Mapping CFI culture, investigating which ideas/experiences are acceptable/non-acceptable, to see if this is a place where I want to spend any time.
My key question is about self-inquiry. Voegelin’s “experience…which cannot become itself an object of propositional knowledge…” seems to be unacceptable. Yet V claims that across cultures and across centuries this experience is the source from which “the symbols of ultimate values emerge as the exegesis of its truth”. In taking this position V seems to agree with Daoist discipline, Buddhist “make friends with yourself”, and Buddhist “cease the chatter of the mind”. So, this kind of self-inquiry seems to be unacceptable in CFI culture.
Also, on the issue of religion being the sedative use of doctrine (without the aforementioned experience) that fits into the historic process of recovery from trauma, this seems to be unacceptable.
In this frame of reference, “secular” and “humanist” would seem to be synonymous with “recovered from trauma”, and “religious” would seem to be synonymous with “suffering from serious PTSD”. (The crusaders were the jihadists of a former age.) Religious violence would be related to fear of losing one’s fix. The intensely orthodox believer would be a kind of junkie.
“Reason” seems to be trickier. It seems to be purely “thinking”, versus “meditation”, which includes “to be fully aware of the vividness of internal sensations and stimuli from the external world as they impact the senses.” [And there are distinctly possible left-brain, right-brain correlations.]
I am a self-inquiring meditator. Do I belong here?