Matthew introduces Julian to the solipsism of an old Catholic catechism. Julian remembers meditating on non-duality. What spaces in our brains do these exercises create? Did we need those spaces for safety, or to hide from ourselves and the world? What happens to these spaces when we no longer need them? If we learned how to take pleasure in “cognitive closure” through religion or spirituality, can we use that skill forever, but detached from the ideologies that want to steal that fire?
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Thank you.
Hey Julian, welcome to Bonus Monday.
Here we are again.
I'm enjoying this new theme that we're exploring.
Yeah, so you went to church last time around and this time around I want to invite you into a little bit of 1950s-era Catholic orthodoxy and say something about how that has impacted my brain in a way that I'm trying to figure out and I think you can probably help me with it because you're all about the neuroscience.
So I've got this book and it is called, I'll show it to you, maybe I'll put a screenshot in Patreon, It's got, you know, this classic leather, brown, sort of maroon cover.
It's called My Catholic Faith.
It's by a priest named Louis Larrovoir Moreau.
And he was actually the Archbishop of Krishnagar, which is the Diocese of Calcutta when he wrote this, but I believe he's from the Midwest.
It's published in 1949, and it was the best-selling catechism for Catholic high schoolers in America.
I don't know how many years, but probably up until Vatican II changed everything in the mid-60s.
But I'll just give you a sense of what this covers.
It has three parts to it, and the contents are laid out in Part 1, What to Believe.
Part two, what to do, and then part three, the means of grace.
And yeah, the didacticism is incredible.
And I'm just going to start with a couple of quotes because I just want your sort of cold response to them, but I also want to explain what happens to me when I encounter this material.
Okay, so this is just from section number one, which is called Religion and the End of Man.
I'm going to give you the illustration here.
Maybe you can see it.
Okay, so we've got like a woodcut print.
I'll just read the caption.
It says, In creating us, God gave us the power and right to choose which path we should follow in life, either the path of obedience or the path of disobedience to his commandments.
The first seems wearisome and full of thorns, but reward comes in the end, happiness with God.
The second seems full of pleasures and roses, but punishment awaits the traveler at the end.
Eternal damnation and hell.
There you go.
You're already turning green.
Okay.
Each must choose for himself.
We may find the choice a hard struggle.
We shall be strengthened in the choice of the difficult path if we remember that we belong to God, that He loves us, that He will help us and is waiting for us at the end of the road of obedience.
Okay.
So, from the chapter, There's a number of Q&A passages, and one of the questions is, is it necessary for us to practice religion?
And the answer is, it is absolutely necessary for us to practice religion.
God gives us no choice in the matter.
Okay, and then this is just for you.
Who are those who advocate no study of religion?
Question.
Answer.
Those that advocate no study of religion are generally termed free thinkers, agnostics, skeptics, rationalists, and Julian Walkers.
Actually, I advocate studying religion very deeply.
Right, right.
Okay, well there's no category for you, right?
For like stealth students.
Okay, so then the explanations are, these thinkers claim that all problems can be solved by use of the intellect alone without necessity of any principle, law, dogma, or authority.
Freedom of thought has a pleasant sound, but it is against reason.
By it, the mind is fettered by error.
We submit our minds freely to natural and scientific truths.
That is true freedom.
If there is no freedom of thought in mathematics, why in religion?
Freedom of thought is evidently a contradiction.
We are not free to think what is not the truth.
There are fundamental laws that bind the intellect.
For instance, are we free to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, even if it appears to do so?
The intelligent man, in order to attain the kind of freedom humanly possible, should find out to which authority he must submit.
He must discover which is the law.
And this is why the rational man studies religion, to find out this fundamental law.
Yeah.
Are you converted?
Not yet, not yet, but keep coming.
I mean, that's the classic epistemology, right?
It's that there are fundamental truths which can only be approached through religious revelation for the special ones.
And then for the rest of us, we have to study what they have told us about that religious revelation and learn it as factual in the same way that there are laws of mathematics and science.
There are religious laws that just have a perennially factual quality about them.
And you disagree with that at your peril.
Right.
And the definitions of all of these things, of course, have to be self-evident, right?
Yeah.
It's circular.
Well, this is what I want to get to.
Because, let me just go back to, is it necessary for us to practice religion?
It is absolutely necessary for us to practice religion.
God gives us no choice in the matter.
Okay, so there's 85% of my brain that recognizes the complete circular self-sealing word saladry of that.
Then there is another part of my brain, I can visualize it as kind of like some sort of little, I don't know, little knot of cells somewhere that lights up because the circular reasoning feels comfortable.
It feels comforting.
Yeah.
I have asked a question and I have answered it.
I mean, really, I'm being told from the authoritarian page.
What my question should be and what my answer should be.
But somehow reciting the question and answer from the catechism gives me this feeling that I have a kind of perfectly solved riddle in my brain that feels comforting.
It's like a little pearl in there.
And that's a very deep memory of sort of accepting and relaxing into Catholic theology.
And the fact that I can still feel it, Julian, that's what I wanted to sort of share with you and with the listeners, because I don't know whether that will ever go away, but I feel like I because I don't know whether that will ever go away, but I feel like I grew up in a religious context in which part of my brain has simply formed around the need but I feel like I
I grew up in a religious context in which part of my brain has simply formed around the need for a comforting spot and the capacity to Sort of invoke it and to create it, even if it happens through contradiction and word salad.
And that's why I think that the solipsism of A Course in Miracles found its way into my brain later on.
That's why I believe that some of the solipsistic aspects of Buddhist philosophy found a home, a sort of ready-made home in my brain, a place where everything was mathematically balanced and complete and every question was answered.
