Inspiration - Concluded

Third in a series on Revelation and Scripture

What I managed to say yesterday is simply that inspiration comes from “the beyond,” and in trying to explain it, I’ve produced a model of sorts. How to picture this model? I picture it as two dimensions that interpenetrated each other. One is physical; the other I simply call mental but could also call spiritual. I call the mental “higher.” Furthermore I claim that we are in bodies (rather than that we are bodies)—and that the body’s processes interfere with an unobstructed vision of the “higher realm.” What else did I assert? That our entire soul life—the workings of our minds, understanding, consciousness, and willing—draw their energy or sustenance from this hypothetical higher region or dimension. Our bodies draw their sustenance from the physical world. This is not the traditional description we encounter in religious doctrines. In those doctrines, at least as popularly understood, higher and lower do not interpenetrate. They are distinct locations. The higher (heavens, purgatories) are above us; the hells are below. Dante’s Divine Comedy places them this way. The philosophical structure undergirding western traditional views pictures a hierarchically arranged reality in which entities range from pure matter to pure spirit; to be human is to occupy an intermediate position, a matter-spirit fusion. In this view to be embodied entities is our rightful and permanent condition. We shall always be embodied, even after death—when, after the End Times, we assume our resurrection bodies.

The traditional view, largely based on the Aristotelian concept of substance (form-matter duality) in which neither form nor matter are permanent, has been modified to recognize an immortal, indestructible soul. And this soul alone—not the entire spiritual dimension—interpenetrates the body. In post-Aristotelian religious thought, embodiment is still held to be the natural state of human souls, but physical bodies decay and resurrection bodies are divinely created later. The model I proposed yesterday differs from this one in suggesting that the entire soul-dimension interpenetrates the entire physical dimension, not merely the soul the body. But that, as humans, held in tight unity with bodies (the whys of that we need to discuss too, by-and-bye), the bodily functionalities filter out most of the “higher” dimension so that we don’t ordinarily see it or perceive its presence all about us sharply.

(Here, finding that I used the word “higher,” in quotes, yet again, I would insert a clarifying note. I use that word to indicate a realm of higher subtlety, not necessarily or invariable a better, a morally elevated realm. In my mode of thought, the spiritual dimension also includes hell.)

Now, still in an attempt to make my conception more vivid, let me note that as souls we depend on the soul-dimension as our natural habitat. We live and breathe it, as it were—we live in it spiritually (our bodily life comes from matter) and we breathe its rarefied airs (thus we use its energies). Thus I propose that we are constantly inspired: waking, sleeping, working, playing, etc. But we are unaware of this. What we call inspirations are episodes of unusually intense contact with that dimension when, for some reason or another—exposure to works of arts, an inner striving, a crisis requiring extreme physical exertion, or circumstances when our filtering mechanisms weaken—we are suddenly exposed to stronger manifestations of a dimension in which we naturally live at least the human part of our mixed human-animal life. Our need for sleep may be evidence for this model. In waking states we are more isolated from our native dimension because our bodies more actively filter out that dimension so that we shall pay closer attention to the needs of physical survival. We must restore our spiritual balance at regular intervals by shutting down the noisy machinery. Not surprisingly, many inspirations come in the night.

This much will suffice to make a case for inspiration—and for particularly strong and unusual manifestations of it. But what about the notion that inspiration of the religious kind comes to us from agents, not from environments: from God, angels, saints, and other transcendental figures who act as messengers of God. This is the religious claim. I will get into that subject in the next post in this series. For the moment I will sketch an outline.

The broad framework might be stated as follows. If the soul-dimension is a real world, if we are destined to enter it after we die, that “place” may be conceived of as a genuine realm complete with all of the features of a “world” as we conceive this: thus a composite of environments analogous to those we know in this life as well as other persons, agents, like ourselves. All those elements interpenetrate this dimension, but we don’t see it. If we can enter that dimension now and then while still alive, it makes sense to assume that, from time to time, we may have actual contacts and communications with other being there who, like us, are selves and agents. I’ll say more about this in the next post.