Covered Over

Aldminster is a fictional cathedral in England created by Joanna Trollope in her novel The Choir. Here is a telling description of the dean’s wife:

When he [the dean] had wooed her and won her—no very arduous task, for she was thirty-two, very eager, yet very exacting as to the breeding and calling of her suitors—he discovered that she thought God was a part of mammon, a kind of high moral gloss available to put upon the good things of the world. He also discovered that she was not teachable, that she lacked not only any kind of self-awareness but, even more dangerously, the smallest atom of humility.

Joanna Trollope is a top-ranked writer and worthy descendant of Anthony Trollope—and, sure enough, one hears the voice of the genuine author as she looks down upon the world and dispassionately notes what she observes.

But questions do arise. Can observers like Joanna Trollop or like me really be sure that such descriptions are correct? If yes then people like the dean’s wife precisely match the modern description of what a human being is, thus a pure mechanism driven entirely by instinct and habits formed by her environment. If the modern description is correct, what do we make of people who can consciously process such a description? That takes self-awareness. But how can self-awareness be the product of mechanism?

The dean’s wife is a healthy, vital, energetic sort, busy, active, and very active in the social round, although quite manipulatively. She’s intelligent enough, indeed quite smart in reading the clues of her environment—and it’s a complex one. I loved this description when I read it the other day. It concentrates quite a few problems in living pattern usually absent from abstract discussions. Here are the problems. If she is really devoid of self-awareness (as her behavior indicates, but it’s typical behavior) and if she is nonetheless intelligent, is intelligence per se part of consciousness?

The traditional view is that intelligence is in the soul, not in the circuits of the brain. The dean’s wife is not a machine. She too has a soul. But then why does she behave in such a way as to seem an automaton—very complex but still one. My take is that she illustrates the human condition—and my favorite thematic, the fall. Her intelligence is too a function of her soul, but she is so covered over by the dust of some very ancient volcanic explosion that she is totally shielded from the higher currents that could bring her awake.

Now what the dean’s wife needs, in order to awaken, is hardship at a high enough degree (which need not be monetary or physical) so that, experiencing the pain, she will find herself. And then her escape from this dimension will begin. Paradoxical situation. The better things are, the less awareness. And those who are aware quite early in youth already should at least in thought be on their knees daily thanking the Lord for the gift of self-awareness. When it’s not a gift and you have to buy it, as it were, you have to pay with suffering.

Spotty, Lossy Self-Awareness

Consciousness fascinates me. Take for instance consciousness in dreams. We seem to be conscious, but we are not. We do and see things, but it is not the same as genuine awareness. Take half-awake or other passive states. Engrossed in a pleasing TV drama without ads or interruptions, we become identified with the action. Our surroundings almost completely disappear. When the drama ends, there is a sensation of awakening. I watch women shopping. Sometimes their faces reveal that they might as well be asleep. When their cell phone rings, their faces change dramatically; suddenly they’re human again. I can mow my lawn almost entirely in a state of trance, my mind repeating the same phrase over and over again. I’m active. I seem to be awake. Yet this is not what I’d call self-consciousness.

It seems that we have the potential to be genuinely conscious, thus self-conscious; and we frequently are. But all depending on our way of life, self-awareness may be much more enduring or much more paced out, as it were, arising only now and then. The phrase itself, self-consciousness, is ambiguous. In that state the self is conscious; we’re not conscious of the self as such. But when the self is not aware, where has it gone? It seems then to have been absorbed, captured, submerged in pure experience. It has disappeared. Some label this as identification. Self-awareness comes into being when the self separates itself from its experience. Then it stands aloof.

Only when the self detaches can it genuinely think and will. In all other situation—and these can be extraordinarily complex—habits and reflexes operate. Now it is worth noting that all child-raising and educational efforts of humanity are bent on awakening and training self-awareness. And its utility is undeniable. And, strictly speaking, it isn’t necessary for survival. The animal kingdom survives very well without it. The higher functions of the self point beyond biology. Living in bodies—and when we are self-conscious, we know that we’re not our bodies—we may be living in a prison (as Plato has Socrates say) or we may be in some stage of development. What is certain is that our conscious awareness is a lossy sort of power, very often absent. What we value is its presence. Our real lives are in the mental/spiritual dimension, even in this life. We eat in order to experience meanings; we don’t manipulate meanings in order to live. It is a struggle to separate the self from the fascinations of experience that can pull it into forgetting and a kind of waking sleep.

An Experience of Nirvana

It is fascinating to follow the thoughts of a modern scientist as she skates on the strange border between physical reality and something transcendental. Such is the case when we read My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor. She is a neuroscientists of the first rank. At age 37 she suffered a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. The book is an account of this event which she underwent more or less consciously until, some seven years later, she recovered her health and her faculties in full. Her viewpoint is, as it were, from the bottom upward. Her cosmology—at least as I perceive it reading this book—is evolutionary through and through, meaning that consciousness is a product of brain function. But her experiences cause her, seemingly, to invert that view. The evolutionary view asserts that life is a function of matter at certain stages of extraordinary complexity. But the following passage appears to reverse that view. She says, reflecting on her state during the earliest stages of her stroke:

I felt so detached from my ability to move my body with any oomph that I truly believed I would never be able to get this collection of cells to perform again. Wasn’t it interesting that although I could not walk or talk, understand language, read or write, or even roll my body over, I knew that I was okay? The now offline intellectual mind of my left hemisphere no longer inhibited my innate awareness that I was the miraculous power of life. I knew I was different now—but never once did my right mind indicate that I was “less than” what I had been before. I was simply a being of light radiating into the world. Regardless of whether or not I had a body or brain that could connect me to the world of others, I saw myself as a cellular masterpiece. In the absence of my left hemisphere’s negative judgment, I perceived myself as perfect, whole, and beautiful just the way I was. [p. 73-74; the emphasis is mine]

Several aspects of Dr. Taylor’s invaluable account strike me most forcefully. One is the occasional emergence in her writings of the suggestion that she is one with a cosmic energy stream that is somehow compressed and captured in what she calls “the intricate networks of my body’s cellular and molecular tapestry.” While in her detached and expanded state, she says that “I sincerely believed I would never be able to fit the energy back inside this skin.” At the same time she is firmly persuaded that the very consciousness which she now recalls and then experienced, was yet produced entirely by the functioning of her still intact brain mechanisms. Her view thus straddles in an interesting way the incompatible divides between being genuinely a being of light and yet a consciousness produced by millions and millions of cells.

The other aspect of her account that seems very interesting to me is that, throughout this difficult recovery, even while entirely relying on her still-functioning right brain hemisphere, she never had experiences of the sort reported by sensitives and psychics. Her peak experiences, quite nirvana-like, indeed she so designates them, are feelings of utter peace, a kind of fluidity, omniscience, safety, and well-being. Throughout this experience, she is quite alone inside herself.

This, it seems to me, is the normal state of being human. In one direction, of which we are mostly ignorant, is a cosmic bliss. In the other is the incessant noise of physical reality. When the instruments that organize that noise are somehow stopped—by a blood clot as in Dr. Taylor’s case or by various practices and disciplines, as in the case of the Buddha and others—the cosmic bliss becomes a central experience. But whose experience is it? Is it that of a being of light or of vast networks of neurons? In these cases—in normal and in mystical states, however induced—the individual is still entirely captured and held within the framework of the body. But what happens after the last knot is loosed and the being of light becomes detached? Some individuals—and these people typically don’t have an experience of cosmic bliss—do manage to detach and communicate with yet another reality behind, beyond, or interpenetrating both the noise and the nirvana. And that state, I would suggests, is what lies beyond the border. All else is still on this side of the divide.

Dr. Taylor book is available on Amazon.com here.

The Experience of Helen Keller

Self-observation tells us that consciousness manifests in many forms. Sharp self-awareness is rather rare. In times of stress and trouble, during infatuations, during illness, disasters, or after winning a sizeable lottery—while daydreaming, watching TV, musing at the wheel, and even doing habitual work—the self is in various states of identification. For all practical purposes, it is one with, unified with, its own experience. The sense of self is vaguely present at all times, but the consciousness of the self is dormant. It requires concentration to take control. “I had to get a hold of myself,” people say—but indicating what? They mean that they had to break the identification and become aware. With consciousness fully present—rather than held captive by experience—directed action becomes possible. Arguably a principal difference between people is the degree to which they are able effectively to detach. The word is paradoxical because, in this context, to be detached is to be present, whereas to be identified means that the self is absent in a state of semi-sleep. Shocks awaken people.

The Case

To illustrate the thesis I present the fascinating case of Helen Keller (1880-1968). Keller lost her sight and hearing in an illness at the age of 19 months. She was beginning to learn to speak, was imitating phrases that she heard. She had also learned the word for water and remembered it (as “wah-wah”) throughout her painful period of mental darkness. Thus her acquisition of language had at least begun, if only barely. Then she fell into a world of total silence and darkness. It is clear from her autobiography that she was conscious in a way—but conscious in the way I’ve labeled as identification. She felt a need to communicate and tried to do so with some success by using signs and gestures—pushing, pulling, imitating the motions of cutting bread to get bread, and so on. She felt powerful frustrations. And she enjoyed sensory experiences using her remaining powers of movement, smell, and touch. But full consciousness dawned in her only as she was approaching her seventh birthday. This happened while she felt the flow of water on one hand as her teacher, Anne Sullivan, spelled out the word for water with finger-motions on Helen’s other hand. Suddenly Helen understood. This was a revolutionary and dramatic experience for her! As soon as she had understood that a certain pattern of finger-touches stood for water—and that the experience of water thus had a name—her heroic and splendid career began. She had been enabled to experience abstraction. As she put it later, “The mystery of language was revealed to me.”

Discussion

Let us ponder this mystery, the mystery of naming. It consist of the association of two radically different phenomena with one another. In Keller’s case the two were the flow of water and a series of touches. Her mind made the conjunction: this is that. Her power of consciousness grasped this difference and sameness. But the association was presented to her by another person, and repeatedly, until Keller “got it.”

Keller’s experience, of course, was of a fundamental type, akin to something like the taste of chocolate. To convey what any taste actually is using words alone comes down to empty gesturing unless the other party shares the experience. But if the other does, just naming it suffices. In Keller’s case, one cannot say much more than simply to assert that such an association, between this and that, is obviously possible; we’ve all experienced it. But why then was this particular experience so revolutionary in Helen Keller’s case? During her long period of silence and darkness, she had already begun to use a kind of language—a language of motions. Why did her pushing (to signal “go away”) and pulling (to signal “come”)—and the discovery that these signs got appropriate responses—not give her the grand experience of understanding that a signed word gave her later?

My guess is that the discovery, the mystery of language, is the discovery of abstraction—but also that abstraction really points at something more than merely “abbreviation.” The motions she used earlier were such abbreviations, but they didn’t give her that moment of Aha! It seems that the abstract points to or reveals some aspect of another reality which, by means of the abstraction itself, suddenly becomes perceivable. Thus the emotion Keller felt came from the sudden opening to the dimension of Intelligence. In her own report, she spoke of having a feeling of suddenly remembering something long forgotten. Pushing and pulling were too closely associated with the physical facts of go-away, come-hither to serve the purpose of abstraction. The word “water” spelled with fingers, however, did have this alien quality of otherness and therefore its magical effect. The finger-spelling was radically different from the flow of water Keller actually felt on her other hand. An effort of inner linking took place. A new world opened.

The word “symbol” derives from the Greek word meaning “sign.” Language provides an alternative world of signs for every conceivable aspect of reality. By its very nature, language is arbitrary, illustrated by the fact that humanity uses many different languages. This quality, this arbitrary assignment of this for that, where the this has no resemblance whatever to the that, demands a corresponding motion or act by the perceiving intelligence, a perceptive act. When this act takes place effectively, the self awakens to a power dormant until then. The mystery of language, therefore, appears to be its power to evoke a recognition of meaning.

Curiously the perception of meaning, like the taste of chocolate, is a primordial experience we can’t describe. In a manner of speaking we acquire meanings long before we do. For most of us the recognition of abstraction is not an explosive experience, as it was for Helen Keller. Meaning is intrinsically associated with naming. For the child, early on, a table covered with objects is just a sensory landscape without meaning until the child discovers that that red object over there is called a “cup.” Once the object and the symbol are connected, the cup has meaning even as all the other stuff remains a landscape. “Buckle, Mami,” one of my daughters used to say in her crib, still tiny. She meant her bottle. Her hunger, her desire to have some milk, had been resolved into a clear meaning with a name. She had acquired a power more discriminating and efficient than simply crying.

Language awakens intelligence by separating the self and its surroundings (including its internal experiences like pain or pleasure) into a triad of relationships: there is the self, there is the object, and there is its abstract representation—its meaning. And meaning, to be sure, is a deeper concept than mere abstraction. Using that representation, the child can understand the object and, in turn, manipulate it in the mind itself and in communication with others. But using this insight, the self itself becomes an object of thought. An inchoate sensation becomes me; me becomes Jane, initially. Later, more ceremoniously, the last name is added: me becomes Jane Xavier.

Now the chief lesson I draw from this case is that language is a tool, a means. The capacity for understanding must be present and is innate. It isn’t language that produces intelligence but intelligence that manifests by using a tool. And once the tool is present, the powers of the intelligence are able to expand.

Our Mysterious Awakening

We never even think about our origin—which is the subject of our meaning—until our consciousness is able somehow to separate itself from the turbulent flow of our experience. Something in us must detach, something must reflect—or catch a reflection.

Consciousness thus becomes a mystery in turn. In one sense it is a partial description of a feeling—the feeling of our agency, the feeling that we are a Self. We couldn’t feel that we are individuals, people, responsible beings if we remained unaware. Neither could we choose to act this way or that without awareness. Thus the other major element of our fundamental nature, our will, is possible only through awareness. Indeed the very concept of an agency includes both at the same time and irreducibly so.

But our nature is paradoxical. Muted forms of agency—and therefore of consciousness and of will—are everywhere displayed for us in living creatures from birds to lions to giraffes. And most of the time their behavior is equivalent to ours. What divides us from the animal kingdom is our ability to become holy or evil. Neither path is open to a mule. And the paradox itself is murky and reveals additional degrees.

Thus, for instance, I genuinely wonder about the “humanity” of a pair of thugs who, under orders from a boss, kill two innocent people in an attempt to extract information from them (an actual case). I wonder about the “humanity” of the boss as well. I wonder about the human label applied to shady financiers who obtain houses from the desperate by fraudulent schemes they know will soon end in forfeitures. And on. In these people consciousness is present at levels well above a mule’s. They must know that they are causing harm. Are they really conscious? If they are they’re deliberately choosing evil. Is that possible? I assert that it is on the basis of personal experience—and I rather think that all of us have chosen evil knowingly in the past, finessing the acts by rationalizations. The difference between the criminal and Everyman lies in the degree. Evil does not always qualify as crime; it is a sliding scale.

Thus consciousness and agency in animals continues at a heightened rate in humans, but still on a certain scale, the difference in us now being that we deliberately choose. And when our choice is real—and if not real it’s not a choice—we use our will to lean now in one direction and now in the other.

The situation just described is a central feature of our meaning—must be. How it fits into the scheme of origins must still be developed.

Genuine consciousness really arises as a “separation” from the general flow of turbulent experience. Something must detach, something must reflect—or catch a reflection. More and more I’m coming to see awareness as a force or as a structure that emerges out of a material casing—not in the modern scientific sense of an “emergent phenomenon” but rather as a seed that catches on and begins development until at some point it reaches the light. It’s not an achievement but requires a favorable environment or endowment nonetheless. It seems to me that once it’s present it will assert itself thereafter—not because a person is virtuous or diligent but simply because this soul-force is strong and sovereign. It is not equivalent to intelligence but without its presence in awareness, intelligence is limited in reach.

Faculties: The One and Many

If I consult my own experience, I find that my various modes of being are a unity. I think of the self as a point, this despite the fact that I distinguish at least six modalities—thought, will, intuition, memory, emotion, and sensation. These are ways of perceiving the self in action; one of the meanings of modality, derived from the word mode, is form. The self may therefore be said to be a unity that manifests in different ways or forms. As we all know, these modalities may coincide, overlay, mix, fuse, etc. Each may be more or less quiescent. When I mow the lawn I immerse myself in the mode of sensation and of willing. My thoughts wander, my emotions rest except, from time to time, when I’m pleased by the attractive swaths of green that I produce; my intuition is in neutral; my thoughts wander; sometimes they latch on to a phrase left over from the last coherent run of mentation and keeps repeating that phrase over and over again; my memories are on automatic, but since my will is focused on making the lawnmower do its thing, their presentation—the stream of consciousness that still flows beneath the phrases I might be repeating, maybe something Latin and totally irrelevant but mildly pleasing—corruptio optima pessima, say—isn’t noticed. The repeating phrase need not learned, by the way. The last one I recall was “What’s hidden in that kitchen midden” which kept my mind playing like a child because it liked the rhyme.

The poet in me insists on the unity of self, but philosophers sometimes get caught up in the conceptual game too much. We separate and label the modalities, make of each a kind of hard and distinct something. Thus we have Schopenhauer who settled on the Will and would have it be the king. In modern psychiatric practice, Feeling is everything. I haven’t traced that peculiar emphasis back to its source in some philosopher or other, but it’s probably possible. But I always chuckle when Star Trek The Next Generation’s Deanna Troi (played by Marina Sirtis), the empath, we might call her, comes out with her true-and-tested question: “How do you feel about that?” The Intellect is the favorite of the philosophical community. It is the faculty philosophers hone to a fine edge and brilliant sheen; is it any wonder then that it must be the king of the faculties? For the more poetic mind, intellect has serious limits. As a young man I used to joke, heading to the bar with my friends after obligatory classes in philosophy saying: “If I stop suddenly and my esse should roll out in front of me—then I’ll believe I have one.” Juvenile, to be sure, but I make my point.

Here we have yet another instance of the one and the many—the conceptualization of which is a very hard nut for the intellect to crack but not all that problematical for the poet. The wonder of the human soul, in fact, is this oneness with multiple modalities. In this low realm we do get weird adaptations. When I see trees adapted to peculiar terrain, plants that grow immensely tall because they try to reach the tiny bit of light available to them, when I see strange creatures that inhabit the total darkness of the deepest oceans—at times like that I’m reminded of people in whom one faculty is massively developed but others have had no chance to unfold. My admiration is thus for those who develop fully on many fronts, and in harmony. I am on record as an admirer of St. Hildegard of Bingen, an exemplar of such persons who reach high states of development often overcoming, on the way, what appear insurmountable odds.