Hi John B., Glenn, All:
I agree with John's rebuttal to Glenn:
> Your comments are generally on target, but Dawkins is probably not the best
> guide in this area.
As Wilber rightly points out:
> "To attempt to bolster a spiritual worldview with data from physics - old
> or new - is simply to misunderstand entirely the nature and function of
> each." (p 3)
Wilber follows with a description of the mystic experience:
> "The central mystical experience may be fairly (if somewhat poetically)
> described as follows: in the mystical consciousness, Reality is apprehended
> directly and immediately, meaning without any mediation, any symbolic
> elaboration, any conceptualization, or any abstractions; subject and object
> become one in a timeless and spaceless act that is beyond any and all forms
> of mediation. Mystics universally speak of contacting reality in its
> 'suchness', its 'isness', its 'thatness', without any intermediaries;
> beyond words, symbols, names, thoughts, images." (p 5-6)
The similarity of this description with a description of the aesthetic
experience from the book "Pictures and Tears" by James Elkins
supports my contention that they are the same:
>From a Dutch woman on visiting Michelangelo's Medici chapel: "I cried
because I experienced what life in reality was really all about, when
time stands still, or does not exist. I had a feeling of being touched, of
great happiness. Being home."
>From an art historian on viewing 15 foot canvases lining the walls of
the Rothko chapel in Houston: "I cried with feelings of relief, of perfect
ease, of pure peacefulness and joy."
>From art historian Robert Rosenblum: "If you can see the picture just
for what it is, without restraining yourself, you might be overwhelmed by
its beauty, which breaks all the resistance and tears down all the walls
between the object and the observer--even 'inner walls.' In that case
the painter and the observer grown into one another. They are united
like Siamese twins."
Wilber himself believes art can provoke a mystic experience. He writes
in "Eye to Eye:"
"Great art dissolves ego in nondual consciousness, and is to that
extent experienced as an epiphany, a revelation, a release of liberation-
-great art as release from the tyranny of the separate self sense."
It should be duly noted that Wilber, Pirsig and the mystics consider
"release from tyranny" (freedom) to be the highest value of all.
Platt
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