Curious Phenomenon: Dogmatism

I came across it today when looking up something about Charles T. Tart, a psychologist largely associated with paranormal studies. In that process I became aware of the manner in which Tart is treated by the scientifically dogmatic, read by materialists. I had to chuckle. I began life surrounded by religious dogmatism—and nearing its end surrounded by its opposite. Idries Shah says somewhere that those greedy for heaven and those greedy for wealth have something in common: greed. There is a common factor in dogmatism as well, although it is somewhat submerged. A small element in it might just be—disbelief. It would fit both kinds equally well. Why else the fierce clinging? Why the attempt, when actual coercive power is denied the dogmatist, to persuade the unbeliever? A personally held belief is not, evidently, sufficient for everyone. It must be held by many—and ideally by the society as a whole—in order to dispense its soothing anointment on the individual. Yes. It is odd to live in a society where most members of large and influential elites hold views of reality quite contrary to my own. Odd but not precisely threatening. I rant a great deal about Modernity myself, but, frankly, secular times in which the Market is god are by far the most pleasant in which to live. Heterodox books still find their publishers, assembly with like-minded people is still possible, and you can say what you like. The grown-ups, be they atheists, believers, or somewhere else in that spectrum, do not burn witches or parapsychologists. They’re grateful for knowledge, wherever it comes from.

Catch-as-Catch-Can

The moods have their seasons, and sometimes, despite the lovely weather, they are filled with clouds. What’s the right attitude then? When the mood is cloudy and there is no background in events, the state is surely due to the state of the body. So I proceed from there. The right attitude is to remember the hierarchy of things. The heart need not echo the body’s state—nor, for that matter, the state of the world unfolded as I turn the pages of the paper. Our feelings of identification are habitual, and that habit probably has an adaptive purpose. We are actually free agents quite able to counter the natural signaling of our vehicle—which, if it were a dog, would simply curl up and sleep in moody states or, in others, simply follow the stimulus in total innocence. Now it seems that the body is designed to work quite efficiently without consciousness—in which case we would be apes; therefore, as nature has things, consciousness should not interfere much, or possibly not at all, with the “natural.” Identification, consequently, seems to serve a useful purpose. It keeps us “close” to the body’s state at all times, echoing it most of the time. But similarly—since the body cannot understand the abstract stimuli that we do—the body also echoes what is present in the mind; otherwise news coverage could not produce anger, disgust, and so forth; but it does. From the ape’s point of view the paper is just stuff of very little interest. Thus the two systems work together more or less seamlessly—well enough so that in Aquinas’ scheme of things the human—embodied rational being with immortal soul—is God’s own creations and a specific “order” of existence. Alas, that doesn’t sound right to me.

I am on the side of those who view the soul as captured in a body somehow—or entering it when it ought not. This is the great puzzle of this dimension because no one has as yet, so far as I can discover, answered my question. How or why did we take on these bodies? Was that a practical solution to some problem? If yes, the problem is still with us—because babies are still being born.

I ought to spell this out. Summer. Outdoors. I used to speculate at great lengths out here once. No end to such imponderabilities.

The discord or dissonance I feel arises when I contemplate the highly “engineered” character of bodies. This engineering is natural and evolutionary. It displays at the same time purposive arrangements and a kind of trial and error during its historical formation, the errors often corrected after a false start, with traces of those starts still present. Indeed the phenomenon reminds me of old farms—where the farmer solved problems in a catch-as-catch-can way, but once he chanced on a solution that worked, he left it in place. The blood-clotting cycle has all these earmarks. Purposive groping characterizes it, a groping that has over time piled layer on layer on layer, always aiming at—and exploiting—good results. Missing from this are the marks of high intelligence; present in it is a kind of ignorance, a will, and also a vague perception of some desired end. It works. But it’s not what I mean when I think of “creation.” I can think of a higher kind. The body resembles a human creation—drafts, revisions, errors, editings, and on and on. The mind, by contrast, is a marvel: it has multiple functions so seamlessly united that they form an indivisible whole.

This structure then, this body, holds us.

The life process as a whole is a system. All life uses water. At its base are creatures that feed on solar energy (or simply heat) directly, using elements to capture it. Above that level are entities that suck up water and minerals and fix carbon from the air. And all else feeds on other life.

What we see “out there” are the basic raw materials of life: energy and elements. And Something has turned these givens into the most incredibly diversified and form-maintaining (read reproducing) entities—so far as we have yet established, only on the earth; life everywhere is but a theory. Life has all the earmarks of a colonization. But from where? What life doesn’t look like is a “creation”; it’s more like an invasion of matter.

Earlier ages simply didn’t know enough about bodies, chemistry, the solar system (no fly-bys or Mars landers), or the cosmos (no Hubble) to see things the way I do. We still don’t know anything about how life started. Our theories that matter can form life by a chance event—energy and matter meeting in a certain happy conjunction—are inadequate. Where in matter is that mysterious Something that took advantage of (or perhaps arranged) that chance event to fashion reproducing, form-maintaining, indeed evolving entities. That was a radical departure from the norm.

Earlier ages, however, clearly discerned the differences between mind and matter, souls and bodies. And trying to explain this difference, they projected an essentially static cosmos in which Mind writ large created all that we see. Emphasis on static. They knew nothing about the Cambrian explosion. They thought the earth stood still: no satellites. They saw order in the repeating cycles of day and night, the phases of the moon, the succession of the seasons. And all is number.

Our age has produced observations and discoveries so stupendous that the old scheme seems utterly naïve. In the process, however, we have eliminated Mind altogether, whether written small or large. But what hasn’t yet transpired is the proper integration between old and new, an integration in which the truth in both is acknowledged, namely the reality of Mind and the now visible aspects of “body,” including in that word life as a whole, its carriers, and the cosmos in which they reside.

A different view emerges when we make the attempt: life as a colony or as an invasion of matter by Something mysterious present here and proceeding—not quite knowing where it’s headed—by catch-as-catch-can methods and Hail Mary passes.

Closer To You Than Your Jugular Vein

The phrase may lack all currency in the West, but all Muslims know it well. It is a quote from the Koran (QAF 50:16) and says: “We created man. We know the promptings of his soul, and are closer to him than the vein of his neck.” Interesting image. Closer than his physical life, you might say. The phrase came back as I was contemplating the great divide of invisibility between our dimension and the next one over. But what possible proof is there for that, the existence of the next one over? And then came the answer provided by my memory: “It’s closer to you than your jugular vein”—in which process, of course, what I meant was my own mind, my consciousness, not God, as the Koran has it, although I don’t dispute that either.

It is rather curious, when you think about it, that the proof of our transcending status, above the physical—however vital a physical it is—is the utterly ordinary, common, daily, indeed moment-to-moment fact of self-awareness. It isn’t sharply, clearly visible to us, this radical difference, because we are so intimately identified with our bodies—and a vast radiation of other structures that maintain them—that we do not realize that mind is impossible to build up from the same elements that form the jugular. Conventional wisdom asserts the opposite. Hence to really pin down the facts requires labor. If conventional wisdom had it right, however, Apple would by now have brought us Eve-pad. And looking at her screen some gloomy morning, she would say soothingly, but with an edge of challenge: “We’ve had a bad night—have we?”

Knowledge

Any person who knew with absolute certainty that another reality exists above this one (and leave to the side, for the moment, how that knowledge was acquired) then that person, and a community of such people, would be operating in this world of ours according to the laws of that reality rather than more or less unconsciously adapting to this one. Here a new aspects of the old gnosis—and why knowledge, quite by itself, might be enough—emerges. Such knowledge makes all the difference. To be sure, effective action in this world would then also require much more learning—but the learning about this world would be from the new perspective. It would have quite another context. Faith, as that word is usually understood, is nine parts hope and one part knowledge; it is a weaker state.

But how does this knowledge actually arise? Can it arises more or less naturally?

In my own case the process began with observation and continued through research, thought, reasoning. Gradually. What words to apply to those activities? Exhaustive, wide-ranging, comprehensive. Those qualifiers are crucially important because they incline the investigator to feel obliged to explain whatever facts or phenomena actually appear. Each must be integrated effectively into a whole. The process began for me in trying to make sense of history—when I first entered the Army. The question was suddenly there: What are armies all about? The simple answer I already had, defense. But when you apply those qualifiers (exhaustive, wide-ranging, and comprehensive) that’s only a start. It doesn’t matter where the process begins provided that the effort is allowed to branch. From armies, history. So what is history all about?

Knowledge comes in two varieties: adaptive and truth-seeking. Adaptive learning stops when the action becomes clear; truth-seeking, by its nature, never stops. To follow one’s inclinations belongs to the adaptive category: adapting to desire. So you become all-knowing about literature. It can easily fill a career. To be sure, literature can also be a starting point provided that it becomes exhaustive, wide-ranging, and comprehensive. Soon you’re studying DNA and cells. The human tendency is to organize knowledge into domains and to leave the borders between them more or less neglected territory. Within those domains, lots of easy answers—also enough and exciting controversy to engage the specialist as a fan or opponent for a lifetime. But reconciling different domains is something quite different—especially when they appear to present quite opposing general views of life. And the work is not outwardly rewarding; yes, there are people who tackle such controversies and make a name for themselves; they will also “specialize” in two; but tackling all of them?

Knowledge also arises from life—as opposed to subjects. And lived experiences must also be harmonized with formal knowledge. Endless process. It’s best to keep it separate from earning a living. What might begin as faith (or absolute lack of it) turns into knowledge eventually. And once it is present, it makes all the difference. Not surprisingly, everything then looks—very different.

Secular Times

Secular times produce their own values. They clear off the vast accumulations of authority. In place of traditional values they focus attention in the readily observable. The readily observable has utility. The inner experience has value. The first produces science; it may be tested by experiment. The second cumulates and becomes authority as individual experiences are interpreted, concentrated, formalized, and passed on; but authority can only be tested by personal experience—because the transcending is not observable.

The key word in the last sentence is interpreted. To illustrate, let’s take the case of “dreaming the future” mentioned in the last post. It’s an astonishing and rare experience. How is it explained? One interpretation is that our long-standing views of time are in some way incomplete. Another is that some invisible, superior agency sent the dream as a message. Yet another is that the dreamer is lying to garner attention—tough on the critic if he soon dreams the future in his turn.

Authority is a cumulation of the preferred interpretation, in such cases. The preference will be a function of prevailing views at that time. That interpretation is then further structured and refined by intellectual reasoning mostly by people who did not have the experience themselves.

The deposit of authority is not destroyed in secular times, to be sure. The old books are still there. Resistant groups still, as it were, live it. The curious person has access, so to speak. What secularism does is to devalue authority, and doing so it clears the decks. It serve to renew. It represents a genuine renewal because authority, like tradition, carries a vast detritus of error as well as truth. Much of it is well worth dumping, the valuables well worth retrieving and polishing again.

I had dug up some buried compost three years old. In that I found an excellent black dustpan used outdoors; I thought that I had accidently dumped it with yard waste in a tall paper sack some time ago. I also found a silver spoon. Now ancient authority carries much more value than my compost, but at least you know how this thought arose. At rare intervals, even this traditionalist will praise Modernity.

Spacetime and Mindmatter

The core of Sufi teaching is that some kind of higher organs form in us as a consequence of right attention (mindfulness) to experience. The presumption (mine) is that the person so formed is enabled to function properly in the next dimension. “Salvation” in this context has a developmental meaning.

In the Western Christian concept, salvation is projected principally as a divine gift, but achieved by the will to live in accordance with divine law known through revelation and believed in—and that belief itself is a function of the will. We shall fail in this effort, human that we are, but it is the consistency that counts, the sincere intention and its steady implementation. The backstory here is the Fall; it degraded our natures. Therefore the model is that of a blissful state, a descent therefrom for faults of our own, and a return to bliss achieved, as it were, by a reform of our fallen nature. Call it re-development.

The first model suggests that we came into being unfinished, mere potentials, and that ascent is akin to growing up. The second suggests perfectly created beings who fell and must recover.

The Eastern model suggests, more or less explicitly, that souls are really gods but ignorant of their status—and a fall of sorts is implied because that ignorance may have been acquired willfully. If so, these gods have lost the crucial aspect I associate with divinity. And to speak of “sparks of God” does not correct the problem. The meaningful idea of God, for me (an adherent to negative theology that I am) does not support, in relation to God, any kind of division, whether into sparks or not, any kind of evolution, attributes, acts, thoughts, or anything else farmable in thought. Something like the Cosmos may have attributes, may evolve, etc. We can say nothing about God.

So where to go from here? Seriously. How to see this correctly?

Humanity, it seems to me, has no answer. The totality of wisdom consists of different ways of interpreting the contradiction between consciousness and the mindless over against. Dualism of the radical kind (Mazdaism) is one answer. In that view the mindless is one, the mindful the other polarity, both preexistent from eternity. The omnipotent creator (Western monotheism) at least accounts for mind, but don’t ask too many questions about the mindless; the answer will be that God does what he will. Denial of the mindless is the third approach; all is mind; the rest is illusion (e.g. Buddhism). Materialism completes the picture by denying mind; all is matter.

The solution is probably hidden in this quaternity. The most mind-blowing fact in experience is that we can dream the future. Just once, unambiguously, is enough. I’ve experienced it (link). Such an experience convinces me that our concept of time is very iffy. And if of time, probably also of space. In the Real world, and I do not mean this cosmos here, the contradiction I identified above may not be present. Occasionally, for very good reasons, well understood over there, big bangs generate cosmoses of space and time to get some necessary work accomplished. Once over there, we’ll understand it. And we’re all bound over there. Our problem here is cosmocentricity, if you like. We can’t imagine a reality without space and time, mind and matter—nicely separated. Einstein tried, with his spacetime continuum. But don’t try to picture that. Failure is guaranteed.

Behind the Veil

The following is an extract from Alfred Tennyson’s 1849 poem, In Memoriam A.H.H., cantos 55 and 56. The initials stand for Arthur Henry Hallam, a fellow poet and a young man who died at 22; he was engaged to Tennyson’s sister, Emily. The work was originally titled “The Way of the Soul,” and the quoted portions in a way summarize the “problem” we all face here.

LV
The wish, that of the living whole

No life may fail beyond the grave,

Derives it not from what we have

The likest God within the soul?

Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds,

And finding that of fifty seeds

She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares

Upon the great world's altar-stairs

That slope thro' darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,

And gather dust and chaff, and call

To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.

LVI

'So careful of the type?' but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone

She cries, `A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.

'Thou makest thine appeal to me:

I bring to life, I bring to death:

The spirit does but mean the breath:

I know no more.' And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,

Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation's final law—

Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek'd against his creed—

Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,

Who battled for the True, the Just,

Be blown about the desert dust,

Or seal'd within the iron hills?

No more? A monster then, a dream,

A discord. Dragons of the prime,

That tare each other in their slime,

Were mellow music match'd with him.

O life as futile, then, as frail!

O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

Although context provides the explanation, the word “type” used first in the second stanza of 55 means “species,” but that word would jar poetic nerves. Another as it were poetic work-around is in the last line of the first stanza, “the likest God within the soul,” where saying “the likeness of God within the soul” would much trouble the meter. Those fanes in the third stanza of 55? Banners.

The segments illustrate the problem faced by the sincere and active soul attempting to grapple with traditional understanding of the divine arrangements and actual observation. As Tennyson himself remarks in this work (Canto 96): “There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.” There is discernible here also the path by which portions of humanity reach a gnostic vision of the fallen world.

Cosmic Vistas

Speaking of faith (last post), my own persuades me that humans are something more than energy- and matter-consuming and waste-producing machines. The part of us that transcends this structure appears to be superior, not the product of the machine but, most likely, the reason why the machine is there in the first place. Our minds tell us that we’re here for a purpose—and that purpose is not merely to help others or to leave behind fine memories, in other people’s minds. Therefore our purpose points beyond the machine. The machine is a tool. But why would we need such tools? Here is an instance where knowledge thins out and only speculation remains.

The traditional speculations are largely descriptive: matter, life, intelligence. Life is subdivided into vegetative, animal, and human. The first two have souls that die, the third one does not. We can go beyond this and include angels—that have no bodies. And considering that bodily differentiation make us individually recognizable units but sharing one species, the speculation (Thomas Aquinas’, for example) has it that each angel is also its own species. With angels we leave the created order. Under this schema, humans are always embodied—and death is the consequence of the Fall. After resurrection we shall have bodies again; as for what kind (will they sweat, defecate, have to eat, etc.) on that the speculation rather thins out. Here faith, which I hold must be supported by intuition, fails me. I don’t detect a resonance.

Let me unpack it a little more. I resist the notion that only humans have immortal souls. The biosphere beyond us must have a meaning too—and what if it is the same meaning as in our own case? At the same time, I have no problem thinking that there was a “fall” of some sort and that it has necessitated “bodies.” Further, the notion that death is the consequence of the Fall makes good sense. These tools, being material, cannot last forever. It may also be highly desirable that they drop away at regular intervals. When the job is done, we lay the tools aside.

The Fall, of course, complicates matters. If we take the Judeo-Christian transmission, before it came was Paradise—presumably a place where bodies existed and, indeed, had to ingest food. Why else those forbidden apples that caused the fall? And if ingestion, then also defecation. Or should we accept that depiction of Paradise in symbolical terms—described so that fallen humanity would understand it? In that case Paradise is a previous condition; the eating of the apple is a symbolical depiction of some sort of failure. And all that followed, not least being here, and bodies, and apples, and all the rest—came later. As a consequence.

That we are in a fallen state is rather obvious. That we are personally responsible for being here makes sense; therefore the cause of the Fall was not merely Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience. Let’s view that, too, as symbolical short-hand. Thinking ourselves as stranded here by some cosmic disaster—don’t you dare go near that Big Bang, child, I don’t know what I’ll do if you disobey—introduces an irrational arrangement into reality—and if I wanted that, Materialism has a much better explanation. Occam’s razor, and so forth, would make me choose that.

That, finally, leaves me but one other speculative option. Call it some heavenly Outward Bound program intended to put the newly created soul-beings into a very rough environment in which to learn how to become genuinely human. That model suggests that life here was created by a superior heavenly community, carefully engineered to develop slowly until students could be sent down here to learn and to develop. That one, I’m afraid, produces even less resonance than any of the other models. That this realm, functionally, is a developmental realm is certainly true. But as for its creation, I think the Fall from a paradisaical realm is a better explanation. Whether to develop or not to is left to those who’re here. And failure to develop probably means one thing: Staying here—whether in a body or not. And it is better to be in a body rather than not. We can at least handle, rearrange, and play with matter—rather than simply contemplating our fallen state.

Faith

Faith is a difficult word to define—when you think about it. My old (1967) Webster’s seems to agree. The most interesting definition of it is 2 b (1): “firm belief in something for which there is no proof”; that is a commonly held view of it in a culture where the only things that serve for proof are physical observations. The Latin root it fidere, to trust, which Webster’s never uses by itself; but one must ask: When I trust, what are my proofs? Interior sources of proof have no standing in our culture because all internal experiences are derived, in turn, from brain functions; brain functions from physical actions of neurons, etc.

But ignoring all that, we can distinguish, nonetheless, between different roots of faith: external or internal. If the faith is in a learned transmission, the faith then resides in the transmission, thus it is a trust in the words or reports of other people that have reached us by an immensely long route of passing from mind to mind—and part of that proof is the very fact that so many people had passed it on. If the faith arises from a conviction that comes from my own intuition, it is a fact I cannot for the life of me describe. But it is very strong. And only that of which my own intuition thus approves do I accept as real proof. The physical? It sometimes gives me that feeling—but by no means always; and least so if the physical is a stand-in from something internal in minds other than mine. Transmission has drawbacks, not least that large numbers of people very often believe in things that are quite dubious—and hold such beliefs for many centuries.

The action of the will is not, in my opinion, engaged in faith. Faith must come first—and from the intuition. But will is involved in this structure in other ways. It may take effort to examine reality—to deepen understanding. For intuition to operate, it must be enabled to see. Another is to follow that intuition. I may not act in accordance with my own legitimately held faith. To do so, when my inclination is to ignore it, the will becomes involved. But to assert, by will, something I don’t inwardly believe is merely a gesture of some sort. It is not, to echo the existentialists, authentic.