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+--- Thread: Embracing the Irrational (/thread-19784.html)
Embracing the Irrational - Magical Realist - Feb 13, 2026
“Beware of becoming too sure of your beliefs, because you run the risk of dissociation, or losing touch with parts of yourself. That is why the irrational and spontaneous are so precious to the student of spirituality. The 'irrational' circumnavigates the rational mind and by that allows the unconscious to manifest. The spontaneous and flexible person, who is not afraid of non-rational impulses, unorthodox behaviors, poetry, and dreams, in other words, the totality of being, acquires a unitive nature.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis
We are programmed to respond to our experience rationally, as a logical and coherent abstraction of our unconsciously accepted world view. There are laws and rules after all, all determining how our life happens and what is possible for it. And yet for a true spiritual sojourner--one who has over the years explored the manifold depths of the metaphorical and sublime---experience springs from a source that is beyond our studied rules and algorithms. There is a distinctive quality of weirdness and wild irrationality to the manifestation of the inner soul such that we are freed from any beliefs or assumptions about it. The language of Being itself is one of constantly liberating us from those doctrines and dogmas we have been programmed with and of exposing us bare to the presence of the Transcendental and the Sublime overshadowing all our consciousness. Be therefore sensitive to the surreal and the confounding, to the paradoxical and the mysterious, for it is precisely when experience transcends our rational consciousness that the potency of its transformative meaning is suddenly unleashed.
RE: Embracing the Irrational - C C - Feb 14, 2026
Even animals aren't wholly predictable (especially in terms of individual oddities). And the bulk of humans certainly aren't rational much of time, as demonstrated by the money that even those in debt waste on unnecessary items every day. I don't know if one should celebrate and revere it, but dysrationalia is certainly a non-ignorable part of experience.