New Year: Marking Eternity

Henry Corbin, the French philosopher, relates an amusing and meaningful exchange at a conference in 1954. Present at this encounter were Corbin, Mrs. Fröbe-Kapteyn, Mircea Eliade, and D.T. Suzuki, the Japanese author on Zen. In conversation with Suzuki, the company asked him what had been his first encounter with occidental spirituality. Suzuki answered that his encounter had taken place fifty years before when he had translated four of Swedenborg’s works into Japanese. To continue in Corbin’s words:

Later on in the conversation we asked him what homologies in structure he found between Mahayana Buddhism and the cosmology of Swedenborg in respect of the symbolism and correspondences of the worlds … Of course we expected not a theoretical answer, but a sign attesting the encounter in a concrete person of an experience common to Buddhism and to Swedenborgian spirituality. And I can still see Suzuki suddenly brandishing a spoon and saying with a smile: “This spoon now exists in Paradise…” “We are now in Heaven,” he explained.*

Thoughts along these lines have been running about in my head of late: the difference between what we call time (time-as-motion, as I like to put it) and eternity. I like the notion that eternity is pure duration—and think that we actually experience it whenever time-as-motion, Einstein’s time, you might say, is temporarily forgotten, when events don’t interfere with our experience of being: contemplative or creative time, also physically active times when we are in control and in the flow.

This morning it struck me (or struck me again—this is not an original observation, certainly not in a context in which Mircea Eliade, who wrote The Myth of the Eternal Return, is mentioned)—it struck me, to repeat, that our ritual markings of anniversaries, like Christmas and New Years, are (perhaps paradoxically) assertions of eternity. On days like today, time stops in a way. Our urge to set such markers—and they are absolutely arbitrary—arises, I think, from the very experience Suzuki highlights, spoon in hand, namely that we already are, if we could but keep it always in mind, already in eternity. We keep falling out of it, of course, day after day. We fall into the hectics of a lower kind of existence, into the rapids of ordinary time. But the odd feelings that mark transitions produce in us a kind of suspension; they serve as reminders that, above the torrent that keeps raging on, there is another time, that of duration, that of eternity. Swedenborg himself struggled to give this feeling expression. In Heaven and Hell (and elsewhere) he suggests that the concept of time in heaven is transformed into something else, what he labels “states.” Yes. But in this life too we can sometimes achieve states in which we slip out of the turbulence into experiences—not of magical exaltations, not of remarkable ecstasy, but of sovereignty.

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*Corbin, Henry. Alone With the Alone. Princeton University Press, 1969. p. 354.

Phenomenon

Last night as I was falling asleep, I saw in my mental vision a woman passing through an open, archway passage, moving away from me. I was, as it were, in the garden to the left of the structure. She was visible, the disappeared, the reappeared as she passed the arches. The whole brief episode— like many other such in states between full awareness and sleep—had a most realistic quality. It might as well have been a film. It was much more real than any memory but somewhat dimmed—as if I were seeing this scene through a kind of intangible but light-absorbing veil.

Now the question I would pose here is the following. Was this a phenomenon? The word comes from the Greek for “to appear.” My Webster’s first definition would include my vision because it states that phenomenon is “an observable fact or event.” I observed it and there it was. A fact for me. The second definition is more ambiguous: “an object or aspect known through the senses rather than by thought or intuition.” What I saw was certainly a vision. It had a pictorial quality—but with my eyes closed it’s difficult to speak of this snippet as a phenomenon produced by light impinging on my eyes. This was no thought or intuition, either—but it vanished instantly as well.

This shows the problems with any philosophy labeled as phenomenology. It may be meaningful (broad, all-encompassing) or narrow and restrictive. A restrictive phenomenology is simply an assertion of materialism using a fancy Greek word. Broadly construed phenomenology means that knowledge comes from experience. Sensory or not, watching that woman in the passage was certainly an experience for me, nothing special but also quite objective, out there, independent of me, appearing to me without any summons on my part.

Difficulties arise when we attempt to determine what is real. Our commonsensical, everyday rule is that seeing is not enough. The real should be capable of examination by touch and hammer too. Here my vision fails the test. I cannot lead you to that archway and I can’t summon that woman to testify on my behalf. I don’t have her number, as it were. Indeed, I did not even see her face. But while ordinary science is very interesting, what I would really like to know a whole lot more about is where, if anywhere, that archway is and how it spent its three or four seconds in my mind between waking and sleep.

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Photo Credit: Ben and Debs Bench: http://www.flickr.com/photos/benanddebsyearoff/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In Praise of Contemplation

We die and go to heaven, say, but what shall fill our blessed time? The learned doctrines speak of contemplation of the highest High, but we’ve no grasp of contemplation except as passivity.

Eternity is more forbidding than it is inviting—because it more suggests a sound that keeps on going without any ups or downs. There is no start, no climax, no conclusion and such a something spells out boredom to any person long accustomed to the high-low tribulations of life on this here blessed earth.

The problem here, I would propose, is with the concepts, what they hold, not with that which they could mean. For most of us the act of contemplation is actually an active occupation, our minds alive and well. We stare at grand designs of beauty and complexity, see them now in parts and now in wholes, we look at this and cannot understand it until, with effort, we also study that and then, once more, fit this to that and see the new emerge. In this activity we never think of time—unless some urgent need distracts us from the pleasure, joy in which we’re caught.

Eternity, turns out, is just duration, a mere container of our selves. Nothing suggests that contemplation has no ups or downs. Quite to the contrary. If the beauty we behold is infinite, and if our own involvement is an active part of it, if we engage in contemplation because we’re drawn to it, like to a project, if the Beauty draws, teases, and tempts us to explore it, why then that idle harping on the clouds turns into something not unlike what down here we engage in at those blessed times when, no broken washer, dryer interfering, we give rein to our own desire to spend our time on that which pleases most.

Time, Stress, and Concentration

I note that we use “time” as a projection for internal states—as in saying, “God, this is a stressful time” or “I had the time of my life” or “There isn’t time for anything.”

Now I am stressed when I feel conflict. And not having time simply means overload. Too many conflicting demands swirl around like knives tossed up into the air by a stage performer. They threaten me. They might cut me if I don’t catch them in time, and here comes another, and a third is already falling again. Yikes!

It surprises me always how little time it takes me to get tense and irritated when I’m in a postal line with nine people ahead of me, each groaning under a mound of packages—and the postal clerks are having a cozy little chat while the people in line are steaming in silent fury. The other day I was in such a line when the idea for a funny poem occurred to me. I reached for a form that had some white space on it and started to jot lines—suddenly unaware of waiting. And then, when it was my turn, I put the sheet away feeling a slight irritation. Having to buy my stamps interrupted the fun time I was having looking for the fitting rhyme. Totally subjective.

Time doesn’t move at all. We live in eternity. What we call time is the perception of motion. We slice and dice time; we measure eternity by the motion of some mechanisms, solar or tiny, the machine on my wrist. In contented states, absorbed in some task, uninterrupted, time disappears. And, time and time again (I can’t avoid the word) after such a period ends, I take a deep breath and sigh. The sigh marks my return from eternity back into that much more hectic something I’ve sometimes, quite inaccurately, labeled “time-as-motion.” I could also talk of it as time-as-stress, time-as-indecision, dead time (as in waiting), and other terms that ultimately reduce to “I am out-of-sorts.” I never feel time when I am resolutely going about some task, when nothing interferes, when I am in the flow of things. But let the phone ring! It’s just a sound, but it feels as if someone had rudely pushed me.

I’ve discovered long ago that concentration can banish stress and tension. Depending on the stress, depending on the tension, this can take a little time. Twenty minutes are usually sufficient if the will is there. Concentration centers the mind. But where is that center? It is in eternity, in simple duration. To be out of “time-as” is also to be, oddly enough, out of the body. The reason why the ringing of the phone is as irritating as it is is because the body reflexively responds—faster than the mind. The body asserts itself and drags the mind from its point of focus. It moves the mind. It can do so because, alas, we are embodied. The phone can also produce the opposite effect. When we are anxiously brooding, waiting for news, we are centered in the body, our consciousness submerged in emotional turmoil. And then the phone finally rings. Alert. All is well. Hope springs up. We rush to answer. We sink back despondently when it is our Honda dealer’s automated call telling us that Precious needs to come in for its maintenance.

Concentration can break the spell of time time-as-motion. I know that. But the paradox is that in states of stress and tension, the obvious solution doesn’t automatically pop into my mind. The feeling must become quite irritating to rise to the level of consciousness when the solution finally occurs—and when it occurs, that moment itself is a moment of concentration. Used wisely, it solves the problem. But this demands an act of the will resisted by the organism. To gain concentration when we are harried always requires that we do something that isn’t exactly on the agenda. The list is long, the day is short—and now he wants me to sit down and spend twenty minutes writing in the diary or counting my breaths as I sit with my eyes closed? Forget that! Forget that, and it’ll be one of those days. Proceed to do the right thing, and the day will start to flow. The list will seem a little thing. The adult is back. The child we are is calmed and charmed again. Stress seeps away. Tension melts…

Revelation and Art, Persuasion and Ideology

Last in a series on Revelation and Scripture.

My presentation on this subject might be summed up in this way: Revelation and real art are closely linked phenomena, closely enough linked so that one might say that they are different words for the same basic experience. The big qualifiers here are, One, that “real art” is difficult to define sharply and itself requires an awakened heart. I’ve discussed this subject in two earlier postings here and here. Two, revelation is equally difficult to separate from moral harangue, legalistic suasion, advocacy and admonition, and other forms of discourse the aim of which is to shape other people’s behavior. I do not hesitate at all to view true revelation as Divine Inspiration. But scriptures are filled with much more mundane writings (harangue, suasion, etc.) which I find difficult to associate with the divine and easily identify with the human.

Thus I would put Revelation and Art to one side and Persuasion (to use a single word for the human part) to the other. Now I would propose that recorded persuasions, once they have been integrated into a society’s collective memory, are gradually transformed into Ideology. And an ideology is always an attempt to shape and control behavior—but with sanctions added for disobedience.

In the first post in this series, I noted that the objections to revelation include two general arguments. One is that the social results of religion (thus of revelation) are wars, persecutions, pogroms, etc. The other is that they present contradictory views of God or of God’s will. And I suggested that the critics’ attacks can be answered satisfactorily. If we accept the division of the phenomenon as I have done—into a presentation of the higher reality as art or as the story of religious experience on the one and into persuasion and ideology on the other hand—the critics’ attacks can be seen correctly. They are directed at those results which arise from ideology. Human beings will always resist coercion. When the religious experience has been transformed into an ideology and thus has assumed a coercive form, it will be resisted. Conflicts will arise, and these, ultimately, will result in mayhem. This will explain why religious phenomena often have bad results. Let’s next turn to contradictory views of God.

These views also arise from the hardening of revelation into ideology. I am a staunch adherent to negative theology, namely the assertion that the Divine is unknowably transcendent. At the same time, as an individual, I too have a picture, as it were, of the cosmic arrangement; it’s only human to make things understandable to oneself. Forcibly to impose my picture on others, however, would be to act against my strongest intuitions—which is that I do feel something but I do not know it as hard fact. I claim the right to see things as I do—and grant that same right to others. People must form their own pictures in their own ways. All claims, therefore, of infallible knowledge arise from the human side of the equation—not from Divine Inspiration. Claims that one view is right and all others are wrong arise from a desire to impose control—thus, again, to shape behavior, loyalty, adherence, and conformity. Granted. Social life benefits from consensus and unity of purpose. But to obtain that illegitimately also introduces in seed conflicts that will later blossom into wars, persecutions, pogroms, etc.

I will conclude this with the splendid analogy I have from Arnold Toynbee, the historian. He suggested that the creative leader resembles the Pied Piper who draws others to himself by the music that he plays. That music, which people willingly follow because it is beautiful and moves their hearts—that is what I call revelation. Toynbee then suggests another kind of leadership, that of the drill sergeant. The drill sergeant’s harsh commands, his power to make you drop and give him ten (push-ups, that is)—that is what I call ideology.

These two modes of communication are, alas, hopelessly entwined in each other in the human experience of religion—also of art. Sorting them, paradoxically, requires that you hear enough of the music, and respond to it enough, so that you can make the necessary distinctions and obey the sergeant when the ordinary circumstances make that rationally sensible. Those who cannot hear this music must also be cut plenty of slack. They are the materialistic critics who simply don’t have an ear for music. Therefore they declare all revelation as pure nonsense and balderdash. But knowing why they cannot hear, those who can must give them time.

Am I a Heretic?

Sixth in a series on Revelation and Scripture.

Many religious people who read the last posting and understand its argument, may well say, somewhat impatiently, “Yes, yes—but then it isn’t real.” For them revelation is only meaningful if it is the word of God, taken more or less literally. My view of revelation is therefore seen as heretical. It pretends to be sympathetic to religion but denies it by removing its very force. The word itself, heresy, comes from the Latin meaning “school of thought, philosophical sect.” The Latin came from the Greek for “taking” or “choosing.” That very word was applied to the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Christians in the New Testament (according to the Online Etymology Dictionary accessible here), but the word is translated as “sect” in English versions of the Bible. Heresy therefore is the belief of those who do not hew to the prevailing dogma. But let’s look at the distinction here between revelation and dogma.

Dogma is determined by organized bodies, such as councils of bishops. These bodies take their de facto authority from the population of believers who appointed or elected them; the councils are a social creation and some distance removed from the experience of inspiration. Councils make law. Their rulings have an arbitrary character: Thou shalt. It is by means of dogmatic rulings that revelations, already written down, turn into scriptures. By the time that happens, an extensive consensus has already developed that the writings are holy and carry truth. They are then given additional force by an authoritative body. This is the process whereby the very mysterious experiences of individuals are transformed into writing and then, stamped by social structures, into the word of God. This phenomenon is present in one tradition only, the Western forms of religion, all based on the Judaic revelations that first touched Moses. The peculiar character of inerrancy does not attach to other scriptures produced in other parts of the world; those are not held to be literally God’s word, but they carry the authority of consensus.

When revelation turns into dogma, the inspiration that reaches humanity is on its way to being materialized, reified. Such at least is my view. The content of revelation therefore carries two kinds of authority. It carries an inherent force, that which it actually says. The words may speak to me personally. I may respond to them because my own intuition tells me that truth has reached me. In other words, at some low level, I too am sharing in the revelation. The other authority is that of an official stamp of approval. The church affirms it. In this latter case, however, I have no choice but to accept the revelation, whether I resonate with it or not. As a member of a church community, I am under sanctions if I withhold my total consent.

Revelation, once it has been socialized in this way—especially when it has become dogma—is very far removed from the situation in which it entered this world from the world next door. The problems of religious conflict arise in this process of socialization—the supercharging of an inspiration with legal implications and sanctions. Let me offer an illustration.

Many poetic works of humanity contain inspiration of high potency, but let’s just select one author, Shakespeare, widely quoted by thousands upon thousands of people to convey truth to one another. Shakespeare’s writings have never become dogma. His quotes are presented on a “take it or leave it” basis by speakers and writers. Those who have ears will hear the message. No religious wars have ever been fought, no population harmed by the sword because someone denied the truth of some Shakespearean story or fragment.

My own take on revelation, therefore, is indeed heretical in the context of dogma. But I am a heretic in two ways. On the one hand I view the religious interpretation of revelation as arbitrary law-making in a realm where personal judgment must remain sovereign. On the other I assign genuine truth and transcendental value to revelation and thus become a heretic to the dogma of materialism. The socialization of revelation, however, does have a value. It causes the high inspirations of the past, initially shared by many—because these inspirations affected many people—to be preserved, printed, and distributed widely and over centuries. Thus socialization, including dogma, acts as a channel by means of which revelation reaches me. But here I am reminded of a Sufi saying: “The channel doesn’t drink.” No, indeed. Only people can drink, and each one on his or her own; and you can lead the horse to the water, but you cannot make it drink.

A Chosen People

Fifth in a series on Revelation and Scripture.

My own grasp of revelation—as I’ve already laid it out—is that some people are able to have contact with a higher realm and receive inspiration which they personally feel as unusual, from a higher dimension, and filled with energy. This makes the inspiration notable, indeed a singular experience. It will be interpreted as authoritative. Now I want to go beyond that. It also seems to me that the inspiration conveys a value—but that that value is not specifically spelled out. Rather, it is a feeling of exaltation, a meaning but without sharp detail. Therefore it needs a certain kind of reduction to the conceptual level. It will require interpretation, particularly if it is to be conveyed to others. The interpretation is by the recipient—but it will be filtered through that person’s consciousness, knowledge, concerns, and circumstances. By way of example, I want to look at the concept of a chosen people as laid out in the Old Testament, most explicitly in Exodus and then in Deuteronomy.

The recipient is Moses, and the initial instance is the prophet’s mystical experience of a burning bush in which an “angel of the Lord” (initially) appears; but in the same passage this angel is the referred to as “the Lord.” Here the Lord refers to “my people,” meaning the Jews, and speaks of leading these people from Egypt to “a land flowing with milk and honey.” Later, after the great tribulations of the Exodus, on Mount Sinai, Moses hears God say to him:

Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine: And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation. [Exodus 19:5-6]

We encounter the word “chosen” in Deuteronomy, used my Moses in addressing the people of Israel. The passage is:

For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth. [Deuteronomy 14:2]

Now I will stipulate that Moses had a mystical experience—possibly two, one by the burning bush and another on Mount Sinai. The question I would raise is this: Was the inspiration that reached him as specific as the scriptures record it or was it, rather, an authoritative feeling of value which energized a man who was, already, deeply concerned with the state of suffering of his people? The inspiration he received ultimately led to his rise to the leadership of his folk. But was that portion of his revelation by which the Ultimate Being selected one tribe as its people, as its peculiar treasure, as those chosen to be a people “unto himself” and “above all the nations”—was that content specifically in the inspiration? Or was that an interpretation?

To doubt that Moses had an experience is to suggest that he was a thoroughly cynical and ambitious would-be leader who invented an experience in order to influence others. That suggestion I reject for multiple reasons. For one, I doubt that such a man would have achieved what Moses did in fact achieve. At the same time, I have serious doubts imagining that the Ultimate Being would choose a people in the manner here depicted. I would also doubt that God intervenes in his creation in the manner in which Moses revelation would have it.

This, of course, is also the demarcation line between the believer and the unbeliever. If there are only these two possibilities, I am an unbeliever. But I think there is a third way, and I choose to understand the facts before us in another way. It is that we have access to guidance from a higher realm, but that guidance reaches us in such a form that we ourselves must interpret its meaning, in detail, based on what we know and understand. Therefore it is possible to value revelation at one level and to critique it on another: namely on the level of interpretation. Exactly the same rules apply, it seems to me, to the lowest forms of inspiration, such as intuitions. These also carry a feeling of authority, but it is always sensible to test them rationally. Conversely, our reasonings should also have the nod of intuition.

The World Next Door

Fourth in a series on Revelation and Scripture.

To derive a fully formed subtle world—inhabited by discarnate spirits yet—just by talking about artistic inspiration—and that in order to justify revelation—must seem extraordinarily presumptuous to many. But cut me some slack. Conventional ways of thought are narrow. My projection (but let me say that it isn’t my invention) is derived from the experience of consciousness. And it’s no more outlandish than other projections. Another, equally weird, is to presume that matter can organize itself by accident into living and reproducing species for no reason whatsoever—and that, when the sun goes into nova, all of them will disappear, sight unseen, with no one to remember or to know. Religious systems that project a hierarchy of beings represent just one attempt by humans to understand the world; the evolutionary theory is another. In religious systems the starting point is the personal experience, of being, thus of consciousness. In the evolutionary, the starting point is matter. I’m with Disraeli on the side of the angels—another way of saying that consciousness is prior to matter; without it we wouldn’t even have the concept of matter. Consciousness gives us a sense of meaning. Looking at our life on earth, we see no permanent personal meaning for ourselves. Not surprisingly, we project it beyond our current existence—thus into the world next door.

The point I want to make today is that revelation is always based on a cosmological account. All religions project at least one other world, and if one then it is always higher than this one. They assert that we have either descended or have fallen into this one. And the substance of their teaching is to guide us in our re-ascent. Materialism considers this a delusion and justifies it by saying that hope is more adaptive than despair. Religion will therefore wither away only after the mass of humanity has reached a secure and high standard of living. Troubles multiply? People flock back to church. Adaptive behavior. But it isn’t as simple as that. Some won’t be quite so easily bribed into sleep by panem et circenses. Meaning, dammit! Give me meaning.

Religions offer meaning—and they base themselves on revelation. And those who produce the revelations claim to have obtained them from on high, thus from the world next door. Now here I would like to make a distinction. It is between precise and specific kinds of revelation and the symbolical essences these revelations carry. A precise revelation is that of the fall of humanity by disobedience of a divine command taking place in a specific Garden where the forbidden fruit of the Knowledge Tree of Good and Evil was consumed. Another is the Song of the Pearl, concerning the son of a king sent from the “East” to “Egypt” to obtain a precious pearl guarded by a devouring serpent. I’ve written about that myth here. Yet another is the myth of Mazdaism; it suggests that we are volunteers, descended from heaven, to fight on the side of Light against the uprising revolt of Darkness. Here we have one story of a fall and two of a descent. In all of these stories the central figure of the drama is assisted in its struggles to regain the height by messages (read revelation) provided from the highest point directly by intermediate agents or ministers.

The essence here may be rendered by saying that (1) there are at least two distinct worlds; (2) the lower of the two is inferior to the higher; (3) we are in the lower, engaged in conflicts, for good and sufficient reasons; (4) the aim is to ascend again after some job is accomplished; and (5) those of us engaged in this task get help and guidance from above.

The first and constituting element of this essence is that a world next door really does exist. Without it there is no story at all, no project, no accomplishment, no meaning. But now let us suppose that the real message is the essence—and all of its renderings and elaborations are to be assigned to us, to the people of this world. That is my working premise. What the inspiration from on high really carries to us is this essence. We then formulated it into stories, elaborate it, apply to ordinary life, reify it, in a way—and as we begin to do that, that is when all of the problems of religion begin.

Inspiration - Concluded

Third in a series on Revelation and Scripture

What I managed to say yesterday is simply that inspiration comes from “the beyond,” and in trying to explain it, I’ve produced a model of sorts. How to picture this model? I picture it as two dimensions that interpenetrated each other. One is physical; the other I simply call mental but could also call spiritual. I call the mental “higher.” Furthermore I claim that we are in bodies (rather than that we are bodies)—and that the body’s processes interfere with an unobstructed vision of the “higher realm.” What else did I assert? That our entire soul life—the workings of our minds, understanding, consciousness, and willing—draw their energy or sustenance from this hypothetical higher region or dimension. Our bodies draw their sustenance from the physical world. This is not the traditional description we encounter in religious doctrines. In those doctrines, at least as popularly understood, higher and lower do not interpenetrate. They are distinct locations. The higher (heavens, purgatories) are above us; the hells are below. Dante’s Divine Comedy places them this way. The philosophical structure undergirding western traditional views pictures a hierarchically arranged reality in which entities range from pure matter to pure spirit; to be human is to occupy an intermediate position, a matter-spirit fusion. In this view to be embodied entities is our rightful and permanent condition. We shall always be embodied, even after death—when, after the End Times, we assume our resurrection bodies.

The traditional view, largely based on the Aristotelian concept of substance (form-matter duality) in which neither form nor matter are permanent, has been modified to recognize an immortal, indestructible soul. And this soul alone—not the entire spiritual dimension—interpenetrates the body. In post-Aristotelian religious thought, embodiment is still held to be the natural state of human souls, but physical bodies decay and resurrection bodies are divinely created later. The model I proposed yesterday differs from this one in suggesting that the entire soul-dimension interpenetrates the entire physical dimension, not merely the soul the body. But that, as humans, held in tight unity with bodies (the whys of that we need to discuss too, by-and-bye), the bodily functionalities filter out most of the “higher” dimension so that we don’t ordinarily see it or perceive its presence all about us sharply.

(Here, finding that I used the word “higher,” in quotes, yet again, I would insert a clarifying note. I use that word to indicate a realm of higher subtlety, not necessarily or invariable a better, a morally elevated realm. In my mode of thought, the spiritual dimension also includes hell.)

Now, still in an attempt to make my conception more vivid, let me note that as souls we depend on the soul-dimension as our natural habitat. We live and breathe it, as it were—we live in it spiritually (our bodily life comes from matter) and we breathe its rarefied airs (thus we use its energies). Thus I propose that we are constantly inspired: waking, sleeping, working, playing, etc. But we are unaware of this. What we call inspirations are episodes of unusually intense contact with that dimension when, for some reason or another—exposure to works of arts, an inner striving, a crisis requiring extreme physical exertion, or circumstances when our filtering mechanisms weaken—we are suddenly exposed to stronger manifestations of a dimension in which we naturally live at least the human part of our mixed human-animal life. Our need for sleep may be evidence for this model. In waking states we are more isolated from our native dimension because our bodies more actively filter out that dimension so that we shall pay closer attention to the needs of physical survival. We must restore our spiritual balance at regular intervals by shutting down the noisy machinery. Not surprisingly, many inspirations come in the night.

This much will suffice to make a case for inspiration—and for particularly strong and unusual manifestations of it. But what about the notion that inspiration of the religious kind comes to us from agents, not from environments: from God, angels, saints, and other transcendental figures who act as messengers of God. This is the religious claim. I will get into that subject in the next post in this series. For the moment I will sketch an outline.

The broad framework might be stated as follows. If the soul-dimension is a real world, if we are destined to enter it after we die, that “place” may be conceived of as a genuine realm complete with all of the features of a “world” as we conceive this: thus a composite of environments analogous to those we know in this life as well as other persons, agents, like ourselves. All those elements interpenetrate this dimension, but we don’t see it. If we can enter that dimension now and then while still alive, it makes sense to assume that, from time to time, we may have actual contacts and communications with other being there who, like us, are selves and agents. I’ll say more about this in the next post.

Inspiration

Second in a series on Revelation and Scripture

Let me continue on this subject and, specifically, look at “inspiration.” As I’ve noted in the first of this series in the last post, revelations are said to be inspired. The first task then would seem to be to examine if inspiration has real standing in human experience. I think it does. And I’ll offer a theory of it.

But let me start with a working definition. A good point of departure is to look at ordinary inspiration as the word is used in the arts and in discovery, not least in science. This word, as usually used, refers to insights. They are almost always sudden and spontaneous; the artist disclaims being their source, thus as having “thought them up”; her or she will, however, acknowledge that a certain preparation came ahead of the inspiration, not least a readiness to receive, a listening attitude. We find many examples of this experience in the creative professions: every artist will agree. Inspirations also have an energetic character. They wake us up, delight us, they amaze us. Recognizing them as integral parts of experience, that experience, always, is a clear and immediate intuition that now we “have something,” also that that something didn’t come from us.

This said, opinion the splits. Some will argue that inspirations do not, repeat not, come from any outside source; to the contrary, they are the end result of subconscious brain activity. This view is legitimate enough, but if brain activity is viewed as purely naturalistic—thus if combined with a denial of mind as a separate reality—it forces the conclusion that many of our most astonishingly creative insights are the consequence of random chemistry. We’re forced to a decision here because we don’t really understand these processes mechanically—if they are purely brain-based. To assign them to the subconscious amounts to substituting one word, easily associated with brain activity (a word like reflex, which also is), for another word, inspiration, which hypothesizes some kind of higher mental realm. In our direct experience inspirations have a creative aura that puts them in the mental realm; they are exceedingly complex on examination and always surprising; they don’t resemble unconscious outcomes, like reflexes, which are adaptive rather than creative.

A decision is needed. Hence what follows is addressed to people who feel spontaneously drawn to the view that mental operations have an immaterial grounding. Those to whom the materialistic explanation sounds innately more reasonable won’t see any merits in the hypotheses I’m about to offer—despite the fact that what I propose also adequately explains their leanings.

My own theory of inspiration might be put this way. Our selves, our souls, belong into another and higher region. Even in these bodies, our mental operations are therefore grounded in another region or dimension. We don’t draw on its energies much, certainly not in our mundane activities, but when we are engaged in creative ventures, our use of higher energies increases and the filtering processes that keep it more or less inaccessible and certainly invisible get in the way of our creative endeavors. The listening stance that we assume when we’re trying to produce arts, understand difficult problems, understand the physical world beyond the kinds of actions we have in common with chipmunks, in creating arts of all kinds—in words, sounds, or visions—that attitude of listening is testimony of our effort, somehow, to reach a dimension native to us although we’re unaware of it except as motions of our will. Here I would stress two things. One is that active involvement in a problem often interferes with its solution, especially when we hit a snag. Inspirations often arise precisely because we turn aside from the problems, release them from active consideration, when we let our minds wander, or sleep, or engage in relaxation. While we thus remove some of the interference, some element of our mind or self is able to contact a more energetic realm, our native dimension. There the elements of the problem are resorted, new linkages form, and visions that don’t reach us in waking states appear. The solution, more or less complete—but by no means fully worked out—then suddenly presents itself in time. The Aha! moment follows. Sometimes we remember participating in this process while we are asleep but dreaming.

This theory fits experience rather well. It explains why inspiration sometimes reaches us suddenly and, at other times, flows like a river. In the first case it was blocked, had to be allowed to cumulate; in the other our personal openness to a higher energetic streaming was greater and therefore every note was perfect and every stroke of the brush brought delight.

I note that these entries require more space than I like to devote to a single blog entry. Therefore, to go on, I’ll need another day.

Revelation and Scripture: The Problem

None of us approaches reality without at least having heard traditional answers to the basic questions. These certainly include the one: Why are we here at all? That question may be put in very basic terms: Why do we exist? Another and potentially more answerable form of it might be: Why are we here on earth?

The traditional western answer is that we are creatures willed to exist by God, a being of infinite power, knowledge, and perfection whose deeper motivations we cannot ever hope to plumb. If we seek the roots of this assertion, we encounter scriptures, literally writings; they assert the answer in mythological forms. Being scriptures, people had to have produced them. To lift these writings to a level above mere storytelling, the tradition calls scriptures inspired writings. The meaning of that word, inspiration, suggests a transmission of meanings from a being or beings at some higher level than the human; the meanings were perceived by some one or several people gifted in some way. They formulated what they perceived; later the substance was written own.

I use both being and beings because, in the case of the Muslim tradition the Angel Gabriel was the conduit of the teachings of Mohammed; and in the Bible angels also play a role as messengers of God. This suggests a hierarchy of higher beings culminating in the Most High who, at various times, most notably addressing Moses from the burning bush, manifested directly and named itself I AM. The western tradition, therefore, may be summed up as holding that a hierarchy of being exists. Its peak is Ultimate Being. The meaning of our existences flows from that peak. And the details are the revelation of that meaning as recorded in the scriptures. Which of the many holy books properly or legitimately belong to the category of scripture is, to some extent, a consensus that has developed over time. It has also changed over time and may well change again.

Now the question I pose today is this one: Is it legitimate simply to dismiss all this as nonsense? The argument for doing so might run as follows: Scriptures are just writings by people, and higher inspiration is simply a claim. The claim may be innocent or calculating. Innocent claims may come from sincere but deluded people who think themselves in communication with God or with angels; they really believe it, but lacking any third party confirmation (good journalistic practice, that) the claims carry no special authority. To the countering argument that sometimes such figures perform miracles, the skeptic answers that miracles are mostly due to natural causes—especially healings; and that proofs of such miracles—when available, which is rarely—are always ambiguous. The second tack, namely that the claimants are calculating, needs no detailed presentation: such people are seeking power and influence and are merely engaging in one form of persuasion that works well on the gullible. Dismissal of revelation is then followed by two more general arguments.

One is the assertion that the results of such teachings in social life produce at least as much evil as good: religious wars, persecutions, pogroms, inquisitions, the arbitrary suppression of scientific discovery, the exploitation of the poor to enrich a priestly class, the oppression of women, the maintenance of authoritarian government, etc., etc. The crowning objection is that scriptures present contradictory images of God or of God’s will, reflect the social consensus of their time (e.g., as regards the status of women) and that different religious traditions have contrasting doctrines. Mazdaism is dualistic, for example; Judaism and Islam are monotheistic; and Christianity produced a Trinitarian deity.

Is there possibly a third way of seeing all this? I think there is. Neither the dogmatic nor the materialistic stance here seems to me to capture the essence of what is going on. I think that revelation is real enough if properly defined and understood; scriptures, similarly, are genuine enough and carry truth—but not if rigidly interpreted and dogmatically enforced. If both—revelation and scripture—are viewed from a higher perspective than is usually the case, their origins and merits gradually emerge. And the skeptics’ attack can be answered point by point, not least the two general dismissals based on bad results and contradictory teachings. But to carry out this task will require at least one and perhaps more posts. Stay tuned.

The Accounting or Mapping Department

Words not only clarify, they may also obscure. I can’t help believing that what the schoolmen called Intellect is but the accounting department of the enterprise we call the soul. The counting house is important, to be sure, but the store or factory matter more. It seems clear to me that, as humans, we gain knowledge not merely and exclusively from sensory experience, which the medievals and moderns both assert; on the contrary, I think we also get knowledge from invisible dimensions. In both cases our knowledge is direct; our understanding flashes up or slowly dawns. I hold that the intellectual operations of abstraction and reasoning arise a little later—an eyewink or much labor later—as we engage in ordering and relating our direct and spontaneous grasp of reality into larger patterns of coherence.

Another way to put this is that the intellect produces maps, but maps are not, as it were, universals. We think of universals or essences—perceptions shorn of accidents, so-called—as in some manner superior to particulars. I see that as an assertion that maps are superior to the landscapes they depict. I’m very fond of maps; I’m devoted to patterns of all kinds; they’re indispensable for orientation but, ultimately, we never visit maps; we visit places.

The interesting fact here is the iterative functioning of what I view as the higher power of the soul, its intuitive grasp. The intellect is a servant; reason is a tool. Intuition first understands the particular and then, once intellect produces its patterns, intuition understands and grasps those in turn—enriched by both but never deceived by what is what: the landscape is the landscape and the map’s a map.

Precognition and Time

I’ve written on this subject before (see Precognition under Labels). The subject fascinates me because awareness of the future is the clearest, most compelling sign that our conventional views of reality are incomplete. I’ve argued earlier that the experience of precognition, for those who’ve had it, is compelling. The only way to avoid this subject is by burying one’s head in the sand. The last entry here, pointing to a case of premonition, got me to thinking about the subject again. I avoid it by and large because no answers seem possible. Yesterday I had a bit of idle time waiting at the doctor’s office, and these stray thoughts occurred to me. They are in the category of pondering the nature of time.

I was remembering earlier sessions of thinking about the subject. Time and again, I start by dividing the concept of time into two categories. One of these is that time is the necessary complement of enduring existence, meaning that we can’t imagine anything being unless we envision a kind of invisible environment in which the persistence of something continues. From this comes my notion of time-as-endurance.

We know this time because our consciousness is capable of retaining memories of past moments. The power of remembering is itself something dynamic, however, something analogous to motion. The experience of this moment is stored away—picture it as being put on a shelf. And we can look at the shelf and note a past action, the action of putting the memory there. Never mind that it happens automatically. From this I derive another concept of time, time-as-motion. Just as we cannot imagine persistence without time so, also, we cannot imagine motion without a container in which it takes place. Mental motions, unlike physical, do not require space. To be sure, a purely materialistic viewpoint would deny this. The materialist derives mental actions from neural motions. But I’m personally persuaded that mental actions do not require space—but do require a time container. In physics we speak of a fusion of space and time, spacetime. It is the container. In the mental sphere, time alone suffices as a necessary environment for motion.

Our mental states—as we experience them in this life—are also fused with the physical. For this reason we experience time as spacetime. Now the thought occurred to me yesterday that the experience of time may be closely bound to the dimension we inhabit. Thus in this life, welded to bodies, we may experience time one way—but, possibly, outside of bodies, in another “mansion” of reality—say across the border that I stare at in this blog—it may be quite different.

The justification for this strange thought is that we measure time by motion here. Motion has a speed dimension. And, in this dimension, anyway—if we take Einstein seriously—there is a speed limit. It is the speed of light. Nothing with any kind of mass can travel even at the speed of light. A photon is considered to be a mass-less something. Now if time is measured by motion, in the cosmos we inhabit the passage of time (time-as-motion) is limited to the speed of light at one extreme.

But let us now suppose that other dimensions may very well exist—characterized by different existential laws than those of matter. And let us suppose, just as a thought experiment, that we may have originated in another dimension and are merely temporarily (that word again) encased in matter. Suppose that we are capable of another, higher or different, time perception. Not that it is readily available to us; let’s just assume that we have the capacity, under certain circumstances, to perceive it—and to have that power because we are not originally from this dimension. Most precognitions, for example, reach us in dreams, a state in which, to some extent, we are much more tenuously linked to the physical dimension than we are when awake.

Precognitions may arise from glimpses of this world from another. And from that perspective, which may operate at much higher speeds of change, we may see more of what is already firmly realized than is visible from this dimension while embedded in it.

Premonitions

Herewith a link to a straightforward story presented by National Public Radio of a young boy's premonition of his own death (hat tip to a member of my family). For those of us of a modern mind but curious and hardy enough to patrol the borders of this zone, nothing is more interesting than reports from our immediate time of what counts as empirical evidence of a wider sphere of reality than is officially countenanced.

Notes on Existentialism

The formalism that this philosophy seems to represent is that there is a difference between Being and Existence, that earlier philosophies saw being as prior and durable and existence either as secondary or as something “added” to essence; thus essence before existence. Existentialism, to the contrary, turns this around: “existence precedes essence,” as formulated by Sartre.

Despite reading Kierkegaard and Sartre (now also reading Heidegger), I’ve always felt untouched by the above philosophical formulation for the simple reason that, try as I might, I can’t detect a shred of difference between existence and being. That difference must have roots in the philosophical notion that goes back to Plato, namely that form is eternal and matter is changeable and therefore instances of it are “corruptible.” Thus existence requires materiality. My own puzzling over the form-matter duality led me in other directions. Here are some points on that:

• In the modern understanding of matter, we find structure (“form”) at the lowest possible levels. In other words, we always find matter already formed.
• We understand reality in terms of processes. Any even superficial study of embryology or the development of plants from seeds reveals a process.
• I resolve the form-matter dualism by holding that form is an intention. The intention behind something that “comes about” may begin very fuzzily, but the steadfast intention guides the process of creation, sometimes by fits and starts. Intention fits my observations (and explains things) much better than a static form or matrix existing in some transcendental realm which is then expressed as a materialized form.
• I see things coming about only in two ways: by chance or by intention. Production of phenomena by chance only requires energy and matter; preexisting things have to be in motion. All other entities that come about come about by intention. And in those cases, “intention precedes existence,” not the other way around. So—if I associate intention with form and from with essence and essence with being (esse means being in Latin)—I am an essentialist.

But aside from this formulaic approach, I feel that existentialism, as it actually originated, introduced valuable new ways of thought—never mind the cosmic conclusions drawn from it by various thinkers. It might have been better if this school of philosophy had been called subjectivism. The genuine rooting of it is a focus on the actual experience of being, existence, or whatever words you wish to use. Heidegger called it “being there.”

In my own thinking about this subject—strictly privately, in hundreds of pages of diary entries extending back decades—the point of departure has always been consciousness, self-awareness, the sharp, alert, awake sort of thing—not the psychologists’ description of mentation. I realize now (my readings of Sartre and Kierkegaard took place in the 1950s and 1960s) that my approach is also grounded in a subjective polarity. I’ve always tended to put the ancient Greeks and the scholastic off to one side—not because their work wasn’t elegant and beautifully developed but because for me it has always seemed to be a game with concepts the direct likes of which I could not detect in myself or in my experience. If I consult my own experience and approach, then my methodology is certainly existentialist. Coming no, going yes—you might say.

Concentration

It strikes me that one of the distinguishing characteristics of being human, thus of consciousness and self-awareness, is the ability to concentrate at will. Animals are quite capable of concentration too, but it is not under their voluntary control. I observe this on every walk I take, especially this time of year. The squirrels are in the final phase of their preparations for the coming winter. They’re all over the place. And I can see how the environment directs their attention and compels their action. Every squirrel, every time will climb the nearest tree or hide under the nearest bush if, as I walk by them, I get close enough to them.

Voluntary action is the hallmark of transcendence. It requires a kind of separateness from the physical. The separation is rarely very great, but there it is. It is that “cubic millimeter” of separation Carlos Castaneda attributed to his real or invented sorcerer-guru, Don Juan. I am, of course, not talking about reflexive actions; controlling them requires extraordinary training. Nor do I refer to spontaneous heroism in situations of sudden crisis—self-defense or defense of the child. I once saw the strangest sight. It was a chipmunk “standing up” to one of our cats. It had been cornered; there it was, about to be killed. It rose on its hind legs and made warding off motions at the cat while making a hissing sort of sound. The cat, for whatever reasons—perhaps my immediate proximity distracted it—did not immediately act. The chipmunk then absconded. But for a moment, heroically, it was ready to face down the vast predator that over-loomed it. I don’t mean that sort of thing. We—whatever that word means—are tightly woven into our bodies. What is amazing is that we can indeed over-come the material at will.

What this suggests to me is that culture—personal as well as collective—will manifest itself in forms that signal concentration and detachment. By contrast, decadence will manifest itself as an increase in spontaneity, informality, and distraction. My classing spontaneity with decadence will rub some people wrong—rubs me wrong too, you might say. But I’ll say more about that in a moment. Processes that proceed in an automated way, stimulus followed by response, resemble the natural, the lower, the physical. Processes triggered by intentions, where the intention follows and guides the development—these are of a higher order.

The life process itself, as I see it, is the action of something high gathering strength and gradually freeing itself from its entanglement in the lower. Therefore life has direction. It is teleological. It manifests in increasing levels of order—and this order opposes, counters the random arrangement of the physical. Chance operates in the material plane, mind creates order. In humans the first possibilities of genuine detachment occur, and these manifest as concentration and conscious volition.

The process, in the human realm, has a cyclic pattern. Thus it manifests as cultural development followed by exhaustion and decay. Oddly enough our very success in organizing matter leads to decay. The pressures of necessity ease up. In consequence we relax our concentration, let go of our formalities, and permit ourselves to be distracted. Distraction requires much less effort. It is going with the flow, as it were. Ours is an age of exhaustion—and let’s not be deceived by our fantastic wealth, brilliant technology, and celebrated diversity. The whole structure of life today is organized to maximize distraction. That is what a culture of consumption produces. Things, things, things. Faster and faster. Flicker and flicker. Instant gratification is followed by equally instant dissatisfaction. Which calls for an immediate fix. And so on it goes. By contrast any activity that requires sustained, focused attention will appear as boring, old-fashioned, out-of-it rather than with-it. I maintain three blogs. Of these one is amusing, sharp-witted, and stimulating. One is cultural in focus but entertaining on a higher level. And this one is much more concentrated. Which one has the least readership? You guessed it. This one. Why? It requires concentration to follow.

Now a note about spontaneity. There is a lower kind which is reflexive. And then there is the higher kind. It is the higher kind that we actually admire and see manifested in the great works of art. But that kind of spontaneity arises from a great surplus of power built up over long periods of sustained effort, mastering higher forms of expression. And when it begins to operate, it looks effortless and yet produces wonderfully ordered structures. That spontaneity is valuable. The other kind even the drunk displays in various amusing and destructive forms.

Immortality

When we speak about the real, we are using a word derived from the Latin word res, meaning thing. The common designator “real estate” points to the most basic object of ownership, the fixed, permanent, physical, and immovable. When we use a phrase like “airy-fairy,” we mean the poetic, the imaginary—the insubstantial products of the human mind that cannot be pinned down because they’re not “concrete.” It is thus rather curious that the belief in some kind of immortality is so ancient and persistent. This belief takes various forms. In Asia the body is thought to perish but the soul or essence to move on, taking up another body to inhabit, unless the person has succeeded in escaping the Wheel of Karma and therefore rises to some higher realm. In the West we have a curious structure of beliefs. The soul is held to be immortal; the body dies; the soul exists in an imperfect manner after death; but at the end of time there is also a resurrection of bodies.

When the philosophers get involved, things get more complicated. Aristotle had the idea that if anything survives after we die, it is some “intellectual core.” As best as I can make out, this view is incompatible with Aristotle’s general scheme of things—the scheme of matter-form substantiality in which only the combination of the two is real; unformed matter and immaterial form exist in a kind of limbo called potentiality. Aristotle can be interpreted to say that personality remains in that surviving “intellectual core”—or that what survives is an impersonal intellect, hence the person disappears with death. In Plato’s view the survival of the soul is derived from its very definition; the soul is defined as simple; the simple cannot be corrupted because it has no parts, hence it is immortal. That is a neat argument, but beyond that it throws no light.

The understanding of the man on the street—and I class myself with him—is that immortality is meaningless unless we, ourselves, personally survive and have capacities for thought, memory, feeling, will, and action. Thus immortality for me is essentially linked to consciousness, and by consciousness I mean all of its usual tooling. In theories of reincarnation there is a radical forgetting between death and birth. Functionally that sounds equivalent to materialism for me unless more is asserted. The essential something that I am is lost in the process. Therefore this kind of “survival” lacks content and meaning.

I think that belief in immortality arose because, without it, all meaning disappears. Immortality is neither narcissistic nor a self-pleasing delusion. It is a necessary condition for any kind of meaning to be present at all. Consider. We live, strive, suffer, and hope; we love others, we work together, struggle, and share joys. What is the point of all this if it leads to nothing? Why did my Mother live, love, struggle, and suffer? And yes, she did suffer a great deal. What was the meaning of her efforts, the love she dispensed to four generations, the sacrifices she made—if she just vanished, after all that, without a trace? So that immortal genes could propagate—as some would have it? So that immortal memes could pass through her mind? If her existence is considered terminal, all of her acts had meaning in a process of life viewed impersonally, but she did not.

Life takes its deepest meaning from its directional flow, its end-seeking character. All of its moment to moment experiences also take their meaning from the onward flow. If the end of life turns out to be nothing—disappearance, cessation, vanishing—then the entire process loses its meaning as well. We understand this in our depths but, faced with the rude fact of death, we find it abruptly contradicted. It doesn’t take too much puzzling about the matter to conclude that the answer to this process must lie hidden in another dimension, on that side of the borderzone.

This line of thought is of the very essence of at least personal philosophy. The public, professional forms, of course, range over a much wider field of concepts; passions run high, schools compete, egos strive, etc. I am an old man at present, over seventy, so it might be thought that this sort of thing gets urgent when you’re nearing the ultimate passage. But, I must confess, this kind of thought preoccupied me even when I was a mere youngster in the Army and quite a wild man and about as far removed from philosophy as you can get.

China’s Religious Experience

I’ve always considered the religious forms native to China the most sophisticated—at least in comparison with religious forms in India and in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim world. The last three, of course, are closely related. The specifically Chinese forms are a belief in spirits, especially those of the ancestors, and Taoism, a much later mystical form, in which the ultimate is pictured as a transcendental All. The chief similarity of Chinese and all other religions is that it is based on a conviction that a spirit world exists beyond this one. The chief difference lies in the absence of a personified God, a God whose characteristics are based on the human model. The great benefit of the religious view for the Chinese people has been that a sophisticated view of the All High is almost impossible to exploit for political purposes. Hence China has been spared the vicious religious wars that have plagued other parts of the globe.

Of course, as many, many people have observed over time, The Chinese temperament is practical and down to earth. Indeed, calling it a “temperament” is probably wrong. It is a cultural blessing, in a way—and in China the culture has been pretty continuous for at least 4000 years. No lesser person than D.T. Suzuki has elaborated this very point. Suzuki, a Japanese, is the chief introducer of Zen Buddhism to the West, and in his Essay in Zen Buddhism, he too stresses the point. Zen, as he points out, is as much a Chinese creation as an Indian, and Zen Buddhism is practical and down to earth.

This works out well. Ancestor worship enlarges the sense of living in this dimension by extending it into the invisible. The ancestors are seen as able to influence one’s banal fortunes in this dimension—and we can please ancestors by upholding the ethical norms. So at the bottom of society. At its highest levels, the concept of Heaven, impersonal but not unaware, has been developed as the sanction of rule. Those whom Heaven favors, have the Mandate of Heaven. Those whom Heaven would depose are deprived of the mandate and, no matter what they do, they will swept away. It is the only culture on the planet in which the personal virtue of the ruler is conceived of as directly related to success in governing a realm—and in which the ruler’s chief activity is to let ordinary people live while keeping the lesser lords from exploiting them. That works for me.

And then, at the very highest levels, the mystical and philosophical, the conception of divinity is appropriately high, always reverent, never inclined to suggest that you can bribe, fool, or otherwise influence the highest. It shall prevail, through any and all contingencies at precisely the distance from us which we also feel when contemplating our own puny selves.

On Love: Well Worth Reading

Herewith a pointer to what I consider to be a superb, brief post entitled “Aquinas on Amor” on Siris. It is a repost of an entry that first appeared last year. Aquinas had a crystal-clear vision, and here it is summarized with skill and parsimony. Click here to see it.

Our Strange Environment

Someday we may discover—after we have passed the border—just how strange an environment surrounded us in life, especially if we spent our time in a modern, highly mechanized urban civilization, out of intimate contact with nature.

Out in nature we’re always in close relationship with living systems, whether we live an agricultural, hunting-gathering, or a herding life. Of course I don’t mean modern agriculture with all of its endless machines and chemical underpinnings. These thoughts occur because I’ve been reading, again, the novels of Alexander McCall Smith, creator of Mma Ramotswe, Botswana’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective. In that book quite frequently we are reminded of an earlier way of life, herding cattle in the arid regions adjoining the Kalahari desert in Africa.

The other root of this notion arises from retirement—and age. In a way, with leisure, I’ve been thrown back into my youth, a period of greater openness, then, as now, to the world of intuitions and ideas, not in the sense of concepts but of perceptions of a higher character. And these, it seems to me, are often indistinguishable from the perceptions that reach us by way of the natural world—the plants, the grasses, the trees, the birds, the animals. The living things, strange though it may sound, are also the worlds of poetry, music, epics, tales, novels, great dramas, and immortal myths.

That on which we focus our attention—that, in turn, takes root in us. Attention is a kind of identification. If we attend to the myriad issues and problems of modern life, that modern life invades our soul and takes up its residence in us. And our perception of reality then becomes, well, industrialized. We see everything in terms of the outer—because we attend to it, indeed must do so.

One of the powerful tools we have to combat this invasion of our natural waters by alien flora and fauna is recurring, periodic detachment. That doesn’t have to take the form of meditation, diaries, worship, or things of that nature. We can also recover our fundamental reality by walks in parks, gardening, or working with our hands outdoors or in.

With age—in which experience has amassed a great deal of visceral as well as formal knowledge—attentive listening eventually produces the strange feeling that what we take to be reality is an artificial construct. It mostly hides that which are, in our essence, and that which really surrounds us, not just in the immediate quarter-mile or so but including the heavens above reaching infinitely far outward (on the visible plain) and in realms only known from myths (in the invisible).

Keep notes. Someday we may have occasion to compare them.

Border Region ABCs

Sometimes we have experiences in which the facts are crystal clear, yet these facts conspire to produce in us emotional contact with something grand: awe, love, union, exaltation. We might actually shiver. To make this sharper: We understand the situation perfectly well. At the same time we have emotions. The two coincide and it is impossible to separate the two sets of facts, the cognitive grasp to one side, the feeling to the other. They go together. They are mutually supportive.

I contrast this to experiencing pure music—no words. We may have powerful emotions, but there is no cognitive counterpart. We can project a cognitive frame in order to explain the music. We might imagine a marriage in heaven, say, and the great climax of the music as the final embrace. Or we may imagine a victorious army taking possession, at last, of the field of battle. But these are—projections. We supply the cognitive frame. It isn’t really present in the music in any even remotely visible or graspable form.

Similarly we sometimes experience cognitive insights entirely devoid of any feelings except, perhaps, a certain satisfaction that we have finally understood the puzzle. We may have an Aha! moment, but it is just a flash.

We can label these three experiences as A, B, and C. Now the question arises, which is the best?

I pose this question because, in accounts of mystical experiences—a good example is the medieval, fourteenth century anonymous work called The Cloud of Unknowing—the middle position, B, pure feeling and the impossibility of knowledge, is held out as the ultimate. And in countless other accounts of a similar kind, however they might be labeled, the same conclusion is drawn.

Now I characterize these three experiences using other imagery. I see B and C as polarities. The ecstatic state is pure emotion but, if carried to its ultimate expression, it is equivalent to annihilation. Not surprisingly, annihilation is one meaning of nirvana, and, I would submit, so is the idea of union with God. So great is the difference between creature and creator, that the first united with the other is nothing at all. The pure cognitive breakthrough, C, pure intellectual grasp, also carries a negative connotation for me. It is ultimately far too abstract. That is why metaphysics bores me. Pure concepts, pure numbers—who cares.

The only interesting experience, for me, is the first, A, in which the two polarities appear in relationship and, at best, in union—but not in fusion. Knowledge and feeling are present and remain distinct, each supporting the other.

But this position implies duality and hence is denigrated. In pure idealism or mysticism, monism reigns supreme. In one the intellect, in the other feeling are viewed as illusory. Monisms, invariably, lack all dynamism and life. To have real union, you must first have separation. And this very separation is the womb of life. It spawns the desire for union and the energy whereby the separated strive for union again. If you believe the mystics, this striving terminates in annihilation. My intuition shakes its head. For me each union is but the prelude to another separation, followed by another motion upward in a spiraling ascent.

Knotty Issue - Art

I am not altogether happy with the last post (Art, Spirituality)—another way to put it, that post needs elaboration.  The problems are these:

• The arts require the spiritual dimension, and all those who engage in the arts do, in a sense, borrow the fire of the gods.
• But in the arts, as in everything else, the intention is the determining factor. I noted correctly that art is the language of spirituality, but it can be a borrowed language to speak about more mundane things. At the same time, if will is moved by a perception of the spiritual realm, thus if the artist is obeying the Muse rather than using energies that flow from her to shape some intention directed downward, as it were, the art will still be illuminated from above, but it is the intention which governs the ultimate expression.

These two issues explain why all sorts of arts—commercial, pure entertainment, the fawning art that celebrates power and fame, the arts of propaganda, and quite evil arts intended to gain profit from lower drives are all, by some, classified as art. To the extent that these differentiations are blurred or overlooked, the last entry is incomplete. These are knotty issues. Let me elaborate on each of the two points above.

Borrowed Inspiration

Here is an example. Someone published a novel a couple of decades ago entitled On the Beach. The intention behind this novel was fundamentally political—anti-nukes. Yet it took the form of an artistic creation, with characters and plot. It evoked emotions, used imagination, etc. Now the novel just happened to be relatively undistinguished, but often quite advanced works of art appear, each moved by an agenda drawn from the lower levels of existence. The creative process, no matter what the artist’s intention, is energized by that aspect of ourselves which reaches beyond the here-and-now. Thus it borrows energy to achieve worldly aims. Now, arguably, all human creations have a range of motives in which the lower levels are also present. But great art is distinguished from the ordinary kinds by a motive obeying an attraction from above, aiming to unite with the mysterious higher—not in order to sell or influence anybody but purely for the sake of art, thus purely from a perceived spiritual inspiration. Such art is marked by its orientation. Never mind the details: the substance, the story, the style. The inner orientation is what makes the difference. In these situations nothing is borrowed “in order to.” The work proceeds from love. The pursuit of the arts, in this second form, is a spiritual striving. To be sure it isn’t felt as such because, in our culture, spiritual action is almost always pent up in kennels, as it were. If the activity is not outwardly religious, if it isn’t lit by the lights of dogma, is not intellectually aligned with the religious, and/or is not characterized by various kinds of voluntary self-denial, asceticism, and the like—then it is denied the definition.

The Ambiguity of Art

Such denial is in part very much justified precisely because the category, art, is such a muddled mixture. This is nicely documented by the prevailing the tongue-in-cheek question we’ve all heard used, always with a touch of irony: “Yes. But is it art?” To see art in its two prevailing modes, as serving lower purposes and as a kind of worship, requires adequacy. No arbitrary rules can be applied. To see requires a developed eyesight—and only those who have ears can hear it.

Art, Spirituality

The arts are the language of spirituality, but the complexities involved in this subject—cultural, social, personal, and, alas, commercial—make it difficult to see this. I’ll attempt a little unpacking today. Certainly in my youth the arts were viewed as a kind of rebellion against bourgeois customs. My youth extended from birth to twenty-five, let’s say, thus from 1936 to 1961. But this rebellion or upheaval predated my birth if, say, looking at painting, we see expressionism as an early sign of this collective mood. It goes even farther back if we take Romanticism as the model. It had its roots in the eighteenth century but flourished in the nineteenth. My own view is that the process—we’re talking about the Western Culture by and large—had its origins early in the nineteenth century. It took religious as well as artistic forms, and all of these were, in one way or another, impulses that moved against rationalism as it peaked in the Enlightenment, thus at the divide between the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, marked dramatically by the French Revolution.

The preponderant thrust of rationalism was outward, world-bound, and leveling. It’s ultimate expressions are “All is matter” and “God is dead.” The artistic reaction to this—ignoring the foolish behavior of all young people, including mine when I was young—is to deny and to oppose it. The denial does not automatically translate into an embrace of ritualistic (and never mind dogmatic) religiousness. But what the arts all sustain is something else, something higher, something above, something transcending.

Humanism is a marvelous synthesis of enlightenment thought energized by the new intuition. I always marvel reading, for example, Thomas Mann’s Sufferings and Greatness of the Masters—a book I re-read once a decade, roughly. It is such a splendid example of bridging the chaos between the Enlightenment and what is yet to emerge, a new Age of Faith. I am of the generation, perhaps a precocious member of it, that fully understands the Thomas Manns of the world, my grandfather’s generation, but can already discern the promised land that they could feel but could not intellectually affirm. I am the beneficiary of the dramatic devolution of rationalism into something ugly and destructive. That hadn’t happened yet in the formative years of that generation; and when they lived through the shattering experiences of two World Wars, they still clung to the blended value system that they had fashioned in youth.

Art as rebellion is a youthful gesture, jejune—and perhaps for that reason appealing to the masses. The model of the artist is the Pied Piper not the pitchfork wielding revolutionary who—all too soon—transforms himself into the commissar. In that rebellion is a conflict, it draws the media. Therefore rebellious writers and painters, people who like to exploit shock for fame and money, achieve at least visibility and, if clever, if able to adapt and channel their rebellion, can also achieve wealth.

Real art—which need not always be great art, but certainly great art above all—arises from travelling in the borderzone of life on this earth. It looks like rebellion, at least to some, because it fails to conform to the norms of fossilizing custom. The able artist will strip his work of obvious signs of rebellion, knowing full well that such behavior is posturing. Artistic inspiration is a grace. The artist is an instrument and, once aware of this, intent on making him or herself a fitting means to something mysterious. This is but one layer of an onion; the subject is inexhaustible.

The Householder

The household still figures in a meaningful way in modern statistical measurement (e.g., household income, number of households, etc.), but it has never carried any kind of spiritual connotation. Not so in the East. In Sufi circles, for one, at least in the tradition that I know a little something about, the Naqshbandi, to be a householder is deemed to be the minimum qualification for higher learning, thus for the spiritual path.

This stands in contrast to the Western and some Eastern traditions where higher forms of dedication appear to demand that the seeker abandon the usual life occupations, take up a celibate or ascetic style of living, and devote him- or herself entirely to the pursuit of God. The life of the artist, similarly, is viewed in the same way. Above all, as an artist, do not be bourgeois, for God’s sake! You must pursue a life in garrets, unattached, eccentric, and unpredictable. The nine-to-five is a definite No-No. I’ve always found this amusing in that—as secularization has spread like a brushfire over the last couple of completed centuries—the scribbler, painter, sculptor, musician, dancer, or actor have been required, in an odd sort of way, at least outwardly, to imitate the saint. Only sexual freedom—but to be enjoyed strictly outside the constrictions of marriage—has been granted these not-quite-volunteers to be the secular saints of the West.

When I came across the householder dictum in the writings of Idries Shah—and his writings are, above all, traditional Sufi teachings presented in varied and carefully selected assemblages to the modern Western reader—I felt a sense of confirmation. I’ve always subscribed to idea that hierarchies exist, but never to the notion that you could join them by merely conforming your behavior to some set pattern. Similarly I’ve considered the notion that the artist may be (or to be genuine even must be) an unreliable, unpredictable, irresponsible, and destructive rebel simply ridiculous: as if there is something magical in poems, novels, paintings, etc. that balances out a man fertilizing women at a whim, abandoning them and their children when another whim arises, and his body to alcohol and drugs because spontaneity trumps everything else. Pure, ignorant baloney.

I have always had difficulties with priesthoods—and this despite the fact that I believe in real hierarchies among the living and beyond. Priesthoods are the institutionalization, in effect the reification, of something much more dynamic and mysterious. Priesthoods have a certain functional role to play, alas. This comes home to me looking at the Muslim world. There the Prophet expressly forbade the forming of a priesthood, yet ranks upon ranks of lawyers came to represent that functions, and we have a priesthood there, too, in all but name. I bow to necessity. I’ve no objection to priests as functionaries. I oppose priesthood as the presupposition that a priest has a higher status than, say, a carpenter.

Why the focus on the householder in Sufism? In functional terms the householder is a responsible person who has managed the basic adaptations to the world and to society. One thing at a time. Before a person aspires to a higher level, she or he ought to be mistress or master of the fundamentals. This is very good doctrine, it seems to me, and equally pertinent to the would-be artist.

The Journal: A Tool of Contemplation

In my experience keeping a journal is one of the most valuable tools for contemplation. But a word about that word: certain words have awkward shadows. By contemplation I simply mean a centered inner state, balance, calm, and clarity. It might be put into the language of martial arts and called readiness; in that category readiness is also means emptiness. Nothing interferes with the steady look at reality as it is. I also like the word “sovereign,” used as an adjective, because in a state of contemplation we feel above the fray but not superior to it in a down-the-nose sort of way, just above it, ready to act, able to refrain, mistress or master of the self.

A contemplative journal is not a record of what I did yesterday. To-do lists are much more efficient for tracking. The point of an inner journal is to help me become aware. Its subject matter, in my case, is often something that troubles, irritates, or exercises me. I look at that and examine why I’m agitated. In due time—usually about a page of handwritten material later—the problem begins to sort. Another half-page later, calm begins to manifest. The irritation has receded. I see it clearly now. My various internal constituencies have calmed down. I am aware of the sources of my anxiety. These are almost always reflexive and therefore unexamined reactions. They combine and produce a collective shouting. I examine the matter with awareness, like an Inspector General, uninvolved. Then I see why I was reacting, see the point or pointlessness of it. If there is a point, I can jot it on a to-do list. In nine cases of ten, the root of irritation is something minor or unimportant—as seen under the species of eternity.

I don’t use the valuable time of journal writing—best done first thing in the morning—for tackling intellectual, analytical problems. Those are best done when I’m already “present.” Intellectualizing has no effect on inner states unless the activity is difficult enough so that it really deepens concentration. The process of journal-keeping serves me to clear away useless or energy-consuming “states”; states, in this context, are moods, preoccupations, emotionally-toned anticipations, anxieties—but also feelings of triumphalism (“Just wait till I tell him that! I can hardly wait to see the confusion on the bastard’s face.”). Upcoming events have a way of throwing a shadow backward from the future—even relatively minor events, e.g., having to go to the dentist for a cleaning or a checkup. These shadows disturb my equilibrium. Big meetings, trips, presentations—indeed any and all occurrences that in some way involve the self, disturb routine, or offer opportunities for momentary failure or success. These shadows are like strings—and I’m the puppet. But I want that feeling of sovereignty. From within that feeling, I am not at all concerned with the outcome. I am above it. I’m in a state of readiness. Que sera, sera. And I feel that without any kind of accompanying resignation or reservations. That is sovereignty, and looking at the day to come in that state, focusing on the up-boil of emotion-laced mental contents, until I see them objectively—that is the real value of journal-keeping of this kind.

These practices, to be sure, demand that we already have an effective cosmology. We must see ourselves as capable of worth. We must see ourselves as intended by something higher than ourselves; we must know, even if temporarily we don’t feel it, that we are empowered to be self-governing souls by our creator. If we seek our own worth in the very turbulence that we are fighting, we will merely (to change the metaphor) stir the pot. Nothing will change. We may just work ourselves into a greater fury or depression. We must become aware of hard rock beneath or steel within our own spine. In the Unity movement (but it is just one example), negation and affirmation are recommended. We must deny every lower manifestation of the mind, every associational stream attempting to suck us back into the problem; we must affirm our transcending origin and destiny. With practice and with time, the stable of Augias will be cleared of manure, even if we have to reroute a river to get the job done. Thereafter, things will improve if we keep returning to the inner silence that we can produce by the right application of attention—in this practice expressed as words on paper.

Public journals—blogs are today’s best example—do not serve this function. They are means of communication in which an audience is always at least potentially present. Journal-keeping is not communication. It is more akin to housecleaning or taking inventory. In many traditions mirrors are used as a symbol. Cleaning the mirror is the object—so that it is capable of reflecting the higher light. Windows work as a good symbol too. Life’s dust and grime obscure them. But the sun shines beyond the pane if we attack the surface with Windex, that favorite of mine.

The Contemplative Life

The last three weeks in my own life illustrate the reason why, in every culture, contemplative orders or aggregations have come into being and still persist despite the violent churn of Modernity around the globe. A sudden up-surge of work caused me to turn my head away from blogging—and the blog that I neglected most was Borderzone. We live in a layered environment in which the most demanding is the lowest level, the physical; the social is next; we will neglect it when we are ill or injured; and we neglect the one above that, the mental and the spiritual, when turbulence draws our attention downward.

I was editing novels I wrote about ten years ago to prepare them for publication. These books are not exactly time-bound in that they deal with an imagined future, and if anything has changed in the outer world since about 2000-2001, it has merely confirmed the trends that I used in my sagas as the base of my projections into the twenty-first century and beyond. But the effort to pummel these works into shape had to be done in the eternal Now, and my attention pulled me well in-land and away from the borderzone.

The men and women who formed and still inhabit the zone of contemplation, to give it a novel name, scorned the kinds of self-centered motives that make me wish to see my work enjoyed by others. For this reason they created environments for themselves in which “the world” was walled off to the maximum extent.

This has some curious aspects. One is that I wrote these novels while I held a demanding job and typically worked about 10 hours a day, not counting two hours of commuting. The writing itself, then, was a form of contemplative activity. It energized me and kept me sane. I used to carve out the time in the early morning, rising at 4 a.m. to write until 7. Contemplation is not, repeat NOT idle musing and idyllic walks. It is creative work. Its chief outer manifestation is concentration, but with the mind and heart in an invisible dimension. This is as true of writing as of sculpting—or cooking, or singing, or scientific work. The other aspect I would touch upon is that the contemplatives typically do a great deal of work, but they set boundaries to it, keep it as routine as possible, and pursue it in a structured manner. Some historians assign virtually all credit for the agricultural restoration of Europe to St. Benedict (480-547), at a time when the shattering of the Roman Empire and wide-spread depopulation had allowed large tracts of Europe to grow wild. In due course, the monastic orders, of which the first was the Benedictine, slowly accumulated immense wealth that, as other historians suggest, was the capital that Europe seized to underwrite the Industrial Revolution. In other words, not mere musing and idyllic walks with the occasional holding out of a begging bowl. But this sort of thing is not taught in our grade- and high-schools, therefore it comes as a surprise to some.

Indeed the contemplative life is not the contradiction of action, per se. But it has a very conscious and sophisticated view of action and thus harnesses its power more effectively. My own short-comings as a contemplative were demonstrated in the last several weeks. I allowed the excitement caused by revisiting my vivid imaginary worlds to break my usual routines. Live and learn. It’s possible at all ages. Indeed trying to do so is a sign of youth. A neighbor passed on to me just the other day a wise old saying that I hadn’t heard before: “If you want to stay young, keep going uphill.”

The Experience of Helen Keller

Self-observation tells us that consciousness manifests in many forms. Sharp self-awareness is rather rare. In times of stress and trouble, during infatuations, during illness, disasters, or after winning a sizeable lottery—while daydreaming, watching TV, musing at the wheel, and even doing habitual work—the self is in various states of identification. For all practical purposes, it is one with, unified with, its own experience. The sense of self is vaguely present at all times, but the consciousness of the self is dormant. It requires concentration to take control. “I had to get a hold of myself,” people say—but indicating what? They mean that they had to break the identification and become aware. With consciousness fully present—rather than held captive by experience—directed action becomes possible. Arguably a principal difference between people is the degree to which they are able effectively to detach. The word is paradoxical because, in this context, to be detached is to be present, whereas to be identified means that the self is absent in a state of semi-sleep. Shocks awaken people.

The Case

To illustrate the thesis I present the fascinating case of Helen Keller (1880-1968). Keller lost her sight and hearing in an illness at the age of 19 months. She was beginning to learn to speak, was imitating phrases that she heard. She had also learned the word for water and remembered it (as “wah-wah”) throughout her painful period of mental darkness. Thus her acquisition of language had at least begun, if only barely. Then she fell into a world of total silence and darkness. It is clear from her autobiography that she was conscious in a way—but conscious in the way I’ve labeled as identification. She felt a need to communicate and tried to do so with some success by using signs and gestures—pushing, pulling, imitating the motions of cutting bread to get bread, and so on. She felt powerful frustrations. And she enjoyed sensory experiences using her remaining powers of movement, smell, and touch. But full consciousness dawned in her only as she was approaching her seventh birthday. This happened while she felt the flow of water on one hand as her teacher, Anne Sullivan, spelled out the word for water with finger-motions on Helen’s other hand. Suddenly Helen understood. This was a revolutionary and dramatic experience for her! As soon as she had understood that a certain pattern of finger-touches stood for water—and that the experience of water thus had a name—her heroic and splendid career began. She had been enabled to experience abstraction. As she put it later, “The mystery of language was revealed to me.”

Discussion

Let us ponder this mystery, the mystery of naming. It consist of the association of two radically different phenomena with one another. In Keller’s case the two were the flow of water and a series of touches. Her mind made the conjunction: this is that. Her power of consciousness grasped this difference and sameness. But the association was presented to her by another person, and repeatedly, until Keller “got it.”

Keller’s experience, of course, was of a fundamental type, akin to something like the taste of chocolate. To convey what any taste actually is using words alone comes down to empty gesturing unless the other party shares the experience. But if the other does, just naming it suffices. In Keller’s case, one cannot say much more than simply to assert that such an association, between this and that, is obviously possible; we’ve all experienced it. But why then was this particular experience so revolutionary in Helen Keller’s case? During her long period of silence and darkness, she had already begun to use a kind of language—a language of motions. Why did her pushing (to signal “go away”) and pulling (to signal “come”)—and the discovery that these signs got appropriate responses—not give her the grand experience of understanding that a signed word gave her later?

My guess is that the discovery, the mystery of language, is the discovery of abstraction—but also that abstraction really points at something more than merely “abbreviation.” The motions she used earlier were such abbreviations, but they didn’t give her that moment of Aha! It seems that the abstract points to or reveals some aspect of another reality which, by means of the abstraction itself, suddenly becomes perceivable. Thus the emotion Keller felt came from the sudden opening to the dimension of Intelligence. In her own report, she spoke of having a feeling of suddenly remembering something long forgotten. Pushing and pulling were too closely associated with the physical facts of go-away, come-hither to serve the purpose of abstraction. The word “water” spelled with fingers, however, did have this alien quality of otherness and therefore its magical effect. The finger-spelling was radically different from the flow of water Keller actually felt on her other hand. An effort of inner linking took place. A new world opened.

The word “symbol” derives from the Greek word meaning “sign.” Language provides an alternative world of signs for every conceivable aspect of reality. By its very nature, language is arbitrary, illustrated by the fact that humanity uses many different languages. This quality, this arbitrary assignment of this for that, where the this has no resemblance whatever to the that, demands a corresponding motion or act by the perceiving intelligence, a perceptive act. When this act takes place effectively, the self awakens to a power dormant until then. The mystery of language, therefore, appears to be its power to evoke a recognition of meaning.

Curiously the perception of meaning, like the taste of chocolate, is a primordial experience we can’t describe. In a manner of speaking we acquire meanings long before we do. For most of us the recognition of abstraction is not an explosive experience, as it was for Helen Keller. Meaning is intrinsically associated with naming. For the child, early on, a table covered with objects is just a sensory landscape without meaning until the child discovers that that red object over there is called a “cup.” Once the object and the symbol are connected, the cup has meaning even as all the other stuff remains a landscape. “Buckle, Mami,” one of my daughters used to say in her crib, still tiny. She meant her bottle. Her hunger, her desire to have some milk, had been resolved into a clear meaning with a name. She had acquired a power more discriminating and efficient than simply crying.

Language awakens intelligence by separating the self and its surroundings (including its internal experiences like pain or pleasure) into a triad of relationships: there is the self, there is the object, and there is its abstract representation—its meaning. And meaning, to be sure, is a deeper concept than mere abstraction. Using that representation, the child can understand the object and, in turn, manipulate it in the mind itself and in communication with others. But using this insight, the self itself becomes an object of thought. An inchoate sensation becomes me; me becomes Jane, initially. Later, more ceremoniously, the last name is added: me becomes Jane Xavier.

Now the chief lesson I draw from this case is that language is a tool, a means. The capacity for understanding must be present and is innate. It isn’t language that produces intelligence but intelligence that manifests by using a tool. And once the tool is present, the powers of the intelligence are able to expand.