When my son was 5, he had an interesting linguistic problem that landed him on the "special needs" school role. Like all of us, he had learned language by repetition, but in his repetition he failed to note a subtle but very essential rule - personal object identification. He would say "my book" meaning my, me, his father's book, and "his book" regarding his, my son's book. The reason is obvious: when I pointed to a book and said, "that's his book," referring to my son, he took that literally. "His" became synonymous with his name. To convince him otherwise was like going through Abbot and Costello's "Who's on First." "No, son," I would say, "that's not MY book. That's YOUR book." He would then dutifully repeat "your book" meaning "my book." "No, no...this is MY book; that's YOUR book," and he would point to my book and say "my book," meaning my, me, Dad's, book. He could not understand the rule for personal reference change and I could not make him understand that rule, and soon he was allocated his "special" spot next to the autistic kid who screamed all the time and had a full-time minder. My son did not scream and did his little sketches and played with the other kids and so forth, but he was marked. In part, because of that, we got him to the Catholic school for first grade, where we learned that he had indeed been labeled "autistic" by the public school. It did happen that he figured it out by the end of kindergarten and would die if he knew I was writing about this. And it did get us to go back to church and help open another angle in exploring the sacred that I had not ever planned on re-opening. This has not been an unqualified success, but it has been, on balance, worth the effort.
But back to the point: my son had no reference for the logic I was using, and it brought me back to my linguistic classes - how do we learn language in the first place? Clearly, we are programmed, or made for language. It is a faculty, learning language, that is opened shortly after birth, and then partially closed by adolescence. How the very young mind figures out the rules - rules it could not understand vocally, even if it already could speak - still puzzles the experts and I suspect always will. It is a system set that we are made to handle, by genetics and whatever other unknown factors, that transcends simple natural conditioning. Giraffes will never understand language; neither will dogs, although they can learn commands. And when we learn a language, we are hemmed in by the logical limitations of that language - limitation formed by cultural group thinking. We could go on and on, but hopefully the reader gets the general idea.
In Thomas Campbell's book (My Big TOE), he states that, to move on to an understanding of higher consciousness, we have to make at least one mystical leap of faith - this by an otherwise hard-nosed physicist - because we do not have the logical reference point to transcend our own overall self-contained reality system. We are indeed made (that is, created) to transcend it, because we can, but we have to make this "leap" just as the very young have to jump into something like language that they have no reference for. They can do it because they are somehow made for it, but it is not as automatic as many - including my son's teacher - think. For my son, the logic behind the language that he was missing must have come as a revelation. He could not explain that revelation in language, just as I had a very difficult time in doing so, but he had it none the less. He went up a level. We can, too, but we have to temporarily and partially abandon a (or perhaps several) central position in our reality system. Campbell identifies his One as our concept of causality and creation. He notes that objective science, and what we call practical sense, tells us that something cannot come out of nothing, yet we know that this had to be the case "in the beginning" regardless of how we envision the succeeding reality. Science - standard science and "common sense" - tells us to ignore that logical impossibility, as if it only happened once. From then on, it tells us, that miracle will never happen again and so is irrelevant.
Campbell rightly tells us that this is simple and arrogant ignorance. The law of nature that allowed an uncreated creator - that something beyond our scientific laws - is fundamental to our understanding of reality. Of course the religious have always known this, but Campbell wishes to find a path that transcends belief. For (standard) science, he says, objective causality can only come from an objective source. But we know that is not true; for him, then, "reality" can still be determined by results, but the cause does not have to fit into our reality mode - only the results. This might tell us that prayer works, or that drawing mandalas and imagining yourself travelling through them works, too; if what one is doing has results, then it is true- as far as that goes, at least. He would bring it further - continue doing things that are "mystical" and see if they have results. With those that do, compile them and then tease apart the logic within them. In this way we can be led objectively to the borders of another reality.
To transcend the borders, however, we need to silence our internal reality system's chatter (as always). There are ways to do this, but sooner or later, we will be able to transcend our own borders of meaning. It is at this point that the "mystical" remains mystical no longer, for it then becomes a "known" - although known by another greater (that is, more widely encompassing) reality system.
But first we have to have the faith to leave behind our comfortable, if unfulfilling, reality state. And it is even logical to do so. There are higher laws of physics operating on us that we simply cannot understand from our vantage point,any more than a dog can understand human language. But they are there - working on us and ready to pop into our reality sphere like the revelation my son had at age 5. FK
But back to the point: my son had no reference for the logic I was using, and it brought me back to my linguistic classes - how do we learn language in the first place? Clearly, we are programmed, or made for language. It is a faculty, learning language, that is opened shortly after birth, and then partially closed by adolescence. How the very young mind figures out the rules - rules it could not understand vocally, even if it already could speak - still puzzles the experts and I suspect always will. It is a system set that we are made to handle, by genetics and whatever other unknown factors, that transcends simple natural conditioning. Giraffes will never understand language; neither will dogs, although they can learn commands. And when we learn a language, we are hemmed in by the logical limitations of that language - limitation formed by cultural group thinking. We could go on and on, but hopefully the reader gets the general idea.
In Thomas Campbell's book (My Big TOE), he states that, to move on to an understanding of higher consciousness, we have to make at least one mystical leap of faith - this by an otherwise hard-nosed physicist - because we do not have the logical reference point to transcend our own overall self-contained reality system. We are indeed made (that is, created) to transcend it, because we can, but we have to make this "leap" just as the very young have to jump into something like language that they have no reference for. They can do it because they are somehow made for it, but it is not as automatic as many - including my son's teacher - think. For my son, the logic behind the language that he was missing must have come as a revelation. He could not explain that revelation in language, just as I had a very difficult time in doing so, but he had it none the less. He went up a level. We can, too, but we have to temporarily and partially abandon a (or perhaps several) central position in our reality system. Campbell identifies his One as our concept of causality and creation. He notes that objective science, and what we call practical sense, tells us that something cannot come out of nothing, yet we know that this had to be the case "in the beginning" regardless of how we envision the succeeding reality. Science - standard science and "common sense" - tells us to ignore that logical impossibility, as if it only happened once. From then on, it tells us, that miracle will never happen again and so is irrelevant.
Campbell rightly tells us that this is simple and arrogant ignorance. The law of nature that allowed an uncreated creator - that something beyond our scientific laws - is fundamental to our understanding of reality. Of course the religious have always known this, but Campbell wishes to find a path that transcends belief. For (standard) science, he says, objective causality can only come from an objective source. But we know that is not true; for him, then, "reality" can still be determined by results, but the cause does not have to fit into our reality mode - only the results. This might tell us that prayer works, or that drawing mandalas and imagining yourself travelling through them works, too; if what one is doing has results, then it is true- as far as that goes, at least. He would bring it further - continue doing things that are "mystical" and see if they have results. With those that do, compile them and then tease apart the logic within them. In this way we can be led objectively to the borders of another reality.
To transcend the borders, however, we need to silence our internal reality system's chatter (as always). There are ways to do this, but sooner or later, we will be able to transcend our own borders of meaning. It is at this point that the "mystical" remains mystical no longer, for it then becomes a "known" - although known by another greater (that is, more widely encompassing) reality system.
But first we have to have the faith to leave behind our comfortable, if unfulfilling, reality state. And it is even logical to do so. There are higher laws of physics operating on us that we simply cannot understand from our vantage point,any more than a dog can understand human language. But they are there - working on us and ready to pop into our reality sphere like the revelation my son had at age 5. FK
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