What Can’t Be Mechanized

The religious life is a good candidate. But when I think about that, I realize that the religious life is just one aspect of individual soul development. Learning can’t be mechanized either. My meaning for mechanized? I mean repetitive behavior, following rules, repeating formulae, willing the truth of doctrines as opposed, say, to penetrating to their core meanings. The worst kind of mechanization, of course, is tribal behavior—where the faith is just a label of belonging to an “us.”

Excessive use of abstraction is a particularly dangerous habit in those spheres where the genuinely human is the core—provided that my own conviction is correct, namely that we belong to a much more sophisticated, subtle, and free order as souls than we do as embodied souls. It is a mistake to think that people who belong to one of the great religions, especially those with lots of ritual, are uniformly following rites and nothing else is going on. As there are no two snowflakes that are identical so also no two Catholics, Baptists, Buddhists, or Muslims are identical either, or any two adhering to yet some other faith—or none; vast differences separate individuals.

To the contrary however, all athletes train the same way and underpinning all good bridges is genuine engineering functionally identical, whether in their design computers, slide-rules, or just plain reasoning and experience guide the construction. The physical and soul realms have radically different characteristics. The soul escapes all mechanical constraints; you can put the harness on, but it won’t hold the horse. That is both a blessing and a problem. If only we could find the magic phrase or the right sequence of motions…

There is a big difference between the channel that brings the water and the water that it brings. All religious battles are about stonework, embankments, depth, shape, decoration, and such—the engineering of the channel. Interesting subject, to be sure—but the water is the same in all and what it’s all about. But while the human body needs the ordinary water and knows precisely how to use it, individual reception of the higher water, Grace, is much more subtle and complicated. We thirst for it but don’t know what we thirst for. In that realm, where mechanics have no rooting at all, the process of development is invariably and damnably subtle. We have to develop enough as individuals—whether in a system or outside it—before it begins its work in us. It requires learning; but how that process actually takes place is a great mystery, despite vast Babels of learning applied to education all over the world—as, seemingly, we get ever more stupid.

Contrasting Cycles

EWTN maintains a website where mass readings for the day are shown for every day of the year (link). On that site, beneath links to the texts, EWTN also shows a daily quotation taken from famous Catholic saints, councils, or documents. Today’s quote comes from Pope St. Pius X:

Truly we are passing through disastrous times, when we may well make our own the lamentation of the Prophet: “There is no truth, and there is no mercy, and there is no knowledge of God in the land” (Hosea 4:1). Yet in the midst of this tide of evil, the Virgin Most Merciful rises before our eyes like a rainbow, as the arbiter of peace between God and man.

The sun is shining here, the vegetable kingdom’s already dressed for Easter Sunday. The secular mood is cheerful: the economy is turning around, good employment numbers will be unveiled at 8:30 Eastern time—and the WSJ laments the fact that the markets are closed today and hence the DOW and other indices will miss the full swell of investor reactions.

I am reminded of the differences between different kinds of time and their cyclings: the natural, the secular, and the transcendant. We live simultaneously in all of these, awarely or not. In the eternal dispensation the rules are very different. The darkest day, Good Friday, is immediately followed by Easter Sunday, celebrating Christ’s resurrection—an abrupt change we never see in the realms down below. Heavenly time is of another kind and order. It accommodates itself to our flowing time here by a cycle of recurrence.

The Unaging Soul

The difference between the body and soul becomes a matter of actual experience as we advance in age. Our bodies call attention to themselves as their functions slow and problems manifest. The unity of the two structures weakens. This arises one fine day when we pass a mirror and the reflexive thought arises, “Who is that old man?”—and the question, for a nanosecond anyway, is quite sincere. Then comes the time when the unaging soul becomes quite aware of the fact that it is now in charge of a huge pet that’s getting very stumbly. Those who’ve owned an aging dogs and nursed it to its end will know what I’m talking about. As with dogs, so with our bodies. When they’re young they need to be restrained—and the exuberant messes they create need cleaning up—and so with bodies as they age. And in that process, gradually, there is a genuine, visceral sense of separation. The reaction will depend on temperament and situation. Poor old body—on the one hand. Damnation! I can’t do that any more!—on the other.

Some might argue that the soul ages as well, but I’d dispute that. That it doesn’t is quite obvious to those whose inner vigor has always been high, but I’ve also seen quite old, decrepit people suddenly come alive, laugh and joke like children, tell stories in excitement, their eyes suddenly full of light—when appropriately stimulated.

Identification with the body comes naturally in youth, persists in maturity, and then becomes virtually impossible in age. When that identification isn’t allowed to break, the price is depression or, minimally, grumpiness. These are the lessons of experience—rather than the derivations of some theory.  Indeed you can make use of the experience to judge various theories.

The theories are largely built by people in their youth and their maturity. When we get old they have less force; experience has come to rule. That we have unaging souls underlies belief in the afterlife. It is dismissed as the wishful thought of people who can’t go for gusto any more, but that is pure baloney. Death with total disappearance doesn’t phase a person of my age—nor, I’d venture to add, most people, especially those who suffer debilitating ailments. Hey. Let it stop. And if there isn’t anything thereafter, so what? What you don’t know can’t hurt you. The soul, however, isn’t all that sure that it will simply go out like a blown candle. Many people, indeed, hope it will. If it doesn’t, there is that uncertainty again that has plagued us all of our life.

But what has plagued us, all of our life, all arises from our physical dependencies, one way or another—our own and that of those we love and value: their bodies’ health, their children’s bodies’ health, their income, safety, on and on. What that unaging soul anticipates—beyond the body’s final pains—is the pain of separation from people we have loved and once more being reunited with people we haven’t seen for many decades now but who’re still there, we think, in the hereafter.

Covered Over

Aldminster is a fictional cathedral in England created by Joanna Trollope in her novel The Choir. Here is a telling description of the dean’s wife:

When he [the dean] had wooed her and won her—no very arduous task, for she was thirty-two, very eager, yet very exacting as to the breeding and calling of her suitors—he discovered that she thought God was a part of mammon, a kind of high moral gloss available to put upon the good things of the world. He also discovered that she was not teachable, that she lacked not only any kind of self-awareness but, even more dangerously, the smallest atom of humility.

Joanna Trollope is a top-ranked writer and worthy descendant of Anthony Trollope—and, sure enough, one hears the voice of the genuine author as she looks down upon the world and dispassionately notes what she observes.

But questions do arise. Can observers like Joanna Trollop or like me really be sure that such descriptions are correct? If yes then people like the dean’s wife precisely match the modern description of what a human being is, thus a pure mechanism driven entirely by instinct and habits formed by her environment. If the modern description is correct, what do we make of people who can consciously process such a description? That takes self-awareness. But how can self-awareness be the product of mechanism?

The dean’s wife is a healthy, vital, energetic sort, busy, active, and very active in the social round, although quite manipulatively. She’s intelligent enough, indeed quite smart in reading the clues of her environment—and it’s a complex one. I loved this description when I read it the other day. It concentrates quite a few problems in living pattern usually absent from abstract discussions. Here are the problems. If she is really devoid of self-awareness (as her behavior indicates, but it’s typical behavior) and if she is nonetheless intelligent, is intelligence per se part of consciousness?

The traditional view is that intelligence is in the soul, not in the circuits of the brain. The dean’s wife is not a machine. She too has a soul. But then why does she behave in such a way as to seem an automaton—very complex but still one. My take is that she illustrates the human condition—and my favorite thematic, the fall. Her intelligence is too a function of her soul, but she is so covered over by the dust of some very ancient volcanic explosion that she is totally shielded from the higher currents that could bring her awake.

Now what the dean’s wife needs, in order to awaken, is hardship at a high enough degree (which need not be monetary or physical) so that, experiencing the pain, she will find herself. And then her escape from this dimension will begin. Paradoxical situation. The better things are, the less awareness. And those who are aware quite early in youth already should at least in thought be on their knees daily thanking the Lord for the gift of self-awareness. When it’s not a gift and you have to buy it, as it were, you have to pay with suffering.

A Minimalist Conclusion

Once we more or less grasp was life is all about—children are still protected from this—is the feeling that something is wrong—not in minor detail but in general. The traditional western expression of this is that we live in a fallen world; the eastern prefers the notion of ignorance—and the illusory and therefore unreal nature of existence.

At the root of this is what we are—and the fact that we must die. To quote from lyrics by the McGarrigle sisters:

We are meat, we are spirit,

We have blood and we have grace,

We have a will and we have muscle,

A soul and a face,

Why must we die?

…

We are human, we are angel,

We have feet and wish for wings.

We are carbon, we are ether,

We are saints, we are kings.

Why must we die?

Why must we die?

     Kate McGarrigle, Anna McGarrigle, Joel Zifkin, “Why Must We Die”

At the root is that we know this. And the contrast is so great that the “something’s wrong” conclusion naturally arises. None of this requires either revelation from on high or blinding enlightenment achieved by heroic breakthroughs to Nirvana. We can’t give that something any definition, but inside that cloud’s a spark of light. Humanity’s minimal conclusion also introduces the concept of right and wrong—and hence the powerful projection that there is somewhere else where we genuinely belong. Sheer logic tells us so—and a feeling for truth, which is also innate.

Thomas A. Williams and Mallarmé

I chance across books in what sometimes seems a random manner. Here for instance I have in hand Mallarmé and the Language of Mysticism by Thomas A. Williams. The circumstances, thus the other two books I chanced across in the same isolated spot, suggest that this book was my Mother’s acquisition, but already used—indeed already heavily marked up but not in her hand. Yes. She would have found Mallarmé fascinating. Thomas Williams was a Duluth-born but resettled New Hampshire novelist and professor. The book is still accessible on Amazon.

This work is bi-lingual, you might say. About a third is in French because all of Williams’ quotes of Mallarmé and of French authors about him are rendered in the original. Thus unless you’re really fluent in French, this is a bit of a labor. But what I find fascinating here is mostly in English. It contains a quite extensive collection of quotes from people who have themselves had mystical experiences—including names travelers in this zone know well (Eckhart, John of the Cross) and others quite unknown. Next, Williams thinks that the artistic and the mystical experience have the same rooting—if they are inward enough. Thus he ranks Mallarmé among the mystics although the poet was an atheist.

The book has value because it shows something I’ve long thought true, namely that such “penetrations” into the foundations of consciousness don’t produce any meaning beyond a meaningless ecstasy.  They sometimes happen accidentally; very often they are the consequences of very willful determination to get to the root of things—present in Buddhism and elsewhere. But what they are not is Revelation. They also produce, when deep enough, the powerful conviction of the emptiness of ordinary experience, thus reality-is-illusion—which it certainly is not. Therefore my conviction that this method of understanding reality is backwards. To go that way is possible but not intended. It’s either that or all these travails down here and all those galaxies up there are absolutely empty of meaning.

Travel or Community: Good Luck

A person isn’t really tested by solitude. Solitude is beatitude—provided, of course, that it isn’t marred by physical stimulation. Physical equilibrium, solitude: beatitude. Excitement, distraction, over-stimulation: the fallen state.  Escape is really only present when the person is genuinely sovereign in midst of the fallen state, not by merely muting its effects.

The Sufis teach that genuine learning takes place in the world, thus in the midst of hardship, hence they send disciples on travels. Travel is hard work. If you can keep yourself centered in that environment, you’ve got your stuff together; if not, you have a ways to go. A wonderful contrast comes to me by means of Kathleen Norris’ magical book†. She quotes a saying of St. Benedict’s that living in a community is asceticism as such. Or as Sartre once said, “Hell is other people.” The two teachings, in effect, are functionally identical.

Expanding on this just a little. A great chasm exists between mere knowledge and experience—and the dubious value of either emerges when the two are not actually fused. Experience alone is insufficient. It must be understood. Knowledge by itself, no matter how high or detailed, creates a false sense of superiority. When knowledge is tested by experience, the sense of one’s superiority is blown away like a useless bit of litter in strong wind.

A bit more. The body merely experiences—and by body here I include the whole structure of ordinary being, thus also “states” of mind, reflexive thought, emotions. And these in turn merely record reactions. The more dense the stimulus, the more dense the reactions. And to control this in theory simple input-output system demands an active state of detachment. But the detachment required isn’t merely “recollection in tranquility” but active presence in the midst of turbulence. That presence requires a kind of energy; but the hurly-burly consumes it—sucks the oxygen right out of the system—hence one loses one’s grip of the situation far too easily. Tough sledding, all of this—or an arduous climb. Tranquil solitude is but a kind of breathtaking in midst of an unending labor.

---------------

†Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.

The Palm Tree

Actually contemplating nature, from close up (as I am doing now on a Florida vacation), challenges the “model” I use for characterizing “life.” The unbelievably large numbers of so many different forms, all of which share a single purpose, produce an odd unease. The fundamentals are the same. Those forms—why most have lifting structures to hold up sun-capturing mechanisms. Their fruit production is aimed at reproduction. The to us observable aesthetic effect appears on sober study to be an altogether secondary by-product of functionality. The bright red blooms of a little tree near where I write this are there to attract insets. The color coordination pleases the human eye but is intended merely to attract the insects that seem to know that sugar is on offer. Trees cannot see—anything, including themselves. In them the agency is hidden. Individuality seems also motivated by survival; it ensures that while the individual may perish, the “category” will survive. In us the individual is paramount because we experience it directly, and while we obey the collective rule as well (one death is not the species’ death) we have no experience of a living species of which we’re just a part; the whole seems meaningless except as a collective, thus as something oddly inferior to the individual. But if plants, animals are individuals, thus if they too have an inner self, where are they? Where do they go when that palm-tree finally succumbs to storm or age?

Our imagination can’t produce a model for the ecology as a whole unless we imagine it made up of individuals like us. And to picture a palm tree as having meaning, we must project a self-aware identity inside it complete with memory and, indeed, as having a future beyond its years-long rootedness in some highly localized tropical environment.

The thing here is that simple being—experienced being—is altogether insufficient as a source of meaning without a timeless future existence. If all that I have seen, felt, learned is lost at my life’s end, the very seeing, feeling, learning seems utterly pointless precisely because I do not really live in the moment. I live toward another state which gives this moment, retrospectively, its justification. That after my passage others will experience similar thoughts and feelings in no way justifies lives long ago completed, or my life, or future lives. And what is true of me is true for the palm tree too.

Nor is a mere continuation of this process—life as we experience it, as the palm experiences its existence—a satisfactory solution. Here I’m thinking of reincarnation. If I’ve lived like, say, a hundred lives before—even if I remembered each such life—the totality of that memory would have no value at all except, perhaps, to give current history more detail. Those lives, like this one, would be overwhelmingly the same old round, for me—and for the palm tree too. As Huxley, if I recall correctly, said a while ago: Time must have a stop. It may well be that once we reach that happy future, when time for us at last comes to a stop—something we cannot now imagine—a great relief, a flood of memory, will cause us to realize that, finally, the trip is over and we are home again. And then it may suddenly make sense, all this: we’d realize that we had lived in a very odd state of compression, in a kind of unnatural groove—of time. And falling into conversation with a fellow soul, we might note that we’d both once lived “down there.” “So what were you when you were incarnated,” I ask my new companion. “A palm three,” he or she might answer. And then we could have a conversation about the differences…

Identification with the Body?

Thesis: The moods of a morning are the moods of the body. That would appear to be true, but my experience is that the dark mood isn’t usually present immediately on awakening. The body is at its most energetic at that time. The strongest sensation is the desire for coffee and something to eat. The mood darkens with looking at the paper. Indeed this morning I came down with the notion that the thesis is correct, but the moment I typed in the headline, the contrary idea presented itself and the mood had already vanished, thus I revised the heading by adding a question mark.

The morning mood may be an unexamined identification instead with my existential condition, of which being in a body is but one element; but at awakening I am in a well-rested body. The paper then reminds me of the cultural projection. A strong element of unconsciousness is present because the darkness I see there is not my darkness at all. If what the NYT projects were an actual situation, a here-and-now and out-on-the street situation, my reaction would be energetic, defensive, active: it would mean that things are seriously out of joint and therefore action would be necessary.

There is an identification behind that mood, but it isn’t with the body. Awakening, alertness, humanity often require a kind of energetic shaking all over, a kind of rising to the surface.

The Serious Question

The serious question is why we are here. To think that some agency of transcendent power put us here seems reasonable—reasonable simply because we are incapable, even with our current vast knowledge, of producing living bodies as intricate as ours—never mind producing all the rest—from bacteria to rain forests. The modern explanation—which amounts to saying that the pure, chance-driven collocation of the right atoms produced life (echoing Bertrand Russell)—is just a very elaborate punt of desperation. That desperation, however, is understandable. It is indeed problematical to imagine that nature is the deliberate creation of a Being of Divine Perfection. My own conviction is that God would not have need to fashion fantastically complex machines in order to make living creatures; God would simply say “Be!”—and we would be there. My conviction, further, is that that’s how it happened. But the beings thus made were souls; and they are simple, in the Platonic sense; they don’t have parts; they don’t corrupt. Complex bodies, metabolism, ecosystems, and so on—that’s some kind of second order creation the evident purpose of which is—what exactly? My own conviction is that it is an adaptation to some kind of challenging event, usually dubbed The Fall. That which we call “life” was created by the divine “Be!” It’s not the artful churn of chemicals that we call bodies. We need bodies for some purpose other than to live; they’re probably vehicles we gradually fashioned after sinking into depths we should have avoided. That work happened so long ago we’ve altogether forgotten how we managed it; or it was done by souls of much higher accomplishment than ours—but well below the Divine; the Divine does not need engineering; maybe the angelic levels thought they’d throw us a rope by means of which to climb out of the pit. Never a dull moment in this life—not even as the departure draws near. This by way of formulating some questions I plan to ask when I’ve passed the border.

The Two Mentalities

I was blessed early on by stumbling across excellent guides who helped me orient myself. One of these was Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968), a Russian sociologist who later became a U.S. citizen. His defining work was Social & Cultural Dynamics in 4 volumes, but a single-volume abridgement is also available. Sorokin proposed two fundamental human mentalities, and he summarizes them as follows:

One extreme is a mentality for which reality is that which can be perceived by the organs of the sense; it does not see anything beyond the sensate being of the milieu (cosmic and social). Those who posses this sort of mentality try to adapt themselves to those conditions which appear to the sense organs, or more exactly to the exterior receptors of the nervous system. On the other extreme are persons who perceive and apprehend the same sensate phenomena in a very different way. For them they are mere appearance, a dream, or an illusion. True reality is not to be found here; it is something beyond, hidden by the appearance, different from this material and sensate veil which conceals it. Such persons do not try to adapt themselves to what now seems superficial, illusory, unreal. They strive to adapt themselves to the true reality which is beyond appearances. [Pitirim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (abridged), p. 25]

The first mentality Sorokin calls sensate, the other ideational. He rightly asserts that the pure type probably does not exist, but he asserts that in most people one or the other will be predominant. He then proceeds to build a cyclic history from this in which Ideational eras are followed by Sensate eras, and in between will come a brief period where the two blend, of which an example is the Renaissance. Good enough, you might say, for sociological work. At the same time my own life’s experience (75 and still counting) totally confirms this classification.

Elaborating on this very basic classification (which brings to mind the introverted/extroverted pairing), Sorokin characterizes the ideational mentality by using negations. Such people are trying to negate the world—while the sensate embrace it.

My own experience suggests a more complex explanation. The real difference between these two extremes is actually a greater openness, in those labeled ideational, to the spiritual, intellectual, and subtle aspects of reality—which they feel to be higher. It’s not that they are negative toward the world. It is that they are much more positively drawn toward the higher—not because of virtue but because they sense it. Sorry about that word. But to the inwardly-oriented, intuition is just as keen a perception as the sensory. And it’s not as if those labeled sensate lack all awareness of the higher currents; they have them too. But they don’t perceive them quite so intensely and are therefore inclined, all things equal, to ignore them.

Vast domains of human conflict exist because these fundamental differences are not sharply and effectively understood by either side. They are therefore conflicts between those who see colors and those who’re colorblind. We cannot overcome a condition like colorblindness by logical discourse. Nor can the colorblind suddenly begin to see colors because they engage in acts of faith. Faith requires more than will. It requires cultivation of the intuitive nature enough so that it will yield an inner sensation of the truth of it; once that is present, faith is easy—indeed unavoidable. The human condition is very powerfully shaped by gifts. To see beyond the borderzone, indeed even to see it as existent, you have to see. And that power is not something that can be manufactured. We’re born with it. Conversely, those who are sensitive can also learn to act as if they do not really see—in order to conform at least behaviorally with the majority of the blind—but that’s just an adaptation. They still see, whether they like it or not. 

The View from the Body

Dramatic dreams of public transformation, of railway stations, dreams of being lost in cityscapes, dreams of hospitals.... In my case such dreams always mean the body, more precisely being “lost” in the body. When I dream of hospitals, these are the enormous institutions I remember from my Army days: unending corridors. My consciousness at such times appears at the right scale: the body is a vast domain and I’m a mere individual. But the dream-scale is probably not really exaggerated enough. The consciousness seems to me the size of the point as described in Euclid: it has no dimension at all, it has no size, but to make me see anything at all, the dream provides the narrative of little man in the big world. Such dreams wake me up; in them I’m always headed for some destination I perceive vaguely by general direction; or there is a gargantuan task to be accomplished but always with a pressing deadline. And in nine cases out of ten my own absorption in the task keeps me dreaming whereas the point is to awaken; hence problems arise. The environment begins to look more dangerous, desolate, disorderly—or if I am engaged in an enterprise, things start going wrong, then become worse, and at some point it’s actually too much—and I wake up just to escape all this.

Such dreams are invariably very vivid, the emotions very strong; it takes a while to shake it all off and to let the hormones used to rouse me be absorbed. So I’m still mulling the “lost” feeling or its equivalent, the great melt-down of the Important Project, during breakfast, not quite able to concentrate on the equally vivid images of social meltdown presented to me in the New York Times.

For quite a while now the explanatory narrative that jells out of all this is that awakening from genuinely deep sleep is a kind of return from another dimension. But it is a reluctant return. I really want to stay asleep a little longer. But that’s not what I’m meant to do. If the wondrous scenes do not awaken me with their delight, the dream begins to ratchet up the stimulus by turning that world into a much more frightening display. At last it’s done. I open my eyes. But then I have to drag the emotions, which adhere to the hormonal releases, along with the old body out of bed and down, groping for the light switches as I arrive.

Deepsea Diving

A neutral sort of way to understand “The Fall,” thus by a physical analogy, is to think of a radical change in environments. For human beings life at great depths in the ocean is not a natural way to live, to be. When we venture to such places, we need a supply of air and some protection against low temperatures and pressures. The world down there is deficient in the oxygen we need. The diving suit is an additional something that we require—and when we once more reach our proper environment, we take it off so that we can move more freely again, take deep breaths of the plentiful air, and enjoy the light of the sun.

One way to picture The Fall is by analogy. The realm where we rightfully belong may be pictured, walking with Theosophy for a moment, as a subtle world where we have subtle bodies—a world were those subtle bodies are nourished by energies of a kind not even detectable by science, a world where our light—indeed all radiations of the electromagnetic spectrum, the most subtle phenomena we know—would be considered coarse.

Now let us picture a very large community of that subtle realm either voluntarily or involuntarily falling into the coarse dimension of what we call materiality—where the electromagnetic, the most subtle there, is already of such density that it significantly interferes with the people’s proper functioning—as deep water interferes with ours. Suppose that they, deprived of the subtle ethers, can’t even properly remember what happened, cannot orient, get lost in the flux of matter, and even have major problems communicating one with the other.

Unlike us they do not suffocate in the material flux. They’re immortal, actually. They retain their subtle bodies but these lack the necessary force to influence the vast coarseness of matter much at all. But they find ways of adapting—although it takes millions of years. They begin to build themselves some diving suits beginning at the atomic level, where they are able to nudge the atoms this way and that. These suits—we call them bodies—gather and concentrate coarse energies—and they discover that these energies also carry residuals, to be sure, but still some real traces of the subtle ethers they once “breathed” as it were to energize their subtle bodies and used in other ways to maintain their memories and to communicate one with the other. This effort to make sense of The Fall, indeed to cope with it, becomes Job 1. And it grows in extent until, today, we call it life on earth. The object of that enterprise becomes—although vast numbers, having experienced confusion for so long, cannot all unambiguously grasp it—is to get back to the subtle world by gathering up enough of that subtle ether, call it grace, to make the trip back again.

Could be turned into a rather exciting TV series, actually—although, in season two or three, I’m fairly sure, the original theme will have been lost. But these higher beings, although greatly challenged by the environment, and vaguely remembering that they might have been guilty of some kind of disobedience, recklessness, or foolish curiosity are still immortal beings. And despite many failures along the way, still destined ultimately to succeed.

Night Journey to Randomland

Honest reflection reveals that our lives are entanglements with chaos. A positive spin might say that lives are a kind of tourism, like a visit to Disneyland, but life on earth is much more like a visit to Randomland. 

What happens is that we are born and then we cope, more or less successfully, until the trip is finally over. That short word, cope, has a lot of heft, of course. It summarizes, using a mere four letters, what amounts to an amalgam: a mishmash of reflexive and of thoughtful actions, of lucky choices and of grievous error, the embrace of impulses and the reluctant resistance of others. Viewed in retrospect, in detail, honestly, that coping isn’t actually pretty at all. But as we have gifts for coping so also we are talented biographers. We shape and ornament the story of our life so that it seems to make a lot more sense than it actually does. We “neglect” our errors and “highlight” the positive. The stories that emerge are, largely, tales of heroism. They are nicely understated—indeed sometimes they are understated so that they sound understated, but the heroism shines right through.

The chaos is most to the fore in those years from early teens to early adulthood. Most of us are lucky. We had good parent who steered our childhood through safe channels—but there are many who’re not so lucky. By early adulthood most of us have formed useful habits; these then more or less guide us—except for those eruptions that later we view as temporary insanities.

I’ve marveled at people who appear to have conventional lives—until, with growing wisdom, I’ve realized that even the most ordered, conventional, successful, and respectable careers are mere appearance—if only we knew the details. The random is hidden in these lives as well.

Although the experience is humbling, sobering, sometimes it’s useful to look at that biography of ours through a critical lens. Sometimes it happens when we awaken at three in the morning and can’t immediately go back to sleep again. And sometimes, thankfully rarely, panoramas of the past then open that at least hint at what might happen after we pass over the borders of the zone from Randomland to Otherland and undergo what people who have experienced them call a “life review.”

Sacred and Profane

New Year’s celebrations bring to mind for me the benefits bestowed by our humble status as a planet circling the sun in an imperfect circle, an ellipse, and at a tilt yet, thus giving us distinct seasons. To avoid the horrors of the Void (see last post), we have the blessings of a place—a certain orbit of the solar system—and the equal boon of a recurring time. The universe appears eternal and limitless, nobody has seen its edge, but we’re all right. We’ve got the minimum orientation we need to maintain our sanity.

To live in eternity, it is nice to have clear markers of the here and now. If we wander away from Here, it is good to know that we can return. And if we can pin a name to the Now we can also return to it. It’s Christmas time again. It’s New Year’s day. These arrangements defeat the horror of eternity; there are some for whom the mere conscious contemplation of it produces a kind of mental nausea. With our markers nicely in place, eternity ends at right regular intervals and we get a brand new beginning. Here it is. A brand new year.

This need to orient, to place, to mark the time—and to renew it—appears to be innately present in us. Emmanuel Kant wisely concluded that space and time are innate intuitive characteristics of our minds—created, as it were, to make sense of the experienced flux but not objectively real. Well, fine. They’re objectively real if we are. But then it occurs to me that dividing space into the here and time into the now—and regularly annihilating eternity by restarting it again—are also innate tendencies. And the oldest and most traditional views of humanity also project what we experience ordinarily into the transcendental realm. A good exposition of this subject is presented in Mircea Eliade’s work, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. This view asserts that as below, so above. It echoes the views of the oldest versions of Zoroastrian philosophy (and Zoroastrianism is most likely the oldest higher religion we know of) that all things here have their counterparts in the transcendental dimension. Thus earthly or profane space and time have their counterpart in sacred space and time. And the rounds of duration and renewal taking place there take place here because they take place there. Interesting view—long predating Plato’s notions of eternal forms. But, as we say, what goes around comes around.

Happy New Year!