From: Scott Roberts (jse885@earthlink.net)
Date: Mon Nov 08 2004 - 19:56:38 GMT
DMB et al (Mark SH, this also has relevance to our MOQ/MOC discussion),
(I've changed the subject line -- was On Faith)
> Marsha asked Scott:
> What is your objection to a secular view?
>
> Scott answered:
> That it doesn't recognize non-empirical reality, that as a result it is
> depraved (what Buddhists call fundamental ignorance, Christians call
> original sin, and what I tend to call original insanity). We know
something
> is fundamentally wrong with us, but the secular viewpoint only offers
drugs
> to mask that wrongness, not cure it: material success, sports, TV, etc.
>
> dmb says:
> I feel your pain, but the spiritual emptiness of materialism is part of
what
> Pirsig is targeting. Its that mechanical rabbit and the lonely isolated
ego
> and all that. And yet Pirsig's solution does not require us to "recognize
> non-empirical reality".
<skip>
[Scott:] Except for the question of the empirical (see below) , and your
facile dismissal of faith as consisting solely of "belief in falsehoods", I
agree with all this. For most, religion is a drug, but for others, it is
the way to get beyond all addictions.
But here we run into our other disagreement, which ties in with the
question of "non-empirical reality". That disagreement is that for you and
Pirsig, mysticism is about going beyond intellect, while for me it is about
working through intellect to Intellect. In explaining this, what I mean by
non-empirical reality will come out.
From the Copleston Annotations:
[Copleston, on Coleridge:] Reason, however, is the vehicle of ideas which
are presupposed by all experience, and in this sense it predetermines and
governs experience. It also perceives truths which are incapable of
verification in sense-experience, and it intuitively apprehends spiritual
realities.
[Pirsig:] The MOQ denies this. Reason grows out of experience and is never
independent from it.
As an immediate counter-example, there is mathematics. Mathematics is
non-empirical reality. But to get into this more, here are some quotes from
Franklin Merrell-Wolff (all taken from the chapter "A Mystical Unfoldment"
from Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object, reprinted in Experience
and Philosophy):
[Merrell-Wolff] "Ultimately [in his readings of mystical methods], I found
one oriental Sage with whose thought and temperament I felt a high degree
of sympathetic rapport. This Sage was the Vedantic philosopher known as
Shankara. I found myself in striking agreement with the more fundamental
phases of his thought and quite willing to apply the highly intellectual
technique that he had charted. It was in this Sage's writings that I
finally found the means that were effective in producing the
transformation I sought."
"I had attained an intellectual grasp of the vitally important fact that
transcendent consciousness differs from our ordinary consciousness in the
primary respect that that it is a state of consciousness wherein the
disjunction between the subject to consciousness and the object of
consciousness is destroyed."
[I'll insert here a remark of Coleridge's, that mathematical "objects" are
"acts of the imagination that are one with the product of those acts", that
is, there is no subject/object distinction in mathematical thought. No
thinking about something else, but where the thinking is the "something
else".]
"I readily realized that if pure subjectivity, or the bare power to be
aware, was a permanent or unchanging element and therefore must, as a
consequence, stand outside of time and be unaffected by any history, then
it must be, of necessity, immortal." [Later, he reconciles this with the
Buddhist anatman doctrine -- see last quote. Also note that by "immortal"
he just means "standing outside of time", not lasting forever in time.]
"While, in addition to the principles or facts just discussed [the
preceding two quotes], there are a number of other statements relative to
the transcendent that can be found in the literature, yet, in my judgement,
the recognition of these is all that is absolutely essential to prepare the
understanding for the Transcendental Awakening. There principles or facts
are clearly of noetic value, and they can be appreciated quite apart from
any affective transformation that may be associated with the arousing of
transcendental apperception. In fact, it may be entirely possible that a
sufficently concentrated meditation upon the inner significance of these
principles might prove an efficient means for effecting the transformation
without the aid of any other subsidiary factor. However, they were not the
sole factors that were operative in my experience, though they occupied the
position of first importance."
"The ordinary technique [to dissolve ego] is the practice of practical
altruism until personal self-consideration sinks well into the background.
But this is not the only means that effects this result. A desire for the
transcendent Self and a love of universals also tend toward the required
melting of the egoistic feeling. In this part of my discipline, I found
that my already established love of mathematics and philosophy was an aid
of radical importance that, supplemented by more tangible practices,
finally produced the requisite degree of melting."
"...it suddenly dawned upon me that a common error in meditation -- and one
which I had been making right along -- lay in the seeking of a subtle
object or experience. Now, an object or an experience, no matter how
subtle, remains a phenomenal time-space existence and therefore is other
than the supersensible substantiality."
[The following is one of several effects noticed after his first Awakening.]
"3. There is a sense of enormous *depth penetration* with two phases barely
distinguishable during this first phase of insight. The first phase is
highly noetic but superconceptual. [Footnote: By "superconceptual" I mean
beyond the the form of all possible concepts that can be clothed in words.
However, the nature of this knowledge is nearer to that of our purest
concepts than it is to perceptual consciousness.] I had awareness of a kind
of thought of such an enormous degree of abstraction and universality that
it was barely discernible as being of noetic character. If we were to
regard our most abstract concepts as being of the nature of tangible
bodies, containing a hidden but substantial meaning, then this transcendent
thought would be of the nature of the meaning without the conceptual
embodiment. It is the compacted essence of thought, the "sentences" of
which would require entire lifetimes for their elaboration in objective
form and yet remain unexhausted at the conclusion of such effort. In my
relative consciousness, I knew that I KNEW in cosmical proportions.
However, no brain substance could be so refined as to be capable of
attunement to the grand cosmical tread of those Thoughts."
"Associated with the transcendent Life-force, there is a very curious kind
of *cognition*. It is not the more familiar analytic kind of intellection.
To me, this development has proved of especial interest, for by temperament
and training my mental action, heretofore, has been predominantly analytic.
Now analysis achieves its results through a laborious and painful
dissection of given raw material from experience and a reintegration by
means of *invented* concepts applied hypothetically. This gives only
external relations and definitely involves "distance" between the concept
and the object it denotes. But there is another kind of intellection in
which the concept is born spontaneously and has a curious identity with its
object. The Life-force either brings to birth in the mind the concepts
without conscious intellectual labor or moves in parallelism with such
birth. Subsequently, when these concepts are viewed analytically and
critically, I find them almost invariably peculiarly correct. In fact, they
generally suggest correlations that are remarkably clarifying and have
enabled me to check my insight with the recognition of others.
"Undoubtedly, this cognitive process is a phase of what has been called by
many "intuition". For my part, however, I do not find this term wholly
satisfactory, because "intuition" has been given a number of meanings that
are not applicable to this kind of cognition. Accordingly, I have invented
a term that seems much more satisfactory. I call it "Knowledge through
Identity". As it is immediate knowledge, it is intuitive in the broad
sense, but as it is highly noetic, it is to be distinguished from other
forms of immediate awareness that are largely, if not wholly,
non-cognitive.There are intuitive types of awareness that are quite
alogical, and, therefore, such that they do not lead to logical development
from out their own nature. In contrast, Knowledge through Identity is
potentially capable of expansive development of the type characteristic of
pure mathematics....Knowledge through Identity is not to be regarded as an
analytic extraction from experience, but rather as a Knowledge that is
original and coextensive with a Recognizable, but nonexperiential, Reality.
It is capable of rendering experience intelligible, but is not itself
dependent upon experience."
[N.b. This is what Coleridge means by Reason, which he contrasts to
understanding, or analytic thought.]
"During the day preceding the final Recognition, I had been busy writing
and my mind was exceptionally clear and acute. In fact, the intellectual
energy was of an unusual degree of intensity. The mood was decidedly one of
intellectual assertion and dominance. This feature is interesting for the
reason that it is precisely the state of mind that ordinarily would be
regarded as least favorable for the "breaking through" to mystical modes of
consciousness."
"Abstract ideas cease to be artificial derivatives from a particularized
expereince, but are transformed into a sort of universal substantiality."
"While in the State, I was particularly impressed with the fact that the
logical principle of contradiction simply had no relevancy. It would not be
correct to say that this principle was violated, but rather, that it had no
application. For to isolate any phase of the State was to be immediately
aware of the opposite phase as the necessary complementary part of the
first. Thus the attempt of self-conscious thought to isolate anything
resulted in the immediate initiation of a sort of flow in the very essence
of consciousness itself, so that the nascent isolation was transformed into
its opposite as co-partner in a timeless reality."
[Which Coleridge refers to as "polarity", and Nishida as "logic of
contradictory identity"]
"I feel myself closer to universals than to the particulars given through
experience, the latter occupying an essentially derivative position and
being only of instrumental value, significant solely as implements for the
arousing of self-consciousness. As a consequence, my ultimate philosophic
outlook cannot be comprehended within the forms that assume time, the
subject-object relationship, and experience as original and irreducible
constants of consciousness or reality. At the same time, although I find
the Self to be an element of consciousness of more fundamental importance
than the foregoing three, yet in the end it, also, is reduced to a
derivative position in a more ultimate Reality."
[Scott:] In sum, you can choose to stick to the limited empirical
viewpoint, with its limited view of mysticism, or you can choose to
understand that Merrell-Wolff has rediscovered what Plotinus and others
mean by Intellect as prior to empirical reality. In my opinion, the MOQ can
be expanded into a more adequate philosophy by these kind of insights.
- Scott
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