The Indian mystical thinker Krishnamurti reports that the experience of radical choice simply fades away when you advance spiritually: “You do not choose,” he says, “You do not decide, when you see things very clearly ... Only the unintelligent mind exercises choice in life’. A spiritually advanced or “truly intelligent mind simply cannot have choice,” because it “can.. only choose the path of truth.” “Only the unintelligent mind has free will”, by which he means experience of radical free will. Saul Bellow has a related thought in his novel Humboldt’s Gift: “In the next realm, where things are clearer, clarity eats into freedom. We are free on earth”, i. e. , we experience ourselves as radically free, “because of cloudiness, because of error, because of marvelous limitation.” And the great Dutch philosopher Spinoza extends the point to God. God cannot, he says, “be said…to act from freedom of the will.” In which case he cannot think or feel that he does so, because he is after all omniscient. Theology aside, Krishnamurti convinces me that it’s not actually impossible for human beings to live the fact that there is no DMR, in spite of the cake and the Oxfam box. What he says has the ring of truth. And there’s convergence here with the passage I quoted from Eleanor Rosch’s talk. That said, I don’t think living without the feeling of DMR a realistic option for most of us.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 12:11:39 +0000