The Invisible

Wir sind mit dem Unsichtbaren näher als mit dem Sichtbaren verbunden.

We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible.

     Novalis, Das Allgemeine Brouillon, §251.

Novalis was the pseudonym of the short-lived eighteenth century poet, thinker, mystic, and civil engineer George Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hadenberg. He died of tuberculosis at 28 (May 1772 to March1801) but left behind a monumental work that greatly influenced his times. At that age I was just beginning to grow up. Novalis means something to us because he died in Weissenfels, the first German town Brigitte inhabited on her long migration from Lodz, in Poland, to the United States.

I’ve noted this “closeness to the invisible” in the Muslim culture a while back (link, “Closer To You Than Your Jugular Vein.”) What struck me today, reflecting on the life of Novalis again, was that some individuals are far more aware of this, far earlier in life. The invisible is literally flooding them, their intuition is on fire, and in some notable instances, Mozart comes to mind as well, they produce magnificent works and then, in a flash, they are gone again—almost as if their stay here is shortened when, evidently, their work is done.

Novalis’ most extensive work is Das Allgemeine Brouillon, notes on all kinds of subjects produced in 1798-1799. A direct translation of that title is The General Muddle, muddle being the translation of brouillon that Novalis borrowed from the French. It has taken a long time to get it translated into English: 2007. The translator was David W. Wood. He gave it the more grandiose title Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia. George Hadenberg, of course, burning very brightly, had it right to begin with: this is the realm of muddle; the order emerges when we leave.

An Excess of Abstraction

Or In Praise of Mythology. All of my heroes have significant flaws—as in they, too, were human—but my admiration for them arose in the first place because they had wonderful insights. I was reminded of that this morning when by happenstance a post here about a year ago—about the Zuni world conception (“The Dance Hall of the Dead” link)—came to mind. I read it again. Now there is a mythological view of the transcendental. And in light of that a post of mine yesterday, about a “science of the spiritual,” fell into better focus. The thought arose: We suffer from an excess of abstraction. We also, of course, suffer from an excess of technology, brittle noise, unnatural flickering motion on millions of screens. That all this should suddenly be forcibly present to me this morning next reminded me of Carl Gustav Jung and his theory of compensation: our greater mind, which he, unfortunately, named the Unconscious, acts as a corrective to the busy working of our conscious mind—and in sleep, in dreams, it reminds us of the Bigger Picture. So I might have dreamt something, although I don’t remember it.

Fleshing this out a little, I am reminded that through vast ages past humanity lived in nature—not in the artificial monstrosity of urban aggregations. Books were nonexistent for most of those times. Collective culture took the form of myths, great narratives, poetry, images. Even after books had come to be, the masses could not read. Here, for instance, a verse by the French poet François Villon, attributed to his mother (1461)†:

I am a woman poor and aged,

I know nothing at all; letters I never read;

At my parish monastery I saw

A painted Paradise with harps and lutes,

And also Hell wherein the damned are boiled:

One gave me fright; the other joyfulness.

Even in this day and age of ridiculously excessive abstraction, real religious feeling continues to be expressed in mythological forms, even on the flickering TV. CNN, for instance treated us to a rich tapestry of images in its re-broadcast of The Two Marys*—images which, in effect, overwhelm the decidedly modernistic message of the accompanying voice-over.

Not everything is concept. And to call all that remains mere emotion is also quite wrong. In the mythologies of humanity a magical fusion takes place of the many facets of soul-experience. And in the next world over, no doubt, we shall once more live “in nature,” not in the calculator our heads have become.

————————

†A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel, Viking, 1996, p. 105.

*See also The Two Marys: The Hidden History of the Mother and Wife of Jesus, by Sylvia Browne, Penguin Group, 2007.

A Science of the Spiritual

At the conventional level, thus in common public discourse, a rather deep abyss separates the spiritual and the so-called scientific. It is an either-or situation. Science represents a materialistic monism (although not all scientists do). The spiritual are presumed to believe in one or more supernatural beings who stand above visible reality in a governing, law-giving, rewarding and punishing relationship. The reason for this is that, viewed from a distance, most highly developed religions project a narrative in the form of ruler-and-subject—easily understood by human societies in which that pattern is always present.

This description, to be sure, is a gross simplification—but that’s what animates public discourse. It ignores the fact that science has reached levels, certainly in physics and to a lesser extent in neuroscience, where hard materialism is ever less sustainable. It also ignores the fact that higher religions have arisen transcending the primitive ruler-subject model. To be sure, the higher faiths still rest on primitive foundations as a consequence of historical origins, thus Christianity on Judaism. At the same time the earlier religions, influenced by higher religions, have also, at their leading edges, become much more spiritualized. Every religion now has a mystical level—an elite expression.

Also present, in very tentative form, is a genuine science of the spiritual. My hope is that the likely brutal transition to a post-fossil-age will not plunge us back to primitivity. If we manage that transition well, the science of the spiritual will continue to grow. If not, it will sink out of view as harshly doctrinaire religious management of masses once more arises. Alchemy is an example of such a science—hidden and submerged by the collapse of the Roman Age.

By a “science of the spiritual” I mean a vastly enlarged scientific venture to understand reality, and particularly spiritual reality, free of the strictures of dogmatically managed Revelation—thus authoritarian religion. Revelation itself, to be sure, would be a central concern of this new science, viewing it as human experience of the transcending regions but, to be sure, interpreted by the very people who have had them—and then socialized yet more, for purposes of human governance, by others.

This science, so far is it already exists, has made me wonder more and more if perhaps human encounters with the Beyond might not be over-stated by those who have experienced them—and this for reasons that are mutually reinforcing. One is that their expectations are formed by religious ideas—thus occurring in the context of religious practices. The other is that the actual “heavenly” environment is both more natural to humans and yet also quite unfamiliar, therefore it is overly stimulating. Good evidence for this comes from Swedenborg’s accounts; his long exposure to that world had made him familiar with it. He also saw enough to see the vast complexities of reality beyond the border. At the same time, it may well be that being anchored in a body is not very helpful for understanding that world, that much learning is ahead for us before we’re fully acclimatized there, that (per Swedenborg and others, e.g., Robert Monroe) low adaptations are available and also common there; and, finally, concerning that last point, that spending some time in this our own more constricted “world of boxes,” to cite a phrase from Carl Jung’s account of returning from a near death experience, may benefit those of us who have lived a life here attentively. It may enable us to aim higher when we actually get there.

A science of the spiritual, given the abyss that separates science and religion today, will tend to appeal to neither the spiritual nor to the scientific camps. But there is always a third way.

Notes on Catastrophism

Fringe elements latch on to any suitable calendrical event to head for high places there to await the End Times or Doomsday. Today is such a day. The Mayan Long Count Calendar, this time, serves as the motivation. I’ve presented the background on that in some detail on Ghulf Genes. In summary, No, the Mayans themselves did not believe the world would end today. But then the people among them who made calendars were more akin in spirit to our scientists than any other subgroup of our current humanity.

Thinking about this—first of all ancient cultures’ great fascination with precise measurement of sky events, second the vast public fascination with end times, be they caused by divine command or cosmological accidents—I suspect that two quite different motivations are present, one for each, although, once upon a time, they coincided. To put this in plain words:

I think that once long ago—and perhaps repeatedly—humanity actually experienced genuine near-collisions with space objects, indeed in what might be called historical times. This or these caused enormous destruction. Therefore societies felt themselves obliged to observe changes out in space. They could not prevent recurrence, but at least they could know if something dreadful loomed ahead. Therefore we find “observatories” such as Stonehenge scattered over the ancient world. These are interpreted as religious sites. But if they were that, why the awesome precision in observation that they permitted. Similarly, there are astronomical observations anchored in calendars, similarly accurate. It’s telling that the Mayans produced extraordinarily accurate observations of the phases of Venus. For more on this I suggest the writings of the Immanuel Velikovsky; he is derided by orthodox science—but that, perhaps, adds justification for reading him. What we have here is a quite plausible link between accurate astronomy on the one hand and real sky-conveyed catastrophes on the other.

As for the popular fascination, that, I think, has its roots in our psychology. Doomsday, viewed as a concept, is in a real sense a projection onto the entire society, and on the world itself, of something that will happen to each of us individually. We shall all die—and as we do, everything, at least everything we’ve grown accustomed to, will disappear: people, culture, rocks, planet, and sun. Knowing nothing beyond that with certainty puts us in a scary place, if we think about it. This will all end. And when times are tough—and they are always tough—Doomsday also holds a faint little promise: when it comes, our troubles will all end. And then, to complete the picture, a small still voice within us also suggests that absolute disappearance is not our fate. Therefore what comes in Doomsday’s wake may be the longed for millennium.

To this I might add that we may not be naturally fashioned to live in a uni-directional time stream. And when we leave this dimension and enter another kind of time, then we shall be home again. Aldous Huxley captures the feel of that in his novel, Time Must Have a Stop. And that sentiment, buried deep within us, also plays a role. It causes us to resonate with widely publicized events signaling just that, time’s stop…with a kind of shivery feeling in which loss and gain are strongly mixed.

If Only We Knew More

How to combat that strong feeling—which at times arises just by looking at the world with a cold eye—that our sojourn in this dimension is altogether pointless. There is a glimmer of intuition, always, that that cannot be. And it arises spontaneously enough so that its source is not something that reaches us from others, although it may well come from on high. The world’s revelations, formed into religious doctrines, may, after all, be viewed as the imaginative fleshing out of that tiny intuition by those who’ve lived before.

When such thoughts assail me I like to remind myself that I don’t know enough, and also cannot—not by reading the tea leaves of this dimension. I don’t know the prehistory of our appearance here; I don’t know enough about the world that follows—although I believe (that intuition again) that something beyond exists. The presumption is that if I knew something real about both, the reason for our stay in this dimension would fall into place. Let’s look at these two ranges of inaccessible knowledge.

Prehistory. This realm would seem less depressing if I knew with certainty that souls originate in this dimension “naturally” or that they have been “caught up” in some also natural event like the formation of a cosmos. These are two cases of many—but perhaps the most obvious. In the first (Prehistory A) the presumed model is some kind of emanation, thus that all of reality is in some sense “flowing” out of a divine center. Part of that flow is the conditioned, part the unconditioned order. The conditioned is simply the visible cosmos of energy and matter, the unconditioned manifests as freedom, intelligence, and, most primitively, life. Here the only “authority” we have is Swedenborg’s. He asserted that all “angels” were at origin like us; they emerged from the dark domain, our sunny world or one like it. I say that because Swedenborg did not view the earth as the only cosmic point where life begins a journey “back to God.” The structure of this narrative is that the created soul is quite unconscious but has all the necessary potential, including life itself. And that embodied life is just a phase of the development of this potential. The soul has many stages of development both before and after it arrives in the “beyond.”

The pros and cons of this projection are that life here is a necessary phase. That immediately gives our life here meaning. In this view life arising anywhere in the universe, if conditions are suitable, would seem normal. It would make sense that we have engineered bodies as temporary “vehicles.” The view is also compatible with reincarnation theories if rebirth is occasional and due to the “unfinished” nature of the reborn soul: it has not developed enough. Among the cons is that the model does not fit the Christian cosmology—which has another prehistory, call it Prehistory C. Other problem are its emanationist structure, which is not rationally explained and obviously based on a physical analogy like the radiations of the sun. To be sure, all creation myths are ultimately incoherent, but a “natural” origin seems less meaningful than a deliberate decision by a conscious God, which is what Prehistory C contains.

Prehistory B is the other case. In that one a preexistent community of souls is plunged into a (for its members) unnatural situation by a cosmic event, the model being the Big Bang—which is not an event of “creation” but, rather, the formation of a kind of bubble in a much greater and vastly more dense “Mother Cosmos.” The community lived in the “space” where that bubble formed. The “density” here can be understood in various ways beyond the simple. It might have more dimensions; it could also mean that our cosmos has greater coarseness, its Mother greater subtlety. The change, in any case, is abrupt and in a real sense destructive of an “environment” in which the preexistent community had its being. The unfortunate community is therefore obliged to adapt in some way and then begin the process of returning to Mother.

Let’s look at the pros and cons of this case too. In this view life here is an accidental phase in the life of a soul community. It projects onto the cosmos, and the matrix of which it is a bubble, a “natural” condition such as we experience here, i.e., shit happens. Whatever happens may be lawful, but it seems random as we experience it. Our condition, however, at least makes some sense. We’ve been plunged into an environment to which we’re not adapted, and all that we observe is an attempt to make the best of a bad situation—not least escaping from it into a more suitable one by appropriate development. Our world has fallen, but it isn’t our fault. It just happened. Our inability to remember our preexistence in a “higher” world would also make sense. Cosmic accidents may have swept our memories away—or adapting to this one favors their suppression—filtered out by our brains. Pro: our situation at least makes sense. Con: there is neither rhyme or reason to the situation. Any meaning is referred to something beyond either this cosmos or its accident-prone Mother. Cosmologies tend to do this: they push meaning further away, rather than supplying it. In any case, no Divine Presence is anywhere discernible beyond the seemingly lawful behavior of matter/energy—but only when we give it close study.

The World that Follows. Knowing the world beyond would presumably illuminate our knowledge of this one. Such knowing would require at minimum (1) memory of this existence there, (2) retention of our powers of reasoning and movement (to enable us to look around), (3) ability clearly to perceive the conditions of that world, and (4) the presence of other beings like ourselves. We could then carry out a survey and discover if others had also lived in a “fallen world.” If some had but others had not, Prehistory B would appear more plausible. If all had, Prehistory A would have more weight. We would be able to discover if others over there had a coherent view of reality. If they did, the reasons for that could be ascertained. If not—if the same puzzlement reigned over there as does here—in that case the quest for answers just continues. What is inconceivable is that there is no answer. Our deepest intuition is that there is. That intuition is not merely a glimmer of knowledge. It is also a hunger and a thirst—for meaning and for righteousness.

Sticks and Stones

One of the ways in which we become very, very well-adapted to living in a physical environment is that we tend to ignore or minimize those messages we hear frequently enough so that they’re familiar but which, at the same time, don’t hold a threat of harming us. If someone reads a lot about spiritual matters, the eastern doctrine of Maya, thus that the world is an “illusion,” rapidly loses whatever thought it might have originally occasioned. It does not seem to be borne out by direct experience. Here the typical reaction is that of Dr. Johnson who, in reaction to hearing Bishop Berkeley’s idealism labeled, by his friend Boswell, as impossible to refute, kicked a stone with great force and said: “I refute it thus.” Funny, yes.

Doctrines of this type are difficult. How can something solid be an illusion? What is rarely offered, by way of counterpoint, is that our most immediate experience of life, self-awareness, is absolutely immaterial. The thought process that went through Dr. Johnson head, the impulse that set his foot in motion, the words he formed before he spoke—all three of these had zero substantiality. So we do have, as it were, two different but equally real experiences of reality. One of these you cannot kick—but you can’t kick without it. And the dead stone that got the kick cannot for the life of it (which it lacks) cry “Ouch!”

Okay. For materialists thought and will and feelings, indeed self-awareness too, are all material. But they haven’t proved their case at all. Hence I ignore them.

Now these doctrines arise from actual experience. It is the experience of the contrast between two worlds, a spiritual and the physical, that gives rise to them. Once the spiritual has really been experienced in a genuine way and for long enough so that it sinks in, the world of matter is discounted, as it were. It is shown to be, in terms of real value, so very much inferior to the material world as to take on the aspect of illusion. Simply to label it thus, as illusion, is not a very sophisticated way to make the point—but the person experiencing the contrast also realizes that it can’t be proved without the experience.

The contrast between the physical and the mental however, are accessible to all of us—and serve as a point from which the hoary old doctrines may be examined. We all of us, virtually all of the time, are living in our minds, not in the physical world. Having one’s tooth drilled might be the exception that proves the rule. And where our minds originate is a great puzzlement. But reasonable reflection on it does suggest several things. One is that mind is vastly superior to matter. Another that it must come from a realm quite different than the one we inhabit now. So there is a mild case, at minimum, for a higher world. And those who have experienced it assure us that it is more real, more solid, than sticks and stones and bones.

Illusion? Why ever not? But the word must be applied with a modifier: relative. This world is relatively less substantial than the subtle world where our minds originated—and where they are bound again. Meanwhile our brains are organized to look out for sticks and stones—and to value only immediate threats and immediate gratifications. It is this, our excellent adaptation, that make us kick the stone or bang the table to make a limited if dramatic assertion of our own superiority.

Negative Pleasures

Negative pleasures seem to be the pleasures of old age, but then I think back...and then I’m not so sure. Anyway, what am I talking about? I’m talking about the absence of stress. But absence of stress is equivalent to an absence of stimulus. And if one is quite readily stimulated, the absence of stimulus is in itself a pleasure.

Reading Berdyaev’s The Beginning and End again after a long stretch of years, I find him speaking of the passionate life. He doesn’t mean the life of the flesh, but nevertheless he is much taken with “passion” and with “dynamism.” At one point he is exploring the German mystic Boehme’s writings about the Ungrund. That is a kind of Nothingness out of which God creates. Berdyaev is also influenced by Hegel—not enough to agree with Hegel that God is evolving in history, but the dynamic view in Hegel appeals to him.

Now reading quotes from Boehme in that book (not included in the compilation that I own, perhaps because of their seemingly heterodox flavor) it occurred to me that Boehme’s inward experiences are ultimately the same as other “unitive” experiences of great mystics. In these there is some kind of experience of the rootings of the self but projected onto God (in my view). The mystics experience energy and take it to be God. But it might very well be the life-force that they feel. Boehme looked deeper than most and hence experienced Nothingness and, arising out of it, a powerful desire. But that may be the experience of an origination, not an experience of God or of God feeling desires; or it may be an apperception of his own fallen state—and the desire to escape it.

The object of that desire I see as something Berdyaev may have viewed as a passive sort of state. I call it sovereignty—the state in which I am above passion taken positively (a drive) or negatively (a suffering).

If stimulus is associated with life in the physical realm then its absence enables us to experience what lies above that realm. That absence frees the attention. Something of value may “flow down” from above; and if we perceive it, we will cultivate the “negative pleasure” in order to enable ourselves to capture it.

An observation that seems to come to all explorers of the Borderzone is that feelings common in bodily life have a two-tiered character. There is pleasure and then there’s joy, for instance. There is eros and then caritas. There is grasp and there is understanding. There is stimulus and there is intuition. The second in these pairings is always more subtle. Berdyaev’s book, referred to above, is filled with such distinctions, although not presented systematically. There is being and non-being in his own philosophy, for instance, and it is non-being which gets the favorable nod. The state of “being” is the fallen state. Words, words, words. Why not just say “the spiritual.” That nothingness, that negativity, is actually a much higher and very real value. And the negative pleasures are higher values that become accessible when a kind of equilibrium between the lower and higher is achieved—the state of “sovereignty.”

There would seems to be a big difference between this dimension and the one where we are going—but yet it will be a familiar sort of place. Things here will correspond to things there—but what a difference. We can experience that difference by contemplating the difference between stimuli and intuitions. Here everything is mixed up and it is tough to sort things out.

Wearing a Dunce Cap

I have been wandering of late in the company of a distinct minority within the Age of Christendom. By and large it is the company I’ve kept throughout my life even if, quite often, sometimes for years on end, I’ve been socializing with the same minorities in other cultures—Persian (Mazdaism), Arab (Sufism), but also touching the Chinese (in Taoism). This walk, of late, began with Duns Scotus whom I met, in my childhood, by way of the dunce cap and, growing up, I never questioned the prevalent but mildly expressed view among my teachers in Catholic schools from lowest to highest that Scotus was a rather dim light, if not a small shadow-thrower, in the vast brilliance of St. Thomas Aquinas. Dunce cap? Worn by those who do not get it. You can make one out of some sheets of newspaper, making them into a cone. For the origin of that shape I show a fifteenth century painting of Scotus (who himself lived mostly in the blessed thirteenth century, 1266-1308); the Flemish painter was Justus van Gent (link).

Scotus belongs to the Platonic line traceable backwards by way of St. Augustine (354-430). Augustine himself was part of this minority, close to Manichaeism in youth, a gnostic view which itself has links back to Mazdaism. He lived in a time when the New Dark Age of the Roman Realm was up and running in a serious way. The Visigoths sacked Rome when he was 56 in 410 AD. Therefore his view was darker and more pessimistic than that of Aquinas (1225-1274) who lived as the light of the Renaissance began to signal its own coming with a faint rosy color beneath the horizon. And Aquinas’ great influence was Aristotle who lived just as the Old Modernism, Hellenism, was about to be launched by his pupil, Alexander the Great.  

Let me capture these distinctions in cartoon-like fashion, as it were. Plato stood in relation to Aristotle as Scotus stood to Aquinas. In Plato we see the mature philosophy of a passing religious age, in Aristotle the foreshadowing of a modern time. The same may be said of Scotus and Aquinas, with the small but not very important difference that Aquinas was 41 years older than Scotus whereas Plato was 43 years older than Aristotle. In inwardly-directed religious ages, awareness of the fallen nature of humanity is to the fore. In outwardly-directed secular ages, self-assertion rises. The feeling tone derives from the focus of attention.

So I was reading Berdyaev. He proclaims himself a Platonist, Christian existentialist, and he viewed Duns Scotus as the greatest of the Scholastics. It was the kind of statement that caught my eye, surprised me. I underlined it heavily, adding exclamation marks in the margin—the last time I had read the Russian sage some decades ago with great approval.

So here we have a minority strain of pessimism and a majority dominance of optimism—both within an almost invisibly small cluster of communities that even think about permanent transcendence. I’m still of the pessimistic camp but getting there, in age, I mean. And the odd thing is that, well past the three-score-and-ten, I am feeling optimistic now. If one goes deep enough in any direction with a kind of junk-yard-dog persistence, amazingly the light begins to dawn. I wonder. Does the light eventually dim for the really persistent optimists? If so, my intuition guided me correctly in my gloomy youth.

Sub Specie Temporis

When contemplating the likely life-course of certain individuals “under the aspect of time,” I often experience genuine pain. But when I do it “under the aspect of eternity” the pain gradually lessens. This comes from my conviction that being here, in this time-sodden dimension, is (to put it neutrally) temporary. There is a way out. We will all eventually find it. Oddly, the Age of Fossil Fuels, which we worship as Progress, has been a kind of curse. That influx of free energy has reduced the level of hardship for many, many people a bit too much; therefore it has made it harder for a similar number to discover what our job on this earth is. Therefore we pay for the ease of modernity with massive private failure at the individual level in neglecting life’s Job 1.

The Latin phrase, sub specie aeternitatis, got it legs in the seventeenth century. It was first used by the short-lived lens-grinder and philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) in asserting that Reason derives from God, that its use permits us to see things under the aspect of eternity, not of time. Curious business, this wisdom in another language. Latin seemingly elevates concepts. Lots of learned people have used it since Spinoza. Something in us resonates with that meaning. I remember reading it for the first time as a youngster used by Arnold Toynbee in one of his works—and immediately latching on to it as if I’d found a treasure. Of such stones, to change the image, are built the steps out of this dimension.

On Being and Meaning

The aim of philosophical knowledge certainly does not consist in the knowledge of being, in a reflection of reality in the mind of the person who knows. Its aim is the knowledge of truth, the discovery of meaning, its purpose is to give an intelligible sense to reality. Philosophical knowledge, therefore, is not passive reflection, it is an active break-through, it is victory in the conflict with the meaninglessness of world reality. What I want to know is not reality but the truth about it, and I can recognize this truth only because there is in me myself, in the knowing subject, a source of truth, and union with truth is a possibility. The fact that there is in front of me a writing-table and I am writing with a pen on paper is not truth. It is something received by the senses and a statement of fact. The problem of truth is already posed in my writing. There is no truth of any sort of object; truth is only in the subject.

  [Nicolai Berdyaev, The Beginning & The End, Harper Torchbook, 1957, p. 42]

Berdyaev (1874-1948) was a Russian philosopher usually grouped with Christian existentialists. I got to know him in the 1950s. He is also sometimes called the philosopher of creativeness. In the following sixty some odd years, I’ve never had occasion to question his intuition. All harmony. He has this to say on the next page:

Truth is a creative act of spirit in which meaning is brought to birth. Truth stands higher than the reality which exercises compulsion upon us, higher than the “real” world. But still higher than truth is God, or to put it more truly—God is Truth.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Breath

Thirty-five thousand times. Please. And may our heart thump 86,000 times. Perpetual motion. I wake up, and I’m in motion. But I was moving even as I slept. Blood flow, dead cell replacement. When all goes well we’re unaware of the vast chemical civilization that we abstract into “my body.” It’s odd to be a sort of, kind of chemical machine requiring a constant supply of oxidation to keep our trillions of little cells going. Even a cursory examination of what we really are, as bodies, will prove quite startling, and the deeper the look them more wild it gets. Nearly seven billion of us, but if we look at a single cell of just one of those bodies, we see a structure as complex as a city. How did we get caught up in this vast seemingly fractal structure? When we look at our traditional or modern answers to this question, they reveal themselves as utterly inadequate. Motivation for cosmology—if it is done right. But the task’s too great. A really good starting assumption, however, a kind of Occam’s razor cut, is that we are not this, not this. But keep that breath going, Lord, until it’s time to move on.

Two Kinds of Dualities

Among the many dualities philosophy and ordinary speech present, some are highly time-dependent, others are, you might say, are timeless, sub specie aeternitatis. To pick two on each side, potency-and-act and being-and-becoming are of the time-dependent kind. The living-and-the-dead and phenomenon-and-noumenon, belong to the timeless category. Let’s deal with these last first.

A person might think that living-and-dead are most definitely time-dependent, arguing that everything living dies and does so within time. But the odd thing is, we can’t be sure. Bodies most certainly die, but what are bodies made of? They’re made of elements. Elements do not die. What constitutes a living being is something more than organic elements, characterized by having carbon as a constituent. A corpse still has all those elements the dying person had a moment before dying. Life has fled, as we say, but until we know just what it is, we can’t say that it has disappeared. If life is a transcending force, living-and-dead are permanently here. Only the forms change.

Phenomenon-and-noumenon, the Kantian categories, meaning that which is capable of being perceived and that, behind it, which cannot, the thing-in-itself, are more obviously independent of time. They co-exist. Thus they point at a basic definition of reality.

Turning to the other side, potency-and-act, the Aristotelian categories, are embedded in time. Potency is a capacity to change. It’s a sleeping power and, when it is unfolding, becoming actual, it is transformed from invisibility to manifestation. Becoming-and-being are equivalent categories. But becoming is impossible to picture without time. Aristotle’s word for potential was dunamis, thus “capacity, possibility.” As it unfolds into act, we have dynamism, a word we derive from dunamis. We’re really dealing here with change, very much a here and now sort of thing, arising from philosophical attempts at explaining motions of sundry kinds. They do not tell us anything about the cosmos, which is always in motion too.

For me the timeless dualities produce more food for thought—because I sense that there is something beyond the here and now. The very abstract, modern formulation I most value is the duality offered by David Bohm, the physicist.† In attempts to make room for intelligence in the Cosmic Whole—but it can be extended to include life and spirit—he suggested two orders in the universe. One is conditioned, the other unconditioned. Call this duality necessity-and-freedom. Intelligence—and life, and spirit—belong to the latter. And these may be thought of as existent within the time flow as well as without.

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†I never tire of trying to sell Bohm’s wonderful book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, 1996, wherein the relevant passage on this subject is on pages 50-53.

Unity and Scatter

Some meditations start in the mundane, today’s in events in Egypt. There President Morsi assumed more powers; in consequence secular, modernist, and liberal elements once more erupted in violent protests. Now it occurred to me that Morsi is linked to a religious majority, the Muslim Brotherhood; the secular elements, however, are notoriously disunited because they have many and often conflicting goals: nationalist, industrialist, capitalist, socialist, centrist, leftist, rightist, and so on. When the focus of interest is something in this realm—which turns out to be the very essence beneath the concept of secular—it is very difficult to find unity.

The natural sequence in this realm of ours, where entropy rules, is from unity to scatter, thus from order to disorder. Every culture begins in a transcending unity and then, over time, becomes secular. But in times of major challenge and disaster, we always observe at least a temporary turn back toward unity, the transcendental. Hence there was a brief upsurge in church attendance following the 9/11 attack. Major traumas in the offing concentrate the mind, wake people up, and then they seek—unity.

Now the very essence of that idea, of unity, is that it is, by its very nature, transcending. It doesn’t work as an organizing principle, goal, or motivator unless it transcends the particular. Attempts to find some decent substitute, like community, nation, or even humanity ultimately depend on something above them to work effectively. Not surprisingly, therefore, that stalwartly secular document, the Declaration of Independence, which bases itself on the Laws of Nature, completes that phrase by adding another (echoing a line of jurists, Blackstone foremost among them): “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” I also note, with some bemusement, that the word “united” in the title, preceding the words “States of America,” is still rendered in lower case…

Order is in the direction of unity. Nature, left to its own devices, causes scatter, entropy.  As people we are potential unities at birth, but it takes much effort and learning to achieve a foretaste of it in this life—in which autonomous urges pull us in all directions. And this has a cost. Nature itself must be opposed so that the transcending self that we are can actually, to some extent, manifest. The urge to scatter appears to be built right into this region of the universe and if we’re diligent and lucky, we’ll master it to some extent as we grow up. But the battle never ends.

Now, of course, as writ small so also as writ large. Hence we meet the same demands at the social level of governance. It is much easier to govern if a transcendental goal is present, understood, and sought by a majority. Any person who has labored at achieving unity in his or her own person will be inclined to join into the collective effort if it aims above itself. If it is only an “alliance,” a common word in secularism, or a “coalition,” of similar interests—read pieces of the scatter—those who look higher will tend to prevail.

The little unity of the individual self, when it has emerged above the clouds of scatter, will also recognize the same unity behind all kinds of very different religious forms so that “Muslim Brotherhood” will not seem something dreadful and threatening right out of the box. Does scatter confuse the transcendental faiths of humanity? Of course it does. But then we live in the natural turbidity of the fallen world.

Dream Dynamics

I am becoming more and more convinced that a very common although always unique pattern of waking-dreams shows where the soul goes during sleep.

These are dreams in which I’m traveling but now I’m going home. The problem always is that I have a pretty good sense of the general direction in which “home” lies; I’m also aware of certain landmarks and, generally, the lay of the land. But then, as I set out, I discover that the landmarks have changed. I get lost. In consequence all sorts of complications arise; for example I discover that I have no money for the train. In due time, sometimes abruptly, sometimes gradually, the landscape becomes ever more ugly, ever more urban, “industrial,” unpleasant, dark, and dangerous. Eventually, in midst of this—and often “this” is some kind of conflict—I wake up.

A kind of parallel floated into my mind this morning. If in this dimension we haven’t the faintest idea of how to get to the “higher” world, it makes sense that being in the higher world we may experience the same problem going in the other direction. Finding our way into the higher, or, more precisely put, simply finding ourselves over there, happens smoothly because the body is shutting down for the night in sleep. One part of that shut-down is memory formation. We don’t remember the process; for all I know it might be very pleasant. At best we recall dream-like imagery as we fall asleep. If that imagery is very vivid and we pay attention to it, wakefulness results and the “scene” abruptly disappears. But going in the other direction, we remember the confusing process of re-entry because the brain, this time, is already half alert.

Today’s case is quite banal but illustrative. The hand on which my head lay had become twisted in sleep and had started to hurt. I discovered that as the cause of my awakening after a rather involved process, as above, of “going home.” You might say that the body needed a conscious assist to stop this minor trauma, and the wandering soul was somehow notified. It had to “go home.” 

Now it is not at all surprising that this process of return conjures up scenes of deterioration, density (as in “urban”), industrialization (our bodies are vast industries), and the like. We are descending from a region of freedom into one of necessity. On waking we re-enter the world of boxes, the phrase Carl Jung used after a near-death experience of his own following a heart problem in advanced age.† We don’t find it pleasant—although, on awakening, we feel a kind of relief; but then we are already used to living in the world of boxes—and our memories of that other world are largely absent.

Memory, in this context, produces interesting puzzles, but a closer look requires too much space. Another time. What I would note here is the rare but well-established body of reports on so-called lucid dreaming. These are people who, for as yet undiscovered reasons, retain, or in the dream itself regain, a link to the brain’s memory-forming machinery. They can therefore experience dreams as the rest of us cannot. They are also, you might say, more present, in the dream while the ordinary person remains disassociated. I’ve reported on a famous case here, the experiences of a prominent psychiatrist, Frederick van Eeden (link). He reported the recurring phenomenon of meeting inferior beings at his own reentry.

The realm we appear to visit while asleep would seem to be the real world—thus richer in dimensions than our own realm of three-spaces-and-one-time—but not its higher reaches; thus it seems to be an intermediate geography. The confusing character of dreams may come from the fact that it does, in fact, possess additional aspects not available to people forced to see through the world past the blinkers of the physical. And in that world the soul appears to gets its refreshment while, in this one, the body gets its rest. Denied those restorative daily visits in sleep deprivation, quite horrific results arise, not least death. We must die, daily, before we die.

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†In Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, written with Aniela Jaffé.

This man receives sinners…

A week or more ago (link) I wrote of choice and consequences, the first a gift from God to us, the second the results of choices made by us. To be sure, free will implies its abuse. That then constellates, in some minds, the problem of evil. God knew that evil would result from his gift; that past tense is just a linguistic nod to our sense of time here. Therefore God approved of that evil? My conclusion was, Not so! Knowledge is not approval. But free will is so great a gift that its price, namely its abuse, is worth it.

Got to thinking about that later along these lines. As knowledge is not approval, so also it is not indifference. And God is not only omniscient, he is also omnipotent. Therefore, in the long run—and never mind “fallen” concepts like eternal hell fire—I have no doubt that in the Great Plan all created beings will be saved. That might, of course, take a long time—but what does time matter in eternity? And also, to honor that great gift, free will, ultimately the created beings will have to choose. But they will. Be sure of it. They will. That God both knows and yet still cares is signaled by the tale of the prodigal son, told in Luke 15:11-32.

That episode is introduced by a brief note about Pharisees and scribes (and I am one of those, a scribe) who, seeing tax collectors and sinners drawing near to Jesus, observe with disapproval: “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” Then follow the parables of the lost sheep, of the lost coin, and of the lost son. In the first case one sheep of a hundred is lost, in the next one coin of ten, in the last one son of two, the younger—which in that culture then meant the less valuable. Rather like that progression. In each case major effort is expended on finding what is lost—or, in the case of the son, lavishly celebrating the prodigal’s return. The older son is angered—but he, of course, is the inheritor: “All that is mine is yours,” his father says.

Now, of course, a dry doctrine of choice and consequences leaves out one of the aspects of God, omnibenevolence. God is love. There is, therefore, more to that choice = consequences equation. Along with free choice we have another great gift, which is God’s absolute love. And it is, in subtle ways—subtle enough not to interfere with the gift of choice—all around us and streaming across the borderzone to envelop us all around. Grace. The first step in being found again would appear to be cultivate our powers to listen for the faint, faint sound of it. But once heard its power grows in guiding us home again.

Where is the Land Beyond the Borderzone?

We are hemmed in by our own spatially habituations.  In day-to-day experience, we reach east, west, north, and south  by travelling on a surface, and any direction may be hilly or flat. But we are now also habituated to picturing ourselves living on a globe. Hence north is up and, as the Australians say, south is “down under.” Apart from this globe-knowledge, we don’t think of living above the ground or beneath it. We reserve the heights and depths for transcendental realms. We picture the good up high ( “heaven” or Olympus) and the bad in the depths (“hell,” sheol (“pit” or “abyss”), inferno (“below”)). But these realms are not, for us, literally Up or Down. We’ve been to the Moon. We have crawlers on Mars. And all of those place also have their four directions—and the skies above.

A quite delightful discussion of this subject, if you enjoy the arcane, is presented in the initial chapter of Henry Corbin’s book, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. The chapter’s title is “Orientation.” In that discussion Corbin suggests that the Iranian Sufis discovered the beyond in the east, the Orient, but he modifies that superficial understanding of orient. He says:

Now one of the leitmotive of Iranian Sufi literature is the “Quest for the Orient,” but this is a Quest for an Orient which, as we are forewarned (if we do not already realize), is not—and cannot be—situated on our geographical maps. This Orient is not comprised of any of the seven climes (keshvar); it is in fact the eighth clime. And the direction in which we must seek this “eight clime” is not on the horizontal but on the vertical. This suprasensory, mystical Orient, the place of the Origin and of the Return, object of the eternal Quest, is at the heavenly pole; it is the Pole, at the extreme north, so far off that it is the threshold of the dimension “beyond.” That is why it is only revealed to a definite mode of presence in the world, and can be revealed only through this mode of presence. There are other modes to which it will never be revealed. It is precisely this mode of presence that characterizes the mode of being of the Sufi, but also, through his person, the mode of being of the entire spiritual family to which Sufism—and especially Iranian Sufism—belongs. The Orient sought by the mystic, the Orient that cannot be located on our maps, is in the direction of the north, beyond the north. Only an ascensional progress can lead toward this cosmic north chosen as a point of orientation. [p. 2]

For sticklers, leitmotive is the German plural, so there is no typo there. The “seven climes” derive from Ptolemy’s Almagest. Ptolemy actually started with 33 zones, later reduced them to 11, finally to seven, and these were then widely used in references by Arabs and Persians.

The general rules for navigation by, call them astral, travelers, are well laid out by Corbin. We’re talking about transcending places. In one paragraph he accounts both for East and North. To this we might add that the Celtic other worlds, most prominently Tirnanog, are located to the West—although the ship, as it sails off in the direction, rises in the air. And if you are in doubt consult The Lord of the Rings for more authority. That only leaves the South unaccounted for. Alas, I’m only now beginning my ant-like progress into Mayan, Inca, and Aztec cultures. For all I know they might complete the picture. But it is true. When something is really beyond, we’re up a creek. And we must do with whatever happens to be handy.

Visiting the Epicurean Café

What ails humanity? According to Epicurus (341-270 BC), it is the fear of death and of the consequent  punishment of the soul in the beyond. This causes great anxiety and, in turn, produces irrational desires. Epicurus was a philosopher of happiness—and happiness, he taught, arises from absence of pain. His doctrine is not even close to hedonism as ordinarily understood, but Epicurus survives in the popular mind linked to pleasure, not least the pleasures of food. Not surprisingly, therefore, when Brigitte and I both worked at the then pre-eminent office tower in Detroit, the Penobscot building, beginning  in the late 1980s, the eating place in the basement was called the Epicurean Café. So let us visit that café.

The teachings of Epicurus are more coherent and rational than merely “grabbing all the gusto ‘cause you only go ‘round once.” His was a philosophical projection based on a strictly serious materialistic view of reality as it surfaced in Greece in the transition between the classical and Hellenistic periods†. Materialism, as this shows, is one of those things that goes around—more than once—and therefore comes around.  Epicurus belongs to a tradition, in other words. In the Greek instance the earliest remembered figure was one Leucippus, whose dates are not remembered but put into the fifth century BC. He is said to have been the first atomist (all is atoms). Democritus (460-370 BC) was the next tall figure in this tradition, and Epicurus studied his teachings. Within the Graeco-Roman realm, the last prominent transmitter of this view was the Roman Lucretius (99-55 BC) known for his philosophical poem On the Nature of Things.

Epicurus meant well; he was also original. He meant well because he thought that he could free humanity of its degraded condition simply by banishing the fear of death and of post-mortem punishment. He was original. The entire materialistic world conception suffers from absolute determinism. Everything is nothing but moving atoms following laws. In order to explain what appears to be unpredictable motion in nature and freedom in humans, he suggested that atoms, at quite unpredictable times, “swerve,” thus change their absolutely linear motions. The modern form of this is the uncertainty principle. Ultimately the smallest particles are waves; their presence cannot be predicted; they live in a kind of cloud of probability. Trust us to make things much more complicated.

Now suppose that we knew, with absolute certainty, that after death we would pass into another and more complete world where life continues in a manner echoing the way we lived our life on earth. Would that produce universal happiness, thus absence of pain? Would such knowledge, on average, change human behavior? I think not. Nevertheless no time ever suffers from a shortage of millennial expectations according to which our current travails will turn into something quite radically different. None have yet borne fruit. But Epicurus’ doctrine is having a genuine test in this our Hellenistic period. Vast numbers believe the atomic theory and also that life ceases after death. But when I open the paper in the morning, settling in my booth at the Epicurean Café, it isn’t filled with news of joy. Quite to the contrary. Isn’t it time, people, to get with the program? It’s been around since the about the third century BC.

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†Classical: fifth through fourth centuries BC; rise and clash of Athens and Sparta. Hellenistic: dated from the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC) to the conquest of Greece by Rome (146 BC).

Even Concerning Free Will—We Have a Choice

The world is hopelessly divided, come to think of it. There are General Motors people and Ford people, Honda people and Toyota, Platonists and Aristotelians, Scotists and Thomists—and, which it is my object to examine today, Voluntarists and Intellectualists. The last are two ways of looking at free will. Neither denies that free will exists—or to put it another way, both affirm that the will is free, but voluntarists put will at the summit, intellectuals put the intellect at the peak. So how exactly does this work?

The problem arises because, as souls, we are a unity but have different powers. We also clearly experience these powers as distinctly real. A commonplace example is when someone says, “I am of two minds about that.” The statement is ambiguous enough to illustrate the problem. Does it mean that the person experiences two intellectual conceptions of some situation too close to one another to signal, clearly, which is right? Or does it mean that the pictures are clear enough, but the person has not yet decided which one to choose as relevant?

The intellectualist view of free will holds that the ultimate decider is the Intellect—and free will is the power that executes the intellect’s lead in choosing some perceived good. Free will is therefore a function of an intellectual appetite or desire. Here acting wrongly is assigned to the intellect. It values a lesser good rather than the higher. But whatever the person chooses he or she desires, therefore the emphasis is on something perceived. Appetite comes form the Latin for “desire toward.” This is the view held by Thomas Aquinas (link).

The voluntarist view is that free will is, in a manner of speaking, sovereign. Nothing compels it. It is quite capable of acting contrary to the intellect’s leaning. This is the view of John Duns Scotus (link). He argues that the will cannot be said to have genuine freedom unless it is capable of acting contrary to the intellect’s desire. Furthermore, the will stands above the intellect because it directs the attention to whatever subject it selects to understand. In the source I cite for Scotus is this interesting observation:

Scotus means to show not just that the will is a higher power than the intellect, however. He argues for the remarkable claim that the will is unique among all created powers because it alone acts freely.

                                                              [Jeffrey Hause, John Duns Scotus (1266-1308)]

This would mean that the will is the essential characteristic of the soul, making it what it is. The human being may be coerced into actions it does not will, but its decisions cannot be changed by external force.

Now, of course, when we look at the unity of the soul—even if it may be of two minds at any one point—we are looking at a something that has multiple powers. The Medievalists like to single out intellect and will, but feeling, imagination, and intuition are also present. We can distinguish them by observation. But, as Duns Scotus observes, these distinctions are “formal,” meaning that they point to “realities” that are present in a unity but inseparable from it. How can we possibly select one to be the primus inter pares? The answer, of course, is that we can choose one. Quite a potent power that, free will.

As for me, I feel quite comfortable with General Motors, Honda, Plato, and Scotus. The addition of the last name to this list I owe to a hint I found on Siris the other day (link). It came in handy in enlarging on the concept of free will I had planned to undertake after writing the last post.

Is Life a Kind of Test?

To answer that question with Yes is to assent to a certain cosmic model. God sets the creature a test—e.g., that tree in Paradise. Humanity fails. Humanity is expelled from the Garden. We’re now undergoing the second test. Succeed: heaven. Fail: hell.

No. I’m not trying to belittle the Judeo-Christian-Muslim faiths—or any other. The great myths can be (and are) understood in very sophisticated ways. A more sophisticated rendition of that model is to view God creating humans and giving them free will. Without it, surely, they would be little more than automata (as Descartes, for instance, described animals). Are animals undergoing some kind of test? Surely they are not. They do not have any kind of choice. Therefore free will is an integral element of the model, indeed sufficient to support a test-model. We don’t need paradises, forbidden fruit, temping snakes, expulsions, or any other of the vividly painted machinery of the creation myth. The mere presence of genuine agents, thus agents with consciousness and free will, is good enough. For that model to work we don’t even need a material realm. There are angels within these traditions, said to be pure spirits—but also endowed with freedom. And, sure enough, some of them rebelled. Let me introduce you to Lucifer. The only environment they require is that of Mind.

The more subtle aspects of that question begin to emerge at this point. The creation of free agents, as such, does not automatically mean that God intends to test them. The intention clearly is that the agents will have choice. And with that power of self-determination given, all that flows from it is, of course, necessarily known by an omniscient Creator. Therefore God gives his creatures freedom, and other necessary concomitant abilities, like consciousness—and the rest is up to the creature. Here also rises another ghost, the Problem of Evil. Does the gift of free agency mean that God approves all of the evil that such agency produces when it abuses its freedom? This conundrum creates another question: Is knowledge equivalent to approval? No. Obviously not. We create all kinds of new “freedoms” legislatively—knowing full well that some will abuse them; knowing that does not demand omniscience; therefore penalties are also put in place for abuse, or let’s just call them consequences. Acts have consequences. That is also inherent in the concept of choice.

Let’s look at that word more closely. Choices are directional—in a kind of higher dimension. Choosing the good leads to light, development, and greater powers; choosing the bad leads to darkness, deterioration, loss of powers. If all choices had the same consequences, freedom of will would lose all meaning.

Is Life a Kind of Consequence? Well, that question may be closer to the truth if we take life to mean life here on earth. If I make the wrong kind of choices and find myself in a desolate space—and an angel with a flaming sword blocks the way back—well, that’s a problem, isn’t it. But am I being tested? Not in the least. I’m just experiencing consequences, limits. I can make better choices the next time I act. If I experience this life as a test, one cause of it might well be that I, ah, volunteered, manner of speaking.

Deserving Immortality?

On another blog the other day I encountered the notion that living life right—so that we deserve immortality—is more important than belief. This got me thinking about different ways of approaching our ultimate fate. 

In one kind, and it comes in two versions, Reward and Punishment are the principal inducements for shaping behavior, as in that comment above, using the word “deserve.” These two are secular and transcendental. 

A. The secular has a low way and a high. The low says: “It’s all about winning rather than losing, and here is where that happens. Anything goes—if you are smart enough to get away with it. You only go round once.” The higher way sees things under the rubric of happiness. It is more likely to be achieved if we live a virtuous life. And while, indeed, we disappear on death, a kind of “beyond” is still there. We live on in the fond memories of the generations that follow. In practice—unless we were truly notorious—that amounts to roughly eighty years after the person dies. I still remember my Great Grand Mother, paternal side. I knew her over a scatter of days when I was very little and came on visits twice before she died; she gave me candy. I will soon pass on, and after I am gone, chances are she will also, under the high secular, entirely disappear. 

B. The transcendental versions are more complicated. One is based on reincarnation theories. Our deeds produce karma. If we can rid ourselves of those consequences, we go into a kind of unnamable bliss. If not, the lightness or weight of our karma will govern the kind of rebirth we shall have after we shed the current body. In the Judeo-Christian-Muslim conception, a real afterlife exits. Souls are immortal. They need not be earned or deserved. The beyond, however, has at least two, some say three, regions. Hell for the wicked, Heaven for the deserving, and possibly a temporary sojourn in Purgatory on the way to Heaven. Further complications enter in when we note that at the very end of this essentially planned process comes resurrection of bodies and life on a heavenly sort of earth.

Is there another kind of way? I think there is. You might say that it has elements of the high secular as well as embracing one certainty of the transcendental beliefs. The high secular is least driven by rewards and punishments but accepts life’s absolute termination at death. The transcendental faiths hold to the immortality of souls, and so would this third way of seeing things. But its motivation is purely internal. It acts because it wills to act—from inner motivation, not to achieve rewards or to avoid the punishments. There are people who classify themselves under A. and B. above who yet live their lives this way. We are, after all, immortal souls, not geese that crave the carrots and would avoid the stick. That’s for beginners, not travelers of this mysterious path.

L’Au-Delà

On this blog I rarely even mention borderzone events as they appear in popular culture. There are surges of this sort from time to time. A while back (October 2010), Clint Eastwood released a quite excellent film he had directed, Hereafter. It sank out of view. Fewer than half the critics gave it a positive rating. And, to be sure, it is—it is a very complicated film. The female protagonist, my God, is French, and lots of the dialogue is in that language. Other parts are set in England; people there drive on the wrong side of the street. And the male protagonist is an American clairvoyant who yet works in a factory and resists his brother’s urgings to turn his gifts into a thriving small biz. But the film kicks off with a fantastically-rendered tsunami overwhelming a coastal region somewhere in India. And Clint Eastwood is a first-class director. At the same time, and to its demerit perhaps, the story is told straight; the Hereafter is accepted by the characters who matter. They find themselves, in consequence, up against the dominant culture—but the conflict is realistically presented. It is more friction than clash. No great heroism, just ordinary life. Hence critics found it lacking in compelling drama.

Quite recently, why just the other day, a book appeared written by Eben Alexander: Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey in the Afterlife. That combination (neurosurgeon + near death experience) was irresistible for Newsweek, a magazine undergoing a kind of near-death experience of its own: it will give up printing itself but remain in the Thereafter of virtual publishing. It put the story on its cover (October 8) and featured an article by Dr. Alexander. That was enough to get the attention of the popular media. The doctor then appeared on ABC TV’s evening news, later on Nightline. And many other places as well.

The book (Brigitte and I are reading it now) is vividly written—and obviously intended for a mass audience. The author, however, is dead serious. Not surprisingly what reviews I’ve encountered dismiss it with contempt, e.g., The Guardian’s Peter Stanford and New Atheist Sam Harris, he of The End of Faith, a New York Times best-seller for nearly a year (in 2005).

Hereafter, in the story of its lead female character, Marie Lelay (played by Cécile de France), illustrates how the experience of visiting L’Au-Delà plays out in real life if made public by a prominent or a highly qualified figure. In the film Lelay is a prominent TV-journalist of the crusading left. The experience drains and redirects the combative energies that made her rich and famous. She is rapidly marginalized, furloughed, turns to writing, and eventually produces a book about her experience. When the horizons of an ordinary, highly secular, prominent person are suddenly enlarged so that the Hereafter becomes not only credible but undeniable, the shock is enormous and life-transforming. Prominence and/or the right qualifications (in Alexandar’s case his profession), are readily translated into visibility. And thus the news of a Greater Reality permeates the public consciousness.

Fascinating. Especially when compared to the alternative current wave, the New Atheism. But which will ultimately prevail? Well, in Marie Lelay’s case it all began with a tsunami. In Ebben Alexander’s case publication of his book was immediately followed by Hurricane Sandy. If such events become more frequent, the awareness of the wide, wide public may also be conditioned to change. And in that process, New Atheism will have no chance at all. As for the truth of things deeper down? They don’t require a near-death experience to discover. They’re lying all about in plain sight for eyes able to see.

The Merits and Demerits of Quantum Explanations

Almost since the rise of quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small, speculative thinkers have formed a kind of aura around the field in attempts to help them give various puzzling phenomena  a scientific explanation. Among these are consciousness, the mind-body problem, telepathy, near-death experiences, and the like.

A philosophically serious attempt in this direction is an appendix in Hans Jonas’ book, The Imperative of Responsibility, 1979. The appendix (pp. 204-231 in the 1984 University of Chicago Press edition), is titled “Impotence or Power of Subjectivity, A Reappraisal of the Psychophysical Problem.” I have read many other such takes, to be sure, but none has shown any rigor, whereas Jonas’ work does. He tackles the problem that Descartes had already struggled with. Assume that we do have an autonomous spiritual self, however it is called (res cogitans by Descartes, subjectivity by Jonas); hereafter I’ll refer to it as “self.” How does this immaterial something interact with the physical world in a meaningfully causal way—or vice versa?

The merits of quantum mechanics as an explanation lie in the fact that it deals with the extremely tiny phenomena at the subatomic level—where the energies involved are also minute. The tentative solution to the mind-body problem is that the self, whatever it is, may have energy enough to move “matter” at the quantum level. Then, if an appropriate structure of amplification has evolved, thus a neuronal network like the brain, an immeasurably tiny intervention by the self can eventually result in a physical action like raising the arm or saying something, both because I want to. This has merit—and produces, at least in me, a kind of intuitive ascent. It points to a potential explanation—and Jonas does not go any further than that. The only assumption we have to make is that the self at minimum has some minute ability to interact with matter at the subatomic level.

The demerits of quantum explanations (and Jonas does not go there, but others do) is to suggest that the only difference between what we traditionally call the spiritual and contrast to the material is a difference in density or wavelength. Therefore souls are just as material as everything else—they’re just made of more subtle stuff.

Here I have the opposite reaction. I don’t believe a word of it. There may be subtle regions made of subtle matter, etc., etc., but matter, no matter how subtle, can’t possibly produce consciousness. The entity we call the self, therefore, is different from matter in kind, not just in degree. Nor is it absent in this coarse material realm. It’s plentifully present here in the ordinary world—and doing plenty of damage as well as good. And in both realms (coarse and subtle) it has, no doubt, a certain amount of force that it can exercise. In these dense regions, however, to exercise that force on the congealed energies we call matter, it needs amplification through machines—of which our bodies are the first and most potent versions.

Jonas wrote his appendix before extensive assembly of data on near-death experiences had even begun. One of the interesting result of those studies is the discovery that disembodied selves have the devil of a time interacting with other people—but an easy time passing through walls. But they do move about, more or less at will. Separated from their tool, the body, they are seriously handicapped here. But, presumably, not so in the regions beyond the border. Manner of speaking. And it would seem to me, those who first arrived here, finding themselves in this valley of dense matter, started to mess about with particles at the quantum level. And lo and behold. In the wink of a few millennia they had made the first living cell. First came chemical civilization, fashioned by nudging quantum particles this way and that. Next came life, then civilization. And now back to studying quantum mechanics again. What goes around comes around. But what they were then, and we still are, is something other than either energy or matter. This is a vale of body-making, not of soul-making.

The Soul-Life Link

Among the most interesting cases of out-of-body experience are those where some person spontaneously leaps from the body when anticipating death—as in auto accidents and in mountain-climbing falls. Sometimes the body isn’t even damaged—but the mind evidently thought it would be—and finds the ejection switch. Some kind of linkage must remain, however, because people return to their bodies again and therefore we have these accounts from them.

We do not know what happens in those more drastic case when the body is destroyed—when it doesn’t roll free of the wreckage or the ropes don’t snag on stone and the mountain climber isn’t “caught,” still alive. In those cases, presumably, the last link is broken, and the soul, having made a hasty exit, sees that it’s time to move on.

The body-soul duality is alive in well in ordinary thought. People do not think of themselves as chemical machines—or of the mind as a secondary product of brain function alone. As for what life is, they haven’t a clue. The orthodox scientific explanation is that it arises from chemistry. But let’s suppose that it’s the other way about. Suppose that what we call soul is life—or that life is the most primitive expression of soul. What we certainly know is that a corpse is dead—no soul is manifesting. And that alert people jump out of their bodies occasionally when it looks like the end has arrived.

Aristotle offered us the primitive soul, calling it vegetative. The animal has both a vegetative and an animal soul. Humans have both and, in addition, what Aristotle called the rational soul. Aspects of the same essence in successively developed stages?

Looking at these two concepts, soul and life, our habits of thought blur things. We think of souls as individual, of life as a broad phenomenon. To be sure, each manifestation of life, at whatever scale, is individual. Life, therefore, is a broad generalization of enormously large numbers of individual instances of it. We also think we have a soul—much as we have a body—but what if we are the soul?

Today’s “grown-up” explanation is a form of physicalist monism. There is no soul independent of bodies—no such thing as jumping out of the bodies. Consciousness is neural functioning. It’s chemistry, stupid. Grow up.

At the pace of a slow snail, this view is changing; but it will probably take another century or more before elite thought will have returned to a more comprehensive view in accord with experience and observation. In the lead are people who have unquestionable standing in the field of science, like Charles S. Sherrington (1857-1952) and John Eccles (1903-1997), both neurophysiologists and Nobel Prize winners. It’s difficult to expel them from the reservation, with such credentials, hence a more polite form of disagreement is noted. They are called dualists. To these I might add Wilder Penfield (1891-1976), a neurosurgeon with significant research achievements in the field. I will conclude with two quotes from him. Other prominent voices are those of Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994), a philosopher of science, and Roger Penrose (1931-), a mathematical physicist. And there are quite a few others.

Herewith then two quotes from Penfield, taken from his The Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain, Princeton University Press, 1975. The quotes suggest that the snail is moving.

Throughout my own scientific career, I, like other scientists, struggled to prove that brain accounts for the mind. But now, perhaps, the time has come when we may profitably consider the evidence as it stands and ask the question: Do brain-mechanisms account for the mind? Can the mind be explained by what is now known about the brain? If not, which is the more reasonable of the two hypotheses: that man's being is based on one element, or on two? (p. xiii)

Since every man must adopt for himself, without the help of science, his way of life and his personal religion, I have long had my own private beliefs. What a thrill it is, then, to discover that the scientist too can legitimately believe in the existence of spirit. (p. 85)

States of Knowledge

A sophisticated psychology would have a “science of states,” thus of states of mind or of consciousness. Some traditions have developed to include this science; an example is Sufism (where I first encountered that phrase). We don’t find it in the West. An obscure nineteenth century American lawyer and philosopher, Daniel Greenleaf Thompson (1850-1897) called for such a science (“Science of States of Consciousness”) in his A System of Psychology (1884, link), but, as I say, he was obscure. How do I define that? Well, there is no Wikipedia article on him. Nobody took up his challenge. But what are they, those states? And where am I going with this?

We use the word to describe states of awakeness, sleep, alertness, concentration, daydreaming, emotional, dreaming, hypnagogic, ecstatic, delusional, and so on. In the Sufi view, these are all aspects of the first, and lowest, state of humanity. Above it rise six others, each a higher state than the ordinary one of being human (link). We think that we are finished when we haven’t even started growing yet. Where am I going? I want to point to the difficulties in looking at various visionary reports, dreaming included but beyond that, without the help of a much more sophisticated understanding of how the human mind behaves above (or below) the level of ordinary consciousness.

The big chasm that appears in such reports is one between cognitive states and the emotional. The first is centered, the other is in motion. People report ecstatic feeling, not least the feeling of understanding everything, but they emerge from these states knowing absolutely nothing new;  they retain a memory of the ecstatic feeling, however, and it signals that all is well in the universe. But is that enough?  Negative experiences are occasionally reported; in these, also, there is little or no content. I recall reading, with sharp interest, a Sufi tale some years ago in which a master chides a disciple when hearing an ecstatic report. Ecstasy? No. It’s a sign of insufficient development. Back to the workbench with you. The knowledge that informed the master here came from understanding the various “states” from his own experience. The developed state, in Sufism, is “to have the option.” The person must be centered and “all there.” Being carried in a maelstrom of emotion is to be passive. Understanding must be present—and free choice. If the cognitive is overwhelmed, the seeker isn’t there yet.

I also note that the Catholic Church echoes the Sufi master’s attitude by displaying wariness concerning ecstasies and caution about mysticism as a general approach. Pop culture, a culture of emotion and of going with the flow, doesn’t like this stance. It sounds authoritarian—whereas it may simply be knowing.

The sharp if simplifying distinction I am making here, between cognitive development and emotional highs and lows, helps in sorting what is today a popular but fringe literature on “spiritual” or “cosmic” states, the paranormal, near-death experience reports, etc. The cognitive, of course, is not merely the intellectual, but the intellectual must be present at its base; and there are also modes of perception that are labeled “emotional” when they hold a higher form of experience, joy. Not that geography really applies here, but in the regions beyond the borderzone, there are most likely qualitatively different regions, from low to increasingly higher coherence. And to travel through them successfully, a good inner map is helpful, a grasp of the different states, principally studied by self-observation in the here and now.

Related Posts:

Mystical Experiences

A Closer Look at Ecstasy

It's a Busy Border

My focus on this blog is on a (to us) invisible realm—the border of which is not to be discovered in three-dimensional space. Nonetheless, there is a border. And people pass from this realm to that one quite frequently—and also, possibly, the other way. Now statistics have never been cited here, but let me make an exception today. Just for a moment, let’s take the subject seriously and ask ourselves to imagine what the traffic across that border might look like. As near-death experience reports suggest, it appears to take place through one or multiple “tunnels,” so presumably these lead to border-crossing points complete with, ah, officials and such.

Well, let us first take those who are leaving here. In 2009, in the United States alone, 2.4 million people “passed on.” Our death-rate, measured in deaths per 1,000 inhabitants per annum, is respectably low: 7.92 people die (in statistics we also have fractional people, another mystery worth lengthy study).  The world death rate for the period 2005-2010 was 8.5. That translates into total death of 57.9 million in 2009. It’s quite a busy border, isn’t it?

Now if we make the assumption that new births also represent an “arrival,” in this realm, of souls that originate “over there,” and we stick to the year 2009, the following tabulation shows the traffic of arrivals and departures, down to the minute:

Birth and Deaths in 2009 in the USA and the World
	Arrivals		Departures
	USA	World	USA	World
Birth	4,131,019	139,126,082	2,437,163	57,882,029
Birth/death rate (per 1,000 population)	13.50	19.95	7.9	8.3
Per day	11,318	381,167	6,677	158,581
Per hour	472	15,882	278	6,608
Per minute	8	265	5	110

We have more coming than going, it seems—but the bottom line is that there is quite a busy traffic across the borderzone. It’s not at all as quiet, distant, and speculative as we normally assume. Hence dipping into some statistics creates a new perspective. I’ve spent about 20 minutes getting here. Around the world 2,200 people died in that span of time; 5,300 people arrived. Would you welcome an assignment as a border guard…in the borderzone?