After a brief hiatus due to work obligations, it’s time to get back to business. In our previous installement, we underscored the necessity of creating disruptive actions capable of “elevating” the subject towards a transcendent experience.
What is the common ground between all these “sacrificial” approaches? What does fasting have to do with ecstatic dancing, meditation and ritual psychedelic use? Why did we say this was a prerequisite to leaving Plato’s cavern?
The thread that unites all these practices is the search for silence. However, “silence” must be understood from a mystical perspective, not a social one: “silence” is not equivalent to “shutting up”, or the absence of talking.
Talking/not talking is a social norm. We establish rules for exchanging ideas, build semantic groups of words and expresions that should or shouldn’t be used in each setting, and we qualify and judge people according to their respect or disinterest in upholding these rules. Talking/not talking produces evaluations like, “he’s uncouth”, “he’s respectful”, “he’s a gentleman”, etc.
Silence, albeit being in debt to “not talking”, is a different experience.
What does language do?
In order to understand what we’re talking about, we need to briefly go over the recent history of Philosophy of Language. Without getting too much into the weeds or breaking up this post into five different ones, let’s say language is a tool that allows us to filter all the stimuli raining on Man all the time. Philosophical Anthropologists like Arnold Gehlen identified in the 20th century how language works as a substitute for our lack of instincts, combined with a retardation in physiological development (known as neotheny).
To sum up, let’s say our mind is a fine-tuned machine programmed to solve problems. This is an evolutionary necessity: an animal without instinctual behavior needs to process information quickly in order to survive. Your mind is constantly screaming, “Move! That rock will hit you in the face!”, or “don’t touch fire, you’ll burn!”. However, this incredible machine, built after millions of years of evolution, becomes a hindrance to transcendent experiences that require you turn it off.
Creating silence
When you meditate, the first thing they’ll tell you is to stop “thinking”. “Thinking” here means that chattering voice going off in your head all the time, or that tune you can’t stop hearing in your head. That’s just your mind trying to make sense of everything, doing its job. Why do we need to turn it off?
Because all transcendent experiences occur outside of language. People fear psychedelic rituals because they “lose control”, which just means their mind wanders off and starts taking them unexpected places. Of course, we don’t “control” anything, but people think they’re in charge when anxious ideas pop off in their heads all the time.
What is the human experience?
In Philosophy, the beginning of the 20th Century was taken over by a debate between the “analytic” schools of thought (basically the US and the UK) versus the “continental” school (France and Germany). This can be summed up as the search for logical and mathematical truths in Philosophy, and the rejection of “metaphysics”. Since thinkers were trying to turn Philosophy into a “serious” science, they wanted to jump on the positivist bandwagon that proposed measuring everything. If you can’t measure it, it’s spurious, spooky, ghost-like BS; that was the idea.
Mathematics was supposed to be the holy grail (at least until Gödel came into the picture), so the first step was reducing logic to mathematics, something done by Bertrand Russell and Whitehead in their ambitious Principia Matematica. Once this was (kind of) done, the next step was reducing language to logic, i.e., taking all the spooky BS out of philosophical language.
Enter Ludwig Wittgenstein, a grumpy Austrian who claimed to have solved all of this in a relatively small (yet dense) book called the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (What’s with the book titles, guys? Jesus).
Basically, Wittgenstein’s point was that if you reduce language to logic, you’ll just wind up with uninteresting propositions like “The sky is blue”, which is redundant, or “the cat has five legs”, which is contradictory. All philosophical language is then, either redundant, or contradictory.
After this philosophical tour-de-force, Wittgenstein produced the best mic drop in Philosophy’s history, proclaiming we should “be silent” about anything that doesn’t fall inside this logical language, and then he left. Gone. Like, Ludwig out. He joined a Church, spent his days meditating, and kept on blabbering about how important the non-linguistic stuff was and that Philosophy was a waste of time.
Silence and awakening
What we mean when we’re talking about “silence” is the ability to be present, and this means escaping language. All revelation entails being able to transcend duality, to stop categorizing the world, analyzing, cutting reality up into little pieces. It is only through this void of mind that the subject can reach a transcendent experience. All mystical schools, spiritual teachings, religious practices and even philosophical framings looking to project Man past materialistic approaches to reality will say the same thing: you need to create interior silence. Not “stop talking” but “be silent”. This is a prerequisite for transcendent, transformative experiences.
Next time, we’ll look at how certain practices we engage in on a regular basis include this language-transcending approach, and how these practices can elevate themselves into mystical experiences.