The Heart

Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point. The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. [Baise Pascal, Pensées §277]

Shah does not hesitate to make the claim … that nearly all we claim as “religion,” as “higher feelings,” as “mystical experience,” is no more than emotionalism. We are taught that there are emotions and intellect, but not that there is something else possible, beyond both and not to be confused with either. [Doris Lessing, in her Introduction to Learning How to Learn, by Idries Shah]

In artistic and spiritual matters, problems of communication arise. Art will illustrate this. When I was in college, “What is Art?” used to be bandied about with a certain irony. My friends and I argued about the subject for hours on end. One side held that beauty was in eye of the beholder; it was subjective through and through. The other held that beauty existed in reality, out there somewhere, beyond the beholder; but the beholder had to be capable of perceiving it. The debate no doubt continues. I belong to those who think that art holds something real, something apart.

I worked once for a major research institute. We rarely ever left the main building by its front entrance; we used back entries and exits going to and from parking lots. I was in the lobby one day waiting for someone to pick me up for a trip to the airport. Leather furniture, fancy tiled entry; the wide glass expanse opened on a distant fountain and a sculpture. As I waited, my eye fell on a large painting hung over the leather couch. My eye swept over it indifferently. Then I did a double-take. It was a Madonna and child. “Wow!” It was beautiful. Renaissance. I'd never seen it before. The Institute had an arrangement with a neighboring art gallery. The paintings changed from time to time. I looked around. The reception was farther inside; I was safely alone. I stepped up on the dark-leather couch to examine a small golden tab affixed to the frame. I jumped off, nodding to myself. It was a Fra Lippo Lippi. Something had reached me from that picture. I knew that something with the heart.

Problems arise precisely because the quality we’re talking about transcends the operations of the way we ordinarily see reality. The crux of this problem is that different people have different capacities. The seed of these capacities everyone must have, but they develop by chance and effort. Things get more complicated. Art appreciation, and piety, can be and are often faked, based on external signs—especially if a pay-off can be had. Only those who have the real stuff dare to turn away from what isn’t genuine. They can smell the genuine. There is no better way to put it. It isn’t visible. It’s felt. Something speaks. Many things on display in a gallery reveal themselves to people like that as mute, deaf, blind—even when the themes are grand, the names immortal, and the display is splendiferous. Others may also feel this but may be uncertain. They think that, perhaps, they lack some sophisticated skill. No. They already have it; they just don’t know that they do—because their experience is limited.

In traditional societies in which the transcendent dimensions still has standing, the organ of this perception is called the heart. Obviously it’s not the blood-pumping muscle. Heart is merely a way of speaking. But neither are emotions in the glands or mentation really in the brain. We have a way, a capacity, to perceive the energetics of a higher order, and if we say that it’s the heart, why not?

I’ve merely touched the subject. This much will serve as an introduction. But I’ll come back and look more closely at this capacity, experienced, if mildly, all the time, very difficult to disentangle from conceptualization and emotion: the very capacity we have to use in order to see, feel, or hear anything at all in the regions of the border. By way of concluding this initial posting on the subject, let me simply add that energetic activity of intellect (in the sense of a passion for debate) or of the emotions (excitement) both act to inhibit the function of the heart. And when they do, we cannot see much and understand even less about the mysteries of being than we ordinarily do when we’re just bored.

Mystical Experiences: An Elaboration

The questions I’ve always asked myself about the mystical experience are these: What is it that mystics experience? Is it God? Or could it be something else extraordinarily energetic? Here I hasten to introduce qualifiers. I’m not in any doubt, myself, that God is ultimately the source of everything. But in the mystical experience, the claim is not that people experience some higher or more energetic order. It is that they have experienced, if only briefly, union with God. To illustrate this:

The Sufi mystic Al Hallaj (858-922) once said, “I am the Truth”; that statement cost him his life. Meister Eckhart (quoted in the last post) identified his eye with God’s—ambiguously enough, to be sure, to escape drastic censure. Angelus Silesius (1624-1677), another mystic, wrote in a poem: “I know God cannot live one instant without Me:/If I should come to naught, needs must He cease to be.” My modern example, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, said the exactly same sorts of things, especially in Chapter VI of his Pathways Through to Space but also sprinkled throughout his book elsewhere. Merrell-Wolff was a modern, wrote in the modern manner, and we understand from him that he fully understood the difference between his limited self and what he called the SELF. So also did, I have no doubt, Al Hallaj, Eckhart, and Silesius. But what they felt was a powerful identity with this higher something in their moments of exaltation—and identified it with the Absolute.

Other characteristics common to this experience are feelings of power and exaltation. The person feels all-knowing. The self seems vast and limitless. Everything seems mysteriously present in the experience—and is also known and understood. And over against that exalted feeling, ordinary life appears to be a mere illusion, nothing, shards, and insubstantiality.

But when the experience is over, the powers felt and the insights temporarily possessed seem to depart again. Nothing new is left over. The experience is most definitely energetic. Franklin called it a “current of bliss” and, in his description, even used electrical analogies. Bruno Gröning (1906-1959), a German faith-healer, spoke about the Heilstrom, the healing current. My own limited experience was also an unmistakeable perception of a powerful but benign vibration, of life and of vitality. It brought the very concrete I walked upon to life.

Now it strikes me that all of the people who have such experiences—except the few who experience them spontaneously—engage in inward practices like prayer and meditation, usually coupled with self-disciplines the aim of which is to shut out distractions, including those produced by the body itself. They are quite willfully seeking some internal origin. When the Buddha sat down under the bodhi tree just before his own personal breakthrough, he was determined to remain there until it happened. To be sure, the onset of the experience happens when it does. It can’t be forced. Sometimes it coincides with the effort. Often—as many Zen stories illustrate—something quite irrelevant triggers the satori. But effort is present in the context. A preparation is present. The focus, the personal viewpoint, has changed. And very often, these practices are also undertaken in a religious context. It is not therefore surprising that the experience itself should be explained in a religious way. The mystic is assaulting heaven—and the gates open! Overwhelming grace descends.

Long years of pondering this subject has gradually convinced me that the mystical experience is probably a temporary exposure to the life force—which, in my thought, originates in God. But I think of this concentrated and all-knowing energy as the creating impulse itself, not its culmination. By contrast with it the individual feels that ordinary reality, as we perceive it, is just ashes and cinder, but as I parse this complex of experience, it seems to me that the Creator intends the world to be—and to be what it is—a fantastic elaboration all of which, when you force your way back to the upwelling point of this energy, is still all fused into a single unity.

To put this in more mechanical terms, the aim of creation is precisely what we see around and beyond us, namely the vast societies of life, the churches militant, suffering, and triumphant. The vector of this great energy is in the direction of complexity, not fusion. Opening ourselves to the grace that flows is definitely desirable, but when it flows so potently as to disable us, we may have gone too far.

In this context, time and again, I’m reminded of the Sufi differentiation between those who do and those who do not have the option, as Idris Shah once put it in one of his books. What does this saying mean? To me it means that genuine spiritual achievement is to cultivate our ability to choose. In a great storm of any kind—not least one of vital energy—we have no option. For this reason Sufi sheiks did not approve of ecstatic experiences, thinking that those who underwent them were insufficiently trained. The real unveiling, when it happens, is something else. You retain the option.

Mystical Experiences

The Experience and Its Content

Genuine mystical experiences are all in some ways ecstatic. The word ecstasy comes from Greek roots for “outside” and for “stand,” thus meaning to “stand outside” of oneself, to be taken out of oneself. These states have a passive character in that the subject of the experience has no choice in the matter. Not that he or she wants to have a choice. The experience is joyous. But the ability to resist it isn’t there. You’re falling, and there is no way to arrest a fall.

When I was around seventeen, I once went off to a choir practice in the evening. A ten-block walk lay ahead. At the time I lacked even change enough to take the streetcar. I left on foot because I’d promised to attend. It was almost dark. As I was walking along, such an event unfolded. It came on without any discernible trigger; my state of mind was calm, indifferent, indeed even a little sour. I didn’t really want to go. I was only going to honor a commitment. Nothing changed outwardly, but my perception of reality underwent a drastic change. Energy seemed to flow from everything around me. Trees, bushes, houses, the concrete sidewalk, the black street surface, everything glowed, vibrated, seemed in motion. The effect was immediate and intensely emotional. Within seconds I crying—crying tears of joy. Later, trying to find a way to link the experience to something, anything, that I had seen before, I thought of some of Van Gough’s painting in which the scenes appear to tremble, to be on fire. The principal feeling I had was that “everything’s alive,” and this realization, at that time, made me feel joyous. The feeling lasted for about as long as it takes to walk the length of a city block. After that the feeling faded.

Compared to other accounts that I have read, mine was a relatively mild experience—but for me the strangest and most unusual event of my life. I was a convinced atheist at the time, and, indeed, I continued in those convictions for several more years. You don’t have to be a narrow-gauged materialist to be an atheist. More pronounced experiences of this kind, “stronger versions,” you might say, have a distinctly noetic quality, a strong sense of knowledge is present. Something of that was also present in my feelings, but not as pronounced as in others’, a feeling of exaltation and sense of knowledge. People in these states feel that they finally understand everything; they have the sense of having penetrated the deepest secrets of the universe.

Over time I’ve become convinced that the noetic quality of these experiences is more feeling than knowledge. There is a real difference between feeling that you know and actual knowing. When something is on the tip of my tongue, it isn’t knowledge yet. And in the case of mystics, whatever it is, it stays on the tip of the tongue. Real knowledge leaves something behind, something tangibly graspable. Published accounts or philosophical works of people with the mystical experience, sometimes called the unitive experience, don’t really have content beyond the sort of empty symbolic knowledge we get from mathematics. By way of example I would point to Plotinus’ Enneads in the Graeco-Roman era, the writings of Meister Eckhart in the medieval, and the books of Franklin Merrell-Wolff in the twentieth century. Merrell-Wolff’s works are of great interest precisely because they are modern and more accessible for that reason. In Pathways Through to Space he describes his actual experiences; in The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object he attempts to build an interpretation of his experiences. Anyone hoping to discover in the second work something genuinely interesting about any world that side of the borderzone may as well abandon all hope now. Ain’t nothing there. Or, to put it more charitably, we get the essence in the title: “consciousness without an object” is a bit like the sound of one hand clapping. The ultimate content of the Enneads is in a way similar: There is the One. From the One we have Intellect and Soul. This trinity defines Reality. Meister Eckhart’s famous saying: “The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me,” delivered in one of his sermons, is similar in its ambiguity and inscrutability to most other pronouncements that come from the mystical experience.

To sum up my take on the reports of “unitive” mystics, they rather resemble something analogous to men reporting, after seeing the ocean, that they have seem something awesome and grand, overwhelming, majestic, and beyond the horizon—and never mention water, salt, wind, waves, sand, shorelines, surf, shells, seagulls, or flying fish either.

My own experience, mild although it was, had the same character: powerful feelings, deeply memorable, but containing no meaning beyond a sense of transcending energy everywhere. Everything’s alive. The energetic quality of these experiences is even more tangibly described in Merrell-Wolff’s account. He speaks of a “current” that he clearly felt flowing at times when he had his experience. I sometimes have the feeling that concepts like grace and its Muslim version, baraka—and theories based on emanation—are possibly based on experiences of this sort.

A Personal Point of View

My object to his point should not be misinterpreted. I’m not in the least dismissive of the experience of enlightenment, as it is often called, reported by towering figures like Plotinus, Buddha, Eckhart, or our own Merrell-Wolff. I simply have a point of view which, in its own way, may have some merit.

My view is that our world is very intricately woven, first of all, not merely the life processes built up of stupendous cells—each of which is at least like a major city—but also the elemental world as a whole—many constituents of which have had to be fashioned in the wombs of two different suns in sequence (at least as currently held). Human fate, relationships of love and kinship, memory, pain and suffering, creative life, history, society, and endlessly more—all this shows a picture of tremendous value and complexity the simple dismissal of which as illusion, or as the thinning out of a denser reality, strikes me as of necessity inaccurate at minimum.

I’ve written extensive about life as a vector pointing at something. Consciousness, which seems to have been hard won by a process lasting eons, I take to be a marker of a boundary between dimensions. Its character as a boundary is further substantiated not, I emphasize, by unitary states that point to a kind of dissolving unity with overwhelming Power but, rather, by the much more messy experiences of those who partially touched the neighboring dimension. Let me call them modern shamans: the healers, the psychics, the people who exhibit paranormal gifts. Of these people Swedenborg produced the most coherent reports; here I ignore his work in biblical exegesis, which was his way of trying to make sense of things. The proof of his writings comes indirectly in the form of his paranormal experiences to which very “sound” contemporaries attested. (Kant, for example, had a friend of his gather the evidence.) These “shamans” are messy. Weeds of madness sprout everywhere around them. One concerns oneself with people like this at the risk of one’s own respectability. Yes, people like Swedenborg—who had a distinguished record as a natural scientist—but also people like Edgar Cayce, idiot savants, and other strangelings of the same sort. Carl Jung spent time on that border too. These cases are of great interest precisely because they are messy (like Reality). They indicate transcendence and they do produce a certain minimum content.

It does not surprise me at all that (a) scientists and other respectable thinkers keep their distance, (b) that the Church handles these cases with exceeding caution—after all the Church must guard its respectability too; and (c) that some few perfectly sane people of great curiosity do go there; these are people like me who have nothing to lose.

Yes, there is a real frontier. Unitary visions belong here too but not by any means as the final word on the subject but as transitions toward a better understanding. What little content seeps through the cracks, coming from the shamans, indicates a much richer reality “beyond,” at least as rich as our ordinary cosmos, including vast and coherent societies, environments with similar but yet different laws, etc., of which Swedenborg’s heaven and hell are examples as prepared for the masses of his time; his madness-riddled diaries are the messy raw material. The Taoist tales and Shiite religious accounts belong to this hidden Library of Alexandria.

My own conviction—which I’ll elaborate more later—is that ecstatic and so-called mystical experiences are contact with the lifestream as it rises into this, not as it passes into the next dimension. But to develop that argument I need more space, and this post has become rather long.

Our Mysterious Awakening

We never even think about our origin—which is the subject of our meaning—until our consciousness is able somehow to separate itself from the turbulent flow of our experience. Something in us must detach, something must reflect—or catch a reflection.

Consciousness thus becomes a mystery in turn. In one sense it is a partial description of a feeling—the feeling of our agency, the feeling that we are a Self. We couldn’t feel that we are individuals, people, responsible beings if we remained unaware. Neither could we choose to act this way or that without awareness. Thus the other major element of our fundamental nature, our will, is possible only through awareness. Indeed the very concept of an agency includes both at the same time and irreducibly so.

But our nature is paradoxical. Muted forms of agency—and therefore of consciousness and of will—are everywhere displayed for us in living creatures from birds to lions to giraffes. And most of the time their behavior is equivalent to ours. What divides us from the animal kingdom is our ability to become holy or evil. Neither path is open to a mule. And the paradox itself is murky and reveals additional degrees.

Thus, for instance, I genuinely wonder about the “humanity” of a pair of thugs who, under orders from a boss, kill two innocent people in an attempt to extract information from them (an actual case). I wonder about the “humanity” of the boss as well. I wonder about the human label applied to shady financiers who obtain houses from the desperate by fraudulent schemes they know will soon end in forfeitures. And on. In these people consciousness is present at levels well above a mule’s. They must know that they are causing harm. Are they really conscious? If they are they’re deliberately choosing evil. Is that possible? I assert that it is on the basis of personal experience—and I rather think that all of us have chosen evil knowingly in the past, finessing the acts by rationalizations. The difference between the criminal and Everyman lies in the degree. Evil does not always qualify as crime; it is a sliding scale.

Thus consciousness and agency in animals continues at a heightened rate in humans, but still on a certain scale, the difference in us now being that we deliberately choose. And when our choice is real—and if not real it’s not a choice—we use our will to lean now in one direction and now in the other.

The situation just described is a central feature of our meaning—must be. How it fits into the scheme of origins must still be developed.

Genuine consciousness really arises as a “separation” from the general flow of turbulent experience. Something must detach, something must reflect—or catch a reflection. More and more I’m coming to see awareness as a force or as a structure that emerges out of a material casing—not in the modern scientific sense of an “emergent phenomenon” but rather as a seed that catches on and begins development until at some point it reaches the light. It’s not an achievement but requires a favorable environment or endowment nonetheless. It seems to me that once it’s present it will assert itself thereafter—not because a person is virtuous or diligent but simply because this soul-force is strong and sovereign. It is not equivalent to intelligence but without its presence in awareness, intelligence is limited in reach.

Our Mysterious Origins

Two kinds of instructions reach us in childhood. Put in the generic terms, one is to excel; the other is to serve the community. These are usually summed by the phrase: “Be good.” The sheer fact that we are here is never discussed. It’s self-evident. Our relationship to others is also obvious. We begin in a dependent role. Indeed, we continue to be dependent until death. What changes is that, later, we have more freedom in choosing our network of connections. If we’re lucky. We are formed by interaction on the one hand, by internal urges and needs on the other. The early advice we get is essentially correct—improve, serve. For most nothing more is needed. Life flows on hemmed in by these banks. And because our needs and mutual relations continue to the end—and societies always have a routine explanation for existence, some kind of story or ideology—something must happen to make us question the conventions. Some kind of inner urge—or external stimulus—must trigger questioning. When that happens, it can shock, or stimulate, us. We’ll be temporarily disoriented.

In life’s normal give-and-take, where the bumps and jostles stay within a well-accustomed range—and pleasures and joys are customary too—nothing presents itself to make us question our place and function. But when the cake of custom cracks, tragedy strikes, troubles arise, strange ecstasies (however brought about) make us lose our balance, then we also temporarily lose our sense of place. The degree of disturbance will suggest the degree to which we’ll question our place. Individual sensitivities will either magnify or minimize the shocks. Shocks lead to learning. With time we include more and more of reality into our compass. We expand our horizons, adjust our sense of alignment. But, here again, personal traits and education will lead to different outcomes.

Children exposed early to cosmic orientations—as I was, growing up in a Catholic environment—will spontaneous integrate cosmic stories. To grow is to integrate external influences with our own intuitions. We are far from blank boards on which environmental influences scribble out our fate. We take elements of the cosmologies we’re taught and integrate them (or suspend them) depending on the answers from within. If receive philosophical “objects” as children, we integrate them right alongside all the practical: it is all one to us.

Indeed, thinking about it, it’s obvious that the precise name of things is not all that important for the child. As children we learn quite early—intuitively, as it were—to handle abstractions skillfully. Concepts like God or king or good or evil rapidly come to occupy a place in a structure of relationships. Quite early in our lives we develop a clear concepts of negatives too— in the sense of “empty,” “lost,” or “gone.” All concepts have physical analogies, but we find it easy to abstract: we see the general concept of “lost” whether we have lost a shoe, glove, or a pencil. We have concepts of time long before we learn to read a clock. “Just a minute,” our mother will say. We have a clear and painful sense of waiting. Space is no more problematical: here and there, far and near.

But that which is most central to our being is deeply hidden. We never question ourselves. I still rather clearly remember my initial reaction in college to hearing the concept of “being” formally discussed. I experienced a certain surprise, mixed with bemusement. It struck me as droll that ancient wise men should have labored so hard thinking about something so obvious; and I thought it vaguely illegitimate to separate “being” from that which “was”—as if you could. I did not then realize that the dance around “being” was the late and advanced articulation of something rather more basic and fundamental. It is the problem of ultimate orientation, namely the issue of “What am I doing here?” Analyzing that simple but stark question one comes up with its opposite, Nothingness. But nothingness isn’t particularly helpful except for philosophizing. Like mathematicians, philosophers manipulate symbols using rules of logic. Philosophy tempts people with the mirage of answers. It can be difficult and complex; these difficulties and complexities more or less hide how empty the enterprise actually is unless it stays firmly anchored in experience.

Meanwhile the stark question is legitimate. It is central to grasping the human condition—even if philosophy as such—formal schemes like Kant’s for instance—cannot answer it. Not viscerally. Not at the level where we live. Only a myth can even come close to the essence of the thing. The manipulation of the labels we attach to experience resembles the operation of a kaleidoscope: we produce ever new patterns but by moving the same old colored bits of glass in a confined space; nothing really changes except the arrangement.

What is most central to our being is its meaning. Our existence, by itself, is not answer enough. So long as a consensus satisfies us, so long as our orientation is adequate for daily needs, the issue of what we’re doing here rarely arises: we’re working, resting, having fun. Life is a flow of experience, stimulus, response. We’re carried on a river of time. We have no knowledge of our origin—we woke up already floating on the river—and the terminus of our voyage is still far away. Moreover, we can easily imagine ourselves continuing on beyond our passing or, if so inclined, imagine ourselves falling into a dreamless and permanent state of sleep.

Nor does this condition, even once it’s realized, exercise people excessively unless something radical is also present, arising from within. If our condition is reasonably comfortable—or can be imagined to improve—we accept traditional wisdom, shy from the seemingly hopeless effort to tackle the problem. We say, “Well, that’s the way things are.” Half of our nature is pragmatic, straight-forward, practical, and sensible. We optimize. Part of optimization is not to bother reinventing wheels. We learn in childhood to accept explanations from our elders—and traditional wisdom is exactly that. We don’t relish becoming engineers, plumbers, or seamstresses when the electricity fails, a pipe bursts, or something tears. First we seek our comfort and adaptation at least cost. Next we rouse ourselves to organize fixes to things that really go wrong. Even when things become quite hopeless, the vast majority of humankind apparently chooses dumb endurance in the face of adversity—exactly as animals do—swamped by that half of our nature which is nature. We hang in there, we hunker down. We have to wander a long ways, and already highly sensitized, before we ever even reach the borderzone.

Suppose There Is No Borderzone

Suppose that reality consisted entirely of what we see and that which we can measure by our scientific instruments. Those who live in a reality defined like that have to see people like me as stubbornly clinging to a vast illusion. Turn-around is fair play. I view people who think like that as hopelessly benighted. Not that there is any virtue or vice attached to either view. Both are natural. The difference lies in some kind of openness to the hidden reality—a capacity to perceive it. I can no more help reaching my conclusions than the materialist his. Turning such things into moral categories is a mistake.

What piques my interest is that people can live side by side with contradictory views of reality. I was reminded of this this morning while reading an article in the New York Times’ Science Section concerning life on other planets, an interview with Alan Boss, a gent on the forefront of the hunt for earth-like so-called “extra-solar” planets. So far as I know, there may or may not be life on other planets; but the categorical assumption in this article is that if the right conditions prevail, there will be life—because life is considered to arise spontaneously from matter. The certainty is on the same level as that concerning gravity: where there is mass, there will be gravity. When it comes to gravity, I agree. When it comes to life, I don’t.

Wherein lies the difference? In the materialist conception, there is no such thing as an agency independent of matter. One need but trace that way of thought to discover that concepts such as selves, souls, or minds are all derived. They are derived from matter. Put another way, if you destroy the material substrate associated with the manifestations of selves, selves vanish. Those who haven’t delved deeply enough into the technical literature of modern science are unaware of the fact that this is orthodox thought today. In the traditionalist thought, agency exists separately from material manifestations. Traditionalist modes of thought diverge in all sorts of directions, to be sure, but they agree that humans are agents. They do not grant the same status to other living phenomena. I do. I think that the logic of the situation drives you there. Therefore I see agency behind every form of life. And if I see agency, I conclude that it is something permanent rather than subject to destruction.

When you think the way I do, it becomes obvious why I take an interest in all kinds of cosmologies and myths. The study of matter is interesting, but for me not exhaustive of all things real.

Forms, Forms, Forms

The big disagreement between Plato and Aristotle had to do with the reality of “forms.” As Plato saw things, if we have actual trees growing all around us—and we do—there must be an immaterial and eternal pattern of the “tree” somewhere in a higher realm. The “idea” had to be there somewhere before trees could form—and its existence must be at least as real as that of the keyboard on which my fingers dance. Aristotle shook his head. He had major difficulty picturing this Warehouse of Eternal Forms hidden somewhere in eternity.

I side with Plato because I have no problem with eternal forms—nor, for that matter, with forms that originate in time. The keyboard is an example. So is the fork, the knife, or shoelaces. These latter day forms were surely not always present in that Warehouse of Eternity where Eternal Forms reside. Nonetheless, we all know what these objects are.

In philosophy this clash has produced the Realist and Nominalist schools. The first asserts that eternal forms are real; the second holds that forms are merely names (nomina in Latin). In the philosophical context forms can also be rendered as essences, meaning exactly what Plato meant by forms.

I side with Plato because, in struggling with this subject myself, in trying to understand it viscerally, really, from the gut, I hit upon the notion that the problem goes away if we think of these forms, ideas, essences, or archetypes not as things but as intentions. Eternal ideas don’t need a warehouse. They need a mind. This line of thought brings the products of nature and the products of humanity under a single roof. Both are the consequence of intentions. The tree embodies God’s intention, the shoelace a human’s. Seeing forms, eternal or otherwise, under the rubric of intention also nicely explains why the form is immaterial and invisible and yet may be manifested in matter. Thus the weird status of form in the Aristotelian conception, form independent of matter, namely as a potential and therefore suffering a kind of not-quite-real status, is put on more solid footing. Essences are created by minds. Until they manifest as substances, thus taking on materiality, they remain ideas. But ideas are real. They are invisible because the mental order is invisible.

Now those who’re reading this entry having comes from the last (“Bodies, Bodies, Bodies”) might wonder: Is this discussion at all related to bodies? Yes. Thinking of essences and their manifestation may be the explanation of bodies, be they flesh-and-blood or subtle.

If we suppose that Reality itself must be God’s creation—and without that assumption all meaning disappears, hence that’s a good start—the Platonic view suggests the process of creation. It is the same on high as it is in our own humble circle. The new arises from intentions and then develops (or evolves, if you like) into a visible actuality in which the intention takes on a body. What this means is that matter itself is necessary in order to separate, to manifest, ideas—whether they originate in human or in higher minds. God’s creation generates the very matter in which divine ideas manifest. Lesser beings, like ourselves, cannot create matter but may form it.

This general idea underlies theosophical, Neoplatonic, and related conceptions of the subtle body. The idea expresses the feeling that actuality must always involve some kind of embodiment, gross or subtle. Without such embodiment, the essence remains still entirely absorbed in God. Actuality may thus be understood as separation from (but not independence of) God. The creation must then be pictured as a kind of separation in which matter plays a crucial role. The creation is not identical with God. Why God creates is the ultimately mystery. The emanationist theory suggests an overflow of benevolence—but that is, surely, just a human conceptualization. How can the Absolute be said to overflow?

This general view of the matter has certain merits. It suggests that transcending orders above us (and possibly below us) are structured like this one, but the match between our powers and the matter in those worlds is better—so that our minds can form our bodies. It suggests that angels also have a dual character. Here I side with St. Bonaventure (who believed that all creatures, not least angels, were made of form and matter) rather than with his contemporary, St. Thomas Aquinas (who held that angels had no bodies). I like the structure because it permits me to imagine that the vast physical cosmos that we see may indeed be entirely alive—that suns may be the bodies of very high beings. This notion, I hasten to add, is not original with me at all—but pleasing because, looking out at the vastness of the visible cosmos, I’m choked by the meaningless incommensurability of that vastness unless I think that so much glory may actually have meaning.

Later: Having read this she who completes me had this comment: “For me, after having re-read this ‘unpacking,’ a very satisfying (pleasingly simple?) thought is that ‘this creation strives toward completion!’ The entire universe is EVOLVING towards the completion of God’s idea of his creation.”

Bodies, Bodies, Bodies

My heart is sad and lonely
For you I pine, for you dear only
Why haven’t you seen it?
I’m all for you, body and soul.

The body-soul duality is deeply embedded in language and thought—and has been from times long forgotten—not because we are subjects to illusion, as the materialists would have it, but because we sense both the difference between and the union of the two as a matter of course.

One of the intellectual habits that has always amused me is the use of the word “naïve” to characterize the way ordinary people see things. Thus it is naïve of us to think that we have selves or souls; the “advanced” view is that we’re mere coils of chemical adaptation. For this reason also I enjoyed first hearing of Dr. Johnson’s reaction to Berkley’s idealism. The quote is from James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — “I refute it thus.”

Humanity’s spontaneous feeling is that substantiality is anchored in matter. Common sayings bear witness to this feeling. “He is just a shadow of the man he used to be.” The Greeks thought of the dead—deprived of bodies—as shades. But a shadow is, nevertheless, a something, even if thinned out. The word ghost has the same connotations: somewhat translucent, so to say, not a very good light reflector, but still good enough to see.

The tough persistence of the Aristotelian matter-form substantiality is testimony to the fact that it’s easy to follow the conceptualization and to accept a duality in which one of the two elements is receptive (the yin of the I Ching, for instance) and the other is active (yang). Matter receives form and form imposes itself on matter. Functionally the western matter-form duality is identical with the yin-yang duality of Chinese thought.

Now you might say that the real is always substantial. You can’t see the form without matter and you never find matter without form. And here lies a problem. There is a problem if we think of the soul as the form of the body. The problem is that a soul separated from its manifestation is insubstantial. It is indeed the sound of one hand clapping. And some of us, anyway, don’t like this idea.

This spontaneous recoil from the thought of insubstantiality has produced interesting philosophical ideas, namely that bodies, other than those made of flesh and blood, actually exist. These other bodies are imagined to be the vehicles of the soul after our current “bag of bones” is buried or cremated. These vehicles are pictured either as “higher” or “lower” kinds of bodies. In Greek thought lower kinds of bodies, those of the shades in Hades, were thought to be of an order inferior to ordinary bodies, thus linked to the element of water only: moist bodies. And those of the higher kind were imagined as partaking of fire. Lower meant sinking; higher meant rising. Note please that in that era the words earth, water, air, and fire carried meanings somewhat analogous to our conceptions of chemical elements or subatomic particles. These people were neither stupid nor naïve; and they intended to be understood by their peers, not some future generation habituated to regard anything ancient as inferior. Therefore, saying what I say here, I’m not talking tongue in cheek. I take these people seriously.

Notice next that in theosophical circles the concept of the “subtle body” is accepted as one of these bodies beyond the “bag of bones.” Here the terminology we encounter includes terms like energy, as in energy body, and also the word vibration, which is suggestive of frequency, hence evokes images (in me, at any rate) of the electromagnetic, hence the energetic, spectrum. Notice further that in the Christian conceptualization, the resurrection body is spoken of as the glorified body—and glory is always associated with light—another pointer in the direction of energy. The glorified body is thus another way of saying subtle body; the difference is that in theosophical conceptions more than one higher body exists, in the Christian conception only one. One more note along these lines. In paranormal circles, we encounter the notion that ordinary bodies are surrounded by an aura, thus, again, an energetic sort of emanation, which is perceptible by certain gifted individuals.

These circles accept a curious conceptualization of nesting bodies—imagine Russian babushka dolls that fit inside each other. The outer body is the one we see; within is a spirit or subtle body; within that may be another yet; the glorified or luminous body. Part of the second is visible as the aura.

Bodies, bodies, bodies. I will return to this and say more the next time. For now the point I wish to emphasize is that at least a subset of humanity recoils from a simple notion of a matter-form substance in which the breakup of the union means the disappearance of the form at least, never to be found again. Therefore the human mind has projected the duality of body and soul beyond this dimension and imagines not only a higher environment for the soul but also the presence, there, of a higher form of matter. How else could the soul retain its substantiality. An examination of this cluster of suppositions will follow.

Soul-Body Interaction: Is the Problem Real?

The most frequently discussed aspect of the soul-body duality has been the interaction between the two. How can an immaterial something affect a material something else, and vice versa. This discussion tends to begin with Descartes (1596-1650), but the problem is that Descartes’ views on the matter are all too frequently over-simplified and, as usually stated, turn out to be cartoons of his thought. For example: bodies are of matter, and matter is the extended thing (res extensa); soul or mind is the thinking thing (res cogitans); it has no extension. But these two realms interact one with the other by means of the pineal gland. That’s the caricature.

The statements listed are, indeed, discoverable in Descartes’ extensive writings—but so is a great deal more. Descartes was a prodigious thinker, a diligent writer; whole tribes of modern theories can claim him as their father. He did not, for instance, insist that the soul has no extension; what he said was “that extension is not the principal attribute of the soul” (quoting an enlightening article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, titled “Descartes and the Pineal Gland,” found here). Indeed, the article just referenced makes it clear that Descartes wrote about every aspects of this subject. Those who wish to cite a famous authority can search René and find chapter and verse to justify their views.

The problem, it occurs to me, may stem from a faulty conceptualization of what we mean by soul. We insist on its immateriality—and when we use that term, it largely suggests a kind of emptiness; we have a tough time imagining the immaterial. The root of that conception is anchored in common experience; we don’t see souls (forget about ghosts for a moment). In part the rooting lies in Plato’s proof for the soul’s immortality; the argument is made in Phaedo; Plato there rests his case on incorruptibility and declares that all things made of parts are subject to change, hence to corruption. Therefore the soul, which is a unity and has no parts, is incorruptible and thus also immortal.

This whole nexus of ideas is tricky, slippery. Immateriality works nicely to prove immortality. But in Greek thought, not least in Plato’s, the soul is also a form. In Aristotle we have the concept of substance, a duality of matter and form. Form shapes matter; matter manifests form. But the interaction between these two is just as nebulous in general as that between the soul and the body is in the particular. Some kind of force is implied in the very concept of the union of matter with form.

Form must compel matter to shape itself either by attraction or by some kind of positively shaping impulse. If by attraction, we might imagine a kind of complex form of gravity. Indeed Descartes himself believed that the soul exerts a force of volition which is communicated to the body by means of the pineal gland. But if a force is present, able to move at least “animal spirits,” thus another but also subtle form of energy, the pure immateriality of the soul becomes problematical. What kind of force? Magic? To avoid magic, one is tempted to see the soul as somewhat more complex, and matter-like, as possessing capacities beyond a kind of point-like presence without extension.

Not that I have any problem with that. But if we admit a soul into the arena, a soul able to exert force—and to the extent that it does also has the ability passively to experience force—at that moment the supposedly insurmountable difficulty of interaction actually disappears. Never mind the pineal gland. You might say that it was a decent stand in for some kind of point or organ where the force of soul is transmitted to the body and where, at the same time, experience reaches the soul. The contact may be extremely subtle—in comparison, for example, with a sneeze—but it must have some kind of tangible reality, suggesting that the soul does have capacity, at some minimal level, to interact with what we normally call matter. It is this sort of meditation on the subject that encourages me to propose, as I have in earlier posts, that the soul may indeed interact with the material dimension at the subatomic level. And if you have a single fixed point of interaction then, as Archimedes said, he could lift the world—and humanity can move mountains or build dams.

More on Chemical Civilization

The ideas that I’ve outlined briefly in the last post (in the narrow compass of the brain’s function) will strike some positively because they suggest a naturalistic (meaning “scientific” or “secular”) approach to reality—while holding on to the meaning of existence. Others will shy from such an approach because it seems to ignore God’s presence and providence. The truth of the matter is that I’m temperamentally more of a medieval than a modern man, but medieval man was far from stupid and much more comprehensive in his world view than modern man for all of the latter’s minute explorations of the Big Bang theory one nanosecond at a time. The naturalistic does not deny the transcendental unless the focus is too narrow. Let me give an example.

The most divine musical composition reaching us, say, by public television broadcast from Vienna, producing sublime shivers in us as we listen in rapt attention while our eyes are focused on the interior grandeur of some great basilica—that experience has a quite mundane and naturalistic underpinning which, at that moment, we are altogether unaware of. To pluck some examples at random: The piano we hear produces its sounds by small hammers hitting wires, the sounds coming from strings made of hexagonally shaped steel cores wound tightly round with copper wire. The winding is one layer of copper at the beginning and at the end of the string (“start of winding,” “end of winding”) and multilayered in the working area where the hammers hit. Every other instrument we hear is a manufactured or crafted product of great precision. The music is printed on paper that comes from paper mills that reduce trees to pulp and then to paper in massive and malodorous processes. The music reaches us from Vienna by means of electronic equipment arrays, not least those on satellites, the transmitted signal, reaching us through air or cable, is transformed into sound and pixels in our television set, the colors of which are in part produced by rare earth elements the names of which virtually nobody knows.

Does the “mechanical civilization” that transmits the beauty of a composition in any way deny the inspired composer, his great work, the talents of the musicians, the guiding skill of the conductor, the reality of the architects who designed the basilica? No. We’re looking at different ranges of reality as we experience a fusion of them in a moment of perception—a moment that is itself produced by chemical machinery serving the needs of a spiritual agent.

In computer and engineering lingo, people speak of “black boxing” something—thus ignoring some aspect of complexity, at least for the time being, by putting it mentally into a black box. The same thing happens in the cultural sphere but, often, with less awareness. Some people “black box” the higher ranges of human experience and dismiss them as epiphenomena. Others black box the infrastructural elements as if those needed no explanation at all beyond the poetical symbols derived from myths or revelations.

My impulse is to open black boxes to see if I can link their contents with those of others without using magical gestures. I’m sincerely persuaded that no structure of human thought (here I really mean religions, world views, philosophies, metaphysics) is absolutely wrong, none is without some level of divine inspiration, but none is absolutely on the mark. The best that we can achieve, it seems to me, is to achieve approximations to a clear view of things. What I say about chemical civilization, therefore, must be seen in proper perspective. The idea is intended to enlarge rather than to narrow our view. In no way do I intend to question other people’s visions of how the reality is organized and wither God’s providence points.

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Illustrations courtesy of Balaams, a piano servicing company, taken from here.

The Brain as Mediator

Positive science and internal experience have produced conflicting philosophies. Materialism is based on the first, transcendental metaphysics rests on subjective experience. Both have a plausible rationale. Materialism is supported by the undeniable observation that brain function is necessarily involved in mental activity; hence brain injuries can interfere with any one or all of the modalities I’ve talked about before. A transcendent view is supported by experience and logic. The logic is simple. It’s impossible to imagine mental phenomena arising from mechanical underpinnings, be these chemical or electromagnetic. We lack even a single instance of genuine mentation arising from machines that we have made. To think that chemistry, complexly arranged, gives rise to thought requires a leap of faith. We have to believe that chemical reactions, like oxidation, hydrogenation, etc., can produce self-consciousness, will, intelligence, memory, and all the rest. That is negative evidence for the positive reality of soul. The experiential evidence, beyond ordinary human life, comes from near death experience reports which suggest that mentation is possible and takes place in the absence of brain function too.

Materialists are prohibited by their very starting premises—all is matter/energy—from granting the possibility of an immaterial soul. The traditionalist—if I’m a reasonable representative—is more flexible. I find it easy to accept the positive evidence that brains are involved in mentation. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that brain activity is mentation. My explanation is that spirits are in some way limited in this realm of reality by the very nature of matter. In this range of the cosmos, therefore, we need tooling and instruments. The brain then becomes a mechanism by means of which we can experience this domain—see it, feel it, interact with it. Without the tooling we may be able to touch it at the subatomic level only. Hence my working model of reality is that life itself is a chemical civilization gradually built up by a spiritual community somehow entangled in this realm, voluntarily or otherwise. The why and the wherefore of that is the Big question, and this entire blog is part of an examination of that question. Here, however, my aim is much narrower. It is to suggest that, culturally, we often confuse the means with the end, effect with the cause. Thus brains are the consequence of mentation, not the cause of it. They are tools chemical civilization has built as instruments by means of which to see; they are not structures chance has produced to aid survival—the reason for that survival never explained by positive science. In my rough working model survival is not an issue because our stay here is not permanent. In the positive model it is incoherent because only individuals experience but no individual survives. And matter, to survive, doesn’t need such fancy instruments as kidneys and livers.

It is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis to suggest that if we are spirits and if we are caught up in this realm against our will—or came here to see what it is all about—and if we are relatively weak in an environment of colossal forces, over against our own, we would actively exert ourselves to bring what force we have to bear to make the situation better—much as we do the same thing routinely in ordinary life. If we can only move matter by interacting at the subatomic level, we would build instruments to obey our will. And the brain is such an instrument. We need but to decide something, and action follows—at the personal as at the collective level. I decide to lift my arm. The brain does the rest. Muscles lift my arm. The vast biological machinery necessary to do that would take volumes to describe. The brain also serves me by giving me the information that I need. And when it is injured, I’m deprived of instruments. I’ve elsewhere on this blog reported the frustrating incapacity of souls, deprived of brain function, in trying to communicate with others who are still “encased” in bodies. This suggests that so long as we’re inside of bodies, we cannot act as discarnate souls, and in a bodiless state, we cannot move these vast hulking masses of matter without the instrumental aid of brains and muscles. We need bodies to act in the world. But this doesn't mean that we have no other and, for us, more appropriate environments in which we could get along quite well without our circulation systems, food intake, oxygen, livers, hormones, and the rest. Given my hypothesis, which at least provides a meaning for existence—which living, breeding, aging, dying, by themselves, do not—my interest in cosmologies is almost self-evident. I’m looking for the bigger picture that will accommodate the vast evidence available for a process either of entanglement, exploration, or development—of souls.

Limits

“The first thing a principle does is to kill somebody,” said Lord Peter Whimsey, the aristocrat-detective, the invention of Dorothy L. Sayers, speaking in one of her best novels, Gaudy Nights. Confessing my own limitations, I am here bound to report another Whimsey quote, in the same book (both courtesy of Wikiquotes, although I did read Gaudy Nights). There Whimsey said, “The facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.” To which I might add, by way of excuse, that if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Witty things always occur to me hours after the occasion for using them is past. Thus I better quickly marshal another quote to set the stage here, that by the most famous French diplomat ever, Charles-Maurice Talleyrand, who said: “Above all, no zeal.”—Which reminds me that he had the bad fortune to live with an even greater man always around, Napoleon. Napoleon once supposedly said to Talleyrand (and this sort of thing does build humility): “Look, you’re shit in a silk stocking.” I suppose I should render that more politely in French: “Ah, tenez, vous êtes de la merde dans un bas de soie.” Which reminds me of something else—of reading certain books in youth—I remember especially A Thousand and One Nights—in which, back in those days, the sexually explicit passages would be rendered in Italian! Groan! How that used to bug me. And my parents, speaking Hungarian, would switch to German when they didn’t wish us to understand what they were saying. But I’m now really wandering from the subject. Let’s get back to boredom.

Here I simply wish to emphasize that if the faculties of Man are single—expressing themselves in multiple modalities, each of those modalities has a boundary or limit. We benefit from them only when they are used in harmony. This is best illustrated with the intellect, the chief limit of which is also its greatest power. It can delimit any aspect of reality by separating it into a concept. This greatly increases our power of understanding, but only up to a limit. Hence Whimsey is correct. Principles, which are concepts dressed as absolutes, will kill people if other modes of perception are not permitted to come to bear. Hence also Talleyrand was nothing if not wise when counseling that zeal must be avoided. By curbing zeal, we give our other modes of being scope to enlarge our sense of the reality or action we are pondering.

One of the maddening but, in the long haul, most beneficial experiences we can gain by patrolling the border zone is that absolute certainties are unachievable. Wisdom is one of those great values that simply don’t lend themselves to exploitation. You can’t beat someone over the head with it, you can’t reduce it to a slogan, you can’t turn wisdom into money, power, or fame. If fame comes, it comes after you’ve departed. Conversely, any wisdom offered for sale or as the sure thing, you can’t miss, is certain to be counterfeit. Quotes are on my mind today, so let me end with one. Wisdom? Well….

So high, you can’t get over it.
So low, you can’t get under it.
So wide, you can’t get around it.
You gotta come in by the door.

Faculties: The One and Many

If I consult my own experience, I find that my various modes of being are a unity. I think of the self as a point, this despite the fact that I distinguish at least six modalities—thought, will, intuition, memory, emotion, and sensation. These are ways of perceiving the self in action; one of the meanings of modality, derived from the word mode, is form. The self may therefore be said to be a unity that manifests in different ways or forms. As we all know, these modalities may coincide, overlay, mix, fuse, etc. Each may be more or less quiescent. When I mow the lawn I immerse myself in the mode of sensation and of willing. My thoughts wander, my emotions rest except, from time to time, when I’m pleased by the attractive swaths of green that I produce; my intuition is in neutral; my thoughts wander; sometimes they latch on to a phrase left over from the last coherent run of mentation and keeps repeating that phrase over and over again; my memories are on automatic, but since my will is focused on making the lawnmower do its thing, their presentation—the stream of consciousness that still flows beneath the phrases I might be repeating, maybe something Latin and totally irrelevant but mildly pleasing—corruptio optima pessima, say—isn’t noticed. The repeating phrase need not learned, by the way. The last one I recall was “What’s hidden in that kitchen midden” which kept my mind playing like a child because it liked the rhyme.

The poet in me insists on the unity of self, but philosophers sometimes get caught up in the conceptual game too much. We separate and label the modalities, make of each a kind of hard and distinct something. Thus we have Schopenhauer who settled on the Will and would have it be the king. In modern psychiatric practice, Feeling is everything. I haven’t traced that peculiar emphasis back to its source in some philosopher or other, but it’s probably possible. But I always chuckle when Star Trek The Next Generation’s Deanna Troi (played by Marina Sirtis), the empath, we might call her, comes out with her true-and-tested question: “How do you feel about that?” The Intellect is the favorite of the philosophical community. It is the faculty philosophers hone to a fine edge and brilliant sheen; is it any wonder then that it must be the king of the faculties? For the more poetic mind, intellect has serious limits. As a young man I used to joke, heading to the bar with my friends after obligatory classes in philosophy saying: “If I stop suddenly and my esse should roll out in front of me—then I’ll believe I have one.” Juvenile, to be sure, but I make my point.

Here we have yet another instance of the one and the many—the conceptualization of which is a very hard nut for the intellect to crack but not all that problematical for the poet. The wonder of the human soul, in fact, is this oneness with multiple modalities. In this low realm we do get weird adaptations. When I see trees adapted to peculiar terrain, plants that grow immensely tall because they try to reach the tiny bit of light available to them, when I see strange creatures that inhabit the total darkness of the deepest oceans—at times like that I’m reminded of people in whom one faculty is massively developed but others have had no chance to unfold. My admiration is thus for those who develop fully on many fronts, and in harmony. I am on record as an admirer of St. Hildegard of Bingen, an exemplar of such persons who reach high states of development often overcoming, on the way, what appear insurmountable odds.

Time Concept Goes Wobbly

Time is like a fortress, unassailable, impregnable—until the experience of precognition makes the concept go wobbly. This is no problem for those who dogmatically deny that precognition is possible. But if it has happened to them (it has for me), they have problems denying it. Precognition is also the only paranormal phenomenon that resists explanation by the ever-handy super-psi explanation (discussed here); thus it’s difficult to explain away.

It’s easy to see why. We feel time as a moving front and therefore do not feel that the future exists, now, in any sense. The raw material of future events is already here, enduring along, as it were, but events are waiting for causation in that nebulous land of potential. Time is thus a necessary part of causation because cause-effect relationships are sequential. Therefore no one can pick up precise, complexly-related features of the future from presently existing minds—by telepathy, for instance—no matter how advanced the telepathic power might be. For this reason I’ve thought for quite a while now that precognition is a genuine hard pointer to some kind of transcendental reality. The really good cases totally resist explanation by naturalistic assumptions. In Einstein’s universe, by way of contrast, time is a function of space and space a function of time. You don’t get one without the other. Can we even think a future space?

Good (believable) cases of precognition therefore force us to question either our own understanding of time or our concept of free will. Let’s take the latter and see where it leads.

If we jettison free will, we are able at least to hypothesize that past, present, and future coexist. If that is true, the future is already present, we just don’t see it. Everything is fixed because everything happens deterministically—and therefore must be. No choice, no alternatives. The future then is totally predictable because it is produced deterministically. J.W. Dunne, one oft-cited thinker about this subject, suggested in the early editions of his An Experiment with Time that if we could move ourselves into the next dimension over, into a time above our time, we would be able to see our lives as a whole, from beginning to end, much as, from a high hill, we can see a whole train progressing east to west, say, on the plain below. Dunne believed in a serial time, a layered time. I came to realize that Dunne mustn’t have thought his example all the way through. Foolishly, perhaps, I did.

Yes. I made a real effort to picture the situation that Dunne described. And I realized that I wouldn’t see a body. I would see a very strange snake formed of endlessly many instances of my body. Let me explain. Take tonight. I would see myself as I was an hour ago (watching TV), as I am now (at the computer), as I will be in an hour (lying in bed). But I would also see my body rising from the chair, moving up the stairs, would see myself slightly advanced at every second, but still connected to the earlier versions, one for each of my slightest movements, each of which would still be there. I’d be a continuous snake. Indeed, the whole house would be filled with my body—up near the ceiling too, because once I painted the ceilings. This giant snake would grow smaller as I moved ever farther into the past and ultimately I would see myself emerging from my mother’s body. — Or, to change the example, the earth wouldn’t appear as a globe but, rather, as a solid ring of many, many earths, all overlaid, forming a ring around the sun. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t be able to see anything because the light of the sun would still be there, the photons would also be present at every instant of time, and the brilliance would hide everything.

As you can see, “collapsing time” so that past, present, and future coexist produces some fairly serious problems in seeing anything—or anything clearly. Everything is jam-packed into a solid mass of bodies. Because I don’t live in this house alone—and every visitor is still here too—as are the bodies of the men who built it, the birds that flew through this space before there was a house, and the trees that grew here once are still here too. But I’ve said enough to make the point. The past remaining as it was, the future as it will be—so that it can be seen, if only we changed our perspective—is not a very plausible hypothesis. So I abandon it—and get my free will back as a reward.

But if the future is not already present, how can anyone perceive any piece of it in a precognitive dream? Not by attempting, as Dunne attempted, to finesse the situation by spatializing time. I’d like to be able to deny that precognition is possible at all—but as I’ve shown in an earlier post, I’ve experienced it, and you can’t doubt your own experience. So I punt, seeing especially that it’s nearly midnight. Alas. There are more things out there, beyond the border, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…

Toying With Time

So far as we can tell, time has no frequency—but everything else does. Everything else has a cyclic pattern of existence and a dual character: things manifest as waves, which have periodicity (frequency) but also simultaneously manifest as particles. The time dimension happily accommodates either version of reality. It is necessary for measuring frequency, which we do in units of time. At the same time it happily accepts particles too. Thus we can at least imagine a totally static and stationary particle, never changing at all, but it also requires time in that form of it we call duration. Movement combined with change gives us a sense of time that flows—but it’s not time but everything else that does the flowing. Maddening, in a way. Not surprisingly, some conclude that there isn’t any such thing as time—by itself; it is simply a necessary aspect of human perception. Immanuel Kant had this take on time.

You don’t have time for this philosophical twaddle? Okay, click away and speed up your time. Time also has a subjective aspect. We can accelerate it by increasing our stimulation or we can slow it down. Just take ten breaths, slowly counting up to five on each inhale, five on each exhale. That’ll do it. The less we do and the more monotonous our action, the slower we perceive time’s flow—or the nothingness that it is.

Our own mode of being is yoked to cycles. The most basic wave we know is that between birth and death, more precisely between awakening to consciousness and our passing. All through this wave we are individuals, particles. And we cycle between sleep and wakefulness.

I got off on this not very fruitful tangent because it occurred to me, after the last post, that higher religions differ from earlier forms because they have very distinct time dimensions, whereas earlier forms of religiousness have annual cycles matched to the seasons. In Hindu cosmology, great cycles follow each other. In the Judeo-Christian and Muslim (call it Western) traditions, one cycle suffices. It begins in a creation and ends in the final judgment. The Mazdean religion (Zoroastrianism), apparently the oldest of prophetic religions, also begins with a creation; Ahura Mazda’s creation arouses a cosmic opponent, Ahriman; a great war between Darkness and the Light commences; the cycle ends when the Saoshyant (the Zoroastrian Savior) appears at the final defeat of Ahriman. Zoroaster lived in the period between 799 and 750 BC. Our materialist cosmology permits either a single great cycle, ending in heat death, or many cycles each beginning in a Big Bang and ending in a Big Crunch. A Big Crunch is in our future if the mass of the universe is sufficient eventually to slow down, stop, and the reverse the expansion we claim to see as a consequence of a Big Bang that started things about 14 billion years ago. Civilization produces big cyclic cosmologies.

Mazdaism, incidentally, later gave rise to an interesting concept of God. The religion is uncompromisingly dualistic. The Persian imagination projected an infinite column of Light in one direction, of Darkness in the other, and the created world situated at their boundaries, the mixing region. We might call that the border zone. This view produces a tremendous logical tension that most humans feel. Our concept of God is unitary. Thus, over time, a heretical version of Mazdaism appeared, Zervanism. In this conception a divine person higher than Mazda and Ahriman was imagined as the father of these two. His name was Zurvan, Time. Time has thus at least in one cultural tradition been imagined as the Absolute Ultimate, beyond good and evil.

I find it interesting that the Hermetic saying (“as above, so below”) applies here as well as elsewhere. The individual’s cycle is the same as that of the great cosmic process in which the individual exists. The individual appears to have been “created” at birth—no memory (for most) of having been before. It ends in a great final battle or “end times,” death, which is supposed to be followed by a judgment. With these facts before us, and with the individual experience much more accessible (and unavoidable—as sure as death and taxes) it is easy to dismiss cosmologies by simply saying that they are a projection of individual fate onto the collective. The truth of the matter may be more interesting. What if Hermes was right? I would suggest that the reader visit this site and play with some of the fractal images presented there. The organization of reality may indeed be analogous to the fractal, where the ever smaller retains the basic patterns of the larger, while yet always changing…despite the steady flow of time which is the ultimate dimension.