In some regards we humans have capabilities beyond those of other species with whom we share our planet. But in this regard we are inferior to those creatures: we are the only animal that can deny our animal nature.
Not everybody does this, of course. I'm proudly animal, as is Maxim Loskutoff, who wrote "The Beast in Me" in The New York Times collection of philosophical essays published in the newspaper, Question Everything.
As you can read below, Loskutoff vividly recognized his animalness when a grizzly bear stalked him and his partner during their hike in Glacier National Park.
But it's strange that so many people are reluctant to admit that they are as much an animal as their dog or cat. Or the chicken they ate for dinner. What else could we be? We're made of flesh, blood, and bone, just like every other animal.
Sure, our brains have evolved to have the capacity to think thoughts like, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." (So said Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.)
This doesn't make such other-worldly thoughts true, though.
It simply shows that we are able to deny the reality of our human animality, covering that inescapable fact with layers of religious and metaphysical fantasy about how our true nature is ethereal soul, or some other supernatural notion with no foundation in fact.
The world would be a much better place if every person recognized that they are an animal.
This wouldn't turn everybody into vegetarians, but it would go a long way toward diminishing the sense most people have that humans are special, separate and distinct from all those animals we use, and abuse, for our pleasure.
Here's excerpts from the essay.
Obviously Loskutoff and his partner survived their grizzly bear stalking. They (literally) ran into a park ranger armed with a big gun who told them that the female bear was being tracked because she was almost twelve and having difficulty finding enough food at that age, manifesting increasingly aggressive behavior.
Missoula, Mont. -- In the summer of 2012, the same year that scientists fully decoded the genome of the bonobo, the last great ape, my partner and I were stalked by a female grizzly bear.
...Several things happened in my mind at once. I realized the bear was following us. I realized she wanted to eat us, and I realized that I was an animal.
It was a strange epiphany. To be human today is to deny our animal nature, though it's always there, as the earth remains round beneath our feet even when it feels flat.
I had always been an animal, and would always be one, but it wasn't until I was prey, my own fur standing on end and certain base-level decisions being made in milliseconds (in a part of my mind that often takes ten minutes to choose toothpaste in the grocery store), that the meat-and-bone reality settled over me.
I was smaller and slower than the bear. My claws were no match for hers. And almost every part of me was edible.
...I had one concern: to get us away without being eaten.
Civilization itself is an attempt to protect us from this feeling. From its earliest iterations in fire-starting and cave-dwelling to its current zenith in the construction of megalopolises, as well as the careful documentation of every birth and the methodical laying bare of each strand in every helix, civilization is a way of setting ourselves apart from the prey we once were.
Building walls, both physical and informational, to keep out the bears.
Yet even atop the highest tower in the most prestigious university we remain animals, directed by the same base-level needs and emotions that motivate living creatures from bonobos to rats.
...Of course there are aspects of our communal society -- caring for the old, the domestication of livestock, the cultivation of crops -- that link us to only a few other species, and other aspects, such as the written word, that link us to none as yet discovered, but in no place but our own minds have we truly transcended our animal brethren.
...As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously said, "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun."
Most days I remain fully entangled in this web, cursing at my smartphone while rolling across the earth in four thousand pounds of steel. Yet there is something of the experience with the bear that remains inside me, a gift from my moment of pure terror.
It's the knowledge of my animal self. That instinctive, frightened, clear-eyed creature beneath my clothes. And it brought with it the reassuring sense of being part of the natural world, rather than separated from it, as we so often feel ourselves to be.
My humanity, one cell in the great, breathing locomotion spreading from sunlight to leaves to root stems to bugs to birds to bears.
All of us fragile, all of us fleeting, all of us prey.
Mystical experiences need testing if they become a worldview
As I've noted before, and surely will do so again, one of the pleasures I get from this blog is reading intelligent comment conversations on posts that I've written. Or in this case, on an Open Thread where the comments are the substance of the post.
Below is a comment that Appreciative Reader left on an Open Thread in response to a comment by manjit. If you want to read manjit's comment, click on that link and scroll up to the preceding comment.
Appreciative Reader has a knack for saying things in a way that I've never come across before. I'm not saying that his ideas are totally unique, just that how he expresses those ideas often is wonderfully clear and creative.
He's correct in noting that every personal experience is subjective, so not rational, logical, or scientific. The world's greatest physicist, along with everybody else, is engaged in a totally ineffable experience when eating a strawberry.
So mystical experiences are simply a subset of all experiences.
They can't be put into words, or pictures, or numbers, or anything else, just as any other experience can't. I make this point frequently on this blog: nobody can question someone else's personal experience, because they aren't the person having the subjective experience.
However, once someone claims that their mystical experience has a meaning beyond the personal, that's when I tend to agree with Appreciative Reader that reason, logic, and science come into play. He just has a fresh way of saying this, as you can read below.
That said, I'm not totally convinced that his thesis is correct about a worldview needing confirmation by reason, rationality, logic, or science. I put raspberries on my cereal every morning. The taste of those berries is "mystical," in the sense that no one but me knows how they taste to me.
But it seems a stretch to say that the fact that I buy raspberries whenever I do our weekly grocery shopping makes raspberries part of my worldview, and so requires confirmation by reason, rationality, logic, or science.
Anyway, Appreciative Reader and manjit have made me ponder things that I usually take for granted. So their comment conversation has benefitted me in that regard. I guess I tend to see a dividing line between symbolic and non-symbolic sorts of experiences, which is a bit different from how Appreciative Reader sees things.
Yet maybe we're seeing similarly. So long as I simply enjoy the taste of raspberries in a subjective, non-symbolic fashion, I'm in the realm of unquestionable personal experience. However, as soon as I try to describe their taste in some way, now I'm in the realm of questionable interpersonal experience.
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Dear manjit,
As ever, pleasure to read your thought-provoking comment.
You think Brian’s approach pseudo-scientific. I’m afraid I don’t agree, at all. I’m kind of curious why you think *that*, but I’ll let it pass, because there’s way more meat in your comment, that I’d like to address, and that I’ll be glad if you’re able to answer, whenever you are able. (I’ll bookmark this thread, so that I don’t miss it, should you end up responding after awhile.)
I’ll resist the temptation of addressing much of your comment, in the interests of (relative!) brevity, and instead focus on just two things, on which your thoughts will be of great interest to me.
The first, and most important, of where we disagree is where you say this: “I think one of your incorrect understandings of mysticism is that there is anything rational, logical or scientific about it.” I’m very interested in how you can possibly have arrived at that conclusion, especially in context of how I see this, which is as follows:
I agree, the mystical experience itself is not rational or logical, in and of itself. Nothing subjective ever is. If we’re content to experience whatever mystical experience we have, and simply stop at that, then, agreed, there’s no reason for reason, rationality, logic, or science to intrude in there. But the moment we incorporate that experience into our worldview, immediately it is subject to all of these things.
And nor is this peculiar to mystical experience, I’d say this applies to any and every subjective experience. You see the sun rise in the morning. Or, say, you feel that kind-of-painful-yet-pleasant pump in your bicep after working out.
Both of those mundane, non-mystical experiences, if you’re content to register them, and simply let them be, then that’s the end of it; and there’s no call to bring in logic, reason, rationality, or science into it. However, the moment you incorporate these experiences into your worldview, even in the slightest bit, then your surest way to arriving at a worldview, a model, that comports best with reality, is by following logic, and reason, and science.
Likewise with mystical experiences, surely? If you’re content to simply have those experiences, and then leave them be, well then, sure, that’s the end to it.
But if you go worldviewing your way with those experiences, no matter how much or how little, no matter how concretely or how vaguely --- even if only negatively, in questioning the veracity or the completeness of what we know about the world --- well then, right then, right there, is when it becomes subject to rationality and to science.
(To be clear, I’m not saying mystical experiences might not occasion reason to question, maybe even revise, our worldview. They well may. My point is, the moment you do even that much, the moment you do anything other than simply register that experience, completely passively and completely without any thoughts about it at all; the moment you incorporate that experience into your worldview [no matter how much or how little, no matter how concretely or how vaguely], right then, right there, is where science becomes the surest way of ensuring that that worldview, that model, those thoughts, comport best with the actual reality.)
Which is why I cannot see how you can possibly state, as you did, that there’s nothing rational, logical or scientific about mysticism.
My other point of disagreement is where you say this (and I’ll quote that paragraph of yours in full here):
“One man's "loose-jawed goggle-eyed imbecelic dogma" is another's belief that the universe was created ex-nihilo, like a rabbit out of a hat, or that life & consciousness are the product of the random, purposeless, accidental bumping together of inert matter, as if putting some oil and pigment in a bag, giving it a good shake for 10 seconds, then throwing it at a canvas could create a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa, and assorted other credulous and magical beliefs. Humanity has a long history of conflating the cultural status quo with reality itself, and implying anyone who challenges it is a "loose-jawed goggle-eyed imbecelic" dogmatist. Very often they're more right than wrong. However, very often they're more wrong than right.”
Well said, that. I agree with much of what you’ve said there. But the essence of it, the actual point of it, that is what I disagree with completely; and, again, wonder whether you might not end up changing your mind about this on thinking a bit more about it.
Haha, agreed, things popping into existence out of nowhere does sound crazy. That goes for lots of things, and indeed most things QM [quantum mechanics], agreed, absolutely. But why do we imagine that reality must necessarily comport with our native intuition about what makes sense?
After all, our intuition itself is shaped by our evolution, and is no more than what we needed to deal to best survive while running around naked in the wilds of Africa. Whether something *sounds* reasonable to our intuition, can hardly be the touchstone for evaluating whether something is *real*.
So then, if not intuition, then how *do* we make sense of the world around us, and within us? By following the evidence. By using reason and logic. In short, science. Even if that, for the present, leads us to such apparently goggle-eyed and imbecilic --- read “counter-intutive” --- explanations, as well as non-explanations, like things popping in out of nowhere, and quantum superposition, and the rest of it.
That is, there is a huge huge huge difference between the “goggle-eyed imbecilities” that science reveals to us, and the other extravagant explanations we think up about the world by means other than scientific. And what's more, basis what I’ve said just now, perhaps you’ll agree that if there’s apparently a double standard at play here, then it’s entirely warranted, in fact it is the only thing that *is* warranted, in this context.
-- Appreciative Reader
Posted at 09:46 PM in Comments, Mystics | Permalink | Comments (6)
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