Three Ways of Seeing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Explosive Words

I’m struck by the interesting relationship between the Western concept of “the church militant” and the Islamic concept of “jihad.” Both have positive meanings if viewed from within the faith system in which they arose but may be viewed negatively from the other—provided that the individual or group doing the viewing is moved by ignorance and ill will. From the Islamic point of view that “militancy” is the violent crusading spirit which brought war and mayhem to the Islamic world intermittently during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. (This comes to mind because I just finished reading one of Ellis Peter’s Cadfael novels.) From the Western point of view, jihad is terrorism.

Concepts can be as dangerous as high explosives. There is no escaping our mixed state in this dimension. Religious structures that came into being to raise humanity to a higher level themselves function in a chaotic environment, are themselves subject to decay, and are often captured by the very forces of ignorance that they would enlighten. Furthermore, they’re never finished and need the continuous effort of every generation even to function badly. Indeed those two expressions incorporate the very meaning of this struggle and its great difficulty. The last thing those on either side who formulated these expressions had in mind was the slaughter of the other.

Toying With Time

So far as we can tell, time has no frequency—but everything else does. Everything else has a cyclic pattern of existence and a dual character: things manifest as waves, which have periodicity (frequency) but also simultaneously manifest as particles. The time dimension happily accommodates either version of reality. It is necessary for measuring frequency, which we do in units of time. At the same time it happily accepts particles too. Thus we can at least imagine a totally static and stationary particle, never changing at all, but it also requires time in that form of it we call duration. Movement combined with change gives us a sense of time that flows—but it’s not time but everything else that does the flowing. Maddening, in a way. Not surprisingly, some conclude that there isn’t any such thing as time—by itself; it is simply a necessary aspect of human perception. Immanuel Kant had this take on time.

You don’t have time for this philosophical twaddle? Okay, click away and speed up your time. Time also has a subjective aspect. We can accelerate it by increasing our stimulation or we can slow it down. Just take ten breaths, slowly counting up to five on each inhale, five on each exhale. That’ll do it. The less we do and the more monotonous our action, the slower we perceive time’s flow—or the nothingness that it is.

Our own mode of being is yoked to cycles. The most basic wave we know is that between birth and death, more precisely between awakening to consciousness and our passing. All through this wave we are individuals, particles. And we cycle between sleep and wakefulness.

I got off on this not very fruitful tangent because it occurred to me, after the last post, that higher religions differ from earlier forms because they have very distinct time dimensions, whereas earlier forms of religiousness have annual cycles matched to the seasons. In Hindu cosmology, great cycles follow each other. In the Judeo-Christian and Muslim (call it Western) traditions, one cycle suffices. It begins in a creation and ends in the final judgment. The Mazdean religion (Zoroastrianism), apparently the oldest of prophetic religions, also begins with a creation; Ahura Mazda’s creation arouses a cosmic opponent, Ahriman; a great war between Darkness and the Light commences; the cycle ends when the Saoshyant (the Zoroastrian Savior) appears at the final defeat of Ahriman. Zoroaster lived in the period between 799 and 750 BC. Our materialist cosmology permits either a single great cycle, ending in heat death, or many cycles each beginning in a Big Bang and ending in a Big Crunch. A Big Crunch is in our future if the mass of the universe is sufficient eventually to slow down, stop, and the reverse the expansion we claim to see as a consequence of a Big Bang that started things about 14 billion years ago. Civilization produces big cyclic cosmologies.

Mazdaism, incidentally, later gave rise to an interesting concept of God. The religion is uncompromisingly dualistic. The Persian imagination projected an infinite column of Light in one direction, of Darkness in the other, and the created world situated at their boundaries, the mixing region. We might call that the border zone. This view produces a tremendous logical tension that most humans feel. Our concept of God is unitary. Thus, over time, a heretical version of Mazdaism appeared, Zervanism. In this conception a divine person higher than Mazda and Ahriman was imagined as the father of these two. His name was Zurvan, Time. Time has thus at least in one cultural tradition been imagined as the Absolute Ultimate, beyond good and evil.

I find it interesting that the Hermetic saying (“as above, so below”) applies here as well as elsewhere. The individual’s cycle is the same as that of the great cosmic process in which the individual exists. The individual appears to have been “created” at birth—no memory (for most) of having been before. It ends in a great final battle or “end times,” death, which is supposed to be followed by a judgment. With these facts before us, and with the individual experience much more accessible (and unavoidable—as sure as death and taxes) it is easy to dismiss cosmologies by simply saying that they are a projection of individual fate onto the collective. The truth of the matter may be more interesting. What if Hermes was right? I would suggest that the reader visit this site and play with some of the fractal images presented there. The organization of reality may indeed be analogous to the fractal, where the ever smaller retains the basic patterns of the larger, while yet always changing…despite the steady flow of time which is the ultimate dimension.

Ex Nihilo

The three cases I laid out yesterday may not be sufficient adequately to explain the full range of reality. Those cases involved A. the soul’s eternal existence, B. its creation at birth, and C. its emergence from matter. Our context was memory. Based on the fact that the vast majority of us do not remember existing before, the second case, B, appeared most logical.

That “model,” however, entangles us with the concept of God creating souls ex nihilo at the moment when ova are fertilized by semen. That idea ultimately rests on the assumption that the creation of every human being requires God’s personal intervention precisely as described in Genesis: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (2:7). I’m happy for those for whom this verse is answer enough. But I’m moved to understand reality at another level. Much as the Greeks—who launched the civilization that stands in a parental role to ours—disliked the notion of creation ex nihilo so do I. From a purely logical stance, if God created the universe, it did not come from nothing; God was present. Ex nihilo creation, as I see it, is an interpretation of Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Understood poetically, this is a wondrous statement. To parse it apart strikes me as courting disaster. You have to get into a quagmire of interpretations from which you’ll never get past the word “beginning.” No human has satisfactorily explained time. And precognitive dreams, for one—the existence of which I cannot doubt—make me doubly sure that exegesis of this verse in hard conceptual terms is going nowhere.

This leads me to evoke another poetical image of creation originating, as best I can determine, with the Gnostics and the Neo-Platonists, but present also in Hindu beliefs. It is the notion that our reality is the emanation of the Godhead, thus a kind of overflow of an infinite plentitude. This is equivalent to the concept of a continuing, ongoing, and, indeed, eternal creation. In this idea the created world does not spring from nothing. On the contrary, it is God—but with a difference. The idea is also discernible in the Jewish Kabalistic image of sparks from a broken divine vessel falling into the void—our own mission being to raise the sparks again: the old theme of descent and ascent.

What makes this poetic image—its model recognizably being solar radiation, but no one claims that it originated that way—unappealing to the West is that it is perhaps too naturalistic. In the Judaic conception—which is at the root of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the emphasis is on an active God in active and personal relationship with his creation. It is a model assertively based on moral behavior. Its very premise rests on command, its disobedience, the consequences of it, and the resolution of that error.

What underlies the emanation concept is quite another emphasis. It is that creation is a diminished, weakened, or dispersed aspect of divine plentitude. The agencies that we observe did not arise from nothing but are separated instances of God; their limitations are due to the separation. This model is equally impossible to render into hard concepts because as the ex nihilo concepts defies explanation by involving time, so this one, through the concept of separation, involves space, and neither one yields to human understanding—as Kant well understood. In what way, precisely, can a spark be separated from God who is everywhere? If we could make sense of that, we might equally well make sense of “in the beginning.” The moral element is also present here but embedded, from the outset, in the individual agent who, being a particle of divinity, carries consciousness and therefore the essence of morality, of free choice.

These problems of space, time, and responsibility have plagued philosophers throughout time. The Gnostics shifted responsibility to an intermediate semi-divine meaning, Sophia, one of the higher emanations of God—but not Sophia personally but to one of her agents, the demi-urge. No human thought can get around the problem that if God is all God must be ultimately responsible—not least for freedom and therefore evil. Swedenborg tried to deal with this using the concept of “permission” in rather tortured ways. In the Hindu conception, a part of divinity develops a yearning for limitation, for experiencing it. This conflicts with the notion of God as all knowing. We cannot escape the problem—and I will certainly not solve it. The issue I’m trying to address—and strictly for myself—is that of ex nihilo creation versus another conception of how reality might be explained.

The ex nihilo model is consistent with our experience of memory. The other model must rely on forgetting. That is where I will go next. I’m not the first to think that it is a good way to go. I will end with a bit of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” by way of introducing what is to follow:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Motivation

I’ve noted long ago—when I first began pondering such matters—that thinking about the origin of life inevitably leads to speculation about cosmological origins. You find yourself going in that direction every time because, I think, the logic in the question posed, and in the facts under examination, force you to take that path. You realize that life is a transcending phenomenon—and at least one of its exemplars is an agent—ourselves. And since we did not make ourselves, seeking a transcendental origin for a transcending phenomenon leads to very basic cosmological questions.

The motivation for the search itself is the love of wisdom, the root meaning of philosophy. If you feel it you’ll certainly also know it. The activity is of its essence contemplative and justified by itself. The genuine lover strives to attain the beloved and has no other motive. The suitor of the princess who doesn’t actually care for the princess but cares only to impress the king—he is a sham. I emphasize this point for a reason.

My discussions of cosmologies—or religious faith systems, for that matter—take place in a philosophical context and are thus part of my search for truth. The last thing I have in mind is to persuade anyone of anything. I’m simply living a part of my life in contemplation. I’ve benefitted a great deal from others’ thought, hence I share mine too. My understanding of agency is that it’s sovereign. Thus every human being is free to make up his or her mind. As the German song has it: Die Gedanken sind frei.* It seems obvious to me that compelled faith—or faith based on ignorance—cannot be real. Thus it seems to me that sincere philosophical discussion will strengthen genuine faith and only weaken unexamined forms of it—which is a service.

The problem I’m addressing has two aspects, one low, one high. Let’s take the high one first. Many faith systems base themselves on revelation, a phenomenon that can be viewed philosophically but cannot be reached by philosophy. By this I mean that philosophy can neither prove nor disprove that God speaks directly to humanity. I have my own understanding of revelation, but that is what it is, an understanding. I believe it to be true, but I cannot prove it. In my view revelation reaches all of humanity in multiple forms; several orthodoxies would deny this. In matters of faith, individual sovereignties may indeed clash. And such clashes cannot be resolved at the level of faith. But they can be discussed philosophically in a generous spirit. And that’s the spirit I try to cultivate in myself.

The low aspect is that faith systems can and often do manifest a tribal character; the best people in these systems always deplore this. Some people, however, out of ignorance, mostly, treat their beliefs as ideologies and view any discussion of them, if outside the “inside” consensus, as an attack. Similarly, they treat those in agreement with their formulations as part of the tribe. But the discussion may not be an attack at all; it may be an appreciation; and the person sympathetic to the faith system may not be a true believer.

This long comment, at this place, seems appropriate. I noted that yesterday’s posting, with its prominent use of the word “Hindu” in the title, caused several partisan websites to broadcast my posting to constituencies. And in each of the two sites (Blogger and WordPress) with the identical content, readership surged to all-time highs. Alas. Time to say the above. High time. In the future I expect to draw fire (or praise) from those who dogmatically deny (or affirm) reincarnation, those who view Gnosticism as a heresy (or truth), and yet others who quarrel with (or adhere to) Catholicism or Islam. Du calm, as my daughter in France might say. This is just philosophy. It follows the Beloved wherever She may wander.
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*Thoughts are free.