The Varieties of Religious Experience 3/15

Religion’s abstract: There exists an order in addition to the visible, which is nonetheless evidenced, and the chief good is our ability to adjust to this plan.

Morality, practicality, emotions—religiosity—derives from objective states of consciousness, which are not in doubt, as they are part of the human experience. These mental objects cause us to react in ways every bit as strong, if not more powerful, than more tangibly sensory objects. In terms of pragmatics, “material sensations actually present may have a weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts.”

Divinity is always idealistic in the abstract never ideological. For the believer, this is a reciprocating attitude influenced by the determination of belief in divine beings, a matter purely of ideas, which cannot directly correspond to anything in the past history of a particular person: Objective idealism. However, there are also a number of abstract concepts equal in importance. These are qualities and states of being guaranteed attributes, the almighty; a means of making apprehendable truths higher than mere sense-perception affords. Such metaphysical potentialities, it is said, can not be the objects of knowledge because they do not have actual signification; they refer to no ascertainable and cannot said to either be or beyond existence. For purposes of practicality, one acts as though difference in conception as to what these may mean is fixed intuitively in determining what form they could take in the instance of particular circumstances. “The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all.”

[that aether thing really didn't pan out]

The timeless abstractions of ideal philosophical concepts—truth, justness, the Good (pizza)—form the backround to which our recognition of facts adheres taking shape in. They allow us, as mental objects, to grasp the meaning of a subjective world and afford grounds for classification as a means to rationalize it. This must simply be granted as a fundamental truth of human experience; what they actually are, obviously, is quite controversial. But the “absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions” is as real as mere transitory objects of perception’s sense. But more often it’s easier to laud the achievements of science as if sprung from God (really, just what s/he left for us to see) and the pathetic fallacy abounds in “Laws of Nature” given intentionality.

Should one conceive of ability to sense ‘the real’ in one’s psychical consciousness, an objective presence made manifest, that does entail greater attention to the modes and expressions of one’s conscience—not Matt Damon to the Sister, ‘Do it, do it and I’ll fucking spank you!’—but by curiosity in sense of alert reality made sharper through substituting ideas for truth in proceeding infinitely, believed in spite of criticism and made stronger for addressing such: To arrive at the presence of unimaginable and vague abstraction.

The most immediate example of this phenomenon is that of hallucination in which the presence intuited constitutes “an undifferentiated sense of reality” but solely as the a-religious instance of this same experience, albeit one of folly. This can, at times, approach states of sublimity, quite a positive experience for the subject. They need not even be interpreted as experiences of the divine, though they of course can be, perhaps could have been; but the subject of mystical experience takes on a fully different character in analyzing its qualities. These span the spectrum from visualizations (if not, “visitations”) to the fully subjective knowledge of connection with ideas and their referents. Medicine, however, tends not to lend itself to the non-quantifiable presence of objective states; even if these have saved far more lives than pills.

So even if it’s not deluded apparitions, certain people hold their belief content as a personally sensible realism.

But no one can sustain “lively and difficult” faith uniform forever; sometimes things start to go south and even then everyone may know how it’s like to feel swept up and awash in the direct recognition of actual truth. The always verging on not quite having arrived (“meaning: ‘God is with us’”) presence immanent of a spiritual feeling—which as stated before need not derive solely from traditional belief in god—a form of perception beyond visibly testable evidence to know.

This is most often called a variety of mystical conception when it is not of a particularly lasting duration of which feeling endures. In particular cases these need not even be prefaced with suggestions of the transition to inspired state. This does, of course, consist of feeling oneness in the egotism’s melting self away that gives rises to the awareness of deeper, a more rich and fully sensible meaning by which one communes with a universal entity beyond ordinary experience to such extent its absence of all time would make meaning away. Or the experience need not be quite so abstract often taking the form of practical impetus to care of one’s self in habit or thought, practices of various formal devotions, it’s commitment, derived from a deeply held conviction of their innate and goodly worth sprung of forceful impressions in the mind. Their differences, though vast, are comprehended from within the realm of a non-delusional (because entirely subjective) process in order to arrive at total synthes’s of thought as felt in one’s metaphorical relation to a sense of divine purpose, intention or significance in excess of the self but which is, nevertheless, wholly contained within it even if this is not the belief which is held (i.e. one may imagine, and even hold God’s own platonic firm conviction in the realitly of non-verifiable mental states without these being subjected to delusional interpretation) as it were, a factual occurrence.

People have a capacity for conceiving abstractly, imagine!, which guarantees its own belief in certain truths. Things need not be picturable, or even things, in order for us to grasp the essence of their idea mentally. It is a sense developed with familiarizing intimacy over time in which two beings come to associate with one an-other while remaining their own stable identity reinforced by the unforgetting image of truth proposed of their divination to each either’s reality. “They are as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing than results established by mere logic ever are.” Those who deny, or refuse to acknowledge the possibility of experiencing, these sublimated states of life-as-force generally tend to object to any and every occurrence of their expression; the motivation for evil, however, remains a bottomless chasm. Rationalism does have its place in mediating experience and determining the truth from its appearance, even in cases of religious and/or its mystical incarnations; but you’d better be able to justify that with recourse to what is practicably logical by means of a damn fine explanation from abstract principles, some definable facts of senses’ perception, a way of mitigating the copiousness of such acts, inferentially, some method to make sense of conjectures formed thereby: Otherwise your ‘rationalism’ is really just relativistic under Enlightened-’meant’ cover of false positivism’s tyranny—at best only a really aestheticizing logical construct bearing no relation whatsoever to the real world except under incredibly controlled circumstances which are a major problem to make adhere to your hypotheses. “The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion.”

So to review: Religious experience is the solemn and quintessentially distinctive form of joy in self-surrender derived from its sensibility that the various configurations can never be fully prescripted a priori because, in its relation to the universe (if not universal divinity Almighty—whether or not made flesh), the actual totality of religious experience is far too vast for one human being to fully conceive. However, thereupon it follows that, although impossible to fully uncover in all its knowable depths, therefore the motivation for reflection of the religious and their modal conceptions of reality is oriented not towards the end of systematic or ultimately definable knowledge with which one might seek to classify and judge the various mystical empiricities as subjective rationales of human mentalities and acts, but merely as the more worthily practical means to derive some solace from infinity’s divine and realizing transcendence—going afield of construed and present categories beyond definitions of sense—in order to arrive at the true appearance of one’s metaphysical self, soul related to the universal all.

en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience/Lecture_III