How far down the rabbit hole can an unbeliever go?

I know something about rabbit holes. I've been down quite a few -- of the psychedelic variety and otherwise. 

Graduating from high school in 1966, I headed to college in the San Francisco Bay area just at the time Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane wrote "White Rabbit." I still get a chill up my spine (tiny LSD flashback?) when I watch a video of her singing it.

Speaking as a proud Flower Child babyboomer, Man, they don't make music like this anymore. Suffer through the brief ad at the start. Two and a half minutes of Jefferson Airplane are worth it.

 

This morning I got to thinking about how far down the rabbit hole it is possible to go while reading a terrific chapter in David E. Cooper's "The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery," a book I blogged about several days ago.

Cooper's philosophically dense, but always stimulating, book examines the extreme humanistic notion that man is the measure of all things. Extreme, because taken literally it posits that "there is no discurable way the world anyway is, independently of human perspective and interest."

Existentialism takes this idea and runs with it. Sometimes a long ways down the rabbit hole. 

If it is up to us to choose what life is all about, if existence precedes essence, if there is no solid objectively real foundation to the cosmos we can stand on, then seemingly we enter a whirlpool realm of absurdity, nausea, no exit's, angst, and a lot of strong coffee consumed while smoking filterless cigarettes in Paris coffee houses, talking about the meaningful meaninglessness of life.

And yet... Cooper says that it really isn't possible to live that far down the rabbit hole. At least, not without going certifiably insane.

Almost all humanists, along with non-monotheistic "faiths" like Advaita and Buddhism, embrace compensations that stop them from falling all the way down into the depths of nothing matters because there is nothing to lean on, not even Nothing.

Cooper argues for the near-necessity of compensations in various ways. Here's how he speaks about one way non-believers in an absolute objective reality, religious or scientific, compensate for the loss of being sure about the world "anyway is."

As inveterately teleological creatures, human beings need to view substantial stretches of their activity as having significance. (I use 'significance' as a portmanteau term for what we want such stretches to possess -- point, worth, meaning, importance, the distinction of mattering, and so on.)

Typically, at least, to assign significance to an activity is to display its appropriate connection with -- say its contribution to -- something beyond itself that then serves as a source of its significance: a wider project, perhaps, that provides measure for the activity.

This is why activity is typically regarded as devoid of significance when perceived as so limited and enclosed as to fail appropriately to connect up with anything beyond itself. 

...There is little doubt, surely, that a final source is sought, or simply assumed to reside, 'beyond the human' -- in , say, an independent, discursable order of facts. 

...The thesis of 'the human world', once 'deeply cultivated', turns out to be one with which human beings cannot live. If our need for answerability is to be satisfied, human life must indeed answer to something beyond itself.

l agree. I'm reminded of my first LSD trip, circa 1968.

A friend experienced in "tripping" took LSD along with me, to be my guide down the rabbit hole where reality As We Know It fades away. Soon, though, I'd convinced him that we had gone crazy.

Not just temporarily. Permanently.

After discussing what life for us was going to be like from now on (we remembered taking LSD, but couldn't fathom ever not being in our current state of consciousness), we reached a fairly satisfying conclusion:

Crazy is good. Yes, we had gone off the deep end. But, hey, it's nice paddling around in those weird waters.

This fits with Cooper's thesis. My friend and I had entered a LSD-created mental world where anything was possible; what we were experiencing was what there was; like Grace Slick sang, "logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead."

And yet... we couldn't handle the idea that we'd entered a completely topsy-turvy world. Our strong inclination was to talk things out and arrive at an understanding that we weren't in a genuine Nowhere Land, we had just entered a realm where things were going to be crazily dependably good. 

Cooper gives examples of how "Asian" traditions (not always literally Asian, but within that philosophical framework) compensate for the lack of absolutism found in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other "this is how things are" traditions.

For example:

If humanism is the thesis that there is no discurable way the world anyway is, independently of human perspective and interest, then Samkara was a humanist. For while he thinks there is an independent, absolute reality, brahman, this is not discursable. 

...The important point in the present context is that the doctrine of brahman is a good example of one that 'compensates' for the thesis of 'the human world'. Samkara's view is that that thesis would be unendurable without the further compensating doctrine. 

...In the Advaitin case, as we know, compensation comes in the shape of the doctrine of brahman. In appreciating that 'all that we can see...is not real in itself', the enlightened person also enjoys a sense of 'the reality behind everything'.

While this reality is strictly ineffable, he or she knows it to be, if only in extended senses of the terms, 'truth, consciousness and bliss (satchitananda). Life then has its point -- the effort to identify with this reality -- and the world is saved from being merely a dream that passes us by.

Comments

[Shawn]

More information about this rabbit hole can be found watching this;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeO2BOdmkEg

[Mike Williams]

There were more than one rabbit hole with LSD.
Paper acid and orange sunshine, pure pharma grade
from Sandoz. Of course all of us here know
the difference from experience. I was just
reading David Crosbys book and how he survived
jail and drugs and financial ruin.

Of course we had all the gurus as a result.
From Jiddu Krishnamuti to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
We searched for answers.

We came to the obvious conclusion there is no God,
no afterlife and not even a self which could have
ever become enlightened. Not even a soul.
It was all a hoax.

Now we look forward to absolute death, never
to re awaken.

The countries of the world are now dominated by
the most sophisticated financial criminals
in the greatest ponzi scheme of all time.

So stange is this world, even enlightened people
are caught up in this trap and wholeheatedly
support it.

So now we find even enlightenment has nothing to do
with being moral and good.

The rabbit hole is something few people experience.
The rabbit hole has nothing to do with nihilism
of complete despair.

The rabbit hole scares the living hell out of
enlightened people. For it is not to much to
loose the notion of a self, or afterlife.

But, to give up the love of a corrupt system
is the final journey. The final crutch is
kicked out from beneath a person.

Only then is the extent of the true bottom
to the rabbit hole seen.

Only those with a pure and honest heart can
deal with it. Only they have true courage.

And only the pure in heart know what happens
after the dark night of the soul.

[Mike Williams]

The believer and the unbeliever
are running around in the same box.

The satsangi and the exsatsangi are
two sides of the same coin.

It never occurs to either to climb
outside this box and look for Something
Else as a solution.

Speculation takes the form of strong
opinions. It actually blocks us from
seeing things as they are.

In fact we know nothing and can do nothing.

Out of this vacuum arises Something Else
to fill the void.

[Tom]

I don't see how an enlightened person (I'll just take that to mean a wise man) could be influenced by money. Most such people live simply and unnoticed. Ramana Maharshi lived in poverty for years in a cave before people came to him in any great numbers - even then he declined to speak much to them. Nisargadatta was an ordinary shop keeper. Papaji was an army officer. None of them were rich or at all interested in hob-nobbing with the well to do.

As for "The rabbit hole scares the living hell out of enlightened people": Neem Karoli Baba consumed 4 300mic doses of acid given him by Ram Dass (who I presume had access to the good stuff) and according to Dass it had no noticeable effect.

[Mike Williams]

Ram Das was quite a character. I lived
in a condo on Ocean Bl. in
Long Beach CA only a few blocks from him.

My first experience on LSD, Sandoz Pharma,
Swiss mfg, was Orange Sunshine, on
the Long Beach Pier, just steps from his house.

Try Ramesh Balsekar, Nisargadatta's disciple's books, for best jnani ever
written.

Ran Dass was so messed up on LSD, he got
on TV and told the commentator he believed
humans would be on Mars in his lifetime.

Richard Alpert ? was his name, a psychologist.

[Tom]

I find Richard Alpert / Ram Dass pretty lucid actually. Of course he had a stroke in 1997 and now suffers aphasia, which if you don't know better is easy to attribute to his rather extensive experience of psychedelics.

If I remember correctly a lot of more qualified people thought the same about a manned Mars mission. And it's still possible in his lifetime, though not very probable :-)

[Tom]

It's possible Ram Dass only needs to survive another 10 years!

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/22/world/mars-one-way-ticket/index.html?sr=sharebar_twitter

[Bob]

You say, "If it is up to us to choose what life is all about, if existence precedes essence, if there is no solid objectively real foundation to the cosmos we can stand on, then seemingly we enter a whirlpool realm of absurdity, nausea, no exit's, angst, and a lot of strong coffee consumed while smoking filterless cigarettes in Paris coffee houses, talking about the meaningful meaninglessness of life."

So your humanistic thoughts are trying to reveal a meaning within yourselves, when the answer lies not within, but outside of ourselves - in the Lord God of the Bible.

Ask yourselves the question: "Why do we have a 7 day week?"
Answer: "Because God set it up that way in the beginning." (book of Genesis in the Bible)

Why do you exist: "Because God created you in the beginning." (book of Genesis in the Bible)

Who are you: "God created you to give Him glory."

Your reasonings and musings through your muddled sense of philosophical thinking has you believing there is no God and therefore you are the only one that can see what the meaning of life is all about.

But not true when you come to the truth of what the Bible says and when you finally come to the realization that God did create everything in the beginning.

You will NEVER find meaning (or non-meaning) in life until you come to see God as the reality of all things. (John 14:6 - "I am the way, the truth and the life.")