As fascinating as we may find the impact of conquering cultures on preconquest groups, it pales before the challenge to epistemology posed by the existence of a system of cognition not based on symbolic logic. We of Western training may find it virtually impossible to see how truth can be demonstrated without recourse to symbols that are logically controlled. When I first came face-to-face with these experientially-based modes of cognition wherein logic was irrelevant, they slid right past me. I did not even see them. Even when I did begin to catch on, I tended to doubt such perceptions once I was again within the confines of Western culture. It took years of repeated, even dramatic exposure before these initially fragmentary mental graspings were able to survive re-immersion in Western culture. Experiences repeated, however, eventually make their mark and I began to question whether symbolic logic was actually the only means to get at truth. Now I rather think that alternative routes to truth may exist within the immediacy of a type of experiential awareness that perhaps moves in extra-sentient directions not yet brought into the realm of our modern sense-of-truth. My slowness in this matter leads me to believe it may take modern humankind some time to identify and make use of these perhaps more rarefied mental capabilities.
Related, posted to the subreddit, Quatism is an ambitious page trying to use science to get beyond science. More precisely, it's using concepts developed by science to try to explain phenomena normally excluded by science. The strategy I prefer is to simply abandon the core assumption on which science is based: an "out there" objective physical universe that is internally consistent and not influenced by observation. Many worlds? How about no worlds? We're all just making up our stream of experience on the fly, and we don't have to agree on what's "real" unless we're trying to share the convenient illusion of a third person reality.
The mystery that remains is the definition of the self, because the "me" that's creating reality is not the same as the "me" that feels banged about by a confusing external world. Also, this whole time I'm trying to use language for something that is described, by people who glimpse it, as being beyond language.
Related, Helen Keller on Her Life Before Self-Consciousness. This was posted last week to Hacker News, with a long comment thread about the effect of language on consciousness, and the possibility of some further human awakening. Keller writes:
]]>I am inclined to believe those philosophers who declare that we know nothing but our own feelings and ideas. With a little ingenious reasoning one may see in the material world simply a mirror, an image of permanent mental sensations. In either sphere self-knowledge is the condition and the limit of our consciousness. That is why, perhaps, many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves -- and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves, either.