Visualizing the Invisible

Words mean what the individual using them thinks that they mean. The person’s definition initially comes from others’ use of a word; there is a kind of cloud of consensus in which a word derives, but looking at dictionaries shows that multiple meanings may be present. And then, building on these, the individual may come to use the word to signal something that differs in significant ways from current usage. An example is phenomenon. The word is rooted in the Greek word meaning “to appear” and is related to phantasm, “an apparition, specter.”  In the eighteenth century is was used to mean “an extraordinary occurrence”—such as, say, seeing a ghost. Later, and ever more aggressively, the word has come to mean “an object or aspect known through the senses rather than by thought or intuition.” This is Webster’s second definition; it is specific in detail in an effort to underline the modern meaning. The first is simply “an observable fact or event.” Here is a word which points to contradictory objects, if we may call them objects at all: strange things we don’t know how we can possibly see—and the objects of ordinary experience. The materialist belief denies that anything can be seen by something other than the senses. Therefore, of course, there are no ghosts, spirits, or what have you. In my own use of the word its meaning is “anything experienced” whether or not sight, sound, touch, taste, or smell are involved or not. A thought is just as much of a phenomenon as the stubbing of my toe.

Let me next contrast two phrases, the “spiritual world” and the “subtle world.” The concept of subtle bodies came into English by way of the founder of the Theosophical Society, Madame Blavatsky, in the nineteenth century and originates in Hinduism. Subtle itself has its root in the Latin tela, web, thus something very finely, thinly woven: the subtle body. Spirit is rooted in Latin as well; it meant “soul” as well as “breath” to the Romans; when the breath leaves the body, all that’s left is that second definition of Webster’s above.

The two words here, at the root, are closely related. Gases are certainly the most “finely woven” of material substances; we might call them subtle matter, accessible only to the touch. Both in the sense of subtle body or spirit, they are convenient pointers to something real (experienced, phenomenal) yet altogether invisible. Over time, however, principally due to the rise of Christianity in the West, a rather wide gulf formed between the conceptualizations of a spiritual and a subtle world. The spiritual gathered to itself a vast body of theological accretions. The invisible world beyond the border took on a radically different character than the world we inhabit on our way there. It is a place of judgement, where our deeds in life are weighed—and all depending on the tilt of the scales we go to heaven, hell, or purgatory. In the first we contemplate God to all eternity; in the other we undergo suffering without end; the third is a kind of reformatory. Viewed as a useful motivational ideology, this model has a certain merit, although it ignores Jesus’ words in John 14:2, “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” Three mansion are not what I’d call many, hence there is some indication that the model may be not quite all there is to the end times; they may not be end times.  

The subtle world, by contrast, having a less didactic accretion of meanings, suggests at least two ranges of reality, a dense and a subtle, and if two, why not more, both going up and going down. That the spiritual world becomes quite clearly visible—if the faculties are free to see it—emerges from a study of near-death experiences and deathbed visions. From such sources we also learn that death is experienced as a sudden and very pleasant enhancement of the soul’s faculties, even if no “senses” seem to be necessary for the experience. The only sort of comprehensive view of the beyond on offer comes from Emanuel Swedenborg; in the world he projects there are plenty of mansion of all kinds, rising high and low. Souls are self-sorting. They find the place where they belong. In some real ways death is a transition, tempting me to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz: “Death is nothing but a continuation of life by other means.” And that continuation will much resemble life here as we lived it. And the invisible will also become visible.

If Dreams Are Thoughts…

…and that is what I think they mostly are, dangers arise because the contents of dreams have a distinctly objective feel. By this I mean that as we dream we never doubt the reality of the projection we experience, even when the dream performs amazing jumps. The dream reporter will then say: “The next thing you know, I was looking at a river…” but such abrupt transitions are accepted. And when we become aware of the dream’s strangeness—or real thought is required for some aspect of it—we wake up.

The danger lies in misunderstanding certain dreams as messages—not from our own thoughts but from some mysterious beyond. Most dreams are just a streaming of associative thought rendered as dynamic images. To be sure the thoughts of some, asleep as well as when awake, are circling around arcane subjects that, rendered in dream imagery, produce fantastic visions. The skill of the sleeping mind in producing visual renditions of abstraction is quite admirable as well as occasionally clumsy and amusing—once understood. Alongside dangers are boons. Sometimes we solve problems in our dreams. A famous example of such a boon was Friedrich Kekulé’s vision of a serpent biting its own tail, which came to him in a revery and helped him understand the structure of benzene, a subject that had long plagued him.

The absence of genuine consciousness in dreams—meaning detached self-awareness—is the most interesting aspect of ordinary dreaming. We appear to experience dreams as if we were embodied presences in them, but altogether absent is even a hint of how we would react if we were really present. If now as I am sitting in my backyard writing in the sun I would be suddenly at the airport waiting at a gate, I would certainly immediately feel that something was drastically wrong. But if this thought recurred in a dream, I would be at the airport; and, at that airport, all kinds of signs, elaborately realistic, would signal some kind of trouble.

These thoughts arise because, recently, I was revisiting Carl Jung’s conceptualization of the Unconscious, a realm peopled by archetypes. That theory arises from dream analysis. And it occurred to me then that unconsciousness is the chief marker of the dreamer; the dream itself is usually accessible enough. The really weird dreams are those in which we dream the future—and, sure enough, a short while later the dream event actually happens. But if a person dreams that God has told him to do this or that, a little cold water splashed on the face will not be out of place.

Now as for lucid dreaming, on that subject I have only hear-say. I know what “lucid” means in the waking state. I’d have to experience a lucid dream before I could judge. Some people might consider lucid what I do not. There is nothing like tasting for yourself.

A Tally of the Theories

What do concepts like the Fall, Maya, Fourth and Higher Dimensions, Alienation, and David Bohm’s Explicit and Implicit orders have in common? And here I might also mention Doris Lessing’s Substance-of-We-Feeling (SOWF). They suggests powerfully that our experience of reality, not least the entire whole we call the cosmos, may be something incomplete.

The Fall, of course, holds the idea of some kind of descent—from something high; in actual usage the concept of a spatial height is not what the Fall means. The spatial reference is a metaphor. Some condition or event is likened to a physical descent. The reason for the Fall, of course, isn’t clumsy climbing but disobedience. The process is also likened to an expulsion—from the Garden—into another and highly deficient realm. Here the imagery is horizontal, but its cause, disobedience, is the same.

The Sanskrit word Maya means illusion; it suggests the unreality of the cosmos. It is said to arise from ignorance, thus the false belief that what we experience has genuine essence. It is an appearance, not the real. Thus the cosmos lacks—reality, reality as fully constituted.

The dimensions above the three spatial (length, width, height) and time, thus a fourth spatial dimension (and successive others) were uncovered by mathematical contemplation. But extra-dimensionality, thus the possible existence of reality beyond the three, or four with time added, quickly captured the fancy of those who believe in a spiritual reality. It provides a modern, math-based “proof” of sorts that the spiritual intuition may be backed by science. We are not really home until we return to the Garden.

Alienation is the core of gnostic beliefs—of which a modern representative is Existentialism. We’re living in a world produced by an underling, the demiurge. Therefore we live as strangers in a strange land—and won’t escape until we know this (gnosis).

David Bohm, the physicist, conceived of a vast enfolded reality of which our cosmos is but a temporarily unfolded bubble. The Big Bang therefore produced a tiny bubble. Here too the symbolism is metaphoric; the Big Bang was a coincidence of the most minute wavelengths. Bohm also suggested, however, that there is a conditioned order, meaning deterministic to a fault, and an unconditioned order, intelligence, perceivable directly in humans.

Lessing’s fictional Fall is caused by the thinning of some mysterious psychic energy in the cosmos, that thinning assigned to a celestial event; it causes human behavior as we know it—but also affects everything else.

As the above illustrates, there is a strong tendency to project explanations of reality using dimensions directly or relatively—height, planes, space-time, distance, and such. The results, taken more or less literally, are incomprehensible. We cannot picture a fourth space dimension; if this table is illusion, it’s still certainly very hard. What precisely is present in the Garden that, if we had it, would make us happy? Harps on clouds won’t do it. At the same time, human intuition unfailingly answers Yes, yes, yes—producing the conclusion that we know something. But we have the devil of a time giving it expression in the language and thought modes of this Fallen world. And the inability also afflicts those few who manage to get a really good look at that Garden, another Dimension, the Implicate Order, or feel the winds of SOWF blowing right strongly a ways beyond Borderzone.

Some Interesting Parallels

Beginning in the nineteenth century—and continuing today—physics on the one hand and psychic research on the other have been on convergent paths, both showing that something beyond our three-dimensional world really exists. These two streams have not, as it were, “unified” yet—but it may be early days. Let me give a quick sketch of that.

Light is a wave—even that which reaches us from the sun and distant stars through a vacuum. But how can that be? As the physicist Michio Kaku put it (in Hyperspace, Oxford University Press, 1994) “[I]f light were a wave, then it would require something to be ‘waving.’ Sound waves require air, water waves require water, but since there is nothing to wave in a vacuum, we have a paradox. How can light be a wave if there is nothing to wave?”  Hence the science of old posited the existence of aether, a kind of subtle substance, to explain that waving. No proof of aether’s existence could later be established, but the subject keeps cropping up under other names (link on Ghulf Genes).

In 1926 the British physics professor Sir William Barrett, prompted by a case reported by his wife, nee Florence Willey, a surgeon in obstetrics, wrote a book entitled Death-bed Visions. It was the first such collection of cases ever published. One of her patients, Doris, experienced such a vision of her dead father. It was so convincing that Lady Barrett was persuaded of the reality of a beyond; her conviction energized her husband to undertake his own investigations. From such beginnings have come death-bed and near-death experience (NDE) studies. Now I suggest that they have something akin to the “waving” of light in a supposedly non-existing ether. These apparitions are very convincing; they are also sometimes inter-subjective, meaning that not just the person reporting the vision but third parties also see it. But based on current theories of reality, they are impossible. To call them supernatural is a bit of a punt. If something exists, it must be somewhere. So where is it?

In 1921 the German Theodor Kaluza published a paper which suggested a solution to the waving of light. With additions (in 1926) of a theory by the Swede Oskar Klein, this has been known as the Kaluza-Kline theory. It suggests that the vacuum itself was vibrating—and that it has a five-dimensional structure consisting of four dimensions of space and one of time. This outlandish theory simply could not be dismissed. Kaluza-Klein showed that if such a structure was presumed to exist, something theretofore impossible was quite easy to do: Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism and Einstein’s of gravity could be elegantly unified. This motivated scientific belief. Gradually the problems of Kaluza-Klein were worked out. The current field that represents continuation of that venture is superstring theory; the name of that “beyond” has become hyperspace—and it is said to have ten dimensions all told.

But let me take this back to the nineteenth century when the initial insights/observations first arose. In 1854 the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann first laid the foundations for a multi-dimensional geometry in a paper titled “On the hypotheses which underlie geometry.” Until this paper, the possible existence of a fourth spatial dimension was deemed an impossibility, but Riemann proved that it was not only thinkable but, at least mathematically, a fourth dimension—and any number after them—could be shown to behave quite lawfully and predictably. Not that the human mind is capable of imagining a fourth-dimensional structure, but we can know something about it. The Society for Psychical Research was founded a little later, in 1882. Among its initial committees was one on Apparitions and Haunted Houses.

As psychic and physical theories have advanced since, fascinating parallels have continued to emerge. Kaku’s book has quite an extensive listing of the physical consequences—if we imagine beings to exists in a fourth spatial dimension. Those beings could walk through walls in the third dimension, travel at the speed of thought, and see “into” matter. Wormholes exist (since their “discovery” much exploited in science fiction) connecting dimensions. In different dimensions, “time beats at different rates,” as Kaku puts it.

On the psychic side, using the near-death experience literature, we certainly have people, out of their bodies temporarily, walking through walls—and being unable to touch those still in bodies; their subtle hands pass right through bodies too; the often report having 360 degree vision and say that time is somehow “different.” In those reports a subset of people report passing out of their bodies through “tunnels”—emerging from which they see dead relatives and beings of light. In the literature on apparitions, we have speed-of-thought travel—as soldiers who died in battle appear hundreds of miles away to relatives to say good-bye. Clairvoyance presents cases of seeing-at-a distance, telepathy person-to-person communications without electromagnetic transmission of voice.

Michio Kaku’s interest is in the physical phenomena associated with hyperspace, above all the promise of the theory that it will eventually permit the complete unification of the four forces. These are the strong force (holding suns and atomic cores together), the weak force (associated with radiation), electromagnetism, and gravity. Going beyond, he identifies the possibility of time travel—and of the physical proof of hyperspace— but notes that extraordinarily high levels of energy would be necessary to produce either time travel or the proofs—or the formation of wormholes, for that matter.

I was re-reading Kaku recently and the parallels above came into my mind. Then it dawned on me that the current understanding of “forces” may be excluding something. There might be a fifth force as well, much as Kaluza and Klein discovered a fifth dimension. That subtle force—which certainly seems to transcend the three dimensions—may be the force of Mind. And just possibly it is sufficient, in its own way, of forming the necessary tunnels with virtually no energy at all—and travel in mere seconds into a kind of hyperspace I call the country beyond the borderzone. That the dimensions might interpenetrate is, of course, part of the hyperspace theory. That they do so is also a feature of NDEs—where people report being simultaneously present at their own deathbed as well as in what are, almost invariably, described as regions of great beauty and a marvelous light. Light seems to be a key in all of this...

Science Expanded

I noted with some interest in Osis and Haraldsson’s book† a history of the study of deathbed visions. It shows a definite trend in culture, namely the very gradual establishment of at least one segment of paranormal studies, those dealing with survival. We really are entering a new age. It is, of course, barely discernible because the vast overhang of a dying secularism shades it from view.

For such studies to proceed, the meaning of science must also change and, indeed, is changing. And for that change to be successful, an even more basic doctrine will have to be revised. It is the assertion that our only possible source of knowledge is the sensorium, thus vision, hearing, smell, and touch. These four, of course, are directly traceable to physical causes and in due course yield materialism. To enlarge the concept of science, however, we need not really have to go too far into some kind of mystic fog. All we need do is base science on experience. The moment we do that, we immediately include as legitimate subjects for study those experiences that reach us by means for which no sensory pathways are discoverable. That would include the entire range of the paranormal: telepathy, clairvoyance, apparitions, near-death experiences, precognition, and more.

Arguably this range of experience is rare. Its systematic study, however, beginning in the nineteenth century, has painstakingly accumulated evidence that such experiences are not reducible either to chance, mental delusions, or bodily malfunctions. They can be studied. The disciplined collection of data and their rational analysis is no less science than the same activity massively deployed to prove the existence of the Higgs boson.

What emerges from such an “expanded” science is knowledge, if not control, but the knowledge, especially from the death-related experiences of humanity, also greatly expands our conceptions of the possible meaning of life, something that a science operating in the straitjacket of materialistic monism has quite failed to deliver.

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†Osis, Karlis and Erlendur Haraldsson, At The Hour of Death, Avon, 1977, Chapter 3, “Research on Deathbed Visions: Past and Future.”

The Demons at the Border

Waking dreams in my case very often have the character of a “return.” There is a trip in the background, a clear sense of heading home, sometimes a sense of urgency—because something needs to be done when I arrive. “Return” or “trip” are also marked by the presence of trains, trolleys, buses, roads, and the like. Very often the surroundings are pleasant but, as I proceed, they become urban, industrial, slum-like, crowded, and ever-more depressing. A sense of being lost arises as well. The landscape keeps changing. Home is “over there”—but then the expected landmark isn’t where it ought to be. And quite often as the chaos increases, some kind of very unpleasant encounters also follow. In this morning’s waking dream, for example, I found myself confronted by people trying to collect a debt I did not remember owing. After long discussions it suddenly occurred to me that if I had borrowed money, I must have signed some documents. I began demanding the documents and—unless they were immediately produced—I threatened to hire lawyers. And with that energetic thought I found myself awake—angry but awake.

The Dutch psychiatrist, Frederick van Eeden (1860-1932), the man who coined the phrase “lucid dream,” also had such dreams; he recorded some 352 of them over a period of 14 years. Toward their end, as he reports, they often morphed into ordinary dreams. And in such situations he sometimes encountered demons. Van Eeden was not asserting the reality of demons per se. They might or might not be real. But he gave an interesting definition. “I call demoniacal those [dream] phenomena which produce on us the impression of being invented or arranged by intelligent beings of a very low moral order.” For more see this paper of his—in which he also describes how to deal with such creatures.

Old van Eeden came back into my memories this morning as I reflected on that unpleasant waking dream of mine. Such dreams get one’s attention. The episode with the would-be debt collectors, within the dream, took place after I’d finally finished my trip and I was “home,” home because Brigitte lived there, but at that moment she was “out.”

It occurred to me that those “returns” might actually be genuine—the return of the soul to the body after some excursion outside of it. That return is usually from a splendid place (a plane that some, like van Eeden, experience lucidly) to the realm of matter, the coarse, the cosmic slums, as it were, the turbidity of the pools. We must return but aren’t eager. And at that lowly level might be assemblies of those “left behind” after they died and still playing their wretched games.

It was Ibn el Arabi who wrote that in some ways the experience of dreams and of the higher realms have similarities—but dreams are an inferior and distorted perception of what lies beyond them. The lucid, perhaps? Here is how van Eeden describes the human state in lucid dreams:

In these lucid dreams the reintegration of the psychic functions is so complete that the sleeper remembers day-life and his own condition, reaches a state of perfect awareness, and is able to direct his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition. [See earlier link]

Both the ordinary and the lucid dream-worlds are symbolic, according to van Eeden. He defines symbol as follows: “A symbol is an image, or an imaginary event, standing for a real object or event whereto it has some distant resemblance. Now the invention of a symbol can only be an act of thought—the work of some intelligence.” Thus it is one—or many—minds that create environments and situations in the disembodied states we sometimes “dream.” Hence the “demonic” phenomena in waking dreams may be the projection of intelligent beings of “a very low moral order.” My own dream diaries have lots of examples; in virtually every such case, what ultimately wakes me up is the distinct feeling that “this isn’t me.”

Of Tunnels and Barriers

My library added a recent book on the near-death experience (NDE), Evidence of the Afterlife by Jeffrey Long, Harper One, 2010. I checked it out. After a while I realized that I was already aware of Dr. Long. He is behind a rather extensive web site on which hundreds of NDE reports appear; these are contributed voluntarily by the public and hence are something of a mixed bag. The book is intended for the public at large, not for students of the phenomenon. No bibliography; no index. Despite this leaning toward the popular, valuable insights, data, cases, and commentaries make the book valuable.

The book, in turn, led me to consult two already on my shelf. The first of these launched the whole category, Raymond Moody’s Life After Life (1975), the other is At the Hour of Death by Karlis Osis and Erlendur Harakisson (1986). Moody’s book is also an introduction of the subject to the public, but its structure, style, tone and cases on which it reports produce a sense of clarity. Moody built up his cases in extensive interviews with people who’d undergone the experience. These he then studied systematically. Osis and Harakisson studied the deathbed experiences of people who died; not NDEs these. The data they used came from interviewing doctors and nurses. There are some interesting differences between NDEs and deathbed visions; in the first people are brought back and report experiences; in the second they soon die. One difference is that in death-bed cases people experience neither a tunnel nor a barrier that separates this world from that one—but they are visited by apparitions of relatives, friends, or religious figures shortly before they die.

Concerning the tunnel, a subset of NDE subjects (33.8% in Long’s book) report passing through a tunnel, narrow passage, valley, or some such delimited structure; sometimes, not always, they also report sound effects; these that range from highly unpleasant to vibratory to musical.  The barrier comes later. It is reported as a stretch of water, a wall, a fence, a door, and so on: pass the barrier and you cannot return; some 31 percent reported a barrier in Long’s NDE database.

I went back to re-read Moody because, in his careful presentation, the tunnel phenomenon is closely associated with the actual near-death event; the heart stops, breathing stops, a vast pain is felt. When reported, it is the first experience of the NDE and appears to mark the point when the mind/soul leaves the body. The person doesn’t travel any actual distance; in most cases, after passage, he or she is still in the same room where the body is. The tunnel, therefore, must be taken as a passage from the body, not as a trip to a heavenly realm.

The barrier appears later in cases where the subject also reports visions of another realm; the barrier is located there. Interestingly, in many cases, this other-worldly setting overlays the actual room where the subject’s bed or operating table is located and where, even as the heavenly scenes progress, the doctors/nurses labor on the physical body; and the subject is aware of both simultaneously. As a consequence of profound feelings of serenity, the subject wishes to proceed “onward”—and then meets the barrier, only to be prevented from making that move because “the time is not yet.”

In Osis and Harakisson’s work, neither phenomenon is reported, most likely because it doesn’t take place. By contrast, however, the figures that appear convey to the subject their intention of taking the subject away.

This got me thinking. The NDE phenomenon, however evidentiary for the reality of soul-survival, may be something exceptional, not the usual situation at death—because it isn’t actually death yet. When the final hour arrives, there is no need to tunnel out of the body or to worry about barriers. The transition will happen quite naturally.

To this I might add two notes. The first: Multiple excellent, disciplined, and careful studies of the NDE exist, usually carried out by doctors, nurses, or a combination of these two professions. The best are published in scientific journals accessible only by paying rather steep fees or membership dues. I’ve seen a few but have no hard copy to consult. The second: If it all happens anyway, why waste time on this arcane nonsense? Well, if you are on a tall ship sailing, slowly, to China—and you’ve never seen that realm—you might be tempted to read the few sorry books on board your ship that say something about China, your destination. That they are few and sorry is a given if you are under sail rather than traveling by diesel-steam; but whatever their number or quality, you will study those pages with some curiosity.

A Primitive Intuition

Matters I’ve been mulling over recently, and have touched on here and there on Borderzone, include the sorting of “deliberate” and “chance,” the nature of space-time and whatever might be the environment “over there,” and the notion that if higher realms extend beyond this one, they must be superior.

Deliberate? The world has been deliberately fashioned, never mind when and how. Chance? The same, but the cause is chance. I favor “deliberate” and would do so with enthusiasm were it not for observation which says “chance”—but not pure chance. The very existence of teleology (read “life”) suggests an invasion of this realm by something alien to it. And the highly engineered character of life suggests something like a tour de force—not a feeling that arises when I contemplate the formation of planets or of suns.

The actual patterns strongly contradict the top down theology of Catholicism (which is “deliberate”) in that they suggest a conflict between the existence of randomness and of omniscience, omnipotence, etc.

The emanationist model fits observation but is hard to reconcile with the presence of intelligence; it’s there, after all, in us. Intelligence, combined with omniscience, makes it seem weird that “waste” should be present in Reality or, what amounts to the same thing, that there should be such enormous ranges of purposeless material in existence.

Turning to intelligence, what makes zero sense is an evolving God. Reduced to a hard essence, such a “god” would be a creature. Therefore it does not surprise me how the Gnostics reasoned—imagining a very detached, indeed an indifferent and utterly unknowable God. But I have a primitive sort of intuition. Can’t imagine the Gnostic model even if I understand its logical rootings. Nor can I imagine creation as an emanation. That’s far too physical a description; the sun’s the model there. Can’t rightly credit a “fall” either—although it feels right. Can’t rightly credit it confidently in detail as the disobedience of a genuinely knowing community. The cosmic disaster model (Big Bang, say) fits things nicely—including viewing it as a kind of Fall. But it introduces the random into an equation where it could only mean a god who isn’t really in control. The atheistic solution works until we encounter life and intelligence.

It is a puzzlement.

Yet I also know that life and intelligence, together, absolutely force the conclusion of a living and intelligent Divine or Whole which must have all of the perfections Catholicism ascribes to it. There I stand, as it were, up against all of the observable contradictions. Is this where faith comes into the picture? It’s not difficult to believe because, as I say, I feel it as a force, compellingly. But the external evidence all testifies against in. Intelligence and life are, of course, internal evidence.

This sorts my current preoccupations, although that space-time business will take at least another day. The two “inputs” are contradictory, but in a hard choice I have to go with the inner. As for a genuine sorting? Something to die for.

The Pit of the Random

The real world has the contradictory appearance of being random and yet lawful, almost as if randomness itself is a law, so that, to grasp it, we need recourse to the laws of probability. The inner world reflects the outer right enough in most respects—so much so that William James thought of consciousness as a flow of, well, random-seeming bits and pieces—like those particles of dust in a beam of light transecting a dark room. It happened when I was a good deal younger too—but happens more frequently now. I enter a room with energy and purpose—and then freeze in place because I can’t remember why I came here. The purpose usually comes back again in a moment—but there, for a while, the “stream” took a turn even as my body was moving purposively, and the stream blocked out the purpose.

What I say above was rendered by John Bunyan, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, as his famous Slough of Despond. Here is what he said:

This miry Slough is such a place as cannot be mended; it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore is it called the Slough of Despond: for still as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition, there ariseth in his soul many fears, and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place; and this is the reason of the badness of this ground.

The very same concept, functionally, is present in Ibn el Arabi, the great Sufi poet, who spoke of “the turbidities of the obfuscation required by the world of nature,” which “turbidity derives from doubts and the unlawful.” These words in explanation of a great verse (I’ve quoted it before here, but it bears repeating):

She is the ease of whoever

   burns for her,

      transferring him from the levels

         of mortal man

out of jealousy, lest her sparkle

   be stained

      by the turbidity

         in the pools.

[Ibn el-Arabi, The Interpreter of Desires, 38-39]

Three versions of the same phenomenon—the baldly secular; a consciousness focused on sin, expanding that concept to the world at large; and a poetic rendition in which the Beloved cleans up her would-be lover to be worthy of her.

Our ability to see our condition—and in so many different ways—attests to the enormous capacity for transcendence innate in us but not in those particles of dust. And at the bottom of that is that we can see reality in greater fullness. But it requires detachment and rational thought reached in reflection, not in the turbulence of action.

Names and their Reverberations

The more earthy, the more real. The realms of Matter and of Spirit. The transcendental. Trans-? Across, beyond. My own immediate association comes from that word, not transatlantic travel, thus trans- means above; the air, for instance. We consider air sort of insubstantial in everyday language—unless we find that we can’t breathe. Airy, therefore, has a reverberation of insubstantiality although, technically, air isn’t. Our thinking is earth-rooted. Language is always challenged when it attempts to grasp what can’t be physically held.

Different languages, different twists, but the fundamentals are the same. In German, for example, the word Geist principally signals intelligence although it also means “ghost”; it is “mind” which also appears to be insubstantial, like a ghost; but Germans have adapted ghost for mind and also for the spiritual, a word that we take from Latin, where it means “breath,” so there you are: airy.

I am reading Malcolm Moncrieff’s book, The Clairvoyant Theory of Perception. There he juxtaposes three-dimensionality and four-dimensionality, in effect attempting to give an earthy sort of foundation to the elusively transcending real by going from 3- to 4-. It’s a tough row to hoe. He emphasizes the words’ endings, those -itys, and says that he doesn’t mean the actual three dimensions of space nor yet the kind of fourth dimension mathematicians can and do project. He means something I would call “orders,” the 3D being the physical, the 4D being meaning. And since meaning is a common experience here in 3D-Land, he sees the two orders interpenetrating.

So why doesn’t he simply call it the spiritual order? Here culture shows its influence. Moncrieff published his book in 1951 hoping to make a contribution to the understanding of paranormal phenomena. But paranormal studies then had, as now they still have, aspirations of being viewed as sciences, and in that realm the spiritual is heterodox. Orthodox science is monistic. In quantum physics and such places it more and more resembles idealism pure and simple; the greater mass of science is still materialistic (physics is too hard to master); but both are monistic. Whereas, by contrast, the spiritual strongly suggests a dualism. Had Moncrieff written in the 1990s, he might have called his fourth-dimensionality quantum-mechanicity. That sort of thing is almost a reflex among people captured by the enormous fascination of the transcendental while wishing to stay on the reservation. The problem is that no matter how hard you strum the material strings, you don’t actually produce spiritual music, just the same old d‑itty entitled “Me too.” I think I’ll stick with the ghost.

Moncrieff's Clairvoyant Vision

Malcolm Matthew Moncrieff published a book in 1951 entitled The Clairvoyant Theory of Perception. I learned of it from a footnote in Carl Becker's book, Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death, where Becker refers to what I call “shielding,” thus the body’s way of shielding us from the perception of the subtle world. Alas. Becker was really referring to the Preface, written by Henry H. Price, not really to the substance of Moncrieff’s work. That work attempts to explain ordinary vision as a kind of limited clairvoyance. This disappointed me—but Moncrieff is very original in his approach to reality—if not on the subject of  “shielding”—so the book was worth the twelve dollars that it had cost me.

There is, to be sure, something of interest in the whole subject of vision, not the big kind but the ordinary, in the context of the borderzone. People who have had near-death experiences, usually while their bodies were in states of great extremity, often comatose, report initially seeing their own situation—their bodies on the hospital bed, doctors and nurses tending them. They also hear what is said. This suggests that souls have vision and quite without the help of physical eyes. In the very rare NDE report we sometimes hear persons explaining that their view was more comprehensive—not just “forward” in the direction of attention but encompassing also what was behind them. But most experiencers don’t notice anything like that. Yet other aspects of that experience are that the blind are able to see—at least during the experience—and many report that their minds are functioning with greater clarity. Could we call that clairmentation?

The simplest explanation of why we don’t see subtle beings is that our sensory apparatus produces too much noise. The distractions must be overcome. And sometimes people do see apparitions—when the son appears to his mother just at the time when he was killed during a war. These phenomena are accompanied by intense emotions, probably on both sides, and they temporarily overcome the distractions of materiality so that the subtle can briefly appear to say good-bye.