The Palm Tree

Actually contemplating nature, from close up (as I am doing now on a Florida vacation), challenges the “model” I use for characterizing “life.” The unbelievably large numbers of so many different forms, all of which share a single purpose, produce an odd unease. The fundamentals are the same. Those forms—why most have lifting structures to hold up sun-capturing mechanisms. Their fruit production is aimed at reproduction. The to us observable aesthetic effect appears on sober study to be an altogether secondary by-product of functionality. The bright red blooms of a little tree near where I write this are there to attract insets. The color coordination pleases the human eye but is intended merely to attract the insects that seem to know that sugar is on offer. Trees cannot see—anything, including themselves. In them the agency is hidden. Individuality seems also motivated by survival; it ensures that while the individual may perish, the “category” will survive. In us the individual is paramount because we experience it directly, and while we obey the collective rule as well (one death is not the species’ death) we have no experience of a living species of which we’re just a part; the whole seems meaningless except as a collective, thus as something oddly inferior to the individual. But if plants, animals are individuals, thus if they too have an inner self, where are they? Where do they go when that palm-tree finally succumbs to storm or age?

Our imagination can’t produce a model for the ecology as a whole unless we imagine it made up of individuals like us. And to picture a palm tree as having meaning, we must project a self-aware identity inside it complete with memory and, indeed, as having a future beyond its years-long rootedness in some highly localized tropical environment.

The thing here is that simple being—experienced being—is altogether insufficient as a source of meaning without a timeless future existence. If all that I have seen, felt, learned is lost at my life’s end, the very seeing, feeling, learning seems utterly pointless precisely because I do not really live in the moment. I live toward another state which gives this moment, retrospectively, its justification. That after my passage others will experience similar thoughts and feelings in no way justifies lives long ago completed, or my life, or future lives. And what is true of me is true for the palm tree too.

Nor is a mere continuation of this process—life as we experience it, as the palm experiences its existence—a satisfactory solution. Here I’m thinking of reincarnation. If I’ve lived like, say, a hundred lives before—even if I remembered each such life—the totality of that memory would have no value at all except, perhaps, to give current history more detail. Those lives, like this one, would be overwhelmingly the same old round, for me—and for the palm tree too. As Huxley, if I recall correctly, said a while ago: Time must have a stop. It may well be that once we reach that happy future, when time for us at last comes to a stop—something we cannot now imagine—a great relief, a flood of memory, will cause us to realize that, finally, the trip is over and we are home again. And then it may suddenly make sense, all this: we’d realize that we had lived in a very odd state of compression, in a kind of unnatural groove—of time. And falling into conversation with a fellow soul, we might note that we’d both once lived “down there.” “So what were you when you were incarnated,” I ask my new companion. “A palm three,” he or she might answer. And then we could have a conversation about the differences…

Identification with the Body?

Thesis: The moods of a morning are the moods of the body. That would appear to be true, but my experience is that the dark mood isn’t usually present immediately on awakening. The body is at its most energetic at that time. The strongest sensation is the desire for coffee and something to eat. The mood darkens with looking at the paper. Indeed this morning I came down with the notion that the thesis is correct, but the moment I typed in the headline, the contrary idea presented itself and the mood had already vanished, thus I revised the heading by adding a question mark.

The morning mood may be an unexamined identification instead with my existential condition, of which being in a body is but one element; but at awakening I am in a well-rested body. The paper then reminds me of the cultural projection. A strong element of unconsciousness is present because the darkness I see there is not my darkness at all. If what the NYT projects were an actual situation, a here-and-now and out-on-the street situation, my reaction would be energetic, defensive, active: it would mean that things are seriously out of joint and therefore action would be necessary.

There is an identification behind that mood, but it isn’t with the body. Awakening, alertness, humanity often require a kind of energetic shaking all over, a kind of rising to the surface.

The Serious Question

The serious question is why we are here. To think that some agency of transcendent power put us here seems reasonable—reasonable simply because we are incapable, even with our current vast knowledge, of producing living bodies as intricate as ours—never mind producing all the rest—from bacteria to rain forests. The modern explanation—which amounts to saying that the pure, chance-driven collocation of the right atoms produced life (echoing Bertrand Russell)—is just a very elaborate punt of desperation. That desperation, however, is understandable. It is indeed problematical to imagine that nature is the deliberate creation of a Being of Divine Perfection. My own conviction is that God would not have need to fashion fantastically complex machines in order to make living creatures; God would simply say “Be!”—and we would be there. My conviction, further, is that that’s how it happened. But the beings thus made were souls; and they are simple, in the Platonic sense; they don’t have parts; they don’t corrupt. Complex bodies, metabolism, ecosystems, and so on—that’s some kind of second order creation the evident purpose of which is—what exactly? My own conviction is that it is an adaptation to some kind of challenging event, usually dubbed The Fall. That which we call “life” was created by the divine “Be!” It’s not the artful churn of chemicals that we call bodies. We need bodies for some purpose other than to live; they’re probably vehicles we gradually fashioned after sinking into depths we should have avoided. That work happened so long ago we’ve altogether forgotten how we managed it; or it was done by souls of much higher accomplishment than ours—but well below the Divine; the Divine does not need engineering; maybe the angelic levels thought they’d throw us a rope by means of which to climb out of the pit. Never a dull moment in this life—not even as the departure draws near. This by way of formulating some questions I plan to ask when I’ve passed the border.

The Two Mentalities

I was blessed early on by stumbling across excellent guides who helped me orient myself. One of these was Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968), a Russian sociologist who later became a U.S. citizen. His defining work was Social & Cultural Dynamics in 4 volumes, but a single-volume abridgement is also available. Sorokin proposed two fundamental human mentalities, and he summarizes them as follows:

One extreme is a mentality for which reality is that which can be perceived by the organs of the sense; it does not see anything beyond the sensate being of the milieu (cosmic and social). Those who posses this sort of mentality try to adapt themselves to those conditions which appear to the sense organs, or more exactly to the exterior receptors of the nervous system. On the other extreme are persons who perceive and apprehend the same sensate phenomena in a very different way. For them they are mere appearance, a dream, or an illusion. True reality is not to be found here; it is something beyond, hidden by the appearance, different from this material and sensate veil which conceals it. Such persons do not try to adapt themselves to what now seems superficial, illusory, unreal. They strive to adapt themselves to the true reality which is beyond appearances. [Pitirim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (abridged), p. 25]

The first mentality Sorokin calls sensate, the other ideational. He rightly asserts that the pure type probably does not exist, but he asserts that in most people one or the other will be predominant. He then proceeds to build a cyclic history from this in which Ideational eras are followed by Sensate eras, and in between will come a brief period where the two blend, of which an example is the Renaissance. Good enough, you might say, for sociological work. At the same time my own life’s experience (75 and still counting) totally confirms this classification.

Elaborating on this very basic classification (which brings to mind the introverted/extroverted pairing), Sorokin characterizes the ideational mentality by using negations. Such people are trying to negate the world—while the sensate embrace it.

My own experience suggests a more complex explanation. The real difference between these two extremes is actually a greater openness, in those labeled ideational, to the spiritual, intellectual, and subtle aspects of reality—which they feel to be higher. It’s not that they are negative toward the world. It is that they are much more positively drawn toward the higher—not because of virtue but because they sense it. Sorry about that word. But to the inwardly-oriented, intuition is just as keen a perception as the sensory. And it’s not as if those labeled sensate lack all awareness of the higher currents; they have them too. But they don’t perceive them quite so intensely and are therefore inclined, all things equal, to ignore them.

Vast domains of human conflict exist because these fundamental differences are not sharply and effectively understood by either side. They are therefore conflicts between those who see colors and those who’re colorblind. We cannot overcome a condition like colorblindness by logical discourse. Nor can the colorblind suddenly begin to see colors because they engage in acts of faith. Faith requires more than will. It requires cultivation of the intuitive nature enough so that it will yield an inner sensation of the truth of it; once that is present, faith is easy—indeed unavoidable. The human condition is very powerfully shaped by gifts. To see beyond the borderzone, indeed even to see it as existent, you have to see. And that power is not something that can be manufactured. We’re born with it. Conversely, those who are sensitive can also learn to act as if they do not really see—in order to conform at least behaviorally with the majority of the blind—but that’s just an adaptation. They still see, whether they like it or not.