Mystical Claims and Embodied Knowledge in a Post-Metaphysical Age
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Transcript of Mystical Claims and Embodied Knowledge in a Post-Metaphysical Age
Tom Murray
2013 Integral Theory Conference
Paper copy at www.perspegrity.com/papers
MYSTICAL CLAIMS AND EMBODIED
KNOWLEDGE
IN A POST-METAPHYSICAL AGE
?
Reality
(it)
Experience
(I)
Belief & Language
(we)
USEFUL CATEGORIES FOR
KNOWLEDGE/BELIEF
BELIEF/KNOWLEDGE CATEGORIES:
EXAMPLES
Linguistic / symbolic
Concepts
• Taste of chocolate; gut
certainty; meditative
state; playing tennis;
intuitions…
• Tree, democracy,
interior,
consciousness…
• Trees are…; We
should…; the
cognitive line leads…
• AQAL, SD, CR,
Einstein’s, ….
4
Non/pre-Linguistic:
Experience
Model/Theory
Statements
OVERVIEW
1. What are mystical/metaphysical claims/beliefs?
2. Reasons for caution and reflection
3. What embodied cognition says about mystical/metaphysical claims and reality <–> idea gap
4. ‘Post-metaphysical’ approaches to mysticism
“Theories can do shadow work”— so can mystical beliefs
Not questioning mystical, magical, or ineffable experiences, or the need to share and construct meaning from it
WORKING DEFINITION OF
MYSTICAL/METAPHYSICAL
CLAIMS/BELIEFS
• Claims about the overarching or underlying nature of the universe/Kosmos/everything
• Not provable by science or amenable to measurement; i.e. not purely physical or psychological phenomena – but still being about “reality” or “truth” (not about the good or beautiful)
• Common themes: Consciousness, Being, Reality, Spirit, Life, Non-dual, Cosmology, other Realms
• Have import to human life/spirit, ethics, ultimate “meaning”
• Mystical differs from metaphysical in that its source is direct experience or intuition (purportedly) with ultimate reality or transcendental truths
SOME EXAMPLES OF
MYSTICAL KNOWLEDGE AND CLAIMS
KEN WILBER — PHILOSOPHER AND
MYSTIC
"the great morphic field of evolutionary
potential…pulling all manifest holons back to their ever-
present Ground as Spirit--a Kosmic field of Agape,
gently pulling evolution into greater and greater
consciousness, embrace […] The reality, suchness, or
isness of every holon is actually Spirit…a drive which
ultimately wants to embrace the entire Kosmos […] This
ultimate realization [is] of the ever-present, spaceless
and therefore infinite, timeless and therefore eternal,
formless and therefore omnipresent, Condition of all
conditions and Nature of all natures and radically
groundless Ground of all grounds.”
Ken Wilber, Excerpt A, Volume 2, Kosmos Trilogy Draft
MORE MYSTICAL STATEMENTS
"…perspectives are primordial, which is to say they are
the most fundamental or primeval elements of reality,
existing at or from the beginning of time"
Clint Fuhs, ITC 2010 paper on Perspectival Semiotics
"the dimension of the profound," "mystical deeper
reality," "timeless present," "eternal now," and "infinite
spaciousness”
Jeff Carreira (student of Andrew Cohen) audio dialogue with Patricia
Albere
"infinite vastness...open suchness... infinite peace...true
self...always already liberated"
Wilber, audio interview with Alan Coombs
DR. BRONNER (THE SOAP
GUY)
• ... a sense for work-love-song-art-law-play-beauty, a
face turned up from the sod!
• Absolute...ever- evolving, ever-recreating, ever-
loving order!...guided by One...God...all-embracing,
• Eternal One! — We're One! All-One!
• DILUTE ENJOY — 1 SQAP FOR 18 DIFFERENT
USES!
NON-AD-HOMINEM
The individuals quotes can be assumed to:
• be sincere and authentic
• have had deep experiences and intuitions
• be pointing to important “truths” or deep
meaning
• not be absolutist; allow for fallibility and
revision
• have a sophisticated and nuanced
understanding
DON’T TRY TO USE THESE WORDS AT
HOME! :-)
Infinite, Omnipresent,
Universal, Ultimate, Primeval,
Primordial, Eternal, Formless,
Ever-Present, Supreme,
Unbounded, Timeless,
Spaceless, Radically Invisible,
Radically Empty, Non-Dual,
Ground Of Being
• Poetry? Metaphor? Inspirational
oratory?
• Truth claims about (exterior)
reality
OUR RELATIONSHIP TO MYSTICAL
CLAIMS
BERTRAND RUSSELL ON MYSTICAL
KNOWLEDGE
• It often deals with universals, infinites, essences, or foundational
truths.
• Mysticism has "a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard
to what is believed about the universe." It has a sense of
"certainty and revelation." Though it sometimes uses logic to
justify beliefs, the claims seem to come from "a way of wisdom,
sudden, penetrating, coercive, which is contrasted with the slow
and fallible [process of scientific reasoning]."
• Mystics are attempting "an articulation upon the inarticulate
experience gained in the moment of" what is called insight or
intuition.
• There is a "sense of a mystery unveiled [and] revelation" of "a
reality behind the world of appearances and utterly different from
it." Truth and essence is found through profound introspective
thought, not through sense experience.
• Can be expressed in deeply poignant, poetic, or metaphorical
prose.
YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH METAPHYSICAL
BELIEFS?
1. Brainstorm mystical/metaphysical
claims/beliefs you hear in the Integral
community.
2. How do you feel when others make
such claims?
3. What happens when you mention
mystical/metaphysical claims to your
friends/family?
4. When you explain or justify these
beliefs, how do you support them?
5. Does it matter if we can explain or justify
MYSTICAL / METAPHYSICAL
KNOWLEDGE HAZARDS —
RUSSELL
• Tendency for the passion of the mystic to
conflate "the good with the truly real"
• Those who "are capable of absorption in an inward
passion" can experience "the loss of contact with
daily things [and] common objects."
• Focus on pure logic to the exclusion of experience or
common sense– "logic used in the defense of
mysticism seems to be faulty as logic”
• >>Highest form of thought is a combination of
mystical and scientific understanding...
MORE CAVEATS RE PROCLAMATIONS
OF THE ULTIMATE OR ESSENTIAL
• Complex philosophical approaches and worldviews...reach beyond the boundaries of the academy and into the lifeworld" where they are subject to being watered-down, muddied, and misappropriated
-Stein 2010
• Ultimately can be:
grandiosity, hegemony, elitism, demagoguery, proto-fascism, colonization, assimilation, totalizing
EMBODIMENT <-> FALLIBILITY
Fallibility, uncertainty, ambiguity, paradox,
fuzziness, systematic bias, indeterminacy
THE IDEA PORTABILITY PRINCIPLE
• Understanding and dealing with the fallibility
and indeterminacy of ideas is more important
the greater the distance between the world
views or beliefs of interlocutors
• Preaching to the (integral) Choir vs.
a) crossing disciplinary boundaries to interact with
other theory/practice communities
b) applying ideas in real contexts
explaining one's purposes to stakeholders
c)disperse ideas into other world views or
conceptual frames
DISCUSSION:
EMBODIMENT & BELIEF FORMATION
1. How does knowing you are angry, in love,
in fearful resistance, or prejudiced influence
what you believe and how you hold a
belief? How does understanding how
shadow works change how you hold a
belief?
2. How does knowing that some aspects of
love — such as attraction, bonding, and
empathy, are tied to bio/neuro/chemical
processes — change the experience of
being in love?
3. New evidence shows how most memory,
perception, and judgment is influenced by
emotion and cognitive biases — how do
you think this effects the claims of scholars,
philosophers, and mystics?
THE EMBODIED MIND
— A Philosophical History of the Fallibility of
Reason
1. Traditional Philosophy — mind/reason separate from body
(Cartesian) &
pure, universal, transcendent, reliable
2. Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution — removing the
influence of
authority, emotion/passion, dogma, instinct/intuition
• Valued: observation, measurement, logic,
repeatability/democratic
• But battle: Realists & Empiricists vs. Rationalists & Idealists
3. Kant — reason is limited by underlying structures of the mind
4. Darwin — cognition evolved through natural selection—from
animal brains
5. Freud — the unconscious; unpredictable hidden powerful
influence on thought
EXAMPLE COGNITIVE BIASES
• Confirmation Bias
• Hindsight Bias
• Amygdala Hijack
SOURCES OF FALLIBILITY
IN MYSTICAL AND METAPHYSICAL
BELIEF
1. Concepts &
Abstractions
2. Misplaced
Concreteness
3. Mystical Specialness
4. Epistemic Drives
1.
SCHOLARLY WORK IS
"NOTORIOUSLY FRAUGHT
WITH DEFINITIONAL
DISAGREEMENT"
(SHERMER, 2011)
George Lakoff
Subject / Object
Singular / Plural
Cognitive, Emotional line...
Non-Dual (/ non-non-dual)
Good, True, Beautiful
Epistemic
Distance
2. MISPLACED CONCRETENESS /
REIFICATION(TREATING INTRANSITIVE OBJECTS LIKE/AS TRANSITIVE
OBJECTS)
3. ESOTERIC CHOCOLATE —
MYSTICAL FEELINGS
STATES REFERRED TO IN BUDDHIST
TEXTS(THE SATIPATTHANA SUTTA, PITAKA SUTTA)
• A series of state experiences (Jhanas) obtainable
through contemplative absorption practices. ...terms
include happiness/joy, rapture/bliss,
attention/mindfulness, unification/attention/one-
pointedness, equanimity/serenity/contentment/utter
peace, infinity of space, and
emptiness/formlessness/cessation.
• Common warnings along the path indicated drives
(addictive & obscuring)
• What from the experience gets transferred to
theories/concepts of reality?
• Terms like infinite, boundless, empty, used in
mystical ideas may point to feeling states, more
than actual properties of reality.
IN "MYSTICISM AND LOGIC" RUSSELL
CONCLUDES THAT
"while fully developed mysticism seems to me
[a mistaken outcome of the emotions], I yet
believe that by sufficient restraint, there is an
element of wisdom to be learned by the
mystical way of feeling, which does not seem to
be attainable in any other manner [and which
is] to be commended as an attitude toward life,
not as a creed about the world"
4. EPISTEMIC DRIVES (FROM COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY TO
PHENOMENOLOGY)
Any cognitive drive or tendency that influences how we produce or share knowledge or ideas
• Desire for certainty (and the avoidance of uncertainty and cognitive dissonance)
• Need to make meaning, seepatterns
• Misplaced concreteness
• Symbolic Impulse
EPISTEMIC DRIVES (FOR MYSTICS!)
35
Abstract Concrete
General Specific
Integration Differentiation
Universal Relative
Fundamental Consequential
Permanent Changing
Simple Complex
Oneness/singularity/unity Multiplicity
Whole, Integrated Part, Differentiated
Completeness, Totality Partiality
Similarity Difference (diversity)
Transcendence Immanence
Perfection, purity Imperfection, grittinessUniqueness, specialness Ordinariness
POST-METAPHYSICS
• Habermas:
1. post-metaphysical era has "replaced
foundationalism with fallibilism” and
2. has a procedural conception of rationality
— from “a rational person thinks this” to
"…thinks like this”
• In Integral Spirituality Wilber (2006) says that
"[arguably,] metaphysics…ended with Kant [who
realized that] we do not perceive empirical
objects in a completely realistic, pregiven
fashion; but rather, structures of the knowing
subject import various characteristics to the
known object. […] Metaphysics is then a broad
name for the type of thinking that can't figure
[out that] reality is not a perception, but a
conception…thinking that falls prey to the myth
WE WILL ALWAYS NEED METAPHYSICS
• To satisfy our epistemic drives toward meaning,
certainty, .... in areas outside the reach of (current)
science/measurement.
• Some things may always appear as mysteries to the
human mind: death, life, infinity, subjectivity, being...
• But we can still avoid unnecessary degrees of
certainty, foundationalism, bias....
APPROACHES TO METAPHYSICAL
CLAIMS
1.Meaning Generative Claims
2.Indeterminacy Analysis
3.Body Awareness of Epistemic Drives
4.Follow Sean Esbjörn-Hargens!
1. MEANING GENERATIVE CLAIMS(A 4TH VALIDITY TYPE)
True
Good/Right/Just
Beautiful
&
Meaning-generative
39
2. INDETERMINACY ANALYSIS
George Lakoff
3. BODY AWARENESS OF EPISTEMIC
DRIVES
4. HUMOR, PLAY, HUMILITY,
UNKNOWING, DANCE
(SEE SEAN!)
• Fallibility: "Blind spots and square
pegs and messy -- oh my!”
• Evolving definition of concept of
"integral"
• Ontological (metaphorical)
Pluralism: multiple earths
• Epistemic Drives: "I love maps,
iteration, and symmetry!”
• Misplaced concreteness: Force-
fitting into quadrants
SUMMARY
• Embodiment implies fallibility and indeterminism of
mystical/metaphysical ideas and claims
• Most abstract/foundational/general concepts are the
most indeterminate (epistemic distance)
• The most deeply meaning-full concepts involved
highest epistemic drives (—“ultimate concern”)
• Honor the mysterious, sacred, mystical, enchanted
— and the need to share and make meaning from
them
• With post-metaphysical, fallibilistic, self-critical
approaches
• That allows integral theory and meta-theories to do
emancipatory work
THANKS!…
[email protected] | www.tommurray.us
A FEW EXTRA SLIDES…
POST-METAPHYSICS
• Is not anti-metaphysics
• No view from nowhere (privileged perspective): reality is not out there waiting to be seen (“misplaced concreteness”)
• Beyond the “myth of the given:” reality is not simply as it appears
• Perspectival: all truths/experiences come from a perspective and are partial
• Misplaced concreteness and “map vs territory:”abstractions are not “real” (independent of us)
• Knowledge is fallible (no absolutes)
• Knowledge is socially constructed
• Concepts and language are indeterminate
TOM MURRAY |
WWW.PERSPEGRITY.COM | MAY
2010
47
IDEAS AS REALITY:
STAGES OF MISPLACED
CONCRETENESS
• Magical thinking – imagination as reality
• Mythical thinking – stories as reality
• Conventional thinking – norms as reality
• Modern thinking – concepts/models as
reality
• Post modern — deep knowing/intuition as
one truth
POSITIVISM/CERTAINTY VS.
FALLIBILISM/INDETERMINACY
• Positivist attitude: clarity, certainty, action
• knowledge/meaning-generative; problem solving, theorizing
• Negative capability: awe, humility, curiosity
• Limits of language & knowledge & method
• Tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty, unknowing
• Dealing with the above
TOM MURRAY |
WWW.PERSPEGRITY.COM | AUGUST
201049
Espoused fallibility vs.
Stylistic (or illocutionary/enacted) fallibility
CALLS FOR HIGHER LEVEL THOUGHTDavid Bohm: "underneath [humanity's dilemmas] there's something we don't
understand about how thought works" and that what is needed is a "very deep [and] very subtle" awareness of thought itself.
Albert Einstein: "the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
• Cultural development as skill of understanding mind, thought, language, knowledge, belief…=> the “post-metaphysical turn”
TOM MURRAY |
WWW.PERSPEGRITY.COM | AUGUST
2010
50
SECOND TIER - GOING “META”(FROM ITC-2008)
• Meta-cognition (thinking about thinking)
• Meta-knowledge (knowledge about the nature and limitations of knowledge); META-BELIEF!
• Meta-learning (learning how to learn, also called triple-loop learning)
• Meta-dialog (dialog about how we engage in dialog)
• Meta-decision making (making decisions about how we will go about making decisions)
• Meta-affect (investigating the feeling of our feelings; somatic awareness of feeling states)
• Meta-leadership (supporting leadership in others)TOM MURRAY |
WWW.PERSPEGRITY.COM | AUGUST
2010
DEVELOPMENT, DISEQUILIBRIUM
AND HUMILITY
Heart/Empathy: Relationally aware -- opening to the suffering of
ever wider circles of relationship
Mind/Cognitive: Construct aware -- foundations of certainty in
knowing are shaken
Spirit/Self: Ego aware -- awake to the profound levels of chaos and
vulnerability in life
External world: Systems aware – chaos: radical connectivity,
unpredictability
TOM MURRAY |
WWW.PERSPEGRITY.COM | MAY 201052