Found this link on another board. Makes many unsubstantiated claims about the nature of fundamental reality and our place in the universe, and the claims violate the Law of Identity. This is the kind of mystical nonsense we are up against. I’d be interested in your comments.
I stopped watching when the guy speaking said that our senses only show a “subjective fiction” due to our “egoism”.
I honestly don’t know how anyone who held that as true could ever want to live, but maybe that is the point.
He pitches Kabblah at the end (and claims it’s not mysticism).
I’ve been aware that Christianity has been recruiting science, physics, biology,etc., in order to prove the validity of it’s beliefs and ancient literature. Now it seems that Judaism doesn’t want to get left behind: The Kabbalah as philosophy.
But it is good to see subjectivism - mysticism - existentialism so clearly portrayed . One realises how weak the opposition really is.
I stopped watching when the guy speaking said that our senses only show a “subjective fiction” due to our “egoism”.
I honestly don’t know how anyone who held that as true could ever want to live, but maybe that is the point.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the anti-life aspect of mystics; do they want to stop living as their mundane selves via immersion into escapist fantasy (which I can somewhat relate to) or are they just flat-out suicidal in a malignant way that seeks to drag others to the grave with them?
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the anti-life aspect of mystics; do they want to stop living as their mundane selves via immersion into escapist fantasy (which I can somewhat relate to) or are they just flat-out suicidal in a malignant way that seeks to drag others to the grave with them?
Both. Escapism explicitly, malignantly suicidal implicitly.
I’ve been dealing with a friend of mine who has a lot of the same basic premises as the guy in that video. The difference is that he doesn’t try to preach mysticism. Rather, he believes that math encompasses everything, that there is no absolute certainty, that everything has a probability and that probability has no such thing as a 1 or a 0, that the map is not the territory. He gets it all from http://lesswrong.com
Here, Eliezer Yudkowsky, the owner of that website, presents an article about how he could be convinced that 2+2=3.
I liked the secret better.
I’m not an Objectivist, and I am a mystic (in the sense of having had mystical experiences) but I do find the kinds of arguments this guy outlines to be utterly tedious.
For instance, in the discussion of the senses, that whole discussion is parasitic on a scientific story about how the senses work that already implicitly accepts the existence of a reality that we are thoroughly embedded in, and in no way cut off from. So if he accepts the scientific story, he can’t use it to claim we are in some weird way cut off from the stuff the senses sense. (Here I am of course alluding to Rand’s “stolen concept” concept, as she deploys it in many writings.)
But I don’t think this kind of crap is representative of modern philosophy - at least, not the modern philosophy that I like (e.g. Dennett) - which is mostly naturalistic these days.
Incidentally, most talk about “the thing in itself” misunderstands Kant (including, sadly, Rand’s). Kant did not say things in themselves are inaccessible - they are perfectly accessible, as the things of experience. All he was saying was that we have no terms in which to talk about things other than terms drawn from experience (which is in opposition to previous tendencies to think we could understand things in absolute or intrinsic terms) - that’s as far as his subjectivism goes. People (again, including Rand) have always conflated his “noumenon” (about which he is sceptical) with “thing in itself” (about which he is not). They are not the same thing. (My interpretation of Kant follows interpretations of Kant by Henry Allinson and especially Arthur Collins - basically nearly everybody has gotten Kant wrong, partly because his philosophy is extremely subtle, and partly because he was sometimes clumsy in explaining it, and used terms which perennially lead people into thinking he’s a species of Idealist, despite his many strenuous avowals that he wasn’t.) However, while I don’t think Objectivism’s “Kant” is the real Kant, Objectivism’s “Kant” definitely captures some real stinky elements in philosophy as it has been done, as exemplified in this clip.
I’m not an Objectivist, and I am a mystic (in the sense of having had mystical experiences) but I do find the kinds of arguments this guy outlines to be utterly tedious.
Would you mind describing the “mystical experiences” you had? What do you define mystical as?
Would you mind describing the “mystical experiences” you had? What do you define mystical as?
Disappearance of the ordinary, everyday sense of self, concomitant presence (filling the “space” that the sense of ordinary self left behind, as it were) of a sense of being the Universe, pervaded with a sense of total satisfaction, ease, peace, unconditional love of everything, and happiness; in short, of “homecoming”. Another way of saying it might be that there was a sense that the Universe had suddenly “woken up to itself” in me. Hence, I believe, the pervasive use of “awakening” metaphors in mystical discourse, and the widespread, cross-cultural use of the analogy dream:waking::waking:this experience. Hence also the use of “illusion” metaphors. This has come down to general culture, by a process of “Chinese Whispers”, as the garbled notion that “ordinary, everyday experience is illusory”. An accurate mysticism would say not “illusory” but “like illusion (in certain respects)”.
Despite the fact that I was a rationalist and humanist from when I can remember (I rejected the Catholicism I was brought up in as soon as I was exposed to the Catechism), I had this experience about 4 or 5 times from about 6 to about 13, after which it became too difficult to sustain the necessary laser-like concentration. It came as a result of a little game I used to play, of wondering “Who/what am I?”, while repeating my name to myself and trying to get some global sense of who/what I was, e.g. remembering salient events in my biography up to that time, having an image of myself in my mind’s eye, things like that. I tried this “trick” many more times than I got a “result” out of it. Often I just got bored and stopped. But sometimes, after a few minutes of this practice there would be a sort of barrier of fear and a peculiar kind of wrenching vertigo, at which, again, I normally stopped - but on those few occasions I persisted through that fear/vertigo, I got the “result”, which was like bursting through clouds into sunshine in an airplane, or like that funny mediaeval engraving with the guy who pops his head out of the sublunar world into the “music of the spheres” world.
That is how I define mystical experience - as that general class of experience. I believe it’s described differently in different religions and cultures - e.g. one might say “God”, or “Siva”, or “The Absolute” instead of “the Universe”. Basically, the mystic will use whatever ultimate concept his surrounding culture provides. Sometimes the descriptions can seem so different one might think that something different is being described, but if you’ve “been there” you can tell.
Mysticism I define as the study and practice of methods to “get there”, and reflection on the experience and its implications.
Judging by how I gradually found myself unable to sustain the required high level of concentration as grew into adolescence, I would say that if I really, really tried and set aside a period of time and arranged my life circumstances appropriately, I could do it again, but I am too lazy, and besides, having had the experience, I don’t have enough “hunger” for it, as many mystics do. I know I will do it again at some point, but I believe something like this experience will occur at death, as I also believe it will for everybody, so there’s no rush. (Incidentally, there’s an ancient Greek maxim, I believe, “die before you die”, that’s apposite.) I would say it takes about as much effort and dedication as, say, training to compete in a sports competition, or, starting and running one’s own business - IOW, it takes a lot of effort, but it’s not some vast, impossible-to-climb mountain, and most people could probably have this kind of experience after about 3 months or so of putting aside 2 or 3 hours a day for meditation, initially, leading up to about 6 hours a day towards the end of the period, having arranged their life affairs so there are no emergencies or intrusions, and a calm daily atmosphere.
I believe that something like this state sustained through time, i.e. made permanent, is what has been called “enlightenment” and “liberation”. (This is from the point of view of the “classic” Hindu way of looking at it called, generically, “Yoga”, which understands this experience as something occuring in time and space, and attainable by causal means. However, there’s another “classical” Hindu understanding of enlightenment called “Jnana”, which holds that the true liberation is the settled understanding that the sense of self that “disappears” in mystical experience was never there in the first place, and is not there even now; that it’s what we would call nowadays a “user illusion”, with the “user” being the Absolute.)
There are no “flashing lights”, everything appears normal - or rather, normal-but-enhanced (i.e. the world looks incredibly real, precious, solid and beautiful, and one is head-over-heels in love with all of it). There’s just “nobody home”, and another, timeless, wise, benevolent, sense of self pervades the whole (and it’s felt by itself to be the “true self”).
It is, I believe, the most remarkable and “strong” experience a human being can have. I’ve canvassed a lot of life’s options for ecstasy since then, but none of them can hold a candle to it. Not even the most delicious meal in the most august company, the thrill of success in some endeavour, the thrill of (in my case, very minor - I was in a band once) fame, the most intense orgasm, nor even multiple doses of LSD, are in the same ballpark (although I have to say that of all drugs that have “echoes” of it, MDMA does capture rather well the feeling of peace, ease, bliss and unconditional love of everything).
Whew! That turned out longer than I expected, but it’s a big subject. I understand the way Rand talks about “mysticism”, and can follow that logic, but it’s not what I recognise as mysticism. However, it’s just a terminological thing. The fact is, this experience and insight is possible, whatever one calls it. (As are the experiences and thoughts Rand calls “mysticism”, whatever one calls them.)
I don’t think it’s a “source of cognition”, although I do think that what is revealed in that experience is Absolute Truth. In fact, the truth that is revealed is A=A. This is this. This is. (And one is it.)