Precision and Pattern

The philosophical and the scientific ways of looking at the world seem closely related. Both aim at precision. The philosophical aims at precision in the management of concepts, the scientific at precision in measuring phenomena. There are problems in both encampments. Concepts are damnably fluid and heavily dependent on the cultural atmospherics present where they arise and, for a while, abide. Nature is very coy and hides herself from measurement at the extremes—yet it is at the extremes where the doubts are: quantum physics and astronomy.

By contrast the poetic way of perceiving reality seeks meaning in patterns. Its operant faculty is intuition and imagination. In all three of these categories, needless to say, intellect, imagination, and intuition are at work, and if one of these faculties is weak, the results are merely so-so. But there is what might be viewed as a temperamental difference or leaning involved; some people are comfortable with precision, others with a much fuzzier gnosis. The great merit of the poetic view is that it produces a sense of certainty—its chief drawback that the poet can’t turn his insights into dogma or into technology; no money in it, you might say. The reason is that the poet is denied precision. The philosopher cannot reach closure; he or she might stare at the inaccessible noumenon, as Kant did—but the poet is right at home with Noumy. The scientist is denied meaning, but in seeking the mechanics of reality, his horizons keep expanding just like the universe is supposed to do; back to the drawing board is a recurring theme.

Borrowing brings happiness to all. Borrow a little science to enlarge the patterns, a little poetry to admire the shifting phenomena of nature, a little science to bolster concepts, a few eternal ideas to give them radiance.

A Science of the Spiritual

At the conventional level, thus in common public discourse, a rather deep abyss separates the spiritual and the so-called scientific. It is an either-or situation. Science represents a materialistic monism (although not all scientists do). The spiritual are presumed to believe in one or more supernatural beings who stand above visible reality in a governing, law-giving, rewarding and punishing relationship. The reason for this is that, viewed from a distance, most highly developed religions project a narrative in the form of ruler-and-subject—easily understood by human societies in which that pattern is always present.

This description, to be sure, is a gross simplification—but that’s what animates public discourse. It ignores the fact that science has reached levels, certainly in physics and to a lesser extent in neuroscience, where hard materialism is ever less sustainable. It also ignores the fact that higher religions have arisen transcending the primitive ruler-subject model. To be sure, the higher faiths still rest on primitive foundations as a consequence of historical origins, thus Christianity on Judaism. At the same time the earlier religions, influenced by higher religions, have also, at their leading edges, become much more spiritualized. Every religion now has a mystical level—an elite expression.

Also present, in very tentative form, is a genuine science of the spiritual. My hope is that the likely brutal transition to a post-fossil-age will not plunge us back to primitivity. If we manage that transition well, the science of the spiritual will continue to grow. If not, it will sink out of view as harshly doctrinaire religious management of masses once more arises. Alchemy is an example of such a science—hidden and submerged by the collapse of the Roman Age.

By a “science of the spiritual” I mean a vastly enlarged scientific venture to understand reality, and particularly spiritual reality, free of the strictures of dogmatically managed Revelation—thus authoritarian religion. Revelation itself, to be sure, would be a central concern of this new science, viewing it as human experience of the transcending regions but, to be sure, interpreted by the very people who have had them—and then socialized yet more, for purposes of human governance, by others.

This science, so far is it already exists, has made me wonder more and more if perhaps human encounters with the Beyond might not be over-stated by those who have experienced them—and this for reasons that are mutually reinforcing. One is that their expectations are formed by religious ideas—thus occurring in the context of religious practices. The other is that the actual “heavenly” environment is both more natural to humans and yet also quite unfamiliar, therefore it is overly stimulating. Good evidence for this comes from Swedenborg’s accounts; his long exposure to that world had made him familiar with it. He also saw enough to see the vast complexities of reality beyond the border. At the same time, it may well be that being anchored in a body is not very helpful for understanding that world, that much learning is ahead for us before we’re fully acclimatized there, that (per Swedenborg and others, e.g., Robert Monroe) low adaptations are available and also common there; and, finally, concerning that last point, that spending some time in this our own more constricted “world of boxes,” to cite a phrase from Carl Jung’s account of returning from a near death experience, may benefit those of us who have lived a life here attentively. It may enable us to aim higher when we actually get there.

A science of the spiritual, given the abyss that separates science and religion today, will tend to appeal to neither the spiritual nor to the scientific camps. But there is always a third way.

Science Expanded

I noted with some interest in Osis and Haraldsson’s book† a history of the study of deathbed visions. It shows a definite trend in culture, namely the very gradual establishment of at least one segment of paranormal studies, those dealing with survival. We really are entering a new age. It is, of course, barely discernible because the vast overhang of a dying secularism shades it from view.

For such studies to proceed, the meaning of science must also change and, indeed, is changing. And for that change to be successful, an even more basic doctrine will have to be revised. It is the assertion that our only possible source of knowledge is the sensorium, thus vision, hearing, smell, and touch. These four, of course, are directly traceable to physical causes and in due course yield materialism. To enlarge the concept of science, however, we need not really have to go too far into some kind of mystic fog. All we need do is base science on experience. The moment we do that, we immediately include as legitimate subjects for study those experiences that reach us by means for which no sensory pathways are discoverable. That would include the entire range of the paranormal: telepathy, clairvoyance, apparitions, near-death experiences, precognition, and more.

Arguably this range of experience is rare. Its systematic study, however, beginning in the nineteenth century, has painstakingly accumulated evidence that such experiences are not reducible either to chance, mental delusions, or bodily malfunctions. They can be studied. The disciplined collection of data and their rational analysis is no less science than the same activity massively deployed to prove the existence of the Higgs boson.

What emerges from such an “expanded” science is knowledge, if not control, but the knowledge, especially from the death-related experiences of humanity, also greatly expands our conceptions of the possible meaning of life, something that a science operating in the straitjacket of materialistic monism has quite failed to deliver.

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†Osis, Karlis and Erlendur Haraldsson, At The Hour of Death, Avon, 1977, Chapter 3, “Research on Deathbed Visions: Past and Future.”

Worn Like a Habit

The world is full of mysteries we barely even notice. Habit is the enemy of wonder. It saves us effort in every way and in that sense is a great blessing. At the same time wonder requires effort. It arises when something new floats into view and our habitual modes of reaction don’t instantly classify it into the known category and—for that very reason—nothing to spend time and effort on. We spend time and effort on what matters, and what matters is our comfort, physical first and then the more subtle kind. Least meriting sustained application are curiosities defying our efforts to understand them. Not surprisingly, therefore, neither the starry skies, nor a death in our circle, never mind puzzles in nature touch more than the margins of attention. In all three cases a widespread collective habit helps us escape the effort to think about the matter very long. There’s shopping to be done or the hamburgers need turning on the grill, or we roll our eyes a little and we think: “Well, science probably has an explanation.” Science usually does; but in pursuing that explanation  (it takes effort) we discover that science has its habits too and obeys the indolence that habit produces (its collateral damage) to frame answers in ways that in turn obey long-standing fashions.

The curious conclusion I reach is that real learning appears to demand a surplus of some kind of energy—one reason why in all spiritual paths on offer people are urged to minimize their attachments to the world, that word understood in one sense, so that they can really understand it, in another sense, at the core.

Theory, Technology, Experience

Take two broad categories of human activity, religion and science. In the latter we divide the activity into the theoretical (as in theoretical physics, which largely runs on math) and the experiential (observation, as in astronomy, geology and experiments as in chemistry, particle colliders, etc.). There is also a kind of middle ground where knowledge is turned to use: technology.

I got to pondering on the applicability of this three-fold division to religion. Just let me use that word for the sake of simplicity—but permit me to include in it any and all relations to the transcendental. The answer here is that these divisions map neatly to the religious as well. The theoretical includes all formal thinking on the subject, thus theology—which, like theoretical thought in science, rests on philosophical foundations. Experience of the religious is very rare if we want to restrict the word, experience, to very direct and unambiguous encounters with the transcendental. Such experiences are much more prevalent than that, but separating the transcendental aspect from the merely psychic becomes problematical. Technology, of course, maps on the practice of religion—at one end bounded by moral codes, at the other on conscious practices of love, prayer, and meditation.

Let me briefly enlarge on the last points—religious experience, technology. It is very difficult to tease apart higher and lower forms of experience. Is an intuition due to unconscious observations or to a “message” from beyond? When do I practice love in a higher sense? When do I merely obey biological impulses? These tend to appear in syntheses. I call morality a technology in that it is something learned, with rules, be it merely etiquette or something beyond it, like conscious acts of self-restraint and love. It begins in conscious, willed acts and then, as habit, functions as technology.

The reason why we do not have a science of religion is explained entirely by the public inaccessibility of the experiential modality of it—which, of course, is the foundation not only of religious but also of material life. Religious experience is fundamentally subjective.

The mildest forms of transcending sorts of experiences—I put it weakly, like that, because anything we can even remotely explain as physical we immediately remove from that category—are somewhat accessible to public study, thus telekinesis, telepathy, viewing at a distance. What we view as strictly miraculous, like bi-location, may very well be energetic in nature—but the energies involved escape our measurements. But there has been, nevertheless, a certain amount of systematic study of these you might say lower forms of border-violation.

The most interestingly new experiential data that emerged in my life time are studies of near death experiences (NDEs). NDEs have always been there, no doubt, but modern science itself, through medicine, has caused these to be reported much more frequently. We’ve been able to resuscitate many more people. And some of those involved in this (doctors, nurses) are directly involved with the experiential rather than the theoretical aspects of biology. A very credible body of writings has thus emerged—the credible parts being initial studies not their endless exploitation as pop literature. This is something genuinely new. Depending on our ability to maintain a hi-tech civilization, it may continue to inform us and provide an almost public body of data to ponder. It is almost public because NDEs recur and are documented—and have certain strong commonalities. If hi-tech will once more fade away with the fossil sunset, in five hundred years or so the NDE nexus will have been lost again.

Very curious times we live in. We’ve got our hands around matter, theoretically, experimentally—for a while. The psychic is much more elusive. Which does not mean that either its theories or its technologies may be neglected; they must be pursued with dedicated vigor.

The Framing is the Picture

While genuine curiosity is always present in humanity, institutionalized forms of it depend on the presence of a suitable ideology. Scientific study of so-called miraculous events, for example, is not undertaken. The scientific ideology just can’t work with the phenomena as these are actually experienced. Let us take something odd like bi-location, thus a person appearing in two places at the same time. Based on the scientific view, bi-location is impossible. Those who claim to have observed it are simply labeled credulous. If such a claim is ever scientifically investigated, the aim of the study is to prove its falsity. Similarly, the Vatican does undertake careful investigation of miracles, but always as part of a process of canonization, not as a general (scientific) undertaking. Thus the Vatican does not investigate claims of miracles surrounding Hindu or Muslim saints. Much as science has a strong view of the necessarily physical causation of any symptoms others might label miraculous, so also the Vatican has a strong view of the causation of miracles; these are necessarily God’s interventions.

For these reasons, we always find evidence for the miraculous in settings where the ideology colors the whole situation. Here and there, in the last two centuries, we’ve seen some few departures from this general tendency. These have been rare because a person, however well-qualified as a scientist, will draw tribal attacks if he or she wanders off the reservation. In the nineteenth century, before the establishment of Science with a leading cap, we have the establishment of the Society for Psychical Research by an elite. An example from our own time is Ian Stevenson, a trained medical man and biochemist, who investigated reincarnation. Near Death Experience studies represent another interesting cluster, also initiated by a doctor, Raymond Moody. NDE work has taken on a certain legitimacy precisely because Moody’s work was then taken up by multiple teams of other physicians—always those who were exposed to the phenomenon directly.

The point I’m after today, however, is not that “fringe” elements in science have “dared” to “dabble” in heresy—and have to some extent “gotten away” with it. Especially in NDE work, fame and fortune—if not in academic circles—may be achieved by heresy. The thought I had was that if the medium is the message, sometimes the framing is the picture. The extraordinary gifts that infrequently become visible surrounding saints or would-be saints—I’m thinking here of Padre Pio, who is, Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth who isn’t yet, and Bruno Gröning who never shall be—appear to me to be of the greatest interest. These are modern people; they’ve all lived during my life time; indeed I once lived a mere handful of miles away from Therese’s town during and after World War II. But I know of many scores of others who’ve lived in the past—and in every culture of the globe. The same stories surround them—albeit figures with stigmata are strictly in Catholic realms, which is itself worthy of careful note. The linkage between reincarnation studies and stigmata has never been noted, except, perhaps, by me (here). But as for other capacities these people have displayed, they are the same: bi-location, precognition, healing and other powers. Each is embedded in a religious culture which explains each in his or her own framing. The total phenomenon, as an established reality, has never been examined as it were objectively, as phenomena but yet with full acceptance of the observed realities. By full acceptance here I mean that to understand these people’s lives, experiences, and actions necessarily requires acceptance of a much more extended kind of reality than we believe surrounds us. (Here I provide this link to some reports on Padre Pio by way of illustration of the nature of this evidence—and how we actually encounter it).

Time still hides many things. The inertial pull of this dimension is enormous, but in due time genuine knowledge of these phenomena, which straddle the zones of here and over there, may become better understood—although, I suspect, never by more than just a minority. As genuine curiosity is always present, there will always be those with one foot in the borderzone.

The Moral and the Natural

Amazing cathedrals of thought are built up over questions to which the answers seem very simple to me. A discussion in the blogs I read now centers on a book the subject of which is the relationship of science to values. Tracing these things I discover, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ht), that there is something called meta-ethics, further that it has a component called non-naturalism, and that this something is described as “the idea that moral philosophy is fundamentally autonomous from the natural sciences.” Now if that description is correct, and to me it seems self-evident, the relationship of science to values would appear to be pretty tenuous, pertaining to scientists, and how they act and live, not to the work they actually do. To give science itself a role in explaining morality would strike me as inviting my best hammer to read out loud to me. I reach this conclusion quite simply. In order to enable science to speak authoritatively on values, I would have to accept that the mind is produced by the brain and nothing else. Now that, of course, is a widely accepted notion—and assent to it is absolutely required to take seriously the notion that science has anything to say about values at all. Science can speak about facts—but values? First, good definitions. I cannot assent to the notion that values are facts.

Where Rigor is Necessary

In certain contexts rigor is simply understood as part of the situation. Mathematics comes to mind. If a famed mathematician claimed that he’d discovered rational irrational numbers (say numbers simultaneously odd and even), the world of mathematics would sadly assume that senility had set it. In other contexts rigor is present in the logical operations, but if no agreement exists about the elements of the argument, so what? Such is the case in philosophy where the crucial issue is agreement on a definition. Suppose a person refuses to accept that there is such a thing as an “accident,” thus that an attribute of something has a different mode of existence than its essence. Such a person might asserts that the redness of this apple and the greenness of that one is, in each case, part of each apple’s essential reality. For that person logical handling of essences and accidents in argument is neither here nor there.

But rigor is necessary for establishing the facts of reality, thus in reaching definitions or in determining the course of a series of events. We expect rigor in scientific and in legal investigations. The interesting difference between the two is that legal investigations are more comprehensive than the scientific. The latter excludes subjective testimony unless it can be corroborated by physical findings; in legal investigations one person’s subjective testimony may be corroborated by another’s; to be sure, the more people corroborate an alibi, for instance, the better. The legal world recognizes the reality of deliberate deception.

In the regions of the borderzone especially—and that region includes the paranormal—rigor is particularly necessary for establishing whatever claims are made. The claim that reincarnation really happens serves as an illustration. There are two approaches, both claiming scientific validity. One consists of the collection of past life memories from individuals and, once these are recorded, work to corroborate them. The corroboration takes two complementary paths. One is the discovery of evidence that the remembered life really did leave something behind. The complement is to establish that the person making the report could not have reasonably learned about that evidence in the course of his or her current life. The late Ian Stevenson (see elsewhere on this blog) undertook such studies. The other approach is to use hypnotic regression. People are put into trances and are then coaxed to “remember” earlier and earlier experience until they pass the threshold of their birth and remember an earlier existence. Once such trance reports are recorded, the corroboration takes the same route.

Now I submit that the first of these methods is at least potentially rigorous. The second contains a major flaw. Hypnosis is very poorly understood and powerfully associated with suggestion. People can be told to do things while in trance, told to forget that they were told these matters, and will then be observed to perform the actions suggested in trance after they are brought out of it. Hypnotic regressions, therefore, cannot be rid of the suspicion that the subject in trance is merely obeying the subtle suggestions of a credulous hypnotist. Now the famous cases of remembered lives all come from the second approach, not from the first. But that’s not a surprise. You might say that it is rigorous proof of human gullibility.

Science and Natural Philosophy

When push comes to shove, I define myself as a “hard,” top-down spiritualist. By that I mean that reality comes from a single conscious agency. From this vantage reality appears to me as hierarchically arranged. If that word jars, I suggest a glance at this recent post. This viewpoint clashes with materialism but is yet entirely compatible with a scientific approach to reality. Science can and should be viewed as a discipline, one of the disciplines of thought. Its focus is the observation and explanation of observable reality based on the rules of reason. The western world has excelled in this discipline and has vastly enlarged our understanding of organic and inorganic nature. This is a marvel and a triumph—and all of humanity has benefited. The determination of how things work and how they are arranged is subject to objective determination and, in very large regions of reality, even to experimental verification. In this sense I’m also a “hard” scientist.

Science is said to have emerged from “natural philosophy”—and said to have displaced the latter. I rather think that speculative or contemplative thought about Nature remains alive and well to this day; science hasn’t displaced it at all. The more disciplined approach to observation, augmented by experimental and statistical methods of verification has, instead, greatly empowered philosophical thought about the observable and measurable world. The task of natural philosophy, indeed of all philosophy, is to work with why rather than with how or what questions. And those questions remain perennially new. They remain—and shall remain—open. We may gain much better and firmer answers to those questions—but not in our current state of existence.

Materialism, in effect, is one school of natural philosophy. It interprets and makes assertions about the meaning of scientific discoveries. Its conclusions, much like those of any philosophy, natural or metaphysical, must be assessed comprehensively in view of our total understanding of all facts and values available to us. And no philosophy produces a “final solution” to the questions that we pose. All of them have a tentative character. They’re all approximations.

I emphasize this distinction because there is a distinction. The very definition of science suggests that, with appropriate study, qualifications, effort, and (often) sufficient funds, anybody should be able to replicate the findings of science to his or her own satisfaction. Problems arise at the edges of genuine science—where science gradually slips away into the speculative mode. Examples of such regions are those where “hard” data are impossible to obtain. Not that these regions are off limits to investigation (the very deep past, the very tiny, the very large, the origin of life); but in these areas a certain kind of humility is necessary—not least the open admission that the investigator, if he or she offers conclusions that cannot be replicated by experiment, may be practicing natural philosophy rather than science. But, as I say, conclusions of that philosophy may also be examined. It’s simply that the rules to be applied to that kind of result are not scientific but—philosophical.