"As historically constituted personalities, we may indeed reside in the prison-house of language. But all manner of sunbeams and birdsong and gut hunches leak through the barred windows of our talk. These phenomena not only touch us but perturb our language as well, even as those languages possess us at least as much as we possess them. The world is full of constructions, but it is full of encounters too, and the vibrant margins wherein we meet these Others shape and sometimes shatter those languages, concepts, and identities that, equally inevitably, map and manufacture the frameworks within which we make do.”
I turned 21 on the 21st of January 2021, at a Vipassana center amidst austere farmland in the outskirts of Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh. Teetering on the verge of leaving, I found myself trudging towards the post-tea meditation session with a dull sense of doom. Why the tread of dread? I was helplessly anticipating the inevitable appearance of a sharp and throbbing pain in my knee that had been tormenting me since the second day of the retreat.
Minutes into the sit, I had my first glimpse of the mystical as my conscious awareness embarked on a brief foray into a pure white light. The immersion eroded the traditional subject-object dichotomy of my corporeal self and I was bathed in a profound feeling of awe that left me distanced from the pain and evaporated my notions of flight.
My experience was a textbook example of a mystical experience, infused with the four hallmarks of ineffability, noetic quality, transiency and passivity, as described by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience. I received the experience without an active intention to seek it and it lasted for about half an hour. It had an illuminative quality that afforded "insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect" (James, 1902, p. 295). Finally, though I have attempted to provide a sketch, the true nature of the experience was ineffable — it defies expression.
Textbook indeed.
The timing of the experience was also remarkable. It occurred exactly when I most desperately needed it, a cosmic birthday gift that ensured I stayed for the entirety of the retreat, a 10 day affair I had envisioned (rather grandiosely I will admit) as a rite-of-passage into adulthood. It was all quite beautifully, absurdly, poetically perfect.
Too perfect.
If I didn't know better, this would present as a nice piece of fiction. Except I do know better, it's completely true.
Perhaps, as the 'collector of coincidences' Charles Fort would say - there is only “the hyphenated state of truth-fiction” (Kripal, 2010, p. 98).
I narrate this story because I believe it contains the seed of a generative paradoxical loop that informs and mediates the complex relationship of consciousness and language. In this essay, I will gamely interrogate the nature of this loop by focusing on Erik Davis' brilliant and evocative quote from High Weirdness on the 'prison-house of language' and attempting to relate it to my own experience (Davis, 2019, p. 26).
"As historically constituted personalities, we may indeed reside in the prison-house of language.”
Davis begins with an acknowledgement of the constructivist nature of our experience. In a way, this is a Whorfian stance, that posits that our ability to make sense of the world's "kaleidoscopic flux of impressions" is largely (if not wholly) reliant on the organization of "the linguistic system in our minds" (Kay & Kempton, 1984). Our expectations become our experience.
“But all manner of sunbeams and birdsong and gut hunches leak through the barred windows of our talk.”
But it's always either a Yes, and or a Yes, but.
Davis sublimely notes how experience can become and change and shatter our expectations. No matter how tightly wound the bars, light and song and the intangible will find a way. In other words, there will always be experiences - embodied experiences - that elude our symbolic alchemy — states of being that have no way of being condensed. As James says elegantly "One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love one’s self to understand a lover’s state of mind" (James, 1902, p. 295). Love, music, the visceral intuition borne by the gut, it is precisely these raw felt experiences that remain embalmed in impenetrable qualia that form the moats that breach our expectation-cloaked Beings. The mystical will illuminate and the weird will find its way out of the box and into the mind through the conduits of our living, breathing, loving bodies.
“These phenomena not only touch us but perturb our language as well, even as those languages possess us at least as much as we possess them.”
So goes the generative paradoxical loop of experience-expectation.
Yes, our languages are the enclosures of all our meaning.
And, our embodied meaning is what forges our languages and symbols.
“The world is full of constructions, but it is full of encounters too, and the vibrant margins wherein we meet these Others shape and sometimes shatter those languages, concepts, and identities that, equally inevitably, map and manufacture the frameworks within which we make do."
By trying to describe my meditative mystical experience, I not only rendered an effable version of the ineffable, but in some sense contributed to the very existence of an ontology of the ineffable. This, Jeff Kripal might say, is explained by the paranormal event not simply being a physical event but also being a meaning event and that it involves "the irruption of meaning in the physical world via the radical collapse of the subject-object structure itself" (Kripal, 2010, p. 25).
The expectation-experience loop flows both ways.
What is the sound of one hand clapping in a forest with no one around to hear?
The loopy nature of reality need not send us into a spiral. As long as we refuse to stodgily stand rooted in dogmatic belief and avoid the desperate grasping for explanations, and instead choose to embrace radical acceptance and relish in acts of defiant expression, we remain anchored to our emancipatory agency. This is because of the metaphysical potency of expression that lies, as Kripal notes, in its unique epistemology of being "a self-conscious knowing that recognizes its own construction and its own relativity and so opens itself up to further evolution" (Kripal, 2010, p. 116).
To let go and then to emerge.
Through the process of passively accepting mystical gifts and actively expressing creative riffs, we can twist, break, or subvert the cage of the experience-expectation loop. Our concepts and identities no longer remain shackled to a mindless self-reinforcing process of input-output-input but instead are bared open to the vagaries of our qualia-drenched existence in an embodied Self-evolving action of revelation-expression.
Harkening back to Nietzsche's account in Thus Spake Zarathustra of the human condition as a taut rope stretched between the ape of the past and the Superman of the future (Nietzsche, 2001), Davis notes the striking similarity of Nietzsche's "spiritual acrobats" or "philosophers of the future" and modernity's 'psychonauts'. (Davis, 2019, p. 35) Davis ascribes a common ground between these "spiritual acrobats" and 'psychonauts' to be their creative ability to play with gravity and create novel meaning without the need for foundations – through acts of groundless affirmation in the face of transience and fragility.
The surfing of altered states coupled with the Self-creating reflexive gain of the experience-expectation loop seems to allow us to realize Fort's rousing call of ceasing to be "written by the paranormal" and instead to "become our own authors of the paranormal" so we "can expand." (Kripal, 2010, p. 143)
This has all been well and good. However, it would be wise to end with this line from the Kena Upanishad (Olivelle, 1998)—
"which one cannot express by speech
by which speech itself is expressed
learn that that alone is brahman
and not what they here venerate"
References
Davis, E. (2019). High weirdness: drugs, esoterica, and visionary experience in the seventies. MIT Press.
James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. Longmans, Green and Co.
Kay, P., & Kempton, W. (1984). What is the Sapir‐Whorf hypothesis? American anthropologist, 86(1), 65-79
Kripal, J. J. (2010). Authors of the impossible: The paranormal and the sacred. University of Chicago Press.
Nietzsche, F. W. (2001). Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge, U.K, Cambridge University Press.
Olivelle, P. (1998). The early Upanishads: Annotated text and translation. Oxford University Press, 1998.