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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.
RE: Embracing the Irrational - Magical Realist - Feb 14, 2026
Quote:I don't know if one should celebrate and revere it, but dysrationalia is certainly a non-ignorable part of experience.
Just as a matter of the fundamental existential situation of ourselves seemingly wholly contained inside a physical and inanimate universe, the nature of experience opens doors to the inherently irrational all the time. The encounter of love with one's future soulmate, the tragic catastrophic impact of the illness and death of others, the nature of good and evil in our own choices and actions, and the ontic shock of experiencing a preternatural phenomenon--there is this tendency for life to sometimes totally buck our expectations and assumptions and manifest a beingness totally beyond what we are used to. It's a way of opening us up out of our too dogmatic rationality and logic to an otherness that triggers a transformation of our very consciousness. In terms of the collective unconscious it is often expressed in mythical archetypes of death/rebirth, of oblivion and total re-creation, signifying an initiatory passage to a higher state of conscious being.
“Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.”― Donna Tartt, The Secret History