Rational spirituality

“There is a total misunderstanding, it seems to me, in the current attitude toward rationality. It is often the target of confused spiritualism, and inversely inner experience or religion is often considered irrational. The real power of the mind is attention. Rationality is the way our thought or our reflection proceeds.

It is not the mirror of reality but is relative to a system of reference, our logic, which changes and evolves. Our common logic, following the old principle of non contradiction, has been superseded by logic implied in dialectical thought as developed since Hegel; it is transcended by the relativity of Einstein and completely struck down by the conceptions of present-day physicists and researchers.

In brief, rationality is a fundamental instrument but it is not our whole being, so the important thing is not rationality itself but the fact that most of the time our center of gravity is in the mind and not in our whole being. This is what is really difficult to convey when it has not been experienced thoroughly.”

Michel de Salzmann “Man’s Ever New and Eternal Challenge”, On the Way to Self Knowledge, Knopf, 1976. (Address given in a series of talks sponsored by Far West Publications, San Francisco.)