TMI Journal 2011-1&2 (Winter/Spring)

A Phenomenological Study of the Relationship Between Experiences of “Wonder” and Philosophical Inquiry by Joseph M. Felser, Ph.D. Joseph M. Felser, Ph.D., graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Boston University and received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Chicago. He is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York. His numerous articles on philosophy, parapsychology, religion, and myth have appeared in both popular and scholarly journals. He is the author of The Way Back to Paradise: Restoring the Balance between Magic and Reason (Hampton Roads, 2005) and the recently published book, The Myth of the Great Ending: Why We’ve Been Longing for the End of Days Since the Beginning of Time (Hampton Roads 2011). ABSTRACT What is the source of philosophical thought? Why do we ask fundamental questions about human existence? Early philosophers like Socrates, whose ideas and practices were shamanistic, believed that rational thinking was rooted in and fed by non-rational experiences, such as visions, dreams, trances, ecstasies, mystical encounters, and other experiences of wonder that excite our curiosity and imagination. But modern Western philosophy largely rejected this older view, holding instead that genuine philosophical analysis can only arise through the purging of all such “extra-rational” influences that interfere with our use of reason, logic, and observation via the physical senses. This paper outlines a new research project, to be undertaken by the author in concert with The Monroe Institute®, that is designed to explore the question of how experiences of “wonder” relate to processes of philosophical-type thinking, and in particular how this question is addressed by TMI program participants. Introduction Alasdair MacIntyre, a world-renown philosopher (who happened to be my mentor), once candidly admitted to a BBC radio interviewer that philosophy “does tend to sterilize the mind and imagination far too easily” (Magee, 1971, p. 199). When I initially read this remark as an eager college undergraduate and enthusiastic neophyte philosophy major, I found it curious, if not incredible. To me, philosophy was a brand new, exciting world of fascinating ideas and heroic, inspiring thinkers. Yet, by the time I entered graduate school 4 years later, it would prove eerily prophetic of my own personal crisis. For despite all my considerable hard work and achievements—or perhaps, rather, because of them—my inner life felt like a well run dry. I found myself wandering alone, without a compass, lost in a mental desert. Thus began my quest for what the late mythologist Joseph Campbell called “the waters of life” (Campbell with Moyers, 1988, p. 121)—a magical elixir that would somehow revivify my stale intellect and dry-as-dust imagination. I needed to find a counterbalance to the narrow, reductive rationalism that passes for “the love of wisdom,” the literal translation of the Greek word philosophia. I did not quit my academic studies—although I was sorely tempted to at times. Instead, I began certain “unofficial” investigations into subjects that would have scandalized my professors but which reflected certain erstwhile experiences and interests that had long lain fallow: mysticism, extrasensory perception, out-of-body experiences, dreams, shamanism, and the like. In public, I was a conventional aspiring academic; in private, I had become a secret searcher after heresies. Eventually, I would learn to blend these two sides of myself as I gradually shifted my “official” areas of study into subjects closer to my true interests in myth, religion, and the ranges of human consciousness. It was during that early, Next Page 4 TMI JOURNAL Winter/Spring 2011 intensive period of searching—in late 1979 or early 1980—that I initially discovered a mesmerizing volume entitled Journeys Out of the Body (1971) by Robert A. Monroe. That book struck a particularly deep chord, as did the author’s two sequels, Far Journeys (1985) and Ultimate Journey (1994). These ignited in me a strong desire to visit The Monroe Institute. I finally did so in 2000, when I took my GATEWAY VOYAGE®. Since then, I have attended other Institute programs (LIFELINE, EXPLORATION 27, and STARLINES). I wrote about my experiences at TMI in my first book (Felser, 2005) and in several published articles (Felser, 2000; 2004), including one in the TMI Focus (2002). In addition, I have been honored with invitations to attend two professional seminars, once in 2006 as the keynote speaker (Felser, 2006) and most recently in 2010 as a guest participant. That makes for a solid decade of active and fruitful involvement with TMI and over 30 years of familiarity with the work of Robert Monroe. Now, thanks to a recently granted sabbatical from teaching duties that happens to coincide with the Institute’s new direction in qualitative research (more on that below), my involvement with TMI is about to be taken to the next level, in the form of a collaborative research project. As I will discuss below, this study will explore the very issues I have wrestled with for the past 30 years in my own life-career—namely, the relationship between the quest for meaning and questions of meaning, between trans-rational experience and rational thinking, and between wonderment and wondering. In short, I am asking, “How does genuine philosophical inquiry relate to expansions of consciousness?” The Quest and Question “Nothing shapes our lives so much as the questions we ask—or refuse to ask,” declared that inveterate spiritual traveler, Sam Keen (1994). “We are all questioners, but the questions that animate us are profoundly different” (p. 14). Indeed, they are. Keen’s longtime friend and colleague Joseph Campbell (1988) may well have been right when he lamented that, for many people today, the only important question is “where their money is coming from and where it’s going to go” (p. 14). Yet, it is not so for all. Witness author, engineer, and consciousness explorer Bruce Moen (1997), who credits his serendipitous discovery of the books of Bob Monroe, as well as his subsequent attendance at the Institute’s GATEWAY VOYAGE and LIFELINE programs, to his “great curiosity”—a fiery spark that ignited his lifelong search for answers to what he calls his “Three Great Questions”: “Where did I come from before I was born? What am I supposed to do while I’m living here? Where do I go when I die?” (p. 24).1 Now, these just happen to be the big, meaty, metaphysical questions concerning human destiny, freedom, and the nature of existence that, in ancient times, were thought to be the special province of philosophy: What is the meaning of life—its significance, value, and purpose? Who and what are we? What is this thing we call “reality”? More recently, however, mainstream Anglo-American philosophers of the logical positivist and linguistic schools have dismissed such large-scale questions as silly and meaningless verbiage, arising either from a perverse inability to discern rational (scientific or common) sense from irrational (religious or mystical) nonsense (e.g., Ayer, 1936/1952; Reichenbach, 1951) or from certain strictly linguistic errors that could be avoided by a properly rigorous analysis (e.g., Austin, 1962). All are the intellectual descendants of the British philosopher G. E. Moore (1873-1958), who once remarked that, as far as he could tell, philosophical problems arose not from the world but rather from the ridiculous things that philosophers have said about it (Warnock, 1958/1966, p. 11). Even some contemporary postmodernists (e.g., Rorty, 1982, p. xl) echo this dismissive attitude toward the big questions and the “cosmic anxieties” (Warnock, p. 10) that inspire them. Such churlish views nevertheless clash with a Western tradition that goes all the way back to Plato—and even further still. It was Plato who famously declared that philosophy begins in the experience of wonder (Plato, 1949). By “wonder,” I would argue that Plato meant not only the intellectual curiosity and sense of perplexity that drive some of us to try to solve puzzles, pursue mysteries, and parse meanings but also the feelings of awe and rapture that accompany the visionary beholding of “other realities” that leave the beholder speechless or groping for words. For Plato, the analytical thinker was also—and at the same time—a profound mystic (Findlay, 1978, pp. 15-16). These, in fact, represent the twin poles or sides of “wonder”—the intellectual and the mystical, the sense-making and sense-transcending—experienced in tandem by Plato’s great mentor, Socrates, whose lifelong philosophical quest was born in a personal crisis triggered by the enigmatic pronouncement of the Oracle of Delphi, which declared him to be the wisest of all. But he did not consider himself wise at all. So what did it mean? Next Page 5 TMI JOURNAL Winter/Spring 2011 Socrates’ effort to reconcile this contradiction led him to conclude that at least he recognized how ignorant he was, whereas the vast majority did not. His dissatisfaction with conventional beliefs and values was fueled by his mystical trances, in which he had visions of other realities and communed with the dead. In the Symposium dialogue, Plato accordingly eulogized his teacher as “a skilful magician, an alchemist [i.e., herbalist], a true sophist” (Plato, 1951, p. 82; cf. Ruck, 1986, p. 177) who yearned after knowledge and loved wisdom. The seer and the seeker of truth were thus one and the same, co-existing side-by-side in a creative synergy in which each side nurtured the other. This symbiosis is precisely what led classical scholars like Carl A. P. Ruck (1986, pp.151-177) and E. R. Dodds (1951, pp. 135-178) to identify Socrates with the primordial lineage of shamanism. Indeed, anthropologist (and shamanic practitioner) Michael Harner (1980/1990) has defined the shaman as one who goes on otherworldly journeys in quest of knowledge and power in order to help others and restore wholeness (health). In the process, said Harner, “the shaman typically experiences an ineffable joy in what he sees, an awe of the beautiful and mysterious worlds that open before him” (p. 21). This is the mystical aspect of wonder. But, he said, there is also the critical aspect that strives to penetrate the mystery and solve the riddle of human existence: “The shaman is forever trying to articulate his personal revelatory experiences as though they were the pieces of a great cosmic jigsaw puzzle” (p. 45). Thus, said Harner, the shaman, like the scientist, is an empiricist, or one who relies on experience, rather than authority or mere armchair speculation, as the source of knowledge and primary method of research (pp. 45-6). It is precisely on this last point that modern philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche (1887/1984) would demur. Nietzsche saw not a synergy but an irreconcilable opposition between the mystical side of wonder and genuine intellectual questioning. In his view, science and philosophy are utterly incompatible with otherworldly visions and mystical experiences, which