I used to think that how things were arranged in terms of human space (architecture, room arrangement) didn't matter. Now I see there is a connection between mind and matter, God and design of our human world. I didn't think there was any true connection of human concepts and Reality either. I think that comes with the idea that man is an accident of blind random forces.
I thought we might chat about transcendence. Yes, I will get to Paul's conversion, but please allow me to take a leisurely route. I hope to catch it from a fresh angle.
Long ago, I took a course on the literature of the American Renaissance. We read a great deal of Emerson and Thoreau. I did not much care for Emerson - what he called "Nature" was not something I had ever hiked through or sifted between my fingers. The object he most wanted us to consider seemed an abstraction, the writing puffed out by his resolve to orchestrate a lofty confrontation with it. Thoreau felt different somehow, but I was as yet too new to this material to challenge the professor's insistence that they were close kin. Transcendentalists, he called them. Whatever. All I know is that I stopped reading Emerson after handing in my final essay. I have been reading Thoreau ever since.
It turns out there was more involved than personal preference. Laura Dassow Walls, in three works of closely argued scholarship, detaches Thoreau from Emerson and inserts him into a lineage headlined by Alexander von Humboldt. Her Thoreau is not a garden variety transcendentalist but a particular kind of scientist - one for whom empirical investigation, philosophical speculation, and poetic imagination were interwoven threads of reasoned inquiry. Where Emerson gazed at loons and trees only for as long as it took to dissolve them into unities valued for their transcendence of any matter that might sing or bloom, Thoreau sought those unities in the singing and the blooming. Nature, he believed, was not the symbol of a deeper reality but the real thing itself. He posited no world behind or beyond the one he sauntered through on his daily rounds.
So while I must confess some sympathy for the correspondent who mourned, apropos of your religious conversion, the declension of a "first-rate social critic" into a "second-rate theologian" (or somesuch ... couldn't track it down), I would put it more generously: the more Christian you have become the more you sound like Emerson and the less like Thoreau. Where once you engaged directly with the world as it is, there are now veils to be pierced, curtains to be lifted, before the most meaningful things come into view. Where once you labored to discern the texture of a "real" England, you now go quarrying about in shrines to long dead saints for the most instructive realities. You've gone transcendental on us.
The brow of Ed Abbey, whom you admire, would surely darken. In Desert Solitaire, he flogged himself whenever he caught himself resorting to metaphor, allusion, or anything that obstructed his view of rocks, lizards, and yuccas in their bare thusness. Never having met any "underlying realities," he snickered, he was happy to commune with "surfaces." Or consider David Abram, whom I imagine Thoreau might have sounded like if he could have read his way through the next century's phenomenologists. It is likely that most people reading this have read his two books. Reread, if you have it handy, the story he tells about his confrontation with a sea lion colony and a humpback whale while kayaking off the coast of Alaska (Becoming Animal, 159-166). What in the way of joy, reverence, empathy, enlightenment, or indeed moral instruction does any Christian canon have to offer that is not available - and available immediately, in the lived moment itself, no mumbo-jumbo appended - in Abram's decidedly non-transcendental account?
Paul, I have attended carefully to all your writings - fiction and essays - since I encountered you in the 2014 profile in the New York Times Magazine. I care enough to worry. I suppose if you feel you have been called, then you are duty-bound to acknowledge the existence of a Caller. But I feel like a hiker who toils all the way up the long, steep ascent to the top of Yosemite Falls, inches himself towards those steel railings you can cling to as you peek over the falls, into the mist, and out over the landscape below ... and then, full of awe and wonder, hears a voice from nowhere whisper in his ear - "Now, for the full experience, flap your arms and fly."
The question, I guess, is why aren't the falls, the sea lions, the Utah desert, and the loons enough? Why must we leap into the void to find what is readily available on sensuous surfaces? I cannot fear for your soul, but I do worry that your uncivilized spirit will be doused in the still waters of an orthodoxy.
This Texan used to think the Bush family were the good guys.
Now I know they are villains. And Trump is the one who, more than anyone else, exposed them.
I also changed my mind on Trump back in 2016. I was on the edge of becoming a Never Trumper. Then I listened to one of his more serious speeches that year, and I thought, "He gets it."
In religion, I've gone from someone who dare not let the Invocation of the Saints cross his lips to someone who asks saints to pray for him everyday. Hey I need all the prayer I can get!
Something that I have really changed my mind about, or at least have had my mind open to changing, is population. I have always believed that “go forth and multiply” meant exactly that, that the idea that population needed to be limited was wrong from a religious POV. In fact all the dire prognostications about running out of food and other resources as well as runaway numbers in the future were wrong. But we seem to have reached an ungovernable number. Does democracy inevitably breakdown when the numbers get too big, when one man was meant to represent 1000 or 10,000 now represents 1,000,000 is this representative government at all?
Yet the idea that we the horde need to be trimmed to create a theme park for the elite is grotesque.
I have always believed that preserving the environment was much more a matter of how we lived than of how many of us there were, and I still believe this. There is plenty of space, arable land, and food, for many more of us with a less consumptive lifestyle. But there are issues of law and order and government that are seriously out of control.
The older I get the more I know only a God can save us, and the less I know about everything else.
I changed my mind about trusting my kids' pediatrician. She always seemed like a nice lady at their checkups, and I had no reason to distrust her. Then in 2022, when information was coming out all over the place about the Covid vaccine causing myocarditis in teen boys, she asked if my son (a runner in perfect health) had had his booster shot. I said we were going to hold off on that until more studies came out.
She looked at me blankly and said: "What studies?"
"There are studies going on all over the world," I sputtered. What studies?? I wasn't paying this bimbo to pluck my kids' eyebrows; she was their doctor. Yet she didn't have a clue.
Now I take my kids to sports physicals twice a year. Full stop. Unless they need acute care, CA pediatricians can go to hell. Quite a change.
I like the military now; I like the orderliness of chains of command and I like the idea that democracy was a thought form a few hundred years ago and now it is a more solid form, though also seemingly dwindling, and I have changed my mind about what is powerful
what is powerful is beauty, good bread, nice smells, the sound of the chop of the wood, the bubbling of the stew, the dog that is pregnant, the spider trying to have a family inside the house, a few mice that then turn into one million mice. this sort of thing is powerful.... and good crisps.... knowing how to make them from a potato left over in the ground in early spring, and birch ale. etc.
I'm not sure my change of mind is completely baked yet, but...
Up until recently, I spent large amounts of my energy trying to figure out the fundamental order of the world with my reason and intuition. Everything I would read or take in through experience was filtered with the idea that I would eventually grasp (seize?) life with my reason and intuition. If only I could just get a little more information and experience...
But now it seems obvious that this has an error at the foundation, because it made my mind/my self the starting point and the end point for not only experiencing life, but also somehow "solving" it. Spoiler alert: It turns out my mind/my self can't solve life because life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived (William James?). It was a well-intended project and I always I tried to orient it toward objective truth. But when you try and encompass life itself within your own self, you are setting up your puny mind as something able to judge/capture/contain sheer being. It cannot work. In my case, I think it also has made my thoughts about God somewhat arthritic.
But what to do? Give up on reason and intuition as the way to understanding the fundamental order of the world? That seems not only dangerous, but also... what other tools are there?
The conclusion I am coming to is that you somehow have to let the flow of life grasp you first. So the majority of energy and efforts in life should focus on how one can let the tide of life, sheer being, the reality of God be primary. Another way to say it: Focus less time on the intellectual or the intuitive response to life and more on the simple practice of being as present as possible to experience.
Perhaps a way to summarize how I changed my mind: I no longer think the functions of reason and intuition are to find an all-encompassing and unassailable vision of the truth of life and how it should be lived. Rather, I see my very limited reason and intuition as humble handmaidens to the sheer tide of being. Those humble tools are there to help deepen the reality of being human, not to control or define that reality.
Maybe that makes at least a little sense to someone else, but perhaps too abstract? Forgive me if this is just rambling gibberish!
I spent a lot of time in nature alone. I am an agriculturalist after all. In the past most of that time has been inside my head trying to figure out God. Truth goodness and beauty as they say. I was always trying to approach the problem in that order but recently I have discovered after decades of attacking the problem the wrong way around that for men there's only one way to know God and that is first through Beauty then to goodness and if you're lucky truth. It may seem like a small reordering of things but it might take me the rest of my life to figure it out and it certainly will to put it into practice. Maybe not so much a change of mind but certainly a change of practice and perception.
This quote from Christopher Dawson helped expand my views on Christianity.
'It is true that Christianity is not bound up with any particular race or culture. It is neither of the East or West, but has a universal mission to the human race as a whole'.
I am rather simple, so my mind has changed from seeing natural things “just” as things of beauty or curious wonder to things with untapped utility….for instance, i use to see sea urchins as sort of ungainly creatures that chomp away at algae to now seeing them as maybe a cure for spikey viruses—-in a biomimicry way. And the lovely crepe myrtles that bloom all summer, now i peel back the bark to find smooth-as-a-baby-butt new growth and i wonder, can i harness whatever it is inside of them to make my old skin new again?
I can remember exactly when my thinking started to evolve, if not the actual date. I used to contribute on Metafilter, and one day there was a discussion - some woman saying she'd failed to achieve a goal, or couldn't get past some obstacle in her life, I can't recall the specifics. But I was several years into being a baseball coach for my oldest son by that point, and responded as a coach might: You can't let this defeat you, you've got to keep pushing, keep trying, etc.
The reaction from the community was almost vicious. "You can't tell her how to feel," one respondent said. Apparently I wasn't validating her suffering. And it occurred to me then that suffering - to these people, and later many others - wasn't something to be endured and overcome; it was something to be valorized. It was an identity. It was almost embraced as a chosen destiny.
I had counted myself a solid liberal, but I didn't understand this way of thinking at all.
Later on, of course, it would snowball. Once men became women - and we had to regard them as indistinguishable from actual women, indeed that the term "actual women" = HATE, etc. - once we were all required to toe the party line on this issue (and others) I realized that not only was I no longer liberal, I detested this "liberalism." Of course, in today's parlance that make me "far right." So be it, I guess.
Like you said Paul, the Covid phenomenon had a deep impact on many of us. I have changed my mind about the medical establishment and pediatricians in particular.
Mind you, my favorite doctor caught my daughter’s exceptionally early-onset appendicitis and the hospital saved her life, but now I cannot divorce the whole lot of them from their links with Big Pharma.
I can’t undo any harm my over-compliance may have caused my children, I can only pray.
I used to think that how things were arranged in terms of human space (architecture, room arrangement) didn't matter. Now I see there is a connection between mind and matter, God and design of our human world. I didn't think there was any true connection of human concepts and Reality either. I think that comes with the idea that man is an accident of blind random forces.
I thought we might chat about transcendence. Yes, I will get to Paul's conversion, but please allow me to take a leisurely route. I hope to catch it from a fresh angle.
Long ago, I took a course on the literature of the American Renaissance. We read a great deal of Emerson and Thoreau. I did not much care for Emerson - what he called "Nature" was not something I had ever hiked through or sifted between my fingers. The object he most wanted us to consider seemed an abstraction, the writing puffed out by his resolve to orchestrate a lofty confrontation with it. Thoreau felt different somehow, but I was as yet too new to this material to challenge the professor's insistence that they were close kin. Transcendentalists, he called them. Whatever. All I know is that I stopped reading Emerson after handing in my final essay. I have been reading Thoreau ever since.
It turns out there was more involved than personal preference. Laura Dassow Walls, in three works of closely argued scholarship, detaches Thoreau from Emerson and inserts him into a lineage headlined by Alexander von Humboldt. Her Thoreau is not a garden variety transcendentalist but a particular kind of scientist - one for whom empirical investigation, philosophical speculation, and poetic imagination were interwoven threads of reasoned inquiry. Where Emerson gazed at loons and trees only for as long as it took to dissolve them into unities valued for their transcendence of any matter that might sing or bloom, Thoreau sought those unities in the singing and the blooming. Nature, he believed, was not the symbol of a deeper reality but the real thing itself. He posited no world behind or beyond the one he sauntered through on his daily rounds.
So while I must confess some sympathy for the correspondent who mourned, apropos of your religious conversion, the declension of a "first-rate social critic" into a "second-rate theologian" (or somesuch ... couldn't track it down), I would put it more generously: the more Christian you have become the more you sound like Emerson and the less like Thoreau. Where once you engaged directly with the world as it is, there are now veils to be pierced, curtains to be lifted, before the most meaningful things come into view. Where once you labored to discern the texture of a "real" England, you now go quarrying about in shrines to long dead saints for the most instructive realities. You've gone transcendental on us.
The brow of Ed Abbey, whom you admire, would surely darken. In Desert Solitaire, he flogged himself whenever he caught himself resorting to metaphor, allusion, or anything that obstructed his view of rocks, lizards, and yuccas in their bare thusness. Never having met any "underlying realities," he snickered, he was happy to commune with "surfaces." Or consider David Abram, whom I imagine Thoreau might have sounded like if he could have read his way through the next century's phenomenologists. It is likely that most people reading this have read his two books. Reread, if you have it handy, the story he tells about his confrontation with a sea lion colony and a humpback whale while kayaking off the coast of Alaska (Becoming Animal, 159-166). What in the way of joy, reverence, empathy, enlightenment, or indeed moral instruction does any Christian canon have to offer that is not available - and available immediately, in the lived moment itself, no mumbo-jumbo appended - in Abram's decidedly non-transcendental account?
Paul, I have attended carefully to all your writings - fiction and essays - since I encountered you in the 2014 profile in the New York Times Magazine. I care enough to worry. I suppose if you feel you have been called, then you are duty-bound to acknowledge the existence of a Caller. But I feel like a hiker who toils all the way up the long, steep ascent to the top of Yosemite Falls, inches himself towards those steel railings you can cling to as you peek over the falls, into the mist, and out over the landscape below ... and then, full of awe and wonder, hears a voice from nowhere whisper in his ear - "Now, for the full experience, flap your arms and fly."
The question, I guess, is why aren't the falls, the sea lions, the Utah desert, and the loons enough? Why must we leap into the void to find what is readily available on sensuous surfaces? I cannot fear for your soul, but I do worry that your uncivilized spirit will be doused in the still waters of an orthodoxy.
This Texan used to think the Bush family were the good guys.
Now I know they are villains. And Trump is the one who, more than anyone else, exposed them.
I also changed my mind on Trump back in 2016. I was on the edge of becoming a Never Trumper. Then I listened to one of his more serious speeches that year, and I thought, "He gets it."
In religion, I've gone from someone who dare not let the Invocation of the Saints cross his lips to someone who asks saints to pray for him everyday. Hey I need all the prayer I can get!
Something that I have really changed my mind about, or at least have had my mind open to changing, is population. I have always believed that “go forth and multiply” meant exactly that, that the idea that population needed to be limited was wrong from a religious POV. In fact all the dire prognostications about running out of food and other resources as well as runaway numbers in the future were wrong. But we seem to have reached an ungovernable number. Does democracy inevitably breakdown when the numbers get too big, when one man was meant to represent 1000 or 10,000 now represents 1,000,000 is this representative government at all?
Yet the idea that we the horde need to be trimmed to create a theme park for the elite is grotesque.
I have always believed that preserving the environment was much more a matter of how we lived than of how many of us there were, and I still believe this. There is plenty of space, arable land, and food, for many more of us with a less consumptive lifestyle. But there are issues of law and order and government that are seriously out of control.
The older I get the more I know only a God can save us, and the less I know about everything else.
I changed my mind about trusting my kids' pediatrician. She always seemed like a nice lady at their checkups, and I had no reason to distrust her. Then in 2022, when information was coming out all over the place about the Covid vaccine causing myocarditis in teen boys, she asked if my son (a runner in perfect health) had had his booster shot. I said we were going to hold off on that until more studies came out.
She looked at me blankly and said: "What studies?"
"There are studies going on all over the world," I sputtered. What studies?? I wasn't paying this bimbo to pluck my kids' eyebrows; she was their doctor. Yet she didn't have a clue.
Now I take my kids to sports physicals twice a year. Full stop. Unless they need acute care, CA pediatricians can go to hell. Quite a change.
I like the military now; I like the orderliness of chains of command and I like the idea that democracy was a thought form a few hundred years ago and now it is a more solid form, though also seemingly dwindling, and I have changed my mind about what is powerful
what is powerful is beauty, good bread, nice smells, the sound of the chop of the wood, the bubbling of the stew, the dog that is pregnant, the spider trying to have a family inside the house, a few mice that then turn into one million mice. this sort of thing is powerful.... and good crisps.... knowing how to make them from a potato left over in the ground in early spring, and birch ale. etc.
I'm not sure my change of mind is completely baked yet, but...
Up until recently, I spent large amounts of my energy trying to figure out the fundamental order of the world with my reason and intuition. Everything I would read or take in through experience was filtered with the idea that I would eventually grasp (seize?) life with my reason and intuition. If only I could just get a little more information and experience...
But now it seems obvious that this has an error at the foundation, because it made my mind/my self the starting point and the end point for not only experiencing life, but also somehow "solving" it. Spoiler alert: It turns out my mind/my self can't solve life because life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived (William James?). It was a well-intended project and I always I tried to orient it toward objective truth. But when you try and encompass life itself within your own self, you are setting up your puny mind as something able to judge/capture/contain sheer being. It cannot work. In my case, I think it also has made my thoughts about God somewhat arthritic.
But what to do? Give up on reason and intuition as the way to understanding the fundamental order of the world? That seems not only dangerous, but also... what other tools are there?
The conclusion I am coming to is that you somehow have to let the flow of life grasp you first. So the majority of energy and efforts in life should focus on how one can let the tide of life, sheer being, the reality of God be primary. Another way to say it: Focus less time on the intellectual or the intuitive response to life and more on the simple practice of being as present as possible to experience.
Perhaps a way to summarize how I changed my mind: I no longer think the functions of reason and intuition are to find an all-encompassing and unassailable vision of the truth of life and how it should be lived. Rather, I see my very limited reason and intuition as humble handmaidens to the sheer tide of being. Those humble tools are there to help deepen the reality of being human, not to control or define that reality.
Maybe that makes at least a little sense to someone else, but perhaps too abstract? Forgive me if this is just rambling gibberish!
I spent a lot of time in nature alone. I am an agriculturalist after all. In the past most of that time has been inside my head trying to figure out God. Truth goodness and beauty as they say. I was always trying to approach the problem in that order but recently I have discovered after decades of attacking the problem the wrong way around that for men there's only one way to know God and that is first through Beauty then to goodness and if you're lucky truth. It may seem like a small reordering of things but it might take me the rest of my life to figure it out and it certainly will to put it into practice. Maybe not so much a change of mind but certainly a change of practice and perception.
“Come back in five years”??
That’s certainly something I’ve changed my mind about: future timelines, me or us having a future at all.
The idea of living into old age and collecting a pension.
The idea of dying in a compassionate NHS that won’t actively hasten my end whether I want it or not.
The idea that there won’t be a catastrophic war this decade.
The idea that the enemy is not only within but is actually governing us.
The 2020s seems to be the hinge decade. I fear what these next very few years will bring us, on too many fronts.
This quote from Christopher Dawson helped expand my views on Christianity.
'It is true that Christianity is not bound up with any particular race or culture. It is neither of the East or West, but has a universal mission to the human race as a whole'.
I am rather simple, so my mind has changed from seeing natural things “just” as things of beauty or curious wonder to things with untapped utility….for instance, i use to see sea urchins as sort of ungainly creatures that chomp away at algae to now seeing them as maybe a cure for spikey viruses—-in a biomimicry way. And the lovely crepe myrtles that bloom all summer, now i peel back the bark to find smooth-as-a-baby-butt new growth and i wonder, can i harness whatever it is inside of them to make my old skin new again?
I wrote an essay about "My Personal Myth." It represents a change in my view of what I owe my "success" to.
https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/my-personal-myth
I can remember exactly when my thinking started to evolve, if not the actual date. I used to contribute on Metafilter, and one day there was a discussion - some woman saying she'd failed to achieve a goal, or couldn't get past some obstacle in her life, I can't recall the specifics. But I was several years into being a baseball coach for my oldest son by that point, and responded as a coach might: You can't let this defeat you, you've got to keep pushing, keep trying, etc.
The reaction from the community was almost vicious. "You can't tell her how to feel," one respondent said. Apparently I wasn't validating her suffering. And it occurred to me then that suffering - to these people, and later many others - wasn't something to be endured and overcome; it was something to be valorized. It was an identity. It was almost embraced as a chosen destiny.
I had counted myself a solid liberal, but I didn't understand this way of thinking at all.
Later on, of course, it would snowball. Once men became women - and we had to regard them as indistinguishable from actual women, indeed that the term "actual women" = HATE, etc. - once we were all required to toe the party line on this issue (and others) I realized that not only was I no longer liberal, I detested this "liberalism." Of course, in today's parlance that make me "far right." So be it, I guess.
Like you said Paul, the Covid phenomenon had a deep impact on many of us. I have changed my mind about the medical establishment and pediatricians in particular.
Mind you, my favorite doctor caught my daughter’s exceptionally early-onset appendicitis and the hospital saved her life, but now I cannot divorce the whole lot of them from their links with Big Pharma.
I can’t undo any harm my over-compliance may have caused my children, I can only pray.
That doctors had integrity and were motivated by the desire to heal people. I no longer believe this.