From: Elizaphanian (Elizaphanian@members.v21.co.uk)
Date: Tue Dec 17 2002 - 18:07:49 GMT
Hi Mari,
With some trepidation, but having looked back at some old posts which talk
about how our discussions tend to go nowhere, I thought I would share
something with you (and the forum) about how these discussions have helped
me. It is in answer to your question from 28 November:
> Can you talk about your "mystical experience": what it is/was, when it
> happened and how it effected your life. Did it change your thinking? etc.
If
> anyone else has had what they believe to be a "mystical experience" i
would
> like to hear the details about them as well.
Now, as should have become clear, I don't see much need to dwell on the
'content' of the experience (in summary: two 'insights', one that love is
foundational - it _literally_ makes the world go round; the other a
'command': be who you are), but hopefully the following will be of interest.
At the very least it articulates my 'final vocabulary' pretty clearly. The
link to Pirsig is made clear at the end.
It will have been noticed by regular readers that my 'output' onto this
forum has been increased recently. I actually did some digging, to find some
numbers. In the year October 01 - September 02 I posted to the forum some
110 times - so less than ten times a month. In October I posted 78 times,
and in November 72 times. I'm now winding down again, back to my 'usual'
rate - just 18 times. The particular trigger was re-reading ZMM and Lila
back to back at the end of September. In any case, I do feel that I have
been climbing a mountain, an intellectual mountain to be sure, but a
spiritual mountain as well.
For this book that I am compelled to write is really a way of resolving a
conflict within myself. The origins of the book lie in an experience that I
had around the time of my twentieth birthday, which moved me from being a
militant atheist to one who could not deny the reality of God, and one who
is now a priest.
That transformation moved me spiritually in a way that I suspect I would
never have been able to achieve on my own, and really the last twelve years
can be seen, in one light, as my trying to catch up intellectually with what
happened in that summer of 1990.
I think I have now caught up - or at least, if I have not in fact gained the
summit of my personal mountain, that summit is now in sight.
The best way to describe the reality behind these words is to talk about the
difference between two paths to God, the Platonic path and the Christian
path.
The Platonic path has its roots in Socrates, and his attitude in the face of
death. He embraced the conflict with the Athenian authorities, and used that
conflict - engineering the death sentence - in order to display his
teachings about the irrelevance of death. For the true philosopher has an
immortal soul, which is not affected by death. Indeed, the best life, the
truest, most virtuous and most authentic life, is one in which a person
prepares themselves for this death by removing all the 'attachments' to the
world from their emotional life, restricts the objects of their concern to
the realm of the Forms and seeks, ultimately, to ascend to a contemplation
of the One, which, in one neo-Platonic phrasing, is the journey of 'the
alone to the Alone'. This is a journey for an intellectual elite; it is a
journey undertaken in solitude; it is a journey which is self-directed and
under the control of the individual will, properly trained. Those who become
'perfect' attain to the One. And the One does not care whether you make this
journey or not.
The Christian path, in contrast, has its roots in Jesus' attitude in the
face of death, best revealed in the Garden of Gethsemane: "My soul is
sorrowful, even unto death. Father, all things are possible to thee; remove
this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what thou wilt." Jesus is afraid
of death; he is not facing the prospect of crucifixion with philosophical
detachment. Yet he surrenders his will to God. Moreover, this surrendering
of the will was characteristic of Jesus' mature life, and it was this
surrendering which was taught to the disciples. This surrendering bears
fruit in a community of loving friendship, exemplified in the Last Supper:
"No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his
master is doing, but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard
from my Father I have made known to you." So the Christian journey is one
that is undertaken within a community of friendship; it is a journey for
everyone; it is a journey which is centred on the abandonment of
self-direction and a radical dependency on divine grace - for God cares very
much whether you take this path. It is the journey of love: 'Beloved, let us
love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and
knows God'.
So, to summarise: the Platonic path, as I understand it, is an
individualistic and intellectualistic project to achieve the contemplation
of the One and thereby to achieve immortality. The Christian path, as I
understand it, is a Eucharistic and moral project to transform the world in
the light of eternity, and thereby gain eternal life.
In the Platonic path, the intellect is dominant.
In the Christian path, surrender of the will to God is key.
(Christianity is not about the abandonment of intellect. It is about
surrendering the intellect - and the intellectual products like our ego and
the deadly sins that go with the desire for ego-preservation - to a higher
power.)
To return to my militant atheism: it was a manifestation of the mainstream
of our present culture, in which the modernist project of triumphant
Reason - atheistic, self-sufficient, controlling, technocratic, inherently
totalitarian - has largely succeeded in eviscerating the Christian
alternative. As I am, temperamentally, an intellect-dominated person, that
Modernist idolatry took deep root in my understanding. Although I would not
have had the words to describe it accurately until very recently: my
understanding was Platonist, in the sense that I have described.
That triumphant Modernism was built upon the re-incorporation of the
Platonic path within Western Christianity itself, from which came the evils
of the Inquisition, Scholasticism, the Crusades, the Wars of Religion and,
ultimately, the Holocaust.
Really what my journey has been about is seeking a way to reconcile my
intellect with my guiding spirit, my soul, that which is of God within me -
to achieve an integrity between a part of myself which was 'touched' by
God - and is therefore undeniable, for it is deeper within me than my
understanding can reach - and an intellect which, every step of the way, has
resisted the implications of that touch. To achieve integrity, to find that
peace which the world cannot give, I have had to dig deeper and deeper into
my understandings, to uproot what it is in my intellect which is opposed to
that touch of God and to slowly and steadily surrender my will to God. Of
course, I resist even now, for I am mulishly stubborn.
Now as you may have noticed, I think that the Pirsig of Lila (much less so
the Pirsig of ZMM) is setting out an intrinsically Platonist metaphysics, in
the sense described here. So I have become a 'fallen priest', in Matt's
phrasing. Having the time to spend thinking about these matters is opening
up things in a way that I didn't expect. (It's quite possible that my
'Sophocles' thread was simply me working out my own neuroses about the
intellect, and that I 'projected' the Platonism onto Pirsig. But I don't
think so. There does, after all, need to be a good 'hook' on which to hang
the projection.)
In any case, I'm about to go away on holiday until the New Year. I wish you
and all forum readers a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year!
Sam
The lover of myth is in a sense the lover of wisdom, for myth is composed of
wonders. Aristotle
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