What a lovely, touching post Tim Morton has written about his conversion to object-oriented ontology. Since my days of doing religious-studies fieldwork, I’ve always gotten ripples of that nameless mixture of joy, pleasure, and sad melancholy — that feeling of being existentially touched, even pierced — whenever I’ve been around people undergoing conversion experiences (whether they were rolling around on the floor during the Toronto Airport ‘Blessing’, or doing Stan Grof’s LSD-without-the-LSD holotropic breathwork). There’s something about the quality of being around someone who’s undergoing radical, life-changing shifts (or what seem that way at the moment) in their understanding, feeling, appreciation, sensibility, and state of consciousness all at once, which is what religious conversion amounts to. It doesn’t matter that I don’t share their conviction, or may not have any overlap with it at all; I can still relate to that piercedness, that sense of being throttled to the core and finding realignment from the bottom up. (Funny that my fingers keep wanting to spell that word “peircedness“…)
What I like about Tim’s note is the upfrontness by which intellectual conversion is acknowledged as religious in nature (though he doesn’t use that term per se). That doesn’t mean there isn’t a strong, and probably central, intellectual component to it; but it’s religious because it’s more than just intellectual. Conversion, at one and the same time, brings sudden comfort — the comfort of having “arrived home,” without having even known that one was away — and a radical transvaluation that involves a feeling of total openness and vulnerability, a stripping of the self to only the naked essentials, the things that really matter.
