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.