Thanks for your response. Good stuff.Res Ipsa wrote: ↑Sun May 12, 2024 4:13 amI view all these “isms” as tools or lenses to aid understanding. But they don’t do that if one mixes and matches them in an ad hoc manner in a way that reaches a desired outcome. I think that’s what you are doing when you posit “spiritual truth” as something other than socially constructed reality. Through the lens of social constructivism, “spiritual truth” is a part of constructed reality and you have no way to tell whether it corresponds to anything in objective reality. If you’re going to apply constructed reality to everything except the one source of knowledge that you want to correspond to objective reality, then you’re simply engaged in motivated reasoning, employing and discarding tools as needed to get you to the result you want. Why bother? I’d happily agree that ad hoc mixing and matching of tools will you get you any place you want to go.
But that would make for boring conversation. And it couldn’t be honestly described as reasoning or a search for truth or objective reality.
I think that spiritual truth and practice can and often is a socially constructed reality. Earlier, however, I mentioned that we live within a closed system of perceived reality. And that’s as good as it’s gonna’ get. If it is true that “knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure”, which I believe is true, then whatever objective truth might be is outside the mind/body system. Within a closed system we might agree on some things but not all things because of the “in the room” descriptor provided earlier:
In the closed system “spiritual truths” can be and are constructed by the human mind. Not to say that there might be input from outside the closed system. But it’s difficult to know one way or the other. Adherents to those spiritual truths will see ‘salvation’ or ‘enlightenment’ as the WAY to personal fulfillment and happiness. That’s religion. I think that if there is an ultimate truth to be found as the objective reality it is going to found outside the system that innately exists because of the limitations of the human mind and human perception.
An extrovert walks into a party and sees a different room than an introvert does. A person who has been trained as an interior designer sees a different room than someone who’s been trained as a security specialist. The therapist Irvin Yalom once asked one of his patients to write a summary of each group therapy session they did together. When he read her reports, Yalom realized that she experienced each session radically differently than he did. She never even heard the supposedly brilliant insights Yalom thought he was sharing with the group. Instead, she noticed the small personal acts—the way one person complimented another’s clothing, the way someone apologized for being late. In other words, we may be at the same event together, but we’re each having our own experience of it. Or, as the writer Anaïs Nin put it, “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
I’m open to this external objective reality. We call it God. We call it Heavenly Father. We call it cosmic consciousness…or what have you. This language and the imagination used to try and explain what is believed to be an external reality may very well be constructivist. Period. All in the mind.
On the other hand, for some of us, we believe and/are open to the possibility that since we live in this closed system of dimensionality (sort of like goldfish in a fishbowl) we would have no option other than to rely on something or someone outside the system to reveal objective truth. This would not be, by definition, a constructed reality. Solipsism would have no place.
That’s the claim of the CofJCofLDS. As a believer in those truth claims I’m not arguing that constructivism on a solipsistic level would be out of bounds within the church. In fact, I think that’s part of the larger plan. This involves real free agency and choice. We live within a closed system where solipsism has its place but there is input from outside the system.
God.
So I see it all as a mixed bag, so to speak. It’s not an ‘all or nothing’ approach that I think I hear you making. Spiritual truth is relative to the position in which it found. Sort of like capital S truths and lower case s truths.
God vs. gods. Spiritual Truth s. spiritual truth.
Regards,
MG
