Those Subtle Bodies

For there is customarily put in question among learned men, whether all the Angels, that is, the good and evil ones, are corporeal, that is, have bodies united to themselves. Wherefore some think, who supporting themselves on the words of St. Augustine [in On Genesis], seem to say, that all the Angels before their confirmation and/or lapse had bodies of air formed from a purer and superior part of the air, able to work, not to suffer; and that for the good Angels, who persisted in the Truth, such bodies were conserved, so that in them they may be able to work and not to suffer, which bodies are of so great a refinement, that they do not prevail to be seen by mortals unless they have been clothed over by some grosser form, with which assumed, they are seen, and with which laid down, they cease to be seen; but to the evil angels their bodies were changed in their downfall, into the worse quality of the thicker air.  For just they were cast down from a more worthy place into an inferior place, that is into the shadowy air, so those tenuous bodies of theirs were transformed into worse and thicker bodies, in which they would be able to suffer from a superior element, that is from fire.

    [St. Bonaventure, quoted in Peter Lombard’s The Second Book of Sentences, Distinction 8, Part I, Chapter I]

It is instructive to discover that very high-ranking learned men in the thirteenth century, and Doctors of the Church would seem to qualify here, spent a great deal of time pondering matters beyond the Borderzone. St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), a Franciscan, was one of these. The entire Second Book of Sentences is available on the Internet (link), in Latin and in English translation, from which I’m quoting a mere snippet above—having eliminated parentheses and the bracketed insertion of Latin words.

While this sort of thing puts me in right honorable company—in that a good deal of my time is spent on quite similar contemplations—I know just how such a text must strikes the modern mind; my own is modern enough to feel it viscerally. The present consensus on angels within Catholicism derives from the dominance of Thomas Aquinas, who held that angels do not have bodies. Other views were held or actively examined within the greater community of faith in earlier times, as the quote indicates. For Aquinas the definition of substance as the Aristotelian duality of matter and form ends with humans (in the hierarchy of beings); but others, among them St. Bonaventure, thought that hylomorphism (to use the Greek tag) extended to higher realms as well; the “matter” of those regions, however, was of a more airy or spiritual (call it subtle) kind.

Swedenborg would have agreed. For him it was a matter of experience. For the early thinkers of Catholicism, authority was rooted in scriptures and their interpretations by thinkers of some fame and gravitas. But when I read texts such as the one above, I am reminded of Theosophical conceptualizations drawn from a completely different spiritual tradition—and of the writings of David Bohm who proposed, based on the study of physics, that the world holds at least two Orders—the conditioned order (“matter”) and the unconditioned (“intelligence”); I think of these, myself, as matter and agency. But when I am reading Bohm, I always think of Aristotle. And then I think: “What goes around, comes around. Nothing new under the sun.”

Two Views of the Prophetic

For years now I’ve been sorting Swedenborg’s experiences, and I’ve concluded that he was genuine, meaning that he really did see into the regions beyond the border. His interpretation of that experience is my focus today. He came at it with assumptions based on his religious background. He assumed that no one could possibly see heaven and hell without God’s permission. An orderly reality with clearly demarcated rules, God’s rules, actively enforced by God, underlie his interpretations. A direct result of this assumption is that what he saw was shown to him, purposefully shown. It was therefore God’s intention to communicate, through Swedenborg, with humanity.

This view underlies all prophetic callings: God selects individuals through whom he intends to communicate. The experience is real, overwhelming, and, from the perspective of ordinary life, radically novel, indeed incredible. But the experience itself is, if anything, even more compelling that earthly life. If the person retains his or her mental stability and ordinary functioning in this world, that person will feel singularly selected. If that eruption overwhelms the person, he or she will be judged mad; the subject will feel mad too, in lucid moments.

An alternative to this view might be called naturalistic. Using that word we don’t deny God’s existence, creation, or an order ruled by law; but it throws a doubt on the prophetic as a “divine institution.” The naturalistic view assumes that while two realities certainly exist, the life manifesting in material bodies is shielded from the much greater Subtle World by, among other things, the circuitry of our brains and the “noise” of the coarse sensory input we must have and process, without distraction, to keep ourselves alive and well here. But that shielding can malfunction—like everything else in the material real. When that happens, and for whatever reasons—genetics, drugs, injuries, and even deliberate efforts—the usual consequence is madness; the very rare consequence is a visionary career; in the rarest of instances, a prophetic mission emerges. Is it a divine intervention? No more so than the failure of the shielding. I am, of course, far from asserting that what we call a higher world is just plain ordinary madness. What I propose, instead, is that there are ways to see into the subtle world; but when that event takes place, the results will vary. Those most able to manage the extraordinary influx of information, while also retaining a certain mental and physical control, will be those viewed as visionaries and prophets. And Swedenborg was one such figure.

I’ve known two schizophrenics intimately. One was a young man, another a man of my own age; I was then in my late forties; both have passed away, the young man by drowning, the other by self-immolation, burning himself to death in a closet in an asylum. The young man’s occasional ravings included astonishingly biblical-sounding Jeremiads; and he was essentially ignorant of religion beyond the conventional understanding of that word—pronouncedly so of the Biblical type. The other was a close friend and colleague of mine and a family friend for many years. When his dreadful time came, he sometimes called me long distance from the asylum where he died—and gave me passionate guidance reaching him from somewhere on things I had to do; these were also delivered in the same biblical manner. These two are representative of bad cases—in which our shielding fails completely and all control is lost.

The positive cases indicate great trials but have luckier outcomes. People see into that world, indeed travel and subsist there, do so consciously, and, as Swedenborg often says, “in the waking state”; consciousness, intelligence, judgment continue to function. How they interpret their experience much depends on their times, education, and backgrounds. A case like this, which might be yet another variant, is that of the American healer, prophet, and psychic Edgar Cayce (1877-1945). Cayce underwent significant sufferings in his life directly related to these “gifts”—the gift of maladaptation.

What the testimonies of such figures provide our ordinary world are indications that something vastly greater than we know exists, that it is an extraordinarily complex world—and that being in a body confuses our understanding of it. The most extensive survey that any prophet has provided us, and in a systematic manner, is Swedenborg’s. But his vision, in detail,  is just as difficult of access for his readers as it was for him—but his readers do not have the experiences Swedenborg attempted to describe and to interpret.

How Trustworthy is Swedenborg?

This post is rooted in the mundane—my waking up this morning, unusually refreshed. Then came the thought: I wonder if we sleep in the next world? I certainly hope so. We so need those periods of non-existence. In turn came the thought: Do angels sleep? Swedenborg said that they do, sort of. They have cycles. Indeed they also have houses. The venerable Swede says, in Chapter XXI of Heaven and Hell, “Their dwellings are just like dwellings on earth which we call homes, except that they are more beautiful. They have rooms, suites, and bedrooms, all in abundance. They have courtyards, and are surrounded by gardens, flowerbeds, and lawns.” [§ 184]. Then came to mind the title to this post: Yes. But how trustworthy is Swedenborg?

Even to talk about that—except dismissively—one has to credit the possibility that another world exists and one that is, furthermore, in some ways analogous to ours. The mundane testimony for that comes from near-death experience reports. In these we are occasionally told of beautiful places, buildings, landscapes, gardens, walls, and the like. Beings appear—including people whom the experiencer recognizes: relatives who have passed on. Most of these reports are emotionally charged, brief, and the testimony is neither long nor detailed. Beautiful flowers, waterfalls, meadows, etc.

The core of my question, therefore, has everything to do with the testimony itself—and the qualifications of the witness. Swedenborg’s experiences began in his maturity, at 53. At that time he was already a well-known and accomplished scientific writer and public administrator. His access to other realms was more or less continuous, thus more extensive than brief NDEs. That that realm was as difficult for him to understand as it is for the near-death experiencers, who often remark about the oddity of their experience, is clear from Swedenborg’s diaries, never intended for the public. That world is different, yet in some meaningful sense similar to this one. Not only in Heaven and Hell but in his other writings, Swedenborg is constantly emphasizing the differences. He formulated the concept of “correspondences.” That notion is that what is below has corresponding realities above; but what is above is not literally what is below. Therefore angels have recurring cycles of consciousness; they experience heaven intensely at the apex of the cycle, as almost an absence at its nadir. In Swedenborg’s attempt to convey this, he speaks of feelings of heat and light and of cold and darkness. And angels cycle because they are still developing, and these changes are of help in that process. When he speaks of bedrooms, he means that they have places of rest that correspond best to what we mean when we retire to our bedrooms, but both “places” and “rest” must be understood as inner soul-states (§ 155).

One more note. Swedenborg’s angels do not correspond to the beings described in Scholastic philosophy. They are advanced spirits. No angel is a species unto itself; all spirits are of the same kind but differ in degree of perfection. Furthermore people can and do eventually advance and themselves become angels. But this note merely to mark out the ground, not to commit theology. This post is about a kind of modified empiricism: knowledge gained by experience, and not necessarily merely of the sensory variety.

If the beyond is different but yet in some ways corresponds to this realm, that would explain why different people report different but very similar things. To link the two the experiencer must interpret those more ethereal phenomena. And in such a context, the skill, intelligence, and experience of the witness are important. Swedenborg, therefore, skilled in observation and in relationships by a life of scientific study, and long exposure to the phenomenon, is probably a very trustworthy witness. And I can go to sleep tonight reassured to think that angels are also in their bedrooms and getting some necessary down-time.

What the Muon Told Me

Elsewhere the other day I had occasion to note (to paraphrase Wikipedia) that an elementary particle is one not known to have a substructure. Not known, to emphasize, to be made up of yet other entities. While I conventionally assent to this, something tells me, “It ain’t so.” Beneath the muon, electron, strange quark, and such must surely be a wealth of structure yet—and so on ad infinitum. But that known refers to us. In a way, as we’re now constituted, we are the limit. In one direction the elementary particle—in another the black hole or the Big Bang, the singularities. Like death itself they are but bulky, visible stone markers of various border zones.

So I went on a walk and, watching the leaves fall, unwrapped an old cosmological fossil from my collection. Like many children so I too have had this thought quite early: Beneath the smallest the yet smaller; above the greatest the even greater. I encountered that same idea later in sophisticated wrapping in David Bohm’s writings on physics, thus Bohm’s suggestion that when we encounter singularities we’ve simply exhausted our theoretical powers and need to shift our gaze further to the left, right, up, or down. New laws will then eventually become perceivable; they won’t abolish our old theories but will render them as applicable to a narrow range of reality rather than to the All. A Grand Unifying Theory will never be discovered because reality is limitless.

To put that into the context of this blog, there is no borderzone. Where we see a radical discontinuity what we really see is simply the darkness of our ignorance. The reason why we cannot see beyond the border (lets call it death), is because we are so well adapted to a narrow range of reality, what we call this, the well-known here and now. What if this is simply a very dense form of reality. When we first came into this region, we couldn’t see a damn thing—because our powers of perception are suited to a much more subtle realm. Let’s suppose that we tried to adapt, to figure out what happened. We began manipulating the coarse matter of this realm at the subatomic level. Our feeble powers could actually do things at that level, not at the gross. Slowly, gradually, we succeeded in shaping structures. These in turn gave us more and more abilities to get a handle on this new environment. We used the matter of this realm itself to make it show us what it is. We learned to maintain these structures—by feeding them, as it were. We devised ways by which they would reproduce. This, of course, is my (let’s call it sci-fi) notion of Chemical Civilization.

We are accustomed to thinking of the realms beyond (heaven, hell, etc.) as different in kind, not merely in degree. But what if they are not? What if Reality has many, many regions with many different kinds of…let me simply call it density. What if matter is always and everywhere present within it, but differences in its structural arrangements make it more or less manipulable by agents. What if there are also agents everywhere, and, like us, have the same characteristics we have. And what if the real difference in kind is that between agents and matter. Arguably that is certainly the case in this here and now. The radical difference we observe in ordinary known reality is between life and matter. Some of us, e.g. Mortimer Adler (see his The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes) would restrict that crucial difference to man, but I apply it to all of life. Agency is present in it everywhere.

Supposing that is true. Supposing, further, that on death, having accumulated subtle energies enough to escape this pocket of coarse density, we find ourselves once more back in a realm much better suited to our “natural” powers. Yes, it has matter, but it is of a much more subtle kind very easily formed by us for self-display and communications. No, we don’t have to eat it in order to “live.” What if our sustenance in those regions is energetic? What if the reason why we were captured in this “pocket” in the first place was because insufficient quantities of those energies reached us here? (Something analogous to that is suggested in Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series.) Would everything then suddenly turn heavenly?

Interesting question. A good answer to that might run as follows. No. Nothing’s really changed except the density—but that does make a difference. Agents there, as here, are free. And they’re either drawn to ever greater unity or ever greater denial of the same. Good guys, bad guys. Still all there. But in realms of lighter density—where we do not need machines by means of which to see and “live”—where space is not, therefore, as demanding a container as it is here, the good guys will congregate with the good, the bad will cling to their like. And some will still vacillate between two minds. Heaven, hell, and purgatory. Your choice. Strong hints like that come to us from the writings of Swedenborg—difficult of access although these are because the old Swede would try to be a prophet and explain every the and and in Genesis in endless volumes of erudition.

Well, my walk is over. The falling leaves are wonderfully bright, so yellow. Sun shines in this lovely pocket of deep density.

The Dance Hall of the Dead

The knights of reason get things right in the hard world of concepts, but for inspiration we look to poets, visionaries, and to mystics. Storytellers belong to the latter tribe, albeit at the humbler working level, hence we often learn something about mysterious and hidden matters from novels and the like. From Tony Hillerman we have The Dance Hall of the Dead, a vivid glimpse into the religious life of the Zuni Indians, a tiny group, part of the Pueblo Indians, about 12,000 all told today, less than 8,000 living the Pueblo life. Yet in that obscure and ancient tradition lives a mythological conception you will find echoing the experiences of Swedenborg, say, of the Tao Te Ching, with hints of reincarnation included. But it takes poetic imagination to do the fusion I’m suggesting.

Here is a summary in Hillerman’s novel put into the mouth of a fictitious Franciscan, Father Ingles. Ingles is speaking.

“What made me think of Kothluwalawa was that business of the dance hall. If you translate that word into English it means something like ‘Dance Hall of the Dead,’ or maybe ‘Dance Ground of the Spirits,’ or something like that.” Ingles smiled. “Rather a poetic concept. In life, ritual dancing for the Zuni is sort of a perfect expression of …” He paused, searching for the word. “Call it ecstasy, or joy, or community unity. So what do you do when you’re beyond life, with no labors to perform? You spend your time dancing.”

Now it turns out that this place, in scholarship as well as in the novel, is a sacred lake near the place where the Zuni river joins the Little Colorado in Arizona. Its formal name is Ko-tluwallawa. Ko stands for “god” and “tluwallawa” for town, city, or pueblo. Thus the name really means “god-town” and also, as I will rapidly show, the Abode of the Dead.

To quote a scholar (A.L. Kroeber, link) here is the original myth of how the watery Dance Hall of the Dead came about: “As the ancient people crossed the [Zuni] river, the mothers dropped their pinching and biting children, who turned into tadpoles, frogs, turtles, and other aquatic animals and descended to the ‘god town’ in the sacred lake, and there at once became the kokko.”

Now the knights of reason will have some problem with that myth—and doubly so when they are told that for the Zuni the word kokko means “gods.” In the Zuni conception the dead are gods—much as in Swedenborg’s writings all angels are former humans. This view has greatly puzzled scholars; they’ve evidently ignored or dismissed voices like Swedenborg’s. The kokko, mind you, aren’t God. That person, in Zuni culture, is Awonawilona, the supreme being, thought of as bisexual, referred to as He-She, the giver of life and present everywhere. Parsed apart further (by Kroeber), the word really means He-She who owns all roads, paths, and ways—and someone like me can’t help but immediately to think of the Tao.

The hint of reincarnation I mentioned above comes from a Zuni belief that every person has an appointed path his or her own—completion of which is mandatory and may not be cut short by suicide, however caused, including excessive grief. Those who thus violate the dispensation must complete that path first before they can descend into the sacred lake and take up their dance in the Dance Hall of the Dead. What little literature is readily available to me does not describe how “finishing the interrupted path” might be accomplished, but it does strike me that in Ian Stevenson’s studies most of the cases of people who recall previous lives feature individuals who died young and by violent means. They remember interrupted lives.

On the Psychic

Turbulent Terminology

Humanity’s many experiences of the “psychic” are undoubtedly based on the same fundamental experience. Terminology obscures this fact. Let me give some examples. We almost never think that “psychics” and “saints” belong to the same category. Nor do we view insanity as a “species of psychism.” People we call “mystics” (Jacob Boehme comes to mind) are rarely designated psychics. We refer to Swedenborg as a philosopher or seer, never as a “medium”—although he also communicated with the dead, as mediums are supposed to do. In some circles a designation like “shaman” is more acceptable than a designation like “sensitive.” Healing phenomena occur but are explained in different ways all based on context. If the healer comes from what is viewed as a “backward” culture, he or she is practicing witch-craft, if from a religious, he or she manifests miraculous power, if from a secular modern, the healing comes from a “healing stream”; an example is the German healer, Bruno Gröning. Santaria is an interesting hybrid in which pagan and Christian derivations are synthesized.

Terminology obscures the underlying elements—because the “psychic,” generally speaking, lies below the salt and no theory to explain it dominates. But that the phenomena observed are closely related should be obvious to any alert observer. Sainthood is associated with the “miraculous,” hence processes of sanctification involve the documentation of such events. These phenomena occur in and around the holy. Padre Pio and Solanus Casey are figures in my own time—so is Therese Neumann, who, however, has not advanced as far as Casey in the process. But we discover precisely the same kinds of phenomena associated with figures outside religious cultures too—or in cultures where no institution designates such people “saints.”

Terminology is also confusing because some designations in common use are drawn from specific effects rather than from a structured explanation of what gives rise to the effect. “Psychic” and “sensitive” are generic labels applied to people with obvious gifts (or are these misfortunes?) manifesting at mild levels: they can see the future vaguely, hear people’s thoughts, discover the hidden, find the murdered, help the police, etc. Their gifts are assigned to paranormal “powers”; I take “paranormal” to be a secular concept. But note that when these phenomena manifest in people with religious vocations, at least believers view these gifts as divine interventions, thus as “supernormal.” Mediums are named after a single skill to communicate with the dead in passive trance states—hence that designation. They are not agents, they are media of communications. Some mediums have other powers as well, but these tend to be ignored. When psychics manifest multiple powers and at higher levels, more potent words are joined to the “psychic” designation. An example in my time was Edgar Cayce, “the sleeping prophet.” Cayce brought healing messages after periods of sleep; he was also labeled a “medical clairvoyant.”

Where the religious element is to the fore, the operant assumption is that the miraculous results are in the nature of a reward for superior virtue. Observers rarely contemplate an inverse process of causation, thus that the person is religious in the first place because he or she was first a psychic and, in dealing with that experience, found religion an appropriate outlet and expression of it and virtuous behavior a suitable adaptation for managing the strains and stresses of that experience. That last explanation, I think, is often the best.

Further problems also arise because the psychic phenomenon, as such, may not actually be present in people carrying certain labels. Some saints are psychic, but by no means all saints are. Pope John Paul II, advancing toward sainthood now, was certainly not a psychic, although a splendid human being. Some mediums are psychics—others are frauds or, to put it more mildly, clever entertainers. Some magicians cultivate the label to give their high gifts of trickery and bold illusion additional attractions. And so on. The consequence in all such cases is that the absence of a good theory produces gullibility on one side and acidy skepticism on the other, with the consequence that a long-known body of phenomena do not produce genuine knowledge, and therefore insight, into the human condition.

The above, I think, might be sufficient to present the problem by way of introducing some speculation about the underlying commonality between all of these experiences—ranging from insanity on up to the highest levels of psychic functioning at the level of the great saint or seer. My own working hypothesis follows.

A Hypothesis

As I hope I've demonstrated above, various kinds of phenomena, with all kinds of different labels, are all based on the same fundamental situation, thus that insanity, miraculous events, prophecies, sainthood, healings, mediumship, shamanism, paranormal powers, and much else all have their roots in a single phenomenon. My linking of insanity, say, and sainthood, my strike some reader as highly provocative, perhaps as incendiary—while striking others as so true. In what follows I hope to disappoint people who hold either view.

My working theory on his very difficult and elusive subject may best be presented by using a hypothesis—a description. I start with the notion that the human body is adapted to life in a material dimension and, to make it work effectively, it has a very effective filtering system, built up over uncountable eons precisely to aid us—meaning life—to operate efficiently in a lower dimension and thus to shield us from interference. But interference from what? From an equally complex psychic world. Why we may be in the material sphere rather than in that other one, I will leave untouched for the moment. It might be in order to develop—in order, therefore, to rise to a higher level than the one in which we naturally originate. That hypothetical explanation will serve my purpose here; humanity has suggested other reasons and I’ve mentioned them elsewhere, most recently here. The basics of this hypothesis are simply three. One is that we are here, for whatever reason. Another is that continuous awareness of the other world would interfere with our mission here—development, let us say. And third, that our brains act as selective filtering mechanisms. They keep out the noise of the psychic world, which, at it lowest levels, may be chaotic— while permitting beneficial higher energies to reach us, energies that are helpful in our task, thus grace or baraka. That is the hypothesis.

Now the filtering mechanism has evolved naturally; it is excellent but not fault-free. It manifests at all sorts of levels. If it is too effective, it blocks out not only the noise but also most of the helpful energies of inspiration and therefore renders us excessively insensitive. If it is weak, it might have mixed consequences ranging from favorable to deplorable. Favorable consequences may be high levels of inspiration beneficial to personal and social life; unfavorable might be situations that make people into nervous wrecks. When the filter is too weak, it may cause definite hardship and, at the extreme, insanity. The filtering powers of the brain don’t necessarily affect intelligence or will—nor the other way around. Thus we have an enormous gradient of possible reactions. Some people can deal effectively with a great deal of psychic noise and hardship because of the kind of people they are. Others are not so inclined and will take undesirable paths in consequence, either because they hear too much or too little. Similarly, the most insensitive people can be and often are very straight and virtuous—while others act in a contrary way. The moral power is no more affected by the behavior of the filtering system than it is by other bodily endowments. Some people can deal with beauty—or it may be their downfall; they may deal with handicaps or fail to do so.

Now it seems to me that psychic gifts, considered generically, are all of them instances of relatively weak filtering mechanism. When they fail, insanity is the consequence, and that’s simply a misfortune. Short of that unfortunate result, the kind of “openness” I have in mind may range from what we properly call “gifts” all the way to “challenges.” They are gifts if the openness enhances favorable inflow of higher energies like inspiration or grace. They are challenges when they open people to interference that adds nothing to knowledge and diverts from life’s tasks. Based on my studies, the majority of psychics experience their gifts as burdens. They tend to experience the lower regions of the psychic reality, not the highest. They hear “voices”; some of them call these voices “guides.” Swedenborg’s spiritual diaries contain many accounts of such voices; most of them are marked by a high level of stupidity. Swedenborg also spoke with angels, but most of his exchanges were with very low kinds of entities—not evil, but dumb. Similarly—at least based on my readings—most psychic messages from the beyond are on the same level of mediocrity. Reading them I’ve time and again remarked to myself: “If that’s the stuff that’s coming from the beyond, why bother listening?” But some people have no choice in the matter. For this reason I wonder above, parenthetically, whether some of these gifts are really gifts; they might be more accurately described as misfortunes.

Healing powers are one kind of energy that flows in strongly, in some people, when the filtering is weak. Bruno Gröning is a good example. These power brought him mostly conflict and grief and, it seems, eventually killed him when he could not put it to use. A post on that subject may be found here.

All of the above suggests that a combination of factors inherent in the hypothesis—of filtering, openness due to weak filtering, the variability of the weakness, and the exercise of moral powers by the agents who experience these phenomena—can adequately explain based on a single relationship phenomena as widely differing as mediumship, insanity, and miraculous phenomena surrounding sainthood. Worth some thought.

What the available materials suggest to me is that the psychic world has a certain hierarchical structure and that its coarsest energies (and agencies) are closest to us, its highest more removed. The higher the development of the individual who experiences the “opening” the more likely it is that he or she will become aware of the heavenly ranges. This suggests that development of psychic “organs” is part of our mission here. When these are still primitive, we will still communicate with the beyond when the filtering fails, but with rather slummy regions of it. And this may also be true after we die. If we’ve developed our inner organs, we shall have sight, orientation, and upward mobility; if not, we may remain below.

It occurs to me here worth mentioning chemical mysticism, as it were, and chemical ways of enhancing the filtering. The first had a run, for a while, some decades back when “dropping acid” was a fad, thus the ingestion of LSD. The drug evidently (under my theory) temporarily weakened the filtering system and made the psychic world partially visible to people. Their own developmental level seems to have had an influence on the quality of their experiences, hence the frequent references to “bad trips.” Drug use in religious practices long predates the twentieth century. Similarly, drugs used to treat mental diseases, like schizophrenia, probably in part restore the filtering functions of the brain.

All of this, of course, however long (especially for a blog entry), fails to exhaust the subject. Far from it. It may well be that a certain opening or, negatively put, a “weakening of the filters,” may be a natural consequence of normal development. And this may explain the higher ranges of psychic perception. Whereas organic kinds of weakening, be it as a consequence of genetic causes, disease, or drug use account for the more troublesome aspects of psychic experience. And I, for one, know of at least one case where schizophrenia, followed by grandiose, quasi-religious, but definitely mad visions, was caused by drug abuse.

Fascinating Parallels

Those who read very obscure books and have the stomach for extraordinarily outlandish ideas—such people sometimes stumble across fascinating parallels.

To maintain, for instance, that there are choirs of angels that concern themselves exclusively with kidney functions most people would dismiss as beyond—and I mean way beyond—the pale. Yet Emanuel Swedenborg offers this idea in all seriousness not only in his Heaven and Hell, which he intended for the general public, but also in his Arcana coelestia (Heavenly Secrets) intended for the learned. Swedenborg arrives at this idea because he learned, in his contacts with the heavenly realm that—

It is an arcanum still unknown in the world that heaven reflects a single person if it is fully grasped, but in the heavens this is most common knowledge. Knowing this even in specifics and details is a specialty of the understanding of angels there. Many things follow from it, things which cannot be crisply and clearly conceptualized without this as their pervasive first principle. Since angles know that all of the heavens—even all of their communities—reflect a single person, they actually call heaven “the Greatest and Divine Man.” The term “Divine” is used because the Lord’s Divine makes heaven. [Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, VIII, §59]

Such ideas are jarring unless you get used to them—gradually. John von Neumann once said, and his quip applies elsewhere too, “In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.” So let’s get used to the idea, for the moment, anyway. You can discard this, if you like, after you’ve absorbed the message here, namely that the heavens are organized “organically” into communities of angels that relate to Swedenborg’s “Grand Man,” the higher reality—and that what is in heaven has direct correspondences down here on earth. As above, so below, we might say, echoing Hermes.

With that, let me go on to the archangels of Mazdaism. In the theology of that religion we encounter, first of all, heavenly counterparts to every living individual here on earth; they are the fravartis—and if you’re reading this, Zoroastrians would say that you have a fravarti too. We also have, above them, holy beings, spentas, archangels, who have charge over—and importantly also act as guides for—humanity, animals, plants, fire and light (we might say energy), minerals, earth, and water. I learned of these matters in Henry Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. That book contains a summary of the cosmology of Mazdaism. The formulation is much more ancient than Swedenborg’s, to be sure; Mazdaism, indeed, has been classified as the oldest known higher religion of humanity. Old it is, but the structure of this cosmology is functionally very similar to Swedenborg’s—and like Swedenborg’s correspondences between a material and a heavenly reality, we also find, in Mazdaism, the notion of interacting realms or dimensions a higher one above guiding and constituting the lower. The difference is that Mazdaism conceives of the upper realm as an infinite column of light rather than as a “Grand Man.” The column of light enfolds the heavens—and their mountains, rivers, waterfalls, plains, cities, and habitations. There too, as above, so below—but in the lower realm another column, of infinite darkness, is mixing with the light. And we, engaged in the work of the creation, will either succeed individually or descend into the darkness if we’re tempted by its allurements.

Now to complete this picture, I would offer the proposals of Rupert Sheldrake, a modern, living scientist. Sheldrake is a biologist. Sheldrake suggests that undetectable morphic fields exist and correspond to all material phenomena. They contain the forms and patterns of the material, not simply statically but dynamically as well, thus they also hold patterns of motion and behavior. And these fields are alive in the sense that they can and do change over time. They are a cosmic memory. And all things are in active contact with these fields at all times. We thus have a scheme that parallels Mazdaism: not only living entities but inorganic stuff also takes its guidance, as it were, from vast accumulations of highly organized banks of memory, the morphic fields. Fields exist at all levels and are hierarchically arranged. There would thus be a morphic field specific to mammals as well as for, say, rabbits and people, the latter fields hierarchically beneath the field for mammals. And above the field for mammals would be a more general field for all living entities. The interesting parallel here is that this undetectable but physical reality is proposed as a naturalistic explanation forced on us by looking at matter. We infer these fields from what we see on the ground—and we need the fields as a hypothesis in order to explain certain categories of events that, thus far, we cannot reduce to a chemical or a mechanical sets of causes. The embryo’s development is usually cited as an example. Our science has not been able, thus far, to offer what might be a hard chemico-mechanical explanation for the changes we actually behold.

Sheldrake’s most relevant works here are A New Science of Life. The Hypothesis of Formative Causation and Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature.

Swedenborg’s proposals, and Mazdaism, too, for that matter, are dismissed as outdated religious mumbo-jumbo. We’re beyond such things today. Sheldrake is dismissed on the grounds of parsimony, chopped away by Occam’s razor. Modern science says it doesn’t need yet another level of explanation. Just wait until we’ve figured things out the hard way, by patient experiment. All right. But that view—alongside the earlier mumbo-jumbo dismissal—depends on a hard commitment to the notion of materialism and its consequent affirmation of the meaninglessness of existence.

People like me don’t wish to make that commitment. And for those who don’t, the ideas sketched in here—just enough to become visible—can take on a certain level of interest. To delve deeper, of course, means to endure trials and tribulations not unlike those that science is condemned to accept. But these may lead to insight; those of science promise more of the same old, same old until the sun burns out.

Angels: A Short Overview

Too many articles on angels rapidly bog down. The become historical. They try to explain the twelve angelic orders and their arrangement into four angelic choirs. They delve into biblical references. They deal with the celebrities among the angels. And so on. They almost never touch the core issue that interests a traveler of the frontier. Are angels real? How do they fit the scheme of things.

Every culture believes in angels, but to make the differences clear, let me suggest the following. Only the Judeo-Christian-Muslim cultures—they are genuinely monotheistic and adhere to a belief in a single, all-powerful God—view angels as a distinct category of beings. They project three kinds of conscious beings: humans, angels, and God.

In most other cultures angels are classified as gods and goddesses; they are celestial beings. The higher gods are higher by degree, not in kind. The angelic form, therefore, is not specifically differentiated. Two examples. The equivalent of an angel in Hinduism is a deva, a god or goddess. The word itself is rooted in the concept of the celestial, shining, or luminous. In Mazdaism all beings are conceived to have a fravarti, thus a celestial counterpart; we are twinned with our guardian angel, as it were. And angels of collectives exist as well. Mazdaism might be considered an angelology. In all systems, not least in the Christian, these spirits may be good or bad, and the bad ones are demons.

Staying with the Asian approach for just a moment longer, we see there that the distinction between humans and higher spirits is continuous. Humans are fallen sparks of the divine. The devas are the same sparks at a higher level. The difference is one of condition, not of essence. Only in the western conception are angels a specially created order. And in the Muslim conception (but notably not in Muslim mysticism, e.g., in the writings of Rumi) angels are functions; they’re strictly messengers of God without a will of their own.

The Asian view, which happens to be the view of the majority of humans, has only two rather limited parallels in the West. Swedenborg—and the churches that follow his teaching—hold that angels are simply highly advanced humans, that all angels began as humans—as did all demonic souls. Here is a quote from Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell which makes this point succinctly:

People in the Christian world are totally unaware that heaven and hell come from the human race. They actually believe that angels were created in the beginning and constitute heaven, and that the devil or Satan was an angel of light who became rebellious and was cast out together with his faction, and that this gave rise to hell.

Angels are utterly amazed that there can be this kind of belief in the Christian world, and even more so that people know absolutely nothing about heaven, even though this is a primary doctrine of the church. Knowing that this kind of ignorance is prevalent, they are profoundly delighted that it has now pleased the Lord to reveal to us so much about heaven — and about hell as well—and so as much as possible to dispel the darkness that is rising daily because this church [Swedenborg means this era] is drawing to a close. [Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, §311]

One faith that arose from the Muslim, and strictly-speaking the Shi’ite branch of Islam, has views almost identical to Swedenborg’s. They are the Baha’is.

Interesting, isn’t it? We have a rather ancient grouping of Asian traditions—and tiny minorities in the west—both of which suggest an interestingly parsimonious explanation of the angelic phenomenon. Together these views suggest that a single created conscious agency suffices to explain higher created beings existing beneath the Ultimate creator’s throne. And we belong into that category right alongside angels. The division of this community—which I like to call the soul community—into three parts is based on the operation of our free will. Some are demonic because they’re headed downward, some are embodied, and some are celestial because they are moving upward through the infinite reaches of reality. The explanation of that status in the middle, thus of the souls encased in bodies differs. The Asians view it as part of a descent; we were drawn by the desire for limited experience; in Swedenborg’s view we are experiencing the first state of life as newly created souls.

This will serve as a very general introduction to this subject. To see a much more sophisticated view of the place of the angelic in the order of creation, as described by the immortal poet, Jalal’ud-Din Rumi, a Sufi, I suggest that you read the next post.

Experienced Continuities Between Dimensions

I have now been almost three years, or thirty-three months, in that state in which—my mind being withdrawn from corporeal things—I could be in the societies of the spiritual and the celestial and yet be like another man in the society of men without any difference; at which spirits also wondered;—when, however, I intensely adhered to worldly things in thought; as when I had care concerning necessary expenses, about which I this day wrote a letter so that my mind was for some time detained therewith , I fell, as it were, into a corporeal state, so that the spirits could not converse with me, as they also said, because they were as though absent from me. A case rather similar occurred before; whence I am enabled to know, that spirits cannot speak with a man who is much devoted to worldly and corporeal cares;— for bodily concerns, as it were, draw down the ideas of the mind and immerse them in corporeal things. [Emanuel Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, March 4, 1748]

This quote, taken from the second volume of Swedenborg’s Spiritual Diary, suggest that under certain conditions—not understood as to causation—some people are able to perceive another reality which appears to be continuous with ours. Information about such experience is rarely recorded and, when it is, is brushed aside. So also are Swedenborg’s own experiences. The fact that he was a notable scientist, writer, and a high-ranking civil servant before his experiences began (at around age 57), and that he continued to maintain his high social standing until his death at age 84—traveling the world and in social contact with Swedish society, not least the royal family at its peak—is brushed aside by those who, for dogmatic reasons, simply cannot accept Swedenborg's testimony. But the experience, while rare, is not isolated. Quite ordinary people have such experiences too. Not surprisingly, they do not make a great fuss over them. And sensibly so. Society must have a certain adequacy even to consider such possibilities. And (as I keep pointing out) in periods when organized religion has the hammer hand, people who have such experiences are frequently treated with much greater severity than in our own. In our own they may be marginalized, ignored, and prevented from publishing. In others they are sometimes executed. One such case is that of the Persian mystic and writer Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi (1155-1191). Another mystic I recently mentioned, Mohiuddin ibn el-Arabi, escaped that fate because he had better high-level connections.

I’ve had occasion to look at this subject before in an earlier post, where I first introduced the writings of Henry Corbin—himself a writer who examined the lives of all three of the mystics I mention above. He originated the phrase mundus imaginalis in an attempt to give a name to the dimension to which these individuals all had access. I’ll say more as occasions present themselves.

How Far is the Next Choir?

As a general rule we can’t see into the borderzone. Sometimes individuals penetrate that region, but this almost always happens spontaneously: they aren’t trying. Some few travel deeply into the interior, others remain in the border region but on that side. We gain some knowledge from the experiences of such people. As a general rule, ordinary people credit such stories up to a point—especially if they hear them from trusted friends and family. The sophisticated classes in secular cultures laugh them off, dismiss them, and label those who report such things as mad or delusional. In religious times the sophisticated classes reserve the right to examine such people and either to approve of what they say or to lock them away.

The best known figure to claim such knowledge, himself of the sophisticated classes, was Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the man who conversed with angels and claimed to have visited both heaven and hell. His best known work, Heaven & Hell, is somewhat tedious reading (my complaints are here), but hard work will extract some interesting facts, not least how far it might be to the next choir of angels.

People associate with those they like—and, according to Swedenborg, this continues in the other world as well. In our realm we find this obvious. We spend our leisure with those who please and avoid those who annoy us. If it weren’t so, divorce would not exist, for instance. But in this realm we often have to deal with all kinds of people in order to earn a living and to develop.

But let us now suppose that certain necessities fall away after we die. Without bodies we wouldn’t need physical goods to sustain us. In subtle bodies we might be able to move without walking, driving, or catching flights. To reproduce Swedenborg’s claims, let’s make some assumptions. One is that in the beyond we’d still have perceptions and could orient ourselves in the subtle environment. Let’s assume next that we could move toward those places where we perceive pleasing experiences and away from those where we do not. And let’s add two more. One is that our speed of motion would depend on the strength of our desire (speed toward) or our revulsion (speed away from). Under this assumption, we would move rapidly if we felt strong attraction and slowly if the attraction were only mild. Finally, let’s assume that the source of pleasure or annoyance would come from other spirits in that realm—as here it comes from other people.

Swedenborg’s writings assert that what we here merely assume is actually a fact on the other side.

Now speed and distance are intimately linked. If I can get there rapidly, it’s near, if it takes a long time, it is far. Swedenborg thus projects what might be called a relativistic geography in the Beyond. How far or near certain kinds of communities are from us (that next choir of angels) is determined subjectively. It all depends on whether we are drawn to them or not. The old sage claims that people choose their own places in the afterlife—and do so by affinity. Those who seek hellish regions are drawn to them, enter them because they feel at home with those who are like them; those moving toward one of the multiple heavens that Swedenborg claims exist are also drawn in their direction. And many remain in the world of spirits, a kind of intermediate place, if place is the right word, because they are intimidated by the higher spheres and repelled by the lower.

How far to the next choir? If you like the music, it is near.

Are Spirits in Another Place?

In the writings of famous mystics like Ibn el Arabi, Swedenborg, and others we encounter people who could see or hear spirits while fully awake—but these entities were not visible, audible to others. I’ve also encountered in the writings of other mystics claims that they saw spirits as points or shapes of colored light, the colors seen indicating the spirits’ variable levels of development. In more technical jargon these are labeled as “photisms,” and visions of photisms sometimes accompany certain deep states of meditation; they may also manifest spontaneously.

The question now arises: Where are these phenomena located? I myself think of them as being in another dimension, but all I mean by saying that is that they are ordinarily inaccessible to me. I know. This is a sloppy way of thinking. It’s equivalent to saying that the electromagnetic spectrum is also in another dimension because we can’t perceive it. Right now, sitting on this couch, multiple radio and television programs are passing right through my body, but I neither laugh at the jokes nor shiver at the prompting of the horror movie’s music because—well, I don’t see or hear a thing.

When I want to be more precise, I think of this “dimension” as present all around me but—like the electromagnetic—existing in a field of its own that interpenetrates matter because it is much more subtle. As conscious living beings we are also present in that field but unaware of it. Our bodies are too noisy and command our attention. To put this another way, we are simultaneously present in multiple worlds, but our attention is principally in one; in our current state we are most aware of the physical. But my thought is that our consciousness, intelligence, will, higher emotions, and intuitions are of the subtle kind—are not produced by our bodies. Rather, in many of our activities, we use the body to live a subtle life in the physical domain.

Some spirits and ghosts, in other words, are right here where we are. They come and go—as we come and go across the planet. They may live here or far away—and come here only on visits. Our physical world seems infinite in extent as is that other—and both have “many mansions.” There need not be a spatial difference between this world and the Beyond. Both may occupy the same space. When we speak of the Beyond, we may well be speaking of a state of density different from our current one. From this one we have the devil of a time seeing that one (unless specially endowed). From that one, similarly, the physical may be damnably difficult to see and to contact without the kind of space suit that we here call the body.

The Boundaries of Experience

One of the brute facts that balances out the primacy of intuition is that our perceptions are bounded by experience. Let me illustrate this. Some people have extraordinary experiences; those who lack these and merely hear about them by report, possess very limited means of judging the veracity of the experience itself. But let me make that sharper. I don’t want to limit that word, “veracity,” to mean “speaking the truth.” Suppose I accept that the individual really did have the reported experiences. But even then I can wonder whether or not—in the absence of physical proofs—the interpretation of the reporter would be the same as mine would be if I had the experience. I’ve noted time and time again in life that my interpretation of an event can radically differ from that of someone standing next to me. When it comes to paranormal experience, the only analogue to physical proof is to have “been there,” thus to have experienced the same thing. Lacking that we’re left with analyzing the basic pattern that the experience offers. We can examine it in terms of consistency, comprehensiveness, probability; by analogy to other patterns; and so on.

A famous case is that of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the man who conversed with angels and visited both heaven and hell. The book to read is Heaven & Hell. It was published 251 years ago, written in Latin, then translated—thus it doesn’t have a modern flavor. And it is tough going—but not because it’s difficult. But an awful lot of it is moralizing, a good deal of it is abstract reasoning in which you have to buy into the concepts Swedenborg offers. Here is a paragraph to illustrate what I am saying:

In heaven, there are two distinct loves—love for the Lord and love toward the neighbor. Love for the Lord dwells in the inmost or third heaven; love toward the neighbor dwells in the second or intermediate heaven. Each comes from the Lord, and each constitutes a heaven. In heaven’s open light, the way these two loves differ and the way they connect is clear, but it is quite hard to see this on earth. In heaven, “loving the Lord” is not understood to mean loving His character, but loving the good that comes from Him. Loving the good means intending and doing what is good, out of love. “Loving the neighbor” is not understood to mean loving a companion’s character, but loving what is true that comes from the Word. Loving what is true means intending and doing what is true.

We can see from this that these loves differ the way the good and the true differ, and associate the way the good associates with the true. But this will not fit comfortably into the concepts of a person who does not realize what love, the good, and the neighbor are.

In the margin next to this I scribbled: “Empty concepts.” I’m not exaggerating when I say that much of H&H is filled with paragraphs like that. To extract meaningfully descriptive material requires extraordinary patience. To get beyond the abstract order and the preaching that fills Swedenborg’s best known work, the best thing to do is to read his Spiritual Experiences, two volumes of what were originally diaries. But here one encounters very little order, structure, or context—because here Swedenborg was making notes for himself, often very elliptically: he knew what he meant, and he left out precisely those details that someone who “hadn’t been there” needs to know. You become convinced that he did have experiences—also that they were far from the pristine order he hammers out in H&H. The sense you really have is of a man who is suddenly opened to a very strange, complex, vast reality that he has difficult understanding and struggles to master while, in a way, stretched across a border.

Knowing how crucial experience is—and that it is the only genuine proof of such realities—my approach is to stick closely to the ranges that I can reach, trusting that, mastering the problems of my reality as best I can will prepare me well for what lies ahead—when the Reaper finally comes.

Communications III: People with Paranormal Talents

When we hear about people with paranormal gifts, can we say that they “communicate with the beyond”? I’ve had a few (fewer than five) unambiguous experiences of telepathy. In these experiences communications reached me, but invariably from living people, thus persons alive and well in the ordinary physical order. I’ve had one unambiguous dream of the future, reported here. Its content dealt with a future event in my ordinary life. Nevertheless—but stretching the concepts quite a bit—I include the experiences of people with paranormal talents as pointing at the beyond, not necessarily in the sense of communicating with it but in the sense of entering it temporarily in some way in order to recover information useful in this dimension.

What do I mean by such people? I include psychics and saints of a certain type, specifically those (of the latter) who’re able to heal, see the future, and read minds. In this category I also put people in whose vicinity strange things happen beyond healings: they can find lost things; they appear somehow to arrange things so that problems are solved; etc. The powers of these people range from relatively low to rather spectacular; some few are able to control them better; these individuals can also hide them at will. Saints with gifts are most certainly functionally psychics; they are called saints because they stem from intensely religious cultures or subcultures; they also tend to assign their gifts to supernatural agencies. As do some psychics, of course. I’m sure that we are dealing here with a clustering of experiences that arise everywhere. The interpretation of these experiences—by those who have them and by society—are culturally determined. Cultures in which concepts like “psychic” or “saint” have no currency have their own labels. But descriptions of these people match those found in the West.

Are these people real—or are they faking? I’ve no doubt that they are real. The only reason some few charlatans pretend to have powers is because such powers exist in others and collective knowledge and memory testifies to their deeds. You’ve got to have the real before the imitators make their appearance. Of course they are present—and a good thing too. What would the skeptics do without them?

Problems surround this field. Psychic powers are rarely if ever under the full control of people who have them. The weaker the power the more stochastic it is. In the exercise of these powers, the counterparties involved also need some kind of talent. Even the great healers cannot heal everyone. “Faith” must be present. But faith in this sense is itself a paranormal power, not just a strong thought that willfully asserts: “I believe. I do!” These matters unfold beneath the level of rational mentation. For these reasons psychic detectives, to use an example, do not invariably solve every crime. If they did, such detectives would be in very great demand and pull down very high salaries. But that some psychic detectives, in some instances, do solve hopelessly deadlocked cases is also true.

The presence of such people in the population and the exercise of these powers, when they do work, do seem to me to substantiate the hypothesis that it is possible temporarily to step out of the physical order, temporarily to gain visions from another perspective, and (and especially in the case of healings) bring energies to bear that can produce “miraculous” effects. If you assume, as I do, that two orders are involved, one placed above the other but each one governed by real laws of the universe, then the term “miraculous” loses its sense of “arbitrary intervention by agencies” out of this world. My own interest in these matters is strictly limited to understanding. I don’t seek such powers and all that is imagined to go with them. Most of the people who have such powers in much greater measure than the ordinary human could probably tell you all the hardships that go with a talent that “bloweth where it listeth” as John’s Gospel speaks of the spirit, as of the wind, in 3:8. What I conclude from the presence of these people with paranormal talents is that we are living on the edges of another order; we are generally shielded from it (understood either positively or negatively), but certain arrangements in our make-up permit us sometimes to act from or with the aid of phenomena accessible there.

Now a comment or two about the specific concept of “communications.” In the case of psychics generally, one does not encounter the claim of communications with spirits. Whatever range of the beyond the psychics reach, it is not evidently populated by spirits. The saints, to be sure, experience visions and communications with transcendental figures, but the content of these messages is almost always of a moral or theological portent. There is one famed exception. It is the case of Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth century scientist-seer who claimed to have visited heaven and hell, to have held converse with the angels, indeed to have communicated with the departed. Swedenborg, however, is a very special case and requires separate consideration.

Life: Some "Weird" Speculation

Seriously entertaining really weird ideas has the merit, minimally, of stimulating the mind. The notion that life may be an intrusion into matter from some other order is such an idea. The initial reaction is: “Ridiculous.” We have a powerful pair of feelings: One is that life is precious and must be preserved at all cost; the other is that life can be lost.

That life itself is necessarily linked to living bodies is powerfully reinforced by observing death—and the consequent disappearance of people we know. This is the overwhelming evidence. Where is grandma? Common sense urges us to acknowledge the facts. Anyone attempting to build another case bears a huge burden of proof. The countering indicators are subjective, meaning that unless we have the experience ourselves, we must credit reports. The very strength with which we cling to bodily life supports the skeptical opinion that any belief in surviving death is wishful thinking—laudable, perhaps, engendered in us by evolution itself to make us fight better and longer, but ultimately an illusion.

Having now made the case for the conventional view, we might be safe enough to consider something weird. Suppose reality is much more rationally organized than we think it is. Suppose that at least two orders exist, an order of matter and an order of souls, and that analogous laws govern each. Let’s assume that conservation laws exist in both realms; here it is the conservation of matter, mass, and energy; there it is the conservation, let us say, of life, consciousness, and individual identity. Each of these orders has its appropriate meaning and justification. What these are is knowable, but not necessarily by us. They’re knowable by something that stands above them. This something would ultimately be God, but quite possibly higher intelligences than ours may also be present in a hierarchy of beings and worlds.

Someone might object here and say that such a formulation isn’t very weird. An ordered hierarchy of being can be found in the Aristotelian/Thomistic, in the Neoplatonic, and in other traditions as well. Granted. Let me then introduce a weird element now.

Let’s suppose that one order of reality intrudes into another. This may be possible because in some sense the orders may “touch” … or because a higher order can perceive a lower but not the other way around … or because either one can influence the other in certain ways. In the last case the lower may limit the higher and the higher may enhance the lower. If souls inhabit a realm of relative freedom—whereas matter is governed by relative necessity—it may be possible that souls are either tempted to explore a lower world or may become entangled in it.

Tempted to explore: Let us suppose here that the material world is perceived and while its character is very strange indeed, curiosity draws souls to enter into it even though dangers are sensed. Here the contact is assumed to be entirely voluntary.

Become entangled in: This situation may come about because the arrangement of the different orders produces “border zones” as it were. The lawful behavior of each order may produce what might be labeled naturalistic situations where, from a conscious perspective, “accidents” can happen. Thus, for instances, random events may take place under the influence of the material order or the material order may be temporarily deformed by contact with a conscious order in which collective will may bend the laws of matter. The entanglement may be involuntary. Or it may take place because of carelessness—the absence of attention, the disregard of warning, neglectful behavior.

We need three assumptions to make this weird speculation plausible. The first is that two orders, although different in kind, must nevertheless be able to influence each other. Thus they must have something in common. The second is that one of the orders must be free in some way but limited in others. The third might be put as a constitutional arrangement of the orders such that they are sufficient to themselves and protected each by its own legal framework and internal arrangement.

Let’s put it more concretely. Soul must be able to influence matter, but in so doing it must yield something of itself to matter in order to achieve this influence. Therefore, to govern matter, the soul must accept limitations that it does not otherwise have. When matter is influenced by soul, it is animated. When the soul relinquishes its hold on matter, it can no longer influence it. Matter then returns to its normal state of being—as does the soul.

Let me elaborate on this. What we know about our current reality is (1) that we have free will but (2) its execution always involves mechanical structures—brain-action, muscular-action, and chemical processes. We also know that in a sense we are the prisoners of bodies. We don’t feel like prisoners—unless, of course, we’re experiencing severe pain. But we are prisoners if we assume another world out there which we cannot reach while we’re embodied. In other words, we cannot leave our bodies at will. (There are exceptions to this generalization, but those exceptions are not part of the general consensus.) We can, of course, kill ourselves and thus escape; but we can’t have any certainty about the consequence of such an act. For all we know we might just disappear. While in bodies we cannot see out except through eyes—and what we see is the material realm. If we existed in some other space before, being in bodies now we’ve definitely moved into another order. We’ve become monads relative to our origin, in Leibnitz’s sense of that word: monads have no windows. We can then reasonably assume that life on earth—assuming that another real world-of-the-soul exists—is a mechanically-rendered mirror of that other one, with all the necessary compromises to make a semblance of that other world work reasonably well in the material dimension. To give one example—keeping in mind Swedenborg’s observations of how people move and associate in heaven and in hell—here on earth we cannot move at will and rapidly to join communities of affinity. If we move at all, it requires that we move our bodies. Those have to live somewhere. Joining communities is difficult. We do the next best thing. We associate as we are able. Here we’re obliged to deal with a rigid arrangement of space. Evidently not in heaven—if Swedenborg saw true.

Turned around, we know from the NDE reports that disembodied souls cannot affect matter. They cannot do so because they’re deprived of the necessary vehicle to express themselves in the physical dimension—the one in which the doctors and nurses who attend to their bodies and the relatives who anxiously await the outcome are “imprisoned.” Cut off from our brains, we can neither talk nor gesture.

All this sounds reasonable enough—and not very weird. The weirdness enters if we seriously contemplate that being in bodies is either a choice we made, along with millions if not trillions of others or a cosmic event in which we are involuntary participants. This strange model of reality, however, makes better sense of the known facts than the conventional view.

The modern view is that life is simply a property of matter. Consciousness is an illusion in that, in actuality, we are completely determined by past events and the lawful behavior of matter. Our freedom is also illusory. With death we disappear. Nothing in our life has any stable meaning. Nor does the universe make any sense. To demand that it make sense is part of our illusory mentality. This is an unvarnished but accurate presentation of modern materialism.

Now I would ask the following. Which model would you label weird? The one I label weird or the modern one?

To this people with more traditional views might respond by saying that they don’t believe that atheistic, positivistic, naturalistic nonsense either. They too assert that the cosmos has a meaningful arrangement. Fine. But traditional religious visions are, alas, also weird! Thus I would suggest that a concept like The Fall is entirely consistent with the model I present above—if we assume that souls don’t belong into the order of matter but may have entered it (no doubt advised to avoid it) by voluntary acts. If those acts plunged a vast community of souls into a pit of sorts, one might legitimately talk about original sin. The functional equivalents are there, if, to be sure, in a more secular garb.

We might want to elaborate this model further to see how it might actually work at the level of detail.