You seem to have managed to misunderstand the point of my essay, and I'm not sure whether the problem is in my writing or your comprehension.
You're right. My mystical experiences didn't change my ontology or my belief that I live in a rationally explicable universe. What they showed me is that "rationally explicable" had to include weirder and more wonderful phenomena than before -- that, in my naive materialism, I had been ignoring important realms of experience because I thought (incorrectly) that they could not be reconciled with a materialist ontology or scientific cosmology.
The whole point of the essay is that it is possible to become a mystic without throwing out rationality -- in fact, that you get better-quality mysTicism if you keep the rationality.
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I'm a little startled
Date: 2004-10-01 10:02 pm (UTC)of my essay, and I'm not sure whether the problem is
in my writing or your comprehension.
You're right. My mystical experiences didn't change my ontology or my belief that I live in a rationally
explicable universe. What they showed me is that
"rationally explicable" had to include weirder and
more wonderful phenomena than before -- that, in my
naive materialism, I had been ignoring important
realms of experience because I thought (incorrectly)
that they could not be reconciled with a materialist
ontology or scientific cosmology.
The whole point of the essay is that it is possible
to become a mystic without throwing out rationality -- in fact, that you get better-quality mysTicism if
you keep the rationality.