Self-observation tells us that consciousness manifests in many forms. Sharp self-awareness is rather rare. In times of stress and trouble, during infatuations, during illness, disasters, or after winning a sizeable lottery—while daydreaming, watching TV, musing at the wheel, and even doing habitual work—the self is in various states of identification. For all practical purposes, it is one with, unified with, its own experience. The sense of self is vaguely present at all times, but the consciousness of the self is dormant. It requires concentration to take control. “I had to get a hold of myself,” people say—but indicating what? They mean that they had to break the identification and become aware. With consciousness fully present—rather than held captive by experience—directed action becomes possible. Arguably a principal difference between people is the degree to which they are able effectively to detach. The word is paradoxical because, in this context, to be detached is to be present, whereas to be identified means that the self is absent in a state of semi-sleep. Shocks awaken people.
The Case
To illustrate the thesis I present the fascinating case of Helen Keller (1880-1968). Keller lost her sight and hearing in an illness at the age of 19 months. She was beginning to learn to speak, was imitating phrases that she heard. She had also learned the word for water and remembered it (as “wah-wah”) throughout her painful period of mental darkness. Thus her acquisition of language had at least begun, if only barely. Then she fell into a world of total silence and darkness. It is clear from her autobiography that she was conscious in a way—but conscious in the way I’ve labeled as identification. She felt a need to communicate and tried to do so with some success by using signs and gestures—pushing, pulling, imitating the motions of cutting bread to get bread, and so on. She felt powerful frustrations. And she enjoyed sensory experiences using her remaining powers of movement, smell, and touch. But full consciousness dawned in her only as she was approaching her seventh birthday. This happened while she felt the flow of water on one hand as her teacher, Anne Sullivan, spelled out the word for water with finger-motions on Helen’s other hand. Suddenly Helen understood. This was a revolutionary and dramatic experience for her! As soon as she had understood that a certain pattern of finger-touches stood for water—and that the experience of water thus had a name—her heroic and splendid career began. She had been enabled to experience abstraction. As she put it later, “The mystery of language was revealed to me.”
Discussion
Let us ponder this mystery, the mystery of naming. It consist of the association of two radically different phenomena with one another. In Keller’s case the two were the flow of water and a series of touches. Her mind made the conjunction: this is that. Her power of consciousness grasped this difference and sameness. But the association was presented to her by another person, and repeatedly, until Keller “got it.”
Keller’s experience, of course, was of a fundamental type, akin to something like the taste of chocolate. To convey what any taste actually is using words alone comes down to empty gesturing unless the other party shares the experience. But if the other does, just naming it suffices. In Keller’s case, one cannot say much more than simply to assert that such an association, between this and that, is obviously possible; we’ve all experienced it. But why then was this particular experience so revolutionary in Helen Keller’s case? During her long period of silence and darkness, she had already begun to use a kind of language—a language of motions. Why did her pushing (to signal “go away”) and pulling (to signal “come”)—and the discovery that these signs got appropriate responses—not give her the grand experience of understanding that a signed word gave her later?
My guess is that the discovery, the mystery of language, is the discovery of abstraction—but also that abstraction really points at something more than merely “abbreviation.” The motions she used earlier were such abbreviations, but they didn’t give her that moment of Aha! It seems that the abstract points to or reveals some aspect of another reality which, by means of the abstraction itself, suddenly becomes perceivable. Thus the emotion Keller felt came from the sudden opening to the dimension of Intelligence. In her own report, she spoke of having a feeling of suddenly remembering something long forgotten. Pushing and pulling were too closely associated with the physical facts of go-away, come-hither to serve the purpose of abstraction. The word “water” spelled with fingers, however, did have this alien quality of otherness and therefore its magical effect. The finger-spelling was radically different from the flow of water Keller actually felt on her other hand. An effort of inner linking took place. A new world opened.
The word “symbol” derives from the Greek word meaning “sign.” Language provides an alternative world of signs for every conceivable aspect of reality. By its very nature, language is arbitrary, illustrated by the fact that humanity uses many different languages. This quality, this arbitrary assignment of this for that, where the this has no resemblance whatever to the that, demands a corresponding motion or act by the perceiving intelligence, a perceptive act. When this act takes place effectively, the self awakens to a power dormant until then. The mystery of language, therefore, appears to be its power to evoke a recognition of meaning.
Curiously the perception of meaning, like the taste of chocolate, is a primordial experience we can’t describe. In a manner of speaking we acquire meanings long before we do. For most of us the recognition of abstraction is not an explosive experience, as it was for Helen Keller. Meaning is intrinsically associated with naming. For the child, early on, a table covered with objects is just a sensory landscape without meaning until the child discovers that that red object over there is called a “cup.” Once the object and the symbol are connected, the cup has meaning even as all the other stuff remains a landscape. “Buckle, Mami,” one of my daughters used to say in her crib, still tiny. She meant her bottle. Her hunger, her desire to have some milk, had been resolved into a clear meaning with a name. She had acquired a power more discriminating and efficient than simply crying.
Language awakens intelligence by separating the self and its surroundings (including its internal experiences like pain or pleasure) into a triad of relationships: there is the self, there is the object, and there is its abstract representation—its meaning. And meaning, to be sure, is a deeper concept than mere abstraction. Using that representation, the child can understand the object and, in turn, manipulate it in the mind itself and in communication with others. But using this insight, the self itself becomes an object of thought. An inchoate sensation becomes me; me becomes Jane, initially. Later, more ceremoniously, the last name is added: me becomes Jane Xavier.
Now the chief lesson I draw from this case is that language is a tool, a means. The capacity for understanding must be present and is innate. It isn’t language that produces intelligence but intelligence that manifests by using a tool. And once the tool is present, the powers of the intelligence are able to expand.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Understanding and Intellectual Grasp
At bottom understanding and intellectual grasp are really one and the same thing. Or are they? I ask the question for a reason. The understanding of something often dawns in my mind before I’ve actually articulated it, thus taken it apart into pieces and realized, in detail, how everything fits together. But even before I do that, I’ve already understood the object. Conversely, understanding may also arise suddenly from the puzzled handling of details, looking at them this way, that way. All at once I understand.
This is a peculiar experience. What is this feeling? What actually happens? Mysterious. A man will say: “Well, I just knew.” If then you ask him how he knew, you may sometimes trigger a retrospective inspection of the process; the account of it will depend on the ability of the person to see into his own innards. The speaker will begin to trace a process backward. We usually call it a process of thought, but the point I’m after is that thought is often not involved at all.
The man in this case will begin his account by examining slices of the process one by one, isolating them from one another. Put another way, the speaker reviews his stream of experiences over time and notes his reactions one by one, almost second by second. When this process originally took place, the speaker did not engage in conceptualization—did not use tokens, words. The process worked beneath the level of speech or its equivalent, thought. The speaker nonetheless absorbed the events and his reactions to them. Translating that process into speech (spoken or silent) is really what results in intellectual grasp. But we know the thing, we understand it, before we ever proceed to its mental formulation into concepts. Like many other people, I often don’t know what I know until I write it down, but, paradoxically, I knew that before I wrote it. But after writing I possess it more fully and completely. But what is it that I possess? It is a structure of symbols in meaningful relationships. And I’m persuaded by my experience that the meaning and the relationships preexisted my grasp of them. Hence the world is intelligible. Some disagree. They assert that no meaning exists out there, none whatsoever. We impose it by using speech. How we act on our understanding may, of course, depend on which fork of this divide we take.
Experiential footnote: I grasped this process years ago once when our washing machine broke down. I disassembled it enough to expose its pulleys, blocks, and belts. I stared at it for at least half an hour totally absorbed, fingering this lever, pushing that belt. I wasn’t analyzing. I examined the assembly by looking at it, now this part, now that; I was letting my mind absorb the picture by focusing on it in great detail. Suddenly, with a flash, I understood the damn thing. I just knew. Then I trusted myself to proceed to the next steps of disassembly—because I now had a feel for how the thing actually worked. The conceptual process began only as I proceeded. In two hours I had the thing running again.
Now putting things this way may seem to support the modern line of thought that intellect and consciousness are the consequence of language, that language could and did simply evolve by accidental changes in our throat so that simple grunts could become much more elaborated sounds. Etc. I take exactly the opposite tack. I think that our innate endowment, what I call soul or self, has hierarchically overlaid powers each seeking expression and realization as soon as it has the modes to actualize itself. Thus understanding is the foundation; the symbolizing intellect is the next higher layer; above the intellect yet other powers await unfolding. In the species homo sapiens nature managed to implement the means by which intellect could function, but it did so because a fierce energy within the self sought expression and exploited the accidents of nature. It is the intellect that creates language, not language the intellect. Same facts, different interpretation.
One corollary of this view is that understanding—in a pre-verbal sense—is present in animals, indeed in all living things, as well; so is, I would assert, the potential for our kind of consciousness. This view is consistent with my experience with Winston, our much loved labrador in Minnesota, who certainly possessed much understanding. I would also point those interested to the fascinating story of Helen Keller, a person whose physical defects prevented her exercise of an innate facility until rescued by Anne Sullivan. This is a fascinating and highly illuminating case. I’ve written it up—its here on this computer somewhere. This post suggests that I ought to find that analysis and present it in the future. It makes my case.
This is a peculiar experience. What is this feeling? What actually happens? Mysterious. A man will say: “Well, I just knew.” If then you ask him how he knew, you may sometimes trigger a retrospective inspection of the process; the account of it will depend on the ability of the person to see into his own innards. The speaker will begin to trace a process backward. We usually call it a process of thought, but the point I’m after is that thought is often not involved at all.
The man in this case will begin his account by examining slices of the process one by one, isolating them from one another. Put another way, the speaker reviews his stream of experiences over time and notes his reactions one by one, almost second by second. When this process originally took place, the speaker did not engage in conceptualization—did not use tokens, words. The process worked beneath the level of speech or its equivalent, thought. The speaker nonetheless absorbed the events and his reactions to them. Translating that process into speech (spoken or silent) is really what results in intellectual grasp. But we know the thing, we understand it, before we ever proceed to its mental formulation into concepts. Like many other people, I often don’t know what I know until I write it down, but, paradoxically, I knew that before I wrote it. But after writing I possess it more fully and completely. But what is it that I possess? It is a structure of symbols in meaningful relationships. And I’m persuaded by my experience that the meaning and the relationships preexisted my grasp of them. Hence the world is intelligible. Some disagree. They assert that no meaning exists out there, none whatsoever. We impose it by using speech. How we act on our understanding may, of course, depend on which fork of this divide we take.
Experiential footnote: I grasped this process years ago once when our washing machine broke down. I disassembled it enough to expose its pulleys, blocks, and belts. I stared at it for at least half an hour totally absorbed, fingering this lever, pushing that belt. I wasn’t analyzing. I examined the assembly by looking at it, now this part, now that; I was letting my mind absorb the picture by focusing on it in great detail. Suddenly, with a flash, I understood the damn thing. I just knew. Then I trusted myself to proceed to the next steps of disassembly—because I now had a feel for how the thing actually worked. The conceptual process began only as I proceeded. In two hours I had the thing running again.
Now putting things this way may seem to support the modern line of thought that intellect and consciousness are the consequence of language, that language could and did simply evolve by accidental changes in our throat so that simple grunts could become much more elaborated sounds. Etc. I take exactly the opposite tack. I think that our innate endowment, what I call soul or self, has hierarchically overlaid powers each seeking expression and realization as soon as it has the modes to actualize itself. Thus understanding is the foundation; the symbolizing intellect is the next higher layer; above the intellect yet other powers await unfolding. In the species homo sapiens nature managed to implement the means by which intellect could function, but it did so because a fierce energy within the self sought expression and exploited the accidents of nature. It is the intellect that creates language, not language the intellect. Same facts, different interpretation.
One corollary of this view is that understanding—in a pre-verbal sense—is present in animals, indeed in all living things, as well; so is, I would assert, the potential for our kind of consciousness. This view is consistent with my experience with Winston, our much loved labrador in Minnesota, who certainly possessed much understanding. I would also point those interested to the fascinating story of Helen Keller, a person whose physical defects prevented her exercise of an innate facility until rescued by Anne Sullivan. This is a fascinating and highly illuminating case. I’ve written it up—its here on this computer somewhere. This post suggests that I ought to find that analysis and present it in the future. It makes my case.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Power Tempts
Many who reject religion and wouldn’t be caught dead engaged in “worship” are nonetheless temped by spiritual power. People who lean this way are reassured by naturalistic descriptions of the spiritual. If the spiritual is a higher or occult kind of power, a power we can tap, capture, and deploy to benefit ourselves, why—that sounds like science. Science? I’d call it magic.
But we’re all of us subject to this temptation. As we emerge from matter, we all go through a magical phase. Some of us get stuck there not because we manage to develop genuine powers but because we discover that we can attract attention and even make money by exploiting the mysterious. At one level attention is money. The magical, however named, is a sizeable industry, its products: books, movies, services, training, music, holy objects with special virtues, websites, and many kinds of groups. People pass through these groups like water through a filter; they leave money behind as they pass. They come expecting powers, are disillusioned, and flow on to other fake “attractors.” Guardians of these faux treasures benefit.
Fear is the other side of power. To conquer fear is to gain power. An element of trade, of quid pro quo, adheres to many religions despite the best efforts of individuals within them to combat this ultimately low tendency. The verse from Proverbs (1:7) is instructive as well as subtle: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” This single sentence in a way sums up the essence of transcendental experience. The fear is a beginning point, felt by those who are becoming conscious. What is rarely stressed is the important word in this verse: beginning. Fear is just a stimulus, the lowest form of an emerging knowledge. I note here in passing, as it were, that our success in mastering nature, illusory though it is—and the great improvement in our standard of living—is the best explanation for the decline of organized religion. Fear has been lowered. I call our mastery illusory because it greatly depends on fossil fuels; and those we shall eventually exhaust; then fear may return and, quid pro quo, religion will once more thrive. An early illustration of this? Church attendance surged immediately after 9/11. Has that surge lasted? I wonder…
Serious travelers of the Borderzone eventually discover that such travel is like art: you do it for its own sake. Indeed, if done for any other reason, it isn’t genuine travel, so to say, but just a form of tourism: snap a few photos and gather a subject or two for conversation once you get home. “Why, the last time we were at the Riviera…”
One of the best-known Sufi saints—and virtually none is known in the West—was Rabia al-Adawiyya (717-801 AD). She put this matter succinctly: “If I worship you for fear of hell, condemn me to hell. If I do so in hope of paradise, deny me paradise.” Why do I cite a Sufi saint of Basra, in Persia, rather than, say, one of the many Christian saints, not least St. Teresa of Avila, who voiced many of the same sorts of sentiments? Here is an sample: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” I cite a Sufi saint because outer forms wear out. There is a reflexive rejection in the West of our own traditions and experience. But we must remember this: all those who wander the hidden ways are in the same country and hold the same citizenship, but people get confused by the different traditional garb that they wear.
Reality and its phenomena always have a naturalistic aspect—which does not mean that there is no awareness and personality behind them; there always is, as in us. To rely on one side of this coin and neglect the other is to worship power ignorantly. Yes, power is tempting. The paradox is that our actual possession of it manifests when we no longer seek it. At that point we’ve made a few steps past the beginning and the radiance of wisdom begins to manifest like a predawn light under the horizon.
—————
Picture credit: Wikipedia here.
But we’re all of us subject to this temptation. As we emerge from matter, we all go through a magical phase. Some of us get stuck there not because we manage to develop genuine powers but because we discover that we can attract attention and even make money by exploiting the mysterious. At one level attention is money. The magical, however named, is a sizeable industry, its products: books, movies, services, training, music, holy objects with special virtues, websites, and many kinds of groups. People pass through these groups like water through a filter; they leave money behind as they pass. They come expecting powers, are disillusioned, and flow on to other fake “attractors.” Guardians of these faux treasures benefit.
Fear is the other side of power. To conquer fear is to gain power. An element of trade, of quid pro quo, adheres to many religions despite the best efforts of individuals within them to combat this ultimately low tendency. The verse from Proverbs (1:7) is instructive as well as subtle: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” This single sentence in a way sums up the essence of transcendental experience. The fear is a beginning point, felt by those who are becoming conscious. What is rarely stressed is the important word in this verse: beginning. Fear is just a stimulus, the lowest form of an emerging knowledge. I note here in passing, as it were, that our success in mastering nature, illusory though it is—and the great improvement in our standard of living—is the best explanation for the decline of organized religion. Fear has been lowered. I call our mastery illusory because it greatly depends on fossil fuels; and those we shall eventually exhaust; then fear may return and, quid pro quo, religion will once more thrive. An early illustration of this? Church attendance surged immediately after 9/11. Has that surge lasted? I wonder…
Serious travelers of the Borderzone eventually discover that such travel is like art: you do it for its own sake. Indeed, if done for any other reason, it isn’t genuine travel, so to say, but just a form of tourism: snap a few photos and gather a subject or two for conversation once you get home. “Why, the last time we were at the Riviera…”
One of the best-known Sufi saints—and virtually none is known in the West—was Rabia al-Adawiyya (717-801 AD). She put this matter succinctly: “If I worship you for fear of hell, condemn me to hell. If I do so in hope of paradise, deny me paradise.” Why do I cite a Sufi saint of Basra, in Persia, rather than, say, one of the many Christian saints, not least St. Teresa of Avila, who voiced many of the same sorts of sentiments? Here is an sample: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” I cite a Sufi saint because outer forms wear out. There is a reflexive rejection in the West of our own traditions and experience. But we must remember this: all those who wander the hidden ways are in the same country and hold the same citizenship, but people get confused by the different traditional garb that they wear.Reality and its phenomena always have a naturalistic aspect—which does not mean that there is no awareness and personality behind them; there always is, as in us. To rely on one side of this coin and neglect the other is to worship power ignorantly. Yes, power is tempting. The paradox is that our actual possession of it manifests when we no longer seek it. At that point we’ve made a few steps past the beginning and the radiance of wisdom begins to manifest like a predawn light under the horizon.
—————
Picture credit: Wikipedia here.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Castaneda
What follows is a diary entry of mine from a while back. I thought it might be of some interest here. At the end I’ll enlarge on the initial reference, which I expect is obscure for most who haven’t read, or no longer remember, the book.
* * *
I found today the chapter in which a mountain lion plays a role in Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan; reading it I was reminded again of the mastery of the author. His knowledge is very advanced—and these days I’m experienced enough to recognize that. Therefore the various scholarly critical dismissals of his work, not least that he was simply writing fiction, thus imagining the content, I reject. No doubt the presentation is fictionalized; no doubt a good deal of his knowledge was acquired from books, but I am fairly sure that he was in touch with a living shaman tradition. Oddly enough my conviction arises because I see so very many similarities with Sufi traditions, most pointedly the one that Gurdjieff had tapped into and exploited and Ouspensky “took to market,” as it were.
All harsh forms of mysticism seem derived from a cosmology in which the divine is conceived as indifferent to—but not unaware of—individual entities. These tend to be pantheisms. The discovery prized by their devotees is a kind of crystallization that takes place under extreme conditions of inner training. Castaneda’s cosmology fits into this class. There is no love relationship between creator and creature. The survival of death, in my definition of it anyway (as holding on to memories and to identity) is denied to all but the tiny minority of sorcerers
The cosmology doesn’t interest me. What strikes me forcefully, however—and much more now than it did when I read Castaneda more than thirty years ago—is the force and correctness of the methods used and the accuracy of the psychological descriptions. Castaneda’s vantage point—from what he claims is a “primitive” position, pre-Christian, unaware of Judaism, blind to Islam, ignorant of Hinduism, and so on and so forth—is now, and has always been, for me, very original and refreshing. The motivation for action is direct and entirely free of the vast overhang of cultural forms, rituals, traditions, dogma, and unsavory history that, in truth, completely suffocate spirituality in the West. Here you find the hard basics—and find it easy to ignore the primitive framework, anchored in nature, which is the teaching’s outward support. This sort of thing attracts the adventurer, the solitary, the “I-want-to-do-it-my-way” personality
Much of this originality really comes from having different names for everything—while the relationship of concepts to real life remain the same. The authenticity of this teaching shines through, however. This is not just a verbal exercise. Castaneda’s stuff comes from people who got there the hard way, by doing, experiencing, and thinking things through in an environment quite different, back when their patterns were laid down, than that of any other tradition on earth.
* * *
The mountain-lion episode appears in Chapter 11 of Ixtlan, entitled “The Mood of the Warrior.” This mood is composed of contradictories, iron control and total abandon. Castaneda guide into sorcery, don Juan, arranges an experience in which Castaneda encounters a mountain lion by night. Moved by fear, he acts with a great deal of skill and yet with total abandon, and this don Juan later explains is the warrior’s mood. It can be invoked at will—not merely by fright.
Other aspects of this story left an impression on me. Don Juan reminds Castaneda that his disciple simply acted, did what was necessary to escape the mountain lion. He treated the mountain lion without unnecessary, extraneous judgments—such as hating it, or imputing all sorts of fancy motives to the animal. At the time I read the story, it suddenly struck me that in most cases, dealing with individuals and with institutions, it is indeed very wise to regard them simply as natural phenomena without wasting time on all kinds of secondary interpretations of their motives. That view has served me very well. I remembered that a while back and went back to reread the account, hence that entry. The last paragraph of that chapter is interesting too:
* * *
I found today the chapter in which a mountain lion plays a role in Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan; reading it I was reminded again of the mastery of the author. His knowledge is very advanced—and these days I’m experienced enough to recognize that. Therefore the various scholarly critical dismissals of his work, not least that he was simply writing fiction, thus imagining the content, I reject. No doubt the presentation is fictionalized; no doubt a good deal of his knowledge was acquired from books, but I am fairly sure that he was in touch with a living shaman tradition. Oddly enough my conviction arises because I see so very many similarities with Sufi traditions, most pointedly the one that Gurdjieff had tapped into and exploited and Ouspensky “took to market,” as it were.
All harsh forms of mysticism seem derived from a cosmology in which the divine is conceived as indifferent to—but not unaware of—individual entities. These tend to be pantheisms. The discovery prized by their devotees is a kind of crystallization that takes place under extreme conditions of inner training. Castaneda’s cosmology fits into this class. There is no love relationship between creator and creature. The survival of death, in my definition of it anyway (as holding on to memories and to identity) is denied to all but the tiny minority of sorcerers
The cosmology doesn’t interest me. What strikes me forcefully, however—and much more now than it did when I read Castaneda more than thirty years ago—is the force and correctness of the methods used and the accuracy of the psychological descriptions. Castaneda’s vantage point—from what he claims is a “primitive” position, pre-Christian, unaware of Judaism, blind to Islam, ignorant of Hinduism, and so on and so forth—is now, and has always been, for me, very original and refreshing. The motivation for action is direct and entirely free of the vast overhang of cultural forms, rituals, traditions, dogma, and unsavory history that, in truth, completely suffocate spirituality in the West. Here you find the hard basics—and find it easy to ignore the primitive framework, anchored in nature, which is the teaching’s outward support. This sort of thing attracts the adventurer, the solitary, the “I-want-to-do-it-my-way” personality
Much of this originality really comes from having different names for everything—while the relationship of concepts to real life remain the same. The authenticity of this teaching shines through, however. This is not just a verbal exercise. Castaneda’s stuff comes from people who got there the hard way, by doing, experiencing, and thinking things through in an environment quite different, back when their patterns were laid down, than that of any other tradition on earth.
* * *
The mountain-lion episode appears in Chapter 11 of Ixtlan, entitled “The Mood of the Warrior.” This mood is composed of contradictories, iron control and total abandon. Castaneda guide into sorcery, don Juan, arranges an experience in which Castaneda encounters a mountain lion by night. Moved by fear, he acts with a great deal of skill and yet with total abandon, and this don Juan later explains is the warrior’s mood. It can be invoked at will—not merely by fright.
Other aspects of this story left an impression on me. Don Juan reminds Castaneda that his disciple simply acted, did what was necessary to escape the mountain lion. He treated the mountain lion without unnecessary, extraneous judgments—such as hating it, or imputing all sorts of fancy motives to the animal. At the time I read the story, it suddenly struck me that in most cases, dealing with individuals and with institutions, it is indeed very wise to regard them simply as natural phenomena without wasting time on all kinds of secondary interpretations of their motives. That view has served me very well. I remembered that a while back and went back to reread the account, hence that entry. The last paragraph of that chapter is interesting too:
“I know, I know,” don Juan said patiently. “To achieve the mood of a warrior is not a simple matter. It is a revolution. To regard the lion and the water rats and our fellow men as equals is a magnificent act of the warrior’s spirit. It takes power to do that.”Now the mention of two names, G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky. Both were Russian émigrés, Gurdjieff the leader of a self-development system which has earmarks of having been derived from Sufism. Ouspensky became its chief advocate. The essentials of the teaching are in the latter’s book, The Fourth Way.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Attachment and Detachment
These two words have wonderfully ambiguous connotations. To be attached is to be drawn to something, but the attraction may very well arise precisely because the object bestows attention back. Attachment implies possession, therefore control. Love and attachment are often conflated, but troubles rapidly develop when love is not returned. Then attachment turns out to be simply trade: I give you attention if you attend to me. Failing this give and take, we’ll soon hear someone say, “X, I think we need to talk.” Love is much more difficult. If it is real, it’s anchored in the will; it’s not provisional, contingent, situational, etc. The reason why pet rocks are amusing objects is precisely because the rock cannot return affection. This aspect of attachment shows that it has a strong element of need hidden within it. Hence people can be said to be “too much attached to”—you fill in the blank.
Detachment gets its positive connotations because people are often excessively attached—so much so that other aspects of their lives suffer. Hence detachment is of value. If we’re in pain but able to detach our attention from the problem, we benefit. Detachment diminishes emotional involvement and therefore increases our freedom to reason, hence to discover objective values, thus to make correct decisions. But too much detachment is viewed as indifference, an absence of “love,” but read this as an absence of willingness to reciprocate attention with attention. Nothing infuriates the lover so much in a quarrel as the partner’s cold insistence on being rational.
If you attend to X with all your heart, you can’t attend to Y. If Y requires a lot of attention, X must be diminished so that Y can increase. In spiritual systems, therefore, teaching people techniques of detachment is usually job one. But this is best achieved by teaching people how to attach attention at will.
People are often frustrated by such systems—and exploited by cults—because they don’t understand the basics. They attach themselves to circles, groups, and communities—or avidly read “occult” literature—wanting to know “secrets.” They think that conceptual grasp of some secret will give them “powers.” This position is equivalent to wishing to be told what chocolate tastes like. No amount of reading, lectures, off-sites, seminars, and mystic journeys to India or Tibet will produce the desired result—until chocolate is actually available and put in the mouth.
Cults exploit people by paying them lots of attention and feeding them conceptual or emotional pabulum—when what is really required is the training of inner powers, already present, which, alas, only the seeker can actually do. The feedback from this is almost always next to nothing—for years on end. Extraordinary persistence is necessary before changes actually manifest. For the vast majority of seekers, long before this can even begin to happen, the work gets tiresome, they drift away, they settle down and find some satisfying game of give-and-take that will stimulate them until it’s time to go. It is for this reason that Sufis, for example, say that the minimum qualification for spiritual advancement is to become a “householder,” generically a person engaged in responsible social activity. The ability to persist in boring and tedious activities, undertaken just because they have to be, for the common good, not for self-pleasing, is “good practice,” as it were, for doing the same thing on another plane.
What appears to many as airy-fairy, whispy-ghostly, magic-wandish, fancy-dress, mystical-elvish activity—surrounded by an aura of mystery, romance, and miraculous powers—is really something much more akin to training for a marathon or editing a ridiculously sloppy computer-generated index of 40,000 words down to 12,500. You really need a lot of attachment and detachment to do jobs like that. And after you’re done, the big feedback is that you’re finally done. Way in the distance will come a payoff. Way in the distance.
Detachment gets its positive connotations because people are often excessively attached—so much so that other aspects of their lives suffer. Hence detachment is of value. If we’re in pain but able to detach our attention from the problem, we benefit. Detachment diminishes emotional involvement and therefore increases our freedom to reason, hence to discover objective values, thus to make correct decisions. But too much detachment is viewed as indifference, an absence of “love,” but read this as an absence of willingness to reciprocate attention with attention. Nothing infuriates the lover so much in a quarrel as the partner’s cold insistence on being rational.
If you attend to X with all your heart, you can’t attend to Y. If Y requires a lot of attention, X must be diminished so that Y can increase. In spiritual systems, therefore, teaching people techniques of detachment is usually job one. But this is best achieved by teaching people how to attach attention at will.
People are often frustrated by such systems—and exploited by cults—because they don’t understand the basics. They attach themselves to circles, groups, and communities—or avidly read “occult” literature—wanting to know “secrets.” They think that conceptual grasp of some secret will give them “powers.” This position is equivalent to wishing to be told what chocolate tastes like. No amount of reading, lectures, off-sites, seminars, and mystic journeys to India or Tibet will produce the desired result—until chocolate is actually available and put in the mouth.
Cults exploit people by paying them lots of attention and feeding them conceptual or emotional pabulum—when what is really required is the training of inner powers, already present, which, alas, only the seeker can actually do. The feedback from this is almost always next to nothing—for years on end. Extraordinary persistence is necessary before changes actually manifest. For the vast majority of seekers, long before this can even begin to happen, the work gets tiresome, they drift away, they settle down and find some satisfying game of give-and-take that will stimulate them until it’s time to go. It is for this reason that Sufis, for example, say that the minimum qualification for spiritual advancement is to become a “householder,” generically a person engaged in responsible social activity. The ability to persist in boring and tedious activities, undertaken just because they have to be, for the common good, not for self-pleasing, is “good practice,” as it were, for doing the same thing on another plane.
What appears to many as airy-fairy, whispy-ghostly, magic-wandish, fancy-dress, mystical-elvish activity—surrounded by an aura of mystery, romance, and miraculous powers—is really something much more akin to training for a marathon or editing a ridiculously sloppy computer-generated index of 40,000 words down to 12,500. You really need a lot of attachment and detachment to do jobs like that. And after you’re done, the big feedback is that you’re finally done. Way in the distance will come a payoff. Way in the distance.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
More on "Primacy of Intuition"
Intuition “flows” or “bubbles up,” “flashes,” “dawns,” “strikes like lightning,” and—sometimes “nags” as conscience. All but the last of these words suggest waters or energy. Indeed I think of intuition as an influx of something energetic from the higher level of reality. Now in this modern age our almost reflexive tendency is to formulate experience in naturalistic term. It feels more real to think of intuition as an energy, thus as something impersonal. In other times, and in still active traditions, we see the same experience rendered in quite another form. We speak of “the voice of conscience,” for example. The artist feels “inspiration” coming from the Muse—that lady surely conceived of as a person. We think it sophisticated to label such things as anthropomorphizing.
I come from a demanding religious tradition, Catholicism. It takes reality seriously, insists that action has real consequences, here and beyond. In my early schooling we were invited to see our selfish urges as temptations whispered in one ear by the devil; our conscience had the other ear. The devil was recruiting future inhabitants for hell; the guardian angel strove mightily to save our soul. These images are vivid, sensory, and therefore effective ways to teach. The abstract formulations—and energetic or liquid analogies—are somewhat less compelling but more suited for the adult understanding. I’ve waxed eloquent on the symbol of the spiral just recently. In that imagery intuition might be imagined as an attraction upward, a kind of negative gravity. (It is, by the way, put almost like that by Beatrice in Dante’s Paradise. The soul “falls upward” toward heaven as naturally as water falls into the depths at a waterfall.) Temptation is the “pull” of the depths.
But I am wandering afield. If intuition manifested in sharp, precise words heard in the ear, all would be clear. It manifests as feelings, images, and perceptions of patterns. So does temptation. We supply the “little voice”—and it is an interpretation, an interpretation in both cases, be it of higher inflows or of feelings produced by hormonal reactions to stimuli. The two differ in taste, as it were; tastes are difficult to render in concepts, but attention to our experiences develops the palate, as it were. The intuitive has a certain joyous sharpness—even when it is a “dark” intuition; temptation is always heavy in flavor (as we speak of certain wines, for instance); one feels the pull of the flesh, the greed for dominance.
To state simply what I’m groping to make palpable: Intuition is primary, but it needs interpretation. The images, feelings, and sensed patterns must be properly understood. The intuition will always be right, but we can make a hash of it nevertheless by inattention or excessive attention to it, by twisting its meaning or direction. Art supplies endless examples. The same inspiration produces both kitsch and the sublime.
Scrupulosity—obsessing about one’s own sinfulness—is a good example of the abuse of conscience. Naturally, under the influence of Modernism, it is labeled as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It can also be seen as sloppy interpretation of intuition, of conscience. The consequences of sin on the one hand (damnation, etc.) and of the self’s importance on the other are exaggerated, deformed, and produce a downward spiraling of obsessive self-absorption. Here, as in everything human, a comprehensive approach is vital. Intuition must be consulted about judgment—and judgment applied to intuition. I assign primacy to intuition in this sense: we don’t produce it ourselves. Nor do we produce our own desires. But intuition comes from above; most desires rise from the body. In the use of both we must apply ourselves correctly.
Now the human is the most maddeningly perplexing reality. I use the word “interpretation” above—and now feel the urge to interpret interpretation more comprehensively. We interpret an intuition in two ways: intellectually, thus as something meant or intended; and by action, thus by doing or abstaining to do something, by the exercise of will. A popular phrase comes to mind: “Which part of NO don’t you understand?” When we ignore a nudge of conscience, we interpret it by action.
I come from a demanding religious tradition, Catholicism. It takes reality seriously, insists that action has real consequences, here and beyond. In my early schooling we were invited to see our selfish urges as temptations whispered in one ear by the devil; our conscience had the other ear. The devil was recruiting future inhabitants for hell; the guardian angel strove mightily to save our soul. These images are vivid, sensory, and therefore effective ways to teach. The abstract formulations—and energetic or liquid analogies—are somewhat less compelling but more suited for the adult understanding. I’ve waxed eloquent on the symbol of the spiral just recently. In that imagery intuition might be imagined as an attraction upward, a kind of negative gravity. (It is, by the way, put almost like that by Beatrice in Dante’s Paradise. The soul “falls upward” toward heaven as naturally as water falls into the depths at a waterfall.) Temptation is the “pull” of the depths.
But I am wandering afield. If intuition manifested in sharp, precise words heard in the ear, all would be clear. It manifests as feelings, images, and perceptions of patterns. So does temptation. We supply the “little voice”—and it is an interpretation, an interpretation in both cases, be it of higher inflows or of feelings produced by hormonal reactions to stimuli. The two differ in taste, as it were; tastes are difficult to render in concepts, but attention to our experiences develops the palate, as it were. The intuitive has a certain joyous sharpness—even when it is a “dark” intuition; temptation is always heavy in flavor (as we speak of certain wines, for instance); one feels the pull of the flesh, the greed for dominance.
To state simply what I’m groping to make palpable: Intuition is primary, but it needs interpretation. The images, feelings, and sensed patterns must be properly understood. The intuition will always be right, but we can make a hash of it nevertheless by inattention or excessive attention to it, by twisting its meaning or direction. Art supplies endless examples. The same inspiration produces both kitsch and the sublime.
Scrupulosity—obsessing about one’s own sinfulness—is a good example of the abuse of conscience. Naturally, under the influence of Modernism, it is labeled as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It can also be seen as sloppy interpretation of intuition, of conscience. The consequences of sin on the one hand (damnation, etc.) and of the self’s importance on the other are exaggerated, deformed, and produce a downward spiraling of obsessive self-absorption. Here, as in everything human, a comprehensive approach is vital. Intuition must be consulted about judgment—and judgment applied to intuition. I assign primacy to intuition in this sense: we don’t produce it ourselves. Nor do we produce our own desires. But intuition comes from above; most desires rise from the body. In the use of both we must apply ourselves correctly.
Now the human is the most maddeningly perplexing reality. I use the word “interpretation” above—and now feel the urge to interpret interpretation more comprehensively. We interpret an intuition in two ways: intellectually, thus as something meant or intended; and by action, thus by doing or abstaining to do something, by the exercise of will. A popular phrase comes to mind: “Which part of NO don’t you understand?” When we ignore a nudge of conscience, we interpret it by action.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
The Priest and the Dervish
The other day I mentioned the Venerable Solanus Casey, a man on his way to sainthood; I know of him because he’d spent many years in Detroit. At that time, looking back over his history, I was reminded of the fact that Casey had been ordained a “simplex” priest, meaning that he could celebrate mass but was prohibited from hearing confessions or giving homilies. Why? His superiors in the Capuchin order thought that he lacked the intellectual capacity. Perhaps. But his saintly powers, not least to heal the sick, those soon began to manifest…
This reminded me of a Sufi story called “The Man Who Walked on Water,” found in Idries Shah’s volume titled Tales of the Dervishes. The story, on page 84, goes like this in summary:
A dervish who belonged to a conventional sort of community was walking along a river and meditating on moralistic and scholastic problems; such problems formed the core teaching of his group. As he walked he was suddenly startled to hear an outcry coming from the island in the water. Someone was intoning the dervish call, YA HU but doing it all wrong; the man over there was saying U YA HU. Our dervish decided that the ignoramus on the island needed instruction. He hired a rowboat and got over there. He found a man dressed in a dervish robe, stopped by him, and carefully instructed the unfortunate.
Our man then left the island again, satisfied; he’d done a good deed. Rowing back he reflected on this sacred formula. It was said that anyone who could repeat it properly could even learn to walk on water, something our man had always hoped to do—but had always failed to achieve. Now he listened, but no sounds came. He had reached the middle of the water when he heard a halting start coming from over there, the ignorant dervish starting out with U YA again. Our man shook his head. Perverse humanity, persistent in error. Then he suddenly beheld a strange sight. The dervish from over there was walking on water, coming out toward the boat. Our man stopped rowing in astonishment. The dervish arrived. “Sorry to trouble you,” he said, standing on the river. “My memory is weak. I’ve already forgotten how to say it right. Could you help me again…?”
This reminded me of a Sufi story called “The Man Who Walked on Water,” found in Idries Shah’s volume titled Tales of the Dervishes. The story, on page 84, goes like this in summary:
A dervish who belonged to a conventional sort of community was walking along a river and meditating on moralistic and scholastic problems; such problems formed the core teaching of his group. As he walked he was suddenly startled to hear an outcry coming from the island in the water. Someone was intoning the dervish call, YA HU but doing it all wrong; the man over there was saying U YA HU. Our dervish decided that the ignoramus on the island needed instruction. He hired a rowboat and got over there. He found a man dressed in a dervish robe, stopped by him, and carefully instructed the unfortunate.
Our man then left the island again, satisfied; he’d done a good deed. Rowing back he reflected on this sacred formula. It was said that anyone who could repeat it properly could even learn to walk on water, something our man had always hoped to do—but had always failed to achieve. Now he listened, but no sounds came. He had reached the middle of the water when he heard a halting start coming from over there, the ignorant dervish starting out with U YA again. Our man shook his head. Perverse humanity, persistent in error. Then he suddenly beheld a strange sight. The dervish from over there was walking on water, coming out toward the boat. Our man stopped rowing in astonishment. The dervish arrived. “Sorry to trouble you,” he said, standing on the river. “My memory is weak. I’ve already forgotten how to say it right. Could you help me again…?”
Monday, September 14, 2009
The Boundaries of Experience
One of the brute facts that balances out the primacy of intuition is that our perceptions are bounded by experience. Let me illustrate this. Some people have extraordinary experiences; those who lack these and merely hear about them by report, possess very limited means of judging the veracity of the experience itself. But let me make that sharper. I don’t want to limit that word, “veracity,” to mean “speaking the truth.” Suppose I accept that the individual really did have the reported experiences. But even then I can wonder whether or not—in the absence of physical proofs—the interpretation of the reporter would be the same as mine would be if I had the experience. I’ve noted time and time again in life that my interpretation of an event can radically differ from that of someone standing next to me. When it comes to paranormal experience, the only analogue to physical proof is to have “been there,” thus to have experienced the same thing. Lacking that we’re left with analyzing the basic pattern that the experience offers. We can examine it in terms of consistency, comprehensiveness, probability; by analogy to other patterns; and so on.
A famous case is that of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the man who conversed with angels and visited both heaven and hell. The book to read is Heaven & Hell. It was published 251 years ago, written in Latin, then translated—thus it doesn’t have a modern flavor. And it is tough going—but not because it’s difficult. But an awful lot of it is moralizing, a good deal of it is abstract reasoning in which you have to buy into the concepts Swedenborg offers. Here is a paragraph to illustrate what I am saying:
In the margin next to this I scribbled: “Empty concepts.” I’m not exaggerating when I say that much of H&H is filled with paragraphs like that. To extract meaningfully descriptive material requires extraordinary patience. To get beyond the abstract order and the preaching that fills Swedenborg’s best known work, the best thing to do is to read his Spiritual Experiences, two volumes of what were originally diaries. But here one encounters very little order, structure, or context—because here Swedenborg was making notes for himself, often very elliptically: he knew what he meant, and he left out precisely those details that someone who “hadn’t been there” needs to know. You become convinced that he did have experiences—also that they were far from the pristine order he hammers out in H&H. The sense you really have is of a man who is suddenly opened to a very strange, complex, vast reality that he has difficult understanding and struggles to master while, in a way, stretched across a border.
Knowing how crucial experience is—and that it is the only genuine proof of such realities—my approach is to stick closely to the ranges that I can reach, trusting that, mastering the problems of my reality as best I can will prepare me well for what lies ahead—when the Reaper finally comes.
A famous case is that of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the man who conversed with angels and visited both heaven and hell. The book to read is Heaven & Hell. It was published 251 years ago, written in Latin, then translated—thus it doesn’t have a modern flavor. And it is tough going—but not because it’s difficult. But an awful lot of it is moralizing, a good deal of it is abstract reasoning in which you have to buy into the concepts Swedenborg offers. Here is a paragraph to illustrate what I am saying:
In heaven, there are two distinct loves—love for the Lord and love toward the neighbor. Love for the Lord dwells in the inmost or third heaven; love toward the neighbor dwells in the second or intermediate heaven. Each comes from the Lord, and each constitutes a heaven. In heaven’s open light, the way these two loves differ and the way they connect is clear, but it is quite hard to see this on earth. In heaven, “loving the Lord” is not understood to mean loving His character, but loving the good that comes from Him. Loving the good means intending and doing what is good, out of love. “Loving the neighbor” is not understood to mean loving a companion’s character, but loving what is true that comes from the Word. Loving what is true means intending and doing what is true.
We can see from this that these loves differ the way the good and the true differ, and associate the way the good associates with the true. But this will not fit comfortably into the concepts of a person who does not realize what love, the good, and the neighbor are.
In the margin next to this I scribbled: “Empty concepts.” I’m not exaggerating when I say that much of H&H is filled with paragraphs like that. To extract meaningfully descriptive material requires extraordinary patience. To get beyond the abstract order and the preaching that fills Swedenborg’s best known work, the best thing to do is to read his Spiritual Experiences, two volumes of what were originally diaries. But here one encounters very little order, structure, or context—because here Swedenborg was making notes for himself, often very elliptically: he knew what he meant, and he left out precisely those details that someone who “hadn’t been there” needs to know. You become convinced that he did have experiences—also that they were far from the pristine order he hammers out in H&H. The sense you really have is of a man who is suddenly opened to a very strange, complex, vast reality that he has difficult understanding and struggles to master while, in a way, stretched across a border.
Knowing how crucial experience is—and that it is the only genuine proof of such realities—my approach is to stick closely to the ranges that I can reach, trusting that, mastering the problems of my reality as best I can will prepare me well for what lies ahead—when the Reaper finally comes.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Souls Sort Themselves
There are three forms of culture: worldly culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self-development. [Hujwiri, Revelation of the Veiled]Suppose that we are guided by our own intuition. That this is so follows as the consequence of two facts. One is that the physical world is harsh. If we violate its rules we will be punished. In that dimension guidance is simply feedback. The second fact, as I’ve endeavored to show in the last post, is that intellectual arguments concerning higher matters, the metaphysical, are never compelling in and of themselves because they can’t be proved—as physical facts can be. But to orient ourselves, we must rely on something. That something concerning matters that can’t be proved (and are not harshly enforced by nature), is our own judgment. And our judgment is guided by a feeling from within: this sounds true; or, this sounds phony.
Let me be precise. Intuition, as the word itself implies (“tuition,” “tutoring” from “within”) is not something we do. It is something we experience. After an intuition is received, something else must follow. It is our agreement or disagreement. In other words, we can act contrary to our intuitions too. When the matter is in the area of knowledge, we can deny the knowledge or act contrary to it. When the intuition is the judgment of an action, thus in the moral sphere, we can override it. Hence “conscience,” in the sense that Catholicism uses that word, is intuition in one of its modes. The presumption here is, one, that we are guided; and, two, that this guidance isn’t our own or, if it is, it emanates from a higher aspect of ourselves.
This suggests that if we correctly understood and invariably followed our intuitions, the world would be paradise. What makes life “interesting”—in the sense of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times!”—is that our condition, the Church Militant of which are now members, is developmental in character. We’re moving up a spiral or, refusing to do so, sliding into an abyss. The downward movement is not interesting but must be acknowledged to exist. We live side by side with others. Most are moving up, some are willfully sliding down. The intuitive “hearing” of individuals varies; some are more and some less sensitive to this inflow; sensitivities, furthermore, can be enhanced by effort or dulled by ignoring the guidance. Intuition is not only accepted or ignored; its strength and effect are also influenced by innate intellectual and physical characteristics which appear to be randomly distributed. The intuition is there, but it may be more dimly or powerfully felt; it may be understood swiftly by some, slowly by others. Whatever the innate disposition, the will still plays a crucial role. The super-bright, for instance, may understand the intuition immediately, but if they don’t want to follow it, they will be very clever in rationalizing it away. Therefore the strength of the intuition is not as important as the direction the person has chosen to follow. It’s a free universe. The soul is sovereign however it may be enabled or delimited by the characteristics of its vehicle.
This then sets the stage for the suggestion that souls sort themselves out by using intuition and will. It is this sorting which produces the three cultural forms that Hujwiri uses to show the hierarchical arrangement of humanity in this realm. The foundational level is physical—where straightforward understanding of the ordinary world suffices; the religious sphere is on a higher level, but behavior is guided by semi-mechanical arrangements, rules. Here a higher dimension is already intuited, but conformity to it is expressed in the language of law, motivated in terms of reward and punishment, and expressed in ritual forms. The highest level is also the most free. Here the intuition is very strong and willingly followed. People at various levels of development find comfort in the culture that feels best. Not surprisingly, those on the lower levels cannot understand and therefore disparage the practices at the levels above. The highest level, however, is marked by understanding of the lower. It’s a good self-test to examine one’s own views, say, of religion, science, or mysticism. You’re certainly not a member of the spiritual elite if you bad-mouth legitimate science or ridicule the true believers.
The sorting process no doubt continues after death. And concepts like hell, purgatory, and heaven are mere labels, very roughly hewn, of other clustering of souls on the other side of the border zone. The sorting over there follows the inclinations of the soul. A way to illustrate that is to say that those who, in this realm, are seeking the depths will feel much more comfortable in hell than anywhere else…
* * *
Ali Hujwiri (990-1077) was a Persian Sufi, teacher, and writer. He was born in what is today Afghanistan. He wrote Revelation of the Veiled, also rendered as Unveiling the Veiled, in Persian. The quotation cited, which I took from Idries Shah’s The Sufis, should be rightly understood. Hujwiri, like all Sufis, believed that the highly developed individual will not only understand but also practice the wisdom available at all three levels of culture.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
The Primacy of Intuition
One reason for the high profile of science in our culture—apart from supposedly fathering our technology—is that, ultimately, no metaphysical assertions are capable of demonstration. Our wealth, thanks to fossil fuels, has temporarily eased our sufferings. Hence our intuitive faculties have been distracted. The small change that science offers, and in the grand scheme of things that’s all it is, suffices for our ordinary lives.
An example of a metaphysical assertion may be drawn from the first line of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” This assertion contains several others within it. One is that God exists. Others are that matter did not always exist, that it came into being at a certain point in time (“in the beginning”), and that an agency produced it out of nothing. Contrary claims—e.g. that the universe has always existed, that were is no God, that all that is is matter, or that the universe is God, etc.—are also metaphysical assertions and hence impossible of demonstration.
What serves as an alternative to proof is reasoning, but if we look at the products of reason, we find them to be empty. They rest on abstract ideas. These, carefully defined, are linked to one another and examined for logical coherence. All we get is formulae of which the terms are suspended in the air. We can understand the ideas—toss them back and forth in play—but we cannot demonstrate that they correspond to anything real. An example? Let’s take Aristotle’s definition of substance. Substance is a duality of matter and form. But this idea requires proof of unformed matter, what Aristotle called prime matter, and of disembodied form. We cannot find such things anywhere. The unbeliever cannot be forced to admit that substance, as here defined, exists by simply being shown prime matter and forms awaiting to be actualized.
Similar problems also plague our most cherished conception, namely that everything has a cause. The problem here is that causes cannot be tidily disentangled from the flux of reality. If we don’t separate them out, however, everything that happens is caused by—well, by everything that happens. The damage to the lamp post down the street was caused by the truck that hit it. Really? What about the driver’s drunkenness? And why did the driver drink? What caused a tavern to be opened so close to the driver’s last stop? Was it the incompetence of the restaurateur who occupied that space last? Why was he incompetent? What caused the current owner to post a sign saying, “Drinks at 1/2 price 5 to 7”? We could go on and on, of course. Modern scientific thought has drifted from the old-fashioned cause and has substituted for it concepts of probability. All change is thus due to random motion; but what we call “cause” is just a way of saying that certain outcomes are much more probable than others. Cause, once the property of agencies, has now become a servant in the house of Chance.
This sort of thing has radiations. Thus the various proofs for the existence of God were built on the older conceptions of cause and motion. Taking the last first, the proof from motion relies on the a priori assertion that nothing moves unless moved by another; a first and unmoved mover is thus necessary because an infinite regress is intolerable. But an infinite regress is only intolerable if we grant the first premise (“nothing moves unless…”). If that is true, yes. Motion then has no beginning, and the presumption is that it had to have had one. Indeed, the very definition of motion has, hiding within it, the denial of infinite regress. But that’s not immediately obvious. The problem is that we cannot demonstrate the first premise. What we observe is motion in everything, down to the hydrogen atom, and below. This motion—thus the motion or energy of hydrogen’s sole electron—seems to require no “fuel” or “push” at all. Nor does it gradually dissipate. Let’s turn to causes. If causes are impossible to package or quantize or separate out from the flux, the argument for an uncaused cause, God, also falls apart. Here, too, the argument depends on the notion that discreet, serial events are accurate definitions of reality. The contrary assertion is that everything has always moved and, indeed, motion is an aspect of reality; this motion clusters in various ways and has always done so, producing what we naively call “causes.”
Notice here how abstract concepts drive the metaphysical project. In one case we have an abstract definition of motion as the temporary property of things; hence they need to acquire motion from something else. This leads to the unmoved mover and the uncaused cause. In the other case, motion is ascribed to reality from the git go, as it were. Other arguments for God’s existence rely on concepts of order, teleology, law, or self-existence versus caused-existence. In none of these cases can we discover tangible proofs for the abstractions. All we find are hints.
This then leads to my premise today: Higher knowledge requires a faculty that transcends reasoning. Reason cannot give us answers to why questions. To the extent that it does, it relies upon the quiet collusion of our intuitive faculty. We have to grant standing or status to certain abstractions—such as they cannot obtain from demonstration or from logical reasoning. We do so, when we do, because we find the abstractions “intuitively true.” This in turn means that higher truth cannot be imposed; logical demonstration can never force us—as physical demonstration can. More importantly, the knowledge obtained will depend on the development of the intuitive power within us. It cannot be acquired by the usual brute means of hard work, memorization, and exercise—as reasoning can be.
For these reasons debate on religious or spiritual subjects has no merit whatsoever. The higher life is a realm of freedom. The compulsions present there must always come from within.
An example of a metaphysical assertion may be drawn from the first line of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” This assertion contains several others within it. One is that God exists. Others are that matter did not always exist, that it came into being at a certain point in time (“in the beginning”), and that an agency produced it out of nothing. Contrary claims—e.g. that the universe has always existed, that were is no God, that all that is is matter, or that the universe is God, etc.—are also metaphysical assertions and hence impossible of demonstration.
What serves as an alternative to proof is reasoning, but if we look at the products of reason, we find them to be empty. They rest on abstract ideas. These, carefully defined, are linked to one another and examined for logical coherence. All we get is formulae of which the terms are suspended in the air. We can understand the ideas—toss them back and forth in play—but we cannot demonstrate that they correspond to anything real. An example? Let’s take Aristotle’s definition of substance. Substance is a duality of matter and form. But this idea requires proof of unformed matter, what Aristotle called prime matter, and of disembodied form. We cannot find such things anywhere. The unbeliever cannot be forced to admit that substance, as here defined, exists by simply being shown prime matter and forms awaiting to be actualized.
Similar problems also plague our most cherished conception, namely that everything has a cause. The problem here is that causes cannot be tidily disentangled from the flux of reality. If we don’t separate them out, however, everything that happens is caused by—well, by everything that happens. The damage to the lamp post down the street was caused by the truck that hit it. Really? What about the driver’s drunkenness? And why did the driver drink? What caused a tavern to be opened so close to the driver’s last stop? Was it the incompetence of the restaurateur who occupied that space last? Why was he incompetent? What caused the current owner to post a sign saying, “Drinks at 1/2 price 5 to 7”? We could go on and on, of course. Modern scientific thought has drifted from the old-fashioned cause and has substituted for it concepts of probability. All change is thus due to random motion; but what we call “cause” is just a way of saying that certain outcomes are much more probable than others. Cause, once the property of agencies, has now become a servant in the house of Chance.
This sort of thing has radiations. Thus the various proofs for the existence of God were built on the older conceptions of cause and motion. Taking the last first, the proof from motion relies on the a priori assertion that nothing moves unless moved by another; a first and unmoved mover is thus necessary because an infinite regress is intolerable. But an infinite regress is only intolerable if we grant the first premise (“nothing moves unless…”). If that is true, yes. Motion then has no beginning, and the presumption is that it had to have had one. Indeed, the very definition of motion has, hiding within it, the denial of infinite regress. But that’s not immediately obvious. The problem is that we cannot demonstrate the first premise. What we observe is motion in everything, down to the hydrogen atom, and below. This motion—thus the motion or energy of hydrogen’s sole electron—seems to require no “fuel” or “push” at all. Nor does it gradually dissipate. Let’s turn to causes. If causes are impossible to package or quantize or separate out from the flux, the argument for an uncaused cause, God, also falls apart. Here, too, the argument depends on the notion that discreet, serial events are accurate definitions of reality. The contrary assertion is that everything has always moved and, indeed, motion is an aspect of reality; this motion clusters in various ways and has always done so, producing what we naively call “causes.”
Notice here how abstract concepts drive the metaphysical project. In one case we have an abstract definition of motion as the temporary property of things; hence they need to acquire motion from something else. This leads to the unmoved mover and the uncaused cause. In the other case, motion is ascribed to reality from the git go, as it were. Other arguments for God’s existence rely on concepts of order, teleology, law, or self-existence versus caused-existence. In none of these cases can we discover tangible proofs for the abstractions. All we find are hints.
This then leads to my premise today: Higher knowledge requires a faculty that transcends reasoning. Reason cannot give us answers to why questions. To the extent that it does, it relies upon the quiet collusion of our intuitive faculty. We have to grant standing or status to certain abstractions—such as they cannot obtain from demonstration or from logical reasoning. We do so, when we do, because we find the abstractions “intuitively true.” This in turn means that higher truth cannot be imposed; logical demonstration can never force us—as physical demonstration can. More importantly, the knowledge obtained will depend on the development of the intuitive power within us. It cannot be acquired by the usual brute means of hard work, memorization, and exercise—as reasoning can be.
For these reasons debate on religious or spiritual subjects has no merit whatsoever. The higher life is a realm of freedom. The compulsions present there must always come from within.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Physical Aspects of Faith Healing
I note that at least one visitor to this blog reached it by using what might appear to be a strange search phrase: “bruno groening neck.” Odd although it is, I understood the search phrase immediately. This famed healer had what seems to be a contradictory medical history—which gives me the opportunity to comment on the physical aspects of faith healing. The wider context here? I referred to Bruno Gröning in a recent post on miracle cures and healers.
First some facts. The searcher’s question was no doubt occasioned by the fact that in many photographs, Bruno Gröning appears to have an abnormally swollen neck. Gröning also died at the relatively young age of 53 of cancer. Two of his sons died in their childhood. Why didn’t he cure his children? Why could he not heal himself?
The straightforward answer to these questions is that for Gröning himself, the healing stream (Heilstrom), as he called it, wasn’t something airy-fairy but a real energetic flow. He experienced it in his body, and it seemed to concentrate in his neck. He felt that he had to use this energy in healing others; if he did not, it actually harmed him. He is quoted as saying (here), “If I am prevented from doing my work, I will burn up inside.” But he was prevented—by a series of lawsuits—in his healing mission. And, evidently, he did burn up. The surgeon who last treated him is quoted on the site already referenced (Bruno Gröning-Freudenkreis) as saying, “The damage in Bruno’s body is terrible, it is a total internal incineration. How he could live so long and without suffering terrible pain is a mystery to me.”
His ability to use his power was also evidently limited and required the active, perhaps inner, participation of the “patient.” His own first wife did not believe in his powers and did not want him treating the children. His sons died years apart. He could also not heal himself; he thought that he was forbidden to do so, but that may be viewed as an interpretation of what he experienced—namely failure.
Now, to be sure, in my own posting on miracle cures, I was not, repeat not, suggesting that such cures are transcendental in character. Rather, I emphasized the fact that some kind of energy is involved—entirely in conformity with facts such as the above. One of the oddities of our perception is that the unfamiliar and the rare appear to us as transcendental; they don’t have to be so in fact. My objective in all of these postings is to enlarge our sphere of understanding. There is more to reality than our conventional modes of thought recognize.
First some facts. The searcher’s question was no doubt occasioned by the fact that in many photographs, Bruno Gröning appears to have an abnormally swollen neck. Gröning also died at the relatively young age of 53 of cancer. Two of his sons died in their childhood. Why didn’t he cure his children? Why could he not heal himself?
The straightforward answer to these questions is that for Gröning himself, the healing stream (Heilstrom), as he called it, wasn’t something airy-fairy but a real energetic flow. He experienced it in his body, and it seemed to concentrate in his neck. He felt that he had to use this energy in healing others; if he did not, it actually harmed him. He is quoted as saying (here), “If I am prevented from doing my work, I will burn up inside.” But he was prevented—by a series of lawsuits—in his healing mission. And, evidently, he did burn up. The surgeon who last treated him is quoted on the site already referenced (Bruno Gröning-Freudenkreis) as saying, “The damage in Bruno’s body is terrible, it is a total internal incineration. How he could live so long and without suffering terrible pain is a mystery to me.”
His ability to use his power was also evidently limited and required the active, perhaps inner, participation of the “patient.” His own first wife did not believe in his powers and did not want him treating the children. His sons died years apart. He could also not heal himself; he thought that he was forbidden to do so, but that may be viewed as an interpretation of what he experienced—namely failure.
Now, to be sure, in my own posting on miracle cures, I was not, repeat not, suggesting that such cures are transcendental in character. Rather, I emphasized the fact that some kind of energy is involved—entirely in conformity with facts such as the above. One of the oddities of our perception is that the unfamiliar and the rare appear to us as transcendental; they don’t have to be so in fact. My objective in all of these postings is to enlarge our sphere of understanding. There is more to reality than our conventional modes of thought recognize.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Still on the Subject: A Spark of Divinity
If I examine my own impressions, the self feels like a sovereign unity. This feeling arises when I attend to it, thus in quiet moments. In the midst of action I am the action; I’m attending to reality out there. In times of conflict, indecision, or in a vortex of emotion my self is submerged, carried along like a body in a raging flood. Such times are rare, to be sure. The feeling of unity returns in times of calm. I can also forcibly summon it up in the midst of action if I have to. It is also, generally, the state when I am in repose.
The characteristics of the self remain constant over the years so that, looking back, it seems to me that I felt exactly the same at age seven as I do today. My self doesn’t seem to age. My knowledge has grown, my experiences have multiplied—but I treat both as possessions, not as the self.
To define what the self actually is is best done using negatives. It’s not my body, not my thoughts. The same applies to my emotions, to my memories. Thoughts are constantly in motion, emotions come and go, memories can be lost, found, made. Body, thoughts, emotions, memories are all phenomena I think of as possessing or experiencing. I experience them as external to me. The self, by contrast, is a constant. I can at least imagine losing body, thoughts, emotions, and memories and yet still imagine being there. What I can’t imagine is nonexistence. The concept falls apart. How can I imagine if I am not there?
I also experience the self as seeing, grasping, attending, and as acting. Seeing and grasping signify a power of perception—be that intellectual or sensory. Attending and acting are functions of the will. I comprehend and act out of the self itself, but understand fully that other functionalities are present; they facilitate this activity. Information comes through the senses and by means of memory. My actions are expressed through the body; my decisions guide bodily actions and, even if they’re not outwardly expressed, I still store them away as memories of having decided something in such and such a context. Not that I do anything to store a memory. I don’t. The brain does that for me and automatically. Recovery of that memory will also take place automatically if stimulated by the right experiences.
This then is a brief and relatively complete presentation of the subjective and thus the introspective view of the self. I am neglecting certain aspects—dreaming, intuitions, and what are called paranormal experiences. Just the above suffices to show that the core of being—and it happens to be accessible—is something very strange indeed. In its bound form it is nothing. In its fragile body, seemingly vulnerable. In its essence, indestructible.
The characteristics of the self remain constant over the years so that, looking back, it seems to me that I felt exactly the same at age seven as I do today. My self doesn’t seem to age. My knowledge has grown, my experiences have multiplied—but I treat both as possessions, not as the self.
To define what the self actually is is best done using negatives. It’s not my body, not my thoughts. The same applies to my emotions, to my memories. Thoughts are constantly in motion, emotions come and go, memories can be lost, found, made. Body, thoughts, emotions, memories are all phenomena I think of as possessing or experiencing. I experience them as external to me. The self, by contrast, is a constant. I can at least imagine losing body, thoughts, emotions, and memories and yet still imagine being there. What I can’t imagine is nonexistence. The concept falls apart. How can I imagine if I am not there?
I also experience the self as seeing, grasping, attending, and as acting. Seeing and grasping signify a power of perception—be that intellectual or sensory. Attending and acting are functions of the will. I comprehend and act out of the self itself, but understand fully that other functionalities are present; they facilitate this activity. Information comes through the senses and by means of memory. My actions are expressed through the body; my decisions guide bodily actions and, even if they’re not outwardly expressed, I still store them away as memories of having decided something in such and such a context. Not that I do anything to store a memory. I don’t. The brain does that for me and automatically. Recovery of that memory will also take place automatically if stimulated by the right experiences.
This then is a brief and relatively complete presentation of the subjective and thus the introspective view of the self. I am neglecting certain aspects—dreaming, intuitions, and what are called paranormal experiences. Just the above suffices to show that the core of being—and it happens to be accessible—is something very strange indeed. In its bound form it is nothing. In its fragile body, seemingly vulnerable. In its essence, indestructible.
Thoughts are Free
Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten,
Sie fliegen vorbei wie nächtliche Schatten.
Kein Mensch kann sie wissen, kein Jäger erschießen
Mit Pulver und Blei, Die Gedanken sind frei!
Our thoughts they are free, and no one can guess themThe quotes is from a German song with the same title as this post; the free and somewhat Americanized translation is mine. The poem “freely” wandered into my thoughts in the context of the last posting on the sovereign will—because our thoughts symbolize our essential character, namely our absolute freedom. No—as embodied beings held in the thrall of matter we are bound and fettered in many ways, but the core that we are is not. And this poem, which has strong political undertones—it was, for instance, prohibited in Germany during the Nazi years—was evidently composed to signal the ultimate defiance of the free soul against all constraint.
They fly right on by like shades—you can’t catch them
No human can know them, no hunter shoot down,
No way José and nay! Our thoughts they are free.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
The Sovereign Will
Talking of the spiral (last post) reminds me that the “problem of evil” has another dimension beyond theodicy (see Label Cloud for posts on that). I’m all too familiar with the philosophical solution that evil is “the absence of good.” We encounter it stated and restated in the great traditions. The problem with that view is that it doesn’t viscerally satisfy—an emphatic way of saying that something in the intuition rejects that answer. No, dammit, there’s more to it than that! Certain kinds of evil arising from passivity—like laziness—may be explained that way. People who are lazy certainly don’t move up the spiral toward the greater good; indeed they probably slowly sink. Laziness is a kind of balanced state: the will is lacking to do anything, good or evil; hence it is an absence of good. But we do encounter active evil in the world—the kind of actions where I, for one, find it almost impossible to believe that the deed springs entirely from ignorance. Positive, willful disregard of good must be present in it. I’ve experienced that. And if I have, so have others.To focus on this a little more sharply, I would propose that good and evil deeds both require active willing. It is only our ability to form habits that deceives us into thinking that we “slip” into evil or do good because we’re “programmed” to do so. We forget that habits are formed out of voluntary activities. I type like a bandit, but I didn’t always. I began by concentrating. Thus even laziness is active—but it is habit, hence I can use it, as I do above, as an example of a neither-nor state of balance.
The very presence of a “sovereign will” automatically produces a polarized reality—because the will, to be real, has to have choices. Mazdaism, to give an example, is one of the most uncompromisingly polarized cosmologies. It projects an image of an infinite column of light in the “upward” direction, an infinite column of darkness in the “downward.” We’re in the mixing zone, as it were; maybe we're created here. The symbol of the spiral is an elaboration of that polarity, a rather creative intensification of it: the spiral suggests resistance to the vector, be it up or down. In ascent the spiral’s curvature is produced by our resistance, our selfishness; in its descent, the same curving is produced by our longing for the good; it brakes our rush to please ourselves.
Conceptualizations like heaven, purgatory, and hell correspond to real states—but they are too simple. We choose to be in these realms. They aren’t granted us, we’re not assigned to them, we’re not condemned to them. What we receive without any merit on our part is being, being of the highest order: with consciousness and with will.
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Illustration courtesy of Wikipedia, available here.
Friday, September 4, 2009
The Spiral
The spiral is one of the visually simplest yet most potent symbols for reality. In the context of the spiritual life, merely invoking it immediately suggests an upward movement. The upwardly moving spiral also happens to resonate with modern, progressive, secular tendencies—and in those, as well, progress is conceived of as unidirectional, like the arrow of time. It can go in one direction only. You might say that the spiral feels right, as it were. The power of the symbol, however, derives from its dualistic character. When people contemplate reality, the universe, the cosmos as an ever rising progression, albeit tracing out a circular path as it encounters resistance, they rarely contemplate descent. But you can go up—or down—a spiral staircase. We picture heavens and God at the apex of the infinitely rising pyramid, but what do we picture at its infinitely sinking extreme in the other direction?
As always, in these matters, the poets have the last word. Perhaps the most famous name associated with the rising spiral is Dante degli Alighieri (1265-1321) author of the Divine Comedy. This three-volume work takes us up through the ranges of reality from earth to hell, to purgatory, to paradise, and finally to heaven. A much more succinct but very powerful image of the descent down the spiral is presented by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) in his poem The City in the Sea. To read the Comedy requires a fair investment in effort—not that it isn’t rewarded; it is. But to read Poe’s poem takes no time at all—and it may have an equally beneficial effect in correcting our routine, reflex reactions to the hypnotic drumbeat of modernity. The poem, in full, is presented here. The first verse follows:
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
Now, mind you, neither Dante’s nor Poe’s visions resonate at all with the modes of thought that prevail today. Our inclination is to dismiss such takes on reality with a wave of the hand and, possibly, dismissive quotes from Freud. But what if reality really is much more like our poets see it? What if they are just a tiny bit more open at the top of the head than the rest of us? I assert that it is so and, therefore, to “go this way” is wisdom, to ignore it is carelessness. It gets dark and dismal as you descend the spiral.
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Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia articles on Dante and Poe respectively.
As always, in these matters, the poets have the last word. Perhaps the most famous name associated with the rising spiral is Dante degli Alighieri (1265-1321) author of the Divine Comedy. This three-volume work takes us up through the ranges of reality from earth to hell, to purgatory, to paradise, and finally to heaven. A much more succinct but very powerful image of the descent down the spiral is presented by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) in his poem The City in the Sea. To read the Comedy requires a fair investment in effort—not that it isn’t rewarded; it is. But to read Poe’s poem takes no time at all—and it may have an equally beneficial effect in correcting our routine, reflex reactions to the hypnotic drumbeat of modernity. The poem, in full, is presented here. The first verse follows:Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
Now, mind you, neither Dante’s nor Poe’s visions resonate at all with the modes of thought that prevail today. Our inclination is to dismiss such takes on reality with a wave of the hand and, possibly, dismissive quotes from Freud. But what if reality really is much more like our poets see it? What if they are just a tiny bit more open at the top of the head than the rest of us? I assert that it is so and, therefore, to “go this way” is wisdom, to ignore it is carelessness. It gets dark and dismal as you descend the spiral.
--------------------
Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia articles on Dante and Poe respectively.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Notes on Attention
I commented today on the subject of attention on another of my sites (Ghulf Genes), but the topic has wider implications. As my daughter commented on that site, “This is a subject we could discuss for an entire day and not exhaust.” Too true.
In Ghulf Genes I make the point to that paying attention and getting it are mirror images of one another—because to pay attention to X is to make X more real, lifting it from the flux of sensations. But if X is another person, the attention itself causes that person to feel more real as well. In human communications, those who bestow attention also seek it. I noted there that we have a certain innate need for attention. But why is that? Why do we need the world’s confirmation for our being when, face it, we already know that we are. We have self-awareness.
I can illustrate this need using writing and publishing as a cluster. Many people yearn to be writers, engage in the activity, indeed get very good at it. But until some publisher accepts their manuscript and puts it out for sale in stores, they don’t really think that they qualify. What happens in actuality is that some publisher’s reader makes the judgment that this work would probably sell enough copies to cover costs and make a profit. The next layer up agrees. The decisions process, in most cases, boils down to this in today’s market. Nor was it any different in Jane Austen’s day, for instance, which we can discover easily by reading her biography. Here is a case of a person seeking authentication, but the authentication itself is just another commercial transaction. Strange. Now, to be sure, after the book is published, the yearning changes. The writer now wants sales or favorable critical reviews—and the more prominent the critic, the better. And so it goes. Eventually unhappiness may set in because no one seems interested in making the movie…
Even when published some people eventually discover that attention from others isn’t enough. If the writer meets enough readers in the flesh, he or she will soon be sobered. It’s not the reader any more—it is the right kind of reader. And I could go on in this vein discussing endless radians extending from this, or any other, subject that centers on achievement, recognition, and reward.
We seek attention, it seems to me, because we feel some lack, a kind of existential loneliness. And it isn’t satisfied by friends and family. We discount such attentions. After all they are—you know, friends, family. What else did we expect? We want the love of strangers. We long for fame. Not too close up, though, thank you. Not the paparazzi, not people chasing our car or crowding our front yard and strewing their damned litter all over. No. Something … somehow …more….
Attention seeking therefore, beyond the homely sort that we actually need in daily life, may be a sign of another and deeper urge to develop inwardly. And the aim of that development, ultimately, is to be above such things as fame, visibility, celebrity, popularity, and fortune. If viewed in the context of attention, the phenomenal success of such developments as Twitter, Facebook, and blogging, for that matter, would appear to be due to a lack of something, not due a plentitude. Something to ponder. The aim of personal development may very well lead into a kind of silence where relating to others, or not, because a genuine option, not an itch, an urge, or even a necessity that ultimately distracts us from genuine growth. In advanced spiritual circles—the Sufis are a good example—limiting attention needs to the minimum is advised. Why? Because the object is to get beyond the dimension in which we find ourselves. We must reduce distractions to a minimum so that we can hear, intuit, and perceive the subtle. That too may be a kind of attention seeking, but of another kind—with possibly much more potent consequences.
In Ghulf Genes I make the point to that paying attention and getting it are mirror images of one another—because to pay attention to X is to make X more real, lifting it from the flux of sensations. But if X is another person, the attention itself causes that person to feel more real as well. In human communications, those who bestow attention also seek it. I noted there that we have a certain innate need for attention. But why is that? Why do we need the world’s confirmation for our being when, face it, we already know that we are. We have self-awareness.
I can illustrate this need using writing and publishing as a cluster. Many people yearn to be writers, engage in the activity, indeed get very good at it. But until some publisher accepts their manuscript and puts it out for sale in stores, they don’t really think that they qualify. What happens in actuality is that some publisher’s reader makes the judgment that this work would probably sell enough copies to cover costs and make a profit. The next layer up agrees. The decisions process, in most cases, boils down to this in today’s market. Nor was it any different in Jane Austen’s day, for instance, which we can discover easily by reading her biography. Here is a case of a person seeking authentication, but the authentication itself is just another commercial transaction. Strange. Now, to be sure, after the book is published, the yearning changes. The writer now wants sales or favorable critical reviews—and the more prominent the critic, the better. And so it goes. Eventually unhappiness may set in because no one seems interested in making the movie…
Even when published some people eventually discover that attention from others isn’t enough. If the writer meets enough readers in the flesh, he or she will soon be sobered. It’s not the reader any more—it is the right kind of reader. And I could go on in this vein discussing endless radians extending from this, or any other, subject that centers on achievement, recognition, and reward.
We seek attention, it seems to me, because we feel some lack, a kind of existential loneliness. And it isn’t satisfied by friends and family. We discount such attentions. After all they are—you know, friends, family. What else did we expect? We want the love of strangers. We long for fame. Not too close up, though, thank you. Not the paparazzi, not people chasing our car or crowding our front yard and strewing their damned litter all over. No. Something … somehow …more….
Attention seeking therefore, beyond the homely sort that we actually need in daily life, may be a sign of another and deeper urge to develop inwardly. And the aim of that development, ultimately, is to be above such things as fame, visibility, celebrity, popularity, and fortune. If viewed in the context of attention, the phenomenal success of such developments as Twitter, Facebook, and blogging, for that matter, would appear to be due to a lack of something, not due a plentitude. Something to ponder. The aim of personal development may very well lead into a kind of silence where relating to others, or not, because a genuine option, not an itch, an urge, or even a necessity that ultimately distracts us from genuine growth. In advanced spiritual circles—the Sufis are a good example—limiting attention needs to the minimum is advised. Why? Because the object is to get beyond the dimension in which we find ourselves. We must reduce distractions to a minimum so that we can hear, intuit, and perceive the subtle. That too may be a kind of attention seeking, but of another kind—with possibly much more potent consequences.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Synchronicity and Meaning
I learn from Carl G. Jung that Richard Wilhelm (the translator of the I Ching) rendered the Tao as “meaning.” The usual translation is “the Way.” Jung then takes up this notion in his attempts to explain synchronicity.
Synchronicity is Jung’s label for what we call “meaningful coincidences.” His labeling is artfully modern. It emphasizes the coincidence of events in time but does not highlight meaning as part of the word. But of course the very essence of meaningful coincidences is the meaning; that essence only emerges when the coinciding events can not, repeat not, be explained as due to a linking cause. That’s why, of course, others often emphatically emphasize that the events are due to chance. To be sure, all of us associate meaning with cause-effect relationships. The only rational explanation of synchronicities, therefore, is to assume that some invisible agency is “arranging” reality. Why? To send us a message. Without such an assumption a meaningful coincidence loses its meaning; any significance we detect is strictly subjective and without any value. But, on the contrary, we perceive the meaning; we can’t accept Modernity’s dismissive judgment. Viscerally we know that meaning in such situations is most certainly a message, even if the message itself says little more than “something magical really does operate in the world.”
The classic example provided by Jung: A man is leaving home for an 11 am meeting as the doorbell rings. A delivery man is at the door with a black suit of the sort Europeans used to rent for funerals. The man did not order such a suit. An examination of the delivery slips shows that the actual target address is on the next block over. The delivery man made a mistake. Apologies. The man hurries off to his appointment. Three days later he learns that an aunt of his died on the day of the delivery at 11 am.
“Meaning” is one of those concepts we all innately understand, but giving the concept a formal definition is more problematical. Intention is one part of meaning. When we address somebody else, we intend to be understood. Meaning is also linked to essence. What we convey is not a thing, action, or conditions but its gist, the concept of it, a token for it. We may give things to people but we convey essences when we speak. Both intentions and capacities to abstract essences from phenomena (or to perceive phenomena when essences are conveyed to us) are capacities of conscious agents. Without the presence of agencies meanings have no reality; neither intention nor understanding is present. At the same time, if meanings can reach us by what appear to be chance arrangements of inorganic matter, and yet meaning is inescapably present, we must conclude that they take form as a consequence of an agent’s intention. Note that, of course, intentions are necessarily acts of agents. Moreover, an agent, in this case, is invisible and inaccessible.
When we discover meanings by studying phenomena, we discover the general intention that brought the phenomena about or still maintains them. An example. We discover pathways by means of which plants lift water and nutrients up from the ground to feed their higher-lying members. When meanings emerge from chance coincidences—events not necessarily linked by cause and effect—we’re getting a message. That’s the big difference between the two cases. The message is personal, not general. The very fact that it is possible for an individual to receive a message from the All (as it were) suggests that reality is constructed in a way quite differently than materialists image is possible. Indeed it is a shocking realization. Meaningful coincidences always have an element of surprise, a moment of bafflement. They bring a sensation of having been addressed by someone hidden.
Synchronicity is Jung’s label for what we call “meaningful coincidences.” His labeling is artfully modern. It emphasizes the coincidence of events in time but does not highlight meaning as part of the word. But of course the very essence of meaningful coincidences is the meaning; that essence only emerges when the coinciding events can not, repeat not, be explained as due to a linking cause. That’s why, of course, others often emphatically emphasize that the events are due to chance. To be sure, all of us associate meaning with cause-effect relationships. The only rational explanation of synchronicities, therefore, is to assume that some invisible agency is “arranging” reality. Why? To send us a message. Without such an assumption a meaningful coincidence loses its meaning; any significance we detect is strictly subjective and without any value. But, on the contrary, we perceive the meaning; we can’t accept Modernity’s dismissive judgment. Viscerally we know that meaning in such situations is most certainly a message, even if the message itself says little more than “something magical really does operate in the world.”
The classic example provided by Jung: A man is leaving home for an 11 am meeting as the doorbell rings. A delivery man is at the door with a black suit of the sort Europeans used to rent for funerals. The man did not order such a suit. An examination of the delivery slips shows that the actual target address is on the next block over. The delivery man made a mistake. Apologies. The man hurries off to his appointment. Three days later he learns that an aunt of his died on the day of the delivery at 11 am.
“Meaning” is one of those concepts we all innately understand, but giving the concept a formal definition is more problematical. Intention is one part of meaning. When we address somebody else, we intend to be understood. Meaning is also linked to essence. What we convey is not a thing, action, or conditions but its gist, the concept of it, a token for it. We may give things to people but we convey essences when we speak. Both intentions and capacities to abstract essences from phenomena (or to perceive phenomena when essences are conveyed to us) are capacities of conscious agents. Without the presence of agencies meanings have no reality; neither intention nor understanding is present. At the same time, if meanings can reach us by what appear to be chance arrangements of inorganic matter, and yet meaning is inescapably present, we must conclude that they take form as a consequence of an agent’s intention. Note that, of course, intentions are necessarily acts of agents. Moreover, an agent, in this case, is invisible and inaccessible.
When we discover meanings by studying phenomena, we discover the general intention that brought the phenomena about or still maintains them. An example. We discover pathways by means of which plants lift water and nutrients up from the ground to feed their higher-lying members. When meanings emerge from chance coincidences—events not necessarily linked by cause and effect—we’re getting a message. That’s the big difference between the two cases. The message is personal, not general. The very fact that it is possible for an individual to receive a message from the All (as it were) suggests that reality is constructed in a way quite differently than materialists image is possible. Indeed it is a shocking realization. Meaningful coincidences always have an element of surprise, a moment of bafflement. They bring a sensation of having been addressed by someone hidden.
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