Injured Pride

The ordinary man repents his sins:
the elect repent their heedlessness.
     [Dhul’Nun Misri]

I must accept, based simply on observation, that the order of this world, meaning world and body, will never be anything but themselves; thus that they behave “naturally.” When the thought occurs that the great saints must be beyond this, I am reminded of Dhul’Nun Misri’s saying, suggesting that even the elect suffer from this fact. Dhul’Nun (796-859) was an Egyptian Sufi. Detachment is the root of human development—even detachment from the body’s state— and one imagines that in the elect this would no longer involve any active effort. But that would only seem to be possible when the self is already entirely turned to the higher dimension and perceives it palpably and strongly. Then of course the stimuli of this dimension, present although they still are, could be casually ignored. The lesson here?

It turns on detachment, a certain difficult humility, and the practice of useful techniques. Humility suggests to take things as they come. It’s a great blessing to be able to detach voluntarily—now and then. The natural, reflexive acts that flow from attachment? Well, there they are. Berating myself for being like that is actually injured pride, not realism. Who do I think I am? We need an effective trigger (although “trigger” is not the right word) to detach. The right words are “reminder” or “remembering” or “occasion.” Detaching requires an earlier moment of detachment first—to remind me, make me aware of the fact, that I’m captured. Here a paradox arises. I cannot will it. By the time I do so will it, I must already be detached.

As so often when virtue is in some way involved, I note that virtue in the past is the cause for it in the future. And from that a technique emerges. What I can do is plant seeds. I can do that by connecting, in times when I am detached, certain emotional states or states of mind with a reminder that they’re unwelcome. The sort of thing here is kin to telling myself that, the next time I reach for the car keys hanging on the side of the fridge, I must remember to buy scotch tape; the big ring on the keychain is the scotch tape. Such seed planting often works—so that, when the unwelcome state arises, the reminder will be there as well; becoming conscious of it will then provide me with the occasion to become aware. Sounds mechanical? Okay. Call it soul-craft.

Indulgence

Suppose we translated that smooth-honed phrase, In the world but not of it, and rendered it as In the world but not indulging in it. Indulgence has the same functional meaning as identification. Taking the first, etymologists suggests that its root might be “in” plus the Proto-Indo-European root dlegh- meaning “to engage oneself.” Taking the second, it dates to the post-Renaissance period and means “make one with (the self)” or “regard as the same (as the self).”

These are difficult words because they are linked with attention. They arise when the attention is drawn reflexively by stimulus and allowed to “attach” to it without deliberation. Then both indulgence and identification are negative. But when the attention is affixed voluntarily to some object, we speak of concentration—a positive. Similarly, people laud spontaneity. Spontaneity comes in two varieties, however. The kind that’s “going with the flow” is an indulgence. But there is also spontaneous action that arises from arduous past efforts repeated so often and so conscientiously that they have become “second nature”; then the effort seems graceful, easy, and amazing. The second kind of spontaneity no longer requires the self, but not because it has been captured by some stimulus but because it is no longer needed at all.

Both concentration and high skill contain a subtle element of separation. The self is separate in concentration: it wants to see, without distraction, without emotional interference. In the good kind of spontaneity, it is no longer needed. So the separation is between the self and the world, as in the old saying above. This separation is absent when we are indulgent or identified.

Calling for this separation is a hard doctrine. Humanity wants it both ways, reflecting our intermediate state of semi-development. People are all for “going with the flow,” but not when that flow is a difficult divorce, the loss of a job, or a painful disease. Life, however, conveniently provides ample opportunities for practicing detachment. One can indulge in grief as well, but detachment, if practiced hard in good times, can be the spontaneous response.

Answering Pilate's Question

Pilate’s famous question came in an unfortunate context. He has been reviled ever since, but his question is actually a good one. What Pilate really said is that it’s very difficult to define what that word means—especially when it is used in an abstract way, thus without the addition of the word “about.” The simple answer, my dear Pilate, is that truth is experience. But experience, while it cannot be denied, is something other than “a conceptual formulation of something experienced.” That second formulation—the expressed, reported truth—is a secondary product. It may fully satisfy the person who had the experience, but the only way to judge whether or not the “translation” is accurate is by having had the same experience. Pilate’s question therefore suggests that while truth has an unambiguous personal standing, its public or shared standing is fraught with ambiguity. It depends on experience, not merely on intelligence sufficient to parse the words in a conceptual formulation.

We can tease this apart further by supplying the appropriate context. Technically truth is an agreement between a statement and the experience on which it rests. If the experience is anchored in the visible, tangible, physical, the outcome is a fact; it can be checked and confirmed. If the experience is inner, the outcome is a truth; but truth is beyond confirmation. God may have told you that, but how do I know? Thus our own reaction to a reported truth is of necessity intuitive.

What we see here is the unbridgeable chasm that exists between different realms of reality. If truth were as forcibly compelling as fact is, there would, in effect, be no such thing as free will. But there is freedom in the spiritual dimension, necessity in the physical. The endless battles over scriptures would cease if revelation were viewed correctly as messages directed to souls. Revelation used as social engineering or as secular legislation is revelation abused. But one of the truths about this world is that if revelation reaches this region, it will be abused. Sooner or later.

The Right Question

The two hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812 brought special programming yesterday in course of which I heard old men, buffs of naval glory, holding forth, in tones of veneration, about old ships and what amounts to the same-old gruesome violence that has been hallowed now by time’s passage.

This got me thinking first (curiously perhaps) about railroad buffs. But such odd segue ways often suggest that more is coming. Sure enough. The thought soon jelled. I was thinking of narrow historical time streams that serve people in place of cosmologies—evidently so because they’re intensely preoccupied. Other such next came to mind—those centered on literature, music, royalty, movies, etc.—identification with each of which then becomes a narrow but serviceable cosmology of sorts. The values each represents become the values of their aficionados. That bit about old ships, I thought, rests ultimately on nationalism, thus identification with a collective—much as there are aspects of literature and music in which youthful rebellion has become a cultural imprint, thus a kind of teen-age stance transmuted into opposition to authority and passionate support of ever growing “rights.” To serve as sufficient orientations for inner life these orientations only really require that a sufficiently large number of people should share them and that channels of communications should exist to form communities of belief.

Next came the thought that there are many arrested cosmologies—on the analogy of Arnold Toynbee’s arrested civilizations. All people in youth ask the right question. That question is “What is it all about?” Arrested cosmologies come into being because many people don’t go far and deep enough to answer that question for themselves. They stop short. They find some answer that seems fitting and don’t look any further. If that question is too easily answered, people don’t advance.

It is too easily answered if the questioner is easily satisfied. A person is easily satisfied if he or she is focused on social adaptation rather than really wanting the truth. In the former case, adopting some prevalent view enables that person to fit in. To be effective, the question should be nagging. Intellectual rigor and curiosity should be present too. The person’s time scale must be very expansive and include at minimum that person’s death—or, in considering broader social questions, like civilizations, it should look back and forward for minimally several millennia.

The way to judge cosmologies is to see the degree to which they conform to observable reality, inner and outer. Do they go far enough? Are they sufficiently inclusive? Do their own views of other such communities accurately describe those they critique? If the effort to answer the question stops in early adulthood, it may nonetheless be correct—but it won’t be that person’s own. It takes a lifetime. The question should still be actively present on one’s death-bed.

"This"

It occurs to me. When we say “This too shall pass,” we are still embroiled in the problem. When we manage to detach from whatever this means, then it has already passed, even when it is still going on. The old proverb (its roots are Persian, Hebrew) in effect says that things change over time. Of interest to me, in the context of detachment, is what this signifies—and what detachment means. Pure observation, all that follows; when it comes to our own states, that is authoritative enough.

In the situation to which the proverb applies, this is usually a situation in which the physical element is just a small part. This points backward and forward in time—backward when something untoward happened and we still “have to live it down.” (Revealing phrase, that.) This points forward when we anticipate trouble, turmoil, or trauma. In either case, this concerns feelings in the present; they intrude to disturb our equilibrium. This  is a tangle of people and what they will or won’t do—or how they will do it or not do it. It embraces unpredictable outcomes, focusing on the negative only. This will involve expenditures of money we either have  but do not want to spend or don’t have; in that case we project hassles and problems in getting the money—which in turn produces another tangle of people…. Buried in there somewhere will be physical things, but these are rarely to the fore. I harp on the relatively minor physical element here because my next topic is detachment.

To see detachment correctly, I start with attachment. We are attached to those thing we want; when things we do not want happen or loom ahead, the body translates our negative view into defensive reactions all of which are quite physical in nature—at minimum tensions and a feeling of stress. The body, as it were, has a mind of its own—signaled to us by the states it initiates on its own (autonomic nervous system). But the body is also a perfect servant of the actual mind—and immediately translates the mind’s state into physical expressions as well: glands start releasing fight or flight stimulants; blood pressure rises; muscles tighten.

This might be a vast structure of mostly mental projections and anticipations, accompanied by mostly negative judgements. But the state they produce, from which we stoically pronounce, “This too shall pass”—almost as a warding-off prayer—are quite physical inside us.

Detachment is a very curious state. It results from a deliberate mental act by means of which we change our mind. And no sooner does the mind change than the body, obeying immediately, sets to work calming the system down. Some hormones stop flowing, others signal relaxation. The stress lifts, the tension eases. This takes on a different perspective. At least as perceived internally, it appears distant—not us. The identification is broken. The body says “Master is no longer concerned—let us therefore restore the status quo ante.” (The body learns its Latin from the mind, of course.)

The practice of detachment is perhaps one of the best ways to demonstrate the transcending status of mind quite viscerally, as it were. The problem becomes an objective over there. Not surprisingly, freed of unnecessary stress, the heart beating at its regular pace, we are always able to deal with this in a much more rational way.

We are blessed with wonderfully well-constructed, very obedient bodies. Alas, they only understand the physical. The body must, by its nature, understand mental threats as physical—and responds as if it were physically threatened. We can get around that by talking to the body. Few people—even those who talk to plants—are very good at it. Hence there is a lot of sighing.

Let Us Start With Phytoplankton

I have problems imagining that the life process had a plan, complete in every detail, before the work of its creation started. But let’s give it a try. For that purpose let me borrow Plato’s Demiurge and imagine what he might have thought. The Demiurge did not create, of course; he merely produced—from preexisting stuff. And having life process in mind— imagined from the outset as ranging from high to low, and how each part would be maintained—the Demiurge, looking around, would have noted that while bodies of water held plenty of good things, a good place to start, and water itself a right handy material, in future, he thought, higher life would need oxygen for its internal combustion—but there was none of it in the atmosphere just then. Oxygen was there, to be sure, but bound up with hydrogen and carbon. So the Demiurge began—the plan already in his head. He said: “Let us start with minute creatures in the ocean. That’ll give us some practice. They’ll feed on carbon dioxide; their wastes will be oxygen; the gas will rise up and enrich the atmosphere; that will serve those other creatures still on my drawing board.” And the phytoplankton came about…

Now the Demiurge is not a communicative sort. This utterance was quite unusual. His ways are right mysterious, and hence we don’t know much about the phytoplankton. Are they, like, people? Or are they machines? Or something in between?

If they are machines, well, so be it. But if they are something in between, how do we picture them? Do they “have a life”? A big problem arises here. “Having a life,” for me, is not merely to have a succession of feeling states. I have them too, to be sure, but the crucial difference is that I am aware of them—while simultaneously being outside the process. If phytoplankton have feeling states yet they are unaware of having them, they lack all thinkable reality for me—except as things. I like to think that they do, too, have a life—but I manage that by projecting something into these creatures for which I have zero proof—except their own end-seeking motions. But those motion are ascribable to unconscious feelings states. Outer life, yes; inner life? No.

Therefore, of course, Descartes saw only automata. So why does that displease me? It shouldn’t. It’s logical. Well, I cannot find any reason whatsoever for an automaton unless it serves some purpose that lies outside of it. We make a mechanical frog that hops across the table. Why? Our own amusement. The Demiurge, if he had a purpose—beyond amusement—must have had the higher animals in mind, one supposes. But for them to be viable at all, a whole ecosystem had to be created. Indeed the whole planet had to be transformed.

But then, what about man? If humans were the end product, the Demiurge was up against it. He could make little machines in which chemical signals (call them feelings) cause different parts to respond to other chemical signals which cause pre-programmed appropriate behavior, much like what we see the mechanical frog doing as it responds to the spring inside—and hops. The Demiurge, to put it mildly, is severely challenged—being only able to use existing materials. How then can he make a human, the only creature we genuinely know to “have a life” as we have it. What is that something? And if it is in us, is it absent in the phytoplankton? So what is life?

I wish the Demiurge would speak. But he is so astonished by what he has made, he has fallen entirely silent. Or was he perhaps merely what his name actually originally meant in Greek, a “public worker,” thus someone out to do a job for a higher authority? He made the machines. But when he was out to lunch, the boss came in and breathed life into them? It’s a hypothesis.

Another Temperamental Note

A post on Siris this morning links temperaments and logical arguments, and the example Brandon uses for the last is the ontological argument for the existence of God (link); there are several such, but here discussed in the singular. Fascinating lash-up! I thought  I would make some notes of my own here; I had touched on the subject of temperaments once before on this blog (link), but in that foray I concentrated on general behavior, not intellectual leanings and tastes. That post, however, reaches a kind of conclusion rarely found in discussion of the temperaments; my view is that temperaments have much to do with personal responses to stimuli; those who experience stimuli coming from within will tend to avoid external stimulus and find themselves labeled introverted (a negative in our times); those who are not stimulated as much from inside seek it out there in the world, the crowd, or in action; they will be labeled extroverted.

Viewing the ontological argument in this context is rather a challenge. It is an intellectual structure; thinking, of course, is something internal; but in the introverted type, intuition tends to be to the fore and reflexively ranked above intellect—not by much, but still outranked. The intellectual is ranked much higher than intuition in the extroverted type, but since the argument is rather abstract, it will get somewhat negative valuation from the extravert for lacking a sensory presentation. The argument, therefore, will tend to straddle the two major types. The introvert will see it as too obvious—and often is convinced before the argument is even made; intuition can be very strong. The extravert will tend to like the argument just because it is one; arguing is interaction with others; but he or she would prefer to see it grounded in much more concrete  (read scientific) facts. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, based on Carl Jung’s two categories, adds to the other polarities (sensing/intuition and thinking/feeling) that of judging/perceiving. The first term of these is supposedly more to the fore in extraverts, the second in introverts. Judging is closely linked to the ontological argument because it is grounded in logic; thus it should appeal to the extroverted temperament. Perception, by contrast, assigned to introverts, is (for me) difficult to disentangle from sensing on the one hand and intuition on the other: is it some kind of mix of the two?

Having had a good Catholic education complete with college under Jesuits, I still vividly remember meeting the ontological argument. My temperament is certainly introverted (although some would vehemently disagree). Not surprisingly, my reaction was quite neutral—as is my reaction to just about anything severely abstract. Interesting—but so what. Like sitting down to gorgeous-looking meal at a festively bedecked table—only to discover that the food on the plate is made of plastic. Nice to look at, but nothing to eat.

Now the science of temperaments has its rigors. It begins with dichotomies but then produces types by measuring the relative force of each member of these pairings in an individual. Therefore, under Myers-Briggs, sixteen different temperaments emerge. A minority will find the ontological argument not only irrefutable (and it is) but will be thrilled by it—while the rest will be indifferent, mildly pro or con, or repelled. My guess is that in those who feel a thrill, thinking and judging must have a much higher voltage than some of the other parts that make up what we call a temperament.

Mysticism, Science

Mysticism and science are more closely related to each other than either is to philosophy. Here I take philosophy in its modern sense—largely engaged in dealing with pure concepts or even simply with grammar and semantics. Both mysticism and science are grounded in experience, the one in the exploration and understanding of transcending realities, the other in examining the physical. Both, of course, have marginal or pseudo forms. In mysticism that manifests as speculation about experience not personally lived; in the other as mathematical science in which any relationship to reality is, at best, produced by instrument readings. Mysticism is rare, science common; the reason for this is that those who have actually experienced the transcending are very few in number; those who have access to matter are many. Herewith two quotes from Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi concerning the mystics:

We deny the right to the Peripatetics [Aristotelians] to speak about the forms and realities which become visible to the visionary contemplatives, for what is in question is a path which scarcely any of them has followed and even in those very few cases the mystical experience remained weak and precarious. The follower of the mystical path who has received his initiation from a master with theosophical experience, or thanks to the special divine assistance which guides the solitary exile—the latter case being very rare—will fully understand that the Peripatetics have entirely overlooked two sublime universes which never figure in their discussions, and there are a number of other things that remain beyond the scope of their philosophy.

…In short, the theosophist who has truly attained to mystical experience is one whose material body becomes like a tunic which he sometimes casts off and at other times puts on. No man can be numbered among the mystical theosophists so long as he has no knowledge of the most holy leaven of mystical wisdom, and so long as he has not experienced this casting off and this putting on.*

A parallel critique of mathematical science is provided by the physicist David Bohm. I’ve quoted this segment before elsewhere. It bears repeating in this context:

All that is clear about the quantum theory is that it contains an algorithm for computing the probabilities of experimental results. But it gives no physical account of individual quantum processes. Indeed, without the measuring instruments in which the predicted results appear, the equations of the quantum theory would be just pure mathematics that would have no physical meaning at all. And thus quantum theory merely gives us (generally statistical) knowledge of how our instruments will function. And from this we can make inferences that contribute to our knowledge, for example, of how to carry out various technical processes….

It follows from this that quantum mechanics can say little or nothing about reality itself. In philosophical terminology, it does not give what can be called an ontology for a quantum system. Ontology is concerned primarily with that which is and only secondarily with how we obtain our knowledge about this.†

The reason why science rules and mysticism is relegated to the category of the airy-fairy is not because one produces truth and the other fantasy. They both produce genuine observations of reality. The decisive reason is that in a collective, social setting, common knowledge must be accessible to the commonality of the population. But transcending experience is only available to the few; the rest must believe. The truth of the mystical, however, is at least indirectly substantiated by the majority of humans who do believe and adhere to one or another of the world’s religions. They have an intuition that the mystics “have something.” And that intuition, of course, comes from the same river the few have actually followed closer to its source.

———————

*Suhrawardi in Book of Conversations, quoted in Henry Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, Bollingen, 1977, p. 124.

†Bohm, David and B.J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe, Routlege, 1993, p. 1-2.

Views of the Guiding Hand

In attempts to look up what Arnold Toynbee had to say about “higher religions,” I went to find my copies of Toynbee’s two-volume (abridged) A Study of History. Soon came memories that I had tried to do this before, two or three years ago. My volumes had absconded, probably lent out, never returned. My replacement copies arrived yesterday from Amazon, and I spent some time with the book. It was a revealing experience.

Toynbee is a wonderful historian and writer—if you enjoy complex sentences and soaring cascades of thought. My admiration for him has only grown. But now, so many, many years since I’d last read him in the same sustained and concentrated manner, I noted some aspects of his viewpoint that I had not awarely done before. To be sure, I had noticed that he saw a pattern of progress in history; but I had not, in the past, viewed that fact as in any way remarkable; back then I took it in stride. Now I noticed that a change in my views has taken place since, and significant enough so that I now feel the difference. The change does not concern Toynbee’s significant, enduring contribution to the study of history, namely his view of cycles: the rising and decay of civilizations one after the other. Those observations are built on very solid foundations. What struck me yesterday is that Toynbee projected into this process a higher dispensation guiding the “evolution” of humanity.

Sometimes it helps to have a good mirror. I noted that my own views, since those early days, had become other-worldly. My focus had changed so that, these days, I see the meaning of human experiences coming from a transcendental point—whereas events in this dimension are entirely to be explained using empirical observation alone. Hence the cycling of history makes “naturalistic” sense; what evolution is present in history is not in any way different from similar and strictly adaptive patterns in living nature. Toynbee saw meaning in the collective behavior of humanity here; somewhere along the line, I had stopped doing so—in that the explanation of what history displays does not need a higher reference; collective life altogether swamps the transcendental traces enfolded within it.

The difference here comes from cosmological assumptions. One view sees meaning here and assumes that being in this realm is right and proper for humanity—thus that it is God’s intended arrangement. The other sees paradise as God’s intended place for our kind of beings; this, the fallen realm, is therefore not intended. Hence the real meaning of being here is—to escape. That project is, of necessity, individual; the action is in the soul, not in social or physical arrangements.

Here is another way to put that. If there is a Guiding Hand, it seems pretty hapless. It seems to act against resistance, and who or what could possibly resist God? At the same time, we can’t simply deny the phenomenon of guidance altogether. It is tangibly perceptible at the personal level. It has many names; grace will do. It’s not merely “in the head”; it manifests as well as “signs,” thus as meaningful coincidences, inspiration, healings, miracles, and wonders. In the western tradition these phenomena are assigned to divine interventions. But why reach so high for an explanation? The “guidance” may also be explained—to pick a suitable analogy—as the “atmospherics” of a higher order still, if only partially, reaching this fallen level and, down here, touching those who are by luck or effort receptive enough to discern them. The seemingly “hapless” character of this guidance is not due to God but to the unevenly distributed gifts of those whom inspiration actually reaches. And if we view such individuals as a community, that community has a slight—but only a slight—influence on history, not enough to speak of progress. The numbers thus touched seem ever in the same proportion no matter what time in history we care to examine. The further back we look, however, the less we see it; while the same old, same old five-, six-thousand years ago is still clearly perceivable. There is no progress—except at a ninety-degree angle to space, time, and history.

More on Higher and Lower

The subject of religion is, of course, inexhaustible. Last time I pointed to Toynbee’s use of the term “higher religion.” His definition of that phenomenon is rooted in human communion with Absolute Reality. In higher religion, it is direct, in primitive religion indirect and mediated by society. The problem here derives from the fact that concepts are extremely malleable and their meaning depends on what is in the mind of the individual as he or she uses a word this time; tomorrow it may mean something else.

If religion is defined as communion with absolute Reality (to echo Toynbee again), this communion will have an almost infinite gradation and will of necessity reflect the almost infinite range in each human being, where an animal and a spiritual nature are inextricably mixed and, on the analogy of a smelting oven, are gradually sorted. The most basic communion here is the prayer for immediate Help!—asking an unseen Power to solve this very mundane earthly problem; that form of religious behavior is common in virtually any form that religion takes and in every individual, no matter that person’s actual state. The highest form that it takes absolutely depends on the individual’s stage of development, hence may occur no matter what form the prevailing religion, seen as a collective and therefore social phenomenon, may be.

Primitive religion, therefore, may then be viewed as a stage in which the principal social expression of religiousness is altogether pragmatic, focused entirely on earthly outcomes; its religious character derives from a belief that unseen forces may exist and may intervene in the visible dimension. Any well-known famous holy place where people leave slips of paper containing prayer requests testifies to the continuing existence of primitive religion today; there is one such place within driving distance of my house; and, yes: I’ve left such a slip there too. Sometimes we have a great need—and such a religious impulse is itself in a way initiatory to the higher ranges.

In Toynbee’s higher religions, which, of course, if they’re really alive, will be saturated with primitive religion still, the collective consciousness of the higher dimension is institutionalized and therefore formally taught. Such religions also serve as collective disciplines of the sort very helpful in stimulating and helping individuals advance spiritually. Alas, the disciplinary aspect of collectives (and there are none, religious or otherwise, that do not have it) tends to be the only one noted by those whom the inner message doesn’t reach. And this disciplinary aspect is always in the form of rewards and punishments.

The really higher religious phenomenon is only experienced in absolute freedom. Individuals who’re lucky enough to get that far know not to act in order to get rewards nor to escape punishments. Herewith a quote, from Idries Shah’s The Sufis. Shah here paraphrases Jalaluddin Rumi (p. 119, Octagon Press edition):

In the collection of his sayings and teachings called In It What Is In It (Fihi Ma Fihi), used as a textbook for Sufis, he goes even further. Mankind, he says, passes through three stages. In the first one, he worships anything—man, woman, money, children, earth and stones. Then, when he has progressed a little further, he worships God. Finally, he does not say, “I worship God,” nor “I do not worship God.” He has passed into the last stage.

Higher Religions

By higher religions I mean religions designed to bring human beings into direct communion with absolute spiritual Reality as individuals, in contrast to earlier forms of religion that have brought them only into indirect communion with It through the medium of the particular society in which they have happened to be participants.

     [Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History, Vol. XII]

Toynbee’s governing image of civilization was progressive in character, thus he imagined each cycle of civilization as yet another attempt at achieving a kind of transcendence; each one, thus far, has fallen short, but in the end, perhaps… This view then produced the notion that later civilization are in some ways an advancement on their “parents,” and that the higher religions arise relatively late in known history. Our own western religion, Christianity, would then seem to be a “first generation” higher religion because Zeus and Juno, let’s call it the Olympian religion, did not make Toynbee’s list—but we are the spawn of the Graeco-Roman.

He contrasted the “higher” to the “primitive” religions, thus essentially nature-worship. But his list of higher religions, in A Study of History, goes far enough back (to Tammuz coupled with Inanna in Babylonia, to Osiris coupled with Isis in Egypt) so that the category becomes almost meaningless. His much later list, in An Historian’s Approach to Religion, includes Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, both Buddhisms (Hinayana and Mahayana), Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Interesting listing. What strikes me about it is that all but one had a founding figure known by name; the exception is Hinduism; at the source of Hinduism we find only Vedic hymns. Toynbee would have had some trouble excluding Hindusim, but since worshippers of Tammuz and Osiris are hard to find, those two, along with others equally obscure, have been purged from the surviving list. Or was Toynbee intent only on naming still living religions?

A basic problem arises when we attempt to relate events in this dimension to human beliefs that transcend this realm. Therefore to view religion as a progressive phenomenon produces puzzlement for me. Maybe all religions are “higher”—as all children in Lake Wobegone are “above average.” Maybe in seeking the founders of primitive religions we are looking at shamans—who could not write and therefore their revelations are lost in the mists of time.