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.

More on Statues

The last post is a bit obscure, so let me correct that by some comments on what I think really happens when people address artifacts in prayer or treat them with reverence. This sort of behavior in our culture may be observed especially among Catholics and sometimes Asians. Mine is a subjective view, of course, but that, I think is what is required, a look at the psychological aspects of this phenomenon. I can only offer mine. But I would assert with confidence that other people’s behavior arises from the same sort of understanding I have. Not in detail, to be sure, but in basic outline.

Here are some facts. First, when I go on my usual one-hour walk in my neighborhood, I can so arrange my path that I’ll see at least six Madonnas on the way. All of these are statues of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Jesus. Two stand on the grounds of a church, one is in a cemetery, and three others (at least) are in private backyards but visible from the sidewalk. I no more think that these stone or plaster figures are the Virgin Mary than does any believer or atheist. The sheer numbers of them would make that obvious. The value of these figures lies in their function. They serve as a reminder of something else and in physically localizing that reminder in certain integrated acts.

Let me develop that. Many people who ignore religious statues still visit the cemetery. They are engaged in an integrated act of remembrance at minimum and often in an act of at least one-way communication. The hope is present, at least in the feelings, that the communication is two-sided. Now why bother to go to the cemetery? The reason for that is that this act is integrated. It involves both body and soul, it isn’t just a thought. It involves a ceremonial in which the whole person takes part. We often additionally, physically mark it by taking flowers. The grave site serves the same function as the statue. It localizes an integrated act.

Second, I am entirely persuaded that spiritual beings exist in another dimension. This means that I have what some call faith but I just view as a conviction. In my own personal case, in the course of all of my ritual behaviors—including sometimes mentally greeting a Madonna as I pass her, sometimes stopping to say a prayer—I am operating at several levels at once. At one level I’m fully aware of Mary as a person—but not of a particular historical woman who, once, required for bureaucratic reasons to travel, to Bethlehem, although she was pregnant, had trouble finding hotel accommodations. No. I’m aware of the spiritual being that that woman has, since then, become. At another level, I reject the notion that Mary is an intermediary—thus as someone closer to God than others and therefore more likely to “get results” for me from a God who is less likely to pay attention to me. I can understand that attitude on the part of others, but I know better. At that higher level, all of my ritual acts toward the higher dimension really only address the High. And Mary in that sense is one of the thinkable symbols for it.

Do I think that prayers work? Yes. But my conviction must be phrased in a specific way. I think that grace flows to us and helps us, but that this requires changes in us rather than arbitrary acts of individual higher beings tossing bits of bread to squawking ducks and favoring those that squawk loudest. The statues serve me as reminders of my general condition. They give me opportunities to mark the occasions by ritual acts which, involving me as a whole person serve to raise my entire being above the levels of constant distraction.

I’m not in any way tempted to imagine that speaking to the Virgin requires the presence of a statue—never mind that the stone image is the Virgin. Nor do I assume that anybody else does either. Some people are highly self-aware and analytical. Most are not. But even those who’re not can be awakened. And when they pay attention, they would say more or less what I do. They just don’t usually think about it.

What matters in these cases, I submit, is the nature of the intention involved. My intention is to acknowledge a higher realm and the possibility of communicating with it—as in touching it, coming in contact. The rest is detail. Statues are helpful focal points for carrying out this intention. They remind me.

Not surprisingly, the statues themselves are the product of intentions. They were commissioned or purchased—and then displayed—to mark physically some person’s or group’s intention to acknowledge a reality invisible to all of us. Those of us who stop before the statue join in that intention.

Now a word about the statue-breakers. Iconoclastic dogmas within religious communities are, in seems to me, elitist interventions by those who would correct the ignorant common people by beady-eyed command. They don’t like low-level displays of piety. They believe, quite ignorantly, it seems to me, that people really worship statues. I don’t think they do—not even the most primitive. And if some do, the act itself will eventually act to correct that view. If we wish to find people who really worship idols, we might look for them among those lavishing excessive time and wax on fancy cars or excessive time on their portfolios.

What Draws People to the Spiritual?

Here it may be best to start with a distinction—between “religious practice” and “personal spiritual endeavors.” The first may be a spiritual activity, but for most of us the practice began in the family; and later, possibly, especially for those educated in parochial schools, it was socially reinforced by the broader community. I want to focus on the voluntary and the personal spiritual quest—something we undertake on our own without any kind of social nudging.

I would propose three distinct motivations. In any one case, these may appear in mixed forms as well. They are pain, the attraction of magic, and curiosity. I’m not an authority, mind you; I don’t have statistics. I’m just an old man—but rich in experience. My guess is that most people are drawn by pain, frustration, suffering of some kind, even feelings of despair: the feeling that there must be a solution, there must be something better than this one-damned-thing-after-the-other. The sheer problems of ordinary life eventually move some people to wonder; they seek out groups and thus, gradually, develop their own spirituality. This kind of questing is almost always spontaneous, sincere, and motivated by an intuition that another range of reality is needed to complete the individual; albeit the intuition arises because of suffering. To be sure, such people wish to be rid of their pain as well.

The second motive is opportunistic. It springs from a hope of gaining dominance, power, wealth, attention by learning methods, formulae, or procedures. The dominant idea here is that the spiritual is a realm of magical power which might be harnessed to improve life here and now. There is a rather extensive industry on hand to satisfy this need; the Christian brand is usually called the Prosperity Gospel. It has a large footprint in the New Age movement as well. Many, many would be disciples of cults from other cultures are moved by the promise of magical powers. We might call this spiritual materialism because the spiritual is pursued to gain something here and now.

The last motive, curiosity, arises in a small number of usually advanced, thoughtful people who, in attempts to understand the world, encounter a wall and begin to explore alternatives to the dominant ideologies on offer. They are intellectuals and artists. Many well-known converts come from this community. They enter by the paths of philosophy or art (thus reason or a strong sense for patterns); then, having gained knowledge, the seekers deepen as people; eventually they experience stronger intuitions that begin to transform them.

Here I would emphasize three things. One is that some kind of ordinary, call it worldly, impulse sets things off. For this very reason, two, the process need not and often does not continue long enough to lead to real spiritual development. It all depends. It depends, for instance, on the nature of the pain. If a person is lonely and neglected, joining a group or church may assuage that pain; he or she may make new friends, enter into new relationships, and—with the pain now lessened—stabilize on a new level. The power-seeker may never achieve that magic touch, that telepathic power, but engaging in these things may give him or her the feelings of being above the herd. Once more, the process ends prematurely. And the intellectually or artistically motivated may also stop short of penetrating very deeply into the borderzone and sit back in satisfaction when they’ve gained enough to satisfy their curiosity.

The paradoxical feature of spiritual endeavors—and this is three in the aspect I’d like to emphasize—is that such endeavors always refuse to yield ordinary payoffs in the ways imagined by the would be seeker. At the same time, once a person’s spirituality begins to develop in earnest, his or her problems tend to be transformed. They look different. Different attitudes toward them develop. Coping mechanisms are learned. The net result is that the problems diminish; they may disappear entirely. These quests therefore do have a positive worldly result, but never in the ways initially pictured.

Knotty Issue - Art

I am not altogether happy with the last post (Art, Spirituality)—another way to put it, that post needs elaboration.  The problems are these:

• The arts require the spiritual dimension, and all those who engage in the arts do, in a sense, borrow the fire of the gods.
• But in the arts, as in everything else, the intention is the determining factor. I noted correctly that art is the language of spirituality, but it can be a borrowed language to speak about more mundane things. At the same time, if will is moved by a perception of the spiritual realm, thus if the artist is obeying the Muse rather than using energies that flow from her to shape some intention directed downward, as it were, the art will still be illuminated from above, but it is the intention which governs the ultimate expression.

These two issues explain why all sorts of arts—commercial, pure entertainment, the fawning art that celebrates power and fame, the arts of propaganda, and quite evil arts intended to gain profit from lower drives are all, by some, classified as art. To the extent that these differentiations are blurred or overlooked, the last entry is incomplete. These are knotty issues. Let me elaborate on each of the two points above.

Borrowed Inspiration

Here is an example. Someone published a novel a couple of decades ago entitled On the Beach. The intention behind this novel was fundamentally political—anti-nukes. Yet it took the form of an artistic creation, with characters and plot. It evoked emotions, used imagination, etc. Now the novel just happened to be relatively undistinguished, but often quite advanced works of art appear, each moved by an agenda drawn from the lower levels of existence. The creative process, no matter what the artist’s intention, is energized by that aspect of ourselves which reaches beyond the here-and-now. Thus it borrows energy to achieve worldly aims. Now, arguably, all human creations have a range of motives in which the lower levels are also present. But great art is distinguished from the ordinary kinds by a motive obeying an attraction from above, aiming to unite with the mysterious higher—not in order to sell or influence anybody but purely for the sake of art, thus purely from a perceived spiritual inspiration. Such art is marked by its orientation. Never mind the details: the substance, the story, the style. The inner orientation is what makes the difference. In these situations nothing is borrowed “in order to.” The work proceeds from love. The pursuit of the arts, in this second form, is a spiritual striving. To be sure it isn’t felt as such because, in our culture, spiritual action is almost always pent up in kennels, as it were. If the activity is not outwardly religious, if it isn’t lit by the lights of dogma, is not intellectually aligned with the religious, and/or is not characterized by various kinds of voluntary self-denial, asceticism, and the like—then it is denied the definition.

The Ambiguity of Art

Such denial is in part very much justified precisely because the category, art, is such a muddled mixture. This is nicely documented by the prevailing the tongue-in-cheek question we’ve all heard used, always with a touch of irony: “Yes. But is it art?” To see art in its two prevailing modes, as serving lower purposes and as a kind of worship, requires adequacy. No arbitrary rules can be applied. To see requires a developed eyesight—and only those who have ears can hear it.

Art, Spirituality

The arts are the language of spirituality, but the complexities involved in this subject—cultural, social, personal, and, alas, commercial—make it difficult to see this. I’ll attempt a little unpacking today. Certainly in my youth the arts were viewed as a kind of rebellion against bourgeois customs. My youth extended from birth to twenty-five, let’s say, thus from 1936 to 1961. But this rebellion or upheaval predated my birth if, say, looking at painting, we see expressionism as an early sign of this collective mood. It goes even farther back if we take Romanticism as the model. It had its roots in the eighteenth century but flourished in the nineteenth. My own view is that the process—we’re talking about the Western Culture by and large—had its origins early in the nineteenth century. It took religious as well as artistic forms, and all of these were, in one way or another, impulses that moved against rationalism as it peaked in the Enlightenment, thus at the divide between the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, marked dramatically by the French Revolution.

The preponderant thrust of rationalism was outward, world-bound, and leveling. It’s ultimate expressions are “All is matter” and “God is dead.” The artistic reaction to this—ignoring the foolish behavior of all young people, including mine when I was young—is to deny and to oppose it. The denial does not automatically translate into an embrace of ritualistic (and never mind dogmatic) religiousness. But what the arts all sustain is something else, something higher, something above, something transcending.

Humanism is a marvelous synthesis of enlightenment thought energized by the new intuition. I always marvel reading, for example, Thomas Mann’s Sufferings and Greatness of the Masters—a book I re-read once a decade, roughly. It is such a splendid example of bridging the chaos between the Enlightenment and what is yet to emerge, a new Age of Faith. I am of the generation, perhaps a precocious member of it, that fully understands the Thomas Manns of the world, my grandfather’s generation, but can already discern the promised land that they could feel but could not intellectually affirm. I am the beneficiary of the dramatic devolution of rationalism into something ugly and destructive. That hadn’t happened yet in the formative years of that generation; and when they lived through the shattering experiences of two World Wars, they still clung to the blended value system that they had fashioned in youth.

Art as rebellion is a youthful gesture, jejune—and perhaps for that reason appealing to the masses. The model of the artist is the Pied Piper not the pitchfork wielding revolutionary who—all too soon—transforms himself into the commissar. In that rebellion is a conflict, it draws the media. Therefore rebellious writers and painters, people who like to exploit shock for fame and money, achieve at least visibility and, if clever, if able to adapt and channel their rebellion, can also achieve wealth.

Real art—which need not always be great art, but certainly great art above all—arises from travelling in the borderzone of life on this earth. It looks like rebellion, at least to some, because it fails to conform to the norms of fossilizing custom. The able artist will strip his work of obvious signs of rebellion, knowing full well that such behavior is posturing. Artistic inspiration is a grace. The artist is an instrument and, once aware of this, intent on making him or herself a fitting means to something mysterious. This is but one layer of an onion; the subject is inexhaustible.