Tao

In a recent comment (made elsewhere) I said, “I think that Taoism represents the most sophisticated view of reality.” And in this post I suggested that “the Tao Te Ching might be called a classical text on negative theology, thus the idea that anything you say about the Ultimate is wrong-headed even before you utter the words.” With these comments I thought I’d quote the first subdivision of the book here. It was written by Lao Tzu; the translation is by D.C. Lau in the Penguin Classics edition of 1963.

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.
The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.
Hence always rid yourself of desires in order to observe its secrets;
But always allow yourself to have desires in order to observe its manifestations.
These two are the same
But diverge in name as they issue forth.
Being the same they are called mysteries,
Mystery upon mystery —
The gateway of the manifold secrets.

Now here we encounter the core issues of the spiritual life. It operates beyond the intellectual level—as Idries Shah observes in The Sufis—and must be anchored in experience. The words above escape analysis but may be experienced. Hence my characterization. Negative theology is not a kind of know-nothingness; but neither is it a game of conceptual juggling.

The Private Diary

With whom do I communicate when I keep a private, my-eyes-only diary? That such communication has a genuine value no diarist will ever even think to question. The mysteries of the Self are partially revealed here. Writing the diary draws out (the root of “educate” is in that phrase) something already there; the act of writing presents it to view, and an aspect of the self, seeing that something, is always empowered, reassured, consoled, or enlightened in some way. This sort of thing tends to remind me of the odd conception we find in Sufism that life in this dimension is a kind of inversion. We think that we (the conscious I’s)—are the ones in charge. The notion—I’ve encountered this in C.G. Jung—that the conscious self is but a small island produced by a submerged continent—comes to mind too. Sometimes I have thoughts in sleep that absolutely flabbergast me on awakening. I can’t imagine myself able to think on that level; and, indeed, coming out, I can’t actually hold on to all of it. The obvious conclusion is that someone else is thinking those thoughts, that the new, the revealing, the intuition has its source in some other agency. A more challenging notion is that our conscious selves are a bounded and severely limited aspect of a more extensive Self of which we are aware, to be sure, but quite imperfectly. The conventional explanations of this feeling are undoubtedly flawed. But time will eventually cause a full awakening. This view fits some cosmological conceptions (of our origins, etc.) better than it fits others…

The Sufis

To anyone interested in discovering what the Sufis are all about, I recommend The Sufis, by Idries Shah. This is an authoritative introduction to the subject in depth which was written specifically for the Western public. It is available from Amazon.com here.

Innovative Products...in the Borderzone

Early astronomers developed not-quite-accurate cosmologies because they imagined that the cosmos would display perfection. That out there was God’s domain, after all. Planets therefore had perfectly circular orbits, no doubt about it, because the circle is the perfect form. Close, but no cigar. Creation has a peculiar characteristic; in my own private lingo I say that it is “naturalistic,” meaning that it escapes pure geometry while, at the same time, employing geometry—but as a servant. We find law and order out there, but we cannot quite exploit it. We always overlook some aspect of the situation that later comes to bite us. Humility, therefore, turns out to be a practical virtue. Be humble—or else.

One of our geometrical conceptions is that human life is a test. Be virtuous, die in a state of grace, and you go to heaven. Die in a state of mortal sin, and you go to hell. In the intermediate state—and we have experts who can precisely define which sins are venial and which are not—you undergo purgation and then are admitted to the state of bliss. You can also forearm yourself (or so it was once taught) by piling up indulgences. We might think of indulgences as liquid assets that could be turned into the currency of Purgatory to purchase shorter sentences. To be sure I am now describing a period of corruption in Christendom when innovative products, but of a spiritual kind, were introduced into the market and turned into ordinary cash.

We had a kind of financial revamping that swept all this away. It was called the Reformation. But our talent for simplification was not exactly rooted out. A new product came on the market under which faith without works was now the ticket to heaven. Yet other marvelous inventions surfaced. Among these was the belief that you were either saved or doomed even before your mother gave you birth. The art of salvation then became discerning from various tell-tale signs whether or not you belonged to the chosen or not. A fairly reliable indicator was thought to be whether or not you were well off.

But innovation did not end there. The most recent product is a kind of hedge-fund guaranteed to keep you hale provided only that you have the means to keep healthy until the last moment and, in the final days, well supplied with pain-killing drugs. This new product is called “You Only Go Round Once”; it’s also offered by the folk who bring us “Grab All the Gusto That You Can.” Both offer iron-clad guarantees that no claims will be made against your accounts after death because you will have disappeared.

Ah, yes. We’re a creative kind. But I shy from all of these products because observation tells me that reality is naturalistic, meaning that it's hard and lawful, to be sure, but with a strange twist that makes it ultimately unpredictable. It requires a much more comprehensive approach than these simple algorithms promise to deliver. You can’t purchase a winning ticket just by joining this or that group and acquiring all of its good habits. There is more to it than that. Knowledge alone is insufficient. We are not, repeat not, in control. To trust the Merrill Lynches of spirituality—trusting in their size, name, might—is not a sure guarantee of fat portfolios in heaven. Sometimes, indeed always, it is best to mind our own knitting. And a certain amount of holy dread is perfectly appropriate.

In Their Bones

The reason why the vast majority of people are religious, broadly speaking, is because they simply know, in their bones, that the superficially overwhelming physical world just does not exhaust the subject. They know it in their bones because—well, they act in accordance with this knowledge. At the most superficial level, they touch wood. This tells me that the rational is, as it were, an added or secondary layer. Deeper down we know better...

This came to mind last night when, serendipitously, as it were—in light of the post I logged on atheism earlier that day—we saw an X-Files special in the evening, titled I Want to Believe. This is a somewhat top-heavily Catholic sort of X-Files presentation in which the supernatural plays a heavy role. The film illustrates just how familiar and “right” a heavily “interventionist” view of God appears in Western fiction. Here the expression of this sense, the sense of something above, something beyond, is sharply focused by our cultural past and rendered as God. God is the only agency behind anything and everything beyond the ho-hum, sordid, and the dreary ordinary.

I got to thinking about that. All people, no matter where they are, have this innate sense of extradimensionality—not least that there are dynamics at work that directly touch us in many different and above all meaningful ways—no matter what name we give it. And in the trials and tribulations of ordinary existence—in the trenches, as it were, in the foxholes where no atheist are, as the saying has it—the elaborate conceptualization of this quite mysterious something is of no particular value. It operates at a level where concepts are not, but we still are. That level is wrongly referred to the physical, the lower. It may be the higher. When we’re really up against it and we cry to heaven for a little help—that’s when we are genuinely authentic. And so are we when, having lucked out again, we praise the Lord without even close to thinking about the artificial superstructures of conceptualization where all the problems, ultimately, surface.

Notes on Atheism

There are different ways in which people can couch their disbelief in the religious doctrines of the Hebraic family of religions. People can hold, as I do, that all humans are able to perceive a higher dimension; I usually call this the transcendental order; therefore I view claims of special divine revelation, channeled through individuals or larger aggregates (a chosen people), as an interpretation of personal experiences. Inevitably those who claim the revelation also claim to be pronouncing God’s will—not merely for themselves but others. This I view as “the problem of revelation.” You can find a series of posts on this subject here by clicking the term revelation under Categories. I view it as a problem because, inevitably, this sort of doctrine becomes oppressive when it gains sufficient power. To doubt the claims of those who would speak in the name of God is disbelief, but only from the viewpoint of the believer in the doctrine; disbelief of this kind isn’t necessarily atheism.

Another form of disbelief arises from sincere inability to perceive a transcendental order behind nature, world, and cosmos. This group divides into agnostics and atheists. Agnostics claim they just don’t know, one way or the other; but they leave either possibility open. Agnostics don’t actively push their views. Atheists are convinced that their inability to see the transcendental arises from the fact of its absence; they divide into ordinary atheists and into the militant kind. The latter act as missionaries of their system of faith; in this they are indistinguishable from others who proselytize for other systems that also lack all positive proof, thus proof that can be publicly demonstrated without need for subjective “faith.”

Early in my wanderings I’ve noted that atheism is a peculiarly western phenomenon. It is the Hebraic tradition that introduced the concept of revelation; its acceptance requires “faith”—thus assent in the absence of proof. It is in the philosophical schools of this tradition that proofs for the existence of God have flourished—and have also spawned their atheistic opponents. I’m unaware of any similar clustering of thought in the East. Why isn’t there an analogous movement in China, for instance, centered on showing that the Tao or Heaven do not exist? Here it might be worth mentioning that “Heaven,” in the Chinese conceptualization, is an unanalyzed but well-understood reference to an overweening transcendent sovereignty. We see this in the context, for instance, of a phrase like “the mandate of Heaven.” That such a saying is not merely a cynical equivalent to saying that “what happens happens” is shown by the fact that in Chinese classical literature Heaven’s mandate is withdrawn when the virtue of the ruler flags. Heaven is thus conceived of having a moral aspect. Similarly I note the conspicuous absence of analytical approaches in the writings about the Tao (“the Way”); the Tao Te Ching might be called a classical text on negative theology, thus the idea that anything you say about the Ultimate is wrong-headed even before you utter the words.

The only way I can explain this difference between the East and the West is by noting that, in the West, we have separated from the unanalyzable Ultimate a willful ruling spirit, a spirit that specifically directs humans, as such, to behave in certain ways. I could put this another way and say that we have projected into the unanalyzable Ultimate our own dogmatic dicta; we’ve divinized our own sense of the right; next we proceed to derive our own views, once more, but this time from on High, now as the all-powerful voice of God. And because it is from such a source, we claim for it much more than merely our conviction that right is right. No. It is more than that. The East has avoided this innovation and thus still holds a more reverential view of the divine. Atheism, therefore, at least certain sincere and serious forms of it, might therefore be viewed as a corrective.

Ordinary Like a Salamander

Herewith a brief dream snippet just before I woke up this morning. In that dream four people were engaged in an exchange, two on one side, two on the other. I was one of one of the pairs. It was a case of strangers meeting one another, indeed the dream suggested that the couple across from us was culturally different. My companion was a woman; and, perhaps to counter a sense of unease that she felt, she began explaining what kind of people we were. She went on for a while and she ended by saying, “We’re just ordinary people, very ordinary.” Hearing this I heard myself say, “Yes, very ordinary—ordinary like a salamander.”

On Corbin's Three Levels

One of the most interesting conceptualizations I’ve ever come across is Henry Corbin’s three-level world. He himself would hasten to deny that this projection is his. He would say that it is Persian and that it appears first in the Zoroastrian picture of the cosmos but is then later repeated, at a higher octave, in Shi’ite mysticism. All this is laid out in Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. The book begins this way. The first of several introductions is a presentation of the middle world, the mundus imaginalis.

The three worlds are those of matter, those of the imagination, and those of the intellect. In Corbin’s presentation the middle world is mediating. It mediates between the highest world (cherubic intelligences) and the lowest (the material). The imagination spiritualizes matter and makes intellect accessible through images. The world where this mediation takes place is the mundus imaginalis. This realm is found in the Qur’an [25:53] as the barzak; the barzak it is the separator between two seas, the salty, brackish—and the sweet.

Qur’anic images always resonate better in me than the abstract notions derived from one or another kind of scholasticism. Muhammed was a poet, that is why. Poets rank thinkers. Sorry, but they do. I like the notion of that spit of land separating the brackish from sweet. I’ve been unable to comprehend—genuinely inwardly—the possible attractions of a world of pure intelligence...perhaps because the intelligence means only abstraction to me, nothing  more, and in that I discover, in turn, nothing but a mechanism. But also—and this is really the same issue—I’ve always favored the projections of a Qur’anic heaven, cast in terms of sensual joys over those of the West. We can’t really imagine—I can’t anyway—any kind of heaven in which pure thought produces ecstasies. That might attract the mathematician but certainly not the poet.

To this I would add a couple more comments before I actually get into the core of my reaction. The first of these is that the Mazdaist tradition seems altogether to lack any kind of cherubic level of intellect, as such. Certainly never one expressed as such. I can’t find it—not in Corbin’s summaries presented in the referenced book nor elsewhere. What I do find is magnificent moutain-scapes and waterfalls and goddesses and splendid mansions hugging cliffs. What I find is a grand and uncompromising dualism. That’s preliminary comment one.

Preliminary comment two is that in Corbin’s exposition of the mundus imaginalis I never encounter any discussion of the highest world, the world of Intelligence. The middle world might mediate, but Corbin does not discuss, beyond mentioning and pointing to, the third world, the cherubic. And the reason for this, I suspect, is that the highest level is just a place-holder, is only present by way of completing a triad. It isn’t important for Corbin. His interest is in that second, median world. He is the prophet of the mundus imaginalis; he found it; he is bringing it to the West.

*   *   *

If we seek Corbin’s actual project, it is to establish the reality of the spiritual world. He conceived of our world as having retained two worlds, the physical and the intellectual, and to have abandoned the third. For the moment let’s not label it; but what he clearly had in mind was the spiritual. He pictured the modern world as active in understanding the material universe (by practicing science) and to have continued to maintain a world of thought (by practicing philosophy). But in this process meaning has been lost, the soul has been abandoned. Thus he sets out to rediscover Atlantis, as it were. And he does discovers it: it is the mundus imaginalis. He chooses the imagination as its active force and expression, contrasting it to intellect on the one hand and sensory perception on the other. This matches what he observes in modern life where, on the one hand, all of reality is based on measurable physical phenomena on the one hand and philosophy in its analytical forms has become a juggling with concepts, concerned therefore purely with language. (This, mind you, is an interpretation of Corbin, not what, in so many words, he expresses in precisely this way.) Imagination serves a very good purpose here. In modernity it is the fictitious, frivolous, and the fantastic. It is derived from matter in modern psychology and is also classed with the sensory in scholastic circles. Therefore, seeking an organ for the detection of the soul, he finds imagination, separates it from the physical, gives it rank and status, and raises it to a high rank, below the intellect but above the sensory. And, furthermore, being the organ for the detection of the immaterial, he also renders it immortal.

Terrific, I would say. Laudable. Corbin is right, of course. We have abandoned the spiritual—and, doing so, we’ve abandoned our essence. He projects a middle world to make room for the soul. But it is a middle world only because he ranks the intellect so high. In this he conforms to the traditions at least of the western world. We find this in ancient Greece already, worked to a very sharp point indeed in Plotinus. But, alas, for me, something doesn’t resonate. But what?

Let me try to give expression to this what. I find it hopelessly difficult to separate the functions of the self enough to make them genuinely free-standing realities. By this I mean intellect, feeling, willing, imagination, intuition, and perception. To me all of these things are ultimately and irreducibly one. I cannot separate any one of these forces one from the other even for a nanosecond and still retain a coherent sense of what a true agent, a conscious self, might be. Nor can I therefore reasonably give these powers a hierarchical arrangement—or conceive of reality as ordered by them in a tri-partite or any other arrangement. Schopenhauer, for instance, would deify the will, not the intellect. Same problem.

No. One cosmos, one order, a single integration. I don’t deny a hierarchical arrangement of reality. Something about that concepts everything within me finds almost self-evident. But the way I feel it, think it, intuit and imagine it, the cosmos presents itself at its very highest level just as it does at its very lowest. You might say that up there, in the cherubic realm, the cherubs have delights and joys, and insights, and see wondrous images as, down here, we do as well. It’s all in the degree. No facet of the cosmic diamond predominates anywhere—or is absent even in the deepest chasm of reality.

*   *   *

Henry Corbin’s thought delighted me from the moment I encountered it years ago in a volume titled Swedenborg an Esoteric Islam. And he continues to delight me. I’m not criticizing, here, far from it. I’m engaged in sorting my thoughts about his very up-to-date and very helpful contributions to a new age that is in process of birth.

Concerning Techniques

All of us who become aware of a complex universe—personally, actually aware, not merely repeating learned beliefs without genuine personal effort to understand—then experience the dilemma of a split. The ranges of reality not readily accessible to the senses become real; but our attention is pulled into the world. To detach is difficult, to detach effectively almost impossible. Nor does it always seem appropriate: we have responsibilities, and not merely for those things immediately before us. We are embedded in the society as a whole. We form links in myriad networks. As members of families we have loved ones we care about, and these networks grow enormously as we age. And beyond our families are others, ranging from those who are, for all intents and purposes, powerfully related to us, sometimes closer than relatives. We have friends, neighbors. And although the feelings diminish with distance and numbers, the welfare of humanity as a whole is our concern. We are our brother’s keeper. This makes it problematical to leave the world go hang—even if we had the wealth or dared to live in genuine poverty such that we could entirely look away. We’re in the world, like it or not. And out attachment follows our attention; nor is attention a kind of neutral sort of power; it produces identification. And thus we tend to become the prisoners of our own concerns.

Interesting techniques have come down to us over time, developed by the gifted—or the stubborn. They range from periodic, but daily, detachment and remembering—prayer and meditation. But my experience is that all things repeated decay into habit. Whatever becomes routine loses its force. Therefore it’s good to develop an arsenal of techniques so that when the morning’s meditation begins to lose its power—and an hour after meditating, driving to work, we find ourselves literally or internally shouting obscenities at some driver who’s cut in front of us—then it’s time to pick up something else, wipe it clean, begin to use it again, until its potency is weakened too. Then something else.

One technique I’d heard about—and used—is to split the attention, thus to attempt, at all times, to be aware. This is sometimes rendered as “remembering the self.” This one comes from Sufi sources. A Christian variant is the Jesus Prayer, repeated constantly. It has its counterpart in the Hindu mantra and in the repetition of the names of God in Muslim culture. “Self-remembering” is a secular version of these. This technique is powerful when you first attempt it—but the problem is that you have to remember to remember; and by the time you’ve trained yourself to do so, the technique may have lost its effectiveness. But at times like that there is always something else worth trying.

One time I had the notion that it might be useful to use my own habits as a reminder. Most of us wear watches, and most on the left wrist. But the right side is available. So I switched my watch to the right side. For a while this worked quite nicely. The absence of the watch reminded me. It broke the spell of identification. And that is the value of such techniques—to serve as reminders.

It’s also useful, sometimes, to be reminded—which a blog entry like this can do. Hence it serves a purpose. But victory in this realm—indeed in this dimension—is never due to any kind of technique. If it were, we’d all be walking on water.

And this, then, managed to get me past the furies that this morning’s paper managed to produce in me. But something reminded me—in effect it was Brigitte’s recent teaching me how to tie my shoelaces so that they’ll lie across my shoe, rather than pointing at its tip—reminded me that I mustn’t indulge but get past all that. It’s a big universe, out there, and in the end, all is well.

Theorizing: Awakening from Physical Sleep

In a recent post I’ve speculated about entering the sleep state. There I theorized that as we leave the body behind, as our body quiets down, indeed as higher ranges of mentation shut down, we enter a more subtle world. Today I want to look at the reverse of that, the process of awakening. Here analysis is more difficult because, I think, awakening has multiple and diverse forms. Quite arbitrarily I’ll suggest three broad categories of awakening—not in the least implying that these exhaust the range.

1. Our brain awakens. This means that mental processes, consciousness, resumes. We start to mull things, but more or less passively, thus in the same manner as we might when setting off on a drive to the store. Idle thoughts, immediate concerns or memories, are freely associating. As in the dream state so in idle waking states, this isn’t really thinking; it is the stream of consciousness. As awakening approaches, the stream resumes its flow. Depending on the situation, we may experience this sort of mulling as a story or sorts, meaning that images are present; or, alternatively, images may be at best peripheral; in that latter case the thoughts have a conceptual framing; they’re words colored by feelings, but the abstract qualities are to the front—as indeed they always are in the waking state.

2. External events draw our attention. This may take the form of an abrupt awakening, thus as when we hear a sharp noise, fall out of bed, or someone shakes us awake. The stimulus for awakening is some event, in other words. The brain may first show us the stimulus in a picture story. Thus a loud knocking noise produced by the wind banging a shutter may be represented by a scene of some man hammering. This combination of external stimulus and its internal dream depiction is sometimes explained as the brain’s attempt to resist awakening. The parsimonious explanation is simply that dream-thought is symbolical and uses images, and before we wake up to hear the banging, we think of it (and see it) as hammering. We tend to see living agents as responsible for stimuli—rather than inanimate phenomena like the wind.

3. Our body awakens and we reenter it. This third case is much more speculative than the other two and is the point of my focus today. In my case it takes the form of a meandering journey—always through a vast city or a great hospital. Perhaps I ought to reverse this exposition and say that I frequently awaken in the morning after convoluted dreams which are journeys (through a city, hospital), and I interpret these as reentering the body. Let me get into this third case in more detail.

Such dreams have a uniform structure but an endless variation of detail. I’m always underway and trying to get somewhere. That somewhere is always “home,” but there isn’t anything like a realistic picture of my actual house in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, inside my dream thoughts. The journey isn’t realistic in that sense at all. In those cases where I’m in a building—and invariably it is a huge one and I interpret it to be a hospital—I’m trying to find somebody in the hospital, but this person has no identity. Other elements of the structure are: (1) crowds of people with members of which I interact; (2) a frustration because I have a sense of the direction I’m supposed to follow, but nonetheless I still don’t know the way; and (3) as the dream’s end approaches (but I’m unaware that the end is coming), the crowds get ever more dense, the route I’m following narrows. Finally I find myself facing a claustrophobically tight opening I’m supposed to go through. Invariably I refuse to go forward. And in that moment I wake up.

I used to interpret that claustrophobic “closing in” as due to loss of breath in snoring; and, indeed, that might be the best explanation. But in paying close heed to such dreams over the last year or so, I’ve noticed that I wake up feeling perfectly fine on awakening, not out of breath at all. This has led me to theorize, and that’s all that it can be, of course, that reentering the body, which from a spirit perspective would appear as a vast city or building as I approach it, means a narrowing, a confinement, the loss of a much greater freedom that, until reentry, I enjoyed in the spirit realm.

This reminds me of Carl G. Jung’s account of his near death experience in the wake of a heart attack, related in his autobiography, written with the help of Aniela Jaffé (Memories, Dreams, Reflections). In that account, compelled to return to “life,” Jung recounts bitter feelings about being forced to return to the confining world of “boxes.” As in my earlier post (here) I spoke of the stunning vistas of magical landscapes that open as we fall asleep—but conscious enough to remember the “opening”—so we may also find a panicky resistance to reentry. Paradoxically, awakening from such a dream, it is a relief to have escaped the dilemma. But the truth may be that we actually suffer the confinement that we thought we had escaped.

Posts of this kind may appear to be excessively subjective. To this I would respond that in the “sciences” of the Borderzone, such accounts as this one serve as data. The responsibility is to render the experience as accurately as possible, not least its interpretation, which is an important element. This sort of thing may actually have public value and has nothing to do with me as such.

The Image of a Blast Furnace

Brigitte made me aware of an article Common Dreams.org reproduced from TruthDig.com by Chris Hedges entitled “After Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck with Nietzsche.” I read the article (it’s here) and then sampled some of the 260-plus comments (and counting) that this article produced. Cultural change is a subject I mostly deal with on Ghulf Genes, but I thought I’d record some reactions to this phenomenon here. It’s my conviction that we are slowly leaving the materialistic culture behind us; I date this trend from the early nineteenth century; I think it’s real and, in way, counter-intuitive, indeed barely credible. That is because cultural change is vast and slow. You barely see the new because the all highly visible aspects of culture stem from the last four hundred years or so and overwhelm the new. Occasionally good eyes can glimpse the upwelling of change; Brigitte saw this in Hedges' article and, more to the point, in the rather large reaction to it. There is a great passion and energy here, and also what strikes me as a great mixing of relevant and irrelevant matters.

This bit of public speech—some would call it a “conversation”—reminds me of the seemingly equally chaotic processes that take place inside a blast furnace. There ore is mixed with limestone flux and coke to produce pig iron. At this stage in our culture, we’re still in the early stages of smelting the raw materials from which the bright sword of a new order will be forged. The other stages still lie ahead—and will require much more heat and sophistication: the Bessemer furnace to make steel of the iron, further refinement of the steel, let’s call it the making of stainless. And it is with this very advanced material that the Japanese samurai sword-maker will set to work, beating the steel, bending it, reheating it, hammering it again—and many times over—in ever more careful processes of hardening, and sharpening. And at last a new culture will be formed.

However mixed and chaotic the current discussion is—and in circles that, thirty, forty years ago would not have been interested at all—it is good to see that the process has begun and that it’s drawing people who actually participate. At each stage the passion will be transformed into knowledge, the turbulence into concentration. And thus society will be transformed. A great deal of the heat and energy required for this process will come, alas, from the breakdown of the current order. Fortunately chaos hides order within it (we know this from chaos theory). I assert this of the big collective out there; that's what the exchange I cite represents, a public phenomenon. What happens at the individual level is something quite different; sometimes it is influenced by, but often it is entirely independent of, these cultural transformations. The old order has not died everywhere. The nutrients have always been there, even if hidden beneath vast layers of sediment.

A SciFi Inversion

Let us play a game, a game of the imagination. Let’s take the notion of eternal Platonic forms. These forms, supposedly, subsist in some difficult-to-place hyper-realm. But let’s take that situation beyond its usual abstract description. Let’s assume that those eternal forms are not merely vaguely unreal patterns, patterns that objects on our plane consult, look up, as it were—as in a How-To manual—to figure out how they’re supposed to manifest themselves. Let’s invert our usual scenario. Our usual scenario assume that all the stuff we see around us is genuinely real. Hey, we can touch and feel things, smell the rose, and kick the bucket. Similarly we assume that heavenly things and angels and such are airy-fairy unreal products of our imagination. But suppose that things are really the other way around?

Suppose that genuine reality is actually up there. Suppose—and it’s just a game after all—that everything around us is just a kind of approximation, a kind of imitation, a kind of reconstruction, using inferior local materials, of something much more genuinely substantial up above.

Let me offer a backstory for this, as they say in Hollywood. In that story the Powers that Be decide to establish a new school intended, of course, for developmental purposes, a kind of Outward Bound—call it a wilderness experience. The P-that-B decided that elements of the population would benefit from difficult experiences not available back home. Fortunately the Cosmos has a vast sort of Out Back, a naturally harsh environment. It is a realm where the usual laws are much more rigid, where the innate gifts of those who go will be challenged, honed, drawn out and greatly intensified. The Powers select a likely site for this school, difficult but not too awesome, well-stocked with necessary raw materials in already useful forms. They then open up the program for participation. Now it so happens that up there things work entirely by choice. It’s a superior world, after all. Therefore all those drawn to experience the strange and the challenging are welcome. The motives of the volunteers are not examined. The Powers know what they’re doing. Some volunteers are drawn by a thirst for perfection, some by dissatisfactions, boredom; some by rebellion; some, indeed, by altogether negative motives—but never mind. Come all who wish. Volunteers, of course, must read and sign appropriate disclosure forms. These do not in any way hide the harsh reality that lies ahead. The form clearly states that you’ll be on your own, that you can’t take anything with you, that things are much, much more demanding than anything back home. The rewards are great, but they’re not guaranteed. As volunteers sign they are dispatched into a realm that, as they enter it, produces the shock and awe of utter darkness, disorientation, turbulence, and void.

Now of course (as the Powers are well aware) the talents of those dispatched are almost limitless. These are the best and the worst the home world can produce, but they are all equally gifted. Beyond the choice of place, the P-that-B need to do nothing more. Let those who go make the kind of world they wish to form. Everything needed is already in place—the material resources, ample energies, and strict laws to keep things organized. The world down there appears awesome, frightening—appears as if it might annihilate those who arrive—but the Powers know that people are indestructible, different in kind from lower realm of the Out Back. The darkness and confusion, producing a sense of danger, are all part of the experience. It is precisely that experience, the experience of helplessness, of danger, of the contingent nature of reality which is intended to challenge the students. This feeling of limitation and stress, of danger and mortality, of good and evil—all that is absent in the higher realm and therefore inhibits development back home to a higher state.

Now the students, caught in the maelstrom of materiality, set about to adapt, somehow, to the forbidding demands of the Out Back. Amazingly—or quite predictably—they begin transforming that world, the spot picked for the school—so that it begins to resemble the realm where they originated. They reproduce it now—or, rather, they produce the best possible imitation of it. The matter is of a much coarser grain, much more resistant to formation. They begin to form a kind of chemical civilization first. They are greatly limited by the occultation that their descent occasions. They’re cut off from their memories except the thinnest of threads of recall that continue to link them back to the home world, but their innate powers and the cosmic laws conspire to produce the world below that they knew up above—but with limitations that they cannot overcome because this realm is coarse and that one had been subtle.

In due course—but time, as such, is not a limitation to immortal beings living—if only they were able to remember—in eternity. In due course, therefore, they advance the structures that they initially build. We call that process Evolution. Eventually they gain again something quite close to the state that they had once enjoyed. Once more they experience themselves as free agents with choice and full awareness. Meanwhile they continue to live in an environment that continues to be populated and maintained by yet more vast numbers of new volunteers still struggling to realize themselves in this new and much harsher environment. Those populations we would call the biosphere—the bacteria, the plants, the animal kingdoms.

In due time of course—in what may seem like eternities of time, but only in the lower realm—the time arrives for them to attempt a return. But it’s not easy to escape. The death of an inhabited body doesn’t automatically guarantee it. Only those who’ve learned the intended lesson manage to so. But when at last they do once more return to the shores they left a long, long time ago, and, arriving, realize the nature of their great adventure, they find themselves both humbled and at the same time deeply grateful. They’re richer now—richer by life on earth. They’ve learned something about their own limitations, something about the one and the many, something about good and evil, and the ultimate value of love. Arriving back again, thankful to the Powers that Be for affording them this grand experience, they discover, but with due humility and a sense of new responsibility, that now they, too, belong to the Powers where, joining that community, they know that new tasks await.

There you are…. The SciFi Inversion, to be sure, is just a modern version of something ancient, the old Song of the Pearl—on which you’ll also find some posts on Borderzone. Does it have any relevance to our life today? It might.

So What Is The Aim Again?

The aim is to awaken, not to achieve this or that mood. Back in my active days effort lay ahead on workdays; there it was when I woke up: the commute, the chores left behind the night before. Reality’s pressure forced me to clean up my act at intervals. The mental contents of awakening were quite often tinged with anxiety. I could never contemplate the future with equanimity. Functionally this situation reminds me of certain Zen masters who slapped aspirants at random times. This produced a pervasive anxiety in their charges—that feeling of always expecting something bad to happen. I’ve managed to make my living in such a way that the Zen master was always somewhere behind me or on my blind side. The presence of anxiety will produce alertness of the mind, and alertness is a precondition for hearing the higher dimension.

Hello paradox. The object of life is supposed to be happiness. Now we imagine that state to be a kind of stress-free, childlike bliss—not as a high, sovereign alertness that ignores even while it deals with all the shit that happens all the time. Initially we cultivate that sovereign alertness (I’m speaking for myself) because it is a coping mechanism, not because it makes us happy. It makes us competent. I came to the spiritual life by way of the turbulence of action. Unless you’re blessed with a high state of insensitivity—a really thick skin, a really hearty temperament--the high-energy turbulence of modern life will produce anxiety.

I will describe the conditions in which contemplative musings about happiness—in this life—might seem appropriate. Endeavor to be born into a very well-off family—at that stage of its existence when its wealth is wide and deep, when the family is well embedded in the upper class, and in a time when neither revolution from the bottom, nor a greedy ruler from the top, nor war from the side threatens to unravel this temporary social nest. Oh, yes. Make sure that you are male, first born, and in good health. Finally, take an interest in philosophical matters and think in abstract categories drawn solely from your personal experience. And even under these circumstances, it really is best if you’re not a very sensitive, intelligent, or a poetic soul.

Siddhārtha Gautama, the man later known as the Buddha, had all of the above qualifications except the last. And that last was his undoing. He discovered how other people lived, and that opened his eyes. Goodbye happiness. Despite the presence of all those things most people would consider happy-making, he was miserable and set out on his epic journey of liberation from the wheel of karma.

The case of the Buddha is the case, ultimately, of most people except the genuinely blind. It’s very striking that in every culture a shadow falls upon this dimension, no matter how beautiful it is in sunshine and shade, in mountain and valley, by brilliant starlight, on the shores of the vast ocean. At a functional level all descriptions are equivalent: the Gnostic view that a low god, who holds us captive, made this world; the Christian view of the fall and of original sin; the Eastern view of the karmic wheel. The various solutions also have a uniform shape. Knowledge, gnosis, liberates. So does enlightenment. And salvation, death in a state of grace, also represents an escape from the valley of the shadow of death.

In practice—in the everyday life—this means coming and staying awake. The framing of the story may be different one culture to the other, but the meaning is the same. Alertness, awakeness, and oil in the lamp—so that when the bridegroom comes, the lamp may be lit: wonderful stories full of incisive advice. If we manage to awaken and meet the moment of transition well prepared, then we shall have achieved the real object of this life, which is liberation. And let’s be practical. Such action improves life one moment to the next as well. It’s also competence, not some kind of “piety.” Or, to underline the point, those two states of the self are equivalent—however different the sound. In the end, after a life lived competently terminates, seeking happiness will still not be an aim. At that point it will simply be our natural state.