Wearing a Dunce Cap

I have been wandering of late in the company of a distinct minority within the Age of Christendom. By and large it is the company I’ve kept throughout my life even if, quite often, sometimes for years on end, I’ve been socializing with the same minorities in other cultures—Persian (Mazdaism), Arab (Sufism), but also touching the Chinese (in Taoism). This walk, of late, began with Duns Scotus whom I met, in my childhood, by way of the dunce cap and, growing up, I never questioned the prevalent but mildly expressed view among my teachers in Catholic schools from lowest to highest that Scotus was a rather dim light, if not a small shadow-thrower, in the vast brilliance of St. Thomas Aquinas. Dunce cap? Worn by those who do not get it. You can make one out of some sheets of newspaper, making them into a cone. For the origin of that shape I show a fifteenth century painting of Scotus (who himself lived mostly in the blessed thirteenth century, 1266-1308); the Flemish painter was Justus van Gent (link).

Scotus belongs to the Platonic line traceable backwards by way of St. Augustine (354-430). Augustine himself was part of this minority, close to Manichaeism in youth, a gnostic view which itself has links back to Mazdaism. He lived in a time when the New Dark Age of the Roman Realm was up and running in a serious way. The Visigoths sacked Rome when he was 56 in 410 AD. Therefore his view was darker and more pessimistic than that of Aquinas (1225-1274) who lived as the light of the Renaissance began to signal its own coming with a faint rosy color beneath the horizon. And Aquinas’ great influence was Aristotle who lived just as the Old Modernism, Hellenism, was about to be launched by his pupil, Alexander the Great.  

Let me capture these distinctions in cartoon-like fashion, as it were. Plato stood in relation to Aristotle as Scotus stood to Aquinas. In Plato we see the mature philosophy of a passing religious age, in Aristotle the foreshadowing of a modern time. The same may be said of Scotus and Aquinas, with the small but not very important difference that Aquinas was 41 years older than Scotus whereas Plato was 43 years older than Aristotle. In inwardly-directed religious ages, awareness of the fallen nature of humanity is to the fore. In outwardly-directed secular ages, self-assertion rises. The feeling tone derives from the focus of attention.

So I was reading Berdyaev. He proclaims himself a Platonist, Christian existentialist, and he viewed Duns Scotus as the greatest of the Scholastics. It was the kind of statement that caught my eye, surprised me. I underlined it heavily, adding exclamation marks in the margin—the last time I had read the Russian sage some decades ago with great approval.

So here we have a minority strain of pessimism and a majority dominance of optimism—both within an almost invisibly small cluster of communities that even think about permanent transcendence. I’m still of the pessimistic camp but getting there, in age, I mean. And the odd thing is that, well past the three-score-and-ten, I am feeling optimistic now. If one goes deep enough in any direction with a kind of junk-yard-dog persistence, amazingly the light begins to dawn. I wonder. Does the light eventually dim for the really persistent optimists? If so, my intuition guided me correctly in my gloomy youth.

Those Subtle Bodies

For there is customarily put in question among learned men, whether all the Angels, that is, the good and evil ones, are corporeal, that is, have bodies united to themselves. Wherefore some think, who supporting themselves on the words of St. Augustine [in On Genesis], seem to say, that all the Angels before their confirmation and/or lapse had bodies of air formed from a purer and superior part of the air, able to work, not to suffer; and that for the good Angels, who persisted in the Truth, such bodies were conserved, so that in them they may be able to work and not to suffer, which bodies are of so great a refinement, that they do not prevail to be seen by mortals unless they have been clothed over by some grosser form, with which assumed, they are seen, and with which laid down, they cease to be seen; but to the evil angels their bodies were changed in their downfall, into the worse quality of the thicker air.  For just they were cast down from a more worthy place into an inferior place, that is into the shadowy air, so those tenuous bodies of theirs were transformed into worse and thicker bodies, in which they would be able to suffer from a superior element, that is from fire.

    [St. Bonaventure, quoted in Peter Lombard’s The Second Book of Sentences, Distinction 8, Part I, Chapter I]

It is instructive to discover that very high-ranking learned men in the thirteenth century, and Doctors of the Church would seem to qualify here, spent a great deal of time pondering matters beyond the Borderzone. St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), a Franciscan, was one of these. The entire Second Book of Sentences is available on the Internet (link), in Latin and in English translation, from which I’m quoting a mere snippet above—having eliminated parentheses and the bracketed insertion of Latin words.

While this sort of thing puts me in right honorable company—in that a good deal of my time is spent on quite similar contemplations—I know just how such a text must strikes the modern mind; my own is modern enough to feel it viscerally. The present consensus on angels within Catholicism derives from the dominance of Thomas Aquinas, who held that angels do not have bodies. Other views were held or actively examined within the greater community of faith in earlier times, as the quote indicates. For Aquinas the definition of substance as the Aristotelian duality of matter and form ends with humans (in the hierarchy of beings); but others, among them St. Bonaventure, thought that hylomorphism (to use the Greek tag) extended to higher realms as well; the “matter” of those regions, however, was of a more airy or spiritual (call it subtle) kind.

Swedenborg would have agreed. For him it was a matter of experience. For the early thinkers of Catholicism, authority was rooted in scriptures and their interpretations by thinkers of some fame and gravitas. But when I read texts such as the one above, I am reminded of Theosophical conceptualizations drawn from a completely different spiritual tradition—and of the writings of David Bohm who proposed, based on the study of physics, that the world holds at least two Orders—the conditioned order (“matter”) and the unconditioned (“intelligence”); I think of these, myself, as matter and agency. But when I am reading Bohm, I always think of Aristotle. And then I think: “What goes around, comes around. Nothing new under the sun.”

“Illusion” as Interpretation

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 its 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.

The Borderzone Within

There is a borderzone right inside us too—as there is one out there in the macrocosm—but we don’t think of it in mumbo-jumbo or in mystical terms because it is a matter of direct experience. Humanity has treated this matter in countless ways, but it is summed up by that all-too-familiar phrase, body and soul. If we use that duality as the whole, then the “borderzone” in question is really the point where body and soul meet and interact. But that interaction is so puzzling and mysterious, that we’ve dismissed it altogether, conceived of it as a point, have ignored it, have formed all kinds of fantastic theories about it, and have often simply thrown up our hands.

The modern way is to deny it. There is no soul. Enough already. We’re strictly chemistry arranged in a certain dynamic pattern—and that pattern has a kind of tenacious tendency to maintain itself, like a whirlpool does—but no more mysteriously than a whirlpool does; we call that tenacity survival. End of story.

Aristotle proposed that everything has body and soul if only we call the one matter and the other form. The combination of the two is the only real thing. He called it substance, and to this day, if we mean that something’s real, we say that it’s substantial. A consequence of this, of course, is that after our bodies fall apart, what we call “we” disappears. But Aristotle was not quite sure that intellect disappeared; he cut himself some slack, as it were. Almost to a man—and it usually is a man—our deep thinkers imagine the “high” element within us as intellectual. My explanation is that they expend most of their lives in thought; they get to know that faculty genuinely well; but, perhaps, they fail to experience other facets of their beings equally as fully—or observe them with the same care. There are other ways of being—there are other paths: action, art, and love come to mind. Thomas Aquinas, among the greatest thinkers of the medieval era, had a mystical experience shortly before he died. He stopped writing abruptly. Asked why, he answered that all that he had written until then (and it was a monumental opus, still avidly studied today) was “mere straw.” (1) I’ve always valued Aquinas’ thought—but I have valued this story as its crown. Paradoxically, perhaps, it holds a practical as well as a deeper truth.

Descartes, who, in a way, gave modern philosophical thought its original shape, carried simplification to a great height. He proposed two realities, the extended thing (call that the body) and the thinking thing (call that the soul). They were radically different; they communicated and met at one point in the body, in the pineal gland. No, this is not a tongue-in-cheek dismissal; but to get into the complexities of Descartes’ thought on the subject you have to look elsewhere (2). My point is that humanity has struggled with this subject. The borderzone within is a very mysterious aspect of reality—and this despite the fact that it is, for us, the most familiar.

It is our inability to pinpoint precisely where higher and lower meet, to describe in mechanical (or even electromechanical) terms how spirit moves matter, our inability to capture and hold the spirit that has led to the materialistic theories of life. But modern thought had its ancient analogues too—and functionally quite similar. Lucretius was one of these theorists: everything is atoms, he said. They move deterministically, but at unpredictable times they suddenly “swerve.” This accounts for what we would call mental events and the illusion of volition. But atoms that form into bodies by law and swerves, dissolve back into free atoms, ranging from coarse to superfine. All is a dance of occasionally swerving atoms. (3) Modern theories of physics are now approaching the Lucretian level. Statistical explanations of everything real are beginning to eat away even at the claim that laws of nature exist (which, of course, suggests a law-giver) to make everything a product of chance. This is what I call throwing up the hands.

I’m of a mind to see value in all of these approaches. All of them produce raw materials, all of them spin twine useful for making a meaningful cosmology—or an understanding of the self. What we need is the right loom to weave it into fabric. (4) That loom is projected, I think, by emanationist conceptions of reality. I’ve discussed these recently under the heading of “Angels: Heavenly Schematics.” There I have suggested that reality is indeed a creation of two distinct fundamentals; they interact at every level and dynamically—thus either rising toward complexity or moving away from it. Within this dynamic spiral are regions of relative equilibrium. Borderzones are spatially conceived areas where a transition is taking place— from one region to the other. They are spatially conceived because, for us, living where we live, space is a decent concept for locating activity. But let me put this projection into more visual or linear terms.

God created two kinds of realities. One of these are agents, that which we call “we”: persons; selves. The other is what we call matter—but this matter may manifest in a vast range of subtlety—thus more than just what we call matter. We live our lives in a borderzone. What do I mean by that? I mean that both a higher and subtler and a lower and coarser kind are both present in it, mixed, as it were. We are keenly aware of the lower. And, being lower, it has a greater grip on us; why that is so I’ll try to explain in a moment. But we’re also aware of the higher. It charms and draws us. The matter of that world, however is more subtle. It is invisible to us because we are still more aware of the lower region than the higher. The higher is an imaginal (but not an imaginary) world. We sometimes dismissively label it “mental,” signaling that such worlds are unreal. Yet mental creations and realities are very real for us: great myths, great music, great works of art, great structures of thought, grand tales, personal and collective memories. And also personifications like the United States of America or the Red Menace. Lady Macbeth, meet Don Quixote. There’s also our honor—produce it for me to touch if you can—and our shame. With only the slightest of careful observation, we can easily discover that most of the things that really move us, in our daily lives, are structures of the insubstantial kind—impossible to touch although, of course, they have tangible manifestations as print on paper, images on screens, or the bodies of people whose intangible attitudes, thoughts, intentions, benevolence (or lack thereof) are the source of our pleasures and our pains. The lower order, the material aspect, sometimes touches us most irritatingly too. And their disarray, as in Haiti these days, is a great source of pain.

We live our lives in tension here because we’ve entered a developmental region, a borderzone. We come from the lower and are headed upward. But because the lower is more familiar to us, has long been our home, it has more claim on us. Hence we are more aware of it. But, at the same time, we hear the call (but cannot see) a higher region. We interact with both. But after we are freed of bodies, which way shall we go? That is the question. If in some greater scheme we are on a vector, we are lucky to be in a borderzone; we’re also at risk. If we don’t develop, we won’t be able to resist the downward pull of the lower region after death; to be sure, it is the one we already inhabit now. But if we do manage to acquire new powers sufficient to continue in the higher direction, then, at the end of life, awakening to that ability, and finally seeing the higher dimension directly, without the interference of this level’s coarser materiality, we shall look back on all our works, and like Thomas Aquinas, declare them all as “mere straw.”

Angels: Heavenly Schematics

I am still circling the subject of angels but now would like to enlarged upon the concepts I first outlined in the last post on this subject (“Angels: A Short Overview”). There I proposed two sharply distinct views of angels. We could call these Western and Eastern. The Western view represents a highly-developed cluster of philosophical conceptions; the Eastern provides a very sophisticated image but much less developed in philosophical terminology—perhaps of necessity; the Eastern is much more dynamically complex.

The western view is dominated by the concept of Creation. In that conception God creates a universe. It has a hierarchical structure. Seen from above God is the summit, the angels are a lower order; they are creatures of pure spirit. Beneath that level are humans, composed of spirit and of matter—indeed these two components are considered permanently fused by God’s choice so that the strictly human must always be both. Hence, after the Judgment at the End of Time, we shall have resurrection bodies. Beneath that level come animals, plants, and non-living matter. We can also see this hierarchy from below. To do so we can turn to the poetic formulations of Genesis. There matter is made first; heaven and earth are created, the darkness illuminated. God next makes lower forms, finally man. Angels are missing in this view, but the presumption might be that the creation of “heaven” also includes the creation of angels. The angels then later appear as messengers of God. Here, of course, I’m tracing the Aristotelian, Thomistic formulations in which the two fundamental realities are unformed prime matter and immaterial form.

While the hierarchy is pleasing, the cosmology altogether lacks any kind of justification for matter, as such, except as the wax in which lower orders (not the higher) may be made visible by the impress of form. Matter-form duality admirably fits Aristotle’s concept of substance, but Aquinas has problems maintaining a rationally pleasing hierarchy as he moves on up to the angelic level. If substance is matter-form (hylomorphic), are angels then insubstantial? To get around this problem, Aquinas introduces the notion that angels are also marked by a dual composition; their essence is “substantiated,” as it were, by existence. Aquinas separates essence from existence. God, finally, in Aquinas’ view, is a Being whose essence and existence are one and the same. All I can do here is confess to the opacity of my own intellect. My intuition will not follow me into this thicket. Nothing resonates.

An emanationist schematic of reality pleases me much more—although it has its own challenges. To express that model in static terms—just to make it visible—we might say that reality manifests in degrees of subtlety, from the most gross to the most subtle. But at every level a duality exits—call it matter-form, passive-active, receptive-creative, body-soul, what have you. We might picture each being, substance, or entity as a temporary fusion of two distinct aspects of reality that, in the Ultimate, are one. These two core realities cohere less and less as we descend (or move away) from the Source (God) and appear more and more complexly fused as we ascend to (move toward) the Ultimate. Within the Ultimate the duality disappears into Pure Act. At the other extreme the duality also fuses, but in the sense of “locking up,” thus losing actuality and becoming, at the extreme, the closest imaginable something to non-existence. Here images of Satan, as depicted by Dante in the deepest pit of hell, produce an interesting picture to contemplate.

Still holding the static view, in this schematic angels may be seen as higher entities, thus more complex and unified beings. Humans as simpler and more fragmented entities—but on a much higher level than animals or inorganic matter. But everywhere, at every level, the dualism holds. At every point, from tiniest to greatest, there are analogues to body and to soul. Thus even the minutest subatomic particles of matter have a “pilot wave,” to cite Louis de Broglie and the elaboration of his notion by David Bohm. As above, so below.

The emanationist schematic, which is more akin to the Eastern philosophical traditions, is, however, a dynamic system. That is where, viewed from a Western perspective, problems appear. What we call creation is, in this view, a continuous outflow of divine substance. It “descends” in a way. It becomes ever more coarse as its “distance” from God increases. The problem? The problem is that spatial concepts are required to understand this model. But so does, of course, the Western notion of creation, but we are just more used to that one and rarely bother wondering if God first had to create a “space” for his creation. The Kabbalists (Isaac Luria, for instance) did actually wonder—and proposed that God’s first act was to create a vacuum. The scheme also appears to be a species of pantheism—but that need not be so. We need only make two assumptions to redeem it. One is that this outflow is a circulation. The other is that, on it ascent back to the One, the creation has achieved a higher degree of perfection. A third assumption might be that the creation itself, in the persons of the souls God has created at the outset of the downward flow, participate in the creation by using their free will—or don’t. This freedom, of course, only resides in one of the two core “elements” that make up creation, not in the other. That one is what we call soul, the entity. The other, by contrast, always follows strict laws—which even the free soul cannot suspend. Thus what we call a miracle consists of the lifting of matter from a lower to a higher level, not the violation or suspension of God’s law at all.

In this dynamic model, beings are perpetually descending and ascending, some outward bound to learn or to experience limitation, some inward bound to realize a higher form. Both the down and upward trajectories are spiraling structures—away from unity and back toward it. In this view separate creation of angelic orders, of humans, of animals, of plants becomes unnecessary—which would please Occam. The creation begins to take on a vastly more elegant form. And, pleasingly, what we see through the narrow lens of science appears in harmonious concordance with what our intuitions of the great whole whisper to us in the silence.

On Love: Well Worth Reading

Herewith a pointer to what I consider to be a superb, brief post entitled “Aquinas on Amor” on Siris. It is a repost of an entry that first appeared last year. Aquinas had a crystal-clear vision, and here it is summarized with skill and parsimony. Click here to see it.

Forms, Forms, Forms

The big disagreement between Plato and Aristotle had to do with the reality of “forms.” As Plato saw things, if we have actual trees growing all around us—and we do—there must be an immaterial and eternal pattern of the “tree” somewhere in a higher realm. The “idea” had to be there somewhere before trees could form—and its existence must be at least as real as that of the keyboard on which my fingers dance. Aristotle shook his head. He had major difficulty picturing this Warehouse of Eternal Forms hidden somewhere in eternity.

I side with Plato because I have no problem with eternal forms—nor, for that matter, with forms that originate in time. The keyboard is an example. So is the fork, the knife, or shoelaces. These latter day forms were surely not always present in that Warehouse of Eternity where Eternal Forms reside. Nonetheless, we all know what these objects are.

In philosophy this clash has produced the Realist and Nominalist schools. The first asserts that eternal forms are real; the second holds that forms are merely names (nomina in Latin). In the philosophical context forms can also be rendered as essences, meaning exactly what Plato meant by forms.

I side with Plato because, in struggling with this subject myself, in trying to understand it viscerally, really, from the gut, I hit upon the notion that the problem goes away if we think of these forms, ideas, essences, or archetypes not as things but as intentions. Eternal ideas don’t need a warehouse. They need a mind. This line of thought brings the products of nature and the products of humanity under a single roof. Both are the consequence of intentions. The tree embodies God’s intention, the shoelace a human’s. Seeing forms, eternal or otherwise, under the rubric of intention also nicely explains why the form is immaterial and invisible and yet may be manifested in matter. Thus the weird status of form in the Aristotelian conception, form independent of matter, namely as a potential and therefore suffering a kind of not-quite-real status, is put on more solid footing. Essences are created by minds. Until they manifest as substances, thus taking on materiality, they remain ideas. But ideas are real. They are invisible because the mental order is invisible.

Now those who’re reading this entry having comes from the last (“Bodies, Bodies, Bodies”) might wonder: Is this discussion at all related to bodies? Yes. Thinking of essences and their manifestation may be the explanation of bodies, be they flesh-and-blood or subtle.

If we suppose that Reality itself must be God’s creation—and without that assumption all meaning disappears, hence that’s a good start—the Platonic view suggests the process of creation. It is the same on high as it is in our own humble circle. The new arises from intentions and then develops (or evolves, if you like) into a visible actuality in which the intention takes on a body. What this means is that matter itself is necessary in order to separate, to manifest, ideas—whether they originate in human or in higher minds. God’s creation generates the very matter in which divine ideas manifest. Lesser beings, like ourselves, cannot create matter but may form it.

This general idea underlies theosophical, Neoplatonic, and related conceptions of the subtle body. The idea expresses the feeling that actuality must always involve some kind of embodiment, gross or subtle. Without such embodiment, the essence remains still entirely absorbed in God. Actuality may thus be understood as separation from (but not independence of) God. The creation must then be pictured as a kind of separation in which matter plays a crucial role. The creation is not identical with God. Why God creates is the ultimately mystery. The emanationist theory suggests an overflow of benevolence—but that is, surely, just a human conceptualization. How can the Absolute be said to overflow?

This general view of the matter has certain merits. It suggests that transcending orders above us (and possibly below us) are structured like this one, but the match between our powers and the matter in those worlds is better—so that our minds can form our bodies. It suggests that angels also have a dual character. Here I side with St. Bonaventure (who believed that all creatures, not least angels, were made of form and matter) rather than with his contemporary, St. Thomas Aquinas (who held that angels had no bodies). I like the structure because it permits me to imagine that the vast physical cosmos that we see may indeed be entirely alive—that suns may be the bodies of very high beings. This notion, I hasten to add, is not original with me at all—but pleasing because, looking out at the vastness of the visible cosmos, I’m choked by the meaningless incommensurability of that vastness unless I think that so much glory may actually have meaning.

Later: Having read this she who completes me had this comment: “For me, after having re-read this ‘unpacking,’ a very satisfying (pleasingly simple?) thought is that ‘this creation strives toward completion!’ The entire universe is EVOLVING towards the completion of God’s idea of his creation.”

More Comments on Cosmic Maps

One of the reasons why cosmic models interest me is because the starting point for everything, for me, is to build up a big picture as rapidly as possible. Whenever in the past we’ve moved into a new area, I’ve always wasted a lot of gas getting a feel for the whole metro area, quickly and hands on, of course. Look and see. Long before I knew my own neighborhood even reasonably well just north of Detroit, I’d driven the whole length of Interstates 94, 696, 275, 75, 96 and the Lodge Freeway and knew what they were trying to do. I start with a map and then try to fill in the details, the big chunks first. In the process you discover that some freeways aren’t finished yet, that Outer Drives are broken, that beltways aren’t buckled, etc.

When it comes to border zones, particularly the regions beyond the border at the entrance of which barriers bar the way, the difficulties are much greater, but not insurmountable. Some people claim to have been over there. You can read reports and study ancient maps. In this process geographies of the beyond are possible—but they do resemble the strange things medieval authors produced, all from hearsay, just sitting someplace in a monastery. Foolish of me to be one of these monks, but the itch is irresistible.

A certain discipline helps in building or judging models. That discipline is to subject models to a test of comprehensiveness. Let me illustrate this. Despite my very strong conviction that the human mind, the soul, or consciousness (I tend to use these words interchangeably) is radically different from matter, a difference in kind, not merely of degree, I’m very resistant to cosmic models that make humanity the center of reality or of a divine project. Why? Because the visible universe is incomprehensively vast. It’s incommensurable with the human. Now, mind you, I’ve no problem crediting that an invisible, subtle, spiritual cosmos may coexist with the physical—indeed that the two may be meaningfully related. Such a hypothesis seems reasonable to me. But I’m forced to conclude that the human phenomenon itself (even extended to include all life) is most decidedly a minor something—even if I assume, as I actually do, that it is part of a greater spiritual reality. I see us as temporarily marooned, as it were, marooned in matter. That we should take ourselves seriously is good and proper. We have our own legitimacy. I merely object to making human fate central—because we are so incredibly small.

Another aspect of applying a test of comprehensiveness is to see if a model accommodates the whole range of reasonably discoverable experiences reported by humanity. Where dogmatic elements in some cosmology deny such experiences ex cathedra I see a problem. Two examples are Christian denial of the possibility of reincarnation and materialists’ denial of miracles. I also have problems with the way most faith systems explain miracles. But I have no difficulty accepting Thomas Aquinas’ definition in Summa Contra Gentiles: “Those things are properly called miracles which are done by divine agency beyond the order commonly observed in nature.”* My inclination, to be sure, is to understand “divine agency” in my own way, thus not in a manner that narrows the agency to the usual, narrow human conception.

A final comment on cosmologies derived from revelation as this word is usually understood in the Judeo-Christian and Muslim faiths. I accept the notion of revelation much in the same way as I accept miracles, thus as something that reaches us from a higher order. But revelation is acquired by means of the human consciousness and is therefore subject to filtering by existing knowledge, culture, and understanding. Genuine truth reaches us, but the interpretation of it as the literal word of God is, when subjected to a test of comprehensiveness, contradicted by the contents of these scriptures themselves. A real stumbling block, for me, for instance, is the concept of a chosen people.
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*I found this quote in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Miracles,” here.

Life's Origin: First Steps

When it comes to the origin of life, we seem able only to come up with two theoretical structures, possibly a third if we combine the other two. One is that life emerges from matter spontaneously by chance. The other is that God creates the living by a special act. The combination, favored in Catholicism, for example, is to picture God creating the cosmos in such a way that life is already present in it; thus at the appointed time, life will emerge from matter. Here the absolute sway of chance is mitigated if not entirely removed; it is replaced at the crucial point by an intention hidden in the very structure of physical reality.

The third solution is both elegant and subtle. It leaves science to follow its naturalistic methodology wherever it might lead without the embarrassments that the intrusive correction of Galileo occasioned for the Church. At the same time it preserves the ultimate ground of creation as an act of God.

When I look at this solution in more detail, however, it has a troubling aspect. If life is hidden somewhere inside of matter, its emergence is a change in degree rather than in kind, and I’m persuaded that life is different in kind. My reason is that life displays teleology, thus it displays purpose. The most obvious evidence of this is reproduction. It is the continuation of a very complex arrangement of matter, what might be called an extremely complex form, by an intricate step-wise method, a whole long chain of intricate processes. We do not encounter anything resembling it in inorganic nature. We do encounter various examples of simple structural changes in response to stimuli, thus the formation of crystalline forms, e.g., snowflakes, but we don’t find anything at that level in which a necessary chain of formations takes place and must take place for the end result to emerge.

Purpose is, strictly speaking, associated only with agency. I grant you that this is an intuitive finding. It takes a special effort to deny that agency is present in living entities. It is observable. To explain it away mechanistically is always possible when the entity manifests in physical form. The physical expression of agency will take place using mechanical means. But to assign agency, purpose, strictly to mechanism requires that we willfully ignore that which we really see and feel. It is literally impossible to deny that we feel purpose. It's presumptuous on our part to deny the same feeling to dogs, to plants, indeed even to cells. What we observe is a difference in awareness, not a difference in end-seeking tendency. This is the same-old, same-old battle between two ways of perceiving. I don’t want to waste time on it. But the point I’m after here is that the third solution, given above, namely that life is embedded in the cosmic whole from the start, that it permeates matter so that, in the ripeness of time, it may emerge, that solution doesn’t please me. Even when offered by Catholic thinkers, it still reminds me of panpsychism.

There is a version of this mode of thought that I find much less troubling. It is that two (or at least two) orders of reality are present in the cosmos. David Bohm, the physicist, formulated this conception as the presence in the Whole of a conditioned and an unconditioned order. You can find this idea in Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, 1996. Another way to put this is that an order of agencies or souls exists and so does an order of matter. There may be many other mansions in the Lord’s house as well, but here I’m pondering two. This sort of concept can be imagined as two orders that coexist and possibly also interpenetrate—and under certain circumstances the unconditioned order may, in fact, act upon the conditioned order where circumstances permit such interactions. Both, however, exist independently. As for their origin, my view is simply that if agency exists at all, its origin must be God. The unconditioned order, of course, has both consciousness and freedom; that freedom is clearly delimited, as we see from our circumstances. It isn’t, in us, omnipotence. But it has freedom as the order of matter does not.

The difference I see in this position, call it 3A for convenience, is that it keeps separate what are, in my view, two orders, separate in kind, not one rising from the other. I can thus imagine a community of spirits becoming entangled in matter, seduced by it, as it were, and, over long periods of time, building a strange intermediate world of incarnation just because it’s possible. In my science-fiction role I’ve named this chemical civilization. Thus all of life is a construct by spiritual agencies, working on their own. They don’t originate life—because they are life. But they cause it to manifest in matter, where it does not properly belong. This notion first arose in me when studying biology as a grown man with three children. It has long intrigued me because it fits in many ways that which I see displayed in biology. What it requires is that we also imagine the possibility of many grades of consciousness—upward and down. We find no difficulty imagining higher beings—we even have names form them: angels, whole choirs of them. We find it difficult to imagine spirits operating in vast choirs of their own at levels way lower than ours.

This conceptualization demands a cosmology different from the Aristotelian/Thomistic which builds its hierarchy from unformed matter to absolute act. Thus I’m challenging a tradition vastly more grown-up than I am. But I find that hierarchy difficult in spots. Since it goes on into orders of spirit, ever higher, it does not seem to have a proper justification for matter—unless it is to make sense of man. But what if man is just trespassing on matter? What if original sin has another meaning yet? What if matter has a different explanation?

Obviously there is more to say here, but these posts shouldn’t get too long.

Where Do We Go In Sleep?

Does sleep prove materialism? If our consciousness is the capacity of an immaterial agency, and we are that agency, why do we go away when the brain has to rest?

Let me examine the assumptions hidden in my question above. To make things as clear as possible, let me start by saying that I want to exclude dreaming states for purposes of discussion. Dreams need special attention—and will get it elsewhere. Now to the question. I assume here a duality of body and mind. If I didn’t, the question would be meaningless. To recognize this duality explicitly, I can rephrase the question: “Where does the soul go when the body sleeps?” I assume, further, that body and soul are separable entities; note the distinction: not just separate but separable—else I couldn’t use the word “go” in the question. I also assume that the state of sleep is the sole property of bodies and that souls don’t require sleep—hence they can “go” somewhere. I pose the question in the first place because the last assumption necessarily suggests that consciousness continues even during sleep, but I am unaware of that—and if I am that consciousness, my absence in sleep produces a contradiction. I’m simultaneously asserting that during sleep the soul is both conscious and unconscious.

Let’s next look at these assumptions. Duality rests on my observation of the mind’s behavior, particularly its freedom of action in directing my motions at will. I don’t observe this behavior of self-motion anywhere in inorganic nature. I have a clear understanding of the difference between reflexive, automatic behavior, assigned to mechanical arrangements, and voluntary behavior. The voluntary behavior also requires a cause, and that cause is the soul-mind-agency. In order to move the body, this agent must be in some way independent of it.

That body and soul are separable is not a matter of ordinary observation; experience proves the contrary, otherwise I would never experience pain; I would just go away until it stopped. The notion of separability is a theoretical projection based on my experience of the independent status of my soul, ultimately grounded in free will. But I have no experiential basis for asserting that I can “go” anywhere without old flesh-and-bones tagging along.

My assumption that sleep is solely a property of bodies arises because I cannot find an organic basis for soul. The very concept requires that soul be free of mechanistic determinations. If it isn’t, it would be the body. If soul is independent of the body, it would not seem to require sleep. But that is a relatively weak assumption. By calling soul independent, I have not actually described it very comprehensively. It too may need a constant or intermittent renewal in some way, but, if so, I can’t know anything about that. As Aquinas argues, soul knows itself by its actions, not directly; hence by corollary, soul cannot know anything by its inaction—which is its evident state during sleep.

How then do we deal with the contradiction of a conscious-unconscious soul during sleep? Three possibilities suggest themselves.

· Souls Also Rest. As just suggested above, souls themselves may require restoration and have the functional equivalent of rest. Sleep may, in fact, be viewed as produced by soul-fatigue, produced when a soul, that has exhausted its vital energies, lowers its life-maintaining activity, and the body, in response, slumbers off.

· Souls Are Conscious But Bored. Under this option, souls remain conscious during sleep, indeed continue to have mental freedom to do as they like, but there is no sensory stimulus coming their way. A big black nothingness is what they mostly experience because access to other realms is impossible from this material order. Memories are formed, but they are of the kind almost immediately forgotten. Nothing happens that’s worth remembering.

· Souls Have Experiences, But Memories Aren’t Stored. In this explanation, souls do have experiences, but what with the brain being asleep, it doesn’t store memories of these experiences and, hence, in the waking state, we can’t remember what we saw and felt in our perhaps native dimension.

Notice that in two of these cased (Bored, Experienced), the function of memory is central. In Case Bored, the mind produces memories with or without the brain’s intermediation; memories are of the same kind (let’s say on the same frequency as ordinary memories) and treated in the same way. We don’t usually remember large boring stretches of experience or simply compress them into a very brief token. The other case, Experienced, assumes that for ordinary remembering the brain must be actively involved; the soul may experience events in some other order, may store memories of these events as well, but on another frequency—which is not accessible to the brain but may be accessible to the soul once it is freed of this dimension.

Now some further comments on these cases. The first suggests that the mere assertion of “immateriality” for the soul is inadequate. Hidden within it is the assumption that soul requires some kind of energy for its own maintenance—which it passes on to the body. So the soul becomes more complex, indeed dualistic in turn, consisting of capacities on the one hand and a sustaining energy on the other.

The second depends on the assumption that different orders or regions exist and that the soul, native in another one, is caught in this one, at least while in the body, and unable to experience, at least effectively, any other. Therefore, deprived of sense stimuli, it sees nothing when the brain shuts down. Boring.

I have nothing more to add to the third case. Each of these cases has a certain plausibility and problems. All depend on variant models of reality which are entirely speculative and supported only, and only in part, by highly subjective experiences of the paranormal. Some of that “evidence” I hope to examine in future posts. Here it might be well, once more, to emphasize the problem of knowledge. We have no idea what a soul is, only the experience of its activity; we don’t know how it got here or why it’s tied to bodies. For explanations we must open books of myth. Tough sledding, this business of the mind.

Cosmic Models

When we imagine myths of the world, even one of a small part of it, the tale must match the subject. Now any one human life certainly fits the personal scale, but it cannot be viewed except in a broader context: we all live our lives embedded in history’s flow. I was a small pebble but rolled along by the enormous weather of the twentieth century. You cannot reach a moderately educated level unaware of history’s depth or nature’s incredible complexity.

Whatever the human story, it is a vast tale of great moment and scope and cannot be reduced to simple concepts. In effect reality, even the portions of it we can see, cannot be fitted to a line of logic; it requires a saga at the least. To say that much is also to admit that we cannot really know the big picture in the full. It’s damnably difficult even to know a small part of the physical world. I recall one of my incarnations and remember how little we know about something like cement—and we know a lot about it.

This by way of commentary on models of reality. The philosophical attempts that come close to being satisfying have an architectural character or depict a dynamic process, usually triadic. Monistic systems tend to be rather pathetic because they have no point.

The Aristotelian scheme, completed by Thomas Aquinas, is a static structure built up out of the duality of matter and form. These may be rendered as the potential and the actual or, in other phrasing, the virtually nonexistent (unformed matter) and absolute Being, pure form or actuality, God. “Potential” is one of those wonderfully ambiguous concepts; it exists in a way but in another “not yet.” The Thomistic system ultimately feels incoherent; it has matter but doesn’t really need it. In a cosmos where immaterial beings exist, materiality requires some kind of justification; the theory doesn’t justify it. To be coherent this philosophy requires that duality be extended upward (ever more subtle matter to match ever more exalted spirit) or spirit must be extended downward (matter is thus densified spirit).

Taoism is a triadic, dynamic system in that it provides a creative and receptive (Yang, Yin) which account for the dynamism of the Tao. As a description of reality the Tao is flawless: freedom and necessity in motion forming an unnamable third which is their origin and their expression. The Tao is the ultimate cosmic building kit. You find it hidden beneath just about every cosmology ever made. It’s there in Aristotle, Yin being matter, Yang being form. At it is, however, it requires enormous restraint simply to accept as is. People are tempted to elaborate.

Monistic systems take one or the other of the two elements of Tao and exclude the other. There is Schopenhauer’s Will—which is everything. There is materialism’s Matter—ditto.

The philosophies, however, ultimate stop short of meaning. There is no personality here—although in systems where it’s introduced, it is the Yang. The great sagas introduce meaning by way of a drama in which the two are in conflict for one or several cosmic ages. We are usually minor participants, sometimes at the center (as in Christianity). And our fates are part of the greater history of a vast heavenly turbulence.

The really effective cosmologies—such as, for instance, the fable of the Island—provide a story that goes beyond our direct experience in order to explain its intuited origins and its felt continuation beyond death, but do not attempt to lay down an absolute and final meaning for the entire process. Our inner guidance actually rejects a final explanation. Our intuition (mine anyway) says that the ultimate picture is not knowable from our perspective.