The View from the Body

Dramatic dreams of public transformation, of railway stations, dreams of being lost in cityscapes, dreams of hospitals.... In my case such dreams always mean the body, more precisely being “lost” in the body. When I dream of hospitals, these are the enormous institutions I remember from my Army days: unending corridors. My consciousness at such times appears at the right scale: the body is a vast domain and I’m a mere individual. But the dream-scale is probably not really exaggerated enough. The consciousness seems to me the size of the point as described in Euclid: it has no dimension at all, it has no size, but to make me see anything at all, the dream provides the narrative of little man in the big world. Such dreams wake me up; in them I’m always headed for some destination I perceive vaguely by general direction; or there is a gargantuan task to be accomplished but always with a pressing deadline. And in nine cases out of ten my own absorption in the task keeps me dreaming whereas the point is to awaken; hence problems arise. The environment begins to look more dangerous, desolate, disorderly—or if I am engaged in an enterprise, things start going wrong, then become worse, and at some point it’s actually too much—and I wake up just to escape all this.

Such dreams are invariably very vivid, the emotions very strong; it takes a while to shake it all off and to let the hormones used to rouse me be absorbed. So I’m still mulling the “lost” feeling or its equivalent, the great melt-down of the Important Project, during breakfast, not quite able to concentrate on the equally vivid images of social meltdown presented to me in the New York Times.

For quite a while now the explanatory narrative that jells out of all this is that awakening from genuinely deep sleep is a kind of return from another dimension. But it is a reluctant return. I really want to stay asleep a little longer. But that’s not what I’m meant to do. If the wondrous scenes do not awaken me with their delight, the dream begins to ratchet up the stimulus by turning that world into a much more frightening display. At last it’s done. I open my eyes. But then I have to drag the emotions, which adhere to the hormonal releases, along with the old body out of bed and down, groping for the light switches as I arrive.

Deepsea Diving

A neutral sort of way to understand “The Fall,” thus by a physical analogy, is to think of a radical change in environments. For human beings life at great depths in the ocean is not a natural way to live, to be. When we venture to such places, we need a supply of air and some protection against low temperatures and pressures. The world down there is deficient in the oxygen we need. The diving suit is an additional something that we require—and when we once more reach our proper environment, we take it off so that we can move more freely again, take deep breaths of the plentiful air, and enjoy the light of the sun.

One way to picture The Fall is by analogy. The realm where we rightfully belong may be pictured, walking with Theosophy for a moment, as a subtle world where we have subtle bodies—a world were those subtle bodies are nourished by energies of a kind not even detectable by science, a world where our light—indeed all radiations of the electromagnetic spectrum, the most subtle phenomena we know—would be considered coarse.

Now let us picture a very large community of that subtle realm either voluntarily or involuntarily falling into the coarse dimension of what we call materiality—where the electromagnetic, the most subtle there, is already of such density that it significantly interferes with the people’s proper functioning—as deep water interferes with ours. Suppose that they, deprived of the subtle ethers, can’t even properly remember what happened, cannot orient, get lost in the flux of matter, and even have major problems communicating one with the other.

Unlike us they do not suffocate in the material flux. They’re immortal, actually. They retain their subtle bodies but these lack the necessary force to influence the vast coarseness of matter much at all. But they find ways of adapting—although it takes millions of years. They begin to build themselves some diving suits beginning at the atomic level, where they are able to nudge the atoms this way and that. These suits—we call them bodies—gather and concentrate coarse energies—and they discover that these energies also carry residuals, to be sure, but still some real traces of the subtle ethers they once “breathed” as it were to energize their subtle bodies and used in other ways to maintain their memories and to communicate one with the other. This effort to make sense of The Fall, indeed to cope with it, becomes Job 1. And it grows in extent until, today, we call it life on earth. The object of that enterprise becomes—although vast numbers, having experienced confusion for so long, cannot all unambiguously grasp it—is to get back to the subtle world by gathering up enough of that subtle ether, call it grace, to make the trip back again.

Could be turned into a rather exciting TV series, actually—although, in season two or three, I’m fairly sure, the original theme will have been lost. But these higher beings, although greatly challenged by the environment, and vaguely remembering that they might have been guilty of some kind of disobedience, recklessness, or foolish curiosity are still immortal beings. And despite many failures along the way, still destined ultimately to succeed.

Night Journey to Randomland

Honest reflection reveals that our lives are entanglements with chaos. A positive spin might say that lives are a kind of tourism, like a visit to Disneyland, but life on earth is much more like a visit to Randomland. 

What happens is that we are born and then we cope, more or less successfully, until the trip is finally over. That short word, cope, has a lot of heft, of course. It summarizes, using a mere four letters, what amounts to an amalgam: a mishmash of reflexive and of thoughtful actions, of lucky choices and of grievous error, the embrace of impulses and the reluctant resistance of others. Viewed in retrospect, in detail, honestly, that coping isn’t actually pretty at all. But as we have gifts for coping so also we are talented biographers. We shape and ornament the story of our life so that it seems to make a lot more sense than it actually does. We “neglect” our errors and “highlight” the positive. The stories that emerge are, largely, tales of heroism. They are nicely understated—indeed sometimes they are understated so that they sound understated, but the heroism shines right through.

The chaos is most to the fore in those years from early teens to early adulthood. Most of us are lucky. We had good parent who steered our childhood through safe channels—but there are many who’re not so lucky. By early adulthood most of us have formed useful habits; these then more or less guide us—except for those eruptions that later we view as temporary insanities.

I’ve marveled at people who appear to have conventional lives—until, with growing wisdom, I’ve realized that even the most ordered, conventional, successful, and respectable careers are mere appearance—if only we knew the details. The random is hidden in these lives as well.

Although the experience is humbling, sobering, sometimes it’s useful to look at that biography of ours through a critical lens. Sometimes it happens when we awaken at three in the morning and can’t immediately go back to sleep again. And sometimes, thankfully rarely, panoramas of the past then open that at least hint at what might happen after we pass over the borders of the zone from Randomland to Otherland and undergo what people who have experienced them call a “life review.”

Sacred and Profane

New Year’s celebrations bring to mind for me the benefits bestowed by our humble status as a planet circling the sun in an imperfect circle, an ellipse, and at a tilt yet, thus giving us distinct seasons. To avoid the horrors of the Void (see last post), we have the blessings of a place—a certain orbit of the solar system—and the equal boon of a recurring time. The universe appears eternal and limitless, nobody has seen its edge, but we’re all right. We’ve got the minimum orientation we need to maintain our sanity.

To live in eternity, it is nice to have clear markers of the here and now. If we wander away from Here, it is good to know that we can return. And if we can pin a name to the Now we can also return to it. It’s Christmas time again. It’s New Year’s day. These arrangements defeat the horror of eternity; there are some for whom the mere conscious contemplation of it produces a kind of mental nausea. With our markers nicely in place, eternity ends at right regular intervals and we get a brand new beginning. Here it is. A brand new year.

This need to orient, to place, to mark the time—and to renew it—appears to be innately present in us. Emmanuel Kant wisely concluded that space and time are innate intuitive characteristics of our minds—created, as it were, to make sense of the experienced flux but not objectively real. Well, fine. They’re objectively real if we are. But then it occurs to me that dividing space into the here and time into the now—and regularly annihilating eternity by restarting it again—are also innate tendencies. And the oldest and most traditional views of humanity also project what we experience ordinarily into the transcendental realm. A good exposition of this subject is presented in Mircea Eliade’s work, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. This view asserts that as below, so above. It echoes the views of the oldest versions of Zoroastrian philosophy (and Zoroastrianism is most likely the oldest higher religion we know of) that all things here have their counterparts in the transcendental dimension. Thus earthly or profane space and time have their counterpart in sacred space and time. And the rounds of duration and renewal taking place there take place here because they take place there. Interesting view—long predating Plato’s notions of eternal forms. But, as we say, what goes around comes around.

Happy New Year!