Visualizing the Invisible

Words mean what the individual using them thinks that they mean. The person’s definition initially comes from others’ use of a word; there is a kind of cloud of consensus in which a word derives, but looking at dictionaries shows that multiple meanings may be present. And then, building on these, the individual may come to use the word to signal something that differs in significant ways from current usage. An example is phenomenon. The word is rooted in the Greek word meaning “to appear” and is related to phantasm, “an apparition, specter.”  In the eighteenth century is was used to mean “an extraordinary occurrence”—such as, say, seeing a ghost. Later, and ever more aggressively, the word has come to mean “an object or aspect known through the senses rather than by thought or intuition.” This is Webster’s second definition; it is specific in detail in an effort to underline the modern meaning. The first is simply “an observable fact or event.” Here is a word which points to contradictory objects, if we may call them objects at all: strange things we don’t know how we can possibly see—and the objects of ordinary experience. The materialist belief denies that anything can be seen by something other than the senses. Therefore, of course, there are no ghosts, spirits, or what have you. In my own use of the word its meaning is “anything experienced” whether or not sight, sound, touch, taste, or smell are involved or not. A thought is just as much of a phenomenon as the stubbing of my toe.

Let me next contrast two phrases, the “spiritual world” and the “subtle world.” The concept of subtle bodies came into English by way of the founder of the Theosophical Society, Madame Blavatsky, in the nineteenth century and originates in Hinduism. Subtle itself has its root in the Latin tela, web, thus something very finely, thinly woven: the subtle body. Spirit is rooted in Latin as well; it meant “soul” as well as “breath” to the Romans; when the breath leaves the body, all that’s left is that second definition of Webster’s above.

The two words here, at the root, are closely related. Gases are certainly the most “finely woven” of material substances; we might call them subtle matter, accessible only to the touch. Both in the sense of subtle body or spirit, they are convenient pointers to something real (experienced, phenomenal) yet altogether invisible. Over time, however, principally due to the rise of Christianity in the West, a rather wide gulf formed between the conceptualizations of a spiritual and a subtle world. The spiritual gathered to itself a vast body of theological accretions. The invisible world beyond the border took on a radically different character than the world we inhabit on our way there. It is a place of judgement, where our deeds in life are weighed—and all depending on the tilt of the scales we go to heaven, hell, or purgatory. In the first we contemplate God to all eternity; in the other we undergo suffering without end; the third is a kind of reformatory. Viewed as a useful motivational ideology, this model has a certain merit, although it ignores Jesus’ words in John 14:2, “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” Three mansion are not what I’d call many, hence there is some indication that the model may be not quite all there is to the end times; they may not be end times.  

The subtle world, by contrast, having a less didactic accretion of meanings, suggests at least two ranges of reality, a dense and a subtle, and if two, why not more, both going up and going down. That the spiritual world becomes quite clearly visible—if the faculties are free to see it—emerges from a study of near-death experiences and deathbed visions. From such sources we also learn that death is experienced as a sudden and very pleasant enhancement of the soul’s faculties, even if no “senses” seem to be necessary for the experience. The only sort of comprehensive view of the beyond on offer comes from Emanuel Swedenborg; in the world he projects there are plenty of mansion of all kinds, rising high and low. Souls are self-sorting. They find the place where they belong. In some real ways death is a transition, tempting me to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz: “Death is nothing but a continuation of life by other means.” And that continuation will much resemble life here as we lived it. And the invisible will also become visible.

Phenomenon - More Notes

That word, phenomenon, has come to be associated with the purely physical in the eighteenth century when Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) made a sharp distinction between phenomena and noumena, the appearances of things (die Erscheinungen) and things-in-themselves (die Dinge-an-Sich). We only have access to phenomena, Kant taught, and that by means of the five physical senses. Noumena are inaccessible to us, utterly unknowable. He thus split reality in two. Nothing is accessible to us except by the senses, but what the senses tell us has a kind of mysterious and hard reality behind it.

This illustrates the way philosophers can influence perception—especially those philosophers who are lifted into prominence, a social process actually. The word he used for thing-in-itself, noumenon, in the Greek once meant either “thing perceived” or “what is known.” The linkage implied between perception and knowledge in this word is not emphasized in that other Greek word, phenomenon, “that which appears.” But that which is perceived is certainly that which appears. Hence Kant’s exploitation of the word had an intention: he used the second sense of noumenon and restricted the word phenomenon to the first meaning of noumenon. In the Greek they are equivalent, but one carries more emphasis on knowledge.

But is there any legitimacy in thinking that phenomena hide something utterly inaccessible? And how then do we deal with perceptions in which vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch are not genuinely present? Such is certainly the case in hypnagogic visions, for instance, of which I mentioned one the other day here and have discussed the subject at greater length here. Is vision with eyes closed some as yet undiscovered sixth sense?

This subject is important for a reason. Our current bias to narrow the meaning of the word phenomenon to the senses absolutely forces us to regard any other experience, however real it is, to the region of illusion. This served the spirit of the enlightenment and the succeeding era of materialism very well. A consequence of this has been that we’ve marked as Off Limits an extensive range of reality with possibly very serious consequences. I’ll expand on that as the New Year takes hold and starts to run.

Phenomenon

Last night as I was falling asleep, I saw in my mental vision a woman passing through an open, archway passage, moving away from me. I was, as it were, in the garden to the left of the structure. She was visible, the disappeared, the reappeared as she passed the arches. The whole brief episode— like many other such in states between full awareness and sleep—had a most realistic quality. It might as well have been a film. It was much more real than any memory but somewhat dimmed—as if I were seeing this scene through a kind of intangible but light-absorbing veil.

Now the question I would pose here is the following. Was this a phenomenon? The word comes from the Greek for “to appear.” My Webster’s first definition would include my vision because it states that phenomenon is “an observable fact or event.” I observed it and there it was. A fact for me. The second definition is more ambiguous: “an object or aspect known through the senses rather than by thought or intuition.” What I saw was certainly a vision. It had a pictorial quality—but with my eyes closed it’s difficult to speak of this snippet as a phenomenon produced by light impinging on my eyes. This was no thought or intuition, either—but it vanished instantly as well.

This shows the problems with any philosophy labeled as phenomenology. It may be meaningful (broad, all-encompassing) or narrow and restrictive. A restrictive phenomenology is simply an assertion of materialism using a fancy Greek word. Broadly construed phenomenology means that knowledge comes from experience. Sensory or not, watching that woman in the passage was certainly an experience for me, nothing special but also quite objective, out there, independent of me, appearing to me without any summons on my part.

Difficulties arise when we attempt to determine what is real. Our commonsensical, everyday rule is that seeing is not enough. The real should be capable of examination by touch and hammer too. Here my vision fails the test. I cannot lead you to that archway and I can’t summon that woman to testify on my behalf. I don’t have her number, as it were. Indeed, I did not even see her face. But while ordinary science is very interesting, what I would really like to know a whole lot more about is where, if anywhere, that archway is and how it spent its three or four seconds in my mind between waking and sleep.

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Photo Credit: Ben and Debs Bench: http://www.flickr.com/photos/benanddebsyearoff/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

What Does "Higher Power" Mean?

One of the more interesting books around—especially for people who read such blogs as this one—is Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. The book is by Rupert Sheldrake and is subtitled “And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.” The amazon.com link to the paperback is here. I read the book in fascination. I consider Sheldrake to be one of our time’s most original thinkers about biology. He is also a creative experimenter and a genuine scientist. In certain narrow circles of scientific orthodoxy, to be sure, he is a heretic. But never mind them. What the book demonstrates is that dogs as well as other animals appear to have what for them—for us too, for that matter—are “higher powers.” Telepathic abilities are classed as paranormal at least. Animals also evidently have powers of orientation in the wild inexplicable by ordinary sensory capacities. They seem to have a kind of sight that, traditionally, we call “second sight.” Yes, they’re at home in border zones much as some people are. And, as with us as well, the talent isn’t uniformly present. Nor are these capacities limited to mammals; birds display such powers too.

I start here with animals to make a point. We have a reflexive way of assuming that higher powers, when they manifest, must come directly from God—and if not from God then still from some higher, conscious entity. I’ve pondered this matter for quite a long time and have another take on the matter. But let’s begin with some sorting.

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By “higher powers” I mean phenomena like miraculous healing, ecstatic states, and prophetic visions. In these cases God does the healing, God manifests in the ecstatic states (or the mystic experiences union with God), and God sends the prophetic vision. To be sure, in all of these instances, the phenomenon itself transcends ordinary experience; it is therefore logical enough to use a word that signifies the Transcendent writ large as its cause. But when people speak of God this way, they have something more concrete in mind. They imagine an Agency, distinct and separate, acting deliberately in this specific case whereas, in all other cases, God acts in a more nebulous and indirect way. This must be what people mean. If God sends me a prophetic message but lets you read tea leaves, the only way to understand the distinction is that God intervenes in reality deliberately in some but not in other cases.

People don’t usually invoke divine action to explain telepathy. It is a paranormal power but mild in effect and common enough to be assigned to a lower agency, say to a “talent” or to a “gift.” But notice that even here, using the word “gift” suggests a divine dispensation given to some, not to others. By contrast, people rarely assign a run of bad luck to God. But why not? If in one case God rewards us for being good, in others he might punish us for our careless acts of stupidity. Finally, when in legalese we speak of an “act of God,” what we mean then is simply “accident”; the lawyers don’t intend to suggest that floods, lightning strikes, or tornadoes are literally acts of God.

I think I’ve outlined the issues sufficiently here to show that referring strange, unusual phenomena to God serves no rational or meaningfully explanatory purpose. I strongly lean toward the view that God cannot be pulled down to our level and assigned roles in our ordinary experience. Technically this is known as negative theology: man should not presume. Furthermore, the use of God as a mechanism of explanation amounts to little more than saying, “It happened because it happened.”

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Let’s look at these phenomena from another perspective. Let’s look at miraculous healings. Healers are often involved. They often speak of a flow of energy or of a power that aids them—and they report feeling this whatever in themselves. The consequence, namely healing, is assigned to a “higher” power only because the healing is extraordinary. It is also highly desirable. We give the desirable a “high” value. But what exactly happens in a healing? Some kind of rearrangement of matter takes place. Cancerous cells are destroyed, their remains carried away as waste. Chronic chemical, hormonal balances are restored because the organs that produced or failed to produce them are realigned in proper ways. Something physical happens or no healing could possibly take place. This process requires two factors, it seems to me. One is some kind of knowledge about the right arrangements of the biochemistry and bone structure involved. The other is some kind of energy that removes obstructions and speeds up a process that, in ordinary healing, takes its own sweet time. Let’s examine these factors.

The knowledge may be present in the body already, but the body’s mechanisms may be too weak to implement the healing. In that case the healing stream overcomes weakness, energizes natural processes, possibly catalyzes reactions, and thus leads to rapid recovery of a status quo ante. An alternative possibility is that the healing current itself carries both knowledge and energy. That concept needs special parsing.

When we speak of “energy” in these cases, the justification for using the word is the reported experience both of healers and those who are healed. But the energy involved is not the sort we usually experience—thus mechanical pushes and pulls, gravitational attraction, electrical current, heat, or, more generally, radiation. The very reason why such healings are “miraculous” is because something very different is present. Or is it?

Here things become complicated because, ultimately, we don’t really understand what life really is. We think it is ordinary energy manifesting in material structures. But let us suppose that life itself is just as transcendent a phenomenon as the healing current itself. We don’t think so because we’re all too used to its normal manifestations. One possible explanation of miraculous healings is that they are a temporary intensification of life energy, something that always flows through our bodies but in a relatively thinned-out form. It may be possible to tap into it in such a manner that it flows much more abundantly, and when it does, it will manifest its ordering powers rapidly, setting this right where, in our body, it encounters disturbances in what should be the healthy pattern.

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I began this post with a reference to Sheldrake. I’ll also end it on that note. Sheldrake’s theories of morphic fields suggest a way of thinking about miraculous cures along the lines I’ve just sketched in above. I’ll discuss that application of the morphic field theory in a future post and continue this outline then. For now, as the medievalists used to say, satis.

The Origin of Mind

If mind does not arise from matter, its origin becomes a metaphysical question by definition and hence escapes empirical proof. Mind is a phenomenon in the original sense of that word, meaning a fact or an event (from the Greek “to show”), but mind is not a phenomenon in the restrictive modern sense meaning something knowable by the senses rather than by thought or intuition. Positive science can only study phenomena it can access by light, contact, chemical, or electromagnetic means. Hence, to use a common analogy, it can only study the radio and never the meaning of the newscast that comes across the airwaves: the brain but not the mind. In similar fashion science can study metabolism and enzymes but cannot come to grip with life itself. It treats both mind and life as emergent phenomena, another word I’d rather render as “transcendent,” meaning that the phenomena cannot be reached by instruments.

Looking at mind in this way suggests that our most fundamental experience of life, being here and knowing that we are, cannot be studied or understood by methods that produce anything but subjective certainties. The operation of the will is a fundamental aspect of the mind. Not surprisingly, therefore, some portion of humanity will always disagree with what might be a common consensus of humanity. The human view of gravity is quite uniform by contrast for the simple reason that those who defy it tend to depart.

Here we have a situation where we know, in a way, but not in another. It’s a common human ailment. Some few have very strong and vivid experiences of transcendental states, but the rest of us must rely on an intuitive judgment of the traditional explanations and then go from there. What are these explanations?

To look at these it is best to stop using “mind” and using “soul” or “self” instead. Tradition prefers these latter expressions. The traditions divide into two big streams. There are many others, but two serve to illustrate the human consensus.

In one, the tradition principally of the West, the soul originates in God and departs in a manner of speaking to live in the midst of the creation. It is destined ultimately to return once more to God. The West thus sees a process of descent followed by an ascent, a cycle of existence with God, away from God, and then once more united. Such a description must not be understood too literally—as if God had a location. The intent here is to indicate a subjective experience of distance even if, as we used to recite in our Unity congregation, “There is no spot where God is not.” In this tradition God creates the soul at a point in time and, as it were, in the form of a seed that must develop through its experiences which, ultimately, result in the completion of the cycle.

The other stream of tradition, exemplified by Hindu beliefs, sees each soul as an emanation from the divine Self, identical to but still a separated part of the divine. It plunges into the lower depths of the creation and, doing so, becomes occluded—but also able to experience itself in new ways by means precisely of this delimitation. The soul occupies a vast range of different bodies in this process until it has shaken off its illusion of limitation and once more becomes one with the Self—thus returns to itself. This too is a descent and an ascent. The difference here lies principally in the definition of the soul. In Hindu beliefs the higher aspect of the soul is God. In the Western tradition, the soul is a creature.

A stark summary such as the above helps the mind focus on the question before us, the origin of mind. A vast literature surrounds these simple descriptions spinning fantastic accounts that elaborate the fundamental idea—which is simply that mind, in both cases, originates in the highest form of being imaginable by a human…mind. In the Western case this mind of ours is formed in the “image and likeness” of its Creator. In the Eastern version, it is the Creator limiting itself deliberately in order to experience its own creation. There is an arbitrary element present in both versions. In one God creates because—well, because he does. In the other the divine Self shrouds itself voluntarily in order to experience. This arbitrary element, however, is strongly present in us as well—and should therefore not surprise us.

The striking aspect of this view of origins is that the human mind, when it looks out at the chaos of the cosmos, when it strains in order to understand what it is and how it might have come about, sees, on looking, an image of itself writ large.