Substance-Of-We-Feeling

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

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

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

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

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

What the Muon Told Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rohanda or Shikasta?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Heart

Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point. The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. [Baise Pascal, Pensées §277]

Shah does not hesitate to make the claim … that nearly all we claim as “religion,” as “higher feelings,” as “mystical experience,” is no more than emotionalism. We are taught that there are emotions and intellect, but not that there is something else possible, beyond both and not to be confused with either. [Doris Lessing, in her Introduction to Learning How to Learn, by Idries Shah]

In artistic and spiritual matters, problems of communication arise. Art will illustrate this. When I was in college, “What is Art?” used to be bandied about with a certain irony. My friends and I argued about the subject for hours on end. One side held that beauty was in eye of the beholder; it was subjective through and through. The other held that beauty existed in reality, out there somewhere, beyond the beholder; but the beholder had to be capable of perceiving it. The debate no doubt continues. I belong to those who think that art holds something real, something apart.

I worked once for a major research institute. We rarely ever left the main building by its front entrance; we used back entries and exits going to and from parking lots. I was in the lobby one day waiting for someone to pick me up for a trip to the airport. Leather furniture, fancy tiled entry; the wide glass expanse opened on a distant fountain and a sculpture. As I waited, my eye fell on a large painting hung over the leather couch. My eye swept over it indifferently. Then I did a double-take. It was a Madonna and child. “Wow!” It was beautiful. Renaissance. I'd never seen it before. The Institute had an arrangement with a neighboring art gallery. The paintings changed from time to time. I looked around. The reception was farther inside; I was safely alone. I stepped up on the dark-leather couch to examine a small golden tab affixed to the frame. I jumped off, nodding to myself. It was a Fra Lippo Lippi. Something had reached me from that picture. I knew that something with the heart.

Problems arise precisely because the quality we’re talking about transcends the operations of the way we ordinarily see reality. The crux of this problem is that different people have different capacities. The seed of these capacities everyone must have, but they develop by chance and effort. Things get more complicated. Art appreciation, and piety, can be and are often faked, based on external signs—especially if a pay-off can be had. Only those who have the real stuff dare to turn away from what isn’t genuine. They can smell the genuine. There is no better way to put it. It isn’t visible. It’s felt. Something speaks. Many things on display in a gallery reveal themselves to people like that as mute, deaf, blind—even when the themes are grand, the names immortal, and the display is splendiferous. Others may also feel this but may be uncertain. They think that, perhaps, they lack some sophisticated skill. No. They already have it; they just don’t know that they do—because their experience is limited.

In traditional societies in which the transcendent dimensions still has standing, the organ of this perception is called the heart. Obviously it’s not the blood-pumping muscle. Heart is merely a way of speaking. But neither are emotions in the glands or mentation really in the brain. We have a way, a capacity, to perceive the energetics of a higher order, and if we say that it’s the heart, why not?

I’ve merely touched the subject. This much will serve as an introduction. But I’ll come back and look more closely at this capacity, experienced, if mildly, all the time, very difficult to disentangle from conceptualization and emotion: the very capacity we have to use in order to see, feel, or hear anything at all in the regions of the border. By way of concluding this initial posting on the subject, let me simply add that energetic activity of intellect (in the sense of a passion for debate) or of the emotions (excitement) both act to inhibit the function of the heart. And when they do, we cannot see much and understand even less about the mysteries of being than we ordinarily do when we’re just bored.