In Western cultural spheres we associate the miraculous with God. The word itself has much less explicit roots. In Latin it comes from “wonder,” or “to wonder at” (mirari). Translators of the Bible from the Greek used “miracle” for three Greek words that occur in scripture: “sign” (semeion), “wonder” (teras), and “power” (dynamis). Translated into Latin, in turn, these are signum, prodigium, and virtus. (My source is the ever-helpful Online Etymology Dictionary here).
I find this fascinating. The Latin-rooted “miracle” principally points to our reaction or emotion to something astonishing, thus to our wonder. But in Biblical reference that same word also points at sign, omen, or portent (all contained in the meaning of a prodigy). That meaning suggests a higher source beyond the visible without specifically naming it. Miracle is also used to translate power, but presumably a power unusual enough to be wondered at. To sum this up, a miracle suggests a message as well as an unusual power—and one or both elicit our wonder.
That this communication comes from God is an assumption—or a projection that we make. Nothing wrong there if “God” is used as a word to signify “the greater unexplained.” In our theologies, however, we have vastly expanded on that phrase and given this word many and dense meanings in addition. The mere presence of a miracle, however, does not identify the source of the sign or of the power in any explicit way. The traditional habit within Christendom, however, has been to assign this fact to God, and to define God from other sources as being such-and-such a Being. But I’d insist that our assignment of a phenomenon to a source is not a proof of the source.
C.S. Lewis provides a good example of a Christian apologist who uses Jesus’ miracles in efforts to prove that Jesus was God. What Christian traditions tell us is that Jesus performed miracles or that such occurred in his vicinity (the woman healed by touching his robe, for instance). Anything beyond that is a projection. In the Christian tradition miracles performed by saints or taking place in their vicinity are not used to assert that the saints themselves were God. Here, therefore, we have two very different ways of explaining the miraculous. In one case the person was divine. In all other cases, God was still at work, but the person was just an ordinary if a holy human being. The New Age would call the saint a “channel.”
We do not, of course, view miraculous events as natural events. They’re unexpected, unexplained, and extraordinary. Does that mean that God cancels the laws of nature he has himself ordained? That view introduces an arbitrary element into reality (at least as I see things). An alternative explanation of the miraculous may work equally well. It is that miraculous events represents manifestations of an order of nature not usually visible in our dimension but nonetheless still a natural power that is perfectly at home in this realm too—and that its source is a power (dynamis) not usually seen. The power develops in individuals whose actions (or mere presence) give expression to it. Here I would emphasize the plural. Many people have manifested such powers over time. Meanwhile the three definitions of the miraculous remain intact. The presence of this power is indeed a sign—of other realms of possibility. And our wonder is, of course, simply a reaction to the unusual.
The presence of this power has effects that seem to transcend nature—but miracles are signs, not conceptually framed messages. The doctrine of the Trinity, for instance, cannot be derived in any way from the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. What miracle makers do does not seamlessly support what miracle makers say. If a hard link existed between the doing and the saying, conceptually contradictory doctrines arising in different traditions would all have to be true, and Aristotle wouldn’t like that. Thus, for instance a trinitarian doctrine of Christianity and a unitarian doctrine in Islam would both be true in the same way and in the same respects. Miracles are associated with both traditions—indeed are reported in every religious tradition of humanity, some of which have yet other and awkward conceptual formulations of reality.
What miracles prove, as best as I can make it out, is that our concepts of the limits of nature are too narrowly drawn, that powers exist beyond what we consider normal, that their manifestations are associated with faculties that emerge in a few human beings, and that what these people say has merit, but not absolute divine sanction. That the miraculous is Good, and that by implication it also teaches The Good, is also clear to me. But the conceptual formulation of that good is a human construct always and ever strongly influenced by then prevailing knowledge and circumstances.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
If People are Genuine Agents . . .
A post on Siris here recently gave a fascinating if brief quote from a paper by Jeremy Waldron, of the New York University School of Law, entitled Image of God: Rights, Reason, and Order. The paper itself is accessible here, but to get it you have to download the paper with a click. The phrase in the title, Image of God, refers to Genesis where God is quoted saying, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Waldron examines this framing as the potential foundation for human rights—which is a rather refreshingly traditional look at a thoroughly modern notion, namely inalienable human rights. I’d never linked the two myself, revealing how alienated I’ve become from modernity—and it was therefore refreshing for me, too, to imagine that the endless hue and cry about rights might actually have something to do with a fundamental tenet of my own thought, namely that people are genuine agents, thus belong to another order than matter—which exhibits no agency at all.
By interesting coincidence, a C-Span discussion just a week or so ago about Economics and Environmentalism, both labeled secular religions, featured a theologian who, in commentary, cited the same verse in Genesis to speak about dominion. The verse is:
A third coincidence was a New York Times article today reporting that modern medicine has now succeeded in nearly fail-safe early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, producing a dilemma. Should the patient be told—especially in light of the still persistent incurability of the disease? To tell the patient is tantamount to announcing a sentence to senility. I got to thinking about that. The dilemma is deep indeed. If people are genuine agents, they have the right to know. They have the right to have an opportunity to make such arrangements as they still can in their outer and inner affairs before the disease claims them. They also have the right to refuse. But to refuse, they have to know something, don’t they? The problem is real. Is it right to impose a burden of responsibility on a person? I think yes. Because we are real agents, each and every one of us, and knowing is better, even when painful, than not. In the long run. And there is a longer run even beyond death.
The pleasing aspect here is that the times, they are a changing. Ever more frequently, you hear Reality discussed in the clear even in our media.
By interesting coincidence, a C-Span discussion just a week or so ago about Economics and Environmentalism, both labeled secular religions, featured a theologian who, in commentary, cited the same verse in Genesis to speak about dominion. The verse is:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. Genesis 1:26.The theologian was at pains to point out that, in this verse, dominion meant caring and responsible oversight by a created being endowed with agency by the Highest—with emphasis on care and keeping rather than selfish exploitation for limited ends. Brigitte noticed this first and then drew my attention to it. I watched the replay with great pleasure. The traditional ways of seeing Reality are returning. You see and hear them on TV these days in the least expected places.
A third coincidence was a New York Times article today reporting that modern medicine has now succeeded in nearly fail-safe early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, producing a dilemma. Should the patient be told—especially in light of the still persistent incurability of the disease? To tell the patient is tantamount to announcing a sentence to senility. I got to thinking about that. The dilemma is deep indeed. If people are genuine agents, they have the right to know. They have the right to have an opportunity to make such arrangements as they still can in their outer and inner affairs before the disease claims them. They also have the right to refuse. But to refuse, they have to know something, don’t they? The problem is real. Is it right to impose a burden of responsibility on a person? I think yes. Because we are real agents, each and every one of us, and knowing is better, even when painful, than not. In the long run. And there is a longer run even beyond death.
The pleasing aspect here is that the times, they are a changing. Ever more frequently, you hear Reality discussed in the clear even in our media.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Realm of Shades
Many years ago already, long before the Internet dawned, I’d reached a kind of tentative conclusion. It was that the soul-realm nearest to ours is a subtle world, to be sure, but primitive or of a lower order. I based this solely on trying to understand why it is that the majority of mediums and psychics report nothing of interest from “over there.” When such psychics occasionally write book-length expositions, these books are thick with mounds of pious clichés. Mind you, I had also reached the conclusion that mediums do communicate with the beyond; some may be, but the majority are not frauds. But if I accept that they do—communicate—and with another realm—a good explanation for that might be that these psychics are mostly interacting with a lower realm—not with the peaks of the soul-order. Back in those days I also became acquainted with near-death experience (NDE) reports. The vast majority of those concern a distinctly superior realm; not all of them, mind you; but so-called “negative NDEs” tend to be kept out of books because reports like that would certainly dampen the sales of this new genre of spiritual literature. But I’m interested in reality, not in obtaining feelings of consolation. The very presence of negative NDEs also supports my view that lower realms exist—and probably closer to ours than the heavenly.
In the new age of the Internet, evidence for this conclusion has become much more readily available. Not only have populations become literate, but the web provides people an opportunity to share experience that (say in the eighteenth century) would never have reached print. Hundreds if not thousands of people with psychic gifts at various levels have web pages now; these are often linked to many others so that one has access to a huge deposit of raw data. The sites are extremely mixed in character, of course, but with the right background and a well-developed feel for such material, one can discover multiple sites where their authors are actually reporting experiences—and often skillfully enough to be enlightening.
Content of this kind tends to repel those culturally advanced—the very people who ought to take an interest. Few of the authors are educated in the round or deeply or have absorbed the western philosophical, literary, or scientific culture well enough to stand firm. By and large they’re off the reservation where the academically-trained are comfortable. Not that that surprises me. What proportion of the population is?—thus qualified, I mean. Moreover, many of these people have been coping with unusual abilities that society these days routinely and automatically classifies, minimally, as mental disorder. Therefore, on these sites, the authors keep saying, over and over again, that they are sane, well-adapted to ordinary life, employed, not crazy, not delusional, believe me, take my word for it, and other emphatic phrases no doubt occasioned by the social consensus which holds out a stiff arm in attempts to marginalize these people.
At the same time, and by way of contrast, to someone deeply steeped in the lore of the borderzone going as far back as we are able, in every culture around the globe, what these people have to say has a familiar ring. The very fact many of these people themselves are almost never familiar with ancient human traditions that say the same thing (although the labeling may be different) tells me that I’m reading about actual experience if couched in modern structures of reference. To point at one particular phenomenon, we might take the fact that humanity has always reported on demons and evil spirits, but in the modern setting these entities are rendered as alien abductors who perform unpleasant physical examinations aboard space ships. Ancient people—who’d never heard of aliens or space ships (space in our sense was not a concept for them)—used other language to report “encounters,” often negative, while they were in certain states.
I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that the realms tradition labels as hell and heaven both have their basis in the actual experience of living people who, for some reason, are more open to the invisible dimension than the majority. NDEs and similar psychic experiences have painted the higher levels while ordinarily occurring psychic abilities have produced what humanity has called the underworld, Hades, hell, or the realm of shades. Are the shades that remain behind, as it were, the pool from which souls incarnate again? Is this a very populous realm? Does it take special energy—call it grace—for a soul to reach more paradisaical vistas? Is that famous tunnel we encounter in near-death reports a transit through a lower zone of shades? I wonder. But I’m not surprised that notions of a heavenly and of a darker world are universally found in human societies. There seems to be empirical evidence for them, even if not reported by a majority.
In the new age of the Internet, evidence for this conclusion has become much more readily available. Not only have populations become literate, but the web provides people an opportunity to share experience that (say in the eighteenth century) would never have reached print. Hundreds if not thousands of people with psychic gifts at various levels have web pages now; these are often linked to many others so that one has access to a huge deposit of raw data. The sites are extremely mixed in character, of course, but with the right background and a well-developed feel for such material, one can discover multiple sites where their authors are actually reporting experiences—and often skillfully enough to be enlightening.
Content of this kind tends to repel those culturally advanced—the very people who ought to take an interest. Few of the authors are educated in the round or deeply or have absorbed the western philosophical, literary, or scientific culture well enough to stand firm. By and large they’re off the reservation where the academically-trained are comfortable. Not that that surprises me. What proportion of the population is?—thus qualified, I mean. Moreover, many of these people have been coping with unusual abilities that society these days routinely and automatically classifies, minimally, as mental disorder. Therefore, on these sites, the authors keep saying, over and over again, that they are sane, well-adapted to ordinary life, employed, not crazy, not delusional, believe me, take my word for it, and other emphatic phrases no doubt occasioned by the social consensus which holds out a stiff arm in attempts to marginalize these people.
At the same time, and by way of contrast, to someone deeply steeped in the lore of the borderzone going as far back as we are able, in every culture around the globe, what these people have to say has a familiar ring. The very fact many of these people themselves are almost never familiar with ancient human traditions that say the same thing (although the labeling may be different) tells me that I’m reading about actual experience if couched in modern structures of reference. To point at one particular phenomenon, we might take the fact that humanity has always reported on demons and evil spirits, but in the modern setting these entities are rendered as alien abductors who perform unpleasant physical examinations aboard space ships. Ancient people—who’d never heard of aliens or space ships (space in our sense was not a concept for them)—used other language to report “encounters,” often negative, while they were in certain states.
I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that the realms tradition labels as hell and heaven both have their basis in the actual experience of living people who, for some reason, are more open to the invisible dimension than the majority. NDEs and similar psychic experiences have painted the higher levels while ordinarily occurring psychic abilities have produced what humanity has called the underworld, Hades, hell, or the realm of shades. Are the shades that remain behind, as it were, the pool from which souls incarnate again? Is this a very populous realm? Does it take special energy—call it grace—for a soul to reach more paradisaical vistas? Is that famous tunnel we encounter in near-death reports a transit through a lower zone of shades? I wonder. But I’m not surprised that notions of a heavenly and of a darker world are universally found in human societies. There seems to be empirical evidence for them, even if not reported by a majority.
Friday, December 10, 2010
The Necessary “Over Against”
Sometimes, when I wake from a dream, the thought occurs: “Lord, I sure hope that life after death isn’t like dreaming.” The maddening aspect of dreaming is that there is no genuine “over against.” Everything appears to issue from the dreaming self—the scenery, the characters, the action. I do not consciously feel the process whereby this generation actually takes place; but what I sometimes become aware of is that I can modify the situation, never much but, yes, just a little, and always in my favor. Objects sometimes appear just when I need them; in my falling dreams I always manage to slow down and land smoothly, and so on. But these more or less conscious interventions are infrequent; and most of the time they wake me up.
Most characteristically of all, in dreams—where the environment is clearly unstable and unreal, however awesome, beautiful, confusing, or threatening—consciousness of the kind I call hard (thus a distanced, separated, observing, judging self-consciousness) is also entirely absent. That mental “over against” is also conspicuously lacking. And when it does awaken, as it tends to when things get really hoary, the dream is doomed to end like the descent of a lead curtain.
The substance of dreams is clearly thought, associative thought. It can be quite complex thought, thus for instance a memory of some situation which also holds within it the conscious reaction to it that I had when I first lived it. The judgments I made about the situation, e.g., “That’s awful,” do not display as an abstract judgment, however, but are mirrored back in the arrangements which I see in the dream, awful, ugly arrangements. A great power of image-forming thus seems to reside at a level below that of consciousness. Not surprisingly, therefore, the mediaeval view was that the imagination is part of the sensory apparatus. Notions like Henry Corbin’s that imagination is a higher, spiritual power are not thereby denied; his thought may be rendered by saying that imagination also has a higher form of which the dreaming brain’s uncanny skills are a lower manifestation.
The substance of dreams is unreal because they’re memories—but dynamically manipulated. The dream self is also just a memory of our self as an experiencer—and equally dynamically reactive. Memory must be functioning or else the dream would not be remembered; the emotions arise because the body dumbly reacts to what it sees with hormonal responses. These responses are quite the same as (although stronger) those we get reading a novel or watching a show. The core self, in such situations, withdraws but does not entirely go away—hence if some jarring element intrudes, we protest; if not, we feel the sudden withdrawal of the semi-dream state when the credits begin to roll. And we’ll move our bodies just a little by way of marking a kind of awakening.
All this of course makes a very strong case for the materialistic view of consciousness—as I’ve noted here before. I reject that explanation because it is incomplete and does not comprehensively explain the entirety of our experience. But the materialistic view is well-founded in partial observation. The frontal lobes are sleeping, and the primitive brain plays; or, watching a show, the frontal lobes at least relax to let us enjoy the drama.
But if I’m right the question then arises: Where is that core self when we undergo our convoluted and often quite bizarre dream-experiences? It might have to be absent so that the body can recover from the stress of real awareness. It might be absent because it too needs to be refreshed in an environment where the stresses of materiality are gone and it can then breathe freely, as it were. What I don’t buy is that self-consciousness is merely a brain function. But if it is, I certainly don’t have to worry about spending my after-life in the tohu va-bohu of the dream tale that never ends, never stops, and my stupid self can never trust the ground on which it treads.
Most characteristically of all, in dreams—where the environment is clearly unstable and unreal, however awesome, beautiful, confusing, or threatening—consciousness of the kind I call hard (thus a distanced, separated, observing, judging self-consciousness) is also entirely absent. That mental “over against” is also conspicuously lacking. And when it does awaken, as it tends to when things get really hoary, the dream is doomed to end like the descent of a lead curtain.
The substance of dreams is clearly thought, associative thought. It can be quite complex thought, thus for instance a memory of some situation which also holds within it the conscious reaction to it that I had when I first lived it. The judgments I made about the situation, e.g., “That’s awful,” do not display as an abstract judgment, however, but are mirrored back in the arrangements which I see in the dream, awful, ugly arrangements. A great power of image-forming thus seems to reside at a level below that of consciousness. Not surprisingly, therefore, the mediaeval view was that the imagination is part of the sensory apparatus. Notions like Henry Corbin’s that imagination is a higher, spiritual power are not thereby denied; his thought may be rendered by saying that imagination also has a higher form of which the dreaming brain’s uncanny skills are a lower manifestation.
The substance of dreams is unreal because they’re memories—but dynamically manipulated. The dream self is also just a memory of our self as an experiencer—and equally dynamically reactive. Memory must be functioning or else the dream would not be remembered; the emotions arise because the body dumbly reacts to what it sees with hormonal responses. These responses are quite the same as (although stronger) those we get reading a novel or watching a show. The core self, in such situations, withdraws but does not entirely go away—hence if some jarring element intrudes, we protest; if not, we feel the sudden withdrawal of the semi-dream state when the credits begin to roll. And we’ll move our bodies just a little by way of marking a kind of awakening.
All this of course makes a very strong case for the materialistic view of consciousness—as I’ve noted here before. I reject that explanation because it is incomplete and does not comprehensively explain the entirety of our experience. But the materialistic view is well-founded in partial observation. The frontal lobes are sleeping, and the primitive brain plays; or, watching a show, the frontal lobes at least relax to let us enjoy the drama.
But if I’m right the question then arises: Where is that core self when we undergo our convoluted and often quite bizarre dream-experiences? It might have to be absent so that the body can recover from the stress of real awareness. It might be absent because it too needs to be refreshed in an environment where the stresses of materiality are gone and it can then breathe freely, as it were. What I don’t buy is that self-consciousness is merely a brain function. But if it is, I certainly don’t have to worry about spending my after-life in the tohu va-bohu of the dream tale that never ends, never stops, and my stupid self can never trust the ground on which it treads.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Angels, Angels Everywhere
Last night, passing my bookcase on the way to bed, I sort of swept along a book I hadn’t looked at ever, it seemed, and it promised me a few thoughts to take into my dreaming. Angels, by Paola Giovetti, an Italian lady described on the Internet as a “giornalista e scrittirice, nata a Firenze risiede a Modena.” Just love the sound of that language. The book was published in 1993, a trade paperback with colored pictures and a text, priced then at $22.95. My library here evidently bought it immediately, but had already discarded it by December of that year—and I must have picked it up then. It’s been on my shelf since. I’ve discovered that my library resolutely tosses anything that hasn’t been checked out in five years—but some things, evidently, are shown the door much faster.
It turned out to be a sincere sort of work. Beautiful pictures, a text thoroughly footnoted, four pages of bibliography, nicely and carefully written to settle gently, as it descended, on all believers be they inspired by traditional religious faiths or the breath of the New Age…without either camp feeling the least possible unease. Hence, of course, everything is an angel. Serendipities hide them much as near death experiences unveil them. This produced a number of reactions in me—after I woke up this morning, not as I read. One was that the unseen reality is a perfect receiver of any kind of projection, much like brush-shadows are at twilight. The other was triggered by the discussion of guardian angles, regarding the curious nature of that concept. What an extremely boring assignment it would be to shadow and guide some fellow as he stumbles through his life trying to influence his actions while unable to compel him to do anything at all—because, as my author assures me, free will is God’s most precious gift to us. Words flow from the pen without at times stirring up even a single thought. Is it really logical to be given free will and also a guardian angel? Who cannot guard us or even mildly influence us if we’re inclined to make havoc? Does conscience need an administrative assistant?
Mind you, the book’s overall effect is positive. Indeed the book is well worth having.
The question in my mind is how really to account for the feeling that underlies this book and also renders its message acceptable to the average reader—not least to me.
What is the nature of that feeling? It is that a certain benevolence does really seem to be present in reality and actually does manifest, if only sometimes—in developments, events, and our experiences of them. There is a feeling, certainly present in me, suggesting something, some invisible field, something that does appear to communicate, yet without interfering. Serendipitous events are such communications. They have the character of confirmation: Yes. I am there!
This is the “ground” that calls for some kind of integration into the dismal daily. And some people search for the meaning and use the concept of the angel to build a picture. The reality, however, is not fleshed out by labeling certain experiential clusters with this name or that.
It turned out to be a sincere sort of work. Beautiful pictures, a text thoroughly footnoted, four pages of bibliography, nicely and carefully written to settle gently, as it descended, on all believers be they inspired by traditional religious faiths or the breath of the New Age…without either camp feeling the least possible unease. Hence, of course, everything is an angel. Serendipities hide them much as near death experiences unveil them. This produced a number of reactions in me—after I woke up this morning, not as I read. One was that the unseen reality is a perfect receiver of any kind of projection, much like brush-shadows are at twilight. The other was triggered by the discussion of guardian angles, regarding the curious nature of that concept. What an extremely boring assignment it would be to shadow and guide some fellow as he stumbles through his life trying to influence his actions while unable to compel him to do anything at all—because, as my author assures me, free will is God’s most precious gift to us. Words flow from the pen without at times stirring up even a single thought. Is it really logical to be given free will and also a guardian angel? Who cannot guard us or even mildly influence us if we’re inclined to make havoc? Does conscience need an administrative assistant?
Mind you, the book’s overall effect is positive. Indeed the book is well worth having.
The question in my mind is how really to account for the feeling that underlies this book and also renders its message acceptable to the average reader—not least to me.
What is the nature of that feeling? It is that a certain benevolence does really seem to be present in reality and actually does manifest, if only sometimes—in developments, events, and our experiences of them. There is a feeling, certainly present in me, suggesting something, some invisible field, something that does appear to communicate, yet without interfering. Serendipitous events are such communications. They have the character of confirmation: Yes. I am there!
This is the “ground” that calls for some kind of integration into the dismal daily. And some people search for the meaning and use the concept of the angel to build a picture. The reality, however, is not fleshed out by labeling certain experiential clusters with this name or that.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
One Poet's View
The poet I have in mind today is the Bengali poet Ramprasad Sen (1718-1775), he who celebrated the Goddess Kali throughout his life in verse. In the West we’re so conditioned to think of the divine in a masculine form, it is almost odd to hear divinity framed in the feminine—but such a framing is most accessible when a poet does it. I found the first two quotes on Wikipedia (here), untitled, and sourced there to books by western authors.
You’ll find Mother in any house.Bhairavi, Druga, and Sita are all names of goddesses in the, for us, vast universe of divinities discoverable in the traditions of India. Where she is linked to Shiva and Lakshmana, these male deities are her consorts. Now if the above strikes the reader as a kind of exaltation simply of the feminine, the next quote shows that Ramprasad had more in minds and that his hints are not worked out by most. It presents a fascinating piece of negative theology applied to the Divine but in a female aspect.
Do I dare say it in public?
She is Bhairavi with Shiva,
Druga with Her children,
Sita with Lakshmana.
She’s mother, daughter, wife, sister—
Every woman close to you.
What more can Ramprasad say?
You work the rest out from these hints.
You think you understand the Goddess?Finally a brief but sharply poetic take on Death by this genuine poet of the first rank. I found this quote in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. It also bears no title or sourcing:
Even philosophers cannot explain her.
The scriptures say that she, herself,
Is the essence of us all. It is she, herself,
Who brings life through her sweet will.
You think you understand her?
I can only smile. You think that you can
Truly know her? I can only laugh!
But what our minds accept, our hearts do not.
Ants try to grasp the moon, we the Goddess.
How can you shrink from death,
Child of the Mother of All Living?
A snake, and you fear frogs?
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
The Beloved and Her Veils
One of the fascinating limitations of existing in this low dimension is that we see the higher through veils formed of concepts, symbols. There is that image of the finger pointing at the moon—and the ignorant observer staring at the finger. I’ve always liked that image. The high cannot be uttered—but does that stop us? No. It can be experienced, and somehow we shall express it. The problem is much worse than the finger and the moon. The moon is felt, not seen. The finger is a web of words and images that spring from the hidden inward parts of the person who has the feeling.
It occurs to me that the ineffable has been described in endless ways, but that traditional ways of uttering and picturing the transcendent are, superficially examined, radically unlike each other. There are, for instance, spiritual traditions identical at their core but one we describe as “religion” and the other as “poetry.” Music is another such tradition—radically different enough from the other two so that it appears embedded in each of them. Vast confusions also arise especially for those who will not (or sometimes sadly cannot) fuse the intellectual with the intuitive effectively—and this because no detectable, hard boundary can be mapped between so-called lower and higher feelings; they’re always interwoven or, put another way, are identical, and what we call the lower is just the high at a coarse or “lossy” sort of resolution.
All three are veils—and at our least developed level we attempt to appropriate, co-opt them for service of the bottom layer. We exploit religion for social conditioning and deform it in all manner of strange ways; we name poets-laureate to praise kings or to worship nations; and music must accompany even our boring elevator rides.
I find it interesting that some traditions ban the visual arts, e.g. in branches of Christianity and in Islam; Islam also frowns on music. These customs, of course, arise from a vague sense that it is the Beloved, and not her veils, that should be at the center of worship. What those who’d ban images or sounds don’t seem to realize is that their doctrines, too, are merely veils—and that veils are unavoidable. In this dimension we must attempt to discover the hidden mystery as best we can.
It occurs to me that the ineffable has been described in endless ways, but that traditional ways of uttering and picturing the transcendent are, superficially examined, radically unlike each other. There are, for instance, spiritual traditions identical at their core but one we describe as “religion” and the other as “poetry.” Music is another such tradition—radically different enough from the other two so that it appears embedded in each of them. Vast confusions also arise especially for those who will not (or sometimes sadly cannot) fuse the intellectual with the intuitive effectively—and this because no detectable, hard boundary can be mapped between so-called lower and higher feelings; they’re always interwoven or, put another way, are identical, and what we call the lower is just the high at a coarse or “lossy” sort of resolution.
All three are veils—and at our least developed level we attempt to appropriate, co-opt them for service of the bottom layer. We exploit religion for social conditioning and deform it in all manner of strange ways; we name poets-laureate to praise kings or to worship nations; and music must accompany even our boring elevator rides.
I find it interesting that some traditions ban the visual arts, e.g. in branches of Christianity and in Islam; Islam also frowns on music. These customs, of course, arise from a vague sense that it is the Beloved, and not her veils, that should be at the center of worship. What those who’d ban images or sounds don’t seem to realize is that their doctrines, too, are merely veils—and that veils are unavoidable. In this dimension we must attempt to discover the hidden mystery as best we can.
Monday, November 22, 2010
How “It” Talks to Us
Having waxed eloquent about deuterocanonical or apocryphal books of the Bible yesterday, occasioned by a quote, let me today present the full context of that quote and show how It, the dimension beyond, but not further specified, communicates with us. I take the quote from Owen Chadwick’s book, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 257-258. Chadwick, as I’ve already mentioned yesterday, is an Anglican Priest. He was born in 1916. Here is the quote:
In a secular age, we are surrounded by mysteries. And, indeed, we’re always thus surrounded, never mind the label not quite firmly sticking to the times. But it is an indicator of our era that we speak of such experiences as meaningful coincidences, serendipities, and such—rather than as revelations or as communications from beyond. When we experience this sort of thing ourselves, it’s always quite another matter—even when the circumstances are not as powerful, dramatic, and meaningful as what happened to Professor Chadwick.
My own views of revelation as a whole, as a reality, as a doctrine, are built upon these up-close-and-personal experiences of humanity. This particular case is doubly enlightening in that for a large portion of Christianity the Book of Wisdom is not considered to be canonical, thus is not viewed as inspired. It was written at a time when a Greek version of the Old Testament was already partly available, because Wisdom quotes from it. Biblical scholars believe that the writer was a Jewish sage living in very secular Alexandria and wrote towards the middle of the first century BC. The book reveals Platonic influence, thus the presence of a real distinction between the body and the soul. “For a perishable body presses down the soul, and this tent of clay weighs down the teeming mind.” Wisdom 9:15. This view becomes accepted in Christianity as it develops.
Revelation, it seems to me, is continuing, personal, and comes from all of humanity—as It communicates something of Its reality to this dimension. A Jewish sage living in Alexandria in the midst of the hellenistic decline, an Anglican priest in World War II tending to burn victims, a Greek sage writing dialogues in the fourth century BC. Official revelation is but a sampling, and multiple canons exist. In some the Book of Wisdom is excluded; in others the Tao Te Ching is included. But what really matters ultimately is that It communicates…
On 31 October 1941 at breakfast time, more than fifty people were burnt to death in a factory fire in Yorkshire, and a few were killed when they jumped from the top storey down to the pavement. That was a long day. I spent all of it seeing burnt skin and the relatives of corpses, the most miserable and most exhausting day of my life. When at last I got home after 11 p.m., dog-tired and empty and wretched, I opened a Bible and found, reluctantly, the lesson for the day. And the words leapt out from the page as though they were illuminated, and swept over the being like a metamorphosis, with relief and refreshment:The quote in the quote is from The Book of Wisdom, 3:1-6—and what the Book of Wisdom is was the subject of yesterday’s post.
The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God; and no torment shall touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die, and their going from us to be utter destruction… Like gold in the fire he put them to the test — and found them acceptable like burnt offering upon the altar.
In a secular age, we are surrounded by mysteries. And, indeed, we’re always thus surrounded, never mind the label not quite firmly sticking to the times. But it is an indicator of our era that we speak of such experiences as meaningful coincidences, serendipities, and such—rather than as revelations or as communications from beyond. When we experience this sort of thing ourselves, it’s always quite another matter—even when the circumstances are not as powerful, dramatic, and meaningful as what happened to Professor Chadwick.
My own views of revelation as a whole, as a reality, as a doctrine, are built upon these up-close-and-personal experiences of humanity. This particular case is doubly enlightening in that for a large portion of Christianity the Book of Wisdom is not considered to be canonical, thus is not viewed as inspired. It was written at a time when a Greek version of the Old Testament was already partly available, because Wisdom quotes from it. Biblical scholars believe that the writer was a Jewish sage living in very secular Alexandria and wrote towards the middle of the first century BC. The book reveals Platonic influence, thus the presence of a real distinction between the body and the soul. “For a perishable body presses down the soul, and this tent of clay weighs down the teeming mind.” Wisdom 9:15. This view becomes accepted in Christianity as it develops.
Revelation, it seems to me, is continuing, personal, and comes from all of humanity—as It communicates something of Its reality to this dimension. A Jewish sage living in Alexandria in the midst of the hellenistic decline, an Anglican priest in World War II tending to burn victims, a Greek sage writing dialogues in the fourth century BC. Official revelation is but a sampling, and multiple canons exist. In some the Book of Wisdom is excluded; in others the Tao Te Ching is included. But what really matters ultimately is that It communicates…
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Startled in the Primeval Forest
In a book I was reading by a distinguished professor, historian, and priest of the Church of England (Owen Chadwick), I came across a quote from the Bible that sounded unfamiliar. I followed the footnote to the back of the book and discovered that the quote came from Wisdom 3:1-6. I was startled, but only a little, because somewhere in my depths I knew there was a Book of Wisdom, something to do with Solomon. The Layman’s Parallel Bible lies within my grasp (four versions: King James, The Modern Language, The Living Bible, The Revised Standard Version). I knew that it didn’t have that book in it, but I checked it anyway. I was right. Odd. Odd because, Chadwick introduced his quote by saying:
Several questions now arose. Why did an Anglican, on October 31, 1941, find the “lesson for the day” pointing to verses in the Book of Wisdom, a book that is missing in what for Anglicans is the authorized KJ version...unless, as might be, he was using the Bible as an oracle and opening it at random. My next task was to run all of this down. In doing so I found myself in the primeval forest of the western religious tradition, an amazing, fascinating ecosystem, if you like.
It turns out that the Book of Wisdom first appears in the second of three major versions of the Bible, the Septuagint. That book was created by translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek. Long ago. Precisely (if that’s the word) during the third and second centuries BC. The translation was completed in 132 BC. Now one oddity here is that this Greek translation has a Latin name. Septuagint means seventy. This version came to be known, later, to Latin speakers, as “translation by seventy men,” of which the word “seventy” became the abbreviation used in ordinary speech and writing. The seventy translators incorporated several books into this version not present in the Hebrew original. The Book of Wisdom was one of these; it was originally written in Greek. The third major version is the Latin translation, known as the Vulgate, derived from versio vulgate, the “common version,” thus understood by everybody—at least in the fourth century AD when it was commissioned. Of this word we still retain the English “vulgar,” thus common with an attitude. The Vulgate also contains the Book of Wisdom and twelve other books called deuterocanonical in the Catholic tradition; these same books, plus four others, are part of the Authorized King James Bible, but not the King James Bible “Lite,” as it were. On that more soon.
Before I discovered KJV Lite, I had to learn what “deuterocanonical” meant. Turns out that all of the books of the Hebrew Bible, thus of the Old Testament, are part of the official canon of the Catholic church. The books included in the Septuagint in addition came to be labeled as part of the “second canon”—thus also officially recognized as inspired. The word therefore means “belonging to the second canon.” This is a primal forest. We should not expect things to be simple. In the Protestant tradition, the word Apocrypha has come to be used. The word means hidden or obscure or, perhaps, more obscure books. Whatever the name used, these books are not recognized by Protestant churches as part of the canon; thus they are not viewed as divinely inspired. Protestants stick with the Hebrew Bible. And this stance, in part at least, explains why the King James Bible no longer carries the Apocrypha. The other part of the explanation is economic. Startled by that? Or just bemused? The latter, in my case.
Beginning in the 1770s, innovations in printing began to make large print runs possible. To reduce costs—and in efforts to attract a large Protestant market for the King James Version—publishers began omitting the Apocrypha from the book. Those active in the Church of England, like professor Chadwick, continued to use the “full” editions for good reasons. In the life of the Anglican Church, some “lessons for the day” referred to these books, and it is then startling to open the Bible and find them missing.
The realms of faith are just as vast, complex, and organic as all the rest of reality. It’s life, once more, if on another level…
---------------
Chadwick's book referenced above is The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1975.
When at last I got home after 11 p.m., dog-tired and empty and wretched, I opened a Bible and found, reluctantly, the lesson for the day…This suggested to me—that phrase of his, “a Bible”—an ordinary Bible. And in the household of an Anglican priest that would be the so-called Authorized Bible, therefore the King James. Puzzled now, I went off to find my Jerusalem Bible, a modern translation that appeared in the 1960s. And yes. There, in that Catholic Bible, there it was, the Book of Wisdom, sandwiched between the Songs of Solomon and Ecclesiastes.
Several questions now arose. Why did an Anglican, on October 31, 1941, find the “lesson for the day” pointing to verses in the Book of Wisdom, a book that is missing in what for Anglicans is the authorized KJ version...unless, as might be, he was using the Bible as an oracle and opening it at random. My next task was to run all of this down. In doing so I found myself in the primeval forest of the western religious tradition, an amazing, fascinating ecosystem, if you like.
It turns out that the Book of Wisdom first appears in the second of three major versions of the Bible, the Septuagint. That book was created by translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek. Long ago. Precisely (if that’s the word) during the third and second centuries BC. The translation was completed in 132 BC. Now one oddity here is that this Greek translation has a Latin name. Septuagint means seventy. This version came to be known, later, to Latin speakers, as “translation by seventy men,” of which the word “seventy” became the abbreviation used in ordinary speech and writing. The seventy translators incorporated several books into this version not present in the Hebrew original. The Book of Wisdom was one of these; it was originally written in Greek. The third major version is the Latin translation, known as the Vulgate, derived from versio vulgate, the “common version,” thus understood by everybody—at least in the fourth century AD when it was commissioned. Of this word we still retain the English “vulgar,” thus common with an attitude. The Vulgate also contains the Book of Wisdom and twelve other books called deuterocanonical in the Catholic tradition; these same books, plus four others, are part of the Authorized King James Bible, but not the King James Bible “Lite,” as it were. On that more soon.
Before I discovered KJV Lite, I had to learn what “deuterocanonical” meant. Turns out that all of the books of the Hebrew Bible, thus of the Old Testament, are part of the official canon of the Catholic church. The books included in the Septuagint in addition came to be labeled as part of the “second canon”—thus also officially recognized as inspired. The word therefore means “belonging to the second canon.” This is a primal forest. We should not expect things to be simple. In the Protestant tradition, the word Apocrypha has come to be used. The word means hidden or obscure or, perhaps, more obscure books. Whatever the name used, these books are not recognized by Protestant churches as part of the canon; thus they are not viewed as divinely inspired. Protestants stick with the Hebrew Bible. And this stance, in part at least, explains why the King James Bible no longer carries the Apocrypha. The other part of the explanation is economic. Startled by that? Or just bemused? The latter, in my case.
Beginning in the 1770s, innovations in printing began to make large print runs possible. To reduce costs—and in efforts to attract a large Protestant market for the King James Version—publishers began omitting the Apocrypha from the book. Those active in the Church of England, like professor Chadwick, continued to use the “full” editions for good reasons. In the life of the Anglican Church, some “lessons for the day” referred to these books, and it is then startling to open the Bible and find them missing.
The realms of faith are just as vast, complex, and organic as all the rest of reality. It’s life, once more, if on another level…
---------------
Chadwick's book referenced above is The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1975.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Doctrine and Religion
This post is meant as a companion to the last—in which I attempted to define the personal experience of religion. I defined personal religion as an attitude and orientation in which an intuition of a transcending “beyond” has a genuine reality. While I view this experience as arising in an innate intuition of reality, an “intimation of immortality”—something that trumps, as it were, various conceptual formulations of it—I’m still fully aware that people have the use of intellect and reason and that a fully mature person will have a comprehensive view in which a conceptual framework will be present as well. Today more on the later aspect.
A doctrine literally means a teaching. In the western religious traditions, all of which are revealed religions, the teaching is the elaboration of a revelation directly or indirectly received from God. In the eastern tradition, and here I have the Buddha in mind, the teaching concerns the elaboration of the meaning of an experience persons had—and also about what they themselves said about it. In both cases a certain acceptance, usually labeled faith, is necessary before the doctrine, the teaching, can be considered on its own merits. The fundamental character of such teachings is precisely this faith or this acceptance. There is no way that the ordinary human, even with a great deal of diligence and effort, can replicate the experience on which the doctrine rests. Religious doctrines have a very different character from what we call hypotheses or theories.
To reduce the western religious conception to its absolute grounding premise, it says that the ultimate creator of reality intervenes in its creation at certain times in order to communicate its will to many people through one person. Acceptance of this premise is, I submit, required to go further into the specifics of a doctrine.
The Buddha’s teaching contains another basic assertion, namely that a realm of suffering exits where the illusion of the self is present. The self is created by attachments. When all these are withdrawn, we enter a kind of blissful annihilation.
People who have serious, sincere difficulties with either of these essentials will be left to form their own explanations of the nature of reality. What they must accept as given is that from time to time religious faiths arise from the experiences of individuals, that these experiences are very evidently of a greatly persuasive and very energetic nature—sufficiently so that they produce huge social phenomena that spread over time and, by and large, produce more benefits than harm.
Clashes between groups, the use of coercion to make unbelievers comply with the teaching, persecutions, wars, inquisitions, and crusades do not, alas, at all require a religious orientation. The religious aspect in these phenomena is incidental, not central. What is central in them is the drive to power. The twentieth century brought us ample, indeed rich samples of each of these negatives under entirely secular conditions.
It does not take a great deal of faith to believe in truth, justice, and the good. That comes with personal religion, as I’ve outlined in the last post. The doctrines, however, belong—because of their basic premises—to the realm of judgment.
A doctrine literally means a teaching. In the western religious traditions, all of which are revealed religions, the teaching is the elaboration of a revelation directly or indirectly received from God. In the eastern tradition, and here I have the Buddha in mind, the teaching concerns the elaboration of the meaning of an experience persons had—and also about what they themselves said about it. In both cases a certain acceptance, usually labeled faith, is necessary before the doctrine, the teaching, can be considered on its own merits. The fundamental character of such teachings is precisely this faith or this acceptance. There is no way that the ordinary human, even with a great deal of diligence and effort, can replicate the experience on which the doctrine rests. Religious doctrines have a very different character from what we call hypotheses or theories.
To reduce the western religious conception to its absolute grounding premise, it says that the ultimate creator of reality intervenes in its creation at certain times in order to communicate its will to many people through one person. Acceptance of this premise is, I submit, required to go further into the specifics of a doctrine.
The Buddha’s teaching contains another basic assertion, namely that a realm of suffering exits where the illusion of the self is present. The self is created by attachments. When all these are withdrawn, we enter a kind of blissful annihilation.
People who have serious, sincere difficulties with either of these essentials will be left to form their own explanations of the nature of reality. What they must accept as given is that from time to time religious faiths arise from the experiences of individuals, that these experiences are very evidently of a greatly persuasive and very energetic nature—sufficiently so that they produce huge social phenomena that spread over time and, by and large, produce more benefits than harm.
Clashes between groups, the use of coercion to make unbelievers comply with the teaching, persecutions, wars, inquisitions, and crusades do not, alas, at all require a religious orientation. The religious aspect in these phenomena is incidental, not central. What is central in them is the drive to power. The twentieth century brought us ample, indeed rich samples of each of these negatives under entirely secular conditions.
It does not take a great deal of faith to believe in truth, justice, and the good. That comes with personal religion, as I’ve outlined in the last post. The doctrines, however, belong—because of their basic premises—to the realm of judgment.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Religion and Doctrine
I would here contrast religion as a personal experience and religion as a structure of doctrines. The first I would define as an attitude or orientation to reality—but with a twist. It holds within it an awareness of something beyond the tangible experiences of our day to day life—also something beyond projections derived from observing the world, thus such concepts as “humanity,” “nation,” “cosmos,” “history,” and so on. Under my definition Marxism would not qualify as a religion despite its detection of a “dialectical process” in history—however appropriately airy-fairy that sounds. Nor would atheism or materialism qualify. The last two would deny anything “beyond” the experienced. Atheists with odd intimations of positive meanings hidden somewhere invisibly have already committed heresy, as it were, in their hearts.
Intimation here is a good word although, for me, the German Ahnung, is best. Its derivation is from Die Ahnen, or the ancestors—and they’re definitely no longer here. Wordsworth’s title, Intimations of Immortality, fits my purpose nicely. My personal experiences of the religious take this form, the form of intimations, and they arise from poetry, myth, literary, and other artistic forms, including music. A sneering realist would label all this mere emotionalism—but I view such criticism as arising from the absence of inner powers rather than their presence.
Religion as experienced is an intuition. The moment concepts arise, and we hear of God quite early in life, we enter another realm. We learn to associate certain intuitions with certain structures of concepts. Intimations are intimate, personal. When I was young the concept of God produced in me images of a person in the sky. It did not connect with my own experience of awe—indeed has never linked that way in the intimate sense except in moments of extreme anxiety or gratitude. Odd, that, isn’t it. In certain moments when feelings rise beyond the normal range, when they transcend the average, we reach for the nearest concept of transcendence. There are no atheists in the trenches.
Experience teaches transcendence—and not just in extreme moments. But one does not experience it in a concrete, tangible way as one experience a tree, for instance, when climbing it as a child. The transcendental is ineffable yet felt as real. And the more open the top of one’s head, the more real it is and becomes. But between this experience and the doctrines of religions there is an enormous gulf—one so deep that the Grand Canyon would seem, by contrast, to be a mere line in the sand drawn by a wooden match-stick.
For these reasons I treat all scriptures as poetry—and view poetry as humanity’s highest achievement. I resist doctrinal claims to be communicating tangible realities, to describe in detail, however vague, what God intends or once might have done. Regarding that concept I hew resolutely to a negative theology and assert, no matter what I hear, “Not that, not that.” In the poetic mode I hear of “God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” in Genesis 3:8—and that’s fine with me, not least what came before and comes after. Eventually, by a long process, this inspiration turns into something that has nothing to do with intimations of the high; poetry is turned into doctrine; and by that time it has sunk out of my sight.
Intimation here is a good word although, for me, the German Ahnung, is best. Its derivation is from Die Ahnen, or the ancestors—and they’re definitely no longer here. Wordsworth’s title, Intimations of Immortality, fits my purpose nicely. My personal experiences of the religious take this form, the form of intimations, and they arise from poetry, myth, literary, and other artistic forms, including music. A sneering realist would label all this mere emotionalism—but I view such criticism as arising from the absence of inner powers rather than their presence.
Religion as experienced is an intuition. The moment concepts arise, and we hear of God quite early in life, we enter another realm. We learn to associate certain intuitions with certain structures of concepts. Intimations are intimate, personal. When I was young the concept of God produced in me images of a person in the sky. It did not connect with my own experience of awe—indeed has never linked that way in the intimate sense except in moments of extreme anxiety or gratitude. Odd, that, isn’t it. In certain moments when feelings rise beyond the normal range, when they transcend the average, we reach for the nearest concept of transcendence. There are no atheists in the trenches.
Experience teaches transcendence—and not just in extreme moments. But one does not experience it in a concrete, tangible way as one experience a tree, for instance, when climbing it as a child. The transcendental is ineffable yet felt as real. And the more open the top of one’s head, the more real it is and becomes. But between this experience and the doctrines of religions there is an enormous gulf—one so deep that the Grand Canyon would seem, by contrast, to be a mere line in the sand drawn by a wooden match-stick.
For these reasons I treat all scriptures as poetry—and view poetry as humanity’s highest achievement. I resist doctrinal claims to be communicating tangible realities, to describe in detail, however vague, what God intends or once might have done. Regarding that concept I hew resolutely to a negative theology and assert, no matter what I hear, “Not that, not that.” In the poetic mode I hear of “God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” in Genesis 3:8—and that’s fine with me, not least what came before and comes after. Eventually, by a long process, this inspiration turns into something that has nothing to do with intimations of the high; poetry is turned into doctrine; and by that time it has sunk out of my sight.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Second the Motion
The New York Times today brought a story titled “The Burning Bush They’ll Buy, But Not ESP or Alien Abduction.” “They” refers to the body of religious scholars generally and specifically to those attending the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion that recently concluded in Atlanta. But the article is actually the review of a book, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred by Jeffrey J. Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice. I haven’t read the book myself; I didn’t know about it until today. The article tells me that it is about four writers on the paranormal, two going back a ways and two who focus on UFOs. Kripal, evidently, advocates the inclusion of paranormal phenomena in religious studies and the inclusion of such writers as Frederic Myers, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee, and Bertrand Méheust among the scholars.
“According to Dr. Kripal,” says the article, “their omission is evidence of a persistent bias among religion scholars, happy to consider the inexplicable, like miracles, as long as they fit a familiar narrative, like Judaism or Christianity.”
Good point, there, Dr. Kripal. I’ve made the same point on this blog myself, expressing the same regrets, although I directed my attention more generally at science rather than restricting it to religious studies. Kripal also identifies the ultimate problem underlying this avoidance of the paranormal, be it by science or by the humanities. The paranormal is, alas, a borderzone phenomenon. It bridges the material and the mental spheres, each of which has its well-established professions. It is uncomfortably real, as I might put it. People stay on their respective reservations because that’s more secure than wandering in the desert in the twilight. We might actually advance our knowledge if more talent were dedicated to the study of this uncomfortable interface.
“According to Dr. Kripal,” says the article, “their omission is evidence of a persistent bias among religion scholars, happy to consider the inexplicable, like miracles, as long as they fit a familiar narrative, like Judaism or Christianity.”
Good point, there, Dr. Kripal. I’ve made the same point on this blog myself, expressing the same regrets, although I directed my attention more generally at science rather than restricting it to religious studies. Kripal also identifies the ultimate problem underlying this avoidance of the paranormal, be it by science or by the humanities. The paranormal is, alas, a borderzone phenomenon. It bridges the material and the mental spheres, each of which has its well-established professions. It is uncomfortably real, as I might put it. People stay on their respective reservations because that’s more secure than wandering in the desert in the twilight. We might actually advance our knowledge if more talent were dedicated to the study of this uncomfortable interface.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Get In The Habit
One impetus behind this post is a link sent in a comment to a post of mine on Ghulf Genes. The link is to an essay by Alasdair MacIntyre (accessible here) on The Nature of Virtues. The second is a post on Siris yesterday (here) addressing the question Is Faith a Virtue? Sometimes comments on blogs are just not the way to present one’s own response to highly stimulating ideas of enormous complexity, hence I thought I’d sort out my own thoughts on the matter of virtue here.
In one sense virtue and morality are very closely linked—or indeed synonymous. I find this in Webster’s first definition of virtue, rendered as “a conformity to a standard of right: Morality.” In an earlier posting I’ve at least touched on the subject of morality (here) focusing on its ambiguities. Virtue, by contrast, although very slippery (for reasons that follow), turns out to be simple and straightforward.
As MacIntyre shows, the word is rooted in the Latin vir, man, and is therefore manliness—a concept that different times define in different ways. It also carries the meaning of excellence—and when we speak of the virtue of a plant, say in a medical context, it means efficiency or efficacy. By way of example MacIntyre discusses the meaning of virtue in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament’s so-called theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity), in Jane Austen’s work, and in Benjamin Franklins. The contrasts are quite striking. MacIntyre’s essay is well worth reading just to see how he parses apart two motivations behind virtue, which he labels external and internal. External motivation comes from rewards you hope to gain; internal motivation arises from the inward experience of some practice, e.g., the sheer pleasure of doing a job right. My own view of the external/internal split has been to deny the presence of virtue if the motive is external, to recognize it when it is internal. Rabia al-Adawiyya’s saying always comes to my mind. “If I worship you from fear of hell, condemn me to hell. If I do so in the hope of paradise, deny me paradise.” I’m with her.
So long as we view virtue through the lens of qualities, tendencies, or endowments (like “manly strength” in Homer), the concept remains slippery. Natural endowments lack the immediate sense of a moral quality I tend to associate with the word. It helps me a great deal to define it more sharply from actual experience—always my tendency. And here I get real help from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Augustine defined virtue as “a good habit consonant with our nature.” Aquinas calls it “an operative habit essentially good.” Here I footnote the Catholic Encyclopedia (link). As a habit virtue loses its mystery and becomes straight-forward. Habits are acquired by repeatedly doing something—and if a difficulty must be overcome, thus a higher good must be preferred over a lower, it involves an act of the will. Thus virtue becomes, you might say, a record of repeatedly choosing right. Experience teaches that we naturally tend toward the good; the difficulties arise when we become aware of an ascending scale of goods and realize that lower goods often have more immediate and sensory rewards. A realization, thus a conscious mental grasp of these differences must first arise before a choice even faces us. And before virtue, the habit, is present, our naked will must form it by repeating what at first are relatively painful choices.
Now here I underline that a recognition is necessary—a kind of inward knowing. In my experience this is not an intellectual operation. My word for it is intuitive. I know the difference, for me, but I cannot speak for others. I don’t know what Aquinas really meant by intellect; the internal experience of that concept, for him, might have been be quite different from mine; for me it ranks lower than intuition and, therefore, unless the intellectual formulation gets intuition’s nod, I view it with a certain reserve.
Here then arises the issue of faith as a virtue. Faith in a structure of doctrines—which includes faith in the authority on which they rest—absolutely demands an intuitive assent. We are dealing here with matters that cannot be confirmed in the usual ways. Faith has a much closer relationship to truth than to goodness. Once I believe that something is thus and so, must I continuously repeat that affirmation? The reason why faith plays such a gigantic role in Christianity, it seems to me, is because its fundamentally very complex doctrine does not meet with intuitive assent as readily, say, as belief in God. Hence, perhaps, the affirmation must be repeated—because it’s not genuinely believed; in that context it can become a virtue. Further, faith in God does not by any means logically and automatically produce the Christian doctrines unless we first accept a very particular formulation of how God relates to man. But fear of hell or hope for paradise should not compel a person to act against the movements of his heart.
In one sense virtue and morality are very closely linked—or indeed synonymous. I find this in Webster’s first definition of virtue, rendered as “a conformity to a standard of right: Morality.” In an earlier posting I’ve at least touched on the subject of morality (here) focusing on its ambiguities. Virtue, by contrast, although very slippery (for reasons that follow), turns out to be simple and straightforward.
As MacIntyre shows, the word is rooted in the Latin vir, man, and is therefore manliness—a concept that different times define in different ways. It also carries the meaning of excellence—and when we speak of the virtue of a plant, say in a medical context, it means efficiency or efficacy. By way of example MacIntyre discusses the meaning of virtue in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament’s so-called theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity), in Jane Austen’s work, and in Benjamin Franklins. The contrasts are quite striking. MacIntyre’s essay is well worth reading just to see how he parses apart two motivations behind virtue, which he labels external and internal. External motivation comes from rewards you hope to gain; internal motivation arises from the inward experience of some practice, e.g., the sheer pleasure of doing a job right. My own view of the external/internal split has been to deny the presence of virtue if the motive is external, to recognize it when it is internal. Rabia al-Adawiyya’s saying always comes to my mind. “If I worship you from fear of hell, condemn me to hell. If I do so in the hope of paradise, deny me paradise.” I’m with her.
So long as we view virtue through the lens of qualities, tendencies, or endowments (like “manly strength” in Homer), the concept remains slippery. Natural endowments lack the immediate sense of a moral quality I tend to associate with the word. It helps me a great deal to define it more sharply from actual experience—always my tendency. And here I get real help from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Augustine defined virtue as “a good habit consonant with our nature.” Aquinas calls it “an operative habit essentially good.” Here I footnote the Catholic Encyclopedia (link). As a habit virtue loses its mystery and becomes straight-forward. Habits are acquired by repeatedly doing something—and if a difficulty must be overcome, thus a higher good must be preferred over a lower, it involves an act of the will. Thus virtue becomes, you might say, a record of repeatedly choosing right. Experience teaches that we naturally tend toward the good; the difficulties arise when we become aware of an ascending scale of goods and realize that lower goods often have more immediate and sensory rewards. A realization, thus a conscious mental grasp of these differences must first arise before a choice even faces us. And before virtue, the habit, is present, our naked will must form it by repeating what at first are relatively painful choices.
Now here I underline that a recognition is necessary—a kind of inward knowing. In my experience this is not an intellectual operation. My word for it is intuitive. I know the difference, for me, but I cannot speak for others. I don’t know what Aquinas really meant by intellect; the internal experience of that concept, for him, might have been be quite different from mine; for me it ranks lower than intuition and, therefore, unless the intellectual formulation gets intuition’s nod, I view it with a certain reserve.
Here then arises the issue of faith as a virtue. Faith in a structure of doctrines—which includes faith in the authority on which they rest—absolutely demands an intuitive assent. We are dealing here with matters that cannot be confirmed in the usual ways. Faith has a much closer relationship to truth than to goodness. Once I believe that something is thus and so, must I continuously repeat that affirmation? The reason why faith plays such a gigantic role in Christianity, it seems to me, is because its fundamentally very complex doctrine does not meet with intuitive assent as readily, say, as belief in God. Hence, perhaps, the affirmation must be repeated—because it’s not genuinely believed; in that context it can become a virtue. Further, faith in God does not by any means logically and automatically produce the Christian doctrines unless we first accept a very particular formulation of how God relates to man. But fear of hell or hope for paradise should not compel a person to act against the movements of his heart.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
The Uncomfortable Neutral Stance
Is there a neutral way to approach what are invariably viewed as religious experiences? The answer isn’t obvious. Let me be precise to bring that out. Let me take the case of a person, let me call him A, who hears or reads about other people who claim to have had such experiences. Those reporting may say that God, an angel, or some other sacred figure has addressed them, that they’ve received a revelation, or simply that they’ve had experiences of a transcendental state. Now if A is an unbeliever, he will reject the truth of such reports outright—except to acknowledge the presence of some disarrangement in the claimant’s brain. If A belongs to a well-defined faith system, but the claimant mentions figures from another faith, and especially makes references to some doctrinal aspects of the same, A is likely to dismiss the revelation because it doesn’t fit his structure of belief; he may even think the revelation came from the devil. A Muslim will be dubious if the center of the revelation is the Virgin Mary; a Christian will be dubious if the central role is played by Mohamed’s daughter Fatima.
A neutral stance would seem to require that A must credit the possibility of a transcendental reality, indeed one in which actual persons exist—and also view all religions as essentially equivalent, thus as having equivalent claims. Neither believers nor unbelievers will grant a neutral A much standing. For the unbeliever A is too soft, too gullible. For the orthodox believer, A is “lukewarm,” uncommitted, wishy-washy, and probably some kind of muddle-headed pantheist.
This is a real issue. At the core of every religion is a narrative, a conceptualization, an historical context, indeed a logic that makes it unique, and making any two of them equivalent invariably renders both in some ways or to some extent false. The neutral stance, which happens to be mine (alas!) relies on human fallibility as the legitimate explanation of the claimed equivalence.
All human experience is filtered through the imperfect lens of our consciousness; this is as true of ordinary as of extraordinary matters. At the very root of transcendental experiences—thus the initial core experience of the founder of a religion or a major movement—a human mind encounters something totally unprecedented and undeniable. This must be explained in some way, and the person must use his or her existing knowledge, not least cultural heritage, to make sense of it. And that’s at the root. All religions then develop further, always taking centuries, and the intellectual formulation crystallizes long, long after the revelatory event. By the time a religion has a full complement of orthodox doctrines, many, many people have made their contributions to it and incorporated their fallibilities as well. It remains to note that the source of such developments, whatever it is that the original claimant underwent, carries an enormous force of benevolence within it. If it did not, the religion could not take hold and acquire its millions of followers.
An authentic neutral stance does not deny the reality of the high but sees in the interpretation of the experience of it the equally undeniable fallibility of man.
A neutral stance would seem to require that A must credit the possibility of a transcendental reality, indeed one in which actual persons exist—and also view all religions as essentially equivalent, thus as having equivalent claims. Neither believers nor unbelievers will grant a neutral A much standing. For the unbeliever A is too soft, too gullible. For the orthodox believer, A is “lukewarm,” uncommitted, wishy-washy, and probably some kind of muddle-headed pantheist.
This is a real issue. At the core of every religion is a narrative, a conceptualization, an historical context, indeed a logic that makes it unique, and making any two of them equivalent invariably renders both in some ways or to some extent false. The neutral stance, which happens to be mine (alas!) relies on human fallibility as the legitimate explanation of the claimed equivalence.
All human experience is filtered through the imperfect lens of our consciousness; this is as true of ordinary as of extraordinary matters. At the very root of transcendental experiences—thus the initial core experience of the founder of a religion or a major movement—a human mind encounters something totally unprecedented and undeniable. This must be explained in some way, and the person must use his or her existing knowledge, not least cultural heritage, to make sense of it. And that’s at the root. All religions then develop further, always taking centuries, and the intellectual formulation crystallizes long, long after the revelatory event. By the time a religion has a full complement of orthodox doctrines, many, many people have made their contributions to it and incorporated their fallibilities as well. It remains to note that the source of such developments, whatever it is that the original claimant underwent, carries an enormous force of benevolence within it. If it did not, the religion could not take hold and acquire its millions of followers.
An authentic neutral stance does not deny the reality of the high but sees in the interpretation of the experience of it the equally undeniable fallibility of man.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
A Marxist Orientation
Reading a book in which Karl Marx’s development is skillfully presented, I got to wondering about people’s innate leanings. Marx tried his hand at poetry in youth but rapidly became an intellectual, initially very much influenced by Hegelian philosophy and also much concerned with religion—without, seemingly, even opening the door of it to understand its mysteries. He began to feel a certain comfort when he shifted his view to society and became a materialist. Then religion began to make sense to him as a coping mechanism to mitigate the pain of social conflict and of class oppression. And he was off.
Now, mind you, this man spent his entire life reading and scribbling. He was an intellectual. He was trying to understand the world, to orient himself. Thus he engaged in precisely the same activities I spent my time on when not actually working for a living. Why did my efforts take me very deeply into the religious phenomenon—and through all of the many rooms that surround it (psychology, mythology, hard science, literature, and history) whereas Marx quite rapidly settled on material production and its arrangements over time and expressed in political forms. All of those “rooms” of mine were, for him, by-products of that. Why did he never wonder what people are doing here in the first place? Wouldn’t that be the proper starting point? Of any orientation?
The way we’re inwardly constituted—our innate leanings—are ultimately the most decisive in how we approach our lives. The layer that totally entranced Karl Marx I took in one or two long strides before I’d ever reached my sophomore year—and also occupied my paid labors. The curious aspect here is that his approach was shared by so, so many others of the elites of his time so that he left a huge mark on history. That tells me something about the uneven distribution of gifts…
Now, mind you, this man spent his entire life reading and scribbling. He was an intellectual. He was trying to understand the world, to orient himself. Thus he engaged in precisely the same activities I spent my time on when not actually working for a living. Why did my efforts take me very deeply into the religious phenomenon—and through all of the many rooms that surround it (psychology, mythology, hard science, literature, and history) whereas Marx quite rapidly settled on material production and its arrangements over time and expressed in political forms. All of those “rooms” of mine were, for him, by-products of that. Why did he never wonder what people are doing here in the first place? Wouldn’t that be the proper starting point? Of any orientation?
The way we’re inwardly constituted—our innate leanings—are ultimately the most decisive in how we approach our lives. The layer that totally entranced Karl Marx I took in one or two long strides before I’d ever reached my sophomore year—and also occupied my paid labors. The curious aspect here is that his approach was shared by so, so many others of the elites of his time so that he left a huge mark on history. That tells me something about the uneven distribution of gifts…
Monday, November 8, 2010
Little Town, Big Influence
Herewith a little photograph of the town square of Tirschenreuth, Germany. I spent some years there, in my formative years between 9 to 13, a deeply Catholic region that had a huge influence on me. In those dark post-war years in a backward corner of Bavaria, I might as well have been time-traveling—because that region then had a culture that, for all intents and purposes (ignoring modern power and a few cars) might as well have been medieval. There is nothing like experience, as I keep emphasizing on this blog. Thus there is nothing like living a tradition to get to know it viscerally. I view such experiences—especially when they happen naturally—as gifts.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Somnolent Vocabularies
In efforts to wake up mornings, I jot notes by hand while (this time of year) listening to the furnace. In my case “waking up” only begins after breakfast, and after at least glancing at the papers. My notes today started off in harsh reaction, saying “I’m not in the least interested in reality.” Then the process of waking up actually kicked in, and I realized that what I’d referred to disparagingly as “reality” is linked to the distinctively human, and the collectively human at that. I see nature—yes, dunes, grass, birds, the sky, clouds, ravens, dawns—as part of the transcendent.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Remembering Self-Remembering
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,I encountered the writings of P.D. Ouspensky roughly in the 1970s and soon learned about George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who was Ouspensky’s inspiration. Both men were Russians born in the nineteenth century; both died in the late 1940s. Gurdjieff was the leader of a spiritual teaching movement; Ouspensky, while part of this grou for a while, was more broadly speaking a philosophical writer. Much later I discovered that Gurdjieff had latched on to his ideas from Sufi sources and turned a narrow slice of these into the foundations of his work; he himself characterized what he taught as esoteric Christianity and never acknowledged his debt.
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread…
[Milton, Lycidas]
I found Ouspensky’s (and later Gurdieff’s own) writings fascinating but strange. The essence may be rendered by saying that people are asleep; they have selves but not a genuine core self. That self, the real one, develops after arduous practice; the central technique for producing this initially absent self is self-remembering, thus becoming conscious of self, separating oneself from the flow of mentation, seeing the multiple personalities that constitute us (per G&O) as unreal, and gradually reaching genuine humanity.
I found this strange because I was only too aware—and indeed from childhood on—that I did too have a core self. My roots are in Catholicism, and you don’t go very far from those roots before you’re only all too aware that you have a conscience. But in truth I already knew that as a little child before I’d ever heard of anything like the catechism. Therefore, in the 1970s, the notion that I was an automaton sleep-walking through life was odd. I knew what it referred to, by and large, namely inattentiveness, absorption, passion, and the like, but the notion that you somehow created this self—and in its absence were sort of dismembered after death and blown into the void like dust, as Gurdjieff suggested—seemed illogical. How could you remember the self if there was no self there to do the remembering in the first place. Quite early on, of course, I’d learned Goethe’s famous saying: “Two souls, alas, reside within my breast.” True enough, of course, but Goethe, the third soul, as it were, knew this fact. Later yet I encountered the modern evolutionary doctrine that we are automata—and that our personalities are nothing but discrete (and ever changing) structures of nerve cells engaged in a Darwinian competition. But while that description also fits the G&O model of the ordinary, unenlightened common human, neither of these men came from that modern tradition.
The fascinating aspects of such doctrines is their narrow focus on some aspects of a teaching which, entirely legitimately, uses techniques to nurture human development. The very narrowness of focus is what makes bodies of teaching such as this one cult-like—thus with but marginal influence. The Sufis have developed many techniques of disengaging the human attention from the flux of ordinary life. The repetition of a single phrase, the zikhr—also known to us from the Hindu mantra—was another. Catholicism has both. Self-remembering has the same function as the examination of the conscience; and there is also the repetition of the Holy Name. But what makes a particular practice valuable is the comprehensive structure in which it is embedded. Some teachings tempt people because they promise success by some kind of recipe or formula. Therefore such groups attract those seeking power and—much more poignantly—whose who have been starved of meaning.
The core self is, indeed, enveloped in the material dimension—and, unless cultivated, can readily habituate itself to live in the continuous flux of stimulus that life produces. The proper preparation of the human takes place by nurture in a home and a comprehensively formed society. The vast number of religious and quasi-religious movements that have characterized the twentieth century testify to the failure of homes—and society as a whole—to assume the burden of nourishing the higher aspects of the soul. Then the hungry sheep look for almost anything that seems to offer help.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Nurture
One experience is certainly denied us. We can’t “redo” our childhood and “experiment around”—and thus examine how we might have turned out if we had been brought up in a marginal, disordered household… How much of what we value as adults would still be there in us if our upbringing and culture had been skimpy, shoddy, or confused?
There is a good-old salesman’s saying: It’s better to be lucky than to be good. There is the saying we’ve all heard: There but for the grace of God go I. A sense of having been exceedingly fortunate surfaced in me as soon as I was old enough to see the world well enough. I credit my upbringing for whatever virtues I may have and blame my shortcomings on me. That’s good policy in general—an acknowledgement of probabilities. Culture is more nurture than achievement—and most of us do well if we but pass it on intact. That alone requires all of our effort.
It must be so because these days literally millions of babies have been and continue to be born into marginal families. I’m not slicing, dicing, or dividing and therefore don’t mean economically marginal. Economic deprivation may or may not be a part of it—wealth, indeed, may be a cause of it. But generally, thus by the second or third generation, the sins of the fathers—and let’s not forget the mothers, either—will have manifested in economic decline as well.
The paradox that I discover here is that loss of culture is caused by individual acts of failure—often by small, careless acts—but the transmission of such failure to the next generation magnifies these errors. The poorly nurtured children are weakened and disabled. With each round of births, the children are less and less to blame because, in an almost literal sense “they know not what they’re doing.” But their acts of failure are much more visible and harmful. And the paradox is that we hold individuals responsible who have become irresponsible by lack of nurture rather than by their free choice.
Thus then develop very strange notions and gain a wide authority. One is that morality should not and must not be taught in schools. Morality is a religious concept, and religion, folks, is a lifestyle option, isn’t it?
Ultimately failure of any kind, not least cultural failure, is self-correcting. But cultural failure may take centuries to work around and cost vast amounts of suffering—generally of the stupidly innocent.
There is a good-old salesman’s saying: It’s better to be lucky than to be good. There is the saying we’ve all heard: There but for the grace of God go I. A sense of having been exceedingly fortunate surfaced in me as soon as I was old enough to see the world well enough. I credit my upbringing for whatever virtues I may have and blame my shortcomings on me. That’s good policy in general—an acknowledgement of probabilities. Culture is more nurture than achievement—and most of us do well if we but pass it on intact. That alone requires all of our effort.
It must be so because these days literally millions of babies have been and continue to be born into marginal families. I’m not slicing, dicing, or dividing and therefore don’t mean economically marginal. Economic deprivation may or may not be a part of it—wealth, indeed, may be a cause of it. But generally, thus by the second or third generation, the sins of the fathers—and let’s not forget the mothers, either—will have manifested in economic decline as well.
The paradox that I discover here is that loss of culture is caused by individual acts of failure—often by small, careless acts—but the transmission of such failure to the next generation magnifies these errors. The poorly nurtured children are weakened and disabled. With each round of births, the children are less and less to blame because, in an almost literal sense “they know not what they’re doing.” But their acts of failure are much more visible and harmful. And the paradox is that we hold individuals responsible who have become irresponsible by lack of nurture rather than by their free choice.
Thus then develop very strange notions and gain a wide authority. One is that morality should not and must not be taught in schools. Morality is a religious concept, and religion, folks, is a lifestyle option, isn’t it?
Ultimately failure of any kind, not least cultural failure, is self-correcting. But cultural failure may take centuries to work around and cost vast amounts of suffering—generally of the stupidly innocent.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Primeval Forestry of Symbols
The thought comes that it takes an extraordinary effort to imagine what the advanced life of the mind might have been like in prehistoric times. Here I mean the ages before reading and writing developed and thus came to support and to maintain highly-developed abstract thought.
This occurred to me because a series of links—mental, not Internet—reminded me that Mircea Eliade, an influential twentieth century historian of religion, had written a definitive study titled Shamanism. I found the book and took a new look. Soon it all came rushing back. Eliade’s is an exhaustive description of the way prehistoric wise men (shamans, medicine men, witch doctors, sorcerers) were initiated and how they practiced their craft. Description—not explanation. Eliade’s book, therefore, rapidly causes the eyes to glaze over. We learn that—
Such men (only a few were women) underwent death and rebirth. Demons, gods, or spirits killed and disemboweled them and then replaced their ordinary organs with new and more perfect ones; the higher beings placed magical bones, stones, or crystals into the initiates’ skulls or bodies. They brought the initiates back to life. Then these people, recovering, discovered that they’d gained what we’d call paranormal powers of healing, precognition, sight-at-distance, mind-reading, and so on and so forth.
To modern ears the descriptions sound so fantastic, weird, and brutal that dismissing them outright as primitive fantasy and superstition, all based on rude ritual, comes naturally. No temptation arises in most casual readers to imagine that these accounts could possibly reference real experiences or events. What did strike Eliade forcefully was the uniformity of these descriptions (with minor variations) from culture to culture and from all across the world, including Australia, which landmass had long been out of contact with the majority even of prehistoric humanity.
The uniformity persuades me that genuine experiences lie behind these stories; the accounts don’t immediately evoke the same experiences we still have today because our modes of thought have radically changed since then—but not the structure of our souls. We read in John 3:5: “Except a man be born again of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” Such a statement we take in stride and think little about—because we’ve heard it since childhood. Most people do not undergo wrenching conversion experiences—least of all after long, arduous practices of solitude, fasting, and sleeplessness as did the candidates for prehistoric priesthood. Our own by now deeply embedded habits of abstraction permit us to view John’s assertion as a kind of “change of mind,” not as some kind of heavy-gauged spiritual upheaval. It does not occur to us, hearing about those quartz crystals embedded by higher powers in the candidate’s skull through a hole in the head drilled with a sharp magical stick—but afterwards leaving neither hole nor scar—as possibly a way of speaking about a force of light and spirit that dawns in a soul transformed by major internal change. In Catholicism we speak of transubstantiation and understand by it something rather vague and abstract—but we read accounts of ordinary guts replaced by magical guts as the sordid superstition of the cavemen.
The language of humanity—its incredibly complex and vast systems of symbols—undergoes change. The more abstract our understanding, the easier it is to apply the same symbol to experiences that have very little relationship one to the other. “Being born again” for us might mean an emotional “stepping forward” at a rousing revival meeting. The genuine experience of it—the kind that sometimes really does transform the person and does produce real changes, not least real powers difficult to explain, get the same labeling although they are, in reality, quite something else.
This occurred to me because a series of links—mental, not Internet—reminded me that Mircea Eliade, an influential twentieth century historian of religion, had written a definitive study titled Shamanism. I found the book and took a new look. Soon it all came rushing back. Eliade’s is an exhaustive description of the way prehistoric wise men (shamans, medicine men, witch doctors, sorcerers) were initiated and how they practiced their craft. Description—not explanation. Eliade’s book, therefore, rapidly causes the eyes to glaze over. We learn that—
Such men (only a few were women) underwent death and rebirth. Demons, gods, or spirits killed and disemboweled them and then replaced their ordinary organs with new and more perfect ones; the higher beings placed magical bones, stones, or crystals into the initiates’ skulls or bodies. They brought the initiates back to life. Then these people, recovering, discovered that they’d gained what we’d call paranormal powers of healing, precognition, sight-at-distance, mind-reading, and so on and so forth.
To modern ears the descriptions sound so fantastic, weird, and brutal that dismissing them outright as primitive fantasy and superstition, all based on rude ritual, comes naturally. No temptation arises in most casual readers to imagine that these accounts could possibly reference real experiences or events. What did strike Eliade forcefully was the uniformity of these descriptions (with minor variations) from culture to culture and from all across the world, including Australia, which landmass had long been out of contact with the majority even of prehistoric humanity.
The uniformity persuades me that genuine experiences lie behind these stories; the accounts don’t immediately evoke the same experiences we still have today because our modes of thought have radically changed since then—but not the structure of our souls. We read in John 3:5: “Except a man be born again of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” Such a statement we take in stride and think little about—because we’ve heard it since childhood. Most people do not undergo wrenching conversion experiences—least of all after long, arduous practices of solitude, fasting, and sleeplessness as did the candidates for prehistoric priesthood. Our own by now deeply embedded habits of abstraction permit us to view John’s assertion as a kind of “change of mind,” not as some kind of heavy-gauged spiritual upheaval. It does not occur to us, hearing about those quartz crystals embedded by higher powers in the candidate’s skull through a hole in the head drilled with a sharp magical stick—but afterwards leaving neither hole nor scar—as possibly a way of speaking about a force of light and spirit that dawns in a soul transformed by major internal change. In Catholicism we speak of transubstantiation and understand by it something rather vague and abstract—but we read accounts of ordinary guts replaced by magical guts as the sordid superstition of the cavemen.
The language of humanity—its incredibly complex and vast systems of symbols—undergoes change. The more abstract our understanding, the easier it is to apply the same symbol to experiences that have very little relationship one to the other. “Being born again” for us might mean an emotional “stepping forward” at a rousing revival meeting. The genuine experience of it—the kind that sometimes really does transform the person and does produce real changes, not least real powers difficult to explain, get the same labeling although they are, in reality, quite something else.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Pondering Potential
In the last post I mention the concept of “pure act.” When I first encountered that idea—which refers to the nature of God—I imagined a kind of pure whirling motion at infinite speed, producing infinite light. That’s what my mind produced. The problem is that young people are exposed to such ideas in a kind of foreshortened sort of way. Even when you’re told that act here isn't some kind of flailing around but actuality, thus realized potential, the human mind, even grasping the ideas (or mine at least), isn’t really satisfied. When this pairing—potentiality and actuality—is explained, you realize that all they’re really saying is that “God has all possible perfections and isn’t waiting for them to manifest.” The mad whirling then stops and only the infinite bright light remains. Perfection doesn’t produce anything graspable.
This pairing, potentiality and actuality, is at the base of Aristotle’s concept of change. An existing something can only change because it has the capability for change—but that change is not yet realized. The word Aristotle used was dunamis, literally meaning, simply, capability. That word sounds strange until we spell it dynamis. Then suddenly we realize that we use the word ourselves in various ways—dynamic, dynamism, indeed also as dynamite. Aristotle used an ordinary Greek word for capability; potential comes from its Latin equivalent. His innovation came in characterizing something existing as having both entelechy (actualized potential) and energy (capability not yet realized). Here he gave an ordinary Greek word, meaning “at work,” a specialized technical meaning. We have entelechy right now—so does my coffee cup. We also still have dynamis in which a latent force, energy, is present.
Now the interesting aspect of potential—and why God does not have potential—is that something “not yet” or “asleep” or “as yet unrealized” can be seen both positively or negatively. Positively it is future perfection, if we’re lucky; negatively it is a privation. We’re still lacking its actual manifestation. But God lacks nothing at all. God is perfection. Therefore, alas, God has no potential.
In the twentieth century, we’ve actually proved the frightening energies latent in but a small amount of matter when it is actually released. Energeia is certainly present there, in potentiam. But do spare us, great wise men, any new demonstrations of Aristotle’s concepts in daily actuality; I’d hate to see another major city somewhere frozen in unreachable entelecheia deprived of its complement of energy.
The energy within the atom—the strong force that holds the nucleus together—is an interesting example of an actual and simultaneously potential energy in matter. Aristotle’s definitions nicely fit a region of reality he tended to dismiss. Atomic theories? Aristotle shook his head. The fascinating aspects of this kind of energy is that, so far as we can determine, it need not be renewed at regular intervals—as must the energy that keeps us going. What energy really is and where it arises—those are issues one ponders out here on the border. The dictionaries, whether of philosophy or physics, tend to produce a fog of circular referencing where you meet the word as its own definition after the fourth or fifth look-up.
This pairing, potentiality and actuality, is at the base of Aristotle’s concept of change. An existing something can only change because it has the capability for change—but that change is not yet realized. The word Aristotle used was dunamis, literally meaning, simply, capability. That word sounds strange until we spell it dynamis. Then suddenly we realize that we use the word ourselves in various ways—dynamic, dynamism, indeed also as dynamite. Aristotle used an ordinary Greek word for capability; potential comes from its Latin equivalent. His innovation came in characterizing something existing as having both entelechy (actualized potential) and energy (capability not yet realized). Here he gave an ordinary Greek word, meaning “at work,” a specialized technical meaning. We have entelechy right now—so does my coffee cup. We also still have dynamis in which a latent force, energy, is present.
Now the interesting aspect of potential—and why God does not have potential—is that something “not yet” or “asleep” or “as yet unrealized” can be seen both positively or negatively. Positively it is future perfection, if we’re lucky; negatively it is a privation. We’re still lacking its actual manifestation. But God lacks nothing at all. God is perfection. Therefore, alas, God has no potential.
In the twentieth century, we’ve actually proved the frightening energies latent in but a small amount of matter when it is actually released. Energeia is certainly present there, in potentiam. But do spare us, great wise men, any new demonstrations of Aristotle’s concepts in daily actuality; I’d hate to see another major city somewhere frozen in unreachable entelecheia deprived of its complement of energy.
The energy within the atom—the strong force that holds the nucleus together—is an interesting example of an actual and simultaneously potential energy in matter. Aristotle’s definitions nicely fit a region of reality he tended to dismiss. Atomic theories? Aristotle shook his head. The fascinating aspects of this kind of energy is that, so far as we can determine, it need not be renewed at regular intervals—as must the energy that keeps us going. What energy really is and where it arises—those are issues one ponders out here on the border. The dictionaries, whether of philosophy or physics, tend to produce a fog of circular referencing where you meet the word as its own definition after the fourth or fifth look-up.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
It Becomes You to Be
The mention of Whitehead in the last post brought to mind the complementarity of being and becoming. Becoming is fashionable in our times, and being therefore sits below the salt, but the paradox is that to behold this fashionable Becoming one must be enduring. To hold these two concepts simultaneously in the mind is the easiest thing in the world. It is the experience of consciousness. But it seems to irk the intellect. Hence in the Ages of Becoming, the enduring self is also pictured as but an instance of the universal flux, and as this age peaked, William James discovered the “stream of consciousness.” That strikes a retrograde like me as a contradiction. In the Ages of Being a similar reduction of one to the other hides in the idea that Ultimate Being is pure act. We can’t have one without the other.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Reading—or Not Reading—Philosophy
I can never seriously attend philosophers. That would require reading them carefully and slowly, cover to cover, accepting the rules of their thought. I’ve only ever made the effort here and there—and in those few cases, finally, only with a kind of grim determination that I apply to certain stains—the kind that only ultimately yield to steel brush and razor blade. Thus, for instance, I once made that effort reading Sartre’s opus, Being and Nothingness, in English, and then, in that grim mood, even acquiring a French version to check those passages that struck me as incoherent; and they still were. More recently I read Whitehead’s Process and Reality, after which my main reaction was that all this effort for this pathetic conclusion appears to have been a waste. And, of course, I’ve read often huge chunks of many other philosophers just to keep the secondary commentators and summarizers honest. An almost tangible savor, odor, or aura of the philosophers’ personalities reaches me in about a hundred pages or thereabouts, which, in combination with the content, is most valuable and informative—and lacking in secondary renditions. I’ve also read, in full and many times over, the works of people classified as philosophers who, however, transcend the subject. They might be better labeled as theologians or, put more generally, students of the ineffable. And no. I’m not here using other phrases for “metaphysics.”
The best way to explain my own behavior to myself is to assume that all works minimally contain intellect and intuition. The more the ratio favors intellect, the less the work will draw or hold me. But intellectual content is also necessary to focus my attention. Pure clouds of intuition repel me just as surely as pure cathedrals of abstraction. Intellect is sometimes present with large doses of passion, such as I find in Schopenhauer. But passion isn’t interesting in this context.
One night, long ago, at a party, I spent a good part of it in intense conversation with a man. When the time came to break up, he asked: “By the way. Are you a mathematician?” I had to laugh. Quite the contrary, I said. He said: “Well, you certainly think like one.” Then I to him: “You must be one yourself.” And he nodded.
The mathematician must have an intuitive relation to numbers. Numbers leave me cold—and their relations, one to the other, strike me as self-evident if I spend enough paralyzingly boring time to trace them. As stellar a math great as Bertrand Russell agrees with me. And what applies to numbers also applies to abstractions stripped down to empty concepts.
Today, following some links into the nineteenth century, as it were, I encountered “a discussion of the problem of what makes the unity of an individual thing.” The example given was the unity of a lump of sugar which holds a multiplicity of properties. And these are? Sweetness, whiteness, and hardness. This is the sort of thing that, when I encounter it, makes me roll my eyes.
The best way to explain my own behavior to myself is to assume that all works minimally contain intellect and intuition. The more the ratio favors intellect, the less the work will draw or hold me. But intellectual content is also necessary to focus my attention. Pure clouds of intuition repel me just as surely as pure cathedrals of abstraction. Intellect is sometimes present with large doses of passion, such as I find in Schopenhauer. But passion isn’t interesting in this context.
One night, long ago, at a party, I spent a good part of it in intense conversation with a man. When the time came to break up, he asked: “By the way. Are you a mathematician?” I had to laugh. Quite the contrary, I said. He said: “Well, you certainly think like one.” Then I to him: “You must be one yourself.” And he nodded.
The mathematician must have an intuitive relation to numbers. Numbers leave me cold—and their relations, one to the other, strike me as self-evident if I spend enough paralyzingly boring time to trace them. As stellar a math great as Bertrand Russell agrees with me. And what applies to numbers also applies to abstractions stripped down to empty concepts.
Today, following some links into the nineteenth century, as it were, I encountered “a discussion of the problem of what makes the unity of an individual thing.” The example given was the unity of a lump of sugar which holds a multiplicity of properties. And these are? Sweetness, whiteness, and hardness. This is the sort of thing that, when I encounter it, makes me roll my eyes.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Providence
Brigitte and I spent a good part of our day yesterday discussing the meaning of fate—which in turn prompted yesterday’s post. But, of course—having once entered that portal—we also talked about providence. The difference between these two—fate and providence—is quite marked. The word providence is also rooted in the past; it used to mean foresight, the direct translation of the Latin, and thus prudence. Its elevated meaning, as God’s guidance and care or as God’s power sustaining and guiding human destiny, is relatively new. It dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Fate produces an impression of the impersonal. Therefore no one says: “How could a just Fate let this happen?” But we hear the question asked about God.
Strange how some things coincide. Late yesterday came word of a death in our extended circle of friends. Stephanie, a young woman of twenty-four, passed away. She died of a genetically inherited condition, the same condition that had taken her mother quite young. She died after a very brave and determined struggle, as she wished, at home—rather than in the hospital where she’d spent many of the last months of her life. Our linkage to Stephanie is through her grandparents.
It occurred to me that in this very cloudy world of matter, Brigitte and I had been notified, as it were, of this impending event through the invisible ether—before the e-mail arrived in the evening. Knew it—yet did not. Knew it but not in its personal reference. More than a hundred people die in the Detroit metroplex every day, but none as closely linked to us as Stephanie had been. Felt it—and thoughts of fate and providence arose spontaneously.
Brigitte had been praying every night for quite a while now for the rescue of the miners caught underground in Chile…and for Stephanie’s release from suffering. Providence is a difficult concept because it demands the suspension of human judgment. If God provides, God has reasons for everything that transpires, understands the why of everything, and ensures the best possible outcome. It takes less inner power, it seems to me, to endure the blows of fate than to accept providential arrangements that seem to human eyes as unjust, arbitrary, and a wanton disregard of all that should belong to a just and loving God. It requires the curbing of our pride. We’re proud of our understanding, of our power to penetrate all secrets. But we know next to nothing. If we saw all things exactly as they are, if we understood the really big picture, we’d see the sublime logic even of a death that makes us roll our eyes and shake our heads.
Strange how some things coincide. Late yesterday came word of a death in our extended circle of friends. Stephanie, a young woman of twenty-four, passed away. She died of a genetically inherited condition, the same condition that had taken her mother quite young. She died after a very brave and determined struggle, as she wished, at home—rather than in the hospital where she’d spent many of the last months of her life. Our linkage to Stephanie is through her grandparents.
It occurred to me that in this very cloudy world of matter, Brigitte and I had been notified, as it were, of this impending event through the invisible ether—before the e-mail arrived in the evening. Knew it—yet did not. Knew it but not in its personal reference. More than a hundred people die in the Detroit metroplex every day, but none as closely linked to us as Stephanie had been. Felt it—and thoughts of fate and providence arose spontaneously.
Brigitte had been praying every night for quite a while now for the rescue of the miners caught underground in Chile…and for Stephanie’s release from suffering. Providence is a difficult concept because it demands the suspension of human judgment. If God provides, God has reasons for everything that transpires, understands the why of everything, and ensures the best possible outcome. It takes less inner power, it seems to me, to endure the blows of fate than to accept providential arrangements that seem to human eyes as unjust, arbitrary, and a wanton disregard of all that should belong to a just and loving God. It requires the curbing of our pride. We’re proud of our understanding, of our power to penetrate all secrets. But we know next to nothing. If we saw all things exactly as they are, if we understood the really big picture, we’d see the sublime logic even of a death that makes us roll our eyes and shake our heads.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
The Tragic and the Comic
As a youngster I thought it odd that the most famous Italian poetic work would be called The Divine Comedy. How could the divine be comic? I thought of it as serious. Later I came to understand that “comedy” is one of those words that had one meaning in ancient Greek and Roman times, another in the medieval centuries, and then regained its old classical meaning once more in modern times. You might say that one of the two parts of the word came to dominate the meaning in succession. The two roots are komos, which meant a revel or a carousal and oidos, which meant a singer or a poet. The two were still visible in Greek, komoidia. A revel, an amusing spectacle, carries the “funny” connotation, poetry and song carry the “serious.” In the Middle Ages the word had the latter meaning and was used for poems and stories. The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests that its earliest meaning in English was “narrative poem.” Dante’s intention was to signal a serious story but with a happy ending.
Amusingly the word tragedy also contains the root oidos, but the front part of it comes from tragos, meaning a goat. A tragedy is a “goatsong.” The root of this seems to be dramas that depicted satyrs, thus creatures who are half-goat half man. These meanings, again taken from my trusty online source, are in debate—but they please me; they suggest a deeper truth. The unhappy ending associated with this form of drama seems to suggest that the goat-half had its way. To unpack this line of thought a little more, let me return to my youthful wonder. How, indeed, could the divine be comic?
It might help to ponder another word in this context, the thing that we call fate. Its meaning is the course of a person’s life; the word is derived from “decreed” or “spoken” or “ordained,” as by a higher power—thus that which is determined. The word fatal does not come from some ancient tag for death; rather it comes from the fact that death is our unavoidable destination, our destiny. But is it? It is certainly the destination of the body, of the goat. Its meaning includes the idea of “unavoidable necessity.” That we have to live a life in bodies—that is fate. But we also have another part; and that part is free. How we live that necessary life—that’s up to us. If we identify with the immortal spirit, it suggests that, at death, we escape this realm of necessity and…well, enter the divine. The tragic results when we identify with the limited but necessary; the comic when we identify with the free and limitless. People have a fate; I’ve never encountered any reference to the “fate of angels.” Why? They don’t follow a necessary course.
The very core of our nature belongs to the high, the superior, the ultimately free. That nature, caught in this lower dimension, looking around, but still aware of itself, beholding the shenanigans, will simply have to laugh at what it sees. But its ability to rise above, to laugh at all this in light moments, testifies to a high gift which, in more serious moments expresses itself in poetry.
Amusingly the word tragedy also contains the root oidos, but the front part of it comes from tragos, meaning a goat. A tragedy is a “goatsong.” The root of this seems to be dramas that depicted satyrs, thus creatures who are half-goat half man. These meanings, again taken from my trusty online source, are in debate—but they please me; they suggest a deeper truth. The unhappy ending associated with this form of drama seems to suggest that the goat-half had its way. To unpack this line of thought a little more, let me return to my youthful wonder. How, indeed, could the divine be comic?
It might help to ponder another word in this context, the thing that we call fate. Its meaning is the course of a person’s life; the word is derived from “decreed” or “spoken” or “ordained,” as by a higher power—thus that which is determined. The word fatal does not come from some ancient tag for death; rather it comes from the fact that death is our unavoidable destination, our destiny. But is it? It is certainly the destination of the body, of the goat. Its meaning includes the idea of “unavoidable necessity.” That we have to live a life in bodies—that is fate. But we also have another part; and that part is free. How we live that necessary life—that’s up to us. If we identify with the immortal spirit, it suggests that, at death, we escape this realm of necessity and…well, enter the divine. The tragic results when we identify with the limited but necessary; the comic when we identify with the free and limitless. People have a fate; I’ve never encountered any reference to the “fate of angels.” Why? They don’t follow a necessary course.
The very core of our nature belongs to the high, the superior, the ultimately free. That nature, caught in this lower dimension, looking around, but still aware of itself, beholding the shenanigans, will simply have to laugh at what it sees. But its ability to rise above, to laugh at all this in light moments, testifies to a high gift which, in more serious moments expresses itself in poetry.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
NDEs: Speculating on the Data
The impetus today is still Pin Van Lommel’s book on near-death experiences (see last post). Van Lommel comes from a scientific background; not surprisingly he spends a great deal of time on examining the interaction between the brain and consciousness; he concludes that the brain does not produce consciousness. He doesn’t go beyond that—and that’s fine. Here the saying applies: “Sufficient unto the day the evil thereof” [Matthew 6:34]. His aim is to make a credible case for the survival of consciousness. But I’ve been certain of that for a long time myself, and my interests range beyond that issue.
The three facts I want to examine are these. First, that people in states of coma, with flat EEGs and no sign of brain function, experience themselves alive, alert, able to see, hear, and to move—to think, feel, remember, and, indeed, with sharply intensified powers. Second, that such people, despite these powers, cannot touch anything material. Third, that the brain certainly mediates between physical and mental levels.
That the brain has such a function is one of the data points; another is that the brain—indeed our bodies taken as a whole—behave like machines, like tools. They represent technology—although not technology we have made. Tooling always has the essential quality of “in order to…” Now here is the puzzle. If a spirit sees and hears, has a functioning consciousness, and greater freedom of movement outside than in a body—if it functions well, even better, without tooling than while in possession of it, what parallels does that suggest?
The first that comes to mind is a diving suit—thus something that enables its wearer to function in an environment in which he or she couldn’t function at all or for very long without tooling. But what is this function we can’t engage in without bodies? What the disembodied spirit cannot do is interact with matter. It can’t vibrate the air and thus cannot be heard by the embodied. It cannot touch matter; it passes through it. This suggests…
This suggests that bodies are a tool by means of which we can experience the material dimension. Doing so we give up certain powers. We can’t reliably communicate mind to mind, although sporadic telepathic powers are known; we cannot move at will and instantaneously from one point to another. Our intellectual powers are also seemingly dimmed. This in turn suggests that some kind of linkage or binding takes place to hold us inside bodies; this link, once it is established, seems effectively to blind us to the other or wider dimension but, by means of the body’s tooling, enables us to act on matter—using matter. Indeed it seems to prevent us from acting in any other way.
But why should the spirit want to be bound in this way? What purpose does that serve—seeing that in disembodied form the spirit can indeed communicate very effectively with other disembodied spirits?
Here the technological, machine-like structure of bodies comes into full focus. That bodies are machines of sorts cannot be denied. The very existence of defects in this machinery—even early on at the genetic level—suggests an agency behind the body which is, like us, limited in its powers and doing a terrific engineering job in a hostile environment. Chance cannot have created living bodies; they are far too complex and exhibit purpose. I find it impossible to imagine life without an agency in the background—also impossible to imagine this agency to be God. Only limited agencies are, well, limited—and therefore obliged to reach for tooling.
These are the issues of interest. They rise to that level only if you accept as fact that consciousness is able to survives death and is therefore independent of its vehicle—the brain, the body. Van Lommel does a superb job proving that case. But it would be far more enlightening to understand why, in a sense, we are imprisoned in these tools of ours, why we can escape them, briefly, only under extraordinary circumstances—and at death more certainly. But even after that, can we remain in that other dimension? Or is there in us, or independent of us, something pulling us down here? Or did we come here out of curiosity—by the billions and billions—as some people are drawn to descend into deep dark caves, equipped with diving gear, to spelunk in the depths at the risk of their lives?
This is a very interesting frontier, I submit. None more fascinating. None with greater potential for good or ill.
The three facts I want to examine are these. First, that people in states of coma, with flat EEGs and no sign of brain function, experience themselves alive, alert, able to see, hear, and to move—to think, feel, remember, and, indeed, with sharply intensified powers. Second, that such people, despite these powers, cannot touch anything material. Third, that the brain certainly mediates between physical and mental levels.
That the brain has such a function is one of the data points; another is that the brain—indeed our bodies taken as a whole—behave like machines, like tools. They represent technology—although not technology we have made. Tooling always has the essential quality of “in order to…” Now here is the puzzle. If a spirit sees and hears, has a functioning consciousness, and greater freedom of movement outside than in a body—if it functions well, even better, without tooling than while in possession of it, what parallels does that suggest?
The first that comes to mind is a diving suit—thus something that enables its wearer to function in an environment in which he or she couldn’t function at all or for very long without tooling. But what is this function we can’t engage in without bodies? What the disembodied spirit cannot do is interact with matter. It can’t vibrate the air and thus cannot be heard by the embodied. It cannot touch matter; it passes through it. This suggests…
This suggests that bodies are a tool by means of which we can experience the material dimension. Doing so we give up certain powers. We can’t reliably communicate mind to mind, although sporadic telepathic powers are known; we cannot move at will and instantaneously from one point to another. Our intellectual powers are also seemingly dimmed. This in turn suggests that some kind of linkage or binding takes place to hold us inside bodies; this link, once it is established, seems effectively to blind us to the other or wider dimension but, by means of the body’s tooling, enables us to act on matter—using matter. Indeed it seems to prevent us from acting in any other way.
But why should the spirit want to be bound in this way? What purpose does that serve—seeing that in disembodied form the spirit can indeed communicate very effectively with other disembodied spirits?
Here the technological, machine-like structure of bodies comes into full focus. That bodies are machines of sorts cannot be denied. The very existence of defects in this machinery—even early on at the genetic level—suggests an agency behind the body which is, like us, limited in its powers and doing a terrific engineering job in a hostile environment. Chance cannot have created living bodies; they are far too complex and exhibit purpose. I find it impossible to imagine life without an agency in the background—also impossible to imagine this agency to be God. Only limited agencies are, well, limited—and therefore obliged to reach for tooling.
These are the issues of interest. They rise to that level only if you accept as fact that consciousness is able to survives death and is therefore independent of its vehicle—the brain, the body. Van Lommel does a superb job proving that case. But it would be far more enlightening to understand why, in a sense, we are imprisoned in these tools of ours, why we can escape them, briefly, only under extraordinary circumstances—and at death more certainly. But even after that, can we remain in that other dimension? Or is there in us, or independent of us, something pulling us down here? Or did we come here out of curiosity—by the billions and billions—as some people are drawn to descend into deep dark caves, equipped with diving gear, to spelunk in the depths at the risk of their lives?
This is a very interesting frontier, I submit. None more fascinating. None with greater potential for good or ill.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Kneeling Before Physics
I’ve argued elsewhere more than once (i.e., on Ghulf Genes) that we are “heading back,” thus that we are—culturally—on our way back from the summit of Mount Matter to climb again Mount Spirit. On the way there, thus at present, we’re in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I find it fascinating that these days those who newly discover that the transcendental order must be real after all—and wish to persuade others of this fact—almost reflexively reach for their proofs in physics. The chosen methodology has little to do with the facts of the matter but everything to do with human nature. To persuade others you need Authority; and these days physics has authority. Einstein is the word that equals wise today—and the atomic bomb made the biggest thunder ever over Japan just a few decades back. If physics is the orthodox religion of modernity, quantum physics is its mysticism, hence the best pool of proof of all.
I was reminded of this forcefully reading a book by Pim Van Lommel on the near-death experience. Lommel is a cardiologist and, these days, a leading figure in NDE studies. The book is Consciousness Beyond Life. It’s a mixed sort of product, stunningly excellent in parts. But it fails as a “work.” It is a kind of together-binding of magazine or journal articles padded out into chapters. The book’s early chapters cover the same ground Raymond Moody did in Life After Life; in many areas Lommel’s book is more complete and thorough, in others interestingly selective. Moody gave very strong emphasis to the spirit’s reception in the beyond by a “being of light.” In Lommel’s presentation the testimonials he chose to illustrate this aspect support a much more pantheistic feeling. But it is Lommel’s main thematic I found interesting as an indicator of our times; but Lommel’s case, I hasten to add, is just one of many. He reaches out to physics for his theme and latches on to the concept of non-locality, a discovery of quantum mechanics.
In the crudest form, locality means that if someone punches me hard on the chin, the lady waiting for the bus a block away won’t fall down. She cannot be affected by what happens to me. In more sophisticated form, this means that for B to be affected by A in some way, communication must be possible between A and B; and this communication cannot take place more rapidly than the speed of light. Non-locality means that in some way, anyway, the pain I feel when punched does affect the lady waiting for the bus; my negative experience is communicated to everyone; others don’t have to feel it consciously, but it is so. It also means that instantaneous communications between A and B are possible, even if these two are moving away from each other at the speed of light.
Now it so happens that non-locality has been proved to exist in quantum physics. Two elementary particles can be caused to come into being by producing particle decay. These particles will be “entangled” with each another; thus if A has an upward then B will have a downward spin. If you change the spin of A, the spin of B will necessarily change as well; that’s what entanglement means. And this can happen even when they’re far apart. Experiments have been conducted so that A and B are caused to fly apart at the speed of light. Then the spin of one is forced to change—while the spin of the other is detected. Sure enough, as A changes, so does B. B seems to know that A has changed and thus conforms to be in harmony—but the “signal” between the two, if there is a signal, must have travelled faster than the speed of light. As physicist understand the matter—and they are clearly concerned not to violate Einstein’s iron law on the speed of light—no signal actually passes. Far separated although in space they are, A and B remain linked in a mysterious field relationship.
Now, you might ask, what does any of this have to do the ability of a human consciousness to survive the death of its body? The commonality here is relatively limited. Communications at a distance without a signal are difficult for modern man to grasp. Indeed, Einstein hated the notion of non-locality and tried to defeat it to the best of his ability. Similarly, for the modern mind—but not for those of us who grew up still embedded in hoary old traditions—the notion of human survival of death is a similar scandal. That’s the real linkage. What is interesting here is that appeal to physics, rather than to human reason and intuition, strikes Lommel as appeal to a Higher Authority. Lommel might have used Rupert Sheldrake’s Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home as his proof; Sheldrake’s findings also show “action at a distance” without discernible signaling, especially when the owner is downtown and the dog in the suburbs thirty miles away. Alas the truth is that the highest authority available to us is our own mind.
I was reminded of this forcefully reading a book by Pim Van Lommel on the near-death experience. Lommel is a cardiologist and, these days, a leading figure in NDE studies. The book is Consciousness Beyond Life. It’s a mixed sort of product, stunningly excellent in parts. But it fails as a “work.” It is a kind of together-binding of magazine or journal articles padded out into chapters. The book’s early chapters cover the same ground Raymond Moody did in Life After Life; in many areas Lommel’s book is more complete and thorough, in others interestingly selective. Moody gave very strong emphasis to the spirit’s reception in the beyond by a “being of light.” In Lommel’s presentation the testimonials he chose to illustrate this aspect support a much more pantheistic feeling. But it is Lommel’s main thematic I found interesting as an indicator of our times; but Lommel’s case, I hasten to add, is just one of many. He reaches out to physics for his theme and latches on to the concept of non-locality, a discovery of quantum mechanics.
In the crudest form, locality means that if someone punches me hard on the chin, the lady waiting for the bus a block away won’t fall down. She cannot be affected by what happens to me. In more sophisticated form, this means that for B to be affected by A in some way, communication must be possible between A and B; and this communication cannot take place more rapidly than the speed of light. Non-locality means that in some way, anyway, the pain I feel when punched does affect the lady waiting for the bus; my negative experience is communicated to everyone; others don’t have to feel it consciously, but it is so. It also means that instantaneous communications between A and B are possible, even if these two are moving away from each other at the speed of light.
Now it so happens that non-locality has been proved to exist in quantum physics. Two elementary particles can be caused to come into being by producing particle decay. These particles will be “entangled” with each another; thus if A has an upward then B will have a downward spin. If you change the spin of A, the spin of B will necessarily change as well; that’s what entanglement means. And this can happen even when they’re far apart. Experiments have been conducted so that A and B are caused to fly apart at the speed of light. Then the spin of one is forced to change—while the spin of the other is detected. Sure enough, as A changes, so does B. B seems to know that A has changed and thus conforms to be in harmony—but the “signal” between the two, if there is a signal, must have travelled faster than the speed of light. As physicist understand the matter—and they are clearly concerned not to violate Einstein’s iron law on the speed of light—no signal actually passes. Far separated although in space they are, A and B remain linked in a mysterious field relationship.
Now, you might ask, what does any of this have to do the ability of a human consciousness to survive the death of its body? The commonality here is relatively limited. Communications at a distance without a signal are difficult for modern man to grasp. Indeed, Einstein hated the notion of non-locality and tried to defeat it to the best of his ability. Similarly, for the modern mind—but not for those of us who grew up still embedded in hoary old traditions—the notion of human survival of death is a similar scandal. That’s the real linkage. What is interesting here is that appeal to physics, rather than to human reason and intuition, strikes Lommel as appeal to a Higher Authority. Lommel might have used Rupert Sheldrake’s Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home as his proof; Sheldrake’s findings also show “action at a distance” without discernible signaling, especially when the owner is downtown and the dog in the suburbs thirty miles away. Alas the truth is that the highest authority available to us is our own mind.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
The Contemplative Life: Another Look
As I plow deeper into my seventies, it’s becoming ever more obvious that physical activities and preoccupations are at best utilitarian…that a triumph here and there is also meaningless, thus activities in time seem to be empty too. But here a paradox arises. I feel this viscerally—and that word refers to the physical, doesn’t it?
The shocking thing for me is that I now think of the contemplative life in a physical way, thus as authentic, real, and hard. A few decades back the idea of contemplation always struck me either as airy-fairy, passive, or a kind of pointless hedonism.
We do, don’t we, think of the real as physical, tangible. But let me try to sort that out. Let me use an abstract designator. Whatever appears real to us, we label X. We learn this association in our youth, when the physical is compelling, therefore the physical is X; but in advancing times, another aspect of our experience emerges much more dominantly; and to express its reality, we reach for a familiar label. The real is the real, but at different times, based on different experiences, we associate it with a different aspect of reality.
Now I’m prepared to define the contemplative life as the activity of the spirit when it is unconstrained. It is everything left over after we have set aside the things we do in order to survive. It has a passive as well as an active component, and creativity is its most obvious active element. Let me put things into bins.
Reading or writing books, creating or enjoying art, thinking and conversing, music, community and dialogue, praise and worship, expressing joy and revulsion, science and discovery, poetry and philosophy—and also, curiously, certain forms of exercise and sport, gardening, and free “making” of things for their own sake—we do none of these things “in order to survive.”
To survival belongs showering, putting on socks, eating, and so forth. Also administration, making order, buying and selling, and social acts done to compel or because we are compelled. Here I’d put all forms of pressure and persuasion, all production, and all other common economic activities.
Needless to say, in this realm the material is intrinsically braided into the immaterial so that even the free action of the spirit always has a physical component. Thus I feel inclined to create a third bin yet. There I would put useful work done in full spiritual presence. The greatest periods of joy for me are linked to work—not least money-making work—when I managed to do that work with sufficient concentration so that, paradoxically, I was detached from its survival aspects and doing it purely pro bono.
The shocking thing for me is that I now think of the contemplative life in a physical way, thus as authentic, real, and hard. A few decades back the idea of contemplation always struck me either as airy-fairy, passive, or a kind of pointless hedonism.
We do, don’t we, think of the real as physical, tangible. But let me try to sort that out. Let me use an abstract designator. Whatever appears real to us, we label X. We learn this association in our youth, when the physical is compelling, therefore the physical is X; but in advancing times, another aspect of our experience emerges much more dominantly; and to express its reality, we reach for a familiar label. The real is the real, but at different times, based on different experiences, we associate it with a different aspect of reality.
Now I’m prepared to define the contemplative life as the activity of the spirit when it is unconstrained. It is everything left over after we have set aside the things we do in order to survive. It has a passive as well as an active component, and creativity is its most obvious active element. Let me put things into bins.
Reading or writing books, creating or enjoying art, thinking and conversing, music, community and dialogue, praise and worship, expressing joy and revulsion, science and discovery, poetry and philosophy—and also, curiously, certain forms of exercise and sport, gardening, and free “making” of things for their own sake—we do none of these things “in order to survive.”
To survival belongs showering, putting on socks, eating, and so forth. Also administration, making order, buying and selling, and social acts done to compel or because we are compelled. Here I’d put all forms of pressure and persuasion, all production, and all other common economic activities.
Needless to say, in this realm the material is intrinsically braided into the immaterial so that even the free action of the spirit always has a physical component. Thus I feel inclined to create a third bin yet. There I would put useful work done in full spiritual presence. The greatest periods of joy for me are linked to work—not least money-making work—when I managed to do that work with sufficient concentration so that, paradoxically, I was detached from its survival aspects and doing it purely pro bono.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Isis
* * *
And the shrine of Minerva at Sais (whom they consider the same with Isis) bears this inscription, “I am all that hath been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal has hitherto raised.”
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On this account a desire for religious knowledge is an aiming at Truth, particularly that relating to the gods—a pursuit containing both in the acquisition and in the search a reception, as it were, of things sacred—an occupation more pious than any observation of abstinence, or religious service: but particularly well-pleasing to this goddess who is the special object of thy devotion; for she is both wise, and a lover of wisdom; as her name appears to denote that, more than any other, knowing and knowledge belong to her. For “Isis” is a Greek word, and so is “Typhon,” her enemy, for he is “puffed up” by want of knowledge and falsehood, and tears to pieces, and puts out of sight, the sacred word which the goddess again gathers up and puts together, and gives into the charge of those initiated into the religion; whilst by means of a perpetually sober life, by abstinence from many kinds of food and from venery, she checks intemperance and love of pleasure, accustoming people to endure her service with bowels not enervated by luxury, but hardy and vigorous; the object of all which is the knowledge of the First, the Supreme, and the Intelligible; whom the goddess exhorts you to seek after, for he is both by her side, and united with her. The very name of her Temple clearly promises both the communication and the understanding of That which is—for it is called the “Ision,” [“The entering-place,” as if derived from the Greek.] inasmuch as That which is shall be known if we enter with intelligence and piously into the sacred rites of the goddess.
* * *
The descriptions that follow here are from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, as translated by Robert Graves. In that earliest of known novels the hero of the tale has a vision of the goddess whose cult he later joins. Apuleius died in 180 A.D., suggesting that the cult was still alive in Christian times.
* * *
Not long afterwards I awoke in sudden terror. A dazzling full moon was rising from the sea. It is at this secret hour that the Moon-goddess, sole sovereign of mankind, is possessed of her greatest power and majesty. She is the shining deity by whose divine influence not only all beasts, wild and tame, but all inanimate things as well, are invigorated; whose ebbs and flows control the rhythm of all bodies whatsoever, whether in the air, on earth, or below the sea….
I had scarcely closed my eyes before the apparition of a woman began to rise from the middle of the sea with so lovely a face that the gods themselves would have fallen down in adoration of it. First the head, then the whole shining body gradually emerged and stood before me poised on the surface of the waves…
Her long thick hair fell in tapering ringlets on her lovely neck, and was crowned with an intricate chaplet in which was woven every kind of flower. Just above her brow shone a round disc, like a mirror, or like the bright face of the moon, which told me who she was. Vipers rising from the left-hand and right-hand partings of her hair supported this disk, with ears of corn bristling beside them… But what caught and held my eye more than anything else was the deep black luster of her mantle. She wore it slung across her body from the right hip to the left shoulder, where it was caught in a knot resembling the boss of a shield; but part of it hung in innumerable folds, the tasselled fringe quivering. It was embroidered with glittering stars on the hem and everywhere else, and in the middle beamed a full and fiery moon.
In her right hand she held a bronze rattle, of the sort used to frighten away the God of the Sirocco; its narrow rim was curved like a sword-belt and three little rods, which sang shrilly when she shook the handle, passed horizontally through it. A boat-shaped gold dish hung from her left hand, and along the upper surface of the handle writhed an asp with puffed throat and head raised ready to strike. On her divine feet were slippers of palm leaves, the emblem of victory.
* * *
The image shown is from Wikipedia, here, created by Jeff Dahl; other Egyptian god-images created by Dahl are accessible here.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Re-Reading Life After Life
Reading again Raymond A. Moody’s Life After Life, I was struck, this time, by the quotations from near death experience (NDE) reports concerning the functioning of the spirit or self, particularly its modes of self-perception, communications, and “senses,” thus hearing and seeing. The quotations that deal with time perception or extra-dimensionality also struck me as new—but it has been several years since I’ve last read this book with the requisite concentration it deserves. The book tends to produce a certain amount of trance—the page-turning kind—in part because it was written for the widest possible audience, because the quotations from NDE reports follow each other rapidly, and because the commentary is minimal in order to be maximally accessible.
Moody is generally ignored (so far as I can tell) by the learned—with one notable and, for me, significant exception. Henry Corbin devotes a paragraph to the book in his Prelude to the second edition of Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. Here is part of that paragraph:
Regarding Corbin’s references to imagination, I cannot deal with that in this post beyond saying that he saw the imagination not as an extension of humanity's sensory faculties but as a unique spiritual power, which he, following Paracelsus, called the true imagination rather than the ordinary fancy. Other entries on this blog under Corbin will provide the necessary context.
Reading Moody this time, what Corbin here labels “subtle corporeity” came sharply into focus, namely that selves “see” and “hear” with great acuity but cannot touch or grasp anything material, including living bodies. The hearing does not depend on air vibrations but seems due to thought perception; seeing is odd as well. Perception of the body varies; many perceive themselves as energetic structures, but experience these structures as somewhat extendable and with certain polarities, like up and down; others perceive actual bodies. While focused on this dimension people seem able to extend their attention out great distances and see, at those distances, from up close—while yet retaining a sense of having stayed in place. Reports of what selves see on that side of the Borderzone are complicated by the fact that the experiencers find themselves in an environment with more than three dimensions and a different experience of time. It takes them far less time to experience a great deal, interpreted as a more rapidly flowing time; experiences, like life reviews, while very detailed yet take no time at all. They struggle in expressing the experience in ordinary language the concepts of which are narrowly adapted to a three-dimensional existence and our kind of time.
I got to thinking how unfortunate it is that we are so tribal and clannish in all things, not least in the various arts and sciences. Moody is not viewed as providing extremely valuable data for serious examination for the simple reason that he preferred the more benign and welcoming attention of the general public to the hostile skepticism of those who claim a calling to study how reality works.
Moody is generally ignored (so far as I can tell) by the learned—with one notable and, for me, significant exception. Henry Corbin devotes a paragraph to the book in his Prelude to the second edition of Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. Here is part of that paragraph:
All the more significant then has been the welcome given to a recent study which treats the “life after life” and presents the manifold testimonies of their actual experiences by people who, even though they had not crossed it never to return, had none the less really found themselves on the “threshold,” for their death had already been clinically confirmed. [Here Corbin footnotes Moody’s book.] There is no reason to be surprised that such a book should meet with a moving approval from some, testifying to a nostalgia which nothing has ever succeeded in snuffing out in the human heart. Equally there is no reason for surprise if the same book has been received with scepticism. Certainly, many traditional texts were quoted in connection with the testimonies reported in this book. But how many people knew them? In fact, some of these testimonies cannot be entertained let alone understood except on the condition of having at one’s immediate disposal an ontology of the mundus imaginalis and a metaphysic of the active Imagination as an organ inherent in the soul and regulated in its own right to the world of “subtle corporeity.”Next to this paragraph I wrote in the margin, in amazement, “My God, I can hardly believe it!!” — Yes, but such are the consequences of writing for the general public rather than staying on the reservation.
Regarding Corbin’s references to imagination, I cannot deal with that in this post beyond saying that he saw the imagination not as an extension of humanity's sensory faculties but as a unique spiritual power, which he, following Paracelsus, called the true imagination rather than the ordinary fancy. Other entries on this blog under Corbin will provide the necessary context.
Reading Moody this time, what Corbin here labels “subtle corporeity” came sharply into focus, namely that selves “see” and “hear” with great acuity but cannot touch or grasp anything material, including living bodies. The hearing does not depend on air vibrations but seems due to thought perception; seeing is odd as well. Perception of the body varies; many perceive themselves as energetic structures, but experience these structures as somewhat extendable and with certain polarities, like up and down; others perceive actual bodies. While focused on this dimension people seem able to extend their attention out great distances and see, at those distances, from up close—while yet retaining a sense of having stayed in place. Reports of what selves see on that side of the Borderzone are complicated by the fact that the experiencers find themselves in an environment with more than three dimensions and a different experience of time. It takes them far less time to experience a great deal, interpreted as a more rapidly flowing time; experiences, like life reviews, while very detailed yet take no time at all. They struggle in expressing the experience in ordinary language the concepts of which are narrowly adapted to a three-dimensional existence and our kind of time.
I got to thinking how unfortunate it is that we are so tribal and clannish in all things, not least in the various arts and sciences. Moody is not viewed as providing extremely valuable data for serious examination for the simple reason that he preferred the more benign and welcoming attention of the general public to the hostile skepticism of those who claim a calling to study how reality works.
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