On the Trail of the Grail

David Bohm, the physicist, proposed that anomalous phenomena in science—like the Big Bang at the large and the wave-particle paradox at the small end of the spectrum—are due to the limitations of our theoretical frameworks. The theories are based on correct observations, to be sure, but we are now, as it were, on the border of two domains, and the new observations no longer fit. Bohm goes well beyond this and suggests infinite reaches: beyond every border extends a vast geography—which also has a border. Looks like we have borderzones in the realm of physics too. Here a graphic to make Bohm’s view accessible:

Here we might assume that the left Anomalous Region is the sub-atomic and the right one the cosmically large. The arrows point at the borders of our current knowledge where other or “higher” ranges of knowledge are necessary (new theories), to make sense of the observations. The new theories, to be sure, will not “falsify” the old—but render the old as limited cases valid enough, but only within their own domain of observation.

Bohm proposed that as we reach these borders, we must “shift” our theoretical framework (the yellow region). He asserted that a Grand Unified Theory (the grail of theoretical physics) is unachievable. We might think we have it (e.g. Newton’s clockwork universe), but sooner or later new anomalies will start to appear like signs announcing another border crossing—and to cross we must have passports; the driver’s license will no longer do.

When people encounter notions like this—what look alarmingly like infinite regresses—they standard outcry is “Enough already.” We like to limit our infinities with nice, self-enclosed symbols like the lazy eight. The biggest battles in science (and elsewhere) arise when something established once and for all is shaken to its foundations by new observations or experience. The uproar is Sisyphus’ enormous frustration every time he gets his huge rock to the top of the hill and then, just as he is about to sigh in achievement, watching the damned thing roll down again. But this frustration is then also echoed by roars of triumph on the part of those who, under intense and decades long attack (invariably ideological) discover that they were right all along.

This is the situation that surrounds Darwinism now under the assault of the new biology invariably labeled by its proposed answer to what might be called the anomaly of matter: Intelligent Design. What the new biology suggests is that the frame must be moved to understand this strange anomaly—matter preserving form and, horrors, reproducing it, over and over again. Here we have orthodox biology in frustration—and fundamentalist Christians roaring in triumph. But the detection of design in life (and we don’t really need the qualifier, intelligent, at all) should not be viewed as the achievement of closure. If life is designed, who else but God could do it? Du calm, as the French would say—indeed as one of the new biologists also says. Here is a quote from Michael J. Behe, taken from Darwin’s Black Box, Touchstone, 1996, p. 196:

Inferences to design do not require that we have a candidate for the role of designer. We can determine that a system was designed by examining the system itself, and we can hold the conviction of design much more strongly than a conviction about the identity of the designer.

I recommend this book by Behe as a superb demonstration that design is present—and at the biochemical, which is the meaningfully proper, level. Life manifests as the cell. And it as at the cellular level that we must look for its explanation.

To this I might add that the same triumphant “Told you so” we hear from fundamentalist circles concerning life we also hear, although from a smaller circle, concerning the Big Bang. Does the expansion of the universe really prove that it came out of nothing 14 billion years ago? No. The inference of God based on the Big Bang is as faulty as the inference of God from design in life. What it calls for is a moving of our theoretical frames. Endless wonders will then await us. God transcends both microscope and telescope. No pin will pin the Ultimate.

A Minimalist Orientation

The spiritual life—at least in the context of this blog—needs something more than the usual definition. The phrase is usually understood as life within a religious framework and, specifically, those aspects of such a life that relate to prayer, worship, and personal morality. Using that definition, the believer—the practitioner—already has a firm belief. A well-formed cosmology is part of that belief.

But what about the person who starts from disbelief? Such a condition or view may be inherited (as religious belief usually are too); alternatively the person arrives at disbelief because he or she honestly cannot accept the teachings on offer in the culture. In the West that usually means Christianity. I emphasize honestly to brush aside shallow, juvenile, or self-pleasing motives: rebellion, restraints on sexuality, or thoughtless imitation of supposedly superior, cynical scoffers. People can arrive at disbelief for serious reasons too; and those who do may well discover the spiritual life as well. It will begin in the same way, namely by an examination of the alternative.

Every alternative to any system of beliefs is ultimately a different cosmology. It is for that reason that I talk about that subject on Borderzone. Every cosmology is a description of reality in the large frame, a map of reality. It explains the whole, it tells us where things are, it tells us where we are. It provides a narrative in two parts. One tells us how we came to be here. The other shows us where we might be going. And there are only two kinds: materialistic or transcendental. In the materialistic the individual progresses to death and total disappearance in death. In the transcendental the projection forward offers alternatives. To put it in simplest terms, one outcome is up, the other down. Different transcendental systems have different narratives for what the words up and down mean. In any case, in these systems death is a transition, not an absolute termination. And since up is better than down, life takes on a meaning beyond itself. In the materialistic frame, only this life has any meaning, and that meaning always refers to here and now.

In the Buddhist and Hindu systems down means rebirth in this world. The individual continues to go around and round. Up means escape from the wheel of karma, thus the wheel of suffering. In the Judaic family of religions, down is hell and up is heaven, the union with God. Hell is eternal except in Kabbalistic beliefs; these hold that at the very end even hell is emptied of its inhabitants.

With this extremely compressed summary, a more generalized definition of the spiritual life is possible. It begins with the acceptance of a transcendental cosmology. It is a personal decision to believe in a greater order—or a conviction reached in some way that a greater order actually exists beyond this realm, beyond personal death, and that the way we live our life may literally—not just figuratively—determine which path we’ll individually follow after our breath finally stops: up or down.

Some may say that such a decision is impossible to make on current evidence. Hence agnosticism is the only rational course. It is to these people that Pascal proposed his famous wager. For more, check here. To adapt the wager to this context: if on the one hand you have absolute personal death, no matter what you do, and on the other limitless life beyond the border in an upper realm (with effort) or a lower realm (with negligence), you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by acting on the probability that the transcendental model is correct.

This minimalist framing assumes that there is only one real quest, one real goal and that all sincere beliefs, regardless of the details into which they elaborate the cosmology, are equivalent. But this framing, simple that it is, doesn’t even begin to delineate the spiritual life as it is actually lived. Such a life may be religious—or not. What the frame defines is the minimum orientation that such a life requires.

The Householder

The household still figures in a meaningful way in modern statistical measurement (e.g., household income, number of households, etc.), but it has never carried any kind of spiritual connotation. Not so in the East. In Sufi circles, for one, at least in the tradition that I know a little something about, the Naqshbandi, to be a householder is deemed to be the minimum qualification for higher learning, thus for the spiritual path.

This stands in contrast to the Western and some Eastern traditions where higher forms of dedication appear to demand that the seeker abandon the usual life occupations, take up a celibate or ascetic style of living, and devote him- or herself entirely to the pursuit of God. The life of the artist, similarly, is viewed in the same way. Above all, as an artist, do not be bourgeois, for God’s sake! You must pursue a life in garrets, unattached, eccentric, and unpredictable. The nine-to-five is a definite No-No. I’ve always found this amusing in that—as secularization has spread like a brushfire over the last couple of completed centuries—the scribbler, painter, sculptor, musician, dancer, or actor have been required, in an odd sort of way, at least outwardly, to imitate the saint. Only sexual freedom—but to be enjoyed strictly outside the constrictions of marriage—has been granted these not-quite-volunteers to be the secular saints of the West.

When I came across the householder dictum in the writings of Idries Shah—and his writings are, above all, traditional Sufi teachings presented in varied and carefully selected assemblages to the modern Western reader—I felt a sense of confirmation. I’ve always subscribed to idea that hierarchies exist, but never to the notion that you could join them by merely conforming your behavior to some set pattern. Similarly I’ve considered the notion that the artist may be (or to be genuine even must be) an unreliable, unpredictable, irresponsible, and destructive rebel simply ridiculous: as if there is something magical in poems, novels, paintings, etc. that balances out a man fertilizing women at a whim, abandoning them and their children when another whim arises, and his body to alcohol and drugs because spontaneity trumps everything else. Pure, ignorant baloney.

I have always had difficulties with priesthoods—and this despite the fact that I believe in real hierarchies among the living and beyond. Priesthoods are the institutionalization, in effect the reification, of something much more dynamic and mysterious. Priesthoods have a certain functional role to play, alas. This comes home to me looking at the Muslim world. There the Prophet expressly forbade the forming of a priesthood, yet ranks upon ranks of lawyers came to represent that functions, and we have a priesthood there, too, in all but name. I bow to necessity. I’ve no objection to priests as functionaries. I oppose priesthood as the presupposition that a priest has a higher status than, say, a carpenter.

Why the focus on the householder in Sufism? In functional terms the householder is a responsible person who has managed the basic adaptations to the world and to society. One thing at a time. Before a person aspires to a higher level, she or he ought to be mistress or master of the fundamentals. This is very good doctrine, it seems to me, and equally pertinent to the would-be artist.