The Rationality Illusion

Introduction

Religious musicality is a widely distributed form of intuition of variable maturity. It is a common misconception to collect different talents in religious musicality uniformly under 'believers'. Rather, this form of intuition spans from belief (often characterised by almost complete lack of intuition and preference for religious doctrines) to strong intuitive convictions in rare master-grade performers, who usually are called mystics. These convictions have nothing to do with belief but excel in strength any learned or sensed rational insight and transcend any religious doctrine. The goal of an appropriate balance between intuition and rationality is subject of a mental technology developed by those performers, a technology which is both under-investigated in science and underrated by most of us. To engage this technology does not necessarily involve any religious belief, but effectuates a shift of worthes from outer to inner progression.

Asked, what is really important in life, many would mention a desire for spiritual development quite far down in the list or not at all. Rather wealthiness, prominence, health, acknowledgement, beauty and the like will be listed.

But looking around one can get the puzzling impression that those people who have acquired socially accepted goals, the rich and beautiful, are often not at all happier than so-called average people or not necessarily happier than poor people. To the contrary: living on the summit of the mountain of human wishes may reveal even more succinctly that there still is no bliss and one may have missed it.

If you are not completely absorbed by the superficiality of our restless society, you may feel a faint doubt, running for money and prominence and even reach it might not be everything in life. Is there something missing ?

Actually, yes...

Once a minimal level of shelter, nutrition and health is acquired, happiness cannot be bound to accumulating material wealth. But where else ?

Perhaps by cerebrating on such a difficult issue as the deeper sense of life feels so irritating, uncomfortable or jejune, that one is tempted to drop the faint doubt and better jump back into one of the many diversions and mental anaesthesia our modern society offers cheerfully. There are many good reasons to continue as before and few to open up to the spiritual side of our life, to engage the spiny walk of the mystics. A walk revealing the illusion that rationality is the only tool to access and understand life, a walk aimed at altering the ratio between intuition and rationality.

It is a walk on stony ground, yet the only walk which ultimately is worth to be pursued.

If most of us do not know themselves, it is only because self-realization is painful. We prefer the pleasure of illusion.

Aldous Huxley

A man has many skins in himself, covering the depths of his heart. Man knows so many things; he does not know himself. Because, thirty of forty skins or hides, just like an ox's or bear's, so thick and hard, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.

Meister Eckhart

A personal remark

The question, whether there might be an eternal truth, a meaning in life, never bothered me throughout more than four decades of my conscious life. The one and only truth I accepted - in school, as a student, on job - were the laws of nature, was scientific rigour. I am educated as a scientist and work as a scientist to this day.

As a schoolboy, biblic concepts baffled me. The original sin: a newborn baby, naked and innocent, allegedly already carries sin ? Jesus came to earth to expiate collective human sin ? If this was God's wish, why did He implement sin in the first place ? And Godfather: why should a creator of the world be subject to the limits of the male part of the human species ? Does He have a Y-chromosome ? All that sounded like utter nonsense. I felt, there must be something wrong.

Certainly nobody will doubt that belief into an allmighty, just and affectionate personal God can deliver leadership and comfort, and in its simplicity this concept is accessible to the simplest mind. On the other hand this concept has various demerits which are obvious since ages. If this holy being is almighty, each action, each happening, including each human thought and feeling and urge would be His work. How would it be possible to ask people to give an account of their doing and thinking in front of Him ? In dispensing punishments and rewards God would, in a sense, hold court over Himself. How would that concur with goodness and justice He allegedly offers ?

Albert Einstein: Naturwissenschaft und Religion (1941)

I knew that belief and knowledge represented two completely different realms of consciousness, which have to be kept separate. Formal logic is not an adequate tool when it comes to religion. Still, the world we see, hear, feel has a certain logic buildup, it follows the laws of mathematics and science. Humans thinking and acting follow the very same laws. We all eat, dream, die, see the same blue sky, react similarly on poisons and hormones. Thus, the perception of a holy instance - if it exists - should be similar to all people.

Now, provided there exists a God: why is He perceived so different by various belief systems like christianity, islam, judaism ? What about Wakon Tonka, the god of the red indians, or this strange buddhism ?

Religious disunity to me was a strong counter-indication, if not disproval, of the hypothesis God.

An alternative explanation, why so many people believe in a God, could be an unconscious yearning for a helper or a sense-giver, which I lacked. This longing for a holy instance might be product of a hormonal excretion or a neural circuit common to many and missing in others like myself, leading to a projection named God.

On the other hand: what is the source of the immense power religions can liberate, impressive creative power exemplified in beautiful cathedrals or humanistic powers like compassion, love and care ? How can the charisma of the religious founders be explained, which can be felt even after millenia passed ? The energy in some biblic phrases, where does it come from ? Could all this be based on fiction ? Or is it possible that there is a real form of energy behind all this, driving religious musicality ?

I was fishing in the dust.

With the age of 24 I had a strange experience. It lasted about one week and never happened again. Much later I found a little poem written by Pascalline Maillert and think that she must have experienced something similar.

At times, yet rare, with no apparent cause,

spontaneous awareness of the ‘I’ springs up

and bliss fills the heart with glowing warmth.

Effortless concentration goes with this state

while all desires do come to rest

fulfilled in utmost peace,

till once more the veil is drawn

and illusion seeks to blur the vision of the Real.

Yet what the soul has experienced

and knows repeatedly as Truth,

can neither be denied nor ever forgotten

and ‘That which is’

gives constant strength to persevere.

Pascalline Maillert (Talks with Ramana Maharshi)

I remember it crisp and clear to this day, but for a long time I could not make any sense out of it and did not try. Today I know that this experience was a spontaneous transformation of the mind, a transformation many people had before me or have in this moment. This mental state is almost unknown in science and hardly acknowledged in western religions, however, well known and described in eastern religions. It occurs in different flavours - of short duration or life-long, shallow or deep. It was a brief entry into a mystic state.

After this experience many years followed where I would accept only one deity: scientific reasoning. I deemed science to be capable of explaining the world completely - and was awkwardly flawed.

Those convictions, which are elementary for our actions and our values, cannot be derived solely on the solid ground of scientific reasoning. … Insight in the form of [scientific] truth is splendiferous, but as a guide in [ethical] questions this insight is so insensible that it cannot even explain our aspiration for truth. Here we simply face the limits of the attempt to rationally fathom our being. … Mere thinking cannot tell us about the last and fundamental goals. ... Science can only determine what is, but not, what should be.

Albert Einstein

Later I learned that the „limits of the attempt to rationally fathom our being" can be complemented by an usually hidden capability called intuition. Intuition in mastergrade performers can almost replace rational thinking and allow insights which are inaccessible by rationality alone. These insights have nothing to do with belief and do not involve a personal god. Lectures to develop intuition were written down in scriptures, some dating back 3000 years, some taught by contemporary intuition masters, and I believe it is seminal to respect these lectures. In the following I will try to argue why.

First book: Science

Science has made it possible that we live a comfortable life compared to hundred or thousand years ago. But that is all science can provide: comfort for the body. The sciences have no power when our mind or soul needs comfort, they cannot take leadership when it comes to ethical questions. Not only their realm of responsibility is limited, even within their own realm, in the world of logic, ratio, deduction and thinking, science fails occasionally to provide answers. The scientific grasp of the world is not spotless, it contains holes and open questions. Some of these holes even became bigger in recent years. It seems, we are approaching a limit.

Because technology advances, we fancy that we are making corresponding progress all along the line; because we have considerable power over inanimate nature, we are convinced that we are the self-sufficient masters of our fate and captains of our souls; and because cleverness has given us technology and power, we believe, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that we have only to go on being yet cleverer in a yet more systematic way to achieve social order, international peace and personal happiness.

Aldous Huxley

The experiments decribed in this first part may be difficult to understand for a reader not familiar with science. Readers not interested to delve too deep into the subject can find a summary at the end of each chapter, representing the core of the chapter, which will be sufficient to progress further.

Already here - in a sort of summary of summaries - it should be emphasized that the scientific puzzles described in the first part - in particular the cosmological puzzles - do not exist because the field of research is immature and cracks and holes have a good chance to be filled soon. Some of those physics puzzles are known since 100 years. To the contrary, some scientists doubt whether these puzzles might be of a principally solvable kind.

Cosmology puzzles

The big bang

The vast majority of cosmologicists - scientists dealing with the development of our universe - agree that our universe jumped into existence out of nothing from a stupendous explosion named big bang. This designation is both colourful and obscurant: it blurs our hopeless incapability to fathom this singularity - how can 'something' spring out of 'nothing' ?

Our universe is mainly made from matter, however, big bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. When matter and anti-matter come together, both annihilate each other in an immense lightning flash. Hence, shortly after the big bang the universe must have been filled by radiation devoid of any particles. Why that is not the case - why there was an excess of matter over anti-matter - is unexplained.

1965 was the year of the first observation of cosmic background radiation. This radiation is believed to be a remnant of the extreme heat short after the big bang and an indication that the ‘big bang’ theory might be correct. Some details of this theory, however, are out of kilter.

After Einstein had published the general theory of relativity in 1915 - a theory dealing with huge masses and spaces - it turned out that it was in parts incompatible with quantum physics, the theory describing subatomic particles and forces. The theory of the ‘huge’ could explain well was can be observed by astrophysics, the theory of the ‘tiny’ could explain well what could be measured in quantum physics experiments. But both theories could not be matched into one grand unifying theory describing all dimensions from the sub-atomic up to million lightyear vast space. In the 1960ies the string theory was developed to alleviate these inconsistencies, and it generated much hope that some day not too far away it could be developed into the grand unifying theory uniting all four physical forces (1), surmounting the incompatibilities between quantum physics and the theory of relativity.

However, string theory or theories - meanwhile we have several incarnations - generates some predictions which either could not yet be confirmed by experiment (2) or which will not be confirmed ever (3). Even worse, some of its predictions were not in agreement with observations. In the 1980ies, for instance, astrophysicists found that galaxies, our own ‘milky way’ included, spin faster than predicted by gravitational force. To explain this observation so called ‘dark matter’ had to be introduced into the formula, a spurious matter predicted but unobserved to this day. In the late 1990ies observations of far distant supernovae - exploded stars - suggested that the universe expands much faster than string theory predicts, and that this fast expansion was not the same since big bang but accelerated about 7 billion years ago. Again, we do not have a plausible explanation for this observation, scientists had to introduce a hypothetical