Why Not Something Meaningful?

Over years now, time and time again, I’ve noted reading the mediumistic literature that the departed, communicating through a medium, never have anything really meaningful to say. We hear greetings and very short answers—never what, written down, might spell a complex sentence with clauses, never mind anything of paragraph length. Those who seek out mediums, of course, are people who want contact with those they’ve loved and lost, and they appear satisfied. They recognize voices or intonations. But if I were attending a séance (never have), I’d want to know what is over there, and I’d be wanting to hear something novel, anything novel at all.

Now this recurred to me because fellow-blogger, The Zennist, put up a pointer the other day to a film concerning the Scole Experiment (link), a 1990s account of various experiences of contact with the beyond. I watched a bit of that film and, doing so, and the thought came once again. One-word answers to questions. The séances are well-enough recorded so that one almost hears the strain and the effort in the voices from beyond that answer the questions. After I stopped the film, an association sprang up in my mind. These conversations sounded a lot like dialogs between two people one of whom does not speak the language very well. I’ve had that experience three times in my life—learning German, French, and English. You understand the question—because understanding comes before speech—but you struggle mightily to answer, because you lack the words.

Now it occurred to me that in spiritualistic encounters some analog to language might be at work. The spirit is striving to articulate speech either by using the medium’s vocal apparatus or trying to cause air to vibrate in imitation of spoken sound. This may be extraordinarily difficult for a person no longer directly linked to a physical body. Thus what does come out is the absolute minimum. Quite a few near-death experience (NDE) reports contain descriptions of attempts by those having NDEs to communicate—by touch or voice—with those they see around them, usually in a hospital setting. They absolutely fail. Not surprisingly, therefore, those who try to contact the dead reduce physical stimuli to a minimum—dark rooms, silence, concentration, etc. The skeptics interpret this as deliberate attempts to set up deceptions; indeed such conditions favor magicians and tricksters too; but they may be the minimum conditions for making any effective contact—not least the presence of a person who is already sensitive.

The difficulties involved, and the fact that the best that spirits can do is convey a small emotion and an indication that they are still there, convinced me long ago that the mediumistic enterprise is a fringe activity—and probably on both sides. As proof of the beyond these arcane sessions will never be persuasive for unbelievers. Systematic thought about our human condition will produce the right answer; and data on NDEs, if more data are needed, provide much better ancillary proof.

Transvaluation of All Values

Old Friedrich had it right, of course, but he gave it the wrong slant. The Friedrich I have in mind is Nietzsche. He coined this concept as die Umwertung aller Werte. He referred to religion in the broad sense and to Christianity specifically. He thought that Christianity was hostile to life, elevated the weak when, instead, we should admire the strong, worshipped the weak when we ought to worship, instead, the vital and energetic instead, etc. But Nietzsche was certainly a deep and profound thinker all the same, and if his conceptualization is distilled down from the big messy blog in which he managed to perceive it, it points at a great truth. In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience William James echoed this conceptualization somewhat, although much more mildly, when he contrasted sick-minded and healthy-minded individuals. They were contemporaries, needless to say, James born in 1842, Nietzsche in 1884, and such ideas were, alas, “in the air.” But it is possible to turn this insight upside-down in turn and then derive the genuine truth within it. Our times have happily (or unhappily) evolved a great deal since. We’ve come to know what the healthy-minded are capable of. Both died well before such plagues as communism, Nazism, and commercialism took hold, James in 1910, Nietzsche in 1900.

Curious this. It was “in the air,” the future. Nietzsche interpreted that strange emanation, either from the future or rising like a nasty vapor from his present, in a negative way and embraced primitivism. James felt the same thing but ended by up-holding the inherent value of those who were “soul-sick” and moved by a deep religious impulse. Freud and Jung, who followed them in 1856 and 1875 respectively, also went in different directions sensing the same air. Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion, meaning religion. Jung’s work anchored a broad movement back to religion by the West’s intellectual fellahin.

If we take values to represent the high—whatever meaning we want to give it—it is certainly true that the more stimulus we feel and the more intense it is, the lower we are in the scheme of nature. Pleasure is an intermediate here. The real stimulus is actually pain. And as in the physical, so also in other realms. I once read the comment in one of Idries Shah’s book, he was a Sufi teacher, that the most visible are of the lowest rank. That startled me at first back then, but I’ve come to see its truth. The most visible have power—and we worship power. Another tale that sticks in mind, in this context, I encountered in C.G. Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Here it is, very brief:

There is a fine old story about a student who came to a rabbi and said, “In the olden days there were men who saw the face of God. Why don’t they any more?” The rabbi replied, “Because nowadays no one can stoop so low.” [C.G. Jung]

A variant of “visibility” is that celebrity, when nothing else is present, is almost pure vacuity. Noise is low, silence is high. Motion distracts; indeed when it intensifies, it confuses the mind; therefore advertisers treasure nano-second flickers on the screen to cloud the judgment. The with-it are without it. Solitude is beatitude—except in an age of social networking.

Much has changed since Nietzsche wished to transvalue values and thus get rid of the last traces of Christian culture that still lingered in the late nineteenth century. Well, be careful what you wish for. The paradox is that to wish for nothing might get you everything. But it will be boring in the meantime, and there is no put-down in this day and age as potent as to call something B‑O‑R‑I‑N‑G…

To Be a Tree?

It may well be, if we but knew it, that the Project of Life in this realm provides innumerable avenues for spirits to escape the abyss that managed to suck them under. That’s at least a plausible hypothesis. Embodied experience may well be the Great Escape—and who’s to say that grasses, plants, trees, and animals are all a huge waste and only we, humans, merit salvation. One of the truly odd aspects of consciousness is that we can only ever experience one being from within—and we can touch others only, as it were, by hints and emanations. An answering smile, a look in the eyes of the other, a feeling of agreement sometimes signal that what I feel is also shared. And sometimes on long walks I get the most damnable feeling of communicating with the trees—and that they communicate with one another too. And that there’s no waste out there at all—and the dog has feelings, thoughts, and dreams. We cannot know what it is to be a tree, but sharing life with them at least hints that they may have their own way—and that it is at least as meaningful as ours.