experiences.

The value of the mystical states I have personally experienced was not so
much what they revealed about the nature of reality as what they taught me
about "normal" states. That is that normal is relative. Normal can be a rut.
It is useful to spin things about a bit and examine them from different
perspectives and in different states. But in the end it is the synthesis of
various states, the mixing of metaphors that brings a balance of Truth and
clarity.

Case