A Formal Apology to Mysticism

Over Winter Break, I took a course on Eastern Philosophy. It was pretty awesome, mainly because it means I'll be graduating a year early (fingers crossed, as always). I suppose it bears mentioning that, despite my previous post's apprehensions, I actually did pass everything last semester, or the fact that I took a winter class would be a bit moot. Aside from all that, I really did learn a good bit about the Eastern schools of thought.

To be honest, I've always had a vague, poorly-defined distrust of the Asian philosophies. Maybe it was that they were popular with hippies - unlike bathing. Maybe I'm biased by my eurocentric education. This course changed all that: My vague, general distrust has been replaced with a specific, pointed one. The problem with Eastern philosophy, the thing I think has bothered me this whole time (more than the hippies) was its reliance on mysticism as the answer to epistemological questions.

You see, here in Europe (and remember, in philosophy, America is still part of Europe), there are two main answers to the epistemological question, "Where does knowledge come from?" Those answers are either "observation" (Empiricism) or "logic" (Rationalism). And we're all familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of both of those arguments.

In Asia, the answer to "Where does knowledge come from?" is "go sit on a rock for three days and three nights, eating nothing, and chant constantly, and the knowledge will pop into your head." That probably sounds sarcastic, but it's not. Right off the bat, that sort of thinking makes me want to ignore everything they say. And I don't mean that in a xenophobic sort of way; there have been hundreds of Western mystics, and I've ignored pretty much every one of them. Mysticism is the belief that one can achieve enlightenment through direct experience, intuition, instinct, or insight (to steal Wikipedia's phrasing), and much of Eastern philosophy is devoted to the methods that help one attain such insights.

For instance, the Soto Buddhists of Japan tend to focus their attentions on shikantaza, literally "nothing but precisely sitting." Another Japanese school of Buddhism, the Rinzai Buddhists, instead prefer to meditate upon a koan, which is a sort of paradoxical riddle that old masters tell their pupils to shut them up. "What is the sound of one hand clapping"* is a fairly well known one. They're generally pretty awesome, the point being that they're unsolvable by rational thought, yet nonetheless accessible to intuition.

The main problem I have with mysticism is that it's impossible to argue with: You tell them you've never seen any evidence to back their arguments up, and they'll say that's why you don't understand. You tell them what they're saying isn't rational, they'll tell you irrationality was the whole point.

What bothers me more than that, though, is that I'm a bit of a mystic myself. I don't think anyone who reads this has had the misfortune of learning Physics from me, but if you had, you'd know. There's no amount of proofs I can write to show someone F = ma, and no number of real-world examples that can get them to believe that F_g = G mM/R^2. The best I can do is keep driving them at it, making them do problems by rote memorization until eventually, at 3 am on a Tuesday night, it finally clicks into place, and they just get it.

A friend of mine (and I'm not going to name names) had a similar mystical experience going into his E&M final. He'd gotten Cs on both of the midterms, and had a solid C in the class, so he figured his grade wasn't exactly at stake. Thus, despite not knowing the material at all, he blew off studying the night before. Instead, he smoked a few joints and then dropped a tab of acid.

He ended up with an A on the final. To this day, he's not sure how, but a conversation from the day of the test clearly indicates a mystical experience. Another friend from the class asked him how he did, and he responded that he'd done quite well. "Finally understand vector fields, then?" asked his friend. "Dude," he replied, "I am a vector field."

So truth be told, I'm probably too harsh to mystics, and I owe them an apology. Sorry, guys.
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Next Time!:
1) Confucius say, the exception proves the rule
2) Top 6 bolt-action rifles of WWII, and why you don't care!
3) Finding a Job, or 'why it sucks to have zero marketable skills during an economic downturn'
4) Seriously, does anyone trust this section anymore?

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*The answer to this koan, according to renowned Buddhist scholar Terry Pratchett, is "cl," with the second hand contributing the "ap."

Here's a Buddhist joke for you:

Two pilgrims approach a river from opposite sides. The bridge is out.
The first calls out, "How do I get across?"
The second replies, "You are across!"