Life: Some "Weird" Speculation

Seriously entertaining really weird ideas has the merit, minimally, of stimulating the mind. The notion that life may be an intrusion into matter from some other order is such an idea. The initial reaction is: “Ridiculous.” We have a powerful pair of feelings: One is that life is precious and must be preserved at all cost; the other is that life can be lost.

That life itself is necessarily linked to living bodies is powerfully reinforced by observing death—and the consequent disappearance of people we know. This is the overwhelming evidence. Where is grandma? Common sense urges us to acknowledge the facts. Anyone attempting to build another case bears a huge burden of proof. The countering indicators are subjective, meaning that unless we have the experience ourselves, we must credit reports. The very strength with which we cling to bodily life supports the skeptical opinion that any belief in surviving death is wishful thinking—laudable, perhaps, engendered in us by evolution itself to make us fight better and longer, but ultimately an illusion.

Having now made the case for the conventional view, we might be safe enough to consider something weird. Suppose reality is much more rationally organized than we think it is. Suppose that at least two orders exist, an order of matter and an order of souls, and that analogous laws govern each. Let’s assume that conservation laws exist in both realms; here it is the conservation of matter, mass, and energy; there it is the conservation, let us say, of life, consciousness, and individual identity. Each of these orders has its appropriate meaning and justification. What these are is knowable, but not necessarily by us. They’re knowable by something that stands above them. This something would ultimately be God, but quite possibly higher intelligences than ours may also be present in a hierarchy of beings and worlds.

Someone might object here and say that such a formulation isn’t very weird. An ordered hierarchy of being can be found in the Aristotelian/Thomistic, in the Neoplatonic, and in other traditions as well. Granted. Let me then introduce a weird element now.

Let’s suppose that one order of reality intrudes into another. This may be possible because in some sense the orders may “touch” … or because a higher order can perceive a lower but not the other way around … or because either one can influence the other in certain ways. In the last case the lower may limit the higher and the higher may enhance the lower. If souls inhabit a realm of relative freedom—whereas matter is governed by relative necessity—it may be possible that souls are either tempted to explore a lower world or may become entangled in it.

Tempted to explore: Let us suppose here that the material world is perceived and while its character is very strange indeed, curiosity draws souls to enter into it even though dangers are sensed. Here the contact is assumed to be entirely voluntary.

Become entangled in: This situation may come about because the arrangement of the different orders produces “border zones” as it were. The lawful behavior of each order may produce what might be labeled naturalistic situations where, from a conscious perspective, “accidents” can happen. Thus, for instances, random events may take place under the influence of the material order or the material order may be temporarily deformed by contact with a conscious order in which collective will may bend the laws of matter. The entanglement may be involuntary. Or it may take place because of carelessness—the absence of attention, the disregard of warning, neglectful behavior.

We need three assumptions to make this weird speculation plausible. The first is that two orders, although different in kind, must nevertheless be able to influence each other. Thus they must have something in common. The second is that one of the orders must be free in some way but limited in others. The third might be put as a constitutional arrangement of the orders such that they are sufficient to themselves and protected each by its own legal framework and internal arrangement.

Let’s put it more concretely. Soul must be able to influence matter, but in so doing it must yield something of itself to matter in order to achieve this influence. Therefore, to govern matter, the soul must accept limitations that it does not otherwise have. When matter is influenced by soul, it is animated. When the soul relinquishes its hold on matter, it can no longer influence it. Matter then returns to its normal state of being—as does the soul.

Let me elaborate on this. What we know about our current reality is (1) that we have free will but (2) its execution always involves mechanical structures—brain-action, muscular-action, and chemical processes. We also know that in a sense we are the prisoners of bodies. We don’t feel like prisoners—unless, of course, we’re experiencing severe pain. But we are prisoners if we assume another world out there which we cannot reach while we’re embodied. In other words, we cannot leave our bodies at will. (There are exceptions to this generalization, but those exceptions are not part of the general consensus.) We can, of course, kill ourselves and thus escape; but we can’t have any certainty about the consequence of such an act. For all we know we might just disappear. While in bodies we cannot see out except through eyes—and what we see is the material realm. If we existed in some other space before, being in bodies now we’ve definitely moved into another order. We’ve become monads relative to our origin, in Leibnitz’s sense of that word: monads have no windows. We can then reasonably assume that life on earth—assuming that another real world-of-the-soul exists—is a mechanically-rendered mirror of that other one, with all the necessary compromises to make a semblance of that other world work reasonably well in the material dimension. To give one example—keeping in mind Swedenborg’s observations of how people move and associate in heaven and in hell—here on earth we cannot move at will and rapidly to join communities of affinity. If we move at all, it requires that we move our bodies. Those have to live somewhere. Joining communities is difficult. We do the next best thing. We associate as we are able. Here we’re obliged to deal with a rigid arrangement of space. Evidently not in heaven—if Swedenborg saw true.

Turned around, we know from the NDE reports that disembodied souls cannot affect matter. They cannot do so because they’re deprived of the necessary vehicle to express themselves in the physical dimension—the one in which the doctors and nurses who attend to their bodies and the relatives who anxiously await the outcome are “imprisoned.” Cut off from our brains, we can neither talk nor gesture.

All this sounds reasonable enough—and not very weird. The weirdness enters if we seriously contemplate that being in bodies is either a choice we made, along with millions if not trillions of others or a cosmic event in which we are involuntary participants. This strange model of reality, however, makes better sense of the known facts than the conventional view.

The modern view is that life is simply a property of matter. Consciousness is an illusion in that, in actuality, we are completely determined by past events and the lawful behavior of matter. Our freedom is also illusory. With death we disappear. Nothing in our life has any stable meaning. Nor does the universe make any sense. To demand that it make sense is part of our illusory mentality. This is an unvarnished but accurate presentation of modern materialism.

Now I would ask the following. Which model would you label weird? The one I label weird or the modern one?

To this people with more traditional views might respond by saying that they don’t believe that atheistic, positivistic, naturalistic nonsense either. They too assert that the cosmos has a meaningful arrangement. Fine. But traditional religious visions are, alas, also weird! Thus I would suggest that a concept like The Fall is entirely consistent with the model I present above—if we assume that souls don’t belong into the order of matter but may have entered it (no doubt advised to avoid it) by voluntary acts. If those acts plunged a vast community of souls into a pit of sorts, one might legitimately talk about original sin. The functional equivalents are there, if, to be sure, in a more secular garb.

We might want to elaborate this model further to see how it might actually work at the level of detail.