The Body in Question

With a respectful nod to Jonathan Miller, who produced a TV series and then wrote a book using that title, both being products that gave us much delight, I want to borrow the title for use in another context. My context is more, shall we say, philosophical. Much the same thought often arises as I age and, waking in the mornings, become aware of my body—as a body. It is that with accumulating years the elegant traditional classification, known as the Great Chain of Being, seems less and less persuasive. To save me lots of words I’ve produced a little visual poem to summarize a vast philosophical structure, that very chain. It had its origins in Aristotle and then came to be formalized, in western thought, before the Renaissance came.

Post-Renaissance this structure started to unravel. The very word, chain, signifies necessary relationship—and that chain began rust from the top down so that, by the nineteenth century (Nietzsche and the death of God) the chain had lost its meaning. It was gradually inverted. the Mineral came to rest on top—and all else derived from it, by chance and happenstance, not by a logically elegant relationship.

At the root of this conceptualization are Aristotle’s ideas of potential and actuality, both having real existence. At the top actuality is total, at the bottom we find pure potential. Humans, in the middle, are the mysterious transition from the realm of becoming to the realm of being. As we ascend from the bottom, more and more potential is actualized until it is total Being in God. But what with the inorganic at the top, the whole concept of being loses all interest for the obvious reason that the original duality of potential and actuality is lost.

Now you might think that I would strongly embrace the Great Chain of Being. I appear always to be on the side of tradition. But that’s not the case here. The more aware I become of the body in question, the less inclined I am to see either life as a whole (plant, animal, etc.) or human life as natural to the grand scheme of Creation. The body becomes more and more visible (indeed feel-able) as a kind of temporary tooling for a limited purpose—the longer you live the keener the knowledge of that. I wake up and remember telephone calls bringing me news of my own generation’s physical problems: the parts are making troubles; this fails, that needs a fix, chemical help, surgical assists, etc. That perfect balance in the center of the chain of being might make sense to someone just to either side of forty, not to someone past three-score-and ten.

The machine-like nature of the body is a problem in elegant schemes of this sort. At the same time I think that a duality does underlie reality. But when it comes to human centrality—a kind of centaur-like existence, neither horse nor human, properly speaking—there I feel genuine intellectual discomfort. When I contemplate that state, especially when its old, gnostic ideas present themselves either in pagan forms, like genuine Gnosticism, or in the Christian variety which speaks of a fallen world. It is only in a fallen world that spirits can possibly be required to be prisoners of machines.

Déjà vu

I’ve mentioned this experience once before on this blog (here) when commenting on Carl B. Becker’s Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death—in that context regretting Becker’s exclusion of that experience from the subject matter that he covers under the category of the paranormal. Then I mentioned the experience again in yesterday’s posting—and the post promptly brought some visitors who were using a Google search with the phrase. My own conviction is that the experience is the most widely-known instance ordinary people have of precognition. In my own case—and I think this is generally the case—I experienced the déjà vu feeling much more frequently in childhood than later, but these experience still recur, if very rarely. They’ve always fascinated me. Indeed it was when I first encountered J.W. Dunne’s writings that I felt sure that I’d approached some kind of explanation of the phenomenon.

Déjà vu literally means “already seen” in French. The phrase was first used by the philosopher and parapsychologist Émile Boirac (1851–1917) in a letter to the French journal Review Philosophique and later in his book, The Future of the Psychic Sciences. In that book he also proposed the word metagnomy as a substitute for clairvoyance, thus “knowledge of things situated beyond those we can normally know” (link). Frederick Meyers (1843-1901), the founder of the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR)†, called it promnesia, using a Greek formation meaning prior memory. The simpler common-language French phrase won the linguistic battle. Déjà vu is simply a very powerful sensation that some situation, right now, has happened before. Indeed when it does, we often know what will happen next, including what people will say.

The notion that we are remembering a dream—and a precognitive dream, at that—is totally persuasive if we have ourselves actually had one or more such dreams which we remembered at the time when had them—so that when the déjà vu moment later actually arrived we already knew that we had dreamt it.

The Paranormal Encyclopedia.com here notes that one psychology professor at least, in 1896, Arthur Allin, then of the University of Colorado, Bolder, had suggested that the source of déjà vu was forgotten dreams. The modern explanation, summed up by Wikipedia here, rejects precognition as an explanation and trots out a long list of other supposedly more scientific explanations of that squirrelly sort that make those of us  sublimely confident in the Big Picture smile with bemusement.

†The SPR has an American counterpart, the American Society for Psychical Research, Inc., reachable here.

Precognition: Some Curious Trails

If you looked for a thinker who has expended serious thought on precognitive dreaming—and did so before this 2011—the one name that would surely surface is that of John William Dunne (1875-1949). Since publishing his book, Dreamer, Andrew Paquette joins Dunne as another.

J.W. Dunne, born in Ireland, worked as an aeronautical engineer in England. His book, in multiple (and drastically-changing) editions, is An Experiment with Time (1927) arose from multiple experiences of his own in which he dreamt of events that, later, actually took place—both private and very public events. His theory, Serialism, was an attempt to explain it.

Paquette is an artist of some renown, with multiple achievements in comic books, video games, teaching, the fine arts, and as an author and teacher in computer graphics. He is also a psychic of obviously high gifts—a very well-written report of which experience is his book, Dreamer. He discovered these talents following a precognitive dream, the first of many (see my last post here).

I could, but almost hesitate to, add a third name to the list, that of the Russian, P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), who developed his own theory in A New Model of the Universe. Ouspensky did not address the subject of precognitive dreams narrowly, but his model, presented in the book mentioned above, appeared at about the same time as Dunne’s book (1931).

The first two (Dunne, Paquette) both assume that the future we see in dreams actually exists, with the implication that free will is at minimum problematical. Ouspensky provides a model of time in which this preexistent future is potentially present, but its manifestation (actualization) is due in part to choices. Therefore in Ouspensky’s scheme, the future we dream can be changed—if we make other choices—but the event that we actually live was also there, hiding in potential right alongside the more painful alternative that we avoided by acting differently. We’re dealing here with very original people; therefore it may not come as a total surprise that Ouspensky believed in eternal return, thus that he lived the same life, over and over again—a fact to which he attributed his experiences of déjà vu, whereas others in turn explain that sensation by saying that we’ve dreamt the future the night or the week before but just don’t remember the dream. Sorry, but that’s the nature of this subject…

Dunne and Ouspensky both think in terms of geometrically arranged times. Dunne projects a serial succession, one time existing above the other—so that from T2 you can see the entirety of T1; thus from T2 the observer sees T1’s life all at once, from childhood to death, all at one glance. Dunne imagined an infinite regress of times—and staunchly defended this heterodoxical view. Ouspensky’s model, presented on pages 343-406 of his book (Vintage, 1971) presents an infinite time in which a multi-dimensional matrix contains an infinite number of lines, each linking points of possibility. One life is thus a single branching line traced through this (to the human mind unimaginably complex) matrix of possibilities. The line is what we actualize; other possibilities, other lives we might have lived, remain in the matrix. (One is reminded of the many-world theory we owe to physicist Hugh Everett (1957)—with the difference that in Everett’s scheme, each world tangibly exists.)

Alas, precognition is a genuine problem. If we see the future, something must be there to see. Is it a tangibly existing hard real something? Ouspensky avoids the problem of free will—the existence of which we assert from experience—by moving preexistence to a quasi-real matrix of potential. You might say that he reifies Aristotle’s potential. But if we accept hard preexistence, we must find another explanation for free will. One solution Paquette presents is that we choose to live a life, a life shown to us, in the sublime world, and in great detail, before we’re born. Thus we exercise choice outside this life but not in it. But Paquette is no doctrinaire; his focus is on rich actual experiential data. He reports precognitive dreams that come out almost, but not precisely, as dreamt; thus choice is exercised here. Sometimes he says that everything’s fixed; he also asserts that we are here to develop. He does not resolve the contradictions that thus sprout here and there; no coherent cosmology has yet (I’m still not finished with his book) emerged that might explain how we can possibly learn anything in a life in the midst of which the most crucial element of agency, choice, is denied us except as an illusion.

The fully worked-out models all reflect a modern form of thought in which it is not at all common to ponder such divine powers as omniscience—or to take them seriously. At the same time, the actual experience of precognitive dreams frequently features instances showing that (1) they do indeed happen, (2) are confirmed later in very large part, but (3) then sometimes do not end tragically, as they did in the dream. This would suggest that the assertion of a fixed future must be opened up in some way, thus minimally as Ouspensky opened it. Another way to do that is to suggest that agencies may be involved—other than ourselves, that precognitive dreams may be in the category of communications. Let me flesh that out a little more.

The best way to do this is to imagine that the future may actually be visible—thus projected to the eyes of minds—without being tangibly there. At some resolution all events and things are energy in motion, at all kinds of levels of coarseness and subtlety, mental and physical. Our reality may be more transparent to higher beings than ourselves. God, of course, is omniscient, but angels (not least guardian angels) may be multiscient, or much-knowing, just eyeballing the vast energetic flow and, furthermore, communicating instantly with one another. And if you hate the very notion of an angel, why not every human being but not in our ordinary waking selves but genuinely near-angelic when we are asleep. Either way, the future may already be here, in projection, and the distant future as well as the near—but the nearer the more detailed. And our sleeping selves may see it (or may have it framed as dreams by guardian angels). And some of us are more gifted, alert, or open to these things than others—and the dramatic is more likely to catch our attention than the ordinary.

What we are seeing, then, are patterns of the future, not the actual rooted and cemented tangible reality of it. Therefore it remains open to change, certainly at the level of personal detail, which is what matters to individuals. It is simply a general kind of communication of reality, in projection, which is present quite naturally based on the very design of reality. And if apprehended can sometimes be a source of help in need.

One of the more interesting aspects of the paranormal, and Paquette notes this fact in his book, is that willful attempts to produce psychic results tend to fail dramatically. A prominent explorer of this phenomenon is J.E. Kennedy (for some of his papers, see this link). One aspect of this well-documented observation is that paranormal phenomena may possibly be a means of communication, form beyond the borderzone, to humanity here, to indicate that something more exists than we can actually see. It’s there like water, but nobody is forced to drink. And precognition may be a means of signaling that fact to many people in times when great disasters loom ahead—already clearly visible from “over there,” not fixed in every detail, but visible, from patterns already forming now.

Notes on Paquette's Dreamer

A fascinating book, by Andrew Paquette, titled Dreamer (O Books, 2011). All through the years I’ve complained about the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg saying that it is all analysis, not enough raw material. Well, here we have a case of all raw material, not enough analysis. Paquette is a gifted psychic, by profession an artist—commercial, fine, etc. Mostly in dream-scapes, he reports on experiences that range far beyond the borderzone. He discovered his talents by dreaming the future, rather dramatically, while working in the Netherlands. He dreamt of a hold-up in which he was killed, shot, died, and rushed back to New York as a spirit to his then girl friend, later wife, to tell her of his misfortune—still in his dream. And then woke up—still in the Netherlands and very much alive. Some time later the event actually took place, but, in the midst of it, remembering the dream with great shock as, again, two men, in the same locale, actually took hold of him,  he managed to escape his assailants.

Here we have a classical dilemma. He dreamt the future with one outcome. It happened, and identically, more or less, in real life—but only up to a point. Then the recall of the dream itself served as the cause of his action to escape the consequences. So how do we explain what appears to be a contradiction. The future is visible, hence apparently fixed. But the future is changeable, hence subject to action arising from knowledge and will.

In a much more minor way, I’ve been concerned with dreams, including the precognitive kind, for more years (I think) than Paquette has lived. My own powers are drastically muted compared with his, but I’m open enough to recognize the same objective reality over there that he reports. Multiple posts on this blog deal with some of my observations.

Thus far I haven’t penetrated very far into this modest but rich book (less than 300 pages). I may have additional notes on Dreamer as time goes on.

Chemical Civilization or More Comments on ID

Human imagination has limits of sorts—not at the individual level, to be sure, but when we get more collective, certain thoughts never seem to occur to groups—at least not in public writings. The Intelligent Design movement in biology (I call it the new biology), using very powerful reasoning, based on observation, not on first principles, has concluded that actual design underlies biological systems. The proposition surfaced—and in the wink of an eye ID proponents were tarred with the brush of creationism. If life is actually designed, the only possible explanation anybody can come up with is that the designer must be God.

The leading thinker in this field, in my opinion, is Michael J. Behe, a biochemist. I rank him thus because he stays close to the actual observational data at the lowest possible level—and he isn’t tempted to knee-jerk reactions. His two books are Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution. These are must reading for anyone who wishes to understand the ID proposition. I’ve quoted Behe earlier to show that he does not name the designer but simply insists that design is present in life. In his second book, which is largely concerned with malaria, a disease caused by a one-celled organism (a so-called protist) of which the most virulent kind is Plasmodium falciparum, Behe faces the “designer” question squarely when he says:

Here’s something to ponder long and hard: Malaria was intentionally designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts…. What sort of designer is that? What sort of “fine-tuning” leads to untold human misery? To countless mothers mourning countless children? Did a hateful, malign being make intelligent life in order to torture it? One who relishes cries of pain? Maybe. Maybe not.

I discovered “intelligent design” before that movement began when—already a father with children—I studied biology on my own and discovered what I called the unmistakable signs of what I called technology—present at the cellular and sub-cellular level. I was then professionally engaged in technology assessment—the human kind—and the conclusion seemed obvious. Being also a science fiction writer, my own intuitions rapidly produced the concept of chemical civilization. (That subject is mentioned multiple times in this blog; here are one, two, three, and four posts on the subject.) What I saw in Brigitte’s textbook (Biology Today, Random House, 1972, which is the book I had been reading) was precisely what I saw in my work-life, but more sophisticated in design at the sub-microscopic level—namely technology of the human kind. It wasn’t perfect; it showed the same tendencies as our own—thus definitely goal-seeking arrangements of chemicals to get certain jobs done, by far not perfect, frequently not elegant at all—but working. I imagined this civilization peopled by what I called “little people”—invisible to us, utterly invisible, who made machines by nudging atoms around to achieve some end which still remains murky except, on certain days, to the primitive cosmologist who cohabits this body with me.

The picture I have of life is of an intelligent striving but by a civilization that cannot see the whole picture at all—indeed is striving mightily to see anything at all. We are one of its most successful ventures, because we do, indeed, see a little something ourselves—still not enough, but something. The very fact that life eats life, nature red in tooth and claw—and the fact that life is innocent, innocent, innocent—right up to our appearance—tells me that intelligence is present but, above the chemical, not vision of the sort we sometimes manage. Assuming that our observations are correct—that something intelligent but certainly not even very scient, much less omniscient, is the causative agent of life—indeed that it is life, as we really understand it, and bodies are merely tools it needs in this weird dimension—assuming all of that, quite interesting cosmological ideas surface—and indeed this blog is filled with such speculations.

Now to my opening statement concerning imagination. Nowhere in the ID literature have I thus far encountered serious speculation of the sort that imagination and a little thought—particularly about the fractal nature of this universe—suggests, namely that intelligence may be diffused in the universe and may be as common as matter, thus that many orders of intelligence may exit—to be sure all of them created. Deep down I am a creationist, but not of the primitive variety. Some of us, anyway, accept two orders already—the human and the angelic, beneath the Ultimate. Why not, minimally, a third? My conclusion? It might best be expressed, perhaps, by modifying a popular saying. Keep it simple—and you’ll stay stupid.

On the Trail of the Grail

David Bohm, the physicist, proposed that anomalous phenomena in science—like the Big Bang at the large and the wave-particle paradox at the small end of the spectrum—are due to the limitations of our theoretical frameworks. The theories are based on correct observations, to be sure, but we are now, as it were, on the border of two domains, and the new observations no longer fit. Bohm goes well beyond this and suggests infinite reaches: beyond every border extends a vast geography—which also has a border. Looks like we have borderzones in the realm of physics too. Here a graphic to make Bohm’s view accessible:

Here we might assume that the left Anomalous Region is the sub-atomic and the right one the cosmically large. The arrows point at the borders of our current knowledge where other or “higher” ranges of knowledge are necessary (new theories), to make sense of the observations. The new theories, to be sure, will not “falsify” the old—but render the old as limited cases valid enough, but only within their own domain of observation.

Bohm proposed that as we reach these borders, we must “shift” our theoretical framework (the yellow region). He asserted that a Grand Unified Theory (the grail of theoretical physics) is unachievable. We might think we have it (e.g. Newton’s clockwork universe), but sooner or later new anomalies will start to appear like signs announcing another border crossing—and to cross we must have passports; the driver’s license will no longer do.

When people encounter notions like this—what look alarmingly like infinite regresses—they standard outcry is “Enough already.” We like to limit our infinities with nice, self-enclosed symbols like the lazy eight. The biggest battles in science (and elsewhere) arise when something established once and for all is shaken to its foundations by new observations or experience. The uproar is Sisyphus’ enormous frustration every time he gets his huge rock to the top of the hill and then, just as he is about to sigh in achievement, watching the damned thing roll down again. But this frustration is then also echoed by roars of triumph on the part of those who, under intense and decades long attack (invariably ideological) discover that they were right all along.

This is the situation that surrounds Darwinism now under the assault of the new biology invariably labeled by its proposed answer to what might be called the anomaly of matter: Intelligent Design. What the new biology suggests is that the frame must be moved to understand this strange anomaly—matter preserving form and, horrors, reproducing it, over and over again. Here we have orthodox biology in frustration—and fundamentalist Christians roaring in triumph. But the detection of design in life (and we don’t really need the qualifier, intelligent, at all) should not be viewed as the achievement of closure. If life is designed, who else but God could do it? Du calm, as the French would say—indeed as one of the new biologists also says. Here is a quote from Michael J. Behe, taken from Darwin’s Black Box, Touchstone, 1996, p. 196:

Inferences to design do not require that we have a candidate for the role of designer. We can determine that a system was designed by examining the system itself, and we can hold the conviction of design much more strongly than a conviction about the identity of the designer.

I recommend this book by Behe as a superb demonstration that design is present—and at the biochemical, which is the meaningfully proper, level. Life manifests as the cell. And it as at the cellular level that we must look for its explanation.

To this I might add that the same triumphant “Told you so” we hear from fundamentalist circles concerning life we also hear, although from a smaller circle, concerning the Big Bang. Does the expansion of the universe really prove that it came out of nothing 14 billion years ago? No. The inference of God based on the Big Bang is as faulty as the inference of God from design in life. What it calls for is a moving of our theoretical frames. Endless wonders will then await us. God transcends both microscope and telescope. No pin will pin the Ultimate.

The Mysterious Survivor

A coincidence of various stimuli got me thinking once again about Darwinism and Intelligent Design. One such was discovering the Journal of Scientific Exploration, thus a pointer to science as practiced close to the borderzone; I’ve made notes on that earlier here. Another was seeing Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator, courtesy of Netflix. The film makes a very calmly reasoned case for transcendentalism by, among sources, mining the insights of the ID community. I’ve written some notes on the ideological aspects of ID on Ghulf Genes here under the title of “Battle of Clerics.” In that I focused principally on the unfortunate aspects of a debate where philosophical positions clash and cannot be resolved. The actual scientific work that people like biochemist Michael Behe pursue I’ve always admired. That sort of work, seems to me, is genuine science—open-minded, in other words—much like the material presented by JSE. Third on my list of stimuli is my use of the word devolution in the political context on LaMarotte—and remembering, later, that the New Yorker had used that word to lambast Michael Behe in an article published in 2005. The article’s subtitle was “Why intelligent design isn’t.”

But let’s examine that dismissive phrase. The new biology, as I might call it, is quite excellent natural philosophy; it is reasoning about nature based on observation. What the ID movement sees is the marks of intelligence in living beings. It’s obviously there, as I pointed out on Ghulf Genes. Long before the ID movement had its birth, I spent some month studying biology in depth, but as a grown man and already an expert on technology. What I saw in living things, and this time in detail, was just that, technology—indeed exactly the same kind of technology I’d been studying for years already in human society; the big difference between the two was that the biological variety was much, much more sophisticated—and the agencies behind it invisible. And therefore, being also a science fiction author, I hit on the notion of a “chemical civilization” to explain it. In other words, I do agree with the ID proponents, and did so before they came to be known. Obvious intelligence underlies life. No doubt about it.

Now what is not intelligent is to assert that matter can, by sheer chance, produce intelligence—with nothing else added or present. Matter shows no sign whatever of having the potential to manifest life, never mind intelligence. The two concepts on which the whole of Darwinism (neo- or otherwise) rests are natural selection and survival. Natural selection for what? Survival. But what or who is this Mysterious Survivor? Well, it is a chance convergence of chemicals, per Alexander Ivanovich Oparin (1894-1980)—who pushed evolution back to the level of chemicals. By chance they converged, by chance they accidentally formed some more chemical combinations within themselves, the DNA, which by chance coded for proteins that formed, first of all, the walls that they had earlier accidentally formed without the help of DNA and also, by good luck, the enzymes (also proteins) that actually read the DNA later and, reading it by forming RNA, aligned themselves accidentally in such a manner as to form a machine that could, reading RNA this time, form other proteins as well. And presto we have the self-reproducing cell. And having shown that this could be, and all just by accident, the rest is history, a history that, by accident, formed Alexander Ivanovich Oparin, who, by the accidents of birth and education could finally explain it all to the accidentally formed Soviet citizenry.

Considering the mind-boggling improbability of all this, the little child who cries that the emperor is naked might be viewed as intelligent. And that, ultimately, is what the new biologists are actually doing. They point to a gap in the logic that leads from a handful of elements—but by no means all—to self-moving creatures that exhibit purposive arrangements internally, like that handy DNA code. Is it their unforgivable sin that some of the more philosophically minded among them, looking to fill the gap, point to God rather than, like their opponents, to the equally mysterious divine Complexity. The sin, it seems to me, lies in the meanings associated with these two concepts. God is assumed to be intelligent, a source of law, suggesting a relationship between creator and creature—whereas Complexity demands nothing at all while giving us whatever we want in the way of explanation. And where power to explain is sought, Complexity is certainly omnipotent.

Contemplative Life

From the vast continents of ordinary life, the contemplative variety appears quite close to what here I call the borderzone—the edge of a flat earth, as it were, where the great chasm of eternity suddenly appears. Contemplatives? They are religious—and not merely nuns or monks or priests or bishops or abbots and abbesses. Such people, to the extent they live an active life, are not living the contemplative (or so it’s said). And certainly not laymen. And least of all the married.

But concepts like that, concepts like the contemplative life, do sprout near the borderzone—and not just within Catholicism—and if we look at them closely, they turn out to mean something other than they signal to the uninterested public. The concept of jihad comes to mind; by that we understand anything from Holy War to terrorism, but to the pious at the core of Islam, the word means spiritual struggle. All right. If you think me a propagandist for Al Qaida, that’ll be my jihad to live down. Or let us take the Buddhist concept of nirvana, defined as extinction, disappearance, the state of being blown-out, like a candle. The Online Etymology dictionary helpfully Latinizes the word as de-spiration—all life sucked out of you. And that is the “pearl of great price” the Buddhists seek? Nothingness? Well, “contemplative life” and “nirvana” are similar in this sense: to most people they suggest something negative, to others something of the greatest value. But to get the second meaning, one has to unfold the concept.

Perhaps the simplest way to approach this is to call contemplative life soul life or inner life. Now the problem is that a certain special way of seeing reality hides beneath these phrases. That way is a hierarchical conception of our dual nature in which the physical, hormonal, outer, and social are at the lower and a corresponding spiritual, empathic, intuitive, and communal are the higher level. And then the contemplative life is minimally defined as one where more of our being takes place inwardly, in the soul, than takes place outwardly, in the body, in the world. It’s as simple as that; but it is difficult because it takes gradual development even to tease these two realms apart enough to recognize that they each have a separate and real existence.

Let me illustrate this by examining words like mental (often associated with contemplation) and emotional (linked to the physical). By mental people mean conceptual, intellectual. By emotional they mean the heat we feel in the chest from anger or joy: the breath increases; you feel it, it moves you. The contemplation of an infinite regress or the square root of minus-one do not, by contrast, have any emotional toning (except for Brigitte, who invariably expresses her disgust!) Now let’s proceed to sort these concepts out.

First of all the mental is much more than merely concept juggling. It includes within it what we call consciousness, the definition of which I leave to those foolhardy enough to try and inevitably to fail. It includes the mysterious will—which is something other than reflexive action. It includes imagination, a faculty I do not (like Aquinas) associate with the lower realm. It does include intellect—which we do not find in the body-machine. It also includes the experience of being drawn toward some and repelled from other things—visible and invisible. Empathy and apathy: the real sources of emotion. That the body should immediately respond when we feel these things by mirroring the soul’s movements by hormonal discharges (hence the heat and the breathing) merely confirms the close linkage between soul and body, not that emotions are physical. The few that genuinely are are also merely reflexes we have in common with all animals. Thus I am absolutely sure that a disembodied soul will have emotions—and that emotions are not, repeat not, grounded in the sensorium.

The reader who nods reading this will do so from experience—thus because his or her inner life has developed its autonomy enough to have noted these two realms, their hierarchical relationship, and their potential independence. For someone like that, the suggestion that the contemplative life is real, outside of temples and cloisters too, will not be surprising—even if she or he is more accustomed to think of it as the creative life.