From: Erin (macavity11@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Oct 25 2004 - 02:06:58 BST
David Buchanan <DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org> wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Erin
I am a fan of Jung and do enjoy his writing on synchronicity. Although I wish he lived longer because I don't the term was fully explored and is still too vague right now for me to be happy and am patiently waiting for the next genius to work clear it up. Although synchronicity for me is 'evidence' that everything is connected and notice the rate of them in my life changes with how connected to that idea I am. Although experiencing a synchronicity, mystic experience is lumped under faith for some and lumped under experience as others, which just furthers my confusion :-)
If somebody dismissed every mystic experience you have had as 'faith' nothing more, even though for you it was an experience is a main problem with understanding people's distrust of this word. I can not provide any "proof" of synchronicities but I feel I have experienced them, regardless of whether you lump it as due to faith in them or not.
dmb says:
Right. Jung's synchronicity is not a precise idea and some further elaboration sure would be nice, but I suspect that such things are very slippery beasts that no amount of study can capture them entirely. And I whole-heartedly agree that its evidence of the underlying connectedness of 'things'. Its one of those moments when the illusion of separateness suffers a glitch and we get a brief chance to see through it. As far as proof goes, the difficultly stems from cultural bias more than anything else. It doesn't fit into the paradigm and so there is not YET a body of experiments, reports, comparisons, etc., BUT there is no real reason why such an investigation could not be done. If fact I wouldn't be too surprized if somebody at Esalen or the Jung Institute has already begun. And finally, I think this is the kind of "evidence" that really does count as evidence in Pirsig's MOQ, with its expanded empiricism.
Thanks.
So in talking about faith you said:
And a final question. Mark Twain defines faith as "believing what ya
know
ain't so." And the bible describes it as "the assurance of things hoped
for,
the conviction of things not seen."(Hebrews 11:1) What's the difference
these and Pirsig's description of faith as "a willingness to believe
falsehoods"?
What if a skeptic came to you and said that you have faith in mystic experiences and your belief in them is a just a willingness to believe in falsehoods. You may have experienced them but everybody has to take it on faith that you actually did, that is it is a falsehood for the skeptic but experience to you.
Erin
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