Nurture

One experience is certainly denied us. We can’t “redo” our childhood and “experiment around”—and thus examine how we might have turned out if we had been brought up in a marginal, disordered household… How much of what we value as adults would still be there in us if our upbringing and culture had been skimpy, shoddy, or confused?

There is a good-old salesman’s saying: It’s better to be lucky than to be good. There is the saying we’ve all heard: There but for the grace of God go I. A sense of having been exceedingly fortunate surfaced in me as soon as I was old enough to see the world well enough. I credit my upbringing for whatever virtues I may have and blame my shortcomings on me. That’s good policy in general—an acknowledgement of probabilities. Culture is more nurture than achievement—and most of us do well if we but pass it on intact. That alone requires all of our effort.

It must be so because these days literally millions of babies have been and continue to be born into marginal families. I’m not slicing, dicing, or dividing and therefore don’t mean economically marginal. Economic deprivation may or may not be a part of it—wealth, indeed, may be a cause of it. But generally, thus by the second or third generation, the sins of the fathers—and let’s not forget the mothers, either—will have manifested in economic decline as well.

The paradox that I discover here is that loss of culture is caused by individual acts of failure—often by small, careless acts—but the transmission of such failure to the next generation magnifies these errors. The poorly nurtured children are weakened and disabled. With each round of births, the children are less and less to blame because, in an almost literal sense “they know not what they’re doing.” But their acts of failure are much more visible and harmful. And the paradox is that we hold individuals responsible who have become irresponsible by lack of nurture rather than by their free choice.

Thus then develop very strange notions and gain a wide authority. One is that morality should not and must not be taught in schools. Morality is a religious concept, and religion, folks, is a lifestyle option, isn’t it?

Ultimately failure of any kind, not least cultural failure, is self-correcting. But cultural failure may take centuries to work around and cost vast amounts of suffering—generally of the stupidly innocent.

Primeval Forestry of Symbols

The thought comes that it takes an extraordinary effort to imagine what the advanced life of the mind might have been like in prehistoric times. Here I mean the ages before reading and writing developed and thus came to support and to maintain highly-developed abstract thought.

This occurred to me because a series of links—mental, not Internet—reminded me that Mircea Eliade, an influential twentieth century historian of religion, had written a definitive study titled Shamanism. I found the book and took a new look. Soon it all came rushing back. Eliade’s is an exhaustive description of the way prehistoric wise men (shamans, medicine men, witch doctors, sorcerers) were initiated and how they practiced their craft. Description—not explanation. Eliade’s book, therefore, rapidly causes the eyes to glaze over. We learn that—

Such men (only a few were women) underwent death and rebirth. Demons, gods, or spirits killed and disemboweled them and then replaced their ordinary organs with new and more perfect ones; the higher beings placed magical bones, stones, or crystals into the initiates’ skulls or bodies. They brought the initiates back to life. Then these people, recovering, discovered that they’d gained what we’d call paranormal powers of healing, precognition, sight-at-distance, mind-reading, and so on and so forth.

To modern ears the descriptions sound so fantastic, weird, and brutal that dismissing them outright as primitive fantasy and superstition, all based on rude ritual, comes naturally. No temptation arises in most casual readers to imagine that these accounts could possibly reference real experiences or events. What did strike Eliade forcefully was the uniformity of these descriptions (with minor variations) from culture to culture and from all across the world, including Australia, which landmass had long been out of contact with the majority even of prehistoric humanity.

The uniformity persuades me that genuine experiences lie behind these stories; the accounts don’t immediately evoke the same experiences we still have today because our modes of thought have radically changed since then—but not the structure of our souls. We read in John 3:5: “Except a man be born again of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” Such a statement we take in stride and think little about—because we’ve heard it since childhood. Most people do not undergo wrenching conversion experiences—least of all after long, arduous practices of solitude, fasting, and sleeplessness as did the candidates for prehistoric priesthood. Our own by now deeply embedded habits of abstraction permit us to view John’s assertion as a kind of “change of mind,” not as some kind of heavy-gauged spiritual upheaval. It does not occur to us, hearing about those quartz crystals embedded by higher powers in the candidate’s skull through a hole in the head drilled with a sharp magical stick—but afterwards leaving neither hole nor scar—as possibly a way of speaking about a force of light and spirit that dawns in a soul transformed by major internal change. In Catholicism we speak of transubstantiation and understand by it something rather vague and abstract—but we read accounts of ordinary guts replaced by magical guts as the sordid superstition of the cavemen.

The language of humanity—its incredibly complex and vast systems of symbols—undergoes change. The more abstract our understanding, the easier it is to apply the same symbol to experiences that have very little relationship one to the other. “Being born again” for us might mean an emotional “stepping forward” at a rousing revival meeting. The genuine experience of it—the kind that sometimes really does transform the person and does produce real changes, not least real powers difficult to explain, get the same labeling although they are, in reality, quite something else.

Pondering Potential

In the last post I mention the concept of “pure act.” When I first encountered that idea—which refers to the nature of God—I imagined a kind of pure whirling motion at infinite speed, producing infinite light. That’s what my mind produced. The problem is that young people are exposed to such ideas in a kind of foreshortened sort of way. Even when you’re told that act here isn't some kind of flailing around but actuality, thus realized potential, the human mind, even grasping the ideas (or mine at least), isn’t really satisfied. When this pairing—potentiality and actuality—is explained, you realize that all they’re really saying is that “God has all possible perfections and isn’t waiting for them to manifest.” The mad whirling then stops and only the infinite bright light remains. Perfection doesn’t produce anything graspable.

This pairing, potentiality and actuality, is at the base of Aristotle’s concept of change. An existing something can only change because it has the capability for change—but that change is not yet realized. The word Aristotle used was dunamis, literally meaning, simply, capability. That word sounds strange until we spell it dynamis. Then suddenly we realize that we use the word ourselves in various ways—dynamic, dynamism, indeed also as dynamite. Aristotle used an ordinary Greek word for capability; potential comes from its Latin equivalent. His innovation came in characterizing something existing as having both entelechy (actualized potential) and energy (capability not yet realized). Here he gave an ordinary Greek word, meaning “at work,” a specialized technical meaning. We have entelechy right now—so does my coffee cup. We also still have dynamis in which a latent force, energy, is present.

Now the interesting aspect of potential—and why God does not have potential—is that something “not yet” or “asleep” or “as yet unrealized” can be seen both positively or negatively. Positively it is future perfection, if we’re lucky; negatively it is a privation. We’re still lacking its actual manifestation. But God lacks nothing at all. God is perfection. Therefore, alas, God has no potential.

In the twentieth century, we’ve actually proved the frightening energies latent in but a small amount of matter when it is actually released. Energeia is certainly present there, in potentiam. But do spare us, great wise men, any new demonstrations of Aristotle’s concepts in daily actuality; I’d hate to see another major city somewhere frozen in unreachable entelecheia deprived of its complement of energy.

The energy within the atom—the strong force that holds the nucleus together—is an interesting example of an actual and simultaneously potential energy in matter. Aristotle’s definitions nicely fit a region of reality he tended to dismiss. Atomic theories? Aristotle shook his head. The fascinating aspects of this kind of energy is that, so far as we can determine, it need not be renewed at regular intervals—as must the energy that keeps us going. What energy really is and where it arises—those are issues one ponders out here on the border. The dictionaries, whether of philosophy or physics, tend to produce a fog of circular referencing where you meet the word as its own definition after the fourth or fifth look-up.

It Becomes You to Be

The mention of Whitehead in the last post brought to mind the complementarity of being and becoming. Becoming is fashionable in our times, and being therefore sits below the salt, but the paradox is that to behold this fashionable Becoming one must be enduring. To hold these two concepts simultaneously in the mind is the easiest thing in the world. It is the experience of consciousness. But it seems to irk the intellect. Hence in the Ages of Becoming, the enduring self is also pictured as but an instance of the universal flux, and as this age peaked, William James discovered the “stream of consciousness.” That strikes a retrograde like me as a contradiction. In the Ages of Being a similar reduction of one to the other hides in the idea that Ultimate Being is pure act. We can’t have one without the other.

Reading—or Not Reading—Philosophy

I can never seriously attend philosophers. That would require reading them carefully and slowly, cover to cover, accepting the rules of their thought. I’ve only ever made the effort here and there—and in those few cases, finally, only with a kind of grim determination that I apply to certain stains—the kind that only ultimately yield to steel brush and razor blade. Thus, for instance, I once made that effort reading Sartre’s opus, Being and Nothingness, in English, and then, in that grim mood, even acquiring a French version to check those passages that struck me as incoherent; and they still were. More recently I read Whitehead’s Process and Reality, after which my main reaction was that all this effort for this pathetic conclusion appears to have been a waste. And, of course, I’ve read often huge chunks of many other philosophers just to keep the secondary commentators and summarizers honest. An almost tangible savor, odor, or aura of the philosophers’ personalities reaches me in about a hundred pages or thereabouts, which, in combination with the content, is most valuable and informative—and lacking in secondary renditions. I’ve also read, in full and many times over, the works of people classified as philosophers who, however, transcend the subject. They might be better labeled as theologians or, put more generally, students of the ineffable. And no. I’m not here using other phrases for “metaphysics.”

The best way to explain my own behavior to myself is to assume that all works minimally contain intellect and intuition. The more the ratio favors intellect, the less the work will draw or hold me. But intellectual content is also necessary to focus my attention. Pure clouds of intuition repel me just as surely as pure cathedrals of abstraction. Intellect is sometimes present with large doses of passion, such as I find in Schopenhauer. But passion isn’t interesting in this context.

One night, long ago, at a party, I spent a good part of it in intense conversation with a man. When the time came to break up, he asked: “By the way. Are you a mathematician?” I had to laugh. Quite the contrary, I said. He said: “Well, you certainly think like one.” Then I to him: “You must be one yourself.” And he nodded.

The mathematician must have an intuitive relation to numbers. Numbers leave me cold—and their relations, one to the other, strike me as self-evident if I spend enough paralyzingly boring time to trace them. As stellar a math great as Bertrand Russell agrees with me. And what applies to numbers also applies to abstractions stripped down to empty concepts.

Today, following some links into the nineteenth century, as it were, I encountered “a discussion of the problem of what makes the unity of an individual thing.” The example given was the unity of a lump of sugar which holds a multiplicity of properties. And these are? Sweetness, whiteness, and hardness. This is the sort of thing that, when I encounter it, makes me roll my eyes.

Providence

Brigitte and I spent a good part of our day yesterday discussing the meaning of fate—which in turn prompted yesterday’s post. But, of course—having once entered that portal—we also talked about providence. The difference between these two—fate and providence—is quite marked. The word providence is also rooted in the past; it used to mean foresight, the direct translation of the Latin, and thus prudence. Its elevated meaning, as God’s guidance and care or as God’s power sustaining and guiding human destiny, is relatively new. It dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Fate produces an impression of the impersonal. Therefore no one says: “How could a just Fate let this happen?” But we hear the question asked about God.

Strange how some things coincide. Late yesterday came word of a death in our extended circle of friends. Stephanie, a young woman of twenty-four, passed away. She died of a genetically inherited condition, the same condition that had taken her mother quite young. She died after a very brave and determined struggle, as she wished, at home—rather than in the hospital where she’d spent many of the last months of her life. Our linkage to Stephanie is through her grandparents.

It occurred to me that in this very cloudy world of matter, Brigitte and I had been notified, as it were, of this impending event through the invisible ether—before the e-mail arrived in the evening. Knew it—yet did not. Knew it but not in its personal reference. More than a hundred people die in the Detroit metroplex every day, but none as closely linked to us as Stephanie had been. Felt it—and thoughts of fate and providence arose spontaneously.

Brigitte had been praying every night for quite a while now for the rescue of the miners caught underground in Chile…and for Stephanie’s release from suffering. Providence is a difficult concept because it demands the suspension of human judgment. If God provides, God has reasons for everything that transpires, understands the why of everything, and ensures the best possible outcome. It takes less inner power, it seems to me, to endure the blows of fate than to accept providential arrangements that seem to human eyes as unjust, arbitrary, and a wanton disregard of all that should belong to a just and loving God. It requires the curbing of our pride. We’re proud of our understanding, of our power to penetrate all secrets. But we know next to nothing. If we saw all things exactly as they are, if we understood the really big picture, we’d see the sublime logic even of a death that makes us roll our eyes and shake our heads.

The Tragic and the Comic

As a youngster I thought it odd that the most famous Italian poetic work would be called The Divine Comedy. How could the divine be comic? I thought of it as serious. Later I came to understand that “comedy” is one of those words that had one meaning in ancient Greek and Roman times, another in the medieval centuries, and then regained its old classical meaning once more in modern times. You might say that one of the two parts of the word came to dominate the meaning in succession. The two roots are komos, which meant a revel or a carousal and oidos, which meant a singer or a poet. The two were still visible in Greek, komoidia. A revel, an amusing spectacle, carries the “funny” connotation, poetry and song carry the “serious.” In the Middle Ages the word had the latter meaning and was used for poems and stories. The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests that its earliest meaning in English was “narrative poem.” Dante’s intention was to signal a serious story but with a happy ending.

Amusingly the word tragedy also contains the root oidos, but the front part of it comes from tragos, meaning a goat. A tragedy is a “goatsong.” The root of this seems to be dramas that depicted satyrs, thus creatures who are half-goat half man. These meanings, again taken from my trusty online source, are in debate—but they please me; they suggest a deeper truth. The unhappy ending associated with this form of drama seems to suggest that the goat-half had its way. To unpack this line of thought a little more, let me return to my youthful wonder. How, indeed, could the divine be comic?

It might help to ponder another word in this context, the thing that we call fate. Its meaning is the course of a person’s life; the word is derived from “decreed” or “spoken” or “ordained,” as by a higher power—thus that which is determined. The word fatal does not come from some ancient tag for death; rather it comes from the fact that death is our unavoidable destination, our destiny. But is it? It is certainly the destination of the body, of the goat. Its meaning includes the idea of “unavoidable necessity.” That we have to live a life in bodies—that is fate. But we also have another part; and that part is free. How we live that necessary life—that’s up to us. If we identify with the immortal spirit, it suggests that, at death, we escape this realm of necessity and…well, enter the divine. The tragic results when we identify with the limited but necessary; the comic when we identify with the free and limitless. People have a fate; I’ve never encountered any reference to the “fate of angels.” Why? They don’t follow a necessary course.

The very core of our nature belongs to the high, the superior, the ultimately free. That nature, caught in this lower dimension, looking around, but still aware of itself, beholding the shenanigans, will simply have to laugh at what it sees. But its ability to rise above, to laugh at all this in light moments, testifies to a high gift which, in more serious moments expresses itself in poetry.

NDEs: Speculating on the Data

The impetus today is still Pin Van Lommel’s book on near-death experiences (see last post). Van Lommel comes from a scientific background; not surprisingly he spends a great deal of time on examining the interaction between the brain and consciousness; he concludes that the brain does not produce consciousness. He doesn’t go beyond that—and that’s fine. Here the saying applies: “Sufficient unto the day the evil thereof” [Matthew 6:34]. His aim is to make a credible case for the survival of consciousness. But I’ve been certain of that for a long time myself, and my interests range beyond that issue.

The three facts I want to examine are these. First, that people in states of coma, with flat EEGs and no sign of brain function, experience themselves alive, alert, able to see, hear, and to move—to think, feel, remember, and, indeed, with sharply intensified powers. Second, that such people, despite these powers, cannot touch anything material. Third, that the brain certainly mediates between physical and mental levels.

That the brain has such a function is one of the data points; another is that the brain—indeed our bodies taken as a whole—behave like machines, like tools. They represent technology—although not technology we have made. Tooling always has the essential quality of “in order to…” Now here is the puzzle. If a spirit sees and hears, has a functioning consciousness, and greater freedom of movement outside than in a body—if it functions well, even better, without tooling than while in possession of it, what parallels does that suggest?

The first that comes to mind is a diving suit—thus something that enables its wearer to function in an environment in which he or she couldn’t function at all or for very long without tooling. But what is this function we can’t engage in without bodies? What the disembodied spirit cannot do is interact with matter. It can’t vibrate the air and thus cannot be heard by the embodied. It cannot touch matter; it passes through it. This suggests…

This suggests that bodies are a tool by means of which we can experience the material dimension. Doing so we give up certain powers. We can’t reliably communicate mind to mind, although sporadic telepathic powers are known; we cannot move at will and instantaneously from one point to another. Our intellectual powers are also seemingly dimmed. This in turn suggests that some kind of linkage or binding takes place to hold us inside bodies; this link, once it is established, seems effectively to blind us to the other or wider dimension but, by means of the body’s tooling, enables us to act on matter—using matter. Indeed it seems to prevent us from acting in any other way.

But why should the spirit want to be bound in this way? What purpose does that serve—seeing that in disembodied form the spirit can indeed communicate very effectively with other disembodied spirits?

Here the technological, machine-like structure of bodies comes into full focus. That bodies are machines of sorts cannot be denied. The very existence of defects in this machinery—even early on at the genetic level—suggests an agency behind the body which is, like us, limited in its powers and doing a terrific engineering job in a hostile environment. Chance cannot have created living bodies; they are far too complex and exhibit purpose. I find it impossible to imagine life without an agency in the background—also impossible to imagine this agency to be God. Only limited agencies are, well, limited—and therefore obliged to reach for tooling.

These are the issues of interest. They rise to that level only if you accept as fact that consciousness is able to survives death and is therefore independent of its vehicle—the brain, the body. Van Lommel does a superb job proving that case. But it would be far more enlightening to understand why, in a sense, we are imprisoned in these tools of ours, why we can escape them, briefly, only under extraordinary circumstances—and at death more certainly. But even after that, can we remain in that other dimension? Or is there in us, or independent of us, something pulling us down here? Or did we come here out of curiosity—by the billions and billions—as some people are drawn to descend into deep dark caves, equipped with diving gear, to spelunk in the depths at the risk of their lives?

This is a very interesting frontier, I submit. None more fascinating. None with greater potential for good or ill.

Kneeling Before Physics

I’ve argued elsewhere more than once (i.e., on Ghulf Genes) that we are “heading back,” thus that we are—culturally—on our way back from the summit of Mount Matter to climb again Mount Spirit. On the way there, thus at present, we’re in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I find it fascinating that these days those who newly discover that the transcendental order must be real after all—and wish to persuade others of this fact—almost reflexively reach for their proofs in physics. The chosen methodology has little to do with the facts of the matter but everything to do with human nature. To persuade others you need Authority; and these days physics has authority. Einstein is the word that equals wise today—and the atomic bomb made the biggest thunder ever over Japan just a few decades back. If physics is the orthodox religion of modernity, quantum physics is its mysticism, hence the best pool of proof of all.

I was reminded of this forcefully reading a book by Pim Van Lommel on the near-death experience. Lommel is a cardiologist and, these days, a leading figure in NDE studies. The book is Consciousness Beyond Life. It’s a mixed sort of product, stunningly excellent in parts. But it fails as a “work.” It is a kind of together-binding of magazine or journal articles padded out into chapters. The book’s early chapters cover the same ground Raymond Moody did in Life After Life; in many areas Lommel’s book is more complete and thorough, in others interestingly selective. Moody gave very strong emphasis to the spirit’s reception in the beyond by a “being of light.” In Lommel’s presentation the testimonials he chose to illustrate this aspect support a much more pantheistic feeling. But it is Lommel’s main thematic I found interesting as an indicator of our times; but Lommel’s case, I hasten to add, is just one of many. He reaches out to physics for his theme and latches on to the concept of non-locality, a discovery of quantum mechanics.

In the crudest form, locality means that if someone punches me hard on the chin, the lady waiting for the bus a block away won’t fall down. She cannot be affected by what happens to me. In more sophisticated form, this means that for B to be affected by A in some way, communication must be possible between A and B; and this communication cannot take place more rapidly than the speed of light. Non-locality means that in some way, anyway, the pain I feel when punched does affect the lady waiting for the bus; my negative experience is communicated to everyone; others don’t have to feel it consciously, but it is so. It also means that instantaneous communications between A and B are possible, even if these two are moving away from each other at the speed of light.

Now it so happens that non-locality has been proved to exist in quantum physics. Two elementary particles can be caused to come into being by producing particle decay. These particles will be “entangled” with each another; thus if A has an upward then B will have a downward spin. If you change the spin of A, the spin of B will necessarily change as well; that’s what entanglement means. And this can happen even when they’re far apart. Experiments have been conducted so that A and B are caused to fly apart at the speed of light. Then the spin of one is forced to change—while the spin of the other is detected. Sure enough, as A changes, so does B. B seems to know that A has changed and thus conforms to be in harmony—but the “signal” between the two, if there is a signal, must have travelled faster than the speed of light. As physicist understand the matter—and they are clearly concerned not to violate Einstein’s iron law on the speed of light—no signal actually passes. Far separated although in space they are, A and B remain linked in a mysterious field relationship.

Now, you might ask, what does any of this have to do the ability of a human consciousness to survive the death of its body? The commonality here is relatively limited. Communications at a distance without a signal are difficult for modern man to grasp. Indeed, Einstein hated the notion of non-locality and tried to defeat it to the best of his ability. Similarly, for the modern mind—but not for those of us who grew up still embedded in hoary old traditions—the notion of human survival of death is a similar scandal. That’s the real linkage. What is interesting here is that appeal to physics, rather than to human reason and intuition, strikes Lommel as appeal to a Higher Authority. Lommel might have used Rupert Sheldrake’s Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home as his proof; Sheldrake’s findings also show “action at a distance” without discernible signaling, especially when the owner is downtown and the dog in the suburbs thirty miles away. Alas the truth is that the highest authority available to us is our own mind.

The Contemplative Life: Another Look

As I plow deeper into my seventies, it’s becoming ever more obvious that physical activities and preoccupations are at best utilitarian…that a triumph here and there is also meaningless, thus activities in time seem to be empty too. But here a paradox arises. I feel this viscerally—and that word refers to the physical, doesn’t it?

The shocking thing for me is that I now think of the contemplative life in a physical way, thus as authentic, real, and hard. A few decades back the idea of contemplation always struck me either as airy-fairy, passive, or a kind of pointless hedonism.

We do, don’t we, think of the real as physical, tangible. But let me try to sort that out. Let me use an abstract designator. Whatever appears real to us, we label X. We learn this association in our youth, when the physical is compelling, therefore the physical is X; but in advancing times, another aspect of our experience emerges much more dominantly; and to express its reality, we reach for a familiar label. The real is the real, but at different times, based on different experiences, we associate it with a different aspect of reality.

Now I’m prepared to define the contemplative life as the activity of the spirit when it is unconstrained. It is everything left over after we have set aside the things we do in order to survive. It has a passive as well as an active component, and creativity is its most obvious active element. Let me put things into bins.

Reading or writing books, creating or enjoying art, thinking and conversing, music, community and dialogue, praise and worship, expressing joy and revulsion, science and discovery, poetry and philosophy—and also, curiously, certain forms of exercise and sport, gardening, and free “making” of things for their own sake—we do none of these things “in order to survive.”

To survival belongs showering, putting on socks, eating, and so forth. Also administration, making order, buying and selling, and social acts done to compel or because we are compelled. Here I’d put all forms of pressure and persuasion, all production, and all other common economic activities.

Needless to say, in this realm the material is intrinsically braided into the immaterial so that even the free action of the spirit always has a physical component. Thus I feel inclined to create a third bin yet. There I would put useful work done in full spiritual presence. The greatest periods of joy for me are linked to work—not least money-making work—when I managed to do that work with sufficient concentration so that, paradoxically, I was detached from its survival aspects and doing it purely pro bono.

Isis

Today a tribute to Isis, one of the most ancient goddesses arising from an early civilization, the Egyptian. Isis is the wife of Osiris, the god of the underworld or, in the context of this blog, the realm beyond the Borderzone. Osiris is first captured in an artfully-made mummy case by his brother, Seth, the god of chaos. Afterwards Seth destroys the mummy and scatters its pieces—but Isis finds them and resurrects her husband once again. In this image of Isis—as in most others—she is shown wearing a strange headgear; it is supposed to be the throne of Osiris. The two texts that follow are taken from Plutarch’s Isis and Orisis accessible here. By Plutarch’s time the cult of Isis had spread widely into the Graeco Roman realm.

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And the shrine of Minerva at Sais (whom they consider the same with Isis) bears this inscription, “I am all that hath been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal has hitherto raised.”

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On this account a desire for religious knowledge is an aiming at Truth, particularly that relating to the gods—a pursuit containing both in the acquisition and in the search a reception, as it were, of things sacred—an occupation more pious than any observation of abstinence, or religious service: but particularly well-pleasing to this goddess who is the special object of thy devotion; for she is both wise, and a lover of wisdom; as her name appears to denote that, more than any other, knowing and knowledge belong to her. For “Isis” is a Greek word, and so is “Typhon,” her enemy, for he is “puffed up” by want of knowledge and falsehood, and tears to pieces, and puts out of sight, the sacred word which the goddess again gathers up and puts together, and gives into the charge of those initiated into the religion; whilst by means of a perpetually sober life, by abstinence from many kinds of food and from venery, she checks intemperance and love of pleasure, accustoming people to endure her service with bowels not enervated by luxury, but hardy and vigorous; the object of all which is the knowledge of the First, the Supreme, and the Intelligible; whom the goddess exhorts you to seek after, for he is both by her side, and united with her. The very name of her Temple clearly promises both the communication and the understanding of That which is—for it is called the “Ision,” [“The entering-place,” as if derived from the Greek.] inasmuch as That which is shall be known if we enter with intelligence and piously into the sacred rites of the goddess.

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The descriptions that follow here are from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, as translated by Robert Graves. In that earliest of known novels the hero of the tale has a vision of the goddess whose cult he later joins. Apuleius died in 180 A.D., suggesting that the cult was still alive in Christian times.

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     Not long afterwards I awoke in sudden terror. A dazzling full moon was rising from the sea. It is at this secret hour that the Moon-goddess, sole sovereign of mankind, is possessed of her greatest power and majesty. She is the shining deity by whose divine influence not only all beasts, wild and tame, but all inanimate things as well, are invigorated; whose ebbs and flows control the rhythm of all bodies whatsoever, whether in the air, on earth, or below the sea….
     I had scarcely closed my eyes before the apparition of a woman began to rise from the middle of the sea with so lovely a face that the gods themselves would have fallen down in adoration of it. First the head, then the whole shining body gradually emerged and stood before me poised on the surface of the waves…
     Her long thick hair fell in tapering ringlets on her lovely neck, and was crowned with an intricate chaplet in which was woven every kind of flower. Just above her brow shone a round disc, like a mirror, or like the bright face of the moon, which told me who she was. Vipers rising from the left-hand and right-hand partings of her hair supported this disk, with ears of corn bristling beside them… But what caught and held my eye more than anything else was the deep black luster of her mantle. She wore it slung across her body from the right hip to the left shoulder, where it was caught in a knot resembling the boss of a shield; but part of it hung in innumerable folds, the tasselled fringe quivering. It was embroidered with glittering stars on the hem and everywhere else, and in the middle beamed a full and fiery moon.
     In her right hand she held a bronze rattle, of the sort used to frighten away the God of the Sirocco; its narrow rim was curved like a sword-belt and three little rods, which sang shrilly when she shook the handle, passed horizontally through it. A boat-shaped gold dish hung from her left hand, and along the upper surface of the handle writhed an asp with puffed throat and head raised ready to strike. On her divine feet were slippers of palm leaves, the emblem of victory.

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The image shown is from Wikipedia, here, created by Jeff Dahl; other Egyptian god-images created by Dahl are accessible here.

Re-Reading Life After Life

Reading again Raymond A. Moody’s Life After Life, I was struck, this time, by the quotations from near death experience (NDE) reports concerning the functioning of the spirit or self, particularly its modes of self-perception, communications, and “senses,” thus hearing and seeing. The quotations that deal with time perception or extra-dimensionality also struck me as new—but it has been several years since I’ve last read this book with the requisite concentration it deserves. The book tends to produce a certain amount of trance—the page-turning kind—in part because it was written for the widest possible audience, because the quotations from NDE reports follow each other rapidly, and because the commentary is minimal in order to be maximally accessible.

Moody is generally ignored (so far as I can tell) by the learned—with one notable and, for me, significant exception. Henry Corbin devotes a paragraph to the book in his Prelude to the second edition of Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. Here is part of that paragraph:

All the more significant then has been the welcome given to a recent study which treats the “life after life” and presents the manifold testimonies of their actual experiences by people who, even though they had not crossed it never to return, had none the less really found themselves on the “threshold,” for their death had already been clinically confirmed. [Here Corbin footnotes Moody’s book.] There is no reason to be surprised that such a book should meet with a moving approval from some, testifying to a nostalgia which nothing has ever succeeded in snuffing out in the human heart. Equally there is no reason for surprise if the same book has been received with scepticism. Certainly, many traditional texts were quoted in connection with the testimonies reported in this book. But how many people knew them? In fact, some of these testimonies cannot be entertained let alone understood except on the condition of having at one’s immediate disposal an ontology of the mundus imaginalis and a metaphysic of the active Imagination as an organ inherent in the soul and regulated in its own right to the world of “subtle corporeity.”

Next to this paragraph I wrote in the margin, in amazement, “My God, I can hardly believe it!!” — Yes, but such are the consequences of writing for the general public rather than staying on the reservation.

Regarding Corbin’s references to imagination, I cannot deal with that in this post beyond saying that he saw the imagination not as an extension of humanity's sensory faculties but as a unique spiritual power, which he, following Paracelsus, called the true imagination rather than the ordinary fancy. Other entries on this blog under Corbin will provide the necessary context.

Reading Moody this time, what Corbin here labels “subtle corporeity” came sharply into focus, namely that selves “see” and “hear” with great acuity but cannot touch or grasp anything material, including living bodies. The hearing does not depend on air vibrations but seems due to thought perception; seeing is odd as well. Perception of the body varies; many perceive themselves as energetic structures, but experience these structures as somewhat extendable and with certain polarities, like up and down; others perceive actual bodies. While focused on this dimension people seem able to extend their attention out great distances and see, at those distances, from up close—while yet retaining a sense of having stayed in place. Reports of what selves see on that side of the Borderzone are complicated by the fact that the experiencers find themselves in an environment with more than three dimensions and a different experience of time. It takes them far less time to experience a great deal, interpreted as a more rapidly flowing time; experiences, like life reviews, while very detailed yet take no time at all. They struggle in expressing the experience in ordinary language the concepts of which are narrowly adapted to a three-dimensional existence and our kind of time.

I got to thinking how unfortunate it is that we are so tribal and clannish in all things, not least in the various arts and sciences. Moody is not viewed as providing extremely valuable data for serious examination for the simple reason that he preferred the more benign and welcoming attention of the general public to the hostile skepticism of those who claim a calling to study how reality works.

Finding or Creating?

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. George Bernard Shaw.

This motto is featured for September on the calendar that hangs in our bathroom—and we do have to go, therefore I expect to read this for a few more days yet.

So what’s my take on this? I disagree—and yet I don’t. In my youth GBS—as we affectionately called this famed playwright, an Irishman who made his fame in England—was still riding high for such creations as Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Man and Superman, and many other delightful plays. What survives of him these days is mostly that wondrous film, My Fair Lady, which is the play Pygmalion remade as a musical and filmed. Alas, they changed the ending—but that, folks, is Hollywood. In the 1950s, when I was cutting my teeth as it were, the progressive, ironic, socialist spirit GBS represented still powerfully influenced the young. And, I must say, still lingers on—else my calendar’s publishers would not have used this slogan to, as it were, make my September.

But I disagree. The notion is flattering and resonates with the ethos of the time. It also resonates with youth. With age we tend to, I believe, turn the slogan around. We’re lucky if we manage to emerge from the darkness and the chaos and discover the core of ourselves, which is there all along, created by someone else. Life much more resembles education than creation. The roots of education are “to draw or to lead out,” from dux, the leader or commander, and ex-, out. Something is present—but it must be freed from its shrouding and made visible, made to emerge.

And yet I don’t. I don’t if I closely examine what “creation” really means in the human context. It is definitely not “bringing into existence” something that is not and never has been. Human creation is a kind of discovery, a kind of finding and arranging what is already present. At best we discover a hidden treasure. But we didn’t make it.

Permanence

An urge to contradict the flux of time is present in the soul. Monuments are outward expressions of this innate tendency. So is recording things. In effect it seems to be a marker of consciousness itself. Our sense of time is meaningless without our intuitive perception of genuine permanence. We can’t actually observe it in nature, but we feel it in ourselves as a permanent self. That self sometimes, rarely, becomes sharply distinguished from the flux of thought, and as we recall moments like that from childhood, we are aware that nothing has changed, not in that feeling, and this despite the flow of decades in between.

I clearly, sharply remember one of these moments as a child of seven in my grandmother’s back yard when, all alone and sure of it, I tried to imitate the fiery oration of a newly minted Nyilas (read Nazi) prime minister of Hungary—and in the process suddenly became equally sharply self-aware and stopped. I’d no idea what a Nazi was, by the way; I was just imitating the fervor I’d heard on the radio. That moment of solitary self-awareness left a very deep impression. I was suddenly present, somehow; and at that time I also remembered yet another such occasion when I had been four. And this, the permanent self, after that, became my odd point of permanence in light of which I’ve always tried to live. Not consciously, mind. The consciousness of this linkage developed as I grew wiser. But now I know that this permanence, this moment, is the fixed point from which anything and everything can be viewed with timeless equanimity.

Many people are dizzied, troubled by the concept of eternity, when trying to think about it. The reason for this, I assume, is that they think of it under the rubric of time, thus of change or motion—rather than the very opposite of change, namely permanence. And permanence is in another order, another dimension. Such permanence, if we are lucky, is always present in us if we but stop. That we can stop and experience it tells us that we’re strangers here.

Transcendence

Although it is a favorite word of mine, transcendence has its problematical aspects. It suggests a radical difference between two regions of reality when, in truth, the difference may simply be due to ignorance, thus to the limits of our innate perception.

This thought occurs to me—can occur—because I am a child of the twentieth century. In that time we’ve expanded our perceptions most notably into the virtually invisible regions of the electromagnetic, indeed we’ve managed to exploit the powers of that dimension effectively enough to give us a system of communications unthinkable in former times. We’ve also expanded our view into the extremely small so that we speak of the physicist’s view of the metal table—which becomes a network mostly of voids—and we have successfully released the force hidden in the core of the atom to stage the miracles of Hiroshima, Nagasaki.

Now it is a simple fact that familiarity will breed contempt, thus whatever we manage to understand—never mind control, exploit—loses is aura of mystery, leaves the transcendent realm and becomes just ordinary physics and ho-hum chemistry. Conversely, those who are committed to the notion that radical transcendence is genuinely real would here chide me for suggesting that electromagnetism be labeled transcendent in any sense at all. But why not? Merely because we’re able to control it? We’re able to control it only because we obey the laws that rule it, and then with great effort and skill. And neglecting precaution, we’ll be electrocuted.

The trend of my own thought these days is to see reality as seamless. To be sure, it depends on the day of the week: it’s difficult to shed old habits of interpretation. In this process I’ve retained my strong sense of dualism, but apply it across the board. Body and soul, yes. But I’d frame that more abstractly as a passive and an active principle, always everywhere interacting and everywhere constrained by law, thus by an Ultimate from which reality springs.

By passive I mean matter—but not necessarily only matter as we know it. It is governed by physical laws—but I’d speculate that we’re only seeing a range of those laws’ applicability; in other ranges they may be more forgiving to the action of minds than at this level. By active principle I mean agencies, minds. They are free but governed by moral law; call it karma. Being always associated with the passive principle, agencies are also governed by limitations placed on “matter”.

It’s a Tuesday so I’ll illustrate this more. On days like this it seems to me that these two principles are just as present at the subatomic level as anywhere else. There is the particle and its guiding wave—proposed to explain the paradoxes of the two-slit experiments in physics. There is a guiding intelligence within the living cell where chemical civilization builds its astonishing structures. It’s there in us as soul. And angels too have bodies of some subtle kind and thus are not, using an ancient hierarchical schema, “pure” intelligences. And we’ll experience the familiar passive principle in a more rarified form after we die and cross the border into another range of perception. But no, I won’t drop the word “transcendence” just yet. It’s an old, old friend. And I know what I mean when I use it.