On mystical atheists

[Magical Realist]

I fancy myself a mystical atheist. What I mean is that while denying the existence of God in any intelligible sense, I believe reality is a transcendental domain that can only be experienced directly. I am really big on the experiential as the source of truth for our lives. We can go by what others say and have taught, but until we approach reality for ourselves and explore its meaning/meaninglessness firsthand, we don't really know anything about it. Science is an approach to reality created by our society. It unveils order in chaos and structure in an otherwise unpredictable universe. But it is only as good as any second hand knowledge could ever be. We have to personally grapple with reality itself in its raw "otherness"--its strange defiance to everything we know and think we know. Here's an article on the mystical atheism of Eric Fromm:

http://www.unitarianchurchdublin.org/sermons/Atheistic Mystics.htm

"The mystic begins with the mystery – with that overwhelming sense of the unfathomable nature of the reality in which we participate; the staggering complexity, immensity and age of the universe, for example, which can only leave us open-mouthed in wonder at the grandeur of it all. This is the “mysterium tremendum atque fascinans” of Rudolf Otto, the terrifying yet compelling mystery of things, which was experienced in the ancient world, of course, but which we, courtesy inter alia of Stephen Hawking and the Hubble telescope, have been given an insight into which our ancestors could never have."

 

[quinnsong]

@ Magical,

Have you investigated any of the literature on the pineal gland(third eye)?

 

[Magical Realist]

@ Magical,

Have you investigated any of the literature on the pineal gland(third eye)?

I'm familiar with HP Lovecraft's fictional idea that the pineal gland allows a sort of vision into another demonic dimension. But other than that no..

 

[spidergoat]

Isn't perception also second-hand? ...And limited to our particular set of senses?

 

[Magical Realist]

Isn't perception also second-hand? ...And limited to our particular set of senses?

Perception is firsthand imo. When I see an apple on the table, I am really seeing it. I am experiencing the direct input of reality into my mind. Inner perceptions are even more direct. The sense of space and time. The intuition of selfness vs worldness. The certainty of reason and logic. The sense of causing my own actions and thoughts. All these senses come into play in our firsthand experience of reality.

 

[spidergoat]

Perception is firsthand imo. When I see an apple on the table, I am really seeing it. I am experiencing the direct input of reality into my mind. Inner perceptions are even more direct. The sense of space and time. The intuition of selfness vs worldness. The certainty of reason and logic. The sense of causing my own actions and thoughts. All these senses come into play in our firsthand experience of reality.

Mostly that's not true. What you see is something with colors and textures that is largely undifferentiated from the rest of the world. It's our memory and experience of apples that allows you to know what it is and what to do with it, that it's something to eat, that it's a separate object, that it's edible, that the color is red and that means it's ripe, etc... What we see is largely not reality but our memories and experiences.

 

[Yazata]

I fancy myself a mystical atheist.

I do too.

What I mean is that while denying the existence of God in any intelligible sense, I believe reality is a transcendental domain that can only be experienced directly.

I don't want to deny knowledge by inference and I'm happy to learn from others. (Although I do try to maintain a healthy skepticism about all of it.)

But yeah, I feel very strongly and very emphatically that the universe around me totally overflows my understanding. Ever since I was a child I've felt that I'm surrounded by mysteries.

(Time, space, matter, causation, logic, mathematics, meaning and reference, mind and mental phenomena, beauty and good, the 'laws' of nature, teleology, the origins of everything, the emergence of novelty, why reality exists at all instead of nothing...)

It's like that game that small children play with adults, asking 'why' over and over. Adults have answers the first couple of times kids ask, but after three or four iterations adults just say 'stop that!' and have nothing more to say.

Nevertheless, everyone proceeds through life with this sublime confidence that they have everything important all figured out. Yet any pre-schooler can pop that bubble with no effort at all.

I've always taken that to heart and it's always been what's motivated my interest in philosophy.

We don't have it all figured out and we are only fooling ourselves when we think that we do. It's true that science has made some progress and has generated plausible hypotheses about some of it. But it's all very much a work in progress, a work that will certainly never be completed in my lifetime.

Personally, I'm inclined to think that human beings will probably never get to the bottom of everything. There will always be mysteries, as long as humans are human.

 

[Aqueous Id]

I fancy myself a mystical atheist.

I developed an aversion to mysticism in my teens, only to begin to tolerate it in my early adulthood when I was living among hipsters who were given to studying Buddhism, Tarot, Kabbalah, Aleister Crowley, the occult, etc. A lot of that dovetailed with acid/stoner ideas about "waking up in the Matrix", trance and hypnotic states developed out of meditation, and the general attitude that there has to be some other guiding principles besides the ones handed down to us by our psychopathic ancestors. At least then it was as much a fascination with personal mystique as with the mysteries of the cosmos.

Today I'm more alarmed by the popular appeal of religious superstition than anything else. I can't help but equate all mysticism with a familiar brand of superstition.

I would go so far as to say that none of us is genuine, but that we are living under the illusion of some invented persona, which includes facets like "I think Ultimate Reality inhabits the mind, if only one can develop the skills to unlocks its secrets". Today I am operating under the world view that we don't know who we are--that what we are is indeed a sort of matrix, but one of biological design. We rarely give credit to it yet we know it's undeniably true. We are just mutant apes with a chromosomal anomaly, one which makes us the one truly insane species of vertebrates ever to roam the Earth. Knowing this makes it really hard for me to start filling in the gaps with fantastic ideas built out of dream-like fabrications of make-believe. It's fun to think about, and compelling under the influence of chemical inducement, but isn't it all really just styrofoam? The really big mystery, which is purely a biological one, is this: what does a bundle of nerves have to do with sentience? It's just beyond comprehension. I'm OK with that. I'd rather leave it as an insoluble question than to start making stuff up to fill in the gaps. That's practically the default state for us insane apes anyway. Isn't it time for us to move on down the road?

I think this need to fill in the gaps with fantasy is a fallback to the infantile state, much the same as religious ideation is. We keep thinking there is some ultimate resolution out there, that doesn't leave us orphaned, screaming from our cradles that we are alone and uncared for. But really we are. Except that we have each other, another fact that we rebel against. Accepting that is akin to breaking the umbilical cord, morphing to the adult state, and letting go of our childish ways. To me, that's the more heightened state of awareness that awaits us all.

 

[Cris]

It would seem that we are unable to directly experience reality. We, and by that I mean our consciousness, or to be more exact - those processes in the brain that comprise our consciousness, are removed from the outside by at least two layers - the senses and a model. What you think is reality is a model that your brain has constructed based on data that it has received via the senses.

Given this fact you should now realize that indeed your brain might well be held in some type of jar wired to a clever machine that is feeding very precise data directly to those parts of brain normally connected to your senses.

In a very real sense you have no way of knowing whether you are in a matrix or not, and hence you have no way to know what is real and what is not.

There is a nice quote around that says - a mystic is simply someone who is too lazy to learn physics and math.

There was a serious accident reported recently where many people were injured and killed. One of the few who survived unscathed remarked that it was a blessing he had been saved. I find such remarks an insult to humanity. A simple understanding of probability would have prevented such stupid remarks. Given a normal distribution curve some will be outliers - it is not that these people are special, but that they are simply examples of the laws of mathematics.

A mystical atheist is simply someone who rejects theism but is quite happy to believe other types of supernatural nonsense.

 

[Balerion]

There was a serious accident reported recently where many people were injured and killed. One of the few who survived unscathed remarked that it was a blessing he had been saved. I find such remarks an insult to humanity. A simple understanding of probability would have prevented such stupid remarks. Given a normal distribution curve some will be outliers - it is not that these people are special, but that they are simply examples of the laws of mathematics.

It speaks to the solipsism inherent to that brand of religion. A person survives a fatal wreck and has the gall to believe that they survived by some divine ordinance. As if no thought were given to the people who were hurt or killed. Or, worse, they believe it was all a part of His plan, suggesting that they themselves are at the center of the universe, and the people who died were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A mystical atheist is simply someone who rejects theism but is quite happy to believe other types of supernatural nonsense.

I think it certainly can be that. The author of this thread, for Instance; God is just about the only thing he doesn't believe in.

 

[Magical Realist]

It would seem that we are unable to directly experience reality. We, and by that I mean our consciousness, or to be more exact - those processes in the brain that comprise our consciousness, are removed from the outside by at least two layers - the senses and a model. What you think is reality is a model that your brain has constructed based on data that it has received via the senses.

Given this fact you should now realize that indeed your brain might well be held in some type of jar wired to a clever machine that is feeding very precise data directly to those parts of brain normally connected to your senses.

In a very real sense you have no way of knowing whether you are in a matrix or not, and hence you have no way to know what is real and what is not.

There is a nice quote around that says - a mystic is simply someone who is too lazy to learn physics and math.

There was a serious accident reported recently where many people were injured and killed. One of the few who survived unscathed remarked that it was a blessing he had been saved. I find such remarks an insult to humanity. A simple understanding of probability would have prevented such stupid remarks. Given a normal distribution curve some will be outliers - it is not that these people are special, but that they are simply examples of the laws of mathematics.

A mystical atheist is simply someone who rejects theism but is quite happy to believe other types of supernatural nonsense.

Here's another nice quote from someone who WASN'T "too lazy to learn physics and math":

"The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties — this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men."-- Albert Einstein,

 

[Magical Realist]

Knowing this makes it really hard for me to start filling in the gaps with fantastic ideas built out of dream-like fabrications of make-believe. It's fun to think about, and compelling under the influence of chemical inducement, but isn't it all really just styrofoam? The really big mystery, which is purely a biological one, is this: what does a bundle of nerves have to do with sentience? It's just beyond comprehension. I'm OK with that. I'd rather leave it as an insoluble question than to start making stuff up to fill in the gaps. That's practically the default state for us insane apes anyway. Isn't it time for us to move on down the road?

But this is precisely the mystical intuition that reality, whatever we define it to be, IS inherently beyond our comprehension. That there is a variable X, and that variable cannot be filled with anything we know or think we know. I'm wary also of filling the gaps, noting the wide variety of mystical systems out there that has attempted to do so. I've explored Buddhism, Jungian psychology, Sufism, Gnosticism, chaos magick, shamanism, mushroomism, etc. Just different ways of filling the gap and making it seem less a gap. But the gap remains. Even science cannot breach it. The certainty it creates is just as real, and just as fake, as any other conceptual model. What I strive to remember is that all this self-contained abstract knowledge we have about reality ISN'T reality. The map is not the territory. And sometimes it is better to just go off and explore that territory trusting no map at all.

 

[Magical Realist]

We don't have it all figured out and we are only fooling ourselves when we think that we do. It's true that science has made some progress and has generated plausible hypotheses about some of it. But it's all very much a work in progress, a work that will certainly never be completed in my lifetime.

Personally, I'm inclined to think that human beings will probably never get to the bottom of everything. There will always be mysteries, as long as humans are human.

It's ironic to me that no matter who we are and what great knowledge we think we've acquired about reality, we all end up facing the grandest of all mysteries--our own inevitable dissolution into nothingness. For the first time we will step outside of this bubble of information surrounding us and find..what? Nobody knows till they personally encounter it themselves. All second-hand knowledge comes to naught. We are returned to the primal aloneness of our own being. The bubble bursts. And then what? We'll see..

 

[Magical Realist]

"I think it certainly can be that. The author of this thread, for Instance; God is just about the only thing he doesn't believe in."

Mysticism doesn't entail supernaturalism. A person who believes in spirits is the same as one who believes in zebras. They are still living inside a world construct of objectified entities. The problem of transcendental being applies as much to them as it does to the physicalist. "How do we know about a reality that as defined is totally beyond us?" Thus it is that Buddhists, while acknowledging the existence of supernatural beings, are largely indifferent to all this because they are concerned with the conscious experience of being itself and not of any of it's illusory instantiations.

“I have recommended you the dignity of skepticism: yet here I am, prowling around the Absolute. Technique of contradiction? Remember, rather, what Flaubert said: "I am a mystic and I believe in nothing".”
― Emil Cioran, The Temptation to Exist

 

[Magical Realist]

"Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not. The mystic has recognized something about the nature of consciousness prior to thought, and this recognition is susceptible to rational discussion. The mystic has reasons for what he believes, and these reasons are empirical. The roiling mystery of the world can be analyzed with concepts (this is science), or it can be experienced free of concepts (this is mysticism). Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial--at once full of hope and full of fear--of the vastitude of human ignorance."--Sam Harris

 

[Balerion]

Mysticism doesn't entail supernaturalism. A person who believes in spirits is the same as one who believes in zebras.

It certainly seems to entail that in your case. And no, belief in zebras is not the same as belief in spirits. We have evidence of the existence of zebras. We have none for the existence of spirits.

 

[Magical Realist]

It certainly seems to entail that in your case. And no, belief in zebras is not the same as belief in spirits. We have evidence of the existence of zebras. We have none for the existence of spirits.

I don't believe in paranormal phenomena because of mysticism. I believe it because of science. The evidence from investigations, photos, videos, and eyewitness accounts. Same as we would use to confirm the existence of the giant squid.

 

[Balerion]

I don't believe in paranormal phenomena because of mysticism. I believe it because of science. The evidence from investigations, photos, videos, and eyewitness accounts. Same as we would use to confirm the existence of the giant squid.

I disagree. You're smart enough to know the "evidence" you cite is bullshit. It's an exercise in wish-thinking hardly different than belief in miracles, or angels.

 

[Magical Realist]

I disagree. You're smart enough to know the "evidence" you cite is bullshit. It's an exercise in wish-thinking hardly different than belief in miracles, or angels.

Actually I "wish" paranormal phenomena DIDN'T occur. It'd make reality a lot easier to understand to know physical entities were the only things that exist. And it'd definitely make me sleep a lot better at night. Unfortunately I can't wish away the evidence.

 

[Balerion]

Actually I "wish" paranormal phenomena DIDN'T occur. It'd make reality a lot easier to understand to know physical entities were the only things that exist. And it'd definitely make me sleep a lot better at night. Unfortunately I can't wish away the evidence.

We both know you're full of it.