One Self or Many?

The notion of multiple souls in us is a familiar enough concept, although the number we use in the West is usually only two. There is that famous line by Goethe: Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust (Two souls, alas! reside within my breast). Okay, make that three. Freud had his ego, id, and superego. Jung had three for males and more (in a sense) for ladies. In the male there is the self, the self’s female side, the anima, and then the “shadow,” the chthonic, undeveloped soul. The same pattern holds for women, but the animus appears as multiple males, at least in dreams. The shadow in males is male, in females female. The numbers increase in a hurry.

And things get complicated. People say, “I’m of two minds about that.” Does that mean that there is one I with two minds, or two minds each with its own I but sharing one voice and both saying the same thing at the same time?

Sometimes in a milder form another word is used—personality. There are split personalities. This can take mild forms, thus quite different behavior in various habitual settings, at home, at work, visiting the parents. But in some cases it manifests as a formal mental disorder called dissociative identity disorder (DID). It is a real disease; when present, personality A does not even remember at all, or very clearly, what personality B knows, and vice versa; and the behaviors are very different. Does that mean that two or more souls or selves are present in all of us, but usually smoothly communicating? And that in severe cases of dissociation the communications break down or are simply cut off? The disorder is due to trauma in early childhood caused by severe and repetitive abuse. But does one self violently detach itself from a whole range of experience and develop an alternate mode of being, sometimes cycling back? Is one real identity present beneath the personalities? Or is the only substrate of these personalities a single body without consciousness at all? Case stories of DID suggest that one identity remains. Some may be read here, and they suggest that the “alter” is a rogue. Some describe themselves as passengers in their bodies rather than as drivers. Detached behavioral programs seem to run—and the reset key is stuck. But the frustrated person, staring at the screen, is separate. This suggests that personalities are tools, although in practice we identify with them so completely that we think that they are us—rather than structures we have formed and allow to run on automatic. And in cases of disorder, these programs become so automatic that they cannot be shut off, alas, can’t even be seen to be running.

Identification is a key word here. In Sufi circles the concept of multiple selves is used in two different ways. In one these refer to the soul at its various levels of development: commanding, accusing, inspired, and illumined. The Commanding Self is the unreformed natural product in which self-awareness is barely present and the individual is always “identified” with whatever is going on. It is also the conditioned self, just thoughtlessly executing its routines. The Accusing Self manifests higher awareness, hence it displays a conscience. It is accusing—itself; of heedlessness. In the next stage development has crystallized the self enough so that grace begins to flow (or to be perceived). In the last stage the person belongs to the Illuminati.

The second way of talking about multiple selves in Sufi circles is really a part of their methods of training. Here we sometimes hear or read that people have no self; they have selves; now this, now that. Emphasis is laid on this, and the disciple is invited to observe himself or herself. The automatic, reflexive, associative, reactive character of our behavior then becomes apparent. But apparent to whom? Why—to the actual self. So there is a self there after all. And to teach it to become aware of itself, it is told that it isn’t there. A teaching method. Therefore let’s not trot it out as a scientific observation. What is an observable fact is that most of the time in most of our actions, we follow routines. We’re not self-aware. We’re just behaviors. But to control those behaviors, we must develop consciousness. It is there, in potentiam, all the time. But not, as the medievals used to say, in actus. The “natural” behavior of the Commanding Self is purely reactive—however complex that reactive behavior is, and often (as I well know) it can be very complex. It is but one self, but it identifies with its own routines of behavior. It is a base case. The way is upward from there.

Modern psychologies that emphasize multiple selves but never speak of stages of development are simply incomplete. And they maintain this view because of underlying metaphysical assumptions, among which is the absence of an actual, real soul or self. Souls, selves, are mere epiphenomena that vanish into thin air as soon as the brain dies.

From Idries Shah's Reflections

Herewith an brief sample from a wondrous small book of modern Sufi stories written by the late Idries Shah, Octagon Press, London, 1978.

Lichen

A piece of lichen was growing on a rock.
     In addition to the customary lichen thoughts, it often wondered why it could not spread so as to cover a part of the rock which was still bare.
     ‘There is no lichen nutrient there,’ said the wisest part of the lichen, ‘and we must wait until it comes to us.’
     As the years passed, the expectation of the mass of the lichen became stronger and stronger. Slowly, climatic changes caused the rock to split slightly. Certain chemicals were released and started to ooze outwards, covering a part of the bare surface of the stone.
     For the devout lichens, this was the answer to their prayers, and they gratefully spread themselves over the delicious food.
     Many years passed, and the chemicals began to become exhausted. This created changes in the character of the lichens, who attributed their difference in composition and being to profound social changes.
     Theoreticians multiplied, each with his explanation. The lichen philosophers, academics and scientists divided themselves into groups. You can imagine what their various explanations were like. Each version was based upon the interpretation of observed phenomena. In fact, of course, the theories were generally attempts to concentrated and spread certain convictions.
     Then another chain of events caused someone to spill upon the rock another lichen-nutrient, and the organisms were able to start growing again.
     The stimulus itself energized the theoreticians. Their increased anxieties in the immediate past had sharpened their mental activity. It had enabled them to realize the immediate cause of their reprieve and comparative abundance.
     But so far as the lichens have not got to the point where they can fathom any perceptible intention behind the chain of ‘causes’ which brings them the means to live and to expand.
For this reason, they have given up thinking abou it. They believe, nonetheless, that they are thinking about it. But it is only because they are at the level of culture which regards the following statements as ‘thought’:
     ‘Everything is accident’
     ‘Everything is of supernatural origin’
     ‘Some things are accident, some supernatural’
     ‘I do not know what to think’
     ‘I can believe, and therefore I can believe that mere opinion is the same as knowledge’
     ‘I have inferred some things, therefore they are true’
     ‘I have observed some things, therefore I can observe others’
     ‘What cannot be observed can be inferred, what cannot be inferred can be felt, what cannot be observed, inferred or felt cannot have any relevance to anything and is therefore nonsense.’
     How fortunate that humanity is different from lichen.

The Sufis

To anyone interested in discovering what the Sufis are all about, I recommend The Sufis, by Idries Shah. This is an authoritative introduction to the subject in depth which was written specifically for the Western public. It is available from Amazon.com here.

The Angel Beckons

The title is my own and chosen for its context here, today. See the last post to understand it. The following is, again, from Rumi’s Divani Shamsi Tabriz XII.

Every form you see has its archetype in the placeless world;
If the form perished, no matter, since its original is everlasting.
Every fair shape you have seen, every deep saying you have heard,
Be not cast down that it perished; for that is not so.
Whereas the spring-head is undying, its branch gives water continually.
Since neither can cease, why are you lamenting?
Conceive the Soul as a fountain, and these created things as rivers:
While the fountain flows, the rivers run from it.
Put grief out of your head and keep quaffing this river water;
Do not think of the water failing; for this water is without end.
From the moment you came into the world of being,
A ladder was placed before you that you might escape.
First you were mineral, later you turned to plant,
Then you became animal: how should this be a secret to you?
Afterwards you were made man, with knowledge, reason, faith;
Behold the body, which is a portion of the dust-pit, how perfect it has grown!
When you have travelled on from man, you will doubtless become an angel;
After that you are done with this earth: your station is in heaven.
Pass again even from angelhood: enter that ocean,
That your drop may become a sea which is a hundred seas of ‘Oman.
Leave this ‘Son,’ say ever ‘One’ with all your soul;
If your body has aged, what matter, when the soul is young?

Jalal’ud-Din Rumi (1207-1273) was a Sufi mystic who lived most of his life in a region which is now Turkey. This poem was written in Farsi and the translation is by R.A. Nicholson.

From Rumi’s Divani Shamsi Tabriz (XXXVI)

O lovers, O lovers, it is time to abandon the world;
The drum of departure reaches my spiritual ear from Heaven.
Behold, the driver has risen and made ready the files of camels,
And begged us to acquit him of blame: why, O travelers, are you asleep ?
These sounds before and behind are the din of departure and of the camel-bells;
With each moment a soul and a spirit is setting off into the Void.
From these stars like inverted candles, from these blue awnings of the sky
There has come forth a wondrous people, that the mysteries may be revealed.
A heavy slumber fell upon thee from the circling spheres:
Alas for this life so light, beware of this slumber so heavy!
O soul, seek the Beloved, O friend, seek the Friend,
O watchman, be wakeful: it behooves not a watchman to sleep.
On every side is clamor and tumult, in every street are candles and torches,
For to-night the teeming world gives birth to the world everlasting.
Thou wert dust and art spirit, thou wert ignorant and art wise;
He who has led thee thus far will lead thee further also.
How pleasant are the pains he makes thee suffer while he gently draws thee to himself!
His flames are as water. Do not frown upon him.
To dwell in the soul is his task, to break vows of penitence is his task;
By his manifold artifice these atoms are trembling at their core.
O ridiculous puppet that leapest out of thy hole, as if to say, ‘I am the lord of the land,’
How long wilt thou leap? Abase thyself, or they will bend thee like a bow.
Thou didst sow the seed of deceit, thou didst indulge in derision,
Thou didst regard God as nothing: see now, O miscreant!
O ass, thou wert best with straw; thou art a caldron: thou wert best black;
Thou wert best at the bottom of a well, O disgrace of thy house and family!
In me there is Another by whom these eyes sparkle;
If water scalds, it is by fire; understand this.
I have no stone in my hand, I have no quarrel with anyone,
I deal harshly with none, because I am sweet as a garden of roses.
Mine eye, then, is from that source and from another universe;
Here a world and there a world: I am seated on the threshold.
On the threshold are they alone whose eloquence is mute;
It is enough to utter this intimation: say no more, draw back thy tongue.

Jalal’ud-Din Rumi (1207-1273) was a Sufi mystic from the region which is now Turkey. This poem was written in Farsi and the translation is by R.A. Nicholson.

Six Factors

Until comprehensive modes of thought are developed, people react to words reflexively. We know this as the “sound-byte” phenomenon: the manipulators of public opinion are all too aware that some words will produce this and others that raw emotion in people who live on the surface.

Last night I was again reading Idries Shah’s A Perfumed Scorpion, in part an introduction to Sufi methods of teaching. Here Shah presents a page or two on six factors related to the Sufi teaching methods. Of the six points some are about the teacher and some about the prospective student. These are:

1. A teacher who isn’t moved to teach but is more drawn to learning.
2. Avoidance (by both) of outward show, arising from genuine sincerity and a healthy humility.
3. The ability to act or to avoid acting based entirely on the objective characteristics of situations. This implies avoiding actions to attract attention or simply to please.
4. The ability to switch attention at will, thus the power to bestow it or to withdraw it.
5. Ability to observe people and to read them accurately, especially needed in the teacher who must form groups in which individuals will help/complement each other.
6. The ability and inclination to be of service to others without seeking (or feeling the sensation of) a reward.

Shah makes this presentation in the context of technique, of method—and deliberately so. He is attempting to communicate with people who are into technology, systems, and so on and conditioned to react negatively if anyone mentions obeying the will of God or loving your neighbor. The modern reaction to that sort of thing is: “Where’s the exit?” But what Shah is actually laying out as a requirement for the student is a high state of maturity and of morality, omitting any religious references.

Also notable: Hidden in this listing is the fact that obeying such “factors” produces a movement inward—but without causing a neglect of the outer. It calls for a withdrawal to the inner sovereignty of the mature individual from the usual stimulus-response games on the surface of ordinary reality.

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.

The Priest and the Dervish

The other day I mentioned the Venerable Solanus Casey, a man on his way to sainthood; I know of him because he’d spent many years in Detroit. At that time, looking back over his history, I was reminded of the fact that Casey had been ordained a “simplex” priest, meaning that he could celebrate mass but was prohibited from hearing confessions or giving homilies. Why? His superiors in the Capuchin order thought that he lacked the intellectual capacity. Perhaps. But his saintly powers, not least to heal the sick, those soon began to manifest…

This reminded me of a Sufi story called “The Man Who Walked on Water,” found in Idries Shah’s volume titled Tales of the Dervishes. The story, on page 84, goes like this in summary:

A dervish who belonged to a conventional sort of community was walking along a river and meditating on moralistic and scholastic problems; such problems formed the core teaching of his group. As he walked he was suddenly startled to hear an outcry coming from the island in the water. Someone was intoning the dervish call, YA HU but doing it all wrong; the man over there was saying U YA HU. Our dervish decided that the ignoramus on the island needed instruction. He hired a rowboat and got over there. He found a man dressed in a dervish robe, stopped by him, and carefully instructed the unfortunate.

Our man then left the island again, satisfied; he’d done a good deed. Rowing back he reflected on this sacred formula. It was said that anyone who could repeat it properly could even learn to walk on water, something our man had always hoped to do—but had always failed to achieve. Now he listened, but no sounds came. He had reached the middle of the water when he heard a halting start coming from over there, the ignorant dervish starting out with U YA again. Our man shook his head. Perverse humanity, persistent in error. Then he suddenly beheld a strange sight. The dervish from over there was walking on water, coming out toward the boat. Our man stopped rowing in astonishment. The dervish arrived. “Sorry to trouble you,” he said, standing on the river. “My memory is weak. I’ve already forgotten how to say it right. Could you help me again…?”

Souls Sort Themselves

There are three forms of culture: worldly culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self-development. [Hujwiri, Revelation of the Veiled]

Suppose that we are guided by our own intuition. That this is so follows as the consequence of two facts. One is that the physical world is harsh. If we violate its rules we will be punished. In that dimension guidance is simply feedback. The second fact, as I’ve endeavored to show in the last post, is that intellectual arguments concerning higher matters, the metaphysical, are never compelling in and of themselves because they can’t be proved—as physical facts can be. But to orient ourselves, we must rely on something. That something concerning matters that can’t be proved (and are not harshly enforced by nature), is our own judgment. And our judgment is guided by a feeling from within: this sounds true; or, this sounds phony.

Let me be precise. Intuition, as the word itself implies (“tuition,” “tutoring” from “within”) is not something we do. It is something we experience. After an intuition is received, something else must follow. It is our agreement or disagreement. In other words, we can act contrary to our intuitions too. When the matter is in the area of knowledge, we can deny the knowledge or act contrary to it. When the intuition is the judgment of an action, thus in the moral sphere, we can override it. Hence “conscience,” in the sense that Catholicism uses that word, is intuition in one of its modes. The presumption here is, one, that we are guided; and, two, that this guidance isn’t our own or, if it is, it emanates from a higher aspect of ourselves.

This suggests that if we correctly understood and invariably followed our intuitions, the world would be paradise. What makes life “interesting”—in the sense of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times!”—is that our condition, the Church Militant of which are now members, is developmental in character. We’re moving up a spiral or, refusing to do so, sliding into an abyss. The downward movement is not interesting but must be acknowledged to exist. We live side by side with others. Most are moving up, some are willfully sliding down. The intuitive “hearing” of individuals varies; some are more and some less sensitive to this inflow; sensitivities, furthermore, can be enhanced by effort or dulled by ignoring the guidance. Intuition is not only accepted or ignored; its strength and effect are also influenced by innate intellectual and physical characteristics which appear to be randomly distributed. The intuition is there, but it may be more dimly or powerfully felt; it may be understood swiftly by some, slowly by others. Whatever the innate disposition, the will still plays a crucial role. The super-bright, for instance, may understand the intuition immediately, but if they don’t want to follow it, they will be very clever in rationalizing it away. Therefore the strength of the intuition is not as important as the direction the person has chosen to follow. It’s a free universe. The soul is sovereign however it may be enabled or delimited by the characteristics of its vehicle.

This then sets the stage for the suggestion that souls sort themselves out by using intuition and will. It is this sorting which produces the three cultural forms that Hujwiri uses to show the hierarchical arrangement of humanity in this realm. The foundational level is physical—where straightforward understanding of the ordinary world suffices; the religious sphere is on a higher level, but behavior is guided by semi-mechanical arrangements, rules. Here a higher dimension is already intuited, but conformity to it is expressed in the language of law, motivated in terms of reward and punishment, and expressed in ritual forms. The highest level is also the most free. Here the intuition is very strong and willingly followed. People at various levels of development find comfort in the culture that feels best. Not surprisingly, those on the lower levels cannot understand and therefore disparage the practices at the levels above. The highest level, however, is marked by understanding of the lower. It’s a good self-test to examine one’s own views, say, of religion, science, or mysticism. You’re certainly not a member of the spiritual elite if you bad-mouth legitimate science or ridicule the true believers.

The sorting process no doubt continues after death. And concepts like hell, purgatory, and heaven are mere labels, very roughly hewn, of other clustering of souls on the other side of the border zone. The sorting over there follows the inclinations of the soul. A way to illustrate that is to say that those who, in this realm, are seeking the depths will feel much more comfortable in hell than anywhere else…

* * *

Ali Hujwiri (990-1077) was a Persian Sufi, teacher, and writer. He was born in what is today Afghanistan. He wrote Revelation of the Veiled, also rendered as Unveiling the Veiled, in Persian. The quotation cited, which I took from Idries Shah’s The Sufis, should be rightly understood. Hujwiri, like all Sufis, believed that the highly developed individual will not only understand but also practice the wisdom available at all three levels of culture.

Notes on Attention

I commented today on the subject of attention on another of my sites (Ghulf Genes), but the topic has wider implications. As my daughter commented on that site, “This is a subject we could discuss for an entire day and not exhaust.” Too true.

In Ghulf Genes I make the point to that paying attention and getting it are mirror images of one another—because to pay attention to X is to make X more real, lifting it from the flux of sensations. But if X is another person, the attention itself causes that person to feel more real as well. In human communications, those who bestow attention also seek it. I noted there that we have a certain innate need for attention. But why is that? Why do we need the world’s confirmation for our being when, face it, we already know that we are. We have self-awareness.

I can illustrate this need using writing and publishing as a cluster. Many people yearn to be writers, engage in the activity, indeed get very good at it. But until some publisher accepts their manuscript and puts it out for sale in stores, they don’t really think that they qualify. What happens in actuality is that some publisher’s reader makes the judgment that this work would probably sell enough copies to cover costs and make a profit. The next layer up agrees. The decisions process, in most cases, boils down to this in today’s market. Nor was it any different in Jane Austen’s day, for instance, which we can discover easily by reading her biography. Here is a case of a person seeking authentication, but the authentication itself is just another commercial transaction. Strange. Now, to be sure, after the book is published, the yearning changes. The writer now wants sales or favorable critical reviews—and the more prominent the critic, the better. And so it goes. Eventually unhappiness may set in because no one seems interested in making the movie…

Even when published some people eventually discover that attention from others isn’t enough. If the writer meets enough readers in the flesh, he or she will soon be sobered. It’s not the reader any more—it is the right kind of reader. And I could go on in this vein discussing endless radians extending from this, or any other, subject that centers on achievement, recognition, and reward.

We seek attention, it seems to me, because we feel some lack, a kind of existential loneliness. And it isn’t satisfied by friends and family. We discount such attentions. After all they are—you know, friends, family. What else did we expect? We want the love of strangers. We long for fame. Not too close up, though, thank you. Not the paparazzi, not people chasing our car or crowding our front yard and strewing their damned litter all over. No. Something … somehow …more….

Attention seeking therefore, beyond the homely sort that we actually need in daily life, may be a sign of another and deeper urge to develop inwardly. And the aim of that development, ultimately, is to be above such things as fame, visibility, celebrity, popularity, and fortune. If viewed in the context of attention, the phenomenal success of such developments as Twitter, Facebook, and blogging, for that matter, would appear to be due to a lack of something, not due a plentitude. Something to ponder. The aim of personal development may very well lead into a kind of silence where relating to others, or not, because a genuine option, not an itch, an urge, or even a necessity that ultimately distracts us from genuine growth. In advanced spiritual circles—the Sufis are a good example—limiting attention needs to the minimum is advised. Why? Because the object is to get beyond the dimension in which we find ourselves. We must reduce distractions to a minimum so that we can hear, intuit, and perceive the subtle. That too may be a kind of attention seeking, but of another kind—with possibly much more potent consequences.

Heart Exam: Continued

Conceptual thought has a devil of a time capturing dynamism. Motion is a good example. We experience it without trouble; we find it tougher than nails to describe precisely. We have to do it piece-meal. The object was here, but now it is there, and whatever happened happened in between. We don’t know what it was, but have a name for it. We call it motion. But of course, we can usually find a spot half-way between here and there. And between that half-way point and here, there is another point that’s also half-way in between. To describe motion precisely, we have describe the tiniest increments. This is what calculus is intended to do: slicing and dicing space and time into infinitely small increments and then artfully summing them up. We get an illusion of control. At the conceptual level we never really get there—because we can’t reach infinity, but close enough for government work.

All right, but what does that have to do with heart? In looking at the dynamics of human development, we also engage in many differentiations. We have an experience of Self, but to grasp it intellectually, we parse it apart: intellect, emotion, imagination, will. They don’t exist independently, but the names do. But if we look at any one of these aspects or abstractions—these slices and dices of the Self—we detect even finer distinctions. Our feelings have many different qualities. There is raw emotion at one and joy at the other extreme; in between we find an infinity of other states. There is the emotion of watching Charles Bronson deal with the bad guys in one of the Death Wish movies. Raw emotion. There is the complex emotion at the end of watching The Death of a Salesman. There is the rock concert and Handel’s Messiah or Judas Maccabaeus. There is Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. To describe the curvature between these poles would require a kind of literary calculus no one has ever devised.

In dealing with the range of our capacity we associate different manifestations of the soul with different organs. We associate intellect with the brain, emotions with the gut, imagination with the eye, will with the fist, and all of the higher expressions of our nature with—the heart. Well, we’re finally there.

A somewhat hidden example of this is courage. Courage is an aspect of the will; and by real courage we don’t mean a man who, say, assaults a bigger, stronger fellow in a fit of rage. Rather, we call courageous someone who, in an extremely dangerous or risky situation, is able to overcome his fears to achieve a higher good. The word itself masks my point. Courage derives from the French coeur and ultimately from the Latin cor, both meaning heart. An interesting side note: the obsolete meaning of "courage" also includes mind, spirit, and temper. When we intend to speak of a lower kind of courage we label people who have it gutsy.

As we saw in the last post, Pascal associated a higher kind of reason with the heart. Paracelsus differentiated lower and higher forms of imagination. He called the higher form of it true imagination (imaginatio vera), the lower form fantasy. There is also a kind of intellectual imagination which we label foresight, thus imagination based on calculating the complex vector of events—in which the weighing of probabilities is to the front.

If heart is thus associated with a kind of thought, a kind of imagination, with courage, and with higher feelings, of which the highest is self-less love, it might be argued—I argue this point—that what tradition calls the heart, and treats as if it were a higher organ—is just a way of making a differentiation between a highly but comprehensively developed self and one that is more primitive and still largely undeveloped. The self as it appears most commonly is strongly conditioned by societal norms. Concerning this form of the self, Idries Shah has this interesting comment about this as yet undifferentiated form of the self. Writing in Learning How to Learn (pp. 157-157) he writes:

Remember that the human being is so intensely standardized that an outside observer, noting his reactions to various stimuli, need not infer an individual controlling brain in each person. He would be more likely to infer the existence of a separate, outside brain, and the people as mere manifesters of its will.

If we examine the polarities I’ve noted above using movies and other works of art, the chief difference between the low and the high is level of complexity. To appreciate the high, the self has to be developed enough to do so—and not simply intellectually. The self as a whole has to be developed, the will as much as the emotions, the imagination as much as the intellect. We are here faced with a dynamic of development. When we observe higher expressions of the self, we grope for a different way of rooting them. We recruit the heart as the organ. For lower expressions, we locate them in those organs most tangibly associated with different manifestations of the self that permeates the human body.

Mystical Experiences: An Elaboration

The questions I’ve always asked myself about the mystical experience are these: What is it that mystics experience? Is it God? Or could it be something else extraordinarily energetic? Here I hasten to introduce qualifiers. I’m not in any doubt, myself, that God is ultimately the source of everything. But in the mystical experience, the claim is not that people experience some higher or more energetic order. It is that they have experienced, if only briefly, union with God. To illustrate this:

The Sufi mystic Al Hallaj (858-922) once said, “I am the Truth”; that statement cost him his life. Meister Eckhart (quoted in the last post) identified his eye with God’s—ambiguously enough, to be sure, to escape drastic censure. Angelus Silesius (1624-1677), another mystic, wrote in a poem: “I know God cannot live one instant without Me:/If I should come to naught, needs must He cease to be.” My modern example, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, said the exactly same sorts of things, especially in Chapter VI of his Pathways Through to Space but also sprinkled throughout his book elsewhere. Merrell-Wolff was a modern, wrote in the modern manner, and we understand from him that he fully understood the difference between his limited self and what he called the SELF. So also did, I have no doubt, Al Hallaj, Eckhart, and Silesius. But what they felt was a powerful identity with this higher something in their moments of exaltation—and identified it with the Absolute.

Other characteristics common to this experience are feelings of power and exaltation. The person feels all-knowing. The self seems vast and limitless. Everything seems mysteriously present in the experience—and is also known and understood. And over against that exalted feeling, ordinary life appears to be a mere illusion, nothing, shards, and insubstantiality.

But when the experience is over, the powers felt and the insights temporarily possessed seem to depart again. Nothing new is left over. The experience is most definitely energetic. Franklin called it a “current of bliss” and, in his description, even used electrical analogies. Bruno Gröning (1906-1959), a German faith-healer, spoke about the Heilstrom, the healing current. My own limited experience was also an unmistakeable perception of a powerful but benign vibration, of life and of vitality. It brought the very concrete I walked upon to life.

Now it strikes me that all of the people who have such experiences—except the few who experience them spontaneously—engage in inward practices like prayer and meditation, usually coupled with self-disciplines the aim of which is to shut out distractions, including those produced by the body itself. They are quite willfully seeking some internal origin. When the Buddha sat down under the bodhi tree just before his own personal breakthrough, he was determined to remain there until it happened. To be sure, the onset of the experience happens when it does. It can’t be forced. Sometimes it coincides with the effort. Often—as many Zen stories illustrate—something quite irrelevant triggers the satori. But effort is present in the context. A preparation is present. The focus, the personal viewpoint, has changed. And very often, these practices are also undertaken in a religious context. It is not therefore surprising that the experience itself should be explained in a religious way. The mystic is assaulting heaven—and the gates open! Overwhelming grace descends.

Long years of pondering this subject has gradually convinced me that the mystical experience is probably a temporary exposure to the life force—which, in my thought, originates in God. But I think of this concentrated and all-knowing energy as the creating impulse itself, not its culmination. By contrast with it the individual feels that ordinary reality, as we perceive it, is just ashes and cinder, but as I parse this complex of experience, it seems to me that the Creator intends the world to be—and to be what it is—a fantastic elaboration all of which, when you force your way back to the upwelling point of this energy, is still all fused into a single unity.

To put this in more mechanical terms, the aim of creation is precisely what we see around and beyond us, namely the vast societies of life, the churches militant, suffering, and triumphant. The vector of this great energy is in the direction of complexity, not fusion. Opening ourselves to the grace that flows is definitely desirable, but when it flows so potently as to disable us, we may have gone too far.

In this context, time and again, I’m reminded of the Sufi differentiation between those who do and those who do not have the option, as Idris Shah once put it in one of his books. What does this saying mean? To me it means that genuine spiritual achievement is to cultivate our ability to choose. In a great storm of any kind—not least one of vital energy—we have no option. For this reason Sufi sheiks did not approve of ecstatic experiences, thinking that those who underwent them were insufficiently trained. The real unveiling, when it happens, is something else. You retain the option.

Hierarchy of Faculties

We have a tendency to associate the real with the tangible, the sensory. We can’t touch thoughts and therefore it seems that they cannot hurt us. “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” At the trivial level the old saying is true enough, but not in social reality. A sentence of death from the high bench has killed many people. And many millions have perished at the commands of rulers throughout time. An intention killed them—and you can’t touch intentions either. They turn physical as if by magic. Nonetheless, we live so embedded in the physical that we give it more value than higher faculties like intuitions and seemingly immaterial perceptions that reach us from the patterns of things.

What is in closer conformity with reality is that experience is basic. We’re very loyal to our experiences and defend them doggedly against abstract contradiction. Experience, however, is not by any means self-explanatory; it’s simply a datum; thus error can enter into the situation if the experience is wrongly interpreted. My rule of thumb is to trust experience above all but to test its explanation, in myself as well as in others, by the use of reason. But if the reasoning attempts to deny, denigrate, or nullify my experience, I will reject that logic no matter how pristine. The other side of the equation, therefore, is that experience is a test of reason. Thus we make progress in understanding the world.

The very highest forms of experience—of the sacred, the numinous, the poetic, the visionary—are very much real experiences. But they are impossible to share; for others to confirm such matters, they too must undergo something analogous. Attempts to share tend to take artistic forms. And those who “understand” such communications have to have what E.F. Schumacher, quoting the scholastics, called adaequatio—adequacy.* Some people get it, some don’t. The difference is that some are prepared by experiences, others lack them. The Sufis say that “the secret protects itself.” This is another way to say the same thing. We can’t grasp what we haven’t experienced. The outsider will interpret reports of experiences that exceed his or her adequacy in terms of personal experience, thus using a lower framework. And here errors are likely—not least assigning such experiences to lunacy. For this reason it’s pointless to argue about matters of this sort with those who begin to bristle defensively. Their opposition is perfectly logical. Even to consider in a neutral, tentative way what someone else is claiming is already a sign of advanced preparation. Therefore the stance or attitude of the other party foreshadows the reaction that will follow.

If reality encompasses a vast spectrum from the subatomic upward, including the material, the mental, and the spiritual, one might say then that sticking with stones is to limit oneself. Therefore the higher faculties, although very much more difficult to interpret, are of higher ranges of reality. You’ve got to get used to the altitude before you can operate with a modicum of competence there.
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*Developed in A Guide for the Perplexed, Harper & Row, pp. 40-60.

Communications II

In the spiritualistic context, communications are understood as messages between two agents, one embodied and one a spirit—with the medium acting as an enabler or intervenor. Here the activity is equivalent to “conversation” or to “exchange.” But what is it that is being exchanged? Meanings capable of being rendered into concepts.

In ordinary experience, however, we also encounter all kinds of other forms of communication that don’t display real-time “give-and-take” characteristics. Examples are signs and broadcasts. These are messages put out by an agency on purpose; the message has a meaning; but when it is issued, no one in particular is being addressed; the target is everyone in general. These broadcasts are in the “Hear ye, hear ye!” category. They also convey concepts. The message may be spoken or written or may simply be an image, thus a left-pointing arrow to indicate a sharp curve on a highway.

A particularly interesting form of this “broadcast-style” communication is music. For purposes of discussion, let’s eliminate words set to music as in songs or operas and stick to pure compositions of sound. These musical messages have structure. In that they aren’t random noise, they have meaning. If we stick to clear and obvious forms, we can identify the seeming intention behind the music, or its the content. It may be rousing, martial, passionate, pastoral, sensuous, innocent-childish, tense (used in movies), lulling, exalted, transcending, and so on and so forth. Music therefore has a meaningful content usually labeled as emotional. The feelings aroused are a good match for other experience that produce the same emotions. Yet another way of looking at music is to see it as a structured form of energy. Its conceptual content is diffused; its feeling content is concentrated. Within the boundaries of the emotion, the listener can apply any number of fitting concepts to the sound. To put this more emphatically, the individual who hears the music is free to interpret it conceptually using his or her own ideas as they happen to occur. The ideas are not explicitly present in the music, but the music is compatible with the ideas. An eerie, tense piece of music may be added to a ghost-movie, a spy-thriller, the story of a lovable dog about to encounter a snake, a marital conflict, and on and on. The eerie music, however, is incompatible with love-scenes or birthday parties or the birth of a baby—unless the newborn just happens to be Damian.

I’ve gone in this direction—broadcasting, music—by way of introducing a speculation. It is that meaningful flows of energy, thus structured forms of energy, may be reaching us in this dimension from the order of the soul. I don’t conceive of these as coming from active agencies, thus angels or demons; others use yet other words for immaterial agents. I think of these flows as part of the normal environment of the soul-order, flows that have a dynamic behavior. The individual’s inner state can draw such energies towards itself; if the inner state is high, it will draw high energies; if the state is low, it will draw negative forms of the same energy appropriately structured.

Now here I’m really reaching, thus I’m engaging in pure speculation, but I think that experience provides a foundation of evidence for it. To give that experience a recognizable name, let me call it inspiration. Everyone experiences inspiration, but it is particularly obvious to those engaged in the arts. You have a general idea, a feeling and a fuzzy concept of what it is you’re trying to express. And suddenly the inspiration is right there. The hands start moving, images begin to flash, the words begin to flow. This last process, a reaction to the inspiration, is the action of the person, I believe. But the inspiration that triggers it is energy attracted by the inward groping of the agent’s will. Inspiration will flow—if the individual is at all in a listening state. But the result is due to the individual. A confused, unskilled, careless person will produce a chaotic sort of work, no matter how strong the inspiration is. The highly skilled, intelligent, and disciplined person will produce a fine piece of work even from a faintly-perceived inspiration. Great works of art signal very high gifts, very deep listening, and very strong flows from the beyond.

With this I have at least outlined how communication from the beyond, from another order, reaches ordinary people on more or less a daily basis. This is a hypothesis, of course. The reason why I find it plausible is because I’m certain that our consciousness, mind, soul—you name it—originates elsewhere and, in its normal operation, it uses energies from its native order even on the material plane. What we call inspiration is the noticeable manifestation of this linkage. It may very well be present in many other ways of which we remain unaware. One of the reasons why we notice it is because it surprises us. We get the most wondrous ideas when we are “in the zone,” as the phrase has it. We know full well what kinds of results we usually get. Great art, even a fortunate poem, is inexplicable in the ordinary way.

Some individuals are quite dense and “hear” very little of this heavenly music; at the other extreme are very gifted people who literally swim in the current. Being closed or open to the flow does not automatically translate into tangible achievements. Two factors are involved. To be effective in translating the inspiration, the individual must be competent in the tooling of this world as well. It did not in the least surprise me, therefore, that in Sufi teachings—one of the most mystical approaches to reality—the minimum qualification of the initiate is that he or she should be a “householder,” meaning somebody who’s already proved his or her competence in getting things done in the real world.

Left to the Poets

All communications ultimately rely on shared experience, and if the experience is subtle, making it known turns problematical; one can’t rely on adequacy in the listener. The world to which Henry Corbin points, the mundus imaginalis, is actually accessible to us, but our experiences of it, especially if they are mild (as mostly they tend to be), we routinely class as mere emotions; we mislabel and dismiss them.

Corbin himself, writing in preface to his Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, writes as follows about the imaginal realm:

…the fact remains that between the sense perceptions and the … categories of the intellect there has remained a void [in modern times]. That which ought to have taken its place between the two, and which in other times and places did occupy this intermediate space, that is to say the Active Imagination, has been left to the poets.

The poetic and the spiritual are rarely conflated for the simple reason that we class “spiritual” perceptions with religious piety whereas we place the “poetic” in a mental region marked with the sign of Eros; Eros we classify as an inhabitant of the sensate dimension. Herein lies a vast potential for misunderstanding.

The poetically-gifted (in my language “poetic” includes all of the arts) are our most experienced travelers in the imaginal world, not, to be sure, because “imagination” is often involved in the creative arts but because these arts draw their sustenance entirely from the “third” world that Corbin claims modernity has written off. Here the potential for misunderstanding is even more marked. If we select, say, ten novels from the library entirely at random, running through the fiction aisles, maybe with some special luck we’ll manage to pick up one book strongly marked by the poetic spirit. The rest will all be mere entertainment, indeed ordinary secular works. Artistic talent and poetic gifts don’t always coincide. The greats are not always fluent, the clever are rarely poets. Here that common phrase applies: “I know it when I see it.”

There is a Sufi saying that “The mystery hides itself.” This applies with special force to the genuine products of the poetic power. Only those who have ears will hear. The perception remains always private and cannot be socialized—another way of saying that it cannot be conveyed unless the hearer is himself, herself able to hear the message.

The Fable of the Island

The Gnostic idea is almost never contemplated by modern people realistically, not even by those with a transcendental bent. The chief reason for that, perhaps, is that the organic world is too well made to assign it to a bumbling demiurge. At the same time there is pattern in nature which, alas, suggests the—natural. It is therefore difficult to see Nature as the creation of an all-knowing and perfect craftsman. There is too much reliance in it on chance and circumstance. It is for this very reason that in Catholic tradition, anyway, the Fall of the world is stipulated in order so that we can have it both ways. This tradition envisions the “original” creation as perfect. The “natural” world comes about later as the consequence of the Fall. Concerning the Fall we might paraphrase Voltaire and say that if it hasn’t happened we’d have to invent it. Pick any period in history at random and you will see a clear madness overshadowing human reality. Meanwhile the natural world retains its sanity and innocence while also displaying a maddening ambiguity: unconscious consciousness, unaware wisdom, blind teleology. For a quick capsule of Gnosticism, look here.

Idries Shah offers what he calls a fable in The Sufis (Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964) vaguely reminiscent of the Gnostic myth but quite different in thrust. It depicts a fall, but in a different way—as a necessary adaptation. I count myself a friend and admirer of the Sufi tradition—drawn in its direction precisely by such formulations as Shah’s fable of the Island. Shah proposes—not as a factual situation but as a framework for thought—that humanity might be pictured as a community living in a much more perfect state. Its leader foresaw a change coming about which would cause the community’s habitation to be unusable for an extended period of time. In consequence a new place, an Island, is found as the home for the community, but with conditions such that the individuals must undergo a radical transformation to survive in the new environment. These adaptive transformations are so profound that return to the more favorable climes of the motherland requires a long and arduous process. The community moves from a subtle and superior world to a coarser and grainier reality; to make the process easier on people, most members are caused to forget the original country except in the vaguest sort of way; they’re shielded from the past to lessen their pain of loss. There is a good deal more to the fable, but this much will suffice here. Naturally I would suggest that people read the book—at least its first chapter, where the fable is presented.

Unlike most myths, Shah’s fable avoids producing a full-blown cosmology. What he presents (at least as I interpret it) is a picture of large scale interactions between dimensional realms—interactions severe enough so that their inhabitants must adapt themselves to unwished-for events. The fable works as an explanatory framework under certain assumptions. One is that many communities of beings exist, thus a vast concourse of freedom. The communities live in similarly many environments, the environments themselves subject to lawful changes: a realm of necessity. Shah leaves untouched how all of these communities and environments might relate to one another. Suffice it to say, simply, that freedom and necessity, in interaction, can produce major changes requiring adaptation; and some of these will be better than others.

We might call this a modified Gnostic myth—or a modernized, secularized Gnostic tale. Instead of an errant aeon called Sophia, the cause of the world’s fall from a level of subtle sophistication and deep purpose to a much coarser level of materiality and chance is explained in terms of something like climate change (in an era when that phrase did not have modern connotations of global warming). But never mind. This fable also depicts a fall, and that’s really my point: some kind of a fall must be assumed. The negative aspect of the Fall is required by the “natural” arrangement of things; our world is far from perfect. The presumed higher origin (the higher region from which we fell) is required by the presence here of consciousness and intelligence. I myself consider the doctrine of intelligence as an “emergent form of matter” ridiculous because logically insupportable—really a form of magic. For those who can accept the modern Big Bang theory without unease (I myself am very uneasy about it), the Big Bang might actually represent a factual underpinning that weird things happen in the cosmos out there.

This fable-making is really a balancing act. You have to admire nature, meaning organic nature; you cannot go to the lengths Gnostics went and simply dismiss all of it; we know too much to agree with that sentiment. What Shah’s fable does is to introduce a neutral point of departure (disturbance of our habitation) and a creative response to it by an already conscious community. Indeed the “island” might be viewed as a very good symbol for the Earth. Not a lot of places in the material cosmos are suitable for life. The cause for the evil we experience as genuine evil, meaning willful evil, is ignorance produced by the occultations of a new habitation. The price we pay for a reasonable fable is to defer grander explanations to another time. There is no explanation here of how either the community or its environment originated. And even that is justified: Why should we presume total knowledge of everything in our community of being? Especially while, as Shah would have us see, our job now is to make it back again from our temporary abode on the Island to the lands where we originated.