The Origin of Mind

If mind does not arise from matter, its origin becomes a metaphysical question by definition and hence escapes empirical proof. Mind is a phenomenon in the original sense of that word, meaning a fact or an event (from the Greek “to show”), but mind is not a phenomenon in the restrictive modern sense meaning something knowable by the senses rather than by thought or intuition. Positive science can only study phenomena it can access by light, contact, chemical, or electromagnetic means. Hence, to use a common analogy, it can only study the radio and never the meaning of the newscast that comes across the airwaves: the brain but not the mind. In similar fashion science can study metabolism and enzymes but cannot come to grip with life itself. It treats both mind and life as emergent phenomena, another word I’d rather render as “transcendent,” meaning that the phenomena cannot be reached by instruments.

Looking at mind in this way suggests that our most fundamental experience of life, being here and knowing that we are, cannot be studied or understood by methods that produce anything but subjective certainties. The operation of the will is a fundamental aspect of the mind. Not surprisingly, therefore, some portion of humanity will always disagree with what might be a common consensus of humanity. The human view of gravity is quite uniform by contrast for the simple reason that those who defy it tend to depart.

Here we have a situation where we know, in a way, but not in another. It’s a common human ailment. Some few have very strong and vivid experiences of transcendental states, but the rest of us must rely on an intuitive judgment of the traditional explanations and then go from there. What are these explanations?

To look at these it is best to stop using “mind” and using “soul” or “self” instead. Tradition prefers these latter expressions. The traditions divide into two big streams. There are many others, but two serve to illustrate the human consensus.

In one, the tradition principally of the West, the soul originates in God and departs in a manner of speaking to live in the midst of the creation. It is destined ultimately to return once more to God. The West thus sees a process of descent followed by an ascent, a cycle of existence with God, away from God, and then once more united. Such a description must not be understood too literally—as if God had a location. The intent here is to indicate a subjective experience of distance even if, as we used to recite in our Unity congregation, “There is no spot where God is not.” In this tradition God creates the soul at a point in time and, as it were, in the form of a seed that must develop through its experiences which, ultimately, result in the completion of the cycle.

The other stream of tradition, exemplified by Hindu beliefs, sees each soul as an emanation from the divine Self, identical to but still a separated part of the divine. It plunges into the lower depths of the creation and, doing so, becomes occluded—but also able to experience itself in new ways by means precisely of this delimitation. The soul occupies a vast range of different bodies in this process until it has shaken off its illusion of limitation and once more becomes one with the Self—thus returns to itself. This too is a descent and an ascent. The difference here lies principally in the definition of the soul. In Hindu beliefs the higher aspect of the soul is God. In the Western tradition, the soul is a creature.

A stark summary such as the above helps the mind focus on the question before us, the origin of mind. A vast literature surrounds these simple descriptions spinning fantastic accounts that elaborate the fundamental idea—which is simply that mind, in both cases, originates in the highest form of being imaginable by a human…mind. In the Western case this mind of ours is formed in the “image and likeness” of its Creator. In the Eastern version, it is the Creator limiting itself deliberately in order to experience its own creation. There is an arbitrary element present in both versions. In one God creates because—well, because he does. In the other the divine Self shrouds itself voluntarily in order to experience. This arbitrary element, however, is strongly present in us as well—and should therefore not surprise us.

The striking aspect of this view of origins is that the human mind, when it looks out at the chaos of the cosmos, when it strains in order to understand what it is and how it might have come about, sees, on looking, an image of itself writ large.

Can Mind Emerge from Matter?

The question is equivalent to asking whether or not anything useful can appear by accident. On the surface it might appear so. If a steady drop hollows the stone, as the German proverb has it, nature might form a nice-enough spoon by hammering one end of a narrow stone with droplets long enough. But the object wouldn’t be a spoon until some mind recognized the utility of that shape and at one stroke transformed that hollowed stone into a tool. Yet this transformation wouldn’t actually change the stone physically. It is the mind that does this transformation, this re-purposing as modern usage has it.

Implicit in the very concept of utility produced by chance is that some agency must recognize the utility of an object. Until that happens, the object is simply a fact of nature without meaning. Chance hasn’t produced anything useful yet. The object is thus in an order of indifference. When a utility is discovered in it, it comes to coexist, as well, in an order of purposes and meanings.

The difference between a consciously produced object (A) and one formed by accident (B) is that, in the case of A, A’s future useful function guides its very production. In the case of B a function is discovered after an unconscious process that had no intention whatsoever.

In the evolutionary scheme of origins, mind must be material by definition. It must be a function of the brain. The brain is a chemical machine the parts of which—and the convergence and proper linkage of the parts—had to come about by random events of a chemical nature. In this scheme utility is defined by advantages accruing to the individual in whom the changes take place. That individual is more likely to reproduce than another unluckier creature that lacks those advantages.

In this scheme useful innovation takes place entirely without any other agency than the fact that changes produce advantages in reproduction; by this means they aid the survival of the species.

What’s wrong with this picture? Well, it mixes things up a little bit. The picture presented is actually the same as the picture of the drop-hollowed stone. Concepts such as “advantage” and “survival” are not actually present in the naturalistic description of our origins. We’ve introduced those from the outside. Such ideas properly belong in the order of purpose and meaning. If the life process is an extension of the chemical behavior of matter, we cannot really speak about advantages or of survival; we can only talk about outcomes. It is only from our perspective that survival is a value. It is a judgment, a hierarchical ordering of outcomes entirely missing in nature.

What we are facing here is the improbability of deriving from one order (Y) the emergence of another order (Z). If Y does not already contain or possess Z, it cannot produce it. We want the material and specifically the chemical order to produce the order of purpose and of meaning. But in the material we only ever encounter necessity and chance. Here, of course, I’m leaving the whole subject of life as such entirely unexplored. I’m merely pointing out that you cannot derive perception, thought, will, and imagination from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on.

Attempts to do so ultimately rely on the invocation of complexity. It is the modern way of naming the order of meaning and of purpose. Complexity, however, is ultimately only the very intricate arrangement of the same old components. Complexity theory therefore, logically speaking, demands our acceptance of a magical element that simply “emerges” when enough of the same old chemicals are rearranged intricately enough. No explanation of this emergence is ever provided. Thus no one is ready to say why and how the last element linked to the whole would cause it suddenly to burst into consciousness. We are asked to take it on faith. It’s an empirical observation. Really? Before we take that leap of faith, however, another earlier one is required. We must first accept that only the material is actually real.

Mind

It is astonishing, indeed revealing, what a lot of meanings a word like mind leaves in our dictionary—and meanings it leaves out. In Webster’s Collegiate (my 1967 copy) the word is defined as recollection, memory, an element (in individuals), conscious events and capabilities (in organisms), intention, desire, a condition (of mental faculties), opinion, view, disposition, and mood. There are other more derivative meanings in addition.

Concerning the definition of mind given above as an element, the exact words are these: “the element or complex of elements in individuals that feels, perceives, thinks, wills, and esp. reasons.” In this context element may be taken to mean a part or a function. In any case it is something that acts in certain ways.

The Latin root hidden deep under Old English and East and West Germanic derivations is mens, already meaning “mind.” The root of the Latin is the Greek menos meaning spirit. In romance languages like French the ancient meaning is carried forward; mind is esprit. In German the term is Geist; the word also means ghost or spirit. In German other words, including “soul,” are used as equivalents, the majority being narrower aspects of the mind. Hungarians, who speak my mother tongue, translate the English mind by using thirteen different words eleven of which, much as in our own definitions, are simply functions of consciousness; the two remaining words used are one that is “mind” as a single entity; the other one is “soul” or “spirit.”

Although we, as English-speakers, use the mind to include its richer connotations of something transcendent, our dictionaries are more piously coy and avoid linking mind and spirit except in often-skipped recitals of etymology. It’s slightly indecent in secular times even to suggest that something like “spirit” may be related to the mind, hence the use of words like “element”; it has a safely material connotation. The modern mind! This reminds me of Theodore Dalrymple’s tongue-in-cheek definition of murder as “The knife went in.” You can find the story here. The knife went in, perhaps, because the element decided that another martini wouldn’t hurt…

I turn to dictionaries as I turn to the media—not in order to discover authoritative truth but to find raw materials from which the truth might be built up with effort.

Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that the ultimate proof of transcendence is found in consciousness—by means of the power of the mind to reason. An example of the line of thought one tends to pursue is expertly presented by one of my favorites, the Maverick Philosopher, here. Webster’s element, ultimately, must be defined as an agent, the very owner of the mind itself; the mind is one of this agent’s capabilities.

Ears That Hear

One of the more interesting philosophical questions—for me, at any rate—is how people get their fundamental stance. By fundament stance I mean their structure of beliefs. Here, of course, I’m principally interested in a subset of the population that engages in the subject rather than merely adopting a position more or less by passive acculturation. This distinction may not be important, however: virtually everyone makes choices and feels leanings.

On the one side we have people—on offer over against them are structures of belief. To keep it simple the big ones are Monism and Dualism. Monistic structures may be materialist or idealist. I would class Pantheism as a monism. The dualistic systems are all, almost by definition, transcendentalist. By that I mean that a dualist believes in two radically different realities, usually labeled matter and spirit; the dualist holds both to be genuine, real, and coexisting in the human form.

I myself strongly lean to the belief that innate sensitivities and intellectual powers, acting in combination, determine a person’s “fundamental stance.” I know, I know. This position, unpacked a little, sounds rather Calvinistic. A Hindu-style karmic belief is also compatible with my hunch. Applying that logic, we might say that a person’s karmic burden may make that person more open or opaque. To give yet another possibility, a “developmental” model of soul formation would be compatible with this notion of innate endowment—provided that we see souls cycling through this lower dimension gradually acquiring the powers to transcend it. In any case, ordinary observation seems strongly to support my view. Some people just don’t get it, as it were—but all other things are equal. Some who “get it” act wretchedly anyway—and many who don’t are exemplars of morality. This is an observation about talents, not about morality.

To emphasize the last point, it would seem that all people are going in the same direction (upward, in the dualist view) but the felt conscious awareness of this process is rather vague, dull, or muted in some—sharp, painful, and clear in others. Whether the individual actually makes progress along the vector is not determined by the innate feeling but by something else. Thus absolute determinism is actually foiled—but a process strongly influenced by elements of chance (such as body-type, genetics, circumstances) is allowed.

Left to the Poets

All communications ultimately rely on shared experience, and if the experience is subtle, making it known turns problematical; one can’t rely on adequacy in the listener. The world to which Henry Corbin points, the mundus imaginalis, is actually accessible to us, but our experiences of it, especially if they are mild (as mostly they tend to be), we routinely class as mere emotions; we mislabel and dismiss them.

Corbin himself, writing in preface to his Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, writes as follows about the imaginal realm:

…the fact remains that between the sense perceptions and the … categories of the intellect there has remained a void [in modern times]. That which ought to have taken its place between the two, and which in other times and places did occupy this intermediate space, that is to say the Active Imagination, has been left to the poets.

The poetic and the spiritual are rarely conflated for the simple reason that we class “spiritual” perceptions with religious piety whereas we place the “poetic” in a mental region marked with the sign of Eros; Eros we classify as an inhabitant of the sensate dimension. Herein lies a vast potential for misunderstanding.

The poetically-gifted (in my language “poetic” includes all of the arts) are our most experienced travelers in the imaginal world, not, to be sure, because “imagination” is often involved in the creative arts but because these arts draw their sustenance entirely from the “third” world that Corbin claims modernity has written off. Here the potential for misunderstanding is even more marked. If we select, say, ten novels from the library entirely at random, running through the fiction aisles, maybe with some special luck we’ll manage to pick up one book strongly marked by the poetic spirit. The rest will all be mere entertainment, indeed ordinary secular works. Artistic talent and poetic gifts don’t always coincide. The greats are not always fluent, the clever are rarely poets. Here that common phrase applies: “I know it when I see it.”

There is a Sufi saying that “The mystery hides itself.” This applies with special force to the genuine products of the poetic power. Only those who have ears will hear. The perception remains always private and cannot be socialized—another way of saying that it cannot be conveyed unless the hearer is himself, herself able to hear the message.

Henry Corbin

Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was a great, original, but obscure French philosopher, no doubt the most searching interpreter of Iranian religious culture to the West in the twentieth century—but by no means restricted to that scope. Most of his writings are centered on Mazdaism and Shi’ite Islam. A truly excellent introduction to Corbin is Tom Cheetham’s The World Turned Inside Out. That book, as I’m sure Cheetham himself would agree, is a mere introduction to Corbin, much as Corbin’s entire opus is itself but an introduction to a vast cultural treasure no one can casually absorb. Great obscurity—but equally great splendors—await those who enter here.

Corbin is perhaps best known for introducing the concept of the imaginal world, what he labeled the mundus imaginalis. Not to be confused with the imaginary or with the fantastic, Corbin placed this realm in an intermediate cosmic space between the world of matter and the world of pure intellect, a plane of visionary experience, to which our access is by means of a power Corbin associated with the true imagination, Paracelsus’ imaginatio vera, a visionary power Paracelsus placed in the heart. A culture that cannot recognize this faculty in man and does not help it to develop is doomed to a flat cosmic landscape and an existence polarized between sensory perception and intellectual speculation, unaware of a vertical orientation that gives meaning to existence.

I came across Corbin in an odd way. I was reading an article in Arcana: Inner Dimensions of Spirituality, a journal centered on Swedenborg’s teachings. It occurred to me that Swedenborg’s experiences and those of the twelfth-thirteenth century Ibn el-Arabi had a great many parallels. I sent an e-mail to Leonard Fox, then the editor of Arcana, and suggested that someone ought to be commissioned to write an article on this linkage. Fox answered by suggesting that I read Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam by Henry Corbin, which Fox himself had translated from French into English. I’d never heard of Corbin before. For me this was a significant discovery—and the recommended book my introduction. The first half of the book is titled Mundus Imaginalis—thus I began at the most crucial node of Corbin’s own teachings.

An excellent general-purpose entry point for anyone is Cheetham’s website entitled The Legacy of Henry Corbin.

The Roots of Dualism

In consciousness the presentation of content must be viewed as separate from the perception of content. William James does that, in effect, by discussing the role of attention. The materialistic mode of thought, however, by speaking of attention rather than of the soul or the self, obscures what in effect can be seen as a radical duality. James himself (in Talks to Teachers) rejects the possibility that consciousness can be the consequence of mechanical processes. In this context he means the composite of presentation and perception. The nature of whatever it is that bestows attention to the flow of consciousness is altogether inaccessible to observation, as James himself notes. That this whatever picks and chooses what to notice and what to neglect is the basis for the faculty we call the will. James holds for a free will but thinks that its freedom cannot be proved. To lean in one direction or the other is itself a choice.

The traditional approaches to the mind are based on a narrative of reality in which responsibility is central. In effect you cannot have a meaningful narrative without real characters, thus agents. Agents without freedom of will cannot claim to be agents. Whatever cosmic narrative we choose, the characters within it must have freedom of choice. They need very little else. Angelic communities may rebel, for instance, and this alongside a presumption that they are immaterial. You might say that from the traditional perspective the fact that humans have bodies is almost incidental to their core being. In that agency must have free choice and free choice cannot be conceptualized without understanding of the choices before the agent, the very notion of agency includes consciousness and will in a single complex; you cannot remove one without negating the other.

The content of consciousness must be separate from the act of perception if language is to correspond to reality in any meaningful way. When I say "I am aware of XYZ," I'm positing two distinct phenomenal realities. One is awareness and the other is XYZ. Aquinas argued that the self cannot become aware of itself except by its acts. We can examine this assertion by pondering Franklin Merrell-Wolff's notion of consciousness-without-an-object, M-W's idea of the absolute. That phrase is without meaning. Consciousness-without-an-object is akin to the paradoxical concept of Aristotle's potential, a capacity out there in some ontological limbo without actuality.

In this relationship I discern a fundamental dualism beneath reality. If consciousness is, something else must be there too. The object seen cannot at the same time be the object that sees. Once we accept this, we have a reasonable basis for looking at reality. We have minimal orientation. Neither a materialistic nor a pure idealistic position is tenable. The materialistic view denies the reality of an agency. The idealistic denies the reality of anything over against the agency; it treats everything as a mirage produced by the mind.

Cosmic Models

When we imagine myths of the world, even one of a small part of it, the tale must match the subject. Now any one human life certainly fits the personal scale, but it cannot be viewed except in a broader context: we all live our lives embedded in history’s flow. I was a small pebble but rolled along by the enormous weather of the twentieth century. You cannot reach a moderately educated level unaware of history’s depth or nature’s incredible complexity.

Whatever the human story, it is a vast tale of great moment and scope and cannot be reduced to simple concepts. In effect reality, even the portions of it we can see, cannot be fitted to a line of logic; it requires a saga at the least. To say that much is also to admit that we cannot really know the big picture in the full. It’s damnably difficult even to know a small part of the physical world. I recall one of my incarnations and remember how little we know about something like cement—and we know a lot about it.

This by way of commentary on models of reality. The philosophical attempts that come close to being satisfying have an architectural character or depict a dynamic process, usually triadic. Monistic systems tend to be rather pathetic because they have no point.

The Aristotelian scheme, completed by Thomas Aquinas, is a static structure built up out of the duality of matter and form. These may be rendered as the potential and the actual or, in other phrasing, the virtually nonexistent (unformed matter) and absolute Being, pure form or actuality, God. “Potential” is one of those wonderfully ambiguous concepts; it exists in a way but in another “not yet.” The Thomistic system ultimately feels incoherent; it has matter but doesn’t really need it. In a cosmos where immaterial beings exist, materiality requires some kind of justification; the theory doesn’t justify it. To be coherent this philosophy requires that duality be extended upward (ever more subtle matter to match ever more exalted spirit) or spirit must be extended downward (matter is thus densified spirit).

Taoism is a triadic, dynamic system in that it provides a creative and receptive (Yang, Yin) which account for the dynamism of the Tao. As a description of reality the Tao is flawless: freedom and necessity in motion forming an unnamable third which is their origin and their expression. The Tao is the ultimate cosmic building kit. You find it hidden beneath just about every cosmology ever made. It’s there in Aristotle, Yin being matter, Yang being form. At it is, however, it requires enormous restraint simply to accept as is. People are tempted to elaborate.

Monistic systems take one or the other of the two elements of Tao and exclude the other. There is Schopenhauer’s Will—which is everything. There is materialism’s Matter—ditto.

The philosophies, however, ultimate stop short of meaning. There is no personality here—although in systems where it’s introduced, it is the Yang. The great sagas introduce meaning by way of a drama in which the two are in conflict for one or several cosmic ages. We are usually minor participants, sometimes at the center (as in Christianity). And our fates are part of the greater history of a vast heavenly turbulence.

The really effective cosmologies—such as, for instance, the fable of the Island—provide a story that goes beyond our direct experience in order to explain its intuited origins and its felt continuation beyond death, but do not attempt to lay down an absolute and final meaning for the entire process. Our inner guidance actually rejects a final explanation. Our intuition (mine anyway) says that the ultimate picture is not knowable from our perspective.

The Fable of the Island

The Gnostic idea is almost never contemplated by modern people realistically, not even by those with a transcendental bent. The chief reason for that, perhaps, is that the organic world is too well made to assign it to a bumbling demiurge. At the same time there is pattern in nature which, alas, suggests the—natural. It is therefore difficult to see Nature as the creation of an all-knowing and perfect craftsman. There is too much reliance in it on chance and circumstance. It is for this very reason that in Catholic tradition, anyway, the Fall of the world is stipulated in order so that we can have it both ways. This tradition envisions the “original” creation as perfect. The “natural” world comes about later as the consequence of the Fall. Concerning the Fall we might paraphrase Voltaire and say that if it hasn’t happened we’d have to invent it. Pick any period in history at random and you will see a clear madness overshadowing human reality. Meanwhile the natural world retains its sanity and innocence while also displaying a maddening ambiguity: unconscious consciousness, unaware wisdom, blind teleology. For a quick capsule of Gnosticism, look here.

Idries Shah offers what he calls a fable in The Sufis (Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964) vaguely reminiscent of the Gnostic myth but quite different in thrust. It depicts a fall, but in a different way—as a necessary adaptation. I count myself a friend and admirer of the Sufi tradition—drawn in its direction precisely by such formulations as Shah’s fable of the Island. Shah proposes—not as a factual situation but as a framework for thought—that humanity might be pictured as a community living in a much more perfect state. Its leader foresaw a change coming about which would cause the community’s habitation to be unusable for an extended period of time. In consequence a new place, an Island, is found as the home for the community, but with conditions such that the individuals must undergo a radical transformation to survive in the new environment. These adaptive transformations are so profound that return to the more favorable climes of the motherland requires a long and arduous process. The community moves from a subtle and superior world to a coarser and grainier reality; to make the process easier on people, most members are caused to forget the original country except in the vaguest sort of way; they’re shielded from the past to lessen their pain of loss. There is a good deal more to the fable, but this much will suffice here. Naturally I would suggest that people read the book—at least its first chapter, where the fable is presented.

Unlike most myths, Shah’s fable avoids producing a full-blown cosmology. What he presents (at least as I interpret it) is a picture of large scale interactions between dimensional realms—interactions severe enough so that their inhabitants must adapt themselves to unwished-for events. The fable works as an explanatory framework under certain assumptions. One is that many communities of beings exist, thus a vast concourse of freedom. The communities live in similarly many environments, the environments themselves subject to lawful changes: a realm of necessity. Shah leaves untouched how all of these communities and environments might relate to one another. Suffice it to say, simply, that freedom and necessity, in interaction, can produce major changes requiring adaptation; and some of these will be better than others.

We might call this a modified Gnostic myth—or a modernized, secularized Gnostic tale. Instead of an errant aeon called Sophia, the cause of the world’s fall from a level of subtle sophistication and deep purpose to a much coarser level of materiality and chance is explained in terms of something like climate change (in an era when that phrase did not have modern connotations of global warming). But never mind. This fable also depicts a fall, and that’s really my point: some kind of a fall must be assumed. The negative aspect of the Fall is required by the “natural” arrangement of things; our world is far from perfect. The presumed higher origin (the higher region from which we fell) is required by the presence here of consciousness and intelligence. I myself consider the doctrine of intelligence as an “emergent form of matter” ridiculous because logically insupportable—really a form of magic. For those who can accept the modern Big Bang theory without unease (I myself am very uneasy about it), the Big Bang might actually represent a factual underpinning that weird things happen in the cosmos out there.

This fable-making is really a balancing act. You have to admire nature, meaning organic nature; you cannot go to the lengths Gnostics went and simply dismiss all of it; we know too much to agree with that sentiment. What Shah’s fable does is to introduce a neutral point of departure (disturbance of our habitation) and a creative response to it by an already conscious community. Indeed the “island” might be viewed as a very good symbol for the Earth. Not a lot of places in the material cosmos are suitable for life. The cause for the evil we experience as genuine evil, meaning willful evil, is ignorance produced by the occultations of a new habitation. The price we pay for a reasonable fable is to defer grander explanations to another time. There is no explanation here of how either the community or its environment originated. And even that is justified: Why should we presume total knowledge of everything in our community of being? Especially while, as Shah would have us see, our job now is to make it back again from our temporary abode on the Island to the lands where we originated.