On Logic and Mysticism

One of the things I want to use this blog for is to express my intellectual / philosophical / ethical / spiritual views, because I feel they are at the very least different. But I do not want this place to be a kind of soapbox where I just talk about whatever I want, either. I encourage anyone and everyone to comment!

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle

When I imagine someone close-minded hearing about a belief that riles them up, they act like little kids, plugging there ears and going "LALALALALA". Aristotle tells us that we should be able to hold, or grasp, those thoughts that we do not agree with, or perhaps better still, to carefully extract from them what we consider to be true and leave out the rest. Taking the diamond out of the rock, as it were.

Doubt envelops everything just as smoke envelops fire. 

It is very important to think critically. Let us consider that there are certain questions that are key to the human condition, questions that are intrinsic and that everyone is born having. Society gives us pre-packaged answers to these questions. We assume that we agree with them because we are told to, but we find that if we tilt the investigative lens inside ourselves we find that we may actually not. Forming our own opinions about things is how we avoid getting swept up in the current.

When we start to think critically, we realize that doubt envelops everything just like smoke envelops fire. However, just as there is a fire shining through all that smoke, there is still a truth. The thing about the Truth is that the truth is the truth everywhere. Gravity is just as much gravity here as it is in Africa. So, universalities about the human experience are also true no matter what part of the earth you stand on.

In other words, 2+2=4 is true no matter where or who you are. Other truths, much deeper ones than that, are similarly universal. 

Some of the ideas that are a part of the "wave" nowadays that we will discuss are: only believing material things to be real, liking the materialistic worldview, the belief of Matter over Mind, and denying, or hating outright, anything or anyone that would claim that there is a higher reality. These are also beliefs that I used to  uphold.

All of those beliefs are the mainstream today, even though the people who prescribe to them like to imagine themselves as the only sane men in a planet-wide asylum. But, nonetheless, if you ask the average man on the street about things like, "Who or what is God?" he will either shrug or tell you He does not exist. If ask people "What do you think Deja-Vu is for? What do you think Synchronicities  are for?" they will reveal that they have not given those ideas much consideration. If you ask them, "What about Lucid Dreams, and Astral Projections? What about Near-Death-Experiences? What about Healing Energy? What about The Flower of Life?", they will run away. They don't want to be guided out of Plato's Cave.

But, luckily, when I myself looked at these things, and in a lot of cases experienced them directly, it rocked my world. 

Bertrand Russel, wrote an essay "On The Value of Skepticism", which has a lot of valuable thoughts and points out flaws in the way that ordinary people think. How phenomenal if his belief could be adopted by everyone (what a pipe dream!). 

But I do not agree everything Bertrand Russel says. It is important to question even the most learned intellectual. Probably my favorite idea of his is the "Middle Way of Reason", which consists of three principles: 

1)That when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot held to be certain;

2)That when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert 

3)That when they all hold that no sufficient ground for a positive opinion exists, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgement.

If you read in Bertrand's essay, he uses these principles to deconstruct (among other things!) religion. This is what we will hone in on for this article.

Who qualifies as an "expert?". Bertrand does not define for us what an expert means and leaves it to the reader, assuming that it must be obvious. Certainly he could not mean the so-called "expert"(s) that are supposedly quoted in newspapers and magazines. "According to "experts", 70% of statistics are biased, made-up on the spot, done under controlled circumstances, or just plain wrong!" Ha!

I, personally, would say that an expert is someone who obviously knows a lot about certain topics, has had a lot of first-hand experience on that topic, and also cares about it enough to want to learn more and more about it. Now, there are degrees of expertise and varieties of experts. One cannot be an expert on every topic under the sun, and expect to be an expert at all of them equally. 

So for example, if I wanted to know about Engineering I could ask someone who read lots of books on engineering (knowing a lot about your topic). Or, even better, I could ask someone who actually fixed or built things (first-hand experience on your topic). How much better if the man loves being an engineer! 

However, you would have to agree with me that if I wanted to ask him about, say, Underwater Exploring, he might not know a whole lot about it. He might have some general knowledge, but I think you would agree that if you excel at certain things you do it at the expense of other things that you are not excelling at. 

So then, when people look to ask questions about God, why do they ask Scientists? They are not "experts" on God. They probably haven't done a lot of thinking about it, since they're mind belongs to the outer world and not the inner world. I probably wouldn't ask a Mystic about Geophysics, either. So there is no reason why spirituality falls out of line with Bertrand's first principle. 

The "experts" on the topic of God are agreed about a lot of things. Every religion believes in grand and beautiful ideals like sexual purity and universal compassion. Every religion believes in punishment for sin and reward for virtue. The "esoteric" aspect of each religion believes in the direct, personal, here-and-now experience and contact of God through spiritual effort, and not just after death. So there is no reason why spirituality falls out of line with Bertrand's second principle. 

Of course, when people like Bertrand Russel are citing "experts" on the topic of God, they would only ever mention people like certain wicked popes, or bigots. It is foolish to list everyone who believes in God under the umbrella of "bigot", don't you think? 

Here is a thought: When asking about experts on God, why not consult Paramahansa Yogananda? Or Swami Vivekananda, and Ramakrishna? Or St. Padre Pio? Or St. Therese Neumann? All these people lived within the last 100 years. 

So, in other words: God, Mysticism, and experiences of the Otherworldly do not contradict Bertrand Russel's "Middle Way of Reason" despite the fact that he begins his article with making a direct insult to those ideas.

Scientist and Mystic

Isaac Newton, one of the the most brilliant minds to ever grace the earth, was a great scientist and a deeply religious man. It was not at all a surprise to the earliest physicists to discover that we live in a universe governed by laws. After all, one of the most important aspects of God, has always been a law giver. They also did not consider there to be a contradiction in religious belief and worship. Natural Philosophy supported theology because discovering the wonders of the universe increased our appreciation for the wonders of God. Isaac Newton, and several others, considered science as a means of worship for the inquiring mind.

A great website for this type of belief system, which used to be very popular before the rise of Fundamentalism (which led to people who adopted spiritual/religious ideas being painted with the same brush, sadly) can be found here: www.enlighteningscience.sussex.ac.uk.

From that site, some information on what Newton believed: (and other Natural Philosophers, by extension):

Newton can be placed firmly in the tradition of natural theology in which God's being was obvious from the order of nature (..) he condemned atheistic accounts which claimed that the order and beauty in the world arose by chance.

Pythagoras, another man who contributed greatly to our understanding of the natural world and to mathematics, believed in reincarnation (he called it, "The Transmigration of Souls") and emphasized the distinction between Mind and Body. Pythagoras also had the idea that the universe was explainable in geometrical principles, an idea greatly elaborated upon by modern-day sacred geometry.

This belief was adopted by Freemasons. The "G" on the Masonic symbol stands for both God and Geometry, because God Geo-metricizes. 

But perhaps no one demonstrates the co-existence of Logic and Mysticism better than Albert Einstein, who said:

 “Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a Spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe – a Spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.” (Einstein 1936, as cited in Dukas and Hoffmann, Albert Einstein: The Human Side, Princeton University Press, 1979, 33).

Another quote from Einstein, who was alive at a time when the supposedly "old" ideas of the Metaphysical where being thrown out the window in the light of atheism, materialism, and physicalism. I find this following quote to be extremely powerful because it is exactly how I felt when I first experienced the feelings from beyond.

 “The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior Reasoning Power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible Universe, forms my idea of God.” (Einstein, as cited in Libby Anfinsen 1995).

But finally, my ultimate point for elaborating how God still has a place in our modern understanding is that there is absolutely nothing rational about rejecting something on the grounds of it being irrational, because irrational things happen all the time.

But it isn't enough to read about it, or to believe in it. After all: 

Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe

-John 4:48

How one can see the unseen, something many have done before and something all can do, will be the topic of a different blog post. 

OM-SADCHIDANANDA-OM