Lifting the Final Veil off Mysticism II

Having looked at what Horgan had to say in the introduction to his book, it would be interesting to find out what he has to say in his conclusion, entitled "The Awful Truth".

In this final chapter, Horgan describes his encounter with Huston Smith, a perennialist who has written extensively about various world religions ( The World's Religions 1991, Forgotten Truth 1992, Cleansing the Doors of Perception 2000, Why Religion Matters 2001). Smith thinks that all wisdom traditions proclaim that our consciousness is not just an epiphenomenon of our brain which extinguishes upon our death and is more enduring than material science implies and if he were forced to boil the perennial philosophy down to a single tenet, he would say that beyond our mundane material world lies an infinite transcendent realm, the infinite being "that outside of which it is impossible to fall." and that a mystical experience "makes the obtuse blockages to the infinite transparent.". Horgan disagreed, saying that some mystics insisted that they are not transported to some transcendent "beyond", but just see ordinary reality for what it really is. Smith agreed that before the practice of meditation, the world is what it appears to be and after the practice, the world still appears the same but added that the way we perceive that world is totally different: the mystical experience infuses our vision with awe, which, according to the German theologian Rudolf Otto, in his book The Idea of the Holy (1923)  "combines fear and fascination and...may be the the distinctive religious emotion". So mysticism is just "awe-struck perception of the infinite in the finite." Otto used the Latin words numen  ( power of either a deity or a spirit that is thought to be present in certain sacred places and objects. Literally it means "nodding", but has been used in the context of "command" or "divine majesty") and mysterium tremendum.( overwhelming or awe-inspiring mystery causing fear and trembling). Our encounter with the mysterium tremendum can strike us "chill and numb" and fill us with "an almost grisly horror and shuddering". Per Otto, "It is not anything we can possibly identify with, let alone become. It is not a deity, force, principle, spirit or ground of being--not a thing at all. It is 'wholly other', 'nothingness', the 'opposite of everything that is and can be thought'. It is absence, not presence." and Horgan adds, "religions do not reveal the mysterium tremendum but shield us from direct confrontation with it. "They are attempts ...to guess the riddle it propounds, and their effect is at the same time always to weaken and deaden the experience itself.... Theology often ends by constructing such a massive structure of theory and such a plausible fabric of interpretation, that the 'mystery' is frankly excluded". Horgan says that the infinite is the nothingness from which we came and to which we must return, whether we call it Yahweh, God, Allah, ground of being, Brahman, void or mysterium tremendum.

Horgan continues "Seeing life against the backdrop of infinity can evoke joy, madness, terror, revulsion, love, gratitude, hilarity--or all of the above at once. You may delight in the world's astonishing beauty or despair at its fragility and insignificance.....mystical awe is the inverse of knowledge; it is a kind of anti-knowledge. Instead of seeing The Answer to the riddle of existence, you see just how impenetrable the riddle is". He thinks that we are anti-mystical to the extent that we think that reality has been or can be explained by e.g. Hinduism, theosophy or gnosticism lite or superstring theory or any theory or theology. To the extent that they think their vision has revealed to them The Truth, The Answer, the secret of life or Ken Wilbur's trans-personal periodic table, the mystics can be anti-mystical because at the heart of things, is what Wilbur says" a staggering mystery....that facts alone can never begin to fulfill."   But our "compulsion" to seek to explain that mysterium tremendum is understandable because as Otto suggests, confronting the abyss of non-being can be terrifying: life is precarious and gratuitous: there is no need for us to exist. But "the flip side of mystical terror is joy: we should not be here and yet we are!" Heaven and hell are two sides of the same mystical vision.

Most of the mystical experts Horgan interviewed are mystified and awed by life. Steven Katz (ed. Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis 1978 ) says that "ultimate reality" by its very nature eludes us. James Austin (Chase, Chance and Creativity 1978, 2003) thinks that our existence is "beyond belief".  Stanislav Grof thinks that creation is "a mystery you cannot account for" and Terence McKenna thinks that gnosis can never capture the weirdness of the world. Everyone is agreed that there is an irreducible mystery at the heart of existence: perennial philosophy, postmodernism, negative theology, trans-personal psychology, neuro-theology, gnosticism, and neo-shamanism. So does science, he adds.

There are, nonetheless, many "convergences" between science and mysticism: cognitive psychology is said to "corroborate" the Buddhist doctrine that the self is an "illusion", the very process of the quantum measurement itself is supposed to "confirm" the mystical intuition that consciousness and human subjectivity is an intrinsic part of reality and quantum nonlocality, which Einstein once disparaged as "spooky action at a distance..clinches the mystics' perception of the interrelatedness or unity of all things". But Horgan thinks that each one of such corroborations reveals in its own way, the "miraculousness" of our life: "how staggeringly improbable we are: the fact that we exist"; the big bang theory might explain the changes in the structure of the universe after it happened but not why it happened in the first place; particle physics might suggest that empty space is seething with "virtual particles" which spring into existence for an instant and then vanish or that it is possible that the entire universe might have sprung into existence like a virtual particle but many physicists admit that they have no idea why there is something rather than nothing. Steven Weinberg ( Dreams of a Final Theory 1992 and Facing Up 2001) eg. says, "No one is certain what happened before the Big Bang or even if the question has any meaning.". Then there is the question of why the universe should adhere to those laws of nature and have the kind of physical "constants" which scientists have in fact found and which strangely all appear to converge to make the emergence of life possible. If the cosmos had been slightly more dense at the beginning, it would have quickly collapsed into a black hole and if it were "a smidgeon less dense", it would have blown apart so fast that there would have been no time for stars, galaxies and planets to form. Why should the universe be so "fine-tuned" for the emergence of life: this is the so-called "Goldilock dilemma" or the "anthropic principle." Although Richard Dawkins once declared that life is no longer a mystery because Darwin has solved it with his theory of evolution by natural selection , we still do not know why there should be life in the first place or whether it was just a "once-in-eternity fluke." Although some scientists suggest that life must be a ubiquitous phenomenon pervading the universe, the SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) which had been scanning the universe for radio signals from other civilizations since the early 1960s, has failed to find any such and space probes of other accessible planets have so far failed to find any signs of life in other planets and despite years of trial scientists have still been unable to create animate from inanimate matter in our laboratories. In Life Itself (1981), Francis Crick the discoverer of the double-helix, suggested that the seeds of life might have been planted on earth by an alien civilization. Stephen Jay Gould (Punctuated Equilibrium 2007) estimated that if the great experiment of life were re-run a million times over, the chances are that it would never again give rise to mammals, let alone mammals clever enough to invent negative theology and television. Susan Blackmore offers an explanation for human superstition and their tendency to believe in various gods: the average man is notoriously bad in judging probabilities. That may be why we are so prone to make too much of chance events, as evidenced by so many people falling for beliefs in ESP, clairvoyance, telekinesis and other "miracles". 

Horgan does not think that it is possible for science to answer the ultimate question of how something came from nothing. He repeats his conclusion in The End of Science that science's grand quest to uncover the basic rules governing reality might be reaching an impasse and remains shrouded in mystery. The astronomer Chet Raymo (Skeptics and True Believers 1998) has, however, given five compelling reasons why science instead of religion should form the basis of a new spirituality which he calls the "New Story":  1. science works. 2. it's universal and is true for all people at all times 3. it emphasizes the inter-connectedness of all people and all things. 4. it makes ourselves rather than some diety or transcendental force responsible for our own destiny and 5. it reveals the universe to be more vast, more complex and more beautiful than we ever imagined. But he also recognizes that there is no guarantee, as contrasted with conventional religions, that we shall somehow survive. He says, " We are contingent, ephemeral--animated stardust cast up on a random shore, a brief incandescence." What the "New Story" makes clear is that we are not immortal.
 
Huston Smith considers that science cannot assure us a "happy ending" and is thus inadequate as a basis for spirituality. But Horgan does not agree. He prefers Terence McKenna's( The Invisible Landscape 1975)  timewave and Freeman Dyson's (Infinite in All Directions 1988) principle of maximum diversity which to him offers "endless adventure rather than closure". Scientists are thinking of ways of making consciousness last forever through our own ingenuity, instead of through divine intervention. Dyson thinks that consciousness, in the form of clouds of charged particles rather than flesh and blood, might resist entropy and sustain itself forever in an eternally expanding universe through shrewd conservation of energy. To Horgan, this kind of speculation about ultimate end is merely "scientific theology" or theology in the garb of science. But at least it shows that "science can imagine futures at least as hopeful and open-ended as those of religion".

Horgan is undaunted. He thinks that although we can never solve the riddle of existence, we must not stop trying. However, he thinks that skepticism alone (and the cold hard facts of science) is for him a non-starter and "cannot serve as the basis for spirituality". He is grateful to Susan Blackmore for teaching him that Zen is a kind of "rubbish-removal system that cleanses the mind of extraneous beliefs (like parallel dimensions and universes, heavens and hells, gods and ghosts and demiurges and extraterrestrials) and emotions so that we can see reality for what it truly is." He argues, "Skepticism clears away cumbersome beliefs on an intellectual level, just as meditation (ideally) clears away beliefs, emotions, and thoughts on a more experiential level. Skepticism can help us achieve mystical de-automatization." But he has his own doubts about even skepticism. To him, "minimalist as it is, Zen clutters more than it clarifies my mind....Maybe skepticism, instead of cleansing our vision, just substitutes one type of trash for another. Instead of belief in reincarnation, angels, ESP, ET, parallel universes and the Oedipus complex, the skeptic crams his mind with disbelief in reincarnation, angels and so on." I think he is absolutely on target. In the same manner that John Donne says, "Death, thou shalt die", skepticism must finally turn its own fatal blade upon itself so that in the end, nothing remains, even skepticism. In the same manner that St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas think that sin has no reality since sin and evil is only the absence of good, skepticism is parasitic in that without belief, skepticism has nothing upon which it may act on. Horgan says, " The problem is that any truth or anti-truth, no matter how initially revelatory and awe-inspiring, sooner or later turns into garbage that occludes our vision of the living world. He cites the example of Ludwig Wittgenstein who, like the great Buddha, advises his followers to abandon the dharma once it has served its purpose and get on with the problem of actually living their lives in accordance with their new insight, also described his philosophy as a ladder that we should "throw away" after we climbed it.

In the end, Horgan advises us, to treat mystical insights, as we treat art. He says, " At its best, art--by which I mean poetry, literature, music, movies, painting, sculpture--works in this manner. Art, the lies that tells the truth, is intrinsically ironic. Like Ludwig  Wittgenstein's (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 1990) ladder, it helps us get to another level and then falls away. What better way to approach the mystical, the truth that cannot be told?". He sensibly suggests that all our modes of expression, including art, fall short of the mystical truth. But there is an advantage in speaking about the inexpressible, the ineffable, the intangible in the language of art because "unlike more literal modes of expression, art comes closer to uttering the unutterable by acknowledging its own insufficiency. It gives us not answers but questions". However, this does not mean that mystical insights cannot be expressed with other modes of knowledge like science, philosophy, theology etc. Only that we must take care to view "even the most fact laden mystical texts ironically when they turn to ultimate questions." Horgan suggests that we read the Upanishad, Genesis, Dionysius the Areopagite and neurotheolgoical suppositions of Andrew Newberg as we read Blake or Borges or Emily Dickinson. From this perspective, he says, even the "old stories of religion, can serve a purpose. Whether they postulate super intelligent clouds of gas, insectoid aliens in hyperspace, a Demiurge with multiple-personality disorder or a loving God who for inscrutable reasons make us suffer, well-told ghost stories can remind us of the unfathomable mystery at the heart of things. Our creation myths and eschatologies, our imaginings of ultimate beginnings and ends, can also help us discover our deepest fears and desires." He falls back to that witty sage of the Enlightenment Voltaire who said: " It is truly extravagant to define God, angels and minds, and to know precisely why God defined the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one."