#trans-rational

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Q.Why has the scientific worldview dismissed this trans-personal dimension? For most intellectuals around the world, the secular scientific paradigm has triumphed. A. It’s understandable. Historically, if you look at these broad stages, the magical era tended to be 50,000 years ago, the mythic era emerged around 5,000 B.C., and the rational era — secular humanism — emerged in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an attempt to liberate myth and base truth claims on evidence, not just dogma. But when science threw out the church, they threw out the baby with the bath water. You can’t prove a higher stage to someone who’s not at it. If you go to somebody at the mythic stage and try to prove to them something from the rational, scientific stage, it won’t work. You go to a fundamentalist who doesn’t believe in evolution, who believes the earth was created in six days, and you say, “What about the fossil record”? “Oh yes, the fossil record; God created that on the fifth day.” You can’t use any of the evidence from a higher stage and prove it to a lower stage. So someone who’s at the rational stage has a very hard time seeing these trans-rational, trans-personal stages. The rational scientist looks at all the pre-rational stuff as nonsense — fairies and ghosts and goblins — and lumps it together with the trans-rational stuff and says, “That’s nonrational. I don’t want anything to do with it.” Q. So where does God fit into this picture? Do you believe in God? A. God is a perfect example of how these two types of religion treat ultimate reality. You asked, “Do you believe in God?” In exoteric religion, it’s a matter of belief. Do you believe in the kind of God who rewards and punishes and will sit with you in some eternal heaven? But in the esoteric form of religion, God is a direct experience. Most contemplatives would call it “godhead.” It’s so different from the mythic conceptions of God — the old man in the sky with a gray beard. The word “God” is much more misleading than it is accurate. So there’s a whole series of terms that are used instead by the esoteric traditions — super-consciousness, Big Mind, Big Self. This ultimate reality is a direct union that is felt or recognized in a state of enlightenment or liberation. It’s what the Sufis call the “supreme identity,” the identity of the interior soul with the ultimate ground of being in a direct experiential state.

Ken Wilber talking to Salon.com

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Tackling The Trans-Rational

I use the neologism 'trans-rational' to describe the difference between how things like qualia and meaning work from how logical functions like computer programs work. I see them as canonical conjugates with a supervenience relation from the trans-rational to the logical (It is necessary to have the trans-rational possibilities of experience and intuition to have logic, but logic is not necessary to dream or imagine.)

Could you elaborate a bit more on the concept of trans-rationality? I see it as an attempt to draw a clear distinction between the representation of a concept, such as what we do in languaging, and the first-person experience itself.

In general I use trans-rational as a way of differentiating an orderly relation which is intuitive rather than logical. For example the color yellow is not just a bluer version of the color red, even though any logical system based on wavelength would predict that should be the case. I would say that most of our experience is trans-rational and most of it we take for granted. For example the idea that doing something which feels painful should actually prevent us from continuing to do it doesn't really make logical sense. It makes sense that there could be a function which prevents us to do this or that when a particular set of signals exceeds a threshold, but the experience of that as a feeling which cannot be ignored and demands to be stopped is just not really a rational or logical mechanism. It is instead, experiential. An alien being from Platonia might argue with us that losing weight is a matter of simply exercising more and eating less, but there is no way really to convey why that logic falls short unless you actually can experience food cravings, lethargy, etc. Going deeper into the nature of trans-rationality, I suspect that logical algebras and functional systems are more of a limited sub-set of trans-rationality. The TR algebras are like a parabolic set extending to infinity whereby experiences - unique and specific occurrences in the universe, are sort of meme-fied, coined or iconicized (in different ways depending on what kind of a thing is perceiving it, from what vantage point).

The point is that the way the TR works is the polar opposite to logic. Instead of a universal system which automates functions - i.e. we plug in a value and through a simple rule wind up with a value, this is the proprietary non-system which automates nothing. Each experience of blue is a new instantiation, a new private relation connecting signifier and signified, redefining it slightly for all future encounters.

Where logic is all about standing aloof from a given phenomenon and modeling it from a distance, the trans-rational is about sitting right down in the phenomenon itself. The inescapable presence in all of its unknowable significance. The intelligibility of logic I think derives from its basis in nothingness. Building an airtight case from zero assumptions. TR epistemology derives its authority through the negative space or diffraction which separates any particular event or story from the whole story of the universe. It's dizzying, but I think this is the only way to ultimately understand where itchy and blue come from - as much from the future as the past, from the microcosm as from imagination. It's much weirder than math, but it is, nonetheless physical...it just comes backward from eternity, hah.