Becker on Buddhism

Recently I managed to discover another book by Carl B. Becker, this one titled Breaking the Circle: Death and the Afterlife in Buddhism (Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). I’d mentioned earlier here (link), Becker’s Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death (State University of New York Press, 1993). Becker is a professor of comparative philosophy and religion at Kyoto University in Japan.

Both of these books are of the highest excellence. The second is, for me, the best ever summation of its subject, human survival of death. The second, it turns out, turns out to be one of the very few coherent accounts of the evolution of Buddhism over time. That development has to be sketched in order to present the development of Buddhist views on the afterlife. The presentation is brief but—Becker is a very clear thinker and a talented writer—wonderfully clear.

Even approaching this pair of subjects—Buddhism and the afterlife—seems harshly daunting. The seeming object of Buddhism is nirvana, a kind of absolute enlightenment. The Buddha himself (he lived 560-477 BC) maintained that nothing whatever could be asserted of it pro or con. The earliest Buddhist school (the Theravada, later renamed by its opponents as the Hinayana*) asserted that nirvana meant annihilation; the Sanskrit meaning of the word is “blown out.” Buddhism itself came to be powerfully linked to the concept of anātman, meaning “no soul” or “no self”—although the Buddha actually denied that. In practice, however, anātman came to mean that, on death, what remain are packets of karma—read residuals of action—not tied to an “owner” or “a carrier”; therefore rebirth is not the reincarnation of a person but that of karmic packets. So how are we to understand an afterlife? But hold for a moment. With the rise of the now dominant form of Buddhism, the Mahayana, coinciding with the first century of our era, the religion came to be transformed into a faith complete with heavens and hells—and beyond them the Realm of Nirvana, a realm that a Catholic, anyway, might be forgiven for thinking of as union with God.

How we get from no-self to saved-self is a major part of Becker’s story told here. I’d been exposed to the transformations within Buddhism earlier through the writings of D.T. Suzuki. particularly his Essays in Zen Buddhism. These volumes, however, concentrate on the history of Zen, and Zen, hews close to the Hinayana throughout time. And while the surprises of history are there in Suzuki as well, much greater light falls on the subject in Becker’s work. I recommend The Closing Circle highly to other amateur scholars—a work written by a gifted professional.

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*Theravada means the “teaching of the elders.” Hinayana means “the lesser vehicle,” so labeled by those who thought they were riding in the Mahayana, “the greater vehicle.”

Sparks of Faith

Negativity on culture, especially in times of decay—but I wonder if times are any different when growth prevails—can only be effectively countered by the belief that somehow or other a radically different order exists somewhere—thus, poetically, beyond the borderzone.

What we observe, of that better world, is a striving in at least a portion of humanity touched in some way by one of the faiths. It is worth noting that the only rooting of these faiths is an inner agreement in individual souls; nothing external really supports it. But the external support I have in mind the sort of proof that stands up in court. Many, many things, events, processes can be demonstrated in that way but not the (call it hard) reality of a “kingdom not of this world.” That reality may be experienced, but experience is different in kind from demonstration. Let me look at the differences.

Experience is fundamentally individual, demonstration fundamentally social. Experience may contain something radically new, something no one else has ever seen, heard, or felt before. Demonstration depends on widely shared experience; therefore the unique can only be demonstrated by causing meaningful numbers of people to experience the unique themselves.

Experience also carries with it a certain characteristic. Let’s call that undeniability. When that quality is present (and sometimes it isn’t) the individual simply knows, meaning that no interpretation is necessary. Interpretation may also be problematical. In those cases interpretation is simply a quite secondary aspect, if applied to the experience, and its results cannot be demonstrated. An example. Someone dreams of an event and remembers the dream. A few days later the event actually takes place in the person’s ordinary, waking, daily life. Such an experience is undeniable. Interpreting that experience by saying that the future is already a fact and that dreaming sometimes allows us to see it adds nothing to the experience itself. The explanation may be true, partly true, or altogether false. The real explanation may be something very different. The experience itself, while undeniable, simply shows that the vast majority of people either do not have such experiences or do not remember them. The experience, furthermore, is not a demonstration of anything. But if vast numbers had such experiences, precognition would just be treated as a fact. One or two theories would have developed and would be competing—and no way to choose between them by demonstration.

There are also what might be called incomplete or fuzzy experiences. Dreams and visions fall into this category—seeing or hearing things in the dark, drug-induced states, etc. That they happened is undeniable to the person, but what they mean, being fuzzy, has no value whatsoever.

If we take a large number of people who have had near-death experiences and then we proceed to marshal masses of proof that our lives continue after death, we would be wasting time. That audience already considers that to be a given. We might as well gather football fans to prove to them that football exists. No demonstration is necessary.

This contrast between experience and demonstration indirectly illustrates the nature of faith—which gives people hope in a world that seems fundamentally hopeless. No amount of internal testimony from seers or prophets can demonstrate anything at all about a higher reality. Miracles? C.S. Lewis relied on them, but they cannot be demonstrated in the sense I attach to the word here. But faith arises anyway. It is at minimum a faint inner spark within believers that echoes and responds to the transmission of religious founders’ testimony. Call it the still small voice of intuition. Those sparks may be quite tiny, occurring weakly or rarely. Being weak and rare, the tumultuous noise of physical/social reality may mute them in good times, strengthen them in times of woe. Therefore the religious experience of humanity, viewed historically as a social phenomenon, is something of a mess. The serious cultivation of religious intuition deepens it. But, on average, that sort of cultivation only attracts tiny minorities.

Looking for a New Meta-Theory

I made a note the other day on the need to have a meta-theory of some sort before any thought is expended on the possible meaning of the life phenomenon on earth. Herewith a brief exploration of that notion.

Modern science begins with an inherently monistic assumption that only tangible or at least measurable physical phenomena may be consulted in seeking an answer. Such phenomena, however, only yield limited meanings, thus answers to questions beginning with when, where, and how. The what question is a matter of experience. The why question is never answered although it is unavoidable when comparing living with non-living nature.

It is unavoidable because living nature has a purposive character. Its ultimate purpose is invisible, but its reproductive behavior is clearly teleological. Its undeniable intent is to maintain very complex physical forms despite the fact that all individual instances of it die and return to the inorganic state. We find no parallels to this behavior in the inorganic realm. Yes. Crystals are formed (and deformed) as particular external conditions change—but no crystal ever produces another crystal, and that one yet another, in a continuous chain. Matter at great scales forms spherical aggregates, but these do no reproduce. Nor do such forms actively struggle to “stay alive” by flight or fight behavior. Life therefore displays a discontinuity with the order from which it seemingly arises. The science-based explanation of this discontinuity is that complexity, as such, produces radically new behavior in matter. But why it should be that linking many different structures made of the same fairly limited number of elemental components should suddenly produce purposive behavior has never been explained. These structures, moreover, are unquestionably purposive themselves, providing “tools” for locomotion, oxygenation, nutrition, digestion, etc., etc. To say that something changes magically is also to say that something, matter, has a tropism toward complexity.

The religious view solves the problem of meaning by supplying it in such a potent form that the actual question of what life is becomes trivial. God made it. But God is too high an explanation because God can do anything. This view produces a problem of another kind.

The problem is that while life exhibits a designed—or perhaps better put a quasi-designed—character, thus revealing purposes, the design also clearly arose in answer to stimuli and has an “any which way so long as it works” appearance—as if a half-blind drive, urge, or intention had been present behind it, nothing even close to waking consciousness, much less omniscience. Life is purposive but is also evolving and evolved. It suggests some agency light-years lower in status than divinity. A popular symbol of this quasi-engineered but catch-as-catch-can process is the panda’s thumb, made famous by Stephen Jay Gould. It’s not a thumb but functions as one. The panda has five fingers; the thumb is a wrist-bone promoted to thumb-status by evolutionary pressures.

If living bodies appear to be purposive structures built by some agency operating intelligently (meaning purposefully) but largely in the dark—rather than divine creations, the why of life would seem to require something more than complexity and something less than divine creation as their explanation. Materialism founders on the undeniable teleology of life, creationism on the quasi-engineering of all living bodies.

This in turn demands, even to start looking at life properly, a new meta-theory. It must accept both meaning in the universe and the presence in it of a secondary agency. So far such a theory is notable for its absence—although some elements of forgotten Gnosticism point in the right direction.

Mortal Mind

For the mind of the flesh is death, and the mind of The Spirit is life and peace. Romans 8:6 [Aramaic Bible in Plain English]

The rendition of “mind of flesh” as “mortal mind” is found in the writings of Unity—and probably first appeared in Christian Science; that religion much influenced Unity in its beginnings. It was introduced in H. Emilie Cady’s most influential work, Lessons in Truth. Paul’s use of the phrase is one of the countless indicators of the difference between views of the world founded on intuition and those on philosophy. We learned the phrase during our extensive involvement with Unity in Kansas City and, beyond, in Virginia. It had a fresh flavor for us, Romans renewed, you might say. Renewal is an absolutely vital process if the genuine content of revelation is to survive the inevitable process of socialization and reification that happens over time. The phrase has survived in my memory and rose spontaneously this morning as I noted the state of my mind on waking, didn’t like it, and thought: mortal mind. Only later this morning did I rediscover its Pauline origin; I’d forgotten.

Two minds in us. It is a matter of direct experience. Both are quite real. The intuition ran strongly in Paul—but the verse is not well known in a tradition that later more or less force-fitted the total Christian feeling mode to the Aristotelian framework where the real is substance, something made of matter and form. No. The intuition doesn’t fit the substance doctrine. But it matches what we experience. The flesh will pass, but The Spirit is life.

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Unity is a New Age spiritual movement, founded in 1899, with headquarters in Unity Village, MO.

Poesy v. Theology

My guess is that C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, might be among his least read works, viewed perhaps as a mere mole hill next to such vast mountains like The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. But reading that book recently, what with prayer on our minds around here, I was quite amazed by its content. Here, for instance, is a brief quote which quite startled me by its truth and originality. It concerns biblical interpretation:

I suggest two rules for exegetics: 1) Never take the images literally. 2) When the purport of the images—what they say to our fear and hope and will and affections—seems to conflict with the theological abstractions, trust the purport of the images every time. For our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modeling of spiritual reality in legal or chemical or mechanical terms. Are these likely to be more adequate than the sensuous, organic, and personal images of Scripture—the light and darkness, river and well, seed and harvest, master and servant, hen and chickens, father and child? The footprints of the Divine are more visible in that rich soil than across rocks or slag-heaps. Hence what they now call “demythologizing” Christianity can easily be “re-mythologising” it—and substituting a poorer mythology for a richer.

  [From Chapter X, p. 52, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., edition, 1964]

Ah! the hierarchies of experience, where the poetic rises above the intellectual. But at those heights the general fades and becomes personal—which is where real understanding germinates.

Mosaic of Madness

Some mornings I have to make active efforts to assert a view of the world in stark contrast with the one I see presented in the newspaper of record. The paper’s view is a mosaic made of hundreds of stories, some illustrated. Both are “selected,” each selection itself chosen to highlight a particular editorial impulse. The composite is what I called the ravings of a schizophrenic a while back. The vast contrarian mosaic possible from events across the globe would not by any means suggest that total madness has us in its grip. It would show, rather, humanity at its usual…

The view I must assert is not visible at all. It holds the overwhelming presence in reality of an altogether invisible order. I don’t hold that view to compensate for the “horrors” in the news—although my view does have compensatory effects. It’s not about “feel good” or “ain’t it awful”; those are the filters the paper uses in picking stories to cover and images to show. My view attempts to capture the truth. The compensation arises because the news-mosaic is extremely distorted and, alas, the only image that’s tangibly available. It tends, therefore, to persuade us that that’s the way things are. And that impression must be countered.

To be sure, virtually all of our information reaches us by the senses; not all but virtually all; to hold that reality is divinely ordered therefore relies on a minuscule input from our innermost selves. Not surprisingly, therefore, in secular ages, when faith is not reinforced by masses of other believers, it’s lonely out there.

The Satori and the NDE

I keep trying to put into words my long-standing view that dramatic experiences like satori (and their equals under other names) stand in sharp contrast to experiences reported by people who’ve experienced death but then were eventually revived.

In the one case the experiencer produces a sort of closure. He feels that all questions have been answered, perfect liberty achieved. At the same time his experience itself lacks content and hence, not surprisingly, is sometimes called the Void. It doesn’t matter what this end result is called—Buddha Mind, union with God, union with Plotinus’ One; these are all functionally equivalent. But we never learn anything at all about the structure or meaning of reality. What we view as the world or cosmos is said to be the consequence of ignorance—or an illusion produced by it. The blood-clotting cycle is an illusion? Produced by ignorance? The hibernating butterfly’s ability to produce a kind of anti-freeze to keep itself alive during months of frost? Whose illusion is that?

In the second case a person experiences separation from his/her dying body, observes events in the hospital, and eventually enters another world where he/she meets other already departed relatives and, often, a luminous person who seems to be in charge of this “reception.” A decision-process takes place. The person then learns that she or he is not yet ready to depart and is sent back—often quite unwillingly. The minimum content of this near-terminal experience is that there is another realm beyond this one; that it has visible and very pleasant aspects; and that some who have died are still there; they are “alive,” capable of communication, capable of being perceived by the discarnate visitor.

In both cases the experiencer, be it of satori or of near-death experience (NDE), is changed for the better in this life. The change usually persists but may fade with time. In both cases, occasionally, the person may have acquired what we call psychic powers; this sort of change is not pronounced or universal; and such abilities may also fade.

The chief differences here are that those seeking enlightenment work very hard and with a will to achieve the end result. Those experiencing NDEs do so passively, often with great surprise. Satori-seekers, you might say, are specialists; near-death experiencers are ordinary people, the usual proportion of men and women, whereas in D.T. Suzuki’s famed essays on Zen no woman ever appears to have been struck by the bold of Enlightenment. The satori is produced by major concentrated labor. The NDE seems to be nature’s way of signaling that there is something beyond the border and, moreover, it has real content.

There is hope, in other words, that humanity’s masses can get there too—and without grinding nonsensical koans for decades counted on two hands.

Hell is Logical

There is such a thing as feeling-logic alongside the logic based on observation. Feeling-logic assures me that there is such a place as hell—however abhorrent that seems to the modern mind. It is abhorrent because it seems to imply a vengeful God—whereas it only implies that (1) reality is lawful and (2) that agents are free to violate the laws. The first is quite evident merely from the observation of nature; the second is proved by self-observation. If the material order is lawful, and uniformly so, it is an extraordinary claim that a moral order is altogether absent—except as enforced by humanity itself. If it is absent people can “get away with it” unless they are caught. And let’s assume that “it,” in this case, is harvesting organs from poor, healthy, innocent people lured into situations by a corrupt system at the peak of which are doctors doing the harvesting (story in the New York Times this morning). If even one of these people “got away with it,” the entire cosmic whole in which we exist would be hopelessly corrupted and utterly meaningless. Therefore feeling-logic, call it logic based on intuition, powerfully asserts that justice triumphs always; and if it appears to fail in the here and now, be sure that it will not fail in the hereafter.

Deprived of Bodies?

A post on Just Thomism (link) reminded me, again, of the problematical nature of substance as understood by Aristotle and Aquinas (hylomorphism). An earlier post on that subject is here. If we assume that reality is a created structure and, as it were, complete in all important details from the beginning, this translates, in Aquinas’ thought, into the assertion that humans belong to an order in which the human being is a body-soul composite. If you separate soul from the body, the immortal soul, which Aquinas acknowledges, is in a deprived state where it is incapable of thought—which requires both intellect and sensory inputs. Therefore the brain is necessary. James Chastek, in the post referenced above, provides a very subtle argument of how you can escape this dilemma—while still retaining the problematical hylomorphic view.

What strikes me, however, is that we have what might be called empirical evidence—and here I refer to Near Death Experience reports—that disembodied souls continue to see, to sense, to think, and to perceive, even in situations in which they are comatose. And, yes. They do reach the edges of what here I call the Borderzone.

There is, of course, a difference between philosophy and faith. Christian belief does not demand assent to hylomorphism as such; that concept, after all, isn’t really revelation. It is something that must have seemed a happy schematic structure for a super-bright Greek pagan philosopher: matter and form, potential and act. God’s creation of man, taken from Genesis, requires an excessively literal belief to be interpreted as God making man from the dust of the ground. A more poetic interpretation leaves us lots of room for imagining vastly more complex answers. What experience and NDE reports suggest is that the soul is the real agency. The body is something we need in what may very well be a fallen dimension. And Aquinas’ own view that the intellect can only perceive universals, not particulars, and that it needs sensory organs even to see this apple, is more an accommodation to his principal teacher’s, Aristotle’s, scheme. Reality suggests something more simple: souls can perceive just fine, in or out of bodies. But while in these bodies, alas, we’ve got to have brains to think.

Is it “Tender” or is it “Open”?

One of my habits is to re-read an old textbook of mine, Thomism and Modern Thought by Harry R. Klocker, S.J. This tends to be good-weather, outdoor reading. Last summer I left the book outdoors, forgot that it was there, and a downpour damaged it. All of my copious marginal notes, made (foolishly) in ink were obliterated in the process. But then I found another copy on the Internet… Anyway, trying to tease Spring into action, I took the new copy out the other day and came across this interesting classification:

The Tender-Minded	The Tough-Minded
Rationalistic (going by principles)	Empiricist (going by facts)
Intellectualistic	Sensationalistic
Idealistic	Materialistic
Optimistic	Pessimistic
Religious	Irreligious
Free-Willist	Fatalistic
Monistic	Pluralistic
Dogmatical	Skeptical

Those familiar with William James, particularly his The Varieties of Religious Experience, will have heard the phrases used in the title. But this side-by-side characterization of these two psychological types, as viewed by James, appeared in Pragmatism (New York, Longmans, Green & Co., Inc., 1908) in a chapter titled “The Dilemma in Philosophy.”

The scheme is reproduced in Klocker’s segment on Pragmatism on page 127 of his book. Pragmatism, of course, falls decided under the tough-minded category. This time around, I got to thinking about the words James had used to classify these two opposing tendencies. Why “tender”? What really underlies these two classifications? Other words he might have chosen are “sensitive/insensitive,”  “inner-oriented/outer-oriented,” and from that last, echoing Jung, why not “introvert/extrovert”?

Now pragmatism, logical positivism, and other related philosophical positions are absolutely anchored in the assertion that all knowledge reaches us by the senses (hence the tough-minded are sensationalistic). And, furthermore, there is absolutely no way that sensory experience can give us proof of the metaphysical. But there are those tender-minded people who, perversely, assert the opposite. Should the pairing therefore include “stupid/bright” and “deluded/realistic”?

My simple solution here is to borrow from pragmatism its emphasis on “experience”—experience as the crucial and sole source of knowledge—but modifying that by asserting, based on experience itself, that some people do obtain additional knowledge that comes from a source beyond the senses. Call in inspiration. But if that is so (and I certainly think it is), then the tender-minded have greater access to reality than the tough. They are more “open” to ranges of reality than the tough-minded. The tough-minded feel it too—but at so marginal a level that they do not notice these ranges.

The “tender” classification used by James signals awareness of the tougher job the tender-minded have of dealing with reality. There is much more there. The tender are over-stimulated. They turn inward. And the tough, to be sure, have an easier time of coping with the world. Why then are they “pessimistic”? Could it be that, having nothing beyond the sensorium on which to build their world-view, they tend, ultimately, to despair? While the long-suffering tender-minded are “optimistic”?

The classification also shows that we are really mixtures of these two. It is very “tough” to choose but one.  My guess is that most people would rather pick and choose. But a forced choice will produce the actual leaning of the individual; it will mean, however, letting go of quite useful or inspiring products on the shelf of philosophy.

The Painted Porch

The man credited with founding the Stoic philosophy was Zeno of Citium who lived from 334 to approximately 262 BC. Citium is in Syria, but Zeno taught in Athens. Worth noting about this interesting, noble philosophy: it began in a time when late Greek culture, Hellenism, is said to have begun. That birth date was 323 BC, the death of Alexander the Great. Hellenism as a cultural phenomenon is dated from 323 to 146 BC, when the last Greek power was overcome by Rome, or 31 BC, the time when, with the Battle of Actium, the imperial age of Rome began. The Stoic philosophy, however, increased its hold on the Roman elites. In many important ways it matched the ethos of Christianity—which ultimately replaced it. But it was still until 529 AD when Justinian I closed the Academy of Athens and thus silenced the last effective Hellenistic influence.

This philosophy got its name from a place where it was taught, the Stoa Poikile, a columned portico or porch on the north side of Athen’s agora. Zeno used to stand there and teach his philosophy—which in many functional ways resembles the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) whom many view as being a pantheist. Technically he is not, but it is easy to read him that way. Stoicism certainly was. Stoics saw the universe as two interacting substances, a passive matter and an intelligent, primordial fire or aether ever transforming reality. The fire, this energy, never runs out. God, which is the universe, is absolutely good. All evil derives from human choices, and the power to act freely is God’s gift. Individual personalities disappear at death but the fire that carried them through life is taken up into the swirl of the greater Fire and keeps working on, creating forever. Spinoza would have agreed. If we count the years between 529 and Spinoza’s birth year, we have the return of the Stoa after a lapse of 1100 years.

At present a genuine stoicism, which carries a very strong emphasis on ethics—as a way of aligning with the laws of the cosmos, and incidentally achieving happiness to the extent possible through reason and right action—has not yet fully developed under a materialistic dispensation. And never mind embraced by the dominant cultural elite. Materialism does not recognize a minimal transcendence in matter, thus as having intelligence. And its ethics are relative. A new Stoa might eventually emerge, especially if conditions worsen. Therefore, perhaps, some people might already be mixing new paint for application to the old porch.

Inversions

In our frustrations, we something say that “Things are upside down.” Herewith some words about that from two different traditions. The first quote comes from Seeker After Truth, by Idries Shah (Harper & Row, 1982), p. 38-39:

Mundane things, and this includes emotional stimuli which are often imagined by very devout people to be religious, are pursued by means of this desire, this coveting [mentioned above]. It is evidenced by the fact that the thing desired acquires a great importance in the mind of the victim, rather as one desires possessions, importance, recognition, honours, successes. To distinguish real objectives from secondary ones the Sufis have said: “The importance of something is in inverse proportion to its attractiveness.” This is the parallel of the negligence with which people often fail, in the ordinary world, to recognize important events, inventions or discoveries. That this is appreciated in day-to-day matters is perhaps evidenced by the appearance of this statement in a London daily newspaper recently as “The importance of a subject can be judged by the lack of interest in it.” [The daily is Daily Mail, March 17, 1979, quoting one P. Butler.]

The second quote comes from 1 Cornthians 3:19; it is by the Apostle Paul:

For the wisdom of the world is folly with God.

“May the Force be with you”

In times like these it’s natural to think about the regions beyond in terms of energetics: “May the Force be with you.” What distinguishes this saying from “May God be with you” is that it uses an energetic word; but most people will feel that Force means some Higher Power. Power, of course, is another energetic word.

In an earlier post I’ve pointed to the widespread use of this kind of reference in many cultures using equivalent words (here): chi, prana, baraka. The western form of this is grace.

Grace is not experienced in the same way by all individuals—or the same individual at all times. If it were we would think of it much as we think of life. We’ve got it while we’re living. Therefore this kind of energy is of a special, subtle kind—and what we do (or don’t do) can increase its experienced presence in us. It may be thought of as everywhere present, and to the same degree, but not always accessible.

The teaching of the cultures agree to this extent. Concentration of a certain kind produces the experience of grace; and when it is felt, it is transformative. The concentration must come from a freely willed decision—which makes it different in kind. Meditation, prayer, attention to some things, detachment from others—and carried on not for pragmatic reasons but in order to be transformed. In the Catholic doctrine, for instance, sanctifying grace attends salutary acts and the state of holiness. The acts are tied to mindfulness; they produce a state—of receptivity.

No word, however subtle its initial reference may have been, is protected from abuse. De Gaulle famously claimed that he had baraka when addressing the Algerians—thus using the word in a political context. Grace is available as a description for pleasing movements in dance or skating. But the human intuition knows full well that something, call it magical, is at work here. Does it matter whether or not we trace it back to a divine source and fit it into an organized religious system? It matters for some. But if we stay with the energetic terminology, it suffices to remember that energy is intimately connected with doing work. The word derives from the Greek ergon, meaning just that. And in that context I recall one of the short sayings of Laura Huxley’s, in You Are Not the Target: It works— if you work.

Never Mind Disorder

Those nostalgic for religious ages—in which Faith tends to dominate the cultural realm—just don’t know their history well. Times are always in upheaval. Wars and rumors of wars? They’re a perennial. Take the eleventh century, close to the peak of Christendom. In that century, just within Christendom itself, twenty-six wars took place. One famine, due to climate change, plagued southern France. And the First Crusade was launched. It’s not as if people practice the prevailing ideology—ever. It’s always a mixed bag. And at the highest level greed and lust for power rule behavior.

Religious times are hard on people who want to follow the lead of their own minds and conscience—unless they are narrowly conformant to approved institutional means of doing so. In irreligious times, people who want to cultivate an inner life are blessedly left alone. The culture does not even recognize that such a life exists.

The Sufis say that seeking the highest values in no way depends on order in society. The search takes place in another dimension than the one “the world” inhabits, no matter labels the world favors currently. Which of course is nothing more than saying that (1) disorder is always present and (2) no socially wide-spread ideology actually captures reality in the full.

I’ve had the good luck to live my youth in regions where the religious ethos was dominant, but stripped of all power to compel—and to live my adult life in an age that denies the soul’s very existence. The best of both worlds, you might say.

Under- and Over-Estimates

Over extended periods of time, humanity cycles between opposing views of reality, of which one is slightly more correct than the other, but both are flawed. They arise in Ages of Reason and in Ages of Faith. We see similar imbalance in physics as well. As Wikipedia says in its article on Antimatter, “At this time, the apparent asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the visible universe is one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics” link. There appears to be much more matter than antimatter. In a neat reversal of this asymmetry, there is much less Materialism in history than Faith.

In Ages of Reason elites under-estimate the human being. They see humans as just another product of nature and see Mind arising from matter. There are variations here, of course. In Roman times Lucretius thought that “mind” arose from very subtle atoms, but still atoms. Our moderns prefer arrangements of atoms, thus they embrace the concept of complexity.

In Ages of Faith, as the word “faith” implies, the transcendent is to the fore. Something beyond the world of matter is presumed. This stance is more on target, but it tends to over-estimate the human in the cosmos so enlarged. God is pictured as creating the entire cosmos to make a suitable dwelling for humanity. We were the aim. Hence we’re higher than the angels.

The masses of ordinary people are, on the whole, closer to the second view—and only portions of it ever leave that faith behind and then only if their standard of living rises a slight bit over what is normal for most humans—endless toil at the margins of survival—in so-called civilized times. Paradise could certainly be viewed as a distant memory of vast ages when humanity just gathered or herded…

It amuses me to think that Ages of Reason produce unreason, because humans are so radically different from chemical machines—while Ages of Faith produce reason, because faith opens up more of Reality for contemplation. But to think that the vast Out There has us in mind, and was created just to make a home for humanity, is a bit of a stretch. It is, of course, understandable. One consequence of the Fall is bone-deep ignorance. We are rather superior to the humble animals. And vastly worse at our bad. Therefore to think that we are the focus is at least credible—unless we spend some time contemplating the great sky by night.

There is a position between these two—closer to faith than reason, avoiding pride. It is the notion of the Fall—not of the whole of humanity but of a part. And what we call humanity may in essence be angelic. And therefore reality may be many magnitudes-raised-to magnitudes more complex than our simplifying myths have made it.

That Slippery Intuition

What we mean by words is, ultimately, intrinsically personal—and especially so when it comes to “objects” that are beyond the reach of the outward senses. One such word is intuition. Prodded in Kant’s direction by a post today on Siris (link), I came across this fascinating quote (source):

Our nature is so constituted that intuition with us never can be other than sensuous, that is, it contains only the mode in which we are affected by objects. On the other hand, the faculty of thinking the object of sensuous intuition is the understanding. Neither of these faculties has a preference over the other. Without the sensuous faculty no object would be given to us, and without the understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind. Hence it is as necessary for the mind to make its conceptions sensuous (that is, to join to them the object in intuition), as to make its intuitions intelligible (that is, to bring them under conceptions). Neither of these faculties can exchange its proper function. Understanding cannot intuit, and the sensuous faculty cannot think. In no other way than from the united operation of both, can knowledge arise.

       [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction, translated by J.M.D. Meiklejohn]

[In the Original German:]

Unsre Natur bringt es so mit sich, daß die Anschauung niemals anders als sinnlich sein kann, d.i. nur die Art enthält, wie wir von Gegenständen affiziert werden. Dagegen ist das Vermögen, den Gegenstand sinnlicher Anschauung zu denken, der Verstand. Keine dieser Eigenschaften ist der andern vorzuziehen. Ohne Sinnlichkeit würde uns kein Gegenstand gegeben, und ohne Verstand keiner gedacht werden.Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind. Daher ist es eben so notwendig, seine Begriffe sinnlich zu machen (d.i. ihnen den Gegenstand in der Anschauung beizufügen), als, seine Anschauungen sich verständlich zu machen (d.i. sie unter Begriffe zu bringen). Beide Vermögen, oder Fähigkeiten, können auch ihre Funktionen nicht vertauschen. Der Verstand vermag nichts anzuschauen, und die Sinne nichts zu denken. Nur daraus, daß sie sich vereinigen, kann Erkenntnis entspringen.

This fascinates me because, in that first sentence, Kant defines intuition in a peculiarly narrow way. And for me, anyway, that definition, by itself, explains Kant’s view of reality—not least that we can only ever have access to appearances (phenomena) and never to the real (noumena).

The English version then made me curious what Kant actually wrote in German . The word he used for intuition was Anschauung—although Intuition is, and was then, a common German word. Our dictionary (Cassells) defines Anschauung as view, perception, observation, and contemplation, in that order, and finally also as intuition. Etymologically intuition derives from the Latin for  “looking at” (which is also what the literal German Anschauung means), but when I stand before a mural in a museum, Brigitte doesn’t approach me and ask “What are you intuiting there?” The word has come to have another meaning for us, with a contrarian etymology: it is a message, a tuition, from within. Thus it is the soul’s own grasp of something—which need not be sensory in character at all. Indeed, intuition is a kind of inner knowledge; it is always a feeling quite stripped of any visual or sensory modes.

Kant himself asserts that “all of our knowledge begins with experience.” Well and good. But he limits experience to the sensory whereas experience includes, for us, ranges of reality the senses know nothing about. If you stay on the reservation, you’ll never see what is beyond the borderzone.

Paired Cosmologies

The two cosmologies I want to look at both assume a complex Reality with a God. Representatives are Christianity and some forms of Gnosticism. The two appear to be quite different. In one the phenomenon of life in this our own reality is an intended outcome; in the other it is an aberration. The first suggests an order or arrangement in which God intended at least one category of living entities to populate some tiny portion of the vast emptiness of space. The second maintains that a community of life either erred or by some accident fell into a pocket of reality (i.e. the Universe) where life is not really at home.

Both of these cosmologies demand a certain view of the life-phenomenon and of the universe of matter-energy. To simplify it, for most people “life” simply equals “human life,” but it is interesting, at the graduate levels, to include all life. I’ll stay with 101. To have any kind of view at all, one must be a conscious agent, obviously, equipped with powers of reasoning, an agent for whom what it sees should be meaningful.

Those who’re satisfied with limited meanings, thus those that ordinary life produces (pleasing, displeasing outcomes) neither member of the pairing I propose is meaningful. Life is just a form of matter; nothing above it is required except motion; and matter-as-energy provides that.

All those who can entertain the pairing, above, as possibilities will see reality as a top-down structure. We know that we didn’t make ourselves—even if we can, more or less, chemically trace the making of our bodies. If we were “created” at our formation as embryos, therefore already in this realm—or if we were “created” in a higher sphere first and later, as agents, “descended” into the world of matter—in either case, we were created, and created with limited powers.

The first cosmology, “intended,” easily explains our ignorance at birth. We start as entirely undeveloped potentials; the potentials unfold as we live our lives. In the second, “aberration,” we originated somewhere else, being quite knowing there, but as we descended into the world of matter we were blinded in every possible way, not least by losing our memories. Sticking with the second now, bodies then become a kind of tooling that had to be developed over vast eons of time as a means by which, using matter to see by, we regained, to a limited extent, the power to orient ourselves again in this inhospitable setting to the nature of this reality. Then as we advance our powers gradually develop, we begin intuitively to see again that we are strangers in a strange land. We begin our trek toward the Borderzone—once again equipped, we hope, to make it all the way back again to where we came from.

One indication that this second position has merit is the strangely engineered character of bodies generally. They are systems quite analogous to advanced machines, but more sophisticated. They show a kind of design. Indeed we are still tinkering with them, as witness genetic technologies of healing. By contrast, our inner selves, which seem to have been created rather than fabricated, a kind of seamless perfection appears to be present.

Is this, the second position, incompatible with the first? I don’t think so. The great myth of the Fall, which begins in Paradise, argues for a convergence of these two models. We might take Paradise to be the intended place for souls, for life. And it seems located beyond the Borderzone. Our original home. The fall itself may be read as the “aberration” that caused us to be here. In Genesis we’re driven out of Paradise. But we might have left voluntarily. Sometimes what seems novel and intriguing—and the lower reaches may have opened to our view by a nearby happening, like the Big Bang—hides a lot of trouble and mayhem if carelessly explored. The Gnostics blame the demiurge for making that Big Bang mess—and thereby capturing the innocent. Genesis may be more on target by pointing at a certain overreach—or was it an underreach?—by fully conscious beings. In any case, great troubles cause great labors. And when they are finally over, we tend to be more sober and wiser. Thank God for Jacob’s ladder—and other help sent us from Above.

Poetic Power

Herewith a brief quote from Jalaluddin Rumi, the Persian mystic poet:

God’s mirror: the front is the heart, its back the world.

I don’t know where it fits into Rumi’s work; I have it from Idries Shah’s Caravan of Dreams, p.80. What strikes me about it here is the amazing poetic power it shows in rendering the very fundamental nature of our being here in this dimension. In a way the heart is blind—and the world is infinitely diverse. And it is the heart that truly mirrors; the back of the mirror is just coarse brown paper, a rectangle of wooden framing, and in our day some staples to hold the paper in place. The heart is the mirror. But, to take another quote from Rumi, this one from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz XII:

The moment your entered this world of form, an escape ladder was put out for you.

That ladder? Could it be the heart? As concerns heart, I’ve noted things about it on this blog before (link).

Even in a Savaged Landscape…

If a Lutheran impulse lurks within me, as I noted yesterday, I also have, you might say, a marginally existentialist temperament. When looking for a starting point for making sense of life, I find that point anchored in personal consciousness (with all of its powers included, of course). Before thought, there must be a thinker; before experience, there must be someone to have it. But my position does not extend to affirming what authentic existentialists do, namely that “existence is prior to essence.” For the hard-core existentialist, each human essence (“what we are”) is created by the person’s voluntary action. Curiously, as I grasp this—to the extent that I do—the existentialist’s “existence” is what Aristotle seems to have meant by potential. Potential is a devil of a concept. It must be there, but yet it isn’t—yet. In any case, for me, the core self has “features,” right out of the box, thus something that we are—long before we’ve done anything at all. We are a power of awareness and of will.

Been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Anxiety. It is an admirable, brief summation of Sartre’s philosophy from the perspective of “the eternal feminine.” I owe Brandon Watson for pointing me in that directed quite some time ago. The book is inaccessible to people who’ve never grappled with Sartre—in whose Being and Nothingness the various core concepts de Beauvoir uses are first defined with plentiful examples; de Beauvoir does not bother with definitions: she is addressing other existentialists. But once those notions are firmly renewed, de Beauvoir’s work is helpful. Reading it came the thought: “Lord, that twentieth century! An absolute desert, a ravaged landscape. And yet spirituality rises from that wreckage nonetheless.”

Reorienting myself in this arcane world of thought and feeling born of ruin, I came across a wonderful short paper by Gordon R. Lewis, of the Conservative Baptist Seminary (Denver, CO), titled “Augustine and Existentialism” (link). Lewis traces the essence of existentialism back to Augustine (354-430). Augustine’s view is only marginally existentialist; he would also have found problems in putting essence second. He, of course, lived in a time of disintegration—that of the Western Roman Empire. The cultural landscape might have been similarly savaged.

I’ve come to think, reading another existentialist, Hans Jonas, in his The Gnostic Religion (link on this blog) that the same spirit, minus philosophical machinery, also inspired Gnosticism, a phenomenon that predates Augustine (say second century AD), with the Hellenistic order coming unraveled. The same phenomenon sprouting, each time, from a landscape of cultural chaos.

Remembering Garner Ted Armstrong

A couple of days ago a long-forgotten memory surfaced—specifically of listening to a radio program in the 1960s, usually while driving home for lunch in Kansas City. It was a rather vivid memory, once it returned. But I could recover neither the name of the preacher nor of his organization; the name of the program, I was sure, had the word “world” in it. I was also sure that I would instantly recognize the name if only I saw it. Google. Now the world of religious radio broadcasting is vast—albeit it is almost buried under Religious TV Mountain that had risen in the decades since. Dozens of web sites later, I gave up. But Brigitte, in about five minutes, sent me a link to a list of television evangelists; I’d skipped that, focused, as I’d been, on radio. Well! Right there, under the As, right on top, was the name I had been looking for: Garner Ted Armstrong (1930-2003). The program was The World Tomorrow. And the organization, founded by Garner Ted’s father, Herbert W., was the Worldwide Church of God.

The World Tomorrow was my first-ever exposure to fundamentalist Christianity. I’d heard such programs briefly before, but never stayed to listen. Garner Ted Armstrong, however, caught my attention by his eloquence, by the power of his rhetorical skills, and the peculiar angle on reality that the Worldwide Church of God offered. Apocalyptic. Hence the program was strongly sprinkled with current world-wide news, the news themselves used as evidence of the prophecy that the elder Herbert W. preached. The world would soon be ending. But this end was being preached with a very high level of sophistication by Garner Ted. Quite wonderful if, for me, only as an illustration of what you could do with biblical material if you were diligent and, well, that word again, sophisticated.

What Garner Ted Armstrong taught me was the power behind a certain kind of firmly held belief—Biblical inerrancy—thus taking it as unquestioned truth that the Bible was literally the word of God. Ours was only to understand it and, then in turn, using only the Bible itself as our resource, to explain all modern knowledge so that it came to harmonize with the literal sense of the Word.

The fact that explanation, of that Word, was necessary—the authenticity of the other claim (It is the Word of God) not really questioned by Christian believers—the question that arose next in my mind was: whose interpretation is to be believed? There is an institutional explanation, held in Catholic doctrine for example, slowly hammered out over a couple of millennia. Garner Ted’s view on evolution sharply disagreed with that of Catholic teaching, for example. One man’s, or a father-son pairing’s, versus that of an institutional collective? Difficulties arise in either case. The collective transmission had begun to bother me long before the 1960s arrived. Garner Ted, therefore, helped me to modify my own views still further. Whatever the inspiration behind the Bible, was doctrinaire exposition of it really necessary? (A Lutheran impulse lurks within me.)

I was, to be sure, quite immune to Garner Ted, but pleased by his stance against modernity—and the joyful pleasure with which he deployed it—absolutely certain, as he was, of his own Biblical righteousness. Much harder sledding was still ahead for me, one who, taking “world” to be much larger—and likely to remain in place much longer—had to discover truth without an unfailing, written guidebook. The 1960s seem very long ago…

Change Your Mind

I was reminded today of an old post of mine on Ghulf Genes, “Silent in Siloam” (link). There I quoted a passage from Luke 13:2-4 as follows. The passage comes when some people approached Jesus and told him some news about the execution of some insurgents by Pilate. He answered them thus:

“Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? I tell you, No: but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem?”

Brigitte and I got to talking about this—and soon we were focused on one word, repentance. We wondered about its origin, thus what word was used there in the first edition of Luke, you might say. I was reluctant to make the effort, but finally succumbed. Luke was written in Greek, and the word used was metanoeo. I also discovered that it is a key word throughout the Gospels. Now that Greek comes apart into meta and noeo, a form of noos. The first, used as a prefix, can mean “beyond,” as in metaphysics; it can also signal “movement,” and therefore “change.” Noeo stands for mind—and survives in English in “noetic,” thus pertaining to the intellect. Metanoeo thus means “change of mind”—which, while it certainly encompasses repentance, also carries a wider meaning. “Repentance” narrows the meaning unnecessarily, but—and this is true generally of all revelation—there is more there than at first meets the eye.

Repentance signals a quid-pro-quo sort of rule. Sin and its punishment—unless sins are repented. But in metanoeo one senses something more fundamental that simply stopping sloppy or criminal behavior. It signals something more fundamental, a change in the very character of the mind itself, one might view it as an ontological change. Jesus’ brief reply also holds two different meanings for “perish.” There is death in that word—as by execution or the accidental collapse of a tower. And there is in that word, as well, a more fundamental loss than merely the loss of a body.

Late Learning

In advancing age come insights almost intended to be private—or to be shared only with one’s life-long mate—not because they shouldn’t be shared but because they require experiences that humanity only achieves in its advancing years. One has to be adequate for such knowledge—and it cannot be shared with those who haven’t gotten there yet.

In this category belongs the notion that conceptual intellection is merely a tool, an artifact, developed principally for practical purposes—and because, within these bodies, we cannot communicate directly with others mind to mind. Another is that all life is intelligent, in the higher sense—but cannot communicate that state to us because it lacks the artifact of conceptual language. Vast aggregations of habit—especially if one has lived largely in a conceptual world—make it almost impossible to believe that one can communicate, not least great complexities, without using abbreviations, tokens, which is what language is.

This came to mind today, again, reading a post on Laudator Temporis Acti (“Almost too Pitiful to Bear”) where one John Buchman hears the anguish of the trees as a grove is felled. We assign that sort of thing to the imagination—but even if we think we know a lot, in advancing age, it is obvious that we have a whole lot more to learn—and that that learning will come when we have passed.

Orientation Toward the Future

		Alles Vergängliche	All passing things
		Ist nur ein Gleichnis;	Are merely symbol;
		Das Unzulängliche,	The unattainable
		Hier wird’s Ereignis;	Here turns event;
		Das Unbeschreibliche,	The indescribable,
		Hier ist’s getan;	Here it is done;
		Das Ewig-Weibliche	The Eternal Feminine
		Zieht uns hinan.	Draws us along.
		[Goethe, Faust]

In Viktor Frankl’s meaning-oriented psychotherapy—he called it logotherapy—the highest level of the human being is the spiritual; it strives for meaning. The lower levels, the somatic and the psychic, represent forces that push us to achieve physical and social ends in the here and now, but meanings exerts a pull on us. And in the process of following our innate perception of something beyond us, we look to the future.

It struck me this morning that using one of the time dimensions (thus past, present, and future) does not express the longing for meaning that we feel adequately. To the extent that it does, future must be understood as something that we never actually achieve while we are on this plane. The future acts on us in a mysterious way, but it disappears precisely as it arrives. It turns into the present. And as the present fades with the same mysterious diminution into the past, that which has been and that which is yet to come can both be viewed under the species of eternity. Quite consistently, Frankl views the achievement of values in the present; and once realized, they are permanently saved in the past—which is immune to the forces of the flux in which we actually live, the Now.

The notions—these contrasts between what we are, what we seek, and what we actually achieve—reward the effort to contemplate them. Flickers, glimmers, bright sparks of intuition arise in us that we are not really time-bound creatures at all but beings of another order experiencing here and now a novel process in the experience of which we grow as souls.

Steadiness

I note (with what I hope will soon be sang froid) that a state of steadiness is only present when hormones do not flood the body. Some dreams produce emotional states, indeed the most complete, because in dreams awareness does not mitigate experience. I awoke from one of those emotional dreams this morning. A hard look showed that my dream arose from a more or less routine reflection on the state of our collective life—a reflection which, when no one’s present to stare it down, can indeed flood the body with anxious emotions. I feel for animals. In them such states must come and go unobstructed, awake or asleep. It is the order of nature: the inner always reflecting the outer—but the outer is not just the inorganic, the winds, the temperature, the skies, the dry, the wet. It includes also the living creatures and their agitation or lack thereof.  Steadiness is being above, meaning beyond, this lower realm, even while within it. But bodies are physical, they need their sleep. The self goes away on long perambulations in heavenly landscapes. It is on returning to the body (no doubt with a sigh) that it encounters psychic states brought about by recent memories, just surfacing again, which flood the tissues with hormonal discharge. And then it’s time to calm everything down. Such observations lead to the notion that beings in bodies have a three-fold nature: body, soul, and spirit. Only the spirit is steady because it isn’t influenced by the endless flux of this dimension.

Ignorance and Knowledge

It struck me this morning that at bottom major religious movements rest on the contrast between ignorance and knowledge. In the Hindu and Buddhist faiths, the human problem is produced by Ignorance, our mistaking the insubstantial mirage produced in this dimension by matter and all that is connected to it. Ignorance is bliss? No. In these faiths ignorance is suffering. The Gnostic faiths, which left a footprint in the century before and in the century after our current calendar changed from BC to AD, emphasize Knowledge as that which helps us to escape from this dimension of Ignorance. In Gnosticism this world of ours is the false creation of the Demiurge, spreading confusion and thus capturing the free beings that we are. The same “knowing” is rendered as Enlightenment by the Hindus and the Buddhists.

The Western religions (Judeo-Christian-Muslim) are based on the actions that center on The Fall. That story is incoherent unless taken as a parable of how human consciousness arose. In effect it says, When Consciousness arose among humans, the world fell. Incoherent? Yes. Eve took the forbidden fruit. But to disobey God in any meaningful sense, she had to have had “knowledge of good and evil” before she ate of the fruit. To emphasize this, to understand what “forbidden” means, one has to understand good and evil already. Yet that knowledge only came, supposedly, after eating the fruit.

East and West, therefore, it seems to me, take their religious insights at different points in human development. The Eastern view already assumes the presence of a conscious humanity, but one that still lacks a crucial insight—unlikely to be acquired except by suffering. The Biblical account records, and labels as disobedience, a point in time when the knowledge of good and evil actually arose. The higher insight, in the West, comes when consciousness is expanded by Revelation—and Revelation is unlikely to motivate humanity in the absence of—suffering.

Another way to see this is to say that the East emphasizes the power of cognition, the West the powers of the will. Both are powers of the human soul—alongside feeling, intuition, and imagination. All of these powers, however, are one. They cannot be teased apart in actual living. They are all present in all decisions—to act or not to act in certain ways. But religious faiths can, and have, laid their emphasis on one or the other of humanity’s supposedly different powers. In truth they are the same single power. And it works—if we work.

The Will to Meaning

The phrase is most closely linked to Viktor Frankl’s psychotherapy, but it was first articulated, in his own usage, by Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the Christian existentialist. In this context meaning translates into value, belief, and purpose—all viewed as individual, internal, subjective achievements. The will to meaning is the inner striving for something altogether absent in objective reality—out there. Meaning, in this existential sense, is the very core of Frankl psychotherapy, which he calls logotherapy. The affirmation of meaning, in Frankl’s work, is about as close as one can get to an affirmation of human transcendence in secular terms—but even a superficial reading of Frankl reveals that he means just that. Human beings cannot be adequately described when ignoring the deeply felt will to meaning present in us. We have a soul.

The particular formulation here derives from competing schools of psychotherapy: Freudian, the will to pleasure, usually rendered as the pleasure principle, and the Adlerian, the will to power. Freud’s work was centered in the sexual drive, the Adlerian on the inferiority complex. Frankl does not deny that drives exist but classifies them as on a lower, biological level, than the quest from meaning, which rises above this level. Even the person most adequately adjusted sexually or in status will experience neuroses arising from life’s seeming meaninglessness. Indeed, in Frankl’s view that state, which he calls the existential vacuum, was the dominant neurosis of his time, the twentieth century. Does it continue to loom large today?

Meaning is transcending, in Frankl’s view, because it can illuminate and overcome even the greatest suffering, not least terminal suffering, by the vital acts of endurance and affirmation of the individual. All of his books are quite accessible. A good example is Man’s Search for Meaning. Do not, however, expect to find “the meaning of life” explained, chapter and verse. That remains an individual responsibility—another important word in Frankl’s thought.

Reminders Mild and Harsh

Nothing works as effectively as a reminder of mortality than the abrupt interruption of our habitual way of life. The mild form of that, just at the present, is the failure of our Internet connection; a more telling nudge is a power-failure; in the summer; in winter it’s a much more potent wake-up call. Living in habit’s warm embrace we are protected from the awareness of our current quandary: we exist in what, for humans, is an alien environment. Then there are the serious events: blood in the urine, the tight band across the chest. The world seems to stop. Everything is in the air.

Curious business, habit. If the upheavals last long enough, we get used to them. New habits form. If the ailments do not kills us, we learn to limp or to take our medications; routine visits to the doctors, to the clinics become…routine. The lens gets adjusted; we forget how blurred our vision has become. We also find it easy to recall adaptive habits. After the fourth or fifth recurrence of something unpleasant, we just dust off learned routines and resume them—until the lights are back on again or that pain across the chest gradually diminishes.

At its deepest levels, organic life seeks equilibrium—a word that nicely approximates the feeling we have when we are just living our habits. It was Freud, I think (and I cannot check this, what with the Internet down), who spoke about the death instinct in man, derived from the fact that organic life has a secret wish to reach, again, that state of total equilibrium present in inorganic matter. Matter has neither wants nor wishes. But the death instinct may also signal something else—the wish to be entirely free of matter which, stirred up by energy, is ever in motion and ever undergoing change. Plato well knew this. The soul has no parts hence cannot decay.

An examination of this situation suggests a paradoxical solution to the ever-looming dread of unwished-for change. A genuinely awaked person knows that one must be detached from all of that—“all of that” being precisely what we call “life” here. He or she should, like a good Scout, be semper paratus for anything, attached to nothing. But a vast gulf separates knowing from being. Being attached to our daily life is virtually unavoidable. Practicing detachment is a good thing—until, chuckle, it becomes habitual. In which case, sure enough, it no longer works.

All this, to be sure, will come to an end. In the meantime, when we fall, we must promptly get up again, brush off, grit our teeth, and soldier on. And, paradoxically again, the reminders, mild or harsh, are actually a blessing. They are reminders. Your work on earth is still not done.

Another View of the Unconscious

In western psychotherapy—and very prominently in Freudian and Jungian analysis—the “unconscious” plays a rather major role. It is also present in the work of Milton H. Erickson, a remarkable therapist—but there it has a quite different flavor. The following quotation comes from Volume 1 of a fascinating book: Conversations with Milton H. Erickson, M.D., edited by Jay Haley, himself a psychiatrist (p 106-107):

Haley: Talking about metaphors or analogies or stories, you have said you reach the unconscious with them.

Erickson: Yes.

H: Now you chose the word “unconscious” as a description of this process. I wonder if it is really essential, or if you could deal with it in terms of how to get someone to follow a suggestion which they cannot resist because they are not aware of it. They are not aware they are receiving the suggestion. An awareness difference, rather than an unconscious-conscious difference.

E: I’m trying to think of a patient. She told me about her horrible self-consciousness in a bathing suit because it seemed to her that whenever she wore a bathing suit her genitals were too prominent and everybody looked at that area of her body. She didn’t like to go swimming for that reason. Another thing she mentioned was the question that had come to her, whether or not at the age of 35 she should relinquish her virginity. She wasn’t willing to talk about that, and she only talked about the temptations she had had. But she was utterly indefinite, and so I steered her away from the subject. I knew that she was self-conscious in a bathing suit, everybody looked at her genitals, and that she had, at the age of 35, wondered about the desirability of keeping her virginity. She was a decidedly attractive woman. Of course, if she wanted to wonder about the desirability of keeping her virginity, she mentioned the age of 35—well, I drew my own conclusions. So one day I told her, “You know, Eisenhower, and Patton, and—who was the other general? Suppose you tell me about the Battle of the Bulge?” And I got the whole story about the time she went to bed with a man and then wondered and wondered and fought the man off on the battle of the bulge.

H: Milton, that’s a remarkable metaphor. But suppose the idea of conscious and unconscious had never been proposed. Now, how else would you explain what you did in that example? If there was no such concept as the unconscious.

E: Are you going to get rid of the back of the mind?

This comes from a chapter concerned with the Unconscious, Insight, and the Use of Analogies. This segment powerfully reminded me of Sufi teaching methods—which use stories, metaphors, and analogies. But why? Because in Sufi doctrine the ordinary self is a habit self, a structure produced by social conditioning. It reacts to straightforward, linear presentations reflexively. Stories, and humor, however, are able to penetrate this mask and reach the real, read higher, self and stir it into awareness.

The thought then occurred to me that the really unconscious mind is our habitual mind—and that what psychiatry calls the “unconscious” is actually the higher mind. Erickson, famed for his uses of hypnosis—albeit he rarely had to use it in practice—had a way of getting past the superficial but stubborn surface layer society builds to stir up a deeper layer. In his methods, that deeper layer is not the accumulation of detritus and of repressions but a potential—awakening which leads to insight and healing.

The Flaw in the Robot

Before I ever properly awoke this morning (it’s 8:30 am as I write this but I was up before 7), I experienced the way the Internet distracts. A comment on another blog, signaled by e-mail overnight, got lost as I attempted to approve it—which led to a mesmerizing process of trying to discover why. I lost track of time.

Any kind of feedback system that appears to be alive captures the body. It’s much harder to find distraction just staring at an old-fashioned writing desk—although, as I’ve discovered, excessive disorder has occasionally captured me, now and then leading to an hour’s order-making, rising to such outrages as fetching a vacuum cleaner, etc. That’s the same basic process—but the computer is so much better at delivering distraction.

Now I am retired, so this happens with less resistance. A busy life in which the outer is constantly demanding attention keeps people focused on tasks; the utterly trivial has less power. But then the tasks themselves, however nobly sanctioned by society, can become hypnotic so that the day rolls on, like an avalanche. In retrospect, thus observed from a slightly surprised point in time in the evening, the surprise arising because true awareness, for the first time, has managed to fight its way to the top, the person marvels at the scene: the day seems quite like a dream in its turn.

What I want to note here is that consciousness is a deeply layered phenomenon in which many quite deliberate actions—not least rather complex thinking—can take place above the merely waking state. At lowest levels are, say, the routine of breakfast, then a kind of noodling. The noodling can become obsessive, as it did today. Above that layer daily routines dictate the thoughts, action, planning, and the like—but blinkered by the tasks themselves. In midst of those—say while driving—the day-dream-like process returns. The news on the radio milks us of reflexive emotings. Now and then the traffic patterns cause tension and attention—but not real consciousness. In a long active day, there may never come a moment when we are genuinely present. And that moment may not last. Making it last is, as it were, the important task of the day, given our mission here on earth. But, of course, that moment of wakefulness, self-awareness, itself appears, in the context of the flux, as an unwelcome distraction from the compelling urge to obey the demands of our reflexes.

The higher urge, one might say, is a flaw in the robot—which can do great wonders, intelligent as it is, without any help. Real awareness stops the machine. Goodness! If allowed to stick around, it produces shudders—as tensions in the muscles are released. And then what? What is there to do? It’s a puzzlement that rises as we glimpse the borderzone.

Mystical Jargon

Over the years I’ve accumulated sheets with scribbled or marginal definitions of a lot of words thickening texts that form the scholarly literature on the mystical. I thought I’d consolidate them in one place. This listing will remain “active” in that I’ll keep on adding to it as new ones make me reach for the dictionary.

docetism: From Greek dokein, meaning to “seem, to appear to be,” therefore the belief that the body of Jesus was not really a body, but merely an appearance, a phantom, thus the denial of Jesus as simultaneously being both God and man.

eschatology: eskhatos from the Greek, “last, furthest, uttermost, extreme, most remote”; then the added -ology, from -logy, from Greek logia, Latin legein, “to speak,” hence teaching, doctrine science of — whatever—in this case of the End Times.

epiphany: Greek phainein, “to show,” and epi meaning “on or in.” Therefore “showing forth,” manifestation, appearance.

Now there are several other kinds of -phany. Hierophany is from Greek hieros, holy, sacred—the manifestation of something holy. Theophany where the subject is theos, God. Other such formations sometimes occur, and when they do the initial leading word must be understood to see who or what is “manifesting.”

Authors then tend to turns these words into adjectives (hierophanic, theophanic) to modify words like vision or imagination or experience, by which time the meaning begins to fray because the visceral meaning of the words is, to begin with, something very rarely experienced.

haecceity, hexeity: From Medieval Latin (actually Duns Scotus), haec, “this,” therefore thisness, meaning the quality that makes something, e.g. God, absolutely unique. Its rendering as hexeity is linguistically confusing although it makes spelling the word a lot easier. Hex of course refers to “six” in Greek, but the meaning is the very opposite: unique one-ness.

homologation: Greek root is homologeo, “to agree.” Therefore the word carries the meaning of accreditation or proof or qualification.

hypostasis: From the Greek hypo, “under,” a word that means “that which is underneath,” therefore its substance. The plural is hypostases.

ipseity: A word meaning “self” or “selfhood” using the Latin ipse for self. The reference is often to divine ipseity, or selfness, presumably a way of pointing to “self” writ super large. The word’s root is used in the phrase ipse dixit, attributed to Cicero (106-43 BC), who was castigating appeals to personal authority. The phrase means “he said it himself.” The origin of that was the Greek autos ephā, meaning the same thing, used as “authority” by students of Pythagoras. 

philoxenia: The easiest way to parse this word is by comparing it to its opposite, xenophobia. The last is “fear of strangers, foreigners”; the word here is “love of strangers, foreigners.”

soteriology: From Green soteria, “salvation, preservation.” Also used as soteriological.

syzygy: From Greek syzygia meaning “a union of two, a pairing, yoking, conjunction.” Implied is twinning—and in mystical literature referring to a “heavenly twin” corresponding to the earthly soul. This then widens and thins even to include the concept of the guardian angel.

thaumaturgy: Greek thauma for “wonder, miracle” and ergon for “work”. Miracle-working.

theogony: From the Greek theos and agonia, “struggle, suffering.” God’s sufferings.

theosophy: Greek, theos and sophos, “wise, learned.” Knowledge of God.

The curious effect of using principally Greek words in scholarly discussions of mysticism is to cause a veiling the subject behind a kind of sacred language. Putting these concepts in plain English exposes the scholar to dismissal or attack because the presentation would then have a strongly fundamentalist sound.