The Mood of No Mood

In the writings of the Persian mystic, Suhrawardi (ca. 1153-1191), we encounter the “Eighth Climate”; he also calls it Na-koja-Abad, translated as “land of No-where” (link). The word utopia is equivalent, taken from the Greek for “no place,” but Suhrawardi refers to the regions on the other side of the border, thus what we often refer to as the Beyond. Antiquity counted seven climates on the earth; hence, similarly, Suhrawardi’s Eighth Climate refers to one beyond those found in this dimension.

Got to thinking this morning that the first step in reaching that Land of No-Where while still in the prison of this dimension is by cultivating the mood of no mood. It comes when we make an effort to achieve a contemplative state. That state, simply put, is one in which we stop identifying with all that we hear and see and become clearly self-aware. It differs from the ordinary state in which we live, call it our habit mood. That last is not a bad state, by and large. We’re there, we’re aware, we’re acting—but the object of our awareness is out there, in the world. The best way to experience the mood of no mood is when we happen to be in a dark or somber state. Then the effort, in practice reachable by meditation, say, or writing a diary entry in which the focus is our own state of mind, produces an interesting result. In a short while the dark mood recedes, indeed it disappears. We find ourselves in a state often labeled as detached. The world out there remains the same. The problems or conditions that plagued us are still there. But the self seems as if it now floats above the fray. We are temporarily out of this world—and the winds of the Na-koja-Abad can touch our face. We’ve just made an elementary move towards another climate. Frequently repeated, it becomes a journey.

Of interest here is that the practice of recollection, concentration, meditation has palpable results. And the Eighth Climate is not empty either. It is very real—more real than this dimension. Our deepest longings are to return there. Curiously, when in a state of contemplation, that longing is also absent. Is that because, although we are still blind to it, we are already there?

The Dark Filter of Tradition

Through a glass darkly? That glass is sometimes very dark. The sacred writings of an age invariably reflect the powerful biases that then prevail and render those biases in a context suggesting that they carry divine approval. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, which has no female figure of the deity, it is possible to encounter such things as the following:

Simon Peter said to him, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.”

Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

This comes from the Gospel of Thomas, discovered in 1945 as part of the Nag Hammadi find in Egypt.  It contains purported sayings of Jesus, and this is one; indeed it is the last one in the document. I am showing the Lambdin translation, from the Coptic. It is conformant to all other translations, including a linear word-for-word rendering. The meaning is clearly what is stated above. The document dates to the period 130-250 AD.

I found this interesting because I’d chanced across it on the same day I’d listened to a television broadcast; there was no link between those two activities. The broadcast carried a conference session where assembled leaders discussed religious rights under current public policy. One strong thrust of the presentations was bemoaning the government’s support of feminist advocacy. The problem, of course, for organized religions, is that dark filter of tradition. There was evidently a time when men reflexively viewed women as in some way less than human. This same view is also echoed in some Shi’ite religious writings. Alas.

My view of revelation (developed elsewhere here) is that it comes from “above” but, after it ends up on paper, it carries an interpretation that echoes its own times. I reached this view by noting that, in successive revelations, the then prevailing culture always leaves “its Mark.”

Fortunately for those participating in the conference I viewed, such gospels as Thomas’ and many other writings, were scrubbed from the canon, beginning with St. Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria (died 373). Can you imagine the attendees’ problems if such verses as the above had to be defended as the word of God?

Two Views of the Prophetic

For years now I’ve been sorting Swedenborg’s experiences, and I’ve concluded that he was genuine, meaning that he really did see into the regions beyond the border. His interpretation of that experience is my focus today. He came at it with assumptions based on his religious background. He assumed that no one could possibly see heaven and hell without God’s permission. An orderly reality with clearly demarcated rules, God’s rules, actively enforced by God, underlie his interpretations. A direct result of this assumption is that what he saw was shown to him, purposefully shown. It was therefore God’s intention to communicate, through Swedenborg, with humanity.

This view underlies all prophetic callings: God selects individuals through whom he intends to communicate. The experience is real, overwhelming, and, from the perspective of ordinary life, radically novel, indeed incredible. But the experience itself is, if anything, even more compelling that earthly life. If the person retains his or her mental stability and ordinary functioning in this world, that person will feel singularly selected. If that eruption overwhelms the person, he or she will be judged mad; the subject will feel mad too, in lucid moments.

An alternative to this view might be called naturalistic. Using that word we don’t deny God’s existence, creation, or an order ruled by law; but it throws a doubt on the prophetic as a “divine institution.” The naturalistic view assumes that while two realities certainly exist, the life manifesting in material bodies is shielded from the much greater Subtle World by, among other things, the circuitry of our brains and the “noise” of the coarse sensory input we must have and process, without distraction, to keep ourselves alive and well here. But that shielding can malfunction—like everything else in the material real. When that happens, and for whatever reasons—genetics, drugs, injuries, and even deliberate efforts—the usual consequence is madness; the very rare consequence is a visionary career; in the rarest of instances, a prophetic mission emerges. Is it a divine intervention? No more so than the failure of the shielding. I am, of course, far from asserting that what we call a higher world is just plain ordinary madness. What I propose, instead, is that there are ways to see into the subtle world; but when that event takes place, the results will vary. Those most able to manage the extraordinary influx of information, while also retaining a certain mental and physical control, will be those viewed as visionaries and prophets. And Swedenborg was one such figure.

I’ve known two schizophrenics intimately. One was a young man, another a man of my own age; I was then in my late forties; both have passed away, the young man by drowning, the other by self-immolation, burning himself to death in a closet in an asylum. The young man’s occasional ravings included astonishingly biblical-sounding Jeremiads; and he was essentially ignorant of religion beyond the conventional understanding of that word—pronouncedly so of the Biblical type. The other was a close friend and colleague of mine and a family friend for many years. When his dreadful time came, he sometimes called me long distance from the asylum where he died—and gave me passionate guidance reaching him from somewhere on things I had to do; these were also delivered in the same biblical manner. These two are representative of bad cases—in which our shielding fails completely and all control is lost.

The positive cases indicate great trials but have luckier outcomes. People see into that world, indeed travel and subsist there, do so consciously, and, as Swedenborg often says, “in the waking state”; consciousness, intelligence, judgment continue to function. How they interpret their experience much depends on their times, education, and backgrounds. A case like this, which might be yet another variant, is that of the American healer, prophet, and psychic Edgar Cayce (1877-1945). Cayce underwent significant sufferings in his life directly related to these “gifts”—the gift of maladaptation.

What the testimonies of such figures provide our ordinary world are indications that something vastly greater than we know exists, that it is an extraordinarily complex world—and that being in a body confuses our understanding of it. The most extensive survey that any prophet has provided us, and in a systematic manner, is Swedenborg’s. But his vision, in detail,  is just as difficult of access for his readers as it was for him—but his readers do not have the experiences Swedenborg attempted to describe and to interpret.

How Trustworthy is Swedenborg?

This post is rooted in the mundane—my waking up this morning, unusually refreshed. Then came the thought: I wonder if we sleep in the next world? I certainly hope so. We so need those periods of non-existence. In turn came the thought: Do angels sleep? Swedenborg said that they do, sort of. They have cycles. Indeed they also have houses. The venerable Swede says, in Chapter XXI of Heaven and Hell, “Their dwellings are just like dwellings on earth which we call homes, except that they are more beautiful. They have rooms, suites, and bedrooms, all in abundance. They have courtyards, and are surrounded by gardens, flowerbeds, and lawns.” [§ 184]. Then came to mind the title to this post: Yes. But how trustworthy is Swedenborg?

Even to talk about that—except dismissively—one has to credit the possibility that another world exists and one that is, furthermore, in some ways analogous to ours. The mundane testimony for that comes from near-death experience reports. In these we are occasionally told of beautiful places, buildings, landscapes, gardens, walls, and the like. Beings appear—including people whom the experiencer recognizes: relatives who have passed on. Most of these reports are emotionally charged, brief, and the testimony is neither long nor detailed. Beautiful flowers, waterfalls, meadows, etc.

The core of my question, therefore, has everything to do with the testimony itself—and the qualifications of the witness. Swedenborg’s experiences began in his maturity, at 53. At that time he was already a well-known and accomplished scientific writer and public administrator. His access to other realms was more or less continuous, thus more extensive than brief NDEs. That that realm was as difficult for him to understand as it is for the near-death experiencers, who often remark about the oddity of their experience, is clear from Swedenborg’s diaries, never intended for the public. That world is different, yet in some meaningful sense similar to this one. Not only in Heaven and Hell but in his other writings, Swedenborg is constantly emphasizing the differences. He formulated the concept of “correspondences.” That notion is that what is below has corresponding realities above; but what is above is not literally what is below. Therefore angels have recurring cycles of consciousness; they experience heaven intensely at the apex of the cycle, as almost an absence at its nadir. In Swedenborg’s attempt to convey this, he speaks of feelings of heat and light and of cold and darkness. And angels cycle because they are still developing, and these changes are of help in that process. When he speaks of bedrooms, he means that they have places of rest that correspond best to what we mean when we retire to our bedrooms, but both “places” and “rest” must be understood as inner soul-states (§ 155).

One more note. Swedenborg’s angels do not correspond to the beings described in Scholastic philosophy. They are advanced spirits. No angel is a species unto itself; all spirits are of the same kind but differ in degree of perfection. Furthermore people can and do eventually advance and themselves become angels. But this note merely to mark out the ground, not to commit theology. This post is about a kind of modified empiricism: knowledge gained by experience, and not necessarily merely of the sensory variety.

If the beyond is different but yet in some ways corresponds to this realm, that would explain why different people report different but very similar things. To link the two the experiencer must interpret those more ethereal phenomena. And in such a context, the skill, intelligence, and experience of the witness are important. Swedenborg, therefore, skilled in observation and in relationships by a life of scientific study, and long exposure to the phenomenon, is probably a very trustworthy witness. And I can go to sleep tonight reassured to think that angels are also in their bedrooms and getting some necessary down-time.

Visibility

In one of Carlos Castaneda’s books about Don Juan, the wise shaman, these two are on their way home from a long outing. As I recall it Castaneda is obsessing again (he is always obsessing about something). The subject I think is “touch the world lightly—and then be gone.” Ahead is a curving rise with brushwork and trees at its top. Castaneda says to Don Juan: “Fine, Don Juan. But supposing that you had an enemy hiding up there, in that brush up there, with a rifle, intent on killing you. How could you avoid that?” Don Juan then delivers one of his ambiguous but charged responses. “I just wouldn’t be going that way,” he says.

Let’s take an analogous teaching from Matthew 10:16. “Look, I send you out like sheep among wolves; be wary as serpents, innocent as doves.” Different translations use different adjectives. Serpents are sometimes prudent, shrewd, or wise. The doves are sometimes guileless, sometimes harmless. It is certainly shrewd to avoid visibility and wise to avoid harming others.

Then there is that quote I cited from Abdul Qasim Gurgani a while back. Asked about his humility by his disciples, he said: “My humility isn’t there to impress you. It is there for its own reason.”

This cluster suggests how to be “in the world but not of it,” the manner and behavior of the wise in the fallen world. Why wouldn’t Don Juan be going that way? Is that because he is all knowing and knows that somebody is hiding on that rise? He doesn’t say that. If we are lucky—but luck is not a mere matter of chance—we are avoiding all manner of grievous harm not because we knowingly avoid it but because our state renders us immune; something guides us. What we are avoiding is unknown to us; if we knew it, we’d turn proud—and soon bad things would start to sprout all over. The sheep Jesus sends among the wolves become invisible. They are wise as serpents; they stay camouflaged. The doves are harmless and do not invite aggression—besides, they can “detach” from the world in flight. Touch the world lightly and then be gone. Humility is a method; it protects us from the harm of pride within.

There is a Sufi story which points to the flipside. Some rats who’d lived for countless generations in a backward, arid region discovered a kind of herb that made them grow larger. This appealed to the rats who’d always thought themselves disadvantaged by size. They began to cultivate the herb and to consume it in massive doses. Within three generations, they were as large as wild pigs. Having thus become visible, humans noticed them and promptly began to hunt them for their meat.

Solomon’s Cord and Paul’s Boast

In the West we’re still a long ways from catching up to the rich accumulations of knowledge (of sorts) of the world beyond the border. Having quoted from Ecclesiastes recently, I remembered seeing there what is the original mention of the silver cord. It is the cord that supposedly links our material to our subtle bodies; it thins out and extends into a cord when the spirit is out of the body or in a near death state, but we don’t die until the cord is broken.

Here is the citation in full, near the end Ecclesiastes (12:6-8).

Remember him [the Creator] before the silver cord is snapped and the golden bowl is broken, before the pitcher is shattered at the spring and the wheel broken at the well, before the dust returns to the earth as it began and the spirit returns to God who gave it. Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, all is empty.

Amusing, in a way, that the tradition which brings us the silver cord also accurately characterizes the meaning-content of modern culture. I knew about vanity, of course, but I’d forgotten about that emptiness.

In the East what is a minor thread, in ours, is much more fully developed, both in the Hindu and Buddhist cultures.  Energy bodies are pictured in those and the élan vital in their case is a genuine energy structure, the chi in China. In the Hindu world we have the sutratma, which is a “self-thread.” There is much less emphasis on the connection, in the East, much more on the subtle body itself.

Having read the quoted verse, I got curious about let’s call it ordinary “paranormal” reports—in the New Testament. One that fell into my lap is a brief section in Paul’s 2 Corinthians where the apostle tentatively mentions an out-of-body experience, although not his own (12:1-5):

I am obliged to boast. It does no good; but I shall go on to tell of visions and revelations granted by the Lord. I know a Christian man who fourteen years ago (whether in the body or out of it, I do not know—God knows) was caught up as far as the third heaven. And I know that this same man (whether in the body or out of it, I do not know—God knows) was caught up into paradise, and heard words so secret that human lips may not repeat them. About such a man as that I am ready to boast; but I will not boast on my own account, except of my weaknesses.

We live in an interesting universe.

The Attraction of the Natural

Traveling in the Borderzone in contrast to visiting occasionally—which is all a busy life permits—means to be alone or, what amounts to the same thing, to be interested in odd matters most people can’t or don’t bother to fathom and think kinda weird. Here comes one of those. I’ve long found the naturalistic far more attractive than the arbitrary explanations of reality. On the one side things evolve, flow, change, emanate. On the other God created everything. Mind you, the poetics of Genesis manage to do both. Its leading verse contains the latter in a sharply rendered concept (“created”); its second the former as wondrous images:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. [Genesis 1:1-2]

The naturalistic view is that paragraph if stripped of any conscious agency, a meaning that the word “created” unmistakably carries. The first sentence would be missing; the second would replace “Spirit of God” by “energy.” Energy introduces motion without endowing it with the features of a person, an agent.

The attraction of the natural arises in me because that’s what I see at the large scale—thus, say, looking out at the sky, with or without a telescope, or down at the earth from orbit. The sun is blazing but nothing tells me Why. It is so great that, when it finally goes into its death stage, it will extend out and way beyond the earth. The earth will simply melt away in its heat. And yet this thing is but a microscopic little thing in one galaxy—and our galaxy is one of countlessly many. From space, at least by sunlight, the earth may have a vague green sheen, here and there, but life, as such, is quite invisible, the merest rash a few degrees of centigrade, either way, would rapidly eradicate. Nothing about this gives us any explanations, and the scale is such that it is incommensurable with the human—or even the blue jay-ish.

The maddening aspect of the naturalistic, however, is that it simply doesn’t cover everything. It works up to the level of life. The chaos can yield different kinds of atoms that will then attract or repel each other and thus form various bodies by a cosmic evolution provided that the chaos is moved by “energy.” To be sure, by adding motion, as such, we are already introducing an agency, by the back door, as it were, but never mind. What the naturalistic does not cover, not at all, is the life phenomenon. And least of all human self-awareness.

Pantheism is great at a distance but becomes very problematical up close—thus when we encounter either end-seeking form-preservation or consciousness. What all modern naturalistic systems attempt, vainly, of course, is to explain how the lifeless can suddenly take on life, the purposeless develop purpose, and the mindless evolve mind ex nihilo. These explanations have trended from the mechanistic to the ever more ephemeral. Each advance in physics has had its corresponding exploitation by cosmology. Thus we have the clockwork universe, then atoms, then quanta, then morphic fields, and last complexity, whatever that is, sort of floating in the air or hiding in the core of reality, with a tropism for increasing itself; until minds form.

Temperamentally I am a naturalist. But when it gets down to decision time I’m forced, by the very logic of things, to side with the arbitrary, which is to assert that the only way we can squeeze any meaning out of this chaos is to discern invisibly behind it a genuine conscious agent. Its flowing garments, while they may not be fully alive still carry a kind of impress or memory of their creator, and that emanation itself is what makes the natural world magical and attractive. But there is something inexpressibly more wondrous beneath.

Fractal Aging

One characteristic of reaching advanced age is that the patterns have become all too familiar. Not that we know much. Nobody really does. But any effort to dig deeply into the details of something will in old age predictably reveal patterns already encountered numerous times before. That sentiment is echoed in Ecclesiastes 1:9: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.” So how old was Solomon—assuming he dictated his wisdom in advancing age? Wikipedia grants him 80 years but without presenting any evidence for that; the Jewish Virtual Library scatters some dates from which I derive maximally 69. In any case, old enough—especially if you had circa 1,000 wives…

Thinking about this feeling—that “same old” feeling—brings to mind tracing, say, a Mandelbrot or Julia fractal image to ever greater levels of magnification, and while the vistas keep changing and can be beautiful, interesting, even mesmerizing, the patterns remain the same.

For this reason alone—ignoring the fact that with advancing age the body gradual weakens, stiffens, hardens—at my age the notion of extending life beyond the standard three-score and ten or, these days, fourscore, is not all that attractive. And supposing science could deliver augmentations, let me call them, so that we could live to be two hundred, three hundred while yet retaining bodies that function as they do in their late forties, early fifties, why, the prospects would not be all that attractive. That would mean working for many more decades with all that that implies for the ordinary human: layoffs, new managements, reorgs, off-sites, airports, committee-meetings, deadlines, budgets, on and blessed on. That same old would soon take on a quite toxic flavor; life would become quite burdensome. And a feature of that future society would be, it seems to me, that the majority of deaths in that evil future would be by suicide. A sci-fi story lurks here, come to think of it, but, come to thinks of it, I’ve already been there and done that.

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The Julia set image courtesy of Wikipedia, by someone called Eequor. Link.

Going with the Flow

The Russian philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) pictured time as a horizontal flow—and eternity abruptly intersecting it from above like the strike of a lightning bolt. I think I read that in The Beginning and the End. I’ve always appreciated near-poetic imagery in place of abstract expressions. Here Berdyaev captures the almost ungraspable dimensional differences between this world and another by using a vivid image. Not surprisingly, Berdyaev was also a philosopher of creativity. We can better picture it, but there is also a way to experience that difference in our ordinary here and now.

The Naqshbandi order of the Sufis has long taught eleven rules or practices intended to advance human development. Of these the ninth is called “Temporal Pause” or “Pause of Time.” In more abbreviated form it is known as “Stop.”  What the practice intends is that, for a moment, long or short, we remove ourselves from that much-lauded activity, going with the flow. That last phrase is used to describe pleasurable spontaneous activity, but in truth we’re always going with the flow. We’re creatures of habits and impulses, impulses arising from associations and habits guiding their satisfaction. Examining a whole day will reveal just how automatic all of our actions have been, no matter how complex and “intellectual” they might have been in content. Even when we are engaged in quite purposive activities, the purposes themselves are part of our habituation. We might look long and hard before we encounter a “temporal pause,” and if we meet it at all, it will itself have been caused by some (usually negative) news. The “pause in time,” however, to be effective, must be deliberate. Another aspect of it is that it should, for all intents and purposes, be unwelcome to our personality, our habit self, what the Sufis call the Commanding Self. It is nothing other than our programming. It might have elements within it introduced by actual deliberate effort long ago, but these have been, as it were, automated.

We shouldn’t want to do it—but we do it anyway. When I’m engaged in something (e.g., writing this) and the telephone rings—that irritates me; I feel an inner violence I have to bring under control; that too, of course, becomes habitual, sublimated into a sigh. It is an unwanted Stop. But when I get up from the keyboard to take a sheet of paper at my desk and settle to half-an-hour’s diary writing, my personality is still resistant—but not quite in the same way. After all, it is the boss who wants to do this boring thing. Other forms of the temporal pause are prayer, meditation, going on walks (especially when these are of some duration and it’s hot or cold), other forms of strenuous exercise, and, for some people, sitting down and reading a book.

That pause in time, when the necessary conditions are present, thus when I’d rather be doing something else, when my motive is precisely to interrupt the flow, then it yields unusual results. Can such things become habitual? Not if I don’t really want to do them. The paradox is that the pause only works when it is resistance to the flow. The results show that.

Stopping time—and this sort of action is actually stopping time—because what we call time is the flow—suddenly changes our usual perspective. In a while the body begins to reflect this new state. It calms down. Anxieties recede. Important things become less so. The boredom we anticipated dissipates. We’re still in time, but no longer of it. The exercise, in various forms, does something for me, always positive. Whereas three or four days spent in the flow exclusively produces quite different atmospherics; therefore I know that it is time to Stop. We don’t have the eyes to let us see what actually happens when we remove ourselves from time into eternity. But there is a feeling there. Years ago, trying to find a word for it, I began to call it sovereignty. All genuinely deliberate thought and action arises from this central something. The flow temps us incessantly, but we shy from making use of a great gift that is entirely within our grasp.

Why Babies Cry at Birth

Birth and death are in a way equivalent experiences. They represent transitions—one from a state we don’t remember, the other to a state we don’t yet know. This applies to most of us. On entry into what we here call life, our memories of any pre-existence are effectively suspended—except for the handful who, for a while, remember previous lives. The latter also remember a death, and it came before this new life had its start. Those few who’ve undergone near-death experiences also have memories that at least suggest what such memories might be like.

Their reports suggest that death is rather ordinary, indeed abrupt. Ahead of it come memories of accidents or hospitalizations and then a state of detached awareness without pain. In many of these cases the person hears doctors, nurses in agitated states pronouncing that the patient’s dead. The subject then protests: “No, I’m not. I’m still alive! Here I am!” But the patient isn’t heard.

Perhaps it is a blessing that our consciousness is blanked out at birth and that our new brains cannot yet link to accumulated memories of our longer past, if any. Then babies might cry even harder. “No, no, no! Not that old trip again! Oh, my God. High school. Still ahead. Again!” To be sure the healthy-minded might look forward to all that, the cheerleading, the hazing, the Letter, the quest for popularity. For non-participants birth signals joy, death sorrow. If we but knew it, participants’ reactions may be the exact reverse.

If we but knew it. But all that we actually know is what we experience here—plus what amount to marginal and indistinct whispers suggesting that we might be wrong. Hence we view this life as immeasurably precious—if it’s our own and not the life of a chicken we chew or the lives we send drones to terminate. Do I remember being upset at waking in this world? I don’t. But I do recall some doubts distinctly. As for what lies ahead, for that I have my least-favorite apostle’s judgment. Oh death, where is thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory? 1 Corinthians 15:55.

Sick-Mindedness

The subject of adequacy, touched on in my last post, has corollaries that throw a light on various stands that people take: atheism, agnosticism, belief, and so on. We operate under an assumption of absolute human equality, which is true enough when we view ourselves as physical beings, but even at the physical level there are exceptions to the rule when we include various handicaps people have at birth or acquire by accidents: the blind, the deaf, the mute, the paralyzed.  

Some experiences leave a much deeper imprint than others. One such for me was reading William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience as a freshman in college—indeed I was reading him in the auditorium awaiting the first event, the welcoming ceremony. It introduced me to the notion that there may be at least two different kinds of people. James called these sick-minded and healthy-minded; the words he used are highly revealing of a bias, of course. The first kind have a vastly different experience of religion than the second; for the second it is a social, for the first an inner something. Indeed, reading that book then, I reacted aggressively to the term, sick-minded. I was then a convinced atheist; yet I knew myself to belong to that category nonetheless.

Sick-minded? Why that designation? Those who are sensitive to currents in reality that reach beyond the strictly physical and social tend to be less smoothly adapted to the world. There are things out there, felt, perceived, but never seen—but, for this type of person, real. Sensitivity is one way to described it; awake is another—awake to something more. Now if there is something more than atoms and electromagnetism out there, the sick-minded are more adapted, not less. But the healthy-minded, who don’t feel these currents much, feel more at home—because those currents point beyond this realm.

The interesting difference here is that we can all share (handicaps aside) the physical realities; but sharing realities that manifest beyond the reach of sensory organs is possible only with those who also sense them. Those capacities are internal, invisible, and beyond “objective,” meaning material, reach. I may know I have a soul, but I can’t trot it out and have it dance for you—whether it is a graceful ballet or a Ka Mate rugby haka.

The reality of the Beyond that the sick-minded feel also ultimately escapes intellectual approaches. Words, concepts, signify “things,” existences. If those things are physical, objective, tangible, measurable, they belong to the objective category and are thus matters about which people can constructively argue. But those things that lack this physical characteristic, i.e., they are inner phenomena, can only be discussed by those who “see” them. Therefore intellectual debate about God’s existence, let us say, or realms beyond, angels and principalities, are only possible between people who are adequate. All else belongs to the struggle for ordinary power in which, alas, both sick- or healthy-minded people tend to engage—until they know better.

Tonalities of Being

If someone is incapable of hearing the difference between intervals of a fifth and a fourth, a musical career is not recommended. If a friend of yours cannot achieve a grasp of verb declensions, you will not take any lofty linguistic or philological ambitions seriously. Similarly, we must recognize that there exists a certain tonality of being which conditions perception of philosophical and religious facts. If this perception is lacking, better to pursue some entirely different field. [Henry Corbin in The Voyage and the Messenger, a collection of lectures and essays, North Atlantic Books, 1998, p. 5-6]

Around here we (read members of the family) were much taken with E.F. Schumacher’s book, A Guide for the Perplexed, years ago. In that he discusses the concept of adequacy, taken from the scholastic concept of adequatio rei et intellectus, thus the correspondence between the “thing” and the understanding of it. Sounds dry, but isn’t. I have the suspicion that St. Thomas and many others of that era meant something much more, using the word “intelligence,” than that word has come to mean in our times. The subtlety of that word, adequacy, becomes nicely visible in the quote from Henry Corbin; Corbin’s examples carry the wider meaning nicely. He means what people say when they have problems translating an understanding into concepts but say, instead, “I know it when I see it.” Hence Corbin’s nice word, tonalities. Music escapes the usual approach which must break things in order to parse them, and in the breaking something escapes the definition.

Adequacy has served us well. It makes one tolerant of those who simply cannot hear the music.

What Is, Is?

Material reality is all that we see and it is therefore compelling. We exist before we know that we do; we’re aware of being very early, but not of being selves. For all of us—I think that everyone experiences it, but I can’t be sure—a moment comes later when self-awareness suddenly erupts.  It happens in childhood. At that moment our human life begins. No sudden memories of having been before accompany our abrupt awakenings.  And by that time we’re so habituated to our bodies and surroundings that self-awareness isn’t felt as anything radical. The last thing we think at that moment is that it’s odd that we are here. The moment, indeed, doesn’t last long. In a minute or two we’re back to doing our usual things—at that age play or exploration.

We come awake in an environment we can’t compare to any other. It appears as an absolute. What is, is, etc. We know the difference between living and dead, but both were always present, so the crucial difference does not exercise us. That sort of thing comes later, with development, and that experience—wondering about life, as life—isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. The What is, is remains an adequate explanation for lots and lots of people.

Some years back now I spent two years writing a book entitled What Does Life Want? I shopped it around, too, but had only a single positive reaction, that from a woman who thought it was great, fascinating, wonderful—but her firm couldn’t take it on, she said, and then came a litany of where that firm was now putting its emphasis. Those experienced in trying to publish books will know that this response was way, way beyond what you can expect in a rejection. I’d reached one reader—not the public. That book had had its origins in the question that arises later, after many years of life, if your curiosity is still alive and standard answers to the question, provided by various traditions, do not satisfy.

Life is as radical a phenomenon as self-awareness—and of course I don’t merely mean human life, I mean the life phenomenon. In its accessible, physical form, it is a chemical mechanism. In its behavior it is something one cannot find anywhere in the inorganic realm. It is end-seeking. It preserves, with enormous tenacity, complex forms generation after generation. But in every individual instance, it comes to an end. Yet it is, and always and only is, individual, whether that entity is a bacterium, a grass plant, or an elephant. This self-perpetuating something exists, so far as our telescopes can tell us, only in one place. Peopling the galaxies with countless life-supporting planets is a projection based on the notion that life is entirely material and arises spontaneously from chemicals “when the conditions are favorable”; thus it is a theory, not an incontrovertible fact multiply demonstrated in laboratories busy nurturing brand new man-made species. The presence of life, therefore, in an enormous wasteland of matter, is a question well worth exploration. A long but useful word is incommensurability. It applies to life when viewed against the backdrop of billions of galaxies each holding billions of suns, some few of which, by statistical extrapolation of the modern mind, will have planets situated just right and with the appropriate chemical composition, atmosphere, plentitude of water, etc., etc. to produce life spontaneously. Life as a whole for one, individual self-aware selves for another, are incommensurable to the inorganic order that seems to dominate the universe.

In making sense of all of this, living on a planet covered with life—but challenged by absence of really good telescopes on the one hand and electron microscopes on the other—the ancients took the weird single sample to be representative of the all. They assumed a chain of existence from matter to plants, to animals, to humans—and extended it upward to living orbs, angels, and God. They hadn’t as yet developed a plethora of machines as intricate as ours and fueled by the residues of life, which is what oil and coal are, or studied bodies and discovered that they’re machines. Nonetheless, minds more intuitive than intellectual and therefore less inclined to engage in intellectual system-building, discerned, already in ancient times, that something wasn’t entirely right in all of this, that something didn’t fit. Hence arose the fascinating religious projections suggesting that What is, is is just illusion, or that the world is the creation of an inferior demiurge, or that a race once living in an exalted paradise was forced from the garden by an angel with a flaming sword and, in consequence, fell, as it were, into another world.

Or into a kind of darkness, a dimension so low that the spirits, as they fell, saw nothing any more, were deprived of virtually all nourishing grace, and, in the great darkness, desperately started exploring that realm and adapting to it. Some glimmers must have been present even in those deepest depth because the ancestors of what we now call life began to notice patterns in the coarse energies they saw down there and nudged an electron here, one over there, to make a new combination. And thus began what I call chemical civilization. A long time ago.

Anne Boleyn

I woke up this morning with a dream. It concerned the deadlines of a book the author or translator of which was a certain clever but unreliable figure called Buleyn. Book deadlines used to be a major part of my life and still occasionally if only distantly worry me. In this dream someone asks me to call Buleyn to put the pressure on. I don’t approve of this request; I suspect that bugging our author will have precisely the wrong effect. So I refuse. But in the dream the name then catches my attention. I don’t know why, but (still in the dream) it fascinates me. I repeat it to myself, with emphasis: BULL-EYN, BULL-EYN. And doing so I visualize the name in letters. Such mental efforts, needless to say, invariably wake me up—and did so this morning. But the sound remained on my mind; the letters were there too. Within a minute an  association surfaced. Anne Boleyn. This made me look up that lady’s history after my breakfast.

Morning dreams, as I call those that wake me—and the sun’s already up—usually deal with mundane matters, looking ahead. At present a book is just some slogging steps from publication in our realm, and the dream refers to an already resolved problem with one lady author. What didn’t fit here was that name.

The thought then occurred. If this was a precognitive dream—in which, alongside morning thoughts I also saw the immediate future, thus reading about Anne Boleyn—it was a very circular dream. I’d never have looked up the name had not the dream brought her to mind. But what then comes to mind is that, most likely, we might be in a detached dimension in our dreaming where Time has a character quite different from that which we experience in waking consciousness. Along with processing recent memories, I was also seeing something that was still ahead, the associations of past and future fusing. Therefore a future action produced its own cause. The proof of that is found in the dream itself where my peculiar fascination with that name resulted in my repeating it, trying to spell it. Which is, truth to tell, always an issue, for me, with that name. It is pronounced Boleen, with emphasis on the “e” sound. I prefer Bolayn, which might be spelled Bollein, as indeed that name was sometimes spelled, e.g. in the illustration of the Queen by Holbein.

Can the future act upon the past? I think it can. We are able, occasionally, to see events in this dimension from another more generous perspective. And then, as it were, one thing leads to another.

More Notes on Rebirth

In pondering the notion of reincarnation, certain questions arise. The evidence available (and it is strong) suggests that people are born again; but the number of such cases is relatively small. If it were universal, we’d have much larger numbers who remember, not just a few. Therefore it may well be that some people are reborn after death, but not all. The generalization from a small sampling to all of humanity is not based on evidence but on philosophical projections trying to explain the few cases that seemingly always arise—and not just in regions where reincarnation is generally accepted.

In the West the general belief is that souls are created by God at or around a baby’s conception. In Catholicism reincarnation was anathamized by the Second Council of Constantinople (533), which declared both that the “fabulous pre-existence of souls” as well as “the monstrous restoration which follows from it” were wrong. In the East (Hinduism, Buddhism) the pre-existence is assumed—and souls are assumed to be, as it were, sparks of the Ultimate itself, entangled in the material realm by their own illusions and held here until, overcoming them, they rejoin the Ultimate.

The belief held in the East, however, was also articulated by Origen (185-254), an early theologian of the Church in his book, Peri Archon (I’m cribbing from the Catholic Encyclopedia here). He also held that souls pre-exist their incarnation, having been created outside of time; their presence in time, thus in bodies, is the consequence of their own willful behavior. To quote the Encyclopedia: “Origen’s theory excludes both eternal punishment and eternal bliss; for the soul which has been restored at last to union with God will again infallibly decline from its high state through satiety of the good, and be again relegated to material existence; and so on through endless cycles of apostasy, banishment, and return.”  If Origen used those words literally, he was surely mistaken about satiety, but never mind…

In any case, fascinating. Origen ultimately derives this cycling from the operations of free will—which is at least a coherent sort of doctrine. It assumes that each of us, individually, caused our own fall rather than, as it were, getting our original sin by mere genetic inheritance. The alternative, that of being created in a fallen state, at birth, is, for me, incoherent. In the latter instance all we must try to explain is why we don’t remember the initial act that sent us to a realm where, every morning, we have to put on socks.

Just a handful of those who remember having lived one life before also remember the intermediate state between lives in another and always rather magical realm. And some very few among them also recall having been urged by one or several angels to come back to earth again. Why? Because, evidently, they needed to do so to develop further. Those are interesting cases. In most others, it just happens.

So what does all this suggest? Is the model developmental? If so, the engineering of such intricate machines as bodies would not have been done by the fallen creatures themselves but would be part of the divine plan (which, of course, is the orthodox teaching, but I find it hard to believe); this is a big subject; I will have to enlarge on it later. Something more complex is going on here. I suspect, however, that I’ll have to wait until my own border crossing before the structure that brings us here and receives us back over there—and what’s really behind it—becomes clearer. I’ll put this in that notebook I’ll take with me when I die.

Almeder on Stevenson

I read an article today by Robert F. Almeder, retired professor of philosophy at Georgia State University, in the Journal of Scientific Exploration titled “A Critique of Arguments Offered Against Reincarnation” (link). In the article Almeder makes the point that strong cases that provide empirical evidence for reincarnation—which the work of Ian Stevenson does—that evidence per se falsifies the modern theory that minds are the product of the brain, thus shattering the materialistic stance on human experience.

I got to thinking about that. What other empirical evidence do we have that “mind” or “soul” or “personality” are radically different from bodies and their functions? Near Death Experience reports fail on that score because, while technically the person undergoing an NDE may be dead (“clinical death”), he or she comes back to life to render an account, hence that “death” was not really final. Reincarnation cases are very different. Those who remember a prior life most definitely died but retain memories of another life in a current and new body. My conclusion, in effect, is that reincarnation cases may be the only evidence for the agency’s survival of death, evidence of the kind that may be called empirical, thus discoverable multiple times by different researchers, as has indeed been the case.

My own views on this subject are scattered throughout this blog and may be gathered by clicking on Reincarnation under Categories to the left. Almeder’s article requires some time and attention. A summary of his views is presented in the YouTube I show at the beginning of this post.