“God is dead” Friedrich Nietzsche once famously said.
The nineteenth-century German philosopher wrote this God obituary in The Gay Science (a.k.a., Joyous Wisdom), as he described an exchange between a lantern-yielding “madman” seeking God in a marketplace full of cynical atheists. While those gathered in the marketplace taunt the madman with laughter and jeers (“Is God hiding? Did he lose his way like a child?”), the madman responds, “Where has God gone? I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. We are his murderers.”
And you know what else we've murdered, what else is dead in the modern age?
The human soul.
Alas, the subject of poets and romantics is done, kaput. We've killed the human soul, and the sword of science has been our murder weapon. Because, you see, in a world ruled by the empirical sciences, there's no room for the unseen. And since that pesky thing called a soul can't be seen under a microscope or weighed on a scale (the movie 21 Grams not withstanding), well, we just had to conclude that it didn't exist—or shouldn't exist.
Murdered by science and its sharp blade of materialism (the belief that matter is the only fundamental reality in the universe), the soul was misguidedly slaughtered in the name of reason.
Yet that isn't our Western heritage; the founders of Western philosophy never intended science veiled as reason to do away with the human soul. Quite the contrary; in the mystical philosophical traditions of antiquity, science and reason were embraced as tools that could elevate the soul towards the transcendent— not destroy it or deny its very existence. Indeed, rationalism in the form of reason and spirituality in the form of metaphysics weren't adversarial perspectives; they were both lenses that could illuminate a deeper truth. As was mentioned in the last chapter, this integral approach welcomed both science and spirituality at the table of knowledge.
In fact, in what some have described as a transrational perspective, the essence of philosophy for some of the most prominent Greek thinkers, such as Pythagoras, Parmenides, Plato, and Plotinus, was a mystical perspective that not only included reason, but also attempted to go beyond the logical constraints of reason and into a realm of expansive and ineffable paradox. These metaphysical philosophers have been described as rational mystics, which, to many, might be a term right up there with “military intelligence” as an oxymoron, but it's a very accurate—and seemingly contradictory—description.
Rational mysticism was an orientation that involved the use of the reasoning and the rational mind to achieve a higher level of metaphysical and mystical awareness that would then allow the practitioner to transcend the rational mind. By using reason, one could go beyond reason. These beyond-reason mystics viewed both mathematics and logic paradoxes as consciousness-expanding keys that could unlock the door of the infinite and strangely paradoxical realm of Ultimate Reality.
Just as a Zen koan challenges the initiate to go beyond rational analysis, so too did these logic paradoxes challenge the philosophical initiate in Greece to transcend the limitations of reason and logic for a deeper, more transrational understanding. For the Greeks, riddles, paradoxes, and enigmas helped to free an individual's mind from misconceptions created by an overdependence on either sensory perception or constraining logic. While logic and reason had their obvious utility, they also had their constraining shortcomings— shortcomings that logic riddles would serve to expose.
For example, Zeno's “Achilles and the Tortoise” riddle forces us to reexamine our notions of motion and movement and, in a deeper sense, our ideas of space and time. In essence, Zeno and his teacher, Parmenides, wanted us to reexamine whether or not all of these things were merely illusions, or human constructs developed by a reasoning and ordered mind in order to measure things that really didn't exist independent of human thought and perception.
For the mystics (as well as for certain physicists), what we would call past, present, and future all coexist in what has been called the eternal now. Physicist Brian Greene discusses this difficult-to-grasp concept through the lens of physics and the totality of the universe as spacetime. Unlike the relativity of space and time, spacetime is absolute, meaning it contains all there is. Greene describes the totality of the spacetime universe as a huge, fresh loaf of bread. In this conception, past, present, and future are all baked into the loaf. You can slice the loaf a million different ways. It's the subjective angle of each slice that we cut out with our individual perception that determines what we perceive as that moment in time.
Logic Paradoxes:
Achilles and the Tortoise
Zeno was the student of the rational mystic philosopher Parmenides and is credited with creating several clever logic riddles. Let's take a look at his most famous one, Achilles and the Tortoise, where the very idea of motion is challenged. In this riddle, the legendary Greek warrior Achilles is racing a slow-moving tortoise.
Zeno's riddle says that because the slow tortoise received a head start, the speedy Achilles will never catch it. This conclusion is in accordance with the rule of logic that says that for something to move between two points, it must first move halfway between those two points. But before it can traverse the first half distance, it must move half of that half, and half of that half, in turn, and so on, ad infinitum.
By this logic, a person, or in the case of Zeno's riddle, Achilles, can never reach the other point, which in this case is the tortoise that he is racing, because he will always be halving the distance into decreasingly smaller and more infinitesimal fractions. But these fractions will none-the-less always have some positive value greater than zero— meaning that he will never quite reach that other point (the tortoise).
Obviously Achilles will reach and surpass the tortoise; our senses and our experience confirm this. Yet logically, he shouldn't.
What sense are we to make of Zeno's riddle? As historian Bryan Magee writes in The History of Thought (1998):
The point is that here is an impeccably logical argument that leads to a false conclusion. And what are we to say about that? If it is possible for us to start from unobjectionable premises, and then proceed by logical steps, each of which is without fault, to a conclusion that is manifestly untrue, this threatens with chaos all our attempts to reason about the world around us. People have found it terribly disconcerting. There must be a fault in the logic, they have said. But no one has yet been wholly successful in demonstrating what it is.
And that's the point; the purpose is to create a “crack in the constraining shell of the familiar, through which new worlds could be glimpsed” (Hoffman, 2004). These cracks are cracks in our familiar rational and logical constructs that allow an expansion of our consciousness into the “new world” of the transrational.
If we were a worm eating our way forward through the absolute spacetime loaf of the universe, gnawing forward from slice to slice, it's not time that's moving—it's us as the worm that's moving and experiencing things sequentially, thus giving us the illusion of the forward arrow of time.
But Greene doesn't address the questions that might be best left for philosophers and theologians: who baked the damn thing anyway?
I'll bet that you thought I was going to say God. Well, our friends the mystics didn't so much believe in a god as much as they believed that everything is God. In their conception, God is not the anthropormorphic old man with the white beard and cane; instead, God is just another word for the totality of the universe (the whole loaf of bread, even the part beyond the crust) —otherwise known as what we've been calling Ultimate Reality.
But what made the rational mystics of ancient Greece radically different from religious mystics was their use of reason to achieve the higher transrational awareness that I've described. While other mystics used certain prayers, religious meditations, or, in the case of Zen, an “empty cup,” non-thinking meditation, the rational mystics embraced the abilities of the mind as the royal road towards Ultimate Reality.
Before we proceed any further, perhaps a few definitions are in order, since terms like metaphysics and mysticism often suffer from popular misconceptions.
Let's start with metaphysics. What does that mean? For some, the word metaphysics conjures up images of tarot cards, crystals, and tea leaves, dubious New Age practices used in incense-laden parlors, where a bejeweled and turbaned clairvoyant predicts the future. But that's not what I'm referring to when I use the term metaphysics. Nor am I referring to the Ms. Cleos and all the 1-800 psychic hotlines and their various permutations. While I'm not intending to disparage any of those things, they don't represent metaphysics in the classical Greek sense.
The ancient Greeks meant something altogether different when Aristotle first coined the phrase in his classic work Metaphysics.Since it followed his treatise on nature and the physical world, entitled Physics, the title Metaphysics literally translates into “after physics” (meta is the Greek word for “after”). But Aristotle meant more by the term than just that Metaphysics came temporally after his earlier work; rather, it also implied that the metaphysical realm comes after physics in the sense that it is more than physics (the physical realm). Metaphysics, then, connotes an unseen, nonphysical, and nonmaterial reality that is beyond or after (meta) the physical.
Webster's dictionary (2007) defines the word metaphysical as “immaterial” and “incorporeal” and further defines metaphysics as “the branch of philosophy that systematically investigates the nature of first principles and problems of ultimate reality, including ontology and often cosmology.”
Obviously, this is more than just reading tea leaves.
The Webster's definition also mentions cosmology and ontology, but what do those two words mean? Well, cosmology shouldn't be confused with the similarly sounding cosmetology. The latter has to do with hairstyling and weaves, while the former has to do with the study of the universe. It's also important to point out that when we refer to cosmology as the study of the universe, it's meant in both the philosophical and astrophysical sense. Thus, cosmology is the realm of both the astrophysicist and the philosopher.
Ontology is, quite simply, the study of being. The study of being? The study of being what? Well, the term being, in the ontological sense, is derived from the Greek word ousia, which, roughly translated, meant “essence” or “substance.” So ontology, then, is the study of the essence of being, or in other words, an exploration into the nature of reality and existence. In fact, you might find it helpful to mentally substitute the word existence or reality whenever you see the word being discussed in philosophy books.
In any event, ontology examines what can exist and what cannot exist, and it further breaks those distinctions down into categories as it explores whether things can change or are, in fact, eternal.
These conceptions of “being” as an eternal and unchanging reality (also known as monistic orientations) versus “becoming,” which is a dynamic, fluid process (also known as ontological pluralism), have been explored by both ancient philosophers, such as Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Aristotle, and their more modern counterparts, like German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.
So what about mysticism? What's that all about?
Mystics have been described as those spiritual seekers who seek to directly experience what some have called God or what others have called Ultimate Reality. That's the main point about our friends the mystics: they don't just want to read about God (or Ultimate Reality); they want to experience God. They want to feel Ultimate Reality.
The other key point about the mystic is the idea that true mystics don't believe that there's any separation between everything that exists and what God is; in other words, there's no dualistic divide between the infinite and the finite. God, or Ultimate Reality, is the allness of the universe. Many who share this orientation believe that we need to get out of our own way before we can experience what's all around us, that our senses, emotions, and, yes, our discursive thinking can actually cloud us from experiencing this allness.
I'm reminded of the parable of the fish that doesn't believe in water.
“I don't believe in this thing you call water!” exclaimed the skeptical fish. “I can't see it. I can't touch it. Prove to me that there is such a thing!”
With that, an older and much wiser fish, which had been swimming by and had overheard the skeptical fish, stopped and shook his head (as fish that inhabit the world of parables can sometimes do). He calmly replied, “You don't see water, yet it's all around you. You don't experience it because your mind won't allow you to!”
While the mystics would agree with the sage fish's perspective that the unseeable is “all around us,” they also, as I've mentioned, believe that everything is God—or Ultimate Reality. Huston Smith, the eminent MIT and Berkeley professor who's widely considered one of the world's preeminent authorities on comparative religions, describes the mystic's belief this way: “For the atheist, there is no God; for the polytheist, there are many Gods; for the monotheist, there is only one God; for the mystic, there is only God” (Smith, 2001).
Mystics tend to shy away from religious sacraments and dogma in their search for a more personal and direct union with the infinite. How does the mystic find that union? How does he or she tap into the numinous? Well, for many, this magic carpet ride is often achieved via deep contemplative meditation of a usually solitary nature. Yet while the journey for the typical mystic tends to be an individual and lone path, most major religions have mystical branches (usually as ascetic or contemplative monastic orders): Buddhism has Zen, Islam has Sufism, Judaism has the Kabbalah, Christianity has the St. John of the Cross or St. Ignatius traditions, and so on.
Regardless of whether a person is part of a monastic sect or just a lone-wolf nature mystic, his or her mystical quest tends to be a search for a more expansive level of reality—the metaphysical more, no matter what it's called (God or Ultimate Reality). That seems to be the mystic's Holy Grail. (My apologies for mixing religious metaphors.)
All right then, enough talk about these mystics in the abstract. Who exactly were these Greek mystics and what were they all about?
This contemplative exercise deals with paradigm-shattering riddles and paradoxes. As discussed in this chapter, the Greeks valued riddles and paradoxes because they could “create a crack in the constraining shell of the familiar, through which new worlds could be glimpsed.” In other words, riddles and paradoxes can open up our minds and expand our consciousness in order to get us past habituated ways of thinking.
For this exercise, we are going to contemplate two interesting riddles— one from the world of quantum physics and one from Japanese philosophy.
But before we begin, take a few minutes to do some sort of physical exercise, being sure to only do as much as your physical health allows. This could include walking, jogging, or bicycling. After fifteen to thirty minutes(depending on your health) of exercise, find a body of water to sit facing in quiet contemplation. This can be a pond, a river, a lake, or a pool. If there are no appropriate bodies of water, light a candle and meditate while focusing on the flickering flame.
For our first meditation, let us examine the Heisenberg Principle from quantum physics. This principle states that, depending on the kind of observation, light could manifest as either a particle (little packets of energy) or a wave with all the appropriate wave functions. But how can something be two things at once? How can something seem to be both a particle and a wave, yet not manifest as either until it is observed?
Along the same theme regarding participant-observer effects (as they have been dubbed or, as others call them, Creator-created dynamics), let's meditate on the old Zen koan about the tree falling in the forest: If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? And even if it did create a sound wave, how would that sound manifest if there is no eardrum to process it? Take several minutes to contemplate this notion.
When you're done, sit for several more moments and become aware of how you feel. Now look around you; do you experience things any differently? Feel free to write down any of these initial thoughts and feelings, as writing these down will help you to process this experience.