Essay 4: “Experience & Interpretation, or ‘the Guy with the Blue Sunglasses.”
(I’ve been loving your comments on this series of essays. Thanks for sharing them. Note that I too am only sharing, rather than trying to convince you of anything. As I always told my college students, “I’m a teacher, not a preacher,” so take what you like and leave the rest.)
Huston Smith, the celebrated scholar of world religions, often used to remark, “Reality confronts us like a Rorschach Inkblot Test,” meaning that the universe comes at us without an interpretation. We have to supply that for ourselves. Of course, every culture has what Lily Tomlin, that great American philosopher, once referred to as its “collective hunch” about the nature of Reality, including our relationship to it, but these hunches vary from culture to culture and who’s to say whose interpretation of the ‘Inkblot’ is correct?
There is an old saying that goes, “What do they know of England who only England know,” and I find wisdom in that. People who only know the worldview of their own culture are commonly unaware of just how mysterious the Inkblot is. They wrongly assume that because their culture’s hunch about life gives answers to all of life’s questions, then it must be correct. But other cultures have answers to their own sets of questions, arriving at their own culture-specific interpretations of the Inkblot. Moreover, philosophically speaking, every culture’s worldview tends to be a matrix of mutually reinforcing assumptions, ideas that prop each other up in ways suggesting closure but are actually a house of cards when scrutinized closely. In fact, the relativity of hunches about the ‘Inkblot’ are generally so fragile that people feel the need, historically speaking, to buttress the authority of their hunch by claiming it derives from one or other divine being. “Hey, we didn’t think this stuff up, it was revealed to us by God!” But then, why would “God” or the “Divine” reveal different worldviews to different cultures via different scriptures? Is He or She playing mind games with us or is there another explanation? Too often, in my opinion, we blame “God” and the “Divine” for ideas that we humans make up for ourselves—as studies in comparative religion make clear.
Please understand I’m not knocking anybody’s worldview or religion here—nor am I claiming there’s no God. In fact, regarding religion, we all need to act each day, and faith traditions provide moral compasses for how we should act in a particular society without stepping on toes, while also generating a sense of community and shared identity. Moreover, I agree with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist, that finding meaning is inescapable. As he once explained, “Because we are present to a world, we are condemned to meaning.” The import of this statement is that soon after we’re born, we realize there are other beings in this world, beings with whom we must interact—including beings of other species. Therefore, we must—inescapably—hold ideas about these “others” and how to deal with them, for the simple reason that they’re here with us. In short, we are “condemned” to finding meaning, whether we inherit it from the worldview of our culture or make it up for ourselves.
But when a culture’s assumptions become fixed, congealing into a set of unassailable truths, people in the culture can become blind to the fact that their view of the Inkblot is filtered through those assumptions. They become like a person wearing blue sunglasses who thinks the world itself is blue, since everywhere the person looks they see only one color. Their ‘glasses’ have become glued to their faces, mediating their perceptions and influencing their decisions—occluding their ability to grasp that through another culture’s lens the world could appear ‘green’ or ‘orange.’ In fact, the greatest tragedy of human existence in my opinion is generated by the tribalism surrounding worldviews and the inability to grasp how someone else could see the world differently. This is the sad story of human history.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t assess various hunches of reality for their viability (part of my job as a philosopher); it means we don’t camp out in them to the exclusion of all other possibilities. And, getting to the point of this essay, this is how I also feel about theories regarding the unitive mystical experience. Like all perennial philosophers, I believe the experience has profound value, but it is, after all, another aspect of the Inkblot, and therefore subject to interpretation. The perennial philosophy is a family of interpretations of the unitive experience and what it reveals about the Inkblot, but the views range widely. In terms of personal preference, I tend to agree with Aldous Huxley’s position, but I sometimes joke with colleagues that I’ll hold their coats while they fight it out over the details, because for me it’s in the spaces between the theories that I find the most meaning.
In my book The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded, I tried to make clear how differently the unitive experience has been described and expressed, but like all perennialists, I put a premium on the experience itself. In the perennial philosophy, the highest truth—the truth that generates the peace that “passeth all understanding”—is a state of consciousness, not a set of ideas. Consequently, interpretations of the Inkblot and our relationship to it have a secondary role in the search for the experience. They placate the rational mind’s relentless drive to make sense of things by providing sensible reasons for cultivating the experience and valuing it. Let me end with a story that illustrates this point.
Long ago in China, two Buddhist monks were climbing a mountain, on their way to a monastery where they would spend the night. The going was tough and they struggled to keep their breath, so the younger of the two monks, who had been lagging behind, paused to sit and catch his breath. As he recovered, he straightened his back and looked ahead to find his master. The older monk was smiling and pointing at something over the top of a pine tree. Following the direction of the old monk’s finger, the younger monk saw a bright pink moon rising into the sky, a sight so splendid he gasped. Soon after, he joined his master and the two sat for a while, enjoying the rosy moonlight. The moral of this story, according to Zen tradition, is that interpretations can be like ‘fingers’ pointing at the ‘moon’ of direct experience. They can direct us toward the noetic or inner truth, but they are not the truth—at least not of the unitive or mystical sort. Consequently, if we raise interpretations of the unitive experience to the status of the 'Truth’ itself, we get stuck on the conceptual level—the level of assumptions which are no equal for direct cognition of reality. In short, we get ‘the finger’ but not the ‘moon!’
