Mysticism – Page 5 – Maverick Philosopher

Was Moses High on Mount Sinai? If Yes, What Follows?

Benny Shanon is quoted by The Guardian as saying:

     As far as Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a
     supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend,
     which I don't believe either. Or finally, and this is very
     probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under
     the effect of narcotics.

and

     The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of
     Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the
     imaginings of a people in an altered state of awareness . . . In
     advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is
     accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings.

These speculations of Professor Shanon raise some interesting questions. I take Shanon to be saying that Moses on Sinai (i) really did have an unusual experience, and that therefore there is nothing legendary about the report in Exodus of this experience, but that (ii) this experience was not supernaturally caused, but caused by Moses' ingestion of a psychotropic drug, and that the etiology of the experience shows that the experience was nonveridical. Thus God did not reveal the Torah to Moses on Sinai; Moses had a drug-induced nonveridical experience of God revealing the Torah to him.

Question One

One question concerns the validity of the inference from

1. Subject S under the influence of drug D experiences that p

2. S's experience that p is nonveridical.

Simply put, the question is whether one can validly infer the nonveridicality of an experience if the experience was had while the subject of the experience was under the influence of a drug.

Surely this is a non sequitur. Right now, under the influence of caffeine, I note that my coffee cup is empty. This is consistent with the perceptual experience of the cup's being empty being veridical, which it is. So from the mere fact that a subject is 'on drugs,' it does not follow that that any of the subject's experiences are nonveridical. Now caffeine is a very mild drug. But suppose I was I was on a combination of caffeine, nicotine, marijuana, and methampehtamine. Even then one could not infer that the perception in question was nonveridical. Even on a dose of LSD-25 most of one's perceptual experiences remain veridical. In the case of Moses, from the fact, if it is a fact, that he was under the influence of a psychotropic drug while on Sinai, it does not follow that his experience of being addressed by God and being given the Decalogue was nonveridical.

(And anyway, aren't we always on 'drugs'? The consciousness we enjoy in this life is brain-mediated, and the brain is the site of innumerable electro-chemical reactions. In this life at least, 'No consciousness without chemistry.' Our brains are always 'on drugs.' But we don't take this fact as ruling out veridical perceptions, valid reasonings, true judgments, correct moral intuitions, etc.)

Returning to the case at hand, if you begin by assuming that there is no God, then it is plausible to explain the Sinai experience by saying that it was drug-induced. But that simply begs the question against the theist.

The crucial point is that a subject's being on drugs is logically consistent with the veridicality of his experiences; therefore, one cannot infer from the fact, if it is a fact, that Moses was under the influence of a psychedelic or psychotropic drug that his experience was nonveridical. And that holds true for anyone's mystical or religious experience.

If, however, there were independent reasons for believing that a certain experience was nonveridical, then one could explain the occurrence of the experience in terms of the influence of the drug. But the occurrence/nonoccurrence of an experience is not to be confused with the veridicality/nonveridicality of the content of an experience. So questions about how an experience arose, whether by normal or abnormal means, are distinct from questions about the content of the experience. To fail to observe this distinction may lead one to commit the Genetic Fallacy. It is so-called to highlight the fact that questions about origin or genesis are logically independent of questions about truth and falsehood. If it has been antecedently established that the content of an experience is nonveridical, then it is legitimate to inquire into the origins of the experience. But one cannot demonstrate that the content of the experience is nonveridical by adducing facts about its origin.

So even if Shanon could prove that Moses and the people around him were under the influence of powerful drugs, that would not support his contention that nothing supernatural occurred on Sinai. It would not because it is consistent with theism. How does Shanon know that the drugs Moses supposedly took did not open "the doors of perception" (in Aldous Huxley's phrase) allowing him access to the transcendent, as opposed to shutting him up among figments of his own imagination?

Question Two

There is a second question whose full discussion should be reserved for a subsequent post. It is clear that mathematical and other truths can be grasped whether one is awake or dreaming, sober or drunk, on drugs or not. Sometimes when I dream I know that I am dreaming. This awareness that I am dreaming is veridical despite the fact that I have it while dreaming. After all, I am not dreaming that I am dreaming. Or if a valid proof occurs to a mathematician in a dream, it is no less valid because the mathematician is dreaming. Why should not the same hold for moral truths? If it is true that it is morally obligatory not to kill human beings, then the experiencing of this truth is veridical whether or not the subject is awake or sleeping, sober or drunk, on drugs or not. So even if it could be proven that Moses was under the influence of powerful drugs on Sinai, what relevance would that have? At the very most it might cast doubt on the veridicality of Moses' perception of God, but not on the veridicality of his experiencing of the content of the Decalogue. If it is true that one ought not kill, then it is true whether or not God exists. And if it is true that one ought not kill, then one's intuiting that it is true is veridical whether one is awake of dreaming, sober or drunk, on drugs or not, or a brain in a vat as opposed to a brain in a skull.

Suppose that all of Moses' perceptions of unusual physical phenomena while he was on Mt. Sinai were hallucinatory and thus nonveridical as the result of his ingestion of a drug. Suppose there was no burning bush, etc. It could still have been the case that he had veridical insights into objective moral truths.

Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism, and Wisdom

Dennis E. Bradford sent me three comments via e-mail on my recent Butchvarov post. I omit the first and the third which are more technical in nature, and which I may address in later posts. Bradford writes,

Second, and this separates me from Butch, Larry [Blackman], and you, I reject your assumption concerning the narrowness of philosophy. You mention a conceptual impasse that is “insoluble on the plane of the discursive intellect, which of course is where philosophy must operate.” I object to the “of course.” To be a philosopher is to be a lover of wisdom and who says that our only access to wisdom is via the discursive intellect? In fact, I deny that. As far as I can tell, the Buddha was the greatest philosopher and the wisest human who ever lived, and his view was that limiting our examination only to the domain of the discursive intellect prevents one from becoming wise.

Actually, I don't disagree with this comment. It is a matter of terminology, of how we should use the word 'philosophy.' For me there are at least four ways to the Absolute, philosophy, religion, mysticism, and morality. This post provides rough sketches of how I view the first three. I end by suggesting that the pursuit of wisdom involves all three 'postures.' (Compare the physical postures in the three pictures below.)

Philosophy

Philosophy is not fundamentally a set of views but an activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need to know the truth, applies discursive reason to the data of life in an attempt to arrive at the ultimate truth about them. Discursive reason is reason insofar as it articulates itself in concepts, judgments, arguments, and systems of argument. As the etymology of the term suggests (L. currere, to run), discursive reason is roundabout rather than direct — as intuitive reason would be if there is such a thing. Discursive reason gets at its object indirectly via concepts, judgments, and arguments. This feature of discursive reason makes for objectivity and communicability; but it exacts a price, and the price must be paid in the coin of loss of concreteness. Thus the oft-heard complaint about the abstractness of philosophy is not entirely without merit.

Note that I define philosophy in terms of the activity of discursive reason: any route to the truth that does not make use of this ‘faculty’ is simply not philosophy. You may take this as a stipulation if you like, but it is of course more than this, grounded as it is in historical facts. if you want to know what philosophy is, read Plato. As Ralph Waldo Emerson says somewhere, "Philosophy is Plato, and Plato philosophy." (I quote from memory!) And there is this from Keith's blog.

The nearest thing to a safe definition of the word "philosophy", if we wish to include all that has been and will be correctly so called, is that it means the activity of Plato in his dialogues and every activity that has arisen or will arise out of that.

(Richard Robinson, "Is Psychical Research Relevant to Philosophy?" The Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 24 [1950]: 189-206, at 192.)

This is in line with my masthead motto which alludes to the famous observation of Alfred North Whitehead:

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)

Discursivity, then, is essential to philosophy as a matter of definition, a definition that is not merely stipulative but grounded in a possibility of our nature that was best realized in Plato and what he gave rise to.

Thus Jesus of Nazareth was not a philosopher, pace George Bush. If you insist that he was, then I will challenge you to show me the arguments whereby he established such dicta as "I and the Father are one," etc. I will demand the premises whence he arrived at this ‘conclusion.’ Argument and counterargument before the tribunal of reason are the sine qua non of philosophy, its veritable lifeblood. The truth is that Jesus gave no arguments, made no conjectures, refuted no competing theories. There is no dialectic in the Gospels such as we find in the Platonic dialogues. This is not an objection to Jesus’ life and message, but simply an underscoring of the fact that he was not a philosopher. (But I have a nagging sense that Dallas Willard says something to the contrary somewhere.) Believing himself to be one with the Father, Jesus of course believed himself to be one with the ultimate truth. Clearly, no such person is a mere philo-sopher, etymologically, a lover of wisdom; he is rather (one who makes a claim to being) a possessor of it. The love of the philosopher, as Plato’s Symposium made clear, is erothetic love, a love predicated on lack; it is not agapic love, love predicated on plenitude. The philosopher is an indigent fellow, grubbing his way forward bit by bit as best he can, by applying discursive reason to the data of experience. God is no philosopher, thank God!

Agreeing with Bradford that a philosopher is a lover of wisdom, I yet insist that he is a lover and pursuer of wisdom by dialectical means, assuming we are going to use 'philosopher' strictly. This use of terms does not rule out other routes to wisdom, routes that may prove more efficacious.

Indeed, since philosophy examines everything, including itself (its goals, its methods, its claim to cognitivity), philosophy must also examine whether it is perhaps an inferior route to truth or no route to truth at all!

Religion

Religion (from L. religere, to bind) is not fundamentally a collection of rites, rituals, and dogmas, but an activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need to live in the truth, as opposed to know it objectively in propositional guise, seeks to establish a personal bond with the Absolute. Whereas philosophy operates with concepts, judgments, arguments and theories, religion proceeds by way of faith, trust, devotion, and love. It is bhaktic rather than jnanic, devotional rather than discriminative. The philosophical project, predicated on the autonomy of reason, is one of relentless and thus endless inquiry in which nothing is immune from examination before the reason’s bench. But the engine of inquiry is doubt, which sets philosophy at odds with religion with its appeal to revealed truth. If the occupational hazard of the philospher is a life-inhibiting scepticism, the corresponding hazard for the religionist is a dogmatic certainty that can easily turn murderous. For a relatively recent example, consider the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. (This is why such zealots of the New Atheism as Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Grayling, et al. are not completely mistaken.)

The philosopher objects to the religionist: "You believe things for which you have no proof!" The religionist replies to the philosopher: "You sew without a knot in your thread!" I am not engaging in Zen mondo, but alluding to Kierkegaard’s point that to philosophize without dogma is like sewing without a knot in one’s thread. The philosopher will of course reply that to philosophize with dogma is not to philosophize at all. Here we glimpse one form of the conflict beween philosophy and religion as routes to the Absolute. If the philosopher fails to attain the Absolute because discursive reason dissolves in scepticism, the religionist often attains what can only be called a pseudo-Absolute, an idol.

The reader must of course take these schematic remarks cum grano salis. It would be simple-minded to think that cold impersonal reason (philosophy) stands in simple and stark confrontation to warm personal love (religion). For philosophy is itself a form of love –- erothetic love – of the Absolute, and without the inspiring fervor of this longing love, the philosopher would not submit himself to the rigorous logical discipline, the mental asceticism, without which serious philosophy is impossible. (I speak of real philosophers, of course, and not mere paid professors of it.) Good philosophy is necessarily technical, often mind-numbingly so. (The reader may verify that the converse of this proposition does not hold.) Only a lover of truth will put up with what Hegel called die Anstrengung des Begriffs, the exertion of the concept. On the other hand, religious sentiments and practices occur in a context of beliefs that are formulated and defended in rational terms, including those beliefs that cannot be known by unaided reason but are vouchsafed to us by revelation. So in pursuit of taxonomy we must not fall into crude compartmentalization. The philosopher has his devotions and the religionist has his reasonings.

Mysticism

Turning now to mysticism, we may define it as the activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need for direct contact with the Absolute, disgusted with verbiage and abstraction as well as with mere belief and empty rites and rituals, seeks to know the Absolute immediately, which is to say, neither philosophically through the mediation of concepts, judgments and arguments, nor religiously through the mediation of faith, trust, devotion, and adherence to tradition. The mystic does not want to know about the Absolute, that it exists, what its properties are, how it is related to the relative plane, etc.; nor does he want merely to believe or trust in it. He does not want knowledge by description, but knowledge by acquaintance. Nor is he willing, like the religionist, to postpone his enjoyment of it. He wants it, he wants it whole, and he wants it now. He wants to verify its existence for himself here and now in the most direct way possible: by intuiting it. ‘Intuition’ is a terminus technicus: it refers to direct cognitive access to an object or state of affairs. You should think of the the Latin intuitus as used by Descartes, and the German Anschauung as used by Kant. The intuition in question is of course not sensible but intellectual. Thus the mystical ‘faculty’ is that of intellectual intuition. The possibility of intellektuelle Anschauung was of course famously denied by Kant.

Wisdom

The ultimate goal for a human being is wisdom which could be characterized as knowledge of, and participation in, the saving truth. One who attains this goal is a sage. No philosopher is a sage, by definition. For a philosopher, as a lover (seeker) of wisdom, is not a possessor of it. One does not seek what one possesses. The philosopher's love is eros, love predicated on lack. At most, the philosopher is a would-be sage, one for whom philosophy (as characterized above) is a means to the end of becoming a sage. If a philosopher attains the Goal, then he ceases to be a philosopher. If a philosopher gets a Glimpse of the Goal, in that moment he ceases to be a philosopher, but then, after having lost the Glimpse (which is what usually happens) he is back to being as philosopher again.

At this point a difficult question arises. Is philosophy a means to sagehood, or a distraction from it? I grant that the ultimate Goal cannot be located on the discursive plane. What one ultimately wants is not an empty conceptual knowledge but a fulfilled knowledge. Some say that when a philosopher seeks God, he attains only a 'God of the philosophers,' an abstraction. (See my Pascal and Buber on the God of the Philosophers.) The kernel of truth in this is that discursive operations typically do not bring one beyond the plane of discursivity. One thought leads to another, and another, and another . . . and never to the Thinker 'behind' them or the divine Other.

And so one might decide that philosophy is useless — "not worth an hour's trouble" as Pascal once said — and that one ought either to follow the path of religion or that of mysticism. That is not my view, for reasons I will need a separate post to explain.

For now I will say only this. Philosophy is not enough. It needs supplementation by the other paths mentioned. Analogy. You go to a restaurant to eat, not to study the menu. But reading the menu is a means to the end of ordering and enjoying the meal. Philosophy is like reading the menu; eating is like attaining the Goal.

But it is also the case that religion and mysticism require the discipline of philosophy. There is a lot to be said on these topics, and it will be the philosopher who will do the saying. The integration of the faculties falls to philosophy, and an integrated life is what we aspire to, is it not? We seek to avoid the onesidedness of the philosopher, but also the onesidedness of the mystic, of the religionist, of the moralist, not to mention the onesidedness of the moneygrubber, the physical fitness fanatic, etc.

Buber on Buddhism and Other Forms of Mysticism

Robert Gray e-mails:

Dear Bill,

I am appreciating Kerouac month. Here is something on Buddhism in Buber's I and Thou that may be of use.

Nor does he [Buddha] lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. His inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You . . . . All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of human spirit bent back into itself — the delusion that spirit occurs in man. In truth it occurs from man – between man and what he is not. As the spirit bent back into itself renounces this sense, this sense of relation, he must draw into man that which is not man, he must psychologize world and God. This is the psychical delusion of the spirit. ( pp.140-141 / part 3 : Tr.Kaufmann, Ed: T&T Clark Edinburgh 1970)

Thank you for reminding me of these Buber passages which I had planned eventually to discuss. The context of the above quotations is a section of I and Thou that runs from pp. 131 to 143. Here are some quickly composed thoughts on this stretch of text.

In this section Buber offers a critique of Buddhism, Hinduism and other forms of mysticism (including Christian forms such as the one we find in Meister Eckhart) which relativize the I-Thou relation between man and God by re-ducing it (leading it back) to a primordial unity logically and ontologically prior to the terms of the relation. According to these traditions, this primordial unity can be experienced directly in Versenkung, which Kaufmann translates, not incorrectly, as 'immersion,' but which I think is better rendered as 'meditation.' As the German word suggests, one sinks down into the depths of the self and comes to the realization that, at bottom, there is no self or ego (Buddhism with its doctrine of anatta or anatman) or else that there is a Self, but that it is the eternal Atman ( = Brahman) of Hinduism, "the One that thinks and is." (131)

Either way duality is overcome and seen to be not ultimately real. Buber rejects this because the I-Thou relation presupposes the ultimate ineliminability of duality, not only the man-God duality but also the duality of world and God. Mysticism "annuls relationship" (132) psychologizing both world and God. (141). Verseelen is the word Kaufmann translates as 'psychologize.' A more suggestive translation might be 'soulifies.' Mysticism drags both God and the world into the soul where they are supposedly to be found in their ultimate reality by meditation. But spirit is not in man, Buber thinks, but between man and what is not man. Spirit is thus actualized in the relation of man to man, man to world, man to God.

At this point I would put a question to Buber. If spirit subsists only in relation, ought we conclude that God needs man to be a spiritual being in the same way that finite persons need each other to be spiritual beings? Is God dependent on man to be who he is? If yes, then the aseity of God is compromised. A Christian could say that the divine personhood subsists in intradivine relations, relations among and between the persons of the Trinity. But as far as I know Trinitarian thought is foreign to Judaism. Anyway, that is a question that occurs to me.

The "primal actuality of dialogue" (133) requires Two irreducible one to the other. It is not a relation internal to the self.

Buber is not opposed to Versenkung as a preliminary and indeed a prerequisite for encounter with the transcendent Other. Meditative Versenkung leads to inner concentration, interior unification, recollectedness. But this samadhi (which I think is etymologically related to the German sammeln) is not to be enjoyed for its own sake, but is properly preparatory for the encounter with the transcendent Other. "Concentrated into a unity, a human being can proceed to his encounter — wholly successful only now — with mystery and perfection. But he can also savor the bliss of his unity and, without incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction." (134)

Buber's point is that the mystic who, treading the inward path, arrives at the unitary ground of his soul and experiences sat-chit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss) shirks his supreme duty if he merely enjoys this state and then returns to the world of multiplicity and diremption. The soulic unity must be used for the sake of the encounter with God.

Buber seems to be maintaining that Buddhist and other mysticism is an escape into illusion, an escape into a mere annihilation of dual awareness for the sake of an illusory nondual awareness: "insofar as this doctrine contains directions for immersion in true being, it does not lead into lived actuality but into 'annihilation' in which there is no consciousness, from which no memory survives — and the man who has emerged from it may profess the experience by using the limit-word of non-duality, but without any right to proclaim this as unity." (136)

Buber continues, "We, however, are resolved to tend with holy care the holy treasure of our actuality that has been given us for this life and perhaps for no other life that might be closer to the truth." (136-7, emphasis added)

This prompts me to put a second question to Buber. If there is no other life, no higher life, whether accessible in this life via Versenkung or after the death of the body, and we are stuck with this miserable crapstorm of a life, then what good is God? What work does he do if he doesn't secure our redemption and our continuance beyond death? This is what puzzles me about Judaism. It is a worldly religion, a religion for this life — which is almost a contradiction in terms. It offers no final solution as do the admittedly life-denying religions of Buddhism and Christianity. Some will praise it for that very reason: it is not life-denying but life -affirming. Jews love life, this life here and now, and they don't seem too concerned about any afterlife. But then they don't have the sort of soteriological interest that is definitive of religion. "On whose definition?" you will object. And you will have a point.

When I think of the vibrant bond between Sal and Dean, I am reminded of Buber's I-You .
Kerouac's restless spirit sought always to renew the I-You in Neal and in life; Both became submerged in I-It. (Minding the final paragraphs of On the Road)

Well, both Kerouac and Cassady were brought up Catholic and so were steeped in the ultimate duality of man and God; but both occupied themselves with mysticism with its dissolution of the ultimacy of I-Thou. And so perhaps we can say that the spiritual lives of both involved an oscillation between I-Thou and I-It.

Hitchens on Mother Teresa’s Dark Night of the Soul

In some measure one must admire that professional contrarian, Christopher Hitchens, whose mind is incandescent in its brilliance, and whose speech is preternatural in its articulateness, and who has the audacity to go after anyone, including Mother Teresa. In a piece in Newsweek he comments on her Dark Night of the Soul.

But what are his qualifications for such commentary?

Hitchens, like the other members of the 'Dawkins Gang' as I like to call them, does not have a religious bone in his body. He simply does not understand religion, and has no sympathy for it, so much so that he must dismiss it as nonsense.

Lack of religious sensibility is like lack of aesthetic sensibility. There are people who lack entirely any feel for poetry and music. They lack the 'spiritual organ' to appreciate them, and so their comments on them are of little interest except as indicative of the critics' own limitations. Others are bereft of philosophical sensibility. I have met mathematicians and scientists who have zero philosophical aptitude and sense and for whom philosophy cannot be anything other than empty verbiage. These people do not lack intelligence, they lack a certain 'spiritual organ,' a certain depth of personality. And of course there are those with no inkling of the austere beauty of mathematics and logic and (let's not leave out) chess. To speak of their beauty to such people would be a waste of time. They lack the requisite appreciative organs.

Hitchens, who remains a man of the Left in his total lack of understanding of religion, doesn't seem to appreciate that Teresa was a mystic and that her dark night of the soul was not a crisis of faith, where faith is construed as intellectual assent to certain dogmas, but an experiencing of the divine withdrawal, an experiencing of God as deus absconditus. A believing non-mystic might lose his faith after applying his reason to his religion's dogmatic content and then finding it impossible rationally to accept. Although I haven't read Teresa's letters, I suspect that this is not what happened in her case. After the fullness of her mystical experience, she experienced desolation when the mystical experiences subsided. So, contra Hitchens, it was not a realization of the "crushing unreasonableness" of Roman Catholic dogma that triggered Teresa's dark night, but her experience of the divine absence, an absence that is an expression of the divine transcendence.

I suggest that an atheist like Hitchens, for whom theism is simply not a live existential option, cannot understand the spititual life of a person like Mother Teresa. He can understand it only by caricaturing
it.

And the same goes for the whole gang (Dawkins,Dennett, Hitchens, Harris.)

Incarnation: A Mystical Approach?

I have been, and will continue, discussing Trinity and Incarnation objectively, that is, in an objectifying manner. Now what do I mean by that? Well, with respect to the Trinity, the central conundrum, to put it in a very crude and quick way is this: How can three things be one thing? With respect to the Incarnation, how can the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal and impassible Logos, be identical to a particular mortal man? These puzzles get us thinking about identity and difference and set us hunting for analogies and models from the domain of ordinary experience. We seek intelligibility by an objective route. We ought to consider that this objectifying approach might be wrongheaded and that we ought to examine a mystical and subjective approach, a 'Platonic' approach as opposed to an 'Aristotelian' one. See my earlier quotation of Heinrich Heine.

1. The essence of Christianity is contained in the distinct but related doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Josef Pieper (Belief and Faith, p. 103) cites the following passages from the doctor angelicus: Duo nobis credenda proponuntur: scil. occultum Divinitatis . . . et mysterium humanitatis Christi. II, II, 1, 8. Fides nostra in duobus principaliter consistit: primo quidem in vera Dei cognitione . . . ; secundo in mysterio incarnationis Christi. II, II, 174, 6.

Continue reading “Incarnation: A Mystical Approach?”

How to Become Wealthy Overnight

John Blofeld, Beyond the Gods: Buddhist and Taoist Mysticism (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974), p. 153:

For the sake of wealth, people already well above the poverty line slave all their lives, not realising that withdrawal from the rat-race would immediately increase rather than diminish their wealth. Obviously anyone who finds the full satisfaction of all his material desires well within his means can be said to be wealthy; it follows that, except by the truly poor, wealth can be achieved overnight by a change of mental attitude that will set bounds to desires. As Laotzu put it, "He who is contented always has enough."

Joubert on Mystical Experience

From The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, p. 29, tr. Paul Auster:

Forgetfulness of all earthly things, desire for heavenly things, immunity from all intensity and all disquiet, from all cares and all worries, from all trouble and all effort, the plenitude of work without agitation. The delights of feeling without the work of thought. The ravishments of ecstasy without medication. In a word, the happiness of pure spirituality in the heart of the world and amidst the tumult of the senses. It is no more than the gladness of an hour, a minute, an instant. But this instant, this minute of piety spreads its sweetness over our months and our years.

So excellent and accurate is this description of the mystical experience that I cannot doubt that the above entry records an actual experience of Joubert's.

François Fénelon

François Fénelon the Christian sounds like a Buddhist when he speaks of the annihilation of the soul in God:

Nothing would give us more delight than that God should do all his pleasure with us, provided it should always be to magnify and perfect us in our own eyes. But if we are not willing to be destroyed and annihilated, we shall never become that whole burnt offering, which is entirely consumed in the blaze of God's love.

We desire to enter into a state of pure faith, and retain our own wisdom! To be a babe, and great in our own eyes! Ah! what a sad delusion!

I am attracted by the thesis of the esoteric (transcendent) unity of all religions, a thesis argued by Frithjof Schuon. Beyond divergence of doctrine, unity. But I am also skeptical of the unity thesis. If Islam affirms the radical unicity of God, and Christianity denies it by affirming the tri-unity of God, what is the synthesis in which this thesis and that antithesis are aufgehoben? And so on down the line. How reconcile The Buddhist anatman doctrine with Christian personalism?

The Inconceivable

It is arguable that all religions and salvation-paths point to the Inconceivable and terminate in it if terminus they have. The Nibbana of the Pali Buddhists. The ontologically simple God of Thomas Aquinas. A theory of the Inconceivable would have to show that it is rationally admissible that there be something that cannot be grasped rationally. The theory would not be a grasping, but a pointing to the possibility of the Ungraspable. It would include a discursive refutation of all attempts at foreclosing on this possibility. The theory would deploy itself on the discursive plane, but the purpose of it would be to point one beyond the discursive plane, to make a place, as it were, for the possibility of the Transdiscursive.

But such a philosophical project is self-contradictory. If you say that the Inconceivable is possibly existent, then you exclude its necessary nonexistence. You make a determinate predication of the Inconceivable and therefore think it, conceive it, as having the property predicated. But then you fall into contradiction by affirming something of that of which nothing can be affirmed. There is no transcending the duality of thought if you are to think at all. A 'theory' that consists of a pointing to the Transdiscursive must needs be gibberish. The Real is exhausted by the discursively graspable. Outside it, nothing.

Is this a good objection or not?