By
the Same Author |
Title Page |
Copyright Page |
Dedication Page |
Preface | Contents | I | II | III | IV,
& V |
VI, & VII |
VIII | IX | X | XI, XII, & XIII |
XIV, &XV |
XVI, &XVII |
XVIII | XIX | XX | Postscript | Index |
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(Most quotes verbatim William James, some paraphrased.) |
(Relevant to Pirsig, William James Sidis, and Quantonics Thinking Modes.) |
"Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul. I wish during this hour to call your attention to some of the psychological peculiarities of such an attitude as this, of belief in an object [juxtapose quanton] which we cannot see [James' dialectic gets us in huge philosophic and classically-scientific trouble here with a classical non notion of "an object which we cannot see." How? Classically, "objects which we cannot see" do not dialectically, predicably, predictably, logically, classically exist! This is crux and funda of The Enlightenment. Doug - 9Apr2005]. All our attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due to the 'objects' of our consciousness, the things which we believe to exist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves.
"Such objects may be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. In either case they elicit from us a reaction, and the reaction due to things of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due to sensible presences. It may be even stronger. The memory of an insult may make us angrier than the insult did when we received it. We are frequently more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of making them; and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is based on the fact that material sensations actually present may have a weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts. "The more concrete objects of most men's religion, the deities whom they worship, are known to them only in idea." [Plato's 'idea,' and 'ideal' are what Pirsig refers "ESQ." Plato's ideas are immutable (we say "stux sux"), and thus in quantum reality, useless. Why? Quantum ræhlihty issi æmærgænt pr¤cæssings which we call "quantons."] |
(Our bold, color, brackets, links, underlines, and violet bold italic problematics.) James uses European spelling. He hyphenates to-day. He contracts 'not' as n't stand alone! He is profoundly gender biased, however, he often respectfully refers Nature and creation "she." He proliferates some old English, which we must say, we enjoy immensely. He has some enormous footnotes which run most of multiple pages. Strange, indeed. We retain page integrity to best of our abilities from original 1902 copyrighted first edition text. We offer intra text commentary in various ways: highlights, brackets and links according to this - Our bold and color highlights follow a code:
Our many Quantonics' local~online references include:
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54 |
"It has been vouchsafed, for example, to very few Christian believers to have had a sensible vision of their Saviour; though enough appearances of this sort are on record, by way of miraculous exception, to merit our attention later. The whole force of the Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in the divine personages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer, is in general exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in the individual's past experience directly serves as a model. "But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects, religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power. God's attributes as such, his holiness, his justice, his mercy, his absoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri-unity, the various mysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments, etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Christian believers.1 We shall see later that the absence of definite sensible images is positively insisted on by the mystical authorities in all religions as the sine qua non of a successful orison, or contemplation of the higher divine truths. Such contemplations are expected (and abundantly verify the expectation, as we shall also see) to influence the believer's subsequent attitude very powerfully for good. "Immanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief as God, the design of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter. These things, he said, are properly not objects of knowledge at all. "
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Can 'people' be divine? Do we need divine means to achieve mortal assessment of divinity? If someone tells us that someone else is divine, is it appropriate to ask them, "How do you know?" If you tell us that you know, does that beg inference of your divinity? Rather, if you tell us that you believe, does that beg inference of your divinity? Or does that beg inference of your uncertainty? Are "pure ideas" generic? Are "pure ideas" specific? Can "pure ideas" in general be instrumental? Can "pure ideas" be specifically instrumental? H5W? Is ideal Platonic formal mechanical absence of change instrumental? Do not classical notions of instrumentality, utility, and tool mechanization drive out any notions of mutable emergent change? Do n¤t they drive out, attempt to drive out, any quantum memeos (i.e., sophisms) of stochastic uncertainty? Classically doesn't any notion of purity elicit inferences of clarity and simplicity? Which 'fits' clarity and simplicity better: genericity? specificity? What does classical dialectical specificity mean? What does classical dialectical genericity mean? Doesn't classical specificity imply "unique to a case or situation?" Doesn't classical genericity imply "applicable across all cases and situations?" How then, can we (paraphrased), "...in general exert instrumentality of pure, ideal specificity?" See Quantonics QELRs of genericity, and specificity. As an applied and contemporary example, what do politicians intend when they say, "the people?" Do they intend you? Me? Us? All of us? Is society generic? Is individual specific? Does genericity 'fit' all? H5W? Does specificity 'fit' all? H5W? Is 'di'versity specific? Generic? Is omniversity specific? Generic? Is specificity determinate? Is genericity determinate? Causal-effective? See our QELR of uncertainty. Page top index. |
55 |
"Our conceptions always require a sense-content to work with, and as the words 'soul,' 'God,' 'immortality,' cover no distinctive sense-content whatever, it follows that theoretically speaking they are words devoid of any significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning for our practice. We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life. Our faith that these unintelligible objects actually exist proves thus to be a full equivalent in praktischer Hinsicht, as Kant calls it, or from the point of view of our action, for a knowledge of what they might be, in case we were permitted positively to conceive them. So we have the strange phenomenon, as Kant assures us, of a mind believing with all its strength in the real presence of a set of things of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever. "My object in thus recalling Kant's doctrine to your mind is not to express any opinion as to the accuracy of this particularly uncouth part of his philosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristic of human nature which we are considering, by an example so classical in its exaggeration. The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all. [For Doug James here justifies our entire effort in Quantonics! Each of us and all of us and all of reality are quantons(n¤nactual_selfings,actual_selfings). What does that quanton emerse in our own innovated qualogos? "We are in It and It is in us!"] It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming" |
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56 |
"and going in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies. Such a bar of iron could never give you an outward description of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly; yet of their presence, and of their significance for its life, it would be intensely aware through every fibre of its being. [Given our own quantum hermeneutics, James just broached a very quantum memeo which classicists usually refer as "pantheistic hylozoism." Again, for us, that jibes our, "We are ihn It and It is ihn us." Reality as: all actuality ihn n¤nactuality and all n¤nactuality ihn actuality. All scales of reality animate REIMAR quantum sorso complementary compenetration.] "It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason, as Kant styled them, that have this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with them the same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember those passages from Emerson which I read at my last lecture. The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only for such a transcendentalist writer, but for all of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things, so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant, and just. "Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of. They give its 'nature,' as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we know is 'what' it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception." |
See our coined omnifferent.
Obviously, we like this green bold text. But when we hear fundamentalist Christians use these words similarly, we are confident they speak from a wholly dialectical conspective. Of course that turns our green to violet. Plato's beauty is-was concrete, immutable, unchangeable and thus 'ideal form' ESQ! Aristotle placed good as a subspecies of dialectical truth! Ugh! And dialectical 'justice,' based upon SOM's judgment, is simply hell on Earth! Fundamentalist, especially Christian, justice is fossilized social coprolytic detention in exclusively static cultural, common sense, socially positive, rules. Fundamental religion AKA 'intelligent design' J of any kind denies individual freedom, explicitly! Fundamentalists are absolutely certain about rules and who decides what the rules are. They are SOMitic DIQheads. Fundamentalists of whatever persuasion always drive out Dynamic Quality, they drive out individual freedom. Aquinas, using Aristotelian sillygisms, taught them how to do that. See additional comments on quantum free will at Bergson's Time and Free Will. Doug - 12Apr2005. Page top index. |
57 |
"This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as they do, we [dialectically] turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold them, hate them, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete beings. And beings they are, beings as real in the realm which they inhabit as the changing things of sense are in the realm of space.
"Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known as the platonic theory of ideas [state-ic ideas which never change] ever since. Abstract Beauty, for example, is for Plato a perfectly definite [perfectly state-ic, unchanging, define-it, dialectically certain] individual being, of which the intellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing beauties of the earth.
"In our last lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a platonizing writer like Emerson may treat the abstract divineness of things, the moral structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship. In those various churches without a God which to-day are spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate object. 'Science' in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the 'Laws of Nature' as objective facts to be revered. A brilliant school of interpretation of Greek mythology "
1Symposium, Jowett, 1871, i. 527. |
We stated in earlier lectures that we were worried about James' apparent classicism here. But in Lecture III, he is showing us some of his quantum intuitions. We highlighted some of it in bold dark green above. However, his "...absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the cardinal facts in our human constitution," takes us right back into SOMland. To call absolute determinability a cardinal fact is a pure dialectical act. From our quantum perspective, classical determinacy is pure dialectical foolishness. Rather, quantum intellectual curiosity and intelligence depend vitally on quantum uncertainty as a fact of our human constitution. As Paul Pietsch said in his Shufflebrain, "Indeterminacy is the principal feature of intelligence." We totally agee. Here, his "Polarizing and magnetizing" and "turn towards them and from them" are much more quantum. Can you see him partially eschew dialectic's either-or here? He uses much more quantum both-ands here. Bravo! He also takes a Bergsonian and Pirsigean approach to space (as SQ) and sense (as closer to DQ).
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58 |
"would have it that in their origin the Greek gods were only half-metaphoric personifications of those great spheres of abstract law and order into which the natural world falls apart the sky-sphere, the ocean-sphere, the earth-sphere, and the like; just as even now we may speak of the smile of the morning, the kiss of the breeze, or the bite of the cold, without really meaning that these phenomena of nature actually wear a human face.1 "As regards the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at present seek an opinion. But the whole array of our instances leads to a conclusion something like this: It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call 'something there,' more deep and more general than any of the special and particular 'senses' by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; but anything else, any idea, for example, that might similarly excite it, would have that same prerogative of appearing real which objects of sense normally possess. So far as religious conceptions were able to touch this reality-feeling, they would be believed in in spite of criticism, even though they might be so vague and remote as to be almost unimaginable, even though they might be such non-entities in point of whatness, as Kant makes the objects of his moral theology to be. "The most curious proofs of the existence of such an
undifferentiated sense of reality as this are found in experiences
of hallucination. It often happens that an" |
Reader, are you perturbed at James' choice of words here? Is feeling objective? Is a feeling of presence objective? Is not James' con(m)text "individual spiritual belief?" So then is objective an appropriate word here? Do you peruse James as referring physical feeling? Spiritual feeling? Both? His use of 'perception' appears to aver 'spiritual feeling,' doesn't it? 'Deeper and more general' do too, do you agree? Is he advocating dialectical objectification of spirit in order to deflect criticism? But that is what 'science' does, isn't it, not 'religion?' Is 'religion' trying to be 'scientific' here as James describes it? We are k-now-ing that 'science' does its utmost to drive any notions of spiritual reality out of 'science.' Page top index. |
59 |
"hallucination is imperfectly developed: the person affected will feel a 'presence' in the room, definitely localized, facing in one particular way, real in the most emphatic sense of the word, often coming suddenly, and as suddenly gone; and yet neither seen, heard, touched, nor cognized in any of the usual 'sensible' ways. Let me give you an example of this, before I pass to the objects with whose presence religion is more peculiarly concerned. "An intimate friend of mine, one of the keenest intellects I know, has had several experiences of this sort. He writes as follows in response to my inquiries:
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We choose not to comment on James' extensive quotes here...each individual can interpret them in various and phenomenal ways. Beth and Doug believe that much of what folk call phenomena at Millennium III's commencement can be described in a novel quantum language. We have ample evidence for at least a pinch of quantum faith in our belief, including:
Doug - 27Apr2005. Page top index. |
60 |
"Of course such an experience as this does not connect itself with the religious sphere. Yet it may upon occasion do so; and the same correspondent informs me that at more than one other conjuncture he had the sense of presence developed with equal intensity and abruptness, only then it was filled with a quality of joy. "There was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused in the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of some ineffable good. Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of some poem, or scene, or blossom, of music, but the sure knowledge of the close presence of a sort of mighty person, and" |
James offers what we choose to view as a Quantonics' description of quantum reality in his, "some ineffable good." See our various discussions and papers on probability (and read what Sankara has to say at our QELR of positive), especially probability as n¤n-negative. That is a powerful tell that reality is much more quantum than dialectical. Note how Pirsig concluded that probability is Value in his SODV paper. Too, inure this: quantum waves are probability and thus are Pirsigean Value! Quantum reality issi fluxing waves and thus is Pirsigean Dynamic Value!!! Doug - 27Apr2005. Page top index. |
61 |
"after it went, the memory persisted as the one perception of reality. Everything else might be a dream, but not that." "My friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these latter experiences theistically, as signifying the presence of God. But it would clearly not have been unnatural to interpret them as a revelation of the deity's existence. When we reach the subject of mysticism, we shall have much more to say upon this head. "Lest the oddity of these phenomena should disconcert you, I will venture to read you a couple of similar narratives, much shorter, merely to show that we are dealing with a well-marked natural kind of fact. In the first case, which I take from the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, the sense of presence developed in a few moments into a distinctly visualized hallucination, but I leave that part of the story out.
"and hereupon the visual hallucination came." 1Journal of the S. P. R., February, 1895, p. 26. |
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"Another informant writes:
"Professor Flournoy of Geneva gives me the following testimony of a friend of his, a lady, who has the gift of automatic or involuntary writing:
"In an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious case of presence felt by a blind man. The presence was that of the figure of a gray-bearded man dressed in a pepper and salt suit, squeezing himself under the crack of the door and moving across the floor of the room towards a sofa. The blind subject of this quasi-hallucination is an exceptionally intelligent reporter. He is entirely without internal visual imagery and cannot represent light or colors to himself, and is positive that" 1E. GURNEY: Phantasms of the Living, i. 384. |
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63 |
"his other senses, hearing, etc., were not involved in
this false perception. It seems to have been an abstract conception
rather, with the feelings of reality and spatial outwardness
directly attached to itin other words, a fully objectified and exteriorized
idea. "Such cases, taken along with others which would be too
tedious for quotation, seem sufficiently to prove
the existence in our mental machinery
of a sense of present reality more diffused and general than
that which our special senses yield. For the pyschologists the
tracing of the organic seat of such a feeling would form a pretty
problemnothing could be more natural than to connect it
with the muscular sense, with the feeling that our muscles were
innervating themselves for action. Whatsoever thus innervated
our activity, or 'made our flesh creep,'our senses are
what do so oftenestmight then appear real and present,
even though it were but an abstract idea.
But with such vague conjectures we have no concern at present,
for our interest lies with the faculty rather than with its organic
seat. "Like all positive affections of consciousness, the sense of reality has its negative counterpart in the shape of a feeling of unreality by which persons may be haunted, and of which one sometimes hears complaint:
1Pensees d'un Solitaire, p. 66. |
James' words here are exceptional, do you agree? What does he intend semantically by "all positive affections?" And "negative counterpart in the shape of a feeling of unreality?" Both phrases, clauses are just extraordinary in our view. How can affections be positive in any classically logical, formal semantic? Too, even in any classically-socially-positive semantic? Effections yes, affections...how? James' language here is, apparent to us, n¤t objective! And does n¤t "negative counterpart...shape...feeling...unreality" express an informal and subjective quantum complementation? His words here and their apparent~wholly quantum semantics appear to us as precursors of his 5-10 year later use of compenetrate in his last, and, published posthumously by brother Henry James, notorious Some Problems of Philosophy. A quantum~n¤vel set of hermeneutics offer us more than small assurance our view quantum~metaph¤rically renders James' complementary and compenetrating quantum~appositional ihntensi¤ns. Further, James uncloaks himself as n¤t just Earth's founding father of psychology, but likely Earth's quantum father of psych¤l¤gy! Page top index. |
64 |
"In another lecture we shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of the unreality of things may become a carking [load, anguish, burden, trouble] pain, and even lead to suicide. "We may now lay it down as certain
that in the distinctively religious sphere of experience, many
persons (how many we cannot tell) possess the objects of their
belief, not in the form of mere conceptions which their intellect
accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasisensible
realities directly apprehended. As his sense of the
real presence of these objects fluctuates, so the believer alternates
between warmth and coldness in his faith. Other examples will
bring this home to one better than abstract description, so I
proceed immediately to cite some. The first example is a negative
one, deploring the loss of the sense in question. I have extracted
it from an account given me by a scientific man of my acquaintance,
of his religious life. It seems to me to show clearly that the
feeling of reality may be something more like a sensation than
an intellectual operation properly so-called.
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This quotation exemplifies, perhaps best in our view, what James and Boris Sidis intend by "tapping into reserve energy." Note this informant's description as almost ideally bivalent: either on or off. And dichotomized intwo kinds of on-off: short term on-off, and quasi-permanently off. Quantonics teaches its students how to quantum~included~middle animately straddle quanton(It,you). Indeed, we teach you that you are quanton(It,you): you are ihn It and It issi ihn you. We borrow our memeos semantically paraphrased from Clifford Geertz' Available Light as "a pinch of quantum faith." We go beyond any simple, locally naïve classical notions of any schismatic dichonic 'interactive' relationship to expanded quantum memeos of absolute fluxing ontic interrelationshipings' cyclicity: endless quanta of betterness via quantons(resurrection,self_euthanasia). A natural cyclicity of quantum natural 're n¤vel ation,' and rejuvination. Our templadigms here are nature's own cellular metabolisis as anabolisis-catabolisis and meiosis-mitosis-apoptosis, and on a larger scale supernovae and their own potential reemergencings, and so on... Nature shows Quantonics' how to mimic Hê-r aretê. J Doug - 28Apr2005. Page top index. |
65 |
"Nothing is more common in the pages of religious biography than the way in which seasons of lively and of difficult faith are described as alternating. Probably every religious person has the recollection of particular crises in which a directer vision of the truth, a direct perception, perhaps, of a living God's existence, swept in and overwhelmed the languor of the more ordinary belief. In James Russell Lowell's correspondence there is a brief memorandum of an experience of this kind: -" |
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66 |
"Here is a longer and more developed experience from a manuscript communication by a clergyman, I take it from Starbuck's manuscript collection:"
1Letters of Lowell, i. 75. |
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67 |
"1I borrow it, with Professor Flournoy's permission, from his rich collection of psychological documents." |
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68 |
state of equilibrium. When all at once I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I felt the presence of GodI tell of the thing just as I was conscious of itas if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent that I could barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life and took pity both on the insignificant creature and on the sinner that I was. I begged him ardently that my life might be consecrated to the doing of his will. I felt his reply, which was that I should do his will from day to day, in humility and poverty, leaving him, the Almighty God, to be judge of whether I should some time be called to bear witness more conspicuously. Then, slowly, the ecstasy left my heart; that is, I felt that God had withdrawn the communion which he had granted, and I was able to walk on, but very slowly, so strongly was I still possessed by the interior emotion. Besides, I had wept uninterruptedly for several minutes, my eyes were swollen, and I did not wish my companions to see me. The state of ecstasy may have lasted four or five minutes, although it seemed at the time to last much longer. My comrades waited for me ten minutes at the cross of Barine, but I took about twenty-five or thirty minutes to join them, for as well as I can remember, they said that I had kept them back for about half an hour. The impression had been so profound that in climbing slowly the slope I asked myself if it were possible that Moses on Sinai could have had a more intimate communication with God. I think it well to add that in this ecstasy of mine God had neither form, color, odor, nor taste; moreover, that the feeling of his presence was accompanied with no determinate localization. It was rather as if my personality had been transformed by the presence of a spiritual spirit. But the more I seek words to express this intimate intercourse, the more I feel the impossibility of describing the thing by any of our usual images. At bottom the expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him." |
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"The adjective 'mystical' is technically applied, most often, to states that are of brief duration. Of course such hours of rapture as the last two persons describe are mystical experiences, of which in a later lecture I shall have much to say. Meanwhile here is the abridged record of another mystical or semi-mystical experience, in a mind evidently framed by nature for ardent piety. I owe it to Starbuck's collection. The lady who gives the account is the daughter of a man well known in his time as a writer against Christianity. The suddenness of her conversion shows well how native the sense of God's presence must be to certain minds. She relates that she was brought up in entire ignorance of Christian doctrine, but, when in Germany, after being talked to by Christian friends, she read the Bible and prayed, and finally the plan of salvation flashed upon her like a stream of light.
"Here is still another case, the writer being a man aged" |
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70 |
"twenty-seven, in which the experience, probably almost
as characteristic, is less vividly described:
"Of the more habitual and so to speak chronic sense of God's presence the following sample from Professor Starbuck's manuscript collection may serve to give an idea. It is from a man aged forty-nine, probably thousands of unpretending Christians would write an almost identical account."
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"I subjoin some more examples from writers of different
ages and sexes. They are also from Professor Starbuck's collection,
and their number might be greatly multiplied. The first is from
a man twenty-seven years old:
"Another statement (none the less valuable psychologically for being so decidedly childish) is that of a boy of seventeen:
"I let a few other cases follow at random:
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"Such is the human ontological imagination, and such is the convincingness of what it brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are realized, and realized with an intensity almost like that of an hallucination. They determine our vital attitude as decisively as the vital attitude of lovers is determined by the habitual sense, by which each is haunted, of the other being in the world. A lover has notoriously this sense of the continuous being of his idol, even when his attention is addressed to other matters and he no longer represents her features. He cannot forget her; she uninterruptedly affects him through and through. "I spoke of the convincingness of these feelings of reality, and I must dwell a moment longer on that point. They are as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing than results established by mere logic ever are. One may indeed be entirely without them; probably more than one of you here present is without them in any marked degree; but if you do have them, and have them at all strongly, the probability is that you cannot help regarding them as genuine perceptions of truth, as revelations of a kind of reality which no adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in" |
We agree, with a caveat that to anthropomorphize "unpicturable beings" is...in our local perspective...to classically actualize spirit a wholly sacrilegious, hypocritical, and hubristic dialectical act. Why? It interprets like this: dichon(unseen, seen), and dichon(spirit, actuality). Classical fundamentalists dichotomize either God or mortals. In our ways of seeing this to make God classically EOOO(immortal, mortal) is sacrilege. Again, our view...n¤t the view, is quanton(spirit,actuality) and quanton(n¤nactuality,actuality) and quanton(unseen,seen). Doug - 27Apr2005. Page top index. |
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"words, can expel from your belief. The opinion opposed to mysticism in philosophy is sometimes spoken of as rationalism. Rationalism insists that all our beliefs ought ultimately to find for themselves articulate grounds. Such grounds, for rationalism, must consist of four things: (1) definitely statable abstract principles; (2) definite facts of sensation; (3) definite hypotheses based on such facts; and (4) definite inferences logically drawn. Vague impressions of something indefinable have no place in the rationalistic system, which on its positive side is surely a splendid intellectual tendency, for not only are all our philosophies fruits of it, but physical science (amongst other good things [in quantum reality "good things" is an oxymoron]) is its result. "Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it. This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it. That" |
Rationalism is quintessentially Earth-chauvinistic anthropocentrism, period! Classical definiteness is classical certainty is classical thing-king is classical DIQheadedness. See definite. Quantum reality is quantum~uncertain. Quantum Intellectual Curiosity (QICheadedness) issi quantumly~uncertain, n¤t classically positively certain.
See logic, proof, truth, etc. See Quantonics' Bases of Judgment.
Amen, James! Bravo James! William James directly confronts scientism's objective, rational, analytic, dialectical, logical scientism. Yes! James has vast quantum intuitions of his own. He intuits a quantum G¤d n¤t a classically dialectical God!!! Page top index. |
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"vast literature of proofs of God's existence drawn from
the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly
convincing, to-day does little more than gather dust in libraries,
for the simple reason that our generation
has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for.
Whatever sort of a being God may be, we know to-day that
[S-]he is nevermore that mere external inventor of 'contrivances'
intended to make manifest his 'glory' in which our great-grandfathers
took such satisfaction, though just how we know this we cannot
possibly make clear by words either to others or to ourselves
[Quantonics' QELR helps a bunch, though. J].
I defy any of you here fully to account for your persuasion that
if a God exist he must be a more cosmic and tragic personage
than that Being.JKL "The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious
sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate
feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the
same conclusion. Then, indeed, our intuitions and our reason
work together, and great world-ruling
systems, like that of the Buddhist [we have discovered dialectic
in Buddhism, unfortunately] or of the [Aristotelian dialectical-]
Catholic philosophy, may grow up.
Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the
original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized
philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned
and immediate assurance is the deep thing
in us, the reasoned argument is but
a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow.
If a person feels the presence of a living God after the fashion
shown by my quotations, your critical arguments, be they never
so superior, will vainly set themselves to change his faith. "Please observe, however, that I do not yet say that it is better that the subconscious and non-rational should thus hold primacy in the religious realm. I confine myself to simply pointing out that they do so hold it as a matter of fact." |
Surely those are our smileys!
All we have is an emerging quanton of uncertainty. This begs our William James Durant quote of William James, "Truth is a process, and 'happens to an idea...'" Page top index. |
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"So much for our sense of the reality of the religious objects [an oxymoron]. Let me now say a brief word more about the attitudes they characteristically awaken.
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"The constitutionally sombre religious person makes even
of his religious peace a very sober thing. Danger still hovers
in the air about it. Flexion and contraction are not wholly checked.
It were sparrowlike and childish after our deliverance to explode
into twittering laughter and caper-cutting, and utterly to forget
the imminent hawk on bough. Lie low, rather, lie low; for you
are in the hands of a living God. In the Book of Job, for example,
the impotence of man and the omnipotence of God is the exclusive
burden of its author's mind. "It is as high as heaven; what
canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?"
There is an astringent relish about the truth
of this conviction which some men can feel, and which for them
is as near an approach as can be made to the feeling of religious
joy.
"If we turn to the sanguine onlooker, on the other hand, we find that deliverance is felt as incomplete unless the burden be altogether overcome and the danger forgotten. Such onlookers give us definitions that seem to the sombre minds of whom we have just been speaking to leave out all the solemnity that makes religious peace so different from merely animal joys. In the opinion of some" 1Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, London, 1885, pp. 196, 198. |
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"writers an attitude might be called religious, though
no touch were left in it of sacrifice or submission, no tendency
to flexion, no bowing of the head. Any "habitual and regulated
admiration," says Professor J. R. Seeley,1 "is
worthy to be called a religion"; and accordingly he thinks
that our Music, our Science, and our so-called 'Civilization,'
as these things are now organized and admiringly believed in,
form the more genuine religions of our time. Certainly the
unhesitating and unreasoning way in which we feel that we must
inflict our civilization upon 'lower' races, by means of Hotchkiss
guns, etc., reminds one of nothing so much as of the early spirit
of Islam spreading its religion by the sword. "In my last lecture I quoted to you the ultra-radical
opinion of Mr. Havelock Ellis, that laughter of any sort
may be considered a religious exercise, for it bears witness
to the soul's emancipation. I quoted this opinion in order
to deny its adequacy. But we must now settle our scores more
carefully with this whole optimistic way of. thinking. It is
far too complex to be decided off-hand. I propose accordingly
that we make of religious optimism the theme of the next two
lectures." |
Please forgive us, for we are late with this Lecture review. Doug has had Imus' I-Man syndrome since 11Feb2005. Lotsa Vicodin. Little sleep. Lotsa pseudo-labor and -deliveries... J G¤d bless all w¤men. Sincerely! We start on reviews of Lectures IV & V about 3May2005. Doug. Page top index. |