Blogosphere Oldies But Goodies, II: "Reverse Mysticism"

In my previous post below, I described two ways in which we may happen to retrieve a gem of blogging insight from the trash bin called "That's So Yesterday." Sometimes you just stumble on something great trolling in someone's archives. Sometimes you insistently remember a phrase or concept, and it nags you till you go back and look for it. Here's an example of the second.

This one's not so old. In the wake of his mother's death, Richard Lawrence Cohen wrote about premonitory dreams, and the hopeful skeptic's responsibility to try to verify or debunk them, so that we can see if this phenomenon is ever real, or whether it's always a compound of rationally explainable events and wishful thinking. Richard dreamt of his ailing uncle, appearing together with his late father and assuring Richard that they both were fine, on the night his uncle died. He was not particularly close to that uncle, and had never dreamt about him before. He knew the uncle was ill, but had no reason to believe his death was imminent.

It would be easy to dismiss my dream of Uncle A. as a coincidence. Simply multiply the probability that a man dreams of his uncle by the probability that the uncle will die on that night. The result is some small number which, if landed upon by the roulette wheel of life, will produce a feeling of uncanniness in the dreamer.

But I reject such mechanistic explaining-away as reductionistic. They ignore the fact that this dream had profound subjective meaning for me even before I learned that the death had occurred. It wasn’t a dream about just anyone, it was a dream about a person with whom I had a specific relationship that the dream addressed. It was a unique occurrence in my life, not just one in a series of spins of the wheel. The conjunction didn’t occur on just any night, it occurred on a night of special significance that was both public and private [the tenth anniversary of John Lennon's murder]. I recognized the dream as special the moment it happened, not merely afterward. Factor in all this and the chance of coincidence becomes so infinitesimal as to be scarcely worth considering. To cling to an explanation of coincidence, in this circumstance, would seem to me to be a kind of reverse mysticism, a clinging to the power of numbers however tiny, from fear of facing the obvious. It could have been a coincidence, but it wasn’t. [Emphasis added]

I mentally bookmarked this phrase, "reverse mysticism," when I first read it, and vowed to come back and blog about it. It so perfectly captures the need some rationalists feel to expunge all traces of the uncanny, the just-maybe-meaningful, from this universe. They are like bacteriophobes on the warpath with bottles of Lysol, determined to wipe out every germ of sentimental folly, every furtive, funky hope of cosmic rapprochement or resonance, perhaps first of all from the gleaming steel sinks of their own modern minds. It's quite true that the prescientific world was infested with projection and wishful thinking, and that you absolutely must disinfect your mental laboratory before you can conduct rational inquiry and verification. But they've gone on past disinfecting the lab to scouring the kitchen, the bedroom, the street, the sky. Their belief that there can be no messages but in the childish eye of the beholder, that every strange and thrilling occurrence can and must be broken down to random chance, probability, and the whirling of mindless matter, comes to seem in itself a kind of faith, or superstition. Reverse mysticism.

Here's my own oldie but goodie on Significant (?) Coincidence vs. Reverse Mysticism. Have you ever had an exceptionally meaningful encounter or relationship with someone who turned out to have the same birthday as you? I explore the pros and cons of that, quote a prominent Reverse Mystic, and give some examples of my own.

Comments

[Adam]

When you mentioned this phrase to me, it permanently entered my lexicon. I think what we need to realize is that people ought to always be committed to the best explanation. But the problem with reverse mystics is that they a priori rule out the possibility that the best explanation might be a metaphysical one.

[Natalie]

I couldn't agree more. I can't understand why any hint of the un-explained or unexplainable (ie, "irrational") upsets some people so intensely. Reverse mysticism indeed. Sweeping it all into a neat box called "mere coincidence" or "chance" is not unlike wearing a rabbit's foot. In both cases, the hope is that the unpredictable/unexplained/irrational will either be ineffectual or work in the wearer's favor (ie prove him right).

[karen]

I like this post. To each his own, i guess. Here's a coincidence... Natalie posted on your own *Oldie But Goodie* post in March. I like that, too :).

[sail on]

Here's a weird one. The Principal of the school where I work - my boss - has the same birthday as me. (But she's 3 years younger.) Her husband has the same birthday as my daughter.

Oooooooo . . .

[karen]

i met a girl my age at a Teen Drug Prevention Convention. We each have an older brother the same age, both named David. Both were heavy into drugs, both were diagnosed paranoid schizophrenics and we each thought the world of our big brothers.

My brother survived the *trip* and is whole and well today. Her brother had commited suicide...

[Charlie (Colorado)]

My unexpected teacher --- like Scott Peck for you above, I think --- was A Course in Miracles, once I got over the Christian terminology. ACiM says that a "miracle is a change in perception". Coincidence, synchronicity, and reverse mysticism seem to me to all be changes in perception that arise from the way we think about the events themselves.

[Richard Lawrence Cohen]

Amba, I like your Lysol metaphor very much. To extend it a little, there's a theory that modern children who are being raised in an excessively germ-free environment (antibacterial soaps, etc.) are not being given the chance to strengthen their natural immunities. Thus they may become more susceiptible to common diseases. As a parallel, could we theorize that people raised in an excessively rationalistic environment actually become MORE susceptible to the superstitions of our time?

[amba]

Hmmm. Very interesting proposition.

[Adam]

I would say excessive rationality, (read faux-rationality), is itself a superstition. While some religious folk may believe in certain things for no good reason, and thus are superstitious, reverse mystics reject the possibility of the "supernatural" for no good reason.

As they say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Besides, science keeps discovering weirder and weirder things, so it seems really bone-headed to proclaim that science justifies living in a sanitized world of what passes for rational among the intellectual elite. These reverse mystics could also be called irrationally "rational."