Hi Patrick; thanks for your response – to deal with the charge of vagueness, I’ll get straight down to it.
The human being is fundamentally an experiential capacity with an intellect attached. Experiencing, whether physical or mental (ie imaginative, psychological) is more or less open-ended in the sense that its creative combinations can go on indefinitely. The intellect – that capacity which permits us both to witness experiencing as well as assess its value (to the witnessing subject) – is crucial and primordial in the sense that without its participation in the process of experiencing, experiencing itself is not possible.
The denigration of the intellect – inherent in New Age, and dominant from the start – comes about through a misidentification of its extensive potentiality with some of its more trivial features such as ‘overthinking’, repetitive thinking, its ability to confuse, and its ability to present unwanted alternatives. Argumentative ‘clever-dickery’ is also seen by spiritual teachers as a decisive reason to disparage intellectual activity.
The essential problem of human existence is that the intellect (the mind’s eye) – except insofar as it is employed for calculation, decision-making, categorising and other life-based pursuits– is unknown to itself – at least, as far as the experiencing human is concerned. Systematic metaphysical exploration and reflecting thinking can (relatively quickly) demonstrate to the experiencing subject the presiding role of the intellect in absolutely everything, yet while failing to illuminate it on its own terms. If and when it does illuminate itself on its own terms (ie to its furthest extent), ‘enlightenment’ occurs, as nothing else remains to be illumined.
None of the above has anything to do with trying to find ways to maximise human experiencing in any particular direction, whether becoming saintly, merging with the divine, or saving the world. Once one has seen clearly that experiencing itself is open-ended, and always functions according to absurdly simple binary principles (good or bad, pleasurable or painful, infinite or limited, divine or mundane, etc etc) there is no point, as the ‘stone in the shoe’ is not unpleasant subjective experiencing, but an ‘unknowing’ of the essential nature of the capacity to know. The mind’s eye illumines experience, but not itself.
How then to get the mind’s eye to shed light on itself ? Not by any known spiritual, religious or mystical practice. Refining or modifying experiencing has nothing to do with it, and is therefore wholly misdirected.
This does not mean that progressive metaphysical insight and exploration is not possible, merely that our intellectual capacities can only take us to the factual evidence, and no further. The capacity for apprehending/comprehending/understanding the metaphysics of our existence is something which evolves over time, and incorporates objective experiencing, intuition and the steady elimination of clearly unviable alternatives.
Could this be ‘wrong’ ? Deluded ? Self-justifying ? No, because this doesn’t involve the aggrandisement of any particular ‘self’, in any conceivable self-aggrandising context.
Strangely enough, there is an amazingly simple – and irrefutable – test anyone can put all this to: merely conjure up, by any means necessary, the most profound, cosmic, divine, inexpressible, etc experience possible, immerse yourself in it for however long you want, and then ask your intellect if that’s all there is. It will answer no. To paraphrase Samuel Beckett ‘God gets boring after a while.’
