> On Jun 27, 2025, at 0:10, Prof David West <[email protected]> wrote: > > This make me curious as to why there is so little interest in pursuing the > "mystical" / "non-scientific."
This is a question that I spend a fair amount of ruminating-time trying to compose a good-faith articulation of an answer to. Why would I? Because the moral interests that you express I largely agree with. And because the prospect of having a fuller and clearer picture of the world is always appealing to imagine. Both these things are always promised on that channel. So why am I not optimistic about it? I can try to make a list: 1. In a volley of posts maybe a year or two ago, with Glen and SteveS providing the main material, the word “othering” had a good connotation built up around it that I want to invoke in using the “othering” reason here. I can think of maybe one partisan of mysticism (of some variety; he would probably use the word “contemplative traditions” to avoid the negative connotations of “mysticism”, but the intent would be the same as the positive uses of “mysticism” in this general line of threads) for whom the level of “othering” is muted enough that it’s not completely annoying, seemingly unproductive, and thus off-putting. 2. The secret in the closed hand: the partisan advocates endlessly that this is The Best Thing Ever, and he’s not going to show it to you. But whatever you have is clearly not as good, and he knows, because you haven’t Seen the thing that he couldn’t show to you. 3. Closely adjacent to 2 is a form of obscurantism that I know is active in the world, and that the mystic would vehemently assert that he doesn’t practice, but that to me is not distinguishable. Obscurantism seems very close, in my read of how people are, to a taste for magical thinking. That the ordinary world where things are out in the light and can be seen is somehow disappointing, but in the occult, the hidden-in-shadow, etc., there is a magical world that won’t be disappointing the way the world that is out here in the light disappoints them. (I have _so_ many records in which just these kinds of words are used, so I don’t have to put words into somebody else’s mouth.) It’s not just that I find this unpleasant at a personal level, it seems to me like a mistake of orientation or premise. This is what I didn’t like about the Christians, or the Platonists separately, and then about their confluence in the neoPlatonists: it seems like a rejection of the world that gives an opportunity to be seen in the light (always more than we have), in favor of one’s own imaginings that are a reflection of one’s own small self. The mirror preferred to any window. 4. Of course, in all this, any words I use, the mystic will say I have upside down, and so he will invert. He will claim that what I call occult or obscure is actually the purest of light, and that what I call light is a condition of being lost in illusion and something worse than shadow. That what comes across to me as incomprehensible or confused is in fact the only thing that is _not_ confusion, and that what to me seems like sense and some coherence is (unbeknownst to me) the height of confusion. Etc. One can go on and on. Since language admits this kind of constructs, anyone can use them to defeat any conversation about anything, so there isn’t really any answering it. But then it also defeats the purpose of entering any other conversation, to which this will be the reply from inside the temple. 5. The impulse to condescension toward anyone other than fellow partisans. By and large, the mystics to whom I have some relation in ordinary life (as, to me, other ordinary people) aren’t too given to contempt. (In that, they are easier to deal with than some branches of scientists for whom contempt is the cultural water.) But they can’t fight off the impulse to condescension. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of them fail to respond with it, though some are clearly worse than others. 6. Something that to me, responding to these people as I would to any other people, comes across as a kind of megalomania. This is connected, I think, to the place of nouminousness in human experience. If I had to characterize the main break-point between those who are comfortable with the term “religious” and those who want the term “spiritual” and recoil from being identified with religiosity, I would say that for the religious, the important tea that is more general than the cup that carries it is certainty. The insistence on having it, and the belief that this is the vehicle that delivers it, is common in them and in the metaphysicians, and is what the Empiricists argued is an error. In contrast, for the “spiritual” ones, they aren’t so concerned with certainty, but instead the sense of overwhelming significance about something, which is the core of its being “nouminous”, seems to be what they are after, and the tea that is more general than the cup that carries it. I look at nouminousness as something one would experience, and say “gosh, how weird it is to be a person, who has these kinds of affects”. The fact that I could just deliver it with a dose of DMT makes even clearer the smallness and arbitrariness of the fact that I could experience it. But the spiritual seem to want to experience it and conflate it with Reality (needs to be said in an awed and portentious voice, not mere “reality” like “I narrowed the error bars on our estimate for the mass of the electron by a factor of 2"). In that, they seem to me to insist that some arbitrary small artifact of happening to exist as a person is not that, but rather some bigger-than-the-biggest-thing-there-is-to-refer-to totality, with which _they identify_. That triggers my objection to people’s (seeming to me to be) puffing themselves up to an importance that I don’t think they have, and that I wish they didn’t want or assert. To write about this is different from writing about why one does or doesn’t get along with any particular person. To the extent that “the mystics” would assert that they can recognize each other and are “of a kind”, they inherit responses from the rest of us (the “others”) that sort of tar with a broad brush that draws on many experiences with many people. Eric
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