I have written this as a comment to a comment by Alan Torok a few days ago but I am re-posting it somewhat edited, because it encapsulates why, as a thinking person and an academic, I consider spirituality as our key to understanding the universe: ___________________ Wearing my thinking hat this morning, I think what you are saying is that ultimately our belief in God is nothing more than a state of feeling, therefore . . . an aspect of brain function. To me, however, being in a psychological state that mysteriously surpasses the world is very much the ultimate state of Being. If surpassing, means seeing it as a whole from above (as in understanding it), I have no arguments with St. Augustine. Our (thinking) consciousness is too limited, however, for for such a complex task (injecting some neuroscience: our brain processes about 5-15 bits of conscious information per second but a staggering 11 million bits of unconscious information per second. It is through the latter kind of capacity that we develop what is colloquially termed emotional intelligence.) My experience of life turns Descartes on his head and declares “I FEEL, therefore I am”. I cannot imagine myself (and I speak strictly for myself) being an artist and not feeling this as true. Even though it may sound as sophistry to some people and it would serve me right since now I pretend to be able to raise a rational defense for religiosity, there seems to me that there cannot be ANY theory supported beyond reasonable doubt that everything that we see and feel “out there” is not ultimately an aspect of brain function. Five witnesses that report to the same boss, can be tainted by the boss’s wishes or express instructions, their testimony expertly orchestrated. I am not presenting this as an argument that the world we experience may not be real. I am arguing against its out thereness and the fragmentation the concept of out thereness causes to our holistic experience of the world. But if the “out there” is false witness and may not exist in any shape or form (out there, that is, in the mode that we conventionally experience it) as quantum physics has been hinting at for a century, neither can the “in here” be defended as anything more real or substantial. Our senses and our minds substantiate the world out there but the hidden agenda why they do so may be that the world out there is the only thing that can substantiate our minds and our own existence. We need a witness to our existing, and we will create one if need be. “Therefore” (I hate this word as a link to anything) Descartes’s aphorism is elliptical, self-reflective and ultimately crumbles in its own contradiction. Feeling is more real and truer than thinking because it is connected to experience and experience is connected to the world (the REAL world, not the one we sense with our five conspiring sensory sentinels.) Feeling (LOVE) creates the world and experience substantiates it. The kind of “thinking” we have accepted as THINKING in western thought is merely self-reflection in a house of mirrors and, by necessity, self-involved. Our brain, as well as its intellectual products (most philosophy and science) suffer as a result of this self-reflexivity problem.You can see how my argument can be self-destructive (to substantiate itself, it must smash the mirrors that cause our very sense of existence,) but it cannot be logically debunked, if you pursue logic to its ultimate limitation. Of course I can not defend feeling any more than I can defend thinking as per above. But why defend it when you can EXPERIENCE it? In the presence of the numinous everything makes sense and the world seizes to be so puzzling. Ultimately (my point in this posting), I can no more “prove” I am correct than you can “prove” I am delusional. And this is where reason, and all philosophical conversation thereof, stops.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Feb 2014 14:42:40 +0000
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