Speaking of which....
Dec. 30th, 2008 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinanjuSo the lovely and talented Kami posted about the book Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing (which I have now placed on hold at the library). But anyhow, she wrote the following:
I'm in a weird position, as far as I can tell. I don't consider my beliefs 'faith.' I don't have a book I follow. I have direct experience, and I have history. History is the more suspect of those two. As a former Catholic, I understand how beautiful faith, any faith, can be. Having said that, I think part of the reason why the book, and my son's insights into it, resonate and work for me is because it focuses on work, thinking, and getting at reality. It has nothing to do with woo woo experiences. Not that they don't happen. They just have nothing to do with enlightenment. Aura visualization, seeing/hearing/feeling ghosts, being thrown into states of bliss or alternate realities, astral projection (I've done all these things, btw) are more of a distraction than any proof of spiritual advancement. I've suspected this, but I've never put it into words, never completed the thought for myself. So I'm indebted to Jed McKenna for pointing that out to me.
I've highlighted the part that really interests me.
See, I'm a materialist at heart. I think that pretty much everything we experience mentally and emotionally is the result of processes that occur in our very real, very tangible brains. There's plenty we can't explain, sure. Experiences we can't explain, and processes that still elude our best efforts at understanding them. But the closer we get to pinning down exactly how the brain functions, the more we can explain experiences that seem mystical or magical. Or in other words (Terry Bisson's words), We're made of meat. Thinking meat. Dreaming meat. But meat nonetheless.
As a kid I spent a lot of time haunting my local library scouting out and reading books on all sorts of occult or weird subjects. UFOs, close encounters with aliens, bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, ghosts and spiritualism, parapsychology, psychics, "weird" science, conspiracy theories*, all sorts of things. I also read the books debunking all these things. Brookneal was a small town with not a lot of interesting things going on. I guess I wanted to believe that the world was bigger and stranger than my experience of it. (And it is, of course. But it's hard to tell from the perspective a scrawny, SF-loving geeky kid in a small farm town in Virginia.)
Much as I wanted to believe in some or all of these things, I don't. I tried. I read books on how to develop your psychic powers and tried it because it would just have been so COOL if such things were possible.
But as far as I can tell after all my many years on earth, they aren't. Occam's Razor has sliced my childish dreams to ribbons. It's given me a lot in return, naturally. Like science, and all the fruits thereof. This desktop computer and the interent on which I will post this. And modern medicine. And countless other inventions and discoveries which make life better and richer every day.
The price, though, is discarding my belief in all these fantastic but unproven--and mostly unprovable--things. Seeing auras? I know of people who claim to have seen them, but every concrete test I know of** has failed. Ghosts? No solid evidence I've ever seen or heard of. States of bliss--yeah, this one I'll buy. Of course blissful states are possible, but do they mean what people ascribe to them? Probably not. Alternate realities? Again, no evidence for this one.*** Astral projection? A cool idea, but is there any hard evidence that it's more than--at best--an illusion? Not to my knowledge.
And yet...people I know, people whose judgment I generally trust, will swear up and down that they've experienced these things. It's hard to reconcile these conflicts. Ultimately, it comes down to faith even for us materialists. I have faith that all these things are explainable, as hallucinations or delusions or misinterpretations of real events, whether real phenomena misunderstood or subjective experiences caused by unknown (but ultimately knowable) physical, electro-chemical, or psychological events in the brain. Could I be wrong?
Yes, I suppose its possible. Too many people have experienced things that reason tells me are simply not possible. But on the other hand, history is filled with examples of civilizations--billions of human beings over millennia--who believed equally fervently in things that everyone today knows are wrong.
I don't really have a conclusion here. But Kami's post got me thinking, and this is the result.
* I remember very clearly sitting down one day as a kid and thinking about this. I wondered how I could know--not believe, but know that the world I lived in was the world I was told existed. How could I know that it wasn't all a web of lies? How could I know that the newspapers I read and the tv news I saw weren't part of some Potemkin Village-style conspiracy to keep everyone (not just me) convinced of something that simply wasn't true? My conclusion: it was simply too big a conspiracy to be workable. It would require too many people working in concert in perfect coordination to pull off. Somebody would blab. Someone would slip up. So I never again wondered about The Conspiracy (tm). Oh, I'm sure there are conspiracies large and small--people get convicted of conspiring every day. But those are A-style conspiracies. Not THE-style conspiracies.
**For instance, set up a number of opaque barriers six feet tall. Get some people who are not quite six feet tall to stand behind various of the barriers at random. If people can really see auras which extend around the body, they should be able to see the aura over the top of the barrier and tell you when and if someone is standing behind any given one, right? Not so far, not any better than someone guessing at random.
***Though sometimes I'll joke that I've obviously crossed into an alternate reality when I stop and look at a wall I've seen a thousand times before and marvel that it never looked quite that color before. Or wonder if that carpet has always been there.
I'm in a weird position, as far as I can tell. I don't consider my beliefs 'faith.' I don't have a book I follow. I have direct experience, and I have history. History is the more suspect of those two. As a former Catholic, I understand how beautiful faith, any faith, can be. Having said that, I think part of the reason why the book, and my son's insights into it, resonate and work for me is because it focuses on work, thinking, and getting at reality. It has nothing to do with woo woo experiences. Not that they don't happen. They just have nothing to do with enlightenment. Aura visualization, seeing/hearing/feeling ghosts, being thrown into states of bliss or alternate realities, astral projection (I've done all these things, btw) are more of a distraction than any proof of spiritual advancement. I've suspected this, but I've never put it into words, never completed the thought for myself. So I'm indebted to Jed McKenna for pointing that out to me.
I've highlighted the part that really interests me.
See, I'm a materialist at heart. I think that pretty much everything we experience mentally and emotionally is the result of processes that occur in our very real, very tangible brains. There's plenty we can't explain, sure. Experiences we can't explain, and processes that still elude our best efforts at understanding them. But the closer we get to pinning down exactly how the brain functions, the more we can explain experiences that seem mystical or magical. Or in other words (Terry Bisson's words), We're made of meat. Thinking meat. Dreaming meat. But meat nonetheless.
As a kid I spent a lot of time haunting my local library scouting out and reading books on all sorts of occult or weird subjects. UFOs, close encounters with aliens, bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, ghosts and spiritualism, parapsychology, psychics, "weird" science, conspiracy theories*, all sorts of things. I also read the books debunking all these things. Brookneal was a small town with not a lot of interesting things going on. I guess I wanted to believe that the world was bigger and stranger than my experience of it. (And it is, of course. But it's hard to tell from the perspective a scrawny, SF-loving geeky kid in a small farm town in Virginia.)
Much as I wanted to believe in some or all of these things, I don't. I tried. I read books on how to develop your psychic powers and tried it because it would just have been so COOL if such things were possible.
But as far as I can tell after all my many years on earth, they aren't. Occam's Razor has sliced my childish dreams to ribbons. It's given me a lot in return, naturally. Like science, and all the fruits thereof. This desktop computer and the interent on which I will post this. And modern medicine. And countless other inventions and discoveries which make life better and richer every day.
The price, though, is discarding my belief in all these fantastic but unproven--and mostly unprovable--things. Seeing auras? I know of people who claim to have seen them, but every concrete test I know of** has failed. Ghosts? No solid evidence I've ever seen or heard of. States of bliss--yeah, this one I'll buy. Of course blissful states are possible, but do they mean what people ascribe to them? Probably not. Alternate realities? Again, no evidence for this one.*** Astral projection? A cool idea, but is there any hard evidence that it's more than--at best--an illusion? Not to my knowledge.
And yet...people I know, people whose judgment I generally trust, will swear up and down that they've experienced these things. It's hard to reconcile these conflicts. Ultimately, it comes down to faith even for us materialists. I have faith that all these things are explainable, as hallucinations or delusions or misinterpretations of real events, whether real phenomena misunderstood or subjective experiences caused by unknown (but ultimately knowable) physical, electro-chemical, or psychological events in the brain. Could I be wrong?
Yes, I suppose its possible. Too many people have experienced things that reason tells me are simply not possible. But on the other hand, history is filled with examples of civilizations--billions of human beings over millennia--who believed equally fervently in things that everyone today knows are wrong.
I don't really have a conclusion here. But Kami's post got me thinking, and this is the result.
* I remember very clearly sitting down one day as a kid and thinking about this. I wondered how I could know--not believe, but know that the world I lived in was the world I was told existed. How could I know that it wasn't all a web of lies? How could I know that the newspapers I read and the tv news I saw weren't part of some Potemkin Village-style conspiracy to keep everyone (not just me) convinced of something that simply wasn't true? My conclusion: it was simply too big a conspiracy to be workable. It would require too many people working in concert in perfect coordination to pull off. Somebody would blab. Someone would slip up. So I never again wondered about The Conspiracy (tm). Oh, I'm sure there are conspiracies large and small--people get convicted of conspiring every day. But those are A-style conspiracies. Not THE-style conspiracies.
**For instance, set up a number of opaque barriers six feet tall. Get some people who are not quite six feet tall to stand behind various of the barriers at random. If people can really see auras which extend around the body, they should be able to see the aura over the top of the barrier and tell you when and if someone is standing behind any given one, right? Not so far, not any better than someone guessing at random.
***Though sometimes I'll joke that I've obviously crossed into an alternate reality when I stop and look at a wall I've seen a thousand times before and marvel that it never looked quite that color before. Or wonder if that carpet has always been there.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-31 07:32 am (UTC)Questions of spirituality vs. science are of very little interest to me; what I find interesting is the motives of the people who have faith in one or the other. If we go with the Biblical definition of faith as the “substance of things unseen; the evidence of things hoped for,” then faith is a sort of subjective proof of what we want to believe but cannot objectively prove. There are plenty of things in the world that we cannot yet explain. Why do some of us want to believe that all things will be proved scientifically while others among us want to believe in spiritual causes? I think it’s a psychological question.
Personally, I have very little use for the hardcore believers of either sort. I think there are many things that we don’t yet know, and many things that we think we know but about which we’re wrong. Over the years I’ve grown very used to saying, “This is what I believe, but some people believe other things, and no one knows for sure.”
Kara
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-01 04:19 am (UTC)Same here. I'll add that I'd say the important thing to remember when saying, "But on the other hand, history is filled with examples of civilizations--billions of human beings over millennia--who believed equally fervently in things that everyone today knows are wrong," is that you -- whatever you believe in -- could be one of the people who wakes up tomorrow finding out what you believed was The Truth is wrong.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-31 08:08 pm (UTC)