What part does mysticism play in developing our sense of what’s real? 

Today’s Post

   Last week we moved into the terrain of ‘mysticism’, seeing it from the perspective of religion but recognizing its presence in the human ability to gain better understanding of the reality in which we live.

This week, we’ll look more closely at the part that ‘secular mysticism’ plays in this process.

Human ‘Sense Making’

As we have suggested several times, Science and Religion are simply two of humanity’s principal ways of making sense of what we see around us so that we can become more adept at dealing with it.  Evidently, humans require confidence in the way they live their lives in order to be able to survive, and for millennia they derived this confidence from the belief that somehow reality was intelligible and somehow they could come to understand it well enough to thrive in it.  As humans became more proficient in the process of supplementing this intuitive approach to reality with physical and intellectual tools that increasingly became more empirical, the concepts and beliefs of the past could begin to become objectively understood, and hence more rooted in the objective nature of the reality which surrounded them.

The process of perfecting the mind’s grasp of what the eyes see is a perennial subject for philosophy, Science and Religion.  All three recognize that no matter how ‘correctly’ we grasp reality, there is always a facet of objective reality that is still beyond our gaze.  We cannot escape the reality that our brains are locked securely within the ‘pitch black bony vault’ of our skulls, dependent on a long trail of sensory and neurological processes before conscious awareness can begin.  And such awareness is simply the first step in an even less understood process involving such things as memory of prior experiences, emotional states and objective knowledge gained from our learning experiences.

The myriad and labyrinthine nature of this path from objective reality through sensory processes through mental gymnastics to truth as a more correct repackaging of reality in our brains has led many to suggest that whatever we think we know, we don’t.  This suggestion resembles that of Richard Feynman, ‘the father of quantum theory’, when he asserts that “Those who claim to understand quantum theory, don’t”.  While such dystopian perspectives are not without their nuggets of truth, the more realistic conclusion, based on the human’s success in evolution thus far, is that good enough can suffice as today’s step to tomorrow’s better.

Imagination and The Flow of Awareness

Consider for a moment what happens when we go through the process of ‘seeing’.  The electromagnetic energy that enters our eyes through the lens is projected onto the retina in the form of a multispectral waveform.  This energy is transmitted along the optic nerve to the receptor neurons in the brain.  Somehow, by a process not clearly understood, the neurons in the brain precipitate this signal into distinct images (or concepts of images) which correspond to what our brains have been taught about images of the real world.

If all this is true, and understanding the pathways from objective reality to grasping the truth about it is the key to ‘making sense of things’, where does mysticism come in?  A clue to the answer is in the concept of ‘imagination’.

It is common to contrast ‘imagining’ and ‘seeing’, as if they refer to two completely different mental processes.  In contrast to this simplistic duality, modern science is finding that the flow of awareness from that outside the eye to that finally grasped by the mind is quite complex.  Anil Seth, neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, puts it this way:

“Perceptions come from the inside out just as much, if not more, than from the outside in.”

   From this point of view, we can begin to understand how objective reality is represented in our consciousness as subjective reality.  To some extent, we create our own reality.  At the extreme end of the spectrum, our subjective reality is understood to be so completely disconnected from objective reality that we cease to be able to function normally in society.  For most of us, a cause of such a disconnect can simply can be seen in our biases.

However, Seth’s perspective also addresses a positive characteristic of human psychophysiology: humans are capable of filling gaps in their understanding of reality.  Most of us come to realize that no situation that we face can be completely understood before we are forced to deal with it.  As a result, all our actions are subject to some level of unexpected consequences, requiring us to make choices in the face of gaps in our understanding of the situation.
We fill in those gaps with our imagination.  While this ‘imagining process’ is influenced by memory, emotion and accumulated knowledge, it still addresses the ‘unknown’ which lurks in the future as well as providing us an ability to successfully deal with it.

Human history can also be seen in the light of such gaps and our attempts to fill them.  Johan Norberg, in his book, “Open”, charts the rise and fall of successive civilizations in terms of their ability to develop answers to the questions raised by such gaps as ‘how much freedom should the individual have in society and how much should the society have?”  In his book, “Progress”, he charts the exponential rise of global welfare as successive waves of society have become more proficient at answering them by ‘imagining’ ways to frame them and inventing social structures to better manage them.

Thus, at both our personal level and at the level of cultural evolution, our ability to ‘imagine’ that which is missing from our attempt to capture reality in our minds is a factor in our dealing with this reality.  If our actions are based on ‘what we know’, this knowledge is always enhanced by what we can imagine.

This is where ‘secular mysticism’ comes in.  In true human growth to maturity, our experiences lead us to a more comprehensive and thus more successful relationship with reality, and our ability to successfully use imagination to fill the gaps in our understanding increases as well.  Most of us realize the necessary incompleteness of our knowledge as we evolve in a world which is also evolving, but as we mature we can become more confident in the mystical sense which finds a faithful unity underlying an oft-chaotic diversity.

‘Secular mysticism’ therefore is nothing more than our efforts to ‘fill the gaps’ between what we know we know and what we know that we do not know.  Humans have been aware of this ‘ineffable’ quality of reality for centuries, and musicians and poets are adept at leading us to it.  Whether tears come to our eyes when we listen to Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ or tap our toes to Brubeck’s dizzying ‘Time Out’, we are responding to this awareness of the ineffable weave of the real.

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at the slippery topic of mysticism, understanding that it, in the form of imagination is a natural part of increasing our sense of understanding what’s real.

Next week we will carry these secular insights into this perspective on human ‘knowing’ into seeing how they play out today.