The Mountain and the Flashlight Beam

Thoughts about dualism recur for me at right regular intervals (see for instance here), no doubt because we’re all of us quite naturally dualistic in our stance towards reality. It’s not simply a consequence of language that we think that we have rather than that we are bodies. At the same time our collective feeling are echoed by our language. When we’re really sincere, we support something body and soul. My inner intuition isn’t simply that my Mother still exists, but only in my memories—and that in twenty generations (to be massively generous) she will have achieved total nonexistence because no one among the then still living will any longer remember her. No. My intuition is quite otherwise. Is the matter that formed her body at any point in her life still in existence? Certainly. Our physics tells us so. Does she still exist as a person? I’m certain that she does.

Plato’s conceptualization is no doubt the oldest well-known formalization of the dualism we feel. He proposed that eternal Forms exist, of which the soul is one. His formulation, found in Phaedo, rests on the immateriality and therefore indivisibility of the immaterial and the endless divisibility of material. Plato’s formulation served his purpose well; it was to prove the soul’s immortality. It’s very easy to understand that matter is divisible and that a hammer can very easily turn this green cup of mine, not least its pretty crest and its inscription (Harsen’s Island Michigan—irresistible to someone called Arsen) into shards or powder. It is also very easy to intuit one’s own unity. Yes, I’m divided in my mind on many things, but my mind is analogous to my body—even though it is immaterial. I have a mind; but it is I have it, and I can’t imagine that Whatever as divided. It simply is. But Phaedo, of course, is just one book of many hundreds of thousands written on this subject and serves a single argument. It does not exhaust the subject. In effect it may be reducible to just that, dualism: there are two kinds of things—one subject to a certain kind of change and one that is not subject to that kind of change.

The problem in Plato’s formulation is that we have no handy explanation how something immaterial can cause something material to move, to change its position or character. Or vice versa. This problem, the interaction problem, has legs as long as eternal forms. The problem is much worse than saying that a flashlight beam can’t move a mountain. In that particular case, both systems are material, but there is a great distance in powers—the flashlight’s weak little beam and the mountain’s massive inertia. But in truth that weak beam does move the mountain. It causes minute change at the atomic level to a tiny part of the mountain. But we can imagine—vast technocracy that we’ve become—that we could focus gigantic laser guns on that mountain and cause it not only to move a little but literally to vaporize. Thus far, of course, we’ve only done that thing in action movies.

The interaction problem, however, begins to yield ever so gently if we don’t insist on Plato’s conceptualization of the soul as immaterial and, therefore, by definition incapable of exerting any kind of force on anything material. That the soul is different from bodies, and in some genuinely radical way—that I find quite easy to accept. But it must possess some power capable of moving matter, albeit at the extremely small scale.

Let’s transform that mountain into an organism instead of being, as it is, a massive agglomeration of layers of rock. Let it have a nervous system, organs, circulatory mechanisms, muscles, tendons, and, underneath it all, a powerful skeleton as well. Let’s also make it very sensitive to light at night—hating any kind of light whatever, however faint. This monstrous beast will therefore react to our weak little flashlight. How will it do that? Well, its skin will detect the light beam. Nerves will signal this unwelcome event to the mountain’s not very smart but adequate brain. No sooner has the signal reached that presumably massive brain than the mountain will move—will move just enough to one side or the other to escape the irritation of that beam. Being so vast a creature, it might take a while before the movement actually develops, but here it comes! Could the soul, by just a tiny amount of energy proper to its nature, also move a neuron or two in our brain to signal an action that it wants the body to undertake—like my hand right now scratching my ear? It’s possible—not if it is deprived of all power whatsoever by a word like “immaterial,” but Yes if, while radically different from the domain in which it finds itself, it can actually communicate at a low level with neurons too small even for our best microscopes sharply to resolve.

Physical Expressions of Spiritual Life

The death of Jack LaLanne yesterday (he was 96) reminded me that the spiritual life has a multifaceted physical dimension, quite complex—and rarely mentioned. LaLanne, whose formal name was Francois Henri LaLanne (his parents were immigrants from France), was a leading figure in fitness training. It is certainly an important aspect of this dimension.

It’s a curious fact that our calling is to transcend the realm of matter—but to get there it is best to mind our health and keep our bodies trim. The physical is foundational. There is the famous Latin saying found in Juvenal as a desideratum: mens sana in corpora sano. We often turn this around to say that a healthy body produces a healthy mind. Whichever. We also say, much more broadly, No pain, no gain. That saying points the way. The physical has a huge amount of inertial downward pull, and if we don’t resist it in a sensible way, the higher ranges become more difficult or thin out into one-sided expressions—like intellectual vigor or artistic creativity—but with something crucial actually lacking.

In advanced societies the physical has to be forcefully introduced. In medieval times—and even as late as World War I—ordinary life, work, and transportation made people exercise without knowing that they were doing it. Pictures of soldiers in World War I compared with pictures of soldiers one big war over tell this tale visually. In our times we must make efforts to mind our diets and force ourselves to move. Both of those activities are genuine opportunities to exercise the will daily; habit numbs the pain, of course, but the hand reaches for the chocolates anyway, and my body mutters its complaints when I dress it for a walk—especially at temperatures like these. The training of the will is a crucial element here—best exercised when resistance is optimal and overcoming it produces a bonus that goes beyond the tissues.

Yoga and Tai Chi—and their many relatives—were born of a deep knowledge that in this dimension we’re a seamless unity bodies and of souls and that the training of the higher is best achieved by starting with the lower. In our culture, of course, the higher aspect tends to be minimized, but so what? If the practice is real, the experience will speak for itself.

With advancing age (my case) fascinating phenomena become perceptible. As the body ages, it becomes oddly more visible (perceivable) as a machine. The soul feels its own separation. This feeling begins in the late forties and fifties and simply grows. We remain young inwardly. Sometimes an inadvertent look into the mirror brings a slight surprise. My God. That old man? That’s me? Doesn’t feel like that. The will remains adamant, but the body perceptively suffers as it is called to act as if it were still a mere fifty. And then—especially then—it is most vital to renew one’s own commitment to stay alert, orderly, to make efforts where dragging or slouching is a whole lot easier. LaLanne never flagged. A good example he. Exercises right up to the end.

It’s part of the real life. It’s not simply a life-style. We want to stride, not stumble, over the border when the time comes to make the passage. Thanks, Jack. You played an important role in the fitness of this family beginning long ago (in 1963). And we’ve been keeping at it ever since. Rest a little now that you are over there—before you jog off to that Big Gym in the Sky!

Experience and Understanding

To experience a thing is one thing, to understand it is another. Experience is foundational, hence in mystical circles teachers belittle understanding, meaning concepts; instead they emphasize tasting or experience. But having tasted, did we understand? In Zen, Tao, or Sufi circles emphasis on experience arises because would-be disciples are impatient. They don’t want to waste time building boring foundations. They want to learn magic slogans. They want something. They, too, start with an experience, a desire; they just don’t understand what it is yet. Experience and understanding: an interesting couple.

Let me trace out the process whereby we understand experience. An experience takes place in time and has a sequence. We can take it apart, examine its causes, changes, intensity; we label these, discern their relationships, dynamics, and movements. But how does this actually happen? What are these parts? What are these concepts, these tokens that we use? We might see them as spiritualized or disembodied mental representations of perceptions or feelings. And it is in the examination of these mental entities (however labeled—thought elements, language) that a strange phenomenon takes place. At some point, as we examine these immaterial tokens, a strange phenomenon takes place. Suddenly we understand the experience. The insight we gain is, however, itself an experience—and as ineffable as any other. Thus the examined experience—a set of feelings, perceptions—is re-experienced on another level more accessible to the spiritual agent that we really are. And these feelings and perceptions may arise from a physical or from a mental stratum of our being. We can also understand and re-experience our ideas, intuitions, and abstract strata no longer linked to the physical. There is a layering here. We, the agents, perceive the physical—and then do so again using the more subtle medium of thought. And it is this second process that leads to understanding.

A fascinating aspect of human experience is that we need a tool by means of which we can chop apart the flux of experience into discrete meanings, each of which can be held apart and also seen in relationship. The tool for that is language. Until the means to stop this flux are available to us, we are stuck in a relentless flow. How we came to be here—that’s another matter. I’ve said more on this subject here regarding the experience of Helen Keller.

It is good to taste, but it is best to taste again. The mystical schools stop short of that second step. Their intent is initiation into the mysteries—to help disciples acquire higher experiences first. Once that has taken place, the teacher’s job is really done. The adept will go his or her own way after that—well qualified to do so by a mind that comes equipped for understanding anything.

Three Ways of Seeing

If I take the very big view of humanity’s systems of belief, they divide into three categories—and roughly along geographical lines. In the west prophetic religions and materialism form two of the camps. That fact at once suggests that the debate about God’s existence is essentially a western preoccupation; the reasons for that will become clearer as I go on. Asian cultures see reality as a—well, let me call it a dispensation. Using that word I mean “a broad acceptance that reality arises from a transcending source”—but in a different way than we picture that process in the prophetic religions. In China it is Heaven or the Way (Tao); in India it is Brahman, the Ultimate; the cosmic law experienced by humanity is karma.

The chief difference between these systems is how close or distant their adherents imagine themselves to be from the Ultimate Power—and whether or not this power has anything like a coherent self and consciousness. Some scholars in the west are so influenced by their experience of or familiarity with prophetic religions (in which God is most definitely a person) that they hesitate to call Asian faiths religions at all or add words like “philosophical” to modify the world “religion”; some simply call Buddhism, Taoism, Jainism, and Hinduism “philosophies.” Western religions, by contrast, are “revealed” religions; that very word signals the personal qualities of God as understood in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

In materialism, ancient and modern, no conscious presence exists behind the cosmic whole. The cosmos is assumed to have a lawful behavior, conceived either as innate in matter and/or arising from random motion. In Lucretius, for instance, atoms, the only real existents, move uniformly; but from time to time, arbitrarily and unpredictably, their movement changes by means of a “swirl.” This motion is the source of all change and also of freedom as experienced by humanity. Consciousness here comes from very subtle atoms—and they also “swirl.” The most severe version of modern materialism in effect recognizes only the law of statistics. What we ordinarily call the laws of nature are, in this view, only movements that recur with a very high probability. In this, the materialistic view, the Ultimate is simply atoms or particles or waves—alone or in some kind of combination. Consciousness, personality, selves (and so forth) are invariably but temporarily emergent properties that disappear again as soon as the arrangement that gave rise to them change.

Now to the Asian traditions. In these the functioning of divinity (or simply of the transcending) is also experienced as law, but consciousness within or behind the cosmos (or both) is accepted but not emphasized. And this for a reason: the cosmos is a dispensation, not a perceivably intentional project the object of which is humanity. Heaven’s actions manifest through the world; they are observable in the world’s very arrangements. Human violation of the dispensation is corrected by the very workings of karma, by the Tao, or by the mandate of Heaven—and we discover these outcomes by experiencing them—whether here or in the realms beyond. We know the law by observation, not by revelation—and it works infallibly whether we observe it or not. In outer forms these religions are similar to the Western prophetic religions—not so in their inwardness. Hinduism, for example, has its own trinity, arising from Brahman, the unknowable ultimate. The three are Brahma (notice the difference in spelling) the creator, Vishnu the maintainer, and Shiva the destroyer. In China Heaven is conceived as the ultimate agent, but subsidiary powers are admitted as well. The difference lies in the fact that the observable cosmos as a whole is the message or contains it. There is no specific communication, beyond or within the cosmos itself and specifically directed at humans. Indeed in this form of religion human beings, narrowly considered, are viewed as a spark of divinity. That conception explains human powers and also translates into human responsibility to discern the law and to apply it to specific circumstances—or suffer consequences.

The third way of seeing reality takes the form of revealed or prophetic religions. All three arose from Judaism. The unique character of this view lies in the manner in which the Ultimate communicates with humanity. The form of that communication is between God and selected individuals—who, in turn, then communicate with everybody else. Thus we have a succession of prophets. Alongside the ordinary laws of nature and the inner intuitions every person has, these religions project a special communication to humanity by an indirect method (God to prophet, prophet to public) as I’ve indicated. In Christianity, finally, one person of God—who is in that faith pictured as having three persons—actually becomes a human. Thus in revealed religion we also have a dispensation, which can be read by people, and a special law directed at humans through humans.

This brief encapsulation should make it obvious why it is that faith is such an important concept in the revealed religions—and why it is that atheism is not really an issue in the Asian cultures. Both materialism and dispensationalism (if I might so characterize the Asian systems of belief) leave decisions to the individual and rely for their authority entirely on human diligence in observation—and individual interpretation of the same. You don’t believe that Heaven has its way and cannot be opposed? That’s up to you. The prophetic religions, by contrast, demand assent to the idea that God would communicate specifically and in various contexts with individual humans and, by that method, provide yet another and higher law than is discernible by direct and personal experience.

Eudaimonia

It seems to be agreed among the wise that the aim of an individual life is the soul’s development. That consensus is obscured because we encounter concepts like happiness (Aristotle), salvation (Christianity), and, in modern times, individuation (Carl Jung and others). If we just look at these words casually, happiness and individuation have quite different connotations; they’re very different from each other; and so is salvation from either of these. Individuation strongly suggests a process of development, sometimes dramatic, whereby a personality often displaying contradictory, disorganized, behavior, unaware of being highly conditioned by society, differentiates itself and achieves a kind of noble coherence and autonomy.

The casual use of a word like “happiness” almost suggests nothing much. We all want to be happy—and it means different things to different people. Aristotle used a word that has a great deal more depth. He spoke of eudaimonia. The word contains eu, a very positive concept signifying affirmation, well-being, and beauty. A daimon is a spirit or a minor deity. If we understand this idea for what it once meant in the Greek, it is “beautiful soul” rather than “happiness,” and in Aristotle’s context, it was the consequence of a process as well, the process of a well-lived life. The word can but need not have a spiritual connotation. Indeed, in Aristotle’s hands, it had a secular taste—one more reason why it is easily translated as happiness.

Salvation in the Catholic context—not necessarily in sophisticated scholarly contexts but as taught to children and the public—has a heavily moralistic flavor. It is the consequence of ridding the self of sin, of minimally dying (even if not always living) in a state of grace. That the soul is spiritual is not in question in this community. Salvation is a form of securing for this soul eternal happiness through union with God. Here happiness recurs after a great battle against the fallen self and its natural downward pull.

In its simplest expression in the Protestant context, development is minimized into a single act of faith; and in some branches of Protestantism salvation is not even a process: it is decided by God through foreknowledge before we’re even born. To be sure, the Reformation was a reaction against the excessive mechanizations of the spiritual by a Church that, by the sixteenth century, had become grossly corrupt (on average). And if we examine that single act of faith carefully, studying the process that led up to it, the period that follows it, we discover here another case of abbreviation, simplification, and of crude labeling. Catholic and Protestant religiousness, viewed in detail, is identical; it is the same process that produces eudaimonia in ancient understanding and individuation in the modern, secular conceptualization.

We live our lives in what Keats called “the vale of Soul-making.” The experience is the same, no matter the times, the prevailing cosmologies, the strength or weakness of religion. Concepts concretely underpinned by matter (“this hammer”) are easy to sort, but the great spiritual facts of experience are stubbornly subjective. One man’s God is another’s the Great Unconscious, one’s salvation is another individuation—but all of us strive, ultimately (if the spark throws its light into our soul) to become beautiful demons. Does that sound weird? To transcend the words is to rise to the reality.

From Idries Shah's Reflections

Herewith an brief sample from a wondrous small book of modern Sufi stories written by the late Idries Shah, Octagon Press, London, 1978.

Lichen

A piece of lichen was growing on a rock.
     In addition to the customary lichen thoughts, it often wondered why it could not spread so as to cover a part of the rock which was still bare.
     ‘There is no lichen nutrient there,’ said the wisest part of the lichen, ‘and we must wait until it comes to us.’
     As the years passed, the expectation of the mass of the lichen became stronger and stronger. Slowly, climatic changes caused the rock to split slightly. Certain chemicals were released and started to ooze outwards, covering a part of the bare surface of the stone.
     For the devout lichens, this was the answer to their prayers, and they gratefully spread themselves over the delicious food.
     Many years passed, and the chemicals began to become exhausted. This created changes in the character of the lichens, who attributed their difference in composition and being to profound social changes.
     Theoreticians multiplied, each with his explanation. The lichen philosophers, academics and scientists divided themselves into groups. You can imagine what their various explanations were like. Each version was based upon the interpretation of observed phenomena. In fact, of course, the theories were generally attempts to concentrated and spread certain convictions.
     Then another chain of events caused someone to spill upon the rock another lichen-nutrient, and the organisms were able to start growing again.
     The stimulus itself energized the theoreticians. Their increased anxieties in the immediate past had sharpened their mental activity. It had enabled them to realize the immediate cause of their reprieve and comparative abundance.
     But so far as the lichens have not got to the point where they can fathom any perceptible intention behind the chain of ‘causes’ which brings them the means to live and to expand.
For this reason, they have given up thinking abou it. They believe, nonetheless, that they are thinking about it. But it is only because they are at the level of culture which regards the following statements as ‘thought’:
     ‘Everything is accident’
     ‘Everything is of supernatural origin’
     ‘Some things are accident, some supernatural’
     ‘I do not know what to think’
     ‘I can believe, and therefore I can believe that mere opinion is the same as knowledge’
     ‘I have inferred some things, therefore they are true’
     ‘I have observed some things, therefore I can observe others’
     ‘What cannot be observed can be inferred, what cannot be inferred can be felt, what cannot be observed, inferred or felt cannot have any relevance to anything and is therefore nonsense.’
     How fortunate that humanity is different from lichen.