The Blessed One thought, “I have taught the Truth, but simple as it is, the people don’t understand it! Therefore I will tell them stories.”

Recently I wrote of how we need to meet our spiritual needs in order to attain a sense of wholeness in our lives. I have written that in achieving this we need to integrate both Logos (reason) and Mythos (mythology, parables and folklore) into our thinking. As a result I suspect we need to embrace science as well as mysticism to enhance our understanding of our world.

.This probably seems like gobbledygook to the more rational of you.

In my working life I dealt with (and admired) engineers, scientists, accountants and others who were essential in helping us to successfully negotiate the physical, material world. They were helpful in demonstrating how Logos could help us cope with the world at large. In the meantime, I had acquired degrees in Electrical Engineering and Economics Hence I felt pretty well equipped to deal with the rational world.

But I had a need for more than these sources could provide. This stimulated in me a search to understand my spirituality. I read widely in the fields of religion and philosophy.

I was greatly influenced by Ken Wilber’s The Spectrum of Consciousness, the various works of Alan Watts, the prodigious works of religious historian Karen Armstrong and the delightful simplicity of Anthony De Mello, among many others.

Then I had the great fortune to have formed a liaison with another seeker of the truth, my friend and mentor Dr Phil Harker. Phil was not only widely read but intellectually stimulating. He aided my spiritual journey immensely.

I eventually came to the conclusion that there were two ways of knowing (as Karen Armstrong has long proposed) viz Logos and Mythos. These two ways of knowing are complementary. We rely on both to help us come to grips with the human predicament. If we accept Logos but reject Mythos we will be logical, competent people but lacking in depth in our spirituality and a truncated understanding of human nature. If we reject Logos and accept only Mythos we might live a rich internal life but will be grossly ineffective in dealing with the world around us

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Many of us would concede that we have some ability to know things indirectly, i.e. intuitively. The famous Australian palaeontologist and author Darryl Reanney called this “another way of knowing”,

In his lovely little book The Music of the Mind, Reanney quotes the famous lines from TS Eliot’s Little Gidding.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Reanney points out ‘that most people react to this poem in a special way; they sense that it is true without being able to see why it is true’ Mythos can tap well-springs of knowing that logos cannot and vice versa.

As well, much of the wisdom that we arrive at through the means of Mythos is also paradoxical when viewed through the lens of logos.
For example:

He who loses his life shall find it.
The best way to learn something is to teach it.
All I give to another I give to myself

I was once heartened to come across some quotes of G K Chesterton that both amused me and appealed to my sense of the numinous. (G K Chesterton was both an accomplished author and a Christian philosopher.)

He wrote:

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity
The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.”

[I must confess my favourite Chesterton quote is:

Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly!]

Now I write this essay under the premise that the world is not directly completely knowable. Why might this be so?

In the simplest terms it is because any observer is but a small part of the universe he is trying to understand. So I would ask the question is it possible that a part can understand the whole?

As I have written before, classical Buddhism recognised this problem as “primary dualism”. This is recognition that when we try to step outside that which we are observing we naturally modify what we are trying to observe.

Classical physicists defined the problem in another way. They maintained the observer always impacts on the observed in subtle ways. Consequently observation is always distorted to a degree leading to the conclusion the “world as it is” can never be fully understood by direct observation.

We have seen some good examples of the “logicians making everything mysterious” in our discussions of quantum physics in previous blogs. But the best example comes from mathematics. I refer here to the Incompleteness Theorems of the Austrian mathematician, Kurt Gödel.His first theorem appears in his 1931 paper On Formally Undecidable Propositions in Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I”. [Principia Mathematica is a three volume work on the principals of mathematics written by two giants in the field, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead.] Gödel showed that there was a problem with classical mathematical systems.

Gödel’s theorem was articulated using mathematical concepts which are not very accessible to the average reader. The American philosopher Douglas Hofstadter translated his theorem into plain language this way (and some of you might complain that this is not much clearer!):
All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions.

It turns out that in number theory you can either have a theorem that covers everything but includes contradictions or you can have a theorem that is consistent but can’t include everything.

In Physics I believe the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle embodies the same dilemma – ie the closer we try to examine physical phenomena the more likely that there will be indeterminacies.

This is why there is so much that we cannot know directly. However we get glimpses of the unknown through our intuition. As my reference to Darryl Reanney above proposes, there are ways of knowing indirectly.

It is fortunate that we have ways of recording the outcomes from these two different fields of knowledge.

Just then, as we hand down the realisations we get from Logos in formulae, theorems and equations, the realisations that we get from Mythos we hand down as parables, metaphors and stories.

In this way Mythos underpins our spirituality, and also indeed, in many ways, our understanding of human psychology.

I have talked before of the power of parables and analogies. Carl Jung promoted the value of “symbolic truth” that wasn’t accessible by reason. It is in this context that we run into the conflict between the literalists and the mystics.

Remember, for example, in the Gospel of John, Jesus’ discussions with Nicodemus. The Pharisee, Nicodemus, came in the night to learn from Jesus. (There are some important allegories even in this statement – but I won’t have the opportunity to go there this time!) When Nicodemus asks Jesus to give him the benefits of his wisdom, Jesus responds, “I tell you most solemnly, unless a man is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Nicodemus not understanding the metaphor replies, “How can a grown man be born? Can he go back into his mother’s womb and be born again?”

Jesus responds echoing his previous words:

“I tell you most solemnly, unless a man is born through water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God: What is born of the flesh is flesh; what is born of the spirit is spirit.”

Jesus is saying to Nicodemus do not think about this literally. His message is metaphorical. If Nicodemus can’t throw off the yoke of literal thinking then he will be unable to assimilate the spiritual message that is given to him through a metaphor.

Jesus finally admonishes Nicodemus using the most telling spiritual metaphor.

“Do not be surprised when I say, you must be born from above. The wind blows wherever it pleases; you hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. That is how it is with all who are born of the Spirit.”

And thus he counters the rational enquiry of poor Nicodemus with something very poetical, something seemingly irrational but something very meaningful nonetheless.

Jesus in this metaphorical exchange was saying to Nicodemus “Do not think literally because that will lock you into the trap of the physical, the flesh. But if you think symbolically you will be able to engage with the spirit and it is the spirit that liberates us.” I have often referred to the problem of literal interpretation of enduring truths.

Carl Jung complained, “Even intelligent people no longer understand the value and purpose of symbolical truth, and the spokesmen of religion have failed to deliver an apologetic suited to the spirit of the age.”

Knowing then from Gödel, Heisenberg and the quantum physicists that our best rational efforts to understand the world leave us with uncertainties and mystery, is it not sensible that we should draw on our “other ways of knowing” to come to grips with the world? Isn’t Chesterton right in asserting that drawing on our sense of mystery, our sense of the spirit and our intuition is just as likely to enlighten us as relying on physics and mathematics?

Among those who have argued this position was the German philosopher and poet, Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin. He maintained that poetry gave superior access to the truth. He wrote:

and what are poets for in a destitute time?
But they are you say, like the wine-god’s holy priests
Who fared from land to land in holy night.

Unfortunately, perhaps he couldn’t reconcile the duty of the poet with his personal well-being, ending his life in a mental institution!
This theme was taken up by the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, who, drawing on Hölderlin’s work, wrote a famous essay What Are Poets For?

We should not discard insights that come to us independent of reason and rationality because these are limited faculties. On the other hand we can’t discount rationality. If we can envisage worlds that are illogical and put our faith in what they have to offer we are just as likely to be as disappointed as the rationalists that won’t allow mysticism into their worldview. Mysticism grounded on knowledge and reason lets us see further. Mysticism without knowledge and reason falls into superstition. Mysticism does not discount rationality. It allows us to go beyond reason. This is not an “either or” choice. We need both intuition and reason just as we need both science and spirituality.