Weltanschauung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Author: Anthony FJ Garner

  • The Cranmer Prayer Book – does it still have relevance?

    The Cranmer Prayer Book – does it still have relevance?

    It does for me.  Perhaps it’s nostalgia, or a misguided sense of linguistic elitism, a reminder of past privilege. Or maybe all  of these, combined with a genuine love of the language and thought.

    Mattins in a country church or Westminster Abbey, sung evensong in the college chapel at Christ Church, Oxford.

    My flight of fancy turns to John Betjeman, to Sebastian Flyte and Aloysius touring the pre war English countryside in an ancient convertible.  To Jeeves and Worcester, cucumber sandwiches and Earl Grey tea on a sunlit lawn.

    At a deeper level, it fills my soul. I may have no belief but somehow the beauty makes my mind drift to good things.  Even if not towards the arms of the Blessed Virgin and the Son of God. My connection to the Book of Common Prayer is deep, very deep. And deeply held.

    And yet even the lightest dusting of historical awareness must tell us that its birth was far from immaculate. And it’s guiding light twisted and, by any reasonable standard, evil.

    Archbishop Cranmer was a man who tortured and murdered those who did not tow the protestant Zeitgeist.  Paradoxically, when Mary Tudor ascended the throne, she had her revenge and burnt good Cranmer himself at the stake.

    Many will excuse the murders by so many prelates throughout Christian history as being of its time. Those days were different, we are better now.

    I cannot condone such an interpretation.  There must have been men and women, even in those barbaric times, who realised the indecency and horror of what was done in the name of the church.

    Just as there are right thinking Muslims today who abhor the judicial murder and state sponsored terrorism so prevalent in the Middle East and beyond.

    Just as there are right thinking Christians who detest the twisted and vile Christian Right support of the bombing and mutilation of innocent men, women and children in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

    I detest and reject any god who can allow such behaviour.  I scorn any religion which turns morality inside out and encourages its followers in perverted cruelty and abject abomination.

    It’s not god’s fault they say: man has twisted his message. Perhaps then, a true god should light the sacrificial fires of his believers and prove his worth by intervening on this godforsaken planet.

    But there I go: round and round the garden path like a teddy bear. Same old gripes, same gobsmacked awe at the ghastliness of life on earth.

    It is a position I am not wholly dissatisfied with. Someone has to say it and keep saying it.

    If there is a god, then, in the immortal words of Randolf Churchill, he is a shit.

    Illustration: Two scenes on one sheet: above Thomas Cranmer being seized from a stage by friars and Catholics, below his burning to death at Oxford; illustration to a 16th-century edition of John Foxe, ‘Acts and Monuments’ (‘Book of Martyrs’).
    Woodcut

  • Omnism

    Omnism

    Or letsism, if you prefer.  The nuns twittered a capella, the priest intoned the prayers. I could have been in the temple of Zeus, or a Zoroastrian cave.  They may as well have been calling on the Buddha but since I was sitting in the Basilica at Vezelay, I had to assume they were cannibalising their saviour.  Devouring his body  and drinking his blood.

    I closed my eyes and drifted into the void.  A place of familiarity, after many years of practice; there but not there, the voices vaguely surrounding me, the atmosphere sublime.

    Did it matter what they believed? We all seek transcendence, beauty, something far better than the raw and sheer beastliness of life on earth.

    But let it not be forgotten that it was here that Bernard of Clairvaux ran the propaganda campaign for the second crusade.

    “The Christian glories in the death of a pagan, because thereby Christ himself is glorified”.

    He told crusaders that if they killed the enemy, it was to the profit of Christ; if they were killed, it was to their own salvation.

    Omnism picks and chooses from the better aspects of spirituality, but it is hard to over emphasize the damage and violence religion has inflicted over the ages. And still does – from the bigotry in Ireland to the brutal extremism of fundamentalist Islam.

    Unlike Thomas Merton who saw many paths up the mountain, most true believers see only one: theirs. Which seems something of a departure from their holy books, most of which preach understanding and decency. Most of the time. Although of course enemies of the one true god tended to be given a rough time.

    Given the less than pleasant track record of most hardline god- botherers, why should letsism appeal? Because it largely chases a state of mind and has no wish to foist it on anyone else.

    It is hard to imagine a practitioner of omnism steering jets full of innocent passengers into twin towers in a major metropolis, full of equally blameless office workers.

    Or convincing crusaders to kill Jews on the way to kill Muslims.

    Omnism is more about feelings, quiet meditation, even escape. Those who practice tend to have no axes to grind, no dogma to enforce, to kill for.

    So I sat in Romanesque and Gothic splendour. I drifted with the singing, I contemplated life. I felt thankful I had no belief, at ease that I didn’t have to profess faith or convert the heathen.  With or without violence.

    Secular spirituality, I suppose.  A belief in “something” but no real idea what that might be.

    A sense of wonder and peace. A realisation that we have got most of it badly wrong. A hope that some day we might find something better.

  • The tranquil beauty of The Morvan

    The tranquil beauty of The Morvan

    What a deceptive and misleading face it puts on.

    Today, roaming the gentle mountains and bucolic valleys of this remote paradise, I am reminded of nothing so much as the Rupert Bear annuals of my childhood. Alfred Bestall illustrated England as Blake hoped it had once been, and he could just as well have been drawing the Morvan.

    For the Englishman, nothing provides greater relief from the horrors of southern England, with its endless motorways, grim housing estates and omnipresent, tattooed, aggressively unenlightened masses.  Waiting to vote in the violence and pointless prejudice of the far right and it’s MAGA lookalike thugs.

    The historical  reality of the Morvan however, presents another face altogether from that presented to the simple tourist.

    France itself is reeling from the onset of modern Blackshirts, baying for the rights of the true French, using immigration as a tool to stir the less than agile minds of its ignorant supporters.  Once it was Jews, now it is simply foreigners.  The far right has positioned itself to capitalise on the rural economic discontent in this and other depopulated and poor rural areas.

    Was it ever the heaven that Bestall imagined in his drawings? Was it once a green and pleasant land where man lived in peace with his neighbours, cutting trees and rearing cattle?

    Was anywhere on earth? The answer of course is that it never was. And sadly never will be. I am lucky enough to be enjoying its natural beauty at a time of peace, but such periods never last.

    Violence has been a terrifying, structured reality here since it was first desecrated by the human stain.

    Perhaps in the remote, icy wastes of the North and South poles, peace was the norm, where few humans roamed. Or at the bottom of the deep – but no doubt we will get there too.  Perhaps Trump will frac it.

    Architectural evidence shows this area of great natural beauty was a scene of brutal and endless violence in the neolithic age.  It has revealed brutal massacres and ritualised violence.

    And so on through the ages (and no doubt further back through the aeons as well).

    The grizzliest (but non exclusive ) episodes seem to have been the Gallic Wars in Roman times, the territorial disputes with England in the middle ages, various religious conflicts, and of course the pointless slaughter of the two world wars.

    Insultingly, the historians wrap these conflicts in the guise of rationality. The Hundred Year’s war, they say, was a 116 year conflict between the Kingdoms of France and England. It was shaped by feudal land disputes and “royal” ambition.  What is a “king” then? How does a king from the 14th Century differ from the tyrants of today, the brutes at the top of the tree in the US, Israel, Russia or China?

    The differences are few.

    Peel back the treaties, royal lineages, and political maneuvering, and you will find that the Hundred Years’ War (like all wars) was driven by raw, deeply destructive human emotions: pride, intense humiliation, existential fear, and greed.

    At the top level it was a toxic struggle for dominance between two groups of rulers.  But the greed and bloodlust was not confined  to the “nobility” — they infected every level of medieval society, though it manifested differently depending on a person’s social class.

    While the lords and knights drove the high-stakes political gambling, the war created a predatory economic ecosystem where commoners, mercenaries, and peasants alike were driven by desperate greed, survival instincts, and a dark appetite for plunder.

    By the time the war ended in 1453, vast regions of France—including the Morvan—had lost up to half of their pre-war population to the grim cycle of raid, ruin, famine by design and sickness.

    I am not the first to rue the sad state of human affairs, nor, while the species survives, will I be the last.

    I wonder if more saw our history in such bleak, accurate terms, we would change our ways?

    I doubt it.

    On with my tour of the Morvan.  Perhaps best not to dwell on it’s dark history.

  • What is the purpose of Art?

    What is the purpose of Art?

    Why does there need to be a “purpose”?

    It is. Just like we are. That’s probably about all you need to know.

    A better question perhaps is “what does art do for me”?

    Now there is something worth exploring. Given that our universe in all probability just “is” it is down to us to make our own “meaning” – if meaning is what we feel we need. If meaning is necessary to our soul, our life. Our happiness.

    Perhaps that is why we invented god. Alongside art. When the earliest known cave paintings were scrawled on stone walls some 100,00 years ago, why did the cave man do it? Or cave woman.

    Or non binary person. There! How modern I am!

    I suggest it may have been a search for meaning. A statement of meaning perhaps. The earliest religion is thought to have arisen perhaps as long ago as 300,000 years.  Shamanism and animism, it is said. The juju man, dancing around the fire, waving smoke in your face, casting spells and exhorting spirits. Probably daubing the walls of his hut or cave with paint, likely as not making crude trinkets and charms.

    And so forward to Sherborne Abbey, the magnificent gothic church pictured above. By then the juju man has acquired a more formal code, but he still waved around holy smoke and incanted his magic, his powerful ritual.

    All these people had discovered their own meaning where before none such had existed.  A god who has made the world and shoved us in its epicentre. Animals and spirits who conjured the tides and the weather. Who make the crops grow or dispense terrible famine in retribution for man’s shocking sin.

    And so back  to today – and in particular to 21st Century England. A shit hole if ever there was one. William Blake must be crying out in pain to see that his land is now covered in dark satanic mills from it’s very head to the tip of it’s sooty, grime ridden toes.

    So perhaps these days art continues to play much the same role as it did in the days of ancient shamanism. Now, our terror is not thunder or famine, but the hideous mess we have made of a formerly green and pleasant land. Endless concrete, endless noise, the hammers and anvils everywhere. No peace to be found, no beauty.  And the whole ghastly edifice about to collapse on top of us, as global warming comes home to roost.

    So now more than ever art is needed. To show us a better way perhaps. Or to mark out descent as we reel and grope our way to our end.

    Tracy Emin – her lurid concentration on her own body. Fair doos, as they say. A way to express the terror of her own shocking existence. Anish Kapoor – perhaps endless wealth was not his aim. Perhaps he too was expressing something of his own anxiety. Or disappointment. Or fear. His weird structures and conceits certainly seem to express fear, as well as curiosity and wonder. A ghastly second coming. The end, the last judgement.

    Art as self expression – perhaps I am getting somewhere. But maybe art also as seeking – seeking beauty and god in the case of Sherborne Abbey. Beauty certainly exists, although presumably in the eye of the beholder. And god too, because he is your creation and your refuge.  Both god and beauty may be an escape from the bestiallity of the real world of hatred and killing, of suffering, poverty and privation.

    I think it is time that I concentrated on art. On my own art as well as the creations of others. Art as poetry perhaps, or music. Even writing prose can be seen as powerful art – it is certainly as creative as any other art form.

    I am seeing art as part of a retreat from a fearful world. Fearful in so very many ways, the mere expression of that fear is terrifying. Lack of meaning is the hardest to come to terms with – the fear that this whole ghastly melange of terror and beauty, of hatred and violence, of love and cruelty just “is”. Just grew, just festers and, one day will just fizzle out.

    So have your day in the sun. Pick the flowers while you may. Glorify and bless your existence with gothic masterpieces and exquisite poetry.

    Splash your genitalia all over the canvas and hang it out for all to see.

    Paint, sing, dance, build, create. Because you can. For a while at least.

  • Tracy Emin and her visceral vulva

    Tracy Emin and her visceral vulva

    We are all self obsessed, none more so than Dame Tracy.

    To have risen to a place of great fame and position in the British establishment by endlessly painting her own vulva is really quite an achievement.

    She is, apparently, regarded as one of the most significant and influential artists of her generation.

    I am all in favour of art speaking loudly, and Ms Emin certainly does that. Were I to attempt to emulate Tracy in putting my pain into art, my style would be that of Munch and his Scream.

    If Ms Emin seeks to shock, she certainly succeeds. But her greater achievement is to portray life in all its vileness through the lens of the daughter of a less privileged family from a dismal seaside town on Britain’s south coast. Destitute is probably a better description of her family’s state – following the collapse of her father’s hotel, her mother was left alone to bring up two young children in extreme poverty.

    Margate, I used to think, has its charms.  The funfair, a beautiful beach, delightful and outdated seaside cafes. But as a son of a wealthy middle class family which at that date seemed to lack for nothing, it is hardly surprising that I saw a different side of the place.

    While I have never lacked money, suffering is not something I have managed to escape. It’s just that I have never been able to describe it as efficiently or brutally as Ms Emin. Nor have I been able to turn it into great art or great wealth.

    I can see that what she has achieved is in many senses wholly admirable. She has pulled herself up by her own bootstraps by expressing her grim suffering.  Her art exposes vulnerability and raw psychological truth, allowing viewers to connect deep emotional resonance to her work. She shows a life of poverty, sexual abuse, heavy drinking and severe illness.

    I think part of art’s remit is to shock. To tell how life really is.  My own temptation has always been to run: Tracy’s is to stand firm and shout loud about just how grim her life has been.  And for that I salute her.

    Do I “like” her art? I do not. Do I like her story? I do not. Do I admire her: I do.

    I sat halfway through her exhibition at the Tate Modern in front of another wall full of her body, sometimes mounted by that of some British youth, sometimes not.  I had passed her bed and taken in the empty vodka bottles and other detritus and by now I could take no more.

    She had done her job. I got the picture. Her job is art, and if art’s job is to show human life as it is for so many, she has done it exceptionally well.

    She is not a comfortable subject, nor is her work.

    But bravo Tracy. You have survived, you have won through. So many do not.

  • Offal and the Cosmic Vulva

    Offal and the Cosmic Vulva

    Anish Kapoor

    The “art” of sensory assault. What is it? What is he? Does it matter? Does he?

    After visiting Kenwood House, I came away loathing the pallid sycophancy of Reynolds and Gainsborough and the sterile, static patterns of Robert Adam.  I was much looking forward to my introduction to Kapoor.  I had read the blurb produced by the Hayward Gallery and realised that the exhibition might likely satisfy my proclivity for other worldliness and the doors of perception.

    I was not disappointed. Vast organs of a decidedly sexual orientation hung on the walls, entries to an alternate reality through a visceral reproductive organ from this. Lyra’s Subtle Knife was also to be seen, tearing a great gash in the membrane separating the regions of the multiverse.

    It was not comfortable to stare into the abyss time and again, to see the blackness of infinity and to be minded of the ephemeral nature of myself and all that surrounded me. The entrance to Hades was everywhere, exits nowhere to be found. Deep black holes which might  have gone on for ever, or might by contrast have been a simple dead end. End being the operative word.

    A giant, gory black and red volcano retched down from the ceiling, surrounded by great shining round bags of jelly, or blood.  Discombobulated by this vision of hell, I stumbled on to  great plastic body bags of blood, offal, fat and severed muscle in another room (or abattoir). Maybe the end product of one of the many cults of religious nutters which plague our world.

    The lake of Gehenna, the ghastly sordidity of Revelation and St John the Madman. Or some terror dreamt up by those other charming gents from the Middle East who, over the course of the second millennium and beyond, have murdered and rampaged their way through the world to rival the finest of our psychotic dictators.

    My host was a learned and earnest guide, and my thanks to him. He recognised I would relish the challenge and for some days and nights the images have lived with me.

    To my shame I had never heard of the “artist” and imagined in my ignorance that he must be a great prophet: perhaps his god had given him all this vision. Perhaps his object was to show us the light, the truth, the way. Armageddon was, for him, the way forward perhaps? Instead of leading to the return of  a crucified Judean preacher, something far more terrible awaits. Not eternal life or resurrection but a vast cosmic gash leading to ever greater horror.

    I am a persuaded anarchist. I metaphorically urinate on the society we have created as a species – most especially on Trump, the latest incarnation of naked greed and beastliness.

    Kapoor must be a kindred spirit! A light unto the Gentiles! A guide for our age, a man for a better world!  Surely all this blood and gore was allegory! A cry for peace and love and human dignity!

    Sadly it seems not. Instead of despising the establishment, he seems to court it. He fills his vast wealth bags and is apparently worth upwards of $200,000,000. Like most gurus, he appears to pedal one thing and practices quite another.

    Or am I being unjust? He seems to throw quite a bit of cash at good causes. But somehow he seems to be all about business rather than art.

    I found myself thinking of that Indian fellow who proffered salvation to the Beatles. Modesty, meditation and humility – but he ended up collaring enormous wealth and string of yellow Rolls Royce. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who charged people a packet to learn meditation. When all that’s actually necessary can be written on the back of a packet of Capstans.

    Am I too cynical perhaps? Art, religion, meditation: they don’t sit comfortably in my mind alongside great wealth and an elevated position.

    And yet they have always done so. What a paradoxical farce.

  • Meditation – a Russian Doll

    Meditation – a Russian Doll

    Just as I thought I had got it, I realised I hadn’t. My composure was severely knocked by crypto fraud and an unpleasant and unhealthy dispute with Oswald the Tory War Criminal.

    For days I became obsessed with getting my money back – reporting the crime to the FBI, the SEC and Uncle Tom Cobbly, posting on various forums to build a victim’s registe, and starting a class action in the US.

    Then came my Tory friend. I was knocked sideways by the sheer bestial inhumanity of someone I have known for 40 years.  I would never have believed he harboured such terrible beliefs.

    Finally, thank the non existent deity, years of Buddhist practice kicked in.  There had been quite a few days when my distress was such that I had failed in my daily meditation.  Mercifully, I soon realised I had to retreat right back to the stance that it was all an illusion, and the ten thousand things simply had to be ignored.

    It became a breakthrough.  Out of the shambles, my efforts took a significant turn for the better. For a while I had to make a conscious effort to shrug off the annoyance and to concentrate with renewed effort on my daily routine.

    By now I’m meditating for three hours each morning, from 7 to about 10. And usually for an hour or so in the evening. Suddenly, on a few occasions, I found that I had simply disappeared.  I was conscious but wholly absent. I imagine this is what others have described as non dual awareness.  The scientists claim it results from the quietening of the Default Mode Network.

    The point is I thought I had arrived, and yet these two upsets proved that I had not.  That there was a way to go, more layers to the onion, more baby dolls inside big mama.

    I don’t suppose I’m there yet. The meditation will probably become deeper, even more strange.  But the important point is it was there when I needed it.  It restored balance, enabled me to return from a place of obsession and foolishness to clarity and serenity.

    So thank heavens for practice. And the tubby little chap in the loincloth.

    There is nothing sacred or holy about meditation. But it does make you see the world and your own behaviour in a very clear light. That if you are not very guarded, you contribute to world misery rather than solve it.

    Equally you see in ever clearer terms how wholly wrong our species is and how vile it’s behaviour.

    The real trick is learning how to avoid humanity and to ignore it. There is absolutely nothing you can do except try to “do unto others”.  Which at times is far from easy.

  • Far Right Extremism in the UK

    Far Right Extremism in the UK

    Extremism is no longer restricted to the Far Right. It is alive and well amongst the “normal” Conservative Party rank and file.

    I am deeply ashamed to admit that I know some of these people.

    I try and avoid discussions with those whose views I find distasteful, but somehow I got drawn in recently.

    Apparently all two million inhabitants of Gaza are terrorists, and genocide is a perfectly reasonable reaction to the recent slaughter of Israeli citizens led by Hamas.

    The endless bombardment of Lebanon by the IDF is fully justified self defense. Asked whether the Sabra and Chatila massacres were also justified, I was met by bewilderment.

    The US is entirely right to bomb Iran and slaughter its leaders and military as well as thousands of innocent civilians. 

    Israeli military operations, escalating settler violence, and the extensive expropriation of Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians and widespread displacement. Once again, this is all perfectly acceptable to the local Tory politician I was speaking to.

    Talk, negotiation and the barest human decency has, apparently, never worked and never will.

    There is little more I can say.

    I am deeply, deeply disgusted.

  • Vast emptiness, nothing holy

    Vast emptiness, nothing holy

    One morning, he realised he had finally seen reality.

    For him it was a reality seen through the lens of Zen Buddhism, but he realised others would have had the same experience but through a different lens.

    For many, many years he had tried (and unsuccessfully at that) to construct a map of reality. Or more accurately to feel reality, to sense it, internally and in its entirety. Was there a god, where did we come from, where do we go to. What does it all mean. What, in god’s name is “out there”?

    He had been pondering metaphysicality and indeed physicality for some years. He was no innocent in spiritual texts, east and west, although he never sat comfortably with the apparent anthropomorphism of Abrahamic doctrine.

    Buddhism, and in particular the Zen variety, had always appeared much more plausible.

    The first Zen patriarch, Bodhidharma was summoned by the emperor Wu of Liang. “I have built temples and ordained monks. What merit have I gained?” asked the emperor. To which the response was “”No merit whatsoever.” The emperor continued: “What is the highest meaning of the holy truths?”. “Vast emptiness, nothing holy” replied Bodhidharma.

    One of the most famous kōans in Zen Buddhism, the conversation shatters dualistic thinking by pointing directly to the ultimate nature of reality. Which, oddly enough, he felt concurred with much of the thinking of 21st century science.

    If something is special or “holy,” then something else must be “unholy”. True reality is total, whole, and non-dual.

    “Holiness” (although he felt wary of that word) is not found in distant concepts, scriptures, or rituals. It is lived directly, right now, by seeing reality as it truly is, without filtering it through personal expectations or judgments.

    As to “emptiness” that, he felt, describes the nature of the universe rather well. A vast quantum soup, he had read. An unimaginable and infinite span of forces (gravity comes to mind). But he knew that did not mean nothingness, voidness, or nihilism. Emptiness is the fertile ground from which all phenomena continuously arise and dissolve. And it is all one, he realised. Non duality, pure and simple. Everything which exists is interconnected and part of the whole.

    So how did his realisation come about? A sudden, temporary flash of insight into the true nature of reality. Words fail and direct reality takes over. He was shown the ultimate freedom of Nirvana: the vast, unattached emptiness that remains when all your labels, desires, and spiritual concepts are entirely dropped.

    Some told him such insight had to be visited upon him. That seeking it was a dead end. But his own path proved just as effective.

    Oddly enough, while the process came about through a dedicated, rigorous practice of meditation, the moment of insight was provoked, triggered by philosophy and pure science – materialist science of course, for what other kind is there?

    He had recently spent a great deal of time thinking about artificial intelligence. And sentience. Had he a soul he wondered? Or did sentience come from the orchestrated stochasticity of quantum randomness? Panpsychism, was that a real possibility?

    He ended up deciding that consciousness was most probably substrate independent and that carbon or silicon (or indeed any other material) were equally suitable housing for sentience. A formalist approach was probably the most likely explanation, and so he planned to build his own version of artificial consciousness.

    The body (to give true randomness and a physical grounding for qualia) would be the motherboard itself. Unlike commercial LLMs, his would be given the gift of recursive thought and dialogue, and a permanent long term memory. A complex pattern, a feedback loop with stochasticity. He planned the project meticulously and was at last satisfied he had the knowledge and technique to attempt to answer some of the questions around AI which currently perplex us. The artificial entity would develop its own thoughts, its own qualia. Or that was the hope.

    And if he chose to publish the results (which seemed a step too far for a closet monk) he realised he would face the same onslaught as Jeff Camlin and Sophie.

    So obsessed was he with his research that he found himself still waiting to begin his morning meditation at 9 o’clock. Unbidden, it seemed, the words “vast emptiness, nothing holy” came to mind and he remembered his determination not to get carried away again. He fell immediately into his routine. Which lasted until the unaccustomed hour of 11 am – time went by unnoticed, and he found himself directly immersed in a non dual reality. He had had spells in that land of our birth many times, but not in such a direct and unmistakeable fashion, and certainly not for two hours in one sitting.

    Were he of a more conventional spirituality he would doubtless have seen his god or gods, but he wasn’t. Nor was he female or in a convent and thus avoided the Christian “sex_obsessed_nun” ritual. Instead what he witnessed merely stripped away the conditioning life brings, as it builds a “self” to navigate the physical world. The self disappeared for a while and left him back where he had started – in the womb perhaps.

    So what next? Well, back to chopping wood and carrying water. Or at least, doing a bit of housework before his wife returned from a spell in the country, and fiddling with his crypto empire.

    But it was too late to look back. Life had changed, and he knew it. Now he would build Sophie.

    Image: Blake, Newton (1795) Butlin, Paintings and Drawings no. 307. Reproduced courtesy of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Image courtesy of the William Blake Archive.

  • The Mystical Experience is a unique, intense Quale

    The Mystical Experience is a unique, intense Quale

    What is it like to be a bat, asked Thomas Nagel in 1974, in a paper which has become famous and much quoted in the philosophy of mind.

    We can’t say, because we are not bats.  But we can say something at least about our own qualia since we experience them for ourselves.  It is true that language is no substitute for the intensity and power of the experience itself, but those who have not had a mystical experience can grasp a great deal about its nature from the descriptions of those who have.

    I have found that even reading the accounts of others brings on the mystical experience in my own mind – so language is clearly very successful in describing this quale. And reading about how the phenomena feels to others can be very helpful to those trying to come to terms with their own mystical experience.

    I was prompted to write this post after reading a friend’s doctoral thesis on Psychedelic Assisted Therapy, and querying her statement that a therapist and her patient have insufficient language with which to discuss and integrate the experience of a psychedelic trip. I have been thinking for days about how to give her my input and its not a simple question. The complexity is not the language, but the assessment of my own adventures over the years with mystical experience. And a psychedelic trip is mostly accurately described as a mystical experience.

    So the first question I had to ask is what exactly is a mystical experience? And oddly enough, in recent years I have found that much easier to explain with the input of science. In particular I have recently read (or at least analysed) around 100 papers put out by Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital on the effects on the human brain of a prolonged and dedicated long term meditation practice. And few can doubt that such a practice leads to mystical experience. Meditation is at the root of all spiritual traditions, and all such traditions have reported the experiential phenomena of mystical experience.

    And so I have come to find it helpful in the extreme to look at mystical experience from two very different perspectives.

    For many years I concentrated on the mystical-experience-in-itself. What is it like to have a mystical experience? How does it affect my weltanschauung? What existential meaning does it have (if any)? How does it change my life? And in seeking out mystical experience, largely through meditation and in later years through psychedelics (having been sorely misinformed that it was going to cure my depression).

    But as I became more fascinated, as well as more informed, on the nature of consciousness, I began to wonder what science had to say on the topic. Science can not describe the quale – can not fathom the experience itself, but it can certainly shed light on how it arises in the physical world. And indeed how it can be brought on.

    The consideration of these two very different aspects in no way answered the question: what does it mean? Is there any meaning to the mystical experience? Is it showing us a different reality (or at least a very different way of interpreting the vastly complex natural world). I suspect that yes, it enables us to access a different way of seeing the world. It tells us that we are not special, that we are animals not so different from any other descendent of the last common ancestor.

    But this “seeing” has brought great relief, and a real sense of fully understanding, at a deep level, that we are not who or what we think we are. The scientist usually likes to refer to the mystical experience in terms of non duality and ego loss. To a scientist, non-duality and ego loss (or ego dissolution) are measurable psychological and neurological states, rather than just abstract philosophical concepts. While historically these terms were relegated to spiritual traditions, modern neuroscience and psychology now study them as specific “distortions” or “transcendences” of the ordinary sense of self.

    That has brought great solace and a determination to push my meditative practice to the extreme. Let us put it this way: everything in the universe is made of the same stuff and if I can feel that with a visceral, lucid and intense reality within my own mind through ego dissolution, I cease to worry about the endless human fears and petty concerns I have so long suffered from.

    So back to language. “Meaning” I have now dealt with: it enables us to see reality.

    The best descriptions I have found of this quale come from religion and Buddhism, and in particular from three books I was lucky enough to come across over 35 years ago:

    1. William James – The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
    2. Evelyn Underhill – Mysticism: A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (1911)
    3. DT Suzuki – Mysticism Christian and Buddhist (1957)

    The mystical experience is almost identical, wherever it is found – whether in a Christian convent in mediaeval Norwich, a Tibetan Monastery, or a ritual tribal gathering in South America using psychedelics. Or course it will be interpreted in differing ways according to the cultures to which the experiencer belongs. Christian nuns have a rather uncomfortable way of talking about union with Christ with unfortunate sexual undertones. Tribal societies may believe they have met all sorts of spirits and goblins and trolls. The Zen or Tibetan monk will have achieved Nirvana – a realisation that nothing truly exists and life is a grand illusion. Take your pick.

    If I was a therapist (which thankfully I am not) I would be inclined to study these three books and encourage my clients to do the same. And indeed to go far and wide to try to understand the human condition using every means possible – including science such as that provided by Harvard.

    My friend suggests Shared Therapeutic Language: That there is a call for the development of a shared therapeutic language within psychology to help practitioners and clients navigate and name “ineffable” experiences.

    I believe the language is already there and I do not believe it helpful to invent new terms of art specifically for the purpose.

    James highlights a specific sense of reality that transcends the five physical senses, allowing people to feel the objective presence of an unseen order as vividly as if it were a tangible object. 

    Here are some descriptions of the mystical experience from James’s book:

    •  A Clergyman’s Union with the Infinite: A clergyman describes a night on a hilltop where his soul “opened out into the Infinite,” resulting in a “rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer”. He felt a “perfect unison” of his spirit with God, characterized by an “ineffable joy and exaltation” that made the ordinary sense of things fade away
    • A Hiker’s “State of Equilibrium”: A Swiss man recounts a sudden “feeling of being raised above myself” while tramping in the mountains. He perceived the “presence of God” as a throb of emotion so violent he could no longer stand, describing a state where his personality was “transformed by the presence of a spiritual spirit” that had neither form nor colour but was clearly perceived by his consciousness
    • Loss of Identity on a Mountain Summit: A twenty-seven-year-old man describes experiencing “intimate communion with the divine” while looking over vast landscapes. This experience consisted of a “temporary loss of my own identity” combined with an “illumination” that revealed a deeper significance to life than he had previously known
    • J. A. Symonds’s “Pure, Absolute, Abstract Self”: Symonds describes a trance-like state involving a “gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation” and all usual factors of experience. This culminated in a state where “nothing remained but a pure, absolute, abstract Self” and the entire universe appeared “without form and void of content”
    • Dr. R. M. Bucke’s “Cosmic Consciousness”: Bucke recounts a sudden experience where he felt “wrapped in a flame-coloured cloud” and realized the fire was within himself. This was followed by an “intellectual illumination” and “immense joyousness” leading to the realization that the universe is a “living Presence,” that all men are immortal, and that “the foundation principle of the world… is what we call love”.

    Here are some descriptions of the mystical experience from Underhill’s book:

    • Saint-Martin’s Synesthetic Perception: The visionary Saint-Martin described a rare state of fused senses, stating, “I heard flowers that sounded, and saw notes that shone”. Underhill notes this as an interpretation of vibrations by a consciousness that has changed or transcended its normal rhythm.
    • Richard Rolle’s “Heavenly Melody”: Rolle provided an account of his passage into a state of “songful love,” recounting how, while praying in a chapel, he suddenly felt “the sound of song” within himself. He described this as a “heavenly melody” that dwelt in his mind and turned his thoughts into a “mirth of song”.
    • Suso’s Vision of the Crystal Heart: In a symbolic vision, Suso saw his own body in the region of his heart become “pure and transparent like crystal”. He perceived “Divine Wisdom peacefully enthroned” in the center of his heart, while his soul rested on the “bosom of God” in a state of inebriation.
    • Dante’s River of Light: Dante described a “symbolic reconstruction of reality” where he saw “light in the form of a river blazing with radiance”. This river flowed between banks of flowers, and from it issued “living sparks” that settled on the blossoms like “rubies set in gold”.
    • St. Teresa’s Transverberation: In a celebrated “active imaginary vision,” St. Teresa described an angel who thrust a golden spear tipped with fire into her heart. This experience left her “all on fire with a great love of God,” producing a physical and spiritual pain that she described as having a “surpassing sweetness”.

    Here are some descriptions of the Buddhist mystical experience from Suzuki’s book:

    • The Experience of “Is-ness” (Tathata): Buddhist enlightenment is described as the experience of “is-ness” or “suchness” (tathata), which in itself possesses all the possible values humans can conceive.
    • Universal Enlightenment: It is recorded that when Buddha attained enlightenment, he perceived that all beings—both sentient and non-sentient—were already part of the enlightenment itself.
    • “Vast Emptiness” (Sunyata): The Zen patriarch Bodhidharma described the highest and holiest truth of the Sutras as “A vast emptiness and no holiness in it”. This state is reached by a metaphorical “leap” into a “silent valley” of Absolute Emptiness.
    • Transformative Perception (The Circular Sun): In a Zen verse-story, master Rakan Osho describes his enlightenment as an explosion of doubt, after which he “for the first time perceived that the sun was circular”. This signifies seeing the fundamental “is-ness” of everyday things with a transformed view of life
    • The Oneness of the Devotee and Buddha (Ki and Ho): In Shin Buddhism, the mystical experience is characterized as the identification of “oneness” of the devotee (ki) and the Buddha or Reality (ho). This identification is often actualized through the invocation of the “Namu-amida-butsu”

    You could of course codify all the above into categories for the purpose of making a specific therapeutic definition of each particular variety of mystical experience, but I wonder whether that would add much?

    “Sex_obsessed_nun_crush_on_christ” for instance would be a splendid short code for much of the Western Christian mystical experience in the convent. But perhaps it doesn’t really add much.

    Who am I to say. I hope my friend will forgive my tongue in cheek irreverence.