Saidin said:
Does not changing the mind have to begin somewhere? Are not these types of ideas such that they will encourage others to explore their own existence and spirituality? Since when is understanding a bad thing? One can take this insight and explore the world around one with new idea, with new insight and experiment with the knowledge gained. Isn't understanding our true nature and the reality of our lives not a metaphysical pursuit at its core? If one person is encouraged to become awake and aware of the most inportant questions facing someone living in this world, is that not enough?
The problem with "these types of ideas", which is to say with metaphysics, is that instead of seeking gnosis and a broadening of experience, the metaphysician is simply one more person peddling a view of the world and trying to sort out his experience in such a way that it conforms to it. It is no accident that all the great mystics who have left a
system, rather than a metaphysical picture, have stressed pragmatism and skepticism. So for instance, Crowley says "By doing certain things certain results will follow. Students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophical validity to any of them." When the monks go to the Buddha and ask him what they were in their past lives, and the Buddha tells them that they have shed more blood being beheaded than there is water in the ocean, the point is not that this is literally what happened, but that the question is stupid (or more politely, "unskillful" ).
I am not saying all this because I have some kind of abstract philosophical objection to doing metaphysics (though I do), but because I know from personal experience that however tempting it is to spin theories around your experience, in the end all you are doing is distracting yourself. The understanding is in the doing. The "proof" is in the doing, too, which is why the mystical "system" is not a "theory" about the universe, which you are supposed to believe, but simply a finger pointing at something and inclining you to "see for yourself."
What contemporary scientific knowledge is being offended? The science which doesn't exist yet? That which science (materialists) refuses to accept or even contemplate? How does one offend someone who closes their eyes, covers their ears and shouts at the top of their lungs that they are the truth and wisdom so loudly that they drown out every other voice? How do paradigms shift (and they always do) without someone to "philosophize" about new possibilities to explain that which we experience?
First of all, science is a method and a body of knowledge; it is not a "metaphysics of materialism". The dogmatic materialist and the dogmatic spiritualist suffer from the same disease. The only metaphysical claim of science is naturalism, which is simply the claim that the world makes sense and that this sense can be teased out of it with the proper means.
Contemporary science that is inaccessable to 99.99999% of the people who live on the planet?
This is funny. You mean as opposed to theoretical physics?
Understandings that do nothing to explain the core of the mystical experience to practically anyone who has had one? One can talk about mechanics all they want, subdivide life and experience as many times as they can, chop it into smaller and smaller bits, but it provides no MEANING to life, no MEANING to the experience. And it never will.
This is a terrible attitude. Holism and reductionism are two sides of the same coin - one is upward-looking, to see how the object of investigation fits into a bigger picture, while the other is downward-looking to see how the object
constitutes a bigger picture for smaller units. It ought to be obvious that for proper understanding you need to do both, or at least you need to know
how to do both, and how to decide.
Of course, you are not going to go out and buy a book on connectionism or evolutionary psychology or something, then have an "A HA moment" (or twenty) while reading it and connecting to what is said. Because you are prejudiced against an entire domain of human knowledge, just as the dogmatic materialist is. You think to understand something analytically is to disenchant it and to make it meaningless, but nothing could be further from the truth. If we had never "disenchanted" the flat earth and the firmament of fixed stars, we would never know the universe that we do know, which is not a few orders of magnitude more impressive and more interesting.
So the brain lacks a cohesive cognitive structure to define the self? So there is no self (as we currently believe)? No I? So what does this show us about mystical experience, particularly those of Oneness? What does it say about consciousness? I am curious as to how this realization of science about brain mechanics enhances the understanding or meaning of existence.
I am surprised at having to spell this out. I think it is a common thread running through all the mystical traditions (and it has certainly been the major insight of my own experiences) that the root of human suffering and delusion is the sense of a lack of "beingness", or the lack of an intimate connection with the world, and that this lack is caused precisely by a false and confused sense of who or what one is, i.e. what the self is. Redemption and freedom then consists in remembering or rediscovering one's self, finding or constructing a unity from a sense of identity that is fundamentally fragmented.
I think it is extremely exciting that people who are not spiritual practitioners, and who have not apprehended this dilemma in an intimate and experiential way, are looking at human cognitive architecture and rediscovering this exact same insight. The picture that is emerging from cognitive science is that "personality" or "identity" is an adaptive strategy that the organism takes on to deal with the world. And moreover, there is not one such personality, but there are really many personalities that go together with particular adaptive situations. This is
exactly what one discovers through meditation or psychedelics, or any other non-ordinary state of consciousness that forces the brain to "break" its adaptive strategy and realize that a
strategy is all it ever was. It was not an I, a self, or a subject. It was just something that was being done, or played, or performed. And if you ask, "well who was doing it?" the only answer that can be given is "the world itself" or, perhaps "no one", but these amount to saying the same thing.
