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Monday, December 17, 2012

If Only We Knew More

How to combat that strong feeling—which at times arises just by looking at the world with a cold eye—that our sojourn in this dimension is altogether pointless. There is a glimmer of intuition, always, that that cannot be. And it arises spontaneously enough so that its source is not something that reaches us from others, although it may well come from on high. The world’s revelations, formed into religious doctrines, may, after all, be viewed as the imaginative fleshing out of that tiny intuition by those who’ve lived before.

When such thoughts assail me I like to remind myself that I don’t know enough, and also cannot—not by reading the tea leaves of this dimension. I don’t know the prehistory of our appearance here; I don’t know enough about the world that follows—although I believe (that intuition again) that something beyond exists. The presumption is that if I knew something real about both, the reason for our stay in this dimension would fall into place. Let’s look at these two ranges of inaccessible knowledge.

Prehistory. This realm would seem less depressing if I knew with certainty that souls originate in this dimension “naturally” or that they have been “caught up” in some also natural event like the formation of a cosmos. These are two cases of many—but perhaps the most obvious. In the first (Prehistory A) the presumed model is some kind of emanation, thus that all of reality is in some sense “flowing” out of a divine center. Part of that flow is the conditioned, part the unconditioned order. The conditioned is simply the visible cosmos of energy and matter, the unconditioned manifests as freedom, intelligence, and, most primitively, life. Here the only “authority” we have is Swedenborg’s. He asserted that all “angels” were at origin like us; they emerged from the dark domain, our sunny world or one like it. I say that because Swedenborg did not view the earth as the only cosmic point where life begins a journey “back to God.” The structure of this narrative is that the created soul is quite unconscious but has all the necessary potential, including life itself. And that embodied life is just a phase of the development of this potential. The soul has many stages of development both before and after it arrives in the “beyond.”

The pros and cons of this projection are that life here is a necessary phase. That immediately gives our life here meaning. In this view life arising anywhere in the universe, if conditions are suitable, would seem normal. It would make sense that we have engineered bodies as temporary “vehicles.” The view is also compatible with reincarnation theories if rebirth is occasional and due to the “unfinished” nature of the reborn soul: it has not developed enough. Among the cons is that the model does not fit the Christian cosmology—which has another prehistory, call it Prehistory C. Other problem are its emanationist structure, which is not rationally explained and obviously based on a physical analogy like the radiations of the sun. To be sure, all creation myths are ultimately incoherent, but a “natural” origin seems less meaningful than a deliberate decision by a conscious God, which is what Prehistory C contains.

Prehistory B is the other case. In that one a preexistent community of souls is plunged into a (for its members) unnatural situation by a cosmic event, the model being the Big Bang—which is not an event of “creation” but, rather, the formation of a kind of bubble in a much greater and vastly more dense “Mother Cosmos.” The community lived in the “space” where that bubble formed. The “density” here can be understood in various ways beyond the simple. It might have more dimensions; it could also mean that our cosmos has greater coarseness, its Mother greater subtlety. The change, in any case, is abrupt and in a real sense destructive of an “environment” in which the preexistent community had its being. The unfortunate community is therefore obliged to adapt in some way and then begin the process of returning to Mother.

Let’s look at the pros and cons of this case too. In this view life here is an accidental phase in the life of a soul community. It projects onto the cosmos, and the matrix of which it is a bubble, a “natural” condition such as we experience here, i.e., shit happens. Whatever happens may be lawful, but it seems random as we experience it. Our condition, however, at least makes some sense. We’ve been plunged into an environment to which we’re not adapted, and all that we observe is an attempt to make the best of a bad situation—not least escaping from it into a more suitable one by appropriate development. Our world has fallen, but it isn’t our fault. It just happened. Our inability to remember our preexistence in a “higher” world would also make sense. Cosmic accidents may have swept our memories away—or adapting to this one favors their suppression—filtered out by our brains. Pro: our situation at least makes sense. Con: there is neither rhyme or reason to the situation. Any meaning is referred to something beyond either this cosmos or its accident-prone Mother. Cosmologies tend to do this: they push meaning further away, rather than supplying it. In any case, no Divine Presence is anywhere discernible beyond the seemingly lawful behavior of matter/energy—but only when we give it close study.

The World that Follows. Knowing the world beyond would presumably illuminate our knowledge of this one. Such knowing would require at minimum (1) memory of this existence there, (2) retention of our powers of reasoning and movement (to enable us to look around), (3) ability clearly to perceive the conditions of that world, and (4) the presence of other beings like ourselves. We could then carry out a survey and discover if others had also lived in a “fallen world.” If some had but others had not, Prehistory B would appear more plausible. If all had, Prehistory A would have more weight. We would be able to discover if others over there had a coherent view of reality. If they did, the reasons for that could be ascertained. If not—if the same puzzlement reigned over there as does here—in that case the quest for answers just continues. What is inconceivable is that there is no answer. Our deepest intuition is that there is. That intuition is not merely a glimmer of knowledge. It is also a hunger and a thirst—for meaning and for righteousness.

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