Fascinating Parallels

Those who read very obscure books and have the stomach for extraordinarily outlandish ideas—such people sometimes stumble across fascinating parallels.

To maintain, for instance, that there are choirs of angels that concern themselves exclusively with kidney functions most people would dismiss as beyond—and I mean way beyond—the pale. Yet Emanuel Swedenborg offers this idea in all seriousness not only in his Heaven and Hell, which he intended for the general public, but also in his Arcana coelestia (Heavenly Secrets) intended for the learned. Swedenborg arrives at this idea because he learned, in his contacts with the heavenly realm that—

It is an arcanum still unknown in the world that heaven reflects a single person if it is fully grasped, but in the heavens this is most common knowledge. Knowing this even in specifics and details is a specialty of the understanding of angels there. Many things follow from it, things which cannot be crisply and clearly conceptualized without this as their pervasive first principle. Since angles know that all of the heavens—even all of their communities—reflect a single person, they actually call heaven “the Greatest and Divine Man.” The term “Divine” is used because the Lord’s Divine makes heaven. [Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, VIII, §59]

Such ideas are jarring unless you get used to them—gradually. John von Neumann once said, and his quip applies elsewhere too, “In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.” So let’s get used to the idea, for the moment, anyway. You can discard this, if you like, after you’ve absorbed the message here, namely that the heavens are organized “organically” into communities of angels that relate to Swedenborg’s “Grand Man,” the higher reality—and that what is in heaven has direct correspondences down here on earth. As above, so below, we might say, echoing Hermes.

With that, let me go on to the archangels of Mazdaism. In the theology of that religion we encounter, first of all, heavenly counterparts to every living individual here on earth; they are the fravartis—and if you’re reading this, Zoroastrians would say that you have a fravarti too. We also have, above them, holy beings, spentas, archangels, who have charge over—and importantly also act as guides for—humanity, animals, plants, fire and light (we might say energy), minerals, earth, and water. I learned of these matters in Henry Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. That book contains a summary of the cosmology of Mazdaism. The formulation is much more ancient than Swedenborg’s, to be sure; Mazdaism, indeed, has been classified as the oldest known higher religion of humanity. Old it is, but the structure of this cosmology is functionally very similar to Swedenborg’s—and like Swedenborg’s correspondences between a material and a heavenly reality, we also find, in Mazdaism, the notion of interacting realms or dimensions a higher one above guiding and constituting the lower. The difference is that Mazdaism conceives of the upper realm as an infinite column of light rather than as a “Grand Man.” The column of light enfolds the heavens—and their mountains, rivers, waterfalls, plains, cities, and habitations. There too, as above, so below—but in the lower realm another column, of infinite darkness, is mixing with the light. And we, engaged in the work of the creation, will either succeed individually or descend into the darkness if we’re tempted by its allurements.

Now to complete this picture, I would offer the proposals of Rupert Sheldrake, a modern, living scientist. Sheldrake is a biologist. Sheldrake suggests that undetectable morphic fields exist and correspond to all material phenomena. They contain the forms and patterns of the material, not simply statically but dynamically as well, thus they also hold patterns of motion and behavior. And these fields are alive in the sense that they can and do change over time. They are a cosmic memory. And all things are in active contact with these fields at all times. We thus have a scheme that parallels Mazdaism: not only living entities but inorganic stuff also takes its guidance, as it were, from vast accumulations of highly organized banks of memory, the morphic fields. Fields exist at all levels and are hierarchically arranged. There would thus be a morphic field specific to mammals as well as for, say, rabbits and people, the latter fields hierarchically beneath the field for mammals. And above the field for mammals would be a more general field for all living entities. The interesting parallel here is that this undetectable but physical reality is proposed as a naturalistic explanation forced on us by looking at matter. We infer these fields from what we see on the ground—and we need the fields as a hypothesis in order to explain certain categories of events that, thus far, we cannot reduce to a chemical or a mechanical sets of causes. The embryo’s development is usually cited as an example. Our science has not been able, thus far, to offer what might be a hard chemico-mechanical explanation for the changes we actually behold.

Sheldrake’s most relevant works here are A New Science of Life. The Hypothesis of Formative Causation and Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature.

Swedenborg’s proposals, and Mazdaism, too, for that matter, are dismissed as outdated religious mumbo-jumbo. We’re beyond such things today. Sheldrake is dismissed on the grounds of parsimony, chopped away by Occam’s razor. Modern science says it doesn’t need yet another level of explanation. Just wait until we’ve figured things out the hard way, by patient experiment. All right. But that view—alongside the earlier mumbo-jumbo dismissal—depends on a hard commitment to the notion of materialism and its consequent affirmation of the meaninglessness of existence.

People like me don’t wish to make that commitment. And for those who don’t, the ideas sketched in here—just enough to become visible—can take on a certain level of interest. To delve deeper, of course, means to endure trials and tribulations not unlike those that science is condemned to accept. But these may lead to insight; those of science promise more of the same old, same old until the sun burns out.

The Angel Beckons

The title is my own and chosen for its context here, today. See the last post to understand it. The following is, again, from Rumi’s Divani Shamsi Tabriz XII.

Every form you see has its archetype in the placeless world;
If the form perished, no matter, since its original is everlasting.
Every fair shape you have seen, every deep saying you have heard,
Be not cast down that it perished; for that is not so.
Whereas the spring-head is undying, its branch gives water continually.
Since neither can cease, why are you lamenting?
Conceive the Soul as a fountain, and these created things as rivers:
While the fountain flows, the rivers run from it.
Put grief out of your head and keep quaffing this river water;
Do not think of the water failing; for this water is without end.
From the moment you came into the world of being,
A ladder was placed before you that you might escape.
First you were mineral, later you turned to plant,
Then you became animal: how should this be a secret to you?
Afterwards you were made man, with knowledge, reason, faith;
Behold the body, which is a portion of the dust-pit, how perfect it has grown!
When you have travelled on from man, you will doubtless become an angel;
After that you are done with this earth: your station is in heaven.
Pass again even from angelhood: enter that ocean,
That your drop may become a sea which is a hundred seas of ‘Oman.
Leave this ‘Son,’ say ever ‘One’ with all your soul;
If your body has aged, what matter, when the soul is young?

Jalal’ud-Din Rumi (1207-1273) was a Sufi mystic who lived most of his life in a region which is now Turkey. This poem was written in Farsi and the translation is by R.A. Nicholson.

Angels: A Short Overview

Too many articles on angels rapidly bog down. The become historical. They try to explain the twelve angelic orders and their arrangement into four angelic choirs. They delve into biblical references. They deal with the celebrities among the angels. And so on. They almost never touch the core issue that interests a traveler of the frontier. Are angels real? How do they fit the scheme of things.

Every culture believes in angels, but to make the differences clear, let me suggest the following. Only the Judeo-Christian-Muslim cultures—they are genuinely monotheistic and adhere to a belief in a single, all-powerful God—view angels as a distinct category of beings. They project three kinds of conscious beings: humans, angels, and God.

In most other cultures angels are classified as gods and goddesses; they are celestial beings. The higher gods are higher by degree, not in kind. The angelic form, therefore, is not specifically differentiated. Two examples. The equivalent of an angel in Hinduism is a deva, a god or goddess. The word itself is rooted in the concept of the celestial, shining, or luminous. In Mazdaism all beings are conceived to have a fravarti, thus a celestial counterpart; we are twinned with our guardian angel, as it were. And angels of collectives exist as well. Mazdaism might be considered an angelology. In all systems, not least in the Christian, these spirits may be good or bad, and the bad ones are demons.

Staying with the Asian approach for just a moment longer, we see there that the distinction between humans and higher spirits is continuous. Humans are fallen sparks of the divine. The devas are the same sparks at a higher level. The difference is one of condition, not of essence. Only in the western conception are angels a specially created order. And in the Muslim conception (but notably not in Muslim mysticism, e.g., in the writings of Rumi) angels are functions; they’re strictly messengers of God without a will of their own.

The Asian view, which happens to be the view of the majority of humans, has only two rather limited parallels in the West. Swedenborg—and the churches that follow his teaching—hold that angels are simply highly advanced humans, that all angels began as humans—as did all demonic souls. Here is a quote from Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell which makes this point succinctly:

People in the Christian world are totally unaware that heaven and hell come from the human race. They actually believe that angels were created in the beginning and constitute heaven, and that the devil or Satan was an angel of light who became rebellious and was cast out together with his faction, and that this gave rise to hell.

Angels are utterly amazed that there can be this kind of belief in the Christian world, and even more so that people know absolutely nothing about heaven, even though this is a primary doctrine of the church. Knowing that this kind of ignorance is prevalent, they are profoundly delighted that it has now pleased the Lord to reveal to us so much about heaven — and about hell as well—and so as much as possible to dispel the darkness that is rising daily because this church [Swedenborg means this era] is drawing to a close. [Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, §311]

One faith that arose from the Muslim, and strictly-speaking the Shi’ite branch of Islam, has views almost identical to Swedenborg’s. They are the Baha’is.

Interesting, isn’t it? We have a rather ancient grouping of Asian traditions—and tiny minorities in the west—both of which suggest an interestingly parsimonious explanation of the angelic phenomenon. Together these views suggest that a single created conscious agency suffices to explain higher created beings existing beneath the Ultimate creator’s throne. And we belong into that category right alongside angels. The division of this community—which I like to call the soul community—into three parts is based on the operation of our free will. Some are demonic because they’re headed downward, some are embodied, and some are celestial because they are moving upward through the infinite reaches of reality. The explanation of that status in the middle, thus of the souls encased in bodies differs. The Asians view it as part of a descent; we were drawn by the desire for limited experience; in Swedenborg’s view we are experiencing the first state of life as newly created souls.

This will serve as a very general introduction to this subject. To see a much more sophisticated view of the place of the angelic in the order of creation, as described by the immortal poet, Jalal’ud-Din Rumi, a Sufi, I suggest that you read the next post.

The Mood or You?

The proposition I’d like to develop is that the body’s condition can cause mental states—and vice versa. If we are foiled in some endeavor or we get bad news, our body will obediently mirror our state of depression or anxiety—although it’s in perfectly good shape. But similarly a physically low period, low for whatever reasons, will also affect our attitudes—and what we viewed yesterday with perfect equanimity will today strike us as troubling or ominous. Unless we watch ourselves, bodies and minds can act as amplifiers.

So what comes first? The mood or you?

The body has its cycles. Biorhythms are not considered to be scientifically established, but they are matters of experience. Some people are very sensitive and feel these waves of up and down quite sharply. Some are so insensitive they’re able to sail along in a more or less permanent state of equilibrium. Such people tend also to be insensitive to their own inner states—which actually helps in mood control. If you tend to be moody, you’ll know that perfectly well. It is moody people who benefit from pondering this subject at all. Only they consider the perpetually cheery as sometimes a royal pain in the ass. They sometimes want to dive into the depth and be bloody well left alone.

My own belief, based on self-observation, is that moods are caused by the body—and this in two ways. First, bodies have their lows and highs, and these recur at regular intervals. When they are low they affect the mind—but they affect it only if the mind is closely identified with the body—and the person, the real us, doesn’t do anything about it. The mind thus amplifies the body’s state. Second, bodies are obedient servants. If we are distraught and frustrated, they will obediently produce the necessary chemical states to mirror at the physical level what we feel mentally. Now, of course, being physically listless and moping does not help us solve our problems. Those bodily routines tend to minimize activity, not least clear thought. There the body, mirroring the mind, isn’t actually helping—but then it doesn’t have a mind of its own.

The conclusion here is that—despite whatever we might think about it—we are masters of our mood provided that we make the effort. But that effort requires, as the very first step, a realization of this truth. Once it’s there, the resulting change in our mental states is often quite rapid. The realization is an act of detachment. Another way to put this is to say that we can stop identifying with the feeling of depression or anxiety—figuratively step aside from ourselves, look at ourselves as “the other.” The body will also—and immediately—begin to mirror this new state of the mind. It will stop pumping chemicals. I sometimes feel an immediate lift in my energies.

Now, of course, there is a paradox here. The mood clouds our thought so that the realization does not arise. For this reason, preparation—call it “setting traps”—must take place when we are feeling normal. We must cultivate the habit of detachment—and engage in a kind of “remembering” of ourselves at frequent intervals. Taking just a moment, half of a minute, just to look around and become aware, can become a habit of mind. And we must also in anticipation of the onset of moods decide to come awake when we feel ourselves slipping into darker states.

With practice, then, later on, the mere thought will often work immediately. In the early stages of this kind of exercise, ritual acts are often very helpful. They serve to get the mule’s attention. It’s best to do something dramatically different, to break our routine. In my case cleaning the bathroom or getting out the vacuum will usually serve. Some people put on running shoes. Taking out a fresh sheet and beginning a diary entry—a very good method that. Those who keep diaries are working on themselves. The point is to stop the flow of gloom, to divert the self, to refocus its attention.

The mood is a product of nature, you might say. We must include the social under this heading too—the strictly human—not least the mood in the office, the workplace, the mood on the news, the weather, or our own physical state, not least fatigue. You—namely the person, the agent, the soul—you are sovereign and above it all. You are indestructible. If you refuse the grace of your attention to something, it is amazing how rapidly that thing or phenomenon will shrink into the nothingness it actually is compared to the sovereign you.

* * *

Here by way of additional notes, a few more points. Brigitte (the better half) points out that biofeedback is a relevant example. We can do amazing things when we are wired up, not least influence a single neuron’s action in our brain. Brigitte points out that the feedback mechanism enables our sovereign self to act on the body because it has a precise target for its powerful tool—the attention.

In all of the above, of course, I refer to moods arising in a normal, healthy body. Such bodies will do our will—and continue to do so while undamaged. But there is such a thing as clinical depression; in that case medical assistance is also required. Pain is another difficult area. We cannot stop the body doing its job—of which the signaling of pain is a perfectly normal task. What we can do by such practices is to minimize pain and to stop it possessing us against our will.

Finally, the self’s superiority to the body is exemplified, occasionally, by wondrous stories such as of a woman lifting a car just long enough to free a child—that sort of thing is viewed as miraculous until we realize that such an act mobilizes energies in that body it didn’t think it had—or that the fierce will found forces that, while they invisibly surround us, might be in certain circumstances channeled into the organism to help it do impossible things.

The Mystery of Chi

Two posts back I have suggested that the Chinese concept of chi is present in every culture under other names, and I recited some of them: baraka, prana, and our own concept of grace. We also have a more secular version of it, the élan vital, the life force. In actual use these words often have quite different emphases and connotations. A good example is our use of the word grace. In the religious context it is seen as a special gift from God or a state of being without sin (“state of grace”); in the social context it connotes good upbringing, charm, advanced behavior, fluidity of movement; and then there is “grace under fire.”

All of these uses of the word suggest a kind of elevated state or mode of being; the last phrase is instructive because it suggests holding on to our humanity even when all hell breaks loose. An equivalent of it, the French sang-froid, has the same connotation: cold blooded, thus above the natural state. But notice that in our usage, grace is never equated with the life force as such, whereas it is strongly linked to that concept in Asia. Our usage is the product of our culture, a product of our system of classification. We’re very conceptual. We like to separate. We’ve separated grace from the life force—and this despite the fact that our founding book, the Bible, in Genesis 2:7, tells us that God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” That breath, I would suggest, is chi. The dust of which God formed the body is matter.

Now, mind you, speaking of such matters we’re engaged in the pursuit higher forms of knowledge than our science can ever hope to reach. We’re in the realms of poetry. Poetry’s favorite subject, love, is as foreign to science as is life. The poet dares to call them one and the same thing; science is silent on both. This subject is also ultimately foreign to philosophical approaches unless these acknowledge a higher realm, the realm of revelation. Conceptual approaches cannot capture the essence here, which must be experienced. Concepts divide, poetry unites. But poetry unites without destroying crucial differences that manifest in experience. Indeed the more precise our conceptual understanding becomes, the more it shatters the unity of experience—whereas the life force has the magical result of fusing—without destroying—a vast diversity of materially distinct entities into a unified organism.

One way to get a better feel for the mystery of chi is to picture this fluid, this breath of the divine, as present in everything that lives—and, by organizing matter, becoming visible. At the level of ordinary life—and that dusty little weed growing in the crack of my concrete drive is alive—we might think of chi as already and miraculously present. It announces itself. For all we know it’s also present in the inorganic realm. It may be that energy which defies the laws of inertia and keeps electrons swirling around atomic nuclei. Where do those electrons get their force? And why don’t they ever run down? Those electrons are still swirling, moving, glowing even in the coldest rocks on the frozen continent of Antarctica. And we, ourselves, seem to be made of innumerably many perpetua mobile. Chi may permeate the cosmos. It may be the strong force that keeps the quarks clinging to each other to form protons and neutrons inside the atomic core. In those tiny entities—and they are mere inferences so far as we really know—the energy is invisible. In living things it’s manifest—but, for us, it’s not particularly remarkable. Familiarity breeds contempt. That dusty weed mostly reminds me to pull it. But chi also manifests in much more mysterious and higher form—as grace. And in that form, once more, it becomes invisible. We can, however, still experience it. We experience it as beauty, harmony, intelligence, and benevolence—real phenomena that escape reduction to the visible forms that carry it. That music isn’t violins or black dots on white paper. The grace of that building isn’t merely stone.

This sort of view of chi, poetic and therefore unifying, might be dismissed as a fuzzy sort of pantheism. But what it suggests to me is actually a glimpse into the very structure of reality. I conceive of it as consisting of three distinct but closely related elements always in interaction: matter, energy, and self. Staying with the Chinese modes of naming these things, the first is yin, the receptive, the second yang, the creative, and the third is the Tao. We would call it God, the ultimate Self. A proper view of this structure, I would suggest, emerges when we imagine that the same constituent elements exist at every level of reality, not merely here in on earth. This would suggest that matter has its higher or subtle forms as well—beyond the border I keep talking about. So does energy. So does self, writ small or large. And in that case we get a conceptually sharper view of chi or grace in the bargain. Here is how I would argue that:

What appears as simple energy to us—thus solar power, for example—is chi as it manifests in a lower order of reality. What we call life is that same energy already intensified to a higher pitch, but still embedded in the lower order. It is a sign of a transition between orders, the prelude to entry into the next “mansion” that exists above ours. Living here we’re poised between dimensions, at the very point of transition. What we call grace is the life present in the heavenly reaches touching this one but only, alas, ever so lightly. To have it more abundantly, as suggested in John 10:10, we must cross over.

Angels

[Jacob] dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. [Genesis 28:12]

He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. [Psalms 91:11]

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell. [Shakespeare, Macbeth IV, iii, 22]

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
[Richard Purdy Wilbur, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World, 1956]

I looked over Jordan and what did I see? …
A band of angels coming after me,
Coming for to carry me home.
[Swing Low, Sweet Chariot]

“Pass in, pass in,” the angels say,
“In to the upper doors,
Nor count compartments of the floors,
But mount to paradise
By the stairway of surprise.”
[Ralph Waldo Emerson. Merlin I]




* * *

Angels are a fascinating and deep subject worth pondering. A post on the subject is in the making, but I thought I’d introduce it in this manner, touching on some views of angels over time in quotes. If you want to read a poem of mine about angels, with some appended paragraphs from Swedenborg, see this post on Ghulf Genes. I collect my poems on that site, although that poem, and an earlier companion to it, reachable here, belong in the context of the borderzone.

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The painting is by Hieronymus Bosch, Ascent of the Blessed. Bosch (1450-1516), a Dutch painter, long predates any modern discussions of near-death experiences in many of which tunnels with a light at the end—and sometimes pairs of guides or helpers, and a luminous being present at arrival—became common enough to be abbreviated as NDEs.

Pondering Action

In a comment on “Pondering Desolation,” Monique wonders why the life of action is so distracting and compelling—and why it produces imbalances with undesirable results. Good points. Her comment reminded me that life on the frontier, and here of course I mean life on the borderzone, has its own solution to the demand for “action in the world.” We are, after all, supposed to be in the world if not of it. The Sufi tradition is but one of others that calls for realizing spiritual values in the world—but it is a tradition that gives this matter emphasis. In that tradition withdrawal into solitudes—and celibacy, for that matter—are seen as temporary practices to strengthen the individual for the life of action.

I would also note here that in Asia the martial arts, and related practices derived from it, like Tai chi chuan, directly link physical with spiritual action. And there is also the body of useful western observations about types of personalities—inner- and outer-directed (introverts and extroverts), sometimes linked to body types (somatotypes). This last concept was developed by the psychologist William Herbert Sheldon and studied at Yale. Sheldon proposed three body types called endomorphs, mesomorphs, and ectomorphs, roughly associated with personality types that are gregarious-social, active-muscular-athletic, and inward-sensitive-cerebral. People are, or tend toward, one or the other of these. Thus we may be drawn into the social whirl or the world of action by our own temperament. But beneath our temperaments we are all souls, and ways of life that let us express our given natures at the highest form have been developed over time.

I’ve always felt that the Chinese concept of chi, rudely rendered as life force, is perhaps the key to the spiritual life—no matter what our constitution. Four strangers, all from different parts of the world—in a time before English became a world language—met at a tavern and decided to journey together. Some days later they came across an orchard, and all four cried out in delight. One saw cherries, another one les cerise, a third one die kirschen, a fourth called them cseresnye. They saw the same fruit—a sweet red berry with a stone in the middle. The Asian chi or qi, ki, or gi is another’s baraka, the third person’s grace, a fourth traveler’s prana, and so on.

Why does chi flow more readily in the desolation of the desert, on the peak of rocky mountains? Because the distractions of the world have been minimized. Our genuine happiness derives from increasing and concentrating the flow of grace; unhappiness rises when this flow is rapidly dispersed or blocked by endless distractions. The modern error is to confuse baraka with ordinary life energy of the sort we get from carbohydrates. If it were only that, mere over-eating would make us saints. The wisdom of the traditions lies in recognizing that this energy is of another dimensionality, above that of the coarser kind. It is subtle but, when present, of tremendous potency. In very concentrated form it will cure ills spontaneous and more, much more…

The key to spiritualizing action seems to be concentration. The key to concentration is detachment—not in the sense of withdrawal but in the sense of presence. This demands the cultivation of a peculiar sort of duality within ourselves. We must be present to ourselves while simultaneously attending to the action before us. This may sound weird and contradictory, but it isn’t. What we must detach from is identification with the constant upwelling of emotional reaction to anything and everything. It is that automatic commentary of our habit selves—sometimes a whisper, sometimes a shouting, sometimes rage, sometimes hysteria—which actually distracts us. Action only requires seeing the facts, understanding them, selecting the right action—and then doing it. Without commentary. When the phone rings just as we start typing a sentence, the mind shouts, God dammit! I hope that’s not…whatever. A centered self, a concentrated self, a self that has prepared itself in the morning with appropriate meditation—renewed at intervals—will simply…pick up the telephone. The three dots I placed there stand for an inward pause, a conscious breath to suppress the shouting; it’s a reminder.

Yes, yes, already. But it’s hard. — And it is. But in a real sense the distractions are all internal. What’s out there is just the bombardment of facts. The distraction arises when we let them—distract us. From our intention. Our intention to act. We want to focus on something—and therefore, interrupted, we lose our focus. The trick is not to lose our focus even in the midst of interruptions. The result of this, if assiduously cultivated, is that the atmosphere will cool. The mind will become more disciplined. Slowly. Gradually. The flow of chi will increase, less of it will be blown away into the winds of emotion. We will become more efficient. The lower self is in many ways quite like an animal and requires long and tedious training—and retraining. And again.

My own experience is that practices of this type wear out after a while. As I succeed in organizing my own action better, as things calm down, I tend to ease up on the discipline and then over days I gradually slip back into bad habits. But the upside is that each succeeding effort is more successful, and even in these matters habits do build, not least the habit of just clearing the desk when I feel myself getting hysterical—putting the To Do list aside, overcoming the terror and panic of doing so—and beginning all over again with a session of reminders and a forcible recall of what it’s all about. It works—if we do. We learned that last motto, years ago, from Laura Huxley.

I’ll have more to say on this subject. The whole reality of chi and grace has many more interesting aspects. The teachings of Montessori were centered on natural concentration as a “normalizing” phenomenon. I’ll get to it. It’s on the To Do list.

An Outline of Cosmologies

All kinds of cosmologies vie and have always vied for recognition, with one or another dominating particular times and cultures. Cosmologies, ultimately, answer the most important Why-question that occurs to us: “Why are we here on earth?” Over the months I’ve put up discussions of these cosmologies. The general interest in this subject is close to nil, I realize. The posts rank close to the bottom of subjects I’ve pondered here. Oh, well. I’ll add another one. In this post I’d like to present an outline of cosmology considering only the meaningful kind. Materialism is, I propose, meaningless. Its assertion is that all is matter or some derivate therefore, that all that happens happens because matter is organized in a certain way—and by chance. Using the word matter, as always, I include energy as one form of it. Materialist cosmologies don’t interest me. Herewith then an outline followed by some brief comments.

I. We are here because we were sent here.
     A. We were already in being when we were sent here.
          1. We were sent here by an unconscious agency.
          2. We were sent here by a conscious agency superior to us.
               a. We were sent here in the course of a natural process of development.
               b. We were sent here as a kind of banishment.
     B. We were created and placed into bodies.
          1. Embodied existence is our natural place in the order of nature.
          2. Embodied existence is the first stage in a more complex existence.

II. We are here because we chose to be here.
     A. We came because something attracted us - curiosity, challenge, some positive cause.
     B. We came because we wished to get away - assertiveness, rebellion, a negative cause.

The two big divisions in this Tree of Choice is whether or not our being here was involuntary or voluntary. What most of us know is that we don’t remember any earlier existence. But that doesn’t mean that we did not exist. The very fact of being in this dimension may also explain our lack of memories. We may well have preexisted our birth; and in another “life” may have chosen to be here. Thus the choices presented are legitimate.

If we came here involuntarily but we were already in being, the issue of memory is pertinent. If we were created at the conception of our bodies or a little later (once that event was held to be a little later), the memory problem is moot. To be sure, some people remember a previous life in childhood, which clouds that whole subject.

In both of the big options (sent or chose) the assumption is that something created us—thus that we’re not self-created. Some may object by citing Hindu or Kabbalistic beliefs that souls are tiny sparks of divinity. But a part is not a whole. And in that context the moment of separation, of the spark from the whole, may be understood as the moment of an individual’s creation.

In Option I.A. (we were sent but we were already there, somewhere else) I present two choices. The first of these might be labeled “Cosmic Disaster,” thus some kind of event that simply happened—and in doing so disorganized the dimension in which we were—disorganized it enough so that we had to find another kind and, by implication, an inferior kind of home. That “home” is material existence. This choice, as it stands, assumes a naturalistic framework in the cosmos where conscious communities exist, can’t be destroyed, but their environments can be changed by events over which the communities have no control.

The second choice presented is that Divine Providence caused us to be sent into an inferior world for one of two reasons. In the first (2.a.) it was to unfold our potential through a process of development. The second (2.b.) represents the consequence of free acts that result in a some kind of failure to develop, to conform, to participate, or, in general, to obey the prevailing laws; we could call this punishment, but is more properly rendered as a consequence. In my lexicon God doesn’t punish but does create the environment, not least its limits—that we overstep at our own peril.

Option I.B. (we were created as our bodies formed) is the prevailing view of Christianity. Here I elaborate that option by presenting the Thomistic view (2.a.) namely that Reality describes a hierarchy of beings. In that reality the human presence has a certain fixed place in a hierarchy, both matter and spirit. Below us is matter, above us is immaterial spirit. Here the traumas of earthly existence and of death are explained as the Fall, thus corresponding to a negative choice on our part that disturbed the cosmic harmony, but it shall be righted in the end when we are resurrected into glorified bodies. The second sub-sub option here (2.b.) assumes that a bodily existence is the first stage of a much longer course of future existence in which physical bodies such as we here possess will no longer be needed. Thus it corresponds to the developmental option above it under I.A.

Turning now to the second big option (we chose to be here), I subdivided that into two categories. The first (II.A.) represents a positive option (however nasty it might actually feel in practice). We are here because we were drawn to this dimension. You might say that we volunteered; indeed that is the essence of Mazdaism; we volunteered to participate in the creation. A less dramatic form of that is that soul communities encountered the material realm, became fascinated with it, and, descending into it, often find that state unpleasant. They are released from it at death—and may escape if they can overcome the “attraction” of the lower realm.

The second (II.B.) presents a negative option. It corresponds to the willful word of Lucifer who, pronouncing that he wouldn’t serve (Non serviam) fell from the heavens with his following. This option suggests that we are part of a rebellious soul community members of which, having now tasted of this dimension, are having second thoughts and are split into those willing to return and others who are still inclined to stay at arm’s length.

I’ve excluded from the scheme above the Gnostic conceptualization. It asserts that the cosmos was created by a secondary god, an aberrant angelic being. That low-level creator is usually called the Demiurge. I omit that variant because it merely creates a conceptually unnecessary layer in which the whole idea of a Fall is semi-deified. I put this exclusion here because it helps to see the scheme before this variant is mentioned.

Pondering Desolation

I picture the borderzone as a thinly populated region, indeed as a desert where the wind blows and the sand flies, where the sun stares fiercely down at desolation and the sky at night’s a thick, rich brilliance of stars, but rare indeed the hermit who wanders these wastes and communes with barely visible clumps of dusty vegetation and mosses that, here and there, lend the rocks a somber, greenish hue.

What people want is cures from ills, a job, and help in love relations. Strange theories of origins and soaring speculation, wonder at the meaning of it all—the overwhelming numbers—thus billions of galaxies, and never mind just one of them that holds 200 billion stars like ours—all such things are beyond comprehension and light years distant from the busy brain driving in thick traffic in the morning while it rehearses items on a crowded list of things to do.

Nonetheless—and I look back on quite a crowded life—it seems to me that my passage through its turbulence—the turbidity of pools as ibn el-Arabi once described it—has been greatly blessed by the occasional hour I’ve forced relentless Schedule to yield me for such contemplations. The descent into matter must have been attractive. What did it promise? I do wonder… A resolution of the mysteries--now that I’ve finally reached the basics? Going, I think, in the wrong direction, all the while, in seeking the ultimate answer? What I’ve found, instead, is that in that direction lies the shatter rather than the unity, and that the approach to a kind of silence, symbolized by deserts, empty spaces, and what only seems like desolation produces riches far beyond whatever might be on that shopping list even after I’ve won the lottery, and I don’t mean the ordinary kind. I mean the big one.

Notes on Experiential Evidence

In yesterday’s post, “Held Incognito Inside Bodies,” I refer to evidence drawn from the experiences of individuals. I was referring to near-death and out-of-body experience reports. This is a vast subject, and therefore some additional notes. One need not seek far for documented reports of this sort. The classical source is Raymond A. Moody’s Life After Life. In a segment titled “Out of the Body” (p. 24-29) are a number of cases where people render their own memories in their own words. Many more such experiences are available from The International Association of Near-Death Studies, Inc., accessible from here. Many other resources may be added to these two that someone wishing to look at the evidence directly can examine.

I’ve had occasion to recommend in the past Carl B. Becker’s Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death (available from Amazon.com here). This is the sort of thing serious students will find useful. The book covers the entire field in scholarly detail.

After I’d examined a great deal of this evidence, I came to the conclusion that in the regions beyond the border experiences are of a different kind than they are in the material world. That over there is a world of images (mundus imaginalis, as Henry Corbin called it) where energies dominate and express themselves in feelings, intuitions, and knowledge not supported by hard, physical underpinnings—but, nevertheless, by real and existent forces (animate and inanimate) that behave like matter but are not matter. Visitors to these regions, therefore, clothe these forces in images drawn from their own experience; an active imagination is stirred into action. They may all reach the same boundary, for instance; the boundary will be real; but some will see it as a river, others as a desert, yet others as a wall. For this reason, those experiencing NDEs and OBEs will accurately describe what they see on this side of the border, but what they see on that side will vary based on personal experience, knowledge, and culture. Christians will see figures from the Christian tradition; Hindus will see figures from the Hindu tradition. But indeed it is reasonable to assume that when they encounter higher entities the entities are the same. It is the interpretations given to these beings that will differ from person to person .

In Carl Becker’s book there is a very astute discussion of this subject in a segment titled “An Idealist Next World” on pages 177-188.

Held Incognito Inside Bodies

While we are inside bodies, we cannot see anything except by means of our sensory machinery—and the interpretation of sensory data by our brains. We can’t hear, feel, or smell anything either. By contrast, we seem to be able to see and hear just fine if we are outside of our bodies. Let’s take a look at these two cases.

Inside and Outside

The first assertion is obvious and amply documented. Special cases merely underline known facts. One such is the case of Helen Keller, which I’ve discussed here on this blog. Another are the experiences of Jill Bolte Taylor mentioned in a recent post here. The second assertion is less obvious. It depends on what I call experiential evidence—based on what people experience. The first can be established by scientific means, thus by physical measurements of physical phenomena. Subjective experiences cannot be replicated or checked independently nor yet measured. They cannot be reached by physical means. It is for this reason that scientists shy away from the paranormal; the blind also refrain from visiting picture galleries: what’s the point if you can’t see things?

Experiential evidence, however, does exist for seeing and hearing ordinary reality without the help of the sensory apparatus and the brain. The clearest cases come from near-death experiences (NDEs)—especially in those situations where a patient is declared clinically dead but, nonetheless, reports his or her observations of accident scenes or hospital surroundings—not least the actions and words of doctors or of the police—during that span of time. The patient is unconscious and comatose. The heart may have stopped beating. The eyes are closed. The EEG reading is flat.

For my own purposes I classify NDEs as this-worldly and other-worldly. In the first case people report about what they see in this world—the accident, the operating room. In the other they talk of seeing other-worldly environments, people, luminous beings, and so on. I’ve written multiple posts on this subject on Borderzone. A striking case, reported by C.G. Jung, is here. A discussion of the worldly phases is presented here. Now my presumption is that people who report seeing real events in this word, while cut off from their senses, also see real events in some other world. Why do we assume that the first instance is real and the is second illusory?

Let me restate the issue again to sharpen it. Why it is that in ordinary life—and also when medical conditions prevail, as during a stroke—our view of reality is restricted to matters that come to us only through the biological machinery we call our body? And yet, under the extraordinary circumstance of being on the brink of death, we’re suddenly enabled to examine, usually from a certain height, the scenes of accidents, operating theaters, hospital beds—and our own body, lying there. If we have the power to see and hear outside of the body, doesn’t that strongly suggest that inside the body something inhibits a power we have as souls? Does this inhibition arise because we are fused to matter in some way while we are what we call alive?

This isn’t merely idle musing or philosophical speculation. We do have evidence for both cases—if, that is, we’re willing to accept experiential evidence. And such evidence often comes from highly credible sources—including pilots reporting on dangerous mishaps, mountain climbers who’ve experienced falls, educated people, young people, mothers, technicians—not merely the feeble and the addled old.

Additional Aspects

The cases of greatest interest—especially for documenting body-soul duality—come from accidents and near accidents. In some of these the person involved may not even be hurt. These are sometimes out-of-body experiences (OBEs) rather then near-death experiences. Death was threatened by the circumstances, but nothing harmful actually took place—seen from the future. In these cases the soul literally jumps out of the body almost as if trying to escape the calamity—but the calamity does not develop. The pilot is suddenly outside the airplane, about to crash, and views himself from outside the cockpit inside of which he sees his body still fighting the controls. Or the subject is a mountain climber who loses his hold and is falling—but is, moments later, saved by a rope snagging on a rock. Yet other such cases involve motor cycle accidents in which the rider, about to be crushed, is thrown free and lands safely without harm—beyond having been knocked out. What we get here is an odd feeling that the soul—but surely not the person’s conscious self—takes an action it is able to take under extraordinary stimulus. I say, not the conscious self, because there is neither time to think in such circumstances, nor a knowledge of what to do, and invariably the conscious person is very surprised by that which suddenly happens, namely the body’s release. And once we contemplate that the soul may be able to release the body—yes, conditions have to be extraordinary—it occurs to me, anyway, that the soul may also be able to attach to a body in the same way.

Speculation

In these ranges of experience, we’ve barely begun to explore what we have learned in the twentieth century. Most of those who study NDEs are motivated to establish that indeed the soul does journey on. And once that fact is satisfactorily established, the job is done. These studies are costly and difficult and don’t have much practical value. They are and remain in the category of experiential evidence, hence won’t ever lead to a Nobel Prize in any category of science. Nevertheless, it seems to me, study of this phenomenon is potentially very valuable in orienting ourselves. Hence I’ll indulge in speculation.

Perhaps a start might be made by looking at some assumptions. It seems that disembodied souls are capable to seeing the physical world but unable to interact with it except in unusual or narrowly defined circumstances. If so, it appears that when they do—do interact in some way—they may link up to a living organism. They may be the very cause of life. To put this in other words, it may be that all living things represent a suitable organic structure which is enlivened by fusion with a soul from a vast disembodied pool of souls. Does all this make you feel, reading this, that you’ve wandered into the mind of a madman? Sorry about that. Discovery sometimes produces that kind of rearing back at the seemingly preposterous. But the idea is not at all weird, actually. What we do know, certainly in the case of humans, is that when the soul departs, life departs as well. It’s not that big a leap to imagine that life may be a spiritual fact—and that some spirits may be conscious while vastly many are not.

Let me make one more wild assumption. For the soul to leave the body—even when the body is still a working machine—requires extraordinary circumstances, namely a life-threatening set of events. It would seem to me logical, therefore, to assume that an equally unusual event, certainly an event of enormous emotional intensity, would also be required to cause a soul to fuse with matter. This would require that the soul could do so—therefore that, at some level of matter—a bridge between two kinds of reality should exist. I can’t help but remember the Tibetan Book of the Dead in this context. There we encounter the suggestion that a soul, unwilling to follow the light into the higher regions, finds itself attracted to men and women as they copulate. The soul then, as it were, plunges in. Don’t laugh. A huge intensity of emotion—some ranges of which may draw the soul almost irresistibly—are often involved when bodies meet in love.

But then, once the fusion has been accomplished—willingly or unwillingly—it may take something equally extraordinary, after that fusion, once more to loosen the soul from its newly minted prison in the lower dimension.

Prisoner of Matter

Among the puzzles of the borderzone, one that interests me most is—how to put this? Well, call it the problem of incarnation. Call it the body-soul duality. Call it being a prisoner of matter. Before this situation can even become a puzzle, we have to credit that a duality exists. There is ample experiential but no scientific evidence for it. By “experiential evidence” I mean the reports of people. By “scientific evidence” I mean evidence of such a nature that you can support it by some kind of physical measurement. If souls are real and are genuinely immaterial, scientific evidence, of course, is ruled out by definition. You cannot touch, see, hear, smell or measure the immaterial. And that which we can touch, see, hear, and smell is always reaching us by material agencies. These may be caused to manifest by immaterial realities, but since we have the material manifestations, we can always explain it using material derivations. By material, here, I also mean energetic. This situation explains why science dismisses the paranormal.

A Range of Views

The puzzle is also absent if we accept an Aristotelian definition of substance. Substance, for Aristotle, was always the combination of matter and form. Neither unformed matter nor immaterial form were genuinely real. In his system they occupy a kind of hazy underworld, the realm of potential. The soul, as the body’s form, is thus one aspect of the substance we call a human. When we die the matter of our body takes on another form, and the uniquely human vanishes. Form is thus not a prisoner of matter. It is, as it were, its necessary counterpart. Without it, prime matter sinks into invisibility too.

The Christian belief, strongly influenced by Aristotelian philosophy, maintains this matter-form duality, at least for humans. The Athanasian creed speaks of the resurrection of bodies. In this system the real human is an incarnated human. Resurrection bodies may be “glorified,” to be sure, thus different from those we now inhabit, but bodies they are still. The soul itself, however, in the Catholic tradition, is immortal; but, while absent from the body, it is incomplete. So a duality is maintained but the unity of the two is asserted. God creates each soul at conception.

In Eastern traditions which assert the transmigration of souls (reincarnation), the duality is held to be real, the body always just a temporary vehicle. On the achievement of nirvana, the soul then enters a region of undefined bliss; bodies then no longer matter—indeed are not discussed. In general, bodies are a lower, never a higher, manifestation of reality. In these traditions the soul has a unique reality. It “carries” its karma in some way. Souls preexist their birth but, in the processes of birth “forget” their earlier life (and sometimes don’t—at least for a while). Something has to carry that karma, and that something must be differentiated, in some way, from every other soul.

In some modern syncretistic speculations the soul is often imagined as an energetic phenomenon, thus as the life force. Such models resemble the eastern tradition but picture the individual, the Self, strictly as a temporary embodied manifestation. The life force, moving on after death, is equated with a kind of pantheistic cosmic flow in which the individuality may remain conscious in a kind of merged consciousness of the All.

Comment on these Views

On the subject of form and matter I’ve suggested (link) that I like the notion of this merged duality provided that we substitute, for form, the concept of intention. The source of a substance, therefore, is always a triad: there is matrix in which an intention manifests, there is the intention itself, and there is the source of an intention. In that form the Aristotelian doctrine retains its elegance and takes on valid meaning for me.

My own take on the Christian model is that souls indeed are immortal—but that their yoking to bodies (ordinary or glorified) is dependent on philosophical systems and/or cosmic models that I find difficult to embrace. I resonate with the grand scheme—a creation, a process, a resolution of that process, a divine intention behind it all; but I find the details difficult to accept. I am entirely persuaded by experiential evidence (others’, not my own) that some souls are reborn. I’m sometimes inclined to think that we are engaged in a developmental process, and the Christian model, at least viewed from a sufficient distance so that the details are fuzzy, seems to me a good expression of that feeling.

I am temperamentally drawn to one aspect of the Eastern traditions—an aspect also mirrored in the Christian doctrine of the Fall—which suggests that humanity has fallen into a great chasm of ignorance—from which to extricate ourselves is Job One. And in that sense we are indeed prisoners of matter. One lifetime may not suffice to get clear of the debris. My own view is that most people do escape in a single lifetime, but some do not, hence we have evidence of rebirth. That rebirth is everyone’s invariable and inevitable fate—until they’ve managed to do the near-impossible, namely to achieve Buddha-like bliss in the flesh—that I find difficult to credit.

As for the life-force model of Western syncretism, I see that as a rather inconsequential and groping return from materialism to transcendentalism still largely stuck in a materialist conceptualization of the regions beyond.

In the next post I’ll address the question of how exactly we might be imprisoned in the flesh. Stay tuned.

An Experience of Nirvana

It is fascinating to follow the thoughts of a modern scientist as she skates on the strange border between physical reality and something transcendental. Such is the case when we read My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor. She is a neuroscientists of the first rank. At age 37 she suffered a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. The book is an account of this event which she underwent more or less consciously until, some seven years later, she recovered her health and her faculties in full. Her viewpoint is, as it were, from the bottom upward. Her cosmology—at least as I perceive it reading this book—is evolutionary through and through, meaning that consciousness is a product of brain function. But her experiences cause her, seemingly, to invert that view. The evolutionary view asserts that life is a function of matter at certain stages of extraordinary complexity. But the following passage appears to reverse that view. She says, reflecting on her state during the earliest stages of her stroke:

I felt so detached from my ability to move my body with any oomph that I truly believed I would never be able to get this collection of cells to perform again. Wasn’t it interesting that although I could not walk or talk, understand language, read or write, or even roll my body over, I knew that I was okay? The now offline intellectual mind of my left hemisphere no longer inhibited my innate awareness that I was the miraculous power of life. I knew I was different now—but never once did my right mind indicate that I was “less than” what I had been before. I was simply a being of light radiating into the world. Regardless of whether or not I had a body or brain that could connect me to the world of others, I saw myself as a cellular masterpiece. In the absence of my left hemisphere’s negative judgment, I perceived myself as perfect, whole, and beautiful just the way I was. [p. 73-74; the emphasis is mine]

Several aspects of Dr. Taylor’s invaluable account strike me most forcefully. One is the occasional emergence in her writings of the suggestion that she is one with a cosmic energy stream that is somehow compressed and captured in what she calls “the intricate networks of my body’s cellular and molecular tapestry.” While in her detached and expanded state, she says that “I sincerely believed I would never be able to fit the energy back inside this skin.” At the same time she is firmly persuaded that the very consciousness which she now recalls and then experienced, was yet produced entirely by the functioning of her still intact brain mechanisms. Her view thus straddles in an interesting way the incompatible divides between being genuinely a being of light and yet a consciousness produced by millions and millions of cells.

The other aspect of her account that seems very interesting to me is that, throughout this difficult recovery, even while entirely relying on her still-functioning right brain hemisphere, she never had experiences of the sort reported by sensitives and psychics. Her peak experiences, quite nirvana-like, indeed she so designates them, are feelings of utter peace, a kind of fluidity, omniscience, safety, and well-being. Throughout this experience, she is quite alone inside herself.

This, it seems to me, is the normal state of being human. In one direction, of which we are mostly ignorant, is a cosmic bliss. In the other is the incessant noise of physical reality. When the instruments that organize that noise are somehow stopped—by a blood clot as in Dr. Taylor’s case or by various practices and disciplines, as in the case of the Buddha and others—the cosmic bliss becomes a central experience. But whose experience is it? Is it that of a being of light or of vast networks of neurons? In these cases—in normal and in mystical states, however induced—the individual is still entirely captured and held within the framework of the body. But what happens after the last knot is loosed and the being of light becomes detached? Some individuals—and these people typically don’t have an experience of cosmic bliss—do manage to detach and communicate with yet another reality behind, beyond, or interpenetrating both the noise and the nirvana. And that state, I would suggests, is what lies beyond the border. All else is still on this side of the divide.

Dr. Taylor book is available on Amazon.com here.

Our Layered Behavior

When we’re subjected to advertising and other forms of persuasion—be these seduction of the body or political advocacy—we’re sometimes inclined to shake our heads and wonder: Do they really think we are that stupid? The answer is No. But the almighty THEY have studied human behavior. They’ve concluded that we operate at several different levels, that we are not always awake, that we’re mostly half-asleep even when we’re up, fully dressed, and it’s high noon outside. That we make many decisions without much thought, that we obey impulses and habits, that we’re emotion-driven, that emotions build up habits, and therefore we are subject to all kinds of manipulation.

We have at least three layers. One is animal pure and simple—and manifests almost reflexively. Attacked we fight or flee. We explode into rages. We “see red.” We react before we think, reflexively—and a good thing too. If we didn’t, we would be covered by burns and would be blue with bruises. Two is tribal—the behavior of social animals. Here we resemble members of wolf packs. The other day I saw a nature program (Nova, I think). It showed the battle of two packs of wolves for territory—one driving the other away. The wolves were out to kill, if necessary. But every member of both packs was, of course, a wolf. When we act from this level, it’s always us or them, and it is easy, in that state of identification, to consign them to the worst possible fate—and not just in thought, either. National passions, racism, class warfare, and soccer riots, for that matter, all arise from temporary and total identification of ourselves with some pack.

Three, of course, is conscious humanity. We’re all quite capable of it—but it’s difficult even to reach that stage when passions rise. Sometimes we need reminders. In this state we fully recognize the Other as having genuine standing. We can even extend this feeling to all life—hence we find ourselves revolted by practices, such as the confined raising of animals under intolerable conditions.

The vast majority of commercial and political appeals is directed at the pack animal we actually are—but, of course, we are more than that. The commercial calculation, however, based on observation, is that the majority of people behave, most of the time, like members of a pack. Most memories stored, therefore, and most habits formed, are of this kind—not of the higher sort. It’s wrong—but rational—to construct advertising and advocacy programs so that they are most effective. And if we behave like wolves, we’ll only hear the howling.

Collective life is a mixture in which the message addressed to the higher level, the genuinely human, is but a faint thread in a mass of coarser weave. And the results, not surprisingly, are all around us.