On Being and Meaning

The aim of philosophical knowledge certainly does not consist in the knowledge of being, in a reflection of reality in the mind of the person who knows. Its aim is the knowledge of truth, the discovery of meaning, its purpose is to give an intelligible sense to reality. Philosophical knowledge, therefore, is not passive reflection, it is an active break-through, it is victory in the conflict with the meaninglessness of world reality. What I want to know is not reality but the truth about it, and I can recognize this truth only because there is in me myself, in the knowing subject, a source of truth, and union with truth is a possibility. The fact that there is in front of me a writing-table and I am writing with a pen on paper is not truth. It is something received by the senses and a statement of fact. The problem of truth is already posed in my writing. There is no truth of any sort of object; truth is only in the subject.

  [Nicolai Berdyaev, The Beginning & The End, Harper Torchbook, 1957, p. 42]

Berdyaev (1874-1948) was a Russian philosopher usually grouped with Christian existentialists. I got to know him in the 1950s. He is also sometimes called the philosopher of creativeness. In the following sixty some odd years, I’ve never had occasion to question his intuition. All harmony. He has this to say on the next page:

Truth is a creative act of spirit in which meaning is brought to birth. Truth stands higher than the reality which exercises compulsion upon us, higher than the “real” world. But still higher than truth is God, or to put it more truly—God is Truth.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Breath

Thirty-five thousand times. Please. And may our heart thump 86,000 times. Perpetual motion. I wake up, and I’m in motion. But I was moving even as I slept. Blood flow, dead cell replacement. When all goes well we’re unaware of the vast chemical civilization that we abstract into “my body.” It’s odd to be a sort of, kind of chemical machine requiring a constant supply of oxidation to keep our trillions of little cells going. Even a cursory examination of what we really are, as bodies, will prove quite startling, and the deeper the look them more wild it gets. Nearly seven billion of us, but if we look at a single cell of just one of those bodies, we see a structure as complex as a city. How did we get caught up in this vast seemingly fractal structure? When we look at our traditional or modern answers to this question, they reveal themselves as utterly inadequate. Motivation for cosmology—if it is done right. But the task’s too great. A really good starting assumption, however, a kind of Occam’s razor cut, is that we are not this, not this. But keep that breath going, Lord, until it’s time to move on.

Two Kinds of Dualities

Among the many dualities philosophy and ordinary speech present, some are highly time-dependent, others are, you might say, are timeless, sub specie aeternitatis. To pick two on each side, potency-and-act and being-and-becoming are of the time-dependent kind. The living-and-the-dead and phenomenon-and-noumenon, belong to the timeless category. Let’s deal with these last first.

A person might think that living-and-dead are most definitely time-dependent, arguing that everything living dies and does so within time. But the odd thing is, we can’t be sure. Bodies most certainly die, but what are bodies made of? They’re made of elements. Elements do not die. What constitutes a living being is something more than organic elements, characterized by having carbon as a constituent. A corpse still has all those elements the dying person had a moment before dying. Life has fled, as we say, but until we know just what it is, we can’t say that it has disappeared. If life is a transcending force, living-and-dead are permanently here. Only the forms change.

Phenomenon-and-noumenon, the Kantian categories, meaning that which is capable of being perceived and that, behind it, which cannot, the thing-in-itself, are more obviously independent of time. They co-exist. Thus they point at a basic definition of reality.

Turning to the other side, potency-and-act, the Aristotelian categories, are embedded in time. Potency is a capacity to change. It’s a sleeping power and, when it is unfolding, becoming actual, it is transformed from invisibility to manifestation. Becoming-and-being are equivalent categories. But becoming is impossible to picture without time. Aristotle’s word for potential was dunamis, thus “capacity, possibility.” As it unfolds into act, we have dynamism, a word we derive from dunamis. We’re really dealing here with change, very much a here and now sort of thing, arising from philosophical attempts at explaining motions of sundry kinds. They do not tell us anything about the cosmos, which is always in motion too.

For me the timeless dualities produce more food for thought—because I sense that there is something beyond the here and now. The very abstract, modern formulation I most value is the duality offered by David Bohm, the physicist.† In attempts to make room for intelligence in the Cosmic Whole—but it can be extended to include life and spirit—he suggested two orders in the universe. One is conditioned, the other unconditioned. Call this duality necessity-and-freedom. Intelligence—and life, and spirit—belong to the latter. And these may be thought of as existent within the time flow as well as without.

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†I never tire of trying to sell Bohm’s wonderful book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, 1996, wherein the relevant passage on this subject is on pages 50-53.

Unity and Scatter

Some meditations start in the mundane, today’s in events in Egypt. There President Morsi assumed more powers; in consequence secular, modernist, and liberal elements once more erupted in violent protests. Now it occurred to me that Morsi is linked to a religious majority, the Muslim Brotherhood; the secular elements, however, are notoriously disunited because they have many and often conflicting goals: nationalist, industrialist, capitalist, socialist, centrist, leftist, rightist, and so on. When the focus of interest is something in this realm—which turns out to be the very essence beneath the concept of secular—it is very difficult to find unity.

The natural sequence in this realm of ours, where entropy rules, is from unity to scatter, thus from order to disorder. Every culture begins in a transcending unity and then, over time, becomes secular. But in times of major challenge and disaster, we always observe at least a temporary turn back toward unity, the transcendental. Hence there was a brief upsurge in church attendance following the 9/11 attack. Major traumas in the offing concentrate the mind, wake people up, and then they seek—unity.

Now the very essence of that idea, of unity, is that it is, by its very nature, transcending. It doesn’t work as an organizing principle, goal, or motivator unless it transcends the particular. Attempts to find some decent substitute, like community, nation, or even humanity ultimately depend on something above them to work effectively. Not surprisingly, therefore, that stalwartly secular document, the Declaration of Independence, which bases itself on the Laws of Nature, completes that phrase by adding another (echoing a line of jurists, Blackstone foremost among them): “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” I also note, with some bemusement, that the word “united” in the title, preceding the words “States of America,” is still rendered in lower case…

Order is in the direction of unity. Nature, left to its own devices, causes scatter, entropy.  As people we are potential unities at birth, but it takes much effort and learning to achieve a foretaste of it in this life—in which autonomous urges pull us in all directions. And this has a cost. Nature itself must be opposed so that the transcending self that we are can actually, to some extent, manifest. The urge to scatter appears to be built right into this region of the universe and if we’re diligent and lucky, we’ll master it to some extent as we grow up. But the battle never ends.

Now, of course, as writ small so also as writ large. Hence we meet the same demands at the social level of governance. It is much easier to govern if a transcendental goal is present, understood, and sought by a majority. Any person who has labored at achieving unity in his or her own person will be inclined to join into the collective effort if it aims above itself. If it is only an “alliance,” a common word in secularism, or a “coalition,” of similar interests—read pieces of the scatter—those who look higher will tend to prevail.

The little unity of the individual self, when it has emerged above the clouds of scatter, will also recognize the same unity behind all kinds of very different religious forms so that “Muslim Brotherhood” will not seem something dreadful and threatening right out of the box. Does scatter confuse the transcendental faiths of humanity? Of course it does. But then we live in the natural turbidity of the fallen world.

Dream Dynamics

I am becoming more and more convinced that a very common although always unique pattern of waking-dreams shows where the soul goes during sleep.

These are dreams in which I’m traveling but now I’m going home. The problem always is that I have a pretty good sense of the general direction in which “home” lies; I’m also aware of certain landmarks and, generally, the lay of the land. But then, as I set out, I discover that the landmarks have changed. I get lost. In consequence all sorts of complications arise; for example I discover that I have no money for the train. In due time, sometimes abruptly, sometimes gradually, the landscape becomes ever more ugly, ever more urban, “industrial,” unpleasant, dark, and dangerous. Eventually, in midst of this—and often “this” is some kind of conflict—I wake up.

A kind of parallel floated into my mind this morning. If in this dimension we haven’t the faintest idea of how to get to the “higher” world, it makes sense that being in the higher world we may experience the same problem going in the other direction. Finding our way into the higher, or, more precisely put, simply finding ourselves over there, happens smoothly because the body is shutting down for the night in sleep. One part of that shut-down is memory formation. We don’t remember the process; for all I know it might be very pleasant. At best we recall dream-like imagery as we fall asleep. If that imagery is very vivid and we pay attention to it, wakefulness results and the “scene” abruptly disappears. But going in the other direction, we remember the confusing process of re-entry because the brain, this time, is already half alert.

Today’s case is quite banal but illustrative. The hand on which my head lay had become twisted in sleep and had started to hurt. I discovered that as the cause of my awakening after a rather involved process, as above, of “going home.” You might say that the body needed a conscious assist to stop this minor trauma, and the wandering soul was somehow notified. It had to “go home.” 

Now it is not at all surprising that this process of return conjures up scenes of deterioration, density (as in “urban”), industrialization (our bodies are vast industries), and the like. We are descending from a region of freedom into one of necessity. On waking we re-enter the world of boxes, the phrase Carl Jung used after a near-death experience of his own following a heart problem in advanced age.† We don’t find it pleasant—although, on awakening, we feel a kind of relief; but then we are already used to living in the world of boxes—and our memories of that other world are largely absent.

Memory, in this context, produces interesting puzzles, but a closer look requires too much space. Another time. What I would note here is the rare but well-established body of reports on so-called lucid dreaming. These are people who, for as yet undiscovered reasons, retain, or in the dream itself regain, a link to the brain’s memory-forming machinery. They can therefore experience dreams as the rest of us cannot. They are also, you might say, more present, in the dream while the ordinary person remains disassociated. I’ve reported on a famous case here, the experiences of a prominent psychiatrist, Frederick van Eeden (link). He reported the recurring phenomenon of meeting inferior beings at his own reentry.

The realm we appear to visit while asleep would seem to be the real world—thus richer in dimensions than our own realm of three-spaces-and-one-time—but not its higher reaches; thus it seems to be an intermediate geography. The confusing character of dreams may come from the fact that it does, in fact, possess additional aspects not available to people forced to see through the world past the blinkers of the physical. And in that world the soul appears to gets its refreshment while, in this one, the body gets its rest. Denied those restorative daily visits in sleep deprivation, quite horrific results arise, not least death. We must die, daily, before we die.

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†In Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, written with Aniela Jaffé.

This man receives sinners…

A week or more ago (link) I wrote of choice and consequences, the first a gift from God to us, the second the results of choices made by us. To be sure, free will implies its abuse. That then constellates, in some minds, the problem of evil. God knew that evil would result from his gift; that past tense is just a linguistic nod to our sense of time here. Therefore God approved of that evil? My conclusion was, Not so! Knowledge is not approval. But free will is so great a gift that its price, namely its abuse, is worth it.

Got to thinking about that later along these lines. As knowledge is not approval, so also it is not indifference. And God is not only omniscient, he is also omnipotent. Therefore, in the long run—and never mind “fallen” concepts like eternal hell fire—I have no doubt that in the Great Plan all created beings will be saved. That might, of course, take a long time—but what does time matter in eternity? And also, to honor that great gift, free will, ultimately the created beings will have to choose. But they will. Be sure of it. They will. That God both knows and yet still cares is signaled by the tale of the prodigal son, told in Luke 15:11-32.

That episode is introduced by a brief note about Pharisees and scribes (and I am one of those, a scribe) who, seeing tax collectors and sinners drawing near to Jesus, observe with disapproval: “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” Then follow the parables of the lost sheep, of the lost coin, and of the lost son. In the first case one sheep of a hundred is lost, in the next one coin of ten, in the last one son of two, the younger—which in that culture then meant the less valuable. Rather like that progression. In each case major effort is expended on finding what is lost—or, in the case of the son, lavishly celebrating the prodigal’s return. The older son is angered—but he, of course, is the inheritor: “All that is mine is yours,” his father says.

Now, of course, a dry doctrine of choice and consequences leaves out one of the aspects of God, omnibenevolence. God is love. There is, therefore, more to that choice = consequences equation. Along with free choice we have another great gift, which is God’s absolute love. And it is, in subtle ways—subtle enough not to interfere with the gift of choice—all around us and streaming across the borderzone to envelop us all around. Grace. The first step in being found again would appear to be cultivate our powers to listen for the faint, faint sound of it. But once heard its power grows in guiding us home again.

Where is the Land Beyond the Borderzone?

We are hemmed in by our own spatially habituations.  In day-to-day experience, we reach east, west, north, and south  by travelling on a surface, and any direction may be hilly or flat. But we are now also habituated to picturing ourselves living on a globe. Hence north is up and, as the Australians say, south is “down under.” Apart from this globe-knowledge, we don’t think of living above the ground or beneath it. We reserve the heights and depths for transcendental realms. We picture the good up high ( “heaven” or Olympus) and the bad in the depths (“hell,” sheol (“pit” or “abyss”), inferno (“below”)). But these realms are not, for us, literally Up or Down. We’ve been to the Moon. We have crawlers on Mars. And all of those place also have their four directions—and the skies above.

A quite delightful discussion of this subject, if you enjoy the arcane, is presented in the initial chapter of Henry Corbin’s book, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. The chapter’s title is “Orientation.” In that discussion Corbin suggests that the Iranian Sufis discovered the beyond in the east, the Orient, but he modifies that superficial understanding of orient. He says:

Now one of the leitmotive of Iranian Sufi literature is the “Quest for the Orient,” but this is a Quest for an Orient which, as we are forewarned (if we do not already realize), is not—and cannot be—situated on our geographical maps. This Orient is not comprised of any of the seven climes (keshvar); it is in fact the eighth clime. And the direction in which we must seek this “eight clime” is not on the horizontal but on the vertical. This suprasensory, mystical Orient, the place of the Origin and of the Return, object of the eternal Quest, is at the heavenly pole; it is the Pole, at the extreme north, so far off that it is the threshold of the dimension “beyond.” That is why it is only revealed to a definite mode of presence in the world, and can be revealed only through this mode of presence. There are other modes to which it will never be revealed. It is precisely this mode of presence that characterizes the mode of being of the Sufi, but also, through his person, the mode of being of the entire spiritual family to which Sufism—and especially Iranian Sufism—belongs. The Orient sought by the mystic, the Orient that cannot be located on our maps, is in the direction of the north, beyond the north. Only an ascensional progress can lead toward this cosmic north chosen as a point of orientation. [p. 2]

For sticklers, leitmotive is the German plural, so there is no typo there. The “seven climes” derive from Ptolemy’s Almagest. Ptolemy actually started with 33 zones, later reduced them to 11, finally to seven, and these were then widely used in references by Arabs and Persians.

The general rules for navigation by, call them astral, travelers, are well laid out by Corbin. We’re talking about transcending places. In one paragraph he accounts both for East and North. To this we might add that the Celtic other worlds, most prominently Tirnanog, are located to the West—although the ship, as it sails off in the direction, rises in the air. And if you are in doubt consult The Lord of the Rings for more authority. That only leaves the South unaccounted for. Alas, I’m only now beginning my ant-like progress into Mayan, Inca, and Aztec cultures. For all I know they might complete the picture. But it is true. When something is really beyond, we’re up a creek. And we must do with whatever happens to be handy.

Visiting the Epicurean Café

What ails humanity? According to Epicurus (341-270 BC), it is the fear of death and of the consequent  punishment of the soul in the beyond. This causes great anxiety and, in turn, produces irrational desires. Epicurus was a philosopher of happiness—and happiness, he taught, arises from absence of pain. His doctrine is not even close to hedonism as ordinarily understood, but Epicurus survives in the popular mind linked to pleasure, not least the pleasures of food. Not surprisingly, therefore, when Brigitte and I both worked at the then pre-eminent office tower in Detroit, the Penobscot building, beginning  in the late 1980s, the eating place in the basement was called the Epicurean Café. So let us visit that café.

The teachings of Epicurus are more coherent and rational than merely “grabbing all the gusto ‘cause you only go ‘round once.” His was a philosophical projection based on a strictly serious materialistic view of reality as it surfaced in Greece in the transition between the classical and Hellenistic periods†. Materialism, as this shows, is one of those things that goes around—more than once—and therefore comes around.  Epicurus belongs to a tradition, in other words. In the Greek instance the earliest remembered figure was one Leucippus, whose dates are not remembered but put into the fifth century BC. He is said to have been the first atomist (all is atoms). Democritus (460-370 BC) was the next tall figure in this tradition, and Epicurus studied his teachings. Within the Graeco-Roman realm, the last prominent transmitter of this view was the Roman Lucretius (99-55 BC) known for his philosophical poem On the Nature of Things.

Epicurus meant well; he was also original. He meant well because he thought that he could free humanity of its degraded condition simply by banishing the fear of death and of post-mortem punishment. He was original. The entire materialistic world conception suffers from absolute determinism. Everything is nothing but moving atoms following laws. In order to explain what appears to be unpredictable motion in nature and freedom in humans, he suggested that atoms, at quite unpredictable times, “swerve,” thus change their absolutely linear motions. The modern form of this is the uncertainty principle. Ultimately the smallest particles are waves; their presence cannot be predicted; they live in a kind of cloud of probability. Trust us to make things much more complicated.

Now suppose that we knew, with absolute certainty, that after death we would pass into another and more complete world where life continues in a manner echoing the way we lived our life on earth. Would that produce universal happiness, thus absence of pain? Would such knowledge, on average, change human behavior? I think not. Nevertheless no time ever suffers from a shortage of millennial expectations according to which our current travails will turn into something quite radically different. None have yet borne fruit. But Epicurus’ doctrine is having a genuine test in this our Hellenistic period. Vast numbers believe the atomic theory and also that life ceases after death. But when I open the paper in the morning, settling in my booth at the Epicurean Café, it isn’t filled with news of joy. Quite to the contrary. Isn’t it time, people, to get with the program? It’s been around since the about the third century BC.

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†Classical: fifth through fourth centuries BC; rise and clash of Athens and Sparta. Hellenistic: dated from the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC) to the conquest of Greece by Rome (146 BC).

Even Concerning Free Will—We Have a Choice

The world is hopelessly divided, come to think of it. There are General Motors people and Ford people, Honda people and Toyota, Platonists and Aristotelians, Scotists and Thomists—and, which it is my object to examine today, Voluntarists and Intellectualists. The last are two ways of looking at free will. Neither denies that free will exists—or to put it another way, both affirm that the will is free, but voluntarists put will at the summit, intellectuals put the intellect at the peak. So how exactly does this work?

The problem arises because, as souls, we are a unity but have different powers. We also clearly experience these powers as distinctly real. A commonplace example is when someone says, “I am of two minds about that.” The statement is ambiguous enough to illustrate the problem. Does it mean that the person experiences two intellectual conceptions of some situation too close to one another to signal, clearly, which is right? Or does it mean that the pictures are clear enough, but the person has not yet decided which one to choose as relevant?

The intellectualist view of free will holds that the ultimate decider is the Intellect—and free will is the power that executes the intellect’s lead in choosing some perceived good. Free will is therefore a function of an intellectual appetite or desire. Here acting wrongly is assigned to the intellect. It values a lesser good rather than the higher. But whatever the person chooses he or she desires, therefore the emphasis is on something perceived. Appetite comes form the Latin for “desire toward.” This is the view held by Thomas Aquinas (link).

The voluntarist view is that free will is, in a manner of speaking, sovereign. Nothing compels it. It is quite capable of acting contrary to the intellect’s leaning. This is the view of John Duns Scotus (link). He argues that the will cannot be said to have genuine freedom unless it is capable of acting contrary to the intellect’s desire. Furthermore, the will stands above the intellect because it directs the attention to whatever subject it selects to understand. In the source I cite for Scotus is this interesting observation:

Scotus means to show not just that the will is a higher power than the intellect, however. He argues for the remarkable claim that the will is unique among all created powers because it alone acts freely.

                                                              [Jeffrey Hause, John Duns Scotus (1266-1308)]

This would mean that the will is the essential characteristic of the soul, making it what it is. The human being may be coerced into actions it does not will, but its decisions cannot be changed by external force.

Now, of course, when we look at the unity of the soul—even if it may be of two minds at any one point—we are looking at a something that has multiple powers. The Medievalists like to single out intellect and will, but feeling, imagination, and intuition are also present. We can distinguish them by observation. But, as Duns Scotus observes, these distinctions are “formal,” meaning that they point to “realities” that are present in a unity but inseparable from it. How can we possibly select one to be the primus inter pares? The answer, of course, is that we can choose one. Quite a potent power that, free will.

As for me, I feel quite comfortable with General Motors, Honda, Plato, and Scotus. The addition of the last name to this list I owe to a hint I found on Siris the other day (link). It came in handy in enlarging on the concept of free will I had planned to undertake after writing the last post.

Is Life a Kind of Test?

To answer that question with Yes is to assent to a certain cosmic model. God sets the creature a test—e.g., that tree in Paradise. Humanity fails. Humanity is expelled from the Garden. We’re now undergoing the second test. Succeed: heaven. Fail: hell.

No. I’m not trying to belittle the Judeo-Christian-Muslim faiths—or any other. The great myths can be (and are) understood in very sophisticated ways. A more sophisticated rendition of that model is to view God creating humans and giving them free will. Without it, surely, they would be little more than automata (as Descartes, for instance, described animals). Are animals undergoing some kind of test? Surely they are not. They do not have any kind of choice. Therefore free will is an integral element of the model, indeed sufficient to support a test-model. We don’t need paradises, forbidden fruit, temping snakes, expulsions, or any other of the vividly painted machinery of the creation myth. The mere presence of genuine agents, thus agents with consciousness and free will, is good enough. For that model to work we don’t even need a material realm. There are angels within these traditions, said to be pure spirits—but also endowed with freedom. And, sure enough, some of them rebelled. Let me introduce you to Lucifer. The only environment they require is that of Mind.

The more subtle aspects of that question begin to emerge at this point. The creation of free agents, as such, does not automatically mean that God intends to test them. The intention clearly is that the agents will have choice. And with that power of self-determination given, all that flows from it is, of course, necessarily known by an omniscient Creator. Therefore God gives his creatures freedom, and other necessary concomitant abilities, like consciousness—and the rest is up to the creature. Here also rises another ghost, the Problem of Evil. Does the gift of free agency mean that God approves all of the evil that such agency produces when it abuses its freedom? This conundrum creates another question: Is knowledge equivalent to approval? No. Obviously not. We create all kinds of new “freedoms” legislatively—knowing full well that some will abuse them; knowing that does not demand omniscience; therefore penalties are also put in place for abuse, or let’s just call them consequences. Acts have consequences. That is also inherent in the concept of choice.

Let’s look at that word more closely. Choices are directional—in a kind of higher dimension. Choosing the good leads to light, development, and greater powers; choosing the bad leads to darkness, deterioration, loss of powers. If all choices had the same consequences, freedom of will would lose all meaning.

Is Life a Kind of Consequence? Well, that question may be closer to the truth if we take life to mean life here on earth. If I make the wrong kind of choices and find myself in a desolate space—and an angel with a flaming sword blocks the way back—well, that’s a problem, isn’t it. But am I being tested? Not in the least. I’m just experiencing consequences, limits. I can make better choices the next time I act. If I experience this life as a test, one cause of it might well be that I, ah, volunteered, manner of speaking.

Deserving Immortality?

On another blog the other day I encountered the notion that living life right—so that we deserve immortality—is more important than belief. This got me thinking about different ways of approaching our ultimate fate. 

In one kind, and it comes in two versions, Reward and Punishment are the principal inducements for shaping behavior, as in that comment above, using the word “deserve.” These two are secular and transcendental. 

A. The secular has a low way and a high. The low says: “It’s all about winning rather than losing, and here is where that happens. Anything goes—if you are smart enough to get away with it. You only go round once.” The higher way sees things under the rubric of happiness. It is more likely to be achieved if we live a virtuous life. And while, indeed, we disappear on death, a kind of “beyond” is still there. We live on in the fond memories of the generations that follow. In practice—unless we were truly notorious—that amounts to roughly eighty years after the person dies. I still remember my Great Grand Mother, paternal side. I knew her over a scatter of days when I was very little and came on visits twice before she died; she gave me candy. I will soon pass on, and after I am gone, chances are she will also, under the high secular, entirely disappear. 

B. The transcendental versions are more complicated. One is based on reincarnation theories. Our deeds produce karma. If we can rid ourselves of those consequences, we go into a kind of unnamable bliss. If not, the lightness or weight of our karma will govern the kind of rebirth we shall have after we shed the current body. In the Judeo-Christian-Muslim conception, a real afterlife exits. Souls are immortal. They need not be earned or deserved. The beyond, however, has at least two, some say three, regions. Hell for the wicked, Heaven for the deserving, and possibly a temporary sojourn in Purgatory on the way to Heaven. Further complications enter in when we note that at the very end of this essentially planned process comes resurrection of bodies and life on a heavenly sort of earth.

Is there another kind of way? I think there is. You might say that it has elements of the high secular as well as embracing one certainty of the transcendental beliefs. The high secular is least driven by rewards and punishments but accepts life’s absolute termination at death. The transcendental faiths hold to the immortality of souls, and so would this third way of seeing things. But its motivation is purely internal. It acts because it wills to act—from inner motivation, not to achieve rewards or to avoid the punishments. There are people who classify themselves under A. and B. above who yet live their lives this way. We are, after all, immortal souls, not geese that crave the carrots and would avoid the stick. That’s for beginners, not travelers of this mysterious path.

L’Au-Delà

On this blog I rarely even mention borderzone events as they appear in popular culture. There are surges of this sort from time to time. A while back (October 2010), Clint Eastwood released a quite excellent film he had directed, Hereafter. It sank out of view. Fewer than half the critics gave it a positive rating. And, to be sure, it is—it is a very complicated film. The female protagonist, my God, is French, and lots of the dialogue is in that language. Other parts are set in England; people there drive on the wrong side of the street. And the male protagonist is an American clairvoyant who yet works in a factory and resists his brother’s urgings to turn his gifts into a thriving small biz. But the film kicks off with a fantastically-rendered tsunami overwhelming a coastal region somewhere in India. And Clint Eastwood is a first-class director. At the same time, and to its demerit perhaps, the story is told straight; the Hereafter is accepted by the characters who matter. They find themselves, in consequence, up against the dominant culture—but the conflict is realistically presented. It is more friction than clash. No great heroism, just ordinary life. Hence critics found it lacking in compelling drama.

Quite recently, why just the other day, a book appeared written by Eben Alexander: Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey in the Afterlife. That combination (neurosurgeon + near death experience) was irresistible for Newsweek, a magazine undergoing a kind of near-death experience of its own: it will give up printing itself but remain in the Thereafter of virtual publishing. It put the story on its cover (October 8) and featured an article by Dr. Alexander. That was enough to get the attention of the popular media. The doctor then appeared on ABC TV’s evening news, later on Nightline. And many other places as well.

The book (Brigitte and I are reading it now) is vividly written—and obviously intended for a mass audience. The author, however, is dead serious. Not surprisingly what reviews I’ve encountered dismiss it with contempt, e.g., The Guardian’s Peter Stanford and New Atheist Sam Harris, he of The End of Faith, a New York Times best-seller for nearly a year (in 2005).

Hereafter, in the story of its lead female character, Marie Lelay (played by Cécile de France), illustrates how the experience of visiting L’Au-Delà plays out in real life if made public by a prominent or a highly qualified figure. In the film Lelay is a prominent TV-journalist of the crusading left. The experience drains and redirects the combative energies that made her rich and famous. She is rapidly marginalized, furloughed, turns to writing, and eventually produces a book about her experience. When the horizons of an ordinary, highly secular, prominent person are suddenly enlarged so that the Hereafter becomes not only credible but undeniable, the shock is enormous and life-transforming. Prominence and/or the right qualifications (in Alexandar’s case his profession), are readily translated into visibility. And thus the news of a Greater Reality permeates the public consciousness.

Fascinating. Especially when compared to the alternative current wave, the New Atheism. But which will ultimately prevail? Well, in Marie Lelay’s case it all began with a tsunami. In Ebben Alexander’s case publication of his book was immediately followed by Hurricane Sandy. If such events become more frequent, the awareness of the wide, wide public may also be conditioned to change. And in that process, New Atheism will have no chance at all. As for the truth of things deeper down? They don’t require a near-death experience to discover. They’re lying all about in plain sight for eyes able to see.