My basic assumption is that moderns don't have a privileged position from which they can judge the validity of experiences of Being that humans have had in the course of their history. Being discloses itself in different ways at different times. And I would argue that our relationship to it at this juncture in human history is impoverished in a way unprecedented in human history. And so one path to remedy this situation is to take very seriously what we can learn from the experiences of humans who have other than modern consciousness. This is not a nostalgic project, but rather a process of recovery of what has been lost so that we can move forward, without the abandonment of critical consciousness, into a deeper, richer relationship with the created cosmos.
I say "created" because for Christians, anyway, the more important distinction is created/uncreated rather than natural/supernatural. In a response to a comment to the first post on this topic I suggested a better description of what we commonly think of as natural/supernatural might be sensible/supersensible. The relationship between created and uncreated I'll leave for another day, but I'd like to share a few preliminary thoughts about the relationship between sensible and supersensible.
I think of what is ordinarily considered supernatural phenomena--the world of beings perceived in animist and shamanic culture, the gods, demons, angels, etc. that appear in almost every culture--as part of the natural system even if they are not perceived in ordinary consciousness. To modern rationalist consciousness, all these phenomena are nonsense, or they are explained away as intrapsychic projections the way the Jungians do.
My problem with that model is that it assumes consciousness is something that we own as individuals. There is my consciousness within my subjective bubble, and there are all these atoms out there that make up the objective world that somehow impinge on our senses to give us this picture in our private consciousness of things that are not us. The gods flee from such a sterile consciousness, and breaking out of it is one of the most important cultural tasks for the postmodern era.
This flawed model of humans in relationship with the world was precisely the kind of thing that Heidegger was trying to think himself out of, and in that respect I am very sympathetic to his project. Dasein is not over-against; it is flung into and deeply interpenetrated with Being and the beings that it manifests. The challenge is to pay attention, to allow what hides behind the surfaces to disclose itself rather like the way we pay attention to other people, and we just might find that there are dimensions of Being behind the sensible reality we are in the habit of seeing that will show themselves. Being 'R Us, after all.
Whether the gods will once again disclose themselves, I don't know, but I'm open to the possibility and would welcome them if they make a come back. Most naturalists, as Matthew points out, are probably not open to the possibility, and it was to that garden variety naturalism that I was referring in my previous post. But I agree with Joachim that such a form of naturalism is flawed. Some balance between modern skepticism and openness, or following Ricoeur what I call 'second naivete, has to be found, but it's like anything. If you aren't looking you're not likely to see. If you don't knock, the door shan't be opened. A one-sided skepticism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So the heuristic for me here is that what non-modern cultures and styles of consciousness experienced points to dimensions of being that even if we moderns don't experience it now is potentially re-experienceable. And that in fact the way forward into the future is marked for us like bread crumbs strewn along the forest path by those who have gone before us. But if we don't take their testimony seriously, those crumbs will be eaten by the birds, and we will remain lost in the wood. Let me quote myself from another piece I wrote some time ago:
The ultimate criterion, for me at least, about whether something is ultimately accepted as true is in whether it resonates with these deep ancient traditional understandings of the way things are, and in order for resonance to occur we need to think again analogically, metaphorically, imagistically, symbolically, that is, to think more in the way premoderns think. Myth comes out of the premodern dream time; mythopoesis is soul thinking, but in a postmodern key.
Those premodern traditions are preserved for us in a variety of ways, but however we have access to them, they are like melodies that we need to learn how to play again, and once that melody has been woven into the fabric of our souls, we need then to learn how to improvise on those melodic themes. Improvisation isn’t really possible until the music is living in you, . . .
I go on to talk about how that basic approach can be applied to the Christian melody, which is essentially what I see myself doing all the time here. But more on that another time. The point here is that there's a lot of music out there, and mostly we're deaf to it. It's great if you hear anything, even one wobbly melodic strand, but we should never think that's all there is.