Personal Thoughts and Reflection on an Interesting Oxymoron

This reading sparked a lot of thoughts and questions for me. Almost too many to address here, but I will touch on what I can share and explain the best.

The title of this reading struck me funny because it was titled “Rational Mysticism”. This sounds like a giant oxymoron to me. How can you give rational parameters to something as un-rational as mysticism? The first part of the reading that dealt with physics and mysticism I did mostly enjoy though. How do two particles that are distanced from one another exert subtle influences on each other? It’s a mind bender, and I find the idea fascinating. With the Quantum nonlocality idea being related to interconnectivity, I partially agreed and partially disagreed. I do think things are interconnected, but not because two particles show me this. Among many other reasons, I mostly believe all things to be connected because we are all composed of the same building blocks, atoms. Each person and thing is made up of atoms, and when we die and our atoms will eventually disassociate and go on to assemble other people and things. The atoms that make me up now were once part of another person, a tree, and a variety of other organisms. I like to think that this is the way we are interconnected.

When reading this I thought of a very basic and fundamental question. This also happens to be the first question most children ask , “Why?” This stems from the basic human need to understand. Humans have always tried to understand what and who we are, and the basic purpose as to why we are here. As humans we wonder at our beginnings and need to know we each have a purpose of some sort. Religion tries to answer this question through principles and teachings. Science tries to answer aspects of these questions through research and experiments. Even now, no one truly knows and our questions have mostly gone unanswered. Humans have always tried to understand these basic questions, and have attempted to answer them through science and religion. Whether you accept the answers given or not is personal choice. I personally think that in order to answer these questions we must each embark on a deeply personal journey and that the answers to these questions are at the end. Along the way we will find ideas that partially answer these questions for us but we will always change and question what we have learned. This is a life long pursuit, but it is necessary in order to sift through the fact and fiction and come to our own personal conclusion.

Relating back to science and mysticism, or science and religion this is how I personally approach this idea. Science is/can be absolute and can/does give answers, but for myself, I can not let it answer all my questions. Some questions are deeply personal and I must delve deep within myself to find an answer that I can agree with. Smith was “annoyed” with science because people let it answer all their questions. This I feel could be related to how some people will let religion answer all their questions. No one is better than the other because they are both allowing their free will of opinion and the potential for truly personal understanding to be removed. These people are quitting their personal journey before they even begin it by accepting the ideas given to them and not questioning the validity of it for themselves.

Over all, I enjoyed this reading. I found Smith to be a little too back and forth on some of his ideas though. I liked that he tried to gain understanding from a wide variety of religions and tried for his own mystical experiences. But he seemed to contradict himself at times. I felt that he enjoyed the different religions and their teachings, but the deeply personal enthogenic trips he experienced were how he personally linked to those religions. Because the journey to enlightenment must be very personal his “mystical” experiences make sense. An enthogenic experience is known to be greatly personal on an emotional and mental level, so I see how this made his journey to enlightenment so much stronger. He went inside himself and through those experiences was able to evaluate his personal understandings and relate what he found to his life. I don’t believe this to be a mystical experience, but more of a mental one. He was able to connect with himself and his ideals on a higher plain and relate this to his journey.