Amnesia
My artist friend, Joel B, and I have been having an intellectual roundelay about some of The Big Questions. Recently, we narrowed our focus to HBO Real Time talk show host and comic, Bill Maher, and his just released movie, Religulous.
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JB and I are both Bill fans, but we differ on this religion thing. It seems like JB leans mostly Bill’s way - i.e. “religious” should appear as a synonym when you google “ridiculous” - while I think Bill is much too fundamentalist. He’s a regular fanatic with his Religion of Anti-Religion or, as he calls it, rationalism.
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I believe that what he means by rationalism is what I think of as empiricism. If you wikipedia empiricism, you find this:
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Empiricism emphasizes those aspects of … knowledge that are closely related to evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world, rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.
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As near as I can tell, the main target of rationalism and empiricism is something called magical thinking:
Once again we’ll do this the easy way: Wikipedia
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In anthropology, psychology, and cognitive science, magical thinking is nonscientific causal reasoning that often includes such ideas as the ability of the mind to affect the physical world, correlation equaling causation, the law of contagion, the power of symbols, and the meaningfulness of synchronicity.
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A current example of magical thinking might be the so-called Law of Attraction and similar ideas advanced by the movie and book, The Secret. In a nutshell: You will attract into your physical reality events and circumstances that match your predominant thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. So, you are directly and personally responsible for everything you experience. You literally create your own reality. Or, at the very least, you create your experience of reality.
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Bill Maher, and at least 15% of the general U.S. population, believe that religion or faith is the most pervasive form of magical thinking. They point in particular at those folks who believe that the Bible (King James Version), and other world religious texts, contain factual history and the actual Words of God, as dictated to ancient human stenographers.
Where to fit “eastern” systems of thought and philosophy, e.g. Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, et al, along this continuum between empiricism and magical thinking, is something Mr. Maher didn’t have screen time to consider.
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Back to my friend, Joel B. JB calls himself a “militant agnostic.” I don’t know, and you don’t either. He’s a far cry from “militant,” in nature and manner, but I take his point. [Admin: JB has requested that this be emended to "grumpy 'cause it's dark agnostic." See comments] Mostly I agree with JB. “I don’t know” is a good place to be. It faces into Life as Mystery, and everybody likes a good mystery. But, “I don’t know” has to really mean I don’t know.
I think Bill Maher believes he knows that The Scientific Method is the right way to experience “reality.” This is pretty much the same way that The Secret fans know that The Law of Attraction is creating their “reality.”
I want to offer another view, perhaps one more attuned to the “eastern” ideas Bill didn’t have time for. To do so, I have to ask you to allow me a fairly off-the-wall metaphor.
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Suppose you are Steve Jobs and you are the face and soul of Apple, Inc.. You’ve been personally involved in the collaborative imagination and creativity that produced the coolest technology since radio, TV, and movies. Your office is at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California. One day you are conked unconscious by a real apple that falls from an overhead campus walkway, dropping out of the re-usable grocery bag of some healthfood nut who works in accounting. A passing nogoodnik, visiting from the legal department at Microsoft, steals your wallet. When you regain consciousness, in General Hospital, you have no idea who you are. For purposes of our loopy metaphor, let’s say no one else there does, either.
As your rehab and therapy progresses, you re-discover your affinity for iPods, iPhones, and iMacs, but you still have no idea you helped create them.
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Finally, you are released. While using a clunky Windows PC at the Public Library, you google “Apple, Inc.” and you find out you’re just blocks from 1 Infinite Loop, where Steve Jobs, the Head Mac, has an office.
You walk there. Everybody seems strangely deferential, including security, and you end up outside Jobs’ office. You are telling everybody in earshot how cool Apple Stuff is and asking to meet Steve Jobs. They are all exchanging eye-rolling looks, but you ignore it. After all, weirdness is a small price to pay for creative genius.
For the next few weeks you haunt Apple Headquarters. You ask questions, take tours, offer ideas and get into spirited discussions with geeky young people who continue to treat you with annoying deference.
It starts to bother you that your requests to meet Steve Jobs are laughed off. More creative geek weirdness. You become obsessed with Him. You read everything you can about Him, and Apple, on the Kindle the geeks give you. You beg them to give you a job, any job. You’ll work for free. (The Apple credit card you found in your shirt pocket still keeps working. You assume the name “Steve Jobs” that appears on it is some kind of marketing thing.) It occurs to you that you even look like Him, only younger, with better hair.
One day, when nobody’s looking, you take one of the keys you found in your jacket pocket and try it on the door to Jobs’ office. It’s a quixotic act. Desperate. You don’t actually expect the key to work - but it does!
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You sit in His Chair. You clap your hands, like a delighted child. The light comes on! In more ways than one. It all comes flooding back. Wozniak. The Apple II. Lisa. Macintosh. The 1984 Super Bowl Commercial. The iPod.
You are Steve Jobs!
Here’s the “eastern thought” connection. When you discover you are the Steve Jobs you’ve been desperately looking for, and you have Apple, Inc., at your fingertips: You’ve been Enlightened.
If you’ll allow me just a few more paragraphs to torture the metaphor:
Let’s say that “Apple, Inc.,” and everything it represents, is an analog for The Mystery. The stuff we “don’t know.” As I type this on my MacBook, preparing to upload it to my website via a wireless connection to the WorldWideWeb, I personally think it’s a pretty good analog. Who could have foreseen What Jobs Hath Wrought?
Here we come full circle: What Bill Maher calls “magical thinking” is like Steve Jobs having amnesia and trying to find Him(self) out there somewhere. There is no “Steve Jobs” out there. No matter how many theories and books and DVDs and seminars he plows through, no matter how much desperate praying he does, crying out for help to The Unknown God or to his Personal Saviour, no matter how long he waits: he won’t find Steve Jobs. To find himself and his place in The Mystery, amnesiac Steve has to look no further than … himself. He Is the Who he’s been looking for.
On the other hand, what Bill Maher favors, rationalism or empiricism, is like amnesiac Steve consulting a brain biologist, or running the Large Hadron Collider, in an attempt to unravel The Mystery of Who He Is.
Until the light comes on, he’ll certainly learn some interesting stuff, but ultimately he’ll probably feel more and more confused, even disoriented, by the results of his scientific method. It won’t help him know.
Once the light does come on, and he knows who he is, then he’s in the best possible place to experience The Mystery of Apple, Inc..
I’m with Bill Maher (and my friend, JB) at least this much: If you feel like an amnesiac - I think many of us do - desperately poking around in the Cosmos looking for your missing magical self, or for the Ultimate Magical Self who will save you, is as silly as Bill says it is. I don’t think your salvation is “out there.” (Believing “I Found It” may be even worse than feeling like an amnesiac. Especially if you feel the need to convince others or kill the infidels who don’t agree with you.)
But, I differ with BM and JB this much: If you really “don’t know,” and you feel like an amnesiac, then you can’t dismiss the possiblity that the light will come on and you’ll find out that you already are who you’ve been looking for, and you have your own version of Apple, Inc. to play with. There is a kind of magical thinking in the imagination and creative collaboration at 1 Infinite Loop.
What a relief! There is no need to keep trying to solve the Mystery by searching for myself. Not in books or seminars about magic, not under a microscope or in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
I Am right here. Whatever that means. Who knows: There could be a lot of power, even magic in it.
