From: Sam Norton (elizaphanian@kohath.wanadoo.co.uk)
Date: Fri Nov 12 2004 - 16:17:07 GMT
Hi Wim,
> Doesn't '-ology' derive from the Greek and mean 'words about'? (I never
> studied Greek or Latin. Maybe you can correct me here.) Wherever you use it,
> the 'reflective' seems to me to be implied in the word, if '-ology' is part
> of it.
I think this is too neat. 'Logos' has just as much a sense of wisdom associated with it. The
post-SOM identification of logic/reason/thinking about stuff with an emotional distancing is
precisely what is at issue here in how to understand theology. Theology is thinking about God, and
my point is that this cannot be separated from prayer and practice, or, to put it differently, that
love and knowledge are coinherent and cannot be separated. To accept the standard language here is,
I think, to import SOM by the back door.
> A definition of 'experience' is 'direct observation of or participation in
> events as a basis of knowledge'. No, there is nothing else. Only what's
> directly observed or participated in exists.
If there is nothing else other than experience, what is the language that you would use to talk
about the different types, ie what is normally referred to by 'experience' and 'reflection' (for
example). The trouble with making a word apply so broadly is that it is eventually evacuated of
determinate sense.
> I agree that there is a lot of (static) value in 'mediated' religious
> experience as there is in mediated non-religious experience (e.g. science).
Hooray!!!! I wasn't expecting you to say that.
> The point is, that for me mediated religious experience is not superior to
> mediated non-religious experience (and often inferior, e.g. creation dogma's
> compared to evolution theories), whereas unmediated religious experience IS
> superior to unmediated non-religious experience (for me; for others art or
> even science may be THE ways to reach beyond static quality).
That's fair enough. We seek Quality wherever it may be found.
> I don't intend to argue about the relative value of various sorts and
> sources of static quality. We did agree before about the 'ladder' model,
> with lower rungs still being necessary to serve those still on their way up.
> The point is that I need religion to reach for Dynamic Quality and that that
> is to be found in unmediated and not in mediated religious experience.
> I do NOT 'agree that what for some people is SQ, is DQ for others'. If it is
> recognizably the same, it is not DQ. Newly starting participation in a
> static pattern of value in which others are already participating, may be of
> high value to others, but it is still static quality.
So what did you make of Chuck's (very perceptive) comment that A experiencing X is different to B
experiencing X, so the two experiences are, in an important sense, not 'recognizably the same' -
even if the language that we use places them together?
> It may be the movement up the ladder that is DQ, e.g. from Anglicanism to
> Quakerism (-:, not the lower rungs themselves for those who move up to them.
> The only justification for religious institutions is that they are
> springboards or trampolines to start upward from. The more flexible, the
> better.
Agreed. Discovered - to my delight - that one of my church wardens is a former Quaker.
One of the few things in Wilber that seems of value is the sense of the 'spiral' ie, instead of a
ladder (with just one route up and down) there is something like a helix, and we can go round
different spots gaining things of value at different 'octaves'(?). In other words, for someone at
one stage of development Quakerism is best, for another Anglicanism is best, but there is no
'absolute' sense that one is better than the other, at all times and all places.
> I know very little about Christian mysticism. I presume that the 'theology'
> that is shown in their work can be distinguished from that which I would
> recognize as 'mysticism'.
I don't think that's possible - and I think it depends upon the assumption of a difference between
theology and prayer which I'm objecting to above.
> You wrote:
> 'Probably a temperamental difference between us there'
>
> Or being on different rungs of the ladder? (-;
See above. Interesting that you still see a need to reassure your ego on this point :-)
> Well, a symbol cannot harm what it symbolizes, obviously.
I'm not so sure this is obvious. The iconoclasts in the sixteenth/seventeenth century achieved quite
a lot through the destruction of symbols.
> But what's the
> point, if what matters is coercion or force which IS present on all levels
> and if all 4th level static patterns of value are coercive simply by virtue
> (!) of embodying static quality and resisting change? We could then discuss
> which type of 4th level pattern of value if more coercive than others, but I
> doubt whether 'science' as a whole is a good category to compare with
> others. Some science is more rigidly resisting paradigm change than other
> science, just as some religion is more resistant to let its practitioners
> dance for themselves than other religion... And making practitioners first
> take in 'the accumulated static latches of [their] different religious
> traditions' before they are allowed to change those traditions, doesn't seem
> to me to be a recipe for lessening coercion.
Do you think that it is lessening coercion to insist that a child is taught the alphabet before they
are given the opportunity to choose a different language to study or speak? People have to start
somewhere. In other words, people need to develop some sort of competency or 'fluency' at the third
level before the fourth level can do any good. So it seems to me.
Warm regards
Sam
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