Comment by bevan
8 months ago
You don’t need to take drugs to know things, but reason only covers a portion of what can be known. Reason doesn’t really help one understand the nature of experience itself. That’s a whole different kind of meta-factual knowing, an infinite subject that some people approach through meditation (and psychedelics too).
Reason can know the entirety of all necessary truth. There are experiential contingent things such as what I ate for breakfast that it of course cannot know. But it can know all universal truth, such as all metaphysical and philosophical truth
I’m a Hegelian though so I’m biased
I like this because it immediately accounts for truth not arrived at though reason and then just slaps on the word “universal” as the descriptor for the subset of truth reachable through reason. It is convincing because universal is a big word
Well the reasonable truth is not universal as in exhaustive but as in it always holds. I mean universal as in necessary, not contingent. Psychedelic and personal experience is merely contingent
1 reply →
I think we're talking past each other (or maybe mysticism and Hegel don't mix!). These mystical experiences touch at something on a different level than reason, a little closer to base metal. I mean that no reason or representation can capture that most fundamental reality of being, the fundamental experiential truth. Reason can try to explain it, and reason can help guide some people to the experience of it (jnana yoga, getting a satori from reading Eckhart), but it cannot itself know it. Meditation, psychedelics, dance, or whatever else are the typical pathways to it. All reason, all facts, are subordinate to it and less true than it. Or can being be contained by reason?