To a large extent, your metaphysics will be shaped by how much credence you give to the testimony of others. Others say some pretty crazy things, and you get to choose whom to believe, and your world will be totally different depending on the particular combination of testimonies you buy.
You could believe nobody. But it’s surely a bit dogmatic to believe that everyone is either lying or deluded. It’s also no fun, and prima facie rather unlikely.
Or you could believe everybody, but this also is not so good, because some people are definitely lying or deluded, and many of their testimonies are contradictory, at least at face value.
Here are a few testimonies that have been influential in my life, and which I basically believe in:
- Terence McKenna’s psychedelic experiences
- Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi
- The New Testament of the Bible
Now, how to reconcile these accounts is a task for me. But you would do well to look into these, or any others which interest you, and really try to decide whether or not you believe them.
You are of course perfectly free to believe that the person in question did have the experience exactly as they tell it, but that they conceptualized it wrong after the fact. For example, I may believe, should I choose to, that Christ did rise on the third day, but that this sort of thing is just what ascended masters do, and there have been many such masters. Or I may believe that Terence McKenna did have the experience of talking to an alien mushroom superintelligence, but it was in fact a trick of the devil, and I may believe the same thing about Mohammed’s cave angel.
But the materialist has no choice. He is forced to believe that Mohammed was either lying or schizophrenic, and so was everyone else. Gurdjieff: full of it. Paul: drought- and guilt-induced hallucination. Lao Tzu: excessively poetic. Saint Francis: self-deluded and probably schizophrenic. Crowley: obviously lying. Buddha: he just chilled out super hard and told himself a story about it where he got to be the hero.
The materialist is not allowed to take these people at their word, or even to believe that their experiences came from outside of themselves. He is bound to his dogma.
This seems to suit him fine…but it is rather restrictive.
As Chesterton writes:
My belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord…If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism—the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist.
It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, “Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But mediaevals were superstitious”; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say “a peasant saw a ghost,” I am told, “But peasants are so credulous.” If I ask, “Why credulous?” the only answer is—that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.
Here is the opening sentence of Chesterton’s autobiography:
Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment of private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington.
Determining who you believe should precede any abstract philosophical speculation. The mass of empirical data concerning the supernatural is the raw material of metaphysics. Even Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the Will drew on the Vedic texts which represent a whole culture’s deep communion with God, exemplified by the individual mystics who wrote such words as
Içāvāsyamidam sarvam yat kiñcha jagatyāñ jagat We are enjoined to see whatever there is in the world as being enveloped by God.
Yo dēvō’gnau y’ōpsu y’ō viçvambhuvanamāvivēça ya ōshadhishu yō vanaspatishu tasmai dēvāya namōnamah I bow to God over and over again who is in fire and in water, who permeates the whole world, who is in the annual crops as well as in the perennial trees.
Samprāpyainam rishayo jñānatripatāh Kritātmānō vītarāgāh praçantāh tē sarvagam sarvatah prāpya dhīrāh Yuktātmānah sarvamēvāviçanti They who having attained the supreme soul in knowledge were filled with wisdom, and having found him in union with the soul were in perfect harmony with the inner self; they having realised him in the heart were free from all selfish desires, and having experienced him in all the activities of the world, had attained calmness. The rishis were they who having reached the supreme God from all sides had found abiding peace, had become united with all, had entered into the life of the Universe.
Yaçchāyamasminnākāçē tējōmayō’mritamayah purushah sarvānubhūh The being who is in his essence the light and life of all, who is world-conscious, is Brahma.
Sarvavyāpī sa bhagavān tasmāt sarvagatah çivah The supreme being is all-pervading, therefore he is the innate good in all.
Yadidan kiñcha praņa ejati nihsritam Everything has sprung from immortal life and is vibrating with life,
Prāno virāt for life is immense!
Schopenhauer, a disembodied literate, had no spiritual experiences of his own to speak of. But the testimony of the Vedas demands an answer: do you believe us? And if so, now what? What does it mean?
One can reckon with the great mystical experiences of history as if one had personally experienced them. And this is the great advantage of recorded history and of globalization: the fruits of all past lives are available to benefit the presently living.