Comment by mactavish88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mactavish88 | Hacker News Reader

Given that we don't totally understand reality, is it not a little premature to be taking the "magic" out of it? I mean, what if the base substrate of all that is (underlying subatomic particles, at the tiniest levels we don't have the technology yet to explore) is actually what we commonly consider to be "magic"? :-D

In my nearly 40 years of being alive, I've personally encountered 3 broad "categories" of people so far:

1. Religious types, who are super uncomfortable with the unknown and wave it away by pointing to "God".

2. Scientism adherents, who are also super uncomfortable with the unknown, and wave it away with, what looks to me like, a magical belief in science ("science can't explain this, but I totally trust that it eventually will"). They like to denigrate people in category (1) without realizing they're guilty of a similar kind of magical thinking.

3. Mystics. They appreciate science and its shortcomings and don't resort to magical thinking. They're capable of non-dualistic thinking. They don't resort to "God" or "science" to wave away the unknown. They're comfortable with being uncomfortable as just yet another part of the human experience. They accept their personal limitations and make no declarations about the existence or non-existence of things about which they could not possibly know.

1, 2 and 3 also roughly model the various stages of individual development outlined by M. Scott Peck in "Further along the road less traveled" [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Scott_Peck#The_four_stages_...

I think 1. and 2. are very similar as you describe in that they believe what they pick up and have a difficult time challenging concepts the deeper these sit in their belief system of everything physical and otherwise.

The difference I see with 3. is that people that might identify with this will try to challenge their views in ways that most people won't and in the process often realize how much of their views are based on belief. I disagree with the choice of the word "mystic" greatly because anyone religious, spiritual or not can fit this description. I'm not sure I agree with you on the being comfortable or not part. In my opinion challenging yourself on emotions and feeling comfortable and reflecting on that is a part of this too.

Regarding belief and challenging your views:

I believe the milky way is a spiral galaxy. I have not done mathematical calculations of the position of stars or the densities of light in the night time sky. Even if I had, these would only be indicators. So far I have only the words of others to base this belief on.

I was originally going to go with the example of the earth being round where my only own observation might be the curvature of the earth in an airplane. But I assumed for many this might push them into category 2. so I put it here to challenge those that read this far.

[edit/addition]: The examples are supposed to challenge what you consider absolute knowledge/truth and how close it might be to belief.

I wouldn't have expected to be described as a "mystic", but that is the category I fit best, as do a lot of other people I know.

I suspect you'd lump me as an adherent of scientism, since I suspect that the answer to my questions will look more like that. But I have no trouble admitting that I don't know things. There's a lot of stuff I don't know.

I wouldn't even say it makes me uncomfortable. I wish I knew some things, but wishing doesn't make my life better. I do what I can to narrow down my realms of ignorance, and accept the stuff I don't know as a fact that besets the state of an ape-evolved organism with a mediocre, limited brain and a very finite existence.

I wouldn't take any comfort in most of the things I think of as mysticism. If my suspicion that the answers look more like science than mysticism makes me an adherent of scientism, then I accept that charge. But I think the term has a derogatory character which I don't believe really befits what I've described here.

That sounds a lot less like the religious form of scientism I mentioned. Skepticism seems to move people from the religious mindset into an inquiring one in the first place. There’s an openness there that isn’t present in purely religious thinking.

Moving in the direction of mysticism, as I understand it, is when one crosses a certain threshold of skepticism that results in an ever-greater sense of openness and freedom and ease (even in the presence of painful/uncomfortable circumstances).

I also don’t think there’s an endpoint to mysticism, nor do I think there are sharp boundaries between the “categories”/“stages”.

Ultimately (at least my perception of it) is that if it really turned out, for example, that there actually was a “God” hiding down there, turning the wheels of the subatomic particles that animate reality, a scientism adherent would probably be deeply dismayed and need to go through a kind of grieving process to eventually accept that reality. I imagine a mystic would accept it easily as being beautiful and just as easily move on to ask: “okay, so what’s for lunch?”

The experience of beauty and awe seem to be more prevalent as one heads further in the direction of mysticism.

If you're going to define a "God" as something that can hide down there and turn the wheels of natural subatomic particles, I'd argue that you've already clearly departed from the realm of magic.

There used to be an unknown something beneath what we knew that operated on all objects. Now that we know what it is, we call it gravity. So if I'm understanding this right, mysticism is mindset that meets the prospect of a subatomic "God" with "it's beautiful, okay, so what's for lunch?" instead of "holy shit, surely we can apply scientific tools of discovery & knowledge to figure out how what this is and how it works?"? This seems more like lazy thinking to me; the very concept of an inscrutable "God" is a thought terminating cliche. How is that an inquiring mindset? Edit: How is that an inquiring mindset when the mystic reaction to a "God" is not inquiring what it is and how it works?

I wasn’t trying to define God.

Maybe it’s strings down there, or subatomic gnomes (and then we’d have to probe further to discover what makes them tick). Maybe we’ll never be able to know because knowing reality would require knowing all of reality (a la complexity theory).

All I was saying was that it seems to me like the mystics I’ve encountered aren’t super attached to what they hope the outcome is. They’re interested in it, deeply curious about it, in awe of it, but not attached to it.

There’s a far greater emphasis in mysticism on seeing the world as it truly is (and being able to accept it, regardless of how amazing or fucked up it may be) as opposed to how we want it to be.

This is great, the individual development stages are also listed in the Hindu Vedic texts, which are not dogmatic like modern religions. They clearly state everyone has a path and they sometimes have unfinished business before they can develop their mind, soul and ego, all which are different entities.

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