“Love allows us gently, respectfully and intimately to slip into the life of another person or animal or even the earth itself and to know it from the inside. In this way, love can become a way of moral knowing that is as reliable as scientific insight.”
— Arthur Zajonc
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In an interview with Krista Tippett, commenting on this phrase, Zajonc, author of Meditation As Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love, says:
Now this is again something which as a scientist you can’t prove, so I’m not trying to convince anybody. I’m trying to though speak up on behalf of or for those people for whom when they hear that they go, “I know that place. It doesn’t happen all the time, but I know that place.”
At a certain point William James talks about this when he’s writing about mystical experience. It’s noetic. It’s completely compelling for the person who has it, and it doesn’t change anything for the two of you.
To me it’s like teaching. When I’m teaching a class and I’m up at the blackboard, and I’m having my epiphanic moment in front of some differential equation and the students are all looking at me cross-eyed.
…but then you can see the one in the back all of a sudden just got it. Then the one in the front goes, “Oh, I see that, too.” In other words, it can be contagious, but each one has to do it on their own. It’s a moment of insight. Knowledge is not something you can just move across the table, and the other person has it. It’s an invitation to exploration to think, to ideate.
Then there’s that “Aha.” I think you could say that the moment I’m describing there is a moral analog of that moment. Sometimes it happens at the hand of a teacher. You might say a moral teacher or something of that or a moral dilemma that you’re in the middle of and you just can’t see your way through.
Then you make your steps and find that place where all of a sudden it gets clear. That doesn’t mean you can’t make mistakes. Somehow people think because you can make mistakes. To me if you can make a mistake then you can also not make a mistake. They come with each other.