Hyman Bloom and Mystical Experience

The New York Times today brought news of the death of Hyman Bloom, the Boston-based painter of mystical art. In the obituary is the account of a mystical experience Bloom had in 1939 at age 26. I note this here because it shows, once again, that the mystical is not something ancient, a phenomenon of dark ages or of ages of superstition. It happens to people who are in some way open. Such experiences coincide often enough with artistic and visionary temperaments so that one cannot help but to assume a cause-effect relationship. I usually express this by gesturing with a hand above my head and saying that such people are “open,” as if they had a hole in their skull. This openness manifests in milder forms as well, thus as intuition of a certain kind, and those who have it cannot view the world in the same way as people for whom the region beyond the border is entirely opaque, the wall so solid that not even vibrations reach the hand that inadvertently touches the stones.

The Ambiguities of Moral Action

Let me, for starters, delimit the scope of the moral, thus to separate genuinely moral from what might be called spontaneous useful action. All action is aimed at achieving something good, and we can define good simply enough by saying that it’s something pleasing to us. The issue of moral choice never really arises unless there is a conflict between goods—thus until a situation arises in which we must deny ourselves something for a so-called “higher” good or undergo a pain or deprivation in order to benefit either a future instance of ourselves or to help other people. If there is no conflict, there is no morality involved. Morality always involves the willing acceptance of some kind of deprivation. To eat the French fries may not be a moral act, but to eat the spinach, if I don’t like it, may be—because it is good for me. Similarly, doing services for others in exchange for something else is just exchange. I’m merely pleasing myself by means of other people. When I spend a day helping the old lady next door move her furniture to a small apartment half-way across the city—and I rent the truck and do all the labor—then I’m doing something just because, under the circumstances, I find it appropriate.

Moral action thus seems to require the development within us of a kind of sympathy—both for an enlarged sense of our selves and for other people. In the first case, I enlarge my sense of self from this immediate moment to the larger sense of myself over a long period of time. In relation to others, I include the community as part of my narrow being, hence I give of myself to the collective. In both cases a sense of sympathy and unity must be present as a motive. The sensory pay-offs of abstemious behavior or good deeds are quite minimal.

Now the ambiguities of moral action arise precisely because such action demands this inner state, this intuition, this something that I call a sympathy. And we are not the sole agency that participates in the formation of this feeling. Nurture plays a very big role. Our sense of sympathy is an inner presence formed reciprocally with the community. Suppose a child grows up in a harsh and violent environment where an abusive figure dominates and sets the tone of most hours of the day—whether he or she is present or not. Here I am reminded of Saddam Hussein; he grew up in the shadow of a violent stepfather with criminal tendencies. If our earliest experience is of a certain kind, just how free, later, is our will to ascribe to the “world out there” a benevolent aspect? Why should it—when its own experience has been of a world of irrational and arbitrary threats against which only deception, dissimulation, and countering violence are really effective foils?

Ambiguity further plagues this subject because even people who grow up in the worst of circumstances still retain a sense of moral rights and wrongs. This sense may be deformed, but it won’t be absent. The person will know what hurts him or her, and he or she ought to know to avoid doing to others what he or she does not wish to experience. The good deeds of people scarred like this may be more difficult to discern, but may be present. The Biblical admonition, “Judge not, that ye be not judged” [Matthew 7:1] is based on the perception of this ambiguous character of moral action, the roots of which are so clouded and difficult to see. To shake our organic rootings in actual experience so that everything appears clearly, sharply, and in the right focus, requires a long journey sometimes—and sometimes is present early thanks to the grace of fortunate birth, parents, and optimal circumstances. And even then, the drag of the sensory, the personal, and of the here and now are great enough to lead us into error.

Twisted Together

The concept of complexity suggests an approach to thinking about values. Complex means, minimally, twisted together, entwined. Something made of many parts linked together in meaningfully related ways has more value than something simple existing without relationships. A slice of bread has more nutritional value than a lump of sugar with the same caloric value. Both produce energy in the body but the bread will provide more balanced nutrition owing to its more complex structure.

Another case. You come into a new community and meet two people. Both belong to important and well-connected families. One of them, Arthur, is a leading figure in his family, young but already widely accomplished. The other, Beaumont, is his family’s problem child, the source of many conflicts, with a very patchy history to put it generously. — This, by the way, is how a novelist develops a plot. He says: Who’s going to be more valuable to you in your work in the new community: Arthur or Beaumont? The truth is that odds heavily favor Arthur, and in most cases he will be very helpful; Beaumont may be entertaining, but he’ll be a problem sooner or later. The novelist knows this—knows how people eyeball situations—and therefore has a nice plot situation that might be exploited.

Both are complexly related to their families, but Arthur is integrated and Beaumont is not. This fact suggests that “relationship,” by itself, is not a sufficient condition for value. Relationships are central, but they range between love and hatred. Attraction and repulsion are more neutral terms, but speaking of love and hate permits us to think in terms of willful, feeling agents. We might hypothesize that creation is a movement in the direction of complexity, thus in the direction of an attractor. Destruction then may be envisioned as things spontaneously falling apart because an attractor has been removed; in its absence that which used to cohere no longer does.

Complexity, however, won’t solve the problem of morality. What is it about Beaumont that always produces trouble, mayhem, contention, flare-ups, wrecks, uproars, and the like? Why is it that whatever Arthur touches, it always turns green? Is it a willful quality? Is it grace? Is it nurture, nature, karma? Don’t look at me. I don’t have the answer. I think it is a will that freely decides, but I can’t justify that thought by the mechanics of logic.

Logic depends on concepts, but in Beaumont’s (or anybody’s) actual case, a point comes where a weird concept spoils the logic. Beaumont acts on his perceptions of reality; in his own mind he chooses the good. He seems unable to perceive the full context of his choice, unable to see that, more complexly considered, the choice he makes will lead to a negative outcome. That inability to see: is that also a choice? or is it a real inability. Logic can’t untwist that one for us. When I do bad things, I willfully ignore what I do perceive. Hence arises my belief that evil is chosen knowingly. But I can’t honestly speak for Beaumont.

This all sounds innocent enough, but its implications are quite major. We’ll have to go there.

Mind-Produced Reality?

There is a mystical line of speculation suggesting that beyond the border, that side of life, what we see is the creation of our own minds. Suppose you, an elderly lady, die, and, having been brought up in the Christian tradition—and your conscience reasonably clear—you expect to be in heaven. Heaven is all things good and beautiful—hence you behold beauty, harmony, see lovely lights, hear splendid music. Or suppose that you’ve just been shot dead in a store that you were holding up, but you didn’t see the owner in the hallway, holding a rifle, and just as you try to pistol-whip the clerk, by way of saying “I mean business,” you’re shot, fall to the ground, crawl to the door of the store, and die on the sidewalk. Got it? Good. Now you, a hoodlum, old enough to know that hold-ups are a no-no, a vague conception of Christianity alive in your noodle too, over there, beyond the border, you don’t anticipate the best. Rather the opposite. This mystical speculation therefore suggests that you’ll see devils advancing on you, a sea of flame behind them silhouetting horns and three-pronged spears. You would say “Woe is me!” but, alas, you haven’t read enough to know that phrase. Instead you say, “Oh, shit.”

Now what about this notion that the mind creates reality?

I’m fairly convinced that the idea arose because we do seem to create reality in dreams. I’ve had the experience countless times, usually in quite banal dream situations. Here is one that I recall. In this dream I had to cut something out, a picture from a printed piece of paper. I was standing at a table then and, in dream memory, there was nothing on that table except a cup, pencils, and the sheet. But now I just reached to the left, over there, and sure enough a pair of scissors in my hand, but, I swear, it materialized, manner of speaking. It wasn’t there before. I noted this fact in the dream itself. Indeed that thought caused me to awaken. And I lay there thinking about it—and that’s why I even remember this snippet. But I’ve noted this phenomenon many times before. I think of people, and there they are. But other things far more outrageous also happen, not least—and everybody has experienced this—the scene suddenly changing, without any transitional state. People will say: I was gardening, and the next thing you know I’m in this, like bazaar…

Dream reality, in the dream, a little less so when remembered, precisely for the reasons just outlined, seems very real. But the progression of events convinces me that what we experience as concrete reality is thoughts expressed in three-dimensional picture form. Thus when I think of scissors, I hold them because I thought of them. The gardener is in a bazaar because an association, perhaps a memory, brought a bazaar to mind, a place where once she’d seen some tool she needed at that moment. The reason why scenes change abruptly is because they do. They do so in our head. I just thought of Kroger, a big fruit display. If I were asleep, I might be in that Kroger.

The thinking behind this theory—based on the dream although it is—is that outside of bodies our mind becomes our only home and that, in consequence, we are subject to its spontaneous productions whether we will it or not. The good will enjoy heavenly pleasures, the evil will be tortured forever. End of story.

Something in me dislikes this notion. Let me look and see what it is. The notion has no anchorage in anything except dream experience, and that I’ve managed to explain that to my own satisfaction. Furthermore, why would that be so? What, if anything, would that have to do with galaxies, say, or shells on sandy shores? For any real life beyond this frontier, the other side would have to have some kind of immovable, resistant reality by means of which we should be able to orient ourselves. Without an objective over-against, our own minds would have no meaning whatsoever. Do I think that the elderly lady and the hoodlum will have identical experiences over there? No, I don’t. But the notion that this whole fantastic universe exists merely so that, having spent a lifetime doing—whatever, you fill in the blanks—so that, thereafter, I can spend it reliving my brief jaunt at Woodstock in 1969—Naw. I find that preposterous.

Oh, by the way, just a figure of speech. Too old for Woodstock. And had I been the right age, I’d have been too busy doing something really fun…

Poets and Philosophers

There is a temperamental difference between poets and philosophers—and this difference has corollaries. Philosophers want answers. Poets want projects. Reality offers an infinity of answers, none of which is satisfactory. As a consequence the philosophical will drives on relentlessly until it has reached a concept that dissolves all further questioning. This answer, in one form or another, is God—albeit its expression may be a kind of negative, like the concept of nirvana. A brief but comprehensive formulation of this may be found here, although the context is broader.

The experience of creative endeavor is quite different. Engaged in one, the poet is totally absorbed—sometimes tortured, sometimes elated, but always completely engaged in the project. When the effort is finally done, when the feelings of regret have begun to fade (“I wish I could have done it better, this is wrong, that is weak, etc., etc.”) the poetic mind, after a brief and contemplative interlude, in which the project’s aura is still present, begins to search for what is next. The motivational structure of the poetic mind is endless creation. The sheer fact that engagement in it is to be in eternity, not, repeat NOT in time, takes away all of the negatives that usually accompany the feeling of “same old, same old.” For the creative person there is no such thing. There is the bliss (sometimes manifesting as agony) of being in the creative flow. Then nothing else matters—indeed everything else is just a distraction. And there is the void at all those times when, as yet, the new is not tangibly present, even as a seed.

Our cosmological systems are built by philosophers. They end in ways the poet can’t genuinely value. His or her reaction is, “And then…” This sort of thing is treated with negative rejection by the philosophical mind. It wants closure. The poet wants the story to go on—if not in this project then in another. Poets create mythologies. They have no problem whatsoever with a story that never ends. But it must have a wave-like pattern, with rises and falls, with obstructions, conquests, defeats, and triumphs. And like a child, when the story is over, the poet will want to— hear it again.

Mind you, poets have no monopoly over creativeness, and many philosophers are among the most creative people of all. But in that case they too are poets…

A Modern Platonist

It is an odd characteristics of human behavior that labels give us comfort even when we don’t properly understand a thing. We give it name. We get used to the name. And after a while we feel as if we understand something just because we’ve classified it. Miraculous healings are a case in point. We assign them to a higher order; we endow this order with limitless powers; doing so we escape the burden of explanation; we can avoid specifying exactly how the higher order achieves a miraculous healing. Some people—those who won’t buy the “higher order” explanation—also adopt magical tactics of explanation. They speak of spontaneous healing without explaining how it could possibly have worked—how this particular very rapid spontaneous healing differs from the ordinary slow kind. Alternatively they deny the health condition: there was nothing wrong in the first place, the ailment was imagined. And so it goes.

While this is a characteristic human approach, good theories are also formulated by careful observation, the discovery of where the limits of knowledge are, by naming or circumscribing the unknown element, and then trying to penetrate that region in some new way. An example of this approach, which might have some relevance to miraculous healings, is the concept of morphic fields proposed most recently by Rupert Sheldrake (1942-), a British biologist. You pursue this idea in detail in Sheldrake’s two books on the subject: The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988) and A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance (2005).

Morphic field theory has (in my opinion, anyway) a close kinship to the Platonic concept of eternal forms, but in a modern variant. The term itself is taken from the Greek for “form.” The idea is that any organized aggregate or any kind has a field associated with it; this field may be likened to a memory of how something is organized, thus as a deposit or a record. The field and the organized entity are linked one to the other, as we are to our memories. Thus we continuously add to our memories and, when needed, we retrieve them and they guide us in our activities. Substitute morphic field for memory, and you have a reasonable grasp of Sheldrake’s theory. In Sheldrake’s scheme our own personal memories, however, are just one instance of a morphic field. Our bodies have their own field; the bodies of humanity as a whole have another. In this theory, morphic fields are associated with all organized entities. The fields hold the patterns that describe each—individual or collective. Actual events are taken up into the field and stored there, modifying the pattern.

An interesting idea. It is structurally much the same as hylomorphism, suggesting that everything is a duality of matter (hyle) and form (morphē), an Aristotelian proposal. We’re already used to that idea, therefore it doesn’t strike us as outlandish—whereas Sheldrake’s much more detailed concept of “fields” out there, somewhere, holding a more dynamic sort of form—and zillions of them, for individuals as well as whole species and subspecies—strikes us as weird. But the idea produces less and less resistance as you ponder it over time. At least that is what happened in my case. My reflexive reaction was to say: “We don’t need another whole order of things out there.” Then, later, it occurred to me that I did not object to the Platonic/Aristotelian form-matter conceptualization when I first heard it, although the same “doubling” of everything is also implied there. Why didn’t I object to that? Because I was younger? But enough. Let me continue and sketch in how this idea first surfaced.

The idea was first proposed, not using the same phraseology, by a very important biologist and thinker, Hans Driesch (1867-1941); he is considered the father of embryology. Driesch discovered something rather astonishing. He was experimenting with sea urchin embryos. He cut them in half and then waited to see what would happen. To his astonishment, the embryos developed despite having been halved. They developed into real, living sea urchins, but much smaller ones than those that nature normally produces. This work became the foundation of modern embryology. Driesch, however, came to be classified as a vitalist, thus placed outside scientific orthodoxy in retrospect. Why? He could not explain the phenomena he was observing without recourse to what he called “a unifying non-material mind-like something…an ordering principle which does not add either energy or matter” to the process. This “something” is what Sheldrake later called the morphic field. The term itself is actually a generalization of a more narrow descriptor introduced around 1907 by another biologist, the Russian Alexander Gurwitsch. Gurwitsch spoke of “morphogenetic fields”; he offered it as a suggestive hypothesis, little more than that; his use of the “genetic” suffix limits the concept of biological development, whereas Sheldrake enlarges it to any organized phenomenon. Ross Granville Harrison and others went on to explore this “field” phenomenon in experiments, but their work was marginalized later by emerging mechanistic theories. What this shows is that Sheldrake has a lineage in scientific exploration and speculation, all arising from the puzzle that embryonic development produced—and still does. To this day we do not know with any kind of precision what guides embryonic development. The modern view that chemical feedback loops do the whole job would have to be proved by detailed mapping of all the chemical reactions, showing that they take place by rigid determination, each step necessarily forcing the next. We have no such proof.

* * *

Now it might be objected that “morphic field” is also nothing but a label, nothing more useful than “miraculous.” But here I would point out that a theory of morphic fields—separate from the actual organism—is a much more useful concept for understanding phenomena like miraculous cures. Let’s take it seriously for a moment. Let’s say that every body is formed from a pattern stored “off-line” as it were, thus in a field at least analogous to electromagnetic fields; those also exist, mysteriously, “out there.” Sheldrake describes the interaction between a morphic field and the organism as taking place by what he calls a resonance. He largely leaves it at that, but the suggestion is something akin to a frequency or a vibration; the frequency to be sure, would have to be of a much more complex sort than we associate with electromagnetic waves. Here I would use the example of a memory which has multiple modalities: image, sound, emotion, even smell: a complex experience retrieved as a packet. A morphic resonance related to the body, would similarly have chemical, structural, and dynamic aspects, including electromagnetic states, temperature, and so forth.

Now let us assume that states of disease or malformation come about, in part at least, because something interferes with the proper communication between the organism and its field. Let us assume, further, that a powerful flow of psychic energy, such as a healer is able to generate, stimulates the body of the sick person once more to “tune in” to its field. If that actually happens, rapid healing may take place. It would, indeed, be spontaneous—in the sense that processes that would have taken place slowly and naturally anyway now take place rapidly, possibly helped by the excess energy also present.

This sketch represents a somewhat more thinkable alternative to the concept of a miraculous healing—but that’s all it is, a thinkable hypothesis. This field has not been developed. The reason for that is simply that current theories have no room for non-material mind-like somethings. Sheldrake appears intent in persuading his fellow scientists to engage in meaningful experiments that will definitely establish the reality of morphic fields. His aim has not been to commit cosmology, to echo George Will. Therefore he has avoided speculations of the sort that arises as corollaries to his ideas: What comes first? The field or the organism? Is this a purely naturalistic phenomenology? If yes, pure materialism is better, is more parsimonious. Morphic fields are obviously less than perfect—else we’d never have deformed embryos and malformed babies. I regret, to be sure, that orthodox science is as hostile to metaphysics as it is to theories that wander across the borderzone in search of explanations—which may be the right ones, once fully fleshed out. Not in the current form, to be sure. But the direction may be the right one.

What Does "Higher Power" Mean?

One of the more interesting books around—especially for people who read such blogs as this one—is Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. The book is by Rupert Sheldrake and is subtitled “And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.” The amazon.com link to the paperback is here. I read the book in fascination. I consider Sheldrake to be one of our time’s most original thinkers about biology. He is also a creative experimenter and a genuine scientist. In certain narrow circles of scientific orthodoxy, to be sure, he is a heretic. But never mind them. What the book demonstrates is that dogs as well as other animals appear to have what for them—for us too, for that matter—are “higher powers.” Telepathic abilities are classed as paranormal at least. Animals also evidently have powers of orientation in the wild inexplicable by ordinary sensory capacities. They seem to have a kind of sight that, traditionally, we call “second sight.” Yes, they’re at home in border zones much as some people are. And, as with us as well, the talent isn’t uniformly present. Nor are these capacities limited to mammals; birds display such powers too.

I start here with animals to make a point. We have a reflexive way of assuming that higher powers, when they manifest, must come directly from God—and if not from God then still from some higher, conscious entity. I’ve pondered this matter for quite a long time and have another take on the matter. But let’s begin with some sorting.

* * *

By “higher powers” I mean phenomena like miraculous healing, ecstatic states, and prophetic visions. In these cases God does the healing, God manifests in the ecstatic states (or the mystic experiences union with God), and God sends the prophetic vision. To be sure, in all of these instances, the phenomenon itself transcends ordinary experience; it is therefore logical enough to use a word that signifies the Transcendent writ large as its cause. But when people speak of God this way, they have something more concrete in mind. They imagine an Agency, distinct and separate, acting deliberately in this specific case whereas, in all other cases, God acts in a more nebulous and indirect way. This must be what people mean. If God sends me a prophetic message but lets you read tea leaves, the only way to understand the distinction is that God intervenes in reality deliberately in some but not in other cases.

People don’t usually invoke divine action to explain telepathy. It is a paranormal power but mild in effect and common enough to be assigned to a lower agency, say to a “talent” or to a “gift.” But notice that even here, using the word “gift” suggests a divine dispensation given to some, not to others. By contrast, people rarely assign a run of bad luck to God. But why not? If in one case God rewards us for being good, in others he might punish us for our careless acts of stupidity. Finally, when in legalese we speak of an “act of God,” what we mean then is simply “accident”; the lawyers don’t intend to suggest that floods, lightning strikes, or tornadoes are literally acts of God.

I think I’ve outlined the issues sufficiently here to show that referring strange, unusual phenomena to God serves no rational or meaningfully explanatory purpose. I strongly lean toward the view that God cannot be pulled down to our level and assigned roles in our ordinary experience. Technically this is known as negative theology: man should not presume. Furthermore, the use of God as a mechanism of explanation amounts to little more than saying, “It happened because it happened.”

* * *

Let’s look at these phenomena from another perspective. Let’s look at miraculous healings. Healers are often involved. They often speak of a flow of energy or of a power that aids them—and they report feeling this whatever in themselves. The consequence, namely healing, is assigned to a “higher” power only because the healing is extraordinary. It is also highly desirable. We give the desirable a “high” value. But what exactly happens in a healing? Some kind of rearrangement of matter takes place. Cancerous cells are destroyed, their remains carried away as waste. Chronic chemical, hormonal balances are restored because the organs that produced or failed to produce them are realigned in proper ways. Something physical happens or no healing could possibly take place. This process requires two factors, it seems to me. One is some kind of knowledge about the right arrangements of the biochemistry and bone structure involved. The other is some kind of energy that removes obstructions and speeds up a process that, in ordinary healing, takes its own sweet time. Let’s examine these factors.

The knowledge may be present in the body already, but the body’s mechanisms may be too weak to implement the healing. In that case the healing stream overcomes weakness, energizes natural processes, possibly catalyzes reactions, and thus leads to rapid recovery of a status quo ante. An alternative possibility is that the healing current itself carries both knowledge and energy. That concept needs special parsing.

When we speak of “energy” in these cases, the justification for using the word is the reported experience both of healers and those who are healed. But the energy involved is not the sort we usually experience—thus mechanical pushes and pulls, gravitational attraction, electrical current, heat, or, more generally, radiation. The very reason why such healings are “miraculous” is because something very different is present. Or is it?

Here things become complicated because, ultimately, we don’t really understand what life really is. We think it is ordinary energy manifesting in material structures. But let us suppose that life itself is just as transcendent a phenomenon as the healing current itself. We don’t think so because we’re all too used to its normal manifestations. One possible explanation of miraculous healings is that they are a temporary intensification of life energy, something that always flows through our bodies but in a relatively thinned-out form. It may be possible to tap into it in such a manner that it flows much more abundantly, and when it does, it will manifest its ordering powers rapidly, setting this right where, in our body, it encounters disturbances in what should be the healthy pattern.

* * *

I began this post with a reference to Sheldrake. I’ll also end it on that note. Sheldrake’s theories of morphic fields suggest a way of thinking about miraculous cures along the lines I’ve just sketched in above. I’ll discuss that application of the morphic field theory in a future post and continue this outline then. For now, as the medievalists used to say, satis.

Miracle Cures and Healers

If no human being had ever experienced a miracle, faith healing, or the operation of some kind of strange, inexplicable power, I am sure that we’d still have religious practices, but they would all be of the variety we know as the worship of the collective. All rise. And now some celebrity will sing the National Anthem, possibly in a way we don’t even recognize. Three soldiers stand down there with the flags. And many people have a hand over their heart. State religion. Patriotism. Play ball.

We carry within us a vague intuition that all this stuff around and about us isn’t the be-all and the end-all here, but when we encounter the transcendental up close and personally, then we really know something. Then we take it seriously. And nothing gets our attention more swiftly and fully than hearing about cures. It is an astonishing fact—but nonetheless a fact—that great healers keep appearing among us, not many, but they keep appearing, and they do so no matter what stage of culture we have reached. When they do arise, a cult will invariably form around them either within the bosom of some established church or external to it.

Solanus Casey (1870-1957), a healing saint and a Capuchin priest, is one such figure in my own neck of the woods. As the author of the brief Wikipedia article about him puts it: “Many miraculous cures have been associated with Father Solanus’s intercession, both when he was alive and after his death. Pilgrims from around the world continue to make pilgrimages to the tomb of Father Solanus.” Casey is on the way to sainthood, having been given the “Venerable” designation by the Vatican. He is an example of a healer whose cult is embedded in a church.

Another modern example is the German Bruno Gröning (1906-1959). He was a carpenter by trade and later earned his living as a factory and general laborer. He emerged from obscurity in 1949 and became a very popular faith healer; his powers caused him to become embroiled in controversy. Controlling elements of the medical community opposed him; the state eventually forbade him to engage in healing activities. Thanks to the efforts of Greta Häusler, one of his early followers, the Bruno Gröning Circle of Friends has become a global organization with footprints in many countries. We find the same patterns wherever we go, never mind the locally dominant religions. Hopeful believers visit the graves of many famous Muslim saints with the same expectations—and occasional miraculous healing experiences—as they visit Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, and Jewish figures.

The fascinating aspects of this phenomenon are three-fold. The healing power flows through a person, comes to be associated with a fixed place—hence pilgrimages to grave-sites or regions where the figure was active—and cures continue to take place after the individual passes away. It is also evident that the powers of the healer, and most likely the power of the person to be healed, both arise spontaneously. In the healer the power comes first; alignment with some religion or independent activity follows. Neither Casey nor Gröning were intellectuals. Gröning had very little formal education; and Casey, although he graduated from seminary, was ordained a “simplex” priest; this meant that he could neither hear confessions nor give homilies: his superiors didn’t think he had the intellectual capacity for such tasks. One smiles. The power in the person healed manifests, it seems to me, in response to the stimulus of the healer—but the healer need not be there. Otherwise post-mortem healings would not take place.

I have no doubt that some kind of energy does flows from or through these saints—but I suspect that it is always all around us. They manage somehow to concentrate and to direct it. It flows through them with great strength perhaps because something in us that normally blocks or weakens it is absent in them. It is very difficult to credit that the healing power is associated with a geographical location—easy to assume that it is everywhere. Casey lived decades in New York before he arrived in Michigan. But location—a grave-site, for example—may have bearing on the person to be healed. The healing may be a process in which receptivity to the “current of healing,” to use Gröning’s phrase, must first be stimulated. This receptivity may be enhanced by faith. Being at the place where the saint is buried or where he or she spent a life may heighten the receptivity.

There is ample evidence from many cases that the “faith” required to be healed is not something intellectual. Complete unbelievers are actually healed. But how great, really, was their disbelief? They went to see the healer, after all. This coincidence of intellectual doubt but contradictory action of the will illustrates how complex we are. What we think is often not even half the story. And many of us are far from sufficiently integrated.

Heart Exam: Continued

Conceptual thought has a devil of a time capturing dynamism. Motion is a good example. We experience it without trouble; we find it tougher than nails to describe precisely. We have to do it piece-meal. The object was here, but now it is there, and whatever happened happened in between. We don’t know what it was, but have a name for it. We call it motion. But of course, we can usually find a spot half-way between here and there. And between that half-way point and here, there is another point that’s also half-way in between. To describe motion precisely, we have describe the tiniest increments. This is what calculus is intended to do: slicing and dicing space and time into infinitely small increments and then artfully summing them up. We get an illusion of control. At the conceptual level we never really get there—because we can’t reach infinity, but close enough for government work.

All right, but what does that have to do with heart? In looking at the dynamics of human development, we also engage in many differentiations. We have an experience of Self, but to grasp it intellectually, we parse it apart: intellect, emotion, imagination, will. They don’t exist independently, but the names do. But if we look at any one of these aspects or abstractions—these slices and dices of the Self—we detect even finer distinctions. Our feelings have many different qualities. There is raw emotion at one and joy at the other extreme; in between we find an infinity of other states. There is the emotion of watching Charles Bronson deal with the bad guys in one of the Death Wish movies. Raw emotion. There is the complex emotion at the end of watching The Death of a Salesman. There is the rock concert and Handel’s Messiah or Judas Maccabaeus. There is Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. To describe the curvature between these poles would require a kind of literary calculus no one has ever devised.

In dealing with the range of our capacity we associate different manifestations of the soul with different organs. We associate intellect with the brain, emotions with the gut, imagination with the eye, will with the fist, and all of the higher expressions of our nature with—the heart. Well, we’re finally there.

A somewhat hidden example of this is courage. Courage is an aspect of the will; and by real courage we don’t mean a man who, say, assaults a bigger, stronger fellow in a fit of rage. Rather, we call courageous someone who, in an extremely dangerous or risky situation, is able to overcome his fears to achieve a higher good. The word itself masks my point. Courage derives from the French coeur and ultimately from the Latin cor, both meaning heart. An interesting side note: the obsolete meaning of "courage" also includes mind, spirit, and temper. When we intend to speak of a lower kind of courage we label people who have it gutsy.

As we saw in the last post, Pascal associated a higher kind of reason with the heart. Paracelsus differentiated lower and higher forms of imagination. He called the higher form of it true imagination (imaginatio vera), the lower form fantasy. There is also a kind of intellectual imagination which we label foresight, thus imagination based on calculating the complex vector of events—in which the weighing of probabilities is to the front.

If heart is thus associated with a kind of thought, a kind of imagination, with courage, and with higher feelings, of which the highest is self-less love, it might be argued—I argue this point—that what tradition calls the heart, and treats as if it were a higher organ—is just a way of making a differentiation between a highly but comprehensively developed self and one that is more primitive and still largely undeveloped. The self as it appears most commonly is strongly conditioned by societal norms. Concerning this form of the self, Idries Shah has this interesting comment about this as yet undifferentiated form of the self. Writing in Learning How to Learn (pp. 157-157) he writes:

Remember that the human being is so intensely standardized that an outside observer, noting his reactions to various stimuli, need not infer an individual controlling brain in each person. He would be more likely to infer the existence of a separate, outside brain, and the people as mere manifesters of its will.

If we examine the polarities I’ve noted above using movies and other works of art, the chief difference between the low and the high is level of complexity. To appreciate the high, the self has to be developed enough to do so—and not simply intellectually. The self as a whole has to be developed, the will as much as the emotions, the imagination as much as the intellect. We are here faced with a dynamic of development. When we observe higher expressions of the self, we grope for a different way of rooting them. We recruit the heart as the organ. For lower expressions, we locate them in those organs most tangibly associated with different manifestations of the self that permeates the human body.