21 Feb ’15 ~QofDay~ Classify Mysticism
Is mysticism rational, anti rational, irrational, or super-rational?
The opposition of reason and mysticism seems illusory to me, in the sense that both interpretations seem to me to make assumptions that are not supported by the observation sets I have.
To me, it is clear that our brains have intuitive mechanisms that allow us to make distinctions and abstractions that were not previously present (our mystical side). In one sense, these things come from something much bigger than us (something god like) and in another sense, it seems clear to me that they come from undistinguished possibility space (like number gives us the possibility of the infinite set of numbers, so we can create any number, and it is relatively easy to write out some specific number that has never been written before).
This ability can be applied to any domain, including the domain of all possible domains.
All such infinite possibility domains are beyond reason in one sense, yet reasonable in another sense. The discovery of new domains is always a mystical experience in a very real sense, and they can always be justified in a rational fashion after the fact.
It is clear to me that all discovery includes some aspects of the mystical, the use of intuition, to deliver something truly novel, which is then explored using the tools of reason to explore the relationship of the possibility to the datasets available (or to design some new experiment to create a dataset that enables one to distinguish between competing explanatory frameworks).
So to me, the “mystical” is simply one aspect of what it is to be human – a completely essential part of the package of being able to create and use language, even if many of those still mired within simple binary distinctions don’t yet see it that way, it is, to me, obvious beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt. It is part of what I love about aspects of the philosophies of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Descartes, and I see clear faults in each of those philosophies as a whole.
So I can see a clear distinction between the mechanisms of reason and mysticism, and I can also see that both mechanisms are essential to being human. Either one without the other is crippled in a very real sense, and there is certainly an infinite spectrum of possible mixes between them that form an aspect of what it is to be any specific human being.
