From: John Beasley (beasley@austarnet.com.au)
Date: Fri Oct 04 2002 - 06:29:45 BST
Hi Sam,
Thanks for your extended treatise on mysticism which I have been
anticipating for some time. I even bought some books on western mysticism
which were a total waste of money, since they turned out to be devotional
tomes that assumed everything that I wanted to examine.
Your key comment seems to be that "the assumption made is that mysticism is
about a subjective experience which is both ineffable (unable to explained
in words) and noetic (purveying some cognitive content)."
I would argue that this is slightly off the mark. With Pirsig, I would argue
that 'experience' comes first, and that the 'subjective' tag can be
discarded.
As to 'ineffable', I would say that words are a commentary on the
experience, and are meaningful to others who have encountered similar
experiences. What cannot be carried by words is the actual experience. I
could talk about 'red' to my colour blind father, but he never experienced
what I did.
As to 'noetic', I am not sure about the 'cognitive' content. Ali, in the
quotes I gave in my post yesterday, is arguing that the reality we
experience is already discriminable before we have words to tack on as
commentary. Briefly, he argues for the following 5 characteristics of
reality.
1 Awareness/consciousness. Presence is a self aware medium.
2 Oneness/unity. The field of awareness is an indivisible unity.
3 Dynamism/change/transformation. Being unfolds. Our sense of time
follows from this.
4 Openness/spaciousness. Our experience has spatial extension.
5 Knowingness. Awareness discriminates.
I would want to jump in right here and assert that the mysticism that your
quotation from Wilber alludes to has a greater affinity with science than
with religion. While Ali comes from the sufi tradition, his ideal of inquiry
has more to do with the open ended experimentation of science than of a
formal religion, which Ali would critique as closed and hence obstructive to
inquiry.
You once said you had Cupitt as a lecturer, and I suspect you don't exactly
see eye to eye with his views, but in my view Cupitt is at his best when
critiquing the 'religious' project, which he summarises in the following
words.
DON CUPITT: "Church religion sets up and insists on maintaining an
unbridgable gulf between Holy God and the sinful human being. The church's
realistic view of God keeps believers in a state of permanent religious
alienation and subjection, in order to terrify them into obedience and
conformity. The mystical writer tries to deconstruct the gulf between God
and the individual human being in order to overcome theological realism,
unite the believer with God, and produce an effect of supreme happiness and
liberation. It is of course because non-realist religion is such a wonderful
release from realist religion that the church fears it, and has so often
persecuted the mystics. For the church has always been a disciplinary
organization that aims, not to fuse the divine and the human together, but
to keep them apart for the sake of social control." (An Apologia for my
Thinking, May 2002)
I do not accept Cupitt's view of mysticism as "an embrionic form of radical
theology", but more "a special way of knowing", which he rejects. However
that is not to deny a link between mysticism and religion, which can be put
crudely in the form that religion is often developed around a mystic core of
knowing in its founder, but the effect of religion is, as Cupitt argues, to
deny the immediacy which is the foundation of mystic experience, and promote
a gulf between an externalised God and a subjective individual. (This is a
critique of 'Western' religion, and I would argue that 'Eastern' forms of
religion have been much more open to individual exploration and immediate
knowing.)
I am not sure what to make of your core understanding of early (Western)
church mysticism as in "'the mystics' were not those who had particular
states of consciousness, but those who were able to elucidate the spiritual
interpretation of a passage of scripture, say, or who were faithful
participants in the Eucharist (Grace Jantzen)." Surely the latter definition
is too broad to relate to our discussion today. It makes mysticism little
more than at best holiness or devotion, at worst credulous respect for
dogma. I wonder if this is not more a commentary on the state of our culture
in medieval times, rather than a broader analysis of mysticism. As Pirsig
shows in the extended discussion of Dhyana/Arete/Rt/Rta/Dharma in Ch 30 of
Lila, that follows the statement that "The Metaphysics of Quality identifies
religious mysticism with Dynamic Quality", there is a long history.
You say that Pirsig "doesn't share the Jamesian mistake of seeing mysticism
as essentially concerned with having exotic experiences". I agree, and nor
do I.
You go on to say "the experience of DQ is not to be equated with a
biological Quality (which is the distinction I was drawing between
traditional mysticism and Romantic mysticism, whereby the latter is a quest
for particular experiences and/or feelings)" Again I am in substantial
agreement. One of my early essays on the Forum makes this error, of viewing
mysticism as a regression to the biological level. I do not hold that view
now.
Next you look at Pirsig's treatment of "dhyana, which is the evacuation of
static patterns from conscious awareness (in traditional Christian mysticism
this corresponds quite closely with apophatic prayer) and then grounds out
his thinking in his discussion of ritual, and the Indo-European roots of
Rta, pointing out that the Zen monk's daily life is 'nothing but ritual'."
This is correct as far as it goes, but you must also heed Pirsig's warning
at the very end of this section that "The danger has always been that the
rituals, the static patterns are mistaken for what they merely represent and
are allowed to destroy the Dynamic Quality they were originally intended to
preserve." Actually I see the static patterns as just one way towards a
deeper knowing, and not necessarily the best or most productive. My reading
about Zen in the US suggests that the failure rate is extremely high, and
the social aspect of the master/learner system often results in blatent
abuse (particularly sexual) or more subtle psychic damage.
Wren-Lewis asserts that no path he examined ever had a reliable success
rate, and he is inclined to view the whole idea of a path as misguided, and
put his and other experiences of 'enlightenment' down to 'grace'. However,
as a scientist, examining the Catch-22 situation of finding a path to
'enlightenment', he makes the interesting observation that "the right kind
of lateral thinking can can often bring liberation from Catch-22 situations,
provided the Catch-22 is faced in its full starkness, without evasions in
the form of metaphysical speculations beyond experience." This fits so well
with the way of inquiry, which is open ended and begins with what is
available to experience, deepening that as part of the process of
exploration, that I am comfortable with this suggestion from Wren-Lewis.
The core of our disagreement, though, surely is unearthed in the suggestion
you make that "the traditional understanding of mysticism centres on the
ability to develop the static pattern of the faith in a DQ direction." I'll
try to be sympathetic, given your comment that "I'm hopeful that you'll be
sympathetic to what I am saying, and that is because of your concern with
the importance of a praxis, through which to develop ourselves morally and
spiritually - to get us closer to DQ. Pirsig does not provide any material
for doing this, even if he does point in the direction of American Indian
mysticism at the end of Lila." You are quite correct about Pirsig here, and
I feel it is the major weakness of his MOQ, which is inevitably a
metaphysics and not a praxis.
You conclude "our practices need to be shaped by an established religion,
for they 1. have the resources for it, having developed over thousands of
years and 2. the modern secular scientistic alternative is vitiated for all
the
reasons that are familiar to people who understand the MoQ."
To go back to your core statement above, you talk about developing the
static pattern of the faith in a DQ direction. We obviously agree that there
is something that attracts us towards the dynamic. Pirsig explicitly
identifies mysticism with dynamic quality. Hence it might seem that
mysticism could be a positive development for a faith that has become too
static. But this begs too many questions. Established religions may actually
be the worst places for mysticism to develop. The fact that the religion has
demonstrated epic survival properties does not in my view better fit it for
the task of finding the dynamic; quite the contrary. I find Susan
Blackmore's terminology useful here. If we regard the religion as a
memeplex, a bundle of memes that comes as a package, then some memes can be
attractive, while others can be quite poisonous, yet since the bundle comes
ready wrapped, the convert ends up supporting the bad with the good.
In my previous post I suggested three approaches to exploring our universe
that seem potentially valid today. Religion clearly fits the first, being
predominantly what I called there a "pre-packaged belief system", at least
in the West. Mysticism as I view it is quite at odds with this. Because both
systems end up talking about 'God' in some form or other, there is a
tendency to assume they derive from the same source, but this is doubtful.
The god of the mystic is the immanant experience of what is, moment by
moment. It cannot be defined or even sought, since it arises only in
immediate experience, and that experience continues to unfold and change.
Hameed Ali says that those mystic traditions that spoke of the ultimate as
'emptiness' were involved in a way of negation, and that this is a clever
and subtle way to describe the essence of being. Hameed, though, prefers to
say that the description of Being is not impossible - just inexhaustible.In
his view our infinite determinations of the mystery of Being are actually
the content of our consciousness. At the deepest level there remains just
experience, prior to language, prior to ego. But to access this fundamental
level requires that we do give up the static knowledge that blocks our
ability to experience the here and now.
Pirsig, in developing a metaphysics, clearly saw that this was not
compatible with mysticism. His MOQ is therefore a strange beast, a
metaphysics, a static system, which seeks to incorporate the dynamic in the
system. Pirsig saw the obvious difficulties, and chose to do it because it
felt good at the time. But he manages this only because by not defining the
dynamic he retains some space, yet this comes at a cost. The cost is
ambiguity, uncertainty, reification and confusion. Pirsig never clearly
identifies other issues that seem to drive him, such as the secret
loneliness and alienation that marks his society, and applicability of his
scheme to actual moral problems. (I note he has recently declared that he
wished he had not suggested that it ever could, in any direct way.) So much
of this resembles traditional religion.
Mysticism wipes all this clean. It starts with questioning what I experience
now. The questioning, if sincere and intelligent, leads into an exploration
of those aspects of my early upbringing that have created the mental
blinkers that prevent my experience of the moment ever being very clear. I
also resume contact with aspects of reality that my blinkered self was
incapable of contacting. The praxis now works by incorporating this new
material into an expanded awareness as the earlier blinkers are seen and
hence can be abandoned. There will still be a residual self that experiences
this new openness, but eventually the immediate experience will undercut
that self and reach a point where the spacious experience of Being is simply
experienced. The self dissolves. This does not mean that a person who can be
in the moment so completely cannot for the sake of daily practicalities also
operate as an agent. Planning and creativity are not precluded, but these
activities are seen for what they are, and not treated as fundamental. (I
have some difficulty in imagining this state, but it is clearly described by
Wren-Lewis and others, so I have no reason to doubt this.)
I suspect all this is poles apart from your hoped for mystical tug on the
orthodox towards the dynamic. As I see it, mysticism is too radical for the
churches, for the metaphysicians and thinkers of all kinds, and for those
who live by a sort of scientism. I am doubtful that it could be different.
I will be interested in your response. Hopefully we can respect each others
deepest concerns, which do seem to overlap, while arguing as clearly as we
can for the way we see things. I enjoyed your post.
Regards,
John B
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