The Contemplative Life: Another Look

As I plow deeper into my seventies, it’s becoming ever more obvious that physical activities and preoccupations are at best utilitarian…that a triumph here and there is also meaningless, thus activities in time seem to be empty too. But here a paradox arises. I feel this viscerally—and that word refers to the physical, doesn’t it?

The shocking thing for me is that I now think of the contemplative life in a physical way, thus as authentic, real, and hard. A few decades back the idea of contemplation always struck me either as airy-fairy, passive, or a kind of pointless hedonism.

We do, don’t we, think of the real as physical, tangible. But let me try to sort that out. Let me use an abstract designator. Whatever appears real to us, we label X. We learn this association in our youth, when the physical is compelling, therefore the physical is X; but in advancing times, another aspect of our experience emerges much more dominantly; and to express its reality, we reach for a familiar label. The real is the real, but at different times, based on different experiences, we associate it with a different aspect of reality.

Now I’m prepared to define the contemplative life as the activity of the spirit when it is unconstrained. It is everything left over after we have set aside the things we do in order to survive. It has a passive as well as an active component, and creativity is its most obvious active element. Let me put things into bins.

Reading or writing books, creating or enjoying art, thinking and conversing, music, community and dialogue, praise and worship, expressing joy and revulsion, science and discovery, poetry and philosophy—and also, curiously, certain forms of exercise and sport, gardening, and free “making” of things for their own sake—we do none of these things “in order to survive.”

To survival belongs showering, putting on socks, eating, and so forth. Also administration, making order, buying and selling, and social acts done to compel or because we are compelled. Here I’d put all forms of pressure and persuasion, all production, and all other common economic activities.

Needless to say, in this realm the material is intrinsically braided into the immaterial so that even the free action of the spirit always has a physical component. Thus I feel inclined to create a third bin yet. There I would put useful work done in full spiritual presence. The greatest periods of joy for me are linked to work—not least money-making work—when I managed to do that work with sufficient concentration so that, paradoxically, I was detached from its survival aspects and doing it purely pro bono.

Isis

Today a tribute to Isis, one of the most ancient goddesses arising from an early civilization, the Egyptian. Isis is the wife of Osiris, the god of the underworld or, in the context of this blog, the realm beyond the Borderzone. Osiris is first captured in an artfully-made mummy case by his brother, Seth, the god of chaos. Afterwards Seth destroys the mummy and scatters its pieces—but Isis finds them and resurrects her husband once again. In this image of Isis—as in most others—she is shown wearing a strange headgear; it is supposed to be the throne of Osiris. The two texts that follow are taken from Plutarch’s Isis and Orisis accessible here. By Plutarch’s time the cult of Isis had spread widely into the Graeco Roman realm.

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And the shrine of Minerva at Sais (whom they consider the same with Isis) bears this inscription, “I am all that hath been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal has hitherto raised.”

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On this account a desire for religious knowledge is an aiming at Truth, particularly that relating to the gods—a pursuit containing both in the acquisition and in the search a reception, as it were, of things sacred—an occupation more pious than any observation of abstinence, or religious service: but particularly well-pleasing to this goddess who is the special object of thy devotion; for she is both wise, and a lover of wisdom; as her name appears to denote that, more than any other, knowing and knowledge belong to her. For “Isis” is a Greek word, and so is “Typhon,” her enemy, for he is “puffed up” by want of knowledge and falsehood, and tears to pieces, and puts out of sight, the sacred word which the goddess again gathers up and puts together, and gives into the charge of those initiated into the religion; whilst by means of a perpetually sober life, by abstinence from many kinds of food and from venery, she checks intemperance and love of pleasure, accustoming people to endure her service with bowels not enervated by luxury, but hardy and vigorous; the object of all which is the knowledge of the First, the Supreme, and the Intelligible; whom the goddess exhorts you to seek after, for he is both by her side, and united with her. The very name of her Temple clearly promises both the communication and the understanding of That which is—for it is called the “Ision,” [“The entering-place,” as if derived from the Greek.] inasmuch as That which is shall be known if we enter with intelligence and piously into the sacred rites of the goddess.

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The descriptions that follow here are from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, as translated by Robert Graves. In that earliest of known novels the hero of the tale has a vision of the goddess whose cult he later joins. Apuleius died in 180 A.D., suggesting that the cult was still alive in Christian times.

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     Not long afterwards I awoke in sudden terror. A dazzling full moon was rising from the sea. It is at this secret hour that the Moon-goddess, sole sovereign of mankind, is possessed of her greatest power and majesty. She is the shining deity by whose divine influence not only all beasts, wild and tame, but all inanimate things as well, are invigorated; whose ebbs and flows control the rhythm of all bodies whatsoever, whether in the air, on earth, or below the sea….
     I had scarcely closed my eyes before the apparition of a woman began to rise from the middle of the sea with so lovely a face that the gods themselves would have fallen down in adoration of it. First the head, then the whole shining body gradually emerged and stood before me poised on the surface of the waves…
     Her long thick hair fell in tapering ringlets on her lovely neck, and was crowned with an intricate chaplet in which was woven every kind of flower. Just above her brow shone a round disc, like a mirror, or like the bright face of the moon, which told me who she was. Vipers rising from the left-hand and right-hand partings of her hair supported this disk, with ears of corn bristling beside them… But what caught and held my eye more than anything else was the deep black luster of her mantle. She wore it slung across her body from the right hip to the left shoulder, where it was caught in a knot resembling the boss of a shield; but part of it hung in innumerable folds, the tasselled fringe quivering. It was embroidered with glittering stars on the hem and everywhere else, and in the middle beamed a full and fiery moon.
     In her right hand she held a bronze rattle, of the sort used to frighten away the God of the Sirocco; its narrow rim was curved like a sword-belt and three little rods, which sang shrilly when she shook the handle, passed horizontally through it. A boat-shaped gold dish hung from her left hand, and along the upper surface of the handle writhed an asp with puffed throat and head raised ready to strike. On her divine feet were slippers of palm leaves, the emblem of victory.

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The image shown is from Wikipedia, here, created by Jeff Dahl; other Egyptian god-images created by Dahl are accessible here.

Re-Reading Life After Life

Reading again Raymond A. Moody’s Life After Life, I was struck, this time, by the quotations from near death experience (NDE) reports concerning the functioning of the spirit or self, particularly its modes of self-perception, communications, and “senses,” thus hearing and seeing. The quotations that deal with time perception or extra-dimensionality also struck me as new—but it has been several years since I’ve last read this book with the requisite concentration it deserves. The book tends to produce a certain amount of trance—the page-turning kind—in part because it was written for the widest possible audience, because the quotations from NDE reports follow each other rapidly, and because the commentary is minimal in order to be maximally accessible.

Moody is generally ignored (so far as I can tell) by the learned—with one notable and, for me, significant exception. Henry Corbin devotes a paragraph to the book in his Prelude to the second edition of Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. Here is part of that paragraph:

All the more significant then has been the welcome given to a recent study which treats the “life after life” and presents the manifold testimonies of their actual experiences by people who, even though they had not crossed it never to return, had none the less really found themselves on the “threshold,” for their death had already been clinically confirmed. [Here Corbin footnotes Moody’s book.] There is no reason to be surprised that such a book should meet with a moving approval from some, testifying to a nostalgia which nothing has ever succeeded in snuffing out in the human heart. Equally there is no reason for surprise if the same book has been received with scepticism. Certainly, many traditional texts were quoted in connection with the testimonies reported in this book. But how many people knew them? In fact, some of these testimonies cannot be entertained let alone understood except on the condition of having at one’s immediate disposal an ontology of the mundus imaginalis and a metaphysic of the active Imagination as an organ inherent in the soul and regulated in its own right to the world of “subtle corporeity.”

Next to this paragraph I wrote in the margin, in amazement, “My God, I can hardly believe it!!” — Yes, but such are the consequences of writing for the general public rather than staying on the reservation.

Regarding Corbin’s references to imagination, I cannot deal with that in this post beyond saying that he saw the imagination not as an extension of humanity's sensory faculties but as a unique spiritual power, which he, following Paracelsus, called the true imagination rather than the ordinary fancy. Other entries on this blog under Corbin will provide the necessary context.

Reading Moody this time, what Corbin here labels “subtle corporeity” came sharply into focus, namely that selves “see” and “hear” with great acuity but cannot touch or grasp anything material, including living bodies. The hearing does not depend on air vibrations but seems due to thought perception; seeing is odd as well. Perception of the body varies; many perceive themselves as energetic structures, but experience these structures as somewhat extendable and with certain polarities, like up and down; others perceive actual bodies. While focused on this dimension people seem able to extend their attention out great distances and see, at those distances, from up close—while yet retaining a sense of having stayed in place. Reports of what selves see on that side of the Borderzone are complicated by the fact that the experiencers find themselves in an environment with more than three dimensions and a different experience of time. It takes them far less time to experience a great deal, interpreted as a more rapidly flowing time; experiences, like life reviews, while very detailed yet take no time at all. They struggle in expressing the experience in ordinary language the concepts of which are narrowly adapted to a three-dimensional existence and our kind of time.

I got to thinking how unfortunate it is that we are so tribal and clannish in all things, not least in the various arts and sciences. Moody is not viewed as providing extremely valuable data for serious examination for the simple reason that he preferred the more benign and welcoming attention of the general public to the hostile skepticism of those who claim a calling to study how reality works.

Finding or Creating?

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. George Bernard Shaw.

This motto is featured for September on the calendar that hangs in our bathroom—and we do have to go, therefore I expect to read this for a few more days yet.

So what’s my take on this? I disagree—and yet I don’t. In my youth GBS—as we affectionately called this famed playwright, an Irishman who made his fame in England—was still riding high for such creations as Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Man and Superman, and many other delightful plays. What survives of him these days is mostly that wondrous film, My Fair Lady, which is the play Pygmalion remade as a musical and filmed. Alas, they changed the ending—but that, folks, is Hollywood. In the 1950s, when I was cutting my teeth as it were, the progressive, ironic, socialist spirit GBS represented still powerfully influenced the young. And, I must say, still lingers on—else my calendar’s publishers would not have used this slogan to, as it were, make my September.

But I disagree. The notion is flattering and resonates with the ethos of the time. It also resonates with youth. With age we tend to, I believe, turn the slogan around. We’re lucky if we manage to emerge from the darkness and the chaos and discover the core of ourselves, which is there all along, created by someone else. Life much more resembles education than creation. The roots of education are “to draw or to lead out,” from dux, the leader or commander, and ex-, out. Something is present—but it must be freed from its shrouding and made visible, made to emerge.

And yet I don’t. I don’t if I closely examine what “creation” really means in the human context. It is definitely not “bringing into existence” something that is not and never has been. Human creation is a kind of discovery, a kind of finding and arranging what is already present. At best we discover a hidden treasure. But we didn’t make it.

Permanence

An urge to contradict the flux of time is present in the soul. Monuments are outward expressions of this innate tendency. So is recording things. In effect it seems to be a marker of consciousness itself. Our sense of time is meaningless without our intuitive perception of genuine permanence. We can’t actually observe it in nature, but we feel it in ourselves as a permanent self. That self sometimes, rarely, becomes sharply distinguished from the flux of thought, and as we recall moments like that from childhood, we are aware that nothing has changed, not in that feeling, and this despite the flow of decades in between.

I clearly, sharply remember one of these moments as a child of seven in my grandmother’s back yard when, all alone and sure of it, I tried to imitate the fiery oration of a newly minted Nyilas (read Nazi) prime minister of Hungary—and in the process suddenly became equally sharply self-aware and stopped. I’d no idea what a Nazi was, by the way; I was just imitating the fervor I’d heard on the radio. That moment of solitary self-awareness left a very deep impression. I was suddenly present, somehow; and at that time I also remembered yet another such occasion when I had been four. And this, the permanent self, after that, became my odd point of permanence in light of which I’ve always tried to live. Not consciously, mind. The consciousness of this linkage developed as I grew wiser. But now I know that this permanence, this moment, is the fixed point from which anything and everything can be viewed with timeless equanimity.

Many people are dizzied, troubled by the concept of eternity, when trying to think about it. The reason for this, I assume, is that they think of it under the rubric of time, thus of change or motion—rather than the very opposite of change, namely permanence. And permanence is in another order, another dimension. Such permanence, if we are lucky, is always present in us if we but stop. That we can stop and experience it tells us that we’re strangers here.

Transcendence

Although it is a favorite word of mine, transcendence has its problematical aspects. It suggests a radical difference between two regions of reality when, in truth, the difference may simply be due to ignorance, thus to the limits of our innate perception.

This thought occurs to me—can occur—because I am a child of the twentieth century. In that time we’ve expanded our perceptions most notably into the virtually invisible regions of the electromagnetic, indeed we’ve managed to exploit the powers of that dimension effectively enough to give us a system of communications unthinkable in former times. We’ve also expanded our view into the extremely small so that we speak of the physicist’s view of the metal table—which becomes a network mostly of voids—and we have successfully released the force hidden in the core of the atom to stage the miracles of Hiroshima, Nagasaki.

Now it is a simple fact that familiarity will breed contempt, thus whatever we manage to understand—never mind control, exploit—loses is aura of mystery, leaves the transcendent realm and becomes just ordinary physics and ho-hum chemistry. Conversely, those who are committed to the notion that radical transcendence is genuinely real would here chide me for suggesting that electromagnetism be labeled transcendent in any sense at all. But why not? Merely because we’re able to control it? We’re able to control it only because we obey the laws that rule it, and then with great effort and skill. And neglecting precaution, we’ll be electrocuted.

The trend of my own thought these days is to see reality as seamless. To be sure, it depends on the day of the week: it’s difficult to shed old habits of interpretation. In this process I’ve retained my strong sense of dualism, but apply it across the board. Body and soul, yes. But I’d frame that more abstractly as a passive and an active principle, always everywhere interacting and everywhere constrained by law, thus by an Ultimate from which reality springs.

By passive I mean matter—but not necessarily only matter as we know it. It is governed by physical laws—but I’d speculate that we’re only seeing a range of those laws’ applicability; in other ranges they may be more forgiving to the action of minds than at this level. By active principle I mean agencies, minds. They are free but governed by moral law; call it karma. Being always associated with the passive principle, agencies are also governed by limitations placed on “matter”.

It’s a Tuesday so I’ll illustrate this more. On days like this it seems to me that these two principles are just as present at the subatomic level as anywhere else. There is the particle and its guiding wave—proposed to explain the paradoxes of the two-slit experiments in physics. There is a guiding intelligence within the living cell where chemical civilization builds its astonishing structures. It’s there in us as soul. And angels too have bodies of some subtle kind and thus are not, using an ancient hierarchical schema, “pure” intelligences. And we’ll experience the familiar passive principle in a more rarified form after we die and cross the border into another range of perception. But no, I won’t drop the word “transcendence” just yet. It’s an old, old friend. And I know what I mean when I use it.

The Two Projections

Concerning the reality we shall experience after we die, humanity has two predominant projections. It seems to me that both are based on actual experiences of individuals later further elaborated by speculators who haven’t been there. I call the first ecstatic, the other communitarian. Both appear in variant cultural frames. In the Buddhist tradition nirvana is a kind of pure bliss about which I can’t find any elaboration; in the west it is union with God or the beatific vision. Both appear to me to be passive states; but those who hold this view (or have experienced it) deny that. They report a union, an identity, a fullness, a completeness, an unlimited power, an all encompassing knowledge. For a detailed rendition of such an experience I’d point to that of Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s given in Pathways Through to Space. This work has an eastern, Hindu flavor; its merit is that it comes from a modern twentieth century American who’s trying to communicate it in a framework accessible to us. Anyone genuinely interested in the matters discussed in Borderzone will get something valuable out of reading that book. The iconic and briefest summary is Meister Eckhart’s famous line: “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” The same sort of unitary experience is reported of Plotinus and is found in Islamic mysticism too. I cannot help but think that experiences of this type—very powerful that they are—have shaped humanity’s theologies in major ways. It seems to me that Plotinus’ own unitive experience must have been the basis of his cosmic conceptualization of the One. And ideas like omnipotence and omniscience are mirrored in the experiences of ecstatics—Merrell-Wolff’s for instance or those of Mansur Al-Hallaj, the Persian-Muslim mystic martyred for proclaiming “I am the Truth,” and “There is nothing in my cloak but God.”

I’ve had a minor but potent youthful experience of this type myself (reported here). That should have made me lean in this directions, but, instead, I’ve come to think of it as a valuable inoculation against this view of reality. In all reports of this type of experience I recognize my own—and I’m grateful for the experience because I have a personal basis for evaluating others’. Mine took place spontaneously rather than in the context of passionate struggling, questing, and willful attempts at realizing the transcending—as is usually the case. Thus I see the phenomenon of ecstasy as perhaps caused by a certain state of concentration which releases energies we only experience very, very filtered in ordinary life. And it is an experience of energy rather than of transcending will or intelligence; the cognitive or willful aspects of that experience come from our own consciousness not from that which temporarily envelops us. For these reasons, over a lifetime, I’ve been much more inclined toward the other major human projection of the Beyond.

That projection envisions communities of vast size and diversity in immaterial or “other-material” spaces somewhere invisible to us from here. The simplest expression of this projection might be the “Happy Hunting Grounds” said to have been the destination of some Indian tribes. (With hundreds of real tribes, every human ideology has been presented in Indian lore, not least straight-forward materialism.) The most elaborate such projection I know of is Swedenborg’s, divided into three realms: a lower hellish, a middling spiritual transitional world, and an upper heavenly. Swedenborg’s has a biblical flavor, but missing is the redemptive role of Jesus of Nazareth. People have read similar structures into the Koran. This view also has a strong basis in Near Death Experience reports which picture the earliest moments of entering such communities. Heaven and hell are also part of the Christian world conception—suggesting that it makes room for both, a unitive beatific vision and a “life” in heaven or hell. One is for the upper, let us say, and the other for the less educated classes. And in Buddhism, of course, we also find, perhaps also just for the lower classes, all manner of splendid heavens and dreadful hells, usually numbered seven, a number humanity genuinely likes.

To be sure, the unitive/ecstatic projection is much simpler, tempting the intellectual mind to reach for Ockham’s razor. But Ockham intended for the simplest theory accommodating all of the evidence. I’m much more drawn to the “naive” view of the masses of humanity—which, in the East, for instance, lifted Mahayana Buddhism, with its grand heavens and deep hells, into the most populous branch of that religions—even if, one imagines, it is altogether incompatible with the Buddha’s own view or experiences. If we take the unitive experience as the ballgame, one person in multiple millions born will be saved, the rest plowed under once again. And the vast cosmos of stars and galaxies has no meaning whatsoever. For once I find myself with the masses and look at the elites with a very puzzled face.