Krimel said: ...But holy roller services offer ecstasy and mystical union with the divine in many other forms including dancing, passing out into trance states, laughing hysterically, (becoming drunk in the Spirit) and speaking in tongues.
dmb says:You're talking about rituals and practices that define a social group. That is the static stuff of religion, stuff that happens every Sunday so regularly that you could just about set your watch to it. Yes, it's full of sound and fury and motion but that doesn't mean its Dynamic in the Pirsigian sense. That just means it's a loud public spectacle. Krimel said: I do not see where any of those practices is likely to produce anymore in the way of "enlightenment" than a literal belief in the Bible. dmb says: Developmental psychology is one of my favorite ways to get at the difference. Basically, this only entails an extension of Kohlbergs model where there are increasingly sophisticated stages of moral reasoning. Pirsig's levels can be seen as a version of this same hierarchy, where the individual's development roughly recapitulates the evolutionary history of the species. In our extension, we simply apply these levels to the various kinds of religious understanding. Clearly, the concrete and literal interpretations would be relatively simple, even childlike, and it's no accident that the average American has the equivalent of a second-grade education in religion. What's worse, the symbolic language of myth is misread when it's read as literal and concrete. This is always a problem but the West's scientific materialism and urban lifestyle makes it all the more difficult the read the symbolic language AS symbolic. The non-rational language of myth can be rediscovered, so to speak, by comparative analysis. Not only can we detect patterns in the myths across the various cultures, there are similarities between myths and dreams. They speak the same language and are otherwise so similar that Joseph Campbell says, basically, that they are private and public versions of the same thing. They're cultural, yes, but on a deeper level they're psychological. In the same way, the hero's journey refers to the structure of drama and to the structure of psychological development. This becomes apparent when you read the symbols as symbols, especially in a comparative analysis. Alan Watts, for example, wrote a book called "Myth and Ritual in Christianity" wherein he shows how the hero's journey is symbolically represented in the West's mainstream religious tradition. He has to combine the overlapping myths and rituals of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches because both are incomplete by themselves, but together it's all in there. This psychological journey can be seen in Gilgamesh, Buddha and Alice in Wonderland, the myth of Orpheus, Star Wars or Apocalypse Now. The horror. The horror. The horror is that people take this shit literally and don't quite realize that its all about them and their growth as human beings. To steal a line from Socrates, its about the care of your soul. As Jung thinks of it, its about gaining an integrated personality, a wholeness that defines true health. It's sometimes put in terms of quieting the mind or finding peace of mind, or even like nirvana as Bolte-Taylor described it. So anyway, when read symbolically and psychologically, rather than concretely and literally, the message is seen as referring to your own psyche rather than historical events or supernatural entities. And if these developmental theories are right, we can move to a new stage of cognitive development every seven years or so. In Jungian terms, the movement is an upward spiral so that you come back from each journey only to start a new one from the beginning, except you're starting from a "higher" position each time. Or hopefully so, anyway. You can also find this process of growth and integration and growth in Yoga, Tarot cards, Astrology, Alchemy, as well as Hollywood, religion and psychology. I mean, there is a wide-ranging variety of tools that support the MOQ's assertions about the differences between mysticism and theism. My Oxford Companion to Philosophy and Stanford's encyclopedia of philosophy both have and entry on mysticism and they both make an important distinction right off the bat. They distinguish between the theistic and non-theistic kinds, just like Pirsig, Jung, Campbell and so many others do. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync. http://windowslive.com/howitworks?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t1_allup_howitworks_022009 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
