Numinous Experience

[tongodeon]

A while ago at Smugglers Cove a friend told me that she'd heard a lot of positive things about this blog from other readers, who described reading my blog as a "spiritual" or quasi-spiritual experience. I'm not sure whether my humble writing is worthy of such a heavy compliment, but it was nice to hear.

Scientists occasionally describe numinous

Comments

Agreed, and another lesson I take from it is this.

[jwgh]

When I think of this sort of experience I think of working on a mathematical proof really hard for many hours, and then finally getting a huge insight where all the pieces fall into place and the proof finally comes together into a satisfying hole.

And then I've also had the experience of that happening, then five minutes later noticing a big mistake that I'd missed. So the lesson I took away from that was, a numinous feeling does not necessarily mean you've actually put things together correctly.

Re: Agreed, and another lesson I take from it is this.

[rimrunner]

a numinous feeling does not necessarily mean you've actually put things together correctly

This is why I don't write fiction while drunk anymore.

This might sound odd when you consider what I've been doing and writing about recently, but I'm skeptical of the independent existence of the (for lack of a better term) "stuff" that I work with. The numinous experience there is not an objective reflection of reality.

Re: Agreed, and another lesson I take from it is this.

[tongodeon]

This is an exceptionally good point, and it brings up something else that I think differentiates secular from religious numinous experiences.

Religious people seem convinced of the correctness of their view because it feels right. I was recently discussing with a religious person how they can feel so certain of their religious convictions and they said:

The evidence that I use as the foundation of my faith is a. a strong personal attraction to specific spiritual things, b. the story of God and Christ in the Bible, which I find compelling and beautiful, and c. the practices, stories, myths, and relationships that I find in my worshipping communities.

As you point out, numinous appreciation of the beauty of an understanding is pleasurable, but not necessarily proof that it's actually true. It's possible, like Pons and Fleischmann, to get totally excited about something that's totally wrong. But as long as you understand that scientific knowledge is tentative and probabilistic, and you've done enough due diligence to assure yourself

Re: Agreed, and another lesson I take from it is this.

[jwgh]

This doesn't really relate to any of the points we're talking about, but I just listened to a podcast the other day ('The Nerdist') in which Drew Carey described getting this feeling when delivering a monologue for the first time on the Tonight Show (back in the Johnny Carson days when doing so could make your carreer, as it did in his case) - a feeling of everything clicking together. (When he was much younger and religious he got saved and he said the two feelings were very similar.)

[flwyd]

A good musical take on numinous experience: Bob Schneider - World Exploded into Love.

[tongodeon]

A Glorious Dawn is perhaps an even more direct example of what I was talking about, if you haven't seen it yet.

[ikkyu2]

I think tongodeon is ready to listen to Miracles, which is perhaps even more direct.

LSD and temporal lobe epileptic seizures can reliably replicate the experience of the numinous, which proves to me that these subjective experiences are really just operation of the normal brain mechanisms. Oliver Sacks has written extensively on this topic; it comes up at least once in every one of his books. Knowing that does not diminish my enjoyment of these moments when they occur.

[jakeinhartsel]

"The Universe is way cool." I like that! I may use it myself, unless of course you object.

At age 14 after having gone to church for most of my life up to then, I begin to see things that bothered me. Things like kids dying young, poor people and rich people and people that weren't sane or healthy. I thought why would a benivelent god cause such thing to happen.

So from 14 to 16 I read and reread the the new and old Testimates. I found all kinds of inconsistencies in them and often they made no sense to me. I also read the Koran. I then thought about and talked to lots of people and finally came to the conclussion that at least Christianity and the Muslim releigion made no sense to me. Later I came to the personal conclusion tha religion in general made no sense to me.

A little more thought and I decided that there was two choices one was an Infinite Universe and the other was an infinite being. The infinite Universe seemed the most plausable. I am 74 now and I have never wavered from the decision I made when I was 16.Jake

[tongodeon]

"The Universe is way cool." I like that! I may use it myself, unless of course you object.

I think that the US Patent Office has a rule against being able to patent inventions that are obvious. :)

[tensegritydan]

You should also consider the distinction between exoteric and esoteric teaching/knowledge. I first encountered this particular dichotomy in the Evans-Wentz translation of Bardo Thodol aka The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the idea being that advanced and subtle philosophies must still be dumbed down to some degree for teaching to laypeople, e.g. if you tell most people that they can achieve personal happiness and communion with the cosmos by treating other human beings with love, they will say "GTFO hippy" but if you tell them that a man in the sky impregnated a virgin so that you can live forever, then they are totally down with that

[tongodeon]

Your judgment that the scientifically provable is more personally valuable than the mythically resonant is exactly that--a personal value judgment.

I think that if you were talking about the relative cultural value of two scientifically provable things - the Great Wall of China versus the Pyramids of Egypt - then you'd have a point. It would be a personal value judgement that one is more valuable than the other.

But "scientifically provable" is a subset of the "resonant" which has the advantage of also being demonstrably true. The Pyramids and Atlantis are both culturally resonant, but the Pyramids have the advantage of being knowably, demonstrably extant. We know not only that they exist but where they exist, how big they are, what's in them, etc. Even if we charitably assume that Atlantis may or may not exist, the greater amount of real knowledge that we have about the pyramids seems to be more than simply a matter of personally subjective value.

don't go too far in the other direction by devaluing all experiences that are not

[tensegritydan]

My point is that numinous experiences are not a monopoly of the supernatural.

I agree with this. This is why I characterized your post as apologetics--challenging the prevailing notions about rational vs supernatural numinous experience.

with the advantage that the experience is based on appreciating something that's usefully, demonstrably true.Okay, I think I get what you are saying now. If you are saying that the advantage is a purely practical one, then I can go with that. It's like you get an added bonus for seeking the divine within the rationale world

[tongodeon]

I still feel that there are realms of numinous experience that do not fall into your category of rational, objective reality based experience, or at least do not yield any practical benefit, things like abstract art, music, or physical practices like sports or meditation. Approaching the divine through the intricacies of entomology is inarguably more useful than absorbing oneself in Bach, Clyfford Still, or chanting Om. Perhaps these are simply orthogonal to the rational-supernatural axis.I agree. I tried to include this point in my original post, and maybe I didn't emphasize it clearly enough

[gaping_asshole]

BTW, very nice post.