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From: trc@houti.UUCP (T.CRAVER)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: mysticism and its results
Message-ID: <388@houti.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 16-Aug-83 12:54:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: houti.388
Posted: Tue Aug 16 12:54:00 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 16-Aug-83 22:22:51 EDT
Lines: 66

Response to Laura Creighton on mysticism:

No, I do not have a high opinion of mysticism.

To quote Ayn Rand, mysticism is:
	"any claim to some nonsensory, nonrational, nondefinable,
	supernatural source of knowledge" [it can be explicitly or
	implicitly supernatural - trc]

Nathaniel Branden extended the idea by discussing Faith:
	"Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs
	for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof"

	"A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition.
	Faith is the equation of *feeling* with *knowledge*"

	'To practice the "virtue" of faith, one must be willing to suspend
	one's sight and one's judgment...One must be willing to repress one's
	critical faulty and hold it as one's guilt;  one must be willing to 
	drown any questions that rise in protest - to strangle any thrust
	of reason convulsively seeking to assert its proper function as the
	protector of one's life and cognitive integrity.'

	"Faith is a malignancy that no system can tolerate with impunity;
	and the man who succumbs to it, will call on it in precisely those
	issues where he needs his reason most.  When one turns from reason
	to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts
	the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an
	organ one cannot trust any longer.  It becomes what the mystics claim 
	it to be: a tool of distortion."

(N. Branden) In discussing the traditional morality that arises from faith:

	"the essence of morality, men are taught, consists of self-sacrifice:
	the sacrifice of one's mind to some higher authority, and the
	sacrifice of one's values to whoever may claim to require it"

	"A sacrifice... means the surrender of a higher value in favor of a 
	lower value or of a nonvalue.  If one gives up that which one
	does not value in order to obtain that which one does value - or
	if one gives up a lesser value in order to obtain a greater one -
	this is not a sacrifice, but a *gain*"

	'if sacrifice is a virtue, it is not the neurotic but the rational
	man that must be "cured"'

	'The answer given by many defenders of traditional morality is:
	"Oh, but people don't have to go to extremes!" - meaning: "We
	don't expect people to be *fully* moral.  We expect them to
	smuggle *some* self-interest into their lives.  We recognize 
	that people have to live, after all."     The defense, then, of 
	this code of morality is that few people will be suicidal enough
	to attempt to practice it consistently.  *Hypocrisy* is to be
	man's protector against his professed moral convictions.  What
	does *that* do to his self-esteem?    And what of the victims
	who are insufficiently hypocritical? '
	
That is a fair cross-section of the views on mysticism and its accompanying
beliefs that I agree with.  I should point out that there are several
different types of mystics - those that believe in a god as the source
of morality, and those that believe in "society" as the source of morality.
In either case, it amounts to basing morality on the whim of something 
that is deemed to be beyond morality.

	Tom Craver
	houti!trc