On one side of human experience is mysticism… very few of us actually experience this much.
On the other side is logic and reason and rationality… this is common ground for all of us.
Mysticism is the experience of the ‘Ultimate’… a moment spent in the company of God (as it were)… it doesn’t make any logical sense, it can’t, it never has and it never will… that’s why mysticism is called what it is… and that’s why very few people are willing to go there too often… it just doesn’t make sense. And yet it answers (without words, but by experience) all the unanswerable questions… the whole Universe makes sense from a mystical perspective… (not logical sense, of course… but it makes sense!)
And then there’s rationality. Now, rationality makes sense! We have rules of logic that are demonstrable and repeatable and testable… and within the confines of the topics where logic reigns, rationality makes perfect sense.
Unfortunately, as soon as we move towards the macrocosmic or microcosmic things seem to follow a set of rules that don’t make logical sense.
And so we pendulum between ‘logic’ (within its boundaries of the Newtonian physical world) that makes sense and feels comfortable, and ‘mystical experience’ which makes no sense whatsoever logically, but successfully explains the ‘reality’ of the Universe.
It’s a pretty crazy and bizarre place to be, this world.
And yet, it makes sense actually…
It's fair to assume that ‘rational logic’ and ‘intelligence’ and ‘language’ are simply characteristics that evolved on earth (by chance) and which enabled us to survive in this physical dimension (the dimension of Newtonian mechanics). These evolved tools have been honed over generations to enable success in the physical world. Using only these tools it is all too easy to make the mistake of imagining that there is only a physical world… if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look remarkably like a nail!
But then there seems to be this ‘other world’… this mystical place where the normal rules of physics don’t apply. It’s easy to dismiss this as people’s imaginings – there is no proof (i.e., physical proof which fits within the bounds of Newtonian physics) and therefore it doesn’t exist… God is dead!
But too many people from every religion and culture and time have indicated that they have experienced something ‘otherworldly’ in some way… and these experiences are remarkably similar in many ways… all terribly confusing, non-logical… in a word, mystical.
Perhaps the answer lies in the concept that there is a Universe within which there is the physical world (defined to some extent by Newton).
If this is the case, then things start to make sense. When we are being logical and rational we are applying the tools that have evolved in the physical world - for the physical world - and we are experiencing that subset of the Universe. When we are experiencing the mystical, we are open to experiencing the rest.
So, if there is a God, it certainly doesn’t exist solely within the physical Newtonian world… and therefore will not be detectable or describable with logic or sense or intelligence or language (as these are tools of the physical world only).
If there is a God, it will exist in the larger Universe… it will not make sense…it will not fit the laws of logic, or reason, or intelligence… it will be something other from that altogether… in other words… it will be indescribable and ‘uncommunicateable’ (since language is simply an evolved characteristic in the physical Newtonian subset of the Universe).
This begins to show us just how limited is our access to God… everything that we rely on to survive in this world is blind to God… is entirely incapable of conceiving, imagining, communicating or envisaging God… God is totally beyond and outside the realm of intelligence, logic, reason, language and all the other communication mechanisms we have as human beings.
From this perspective the difficulty about whether God exists or not begins to make sense… the limitation of our abilities to conceive of God becomes visible.
A weak analogy might be trying to understand how an amoeba with chemical sensitivity and a limited ability to detect light and dark only could possibly conceive the depth, intelligence, and beauty of Handel’s Messiah, and then communicate that to another amoeba. It couldn’t!
By the same logic, our minds, our logic, our language, our communication cannot detect, understand, conceive, or perceive, in any way, God.
And yet, something else within our capacity can...?
When we suspend our intelligence, our logic, our reason, etc., and we simply allow ourselves to ‘experience’ (without interpretation, without concept forming of any manner)… we enter a world that is indescribable and inconceivable to our intellectual minds. We try (we try desperately because it is human nature) to translate our mystical experiences into language and rational thought… but it’s hopeless really.
As a result mystics tend to write about “oneness” and “interconnectivity” and “non-conceptual understanding”, etc… it’s all fairly illogical… it has to be because it is describing something outside the bounds of logic and intelligence and language… there is no way to communicate it, or reduce it to thought or language.
Okay, to rephrase the above... it would seem that there is ‘our physical world’… the world in which we have evolved… the world we can detect and reason and describe and understand and survive in… and then there is the rest of the Universe… none of which makes any rational sense whatsoever.
We exist (almost entirely… almost!) in the physical world, and God exists everywhere, but most splendidly in the other world (as it were).
The only connect is you.
When you suspend your evolved skills (sight, hearing, logic, thought, language, etc.) you can experience the bigger Universe… but you can’t bring it back to the logical world… it just doesn’t fit!
But we try...
And our trying has evolved into religion… the middle-ground between, logic and reason on one hand, and the truth of the greater Universe (God) on the other.
Religion is forced into this position because its message needs to be communicated among humans (therefore it must be based in reason and logic and language), but the message is about God, which is untranslatable into reason and logic and language.
Religion, then is an attempt to bring God into our little subset of understanding… it is the attempt to understand, describe, and communicate the unlimited, using the weak tools that evolution has given us to survive in the physical Newtonian world.
It is a brave attempt at the impossible...
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