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

would vanish into thin air if scrutinized by reason—if we truly allow ourselves to think about them. Only those, he said, who “thirst after reason, [and] are determined to scrutinize [their] experiences as severely as a scientific experiment—hour after hour, day after day” (p. 253) are true philosophers. “We ourselves wish to be our experiments and guinea pigs,” he concluded. Real philosophy is thus born with the death of wonder, which to Nietzsche is only the bewitching enchantment of irrationalism. Or is it? Who is on the right track, Plato or Nietzsche? What is the relationship between critical thinking, deep questioning, and intellectual curiosity on the one hand, and visionary or mystical consciousness on the other? In other words, are experiences of wonder—of the kind that leave us dumbfounded and speechless (or just plain grateful), that defy our common sense and both challenge and expand our notion of what is possible—the sweet ambrosia or the bitter hemlock of philosophical inquiry? What might it mean to become one’s own guinea pig, even while not rejecting wonder? Is this even possible?2 The Project These, then, are the very questions that, in one guise or another, I have been more or less continuously wrestling with over the 30-odd years of my own philosophical career. They are also at the heart of the exciting new research project that I am currently undertaking in collaboration with The Monroe Institute and its new director of research, Dr. Hillary Webb, that explores the question of whether (and if so, how) expanded states of awareness conducive to experiences of wonder are related to acts of wondering (questioning, thinking, reflecting, seeking) and, in particular, how this question is addressed by TMI program participants. The Monroe Institute is a uniquely propitious setting for generating and cultivating experiences of wonder. It is, as many would attest, a wonder-full place! What better venue to explore such questions? But a philosopher doing field research, you ask? Yes, I admit this is indeed a radical departure from the kind of armchair reflections, or even the library and archival investigations, in which I have been engaged in the past. Instead of interpreting pre-existing texts, or creating new ones in the solitude of my study, the volunteer participants and I will be co-creating the very texts (in the form of initial surveys, follow-up questions, and perhaps even face-to-face interviews) whose meanings will become the subject of interpretation. It is a full collaboration all around. Because I will be employing a qualitative rather than a quantitative research approach (inspired in great part by the work of Smith and Osborn, [2003]), I will be exploring relationships between phenomena in an open-ended fashion, using semi-structured instruments, as opposed to testing pre-formed hypotheses with highly structured methods and analytical tools designed to collect numerical data. Rather than seek to explain and predict strictly causal relationships between objects Next Page 6 TMI JOURNAL Winter/Spring 2011 or events, or to ascertain general characteristics of a widespread population, my aim will be to describe, in depth and detail, the experiences of selected individuals and to try and grasp the meaning that those experiences have for them. This type of qualitative approach will necessitate using a relatively small sample of participants (some veteran researchers suggest as few as 3 or as many as 10), whose selection will be based on the responses provided by them to the initial (confidential) on-line surveys that will soon be made available to all voluntary eligible participants (that is, graduates of selected TMI programs) on my web site. Link to: http://www.everythingtriestoberound.com/ To start with, I will want to know about the types of questions that bring individuals to TMI’s residential programs in the first place; what kinds of answers, if any, that they receive in the experiences of “wonder” that they might have; how and what they might think about those experiences, if and when they subsequently reflect on them; and whether these experiences then go on to foster new questions or new forms of questions that in turn precipitate a still-further search for answers and/or additional experiences, in an ongoing, perhaps open-ended, process. Once again, my aim will be to describe and make sense of how participants perceive and make sense of their own processes, not to try to explain why some may have certain kinds of experiences (or thoughts) and others do not. Nor will I try to objectively validate (or invalidate) those experiences (or thoughts). This is the essence of the phenomenological method pioneered by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). It was Husserl who urged us to set aside what we regard as “common sense” (which is mostly inherited prejudices or habits of thought and perception) and even our philosophical, scientific, and religious theories in order “to allow us see and describe experience in its lived purity” (Kohak, 1978, p. 27), that is, as a meaningful and intelligible phenomenon in its own right, prior to our sophisticated theorizing about it. The primary aim of the phenomenologist “is not to ‘explain’ . . . experience but first to understand it” (Kohak, p. 41). To both accurately describe and sympathetically understand the relationship between our experiences of wonder and the act of wondering about our experiences is thus the goal of my new and exciting exploration of human consciousness. All aboard! I welcome feedback—anyone wishing to offer comments or suggestions regarding this project is cordially invited to contact me at JFelser@Kingsborough.edu. Endnotes 1 The relationship between experiential quest and the act and attitude of questioning raises some thorny classical chicken- and-egg issues that will have to be explored. For example, was Moen’s curiosity unbidden (i.e., essentially uncaused) or did it motivate him to seek experiences of expanded consciousness? Or, did prior experiences of such nonordinary states (like the childhood dream of a possible past life episode he relates in the same chapter, following his mention of his “Three Great Questions”) spark his curiosity and the nascent questioning? It may very well be, as the psychologist Abraham Maslow (1963) has stated, that certain psychologically healthy individuals are blessed with an instinctive drive to know things, to find out the truth even if it makes them unhappy or uncomfortable, and thus are “positively attracted to the mysterious, to the unknown, to the puzzling and the unexplained” (cited in Wilson, 1966/1980, p. 78), whereas the psychologically sick or those with a weak ego are fearful and threatened by such prospects. In that case, one could point to an innate drive of curiosity, essentially uncaused by any particular experience of “wonder” (though perhaps cultivated through a general upbringing productive of and conducive to psychological health) as the source of the quest. In examining the issue of creativity and the relationship between questioning and questing, author Joseph Chilton Pearce (2007) has identified what he called a “dynamic interplay or looping effect [that] takes place between the bottom- up activity of our volitional, thinking brain-mind and the top-down action from some nebulous field of potential outside our thought” (p. 40). This larger “nebulous field of potential” is what we would directly encounter in those experiences of wonderment to which I have been referring, and which Pearce dubs the “Eureka!” experience insofar as it is, implicitly or explicitly, understood as providing the answer(s) to certain longstanding and important question(s). A “strange loop” indeed! 2 Nietzsche (1887/1974) complained that mystical types are willfully irrational and dishonest because they never ask themselves the really tough questions: “What did I really experience? What happened in me and around me at that time? Was my reason bright enough? Was my will opposed to all deceptions of the senses and bold in resisting the fantastic?” (p. 253). One striking counter-example to Nietzsche’s thesis is Bob Monroe himself, as the record of Journeys Out of the Body (1971) quite readily attests. It is clear that he did ask himself (over and over again) Nietzsche’s very questions: Am I Next Page 7 TMI JOURNAL Winter/Spring 2011 sane? Am I mentally and physically healthy? Is this real? Can I trust my perceptions? Only gradually, and very reluctantly, did he begin to accept the validity of his out-of-body excursions—and only when he was forced to question his own most cherished beliefs and assumptions: “If I accepted the data as fact, it struck hard at nearly all of my life experience to that date, my training, my concepts, and my sense of values. Most of all, it shattered my faith in the totality and certainty of our culture’s scientific knowledge” (Monroe, 1971, p. 31). Even as his experiences of “wonder” expanded in their depth and intensity, he never ceased to value questioning himself or his cultural assumptions, scientific or religious, as his remarks in Ultimate Journey (1994) underscore: “Nothing is sacred to the point where it should not be investigated or put under inquiry” (p. 109). Indeed, he came to view the development of this questioning faculty as the prime purpose of human existence in what he dubbed the “Earth Life System” (p. 86) and therefore as perfectly compatible with our enjoyment of the fullest range of possible human experiences—including and especially experiences in states of consciousness other than the normal physical waking kind. References Ayer, A. J. (1952). Language, truth and logic. New York, NY: Dover. (Original work published 1936) Austin, J. L. (1962). Sense and sensibilia (G. J. Warnock, Ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Campbell, J., with B. Moyers. (1988). The power of myth (B. S. Flowers, Ed.). New York, NY: Doubleday. Dodds, E. R. (1951). The Greeks and the irrational. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press. Felser, J. M. (2000). My gateway voyage: An experiential account. EHE News, 7(2), 17-25. Felser, J. M. (2002). Explaining infinity to a monkey: Challenges and rewards of NVC. TMI Focus, 24(1), 1, 4, 8. Felser, J. M. (2004). Through the doorways of change: A philosopher’s inner voyage continues. Exceptional Human Experience, 17(2), 180-189. Felser, J. M. (2005). The way back to paradise: Restoring the balance between magic and reason. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads. Felser, J. M. (2006). Reasonable magic and magical reason: The philosophy of Robert Monroe. TMI Focus, 28(1-2), 1, 3, 5-6, 8-9; 11. Findlay, J. N. (1978). Plato and Platonism. New York, NY: Times Books. Harner, M. (1990). The way of the shaman (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. (Original work published 1980) Keen, S. (1994). Hymns to an unknown god: Awakening the spirit in everyday life. New York, NY: Bantam. Kohåk, E. (1978). Idea & experience: Edmund Husserl’s project of phenomenology in ideas I. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Magee, B. (1971). Conversation with Alasdair MacIntyre: Philosophy and social theory. In B. Magee (Ed.), Modern British philosophy pp. 191-201). New York, NY: St. Martin’s. Maslow, A. H. (1963, January). The need to know and the fear of knowing. Journal of General Psychology, 68, 119-25.