x-post What the Heart Knows (An exploration of the "mode of knowing that transcends reason")
From the article:
My wife and I were recently invited to lead another service at our local Unitarian chapel and when thinking about what our theme should be, it occurred to us that both Muslims and Unitarians champion the use of reason, firmly insisting that reason should be a bedrock of faith. Yet within Islam, there has always been a mode of knowing which transcends human reason, an intuitive knowledge of the heart which Sufis in particular have attempted to explore......................
After exploring the poem, we................... then invited the congregation to consider a great figure of Western philosophy: Parmenides. Parmenides is often called the “Father of Logic” and his work influenced Socrates and Plato. Most academics like to present him as a rather dry rationalist, somebody you wouldn’t associate with the heart at all.
Parmenides was a mystic, an initiate in the Greek mysteries. Rather than developing logic through dry, rational thought, logic was a divine gift bestowed on him in an altered state of consciousness, a journey into the underworld brought about during a process called “incubation”:
Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/livingtradition/2017/04/what-the-heart-knows/#Xf32vBbtks8wss4c.99
Logic as a "divine gift bestowed on him". Similar to being "created in the image and likeness", but rejected by those who focus solely on what they call rationality.
An interesting, somewhat long article, but this "mode of knowing that transcends reason" is something that people of faith are well acquainted with.
