Mystical Claims and Embodied Knowledge in a Post-Metaphysical Age
1. Tom Murray
2013 Integral Theory Conference
Paper copy at www.perspegrity.com/papers
MYSTICAL CLAIMS AND EMBODIED
KNOWLEDGE
IN A POST-METAPHYSICAL AGE
4. BELIEF/KNOWLEDGE CATEGORIES:
EXAMPLES
Linguistic / symbolic
Concepts
• Taste of chocolate; gut
certainty; meditative
state; playing tennis;
intuitions…
• Tree, democracy,
interior,
consciousness…
• Trees are…; We
should…; the
cognitive line leads…
• AQAL, SD, CR, 4
Non/pre-Linguistic:
Experience
Model/Theory
Statements
5.
6. OVERVIEW
1. What are mystical/metaphysical
claims/beliefs?
2. Reasons for caution and reflection
3. What embodied cognition says about
mystical/metaphysical claims and reality <–>
idea gap
4. ‘Post-metaphysical’ approaches to mysticism
“Theories can do shadow work”
— so can mystical beliefs
Not questioning mystical, magical, or ineffable
experiences, or the need to share and construct
meaning from it
7. WORKING DEFINITION OF
MYSTICAL/METAPHYSICAL
CLAIMS/BELIEFS
• Claims about the overarching or underlying nature of
the universe/Kosmos/everything
• Not provable by science or amenable to
measurement; i.e. not purely physical or
psychological phenomena – but still being about
“reality” or “truth” (not about the good or beautiful)
• Common themes: Consciousness, Being, Reality,
Spirit, Life, Non-dual, Cosmology, other Realms
• Have import to human life/spirit, ethics, ultimate
“meaning”
• Mystical differs from metaphysical in that its source is
direct experience or intuition (purportedly) with
ultimate reality or transcendental truths
9. KEN WILBER — PHILOSOPHER AND
MYSTIC
"the great morphic field of evolutionary
potential…pulling all manifest holons back to their ever-
present Ground as Spirit--a Kosmic field of Agape,
gently pulling evolution into greater and greater
consciousness, embrace […] The reality, suchness, or
isness of every holon is actually Spirit…a drive which
ultimately wants to embrace the entire Kosmos […] This
ultimate realization [is] of the ever-present, spaceless
and therefore infinite, timeless and therefore eternal,
formless and therefore omnipresent, Condition of all
conditions and Nature of all natures and radically
groundless Ground of all grounds.”
Ken Wilber, Excerpt A, Volume 2, Kosmos Trilogy Draft
10. MORE MYSTICAL STATEMENTS
"…perspectives are primordial, which is to say they are
the most fundamental or primeval elements of reality,
existing at or from the beginning of time"
Clint Fuhs, ITC 2010 paper on Perspectival Semiotics
"the dimension of the profound," "mystical deeper
reality," "timeless present," "eternal now," and "infinite
spaciousness”
Jeff Carreira (student of Andrew Cohen) audio dialogue with Patricia
Albere
"infinite vastness...open suchness... infinite peace...true
self...always already liberated"
Wilber, audio interview with Alan Coombs
11. DR. BRONNER (THE SOAP
GUY)
• ... a sense for work-love-song-art-law-play-beauty, a
face turned up from the sod!
• Absolute...ever- evolving, ever-recreating, ever-
loving order!...guided by One...God...all-embracing,
• Eternal One! — We're One! All-One!
• DILUTE ENJOY — 1 SQAP FOR 18 DIFFERENT
USES!
12. NON-AD-HOMINEM
The individuals quotes can be assumed to:
• be sincere and authentic
• have had deep experiences and intuitions
• be pointing to important “truths” or deep
meaning
• not be absolutist; allow for fallibility and
revision
• have a sophisticated and nuanced
understanding
13. DON’T TRY TO USE THESE WORDS AT
HOME! :-)
Infinite, Omnipresent,
Universal, Ultimate, Primeval,
Primordial, Eternal, Formless,
Ever-Present, Supreme,
Unbounded, Timeless,
Spaceless, Radically Invisible,
Radically Empty, Non-Dual,
Ground Of Being
• Poetry? Metaphor? Inspirational
oratory?
• Truth claims about (exterior)
16. BERTRAND RUSSELL ON MYSTICAL
KNOWLEDGE
• It often deals with universals, infinites, essences, or foundational
truths.
• Mysticism has "a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard
to what is believed about the universe." It has a sense of
"certainty and revelation." Though it sometimes uses logic to
justify beliefs, the claims seem to come from "a way of wisdom,
sudden, penetrating, coercive, which is contrasted with the slow
and fallible [process of scientific reasoning]."
• Mystics are attempting "an articulation upon the inarticulate
experience gained in the moment of" what is called insight or
intuition.
• There is a "sense of a mystery unveiled [and] revelation" of "a
reality behind the world of appearances and utterly different from
it." Truth and essence is found through profound introspective
thought, not through sense experience.
• Can be expressed in deeply poignant, poetic, or metaphorical
prose.
17. YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH METAPHYSICAL
BELIEFS?
1. Brainstorm mystical/metaphysical
claims/beliefs you hear in the Integral
community.
2. How do you feel when others make
such claims?
3. What happens when you mention
mystical/metaphysical claims to your
friends/family?
4. When you explain or justify these
beliefs, how do you support them?
18. MYSTICAL / METAPHYSICAL
KNOWLEDGE HAZARDS —
RUSSELL
• Tendency for the passion of the mystic to
conflate "the good with the truly real"
• Those who "are capable of absorption in an inward
passion" can experience "the loss of contact with
daily things [and] common objects."
• Focus on pure logic to the exclusion of experience or
common sense– "logic used in the defense of
mysticism seems to be faulty as logic”
• >>Highest form of thought is a combination of
mystical and scientific understanding...
19. MORE CAVEATS RE PROCLAMATIONS
OF THE ULTIMATE OR ESSENTIAL
• Complex philosophical
approaches and
worldviews...reach beyond
the boundaries of the
academy and into the
lifeworld" where they are
subject to being watered-
down, muddied, and
misappropriated
-Stein 2010
• Ultimately can be:
grandiosity, hegemony,
elitism, demagoguery,
proto-fascism, colonization,
21. THE IDEA PORTABILITY PRINCIPLE
• Understanding and dealing with the fallibility
and indeterminacy of ideas is more important
the greater the distance between the world
views or beliefs of interlocutors
• Preaching to the (integral) Choir vs.
a) crossing disciplinary boundaries to interact with
other theory/practice communities
b) applying ideas in real contexts
explaining one's purposes to stakeholders
c)disperse ideas into other world views or
conceptual frames
22. DISCUSSION:
EMBODIMENT & BELIEF FORMATION
1. How does knowing you are angry, in love,
in fearful resistance, or prejudiced influence
what you believe and how you hold a
belief? How does understanding how
shadow works change how you hold a
belief?
2. How does knowing that some aspects of
love — such as attraction, bonding, and
empathy, are tied to bio/neuro/chemical
processes — change the experience of
being in love?
3. New evidence shows how most memory,
perception, and judgment is influenced by
emotion and cognitive biases — how do
you think this effects the claims of scholars,
philosophers, and mystics?
23. THE EMBODIED MIND
— A Philosophical History of the Fallibility of
Reason
1. Traditional Philosophy — mind/reason separate from body
(Cartesian) &
pure, universal, transcendent, reliable
2. Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution — removing the
influence of
authority, emotion/passion, dogma, instinct/intuition
• Valued: observation, measurement, logic,
repeatability/democratic
• But battle: Realists & Empiricists vs. Rationalists & Idealists
3. Kant — reason is limited by underlying structures of the mind
4. Darwin — cognition evolved through natural selection—from
animal brains
5. Freud — the unconscious; unpredictable hidden powerful
influence on thought
32. STATES REFERRED TO IN BUDDHIST
TEXTS
(THE SATIPATTHANA SUTTA, PITAKA SUTTA)
• A series of state experiences (Jhanas) obtainable
through contemplative absorption practices. ...terms
include happiness/joy, rapture/bliss,
attention/mindfulness, unification/attention/one-
pointedness, equanimity/serenity/contentment/utter
peace, infinity of space, and
emptiness/formlessness/cessation.
• Common warnings along the path indicated drives
(addictive & obscuring)
• What from the experience gets transferred to
theories/concepts of reality?
• Terms like infinite, boundless, empty, used in
mystical ideas may point to feeling states, more
33. IN "MYSTICISM AND LOGIC" RUSSELL
CONCLUDES THAT
"while fully developed mysticism seems to me
[a mistaken outcome of the emotions], I yet
believe that by sufficient restraint, there is an
element of wisdom to be learned by the
mystical way of feeling, which does not seem to
be attainable in any other manner [and which
is] to be commended as an attitude toward life,
not as a creed about the world"
34. 4. EPISTEMIC DRIVES
(FROM COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY TO
PHENOMENOLOGY)
Any cognitive drive or tendency
that influences how we produce
or share knowledge or ideas
• Desire for certainty (and the
avoidance of uncertainty and
cognitive dissonance)
• Need to make meaning, see
patterns
• Misplaced concreteness
• Symbolic Impulse
36. POST-METAPHYSICS
• Habermas:
1. post-metaphysical era has "replaced
foundationalism with fallibilism” and
2. has a procedural conception of rationality
— from “a rational person thinks this” to
"…thinks like this”
• In Integral Spirituality Wilber (2006) says that
"[arguably,] metaphysics…ended with Kant [who
realized that] we do not perceive empirical
objects in a completely realistic, pregiven
fashion; but rather, structures of the knowing
subject import various characteristics to the
known object. […] Metaphysics is then a broad
name for the type of thinking that can't figure
[out that] reality is not a perception, but a
37. WE WILL ALWAYS NEED METAPHYSICS
• To satisfy our epistemic drives toward meaning,
certainty, .... in areas outside the reach of (current)
science/measurement.
• Some things may always appear as mysteries to the
human mind: death, life, infinity, subjectivity, being...
• But we can still avoid unnecessary degrees of
certainty, foundationalism, bias....
42. 4. HUMOR, PLAY, HUMILITY,
UNKNOWING, DANCE
(SEE SEAN!)
• Fallibility: "Blind spots and square
pegs and messy -- oh my!”
• Evolving definition of concept of
"integral"
• Ontological (metaphorical)
Pluralism: multiple earths
• Epistemic Drives: "I love maps,
iteration, and symmetry!”
• Misplaced concreteness: Force-
fitting into quadrants
43. SUMMARY
• Embodiment implies fallibility and indeterminism of
mystical/metaphysical ideas and claims
• Most abstract/foundational/general concepts are the
most indeterminate (epistemic distance)
• The most deeply meaning-full concepts involved
highest epistemic drives (—“ultimate concern”)
• Honor the mysterious, sacred, mystical, enchanted
— and the need to share and make meaning from
them
• With post-metaphysical, fallibilistic, self-critical
approaches
• That allows integral theory and meta-theories to do
47. POST-METAPHYSICS
• Is not anti-metaphysics
• No view from nowhere (privileged perspective): reality
is not out there waiting to be seen (“misplaced
concreteness”)
• Beyond the “myth of the given:” reality is not simply as
it appears
• Perspectival: all truths/experiences come from a
perspective and are partial
• Misplaced concreteness and “map vs territory:”
abstractions are not “real” (independent of us)
• Knowledge is fallible (no absolutes)
• Knowledge is socially constructed
• Concepts and language are indeterminate
TOM MURRAY |
WWW.PERSPEGRITY.COM | MAY
2010
47
48. STAGES OF MISPLACED
CONCRETENESS
• Magical thinking – imagination as reality
• Mythical thinking – stories as reality
• Conventional thinking – norms as reality
• Modern thinking – concepts/models as
reality
• Post modern — deep knowing/intuition as
one truth
49. POSITIVISM/CERTAINTY VS.
FALLIBILISM/INDETERMINACY
• Positivist attitude: clarity, certainty, action
• knowledge/meaning-generative; problem solving, theorizing
• Negative capability: awe, humility, curiosity
• Limits of language & knowledge & method
• Tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty, unknowing
• Dealing with the above
TOM MURRAY |
WWW.PERSPEGRITY.COM | AUGUST
2010
49
Espoused fallibility vs.
Stylistic (or illocutionary/enacted) fallibility
50. CALLS FOR HIGHER LEVEL THOUGHT
David Bohm: "underneath [humanity's dilemmas] there's something we don't
understand about how thought works" and that what is needed is a "very
deep [and] very subtle" awareness of thought itself.
Albert Einstein: "the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same
level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
• Cultural development as skill of understanding mind, thought, language,
knowledge, belief…
=> the “post-metaphysical turn”
TOM MURRAY |
WWW.PERSPEGRITY.COM | AUGUST
2010
50
51. SECOND TIER - GOING “META”
(FROM ITC-2008)
• Meta-cognition (thinking about thinking)
• Meta-knowledge (knowledge about the nature and
limitations of knowledge); META-BELIEF!
• Meta-learning (learning how to learn, also called triple-
loop learning)
• Meta-dialog (dialog about how we engage in dialog)
• Meta-decision making (making decisions about how
we will go about making decisions)
• Meta-affect (investigating the feeling of our feelings;
somatic awareness of feeling states)
• Meta-leadership (supporting leadership in others)
TOM MURRAY |
WWW.PERSPEGRITY.COM | AUGUST
2010
52. DEVELOPMENT, DISEQUILIBRIUM
AND HUMILITY
Heart/Empathy: Relationally aware -- opening to the suffering of
ever wider circles of relationship
Mind/Cognitive: Construct aware -- foundations of certainty in
knowing are shaken
Spirit/Self: Ego aware -- awake to the profound levels of chaos and
vulnerability in life
External world: Systems aware – chaos: radical connectivity,
unpredictability
TOM MURRAY |
WWW.PERSPEGRITY.COM | MAY 2010
52
Notes de l'éditeur
image search?: mysterious/creatures; new age...; mystical; spiritual;
theories, models, claims..
we say map is not territory; we need good maps!
can’t ignore new research on cognition and
(—not just philosophical reasoning)
CLaims – not experiences
not be naive about what they are saying
- proclaiming knowledge of the infinite—but that’s beyond knowledge! view from everywhere is a view from nowhere...
esoteric mysteries offered by spiritual authorities from 19th century occultism, yet are offered in the context of sophisticated post-post-modern frameworks of reality and knowledge building
invite forms of “magical thinking” and “misplaced concreteness,” even if those offering the claims do not succumb
-
we don't use words like these in everyday language, and there is a reason!
What is the language game?
not about whether they are true, but about certainty
its not about the people, its about knowledge building and sharing methods and attitudes
How to we talk about these ideas in polite company?
Our answers MAY apply to the few geniuses and spiritual adepts among us but: how to the REST of us interpret, co-create, disseminate, and evolve such ideas?
Often plays with opposites and paradox, pointing beyond them to knowledge that resolves or harmonizes them.
OR What types of arguments/explanations could/should be used for MM integral claims?
Group Discussion of Mystical/Metaphysics (MM) Claims/Beliefs
Ex.: Does god have free will? (hartshorne)
Do rocks have consciousness?
language about absolutes, ultimate nature,
where the/my miscomfort comes from
Jordan: attitude adjustment
--in integral theory we are used to thinking about how developmental level, culture, effects beliefs and reasoning
– BUT here we look elsewhere
haermas on ‘how we argue’
Best to come up with examples as you discuss:
When we know more about the lens/filter/distortions, we ignore at our peril
reductionism not necesszry
CUT THESE:
1: embodied brain and life context influences beliefs, how we hold ours, and how we should build knowledge together
How does knowing that a person that you disagree with has trauma or disability related to the a topic — change your interpretation and critique of them? (e.g. on gun control or right to life?)
How does knowing your memory is weak in an area change a remembrance? How does knowing that all memory is fallible change your certainty of a remembrance?
culture rises up out of the dark ages to reclaim the glory of rational ordered thought [bequeathed] by the Greeks
cobbled together hrou
effect all and experts; universal to human nature
dozens of them; attentional bias
serious impactions for jury testimony, etc. but also for metaphysical discourse
most phenomena are more like chaos than categories. so we should take caution; or periodically revisit our construct definitions and ontologies
when we slice the world into categories we simplify and may ignore what is between or outside them
Graded (fuzzy);
1. boundaries; 2. outside the scheme; 3 Metaphorical Pluralism
Models and claims work mostly for central exemplars
Symbolic Impulse
mutually exclusive, black and white, definitive, clear boundaried model of concepts the "simple" model; tendency of thought that biases one to perceive or interpret phenomena (subjectively) as simple. Phenomena in nature are usually (some would say always).
The symbolic impulse is exacerbated in contexts that involve emotional charge, importance, or ego attachment,
Theories of truth: A critical introduction
Chris Argyris "the likelihood of differences in the interpretations of different observers increases the higher one goes on the ladder of inference"
Hartshorne: ...god is the most abstract concept; Does god have free will?
Map-territory; myth of the given
conciousness; subjective/objective; quadrants
freedom; (google it); capitalism;
not that these are not REAL; but they don’t have properties
“the economy is doing well”
Race....
democracy, African-American, god, ego, compassion, spirit, evolution, formal operational thinking, left hand quadrant, green meme, or Eros
Enlightenment vs. the taste of chocolate
if everyone had higher state experiences we might have concrete claer ways to refer to them, and not have to use highly abstract terms.
bhaskar – mundane nonduality
compteing with each other
There is a sense of ease, certainty, and mastery when we can ignore details and differences and trust a sturdy generality.
We get a certain satisfaction from ordering things or collecting them into tidy groups.
There is a sense of elegance and wholeness when we can embrace many things into a circle of unity,
and a sense of power in understanding the essential or universal.
The inquisitive and meaning-hungry mind wants to know the causal root, foundation, source, or origin of things.
succession of scientific understandings replacing metaphysical concepts (examples abound in physics and biology).
example, physicists have created the place-holder concepts of "dark matter" and "dark energy" in attempts to make meaning of cosmic phenomena we don't yet understand. Even the terms "life" and "disease" may someday be seen as quaint metaphysical constructs holding place for a future deeper understanding.
Bhaskar – reality is structured, orderly, lawful in its nature.
How we argue...habermas
"believe in" reincarnation
The suggestion here is not to de-valorize rigor but to provide a valid alternative justification mode that allows us to differentiate when we need scientific rigor (or modernist forms of rationality) and when we don't.
Explanatory force
structured self-critique of theories and concepts and examples
they activate a number of epistemic drives that threaten to bias cognition. They trigger the pleasurable and ego-fulfilling senses of purity/tidiness, universality/comprehensiveness, totality/power, and fundamentalism. They point to the infinite, the primordial, ever-omni-present that is said to be so vast it is beyond space and time. Such metaphysical ideas can engender states of certainty, conviction, and zealousness that, in the worst cases, are associated with oppression and totalitarianism. In the less extreme case, the reader can surely sense at least a tiny stirring of fervor in the breast when one considers insights of deep meaning and ultimate concern
negative capability ; positive capability
emancipation; personal and cultural
demi-real
POMO: Focus on what is wrong
OK for Wilber! That certainty and precision creates a force; but WE don’t have to copy it…
How can we bring both of these into play?- everybody is partially RIGHT; vs Everybody is (partly) wrong
