Subject: Re: uplift
From: LR Pearson, Arts 99 (lp9616@bristol.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Apr 24 2001 - 10:54:35 GMT
Dearest Scottie, never afraid to throw the cat in among the pigeons!
It is interesting that I happened to read these posts today, because
I've just had a long conversation with someone from my course (Eng.
Lit) on how people seem unwilling to introduce spirituality into any
discussions about literature. We just had a lecture on Paradise Lost
which argued that it is foolish to regard it in a thelogical light. In
one sense I agree, because it's a poem, not a theological treatise, but
surely literature is a forum for exploring ideas about spirituality and
thelogy, one which allows us to see things which could be hurtful or
embarassing because it is diassociated from real life, but which can
say things which have an impact upon real life.
I am sometimes troubled by the idea that all those things we term
spiritual experiences could be explained away in chemical and
biological terms. Aldous Huxley in 'The Doors of Perception' writes
about how the experience of taking peyote corresponds to many
descriptions of mystic experiences and depictions of heaven. He regards
ths as the reason why peyote was used in religious rituals - he
believes that it breaks down the barriers between the spiritual world
and the world which we need to perceive in order to survive. Of course,
one could easily turns this on its head and say that all religious
experience is merely hallucination and has no basis outside our own
heads. It is kind of disturbing to think like this. On the other hand,
I have seen first hand what the sense of a spiritual presence / world
can do for a person... I guess it's not always positive, but it can be
amazing. Even if it is only neurons firing, does that makes it less
important? I don't think so. I am not a Christian, in fact I am not
religious at all, but I find 'Franny' incredibly uplifting, intriguing
and powerful. Maybe this is because I am just very suggestible, but
y'know what? I don't really care.
This very confused rambling of thoughts ties in with the recent
discussion about 'organisation kids'. I believe that one of the ways in
which young people 'rebel' is by exploring faith. This tends to be a
quieter, less obvious form of rebellion, but I definately believe that
it usually involves some form of rebellion. I have been brought up by
atheists, my best friend's father is a minister, both of us have to
some extent rejected the faith systems we were given by our parents and
tried to explore these things for ourselves. Many of our peers think
we're crazy for wanting to think about spiritual matters in any great
depth, they're happy to drift along with the vaguest of beliefs (mostly
C of E, never go to church but still kind of believe in God). I'm not
suggesting that this kind of rebellion is new to our generation, I
think that every age has been dominated by people who mostly just go
along with everyone else, with a few who question the norm. I don't
think it is very uncommn for young people to want this sort of
questioning, but most people eventually get caught up in their lives
and think about it less. Only a very few continue this sort of
questioning. (I am only 20 so I am not numbering myself among the
select few. In fact, I could be wrong about most people stopping
thinking about it. A bit of input from the more mature members of the
bananafishbowl, please!)
I have a lot more thoughts about this buzzing around my head but they
are getting increasingly incoherent so I want bore you all with any
more of my ramblings.
Love, Lucy-Ruth
On Tue, 24 Apr 2001 07:39:21 +0100 Scottie Bowman <rbowman@indigo.ie>
wrote:
>
> '... anything overtly religious can create discomfort ...
> We don't exactly live in a spiritual world ...’
>
> I mustn’t speak for Cecilia but I sense an element of regret
> in these sentences. But isn’t she deploring this bustling,
> materialistic world where we’ve lost our sources of nourishment
> in the ‘spiritual’? At least, doesn’t Salinger work from some
> similar assumption - that the ‘real’ reality underlies the visible
> & people will live in vain until they renew contact with it?
>
> My problem isn’t an indifference to these eternal values.
> MY problem - & I don’t think I’m alone - is how difficult
> I find it (& more so with every passing year) to combat
> the argument that they are essentially illusory, that there
> need be no underlying supernatural ‘explanation’ to things,
> that the universe is best understood as a sequence of arbitrary
> events & that these wonderful, numinous experiences that
> we call ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ are no more than the firing
> of certain groups of neurones in the human cortex.
>
> Do people REALLY believe their consciousness - & with it
> their whole understanding of things - is somehow independent
> of the quality of blood flow to their skulls, on the nature
> of the circulating chemicals, on the integrity of the circuits,
> on the behavioural conditioning of earlier years ...
>
> Acknowledging that it IS intimately dependent on these
> physical factors, how can anyone ever have anything but
> the gravest doubts about the validity of their ‘spiritual’
> experiences?
>
> Why should I regard Franny - or JD himself, or his gurus,
> or fakirs, or saints, or the rest of them - as anything other
> than self-deludinig narcissists whose funny diets have, most likely,
> disrupted their blood sugar levels? Their lives have had no
> effect, after all - except in the most transient, ‘Ooh-er, isn’t
> that lovely?’ sort of way on the most suggestible.
>
> There’s nothing new about this position. It’s been around
> forever & I suppose became properly respectable through
> the conflicts between Darwin & the Church.
>
> That doesn’t make it any easier - for me at least - to ignore.
>
> Scottie B.
>
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LR Pearson, Arts 99
lp9616@bristol.ac.uk
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