What this thread really cries out for is a scientific elucidation of foundationalism, i.e. an explanation of the criteria by which we may ascertain to what species a given experience belongs. Certain experiences are authenticated on the strength of that part of the soul to which they make their appeal. However mundane or confusing the
prima facie experience was (like being called an extraterrestrial -- who can say what that means in itself?), the fact that it came in a knowing sort of way and struck you in a special manner, means that it needs to be taken seriously. It pertains directly to question of your fundamental identity.
Such experiences can be of either the dark or the light variety. The dark variety exposes weaknesses. When somebody else seems to have an uncanny and disturbing sense of your shortcommings, it will make you feel as if you were exposed, naked, and helpless before all the world. On the other hand, the light variety seems to confirm us in our most cherished aspirations, reminding us that we really will become the person whom we most desire to be. Yes, the devil can manipulate these feelings, but he would not be able to do so unless there was something true there to be manipulated. There are people in the world, especially a certain type of woman, who will play off the vanity and vulnerability of men, discerning who they truly want to be and then flattering them that they really are so. But those women are ultimately hoist with their own petard. She would not have been able to discern who you are,
unless there was something there to be discerened. Ultimately the experience of being discovered, of being "found out," is beneficial to you in either case. You have been revealed to yourself; you simply have to face the facts and decide what you're going to do about it.
Graham, have you read my essay concerning the epistemology of miracles? It has a very crude an tangential relationship with what you are decribing here, but I trust you will be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, and draw the moral. The PDF is available
here.Now getting directly back to the subject at hand. The urge to cast about in the world looking for oracular pronouncements, may indeed dispose us towards superstition and fanaticism if it is over-inflamed. However, the urge itself is natural and salutary within its proper limits. We all need a lot of help along the path of life; we all need people wiser than us to tell us who we are and what to we need to do. It is healthy for us to be attentive to those experiences which ratchet our powers of being up to a higher level. Ideally most of this work should have been done by our family members and pastors and spiritual advisors, but who is so lucky nowadys to have such helps? I certainly am not. Yet if we don't get it from them, we still must get it from somewhere. Thus begins the long quest for soulmates, for friends and lovers and fathers who will really be to us what we need them to be.
To be known and loved is to experience intimacy, which is the deepest of all desires. Practical charity aims at this feeling of intimacy. To be first of all caught up in the pure being of God, and then to extend this love to our neighbor, is the essence of all goodness and the most that anyone could want. That is the criterion by which everything else has to be measured; that is the foundation. A true oracular pronouncement convinces us that we are understood through and through, but moreover that we are loved, that he who understands us desires the best for us. The locus of this love is not always (nor even often) found in the person by whom the pronouncement is made, but comes as it were from behind them, as if they were the mouthpiece of something deeper than their own creaturely potential.
Should anyone doubt this, I would simply ask him, Are you married to someone whom you know loves you?
How do you know that they love you? Did you ever have a mother or father or a friend whom you cherished for their goodness?
How did come to believe in their goodness? It is not through rote sensory perception that such knowledge comes, for the sensory data is ambiguous, incomplete, and insufficient at best. It comes by a direct spiritual intuition, the foundation of which is the experience of intimacy. Oracular pronouncements are a special case of this intimacy. In the ordinary course of things our day to day interactions with loved ones are enough. But sometimes circuмstances call for an extraordinary inspiration. When we are known and loved unexpectedly, this expands our awareness of our true nature. The oracle reminds us of who we are by entering into a self-revelatory constellation with us. The statement "You are an alien" would not seem meaningful at all unless something lept up inside us and said "Yes, I am!"
Finally, we must recognize that the desire for intimacy is really the desire for God, and therefore a divine providence obtains over all of our intimate relations. We want to be loved by God, but we need to be loved by God through His creatures. The whole economy of salvation depends upon this mediation. If it were not so, there would be no need for us to be charitable with our neighbors, there would be no reason to actually work and sacrifice for another's salvation, and there would be no way for us to gain any merit or to show God, by our own initiative, that we really loved Him for His own sake. When we abandon our self-will to be used as an instrument of God, then God loves other people through us. When we experience intimacy in ordinary or special ways, then God loves us through other people. We are all exhorted to practice charity; let us not forget that we have need to receive it as well.
Topic: old women oracularity (Read 2851 times)