Thursday, July 7, 2022
2:25 a.m. I awoke thinking, for some reason, about how the people who haven’t had a given experience get to discuss whether it’s possible – whether it’s real. I thought, there’s a short essay there: Disbelief, belief, experience.
You had your morning blog entry in mind.
I did. I was in mind of one reader who recently commented how he liked to read the blog every morning. I thought, I’d hate to disappoint him, and others who have said the same thing, just because our morning conversations have been replaced by thinking about working on, plotting, the novel, little enough that we do.
You had in mind a couple of other things as well: the advantages of having only a small reputation; the early days of the Monroe Institute.
Also true.
So let’s talk about “Disbelief, belief, and experience,” which might equally be titled “Inexperience, belief, experience.”
Yes. It’s a process. Monroe called it converting beliefs into knowns. I see that a tremendous amount of time and energy is wasted by people writing about what they don’t know.
It amounts to their judging whether a thing is possible, but after all, what else is your life? What was Colin Wilson’s career? What is any exploration? If one sticks to what is already known, one doesn’t make discoveries – but the question to be looked at is – known to whom?
- If you know something from first-hand experience, you are reporting.
- If you believe in something because you believe other people’s reports, you still don’t know it: It may or may not be true, but for you it is still hearsay.
- If you believe something because evidence and testimony together lead you to believe it, still it is hearsay until you yourself experience it.
But is this the end of the story? The chemical composition of the planet Jupiter is hearsay to you, by that standard of judgment. The periodic table of elements is, too. So are many scientific principles that are well established but are not likely to be experienced on a personal basis. In practice – we have said this before, in different contexts – you take most things for granted, by necessity. Many things that are commonly taken for granted by your society, you take for granted too, because if you were to try to examine every little thing, you’d never come to an end of it, and your life would be gone.
Yes, as you pointed out once, in most things, we are of the herd, and only in some things – different things for each person, I gather – are we outliers.
Well, this time instead of looking at that very natural fact in the context of herds and outliers, we are looking at it in the context of fact and opinion.
Commonly held opinion – taken to be obvious, established fact – shapes every culture. If your culture teaches you from an early age that plants talk to people, you will grow up knowing it is so. (Unless circumstances make you an outlier for some reason in that respect. Thus Copernicus was an outlier. People with his same beliefs, born after his time, were herd animals. Same belief, different circumstances.)
In any culture, people who do their own exploring of a given subject are disbelievers in the established story; they may come to be believers in a new story, or a new aspect of the story. If things coalesce sufficiently they may come to know because they have experienced.
I get your point. It’s all more fluid than we sometimes think.
It isn’t a difficult point, just a readjustment. Once you get used to thinking of life as more a dream, a thought, than a thing, fluidity comes to seem more natural, and solidity more an exceptional case.
This also had to do with thinking about Shatner’s commentary in those exploratory shows, I see.
You know full well, any exploration of those themes that could have run the gauntlet to on-air TV time 40 years ago would have had to be far more explicitly skeptical, not to say dismissive. Such were the times. Your times now can’t quite admit the implications of so many discoveries, so much research, but it now cannot dismiss them nor even drown them in skepticism. And of course once something is accepted, it won’t be the subject for the same kind of documentary; it will be more in the nature of a nature special.
We could subtitle this “Shatner’s Eyebrows,” meaning, he tries in his usual way to leave the question open (for the sake of the skeptics) but not disrespected (which would have to be in the teeth of the evidence).
Easy to be impatient with the result, which treats as speculative things that are known to you. But recognize it as also a service, bridging disbelief, belief, and knowns.
Oh, don’t think I don’t hear the subtext: We aren’t to imagine that such truths as we may have discovered are the end of the story, either. Not only is there always more to learn, but there is always more to unlearn.
Columbus unsettled an awful lot of geographic “knowledge.”
Yep. Big mistake, letting him sail.
Done for the moment?
Oddly, we never touched on where you had thought to begin.
That’s true. I had thought to mildly excoriate the fact that exploratory programs are invariably hosted by people who have not themselves experienced what they think they are impartially, (“scientifically,” even), reporting on. By definition, people who claim to know are part of the report; they are not the overall reporter.
That was clumsy. Don’t hurry.
No.
An Eban Alexander reporting on his near-death experience may be treated respectfully; he will not get to be the narrator even of that segment, because to accept him as narrator would be to change the center of gravity from “What if” to “Here’s what happened,” and TV is not quite ready for that.
And you now see why it must be so.
Yes. It isn’t just show biz. It is in the nature of what they want to accomplish, which includes what the times will allow to be explored in that way. In a few more years, this kind of thing will be relegated to the documentaries about accepted things (though with the disclaimer that “science does not yet fully understand…”), and other things, farther out, will receive this treatment.
Fluidity of belief is a fact of life like any other.
Okay. Thanks as always.