I read words like “ineffable” and “incommunicable” used to characterize mystical experiences. Are those words accurate? Should they be used? If mystical experience cannot be put into conceptual language, no other experiences can be communicated either. Really. That’s an obvious fact. Let’s try to unpack this conundrum.
I think that we describe “inexplicable” experiences all the time. If they are inexplicable, then those who hear the description just haven’t had the experience. For the right people, the mystical is just as accessible as is, say, the experience of tennis. Let me give a conceptual description of a tennis maneuver.
Let’s take serving the ball in a tennis match. We begin by assuming a nicely balanced position but inclining forward slightly, our body oriented toward the target across the net, one foot forward, the foot opposed to the hand that holds the racket. The ball is in our other hand. We toss it high from a position about a foot ahead of our face—and toss it somewhat higher than the point we’re able to reach with our racket arm and the racket, both at maximum extension. Even as we make and complete the toss, we reach back with our racket arm and, in one smooth motion execute the following movements: we cock the arm, we stretch our bodies to our maximum height, we bring the racket forward again as we raise it to maximum height and, on its forward sweep, we cause it to impact the ball, which is now falling downward, so that the racket hits the ball with the center of its netted surface. We use the greatest possible force consistent with accuracy to deliver this blow. The ball will then surge forward but on a slight downward vector, travelling in a pleasing ark so that it barely crosses over the net and descends to the targeted area below. As the racket hits the ball, we register a pleasing tactile feedback even as our eyes follow the ball’s trajectory. At our own choice—some pro players excel at this—we can also make a loud exhaling grunt to tell the audience just how hard we tried.
Now the truth of the matter is that this maneuver, as experienced, feels much more mysterious. Someone raised in some inaccessible, hidden mountain valley in Tibet who’s never seen tennis played, has never seen a racket, has no idea of the ball’s size or the court’s layout, unaware of the game’s rules, unfamiliar with words like vector, feedback, and trajectory, will have difficulty understanding what is being said.
Experience itself is necessary to understand its description. Those born blind cannot appreciate the colors of a fresco, those born deaf cannot appreciate the sound of a symphony. We can try to communicate such things by analogy—to something they have experienced—using a richly patterned textile surface for the blind, a video of moving, mixing colors for the deaf.
Mystical experiences can be communicated—and in perfectly ordinary conceptual language—but only those who’ve had them will genuinely understand what’s being described. Those who have higher perception are rare. Those among them skilled at conceptualization even rarer. The great majority of us have these experiences in such muted form, we stand there with mouth open and listen to the babble certain in our mind that those people are just nuts.
What about the thrill of the Dow suddenly surging to 15,000 in a day or the disaster of the S&P 500 plunging 900 points—for a backward Chinese rice farmer? Let's picture him as ignornant of what we call a portfolio and who spent this splendid or disastrous day knee-deep in water wearing a circular but pointed straw hat. For this ordinary and competent farmer, these words might describe the mystical babblings of a western nut. The words don't signal anything.
What is true is that those who have mystical experience do have trouble, at least early on, in formulating their experiences in language. But some can and do do so. And there are those among them who, even having found fitting descriptions, will keep these to themselves—knowing full well that those who haven’t shared the experience will be unable to understand the language no matter how eloquent. The Buddha here comes to mind. The poets are the best at this sort of thing. They are gifted both in tennis and in talk.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Supersubstantial?
What follows here is something very arcane, sorry, but it happens to be meaningful to me. First the context. In the last post I suggested that life itself is a transcendent energy, different from chemical energy. We need both. This morning I literally chanced across variant translations, in Latin, of the phrase “Give us this day our daily bread,” Matthew 6:11 and “Give us day by day our daily bred,” Luke 11:3. St. Jerome, who did the translation from Greek into Latin, rendered the first as Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie (“Give us this day our daily bread”) and the second as Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie (“Give us this day our supersubstantial bread”). In both cases the variant word in Greek is epiousion, derived from epiousios. Epi stands for on, over, above. Ousios means substance, being, essence, nature.
Now the plot thickens. The Greek word is of extreme rarity, what is known as a hapax, thus a word or phrase that occurs only once or a few times in a work, an author, or a language. Evidently epiousios appears only twice in the Greek version of the Bible and nowhere else. All this I gathered from several sites. The subject is generously discussed by Wikipedia in an article on the very subject here. The presumption is that Jesus used an unusual word in Aramaic or Hebrew (see this article by Fr. Benjamin Reese) which the Greek translator strained, as it were, to render into Greek—and which Jerome then rendered as “daily” in Luke and as “supersubstantial” in Matthew.
I think this is quite interesting. I know no Greek, am not a scholar, have not engaged in textual hermeneutics, and, until this morning, knew absolutely nothing about this somewhat controversial issue of translation. I came across this matter quite by chance—as if there is such a thing in such matters. I was checking out the Maverick Philosopher’s blog. His post for February 17, the topmost this morning (here), was titled “Why Run?” and dealt with daily hiking, running, and cycling—the daily bread of legs and lungs. He ends the post with the Latin quote Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie. It was in running down this phrase, which vaguely echoed in my head from my Catholic childhood, that led to the discovery of that strange epiousios and its possible relevance to my post on February 16 suggesting that some kind of “transcendent” energy keeps us “alive”—while food nourishes our bodies.
Now the plot thickens. The Greek word is of extreme rarity, what is known as a hapax, thus a word or phrase that occurs only once or a few times in a work, an author, or a language. Evidently epiousios appears only twice in the Greek version of the Bible and nowhere else. All this I gathered from several sites. The subject is generously discussed by Wikipedia in an article on the very subject here. The presumption is that Jesus used an unusual word in Aramaic or Hebrew (see this article by Fr. Benjamin Reese) which the Greek translator strained, as it were, to render into Greek—and which Jerome then rendered as “daily” in Luke and as “supersubstantial” in Matthew.
I think this is quite interesting. I know no Greek, am not a scholar, have not engaged in textual hermeneutics, and, until this morning, knew absolutely nothing about this somewhat controversial issue of translation. I came across this matter quite by chance—as if there is such a thing in such matters. I was checking out the Maverick Philosopher’s blog. His post for February 17, the topmost this morning (here), was titled “Why Run?” and dealt with daily hiking, running, and cycling—the daily bread of legs and lungs. He ends the post with the Latin quote Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie. It was in running down this phrase, which vaguely echoed in my head from my Catholic childhood, that led to the discovery of that strange epiousios and its possible relevance to my post on February 16 suggesting that some kind of “transcendent” energy keeps us “alive”—while food nourishes our bodies.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
A Closer Look at Ecstasy
I’ve touched on this subject in the last post and in an earlier one, under the heading of Mystical Experiences, here. My view of the so-called unitive experience is unorthodox, hence additional development of my take on ecstasy may be justified.
The term arises because in the Christian tradition it is usually described as union with God, hence ecstasies experienced on earth are seen as a preview of the ultimate experience after we depart. In the eastern traditions—and in the west also in pre-Christian Neoplatoism (i.e., in Plotinus)—the term does not carry the connotation of union with a person. In all other respects, however, the experience is described in the same way. The names—Satori, Samadhi, Enlightenment, Nirvana, Cosmic Consciousness—all clearly describe the identical experience. The reason why the feeling is associated with God is because the experience produces exaltation, a sense of total understanding of everything, a feeling of cosmic expansion, indeed of infinite power. But those returning from such experiences cannot describe what it is that they understand; they don’t gain specific knowledge. True, after such experiences some among them manifest psychic gifts in one or several categories.
As reported by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor in her book My Stroke of Insight (on which I expect to comment more in the future), this unitive state may manifest in some survivors of strokes—as it did in hers. This suggests that abrupt physical changes can bring it about; but, however caused, the effect on the individual of such an event is the same and leads to a much more intense spiritual life whether or not the experiencer is a deist.
A very complete modern account of this experience is recorded by Franklin Merrell-Wolff, a mathematician. The account dates to the 1930s and is told in Pathways Through to Space. Merrell-Wolff’s story is of great value because we learn in an unambiguous way that an energetic flow is involved—a spiritual sort of energy, not anything measurable like electromagnetism. Merrell-Wolff describes it as a current. This same energy may also be the agency that produces miraculous cures. I’ve had a mild experience of this sort myself, described in the post already quoted above. It took place in my late teens, before I’d ever heard of Merrell-Wolff’s book, yet I also experienced and clearly remember the energetic, vibratory aspects of it. And, yes! It was exalting, all-powerful, but carried no content beyond the ecstatic feeling. I’d never had any experience so powerful before—and haven’t had one since.
I am personally fairly sure that the belief in an ultimate union with God in heaven developed from such experiences by saints and seers of the Christian era. They reported their experience and made them credible because some of them gained miraculous powers in the wake of these internal events. But the experience may be interpreted in another way as well, and for several reasons, I think that the alternative interpretation is more plausible; hence my unorthodox stance.
I think that the ecstatic or unitive experience is an intense exposure to the life energy, the very flow that keeps us alive, day in, day out. Under normal circumstances we perceive it mildly, thus simply as life; but it is obviously possible to experience this flow at its strongest, thus before it is diffused by the body or veiled and muted by the brain; and the brain may be designed to do just that. An interesting observation Merrell-Wolff made was that at the time this flow was most intense, his bodily functions visibly weakened.
Now I believe in God and hence believe that all of reality ultimately comes from the Ultimate—the life force no less than anything else. But I think that the unitive state is caused by a powerful primitive form of the spiritual energy—whereas in the mystical traditions, the experience is viewed as the very peak of being. The very fact that damages to the brain—or willfully produced practices of fasting, intense meditation combined with fierce concentration, and other similar unusual methods—can bring about such states suggests to me that we are either passively subject to this experience or can sometimes willfully bring it about. But neither of these possibilities appears to me to be part of a grand design.
That this experience should powerfully stimulate our spiritual life does not surprise me. The life force itself, it seems to me, is a transcendental phenomenon, above the inorganic energetics. Modern thought assigns life to chemical energy, but one can legitimately wonder about that. I have another, broader reason for maintaining my alternative view of this experience. I don’t think that we are here on earth, undergoing all manner of experiences that increase our understanding and hone our will merely to experience, at life’s conclusion, a kind of spiritual electrocution which leaves us blissful but without any choice or knowledge of anything beyond a sense of vastness, an illusion of omniscience, and a sense of infinite power. No. Life, I think, is preparing us for an order of much greater complexity.
The term arises because in the Christian tradition it is usually described as union with God, hence ecstasies experienced on earth are seen as a preview of the ultimate experience after we depart. In the eastern traditions—and in the west also in pre-Christian Neoplatoism (i.e., in Plotinus)—the term does not carry the connotation of union with a person. In all other respects, however, the experience is described in the same way. The names—Satori, Samadhi, Enlightenment, Nirvana, Cosmic Consciousness—all clearly describe the identical experience. The reason why the feeling is associated with God is because the experience produces exaltation, a sense of total understanding of everything, a feeling of cosmic expansion, indeed of infinite power. But those returning from such experiences cannot describe what it is that they understand; they don’t gain specific knowledge. True, after such experiences some among them manifest psychic gifts in one or several categories.
As reported by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor in her book My Stroke of Insight (on which I expect to comment more in the future), this unitive state may manifest in some survivors of strokes—as it did in hers. This suggests that abrupt physical changes can bring it about; but, however caused, the effect on the individual of such an event is the same and leads to a much more intense spiritual life whether or not the experiencer is a deist.
A very complete modern account of this experience is recorded by Franklin Merrell-Wolff, a mathematician. The account dates to the 1930s and is told in Pathways Through to Space. Merrell-Wolff’s story is of great value because we learn in an unambiguous way that an energetic flow is involved—a spiritual sort of energy, not anything measurable like electromagnetism. Merrell-Wolff describes it as a current. This same energy may also be the agency that produces miraculous cures. I’ve had a mild experience of this sort myself, described in the post already quoted above. It took place in my late teens, before I’d ever heard of Merrell-Wolff’s book, yet I also experienced and clearly remember the energetic, vibratory aspects of it. And, yes! It was exalting, all-powerful, but carried no content beyond the ecstatic feeling. I’d never had any experience so powerful before—and haven’t had one since.
I am personally fairly sure that the belief in an ultimate union with God in heaven developed from such experiences by saints and seers of the Christian era. They reported their experience and made them credible because some of them gained miraculous powers in the wake of these internal events. But the experience may be interpreted in another way as well, and for several reasons, I think that the alternative interpretation is more plausible; hence my unorthodox stance.
I think that the ecstatic or unitive experience is an intense exposure to the life energy, the very flow that keeps us alive, day in, day out. Under normal circumstances we perceive it mildly, thus simply as life; but it is obviously possible to experience this flow at its strongest, thus before it is diffused by the body or veiled and muted by the brain; and the brain may be designed to do just that. An interesting observation Merrell-Wolff made was that at the time this flow was most intense, his bodily functions visibly weakened.
Now I believe in God and hence believe that all of reality ultimately comes from the Ultimate—the life force no less than anything else. But I think that the unitive state is caused by a powerful primitive form of the spiritual energy—whereas in the mystical traditions, the experience is viewed as the very peak of being. The very fact that damages to the brain—or willfully produced practices of fasting, intense meditation combined with fierce concentration, and other similar unusual methods—can bring about such states suggests to me that we are either passively subject to this experience or can sometimes willfully bring it about. But neither of these possibilities appears to me to be part of a grand design.
That this experience should powerfully stimulate our spiritual life does not surprise me. The life force itself, it seems to me, is a transcendental phenomenon, above the inorganic energetics. Modern thought assigns life to chemical energy, but one can legitimately wonder about that. I have another, broader reason for maintaining my alternative view of this experience. I don’t think that we are here on earth, undergoing all manner of experiences that increase our understanding and hone our will merely to experience, at life’s conclusion, a kind of spiritual electrocution which leaves us blissful but without any choice or knowledge of anything beyond a sense of vastness, an illusion of omniscience, and a sense of infinite power. No. Life, I think, is preparing us for an order of much greater complexity.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Eternity May Come in Chunks
And they lived happily every after…All good stories are a segment of reality. There is what in movie land they call the “backstory,” thus events that happened before the action starts, but you won’t see them on the screen. This same material is what the playwright calls “exposition.” Next comes the tale itself. And then the story ends with a happy wave of the hand. And they lived happily ever after.
Cosmologies mirror this state of affairs precisely. There is the backstory of Adam and Eve, the fall, the expulsion from Paradise, the Redemption. Then there comes the story—our life, the search for salvation. It is terminated at its conclusion with the promise of eternal bliss or eternal suffering in hell. Reincarnation models are a variant; their hell (chuckle) is return to this world; but their positive outcome, nirvana, is still a happy but entirely undefined ever after.
I have a trait that must genuinely irritate the cosmic story teller. Endings of this type (magical hand wave, etc.) bother me. I go on walks and speculate. I think about the meaning of “eternal bliss”; indeed I often wonder if it has any conceivable meaning at all. The cosmic whole, what little of it I can perceive, strikes me as a vast and extremely complicated, call it expensive, undertaking—just so that, at the conclusion of a life (or thousands of lives for that matter) the winners, as it were, can sink into a kind of dreamy baby bliss forever and forever more?
The sophisticated response to this is to use the word mystery. Well, that’s a mystery. The phrase tells the irritating nerd to get with the program and simply accept our human limitations, stop rattling the bars of the cage, and wait to discover the bliss. The bliss will answer all your questions. Here the interesting thing is that, some individuals actually do have exalted experiences like nirvana or union with God. The experience is overwhelming, and none of these individuals ever suggests that anything at all was lacking. Why then do I keep on scratching at my itch? Because these individuals return among us, do not embrace nirvana and simply swoon away. They keep on living and, to some extent certainly, suffering. That feeling—and it is never more than that; those who have it never offer any expressible content—may not be the same thing that occurs after we’ve shuffled off the mortal coil.
My working hypothesis is that in the grand design eternity may well be diced apart into livable chunks—or to give it a more sophisticated framing, that it occurs in quanta, like energy, distinguishable in actuality. That as one life ends—and the intermediate transition may indeed be a kind of baby bliss, even if the next life is not in the flesh—another begins. The creative work of the cosmos may never end, true. And we may be participants in it. But we’re blessed by participating in it, well, one job at a time.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
About Incomplete Models
The models of the world we carry about in our heads may blinker our view of reality, deny us ways to explain certain experiences, and may also encourage inappropriate behavior. An example. Once at a seminar that Brigitte and I attended, the presenter said something like this: “Before people concluded that the earth was spherical, nobody ever thought of sailing around the earth.” The mathematician Charles Howard Hinton (1853-1907) wrote a fiction called An Episode on Flatland: Or How a Plain Folk Discovered the Third Dimension. Hinton’s Flatland has served numerous writers on the fourth dimension to illustrate by analogy how two dimensional people would interpret a three-dimensional intrusion into their world. Imagine a sheet of paper held rigidly enough so that we could cause a sharpened pencil to pierce it and then to slide through it in a vertical direction. To the people on Flatland, the pencil would be the magical appearance of a tiny round creature out of nowhere. It would then grow in size by magic into a large hexagonal creature. That creature would then—again quite magically—transform itself into a large round creature as the eraser finally reached the surface. The creature would finally vanish into nothing. They’d report this event as a miracle. For us, living in three dimension, the pencil doesn’t disappear and has no magical or miraculous aspects. What’s wrong with those people? Their model of reality is incomplete.
I offer this as food for thought when we encounter phenomena that don’t fit our model of reality. A mild case of that is telepathy—mild because we can assume that some kind of super-subtle energy may be the carrier of thoughts and feelings. We have discovered other such energetic fields, i.e., electromagnetism. But what about premonitions that come true? Or people who don’t merely dream but dream the future and see it materialize days, weeks, or months later. (I have a case like that on this blog here.) Such experiences are common enough. Quite a literature of premonitions has been assembled on people who foresaw the 911 disaster. A sampling of these is presented here courtesy of the Boundary Institute. Now I’m encountering reports of premonitions of the Haiti earthquake too. Unlike telepathy, seeing the future in the present is not a mild but rather an incomprehensible violation of our current understanding of reality.
The usual coping mechanisms are three. We can assume that those reporting such things are mentally deranged (not much of an option if we’ve experienced them ourselves). We can deny the experience, even in ourselves. We are incredibly good at that sort of thing if our will is genuinely behind it. Or we can assign the event to sheer coincidence. Close study of the basis for many theories, not least of how life arose, show that chance is an all-purpose explanatory tool. In some cases we must indulge in a tiny bit of intellectual dishonesty to give chance a chance, but a good cause deserves a small assist, and to make omelets, you have to break eggs. The tougher stance is to confess that our model may be defective. To maintain that stance, we have to have a strong mind. We may be thought kooky or labeled a primitive—not by ordinary people; they have an innate intuition that things are not quite what they seem. I’m speaking of ruling elites.
I offer this as food for thought when we encounter phenomena that don’t fit our model of reality. A mild case of that is telepathy—mild because we can assume that some kind of super-subtle energy may be the carrier of thoughts and feelings. We have discovered other such energetic fields, i.e., electromagnetism. But what about premonitions that come true? Or people who don’t merely dream but dream the future and see it materialize days, weeks, or months later. (I have a case like that on this blog here.) Such experiences are common enough. Quite a literature of premonitions has been assembled on people who foresaw the 911 disaster. A sampling of these is presented here courtesy of the Boundary Institute. Now I’m encountering reports of premonitions of the Haiti earthquake too. Unlike telepathy, seeing the future in the present is not a mild but rather an incomprehensible violation of our current understanding of reality.
The usual coping mechanisms are three. We can assume that those reporting such things are mentally deranged (not much of an option if we’ve experienced them ourselves). We can deny the experience, even in ourselves. We are incredibly good at that sort of thing if our will is genuinely behind it. Or we can assign the event to sheer coincidence. Close study of the basis for many theories, not least of how life arose, show that chance is an all-purpose explanatory tool. In some cases we must indulge in a tiny bit of intellectual dishonesty to give chance a chance, but a good cause deserves a small assist, and to make omelets, you have to break eggs. The tougher stance is to confess that our model may be defective. To maintain that stance, we have to have a strong mind. We may be thought kooky or labeled a primitive—not by ordinary people; they have an innate intuition that things are not quite what they seem. I’m speaking of ruling elites.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Myth: Linear Thought is Inferior
I keep hearing people praise non-linear thought. And in seemingly learned context, they even have an abbreviation for it: NLT. But what’s this all about? The authors of this phrase must have been psychologists with excess leisure time—but youth and new age cultures have certainly picked up on it. People almost proudly say that they’re not into the linear kind. They suggest that linear thought misses the mysteries of existence and cages you in. They dismiss the total written heritage of humanity. Okay. They’d acknowledge some so-called modern poetry and, reluctantly perhaps, James Joyce. He is a little too NLT for most.
My problem is that I can’t produce a decent definition of non-linear thought except, perhaps, by indulging it. Idle associating, hustling after hunches, splashing in tepid pools of spontaneity, zigging after zags, high-fiving with Heys, pissing a pattern on a pavement?
As being a competent householder is the minimum perquisite for any kind of higher learning, so it seems to me that command of linear thought—and capacity to express it in clear writing—is the minimum requirement for producing anything at all, be it products, writings, art, or music. Let me, by way of illustration, translate a poem by Robert Frost into non-linear text for you. See if you can make it out.
My problem is that I can’t produce a decent definition of non-linear thought except, perhaps, by indulging it. Idle associating, hustling after hunches, splashing in tepid pools of spontaneity, zigging after zags, high-fiving with Heys, pissing a pattern on a pavement?
As being a competent householder is the minimum perquisite for any kind of higher learning, so it seems to me that command of linear thought—and capacity to express it in clear writing—is the minimum requirement for producing anything at all, be it products, writings, art, or music. Let me, by way of illustration, translate a poem by Robert Frost into non-linear text for you. See if you can make it out.
Bunch of trees. Some guy. Got to be, yeah. [Image of village] Probably eating. And even if he looked out the window. Hey snowing. Horse blowing. Can’t think, can he. Got to go on. Can’t stop forever. Dark. What they say? Longest night? Stop shaking, buddy. Damned little bells. Impatient s.o.b. Sound odd, those bells. Big flakes. Kind of pretty. Dark in there, kind of like a closet. Got to go. Said I would. Wonder how far. Miles I guess. Then some shut-eye.Got it? Good. If not, check here for the LT original.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Experienced Continuities Between Dimensions
I have now been almost three years, or thirty-three months, in that state in which—my mind being withdrawn from corporeal things—I could be in the societies of the spiritual and the celestial and yet be like another man in the society of men without any difference; at which spirits also wondered;—when, however, I intensely adhered to worldly things in thought; as when I had care concerning necessary expenses, about which I this day wrote a letter so that my mind was for some time detained therewith , I fell, as it were, into a corporeal state, so that the spirits could not converse with me, as they also said, because they were as though absent from me. A case rather similar occurred before; whence I am enabled to know, that spirits cannot speak with a man who is much devoted to worldly and corporeal cares;— for bodily concerns, as it were, draw down the ideas of the mind and immerse them in corporeal things. [Emanuel Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, March 4, 1748]This quote, taken from the second volume of Swedenborg’s Spiritual Diary, suggest that under certain conditions—not understood as to causation—some people are able to perceive another reality which appears to be continuous with ours. Information about such experience is rarely recorded and, when it is, is brushed aside. So also are Swedenborg’s own experiences. The fact that he was a notable scientist, writer, and a high-ranking civil servant before his experiences began (at around age 57), and that he continued to maintain his high social standing until his death at age 84—traveling the world and in social contact with Swedish society, not least the royal family at its peak—is brushed aside by those who, for dogmatic reasons, simply cannot accept Swedenborg's testimony. But the experience, while rare, is not isolated. Quite ordinary people have such experiences too. Not surprisingly, they do not make a great fuss over them. And sensibly so. Society must have a certain adequacy even to consider such possibilities. And (as I keep pointing out) in periods when organized religion has the hammer hand, people who have such experiences are frequently treated with much greater severity than in our own. In our own they may be marginalized, ignored, and prevented from publishing. In others they are sometimes executed. One such case is that of the Persian mystic and writer Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi (1155-1191). Another mystic I recently mentioned, Mohiuddin ibn el-Arabi, escaped that fate because he had better high-level connections.
I’ve had occasion to look at this subject before in an earlier post, where I first introduced the writings of Henry Corbin—himself a writer who examined the lives of all three of the mystics I mention above. He originated the phrase mundus imaginalis in an attempt to give a name to the dimension to which these individuals all had access. I’ll say more as occasions present themselves.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
The Turbidity of the Pools
In the last post I quote a verse by ibn el-Arabi (1165-1240), the Arab but Spanish-born mystic. Ibn Arabi is one of the greatest Sufi masters, one of the outstanding poets in the Arabic language, and a prolific writer. For that reason, I will borrow his own commentary on the verse I quoted, taken from Chapter 276 of one of his monumental works, The Meccan Illuminations (Al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya). I have this quote from William C. Chittick’s work, The Self-Disclosure of God, State University of New York Press, 1998, p. 347.
The verse itself speaks to something in us that we grasp at some level. The explanation suggests an entire cosmology, hierarchically arranged. Above is clarity, light, and perfection. At the bottom is the turbidity of nature, which Ibn Arabi renders as a pool. He pictures it as water, clear and translucent at its highest levels but made murky by the settling of material at its bottom—where any action can cause the turbidity of matter to hide the light.
The explanation also produces different aspects of the higher: higher knowledge, action, spirit, angel, and then God at the peak. All of these, in poetic compression, are the she of the poem. The force of attention directed upward—love for the higher—is shown as lifting us up, out of the turbidity of the pool. Thus our attention turned to the heights is answered by an action that lifts us into clarity—provided that we are sincere. We don’t do it. She does it. If our motives are low, we pull the high down into the confusions of materiality, stain and obscure it, and lose whatever grace it can bestow. Part of Ibn Arabi’s purpose in this chapter is to show that rational reflection cannot and does not reach the heights. Its own activity merely increases the turbidity in the pools. That is, come to think of it, the unambiguous message of all mystics. You don’t think your way to the heights. It is a response to the vision of beauty. But that vision itself, arguably, cannot arrive if the murk is too dark.
What I mean by these lines is that when the lover who has this attribute [turbidity] falls in love, the beloved exercises a ruling property over him and transfers him to the beloved’s self. The beloved drapes him in its own clothing and brings him out of the turbidities of the obfuscation required by the world of nature—this is when the beloved is knowledge. If the beloved is deeds, turbidity derives from doubts and the unlawful; if the beloved is a spirit disengaged from matter, it derives from natural appetites; if the beloved is an angel, it derives from mortal humanity; and if the beloved is God, it derives from everything other than God. Thus the truthful lover is he who is transferred to the attribute of the beloved, not he who brings the beloved down to his own attribute.Now despite what I assume to be Chittick’s excellent translation from the Arabic, this sampling will make clear to any reader the problems of understanding a twelfth, thirteenth century mystic writing in another language.
The verse itself speaks to something in us that we grasp at some level. The explanation suggests an entire cosmology, hierarchically arranged. Above is clarity, light, and perfection. At the bottom is the turbidity of nature, which Ibn Arabi renders as a pool. He pictures it as water, clear and translucent at its highest levels but made murky by the settling of material at its bottom—where any action can cause the turbidity of matter to hide the light.
The explanation also produces different aspects of the higher: higher knowledge, action, spirit, angel, and then God at the peak. All of these, in poetic compression, are the she of the poem. The force of attention directed upward—love for the higher—is shown as lifting us up, out of the turbidity of the pool. Thus our attention turned to the heights is answered by an action that lifts us into clarity—provided that we are sincere. We don’t do it. She does it. If our motives are low, we pull the high down into the confusions of materiality, stain and obscure it, and lose whatever grace it can bestow. Part of Ibn Arabi’s purpose in this chapter is to show that rational reflection cannot and does not reach the heights. Its own activity merely increases the turbidity in the pools. That is, come to think of it, the unambiguous message of all mystics. You don’t think your way to the heights. It is a response to the vision of beauty. But that vision itself, arguably, cannot arrive if the murk is too dark.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
More Magical Verse
She is the ease of whoever
burns for her,
transferring him from the levels
of mortal man
out of jealousy, lest her sparkle
be stained
by the turbidity
in the pools.
[Ibn el-Arabi, The Interpreter of Desires, 38-39]
A woman slender, lissome, of fresh beauty,Translations from by Arabic by William C. Chittick. I’ll say more in another post.
for whom the heart of the sad lover is longing.
The assembly is filled with fragrance at the mention of her,
and every tongue utters her name.
[Ibid, 117]
Monday, February 1, 2010
The Puzzle of Attention
Why do people seek attention? It is one thing to recognize the attention needs of people, another to locate its roots.
The easy explanation is that we need others’ attention before we can get something from them or induce them to do something for us. We avoid some people’s attention because we don’t want to have “anything to do” with them. But while all this is undoubtedly true, the explanation is insufficient. In many of our interactions, not least the most intimate, attention, as such, is a value we seek in and of itself. To illustrate:
Suppose I am invited to a party by a pleasant couple I have met. I show up and find a lot of people already present. A stranger receives me at the door, asks my name, leads me into the room full of people, and introduces me to the nearest group. The group opens and includes me. Drinks, snacks are served. I lack nothing, not even pleasant conversation. But I notice that my host and hostess actually receive guests who arrive after I do; they also spend some time fussing over them. But they never even approach me. And at the end, as the party is breaking up, and the hosts are saying their good-byes to everyone, they manage to be diverted just as I approach. I wait for a bit at the door—but they don’t return. Finally, a bit embarrassed, I just leave.
That party will stick in memory as a failure despite the excellent champagne, tasty food, and a dozen people with whom I held interesting conversations. But why am I distraught? Because I failed to get the minimum attention I thought that I’d deserved. The couple had invited me—paid me some attention—then treated me as if I did not exist. The party would have been quite satisfactory had I had, say, forty seconds of actual one-on-one with even one member of that couple.
Odd, isn’t it? The attention I did receive from other guests was not a substitute. The pleasant couple, in retrospect, therefore comes to be negatively tinged in my memories.
Now let’s sharpen this example and suppose that I can always get adequate attention from people with whom I’m only casually linked—store clerks, people in parks, at concerts, in libraries—but never from people I value. Let us say that people I value will interact with me, but only very casually and only ever at my instigation. They’re pleasant, but it’s a formal sort of pleasantry, nothing even approaching intimacy. They might wave casually but never rush up to me, never inquire with any feeling how I am, what I have been doing.
It would be the strangest sort of thing. To write a story about such a person would rapidly build suspense. The reader would want to know the reason why. It would be a kind of shunning. But why is shunning painful if—as in this case—the person would get all that he or she needs to have the usual things that civilization provides—nice car, apartment, ample funds, good health, etc.
Is there some kind of hidden energy inside genuine attention. Is genuine attention something we need in order genuinely to be. Or to be well? Is love, which makes the world go round, the secret ingredient in attention—that which makes us really value it? Is that the case? And could we really continue to live without it—or with the thinned out form of it which casual relations give us?
That something of genuine value is present in attention is embedded in language. We say “pay attention.” A payment is something of value bestowed on someone else. In German the directly translation of that phrase is to “gift attention,” Aufmerksamkeit schenken. In that formulation too, a gift is something of value. To pay attention to something or to someone, therefore, implies giving something of value, something that we possess, to someone or something outside of us. The very fact that we need attention as such—not merely in order to get some external service or material object—testifies to the mysterious quality of attention, to an energy within it, which may be the energy of love. Scattering this energy on all sorts of unworthy objects and distractions would therefore seem to be a negligent sort of expenditure of a hidden treasure.
The easy explanation is that we need others’ attention before we can get something from them or induce them to do something for us. We avoid some people’s attention because we don’t want to have “anything to do” with them. But while all this is undoubtedly true, the explanation is insufficient. In many of our interactions, not least the most intimate, attention, as such, is a value we seek in and of itself. To illustrate:
Suppose I am invited to a party by a pleasant couple I have met. I show up and find a lot of people already present. A stranger receives me at the door, asks my name, leads me into the room full of people, and introduces me to the nearest group. The group opens and includes me. Drinks, snacks are served. I lack nothing, not even pleasant conversation. But I notice that my host and hostess actually receive guests who arrive after I do; they also spend some time fussing over them. But they never even approach me. And at the end, as the party is breaking up, and the hosts are saying their good-byes to everyone, they manage to be diverted just as I approach. I wait for a bit at the door—but they don’t return. Finally, a bit embarrassed, I just leave.
That party will stick in memory as a failure despite the excellent champagne, tasty food, and a dozen people with whom I held interesting conversations. But why am I distraught? Because I failed to get the minimum attention I thought that I’d deserved. The couple had invited me—paid me some attention—then treated me as if I did not exist. The party would have been quite satisfactory had I had, say, forty seconds of actual one-on-one with even one member of that couple.
Odd, isn’t it? The attention I did receive from other guests was not a substitute. The pleasant couple, in retrospect, therefore comes to be negatively tinged in my memories.
Now let’s sharpen this example and suppose that I can always get adequate attention from people with whom I’m only casually linked—store clerks, people in parks, at concerts, in libraries—but never from people I value. Let us say that people I value will interact with me, but only very casually and only ever at my instigation. They’re pleasant, but it’s a formal sort of pleasantry, nothing even approaching intimacy. They might wave casually but never rush up to me, never inquire with any feeling how I am, what I have been doing.
It would be the strangest sort of thing. To write a story about such a person would rapidly build suspense. The reader would want to know the reason why. It would be a kind of shunning. But why is shunning painful if—as in this case—the person would get all that he or she needs to have the usual things that civilization provides—nice car, apartment, ample funds, good health, etc.
Is there some kind of hidden energy inside genuine attention. Is genuine attention something we need in order genuinely to be. Or to be well? Is love, which makes the world go round, the secret ingredient in attention—that which makes us really value it? Is that the case? And could we really continue to live without it—or with the thinned out form of it which casual relations give us?
That something of genuine value is present in attention is embedded in language. We say “pay attention.” A payment is something of value bestowed on someone else. In German the directly translation of that phrase is to “gift attention,” Aufmerksamkeit schenken. In that formulation too, a gift is something of value. To pay attention to something or to someone, therefore, implies giving something of value, something that we possess, to someone or something outside of us. The very fact that we need attention as such—not merely in order to get some external service or material object—testifies to the mysterious quality of attention, to an energy within it, which may be the energy of love. Scattering this energy on all sorts of unworthy objects and distractions would therefore seem to be a negligent sort of expenditure of a hidden treasure.
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