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).