The brights, mysticism and me
I recently joined the brights. What’s a bright?
- A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview
- A bright’s worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements
- The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview
That’s from the website’s home page. Naturalism is “the doctrine that the world can be understood in scientific terms without recourse to spiritual or supernatural explanations” (@WordNetWeb).
One of the Enthusiastic Brights listed on the site is Daniel Dennett, but the organisers are not, unfortunately, philosophers. I contacted them to complain that they misuse the word “mystical”. They were good enough to ask me to explain what it means to me, and here’s my reply:
In your previous message you said “Being a Buddhist presents no problem to the Brights.” Presumably that’s because you understand that such an identification does not necessarily carry any implication regarding belief in “the supernatural”. You also mentioned other religious affiliations, so presumably we can broaden out the point to say that “religious” does not imply “non-naturalistic”. I would say that exactly the same consideration applies to “mystical”, and in support, here’s a quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
In the wide sense, mystical experiences occur within the religious traditions of at least Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Indian religions, Buddhism, and primal religions. In some of these traditions, the experiences are allegedly of a supersensory reality, such as God or Brahman (or, in a few Buddhist traditions, Nirvana, as a reality (See Takeuchi, 1983, pp. 8-9). [Missing parenthesis closure, presumably after "Nirvana", in the original.] Many Buddhist traditions, however, make no claim for an experience of a supersensory reality. Some cultivate instead an experience of “unconstructed awareness,” involving an awareness of the world on an absolutely or relatively non-conceptual level (see Griffiths, 1993). The unconstructed experience is thought to grant insight, such as into the impermanent nature of all things. Buddhists refer to an experience of tathata or the “thisness” of reality, accessible only by the absence of ordinary sense-perceptual cognition. These Buddhist experiences are sub sense-perceptual, and mystical, since thisness is claimed to be inaccessible to ordinary sense perception and the awareness of it to provide knowledge about the true nature of reality. (@Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Section 1.1 on that page. My emphasis.)
I hope you agree that there is nothing to contradict naturalism in “an awareness of the world on an absolutely or relatively non-conceptual level”. Even where deities are mentioned, such statements can be interpreted in a naturalistic fashion, such as Spinoza’s concept of God as reality-as-a-whole. That’s my own preference, not that I often think of it in these terms, and I certainly don’t worship it, but I do, as a practising Buddhist, seek to identify with it, and that, for me, is mysticism. Mystification is something else altogether, and I won’t bother to say anything about it, because I’m sure we see it the same way.
The brights net person replied saying that they were using “mystical” in the ordinary sense, not the philosophical one. Now, I’m not sure that there is an ordinary sense of “mystical”, besides the common but mistaken assumption that it must mean something like “mystificatory”, but this is not really about semantic squabbles.
Another, much shorter definition of “mysticism” that I ran across a while back but didn’t note the source for, is “the elevation of experience over the intellect”, and that works for me. This is, arguably, the main aim of meditation. Some people think it’s about stopping thinking, and that’s true as regards the result, but how the result is obtained is extremely important: ideally, at least, that state is reached effortlessly. But this is not about meditation technique either.
So what is it about? Well, at one level, it’s the usual, my main obsession (yes, I have a few) for some time now: is academic philosophy really what I want to be doing at this stage in my life? But people on the Buddhist/mystical/meditation path are supposed to become less selfish, and if there’s one thing that most or all of my on-line writings show, it’s my self-obsession (of which the one about studying is a sort-of sub-obsession).
This morning the sky here was a clear, light blue, and the sun was shining brightly on the snow all around. I took my camera, went out, and had a ball. I rediscovered the thing I used to like most about photography when I was deeply into it many years ago: the focusing. Of course, my current camera has autofocus, and that’s not what I’m talking about. I find the concentration required to get the best possible shot from a given situation takes me to another level, mentally. After I got back to the house and uploaded the pics to the computer, I discovered most were horribly over-exposed (I’d taken bad advice about compensating for the snow). But it didn’t matter very much: it was the activity of taking the pictures that mattered, not the results. I’d rediscovered photography—I even discovered things about the camera I never knew before, though I’ve owned it for a couple of years. And, for the first time in several years, I was sufficiently active in really cold weather to get really warm. (I used to do a lot of hill walking, until knee trouble got in the way.) I enjoyed it all immensely. And although some thinking was involved, I enjoyed it most when thinking least. Because that’s when I was most aware of the sun, the snow and the scenery. It was truly beautiful.
And when I was thinking, it wasn’t about myself. Because that’s one of the main things behind the academic activity: I want recognition for my ideas, and for my ability to come up with them. It’s all ego. That’s not to say I don’t find the ideas intrinsically fascinating, because I really do. But to do a proper academic job, you not only have to cultivate your own beautiful ideas, and show how good they are, you also have to shovel the shit of competing ideas, to show how bad they are, and that can be so tedious! (That’s a caricature, of course.) But it’s worth it, in some cases. If I was much younger, and looking for a career, the situation would be very different. To have an academic career, and all that goes with it, including being able to work on your own ideas, is a highly worthwhile aspiration. But that’s not me, I’m just too old now. And that’s not all: I want to spread my thinking as widely as I can, incorporating consciousness, information and mysticism, and I know how to do it, the outline is really quite clear. It involves Dennett plus empathy, simulation and imitation, memes as information, Blackmore, the self as memeplex and meditation to dissolve it. But I’d never get to work on more than one tiny corner of that at a time in academia.
Maybe, just maybe, the main issue here, though, is that the academic work involves too much thinking for me now. Yes, working on my own ideas involves thinking too, but not nearly as much as does the work of shovelling those of other people. So, instead of a PhD, and maybe also instead of completing the MSc, I want to write a non-scholarly, popular (I hope) book on my ideas. Yes, it’s still largely ego-motivated, and I might well drop the book as well after a while, but meanwhile, I think, it’s much closer to what I really want to do. And this post is ridiculously long, and I need to get some other things done today, so that’s where I’ll leave it for now.
References
- Griffiths, Paul J., 1993, “Pure Consciousness and Indian Buddhism,” in The Problem of Pure Consciousness, Mysticism and Philosophy, Robert Forman (ed.), New York and London: Oxford University Press, 121–159.
- Takeuchi, Yoshinori, 1983, The Heart of Buddhism, James W. Heisig (trans.), New York: Crossroad.
March 2, 2010
Posted in: philosophy
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