My spiritual teacher advised his students to read a book called Beyond the Postmodern Mind by a world-known philosopher and scholar Huston Smith. My teacher’s thought was that it would be good for us to understand the evolution of thought and values in the western world, and to understand where and how the current paradigm originated, why the West thinks as it does. What follows is a short piece I wrote, inspired by Smith:
According to Jacques Derrida, claims of Absolute Truth marginalizes other ideas and alienates us from others who don’t share our world view. It makes us blind to alternative ways of understanding. There’s definitely some truth to this. The remedy, however, is not to throw the metaphysical baby out with the bath water in order to be open-minded, but to rely on people whose metaphysics are not only informed by logic and reasoning, but by genuine mystical experience.
A natural conclusion of Derrida’s theory would be that the more a person bases his/her life on a metaphysical world view, the more closed, marginalized and antagonistic towards differently thinking people he must be. But obviously this is not the case with mystics. They are in many ways much more connected to the nature, more conscious and clear-minded of what’s going on around them, kinder to other living beings and very flexible in their thinking –more so than most postmodernists–while basing their lives completely on a “metaphysical” foundation.
Institutionalized religion often serves as an example of what Derrida is warning about. When an institution is based on metaphysical principles but there are no members who would embody the theory of their metaphysical system the problems with absolute claims become very obvious. When religion becomes only a philosophical or theological belief-system with no one to clarify and validate the construct with their mystical experience of it, people start “dragging transcendence to their level”, as Swami puts it. To make matters worse, even if there is such a person, institutions often turn against members that actually embody the true spirit of the institution. The realized person’s flexibility is seen as a deviation because it doesn’t fit the conditioned and literal understanding of the institution’s metaphysics. Truth has to be as the institution delineates it, otherwise it will crumble the whole foundation the members have built their lives on.
It could be argued that true metaphysical world views, that have lasted the tear of time, have originated as a side-product of the mystical experience. The experiencers have put their experiences into words, and from that philosophical systems have developed.The mystical experience is afforded to a fortunate few by revelation, so even metaphysics in the ultimate case would be a descending form of knowledge. This is why reason should never be separated from the mystical experience and given independence. The only solution to keep metaphysics from either turning into totalitarianism or into meaningless relativism (as a reaction to totalitarianism) is to have a continuous stream of new revelation and a chain of saints who can provide that.
Of course it’s a whole other discussion of how to decide who is a real saint and which saint’s vision is the correct, but I won’t get into that here.
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