Trapped: Another Model

Suppose that a community of souls becomes entangled—caught up, trapped—in the quite alien order of matter. We’ve looked at something similar, namely a community that voluntarily enters (I used the word “invades”) the alien realm; I labeled that a “weird” model. What I’d like to look at here is a variant, one in which the entanglement is involuntary.

If this is familiar ground for you, you’ll only notice subtle differences. I based the weird model on Hindu conceptions. In that tradition the soul descends voluntarily but, descending, is so shrouded in ignorance that it becomes a captive on the Wheel of Karma. Escape is only possible by bursting through that veil of darkness by a supreme act of self-denial. The focus in Hinduism is on the ignorance and the escape. The voluntary character of the descent doesn’t get much ink. The involuntary model of entanglement or capture is based on another tradition, Gnosticism. That mode of thought views the soul as innocent; the emphasis is therefore on the capture and on the agency responsible for it (not us); escape is not by self-denial but by realization, insight, knowledge: gnosis.

But let me put Gnosticism on the back burner for now. Its doctrines were forbidden and persecuted in the West; consequently they never acquired the clarity and high philosophical development that Christian and Hindu doctrines manifest. Merely to outline Gnosticism in its endless variants would be confusing. Those who wish to go there, however, might well start with Hans Jonas’ superb work, The Gnostic Religion, Beacon Press, 1958, available here. Let me, instead, put the model in terminology readily accessible to a Westerner using a naturalistic style of framing—meaning that I will neither invoke nor exclude any higher beings in the process.

To see this process we must imagine a cosmic order quite similar to the one we experience down here on earth, namely one in which vast realms coexist under discernible—but not easily discernible—laws. A strong element of randomness is present, at least from our perspective. Beneath that randomness a deeper order may in fact represent absolute necessity, but as we see, weird things can happen; the lightning might just strike the cat, and why it did we’ll never know. Assume, further, that an order of soul, such as I’ve outlined it before, exists within this cosmic whole; it has its own laws and powers, including consciousness and will; it is different in kind from the other phenomena, be they subtle or dense; the soul-order may very well exist in a more subtle kind of material order—suitable to its natural unfolding. It is perfectly consistent, in this model, to hold that God exists in some mysterious way behind all that we are able to discern, indeed that what we see is the creation, and, further, that it may well still be under way. But this God is very obviously the Deus absconditus, not the intervening deity of the Old Testament.

Next assume that in the course of the cosmos cosmosing, as it were, on the model of Spinoza’s “nature naturing,” the cosmos doing what the cosmos does, energetic phenomena well above the pay-grade of the souls happily living their lives in what, to us here, would be a kind of heaven, a disaster would take place. It would be a disaster only from the point of view of the soul-community affected, not in any absolute sense. By way of an example, let’s suppose that a new sub-universe forms in a big bang, and in the process a region of the soul-order is swept away in the consequent enormous explosion and becomes hopelessly disrupted, confused, and its subtle matter wildly mixed in with matter of quite another density. The souls caught in this vast melee would, of course, continue to exist. They are immortal. But they would be greatly disoriented, confused, and their habitation a hopelessly shambles without the accustomed rhyme and reason.

There you have it: an involuntary model of entanglement.

Let me next compare this model to the other two in order to discover if it has any merit. In this model a vast yawning distance opens between God and the soul. In the creation model God personally forms the body and breathes in the living soul; the narrative is that of creator and creature, of command and of obedience. The interaction is continuous. The absence of God is due to the soul’s own disobedience. In the Hindu model the soul is itself a separated tiny instance of God, hence an identity relation continues. And, of course, the separation is voluntary and, with the right effort, can be healed. The Gnostic model, by contrast, produces a very high verisimilitude to actual human experience—which was at least materially a whole lot more miserable even for the middle classes when Gnosticism flourished; it flourished for a couple of centuries before and after the transition between BC and AD. The Gnostics found this world intolerable; they wanted somebody to blame. God could not be blamed. Like all other human communities, the Gnostic were also keen defenders of God against charges of collusion with evil. They chose a secondary agency, much higher than man but lower than God—and they held that this demiurge created the world we see, full of its mayhem and absence of meaning, is a botched job; a hapless imitation of the creator. In the Gnostic doctrine, the demiurge deliberately keeps us asleep so that we’ll stick around. Breaking through our ignorance means liberation.

I will close this presentation by outlining another possible explanation which the modern mind might find more plausible. It isn’t pantheism nor yet lineal creationism. Assume that creation is continuous and God is behind it—but apart. God is not evolving, but the world is. God isn’t finished yet; another chapter is being written. And this evolution, consequently, takes place in resonance with God’s intentions. The aim of existence, in other words, isn’t placid equilibrium but infinite development. We had no choice in being here, but we do have a choice. We can participate or we can decline. If we decline, we’ll find our equilibrium in due time. If we volunteer to take part in the creation, the future may hold many more wonders. Pop psychology might call that “tough love.”