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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