This week a colleague, having read some of my essays involving esoteric and weird religious and philosophical matters — which will appear in my forthcoming essay collection (title reveal: What the Daemon Said) — remarked that he wondered why those who vaunt Eastern or other perspectives don’t realize that these may be just as time- and culture-bound as Western views. I replied as follows:
It’s definitely wrong to refuse to place all religious or philosophical traditions on an equal footing with others by subjecting them to social scientific criticism and recognizing the conditioned and contingent factors that make them what they are. The question becomes whether there’s anything about any religion or philosophy that remains or emerges as enduring and sui generis after all temporal and cultural factors have been accounted for by a thorough (one might say a ruthless) application of methodological naturalism.
I’m of the opinion that the answer is yes, and/but that this affirmative is found in or bound up with a primal level or experience of human consciousness and subjectivity and the phenomenology of such in relation to the experience of objective consciousness.
To some this can sound like a lot of gobbledygook, pure moonshine, but I think it’s defensible, rational, and worth pursuing and talking about. However, talking about it as something real, and even apprehending or intuiting it as something real, is inherently difficult and elusive. This is due to the fact that the very minute you try to think about it, let alone talk about it or otherwise communicate it to someone else, you’re thereby operating in the contingent realm of time, language, and culture again. In this conditioned realm, all thoughts and words can be validly analyzed and even, if desired, “explained away” as cultural products with no viable claim to stand above the fray.
But again, this doesn’t invalidate the possible existence of such an unconditioned reality. In fact, it clarifies what such a thing would actually mean and be like, and how we might approach “knowing” it.
For more on these last points, see the last couple of paragraphs in a post that I wrote a decade ago, titled “This I Believe: An Uber-Agnostic on Religion, Psychology, Consciousness, the Paranormal, and the Meaning of Life.”
Somewhere in the centre of the universe is a blind idiot god babbling insanity – I know this from the psychotic experience of reference after doing meditation etc. Reference is the official psychiatric term for when everything you see refers back to you in bizarre and confusing non sensical ways.
That’s the actual centre of the universe there is nothing ordered about it just chaos
Or at least that’s the way it has to seem when one experiences the state that you describe. Which of course raises the question of whether a truly veridical understanding or apprehension of the principle at the base or core or apex of “reality itself,” the ultimate noumenon, is categorically possible. I’m of the opinion that it is indeed possible. But you can’t know it in, as, or from your customary egoic sense of self and frame of reference. You have to transcend that and become it (or realize/remember that you’ve always been it) to know it. At which point notions of “order” and “chaos,” “normal” and “bizarre,” “sense” and “nonsense,” “beatific” and “nightmarish,” become wholly decontextualized and meaningless. The unconditioned reality just Is.
I think there is a lot of difference between me and my younger because I am passed away from different critical situations, I read this point from Charlie Munger, he said many points in his life, I have read his portfolio so I remember, Charlie Munger is a very big name and he is known from his wealth, a lot of things a read from his portfolio. so if you want to read just go and visit. thanks