Sparks of Faith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drinking Good Water

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.

Experience and Understanding

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.

Notes on Experiential Evidence

In yesterday’s post, “Held Incognito Inside Bodies,” I refer to evidence drawn from the experiences of individuals. I was referring to near-death and out-of-body experience reports. This is a vast subject, and therefore some additional notes. One need not seek far for documented reports of this sort. The classical source is Raymond A. Moody’s Life After Life. In a segment titled “Out of the Body” (p. 24-29) are a number of cases where people render their own memories in their own words. Many more such experiences are available from The International Association of Near-Death Studies, Inc., accessible from here. Many other resources may be added to these two that someone wishing to look at the evidence directly can examine.

I’ve had occasion to recommend in the past Carl B. Becker’s Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death (available from Amazon.com here). This is the sort of thing serious students will find useful. The book covers the entire field in scholarly detail.

After I’d examined a great deal of this evidence, I came to the conclusion that in the regions beyond the border experiences are of a different kind than they are in the material world. That over there is a world of images (mundus imaginalis, as Henry Corbin called it) where energies dominate and express themselves in feelings, intuitions, and knowledge not supported by hard, physical underpinnings—but, nevertheless, by real and existent forces (animate and inanimate) that behave like matter but are not matter. Visitors to these regions, therefore, clothe these forces in images drawn from their own experience; an active imagination is stirred into action. They may all reach the same boundary, for instance; the boundary will be real; but some will see it as a river, others as a desert, yet others as a wall. For this reason, those experiencing NDEs and OBEs will accurately describe what they see on this side of the border, but what they see on that side will vary based on personal experience, knowledge, and culture. Christians will see figures from the Christian tradition; Hindus will see figures from the Hindu tradition. But indeed it is reasonable to assume that when they encounter higher entities the entities are the same. It is the interpretations given to these beings that will differ from person to person .

In Carl Becker’s book there is a very astute discussion of this subject in a segment titled “An Idealist Next World” on pages 177-188.

Intellectual Grasp, Absence of Knowledge

Someone reached this blog by using the following search phrase: “intellectually understand but don’t know.” He or she got my post titled Understanding and Intellectual Grasp. In that post I argue the exact opposite of that situation, namely that a kind of wordless understanding is frequently present before we understand a matter intellectually. So what is the situation my visitor had in mind? He or she had in mind, I think, those situations where someone has successfully explained something at the conceptual level—but after we have “got it” we still haven’t got it; we still don’t know a thing.

A good example of this might be the explanation by modern physics of the electron supposedly circling the atomic core. We are told that the electron is “everywhere but nowhere.” It is a wave of probability. At the same time, if we wish to locate the electron we can set up an experiment to do so, and when we do, we can detect the electron (say on a photosensitive film). And this detection is then explained as the “collapse of the probability wave.” This is the sort of explanation which is intellectual graspable, but it doesn’t produce the feeling of knowledge. All we can do is repeat it to others, but we don’t really understand what we are talking about. When we seek a deeper understanding, we will be given the wave equation for starters. It looks like this:

Much of physics is of this character. The experiential base consists of experimental instruments, dial readings, and points of light on photographic film. The explanation is mathematical, the math derived from instrument readings. There is here a major disconnect between intellectual grasp and knowledge as we experience it. Okay. It is useful knowledge. We can apply it in practice in the design of electronic circuits, etc. Those circuits, however, are no more knowable in the core, in the gut, than the probability wave.

Let me now present an equally arcane counterexample where experience is involved. Let us say that you were mad enough to read the entirety of Dante’s Divine Comedy—in a version yet where the Italian text is in one column, the English translation in the other. And you arrive, at last, on the point where Beatrice, Dante’s great love, dead these many years, reappears to Dante on the portals of Paradise. She wears a dress di fiamma viva (of living flame), a green mantle over it, veiled in white, crowned with olive branches. The image shocks Dante, and he says: E lo spirito mio…d’antico amor sentì la gran potenza—And my spirit…felt the great power of the old love.

Now in this case the reader—if ever that reader has experienced genuine love, the kind we fall into, the kind we cannot help but feel, the kind that makes us remember our first love with a kind of numb and inarticulate awe—a person like that will not be puzzled by this magical appearance, by the fantastical procession that comes first, nor by the seemingly inaccessible assertion that this takes place in earthly paradise. All those concepts were at least felt to a tiny degree in our own first encounter with the magic of love. This is understanding based on experience—and later translated into intellectual concepts. The story of the electron’s sudden flash-up as its probability wave collapses—why that is intellectual grasp without understanding—unless, by a little magical trickery, we imagine that the beautiful electron, perhaps, is alike to the beautiful Beatrice, and that the wave’s collapse is like love’s crashing arrival on our own arid, sandy beach.
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Wave equation courtesy of Wikipedia. Dante reference is to Purgatory, Canto XXX, 31-33 and 40-42, translation by Charles Williams.

Attachment and Detachment

These two words have wonderfully ambiguous connotations. To be attached is to be drawn to something, but the attraction may very well arise precisely because the object bestows attention back. Attachment implies possession, therefore control. Love and attachment are often conflated, but troubles rapidly develop when love is not returned. Then attachment turns out to be simply trade: I give you attention if you attend to me. Failing this give and take, we’ll soon hear someone say, “X, I think we need to talk.” Love is much more difficult. If it is real, it’s anchored in the will; it’s not provisional, contingent, situational, etc. The reason why pet rocks are amusing objects is precisely because the rock cannot return affection. This aspect of attachment shows that it has a strong element of need hidden within it. Hence people can be said to be “too much attached to”—you fill in the blank.

Detachment gets its positive connotations because people are often excessively attached—so much so that other aspects of their lives suffer. Hence detachment is of value. If we’re in pain but able to detach our attention from the problem, we benefit. Detachment diminishes emotional involvement and therefore increases our freedom to reason, hence to discover objective values, thus to make correct decisions. But too much detachment is viewed as indifference, an absence of “love,” but read this as an absence of willingness to reciprocate attention with attention. Nothing infuriates the lover so much in a quarrel as the partner’s cold insistence on being rational.

If you attend to X with all your heart, you can’t attend to Y. If Y requires a lot of attention, X must be diminished so that Y can increase. In spiritual systems, therefore, teaching people techniques of detachment is usually job one. But this is best achieved by teaching people how to attach attention at will.

People are often frustrated by such systems—and exploited by cults—because they don’t understand the basics. They attach themselves to circles, groups, and communities—or avidly read “occult” literature—wanting to know “secrets.” They think that conceptual grasp of some secret will give them “powers.” This position is equivalent to wishing to be told what chocolate tastes like. No amount of reading, lectures, off-sites, seminars, and mystic journeys to India or Tibet will produce the desired result—until chocolate is actually available and put in the mouth.

Cults exploit people by paying them lots of attention and feeding them conceptual or emotional pabulum—when what is really required is the training of inner powers, already present, which, alas, only the seeker can actually do. The feedback from this is almost always next to nothing—for years on end. Extraordinary persistence is necessary before changes actually manifest. For the vast majority of seekers, long before this can even begin to happen, the work gets tiresome, they drift away, they settle down and find some satisfying game of give-and-take that will stimulate them until it’s time to go. It is for this reason that Sufis, for example, say that the minimum qualification for spiritual advancement is to become a “householder,” generically a person engaged in responsible social activity. The ability to persist in boring and tedious activities, undertaken just because they have to be, for the common good, not for self-pleasing, is “good practice,” as it were, for doing the same thing on another plane.

What appears to many as airy-fairy, whispy-ghostly, magic-wandish, fancy-dress, mystical-elvish activity—surrounded by an aura of mystery, romance, and miraculous powers—is really something much more akin to training for a marathon or editing a ridiculously sloppy computer-generated index of 40,000 words down to 12,500. You really need a lot of attachment and detachment to do jobs like that. And after you’re done, the big feedback is that you’re finally done. Way in the distance will come a payoff. Way in the distance.

The Boundaries of Experience

One of the brute facts that balances out the primacy of intuition is that our perceptions are bounded by experience. Let me illustrate this. Some people have extraordinary experiences; those who lack these and merely hear about them by report, possess very limited means of judging the veracity of the experience itself. But let me make that sharper. I don’t want to limit that word, “veracity,” to mean “speaking the truth.” Suppose I accept that the individual really did have the reported experiences. But even then I can wonder whether or not—in the absence of physical proofs—the interpretation of the reporter would be the same as mine would be if I had the experience. I’ve noted time and time again in life that my interpretation of an event can radically differ from that of someone standing next to me. When it comes to paranormal experience, the only analogue to physical proof is to have “been there,” thus to have experienced the same thing. Lacking that we’re left with analyzing the basic pattern that the experience offers. We can examine it in terms of consistency, comprehensiveness, probability; by analogy to other patterns; and so on.

A famous case is that of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the man who conversed with angels and visited both heaven and hell. The book to read is Heaven & Hell. It was published 251 years ago, written in Latin, then translated—thus it doesn’t have a modern flavor. And it is tough going—but not because it’s difficult. But an awful lot of it is moralizing, a good deal of it is abstract reasoning in which you have to buy into the concepts Swedenborg offers. Here is a paragraph to illustrate what I am saying:

In heaven, there are two distinct loves—love for the Lord and love toward the neighbor. Love for the Lord dwells in the inmost or third heaven; love toward the neighbor dwells in the second or intermediate heaven. Each comes from the Lord, and each constitutes a heaven. In heaven’s open light, the way these two loves differ and the way they connect is clear, but it is quite hard to see this on earth. In heaven, “loving the Lord” is not understood to mean loving His character, but loving the good that comes from Him. Loving the good means intending and doing what is good, out of love. “Loving the neighbor” is not understood to mean loving a companion’s character, but loving what is true that comes from the Word. Loving what is true means intending and doing what is true.

We can see from this that these loves differ the way the good and the true differ, and associate the way the good associates with the true. But this will not fit comfortably into the concepts of a person who does not realize what love, the good, and the neighbor are.

In the margin next to this I scribbled: “Empty concepts.” I’m not exaggerating when I say that much of H&H is filled with paragraphs like that. To extract meaningfully descriptive material requires extraordinary patience. To get beyond the abstract order and the preaching that fills Swedenborg’s best known work, the best thing to do is to read his Spiritual Experiences, two volumes of what were originally diaries. But here one encounters very little order, structure, or context—because here Swedenborg was making notes for himself, often very elliptically: he knew what he meant, and he left out precisely those details that someone who “hadn’t been there” needs to know. You become convinced that he did have experiences—also that they were far from the pristine order he hammers out in H&H. The sense you really have is of a man who is suddenly opened to a very strange, complex, vast reality that he has difficult understanding and struggles to master while, in a way, stretched across a border.

Knowing how crucial experience is—and that it is the only genuine proof of such realities—my approach is to stick closely to the ranges that I can reach, trusting that, mastering the problems of my reality as best I can will prepare me well for what lies ahead—when the Reaper finally comes.