Gary, Phyllis, Gene, Søren, Stephen, Ben, list,
Thanks to all for illuminating contributions to this thread!
Ive pretty much given up talking or writing about my quasi-mystical
experiences (to use Garys term), partly because others naturally dont know
what Im talking about, but mostly because my attempts to make them
comprehensible, no matter how inspired they might feel at the moment, by
the next day sound like sops to Cerberus. Besides, why should anybody be
interested in my private experiences expressed in public language? Im not
interested in them myself! What Im always looking for is some way to sweep
aside the cognitive cobwebs that come between us and the immediate,
continuous reality that pours through our pores all the time. But thats
already a sop to Cerberus.
In my youth I tried to say something aphoristically, but what Ive been
trying to do in Turning Signs for a dozen years or so is contruct an context
in which something can be said that will push the envelope of language even
while affirming its limitations. I think this requires a spirit of inquiry,
and my main inspiration for the scientific/philosophical/semiotic side of
this has been Peirce (updated where necessary). But my main inspiration from
the religious side has been Dogen (the 13th-century Zen master). What Peirce
and Dogen have in common is that they plumb experiential reality to its
depths even while pushing rational inquiry to its limits. (One good
collection of Dogens works is called Rational Zen, and one of the best
books about him calls him a Mystical Realist.) Of course, what Ive learned
from both Peirce and Dogen has been determined by my own inquiry, and Im
sure whatever any reader could learn from my book would be equally
determined by that readers ongoing inquiry.
I try to keep in touch with Peirce-L (though I sometimes get behind) because
it reminds me that theres more to be learned from Peirce than my own
inquiry can comprehend, and of course the conversation here often reminds me
how deeply fallible my own comprehension is. But mostly its the
ever-growing, never-complete sense of the Peircean context that adds value
to the gems I manage to mine from his work and incorporate into my own
(con)text.
Which Id better turn back to now
} But what is that which is one going to prehend? [Finnegans Wake 223] {
<http://www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm> www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm }{
gnoxics
From: Gary Richmond [mailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com]
Sent: 23-May-14 11:44 PM
To: Phyllis Chiasson
Cc: Søren Brier; Stephen C. Rose; Gary Fuhrman; Peirce List
Subject: Re: SV: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God,
science and religion: text 1
Phyllis, Gene, Soren, Stephen, Gary, Ben, list,
I earlier quoted Ehrenreich as writing:
"[T]he world flamed into life.
There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals,
just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me, and I poured out
into it.
And then commented that my very few such experiences appeared not unlike
hers. When I consider my first experience, which I earlier described as
occurring en route to the laundry room, her saying that "the world flamed
into life," seems to me to be not exactly a metaphor since I too experienced
this flaming (intense & brilliant light/color) into/of/through my being. I
thought much later of Shiva's dance of profound world transformation. But at
the moment of that experience I simply felt extremely intensely affirmed
in/as/by/through the cosmos, so to speak. If I were to try to put into
words, my immediate feelings were as a pouring into and out of me a Yes,
Yes, Yes!
And further reflection (and other such experiences, always unexpected
without ever being frightening) strongly suggesed to me that even without
drugs, as Soren commented, without brain lesions, etc., it is possible for
at least some ordinary and sane folk to have experiences which either
transform or, in my case, reaffirm the sense that "the life of the cosmos"
is itself not a metaphor, that it is possible to have the curtain lifted,
even if for only a moment, on what we're conditioned to see as "the world
pure and simple and quite ordinary;" I surely don't mean something
supernatural, but rather a perfect sense of a cosmos which, as Peirce
argues, is really and truly alive and intelligent (for us, intelligible)
and, if not exactly benign (since Shiva dances at the destruction of the
world even in its transformation), is at least not the result of a
meaningless chance singularity (the Big Bang) once for all time, that is,
the materialist reduction of the cosmos to a stupefyingly reductivistic
nominalistic idiocy. From childhood I have never felt it that way, but as
alive. Is that so very weird?
Alan Watts used to say that to have something as sensitive as an eye in
order for there to be sight, that sensitive tissue, etc. (easily capable of
being damaged or destroyed) is necessary. For me this was part of the
resolution of the problem of evil. The other part, the human part, is just
the understanding of the way in which too many of us become so *un*natural
as to do the horrible, truly horrific things we do to each other, other
creatures, to the planet itself. We have a perverse "free" will to do what
is perverse, twisted, cruel.
Phyllis wrote:
I agree that every possibility is real, but I don't agree that ymy
interpretations of everything I experience is necessarily accurate. That is
why I don't trust that those experiences are transcendent. I think they may
be just neglected aspects of perfectly ordinary reality that certain others
(or groups of others) have honed (deliberately or unconsciously) to a much
greater degree than I.
That my interpretations of my experiences are fallible is certainly true.
But that some people have honed (or whataver it is, as I don't see my
quasi-mystical experience as the result of any such 'honing'), that their
sensitivity to these "neglected aspects of perfectly ordinary
experience"--if even for a transcendent moment--seems to me something worth
investigating, or at least further reflecting on, rather than denying it out
of hand (not that you are doing that, Phyllis, but some do--I referred to
them recently as essentially kinds of reductivists (and some are scientists
and some are artists and some are religious dogmatists and some are just
ordinary folk. But I don't see them as realists in the deepest, fullest, the
Peircean sense.) And, hey, I too am just an ordinary bloke who happened to
have had these few extraordinary experiences which reaffirmed something
about the universe which, actually, I've always felt was so, and later which
I read in Peirce's philosophy when he took up such cosmic themes--in a word,
the reality of the life of the cosmos.
Once again quoting Ehrenreich:
Try inserting an account of a mystical experience into a conversation, and
youll likely get the same response as you would if you confided that you
had been the victim of an alien abduction
."
So I won't say any more on this any time soon, perhaps for some of the
reasons that Peirce had nothing more to say specifically about his St.
Thomas experience. But since I have had my own such mystical experience, I
refuse to denigrate his, or argue it away as some would seem to wish to do.
Some, however, are so hostile to religious experience in any form that
they'll never accept any sign that there might a life of the cosmos.
"I have never before been mystical; but now I am." CSP That may not be a
very philosophically pragmatic comment; I'm not sure. I think the arguments
offered against it being one are strong.
Best,
Gary R.
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