Borderzone

The Serious Question

2012-02-09T09:32:00.000-05:00

The serious question is why we are here. Tothink that some agency of transcendent power put us here seems reasonable—reasonablesimply because we are incapable, even with our current vast knowledge, ofproducing living bodies as intricate as ours—never mind producing all the rest—frombacteria to rain forests. The modern explanation—which amounts to saying thatthe pure, chance-driven collocation of the right atoms produced life (echoing BertrandRussell)—is just a very elaborate punt of desperation. That desperation,however, is understandable. It is indeed problematical to imagine that natureis the deliberate creation of a Being of Divine Perfection. My own convictionis that God would not have need to fashion fantastically complex machines inorder to make living creatures; God would simply say “Be!”—and we would be there. My conviction, further, isthat that’s how it happened. But the beings thus made were souls; and they aresimple, in the Platonic sense; they don’t haveparts; they don’t corrupt. Complex bodies, metabolism, ecosystems, and so on—that’ssome kind of second order creation the evident purpose of which is—whatexactly? My own conviction is that it is an adaptation to some kind of challengingevent, usually dubbed The Fall. That which we call “life” was created by thedivine “Be!” It’s not the artful churn of chemicals that we call bodies. Weneed bodies for some purpose other thanto live; they’re probably vehicles we gradually fashioned after sinking intodepths we should have avoided. That work happened so long ago we’ve altogetherforgotten how we managed it; or it was done by souls of much higheraccomplishment than ours—but well below the Divine; the Divine does not needengineering; maybe the angelic levels thought they’d throw us a rope by meansof which to climb out of the pit. Never a dull moment in this life—not even asthe departure draws near. This by way of formulating some questions I plan to askwhen I’ve passed the border.

The Two Mentalities

2012-02-07T11:50:00.000-05:00

I was blessed early on by stumbling across excellent guideswho helped me orient myself. One of these was Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968), aRussian sociologist who later became a U.S. citizen. His defining work wasSocial & Cultural Dynamics in 4 volumes, but a single-volume abridgement is also available. Sorokin proposed two fundamental human mentalities,and he summarizes them as follows:

One extreme is a mentality for which reality is that whichcan be perceived by the organs of the sense; it does not see anything beyondthe sensate being of the milieu (cosmic and social). Those who posses this sortof mentality try to adapt themselves to those conditions which appear to thesense organs, or more exactly to the exterior receptors of the nervous system.On the other extreme are persons who perceive and apprehend the same sensatephenomena in a very different way. For them they are mere appearance, a dream,or an illusion. True reality is not to be found here; it is something beyond,hidden by the appearance, different from this material and sensate veil whichconceals it. Such persons do not try to adapt themselves to what now seemssuperficial, illusory, unreal. They strive to adapt themselves to the truereality which is beyond appearances. [Pitirim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (abridged), p. 25]

The first mentality Sorokin calls sensate, the otherideational. He rightly asserts that the pure type probably does not exist, buthe asserts that in most people one or the other will be predominant. He thenproceeds to build a cyclic history from this in which Ideational eras arefollowed by Sensate eras, and in between will come a brief period where the twoblend, of which an example is the Renaissance. Good enough, you might say, forsociological work. At the same time my own life’s experience (75 and stillcounting) totally confirms this classification.

Elaborating on this very basic classification (which bringsto mind the introverted/extroverted pairing), Sorokin characterizes theideational mentality by using negations. Such people are trying to negate theworld—while the sensate embrace it.

My own experience suggests a more complex explanation. Thereal difference between these two extremes is actually a greater openness, in those labeled ideational,to the spiritual, intellectual, and subtle aspects of reality—which they feelto be higher. It’s not that they arenegative toward the world. It is that they are much more positively drawntoward the higher—not because of virtue but because they sense it. Sorry about that word. But to the inwardly-oriented,intuition is just as keen a perception as the sensory. And it’s not as if thoselabeled sensate lack all awareness of the higher currents; they have them too.But they don’t perceive them quite so intensely and are therefore inclined, allthings equal, to ignore them.

Vast domains of human conflict exist because thesefundamental differences are not sharply and effectively understood by eitherside. They are therefore conflicts between those who see colors and those who’recolorblind. We cannot overcome a condition like colorblindness by logicaldiscourse. Nor can the colorblind suddenly begin to see colors because theyengage in acts of faith. Faith requires more than will. It requires cultivationof the intuitive nature enough so that it will yield an inner sensation of thetruth of it; once that is present, faith is easy—indeed unavoidable. The humancondition is very powerfully shaped by gifts.To see beyond the borderzone, indeed even to see it as existent, you have to see. And that power is not somethingthat can be manufactured. We’re born with it. Conversely, those who aresensitive can also learn to act as if they do not really see—in order to conformat least behaviorally with the majority of the blind—but that’s just anadaptation. They still see, whether they like it or not.

The View from the Body

2012-01-25T08:25:00.001-05:00

Dramatic dreams of public transformation, of railway stations, dreams of being lost in cityscapes, dreams of hospitals.... In my case such dreams always mean the body, more precisely being “lost” in the body. When I dream of hospitals, these are the enormous institutions I remember from my Army days: unending corridors. My consciousness at such times appears at the right scale: the body is a vast domain and I’m a mere individual. But the dream-scale is probably not really exaggerated enough. The consciousness seems to me the size of the point as described in Euclid: it has no dimension at all, it has no size, but to make me see anything at all, the dream provides the narrative of little man in the big world. Such dreams wake me up; in them I’m always headed for some destination I perceive vaguely by general direction; or there is a gargantuan task to be accomplished but always with a pressing deadline. And in nine cases out of ten my own absorption in the task keeps me dreaming whereas the point is to awaken; hence problems arise. The environment begins to look more dangerous, desolate, disorderly—or if I am engaged in an enterprise, things start going wrong, then become worse, and at some point it’s actually too much—and I wake up just to escape all this.

Such dreams are invariably very vivid, the emotions very strong; it takes a while to shake it all off and to let the hormones used to rouse me be absorbed. So I’m still mulling the “lost” feeling or its equivalent, the great melt-down of the Important Project, during breakfast, not quite able to concentrate on the equally vivid images of social meltdown presented to me in the New York Times.

For quite a while now the explanatory narrative that jells out of all this is that awakening from genuinely deep sleep is a kind of return from another dimension. But it is a reluctant return. I really want to stay asleep a little longer. But that’s not what I’m meant to do. If the wondrous scenes do not awaken me with their delight, the dream begins to ratchet up the stimulus by turning that world into a much more frightening display. At last it’s done. I open my eyes. But then I have to drag the emotions, which adhere to the hormonal releases, along with the old body out of bed and down, groping for the light switches as I arrive.

Deepsea Diving

2012-01-19T11:49:00.003-05:00

A neutral sort of way to understand “The Fall,” thus by a physical analogy, is to think of a radical change in environments. For human beings life at great depths in the ocean is not a natural way to live, to be. When we venture to such places, we need a supply of air and some protection against low temperatures and pressures. The world down there is deficient in the oxygen we need. The diving suit is an additional something that we require—and when we once more reach our proper environment, we take it off so that we can move more freely again, take deep breaths of the plentiful air, and enjoy the light of the sun.

One way to picture The Fall is by analogy. The realm where we rightfully belong may be pictured, walking with Theosophy for a moment, as a subtle world where we have subtle bodies—a world were those subtle bodies are nourished by energies of a kind not even detectable by science, a world where our light—indeed all radiations of the electromagnetic spectrum, the most subtle phenomena we know—would be considered coarse.

Now let us picture a very large community of that subtle realm either voluntarily or involuntarily falling into the coarse dimension of what we call materiality—where the electromagnetic, the most subtle there, is already of such density that it significantly interferes with the people’s proper functioning—as deep water interferes with ours. Suppose that they, deprived of the subtle ethers, can’t even properly remember what happened, cannot orient, get lost in the flux of matter, and even have major problems communicating one with the other.

Unlike us they do not suffocate in the material flux. They’re immortal, actually. They retain their subtle bodies but these lack the necessary force to influence the vast coarseness of matter much at all. But they find ways of adapting—although it takes millions of years. They begin to build themselves some diving suits beginning at the atomic level, where they are able to nudge the atoms this way and that. These suits—we call them bodies—gather and concentrate coarse energies—and they discover that these energies also carry residuals, to be sure, but still some real traces of the subtle ethers they once “breathed” as it were to energize their subtle bodies and used in other ways to maintain their memories and to communicate one with the other. This effort to make sense of The Fall, indeed to cope with it, becomes Job 1. And it grows in extent until, today, we call it life on earth. The object of that enterprise becomes—although vast numbers, having experienced confusion for so long, cannot all unambiguously grasp it—is to get back to the subtle world by gathering up enough of that subtle ether, call it grace, to make the trip back again.

Could be turned into a rather exciting TV series, actually—although, in season two or three, I’m fairly sure, the original theme will have been lost. But these higher beings, although greatly challenged by the environment, and vaguely remembering that they might have been guilty of some kind of disobedience, recklessness, or foolish curiosity are still immortal beings. And despite many failures along the way, still destined ultimately to succeed.

Night Journey to Randomland

2012-01-08T08:09:00.003-05:00

Honest reflection reveals that our lives are entanglements with chaos. A positive spin might say that lives are a kind of tourism, like a visit to Disneyland, but life on earth is much more like a visit to Randomland.

What happens is that we are born and then we cope, more or less successfully, until the trip is finally over. That short word, cope, has a lot of heft, of course. It summarizes, using a mere four letters, what amounts to an amalgam: a mishmash of reflexive and of thoughtful actions, of lucky choices and of grievous error, the embrace of impulses and the reluctant resistance of others. Viewed in retrospect, in detail, honestly, that coping isn’t actually pretty at all. But as we have gifts for coping so also we are talented biographers. We shape and ornament the story of our life so that it seem to make a lot more sense than it actually does. We “neglect” our errors and “highlight” the positive. The stories that emerge are, largely, tales of heroism. They are nicely understated—indeed sometimes they are understated so that they sound understated, but the heroism shines right through.

The chaos is most to the fore in those years from early teens to early adulthood. Most of us are lucky. We had good parent who steered our childhood through safe channels—but there are many who’re not so lucky. By early adulthood most of us have formed useful habits; these then more or less guide us—except for those eruptions that later we view as temporary insanities.

I’ve marveled at people who appear to have conventional lives—until, with growing wisdom, I’ve realized that even the most ordered, conventional, successful, and respectable careers are mere appearance—if only we knew the details. The random is hidden in these lives as well.

Although the experience is humbling, sobering, sometimes it’s useful to look at that biography of ours through a critical lens. Sometimes it happens when we awaken at three in the morning and can’t immediately go back to sleep again. And sometimes, thankfully rarely, panoramas of the past then open that at least hint at what might happen after we pass over the borders of the zone from Randomland to Otherland and undergo what people who have experienced them call a “life review.”

Sacred and Profane

2012-01-01T12:14:00.001-05:00

New Year’s celebrations bring to mind for me the benefits bestowed by our humble status as a planet circling the sun in an imperfect circle, an ellipse, and at a tilt yet, thus giving us distinct seasons. To avoid the horrors of the Void (see last post), we have the blessings of a place—a certain orbit of the solar system—and the equal boon of a recurring time. The universe appears eternal and limitless, nobody has seen its edge, but we’re all right. We’ve got the minimum orientation we need to maintain our sanity.

To live in eternity, it is nice to have clear markers of the here and now. If we wander away from Here, it is good to know that we can return. And if we can pin a name to the Now we can also return to it. It’s Christmas time again. It’s New Year’s day. These arrangements defeat the horror of eternity; there are some for whom the mere conscious contemplation of it produces a kind of mental nausea. With our markers nicely in place, eternity ends at right regular intervals and we get a brand new beginning. Here it is. A brand new year.

This need to orient, to place, to mark the time—and to renew it—appears to be innately present in us. Emmanuel Kant wisely concluded that space and time are innate intuitive characteristics of our minds—created, as it were, to make sense of the experienced flux but not objectively real. Well, fine. They’re objectively real if we are. But then it occurs to me that dividing space into the here and time into the now—and regularly annihilating eternity by restarting it again—are also innate tendencies. And the oldest and most traditional views of humanity also project what we experience ordinarily into the transcendental realm. A good exposition of this subject is presented in Mircea Eliade’s work, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. This view asserts that as below, so above. It echoes the views of the oldest versions of Zoroastrian philosophy (and Zoroastrianism is most likely the oldest higher religion we know of) that all things here have their counterparts in the transcendental dimension. Thus earthly or profane space and time have their counterpart in sacred space and time. And the rounds of duration and renewal taking place there take place here because they take place there. Interesting view—long predating Plato’s notions of eternal forms. But, as we say, what goes around comes around.

Happy New Year!

Avoid the Void

2011-12-31T10:27:00.000-05:00

Souls plunge into the Void, but the face that the Void reveals is an enormous confusion: it is an ever-changing flux of constant change—and its extent seems limitless. Making sense of this cosmic storm eventually produces an enclosure. At first it’s nothing more than an enclosing wall—something to keep the chaos out. Let us call this thing a cell, a world within the world. Mind you, it’s a very tough assignment. The wall itself is made of bits and pieces of the confusion—and only after the nature and behavior of each bit is minimally understood can we, the souls, link them together to make that wall. It gives us a momentary sense of place and of control. The wall’s no sooner made than it starts making trouble. It won’t stay in place; it comes apart. It must be constantly renewed. We must fashion better tools to capture and align the few bits and pieces we’d managed to understand. The wall is all.

Now mind you that plunge into the Void was probably something typically human, some kind of reckless self-assertion. We had probably been told that the Void is something to avoid. But we plunged in anyway and discovered the harsher version of that initial, gentle teaching. The harsh one says, Pay me now or pay me later. The descent did not elevate us, as we thought it would. It made us do tedious work. Finds those bits. Coax them together. Build that wall so that we can, if possible, collect our wits enough to look around.

Thus I imagine the origins of chemical civilization which, these days, we refer to as life. The cell is the first attempt to separate ourselves from the flux. Instead of exalting us, it drove us to near despair. Making that first habitation practical and self-sustaining took us, like, forever. And after we had done that job, we could still not see much of anything. So the labors continued, and they continue still.

The odd thing about that Void, of course, is that while ever more of it can be coaxed to reveal itself, after each vast billion-year step, we are still caught in chaos, as it were. We’ve made lots of tools since our cell days. Lots. And now our satellite-born telescopes provide us visions of the Void so massively thick with galaxies and nebulae that dizziness makes us reach for the nearest chair or desk (yet other tools) to hold us steady. Meanwhile we, ourselves, have formed, by our billions-great multitudes, yet another smaller kind of void called collective humanity—which it takes a lifetime vaguely to understand. Yes, we’ve built many other walls since then; call them ideologies, religions, philosophies, and such. They too keep coming apart and letting the original harsh Void come in again as doubts and upheavals, bloodshed and the rest.

Boy oh boy. The labor’s never done. Won’t be done until, at last, we find the wormhole by means of which we can wiggle out of here.

Gnosis Writ Small

2011-12-26T23:13:00.000-05:00

Once I became genuinely persuaded that I was neither my body nor that my inner self is a product of a physical process, a radical change in attitude set in. This happened fairly late in my life—but that’s because it takes a long time really to understand what now seems to me an obvious but still very strange fact. Once the real gnosis takes hold, one realizes that something else must explain embodiment, something other than having been created at conception or being some spark that fell into the void. I for one have difficulty seeing this condition as part of a plan, call it divine. The artificiality (the engineered character) of life powerfully suggests to me that some sort of collective effort well below the level of divinity is in place to help us make an escape. Embodiment therefore serves a purpose; and since this purpose isn’t really bliss (this life just isn’t blissful), it must be a rescue effort. Several conclusions follow.

One is that simple knowledge of this fact is probably sufficient to escape. Whatever clouded one’s awareness up to that point where it dawned has been wiped away. No one having a strong awareness of another dimensionality, having seen a full lifetime here, can possibly want to “do it again”; and if the escape genuinely works, thus if the gained knowledge is enough to carry one out of the material range, that person won’t come back again—except on purpose, i.e., voluntarily. Another conclusion is that the “collective effort” must work on reasonably large numbers of people else it’s most deficient. We shouldn’t need earth-shattering satoris, and so on. Awareness of the spiritual reality—and that we belong to that—should be sufficient.

Where that dividing line manifests for different people is hard to pinpoint, but clinging to life would be a kind of negative indicator surely. Those who so cling don’t “instinctively” feel the other dimension. Here language is lossy. We use physical concepts, like visceral, in the gut, heartfelt, etc., to mean the hard sort of internal gnosis, and by hard I simply mean genuinely knowing. That gnosis then changes one’s attitude to life. Those still strongly of the world perceive my stance as negativity; in fact it is just realism. Hardline Buddhism is that stance—and it is incompatible with the conventional belief in life-at-any-cost. Those not yet at that stage can’t understand that the negative attitude is basically well-meaning, indeed benevolent. I don’t want to make life harder for people; I don’t want them to suffer. But they are hurting themselves by blindly living their lives in a sleep.

It’s possible, to be sure, to know all this with unquestioned conviction while yet, at the same time, remaining ignorant of the boundaries of our captivity in this realm. It may well be that extreme degrees of spiritualization are required and that, after death, we may find ourselves still stuck in this dreary dimension and, furthermore, even more limited than we were in our bodies. Then, of course, trying again may seem a perfectly sensible course. But my own sense is that once this feeling is present, it is a species of arrival.

Having Trouble Fitting this Odd Piece

2011-12-16T08:59:00.000-05:00

The older I grow, and the more I get used to the strange realities all around me, the more a single aspects of “the puzzle” comes to the fore. It is the purpose of bodies. If we accept the reality of disembodied living beings (angels, immortal souls) then what purpose do bodies serve? No matter how I twist and bend, I cannot but conclude that bodies are machines, ingeniously engineered from chemical components making good use of the elements’ electromechanical properties. I mean all bodies, from single celled living beings on up to the highly complex such as ours.

Materialists have it easy. In their definition life itself is these machines. It is whatever they do, those machines, while they function as they should. A little circular. When they stop functioning, life disappears—because life is that functioning. Now that functioning itself first, eventually always ends. Second, while bodies are still working, their only real purpose is to keep on working. I search in vain to find any meaning in this rigmarole. It has no more meaning then the formation and temporary maintenance of a wave-form in the ocean started by some external cause like wind or gravity. Good explanation for bodies, but meaningless beyond that.

Meaninglessness is not a puzzle. It is just a big fat nothing. The puzzle arises when we contrast bodies and immortality. The problem is as real in the east as in the west. In both realms an immaterial real entity remains after the body gives up. In the east, if its illusions continue, it will be reborn. But it is difficult to imagine that “ignorance” and the resulting “illusion,” supposedly the causes of bodily existence, could have created the intricacies, say, of the blood-clotting cycle when, for hundreds of thousands of years people didn’t even know that it existed, never mind grasping its incredibly complex feedback loops. Maya is not an engineer. In the west we have to believe that an omnipotent creator must have engineered bodies, in the most sophisticated sense by arranging the fundamental aspects of matter at the lowest level, in a less sophisticated sense by imagining divine interventions in created nature. And then, in our case, the immortal soul is super-added, as it were. Why do those immortal souls need a “vehicle” to express themselves, to manifest will, motion, intellect? Why this duality when angels—even fallen angels—don’t need them?

The Gnostics gave all this a negative interpretation—much as the east does (illusion, ignorance). They thought of souls as captured by the Evil One and holding them here in a kind of prison. But, for my part, having at least looked at biology deeply enough to see its magnificent engineering, what I see there is something positive—not always elegant (the blood-clotting cycle is not very sleek)—but not a prison. The body is an enabler.

Our cosmologies are missing something. The piece meant for that hole in the logic doesn’t fit neatly. And using scissors isn’t allowed. Well, comes the time when we shed the chrysalis. Maybe then I’ll get the briefing I’ve not encountered on any lecture agenda as yet.

A Full Sort of Silence

2011-12-05T11:46:00.002-05:00

The contemplative life trends towards silence, but that silence isn’t empty. It is full. The analytical approach to anything is to take it apart. But if it can be—taken apart—then it isn’t what we’re seeking, therefore the “Not this, not this” of Hindu religion. Not that the restless self is satisfied. Somebody, surely, knows something beyond a mindless, “No, no, not that.” On to the next teaching, the next guru. But if the teaching is promising at all, the Neti, neti once again appears in some other guise or formulation. The odd thing is that if you do this long enough, you actually learn something, namely that there is knowledge beyond words and an inner capacity, able to grasp that, gradually increases. Communicating that, using words, is hopeless, but the power can be felt. All religious teachings, all schools, all methods, sects, movements, and the like, therefore, are entirely introductory to something that only raw experience actually teaches. But the labor itself, the endless analysis, examination, weighing this, weighing that—the frustrations of the quest—are enormously useful in teaching the unlearnable, namely that Unity, as such, cannot be analyzed but is the very core of the self.

Why Not Something Meaningful?

2011-11-24T09:38:00.001-05:00

Over years now, time and time again, I’ve noted reading the mediumistic literature that the departed, communicating through a medium, never have anything really meaningful to say. We hear greetings and very short answers—never what, written down, might spell a complex sentence with clauses, never mind anything of paragraph length. Those who seek out mediums, of course, are people who want contact with those they’ve loved and lost, and they appear satisfied. They recognize voices or intonations. But if I were attending a séance (never have), I’d want to know what is over there, and I’d be wanting to hear something novel, anything novel at all.

Now this recurred to me because fellow-blogger, The Zennist, put up a pointer the other day to a film concerning the Scole Experiment (link), a 1990s account of various experiences of contact with the beyond. I watched a bit of that film and, doing so, and the thought came once again. One-word answers to questions. The séances are well-enough recorded so that one almost hears the strain and the effort in the voices from beyond that answer the questions. After I stopped the film, an association sprang up in my mind. These conversations sounded a lot like dialogs between two people one of whom does not speak the language very well. I’ve had that experience three times in my life—learning German, French, and English. You understand the question—because understanding comes before speech—but you struggle mightily to answer, because you lack the words.

Now it occurred to me that in spiritualistic encounters some analog to language might be at work. The spirit is striving to articulate speech either by using the medium’s vocal apparatus or trying to cause air to vibrate in imitation of spoken sound. This may be extraordinarily difficult for a person no longer directly linked to a physical body. Thus what does come out is the absolute minimum. Quite a few near-death experience (NDE) reports contain descriptions of attempts by those having NDEs to communicate—by touch or voice—with those they see around them, usually in a hospital setting. They absolutely fail. Not surprisingly, therefore, those who try to contact the dead reduce physical stimuli to a minimum—dark rooms, silence, concentration, etc. The skeptics interpret this as deliberate attempts to set up deceptions; indeed such conditions favor magicians and tricksters too; but they may be the minimum conditions for making any effective contact—not least the presence of a person who is already sensitive.

The difficulties involved, and the fact that the best that spirits can do is convey a small emotion and an indication that they are still there, convinced me long ago that the mediumistic enterprise is a fringe activity—and probably on both sides. As proof of the beyond these arcane sessions will never be persuasive for unbelievers. Systematic thought about our human condition will produce the right answer; and data on NDEs, if more data are needed, provide much better ancillary proof.

Transvaluation of All Values

2011-11-12T12:07:00.002-05:00

Old Friedrich had it right, of course, but he gave it the wrong slant. The Friedrich I have in mind is Nietzsche. He coined this concept as die Umwertung aller Werte. He referred to religion in the broad sense and to Christianity specifically. He thought that Christianity was hostile to life, elevated the weak when, instead, we should admire the strong, worshipped the weak when we ought to worship, instead, the vital and energetic instead, etc. But Nietzsche was certainly a deep and profound thinker all the same, and if his conceptualization is distilled down from the big messy blog in which he managed to perceive it, it points at a great truth. In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience William James echoed this conceptualization somewhat, although much more mildly, when he contrasted sick-minded and healthy-minded individuals. They were contemporaries, needless to say, James born in 1842, Nietzsche in 1884, and such ideas were, alas, “in the air.” But it is possible to turn this insight upside-down in turn and then derive the genuine truth within it. Our times have happily (or unhappily) evolved a great deal since. We’ve come to know what the healthy-minded are capable of. Both died well before such plagues as communism, Nazism, and commercialism took hold, James in 1910, Nietzsche in 1900.

Curious this. It was “in the air,” the future. Nietzsche interpreted that strange emanation, either from the future or rising like a nasty vapor from his present, in a negative way and embraced primitivism. James felt the same thing but ended by up-holding the inherent value of those who were “soul-sick” and moved by a deep religious impulse. Freud and Jung, who followed them in 1856 and 1875 respectively, also went in different directions sensing the same air. Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion, meaning religion. Jung’s work anchored a broad movement back to religion by the West’s intellectual fellahin.

If we take values to represent the high—whatever meaning we want to give it—it is certainly true that the more stimulus we feel and the more intense it is, the lower we are in the scheme of nature. Pleasure is an intermediate here. The real stimulus is actually pain. And as in the physical, so also in other realms. I once read the comment in one of Idries Shah’s book, he was a Sufi teacher, that the most visible are of the lowest rank. That startled me at first back then, but I’ve come to see its truth. The most visible have power—and we worship power. Another tale that sticks in mind, in this context, I encountered in C.G. Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Here it is, very brief:

There is a fine old story about a student who came to a rabbi and said, “In the olden days there were men who saw the face of God. Why don’t they any more?” The rabbi replied, “Because nowadays no one can stoop so low.” [C.G. Jung]

A variant of “visibility” is that celebrity, when nothing else is present, is almost pure vacuity. Noise is low, silence is high. Motion distracts; indeed when it intensifies, it confuses the mind; therefore advertisers treasure nano-second flickers on the screen to cloud the judgment. The with-it are without it. Solitude is beatitude—except in an age of social networking.

Much has changed since Nietzsche wished to transvalue values and thus get rid of the last traces of Christian culture that still lingered in the late nineteenth century. Well, be careful what you wish for. The paradox is that to wish for nothing might get you everything. But it will be boring in the meantime, and there is no put-down in this day and age as potent as to call something B‑O‑R‑I‑N‑G…

To Be a Tree?

2011-11-03T08:46:00.003-04:00

It may well be, if we but knew it, that the Project of Life in this realm provides innumerable avenues for spirits to escape the abyss that managed to suck them under. That’s at least a plausible hypothesis. Embodied experience may well be the Great Escape—and who’s to say that grasses, plants, trees, and animals are all a huge waste and only we, humans, merit salvation. One of the truly odd aspects of consciousness is that we can only ever experience one being from within—and we can touch others only, as it were, by hints and emanations. An answering smile, a look in the eyes of the other, a feeling of agreement sometimes signal that what I feel is also shared. And sometimes on long walks I get the most damnable feeling of communicating with the trees—and that they communicate with one another too. And that there’s no waste out there at all—and the dog has feelings, thoughts, and dreams. We cannot know what it is to be a tree, but sharing life with them at least hints that they may have their own way—and that it is at least as meaningful as ours.

The Trinitarian Conundrum

2011-10-31T11:43:00.001-04:00

You might say that life is not predominantly—or even superficially—a logical endeavor. Life transcends logic, and therefore religion does too. At the practical level logic does its manual labor, but the higher reaches are intuitive. Christianity illustrates this. It is the only monotheistic religion which features a triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Belief in these three persons, who are yet a single God, is the mark of all those who subscribe to the Apostles’ Creed. The scriptural roots of this appear in Matthew 28:16-20, the concluding verses of that gospel. The resurrected Jesus appears to his followers on a mountain in Galilee. There Jesus said to them: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” This verse is then formulated, in or around 390 AD into the Apostles’ Creed. In the Latin version, the Son is conceived of the Holy Spirit (conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto)—and since the conception is actually experienced by the Virgin Mary, the obvious reading is that God is most definitely masculine. How else can we read this?

But religions are intuitive structures. Not surprisingly, therefore—and almost by way of a kind of Law of Compensation—the Our Lady becomes a very major symbolical figure, at least in Catholicism. Her statues and images are everywhere—and rare the office of Jesuit professors I used to visit in college where a prominent painting or statue of Mary was not the distinctive art in those offices. Indeed I remember reading, with approval of course, Robert Graves opining that the enduring quality of Catholicism as a religion, and (he might have added) its continuing strong attraction of converts everywhere, is due to a cultural correction introduced into the extraordinarily masculine theology by popular intuition. Once you open up that indivisible number, One, and thus (however explained, however theologized away) multiple persons appear—which, of course, happens in every religion sooner or later, if the real essence of it is strong—the numbers will multiply and the Feminine will make its appearance.

Catholicism makes a kind of conceptual but in practice meaningless distinction between veneration and worship. It is permissible to venerate the Virgin Mary but not to worship her. Doing that would be Mariolatry (rhymes with idolatry), a word of Protestant coinage dating to the eighteenth century.

Religions have a life of their own—and the cultural realities of it have more weight than the theological skeletons that are largely always out of sight. Thus also Buddhism evolved from a kind of very focused, ascetic elite pursuit into the Mahayana, with far more members than any other of its endlessly growing strands. But women in Buddhism are still written in very small letters. How many people know, for example, that the Buddha had been married? Or what Mrs. Gautama’s name had been? Well, for the record, she was the Princess Yahodharā. And she and the Buddha had had a boy called Rāhula. Learn something new every day.

Eye in the Jungle

2011-10-30T10:06:00.007-04:00

There is reality and then the cycling of mentation. The latter is largely a physical phenomenon. It is influenced by weather. We tend to be more cheery on a sunny day; our moods also reflect the overcast. The environment closest to us is that of our body, although we think of “the world” as starting beyond our skin. Not so. By far the most influential in shaping our mental states is that tiny—and I do mean tiny—portion of the world we carry about with us. We project the weather of this personal cosmos and then perceive that as the state of society, the state of the world.

It is possible to detach enough so that the difference—between ourselves and all else physical—turns visible. But it’s not habitual. The curious thing is that all habituation is of the physical variety whereas naked awareness always requires an act of the will. We can habituate ourselves to repeat actions or routines that wake us up, but, amusingly, no sooner are they really habits than they stop being effective. It’s very tough being real, easier to flow. And as we do, we like to say, It’s a jungle out there.

“Illusion” as Interpretation

2011-10-26T09:48:00.002-04:00

A recent earlier post here (“Whose Illusion?”) touches on this subject, and more is provided here. To put it as succinctly as possible, it is unreasonable to speak of the world as illusion once you understand the world in some in detail. The assertion that it is, which we encounter in Brahmanism and in Buddhism, arises not from reasoning but from an overwhelming feeling. The root of that feeling is the unitive experience—as we call it in the West. We call it that because it is taken to be unity with God (or the Cosmos) reached in ecstatic states. That sense of unity is also present in the Vedantic saying Thou Art That, meaning that Atman is Brahman (soul is God). Different Vedantic schools give this doctrine different interpretations, thus ranging from “soul is a part of” to “soul is.” The sense of unity is also present in the Buddhist Enlightenment but without being called that; but all multiplicity is conquered; absolute liberation characterizes the enlightened state.

The experience certainly produces both a radical devaluation of the world and sometimes an equally radical indifference to it. The world is suddenly seen in a very new perspective. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who spent his life writing the most profound works of theology, had a mystical experience while saying mass late in 1273. He stopped writing. Asked to resume his work, he said: “Everything I have written seems like straw by comparison with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me” (source). He did not resume his work.

D.T. Suzuki, in Essays on Zen Buddhism, First Series, quotes the Buddha saying, p. 137: “These questions are not calculated to profit, they are not concerned with Dharma, they do not redound to the elements of right conduct, nor to detachment, nor to purification from lusts, nor to quietude, nor to tranquillization of heart, nor to real knowledge, nor to Nirvana. Therefore is it that I express no opinion on them.” The questions referred to were: Is the world eternal? Is the world not eternal? Is the world finite? The source given is the Pottapada Sutta (in which a beggar, Pottapada, asks the Buddha questions). That word Dharma is a killer, by the way. It means all sorts of things, including “doctrine.” In this context it is best understood as “the path.”

One of the striking features of the unitive experience is that those who’ve undergone it never say anything concrete, never mind new, about the world. They have a feeling of overwhelming knowledge, but it produces nothing they’re able to articulate. What we get from them is a valuation. That’s plain enough in Aquinas’ statement—as in the Buddha’s. Aquinas now dismisses his own works as more or less worthless—more or less because straw isn’t entirely worthless. The Buddha asserts that answering questions about the nature of the world is irrelevant to the achievement of the experience of nirvana. Valuations.

The most accessible written source about a full-fledged modern unitive experience is Pathways Through To Space (1973) by Franklin Merrell-Wolff (1887-1985). The book is readily available still and makes fascinating reading. Merrell-Wolff then tried to give some explanations in his The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object. That second book, in my opinion, has virtually no content—nor does a later one in which he includes commentary on his second book.

Having looked at such matters for many years now, I’ve gradually come to see the unitive experience minimally as a non-starter for cosmological thought. Those who’ve had it are overwhelmed by knowledge, but it’s content is inaccessible, not least to themselves. Now let’s suppose that it is—and I don’t by any means think that it is—an experience of the Ultimate. But if that is the case, it gives us two polarities and absolutely nothing in between. At one pole is Everything at the other Illusion—or something valued not at all. But how one relates to the other—and why it is that life-forms are so very, very intricately engineered, and ditto the elemental world beneath that engineering—that is never even remotely illuminated by this very energetic experience of enlightenment.

Playing JEOPARDY!

2011-10-23T16:30:00.000-04:00

CONTESTANT: I’ll have to try Enigmas, Alex. For $300.

ALEX TREBEK (selecting, reading card): Enigmas for $300. “When the cold weather comes, the fowl flies up in the trees, while the wild duck goes down into water.”

CONTESTANT (ringing bell): What is Zen?

Dimensionally Speaking

2011-10-22T13:20:00.000-04:00

In mystical context as well as in science fiction, people talk about “other dimensions” frequently and casually—as if that word, dimension, had some kind of concrete reference. Use of that word in a way illustrates how concepts drift. It comes from the Latin dimetri, meaning “to measure out”—and it was used, still is, to indicate measurement. What are the dimensions of this room? Well, they so many feet long, wide, and the ceiling is so-and-so-many feet high. The drift began, according to my source (Online Etymology Dictionary, of course), in 1929. It started to be used to mean “any component of a situation,” thus some aspect of a situation that might be judged separately, on its own merits—as opposed to other aspects. What are the political dimensions of that? Thus, what are those aspects or relationships of the subject under scrutiny.

Now we say that space has three dimensions—but if we think in measurements, that’s not really true. I can measure a diagonal distance as well, thus from the left-hand upper corner at the ceiling to the right-hand bottom corner on the floor. That particular measurement (dimension) is a kind of mixture of the three. But that number, three, is conventionally accepted (except by people who play with fractals). And the playful mind then imagines that there might well be a fourth space dimension—and if a fourth then why not many more? For that to be real, the fourth would have to be at right angles to all three of the usual kind. Now our brain will balk. “Enough already,” it will say. “Can’t picture that. Cannot measure that. And if I can’t measure it, it’s not a dimension.” But people are more than their brains. They can’t imagine it, but they can use a symbol for representing it. And that symbol will work just fine in various equations—and hence we have whole fields of mathematical physics in which such phrases as N-dimensions will be tossed about quite lightly—although the few remaining Large Hadron Colliders, like the brain, simply refuse to bring us any physical proof of such dimensions.

Why mystical scribblers have learned to love the word is quite understandable. They deal with very-tough-to-explain experiences and want to find a place for them—one dimension over as it were. Now as for science fiction writers, they’re up against it too. The nearest star to us is 4 light years away. Light travels at the rate of 671 million miles per hour. Using the highest speed achieved by a manned rocket, Apollo 10, we can just about approach 25,000 mph. But that speed is less than one percent of the speed of light (0.004% to be exact). SF writers therefore must travel a great deal faster than light—but Einstein stands at that gate holding a flaming sword. SF therefore has recourse to the speculations of mathematical physics, produces worm holes that get around the problem, and suddenly the star ships are all over the galaxy in the flash of an eye, and only the galactic rim is a little more distant and takes a few days…

While we’re waxing dimensionally, I must mention Time as a dimension. But is it really? The neat thing about the Familiar Three is that we are free to move in them—now to this side, now to the other. Up then down. We can go back and we can go forth. But time presents a problem. We can only go in one direction. That seems to me a disqualifier. The way Time manages to get a foothold in the respectable society of dimensions is by transforming itself into a symbol, usually rendered as t. Once a symbol it can enter the sacred precincts (or are they dimensions) of abstract thought, marry space to become spacetime, and coyly hint that even time travel is possible if only we could harness the energy of a quasar to power our little time machine.

Why The Reverent Music?

2011-10-20T08:28:00.003-04:00

I watched a two-hour presentation of Nova’s Finding Life Beyond Earth on PBS. It’s easy to summarize the substance. What we need for life is oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon, liquid water, and a source of heat. Voila! Nova tries to answer the question of whether or not we are alone. Interesting question. It does so by looking at photographs of planets and moons in the solar system searching for water, the right elements, and volcanoes. Now there is nothing particularly new or surprising here. It is the consensus of our times that life is just a natural form of matter that springs forth as soon as the appropriate conditions for it are present. So why use majestic, reverent, grandiose, exalted music when scouring the planets for these grubby particulars?

Although the Nova series began in 1974, I first consciously noticed reverent music and a materialistic thematic fused in a film when I watched Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, created by Carl Sagan in 1980. A thought then arose—and it keeps recurring every time this fusion reappears. The thought was: “Aha! Atheism as religion!” Behind that was the observation that Sagan attempted to reinforce emotions of exaltation by playing that swelling music while showing grand pictures—while his intellectual message was that there’s nothing beyond these wastes of gas and burning orbs and galaxies piled upon galaxies as far as telescopes could see. He was thus hijacking an ancient human reaction—that the wonders of nature are the works of God.

Mind you, life may have originated out there somewhere. Scientists whose views I value have asserted such things. One is Fred Hoyle (1915-2001). He was a pioneer theorist on the formation of elements inside stars (stellar nucleosynthesis) and a steady-state cosmologist. He thought that life came from outer space. In a lecture titled, Evolution from Space, given at the Royal Institute in London in 1982, he said:

If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of in pondering this issue over quite a long time seems to me to have anything like as high a possibility of being true.

My own entirely unscientific notions don’t require comet-borne sperm and viruses, but I agree with Hoyle on insisting on design—and disagree with modernity that it arises from a handful of elements, water, and heat by lucky accident. And we’re not alone. But that’s not the reason why.

Playing with Modern Dualities

2011-10-18T12:30:00.001-04:00

A modern version of Aristotle’s elegant concept (that substance is a duality of matter and of form) is David Bohm’s suggestion of two orders in reality. One he calls the conditioned, the other the unconditioned order. They suggest something analogous. The conditioned order for Bohm is matter, in that it follows laws. He proposed the unconditioned kind in order to explain intelligence; he found it impossible to derive it from the material, the conditioned order. Intelligence, as I conceive of it at least, is not something self-existent. It is the characteristic of an agent. Therefore his two orders might be named Matter and Mind.

In Aristotle (as best as I can gather), what we call real is substantial. Therefore neither matter nor form can exist alone. It is their fusion that makes reality. Hence unformed matter and immaterial form both produce categories the ontological status of which is rather fuzzy. It is potential—which gives time itself a strange sort of role. In Bohm, at least conceptually, a hierarchy is suggested. The Conditioned Order, just viewed linguistically, demands a conditioner—whereas the Unconditioned Order can be imagined standing alone.

The mere existence of two orders, one hierarchically beneath the next, suggests that the lower of the two has some meaningful purpose. What is that purpose? Is it the medium in which the mind can give itself expression?

Now to flesh this out a little. The Ultimate Mind can condition all matter. But we know that other levels of mind exist as well—minimally like ours. And if minds like ours exist, they imply an Ultimate mind. And we also know that lesser minds are capable of arranging matter but unable to alter its ultimate “conditioning.” We also know that matter itself manifests in a continuum—from invisible electromagnetic waves on up to planets and such. And gross, dense matter can and does block the flow of the electromagnetic. We know that. If the power of lesser minds is insufficient to even to “arrange” electromagnetic waves—and here I mean directly, by simply willing—and those minds found themselves (voluntarily or otherwise) in a region where dense matter predominates, wouldn’t those minds have suddenly felt a sudden drastic loss of functionality? They would have found it difficult to give themselves expression using subtle matter (not enough of it around) or to see each other (blocked by coarse energy everywhere). And what if self-expression and relationship, thus interacting with their like—were the sources of their creativity and their exercise of love? Would they have felt lost in space and time—and blind?

Such is the grounding for my concept of chemical civilization. The presumption is that long ago we found ourselves genuinely lost—thus in an environment of coarse material density. Next we discovered that our only power to influence matter in this region was at the subatomic level—but sufficient to begin using local matter to build tiny and then ever greater machines—until we could finally, by means of those machines, see ourselves and begin to arrange the matter of this region of reality.

It’s just a suggestion, of course. But such a line of thought, it seems to me, has explanatory powers much greater than many of our other myths. It suggests that the two, the conditioned and the unconditioned, may very well be everywhere—but happiness demands that the agents at every level must be matched to their environment so that they can create and relate. And when they’re not, “going home” becomes Job One.

Substance-Of-We-Feeling

2011-10-16T11:01:00.002-04:00

We tend to think of Revelation as communication of knowledge, guidance, and of information from the realms beyond the border. That’s also the context in which I’ve written on the subject in multiple posts here (see Categories). That human renditions of revelation might decay over time and need to be renewed seems obvious to me—but such a view tends to be resisted by those who control its dissemination. They’d agree that interpretation may be necessary—but they reserve the right of interpretation to themselves. I’ve never encountered a sharply put interpretation saying that revelation may also be nutrition, indeed necessary spiritual nutrition. These are my two subjects today.

Let me start with the first by focusing on a single word, Grace. The first dictionary definition of that word is “unmerited divine assistance given humans for their regeneration or sanctification.” The first example Merriam-Webster’s online version gives is “She walked across the stage with effortless grace.” The last three examples mention God. One of these is “By the grace of God, no one was seriously hurt,” but you won’t see that in newspapers. They will substitute “fortunately” for the leading phrase. Neither the deeper meanings of the word, nor its role in religious controversy, is present here.

The word does have such meanings in Christianity. There it is a gift of God linked to salvation and said to flow from right deeds and holiness. Luther disputed this by asserting that faith alone saves—and grace is unnecessary. Its meaning therefore as an active, indeed necessary, support, arising from a real and transcendental source has very much thinned out, more or less replaced by modernity’s secular explanation for all mysteries: chance and probability.

Now concerning the subject of nutrition. In her science fiction novel, Shikasta, Doris Lessing tells the story of a galactic empire, but of a different kind. Multiple planetary settlements have taken place over many eons from the star system Canopus, in the constellation of Argos. All kinds of species have been, as it were, planted, and they are evolving. Sustaining their evolution is an energetic emanation called Substance-Of-We-Feeling, abbreviated SOWF. It isn’t necessary for simple survival, but it is what sustains harmonious development. All is well for a long, long time—but then the emissaries from Canopus notice that something very troubling has taken place. An unexpected cosmic realignment causes the flow of SOWF to thin. Another empire, Canopus’ enemy, Puttoria, attempts to exploit this situation. A degenerative disease begins to affect settlements, among them Shikasta (read Earth); it’s not a physical disease; it is the higher levels—spiritual life, community life—that are affected.

The story of Shikasta, of course, merits interpretation as a new or as a renewed revelation—this one emanating from Sufi roots. Doris Lessing was associated with the Sufi teaching projected by Idries Shah from Britain. When I first read Shikasta, I had to smile when I encountered SOWF; to me it was an obvious reference to Sufism; later I discovered that others had had much the same thought. Lessing’s series of novels, collectively known as Canopus in Argos, is the framing of a cosmology in modern terms, thus accessible to a secular and technological age. SOWF functions as Grace—a gift, a source of higher nutrition, regenerative, as Webster’s has it. Lessing’s intent, to be sure, is far from suggesting that God is a distant galactic civilization. The effect of her, alas, very difficult fiction is to make such ideas of a conscious and meaningful cosmic plan—in which, as it were, energetic emanations like Grace play a vital role—visible to modern minds and, when thought about, illuminative of ancient and by now moribund structures of belief we’ve come to dismiss as backward superstitions.

Cosmologies are Optional

2011-10-15T09:33:00.001-04:00

Action is always possible, but understanding rests on knowledge. We act on feelings, but these do not invariably communicate knowledge. We give recurrent feelings names, but the names do not inherently explain the feelings. Let me proceed with an example: hunger. As one venerable Zen statement has it, When hungry, eat. When tired sleep. Hunger produces eating, but it will take many years before we’re old enough even to understand that eating sustains our bodies. And for most of us—unless we look it up—precisely what it is that causes hunger remains a mystery. In effect it has no practical bearing on anything. Most people live and die without understanding anything about hunger beyond the feeling, which produces the action of eating—indeed they live and die without thinking much about all of the many radiations of that simple, daily experience.

So now you’re curious. Well, let me tell you something. Your curiosity will not be satisfied—as your hunger easily is. It’s a long story. In the center of our brain resides the hypothalamus. It is a kind of regulator. It receives input from the nervous system and causes the endocrine system to take various actions. The endocrine system causes glands to release hormones. The liver signals glucose levels to the hypothalamus. When these levels are too low, that organ causes release of hormones that produce the feeling of hunger. There are some twelve such hormones involved, but the most important is one called ghrelin. When hungry, ghrelin levels rise. With food intake, fat cells generate leptin, and their presence inhibits ghrelin’s effectiveness in signaling a state of hunger. These two hormones, therefore rise and fall, one motivating the urge to eat, the other inhibiting it. And the shift from one state to the other is signaled by blood sugar levels examined by the hypothalamus.

But this is not the end of the story. Real understanding requires us to answer why appropriate blood sugar levels should be present. Very long story. Eventually we have to ask: Why are bodies necessary? How did they come about? What is life? Is it prior to or produced by bodies? Are we, who feel the hunger, just another name for a collective of hypothalami, nerves, glands, ghrelins, leptins, glucose, and all the rest? Or are we, who detect the hunger, and act on it—or refrain to maintain slender figures—something separate? And if so, did we originate when semen penetrated ovum? Did we come later? Or did we exist before? In either case, why?

Good heavens. I was thinking of breakfast, and here I am, committing cosmology. But cosmology is optional, isn’t it? It seems to be on another level entirely, in a different category. Action and feeling suffice me if that’s where I want to stay. But what organ, then, makes me long for understanding?

Neti, Neti

2011-10-11T11:01:00.002-04:00

How can a believer “have problems” with the Creation? (Here I have in mind creation in time, not in the sense of the origin of reality.) That’s simple enough to explain. My leanings are in the direction of what is called negative theology, thus one that denies the possibility of knowing anything at all about the Ultimate. The opposite stance is positive theology; it affirms that we can too know something—but that knowledge will come to us through revelation. We’re a late civilization and hence have the luxury of using technical words here. The two are called apophatic and cataphatic theologies, derived from Greek roots apo- meaning “away from” and kata- meaning “down into.” Away from is used here as denial (of any knowledge) and down into as meaning that knowledge comes from above into this created realm. (I pity the old Greeks; they had no “Greek” of their own to signal that their knowledge came from ancient times…)

Every religious tradition has its negative modality; in some it is very strongly to the fore and thus represents the very core of the teaching. Buddhism is a good example. The mystical schools of other traditions tend toward negativity and to the degree they do, they live in tension with their cataphatic orthodoxies. In the Sufi tradition ibn el Arabi’s writings prominently feature wujûd. It’s plain meaning is “being,” but in el Arabi’s writings it is the single reality of God in contrast to which the created world is as nothing—Maya, the Buddhist’s would say. Pure illusion. In the Judaic tradition the kabbalistic tradition’s En Sof is the infinite, unknowable God. Christianity has strains of this negative theology. My Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion only mentions an unknown but famous theologian called Pseudo-Dionysius (fourth century), but Meister Eckhart comes to mind. Taoism seems rooted in negative theology as well. The first lines of the Tao Te Ching assert:

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.

My title here comes from the Hindu tradition, specifically the Upanishads, where a teacher, Yajnavalkya is asked about the nature of God and answers, “Neti, neti,” meaning literally “not this, not this” That phrase later become a chant, a mantra—and I encountered it almost immediately long, long ago when I first looked into the religious life of India. I liked it then—the sheer simplicity of it. Not this, not this.

Pantheism, in a way, is the inversion of that stance. Put into Sanskrit it would be “Sarva, sarva,” all, all. All is God. Interestingly, the apo- and the kata-style approaches tend to converge. When Moses stands before the burning bush, the following exchange takes place (Exodus 3:13-14):

Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

Ibn el Arabi calls this ultimate wujûd, Being. And who can say what that really means?

On Physical Cosmologies

2011-10-09T12:55:00.003-04:00

Back in the 1950s I acquired a five-volume series of essays from Scientific American. One of these was titled The Universe. Part IV of the book carried two essays, one by George Gamow and the other by Fred Hoyle, summarizing, respectively the “Evolutionary Universe,” read Big Bang, and “The Steady-State Universe.” It is revealing that a book from a scientific publisher, issued in 1956, should have given the Steady-State theory equal billing. Since then the Big Bang has come to rule virtually absolutely—so that physicist who challenge it are systematically marginalized.

Despite my frequent references to that theory on this blog, I was already dubious about it in the 1950s, and the more I learned about the subject in detail, the more so. Does that sound odd coming from a person who has a pronounced belief in the transcending? Doesn’t the Big Bang seemingly offer scientific proof for Creation? My personal starting point, however, isn’t science (never mind scientific orthodoxy) but experience—the experience of the self. The arbitrary nature of the Big Bang troubled me from the outset—indeed so does the notion of Creation. I became somewhat reconciled to the theory thanks to David Bohm’s writings. He minimizes the Big Bang and conceives of a much greater Implicate Order of which our universe is but a small “wavelike excitation.”

The Big Bang theory rests on a single observation by Edwin Hubble, namely that light from distant galaxies is shifted to the red of the spectrum. When a stellar or galactic body is moving toward us, the light is blue-shifted; when moving away from us, red-shifted. In our own neighborhood, the Andromeda galaxy is moving towards us at a speed somewhere between 62 and 87 miles per second. It is a blue-shifted galaxy. Hubble interpreted his data as an instance of the Doppler effect, dating to 1842. It says that the wavelength of anything wavy (sound, light) is enlarged (red) or minimized (blue) by the motion of the emitter. Red means moving away from, blue moving toward us. He concluded, therefore, that the universe was expanding. The Big Bang itself, therefore, is an inference. If the universe is expanding over time, at one time it was smaller. Tracing that motion back, Hubble put its age at 2 billion, Gamow in the 1950s at 5 billion, and today it is nearly 14 billion years. With every passing year the universe gets older—because observations discover yet older galaxies based on the red-shift measurement.

The assumption that red-shift measures taken from cosmic objects represented their movement was so well-established an idea in the 1950s that Fred Hoyle himself, steady-stater although he was, felt obliged to propose that new matter was continuously being created all over the universe. This new addition of matter then accounted for the observed expansion. To be sure, if the universe is not expanding, indeed is eternal and has no special space containing it, thus space produced by matter, as modern theory asserts, Hoyle need not have bothered.

The modern theory that space and time are both functions of matter has always bothered me as well. Something inside the self, which is where I begin, resists the notion of a universe curved in upon itself. So what is outside that curvature? But this view has also produced the very odd notion that the galaxies Hubble saw moving, thus causing the Doppler effect, weren’t really moving at all. Instead, space was expanding between them. But if space is expanding, why is Andromeda rushing toward us? The hapless explanation for this—and for clearly observable galactic collisions—is that “local” clusters cohere by gravity, and space only expands between galactic clusters. So space, supposedly, knows where it may—and where it may not—expand. If instead we opt for another view, namely that the galaxies are really moving, impelled by dark energy, then there is something wrong with our spacetime concepts.

Back about a decade-plus ago, in the course of writing a book, I looked into the Big Bang theory much more intensely than I had done before. In the course of that work I discovered one of the marginalized groups of astronomers and physicists who have reason to believe that the red-shift of light may not always and invariably—particularly at cosmic scales—signal movement at all. The basic discoveries of this were based on astronomical observations of quasars, quasi-stellar objects. The responsible party was Halton Arp (1927-). He observed quasars physically linked to galaxies. If red-shift measures movement, the galaxies are much closer to us and the quasars very far away. Yet they are directly and visibly linked to the galaxies. Indeed, most quasar are associated with galaxies and some have theorized that galaxies produce them in their spiral arms. They are part of the local system, but based on Hubble-style interpretation of their red-shifts, they appear to be vastly more distant. The illustration, below, shows two linked galaxies and, within the connecting band between them, two quasars. The numbers are the red-shift measurements: the greater the number, the farther away.

This is a big subject, but permit me to summarize. Arp has theorized that the red-shift observed in galaxies and quasars may not be due to movement at all but to an intrinsic and as yet unknown characteristic. The evidence is very strong. The orthodox response to Arp is a story very few people know about. He may well have falsified the Big Bang theory, but it will take yet another generation, maybe several, before this shall be acknowledged.

Needless to say, there is substantial community of scientists who are critics of the Big Bang; they’ve taken on that theory and produced much evidence, and cogent arguments, to show how it fails. But Big Bang has become an orthodoxy now. It has formed its own reservation, as it were, and critics are unwelcome. Another physical cosmology, based on plasma physics, also exists. It is a steady-state theory with substantial observational and experimental work to back it. But this post has gone on too long already.

Let me conclude by pointing to the first in a nine-part video series on YouTube called The Big Bang Never Happened (link). Once you see it, YouTube presents other parts of the series on its menu. If oppressive orthodoxies interest you, if science fascinates you, if cosmology is something you wish to study, this is not a bad place to start. The illustration I am showing is a screen-shot from that video, but taken from Part 3. The major galaxy shown is NGC 7603.

Sovereignty, Attention, Identification

2011-10-07T13:05:00.000-04:00

I use the word “sovereignty” in a special, personal, technical sense to mean being centered, being attentively detached, ready for action, prepared, but above the fray. I’ve mentioned it on this blog before in the context of contemplation (link), saying that successful practice of contemplation produces a “feeling of sovereignty” in me. I’m not troubled by anything. In that state my troubles haven’t magically vanished—but they are spatially below me and cannot reach me.

This feeling is closely linked with attention—and is the very opposite of identification. A good example of identification in its raw but easily detectable form is watching my favorite baseball team, the Tigers, struggling. It’s the bottom of the ninth, the Yankees are at bat. The score is 3 to 2 in our favor. The bases are loaded. Two outs. The count is full, three balls, two strikes. I am a seething mass of the worst possible tensions. Sovereignty? Attention? Neither. I am a total slave of my lower being which is absolutely identified with the outcome of this game. But identification need not take this form. It tends to be our normal state. We’re just going with the flow, as the saying has it. And any little thing, arriving unseen from the edges of awareness—somebody’s statement, the telephone ringing, anything at all—can put me in a rage or a delight. Nobody at home, it turns out. To rise up from this state of waking sleep is, in a way, exactly like waking from a dream. There is a moment’s pause.

Genuine spontaneity—the admired kind, what pleases us when we behold it in the arts or in sports—arises from a fusion of sovereignty, thus presence, and attention—but in the midst of an action. The artist or the athlete is highly trained, disciplined, practiced, and alert. His or her attention is on the job at hand. And all those deliberate actions of training, study, practice, self-control, and so on have prepared the actor to act in a pure unity of intention, skill, and execution when events, unfolding with great rapidity, require instant reaction.

Identification is the ordinary state. Combating its sway is the banal but efficacious way of trying to become human. The spacesuits we now wear in this dimension—with which we are very, very identified—make the continuous achievement of sovereignty virtually impossible. But our ultimate well-being requires that we go there as often as we are lucky enough to remember to do so.

Densities and Subtleties

2011-10-06T12:55:00.001-04:00

In the last post I called our material order dense and others (beyond the Borderzone perhaps) subtle. I was using conventional language quite accessible to those who like to wander in mystical orchards, as it were. This sort of wording became popular in West via Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891), the agent behind the Theosophical Society. Thanks to her prolific writings, for those tired of talking of the soul that mysterious entity came to be changed into the subtle body. Subtle, the word itself, comes from the Latin subtilis, and that word gets its hard meaning from tela, or web, and texere, to weave. Fine, thin, delicate, finely woven.

But let’s suppose that this view of things is parochial, rather than accurate, based as it is on sensory experience. Suppose that our material order is thinned out, rarefied—like high-altitude atmospheres were oxygen is not quite enough to let us breathe. And, by contrast, the so-called immaterial order is where all the density resides—but in an energetic form. Is there some basis for this? Yes.

Our physicists are now reluctantly concluding that 96 percent of the cosmos is made up of dark energy (74%) and dark matter (22%)—and, it seems to me, these two may be the same. Back in 1980 already, in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, David Bohm gave a theoretical grounding for this based on quantum theory. Bohm points out that the smallest possible energy wave present in a vacuum (like space) is 10^-33 cm, but waves down to that very tiny wavelength are present. Anything smaller than that renders concepts like space and time meaningless. He continues:

This [wavelength] is much shorter than anything thus far probed in physical experiments (which have got down to about 10^-17 cm or so). If one computes the amount of energy that would be in one cubic centimeter of space, with this shortest possible wavelength, it turns out to be very far beyond the total energy of all matter in the known universe.

What is implied by this proposal is that what we call empty space contains an immense background of energy, and that matter as we know it is a small, ‘quantized’ wavelike excitation on top of this background, rather like a tiny ripple on a vast sea.… In this connection it may be said that space, which has so much energy, is full rather than empty. The two opposing notions of space as empty and space as full have indeed continually alternated with each other in the development of philosophical and physical ideas. Thus, in Ancient Greece, the School of Parmenides and Zeno held that space is a plenum [fullness]. This view was opposed by Democritus, who was perhaps the first seriously to propose a world view that conceived of space as emptiness (i.e., the void), in which material particles (e.g., atoms) are free to move. Modern science has generally favored this latter atomistic view, and yet, during the nineteenth century, the former view was also seriously entertained, through the hypothesis of an ether that fills all space. Matter, thought of as consisting of special recurrent stable and separable forms in the ether (such as ripples or vortices), would be transmitted through this plenum as if the latter were empty. [p. 190-191]

Such considerations eventually led Bohm to suggests that our cosmos is a limited, unfolded, explicated region within a much greater enfolded, implicated region: Reality.

Applying this to our interests, it suggests that which we call life, soul, subtle body, and so on, may be something energetic, real, but undetectable—its subtlety arising from a failure of our instruments to detect it—whereas our intelligence, also a function of this energetic order, has no problems seeing it at all. If we turn the phrasing around, it is our instruments that are insubstantial, not our souls—like catching a butterfly with a net made of air.

If the Big Bang was a sudden thinning out of the Implicate Order, that process may have deprived the agents present within it, us, of ready access to that which makes us whole; my analogy here is oxygen, but suppose we call it life-force, the Chinese ch’i, the Arabic baraka, the Hindu prana, the western grace. And our project here, in this rarefied dimension, is to collect enough of it to give us the power, once more, to get home.

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To pursue David Bohm’s thought in a strictly scientific context, I recommend The Undivided Universe, 1993.

What the Muon Told Me

2011-10-04T11:30:00.003-04:00

Elsewhere the other day I had occasion to note (to paraphrase Wikipedia) that an elementary particle is one not known to have a substructure. Not known, to emphasize, to be made up of yet other entities. While I conventionally assent to this, something tells me, “It ain’t so.” Beneath the muon, electron, strange quark, and such must surely be a wealth of structure yet—and so on ad infinitum. But that known refers to us. In a way, as we’re now constituted, we are the limit. In one direction the elementary particle—in another the black hole or the Big Bang, the singularities. Like death itself they are but bulky, visible stone markers of various border zones.

So I went on a walk and, watching the leaves fall, unwrapped an old cosmological fossil from my collection. Like many children so I too have had this thought quite early: Beneath the smallest the yet smaller; above the greatest the even greater. I encountered that same idea later in sophisticated wrapping in David Bohm’s writings on physics, thus Bohm’s suggestion that when we encounter singularities we’ve simply exhausted our theoretical powers and need to shift our gaze further to the left, right, up, or down. New laws will then eventually become perceivable; they won’t abolish our old theories but will render them as applicable to a narrow range of reality rather than to the All. A Grand Unifying Theory will never be discovered because reality is limitless.

To put that into the context of this blog, there is no borderzone. Where we see a radical discontinuity what we really see is simply the darkness of our ignorance. The reason why we cannot see beyond the border (lets call it death), is because we are so well adapted to a narrow range of reality, what we call this, the well-known here and now. What if this is simply a very dense form of reality. When we first came into this region, we couldn’t see a damn thing—because our powers of perception are suited to a much more subtle realm. Let’s suppose that we tried to adapt, to figure out what happened. We began manipulating the coarse matter of this realm at the subatomic level. Our feeble powers could actually do things at that level, not at the gross. Slowly, gradually, we succeeded in shaping structures. These in turn gave us more and more abilities to get a handle on this new environment. We used the matter of this realm itself to make it show us what it is. We learned to maintain these structures—by feeding them, as it were. We devised ways by which they would reproduce. This, of course, is my (let’s call it sci-fi) notion of Chemical Civilization.

We are accustomed to thinking of the realms beyond (heaven, hell, etc.) as different in kind, not merely in degree. But what if they are not? What if Reality has many, many regions with many different kinds of…let me simply call it density. What if matter is always and everywhere present within it, but differences in its structural arrangements make it more or less manipulable by agents. What if there are also agents everywhere, and, like us, have the same characteristics we have. And what if the real difference in kind is that between agents and matter. Arguably that is certainly the case in this here and now. The radical difference we observe in ordinary known reality is between life and matter. Some of us, e.g. Mortimer Adler (see his The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes) would restrict that crucial difference to man, but I apply it to all of life. Agency is present in it everywhere.

Supposing that is true. Supposing, further, that on death, having accumulated subtle energies enough to escape this pocket of coarse density, we find ourselves once more back in a realm much better suited to our “natural” powers. Yes, it has matter, but it is of a much more subtle kind very easily formed by us for self-display and communications. No, we don’t have to eat it in order to “live.” What if our sustenance in those regions is energetic? What if the reason why we were captured in this “pocket” in the first place was because insufficient quantities of those energies reached us here? (Something analogous to that is suggested in Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series.) Would everything then suddenly turn heavenly?

Interesting question. A good answer to that might run as follows. No. Nothing’s really changed except the density—but that does make a difference. Agents there, as here, are free. And they’re either drawn to ever greater unity or ever greater denial of the same. Good guys, bad guys. Still all there. But in realms of lighter density—where we do not need machines by means of which to see and “live”—where space is not, therefore, as demanding a container as it is here, the good guys will congregate with the good, the bad will cling to their like. And some will still vacillate between two minds. Heaven, hell, and purgatory. Your choice. Strong hints like that come to us from the writings of Swedenborg—difficult of access although these are because the old Swede would try to be a prophet and explain every the and and in Genesis in endless volumes of erudition.

Well, my walk is over. The falling leaves are wonderfully bright, so yellow. Sun shines in this lovely pocket of deep density.

Theory, Technology, Experience

2011-10-02T13:11:00.002-04:00

Take two broad categories of human activity, religion and science. In the latter we divide the activity into the theoretical (as in theoretical physics, which largely runs on math) and the experiential (observation, as in astronomy, geology and experiments as in chemistry, particle colliders, etc.). There is also a kind of middle ground where knowledge is turned to use: technology.

I got to pondering on the applicability of this three-fold division to religion. Just let me use that word for the sake of simplicity—but permit me to include in it any and all relations to the transcendental. The answer here is that these divisions map neatly to the religious as well. The theoretical includes all formal thinking on the subject, thus theology—which, like theoretical thought in science, rests on philosophical foundations. Experience of the religious is very rare if we want to restrict the word, experience, to very direct and unambiguous encounters with the transcendental. Such experiences are much more prevalent than that, but separating the transcendental aspect from the merely psychic becomes problematical. Technology, of course, maps on the practice of religion—at one end bounded by moral codes, at the other on conscious practices of love, prayer, and meditation.

Let me briefly enlarge on the last points—religious experience, technology. It is very difficult to tease apart higher and lower forms of experience. Is an intuition due to unconscious observations or to a “message” from beyond? When do I practice love in a higher sense? When do I merely obey biological impulses? These tend to appear in syntheses. I call morality a technology in that it is something learned, with rules, be it merely etiquette or something beyond it, like conscious acts of self-restraint and love. It begins in conscious, willed acts and then, as habit, functions as technology.

The reason why we do not have a science of religion is explained entirely by the public inaccessibility of the experiential modality of it—which, of course, is the foundation not only of religious but also of material life. Religious experience is fundamentally subjective.

The mildest forms of transcending sorts of experiences—I put it weakly, like that, because anything we can even remotely explain as physical we immediately remove from that category—are somewhat accessible to public study, thus telekinesis, telepathy, viewing at a distance. What we view as strictly miraculous, like bi-location, may very well be energetic in nature—but the energies involved escape our measurements. But there has been, nevertheless, a certain amount of systematic study of these you might say lower forms of border-violation.

The most interestingly new experiential data that emerged in my life time are studies of near death experiences (NDEs). NDEs have always been there, no doubt, but modern science itself, through medicine, has caused these to be reported much more frequently. We’ve been able to resuscitate many more people. And some of those involved in this (doctors, nurses) are directly involved with the experiential rather than the theoretical aspects of biology. A very credible body of writings has thus emerged—the credible parts being initial studies not their endless exploitation as pop literature. This is something genuinely new. Depending on our ability to maintain a hi-tech civilization, it may continue to inform us and provide an almost public body of data to ponder. It is almost public because NDEs recur and are documented—and have certain strong commonalities. If hi-tech will once more fade away with the fossil sunset, in five hundred years or so the NDE nexus will have been lost again.

Very curious times we live in. We’ve got our hands around matter, theoretically, experimentally—for a while. The psychic is much more elusive. Which does not mean that either its theories or its technologies may be neglected; they must be pursued with dedicated vigor.

Attraction or Compulsion

2011-10-01T12:15:00.004-04:00

One of the more memorable metaphors Arnold Toynbee used in his A Study of History—to describe the differences between the early and late stages of a civilization—was the image of the Pied Piper on the one hand and the drill sergeant on the other. The Piper causes change by attraction, the sergeant by compulsion. A still-growing civilization is characterized by drawing to itself both an internal following, its own population, and an external one; the external populations wish to adopt its ways because they find them attractive.

Everything, of course, about the military nexus, signals compulsion. It is designed to move against the natural stream of things—thus to compel individuals to overcome their natural impulses in order to exert a directed force against an opponent, even at the cost of what is supposed to be our greatest good, life itself. Force is at the center of it, not least in those who must apply it. They must force themselves to act against internal resistance. The negative here rules.

By contrast the Piper and his seductive melodies simply attract, spontaneously, and all the action that follows is voluntary and pleasurable.

We find the Piper, stripped of all his pretty garb, sweet music in Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, derived by logic from the sheer existence of motion and the old Greek’s view that nothing moves unless it’s moved—and hence, rejecting the possibility of an infinite regress, he projected, at the heart of movement, of whatever kind, the Unmoved Mover who moves everything, ultimately—by attraction.

That attraction can become compulsion is an assertion only true if we permit the meaning of the word, attraction, to change its meaning in the process. It never becomes compulsion because compulsion implies resistance.

Attraction is also at the root of true religion—whereas the hell and brimstone kind is its fake equivalent to compel social behavior. No true religion ever took root by force—and all those that would maintain themselves by force are mere compulsion; they are dressed in the Piper’s striped garments but are tone-deaf to the core.

Well to remember Toynbee’s contrast in assessing what keeps flooding all the lands.
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Image from Wikipedia Commons (link).

Defending the Tram

2011-09-23T10:36:00.001-04:00

In re David Brook’s new book, The Social Animal, the issue is not really about the conscious or the unconscious mind, and which predominates, but ultimately about the presence or the absence of a genuine agent who may be held responsible.

One reviewer (Will Wilkinson in Forbes) quotes Brooks summarizing the thrust of his book. It is “the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connection over individual choice, character over IQ, … and the idea that we have multiple selves over the idea that we have a single self.” These are supposed to be (and no doubt they are), the revolutionary discoveries of modern psychology and brain science.

I note here the incoherence of this characterization, so prevalent everywhere these days. If we have multiple selves, who has the emotions? How do we define the character (singular) of multiple selves (plural). I know, I know. We also speak about public opinion, as if it were something tangible, the national interest, as if there was a concrete something actually capable of having an interest. But now we find it projected backwards into the individual who, on close inspection, turns out to be a crowd.

If someone hired me to defend this characterization on rational grounds, I’d want to be paid in advance—because my chief argument would be, “Well, I don’t mean that precisely, but you know what I mean.” I would, in other words, appeal to a presumed understanding in my public that modern science denies the actual presence of a soul, an individual, an agency because science can’t decant it, hold the glass beaker up to the light, and then, pointing, say: “There it is! Can you see it? It’s swirling in there.”

The presumption here is that belief in an actual conscious person capable of genuine choice is a “traditional” belief, meaning old, pre-scientific. Also obsolete, hoary, dated, primitive. Therefore the discovery that we are a more or less cohering, continuous, but ever-changing phenomenon—but inhabited by a multiplicity of selves generated by the phenomenon—is “revolutionary.” But if we really are this phenomenon, then there isn’t really anyone there to notice that a discovery has been made. The “revolutionary” modern theory may be rendered as a street-car line in which the real objects are the power lines and the car that runs on rails. The passengers who come and go, our multiple selves, are not really what it’s all about. The revolutionary theory is about as easy to defend as this description of a streetcar line.

The Length of Life

2011-09-21T15:20:00.000-04:00

How to value the length of a life? The standard answer? The longer the better. But in modern thought qualifications follow. Yes, provided that our health is good and our means suffice to give us comfort. No if the person is in pain and the prognosis is continued suffering. In such cases medically-assisted suicide seems right—indeed is legal in some places.

Cosmologies shape common views. Ours is that life is everything, but bounded by what we call the quality of life; its end is absolute, thus the more of it the better. In religious cultures—let me take the Catholic which I understand fairly well—the length of life, as such, is not the value. What matters is the soul’s state when death claims us. If we die in a state of grace, thus sinless for the moment, having repented our earlier sins, our age is of no consequence. But a long life, however comfortable, is worthless if we die in sin. In this tradition life is God’s gift. Suicide is sinful, whether medically-assisted or not. Most tellingly, suffering is viewed as an occasion to develop our soul’s capacities and never a sufficient motive for taking a life, our own or another’s . Prolongation of such a life by artificial means is, however, not required. Underlying this view is that life is just a segment in a human existence; what matters is the quality of soul, not the quality of life. Indeed the two are not necessarily complementary.

In the traditional view life is also valued, but for another reason. The longer a person has to find the truth, the better. Those disinclined to use words charged with transcendental implications, as truth is, development will do as well. But transcendence—at least of corporeal life—is nonetheless implied.

If life has meaning, human existence suggests a developmental purpose. It is fleeting; it is a mixed sort of something; at best we’re in a kind of normal equilibrium, not on cloud nine. And it ends. But most lives way outlast our breeding years, all else equal. If the selfish gene is really king around here, why permit decades upon decades of “useless” survival. Our grandchildren would surely breed even if we did not interrupt our active senior years occasionally to try to entertain them. Why does nature give us those extra years? The following generation isn’t, as it were, hanging on our words of wisdom. In my maturity I wasn’t into listening either. Is all of this just the advance of technology? Was three-score-and-ten coined in a high-tech civilization? Or were those people still just herding sheep?

The sequence seems to be: education, service, preparation. Youth, maturity, old age. Preparation for what? Preparation for the next life. It makes sense to me, all this, but length of life, particularly into the declining years, only makes sense if I see the world through a transcendental lens.

Doctrinal Battles

2011-09-09T14:11:00.003-04:00

Even a barely grown-up spirituality will shy from the doctrinal battles that rage between and within religions. Engaging in such battles is, of course, an indication that the person is attracted by the world. More: such combative activity is probably a violation of the very spirit of the religion the person wishes to defend or to promote. With inner growth comes insight summed up most succinctly here:

When you arrive at the sea, you
do not talk of the tributary.
[Hakim Sanai, The Walled Garden of Truth]

One Sufi master suggested the role of religion (conceived, I think, as doctrinally hedged about) in this snippet:

There are three forms of culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self-development. [Hujwiri, Revelation of the Veiled]

The sentence above suggests a sequence that I here liken to maturing. Each of the three stages mentioned has its place and merit. Each contributes to a person’s development of true humanity. “Following rules” is quite something other than doing battle with others, including merely abstract battle, over the rules that they prefer. That a famous author declines to be in communion with this or that tradition of a faith doesn’t merit mention, never mind highlighting, unless the intention is to promote one’s own or to belittle another group’s convictions.

To rise above doctrine is not to dismiss it. That approach is used by those who insist on staying on the level beneath the religious. To rise above doctrines means to accept them all, to ignore their detectable flaws and seeming contradiction, and to receive the grace that they carry. Another Sufi saying I’m very fond of, in this context, is that “The channel doesn’t drink.”

Rohanda or Shikasta?

2011-09-07T10:47:00.003-04:00

When we speak of “the Fall,” should we speak of the Fallen World or, instead, of Fallen Man? That’s an interesting distinction for me. Yes, I know. For some the most fundamental feature of the fallen world is that living beings feed on each other: predation. That seems to put evil squarely at the heart of nature—based on sympathy. I wouldn’t want something to hunt and eat me. And that seems also to answer the question simply. Fallen world. A place where the living, to live, eat other living creatures, that has to be a fallen world. End of discussion?

Predation and its link with the Fall comes from Isaiah in two verses (Revised Standard):

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
and the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them. [11:6]

Isaiah liked this cluster of images. Much later he repeats them:

The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
and dust shall be the serpent’s food. [65:25]

In the first volume of her exalted sort of science fiction beyond SF, Canopus in Argos, Doris Lessing projects an image of the planet earth in its paradisaical state, its fallen state, and then again restored. The first volume is called Shikasta, the name of the planet after the Fall, as it were. She derives the word from the Persian word for broken. The earth before the Fall and after the restoration is called Rohanda, derived from fruitful (from Tolkien’s Rohan, I assume). In a most telling chapter showing the restoration, people suddenly notice that predatory animals no longer hunt; they consume vegetation, much as in Isaiah we see the wolf and the lamb grazing side by side.

In my mind the discussion doesn’t really end there. Staying in the West for the moment, I note that vegetation, poor domain, benefits neither from the End of Time in Isaiah nor Lessing’s restoration. Grass still gets eaten. The fruit of the trees is still in peril. We justify the eating of meat by arguing that animals have no meaningful consciousness—and plants even less. But how do we know that?

Expanding our view to encompass the East as well, we see the notion of the Fall extended. The world isn’t just fallen. It becomes entirely illusory, maya. And in Buddhism, where eating meat or destroying even insects is forbidden, the Vegetable Kingdom still remains our prey.

For me the discussion is still open. And in my context the world, as such, seems innocent. And the weight of original sin seems to rest squarely on humanity alone.

(Image: Edward Hicks (1780-1849), “Peacable Kingdom” (link).)

Whose Illusion?

2011-08-26T10:00:00.003-04:00

More in touch with the natural world, as on a brief but real Great Lakes vacation, or carefully observing living creatures, as we have been doing here with butterflies—in my own awkward case such experiences invariably produce cosmological notes. And one of these is that the Eastern notion, namely that this world is Maya or illusion, cannot be correct.

I am looking at a wondrous book on Papillons† (in three languages). Here’s a fascinating picture of a certain Grass Moth. And then I’m told that “The Grass Moths, all of which are small, form a large family with a great variety of forms and about 15,000 species worldwide. Many of them can wrap their front wings around their bodies when at rest, so that they are then difficult to make out.” 15,000 species! Of one kind of moth. That’s an illusion? Whose illusion is that? We’re not born knowing such things. Somebody had to count all those varieties of Grass Moths. Well, if Wikipedia has got it right, the Order Lepidoptera, where the Grass Moth belongs, has, all told, an estimated 174,250 species.

On the way home from the pool last night, Brigitte stopped and pointed at a tree. “Look at the bark of that tree,” she said. “Have you ever seen something like that?” We both stared at the trunk of a tree, fascinated now—having passed it at least fifty, sixty times in the past several years.

The notion that the world is an illusion is the interpretation that Eastern traditions give to what is known as the unitive vision. In the West it is interpreted as union with God. Multiple posts on this blog touch on the subject—this experience—which I take to be content-free and energetic in nature. Being that, its interpretation is shaped by the traditions, knowledge, and philosophies of those who have them—therefore by culture.

Western religions are monotheistic; they conceive of the world as created by God. Therefore it can’t be an illusion. An awareness of an enormous contrast, between ordinary experience and this ecstasy, is also voiced in the West, but not quite in the same negative terms as the East has produced. But the Western version, boiled down to its essence, is to say that the world is less than God. The Eastern version drives this to its extreme. The big contrast is that in the West we conceive of God as the absolutely Other—whereas, in the East, the person who has the experience—now of the world, now of Samadhi—is the same person. Therefore it is the experiencer who has the illusion and, for all practical purposes, is also its cause. Logically speaking, he or she is God. But to escape this problem, the East, when pressed to put it into concepts, imagines us as tiny particles of the Ultimate—but still able to create 174,000 species of Lepidoptera? Or is that a collective effort?

The secular version of the experience is Cosmic Consciousness. If the secular has a religious mode at all—and it will have it once it experiences ecstasy—it is pantheistic. Therefore Cosmic Consciousness is a fitting sort of explanation. Oddly enough, the secular version may be the most concise and perhaps accurate; it simply projects energy. In a pantheistic conception, no one is really present, and the Lepidoptera are simply produced by chance variations. That, of course, I find impossible to believe. But that we’re experiencing the cosmos, rather than God, that I think might be right on. Thus I resist assigning the “unitive experience” any transcendental rank. It is content-free but very energetic. The creation, meanwhile, in its extraordinary diversity and intelligent arrangement, tells me that there is more to the world than merely an overwhelming feeling. Ponder the following quote from the same book, this time illustrating two butterflies mating, rear touching rear:

With flying insects which comprise many species, such as dragonflies and butterflies, nature has to make sure that mating cannot take place between representatives of different species. This is achieved by extreme differentiation of the exterior genitalia, so that male and female organs fit together like key and lock. These distinctive features provide the lepidopterist with accurate classifying aids and help him to distinguish between otherwise very similar species. [Papillons, p. 40]

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†Zauberwelt der Schmetterlinge, The Magic of Butterflies, Papillons, by Gunter Steinbach and Werner Zepf, Sigloch, 1998. The image shown (own photography) is of the Common Buckeye, Junonea coenia, not of the Grass Moth. The Buckeye is a butterfly that looks a little like a moth because of its brown coloration.

Hylomorphism—Persistent Critter

2011-08-13T14:47:00.004-04:00

Hylomorphism reared its head again in blogs I occasionally read—and every time it does I think of Thomas Aquinas’ extensions of Aristotle’s definition of substance (fusion of matter and form). He extended that definition by adding the principle of a double composition; in that the pairs are essence and existence. In Aristotle unformed, prime matter and immaterial form have a kind of shadowy quasi-reality until they meet and interact—but when form and matter separate again, as at the death of a human, nothing is left. Hence Aquinas’ extensions. In effect he added existence as a third component—and was thus able to assert the reality of angels and of God. Man is matter, substantial form (essence), and existence. An angel is substantial form and existence. And God’s essence is his existence. Elegant, but one wonders about the role of matter in all this. If genuinely higher beings are possible without it, what purpose does matter actually serve?

And every time I think of this, the same thought occurs. Hylomorphism is problematical. I’ve held for a long time that the scheme should be abandoned—but it hangs on because its tough to abandon a functioning raft as we try to build a new one while still sailing choppy seas—read our ignorance in this dimension. What is matter? What is form?

The concept of matter has become genuinely problematical now that we have some operational knowledge of electromagnetism. It should have been equally problematical for past ages too if they had thought more about air and light. Our own theories about the nature of atoms cause them to manifest as forces, not really as tiny solids held by forces. And as solidity disappears, form morphs (pun intended) into the behavior of forces.

Form has always been, as it were, a handy way of distinguishing classes of tangibilities one from others, with accidents (individually distinguishing features) a kind of work around the limitations of a fundamentally imprecise concept. The concept is indispensable in ordinary thought, of course, but really only means “the way things appear and act,” thus what is usually called their phenomenological aspect. We know that they exist by means of our perceptions; if we can see or feel or smell or hear them, we cannot doubt that they are there. The separation of phenomena and noumena is at root only a mental game; no experiential proof of the distinction may be had. And so are other separations, though less obviously: form and matter, or, as above, force and behavior. If something exists, it behaves—simply by enduring.

There is a game side here—and a practical one. The practical issue is our ability to perceive—and intersubjectively, thus many people having the same perception. Seeing ghosts or angels (to cite two that defy hylomorphism) is a rare and almost always individual experience—and from such perceptions no science can develop. Aquinas extended the concept to angels—by adding his double composition—because angels figure in the Bible, a source of information he saw as transcending the ordinary realm. If vast numbers experienced angels, we’d think of them as casually as we think about air.

For me, washed as I am in the waters of modernity (polluted although they are), hylomorphism is a cul de sac. I’ve suggested on this blog elsewhere that thinking of form as intention promises a fruitful way out. In nature the intention is transcendent, in human products traceable to us. In living nature the intention may be some third agency, above or below. Intention works very nicely as a substitute—and introduces the missing link in logic: agency.

Now as for what spirits are doing here in the material dimension, where we need intricately engineered bodies even to perceive, that is a really good question.

Crises and the Inner Life

2011-08-09T12:59:00.003-04:00

Certainly in times of crisis—perceived or real—various tensions between the social and the interior life become apparent. By “perceived” I mean, for instance, the current atmosphere produced by news of markets, political deadlock, misfortunes in war, and the like. These macroscopic phenomena don’t directly influence the daily life of most people right now, but they produce stresses in those whose personal horizons—in space and time—are expansive. Those who live in the narrow here and now and largely centered in the self, don’t react either to anticipated triumphs or dooms in the wider, in the outer world.

Interesting this. Empathy for others requires expanded personal horizons—thus caring for others. Superior judgment requires expanded time horizons—thus action with a view to future outcomes. But such characteristics link the person more closely to the world and thus distract from the inner life. The inner life might be encapsulated in the phrase “practicing the presence of God”—or, in other traditions, characterized by the word “detachment,” that detachment being from the world. Do empathy and foresight, markers of the higher life, conflict with the inner, the highest form of the higher life?

If someone is genuinely detached from the world, does that mean that he doesn’t care? Is that a kind of selfishness? Never mind the problems of the world. I’m after my own salvation, my own nirvana. What about mendicant orders (Christian and other) that let ordinary people labor for food that they accept because they have a “higher” vocation? Is there a problem here?

The problem is real—but only if we think in a linear way. One of the most maddening aspects of the higher life is that it isn’t linear—thus that it points out of this world, is at right angles to the three dimensions. When I manage to grasp and hold on to this—rarely for more than five minutes at a time—and crises tend to remind me—the problem disappears.

Detachment or conscious awareness of God—there is no spot where God is not—must coincide with, transcend, and at the same time fuse with caring for others and looking far ahead. It is an attitude, a will, to care while being inwardly separated from the great chaos all around. Identification is the technical word here. We can effectively act without being identified. To do this is the hardest thing in the world—but is rewarded with subtle energy by whatever name called. Neither those who are stressed by crises—nor those who just ignore them because they have no direct effect—are properly detached. Both represent linear adaptations to what is coming down. Detachment means to care, to act, and yet to be at peace, no matter what. The most popular version of this general view is a poem called Desiderata. It was written by Max Ehrman in the 1920s (link). One of its most quoted lines is this one: “And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” Not a bad thought to hold as the Dow, this moment, struggles to reach 11,000 at 11:40am eastern time.

Paradoxical Calculus

2011-07-31T10:35:00.001-04:00

If we take the teachings of Buddha seriously, the first act of every day ought to be a conscious effort at detachment. More: That state of mind, detachment, should follow us throughout the day and be the last effort of the night. Paradoxically detachment is the route to empathy. Thus a withdrawal is necessary to be able genuinely to reach out to others. The argument for that in a bit.

Without detachment everything slides into a kind of relativity where another calculus rules. It says: “I exist only in so far as others see me.” This is the calculus of conventionality: attention seeking and bestowing—and we bestow it in efforts to get it. This calculus, habitual although it is, is paradoxical because, if true, then we don’t really exist, not in ourselves. We are strictly a social construct.

All genuine religion is grounded on the perhaps curious notion that Genuine Reality is invisible and intangible. My logic runs thus. The one “other” that always sees me (and thus, using the conventional calculus, makes me real) is God, and if God did not then I would cease to be. But I can’t see God and hence I can’t be sure. Hence the exaggerated role of “faith” in western religiousness. The eastern seeker wishes to reach the Genuinely Real, the pure Buddha Mind, and asserts that all else is illusion. Therefore the only thing that isn’t evanescent is what cannot be perceived at all—because the Buddha Mind is as invisible and intangible as God. Therefore, for all practical purposes, it is Nothingness. And when we at last do experience it, then we have infinite bliss. At the functional level union with God and Nirvana are equivalent, aren’t they? Anything beneath the total sovereignty (read absolute detachment or union with God) is suffering. Is that true or isn’t it?

It seems to be. The area of ambiguity—the only area that is ambiguous in all of this—is intimacy. Therefore we prize it. Intimacy is soul-to-soul communication. It is not really available in group settings. It is also incompatible with radical detachment, strictly speaking, although (ambiguity again) the Buddha’s action (in staying in the world to help others) implies empathy. Genuine empathy and intimacy are virtually one. We don’t seek intimacy for our own sake but for the sake of the other. Here I am reminded of the Sufi story of the lover who pleads for admittance into the chamber of the Beloved. The voice within asks: “Who is it? Who wishes to enter?” — “It is you,” says the lover in response. Until the “me” becomes the “you,” there is no intimacy. That overflow of empathy arises when we succeed in self-extinguishment—or, to put it more dramatically, we love so much we throw ourselves away. For “self” here we must read the unreal self, the projected ego structure. The paradox is present, therefore, in intimacy too. Absolute withdrawal produces absolute empathy. Naturally-occurring intimacy is a foretaste of what is possible writ large—in intimacy a small self-sacrifice, once more paradoxically arising, most frequently, from an initial sexual attraction.

We don’t exist—and I mean this genuinely, literally—if what we are is merely the outer psycho-physical structure. That structure is nothing, as in nothing “real,” because it does not endure, is perishable. If we identify with it, we’re identified with nothingness. Conversely, we are everything if we identify with the seeming nothing of the absolute and indestructible. So the problem is that famous Maya. There is a deceptively real and a genuinely real. The deceptive seems more real than the genuine. We cling to it. And therefore we suffer.

Now of course, when I spend five minutes of serious thought on the matter, I realize that I cannot genuine love unless I’m actually present, real, and free. Therefore genuine love is necessarily a function of detachment—from the unreal. Buddhism is only paradoxical when we think that the fleeting is permanent—and the permanent isn’t there at all. When we correct for that, Buddhism is simply a practical method. But can we teach that sort of thing in grade school? Not very successfully, I don’t think. But it is better to teach unselfishness than self-esteem. The latter arises without any need of help, never mind artificial nurture—unless we’re raising consumers rather than educating souls.

Drinking Good Water

2011-07-17T08:56:00.005-04:00

In philosophical matters it is quite easy to reach firm convictions with very little help from others—by sheer observation. Here is a demo of what I’m saying; the quote is from the eighteenth century but true for all time. And, strictly speaking, to chart our own course through life, we don’t need much more than such personal proof if we are earnest, honest, and determined. Nevertheless, such is the harshness of this dimension, it is a happy moment when we find ourselves confirmed by others who are similarly qualified and similarly earnest. Such confirmation is the more welcome when the prevailing view, high and low, contradicts our personal discovery. It takes some fortitude to withstand a vast social consensus. The wise know this well. Hence there is this Sufi story intended to warn and to strengthen:

A man who studied under a wise Guide learned from this sage that soon (the Guide named a certain day in the near future) all of the water would change. Those who drank it would go mad. The sage suggested that the disciple gather and safely store fresh water deep in a mountain cave where the destructive influence would not reach it. The Disciple did as he was told. After that the Guide departed for another place—and soon after that, as he had predicted, the waters changed. Amazingly, all of the people began to change as well, and while society remained in some way unchanged, it had become quite mad. The Disciple continued to drink his own water and only rarely ventured among people where—when he spoke to others—he saw that they thought that he was crazy now. But he had kept his sanity while they had lost theirs. This went on for a long time—but the Disciple began to feel an ever growing, indeed yawning loneliness. And one day, in desperation, from his feeling of sheer isolation, he gave in, drank the local water in the village—and went mad himself.

Big Brother now once more loved him. It is good to know the truth. But we need the friends who stand by our side when the world goes mad.

Relegare or Religare?

2011-07-16T13:21:00.001-04:00

In religious acculturation the most important element is barely touched upon—so that we don’t even recognize the very experience of it when it arises spontaneously. We don’t in any way link it to religion. I find it interesting that the etymology for religion Cicero once offered is right on target—at least for me. He thought the word derived from “again” and “reading”—relegare. When we expand the concept to include pondering on things, as in reflecting upon, we are very close to the idea of contemplation—thus to “reflecting on the higher or the elevated.” Others have preferred deriving the word from religare, meaning to fasten or to bind fast, thus pointing to a bond between the human and divine. But the sense of that word (binding) also holds the notion of an obligation, an obligation laid on us. And, indeed, my own religious acculturation had plenty of that. It was commandment-based. Do this; do not do that. And there are consequences. Thus religion came in the form of behavioral dicta—not at all dissimilar to “Look before you cross the street—or you might be run over,” the main difference being that the “run over” portion of the teaching was projected in time to a vague and misty sort of place. We were even taught to pray under the rubric of obligation—never ever under the rubric of nutrition. Yet prayer is the closest we get to contemplation in these contexts—and the genuine religious life is actually centered on it.

We were children, of course. The acculturation was more social than religious. Religious acculturation ought to be life-long, and should have institutional support to channel the wisdom in more or less formal ways, but this isn’t in the cards. Usually after 10, maximally after 18 years of age, religious education altogether ceases. Not surprisingly the vast majority is far more ignorant of religion than, say, of high school science. Now, to be sure, coming from a family where Montessori education is highly regarded—and entirely ignored by the world—my view of the rest of education, never mind religious, is equally unprintable. Therefore the religious life, when it is actually practiced, especially by a few members of the laity, is the world’s most hidden activity of all.

At least in West—saying which I engage in one of those ploys you’ll find in Games People Play. (To take the air out of some windbag mouthing generalities, wait until he finishes and then say, “Yes, but not in the East.”) Some religious traditions—I’m thinking of Buddhism—place detachment and inward-directed contemplation much more prominently than the avoidance of sin, obedience to doctrine, and ritual practices—or the euphoric acceptance of Christ preferably in a crowd with lots of people shouting hallelujahs. Perhaps in those Eastern reaches more of the acculturation sticks and lasts beyond childhood.

What comes first? Inner awakening—which is fed (literally, actually, tangibly) by contemplative activities—or behavioral conformity? The first is first, I think. If it is not awakened and active in the person, morality of behavior, even after it has become a habit, is much too easily eroded by unhappy circumstances. Inner awakening is like a spring. Once it flows, it is avidly watched—and when the turmoil of life starts to clog up its channel, the motivation to clean it out and help it flow again arises right out of the pain of life.

Concerning nutrition and prayer in the Christian tradition, I suggest this earlier short post.

Happy Hunting Grounds

2011-07-05T08:35:00.002-04:00

When something cannot be described using words or graspable analogies, how can that something motivate people to seek it? Yet such is the case with ecstatic experiences. Those who report them use words like these: “It cannot be described!” “It transcends all that we know!” “Ineffable!” This can—and is—rendered into dreary technical jargon: The very means we try to use to describe or understand it are also the very veils that hide this unutterable Wonder. More amusing, sometimes, are imaginative aggrandizements like this: Compared to it the greatest Joy that you could possibly experience is like a tiniest black ant hiding at the bottom of the deepest canyon in the deepest ocean in the darkest hour of the longest night. Etc.

I much prefer descriptions of the world we get from some of the Native American tribes. They spoke of the Happy Hunting Grounds. Not sophisticated? Catering to the already excessively sensuous nature of humanity? — Or could the Happy Hunting Grounds be much closer to the truth than the Unimaginably Ineffable reached by extreme and towering mortifications after uncounted lives of failure? The Happy Hunting Grounds can at least be described in some ways. The greatest of humanity’s ecstatics utterly fail to communicate. What they say reminds me of a perfectly-wiped blackboard: we’re staring at nothing at all.

So who is closer to the truth? Could the ecstatics have it right? Or dare we trust the Iroquois? Well, here I would begin by pointing out that the Iroquois were an exceedingly sophisticated people; the Iroquois League had features of government that, if we could reproduce them, would please us indeed—but would also impose disciplines incompatible with a consumption culture. Let’s not dismiss the Iroquois, the Cherokee, or the Algonquians just because we’re ignorant of them and managed to erase them (for a time) from the cultural landscape.

Meanwhile there are some genuine problems with the ecstatic view. If the ecstatics are right, radical discontinuities are present in the cosmos. This comes into view when we compare the life we know in this dimension, the efforts we’re supposed to make to reach salvations, and the rewards we are supposed to gain. Effort and reward are incommensurably disproportional. It does not matter which cultural tradition we consult. Eternal damnation or eternal (but indescribable) bliss? Eternal suffering in rebirth after bloody rebirth, old age, etc., over and over again? Unless in this life we make so heroic an effort of the will to extinguish ourselves that we suddenly become divine? When incommensurability is present, it becomes problematical to speak of meaning. The Arbitrary raises its head—however benevolent its visage.

Over against that Ungraspable, the Happy Hunting Grounds make a lot of sense. The way I see it, life here and life beyond must have some differences, to be sure—but also some continuities. Without both, meaning disappears. In the Happy Hunting Grounds, hunting is still necessary—but it is easier, happiness is greater, the game is ample, and easier to catch. The myth projects a transition to a higher sphere in which the features of the mental landscape retain some element of recognition—not this life here and then an indescribable flash of light. I’m inclined to trust humanity’s traditional views against the extreme experiences of those who assault heaven with boundless fury determined to rob it of its secret. I find it interesting that ordinary people, reporting on near-death experiences, also suggest the kind of continuity the Amerindians did by speaking of hunting grounds. People who’ve undergone an NDE are themselves transformed by the experience, predominantly for the better. And they do have something to say—although, to be sure, they also have difficulties putting that world into the language we use to describe this one.

My own views of the ecstatic are fleshed out here. To give it a brief summary, it appears to be contact with something analogous to energy, experienced as extraordinarily powerful and positive. It appears to heighten benevolence and intellect—but fails to bestow knowledge. It is interpreted as contact with a person—but only by some. Among the traditions, the Sufis are cautious about it, their teachers frown. And official Catholicism (although derided for this) does not rush to embrace the experience either—and quite rightly so.

Tools, Not Lords

2011-07-02T11:05:00.003-04:00

We must keep words in their places: excellent servants but very bad lords. Poets innately know this, thus words dance to their tune rather than the other way about. In my world the outer (let me call it that for just a moment), thus that to which words refer, is the governing reality; the symbols that evoke it are just tools. Some people fasten on words as if these had a heft, tangibility, and immutability—but experience has taught me that the same sound or written form often means quite contrary things all depending on the mysterious “outer” the speaker or writer actually holds in mind.

I’m after that tangibly real. But when I get away from ordinary, physical things, that real becomes invisible; in actual experience it’s just a feeling inside me. Take words like soul or self. Therefore, to save time, my initial interest when picking up a book, say, is to discover the writer’s existential stance. If it greatly differs from mine, I rapidly lose interest. Stance, of course, is unimportant if the reporting is about simple, generally observable facts, but if the matter is murky, aesthetic, or requires interpretation, the person’s stance becomes important—if for no other reason than to save time. A person’s existential rooting, to use another word, determines the meanings he or she will attach to the words.

I spend a great deal of time pondering the writings even of people whose general stance agrees with mine, especially writers far away in time, thus when my context of the life in those times is thin. I spend time wondering what invisible feelings the words they use actually represent. What did they feel when they used this word or that? What did the Buddha mean when he used the word anatman (no-self)? If there is no self, what is the point of nirvana? It couldn’t mean what the summaries say, what the dogmatists ignorantly hammer home, bludgeoning us with a patent contradiction. Well. Today I chanced across a very brief but very potent post on The Zennist, here, titled “Prior to nirvana.” It’s worth a trip there to read it. Here we have the kind of explanation that makes sense to me—entirely in harmony with genuine, hard introspection—which is the real root of knowledge, rather than that which concept-juggling yields. In a nutshell, the Zennist argues that the self the Buddha called no-self was the corporeal entity, this current composite—not at all the self that I have in mind when I use the word.

The Body in Question

2011-06-27T12:54:00.003-04:00

With a respectful nod to Jonathan Miller, who produced a TV series and then wrote a book using that title, both being products that gave us much delight, I want to borrow the title for use in another context. My context is more, shall we say, philosophical. Much the same thought often arises as I age and, waking in the mornings, become aware of my body—as a body. It is that with accumulating years the elegant traditional classification, known as the Great Chain of Being, seems less and less persuasive. To save me lots of words I’ve produced a little visual poem to summarize a vast philosophical structure, that very chain. It had its origins in Aristotle and then came to be formalized, in western thought, before the Renaissance came.

Post-Renaissance this structure started to unravel. The very word, chain, signifies necessary relationship—and that chain began rust from the top down so that, by the nineteenth century (Nietzsche and the death of God) the chain had lost its meaning. It was gradually inverted. the Mineral came to rest on top—and all else derived from it, by chance and happenstance, not by a logically elegant relationship.

At the root of this conceptualization are Aristotle’s ideas of potential and actuality, both having real existence. At the top actuality is total, at the bottom we find pure potential. Humans, in the middle, are the mysterious transition from the realm of becoming to the realm of being. As we ascend from the bottom, more and more potential is actualized until it is total Being in God. But what with the inorganic at the top, the whole concept of being loses all interest for the obvious reason that the original duality of potential and actuality is lost.

Now you might think that I would strongly embrace the Great Chain of Being. I appear always to be on the side of tradition. But that’s not the case here. The more aware I become of the body in question, the less inclined I am to see either life as a whole (plant, animal, etc.) or human life as natural to the grand scheme of Creation. The body becomes more and more visible (indeed feel-able) as a kind of temporary tooling for a limited purpose—the longer you live the keener the knowledge of that. I wake up and remember telephone calls bringing me news of my own generation’s physical problems: the parts are making troubles; this fails, that needs a fix, chemical help, surgical assists, etc. That perfect balance in the center of the chain of being might make sense to someone just to either side of forty, not to someone past three-score-and ten.

The machine-like nature of the body is a problem in elegant schemes of this sort. At the same time I think that a duality does underlie reality. But when it comes to human centrality—a kind of centaur-like existence, neither horse nor human, properly speaking—there I feel genuine intellectual discomfort. When I contemplate that state, especially when its old, gnostic ideas present themselves either in pagan forms, like genuine Gnosticism, or in the Christian variety which speaks of a fallen world. It is only in a fallen world that spirits can possibly be required to be prisoners of machines.

Déjà vu

2011-06-24T12:51:00.004-04:00

I’ve mentioned this experience once before on this blog (here) when commenting on Carl B. Becker’s Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death—in that context regretting Becker’s exclusion of that experience from the subject matter that he covers under the category of the paranormal. Then I mentioned the experience again in yesterday’s posting—and the post promptly brought some visitors who were using a Google search with the phrase. My own conviction is that the experience is the most widely-known instance ordinary people have of precognition. In my own case—and I think this is generally the case—I experienced the déjà vu feeling much more frequently in childhood than later, but these experience still recur, if very rarely. They’ve always fascinated me. Indeed it was when I first encountered J.W. Dunne’s writings that I felt sure that I’d approached some kind of explanation of the phenomenon.

Déjà vu literally means “already seen” in French. The phrase was first used by the philosopher and parapsychologist Émile Boirac (1851–1917) in a letter to the French journal Review Philosophique and later in his book, The Future of the Psychic Sciences. In that book he also proposed the word metagnomy as a substitute for clairvoyance, thus “knowledge of things situated beyond those we can normally know” (link). Frederick Meyers (1843-1901), the founder of the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR)†, called it promnesia, using a Greek formation meaning prior memory. The simpler common-language French phrase won the linguistic battle. Déjà vu is simply a very powerful sensation that some situation, right now, has happened before. Indeed when it does, we often know what will happen next, including what people will say.

The notion that we are remembering a dream—and a precognitive dream, at that—is totally persuasive if we have ourselves actually had one or more such dreams which we remembered at the time when had them—so that when the déjà vu moment later actually arrived we already knew that we had dreamt it.

The Paranormal Encyclopedia.com here notes that one psychology professor at least, in 1896, Arthur Allin, then of the University of Colorado, Bolder, had suggested that the source of déjà vu was forgotten dreams. The modern explanation, summed up by Wikipedia here, rejects precognition as an explanation and trots out a long list of other supposedly more scientific explanations of that squirrelly sort that make those of us sublimely confident in the Big Picture smile with bemusement.

†The SPR has an American counterpart, the American Society for Psychical Research, Inc., reachable here.

Precognition: Some Curious Trails

2011-06-23T15:16:00.006-04:00

If you looked for a thinker who has expended serious thought on precognitive dreaming—and did so before this 2011—the one name that would surely surface is that of John William Dunne (1875-1949). Since publishing his book, Dreamer, Andrew Paquette joins Dunne as another.

J.W. Dunne, born in Ireland, worked as an aeronautical engineer in England. His book, in multiple (and drastically-changing) editions, is An Experiment with Time (1927) arose from multiple experiences of his own in which he dreamt of events that, later, actually took place—both private and very public events. His theory, Serialism, was an attempt to explain it.

Paquette is an artist of some renown, with multiple achievements in comic books, video games, teaching, the fine arts, and as an author and teacher in computer graphics. He is also a psychic of obviously high gifts—a very well-written report of which experience is his book, Dreamer. He discovered these talents following a precognitive dream, the first of many (see my last post here).

I could, but almost hesitate to, add a third name to the list, that of the Russian, P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), who developed his own theory in A New Model of the Universe. Ouspensky did not address the subject of precognitive dreams narrowly, but his model, presented in the book mentioned above, appeared at about the same time as Dunne’s book (1931).

The first two (Dunne, Paquette) both assume that the future we see in dreams actually exists, with the implication that free will is at minimum problematical. Ouspensky provides a model of time in which this preexistent future is potentially present, but its manifestation (actualization) is due in part to choices. Therefore in Ouspensky’s scheme, the future we dream can be changed—if we make other choices—but the event that we actually live was also there, hiding in potential right alongside the more painful alternative that we avoided by acting differently. We’re dealing here with very original people; therefore it may not come as a total surprise that Ouspensky believed in eternal return, thus that he lived the same life, over and over again—a fact to which he attributed his experiences of déjà vu, whereas others in turn explain that sensation by saying that we’ve dreamt the future the night or the week before but just don’t remember the dream. Sorry, but that’s the nature of this subject…

Dunne and Ouspensky both think in terms of geometrically arranged times. Dunne projects a serial succession, one time existing above the other—so that from T2 you can see the entirety of T1; thus from T2 the observer sees T1’s life all at once, from childhood to death, all at one glance. Dunne imagined an infinite regress of times—and staunchly defended this heterodoxical view. Ouspensky’s model, presented on pages 343-406 of his book (Vintage, 1971) presents an infinite time in which a multi-dimensional matrix contains an infinite number of lines, each linking points of possibility. One life is thus a single branching line traced through this (to the human mind unimaginably complex) matrix of possibilities. The line is what we actualize; other possibilities, other lives we might have lived, remain in the matrix. (One is reminded of the many-world theory we owe to physicist Hugh Everett (1957)—with the difference that in Everett’s scheme, each world tangibly exists.)

Alas, precognition is a genuine problem. If we see the future, something must be there to see. Is it a tangibly existing hard real something? Ouspensky avoids the problem of free will—the existence of which we assert from experience—by moving preexistence to a quasi-real matrix of potential. You might say that he reifies Aristotle’s potential. But if we accept hard preexistence, we must find another explanation for free will. One solution Paquette presents is that we choose to live a life, a life shown to us, in the sublime world, and in great detail, before we’re born. Thus we exercise choice outside this life but not in it. But Paquette is no doctrinaire; his focus is on rich actual experiential data. He reports precognitive dreams that come out almost, but not precisely, as dreamt; thus choice is exercised here. Sometimes he says that everything’s fixed; he also asserts that we are here to develop. He does not resolve the contradictions that thus sprout here and there; no coherent cosmology has yet (I’m still not finished with his book) emerged that might explain how we can possibly learn anything in a life in the midst of which the most crucial element of agency, choice, is denied us except as an illusion.

The fully worked-out models all reflect a modern form of thought in which it is not at all common to ponder such divine powers as omniscience—or to take them seriously. At the same time, the actual experience of precognitive dreams frequently features instances showing that (1) they do indeed happen, (2) are confirmed later in very large part, but (3) then sometimes do not end tragically, as they did in the dream. This would suggest that the assertion of a fixed future must be opened up in some way, thus minimally as Ouspensky opened it. Another way to do that is to suggest that agencies may be involved—other than ourselves, that precognitive dreams may be in the category of communications. Let me flesh that out a little more.

The best way to do this is to imagine that the future may actually be visible—thus projected to the eyes of minds—without being tangibly there. At some resolution all events and things are energy in motion, at all kinds of levels of coarseness and subtlety, mental and physical. Our reality may be more transparent to higher beings than ourselves. God, of course, is omniscient, but angels (not least guardian angels) may be multiscient, or much-knowing, just eyeballing the vast energetic flow and, furthermore, communicating instantly with one another. And if you hate the very notion of an angel, why not every human being but not in our ordinary waking selves but genuinely near-angelic when we are asleep. Either way, the future may already be here, in projection, and the distant future as well as the near—but the nearer the more detailed. And our sleeping selves may see it (or may have it framed as dreams by guardian angels). And some of us are more gifted, alert, or open to these things than others—and the dramatic is more likely to catch our attention than the ordinary.

What we are seeing, then, are patterns of the future, not the actual rooted and cemented tangible reality of it. Therefore it remains open to change, certainly at the level of personal detail, which is what matters to individuals. It is simply a general kind of communication of reality, in projection, which is present quite naturally based on the very design of reality. And if apprehended can sometimes be a source help in need.

One of the more interesting aspects of the paranormal, and Paquette notes this fact in his book, is that willful attempts to produce psychic results tend to fail dramatically. A prominent explorer of this phenomenon is J.E. Kennedy (for some of his papers, see this link). One aspect of this well-documented observation is that paranormal phenomena may possibly be a means of communication, form beyond the borderzone, to humanity here, to indicate that something more exists than we can actually see. It’s there like water, but nobody is forced to drink. And precognition may be a means of signaling that fact to many people in times when great disasters loom ahead—already clearly visible from “over there,” not fixed in every detail, but visible, from patterns already forming now.

Notes on Paquette's Dreamer

2011-06-21T13:33:00.002-04:00

A fascinating book, by Andrew Paquette, titled Dreamer (O Books, 2011). All through the years I’ve complained about the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg saying that it is all analysis, not enough raw material. Well, here we have a case of all raw material, not enough analysis. Paquette is a gifted psychic, by profession an artist—commercial, fine, etc. Mostly in dream-scapes, he reports on experiences that range far beyond the borderzone. He discovered his talents by dreaming the future, rather dramatically, while working in the Netherlands. He dreamt of a hold-up in which he was killed, shot, died, and rushed back to New York as a spirit to his then girl friend, later wife, to tell her of his misfortune—still in his dream. And then woke up—still in the Netherlands and very much alive. Some time later the event actually took place, but, in the midst of it, remembering the dream with great shock as, again, two men, in the same locale, actually took hold of him, he managed to escape his assailants.

Here we have a classical dilemma. He dreamt the future with one outcome. It happened, and identically, more or less, in real life—but only up to a point. Then the recall of the dream itself served as the cause of his action to escape the consequences. So how do we explain what appears to be a contradiction. The future is visible, hence apparently fixed. But the future is changeable, hence subject to action arising from knowledge and will.

In a much more minor way, I’ve been concerned with dreams, including the precognitive kind, for more years (I think) than Paquette has lived. My own powers are drastically muted compared with his, but I’m open enough to recognize the same objective reality over there that he reports. Multiple posts on this blog deal with some of my observations.

Thus far I haven’t penetrated very far into this modest but rich book (less than 300 pages). I may have additional notes on Dreamer as time goes on.

Chemical Civilization or More Comments on ID

2011-06-19T11:55:00.001-04:00

Human imagination has limits of sorts—not at the individual level, to be sure, but when we get more collective, certain thoughts never seem to occur to groups—at least not in public writings. The Intelligent Design movement in biology (I call it the new biology), using very powerful reasoning, based on observation, not on first principles, has concluded that actual design underlies biological systems. The proposition surfaced—and in the wink of an eye ID proponents were tarred with the brush of creationism. If life is actually designed, the only possible explanation anybody can come up with is that the designer must be God.

The leading thinker in this field, in my opinion, is Michael J. Behe, a biochemist. I rank him thus because he stays close to the actual observational data at the lowest possible level—and he isn’t tempted to knee-jerk reactions. His two books are Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution. These are must reading for anyone who wishes to understand the ID proposition. I’ve quoted Behe earlier to show that he does not name the designer but simply insists that design is present in life. In his second book, which is largely concerned with malaria, a disease caused by a one-celled organism (a so-called protist) of which the most virulent kind is Plasmodium falciparum, Behe faces the “designer” question squarely when he says:

Here’s something to ponder long and hard: Malaria was intentionally designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts…. What sort of designer is that? What sort of “fine-tuning” leads to untold human misery? To countless mothers mourning countless children? Did a hateful, malign being make intelligent life in order to torture it? One who relishes cries of pain? Maybe. Maybe not.

I discovered “intelligent design” before that movement began when—already a father with children—I studied biology on my own and discovered what I called the unmistakable signs of what I called technology—present at the cellular and sub-cellular level. I was then professionally engaged in technology assessment—the human kind—and the conclusion seemed obvious. Being also a science fiction writer, my own intuitions rapidly produced the concept of chemical civilization. (That subject is mentioned multiple times in this blog; here are one, two, three, and four posts on the subject.) What I saw in Brigitte’s textbook (Biology Today, Random House, 1972, which is the book I had been reading) was precisely what I saw in my work-life, but more sophisticated in design at the sub-microscopic level—namely technology of the human kind. It wasn’t perfect; it showed the same tendencies as our own—thus definitely goal-seeking arrangements of chemicals to get certain jobs done, by far not perfect, frequently not elegant at all—but working. I imagined this civilization peopled by what I called “little people”—invisible to us, utterly invisible, who made machines by nudging atoms around to achieve some end which still remains murky except, on certain days, to the primitive cosmologist who cohabits this body with me.

The picture I have of life is of an intelligent striving but by a civilization that cannot see the whole picture at all—indeed is striving mightily to see anything at all. We are one of its most successful ventures, because we do, indeed, see a little something ourselves—still not enough, but something. The very fact that life eats life, nature red in tooth and claw—and the fact that life is innocent, innocent, innocent—right up to our appearance—tells me that intelligence is present but, above the chemical, not vision of the sort we sometimes manage. Assuming that our observations are correct—that something intelligent but certainly not even very scient, much less omniscient, is the causative agent of life—indeed that it is life, as we really understand it, and bodies are merely tools it needs in this weird dimension—assuming all of that, quite interesting cosmological ideas surface—and indeed this blog is filled with such speculations.

Now to my opening statement concerning imagination. Nowhere in the ID literature have I thus far encountered serious speculation of the sort that imagination and a little thought—particularly about the fractal nature of this universe—suggests, namely that intelligence may be diffused in the universe and may be as common as matter, thus that many orders of intelligence may exit—to be sure all of them created. Deep down I am a creationist, but not of the primitive variety. Some of us, anyway, accept two orders already—the human and the angelic, beneath the Ultimate. Why not, minimally, a third? My conclusion? It might best be expressed, perhaps, by modifying a popular saying. Keep it simple—and you’ll stay stupid.

On the Trail of the Grail

2011-06-08T11:01:00.006-04:00

David Bohm, the physicist, proposed that anomalous phenomena in science—like the Big Bang at the large and the wave-particle paradox at the small end of the spectrum—are due to the limitations of our theoretical frameworks. The theories are based on correct observations, to be sure, but we are now, as it were, on the border of two domains, and the new observations no longer fit. Bohm goes well beyond this and suggests infinite reaches: beyond every border extends a vast geography—which also has a border. Looks like we have borderzones in the realm of physics too. Here a graphic to make Bohm’s view accessible:

Here we might assume that the left Anomalous Region is the sub-atomic and the right one the cosmically large. The arrows point at the borders of our current knowledge where other or “higher” ranges of knowledge are necessary (new theories), to make sense of the observations. The new theories, to be sure, will not “falsify” the old—but render the old as limited cases valid enough, but only within their own domain of observation.

Bohm proposed that as we reach these borders, we must “shift” our theoretical framework (the yellow region). He asserted that a Grand Unified Theory (the grail of theoretical physics) is unachievable. We might think we have it (e.g. Newton’s clockwork universe), but sooner or later new anomalies will start to appear like signs announcing another border crossing—and to cross we must have passports; the driver’s license will no longer do.

When people encounter notions like this—what look alarmingly like infinite regresses—they standard outcry is “Enough already.” We like to limit our infinities with nice, self-enclosed symbols like the lazy eight. The biggest battles in science (and elsewhere) arise when something established once and for all is shaken to its foundations by new observations or experience. The uproar is Sisyphus’ enormous frustration every time he gets his huge rock to the top of the hill and then, just as he is about to sigh in achievement, watching the damned thing roll down again. But this frustration is then also echoed by roars of triumph on the part of those who, under intense and decades long attack (invariably ideological) discover that they were right all along.

This is the situation that surrounds Darwinism now under the assault of the new biology invariably labeled by its proposed answer to what might be called the anomaly of matter: Intelligent Design. What the new biology suggests is that the frame must be moved to understand this strange anomaly—matter preserving form and, horrors, reproducing it, over and over again. Here we have orthodox biology in frustration—and fundamentalist Christians roaring in triumph. But the detection of design in life (and we don’t really need the qualifier, intelligent, at all) should not be viewed as the achievement of closure. If life is designed, who else but God could do it? Du calm, as the French would say—indeed as one of the new biologists also says. Here is a quote from Michael J. Behe, taken from Darwin’s Black Box, Touchstone, 1996, p. 196:

Inferences to design do not require that we have a candidate for the role of designer. We can determine that a system was designed by examining the system itself, and we can hold the conviction of design much more strongly than a conviction about the identity of the designer.

I recommend this book by Behe as a superb demonstration that design is present—and at the biochemical, which is the meaningfully proper, level. Life manifests as the cell. And it as at the cellular level that we must look for its explanation.

To this I might add that the same triumphant “Told you so” we hear from fundamentalist circles concerning life we also hear, although from a smaller circle, concerning the Big Bang. Does the expansion of the universe really prove that it came out of nothing 14 billion years ago? No. The inference of God based on the Big Bang is as faulty as the inference of God from design in life. What it calls for is a moving of our theoretical frames. Endless wonders will then await us. God transcends both microscope and telescope. No pin will pin the Ultimate.

The Mysterious Survivor

2011-06-04T11:17:00.000-04:00

A coincidence of various stimuli got me thinking once again about Darwinism and Intelligent Design. One such was discovering the Journal of Scientific Exploration, thus a pointer to science as practiced close to the borderzone; I’ve made notes on that earlier here. Another was seeing Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator, courtesy of Netflix. The film makes a very calmly reasoned case for transcendentalism by, among sources, mining the insights of the ID community. I’ve written some notes on the ideological aspects of ID on Ghulf Genes here under the title of “Battle of Clerics.” In that I focused principally on the unfortunate aspects of a debate where philosophical positions clash and cannot be resolved. The actual scientific work that people like biochemist Michael Behe pursue I’ve always admired. That sort of work, seems to me, is genuine science—open-minded, in other words—much like the material presented by JSE. Third on my list of stimuli is my use of the word devolution in the political context on LaMarotte—and remembering, later, that the New Yorker had used that word to lambast Michael Behe in an article published in 2005. The article’s subtitle was “Why intelligent design isn’t.”

But let’s examine that dismissive phrase. The new biology, as I might call it, is quite excellent natural philosophy; it is reasoning about nature based on observation. What the ID movement sees is the marks of intelligence in living beings. It’s obviously there, as I pointed out on Ghulf Genes. Long before the ID movement had its birth, I spent some month studying biology in depth, but as a grown man and already an expert on technology. What I saw in living things, and this time in detail, was just that, technology—indeed exactly the same kind of technology I’d been studying for years already in human society; the big difference between the two was that the biological variety was much, much more sophisticated—and the agencies behind it invisible. And therefore, being also a science fiction author, I hit on the notion of a “chemical civilization” to explain it. In other words, I do agree with the ID proponents, and did so before they came to be known. Obvious intelligence underlies life. No doubt about it.

Now what is not intelligent is to assert that matter can, by sheer chance, produce intelligence—with nothing else added or present. Matter shows no sign whatever of having the potential to manifest life, never mind intelligence. The two concepts on which the whole of Darwinism (neo- or otherwise) rests are natural selection and survival. Natural selection for what? Survival. But what or who is this Mysterious Survivor? Well, it is a chance convergence of chemicals, per Alexander Ivanovich Oparin (1894-1980)—who pushed evolution back to the level of chemicals. By chance they converged, by chance they accidentally formed some more chemical combinations within themselves, the DNA, which by chance coded for proteins that formed, first of all, the walls that they had earlier accidentally formed without the help of DNA and also, by good luck, the enzymes (also proteins) that actually read the DNA later and, reading it by forming RNA, aligned themselves accidentally in such a manner as to form a machine that could, reading RNA this time, form other proteins as well. And presto we have the self-reproducing cell. And having shown that this could be, and all just by accident, the rest is history, a history that, by accident, formed Alexander Ivanovich Oparin, who, by the accidents of birth and education could finally explain it all to the accidentally formed Soviet citizenry.

Considering the mind-boggling improbability of all this, the little child who cries that the emperor is naked might be viewed as intelligent. And that, ultimately, is what the new biologists are actually doing. They point to a gap in the logic that leads from a handful of elements—but by no means all—to self-moving creatures that exhibit purposive arrangements internally, like that handy DNA code. Is it their unforgivable sin that some of the more philosophically minded among them, looking to fill the gap, point to God rather than, like their opponents, to the equally mysterious divine Complexity. The sin, it seems to me, lies in the meanings associated with these two concepts. God is assumed to be intelligent, a source of law, suggesting a relationship between creator and creature—whereas Complexity demands nothing at all while giving us whatever we want in the way of explanation. And where power to explain is sought, Complexity is certainly omnipotent.

Contemplative Life

2011-06-03T09:23:00.000-04:00

From the vast continents of ordinary life, the contemplative variety appears quite close to what here I call the borderzone—the edge of a flat earth, as it were, where the great chasm of eternity suddenly appears. Contemplatives? They are religious—and not merely nuns or monks or priests or bishops or abbots and abbesses. Such people, to the extent they live an active life, are not living the contemplative (or so it’s said). And certainly not laymen. And least of all the married.

But concepts like that, concepts like the contemplative life, do sprout near the borderzone—and not just within Catholicism—and if we look at them closely, they turn out to mean something other than they signal to the uninterested public. The concept of jihad comes to mind; by that we understand anything from Holy War to terrorism, but to the pious at the core of Islam, the word means spiritual struggle. All right. If you think me a propagandist for Al Qaida, that’ll be my jihad to live down. Or let us take the Buddhist concept of nirvana, defined as extinction, disappearance, the state of being blown-out, like a candle. The Online Etymology dictionary helpfully Latinizes the word as de-spiration—all life sucked out of you. And that is the “pearl of great price” the Buddhists seek? Nothingness? Well, “contemplative life” and “nirvana” are similar in this sense: to most people they suggest something negative, to others something of the greatest value. But to get the second meaning, one has to unfold the concept.

Perhaps the simplest way to approach this is to call contemplative life soul life or inner life. Now the problem is that a certain special way of seeing reality hides beneath these phrases. That way is a hierarchical conception of our dual nature in which the physical, hormonal, outer, and social are at the lower and a corresponding spiritual, empathic, intuitive, and communal are the higher level. And then the contemplative life is minimally defined as one where more of our being takes place inwardly, in the soul, than takes place outwardly, in the body, in the world. It’s as simple as that; but it is difficult because it takes gradual development even to tease these two realms apart enough to recognize that they each have a separate and real existence.

Let me illustrate this by examining words like mental (often associated with contemplation) and emotional (linked to the physical). By mental people mean conceptual, intellectual. By emotional they mean the heat we feel in the chest from anger or joy: the breath increases; you feel it, it moves you. The contemplation of an infinite regress or the square root of minus-one do not, by contrast, have any emotional toning (except for Brigitte, who invariably expresses her disgust!) Now let’s proceed to sort these concepts out.

First of all the mental is much more than merely concept juggling. It includes within it what we call consciousness, the definition of which I leave to those foolhardy enough to try and inevitably to fail. It includes the mysterious will—which is something other than reflexive action. It includes imagination, a faculty I do not (like Aquinas) associate with the lower realm. It does include intellect—which we do not find in the body-machine. It also includes the experience of being drawn toward some and repelled from other things—visible and invisible. Empathy and apathy: the real sources of emotion. That the body should immediately respond when we feel these things by mirroring the soul’s movements by hormonal discharges (hence the heat and the breathing) merely confirms the close linkage between soul and body, not that emotions are physical. The few that genuinely are are also merely reflexes we have in common with all animals. Thus I am absolutely sure that a disembodied soul will have emotions—and that emotions are not, repeat not, grounded in the sensorium.

The reader who nods reading this will do so from experience—thus because his or her inner life has developed its autonomy enough to have noted these two realms, their hierarchical relationship, and their potential independence. For someone like that, the suggestion that the contemplative life is real, outside of temples and cloisters too, will not be surprising—even if she or he is more accustomed to think of it as the creative life.

Science, Materialism, and Beyond

2011-05-30T12:53:00.003-04:00

In the course of looking into a very curious corner of science, an examination of the “weight of the soul,” I became aware of the Journal of Scientific Exploration (JSE), a publication of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE). Both SSE and JSE are serious entities, the latter a peer-reviewed and genuinely scientific journal in existence since 1987. SSE’s website is here, and a listing of publicly available articles from JSE (in pdf format) is here. Looking at many of the articles caused me to update my sense of trends in the area, meaning now the intersection between matters of the borderzone and serious science. But first about the weight of soul—and how I stumbled upon the JSE.

In 1907 a physician in Massachusetts, Duncan MacDougall, published results of a research study in Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research and shortly after that in American Medicine. He continuously weighed six terminal patients before and after their death. He rejected one of the six observations but used the other five and concluded that at or very near the point of death the body lost weight, very rapidly or in a very short time, ranging between half and three-quarters of an ounce. He also conducted tests on dogs and found that they did not lose any weight. What material I found on the web emphasized that nobody had been able to duplicate MacDougall’s results. This bare statement on repetition of the investigation intrigued me. I saw no citations of these studies. But in that process, lo and behold, I discovered a 2010 paper by Masayoshi Ishida titled “Rebuttal to Claimed Refutations of Duncan MacDougall’s Experiment on Human Weight Change at the Moment of Death” in JSE Volume 24, No. 10, 2010. It turns out that people refuted but did not replicate the studies. So there you are. That issue is accessible here.

Now for me the fascinating issue here is that in an age of materialism, a doctor would have been inspired to try to find a material proof for the soul’s existence—which was MacDougall’s aim. The fact that nobody bothered to replicate his study did not surprise me. People like me who are certain of the soul’s existence, wouldn’t be interested in its weight—and those convinced of its non-existence would not bother organizing a technically and sociologically difficult venture like that. My own interest was, and is, in the conjunction, namely the attempt to link the transcendent back to the physical in some way—which to me testifies to the narrowness of the materially-focused mind. And in that context, the JSE turned out to be a gold-mine.

For decades now (certainly since the 1950s) I’ve watched with fascination both the astounding increase in genuine experiential evidence for the soul’s survival of death and a parallel development whereby some people have attempted to make use of the ambiguities of quantum theory to materialize these phenomena. The positive evidence arose from near death experience (NDE) studies on one hand and scientific studies of reincarnation on the other. The late Ian Stephenson of Virginia University, largely associated with the latter, was also involved with the former. Another development in this period, indeed arising from the very cumulation of evidence, is a delightful debate about the nature of science, or, rather scientism, led on the one side by those who’ve presented the evidence and work in these fields and the professional skeptics who feel themselves called to conduct an on-going inquisition to stamp out such heretical claims.

The JSE, like a good scientific journal should, presents papers on all sides of this issue. Not, I hasten to say, ideologically motivated debunkers who simply “refute,” but those who wish to explain the experiential using approaches like quantum physics. The general stance of the journal, however, is openness and objectivity. Those who have evidence to present are welcome—if they are, as it were, well-behaved. Therefore we find, in the JSE, the very best presentations of actual evidence favoring the reality of things beyond the border stripped of the attention- (and money-) seeking tendencies of virtually all popular sites on such subjects.

One of the genuinely interesting facets of this subject that I encountered in three days of reading journal articles is that the hard, ideologically-motivated scientism so seemingly firm in the saddle in the United States seems not at all to dominate science as practiced in Asia, India, and in the Near East. An example of that, reporting on some truly astonishing research in China, is Dong Shen’s article, “Unexpected Behavior of Matter in Conjunction with Human Consciousness” in the same issue in which I found Ishida’s article.

New Paradigm

2011-05-22T13:31:00.000-04:00

The image that now begins to emerge of the Cosmos—by means of NASA’s measurements of the effects of dark energy—provides yet another hint that Idries Shah’s fable of the beginnings might be true. I’ve been of that opinion for many years now. Among the myths it comes closest to agree with the cosmos of physics, at least if we accept David Bohm’s suggestion that our universe is a tiny Explicate Order emerging from the vast Implicate Order that is the greater, thus the Cosmos. (I discuss the first subject here on Ghulf Genes; more on Idries Shah’s myth is on this blog here.)

The downside of Shah’s formulation is that it does not suggest the sort of “personalistic” cosmology we’re used to, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But it contains an assertion of conscious intelligence in the Cosmos while also matching what we are learning from our astrophysics, thus a “beginning” (the big bang)—which can be read as the disturbance of an order of equilibrium—and the unfolding of that new event in a lawful way that we’re now seeing disclosed in the astrophysical observations of the visible universe.

Conversely, the myth also matches what Bohm hypothesizes, namely that alongside the Implicate and Explicate orders reality also manifests a Conditioned and an Unconditioned order. The latter permits intelligence and consciousness. Our own freedom and consciousness, to be sure, are the only direct observables of that order.

That in this realm we are most definitely disconnected from an ocean, if you like, of that Unconditioned order, thus from the realms of spirit and higher intelligence, which may well be equivalent to the ocean of the Conditioned, the physical, which now surrounds us, is also evident. And hence the grand thematic I once envisioned (in an unpublished work called What Does Life Want?) namely a return to that earlier unity, seems quite on—because even the universe, thus the visible, unfolded material realm and thus the conditioned order seems also to be striving for a reabsorption.

We can’t get closer than that, I assume.

Apocalypticism

2011-05-21T12:53:00.001-04:00

Today may be a suitable day to speak on this subject in that, based on the biblical calculations of Harold Camping, May 21, 2011 is the first day of the end times. These times will extend and conclude on October 21 of this year. Camping is an 89-year old retired civil engineer and religious radio figure (Family Radio). There have been at least a score of such predictions in my lifetime, of the western variety, thus all based on various calculations using biblical references, particularly Revelation and Daniel.

End-times are a favorite subject of mine, albeit in the much more limited sense of cyclic history—thus the end of civilizations. Thus I thought I’d look things up. Come to think of it, the two subjects are closely linked, certainly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Apocalypse (meaning the Book of Revelation) appeared in a time when the Graeco-Roman civilization was entering its end-stages. The date of the book is unknown but falls somewhere between the first and second centuries of our era. In rough terms, I would say, the Roman civilization fell apart between 44 BC, with Caesar, and 305 AD, when Diocletian’s reign ended. He was the one who formally split the empire. In times like that, above all, sensitive souls intuit that something is wrong. All manner of Gnosticisms rise; in our case, for instance, in the form of existentialism. Sophistication and book-learning are wide-spread. People read—and they do so because others write. Our peculiar version of that is that everybody writes—but nobody reads…

Imposing some sort of structure onto the maddeningly structure-less nature of sheer, brute Duration must be at least one reason why apocalypticism is a perennial fruit of human civilization. It becomes acute in hard times—and attracts particularly the elderly. The latter have actual cause for having end-time feelings. These begin to rise geometrically as we pass 75—and what I feel must be the very law of the universe. Mustn’t it? Let the wicked finally be punished; and let me be saved from the turmoil of the end-times.

I note that the Encyclopedia Britannica, at least my 1956 version, restricts the subject to Christian speculation, but Wikipedia, the now encyclopedia, avoid the word itself and substitutes “End of the World” instead. And it embraces a wider cultural interpretation. We learn there that apocalypticism has the same structure all around the world. There is a definite, precise, calculable end—take that, insufferable Duration. Evil, very often personified, is finally defeated. And the blessings of timelessness are always brought to us by a divine or divine-like grand benevolent figure.

It was already so in Mazdaism, Zoroastrianism, said to be humanity’s first higher religion (second millennium BC). With the end-times will come the Saoshyant, the savior. In China and in a Taoist tradition, Ling Ho will appear and set heaven and earth back into proper alignment. The Hindus have the most grandiose scheme of all, first in showing featureless duration where its place is, second in preempting false alarms by using very long periods and with great precision. Thus they divide time into eras or ages, yugas; these come in sets of four, 432 000 years—but the first is multiplied by 4, the second by 3, the third by 2, and so on. We are now in the last or fourth of the yugas of this particular dispensation, the Kali Yuga. The savior who shall appear at the end of it is Kalki, whose image (thanks to Wikipedia here) I am reproducing. It will be a while yet before Kalki arrives. The Kali Yuga began on midnight on February 18, 3102 BC, therefore we have another 426,887 years to go. Each yuga is divided in turn into ten dispensations ruled by a Great Incarnation of Vishnu, of which Kalki is the tenth. The other image, above, is the monogram for the Antichrist.

I like the Hindu version of apocalypticism best of all. Plenty of time to see if the strawberries we planted, and I enclosed in a protective mesh against the rabbits yesterday, will actually eventually, with a little help from Duration, end up in a bowl with my breakfast.

The Ghost Who E'er Denies

2011-05-13T15:12:00.000-04:00

Contradictions inhere in evil. We picture it as powerful, often as superior in intellect, but when we look at evil closely, analytically, comprehensively, it turns out to be pathetic, limited, deficient, and contemptible. The philosophers’ definition of evil as the absence of good turns out to be narrowly correct. Let’s take a moment to examine that contradiction—power and absence—before turning to other aspects of this subject.

Genuinely powerful phenomena have a neutral character: tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, mudslides. We know them to be innocent of the least intention. They represent release of energy. Droughts that come when the rains fail and devastate the land represent the opposite, denial of energy. Droughts also lack intentions; they are conditions, not real denials of anything.

But the power we associate with evil is also simply energy. But those who release or deny it are people who have what nature lacks: intention. What we mean by that word, strictly speaking, is a fusion of will and consciousness. When consciousness is missing we’re dealing with instinct. The tiger may “intend” to eat, but it has no awareness whatsoever that its victim is just another “tiger” in a different form.

People are capable of evil because they innately know—and the more sophisticated they are the more certain we can be that they do—that what they intend will cause harm to others; but they do not care. Innate knowledge and choice of action contrary to it is of the very essence of evil. If we deny this innate knowledge, we cannot really hold people responsible. Conscience must be an absolute, must be really present—or to put it more sharply must have been present at some point and then been consciously overstepped—before evil is possible. And the knowledge that I talk about is the real sort of thing, not a conceptual structure but something fused with a feeling best rendered as empathy. To harm others knowingly shows an absence of empathy, and in the philosophical “absence of good,” the real absence is that of empathy. It is a hardening of the heart. This hardening, however, does not deprive the evil-doer of power; it redirects this power to an evil expression.

It intrigues me that the personification of evil—as Mephistopheles—achieves an ambiguous but yet heroic status in Goethe’s Faust as the nineteenth century dawns (1808). It is from Faust that my post’s title comes, rendered in the same beat Goethe used, I am the ghost who e’er denies (Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint). The Enlightenment is then already in the past, and the devil is now promoted to the status of God’s agent provocateur. Mephistopheles becomes a more interesting figure than Faust; Faust wins in the end; we like this sort of story; it means the cake and eating it too.

The Faust figure appears to have been a real person who styled himself Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior. In his own time, the early sixteenth century, he was uniformly denounced as a charlatan, alchemist, moving about with a performing horse, a dog, familiar and evil spirits, and in league with the devil who eventually carried him off. In all of the earlier literary works based on Faust, the magician reaches a bargain with the devil, benefits for a set number of years with all kinds of rewards, but in the end is carried off to hell. Thus Encyclopedia Britannica informs me—and thus also end of story. In Goethe’s Faust we encounter the blessed transformation to modernity—at least if we view the story from a distance. Faust enjoys the powers that he bargains for but at the end is—saved! saved in part by the pleadings of the virtuous Gretchen, whom he seduces, gets pregnant, and who, in turn, drowns her illegitimate child—but she is saved and enters heaven anyway. There, in a role that evokes Dante’s Beatrice in Heaven, she intercedes for Faust. And all ends well.

But does it? In the earlier tales, the high sophistication, towering intellect, and all those other things Goethe lavishes on Faust do not produce the transformation. The absence of empathy corrupts. In the long run things always end badly. It might be time, again, to write another Faust, in modern dress. Ah, if only I had the energy, the poetry—and the years left for the labor—I might attempt it myself. That being beyond me, I invite a kindred spirit to do this necessary task.

Oh, yes. Perhaps I’d better define what “kindred spirit” means. It means a spirit of the new times, now in process of gestation. In those times it is Gretchen that matters, and who gives a fig for Faust. A kindred spirit will not give a dime for Faust’s ever so exalted soul if his will is bent the wrong way round. The poet will see him enter hell and wait for the doors to slam shut. And leave judgment to the Almighty.

The Old Lady and the Lab

2011-04-29T10:23:00.001-04:00

There is a sense in which human beings resemble plants and molting insects. Moths, butterflies come to mind: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly. If all goes according to design, in advancing age a transformation comes, in some cases almost visible.

I knew an old lady just blocks north of here; I got to know her on my walks. I’d pass her house about the same time every other day about the time when she took an old, old dog, a lab as ancient as she was, on its very short, very slow walk. At one time I’d stopped to talk, and after that we exchanged a few words every time, and over the period of a year or so I saw the strange process of her “detachment” from this life. She was exceedingly thin, frail, almost translucent—translucent enough so that I could almost see her spirit shining through—and it seemed like a light to me, especially brilliant in her eyes—and each time we parted and I marched on, I thought to myself: “She’s almost done. Almost done.” She was an ordinary, simple woman. Our exchanges turned on weather, seasons, plants, the grass. But I sensed a quality in her that transcended all of that.

We can learn many things by intellect, reflection, observation. But to have the inner, visceral, experience of it takes its own time. Odd word, that, visceral. There’s nothing more physical, material than our viscera—yet what I means is something quite different. The feel of this process of gradual detachment has the character of sensation, but it isn’t physical, quite the contrary. By “visceral” I mean something direct, experienced—not the abstract emptiness of concepts.

Long before books, culture, ideologies, philosophies, arts, sciences, religions—long before empires of rhyme and indies of calculus (Nabokov)—humanity already passed through this strange process of growth in which the body itself contained the winged creature and caused it mysteriously to develop into a being that could take to the skies. The old lady I knew—and yes, she did pass on—had little actual knowledge or contact with these highfalutin realms, but the process of life itself had worked on her—and she on herself—just living and being and participating in the ordinary chores of ordinary life. Yet at the end she was translucent and illuminated.

Winged Migration

2011-04-21T16:18:00.004-04:00

Today, by happenstance, I took my walk far from our house and thus saw an area on foot too far away to reach. It was a splendid walk, blue sky, bright, a few puffs of cloud—and this after an unremitting ten, eleven days of overcast, drizzle, snow, sleet, overcast, drizzle, and so on. Along the way I passed St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, immediately adjacent to a huge golf course. The church had been built in 1947 and featured at one of its entrances a shield depicting St. Michael astride a winged horse, a shining lance held in his right, about to pierce a wicked-looking red devil on the ground below. The shield featured the wings in such strikingly white ceramic, they left an impression as I moved on, flanking the green of the golf-course to one side and an empty and almost unearthly silent up-scale neighborhood on the other, the only sounds coming from, well, winged birds.

Those wings and that horse together launched a kind of musing. I could not remember ever having seen St. Michael mounted—and on Pegasus at that. That didn’t fit; to take just one observation, a winged creature surely needs no mount to get about. Then it dawned that the horse meant to indicate high status, and what with the rider himself splendidly winged, the horse had to be winged too. And his own execution of these wings had evidently pleased the artist so that he lifted them by color—or the lack of it. Later, on the Internet, I confirmed my own take on the matter. No, St. Michael, although very often shown as air-borne, does not need to and therefore doesn’t ride. I am here reproducing a Dürer drawing of 1498 that resides today in the Kunsthalle of Karlsruhe in Germany. The drawing, curiously, reflects the very thoughts I had as I marched on.

One was that wings visually picture and thus symbolize a quality we have but cannot actually see—a spiritual nature. Indeed we share this nature with the angels and with devils too who, in depictions of St. Michael, always appear at least singly as Satan or as Satan and his followers—and as the antagonists of a great battle. And Dürer had it right: the devils also have their wings, but not such as you’d brag about. Dürer’s drawing is quite wondrous in that the country-side beneath this aerial scene is ordinary and quite peaceful. The battle rages in the air—in a hidden dimension, you might say, one that a peaceful peasant, too small to see in this etching, would not actually see if he looked up. But it is happening nonetheless—right inside him.

Yes, I thought, eventually—after my walk, proceeding in a huge three-mile ellipse, once more brought heavy traffic into view and therefore I would now be distracted—yes, I thought, we are engaged, aren’t we, in a winged migration of our own. And let’s not blame it on peaceful nature that Dürer also had sense enough to show quite realistically as something pleasing, unless, of course, that battle up above happens to descend and disfigures the countryside.

Just before I reached Vernier, the heavy artery, I passed North High School. It is located precisely at one antipode of my ellipse, St. Michael at the other. There, at North, outside the fence of this huge complex, I saw the following chalked in simple but legible letters across the sidewalk: DOES GOD KNOW ME? And beneath it, by way of signature: MORMON.ORG. Angel Moroni meet Angel St. Michael?

P of E Revisited

2011-04-12T10:14:00.007-04:00

Fate insists that I use initials in this post today. My earlier title was “S, SM, & S.” A quite reflexive thought arises often lately, namely that modern technological civilization is the root of evil. But then I always hastily correct that by saying, “Before that arose came slavery—and, look, a mere 161 years ago it still held black people in bondage within a day’s driving distance from here.” This sequence of thoughts, repeating, has caused me to label it as Slavery, Satanic Mills, and Such. The last phrase is a stand-in for the longish rest of my inner rant. It begins by saying that ours mirror the late Hellenistic times. That era had its slavery in spades although fossil fuels were neither drilled nor mined. But the Hellenistic age had its mass culture and its decadence. And in those days arose varieties of very chaotic religious impulses known collectively as Gnosticism. The next reflection is that in periods like that a kind of self-assertive valuation of the human combines with a sense of anguish at mushrooming evils. In Gnosticism this took the form of pushing off the blame for everything onto the quasi-divine Demiurge. I’m Okay but Things are not. And if only I can hold that idea firmly and effectively in mind, know it, in other words, then I am saved—hence the name of that belief from the Greek for “knowledge.” In our times that view is expressed by raising Victimhood to a high status; our demiurge turns out to be the System.

But the slogan points to a lot more, not least “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” thus the fact we rarely reflect upon, namely that life—at least above the level of the vegetative order (excusing the Venus flytrap for the moment)—exists by destroying other life. Every time I shudder at yet some other facet of modern civilization and the process starts over, eventually I revisit P of E. You have been on tenterhooks to know, haven’t you. The Problem of Evil, of course.

(If “tenterhooks” now bothers you, in turn, I hasten to explain that they are clothes pins, tenters having once been wood frames on which to fasten lines on which to hang cloth for drying. Tenters have been replaced by a combination of the garage and the house in our day—except for those stretch-frames down in the basement by the ironing board.)

But back to P of E. In the East Hinduism, and Buddhism to a lesser extent, adopted vegetarian approaches to diet consistently enough, these arising from a kind of troubled realization that there is a problem out there—and that it might be deeply built into the very Creation itself.

But when Hellenistic times finally wind down—and they do—the real switch that takes place is to stop blaming the demiurge and to look within. Then we get the doctrine of the Fall. That’s where my inner process usually ends. A fallen world explains much better why we might all be in this dimension, thus, in a way, out of place. But if we are then surely each and every one of us must carry the blame directly, not by inheritance from careless Adam, careless Eve. Christianity did not evolve in the direction of vegetarianism. Is that because Greek philosophical culture, honed to a fine edge by the clever sophists, made careful distinctions between humans (don’t eat) and lesser breeds without the law (eat some but not horses, dogs, or nightingales). But I wonder if in some other dimension the souls of wheat and rye will threateningly swarm around me in the future for having eaten thick slices of bread every morning for breakfast as far back as I can think.

One Self or Many?

2011-04-04T12:27:00.004-04:00

The notion of multiple souls in us is a familiar enough concept, although the number we use in the West is usually only two. There is that famous line by Goethe: Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust (Two souls, alas! reside within my breast). Okay, make that three. Freud had his ego, id, and superego. Jung had three for males and more (in a sense) for ladies. In the male there is the self, the self’s female side, the anima, and then the “shadow,” the chthonic, undeveloped soul. The same pattern holds for women, but the animus appears as multiple males, at least in dreams. The shadow in males is male, in females female. The numbers increase in a hurry.

And things get complicated. People say, “I’m of two minds about that.” Does that mean that there is one I with two minds, or two minds each with its own I but sharing one voice and both saying the same thing at the same time?

Sometimes in a milder form another word is used—personality. There are split personalities. This can take mild forms, thus quite different behavior in various habitual settings, at home, at work, visiting the parents. But in some cases it manifests as a formal mental disorder called dissociative identity disorder (DID). It is a real disease; when present, personality A does not even remember at all, or very clearly, what personality B knows, and vice versa; and the behaviors are very different. Does that mean that two or more souls or selves are present in all of us, but usually smoothly communicating? And that in severe cases of dissociation the communications break down or are simply cut off? The disorder is due to trauma in early childhood caused by severe and repetitive abuse. But does one self violently detach itself from a whole range of experience and develop an alternate mode of being, sometimes cycling back? Is one real identity present beneath the personalities? Or is the only substrate of these personalities a single body without consciousness at all? Case stories of DID suggest that one identity remains. Some may be read here, and they suggest that the “alter” is a rogue. Some describe themselves as passengers in their bodies rather than as drivers. Detached behavioral programs seem to run—and the reset key is stuck. But the frustrated person, staring at the screen, is separate. This suggests that personalities are tools, although in practice we identify with them so completely that we think that they are us—rather than structures we have formed and allow to run on automatic. And in cases of disorder, these programs become so automatic that they cannot be shut off, alas, can’t even be seen to be running.

Identification is a key word here. In Sufi circles the concept of multiple selves is used in two different ways. In one these refer to the soul at its various levels of development: commanding, accusing, inspired, and illumined. The Commanding Self is the unreformed natural product in which self-awareness is barely present and the individual is always “identified” with whatever is going on. It is also the conditioned self, just thoughtlessly executing its routines. The Accusing Self manifests higher awareness, hence it displays a conscience. It is accusing—itself; of heedlessness. In the next stage development has crystallized the self enough so that grace begins to flow (or to be perceived). In the last stage the person belongs to the Illuminati.

The second way of talking about multiple selves in Sufi circles is really a part of their methods of training. Here we sometimes hear or read that people have no self; they have selves; now this, now that. Emphasis is laid on this, and the disciple is invited to observe himself or herself. The automatic, reflexive, associative, reactive character of our behavior then becomes apparent. But apparent to whom? Why—to the actual self. So there is a self there after all. And to teach it to become aware of itself, it is told that it isn’t there. A teaching method. Therefore let’s not trot it out as a scientific observation. What is an observable fact is that most of the time in most of our actions, we follow routines. We’re not self-aware. We’re just behaviors. But to control those behaviors, we must develop consciousness. It is there, in potentiam, all the time. But not, as the medievals used to say, in actus. The “natural” behavior of the Commanding Self is purely reactive—however complex that reactive behavior is, and often (as I well know) it can be very complex. It is but one self, but it identifies with its own routines of behavior. It is a base case. The way is upward from there.

Modern psychologies that emphasize multiple selves but never speak of stages of development are simply incomplete. And they maintain this view because of underlying metaphysical assumptions, among which is the absence of an actual, real soul or self. Souls, selves, are mere epiphenomena that vanish into thin air as soon as the brain dies.

Looking at Our Own Reality

2011-03-22T11:10:00.005-04:00

How does our own personal sense of reality arise? The answer seems obvious, but a little reflection proves that to be too simple. The obvious answer is that we feel our own bodily sensations—and also that we, ourselves, know this, this “Here I am.” There is a distinct duality present in this simple state of self-awareness. One polarity is a sense of continuity, of persistence. I was awfully worn out yesterday, but now I’m pretty chipper. The knowledge that I was and now I am—and simultaneously aware of both—is that sense of continuity. I remember being tired; my body is now energetic. The knowledge belongs to me; it is still there. And the mere fact of forgetting doesn’t change that. Thus for instance I haven’t the vaguest of how I felt at 9:20 a.m. on July 11, 2009. Indeed 2009, which is just the other day, is a pretty fuzzy memory unless I start consulting calendars to bring some of it back. Nevertheless I feel innately certain that I was present back in that vague past. So here we have it: continuity, persistence, now tired, now chipper, but while these states cycle, something remains unchanged. That something is the consciousness of my persistence.

The other pole of this duality, of course, is change itself. There is me—and the other, the over against. The most obvious “over against” is my body. The other, greater over against has changed over time, in itself and also in relation to me. Once it was Minnesota, then Virginia, then Kansas, then Missouri, then Germany, then Hungary. My body has also changed. Once it was small and young, now it is big and old. It is still the over against because it has changed—but “Here I am” has not.

So much for the obvious. But is that sufficient to make us feel real? One way to test that is to imagine ourselves in a situation where nothing else is present but Here I am and Stuff out there, the body close and intimate, all else a step removed—pleasing when it’s edible or drinkable, dangerous when it is hard and cold. A world like that would very quickly make us feel deep anguish. The closest to a documented case like that is the life of Helen Keller—close but not quite perfect. Keller was 19 months of age when an illness deprived her of sight and hearing. As I’ve noted in this blog earlier, she was beginning to learn to speak, was imitating phrases that she’d heard. She had also learned the word for water and remembered it (as “wah-wah”) throughout her painful period of mental darkness. Until she reached age seven and finally got help, she lived in a state of powerful frustration, longing to communicate somehow by using signs and gestures. It’s not a perfect case because she had, at an early age, already discovered—not the other but the others. Her fabulous story is of the greatest value in vividly showing how vitally important for a personal sense of reality is the presence of, and communication with, other Here I am’s.

Long ago and far away I came across a great truth. I think it was in Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s Pathways Through to Space. It is that the two great paths exist for human development, one based on heightened consciousness (Enlightenment) and the other through relationship (Love). Merrell-Wolff’s path was the first; indeed it seems to rank very high among the mystics. But I’d assert that Love is prior and higher—indeed that in its absolute absence, in a world of mental darkness such as Keller experienced in childhood—the very tools for higher awareness are denied us. Language, the tool we need for the first-mentioned path, comes about because we use it to relate to other living beings just like us. It begins with that wah-wah in earliest childhood. Our personal reality depends intrinsically on relationship—as does genuine transcendence. All else is secondary.

The Buddha ranks highest in the category of Enlightenment—achieved by a great act of denial, as it were. What were the roots of that effort? Seeing human misery when Siddhartha Gautama was young: compassion. And when the Buddha achieved his aim, what did he do? Did he pass on into Nirvana? If he had done so, some farmers would have found a desiccated body under that now famous bodhi tree. But no. The Buddha returned to the world to—to communicate, to relate. And one of the great religions sprouted from that seed. No. There are no genuine solitaries high or low. Enlightenment needs its justifying polarity too. Ultimately transcendence falls apart unless there is another person out there to give this person his or her reality.

Hell Examined

2011-03-12T12:08:00.002-05:00

The concept of hell as understood today—a place of eternal punishment, hell fires, devils and so on, a place we enter after the final judgment at the end of time or, in the popular mind, right after death—does not have the same meaning that it had in its own time when the word Sheol was used in Hebrew. It meant the grave, the pit, or the abyss. And indeed, the etymology of the word points back to saal, meaning to burrow or to dig. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia (here), it is the place where “the dead meet (Ezek. xxxii.; Isa. xiv.; Job xxx. 23) without distinction of rank or condition—the rich and the poor, the pious and the wicked, the old and the young, the master and the slave—if the description in Job iii. refers, as most likely it does, to Sheol. The dead continue after a fashion their earthly life.” Understood in this way, Sheol is therefore pretty much the same sort of place as the Greek Hades, the under-world. Not surprisingly, when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, the word Hades was used to translate Sheol. Both are realms of shades, not specifically of punishment. And, come to think of it, our own word, hell, is derived from hole, hollow, and the Anglo-Saxon helan, meaning to hide. In Latin it is infernus, thus the “below.”

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia (here), the meaning associated with this word changed with the rise of Christianity. After Christ’s ascension to heaven, the just go to heaven and hell then becomes the place of the damned. Thus references to Sheol in the Old Testament refer to a realm of shades where everybody goes; in the New Testament a new word is often used, Gehenna, derived from a term meaning Valley of Hinnom, an actual geographical location where in Israel Moloch had once been worshipped.

The upshot of all this is that our concept of hell is relatively new and closely associated with Christianity and the doctrine of redemption.

Now, of course, Old and New Testaments are both considered the Word of God, literally by some branches of Christianity. Therefore concepts like a vengeful God—e.g. “The Lord is a jealous God and avenging, the Lord is avenging and wrathful; the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries and keeps wrath for his enemies.” Nahum 1:2—are combined with the New Testament concept of hell. And from this combination of concepts arises the popular controversy over hell in our times. On one side are those who cannot believe that God could be vengeful, never mind what Nahum of Elkosh said. Therefore the concept of a realm where the wicked go to be eternally tortured is thought to be unworthy of God.

The other side, in effect, argues that actions have consequences, that a law governs reality, and that you can’t simply “get away with it.” But. And there is a but here. But given their beliefs, particularly in the authority of the Bible and its literal truth, they give this idea—actions have consequences—the most lurid form possible, thereby weakening that idea’s unassailable logic.

But the much more scary thought, for someone of my age—when the Heavenly Gates become visible ahead—is the Hindu concept of hell. It simply is that we must come back, if we are bad, back into this dimension, starting as babies again—and if we’ve been very wicked in this life, our re-entry will be at a much less favorable level than we’ve enjoyed in our current life. In the Hindu conceptualization hell is right here; and now. And if you wish for proofs of that, study history and read the papers. And if you are well off, comfortable, indeed complacent, just ponder a rephrasing of one of Jesus' famous sayings: “Satan’s house has many mansions.”

The Grace of Recognition

2011-03-06T12:25:00.000-05:00

Part of existence for all of us—it comes sooner or later to all—is a feeling of abandonment. Here I mean a certain you might say existential kind of feeling. At times like that we oddly yearn for a sign out-of-the-blue, as it were. And it must come, in that particular way, not through the usual routes of ordinary attention. It must be unusual. It must counter a feeling I’ve always expressed to myself by “a stranger in a strange land.” That biblical phrase—no Heinlein didn’t frame it though he used it as the title of a novel—is not exactly on target in its own context. Let me reproduce the context by way of showing the peculiar power of the highly compressed Biblical narrative. Here is Exodus 2:16-22:

Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters: and they came and drew water, and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. And the shepherds came and drove them away: but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their flock. And when they came to Reuel their father, he said, How is it that ye are come so soon to day? And they said, An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds, and also drew water enough for us, and watered the flock. And he said unto his daughters, And where is he? why is it that ye have left the man? call him, that he may eat bread. And Moses was content to dwell with the man: and he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter. And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.

So much for the phrase, which, for me, echoes something deeply embedded in a Gnostic kind of consciousness that sometimes rises.

Now the odd thing is that quite minor happenings, thus meaningful coincidences—which by their nature are both, meaningful and yet pure chance—serve to relieve the sense of strangeness whereas, surrounded as we might be by caring others in our own environment, that feeling of abandonment might still be present. The existential confirmation almost requires that it be untraceable to causes. Thus neither family, friends, nor public recognition serve the purpose of providing meaning—because we can easily trace the sources of these supports to a mutual kind of give and take. True love serves this purpose—when it first dawns. It then appears miraculous. Celebrity is vanishing if our head is screwed on right. Then we see that we are merely mirrors in which others see themselves. And complete strangers who come to understand us well, with whom we feel a kinship, rapidly enter, for functional purposes, the role of friends and family.

But here and there an odd event, very often of the most minor kind, lifts our moments of abandonment because we then get a hint that we might actually matter beyond the realms of mere cause and effect.

Mind and Language

2011-03-02T11:35:00.002-05:00

Reflecting yesterday on the wonderful nonsense of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and this in the context of two public events, caused an old conviction of mine to come to the fore again. The two public events were Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement that the Executive Branch would no longer defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the Supreme Court’s opinion yesterday on the privacy rights of corporations. For more on these see my post today on Ghulf Genes here. Both of these cases are intimately concerned with language, with definitions, in the first case of “marriage” and in the second of “personal privacy.” And in the case of Alice, we have a nonsense tale in which the intended meaning is as much hidden by the language of the book as it is revealed in an aura that surrounds it. Humor, generally but not alone, illustrates my conviction that mind uses language but isn’t created by it.

Exactly the opposite is claimed by evolutionary linguists, of whom a representative figure is Derek Bickerton, and his book, Language and Human Behavior, is a classical example.

My endless fascination with language arises precisely because we are forever judging, weighing, and choosing words, thus that we stand over them like sovereigns, that they serve us and not we them. This is vividly obvious in all manner of contexts. The letter of the law stands in contrast to its spirit, for example, and we see endless instances where some insist on the letter, others on the spirit. Language does not compel—people do. The two legal cases I mention above are telling examples as well.

The application of the word “person” to a legal entity, a corporation, is a kind of attempt to compel behavior by expanding the meaning of a word. A corporation is never a person in the sense in which I am. The mind knows that perfectly well. In DOMA Congress attempts to limit the meaning of marriage to a male and a female, but the words of the law do not compel—unless the sovereign mind that hears those words agrees. In both of these cases the spirit behind the definitions is the interesting aspect. In commercial law the spirit that turns corporations into persons is a spirit claiming rights it does not naturally have. In the case of DOMA, the spirit is similarly reactive, at minimum, and makes me cringe just a little. Do I think that breathing is the intake of air and its release again? Yes, I do. But do we need a Congressional act to know that? Do I think that marriage means the union of a man and woman? Yes, I do. But have we exhausted that meaning? “Let me not,” said Shakespeare in Sonnet 116, “to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.” Belay, belay. The thoughts are free—and unless real harm is done, let them use whatever words they choose to voice them. We don’t have to agree. You respirate, I breathe.

The Dance Hall of the Dead

2011-02-26T10:48:00.004-05:00

The knights of reason get things right in the hard world of concepts, but for inspiration we look to poets, visionaries, and to mystics. Storytellers belong to the latter tribe, albeit at the humbler working level, hence we often learn something about mysterious and hidden matters from novels and the like. From Tony Hillerman we have The Dance Hall of the Dead, a vivid glimpse into the religious life of the Zuni Indians, a tiny group, part of the Pueblo Indians, about 12,000 all told today, less than 8,000 living the Pueblo life. Yet in that obscure and ancient tradition lives a mythological conception you will find echoing the experiences of Swedenborg, say, of the Tao Te Ching, with hints of reincarnation included. But it takes poetic imagination to do the fusion I’m suggesting.

Here is a summary in Hillerman’s novel put into the mouth of a fictitious Franciscan, Father Ingles. Ingles is speaking.

“What made me think of Kothluwalawa was that business of the dance hall. If you translate that word into English it means something like ‘Dance Hall of the Dead,’ or maybe ‘Dance Ground of the Spirits,’ or something like that.” Ingles smiled. “Rather a poetic concept. In life, ritual dancing for the Zuni is sort of a perfect expression of …” He paused, searching for the word. “Call it ecstasy, or joy, or community unity. So what do you do when you’re beyond life, with no labors to perform? You spend your time dancing.”

Now it turns out that this place, in scholarship as well as in the novel, is a sacred lake near the place where the Zuni river joins the Little Colorado in Arizona. Its formal name is Ko-tluwallawa. Ko stands for “god” and “tluwallawa” for town, city, or pueblo. Thus the name really means “god-town” and also, as I will rapidly show, the Abode of the Dead.

To quote a scholar (A.L. Kroeber, link) here is the original myth of how the watery Dance Hall of the Dead came about: “As the ancient people crossed the [Zuni] river, the mothers dropped their pinching and biting children, who turned into tadpoles, frogs, turtles, and other aquatic animals and descended to the ‘god town’ in the sacred lake, and there at once became the kokko.”

Now the knights of reason will have some problem with that myth—and doubly so when they are told that for the Zuni the word kokko means “gods.” In the Zuni conception the dead are gods—much as in Swedenborg’s writings all angels are former humans. This view has greatly puzzled scholars; they’ve evidently ignored or dismissed voices like Swedenborg’s. The kokko, mind you, aren’t God. That person, in Zuni culture, is Awonawilona, the supreme being, thought of as bisexual, referred to as He-She, the giver of life and present everywhere. Parsed apart further (by Kroeber), the word really means He-She who owns all roads, paths, and ways—and someone like me can’t help but immediately to think of the Tao.

The hint of reincarnation I mentioned above comes from a Zuni belief that every person has an appointed path his or her own—completion of which is mandatory and may not be cut short by suicide, however caused, including excessive grief. Those who thus violate the dispensation must complete that path first before they can descend into the sacred lake and take up their dance in the Dance Hall of the Dead. What little literature is readily available to me does not describe how “finishing the interrupted path” might be accomplished, but it does strike me that in Ian Stevenson’s studies most of the cases of people who recall previous lives feature individuals who died young and by violent means. They remember interrupted lives.

The Framing is the Picture

2011-02-19T10:20:00.003-05:00

While genuine curiosity is always present in humanity, institutionalized forms of it depend on the presence of a suitable ideology. Scientific study of so-called miraculous events, for example, is not undertaken. The scientific ideology just can’t work with the phenomena as these are actually experienced. Let us take something odd like bi-location, thus a person appearing in two places at the same time. Based on the scientific view, bi-location is impossible. Those who claim to have observed it are simply labeled credulous. If such a claim is ever scientifically investigated, the aim of the study is to prove its falsity. Similarly, the Vatican does undertake careful investigation of miracles, but always as part of a process of canonization, not as a general (scientific) undertaking. Thus the Vatican does not investigate claims of miracles surrounding Hindu or Muslim saints. Much as science has a strong view of the necessarily physical causation of any symptoms others might label miraculous, so also the Vatican has a strong view of the causation of miracles; these are necessarily God’s interventions.

For these reasons, we always find evidence for the miraculous in settings where the ideology colors the whole situation. Here and there, in the last two centuries, we’ve seen some few departures from this general tendency. These have been rare because a person, however well-qualified as a scientist, will draw tribal attacks if he or she wanders off the reservation. In the nineteenth century, before the establishment of Science with a leading cap, we have the establishment of the Society for Psychical Research by an elite. An example from our own time is Ian Stevenson, a trained medical man and biochemist, who investigated reincarnation. Near Death Experience studies represent another interesting cluster, also initiated by a doctor, Raymond Moody. NDE work has taken on a certain legitimacy precisely because Moody’s work was then taken up by multiple teams of other physicians—always those who were exposed to the phenomenon directly.

The point I’m after today, however, is not that “fringe” elements in science have “dared” to “dabble” in heresy—and have to some extent “gotten away” with it. Especially in NDE work, fame and fortune—if not in academic circles—may be achieved by heresy. The thought I had was that if the medium is the message, sometimes the framing is the picture. The extraordinary gifts that infrequently become visible surrounding saints or would-be saints—I’m thinking here of Padre Pio, who is, Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth who isn’t yet, and Bruno Gröning who never shall be—appear to me to be of the greatest interest. These are modern people; they’ve all lived during my life time; indeed I once lived a mere handful of miles away from Therese’s town during and after World War II. But I know of many scores of others who’ve lived in the past—and in every culture of the globe. The same stories surround them—albeit figures with stigmata are strictly in Catholic realms, which is itself worthy of careful note. The linkage between reincarnation studies and stigmata has never been noted, except, perhaps, by me (here). But as for other capacities these people have displayed, they are the same: bi-location, precognition, healing and other powers. Each is embedded in a religious culture which explains them in its own framing. The total phenomenon, as an established reality, has never been examined as it were objectively, as phenomena but yet with full acceptance of the observed realities. By full acceptance here I mean that to understand these people’s lives, experiences, and actions necessarily requires acceptance of a much more extended kind of reality than we believe surrounds us. (Here I provide this link to some reports on Padre Pio by way of illustration of the nature of this evidence--and how we actually encounter it).

Time still hides many things. The inertial pull of this dimension is enormous, but in due time genuine knowledge of these phenomena, which straddle the zones of here and over there, may become better understood—although, I suspect, never by more than just a minority. As genuine curiosity is always present, there will always be those with one foot in the borderzone.

The Wise on Evil

2011-02-17T13:57:00.003-05:00

The Buddha found the roots of evil in desire, which makes sense. If I don’t ever want anything I’ll never experience conflict. But this observation can be rendered in milder form as well. In an environment where resources are very ample and accessible and people are few in number, the sum total of evil is bound to be less than in a very complex and crowded environment where resources are limited and indeed artificially designed to extract effort to obtain. In a vast, rich society such as ours, no sooner does a baby arrive than some parents already begin to scheme to get it into an elite kindergarten when it’s old enough. Desire rises, waves of it tower up, and the whole civilization behaves like a vast, standing tsunami of desire, millions all yelling, me, me, me. Everything’s in conflict, from social items on my calendar, to getting a word in edgewise, and it just goes on.

In a way the Buddha’s is a fundamental insight because it anchors evil in the subjective experience and leaves out all detail. Neither free will, nor time, nor yet discernment of different kinds of goods are present here, and conflicts between them. The source of desire is left unmentioned. Socrates focus on ignorance, suggesting that whatever people do they view as good; evil deeds therefore arise because apparent good is chosen over real; here it is hard to find a place for the notion of a troubled conscience prospective or otherwise. Plotinus, for whom reality is an emanation from the Ultimate and thinning out with distance, as it were, the material realm is the lowest and least containing genuine being. Hence evil is linked to the material dimension. Augustine echoes this; evil is non-being or, better yet, a privation of being. Free will and knowledge converge in Ockham. Evil for him was failure to do what what we’re obliged to do. That failure is only possible if we know both, can distinguish between them, and are free to choose. But desire is also implicit in it; why would we avoid our obligation if avoiding were not more desirable.

All of these snippets throw varying amounts of light on a vast subject. I’m cribbing here from the Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion’s article on Evil—which doesn’t mention Aristotle or Aquinas. Among moderns it mentions Schelling, of whom I’ve read nothing, and Berdyaev, whom I’ve read very carefully. Berdyaev is a half-forgotten modern apostle of free will.

A distillation of the wise does produce an interestingly strong balsamic vinegar. Desire is rooted in matter most of the time or can be linked back to the presence of others when in manifests it unwholesome but mental forms like dominance and envy, to name two. But is it evil to desire wisdom? I suspect the Buddha might have thought so. Awareness is fundamental. Animals follow their desires without the least tinge of guilt. And an awareness of time is present in it—in that the greater good we are obliged to choose (Ockham) may lie as yet unborn and hidden by the future. Socrates touches upon the paradox of good—namely that once we know it is irresistible. And here concepts like Augustine’s come in handy because he suggests that knowledge is not quite enough if we are a kind of blend of being and not-yet being, a kind of ghost in the solid eternities of matter.

Fact, Fiction, and In-Between

2011-02-16T10:29:00.003-05:00

One of the more interesting lenses by which to examine the subject of “faith” is through the lens of reincarnation—a subject touched on in the last post. Those of us living now in wealthy, technological societies are unusually lucky. No other human era had access to as much information, not least to the results of sober and systematic studies of subjects in the hazy regions of the borderzone, reincarnation being one of these subjects. I’ve provided a brief summary on this blog to the studies of Ian Stevenson here. I won’t repeat what I said there but the post outlines what factual knowledge we possess of this claim—namely that people, or at least some people, had lived before.

Well-documented cases—to the extent that these cases can be documented at all—represent a fact difficult to explain away. They represent a “finding,” as it were, uncomfortable although it might be. Most westerners who say that they believe in reincarnation are expressing a feeling rather than a serious thought. It is reassuring in a way—in that death isn’t the be-all and the end-all here. But it isn’t really thought about or there might be a kind of pause. Reincarnation is not really a genuine continuity of any life left behind; the new life is not an expansion or enlargement of the last one—or, if it is, it isn’t a conscious one. The people who remember a previous life well enough for third parties to check the facts are very few in number. Most of us remember nothing—and the parsimonious explanation is that that’s because there is nothing to remember. In regions where reincarnation is part of religious belief, having been born again (but not in the Christian sense) is the mark of failure rather than a boon. We didn’t have what it takes to escape the wheel of karma.

Now reincarnation serves as a cosmological explanation in the Hindu world—as in ours the Fall and its consequence, death, serves in ours. But there is an element of fact in each. Some people do remember having lived before, indeed insistently so. Fact. At the same time the troubles and tribulations of this life are experienced by all; and death is also certainly a fact. To this I would add Near Death Experience studies. Those elements of them telling of experience in another world, meeting a luminous being, relatives who’ve passed on, etc., cannot be objectively checked. But in the early stages of NDEs souls make observations about this world such that comatose individuals cannot possibly make, thus lending some weight by that to that which then follows. This body of information is also a fact.

The fiction—in my title—is the detailed elaboration accruing to these cosmological projections, as common in the East as in the West. It is produced by hypnotic regressions of living individuals who thus “recover” past lives. That literature isn’t even very good entertainment. The notions that bad karma can result in future lives as frogs or dogs or snakes belongs to the fictional category too. The West has produced its low level fiction of horrid devils torturing the wicked in fire with pitchforks—and the righteous harping on clouds. Both East and West have also produced grand and noble myths for which there is not even a shred of factual underpinning. But it is the fiction, largely, that underpins faith, as such.

The In-Between is where the thoughtful person finds himself—and in that zone we find all kind of markers but not a shred of certainty. Human consciousness and its upward potential are very hopeful markers—certainly for me. They point to the presence of meaning in the universe despite the incommensurable meaninglessness of the vastness of material reality. That there is more to reality than the unfathomable depths of burning stars—for that the few odd pockets of fact suffice. To make clear, sharp, conceptual sense of them is denied. A sensible approach, it seems to me, is to accept the visible facts and at least to think about underlying structures that might comprehensively explain all of human experience, not least reincarnation. It too appears to be an aspect of existence. But to assume that reincarnation is the universal fate of every person—that starts to feel like fiction.

To this I might add a third grouping of experiences—and the most puzzling of all. It is the ability sharply and in detail to dream the future. It suggests that there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in our philosophy.

The Monstrous Restoration

2011-02-15T10:14:00.000-05:00

In the context of yesterday’s post on a verse in Genesis, it is sometimes instructive to contemplate the vast process by means of which ancient writings have been raised to the rank of revelation and how orthodox doctrines are formed by a process that functions exactly like legislation—thus hammered out, voted in or voted out. How this observation fits the general thematic of the last few posts, the Fall of Man, will become plain as we proceed. The Genesis view is that the Fall was occasioned by sin and brought death as its consequence. (Paul: “The wages of sin is death,” Romans 6:23). One of the very prominent early Christian theologians, Origen (c. 185-254), held a view that is at least mildly conformant to this doctrine, at the abstract level, anyway, if not in detail. Whenever the Church Fathers are mentioned, there you will find a mention of Origen—but invariably followed by the annotation that, well, technically, he was not a Church Father because he had heretical views. Of that in a moment.

Origen’s fascinating view was that souls pre-exist their incarnation, thus that they were created at the very beginnings of Reality. The very fact that we are material bodies was proof for Origen of the Fall, but the disobedience took place before such objects as bodies existed. You might say that humanity’s disobedience took place in a higher realm and that all those here were personally disobedient. The problems associated with “inherited” original sin therefore go away. The disobedience produced a degree of nonbeing in those who disobeyed, and a consequence of disobedience was, is, bodily existence. Origen, therefore, believed in reincarnation, metempsychosis. “Every soul comes into this world strengthened by the victories and weakened by the defeats of its previous life,” Origen wrote. A source I found for that is here—on page 42 of the referenced book. Origen’s scholarly labor involved work in discerning the origins of the New Testament, thus he participated in the process that turns old writings into revelation. But some of his own theological ideas were later condemned as anathema by a legislative body, the Second Council of Constantinople, in 533. He thus exemplifies in person the processes by which doctrines evolve.

The Council declared the “fabulous pre-existence of souls” anathema and condemned those who believed in “the monstrous restoration which follows from it.” The use of those energetic adjectives pleases me—none of the usual bland-talk in the sixth century. The monstrous restoration, of course, is reincarnation. Well, perhaps it is monstrous—if seen from a much, much higher perch in the order of creation.

Two observations. First, it is interesting to note that a very broad hermeneutical interpretation of Genesis’ Chapter 3—viewed as a poetical take on a real state of affairs—could result in so enlarging the picture that Origen’s view becomes credible. Second, that view is widely held in Hinduism, not least the eternal nature of souls and the fact that their capture by Wheel of Karma is the consequence of desire for the low. In that context the death of someone who has become purified is, indeed, a blessing, devoutly to be wished.

East of Eden

2011-02-14T13:17:00.003-05:00

Poetry holds something beyond conceptual thought—and by the last, of course, I mean the rigorous, the philosophical kind. The poet tries to capture something elusive. He or she has been inspired. The act is a kind of mirror-making. The mirror is made of images drawn from sensory, actual, day-to-day experience. What it suggests is the not-quite-graspable. But if poetry then also mythographic works like Genesis. Both are subject to hermeneutics; we contemplate them; we try to extract meanings implicit but not sharply visible in them. Some view hermeneutics negatively: dissect the apple, analyze it chemically. The knowledge never tells you how an apple tastes. But we engage in hermeneutics all the time—even if the word is unfamiliar. We’re always pondering the meaning of our own intuitions and experiences.

The hermeneutic task I set myself today is to examined Genesis 3:19, the last verse of what is known as “the curse on man and woman” after their disobedience. It is interpreted to mean that death first appears in human experience after the fall. Yes. That’s an interpretation. The verse says (Revised Standard):

In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The verse certainly doesn’t say: “Although my original plan was that you should live forever, always young, I’m now introducing a change. Your body will decay and you will die. You came from matter and back to that state you shall go.”

But then verses 22-24 complicate matters. They are much more specific. Do they already represent a bit of hermeneutics that got included into the myth itself later? Here is the passage:

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”—therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.”

A curious verse. Adam had not been forbidden to eat of the tree of life. But now, now that he had knowledge, it was time to prevent him? Such readings of the Torah, of course, suggested to Paul (in Romans, for instance) that death came with the fall—not because of knowledge so much but because the fruit of the tree of life was then also denied—by denial of access to it.

But no. I’m not talking tongue in cheek here. This is a myth, a poetic statement. The sensory images of trees, magic although they are, are symbols easy for ordinary minds to grasp and to imagine. They simplify through images. They suggest the gist of things. The distance between human and the divine is symbolized simply as the distance between the lord-owner of the rich estates and the poaching peasant who doesn’t know his place. Genesis 3 is not a problem for the poet. Two big intuitions are wrapped up in it and turned into a story without too careful a logical parsing. One is the wayward, willful, selfishness of man. Another is an explanation of our current condition. One is said to cause the other. No critical analysis of each verse was contemplated by the writers—or, indeed, undertaken by them—much less the isolation of single verses as if they were hard facts like gravity.

There is no hint here, not the faintest, that after his body returns to the dust Adam’s soul shall rise into the heavens there to be judged. Materialists might find great comfort in Genesis 3. Dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return is rather, you might say, orthodox materialism. Isn’t it? But the poetry of humanity is not exhausted by reading Genesis. Genesis was one take on the subject. There are others. In some death may be viewed as a great blessing—rescuing the individual who, like Paul, in Romans 7:24, cries out: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

More Notes on The Fall

2011-02-13T11:20:00.000-05:00

The story of the Fall commences roughly on the third page of Genesis; where it falls depends on print size. It is the very opener of the story. The story of Creation sketches in the setting, but the setting is not elaborated. We hear something more about Adam and Eve and how they came about, but nothing like a history of their lives in Paradise. The human events begin with the Fall. If this were not our own at least inherited myth—inherited by way of the decline of the last civilization and the myth’s acceptance by our own, in Christendom—but there promoted to the status of revealed truth—thus if we see it from the outside, objectively, it would be quite correct to surmise that it is a myth attempting to explain the mystery of human existence and suffering. At the same time, it recognizes our very high state in the order of nature, our transcending capacities—while also explaining the dark side, man’s war against himself and nature and, above all, the absolutely unavoidable—death.

We might also read the third chapter of Genesis as a head-shaking and despondent look back to another and ancient time. Tiny pockets of “paradise” have actually survived into ours: primitive hunting and gathering societies (e.g. Papua New Guinea, Amazon region, some island societies). The Fall in Genesis could thus also be read as a view of the transition between such primitive societies and the later agricultural dispensation, the last vastly more complex and riddled with conflict. The herding phase was an intermediate between the two here and there. That this surmise is also correct is evident. Agriculture is prominent in Genesis 3:17—and it is the new thing; it is part of the curse.

Now, of course, we tend to view the primitive as holy, the complex as riddled with evil. The higher the knowledge, the more complex the society always tends to be. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge is thus—shifting to another culture—the opening of Pandora’s box. But sentimentality is clearly at work here. To know anything genuinely means to live it. The hunting and gathering life undoubtedly is also just—life. What characterizes it, when we find it, is ample resources and low levels of conflict; those two are obviously linked. That we find it is already a kind of fall—at least for the people who’ve been found. The next thing you know, they’ll be greedily wanting gas-engines for their boats. After that, kiss paradise good-bye.

When I ponder it, the paradisaical state is present all around us as the animal kingdom. It is primitive society—but without the presence of mind. It lives without our form of consciousness, without history, and without memory. Animals don’t consciously notice death taking others; no fear of it is present—as it it’s also absent in little children. Thus the ultimate Fall is the rise of consciousness as such—and secondarily those transformations in the environment that cause knowledge to increase and also to sharpen. Knowledge is only mildly present in the primitive, and always closely twinned with particulars; it is extraordinarily sharp (conceptual) in a vast, rich, and dying technological culture. Its level increases with every advance of civilization; conflicts multiply; and tools for giving it force become obscene, like atomic bombs.

Having said this much, the core issue sharpens. It is the stupefying observation that something sublime, like awareness, produces evil and the more it develops, the more its dark shadow grows. This is a real issue. Genesis attempts an explanation. The problem is disobedience. But Genesis’ explanation is paradoxical. The idea of obedience contains within it two crucial elements: freedom and knowledge. Adam and Eve knew something—before, as it were, they did. The knew about the Tree of Knowledge. They had been told about it. Something of the fruit of that tree had been given to them before Eve ever reached for that famous apple. The writers and editors of Genesis were people just like us—stupefied by the paradox of reality. And they, too, punted. The explanation must lie deeper than anything that we can now see from the shadows of this valley.

Blog posts should not grow into chapters. These comments will continue. I want to extract more from this, not least something more on death and its linkage to transcendence.

I Didn't Want To! Sin Made Me Do it!

2011-02-12T15:02:00.005-05:00

One of the ways to discover how really old our dogmatic religions are is to ponder the curious concept of original sin. It’s root is in Paul’s letter to the Romans, Chapter 5, Verse 12: “Well then, sin entered the world through one man, and through sin death, and thus death has spread through the whole human race because everyone has sinned” (Jerusalem Bible). That death “entered the world” is linked back to Genesis chapter 3, where the event of Adam and Eve’s disobedience is told, and where, in verse 19, we’re told that one consequence of it is “return to the soil.”

The curious aspect of this view is not the rather straightforward observation that people are capable of wickedness, but that one man brought all this about. Thus it is involuntary for Adam’s descendants, never mind the tortured justification of our voluntary participation in the original disobedience that the Catholic Encyclopedia uses, quoting and summarizing Augustine here (see subtitle “How voluntary.” The pertinent quote follows at the tail of this post). In Paul sin and death are linked. Later successive councils and theologians have dug a deep trench to separate the two; not Paul. Bodies die. Indeed, in the same letter to the Romans, 7:14-24, Paul manages to elaborate the linkage by blaming the body for sin; sin is in the body. Therefore “When I act against my will, then, it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me.”

There are some genuinely valuable insights in those verses in Chapter 7, not least a well-observed tension between at least two levels of consciousness that often tend to be in conflict. Worth reading; a link is here. Too bad that concepts like divine revelation have frozen this testimony and its interpretation—and the foregoing presentation of original sin—into a kind of untouchable fossil unquestioned acceptance of which has led to multiple dicta by church councils and countless theological explanations.

* * *

Here from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

It is this law of solidarity, admitted by common sentiment, which attributes to children a part of the shame resulting from the father's crime. It is not a personal crime, objected the Pelasgians. “No", answered St. Augustine, “but it is paternal crime” (Op. imperf., I, cxlviii). Being a distinct person I am not strictly responsible for the crime of another; the act is not mine. Yet, as a member of the human family, I am supposed to have acted with its head who represented it with regard to the conservation or the loss of grace. I am, therefore, responsible for my privation of grace, taking responsibility in the largest sense of the word. This, however, is enough to make the state of privation of grace in a certain degree voluntary, and, therefore, “without absurdity it may be said to be voluntary” (St. Augustine, “Retract.”, I, xiii).

As a member of the human family I am supposed to have acted with its head? Before being born? Without absurdity? Come again?

I’m not saying that something like “the Fall” didn’t take place; no; but that above is just one hypothesis.

The Moral and the Natural

2011-02-10T11:53:00.003-05:00

Amazing cathedrals of thought are built up over questions to which the answers seem very simple to me. A discussion in the blogs I read now centers on a book the subject of which is the relationship of science to values. Tracing these things I discover, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ht), that there is something called meta-ethics, further that it has a component called non-naturalism, and that this something is described as “the idea that moral philosophy is fundamentally autonomous from the natural sciences.” Now if that description is correct, and to me it seems self-evident, the relationship of science to values would appear to be pretty tenuous, pertaining to scientists, and how they act and live, not to the work they actually do. To give science itself a role in explaining morality would strike me as inviting my best hammer to read out loud to me. I reach this conclusion quite simply. In order to enable science to speak authoritatively on values, I would have to accept that the mind is produced by the brain and nothing else. Now that, of course, is a widely accepted notion—and assent to it is absolutely required to take seriously the notion that science has anything to say about values at all. Science can speak about facts—but values? First, good definitions. I cannot assent to the notion that values are facts.

Elusive Word: Love

2011-02-03T12:42:00.000-05:00

I’ve been rereading an old Harper Torchbooks edition of Martin Buber’s Eclipse of God, nine lectures Buber gave at universities in 1951. The book appeared a year later and, as I’ve just discovered, is till available from Amazon but now from Humanity Books. The lectures centered on a critique of modern philosophies, most centrally on existentialism (Heidegger, Sartre) and Jungian psychology. These “eclipse” God in the sense of a person—and for Buber, most famed for his writing about the “I and Thou” relationship, always between persons, the eclipse really means turning a personal God into either “the God of the philosophers” (Pascal’s phrase), thus into a transcending idea, or into a human self, namely one’s own, a word that Jung liked to render always with a leading cap. The central essay in this book is titled “The Love of God and the Idea of Deity”—a very revealing lecture in that it attempts give some reality to the nature of the love that humanity can feel for God.

Back in the 1950s—and my scribbled comments are still there in the margin—I had already learned to shake my head at the self-centered and the abstract treatments of the subject. The elevation of the self, individuated or not, into a kind of private deity never agreed with me, seeming to be a kind of cul de sac. At the same time, an abstraction cannot love or be loved. For this reason Deuteronomy 6:5, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” either lacks all meaning in any real human context—or I was missing some hidden meaning in the word love itself.

In Buber’s personalistic thought it is the presence of God, always and everywhere, that is an underlying intuitive foundation of the sort of love Deuteronomy points to—very poorly. Buber says that the actual words in Exodus 3:14, usually translated as “I am that I am” actually are “I shall be there”—therefore presence. “I am with you always,” as in Matthew 28:20. “There is no spot where God is not” is a favorite phrase of ours here—and has the same totally personalistic connotation, intentionality, and aura that the I-Thou relationship holds in Buber’s thought. Those we love are always present to us—no matter how many miles may separate us. This feeling is a matter of experience.

There is a Sufi story about a master who gave each of his disciples a live pigeon and told them to wring its neck somewhere where nobody could see the act. All the disciples, except one, came back with dead pigeons. One came back with the pigeon still alive. Asked why he had failed, the disciple said: “There is no place where God can’t see me.”

Contrast this sort of thing with the usually abstract discussions of God—and gradually the notion of what loving God might actually mean emerges, however faintly. Love is the most elusive of words. Yes, we do know its manifestations at the sensory levels—but it is as we leave that level behind that it becomes oddly translucent so that, eventually, even the love of God becomes gradually accessible. But, Lord, it’s a steep mountain—and the simple commands of Just Do It, and with all your heart and soul and might, is not a ski-lift.

The Mountain and the Flashlight Beam

2011-01-28T13:56:00.002-05:00

Thoughts about dualism recur for me at right regular intervals (see for instance here), no doubt because we’re all of us quite naturally dualistic in our stance towards reality. It’s not simply a consequence of language that we think that we have rather than that we are bodies. At the same time our collective feeling are echoed by our language. When we’re really sincere, we support something body and soul. My inner intuition isn’t simply that my Mother still exists, but only in my memories—and that in twenty generations (to be massively generous) she will have achieved total nonexistence because no one among the then still living will any longer remember her. No. My intuition is quite otherwise. Is the matter that formed her body at any point in her life still in existence? Certainly. Our physics tells us so. Does she still exist as a person? I’m certain that she does.

Plato’s conceptualization is no doubt the oldest well-known formalization of the dualism we feel. He proposed that eternal Forms exist, of which the soul is one. His formulation, found in Phaedo, rests on the immateriality and therefore indivisibility of the immaterial and the endless divisibility of material. Plato’s formulation served his purpose well; it was to prove the soul’s immortality. It’s very easy to understand that matter is divisible and that a hammer can very easily turn this green cup of mine, not least its pretty crest and its inscription (Harsen’s Island Michigan—irresistible to someone called Arsen) into shards or powder. It is also very easy to intuit one’s own unity. Yes, I’m divided in my mind on many things, but my mind is analogous to my body—even though it is immaterial. I have a mind; but it is I have it, and I can’t imagine that Whatever as divided. It simply is. But Phaedo, of course, is just one book of many hundreds of thousands written on this subject and serves a single argument. It does not exhaust the subject. In effect it may be reducible to just that, dualism: there are two kinds of things—one subject to a certain kind of change and one that is not subject to that kind of change.

The problem in Plato’s formulation is that we have no handy explanation how something immaterial can cause something material to move, to change its position or character. Or vice versa. This problem, the interaction problem, has legs as long as eternal forms. The problem is much worse than saying that a flashlight beam can’t move a mountain. In that particular case, both systems are material, but there is a great distance in powers—the flashlight’s weak little beam and the mountain’s massive inertia. But in truth that weak beam does move the mountain. It causes minute change at the atomic level to a tiny part of the mountain. But we can imagine—vast technocracy that we’ve become—that we could focus gigantic laser guns on that mountain and cause it not only to move a little but literally to vaporize. Thus far, of course, we’ve only done that thing in action movies.

The interaction problem, however, begins to yield ever so gently if we don’t insist on Plato’s conceptualization of the soul as immaterial and, therefore, by definition incapable of exerting any kind of force on anything material. That the soul is different from bodies, and in some genuinely radical way—that I find quite easy to accept. But it must possess some power capable of moving matter, albeit at the extremely small scale.

Let’s transform that mountain into an organism instead of being, as it is, a massive agglomeration of layers of rock. Let it have a nervous system, organs, circulatory mechanisms, muscles, tendons, and, underneath it all, a powerful skeleton as well. Let’s also make it very sensitive to light at night—hating any kind of light whatever, however faint. This monstrous beast will therefore react to our weak little flashlight. How will it do that? Well, its skin will detect the light beam. Nerves will signal this unwelcome event to the mountain’s not very smart but adequate brain. No sooner has the signal reached that presumably massive brain than the mountain will move—will move just enough to one side or the other to escape the irritation of that beam. Being so vast a creature, it might take a while before the movement actually develops, but here it comes! Could the soul, by just a tiny amount of energy proper to its nature, also move a neuron or two in our brain to signal an action that it wants the body to undertake—like my hand right now scratching my ear? It’s possible—not if it is deprived of all power whatsoever by a word like “immaterial,” but Yes if, while radically different from the domain in which it finds itself, it can actually communicate at a low level with neurons too small even for our best microscopes sharply to resolve.

Physical Expressions of Spiritual Life

2011-01-24T12:38:00.005-05:00

The death of Jack LaLanne yesterday (he was 96) reminded me that the spiritual life has a multifaceted physical dimension, quite complex—and rarely mentioned. LaLanne, whose formal name was Francois Henri LaLanne (his parents were immigrants from France), was a leading figure in fitness training. It is certainly an important aspect of this dimension.

It’s a curious fact that our calling is to transcend the realm of matter—but to get there it is best to mind our health and keep our bodies trim. The physical is foundational. There is the famous Latin saying found in Juvenal as a desideratum: mens sana in corpora sano. We often turn this around to say that a healthy body produces a healthy mind. Whichever. We also say, much more broadly, No pain, no gain. That saying points the way. The physical has a huge amount of inertial downward pull, and if we don’t resist it in a sensible way, the higher ranges become more difficult or thin out into one-sided expressions—like intellectual vigor or artistic creativity—but with something crucial actually lacking.

In advanced societies the physical has to be forcefully introduced. In medieval times—and even as late as World War I—ordinary life, work, and transportation made people exercise without knowing that they were doing it. Pictures of soldiers in World War I compared with pictures of soldiers one big war over tell this tale visually. In our times we must make efforts to mind our diets and force ourselves to move. Both of those activities are genuine opportunities to exercise the will daily; habit numbs the pain, of course, but the hand reaches for the chocolates anyway, and my body mutters its complaints when I dress it for a walk—especially at temperatures like these. The training of the will is a crucial element here—best exercised when resistance is optimal and overcoming it produces a bonus that goes beyond the tissues.

Yoga and Tai Chi—and their many relatives—were born of a deep knowledge that in this dimension we’re a seamless unity bodies and of souls and that the training of the higher is best achieved by starting with the lower. In our culture, of course, the higher aspect tends to be minimized, but so what? If the practice is real, the experience will speak for itself.

With advancing age (my case) fascinating phenomena become perceptible. As the body ages, it becomes oddly more visible (perceivable) as a machine. The soul feels its own separation. This feeling begins in the late forties and fifties and simply grows. We remain young inwardly. Sometimes an inadvertent look into the mirror brings a slight surprise. My God. That old man? That’s me? Doesn’t feel like that. The will remains adamant, but the body perceptively suffers as it is called to act as if it were still a mere fifty. And then—especially then—it is most vital to renew one’s own commitment to stay alert, orderly, to make efforts where dragging or slouching is a whole lot easier. LaLanne never flagged. A good example he. Exercises right up to the end.

It’s part of the real life. It’s not simply a life-style. We want to stride, not stumble, over the border when the time comes to make the passage. Thanks, Jack. You played an important role in the fitness of this family beginning long ago (in 1963). And we’ve been keeping at it ever since. Rest a little now that you are over there—before you jog off to that Big Gym in the Sky!

Experience and Understanding

2011-01-14T11:04:00.001-05:00

To experience a thing is one thing, to understand it is another. Experience is foundational, hence in mystical circles teachers belittle understanding, meaning concepts; instead they emphasize tasting or experience. But having tasted, did we understand? In Zen, Tao, or Sufi circles emphasis on experience arises because would-be disciples are impatient. They don’t want to waste time building boring foundations. They want to learn magic slogans. They want something. They, too, start with an experience, a desire; they just don’t understand what it is yet. Experience and understanding: an interesting couple.

Let me trace out the process whereby we understand experience. An experience takes place in time and has a sequence. We can take it apart, examine its causes, changes, intensity; we label these, discern their relationships, dynamics, and movements. But how does this actually happen? What are these parts? What are these concepts, these tokens that we use? We might see them as spiritualized or disembodied mental representations of perceptions or feelings. And it is in the examination of these mental entities (however labeled—thought elements, language) that a strange phenomenon takes place. At some point, as we examine these immaterial tokens, a strange phenomenon takes place. Suddenly we understand the experience. The insight we gain is, however, itself an experience—and as ineffable as any other. Thus the examined experience—a set of feelings, perceptions—is re-experienced on another level more accessible to the spiritual agent that we really are. And these feelings and perceptions may arise from a physical or from a mental stratum of our being. We can also understand and re-experience our ideas, intuitions, and abstract strata no longer linked to the physical. There is a layering here. We, the agents, perceive the physical—and then do so again using the more subtle medium of thought. And it is this second process that leads to understanding.

A fascinating aspect of human experience is that we need a tool by means of which we can chop apart the flux of experience into discrete meanings, each of which can be held apart and also seen in relationship. The tool for that is language. Until the means to stop this flux are available to us, we are stuck in a relentless flow. How we came to be here—that’s another matter. I’ve said more on this subject here regarding the experience of Helen Keller.

It is good to taste, but it is best to taste again. The mystical schools stop short of that second step. Their intent is initiation into the mysteries—to help disciples acquire higher experiences first. Once that has taken place, the teacher’s job is really done. The adept will go his or her own way after that—well qualified to do so by a mind that comes equipped for understanding anything.

Three Ways of Seeing

2011-01-10T10:47:00.005-05:00

If I take the very big view of humanity’s systems of belief, they divide into three categories—and roughly along geographical lines. In the west prophetic religions and materialism form two of the camps. That fact at once suggests that the debate about God’s existence is essentially a western preoccupation; the reasons for that will become clearer as I go on. Asian cultures see reality as a—well, let me call it a dispensation. Using that word I mean “a broad acceptance that reality arises from a transcending source”—but in a different way than we picture that process in the prophetic religions. In China it is Heaven or the Way (Tao); in India it is Brahman, the Ultimate; the cosmic law experienced by humanity is karma.

The chief difference between these systems is how close or distant their adherents imagine themselves to be from the Ultimate Power—and whether or not this power has anything like a coherent self and consciousness. Some scholars in the west are so influenced by their experience of or familiarity with prophetic religions (in which God is most definitely a person) that they hesitate to call Asian faiths religions at all or add words like “philosophical” to modify the world “religion”; some simply call Buddhism, Taoism, Jainism, and Hinduism “philosophies.” Western religions, by contrast, are “revealed” religions; that very word signals the personal qualities of God as understood in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

In materialism, ancient and modern, no conscious presence exists behind the cosmic whole. The cosmos is assumed to have a lawful behavior, conceived either as innate in matter and/or arising from random motion. In Lucretius, for instance, atoms, the only real existents, move uniformly; but from time to time, arbitrarily and unpredictably, their movement changes by means of a “swirl.” This motion is the source of all change and also of freedom as experienced by humanity. Consciousness here comes from very subtle atoms—and they also “swirl.” The most severe version of modern materialism in effect recognizes only the law of statistics. What we ordinarily call the laws of nature are, in this view, only movements that recur with a very high probability. In this, the materialistic view, the Ultimate is simply atoms or particles or waves—alone or in some kind of combination. Consciousness, personality, selves (and so forth) are invariably but temporarily emergent properties that disappear again as soon as the arrangement that gave rise to them change.

Now to the Asian traditions. In these the functioning of divinity (or simply of the transcending) is also experienced as law, but consciousness within or behind the cosmos (or both) is accepted but not emphasized. And this for a reason: the cosmos is a dispensation, not a perceivably intentional project the object of which is humanity. Heaven’s actions manifest through the world; they are observable in the world’s very arrangements. Human violation of the dispensation is corrected by the very workings of karma, by the Tao, or by the mandate of Heaven—and we discover these outcomes by experiencing them—whether here or in the realms beyond. We know the law by observation, not by revelation—and it works infallibly whether we observe it or not. In outer forms these religions are similar to the Western prophetic religions—not so in their inwardness. Hinduism, for example, has its own trinity, arising from Brahman, the unknowable ultimate. The three are Brahma (notice the difference in spelling) the creator, Vishnu the maintainer, and Shiva the destroyer. In China Heaven is conceived as the ultimate agent, but subsidiary powers are admitted as well. The difference lies in the fact that the observable cosmos as a whole is the message or contains it. There is no specific communication, beyond or within the cosmos itself and specifically directed at humans. Indeed in this form of religion human beings, narrowly considered, are viewed as a spark of divinity. That conception explains human powers and also translates into human responsibility to discern the law and to apply it to specific circumstances—or suffer consequences.

The third way of seeing reality takes the form of revealed or prophetic religions. All three arose from Judaism. The unique character of this view lies in the manner in which the Ultimate communicates with humanity. The form of that communication is between God and selected individuals—who, in turn, then communicate with everybody else. Thus we have a succession of prophets. Alongside the ordinary laws of nature and the inner intuitions every person has, these religions project a special communication to humanity by an indirect method (God to prophet, prophet to public) as I’ve indicated. In Christianity, finally, one person of God—who is in that faith pictured as having three persons—actually becomes a human. Thus in revealed religion we also have a dispensation, which can be read by people, and a special law directed at humans through humans.

This brief encapsulation should make it obvious why it is that faith is such an important concept in the revealed religions—and why it is that atheism is not really an issue in the Asian cultures. Both materialism and dispensationalism (if I might so characterize the Asian systems of belief) leave decisions to the individual and rely for their authority entirely on human diligence in observation—and individual interpretation of the same. You don’t believe that Heaven has its way and cannot be opposed? That’s up to you. The prophetic religions, by contrast, demand assent to the idea that God would communicate specifically and in various contexts with individual humans and, by that method, provide yet another and higher law than is discernible by direct and personal experience.

Eudaimonia

2011-01-05T09:40:00.003-05:00

It seems to be agreed among the wise that the aim of an individual life is the soul’s development. That consensus is obscured because we encounter concepts like happiness (Aristotle), salvation (Christianity), and, in modern times, individuation (Carl Jung and others). If we just look at these words casually, happiness and individuation have quite different connotations; they’re very different from each other; and so is salvation from either of these. Individuation strongly suggests a process of development, sometimes dramatic, whereby a personality often displaying contradictory, disorganized, behavior, unaware of being highly conditioned by society, differentiates itself and achieves a kind of noble coherence and autonomy.

The casual use of a word like “happiness” almost suggests nothing much. We all want to be happy—and it means different things to different people. Aristotle used a word that has a great deal more depth. He spoke of eudaimonia. The word contains eu, a very positive concept signifying affirmation, well-being, and beauty. A daimon is a spirit or a minor deity. If we understand this idea for what it once meant in the Greek, it is “beautiful soul” rather than “happiness,” and in Aristotle’s context, it was the consequence of a process as well, the process of a well-lived life. The word can but need not have a spiritual connotation. Indeed, in Aristotle’s hands, it had a secular taste—one more reason why it is easily translated as happiness.

Salvation in the Catholic context—not necessarily in sophisticated scholarly contexts but as taught to children and the public—has a heavily moralistic flavor. It is the consequence of ridding the self of sin, of minimally dying (even if not always living) in a state of grace. That the soul is spiritual is not in question in this community. Salvation is a form of securing for this soul eternal happiness through union with God. Here happiness recurs after a great battle against the fallen self and its natural downward pull.

In its simplest expression in the Protestant context, development is minimized into a single act of faith; and in some branches of Protestantism salvation is not even a process: it is decided by God through foreknowledge before we’re even born. To be sure, the Reformation was a reaction against the excessive mechanizations of the spiritual by a Church that, by the sixteenth century, had become grossly corrupt (on average). And if we examine that single act of faith carefully, studying the process that led up to it, the period that follows it, we discover here another case of abbreviation, simplification, and of crude labeling. Catholic and Protestant religiousness, viewed in detail, is identical; it is the same process that produces eudaimonia in ancient understanding and individuation in the modern, secular conceptualization.

We live our lives in what Keats called “the vale of Soul-making.” The experience is the same, no matter the times, the prevailing cosmologies, the strength or weakness of religion. Concepts concretely underpinned by matter (“this hammer”) are easy to sort, but the great spiritual facts of experience are stubbornly subjective. One man’s God is another’s the Great Unconscious, one’s salvation is another individuation—but all of us strive, ultimately (if the spark throws its light into our soul) to become beautiful demons. Does that sound weird? To transcend the words is to rise to the reality.

From Idries Shah's Reflections

2011-01-01T11:18:00.003-05:00

Herewith an brief sample from a wondrous small book of modern Sufi stories written by the late Idries Shah, Octagon Press, London, 1978.

Lichen

A piece of lichen was growing on a rock.
     In addition to the customary lichen thoughts, it often wondered why it could not spread so as to cover a part of the rock which was still bare.
     ‘There is no lichen nutrient there,’ said the wisest part of the lichen, ‘and we must wait until it comes to us.’
     As the years passed, the expectation of the mass of the lichen became stronger and stronger. Slowly, climatic changes caused the rock to split slightly. Certain chemicals were released and started to ooze outwards, covering a part of the bare surface of the stone.
     For the devout lichens, this was the answer to their prayers, and they gratefully spread themselves over the delicious food.
     Many years passed, and the chemicals began to become exhausted. This created changes in the character of the lichens, who attributed their difference in composition and being to profound social changes.
     Theoreticians multiplied, each with his explanation. The lichen philosophers, academics and scientists divided themselves into groups. You can imagine what their various explanations were like. Each version was based upon the interpretation of observed phenomena. In fact, of course, the theories were generally attempts to concentrated and spread certain convictions.
     Then another chain of events caused someone to spill upon the rock another lichen-nutrient, and the organisms were able to start growing again.
     The stimulus itself energized the theoreticians. Their increased anxieties in the immediate past had sharpened their mental activity. It had enabled them to realize the immediate cause of their reprieve and comparative abundance.
     But so far as the lichens have not got to the point where they can fathom any perceptible intention behind the chain of ‘causes’ which brings them the means to live and to expand.
For this reason, they have given up thinking abou it. They believe, nonetheless, that they are thinking about it. But it is only because they are at the level of culture which regards the following statements as ‘thought’:
     ‘Everything is accident’
     ‘Everything is of supernatural origin’
     ‘Some things are accident, some supernatural’
     ‘I do not know what to think’
     ‘I can believe, and therefore I can believe that mere opinion is the same as knowledge’
     ‘I have inferred some things, therefore they are true’
     ‘I have observed some things, therefore I can observe others’
     ‘What cannot be observed can be inferred, what cannot be inferred can be felt, what cannot be observed, inferred or felt cannot have any relevance to anything and is therefore nonsense.’
     How fortunate that humanity is different from lichen.

The Miraculous as Proof

2010-12-19T10:39:00.002-05:00

In Western cultural spheres we associate the miraculous with God. The word itself has much less explicit roots. In Latin it comes from “wonder,” or “to wonder at” (mirari). Translators of the Bible from the Greek used “miracle” for three Greek words that occur in scripture: “sign” (semeion), “wonder” (teras), and “power” (dynamis). Translated into Latin, in turn, these are signum, prodigium, and virtus. (My source is the ever-helpful Online Etymology Dictionary here).

I find this fascinating. The Latin-rooted “miracle” principally points to our reaction or emotion to something astonishing, thus to our wonder. But in Biblical reference that same word also points at sign, omen, or portent (all contained in the meaning of a prodigy). That meaning suggests a higher source beyond the visible without specifically naming it. Miracle is also used to translate power, but presumably a power unusual enough to be wondered at. To sum this up, a miracle suggests a message as well as an unusual power—and one or both elicit our wonder.

That this communication comes from God is an assumption—or a projection that we make. Nothing wrong there if “God” is used as a word to signify “the greater unexplained.” In our theologies, however, we have vastly expanded on that phrase and given this word many and dense meanings in addition. The mere presence of a miracle, however, does not identify the source of the sign or of the power in any explicit way. The traditional habit within Christendom, however, has been to assign this fact to God, and to define God from other sources as being such-and-such a Being. But I’d insist that our assignment of a phenomenon to a source is not a proof of the source.

C.S. Lewis provides a good example of a Christian apologist who uses Jesus’ miracles in efforts to prove that Jesus was God. What Christian traditions tell us is that Jesus performed miracles or that such occurred in his vicinity (the woman healed by touching his robe, for instance). Anything beyond that is a projection. In the Christian tradition miracles performed by saints or taking place in their vicinity are not used to assert that the saints themselves were God. Here, therefore, we have two very different ways of explaining the miraculous. In one case the person was divine. In all other cases, God was still at work, but the person was just an ordinary if a holy human being. The New Age would call the saint a “channel.”

We do not, of course, view miraculous events as natural events. They’re unexpected, unexplained, and extraordinary. Does that mean that God cancels the laws of nature he has himself ordained? That view introduces an arbitrary element into reality (at least as I see things). An alternative explanation of the miraculous may work equally well. It is that miraculous events represents manifestations of an order of nature not usually visible in our dimension but nonetheless still a natural power that is perfectly at home in this realm too—and that its source is a power (dynamis) not usually seen. The power develops in individuals whose actions (or mere presence) give expression to it. Here I would emphasize the plural. Many people have manifested such powers over time. Meanwhile the three definitions of the miraculous remain intact. The presence of this power is indeed a sign—of other realms of possibility. And our wonder is, of course, simply a reaction to the unusual.

The presence of this power has effects that seem to transcend nature—but miracles are signs, not conceptually framed messages. The doctrine of the Trinity, for instance, cannot be derived in any way from the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. What miracle makers do does not seamlessly support what miracle makers say. If a hard link existed between the doing and the saying, conceptually contradictory doctrines arising in different traditions would all have to be true, and Aristotle wouldn’t like that. Thus, for instance a trinitarian doctrine of Christianity and a unitarian doctrine in Islam would both be true in the same way and in the same respects. Miracles are associated with both traditions—indeed are reported in every religious tradition of humanity, some of which have yet other and awkward conceptual formulations of reality.

What miracles prove, as best as I can make it out, is that our concepts of the limits of nature are too narrowly drawn, that powers exist beyond what we consider normal, that their manifestations are associated with faculties that emerge in a few human beings, and that what these people say has merit, but not absolute divine sanction. That the miraculous is Good, and that by implication it also teaches The Good, is also clear to me. But the conceptual formulation of that good is a human construct always and ever strongly influenced by then prevailing knowledge and circumstances.

If People are Genuine Agents . . .

2010-12-18T10:14:00.002-05:00

A post on Siris here recently gave a fascinating if brief quote from a paper by Jeremy Waldron, of the New York University School of Law, entitled Image of God: Rights, Reason, and Order. The paper itself is accessible here, but to get it you have to download the paper with a click. The phrase in the title, Image of God, refers to Genesis where God is quoted saying, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Waldron examines this framing as the potential foundation for human rights—which is a rather refreshingly traditional look at a thoroughly modern notion, namely inalienable human rights. I’d never linked the two myself, revealing how alienated I’ve become from modernity—and it was therefore refreshing for me, too, to imagine that the endless hue and cry about rights might actually have something to do with a fundamental tenet of my own thought, namely that people are genuine agents, thus belong to another order than matter—which exhibits no agency at all.

By interesting coincidence, a C-Span discussion just a week or so ago about Economics and Environmentalism, both labeled secular religions, featured a theologian who, in commentary, cited the same verse in Genesis to speak about dominion. The verse is:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. Genesis 1:26.

The theologian was at pains to point out that, in this verse, dominion meant caring and responsible oversight by a created being endowed with agency by the Highest—with emphasis on care and keeping rather than selfish exploitation for limited ends. Brigitte noticed this first and then drew my attention to it. I watched the replay with great pleasure. The traditional ways of seeing Reality are returning. You see and hear them on TV these days in the least expected places.

A third coincidence was a New York Times article today reporting that modern medicine has now succeeded in nearly fail-safe early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, producing a dilemma. Should the patient be told—especially in light of the still persistent incurability of the disease? To tell the patient is tantamount to announcing a sentence to senility. I got to thinking about that. The dilemma is deep indeed. If people are genuine agents, they have the right to know. They have the right to have an opportunity to make such arrangements as they still can in their outer and inner affairs before the disease claims them. They also have the right to refuse. But to refuse, they have to know something, don’t they? The problem is real. Is it right to impose a burden of responsibility on a person? I think yes. Because we are real agents, each and every one of us, and knowing is better, even when painful, than not. In the long run. And there is a longer run even beyond death.

The pleasing aspect here is that the times, they are a changing. Ever more frequently, you hear Reality discussed in the clear even in our media.

Realm of Shades

2010-12-15T17:32:00.003-05:00

Many years ago already, long before the Internet dawned, I’d reached a kind of tentative conclusion. It was that the soul-realm nearest to ours is a subtle world, to be sure, but primitive or of a lower order. I based this solely on trying to understand why it is that the majority of mediums and psychics report nothing of interest from “over there.” When such psychics occasionally write book-length expositions, these books are thick with mounds of pious clichés. Mind you, I had also reached the conclusion that mediums do communicate with the beyond; some may be, but the majority are not frauds. But if I accept that they do—communicate—and with another realm—a good explanation for that might be that these psychics are mostly interacting with a lower realm—not with the peaks of the soul-order. Back in those days I also became acquainted with near-death experience (NDE) reports. The vast majority of those concern a distinctly superior realm; not all of them, mind you; but so-called “negative NDEs” tend to be kept out of books because reports like that would certainly dampen the sales of this new genre of spiritual literature. But I’m interested in reality, not in obtaining feelings of consolation. The very presence of negative NDEs also supports my view that lower realms exist—and probably closer to ours than the heavenly.

In the new age of the Internet, evidence for this conclusion has become much more readily available. Not only have populations become literate, but the web provides people an opportunity to share experience that (say in the eighteenth century) would never have reached print. Hundreds if not thousands of people with psychic gifts at various levels have web pages now; these are often linked to many others so that one has access to a huge deposit of raw data. The sites are extremely mixed in character, of course, but with the right background and a well-developed feel for such material, one can discover multiple sites where their authors are actually reporting experiences—and often skillfully enough to be enlightening.

Content of this kind tends to repel those culturally advanced—the very people who ought to take an interest. Few of the authors are educated in the round or deeply or have absorbed the western philosophical, literary, or scientific culture well enough to stand firm. By and large they’re off the reservation where the academically-trained are comfortable. Not that that surprises me. What proportion of the population is?—thus qualified, I mean. Moreover, many of these people have been coping with unusual abilities that society these days routinely and automatically classifies, minimally, as mental disorder. Therefore, on these sites, the authors keep saying, over and over again, that they are sane, well-adapted to ordinary life, employed, not crazy, not delusional, believe me, take my word for it, and other emphatic phrases no doubt occasioned by the social consensus which holds out a stiff arm in attempts to marginalize these people.

At the same time, and by way of contrast, to someone deeply steeped in the lore of the borderzone going as far back as we are able, in every culture around the globe, what these people have to say has a familiar ring. The very fact many of these people themselves are almost never familiar with ancient human traditions that say the same thing (although the labeling may be different) tells me that I’m reading about actual experience if couched in modern structures of reference. To point at one particular phenomenon, we might take the fact that humanity has always reported on demons and evil spirits, but in the modern setting these entities are rendered as alien abductors who perform unpleasant physical examinations aboard space ships. Ancient people—who’d never heard of aliens or space ships (space in our sense was not a concept for them)—used other language to report “encounters,” often negative, while they were in certain states.

I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that the realms tradition labels as hell and heaven both have their basis in the actual experience of living people who, for some reason, are more open to the invisible dimension than the majority. NDEs and similar psychic experiences have painted the higher levels while ordinarily occurring psychic abilities have produced what humanity has called the underworld, Hades, hell, or the realm of shades. Are the shades that remain behind, as it were, the pool from which souls incarnate again? Is this a very populous realm? Does it take special energy—call it grace—for a soul to reach more paradisaical vistas? Is that famous tunnel we encounter in near-death reports a transit through a lower zone of shades? I wonder. But I’m not surprised that notions of a heavenly and of a darker world are universally found in human societies. There seems to be empirical evidence for them, even if not reported by a majority.

The Necessary “Over Against”

2010-12-10T11:07:00.002-05:00

Sometimes, when I wake from a dream, the thought occurs: “Lord, I sure hope that life after death isn’t like dreaming.” The maddening aspect of dreaming is that there is no genuine “over against.” Everything appears to issue from the dreaming self—the scenery, the characters, the action. I do not consciously feel the process whereby this generation actually takes place; but what I sometimes become aware of is that I can modify the situation, never much but, yes, just a little, and always in my favor. Objects sometimes appear just when I need them; in my falling dreams I always manage to slow down and land smoothly, and so on. But these more or less conscious interventions are infrequent; and most of the time they wake me up.

Most characteristically of all, in dreams—where the environment is clearly unstable and unreal, however awesome, beautiful, confusing, or threatening—consciousness of the kind I call hard (thus a distanced, separated, observing, judging self-consciousness) is also entirely absent. That mental “over against” is also conspicuously lacking. And when it does awaken, as it tends to when things get really hoary, the dream is doomed to end like the descent of a lead curtain.

The substance of dreams is clearly thought, associative thought. It can be quite complex thought, thus for instance a memory of some situation which also holds within it the conscious reaction to it that I had when I first lived it. The judgments I made about the situation, e.g., “That’s awful,” do not display as an abstract judgment, however, but are mirrored back in the arrangements which I see in the dream, awful, ugly arrangements. A great power of image-forming thus seems to reside at a level below that of consciousness. Not surprisingly, therefore, the mediaeval view was that the imagination is part of the sensory apparatus. Notions like Henry Corbin’s that imagination is a higher, spiritual power are not thereby denied; his thought may be rendered by saying that imagination also has a higher form of which the dreaming brain’s uncanny skills are a lower manifestation.

The substance of dreams is unreal because they’re memories—but dynamically manipulated. The dream self is also just a memory of our self as an experiencer—and equally dynamically reactive. Memory must be functioning or else the dream would not be remembered; the emotions arise because the body dumbly reacts to what it sees with hormonal responses. These responses are quite the same as (although stronger) those we get reading a novel or watching a show. The core self, in such situations, withdraws but does not entirely go away—hence if some jarring element intrudes, we protest; if not, we feel the sudden withdrawal of the semi-dream state when the credits begin to roll. And we’ll move our bodies just a little by way of marking a kind of awakening.

All this of course makes a very strong case for the materialistic view of consciousness—as I’ve noted here before. I reject that explanation because it is incomplete and does not comprehensively explain the entirety of our experience. But the materialistic view is well-founded in partial observation. The frontal lobes are sleeping, and the primitive brain plays; or, watching a show, the frontal lobes at least relax to let us enjoy the drama.

But if I’m right the question then arises: Where is that core self when we undergo our convoluted and often quite bizarre dream-experiences? It might have to be absent so that the body can recover from the stress of real awareness. It might be absent because it too needs to be refreshed in an environment where the stresses of materiality are gone and it can then breathe freely, as it were. What I don’t buy is that self-consciousness is merely a brain function. But if it is, I certainly don’t have to worry about spending my after-life in the tohu va-bohu of the dream tale that never ends, never stops, and my stupid self can never trust the ground on which it treads.

Angels, Angels Everywhere

2010-12-08T12:30:00.002-05:00

Last night, passing my bookcase on the way to bed, I sort of swept along a book I hadn’t looked at ever, it seemed, and it promised me a few thoughts to take into my dreaming. Angels, by Paola Giovetti, an Italian lady described on the Internet as a “giornalista e scrittirice, nata a Firenze risiede a Modena.” Just love the sound of that language. The book was published in 1993, a trade paperback with colored pictures and a text, priced then at $22.95. My library here evidently bought it immediately, but had already discarded it by December of that year—and I must have picked it up then. It’s been on my shelf since. I’ve discovered that my library resolutely tosses anything that hasn’t been checked out in five years—but some things, evidently, are shown the door much faster.

It turned out to be a sincere sort of work. Beautiful pictures, a text thoroughly footnoted, four pages of bibliography, nicely and carefully written to settle gently, as it descended, on all believers be they inspired by traditional religious faiths or the breath of the New Age…without either camp feeling the least possible unease. Hence, of course, everything is an angel. Serendipities hide them much as near death experiences unveil them. This produced a number of reactions in me—after I woke up this morning, not as I read. One was that the unseen reality is a perfect receiver of any kind of projection, much like brush-shadows are at twilight. The other was triggered by the discussion of guardian angles, regarding the curious nature of that concept. What an extremely boring assignment it would be to shadow and guide some fellow as he stumbles through his life trying to influence his actions while unable to compel him to do anything at all—because, as my author assures me, free will is God’s most precious gift to us. Words flow from the pen without at times stirring up even a single thought. Is it really logical to be given free will and also a guardian angel? Who cannot guard us or even mildly influence us if we’re inclined to make havoc? Does conscience need an administrative assistant?

Mind you, the book’s overall effect is positive. Indeed the book is well worth having.

The question in my mind is how really to account for the feeling that underlies this book and also renders its message acceptable to the average reader—not least to me.

What is the nature of that feeling? It is that a certain benevolence does really seem to be present in reality and actually does manifest, if only sometimes—in developments, events, and our experiences of them. There is a feeling, certainly present in me, suggesting something, some invisible field, something that does appear to communicate, yet without interfering. Serendipitous events are such communications. They have the character of confirmation: Yes. I am there!

This is the “ground” that calls for some kind of integration into the dismal daily. And some people search for the meaning and use the concept of the angel to build a picture. The reality, however, is not fleshed out by labeling certain experiential clusters with this name or that.

One Poet's View

2010-11-27T10:26:00.003-05:00

The poet I have in mind today is the Bengali poet Ramprasad Sen (1718-1775), he who celebrated the Goddess Kali throughout his life in verse. In the West we’re so conditioned to think of the divine in a masculine form, it is almost odd to hear divinity framed in the feminine—but such a framing is most accessible when a poet does it. I found the first two quotes on Wikipedia (here), untitled, and sourced there to books by western authors.

You’ll find Mother in any house.
Do I dare say it in public?
She is Bhairavi with Shiva,
Druga with Her children,
Sita with Lakshmana.
She’s mother, daughter, wife, sister—
Every woman close to you.
What more can Ramprasad say?
You work the rest out from these hints.

Bhairavi, Druga, and Sita are all names of goddesses in the, for us, vast universe of divinities discoverable in the traditions of India. Where she is linked to Shiva and Lakshmana, these male deities are her consorts. Now if the above strikes the reader as a kind of exaltation simply of the feminine, the next quote shows that Ramprasad had more in minds and that his hints are not worked out by most. It presents a fascinating piece of negative theology applied to the Divine but in a female aspect.

You think you understand the Goddess?
Even philosophers cannot explain her.
The scriptures say that she, herself,
Is the essence of us all. It is she, herself,
Who brings life through her sweet will.
You think you understand her?
I can only smile. You think that you can
Truly know her? I can only laugh!
But what our minds accept, our hearts do not.
Ants try to grasp the moon, we the Goddess.

Finally a brief but sharply poetic take on Death by this genuine poet of the first rank. I found this quote in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. It also bears no title or sourcing:

How can you shrink from death,
Child of the Mother of All Living?
A snake, and you fear frogs?

The Beloved and Her Veils

2010-11-24T10:14:00.001-05:00

One of the fascinating limitations of existing in this low dimension is that we see the higher through veils formed of concepts, symbols. There is that image of the finger pointing at the moon—and the ignorant observer staring at the finger. I’ve always liked that image. The high cannot be uttered—but does that stop us? No. It can be experienced, and somehow we shall express it. The problem is much worse than the finger and the moon. The moon is felt, not seen. The finger is a web of words and images that spring from the hidden inward parts of the person who has the feeling.

It occurs to me that the ineffable has been described in endless ways, but that traditional ways of uttering and picturing the transcendent are, superficially examined, radically unlike each other. There are, for instance, spiritual traditions identical at their core but one we describe as “religion” and the other as “poetry.” Music is another such tradition—radically different enough from the other two so that it appears embedded in each of them. Vast confusions also arise especially for those who will not (or sometimes sadly cannot) fuse the intellectual with the intuitive effectively—and this because no detectable, hard boundary can be mapped between so-called lower and higher feelings; they’re always interwoven or, put another way, are identical, and what we call the lower is just the high at a coarse or “lossy” sort of resolution.

All three are veils—and at our least developed level we attempt to appropriate, co-opt them for service of the bottom layer. We exploit religion for social conditioning and deform it in all manner of strange ways; we name poets-laureate to praise kings or to worship nations; and music must accompany even our boring elevator rides.

I find it interesting that some traditions ban the visual arts, e.g. in branches of Christianity and in Islam; Islam also frowns on music. These customs, of course, arise from a vague sense that it is the Beloved, and not her veils, that should be at the center of worship. What those who’d ban images or sounds don’t seem to realize is that their doctrines, too, are merely veils—and that veils are unavoidable. In this dimension we must attempt to discover the hidden mystery as best we can.

How “It” Talks to Us

2010-11-22T07:52:00.004-05:00

Having waxed eloquent about deuterocanonical or apocryphal books of the Bible yesterday, occasioned by a quote, let me today present the full context of that quote and show how It, the dimension beyond, but not further specified, communicates with us. I take the quote from Owen Chadwick’s book, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 257-258. Chadwick, as I’ve already mentioned yesterday, is an Anglican Priest. He was born in 1916. Here is the quote:

On 31 October 1941 at breakfast time, more than fifty people were burnt to death in a factory fire in Yorkshire, and a few were killed when they jumped from the top storey down to the pavement. That was a long day. I spent all of it seeing burnt skin and the relatives of corpses, the most miserable and most exhausting day of my life. When at last I got home after 11 p.m., dog-tired and empty and wretched, I opened a Bible and found, reluctantly, the lesson for the day. And the words leapt out from the page as though they were illuminated, and swept over the being like a metamorphosis, with relief and refreshment:
The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God; and no torment shall touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die, and their going from us to be utter destruction… Like gold in the fire he put them to the test — and found them acceptable like burnt offering upon the altar.

The quote in the quote is from The Book of Wisdom, 3:1-6—and what the Book of Wisdom is was the subject of yesterday’s post.

In a secular age, we are surrounded by mysteries. And, indeed, we’re always thus surrounded, never mind the label not quite firmly sticking to the times. But it is an indicator of our era that we speak of such experiences as meaningful coincidences, serendipities, and such—rather than as revelations or as communications from beyond. When we experience this sort of thing ourselves, it’s always quite another matter—even when the circumstances are not as powerful, dramatic, and meaningful as what happened to Professor Chadwick.

My own views of revelation as a whole, as a reality, as a doctrine, are built upon these up-close-and-personal experiences of humanity. This particular case is doubly enlightening in that for a large portion of Christianity the Book of Wisdom is not considered to be canonical, thus is not viewed as inspired. It was written at a time when a Greek version of the Old Testament was already partly available, because Wisdom quotes from it. Biblical scholars believe that the writer was a Jewish sage living in very secular Alexandria and wrote towards the middle of the first century BC. The book reveals Platonic influence, thus the presence of a real distinction between the body and the soul. “For a perishable body presses down the soul, and this tent of clay weighs down the teeming mind.” Wisdom 9:15. This view becomes accepted in Christianity as it develops.

Revelation, it seems to me, is continuing, personal, and comes from all of humanity—as It communicates something of Its reality to this dimension. A Jewish sage living in Alexandria in the midst of the hellenistic decline, an Anglican priest in World War II tending to burn victims, a Greek sage writing dialogues in the fourth century BC. Official revelation is but a sampling, and multiple canons exist. In some the Book of Wisdom is excluded; in others the Tao Te Ching is included. But what really matters ultimately is that It communicates…

Startled in the Primeval Forest

2010-11-21T06:37:00.008-05:00

In a book I was reading by a distinguished professor, historian, and priest of the Church of England (Owen Chadwick), I came across a quote from the Bible that sounded unfamiliar. I followed the footnote to the back of the book and discovered that the quote came from Wisdom 3:1-6. I was startled, but only a little, because somewhere in my depths I knew there was a Book of Wisdom, something to do with Solomon. The Layman’s Parallel Bible lies within my grasp (four versions: King James, The Modern Language, The Living Bible, The Revised Standard Version). I knew that it didn’t have that book in it, but I checked it anyway. I was right. Odd. Odd because, Chadwick introduced his quote by saying:

When at last I got home after 11 p.m., dog-tired and empty and wretched, I opened a Bible and found, reluctantly, the lesson for the day…

This suggested to me—that phrase of his, “a Bible”—an ordinary Bible. And in the household of an Anglican priest that would be the so-called Authorized Bible, therefore the King James. Puzzled now, I went off to find my Jerusalem Bible, a modern translation that appeared in the 1960s. And yes. There, in that Catholic Bible, there it was, the Book of Wisdom, sandwiched between the Songs of Solomon and Ecclesiastes.

Several questions now arose. Why did an Anglican, on October 31, 1941, find the “lesson for the day” pointing to verses in the Book of Wisdom, a book that is missing in what for Anglicans is the authorized KJ version...unless, as might be, he was using the Bible as an oracle and opening it at random. My next task was to run all of this down. In doing so I found myself in the primeval forest of the western religious tradition, an amazing, fascinating ecosystem, if you like.

It turns out that the Book of Wisdom first appears in the second of three major versions of the Bible, the Septuagint. That book was created by translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek. Long ago. Precisely (if that’s the word) during the third and second centuries BC. The translation was completed in 132 BC. Now one oddity here is that this Greek translation has a Latin name. Septuagint means seventy. This version came to be known, later, to Latin speakers, as “translation by seventy men,” of which the word “seventy” became the abbreviation used in ordinary speech and writing. The seventy translators incorporated several books into this version not present in the Hebrew original. The Book of Wisdom was one of these; it was originally written in Greek. The third major version is the Latin translation, known as the Vulgate, derived from versio vulgate, the “common version,” thus understood by everybody—at least in the fourth century AD when it was commissioned. Of this word we still retain the English “vulgar,” thus common with an attitude. The Vulgate also contains the Book of Wisdom and twelve other books called deuterocanonical in the Catholic tradition; these same books, plus four others, are part of the Authorized King James Bible, but not the King James Bible “Lite,” as it were. On that more soon.

Before I discovered KJV Lite, I had to learn what “deuterocanonical” meant. Turns out that all of the books of the Hebrew Bible, thus of the Old Testament, are part of the official canon of the Catholic church. The books included in the Septuagint in addition came to be labeled as part of the “second canon”—thus also officially recognized as inspired. The word therefore means “belonging to the second canon.” This is a primal forest. We should not expect things to be simple. In the Protestant tradition, the word Apocrypha has come to be used. The word means hidden or obscure or, perhaps, more obscure books. Whatever the name used, these books are not recognized by Protestant churches as part of the canon; thus they are not viewed as divinely inspired. Protestants stick with the Hebrew Bible. And this stance, in part at least, explains why the King James Bible no longer carries the Apocrypha. The other part of the explanation is economic. Startled by that? Or just bemused? The latter, in my case.

Beginning in the 1770s, innovations in printing began to make large print runs possible. To reduce costs—and in efforts to attract a large Protestant market for the King James Version—publishers began omitting the Apocrypha from the book. Those active in the Church of England, like professor Chadwick, continued to use the “full” editions for good reasons. In the life of the Anglican Church, some “lessons for the day” referred to these books, and it is then startling to open the Bible and find them missing.

The realms of faith are just as vast, complex, and organic as all the rest of reality. It’s life, once more, if on another level…

---------------
Chadwick's book referenced above is The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1975.

Doctrine and Religion

2010-11-16T11:33:00.002-05:00

This post is meant as a companion to the last—in which I attempted to define the personal experience of religion. I defined personal religion as an attitude and orientation in which an intuition of a transcending “beyond” has a genuine reality. While I view this experience as arising in an innate intuition of reality, an “intimation of immortality”—something that trumps, as it were, various conceptual formulations of it—I’m still fully aware that people have the use of intellect and reason and that a fully mature person will have a comprehensive view in which a conceptual framework will be present as well. Today more on the later aspect.

A doctrine literally means a teaching. In the western religious traditions, all of which are revealed religions, the teaching is the elaboration of a revelation directly or indirectly received from God. In the eastern tradition, and here I have the Buddha in mind, the teaching concerns the elaboration of the meaning of an experience persons had—and also about what they themselves said about it. In both cases a certain acceptance, usually labeled faith, is necessary before the doctrine, the teaching, can be considered on its own merits. The fundamental character of such teachings is precisely this faith or this acceptance. There is no way that the ordinary human, even with a great deal of diligence and effort, can replicate the experience on which the doctrine rests. Religious doctrines have a very different character from what we call hypotheses or theories.

To reduce the western religious conception to its absolute grounding premise, it says that the ultimate creator of reality intervenes in its creation at certain times in order to communicate its will to many people through one person. Acceptance of this premise is, I submit, required to go further into the specifics of a doctrine.

The Buddha’s teaching contains another basic assertion, namely that a realm of suffering exits where the illusion of the self is present. The self is created by attachments. When all these are withdrawn, we enter a kind of blissful annihilation.

People who have serious, sincere difficulties with either of these essentials will be left to form their own explanations of the nature of reality. What they must accept as given is that from time to time religious faiths arise from the experiences of individuals, that these experiences are very evidently of a greatly persuasive and very energetic nature—sufficiently so that they produce huge social phenomena that spread over time and, by and large, produce more benefits than harm.

Clashes between groups, the use of coercion to make unbelievers comply with the teaching, persecutions, wars, inquisitions, and crusades do not, alas, at all require a religious orientation. The religious aspect in these phenomena is incidental, not central. What is central in them is the drive to power. The twentieth century brought us ample, indeed rich samples of each of these negatives under entirely secular conditions.

It does not take a great deal of faith to believe in truth, justice, and the good. That comes with personal religion, as I’ve outlined in the last post. The doctrines, however, belong—because of their basic premises—to the realm of judgment.

Religion and Doctrine

2010-11-15T13:07:00.004-05:00

I would here contrast religion as a personal experience and religion as a structure of doctrines. The first I would define as an attitude or orientation to reality—but with a twist. It holds within it an awareness of something beyond the tangible experiences of our day to day life—also something beyond projections derived from observing the world, thus such concepts as “humanity,” “nation,” “cosmos,” “history,” and so on. Under my definition Marxism would not qualify as a religion despite its detection of a “dialectical process” in history—however appropriately airy-fairy that sounds. Nor would atheism or materialism qualify. The last two would deny anything “beyond” the experienced. Atheists with odd intimations of positive meanings hidden somewhere invisibly have already committed heresy, as it were, in their hearts.

Intimation here is a good word although, for me, the German Ahnung, is best. Its derivation is from Die Ahnen, or the ancestors—and they’re definitely no longer here. Wordsworth’s title, Intimations of Immortality, fits my purpose nicely. My personal experiences of the religious take this form, the form of intimations, and they arise from poetry, myth, literary, and other artistic forms, including music. A sneering realist would label all this mere emotionalism—but I view such criticism as arising from the absence of inner powers rather than their presence.

Religion as experienced is an intuition. The moment concepts arise, and we hear of God quite early in life, we enter another realm. We learn to associate certain intuitions with certain structures of concepts. Intimations are intimate, personal. When I was young the concept of God produced in me images of a person in the sky. It did not connect with my own experience of awe—indeed has never linked that way in the intimate sense except in moments of extreme anxiety or gratitude. Odd, that, isn’t it. In certain moments when feelings rise beyond the normal range, when they transcend the average, we reach for the nearest concept of transcendence. There are no atheists in the trenches.

Experience teaches transcendence—and not just in extreme moments. But one does not experience it in a concrete, tangible way as one experience a tree, for instance, when climbing it as a child. The transcendental is ineffable yet felt as real. And the more open the top of one’s head, the more real it is and becomes. But between this experience and the doctrines of religions there is an enormous gulf—one so deep that the Grand Canyon would seem, by contrast, to be a mere line in the sand drawn by a wooden match-stick.

For these reasons I treat all scriptures as poetry—and view poetry as humanity’s highest achievement. I resist doctrinal claims to be communicating tangible realities, to describe in detail, however vague, what God intends or once might have done. Regarding that concept I hew resolutely to a negative theology and assert, no matter what I hear, “Not that, not that.” In the poetic mode I hear of “God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” in Genesis 3:8—and that’s fine with me, not least what came before and comes after. Eventually, by a long process, this inspiration turns into something that has nothing to do with intimations of the high; poetry is turned into doctrine; and by that time it has sunk out of my sight.

Second the Motion

2010-11-13T09:12:00.000-05:00

The New York Times today brought a story titled “The Burning Bush They’ll Buy, But Not ESP or Alien Abduction.” “They” refers to the body of religious scholars generally and specifically to those attending the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion that recently concluded in Atlanta. But the article is actually the review of a book, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred by Jeffrey J. Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice. I haven’t read the book myself; I didn’t know about it until today. The article tells me that it is about four writers on the paranormal, two going back a ways and two who focus on UFOs. Kripal, evidently, advocates the inclusion of paranormal phenomena in religious studies and the inclusion of such writers as Frederic Myers, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee, and Bertrand Méheust among the scholars.

“According to Dr. Kripal,” says the article, “their omission is evidence of a persistent bias among religion scholars, happy to consider the inexplicable, like miracles, as long as they fit a familiar narrative, like Judaism or Christianity.”

Good point, there, Dr. Kripal. I’ve made the same point on this blog myself, expressing the same regrets, although I directed my attention more generally at science rather than restricting it to religious studies. Kripal also identifies the ultimate problem underlying this avoidance of the paranormal, be it by science or by the humanities. The paranormal is, alas, a borderzone phenomenon. It bridges the material and the mental spheres, each of which has its well-established professions. It is uncomfortably real, as I might put it. People stay on their respective reservations because that’s more secure than wandering in the desert in the twilight. We might actually advance our knowledge if more talent were dedicated to the study of this uncomfortable interface.

Get In The Habit

2010-11-12T10:39:00.005-05:00

One impetus behind this post is a link sent in a comment to a post of mine on Ghulf Genes. The link is to an essay by Alasdair MacIntyre (accessible here) on The Nature of Virtues. The second is a post on Siris yesterday (here) addressing the question Is Faith a Virtue? Sometimes comments on blogs are just not the way to present one’s own response to highly stimulating ideas of enormous complexity, hence I thought I’d sort out my own thoughts on the matter of virtue here.

In one sense virtue and morality are very closely linked—or indeed synonymous. I find this in Webster’s first definition of virtue, rendered as “a conformity to a standard of right: Morality.” In an earlier posting I’ve at least touched on the subject of morality (here) focusing on its ambiguities. Virtue, by contrast, although very slippery (for reasons that follow), turns out to be simple and straightforward.

As MacIntyre shows, the word is rooted in the Latin vir, man, and is therefore manliness—a concept that different times define in different ways. It also carries the meaning of excellence—and when we speak of the virtue of a plant, say in a medical context, it means efficiency or efficacy. By way of example MacIntyre discusses the meaning of virtue in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament’s so-called theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity), in Jane Austen’s work, and in Benjamin Franklins. The contrasts are quite striking. MacIntyre’s essay is well worth reading just to see how he parses apart two motivations behind virtue, which he labels external and internal. External motivation comes from rewards you hope to gain; internal motivation arises from the inward experience of some practice, e.g., the sheer pleasure of doing a job right. My own view of the external/internal split has been to deny the presence of virtue if the motive is external, to recognize it when it is internal. Rabia al-Adawiyya’s saying always comes to my mind. “If I worship you from fear of hell, condemn me to hell. If I do so in the hope of paradise, deny me paradise.” I’m with her.

So long as we view virtue through the lens of qualities, tendencies, or endowments (like “manly strength” in Homer), the concept remains slippery. Natural endowments lack the immediate sense of a moral quality I tend to associate with the word. It helps me a great deal to define it more sharply from actual experience—always my tendency. And here I get real help from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Augustine defined virtue as “a good habit consonant with our nature.” Aquinas calls it “an operative habit essentially good.” Here I footnote the Catholic Encyclopedia (link). As a habit virtue loses its mystery and becomes straight-forward. Habits are acquired by repeatedly doing something—and if a difficulty must be overcome, thus a higher good must be preferred over a lower, it involves an act of the will. Thus virtue becomes, you might say, a record of repeatedly choosing right. Experience teaches that we naturally tend toward the good; the difficulties arise when we become aware of an ascending scale of goods and realize that lower goods often have more immediate and sensory rewards. A realization, thus a conscious mental grasp of these differences must first arise before a choice even faces us. And before virtue, the habit, is present, our naked will must form it by repeating what at first are relatively painful choices.

Now here I underline that a recognition is necessary—a kind of inward knowing. In my experience this is not an intellectual operation. My word for it is intuitive. I know the difference, for me, but I cannot speak for others. I don’t know what Aquinas really meant by intellect; the internal experience of that concept, for him, might have been be quite different from mine; for me it ranks lower than intuition and, therefore, unless the intellectual formulation gets intuition’s nod, I view it with a certain reserve.

Here then arises the issue of faith as a virtue. Faith in a structure of doctrines—which includes faith in the authority on which they rest—absolutely demands an intuitive assent. We are dealing here with matters that cannot be confirmed in the usual ways. Faith has a much closer relationship to truth than to goodness. Once I believe that something is thus and so, must I continuously repeat that affirmation? The reason why faith plays such a gigantic role in Christianity, it seems to me, is because its fundamentally very complex doctrine does not meet with intuitive assent as readily, say, as belief in God. Hence, perhaps, the affirmation must be repeated—because it’s not genuinely believed; in that context it can become a virtue. Further, faith in God does not by any means logically and automatically produce the Christian doctrines unless we first accept a very particular formulation of how God relates to man. But fear of hell or hope for paradise should not compel a person to act against the movements of his heart.

The Uncomfortable Neutral Stance

2010-11-11T12:26:00.001-05:00

Is there a neutral way to approach what are invariably viewed as religious experiences? The answer isn’t obvious. Let me be precise to bring that out. Let me take the case of a person, let me call him A, who hears or reads about other people who claim to have had such experiences. Those reporting may say that God, an angel, or some other sacred figure has addressed them, that they’ve received a revelation, or simply that they’ve had experiences of a transcendental state. Now if A is an unbeliever, he will reject the truth of such reports outright—except to acknowledge the presence of some disarrangement in the claimant’s brain. If A belongs to a well-defined faith system, but the claimant mentions figures from another faith, and especially makes references to some doctrinal aspects of the same, A is likely to dismiss the revelation because it doesn’t fit his structure of belief; he may even think the revelation came from the devil. A Muslim will be dubious if the center of the revelation is the Virgin Mary; a Christian will be dubious if the central role is played by Mohamed’s daughter Fatima.

A neutral stance would seem to require that A must credit the possibility of a transcendental reality, indeed one in which actual persons exist—and also view all religions as essentially equivalent, thus as having equivalent claims. Neither believers nor unbelievers will grant a neutral A much standing. For the unbeliever A is too soft, too gullible. For the orthodox believer, A is “lukewarm,” uncommitted, wishy-washy, and probably some kind of muddle-headed pantheist.

This is a real issue. At the core of every religion is a narrative, a conceptualization, an historical context, indeed a logic that makes it unique, and making any two of them equivalent invariably renders both in some ways or to some extent false. The neutral stance, which happens to be mine (alas!) relies on human fallibility as the legitimate explanation of the claimed equivalence.

All human experience is filtered through the imperfect lens of our consciousness; this is as true of ordinary as of extraordinary matters. At the very root of transcendental experiences—thus the initial core experience of the founder of a religion or a major movement—a human mind encounters something totally unprecedented and undeniable. This must be explained in some way, and the person must use his or her existing knowledge, not least cultural heritage, to make sense of it. And that’s at the root. All religions then develop further, always taking centuries, and the intellectual formulation crystallizes long, long after the revelatory event. By the time a religion has a full complement of orthodox doctrines, many, many people have made their contributions to it and incorporated their fallibilities as well. It remains to note that the source of such developments, whatever it is that the original claimant underwent, carries an enormous force of benevolence within it. If it did not, the religion could not take hold and acquire its millions of followers.

An authentic neutral stance does not deny the reality of the high but sees in the interpretation of the experience of it the equally undeniable fallibility of man.