Mystic Revolution

“In reality, here’s what inspiration, or whatever or whoever, has to say about that, however: in the worst-case scenario, the fairy tale element is the realest thing there is, the essential thing. Air, water, fire, earth as the four elements, and the fairy-tale as the fifth, the additional element. In a story, this one at least… the fairy tale has its place, as an answer to the daily toxic chatter, to the days of toxic rain in summer and fall, to the toxic phone calls year after year from international call centers, to the never ending toxic happenings, being cooked up in the devil’s workshop.”

– Peter Handke

“There’s a Natural Mystic blowing through the air.”

– Bob Marley

We often think of the world in a dichotomy of reality. This dichotomy, for many people, is that of natural and supernatural, seen and unseen, real and mystical. We often consider what is “rational” to be what is real (thank you, Enlightenment). To be sure, reason, classically understood, has its place. However, reason, classically understood, will only take you so far in understanding reality. Classical reason tells only part of the story.

About a year ago, I went to see Gustav Holst’s The Planets performed by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. At the time, I was particularly cynical about the world, and was in a state of searching. For what, I did not know. I distinctly remember thinking, at the climax of Jupiter, “Is this all there is? Is this the most that humanity can do?”

Of course I’m sure you’re thinking that I am an arrogant snob. And of course, I was somewhat an arrogant snob at the time. But the question mirrored a deeper trend in my thinking: what is the point? Of art, science, theory; anything?

Is this the best we can do?

It is amazing to me how deeply the nihilism of the current age affected my thinking at that point. I viewed the world as semi-chaotic humdrum, with the mind imposing order upon it arbitrarily. I was not even necessarily of the mind that there is no inherent meaning in the world; to say it in a word, I was weary, and found even great art drab.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think that there is a yearning for adventure, a yearning for fantasy, dragons, courage and fear and death and angels. If that is you, let me tell you this: to say that those things are not part of reality is to deny reality. The mystic is real, and it is not set in opposition to reason, but rather is an inherent part of reason.

You ask how.

Reason and logic primarily help us in grouping things. Reason says that I, Seth Baker, am a human, and therefore am not a dog. These words, human, dog, I, they all represent groups. They are ideas. To say I am a human puts me into the broad category of humanity, and to say the word I puts me into the very specific category of the very specific mind, body and soul that is typing this article. To understand the world this way is to understand the world in terms of ideas.

It is scientism, not science, that has turned our sight from the realm of ideas to the realm of data. The COVID pandemic showed us powerfully just how far scientism has gone. The fact that “follow the science” is received with any sort of respect is a poignant reminder of how lost true science actually is. Scientism, “data-ism,” to quote Chris Anderson, is something that is followed. True science is not followed. True science is observation, hypotheses, testing; not a dictator. Science does not command.

In the same way that it does not command, it furthermore does not describe meaning or give the deeper understanding associated with meaning. Science may be the basis for these inquiries, but it is not the inquiries itself. Take, for example, the rise of Big Data. To quote Chris Anderson once again in his Wired article, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” “Correlation supersedes causation.” What we are witnessing today is not a heightened or enhanced understanding of the world (as modern scientists who affirm the leprous religion of scientism claim,) but purely more. We can see how things are correlated, so much so that understanding the causation is of no importance. Google showed that explicitly. To advertise effectively one merely needs to know that one website is visited more frequently than another, not why that site is more popular. As Anderson points out, models are no longer necessary. The whole point of a model was to express the basic mechanism of a system, like the Earth being reduced down to a globe. In order to understand the world better, we had to simplify it down to a model that our minds could apprehend. Now, however, it is as if we have the whole Earth in front of us. The conclusion, however, is not that we have understanding of what the earth is. In fact, while an overload of data can be quite helpful in understanding the world or furthering various scientific inquiries, it is not understanding in itself. It is one of the tragedies of our modern age (and I think so drastic an expression is implicitly merited,) that understanding what happens is rendered more important than why that thing happens.

To return, then, to my original thesis that Reason, classically understood, only tells a portion of reality.

The truth is that Reason, understood in a sense other than that of the Enlightenment, recognizes the categories of human, dog, tree, flower, as categories proceeding directly from a Mind. To flesh this out, let’s get into the background theory for this seemingly out of place statement. Dr. Nathan Jacobs, speaking with Jonathan Pageau (YouTube link at the bottom), explains Realism and it’s fundamental question this way:

“Realism recognizes that you, and I, and every other human being from the moment we can speak, the moment we are self-aware, we think in terms of groups…. The big question with Realism is why. Is [the mind] abstracting from the world… are those structures actually out there and reflective of the way the world is? If so, the answer is you’re a realist. Or is it all chaotic amorphous matter and the mind is just inventing mental fiction in order to group and categorize and interpret stuff that really isn’t organized?”

– Dr. Nathan Jacobs

It wasn’t until the enlightenment that the idea of the mind imposing order on a chaotic universe came onto the radar of philosophical thought and began to take hold. If you understand the world in terms of order and structure, you must ask why that order and structure is there. If you understand, further, that the principles on which the mind operates, the principles that order things and categorize things, are the same principles that run through the very fabric of reality, of time and space and life and death, ordering the world in its course, then you must conclude that the world lives and moves and has its being in some sort of thing like a mind. The very fact that math exists as a symbolic description of a physical reality forcefully urges the honest thinker to consider that the order that we observe in the world is not a product of the mind but rather the opposite; that the mind learns order from the world. Thus, when you recognize something for what it is definitionally, you begin to commune with something deeper than what is seen.

Once upon a time, everything you see: darkness, light, life, death; all of these things were ideas in the mind of God. In His omniscience, He has foreseen them, and in His sovereignty, He is ruler over them all. The true Form of time, to use platonic language, was once only a reality in the Mind of God. The same is true of trees, birds, love, air, water, fire, earth, and fairy story. This is a mystic idea. To see a tree and realize that that tree was and is in the mind of God and is surrounded and inhabited by God is to partake in a mystical reality, but a reality nonetheless. And we, in our finitude, even still mirror, vaguely though it is, the order of the Mind of God in our own mind. Behold: this; this is true Reason, unbound, unfettered, released from the sterile bondage of Skepticism. To quote Dr. Jacobs again:

“I “see” a table, I “see” a computer… we always attribute that to the eye. That’s the empiricist mistake: that the eye sees that…. The eye doesn’t see that; the eye gives you all this data… light and shadow… but what happens is that the mind so automatically says “table,” “chair,” “floor,” “human,” “cat,” “dog,” and it’s so automatic, and it’s so immediate in identifying those groups, which is what allows you to differentiate all the things in your field of view. We presume it’s the eye, but it’s not. It’s the mind. And if it’s true- if realism is true, and that somehow these structures are divine in nature, they originate from God…. then what happens is that basic perception is already a mystical experience.”

Dr. Nathan Jacobs

Let me then sum up the thesis of the mystic revolution with all the lucidity I have at hand. The mystic revolution is mystic because it arises out of an understanding that scientism does not fully comprehend the adventurous mystery of the universe, and it is a revolution because now, in the present age, the most counter-cultural thing to do is to be thoughtful. This revolution is peaceful, yet internally it is dramatic.

To understand the age, one cannot merely observe the age through the eyes of a specialist. The political theorist sees all things in terms of political theory, the economist sees all things in terms of money, and the theologian sees all things in terms of God. But to grasp the seemingly elusive Zeitgeist, it is not only a requirement that one must be thoughtful, but one must see that truth is of higher value than conformity. This seems apparent; it seems that everyone in their right mind would affirm this. But how many affirm that truth is of higher value than conformity, and then imbibe falsity from the mainstream media? How many affirm that truth is of higher value than conformity, and then drown in doomscrolling, selling their soul to the omniscient algorithm and conforming to the group of millions of Americans who spend hours doing the same? As Frank Herbert so eloquently puts it,

“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

– Frank Herbert writing in Dune

Data, and of course, we, have put the power into the hands of the machines.

Are we free?

The revolution starts with honesty; it starts with bravery. The bravery to ask questions, and the honesty to answer them. Reality is so much more fascinating and adventurous than any video game, any epic tale. The true dichotomy of the world is not the real and the mystic. It is the known and the unknown, united under one banner of mystic understanding.

Let us, then, revolt against the Zeitgeist.

Read books.

Think deeply.

Dream, and then act.

The light does not die with us.

Lux non moritur cum nostrem.

Much of the inspiration for this article was taken from the interview Nathan Jacobs did with Jonathan Pageau:

References:

https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/

Handke, Peter, et al. Quiet Places: Collected Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

Anderson, Chris. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired, Conde Nast, 23 June 2008, http://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/.

Herbert, Frank. Dune. Random House, 2010.