Border Region ABCs

Sometimes we have experiences in which the facts are crystal clear, yet these facts conspire to produce in us emotional contact with something grand: awe, love, union, exaltation. We might actually shiver. To make this sharper: We understand the situation perfectly well. At the same time we have emotions. The two coincide and it is impossible to separate the two sets of facts, the cognitive grasp to one side, the feeling to the other. They go together. They are mutually supportive.

I contrast this to experiencing pure music—no words. We may have powerful emotions, but there is no cognitive counterpart. We can project a cognitive frame in order to explain the music. We might imagine a marriage in heaven, say, and the great climax of the music as the final embrace. Or we may imagine a victorious army taking possession, at last, of the field of battle. But these are—projections. We supply the cognitive frame. It isn’t really present in the music in any even remotely visible or graspable form.

Similarly we sometimes experience cognitive insights entirely devoid of any feelings except, perhaps, a certain satisfaction that we have finally understood the puzzle. We may have an Aha! moment, but it is just a flash.

We can label these three experiences as A, B, and C. Now the question arises, which is the best?

I pose this question because, in accounts of mystical experiences—a good example is the medieval, fourteenth century anonymous work called The Cloud of Unknowing—the middle position, B, pure feeling and the impossibility of knowledge, is held out as the ultimate. And in countless other accounts of a similar kind, however they might be labeled, the same conclusion is drawn.

Now I characterize these three experiences using other imagery. I see B and C as polarities. The ecstatic state is pure emotion but, if carried to its ultimate expression, it is equivalent to annihilation. Not surprisingly, annihilation is one meaning of nirvana, and, I would submit, so is the idea of union with God. So great is the difference between creature and creator, that the first united with the other is nothing at all. The pure cognitive breakthrough, C, pure intellectual grasp, also carries a negative connotation for me. It is ultimately far too abstract. That is why metaphysics bores me. Pure concepts, pure numbers—who cares.

The only interesting experience, for me, is the first, A, in which the two polarities appear in relationship and, at best, in union—but not in fusion. Knowledge and feeling are present and remain distinct, each supporting the other.

But this position implies duality and hence is denigrated. In pure idealism or mysticism, monism reigns supreme. In one the intellect, in the other feeling are viewed as illusory. Monisms, invariably, lack all dynamism and life. To have real union, you must first have separation. And this very separation is the womb of life. It spawns the desire for union and the energy whereby the separated strive for union again. If you believe the mystics, this striving terminates in annihilation. My intuition shakes its head. For me each union is but the prelude to another separation, followed by another motion upward in a spiraling ascent.