Typist wrote:evangelicalhumanist wrote:Yes, I get that. But the question remains, "why?" What is gained by abandoning that which evolution has striven so mightily to accomplish in our species?
Ok, well, as I said above, we aren't "abandoning" thought, we're just exploring beyond it. Assuming that is now clear, we might rephrase your question slightly to "What is gained by exploring beyond thought?" Ok?
The simplest and most practical real world type answer would be, it feels good. This could perhaps be the best reason, as it leaps over a big pile of abstractions etc.
But, if we want to hang on the abstractions for awhile, we might answer this way.
You've made an earnest and sincere case for the value of thought. And you are right of course, thought is essential to our survival.
So, given the central importance of the tool of thought, if we wish to take thought truly seriously, perhaps we should learn where the on/off button of this tool is. Or, more realistically, how to operate the volume control.
Your own argument leads directly to the same point I've been making. Given how important thought is to us, we should learn more about it.
Okay, I begin to glimpse through a glass darkly.
Let's talk about music for a minute. It's a subject I know something about, and one of my very favourite things in the world is Leonard Bernstein doing six lectures at Harvard on the "language of music." It's still available (though expensive) on DVD actually, although it's from decades ago. I play the piano. I've studied music theory.
But one of the things that I love to do is just listen -- especially when it's to a brand new piece, or to something much loved (usually evoking a purely emotional reaction in me). Listen and don't think. Just feel it, wrap my body in it, let the mystery overtake me.
But the thing is, as much as I love to do that, like Bernstein, if I really want more, then I must also now engage the thinking part of my brain, evoke such knowledge as I have (pitifully little compared to Bernstein), and begin the process of understanding how the piece is structured -- it's syntax, it's vocabulary -- and relate it to what I know about myself, to other music, to the situation in which I hear it, and so forth.
So I would suggest that for a short while -- while just listening -- I'm doing what you are talking about.
I do the same when I walk in the woods, but again, not all the time. There is nothing in the world like the sound of the deep boreal forest at first crack of light in the morning, long before there's any noise but the forest and my own breathing. It is indescribable, because I don't describe it, I live it. So again, I believe I'm "exploring beyond thought" as you would have it.
It is these ways, and a few others, that I "medidate," although I know I'm co-opting that word in a way most people wouldn't use it. But it works for me. Other sorts of medidation, however, are not for me. Studying the existence of a pencil for the sake of calming my thinking mind isn't for me, though it may well be for others, in exactly the same sort of way that prayer isn't for me, though it is apparently very useful for others. On the other hand, rich and detailed use of my mental faculties is very much for me. When I haven't got enough problems to resolve (I'm no longer an IT Architect, though I was for a long time), I turn automatically to difficult puzzles, to reading, to learning, to whatever engages my thinking mind because the warm purring of that thing is what I most enjoy -- though others find that sort of thing drudgery. And that's okay, too.
Now, when we apply this to religion, there I have a problem. I lack the "sensory organ" for religious experience, and it won't do any good at all to tell me that I don't lack it, I just don't know how to turn it on. Trust me, it is not there. It's like the person who lacks the ability to see certain colours -- you can tell them all you want to about the nuanced shades of green in the morning forest light, but it's not going to be of much use. They are left with only such analytical ability as they can bring to bear on the subject. That will certainly not be enough to give them any sense of my experience, though they may choose to believe I'm having an experience in which they cannot share.
So, too, for me and religion. I have only my powers of analysis. Now, the interesting thing about religion and that analysis is that MOST (and I agree not all) of what ordinary religious believers claim does not make rational sense. Now, it is one thing, I think we would all agree, not to be able to experience something, but to have it not contradict reason (the colour-blind person, for example, can see multiple shades of gray, and may very well have colour vision in other parts of the spectrum, so he has something analagous to which he can turn and think). But when something actually does contradict reason (God loves everybody, has absolute power and foreknowledge -- and yet still constructed a hell into which non-believers will be tossed), then any ability to reason towards understanding of it becomes an impossibility.
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