Looking at Our Own Reality

How does our own personal sense of reality arise? The answer seems obvious, but a little reflection proves that to be too simple. The obvious answer is that we feel our own bodily sensations—and also that we, ourselves, know this, this “Here I am.” There is a distinct duality present in this simple state of self-awareness. One polarity is a sense of continuity, of persistence. I was awfully worn out yesterday, but now I’m pretty chipper. The knowledge that I was and now I am—and simultaneously aware of both—is that sense of continuity. I remember being tired; my body is now energetic. The knowledge belongs to me; it is still there. And the mere fact of forgetting doesn’t change that. Thus for instance I haven’t the vaguest of how I felt at 9:20 a.m. on July 11, 2009. Indeed 2009, which is just the other day, is a pretty fuzzy memory unless I start consulting calendars to bring some of it back. Nevertheless I feel innately certain that I was present back in that vague past. So here we have it: continuity, persistence, now tired, now chipper, but while these states cycle, something remains unchanged. That something is the consciousness of my persistence.

The other pole of this duality, of course, is change itself. There is me—and the other, the over against. The most obvious “over against” is my body. The other, greater over against has changed over time, in itself and also in relation to me. Once it was Minnesota, then Virginia, then Kansas, then Missouri, then Germany, then Hungary. My body has also changed. Once it was small and young, now it is big and old. It is still the over against because it has changed—but “Here I am” has not.

So much for the obvious. But is that sufficient to make us feel real? One way to test that is to imagine ourselves in a situation where nothing else is present but Here I am and Stuff out there, the body close and intimate, all else a step removed—pleasing when it’s edible or drinkable, dangerous when it is hard and cold. A world like that would very quickly make us feel deep anguish. The closest to a documented case like that is the life of Helen Keller—close but not quite perfect. Keller was 19 months of age when an illness deprived her of sight and hearing. As I’ve noted in this blog earlier, she was beginning to learn to speak, was imitating phrases that she’d heard. She had also learned the word for water and remembered it (as “wah-wah”) throughout her painful period of mental darkness. Until she reached age seven and finally got help, she lived in a state of powerful frustration, longing to communicate somehow by using signs and gestures. It’s not a perfect case because she had, at an early age, already discovered—not the other but the others. Her fabulous story is of the greatest value in vividly showing how vitally important for a personal sense of reality is the presence of, and communication with, other Here I am’s.

Long ago and far away I came across a great truth. I think it was in Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s Pathways Through to Space. It is that the two great paths exist for human development, one based on heightened consciousness (Enlightenment) and the other through relationship (Love). Merrell-Wolff’s path was the first; indeed it seems to rank very high among the mystics. But I’d assert that Love is prior and higher—indeed that in its absolute absence, in a world of mental darkness such as Keller experienced in childhood—the very tools for higher awareness are denied us. Language, the tool we need for the first-mentioned path, comes about because we use it to relate to other living beings just like us. It begins with that wah-wah in earliest childhood. Our personal reality depends intrinsically on relationship—as does genuine transcendence. All else is secondary.

The Buddha ranks highest in the category of Enlightenment—achieved by a great act of denial, as it were. What were the roots of that effort? Seeing human misery when Siddhartha Gautama was young: compassion. And when the Buddha achieved his aim, what did he do? Did he pass on into Nirvana? If he had done so, some farmers would have found a desiccated body under that now famous bodhi tree. But no. The Buddha returned to the world to—to communicate, to relate. And one of the great religions sprouted from that seed. No. There are no genuine solitaries high or low. Enlightenment needs its justifying polarity too. Ultimately transcendence falls apart unless there is another person out there to give this person his or her reality.

Hell Examined

The concept of hell as understood today—a place of eternal punishment, hell fires, devils and so on, a place we enter after the final judgment at the end of time or, in the popular mind, right after death—does not have the same meaning that it had in its own time when the word Sheol was used in Hebrew. It meant the grave, the pit, or the abyss. And indeed, the etymology of the word points back to saal, meaning to burrow or to dig. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia (here), it is the place where “the dead meet (Ezek. xxxii.; Isa. xiv.; Job xxx. 23) without distinction of rank or condition—the rich and the poor, the pious and the wicked, the old and the young, the master and the slave—if the description in Job iii. refers, as most likely it does, to Sheol. The dead continue after a fashion their earthly life.” Understood in this way, Sheol is therefore pretty much the same sort of place as the Greek Hades, the under-world. Not surprisingly, when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, the word Hades was used to translate Sheol. Both are realms of shades, not specifically of punishment. And, come to think of it, our own word, hell, is derived from hole, hollow, and the Anglo-Saxon helan, meaning to hide. In Latin it is infernus, thus the “below.”

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia (here), the meaning associated with this word changed with the rise of Christianity. After Christ’s ascension to heaven, the just go to heaven and hell then becomes the place of the damned. Thus references to Sheol in the Old Testament refer to a realm of shades where everybody goes; in the New Testament a new word is often used, Gehenna, derived from a term meaning Valley of Hinnom, an actual geographical location where in Israel Moloch had once been worshipped.

The upshot of all this is that our concept of hell is relatively new and closely associated with Christianity and the doctrine of redemption.

Now, of course, Old and New Testaments are both considered the Word of God, literally by some branches of Christianity. Therefore concepts like a vengeful God—e.g. “The Lord is a jealous God and avenging, the Lord is avenging and wrathful; the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries and keeps wrath for his enemies.” Nahum 1:2—are combined with the New Testament concept of hell. And from this combination of concepts arises the popular controversy over hell in our times. On one side are those who cannot believe that God could be vengeful, never mind what Nahum of Elkosh said. Therefore the concept of a realm where the wicked go to be eternally tortured is thought to be unworthy of God.

The other side, in effect, argues that actions have consequences, that a law governs reality, and that you can’t simply “get away with it.” But. And there is a but here. But given their beliefs, particularly in the authority of the Bible and its literal truth, they give this idea—actions have consequences—the most lurid form possible, thereby weakening that idea’s unassailable logic.

But the much more scary thought, for someone of my age—when the Heavenly Gates become visible ahead—is the Hindu concept of hell. It simply is that we must come back, if we are bad, back into this dimension, starting as babies again—and if we’ve been very wicked in this life, our re-entry will be at a much less favorable level than we’ve enjoyed in our current life. In the Hindu conceptualization hell is right here; and now. And if you wish for proofs of that, study history and read the papers. And if you are well off, comfortable, indeed complacent, just ponder a rephrasing of one of Jesus' famous sayings: “Satan’s house has many mansions.”

The Grace of Recognition

Part of existence for all of us—it comes sooner or later to all—is a feeling of abandonment. Here I mean a certain you might say existential kind of feeling. At times like that we oddly yearn for a sign out-of-the-blue, as it were. And it must come, in that particular way, not through the usual routes of ordinary attention. It must be unusual. It must counter a feeling I’ve always expressed to myself by “a stranger in a strange land.” That biblical phrase—no Heinlein didn’t frame it though he used it as the title of a novel—is not exactly on target in its own context. Let me reproduce the context by way of showing the peculiar power of the highly compressed Biblical narrative. Here is Exodus 2:16-22:

Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters: and they came and drew water, and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. And the shepherds came and drove them away: but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their flock. And when they came to Reuel their father, he said, How is it that ye are come so soon to day? And they said, An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds, and also drew water enough for us, and watered the flock. And he said unto his daughters, And where is he? why is it that ye have left the man? call him, that he may eat bread. And Moses was content to dwell with the man: and he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter. And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.

So much for the phrase, which, for me, echoes something deeply embedded in a Gnostic kind of consciousness that sometimes rises.

Now the odd thing is that quite minor happenings, thus meaningful coincidences—which by their nature are both, meaningful and yet pure chance—serve to relieve the sense of strangeness whereas, surrounded as we might be by caring others in our own environment, that feeling of abandonment might still be present. The existential confirmation almost requires that it be untraceable to causes. Thus neither family, friends, nor public recognition serve the purpose of providing meaning—because we can easily trace the sources of these supports to a mutual kind of give and take. True love serves this purpose—when it first dawns. It then appears miraculous. Celebrity is vanishing if our head is screwed on right. Then we see that we are merely mirrors in which others see themselves. And complete strangers who come to understand us well, with whom we feel a kinship, rapidly enter, for functional purposes, the role of friends and family.

But here and there an odd event, very often of the most minor kind, lifts our moments of abandonment because we then get a hint that we might actually matter beyond the realms of mere cause and effect.

Mind and Language

Reflecting yesterday on the wonderful nonsense of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and this in the context of two public events, caused an old conviction of mine to come to the fore again. The two public events were Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement that the Executive Branch would no longer defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the Supreme Court’s opinion yesterday on the privacy rights of corporations. For more on these see my post today on Ghulf Genes here. Both of these cases are intimately concerned with language, with definitions, in the first case of “marriage” and in the second of “personal privacy.” And in the case of Alice, we have a nonsense tale in which the intended meaning is as much hidden by the language of the book as it is revealed in an aura that surrounds it. Humor, generally but not alone, illustrates my conviction that mind uses language but isn’t created by it.

Exactly the opposite is claimed by evolutionary linguists, of whom a representative figure is Derek Bickerton, and his book, Language and Human Behavior, is a classical example.

My endless fascination with language arises precisely because we are forever judging, weighing, and choosing words, thus that we stand over them like sovereigns, that they serve us and not we them. This is vividly obvious in all manner of contexts. The letter of the law stands in contrast to its spirit, for example, and we see endless instances where some insist on the letter, others on the spirit. Language does not compel—people do. The two legal cases I mention above are telling examples as well.

The application of the word “person” to a legal entity, a corporation, is a kind of attempt to compel behavior by expanding the meaning of a word. A corporation is never a person in the sense in which I am. The mind knows that perfectly well. In DOMA Congress attempts to limit the meaning of marriage to a male and a female, but the words of the law do not compel—unless the sovereign mind that hears those words agrees. In both of these cases the spirit behind the definitions is the interesting aspect. In commercial law the spirit that turns corporations into persons is a spirit claiming rights it does not naturally have. In the case of DOMA, the spirit is similarly reactive, at minimum, and makes me cringe just a little. Do I think that breathing is the intake of air and its release again? Yes, I do. But do we need a Congressional act to know that? Do I think that marriage means the union of a man and woman? Yes, I do. But have we exhausted that meaning? “Let me not,” said Shakespeare in Sonnet 116, “to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.” Belay, belay. The thoughts are free—and unless real harm is done, let them use whatever words they choose to voice them. We don’t have to agree. You respirate, I breathe.