Michael Nugent tries to grasp and challenge the meaning of the mystical words of Swami Purnananda as the latter explains something or other about his beliefs.
I’ve always been fascinated by how well artists capture moving water. I remember visiting Niagara Falls, and I tried to pick out and follow a pattern in the flow of water as it went over the edge – no sooner had I selected one fast moving ripple to examine its form and it was gone, and the water just kept on coming. Swami Purnananda’s meaningless words just keep on coming, and Michael Nugent has barely a moment to grasp each one and impart some sense onto it.
Swami Purnananda, “I frame in poetic language admittedly”
And there lies the problem of the whole of religious mysticism.
If you keep telling yourself this stuff enough the brain comes to believe it. The brain builds a contextually consistent and eventually familiar conceptual framework where all this stuff ties together and forms some ‘holistic’ explanation that has ephemeral ties to the real word through a careful selection of words – and it helps here if the words are vague or of multiple meanings so they are protected from literal evidential analysis. The whole system can then stand alone, in the brain, detached from empirical scrutiny.
I guess that’s why it takes so long to become a mystic or a priest. Until the brain is thoroughly programmed in this poetic language the brain’s owner is a struggling novice.
In a way I think it’s very much like learning some difficult scientific or mathematical concept. I know from experience that I’ve struggled to really ‘get it’ some times. Evolution, thermodynamics – there are many topics which can seem difficult to grasp until you have many of the bits pinned down, then it all clicks and you get it. I can see why those without a lot of background can find evolution and thermodynamics and other scientific ideas so incredible, and why they look for other explanations.
The scientific conceptual systems succeed or fail on the extent to which they stand up to the empirical challenge. Not so religion.
It doesn’t seem to matter to many people that the religious mystical stuff isn’t grounded in empirical evidence, or that it doesn’t actually work at doing anything – outside all the psychological benefits they find in their communities of common belief. Of course they have to ignore as much as possible how easily such unsupported beliefs can lead to atrocities in the real world; and where they can they blame those outcomes on something else. Many must be finding that deflection tough to sustain in the face of the proclaimed faith of ISIS – though even some atheists still try valiantly to excuse religious belief of being open to any interpretation at all.
Deepities indeed, as was pointed out in an early comment on Michael Nugent’s blog.
Ramblings 