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What is A Rational Mystic?

 

My personal experience tells me that there are many approaches to the Divine. Let me be as clear as I can here, I'm not necessarily talking about a bearded patriarch sitting in the Seat of Judgement. Nor am I talking about a supernatural engineer who built a clockwork universe and set it into motion. I prefer that my "god" remain a nebulous concept for reasons I have discussed in my blog on the 1st commandment in the Bible.

I'd like to envision divinity as incorporating all of what is deemed good, beautiful, wise, beneficent. To me eastern concepts of "god" from Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, magical concepts from the Amerinds, & other so called primitives, concepts of form from the Greeks, Egyptians, Babylonians - all can be subsumed into a greater vision of what Deity means.

As a computer scientist & mathematician my search for the divine has long incorporated rationality. To me the intellect must surely be one of the tools by which the divine can be approached and in my life it has surely been a key to understanding. A godlike being which eschewed reason would not be worthy of my reverence.

Yet there is a point at which reason itself breaks down. In the early part of the 20th century Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead attempted the most rigorous formulation of the laws of reasoning in the mathematical realm of the natural numbers. The result was the seminal work Principia Mathematica. Mathematician Kurt Goedel then proceeded to prove that this rigorous system was either incomplete or inconsistent. Either true theorems about the the natural numbers could not be proved via the Whitehead & Russell formulation or there were theorems within that formulation which were false. The most rigorous attempt at reasoning ever done was either perpetually unfinished or it contradicted itself. You can never "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Logic itself breaks down.

I find this to be wonderously wonderful. It means that some sort of "faith" is needed for the apprehension of the divine. Yet where does this faith come from?

Enter the mystical part of the "Rational Mystic". Most religions, though having lost their skill at the necessary techniques in modern times, stress some sort of experiential connection with the divine. The vision & its corollaries are essential to what is often called "the mystery". The divine is experiential. This is why I use the word "apprehension" and not comprehension. Now it is not my intent here to describe the techniques necessary to obtaining such a direct experience. These techniques are varied and have been described many times elsewhere. The most readily available starting point is meditation. These experiences are not "scientific" in that they are subjective and not repeatable. Suffice it to say that I've sought them and have had a number of  them. I have experienced the divine in my life.

These experiences could easily be self-delusional so I try to maintain a strong sense of skepticism about them. I use my reason, my rationality to weight the import and meaning of these mystical experiences. Thus, I am a rational mystic.