Whose Illusion?

More in touch with the natural world, as on a brief but real Great Lakes vacation, or carefully observing living creatures, as we have been doing here with butterflies—in my own awkward case such experiences invariably produce cosmological notes. And one of these is that the Eastern notion, namely that this world is Maya or illusion, cannot be correct.

I am looking at a wondrous book on Papillons† (in three languages). Here’s a fascinating picture of a certain Grass Moth. And then I’m told that “The Grass Moths, all of which are small, form a large family with a great variety of forms and about 15,000 species worldwide. Many of them can wrap their front wings around their bodies when at rest, so that they are then difficult to make out.” 15,000 species! Of one kind of moth. That’s an illusion? Whose illusion is that? We’re not born knowing such things. Somebody had to count all those varieties of Grass Moths. Well, if Wikipedia has got it right, the Order Lepidoptera, where the Grass Moth belongs, has, all told, an estimated 174,250 species.

On the way home from the pool last night, Brigitte stopped and pointed at a tree. “Look at the bark of that tree,” she said. “Have you ever seen something like that?” We both stared at the trunk of a tree, fascinated now—having passed it at least fifty, sixty times in the past several years.

The notion that the world is an illusion is the interpretation that Eastern traditions give to what is known as the unitive vision. In the West it is interpreted as union with God. Multiple posts on this blog touch on the subject—this experience—which I take to be content-free and energetic in nature. Being that, its interpretation is shaped by the traditions, knowledge, and philosophies of those who have them—therefore by culture.

Western religions are monotheistic; they conceive of the world as created by God. Therefore it can’t be an illusion. An awareness of an enormous contrast, between ordinary experience and this ecstasy, is also voiced in the West, but not quite in the same negative terms as the East has produced. But the Western version, boiled down to its essence, is to say that the world is less than God. The Eastern version drives this to its extreme. The big contrast is that in the West we conceive of God as the absolutely Other—whereas, in the East, the person who has the experience—now of the world, now of Samadhi—is the same person. Therefore it is the experiencer who has the illusion and, for all practical purposes, is also its cause. Logically speaking, he or she is God. But to escape this problem, the East, when pressed to put it into concepts, imagines us as tiny particles of the Ultimate—but still able to create 174,000 species of Lepidoptera? Or is that a collective effort?

The secular version of the experience is Cosmic Consciousness. If the secular has a religious mode at all—and it will have it once it experiences ecstasy—it is pantheistic. Therefore Cosmic Consciousness is a fitting sort of explanation. Oddly enough, the secular version may be the most concise and perhaps accurate; it simply projects energy. In a pantheistic conception, no one is really present, and the Lepidoptera are simply produced by chance variations. That, of course, I find impossible to believe. But that we’re experiencing the cosmos, rather than God, that I think might be right on. Thus I resist assigning the “unitive experience” any transcendental rank. It is content-free but very energetic. The creation, meanwhile, in its extraordinary diversity and intelligent arrangement, tells me that there is more to the world than merely an overwhelming feeling. Ponder the following quote from the same book, this time illustrating two butterflies mating, rear touching rear:

With flying insects which comprise many species, such as dragonflies and butterflies, nature has to make sure that mating cannot take place between representatives of different species. This is achieved by extreme differentiation of the exterior genitalia, so that male and female organs fit together like key and lock. These distinctive features provide the lepidopterist with accurate classifying aids and help him to distinguish between otherwise very similar species. [Papillons, p. 40]

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†Zauberwelt der Schmetterlinge, The Magic of Butterflies, Papillons, by Gunter Steinbach and Werner Zepf, Sigloch, 1998. The image shown (own photography) is of the Common Buckeye, Junonea coenia, not of the Grass Moth. The Buckeye is a butterfly that looks a little like a moth because of its brown coloration.

Hylomorphism—Persistent Critter

Hylomorphism reared its head again in blogs I occasionally read—and every time it does I think of Thomas Aquinas’ extensions of Aristotle’s definition of substance (fusion of matter and form). He extended that definition by adding the principle of a double composition; in that the pairs are essence and existence. In Aristotle unformed, prime matter and immaterial form have a kind of shadowy quasi-reality until they meet and interact—but when form and matter separate again, as at the death of a human, nothing is left. Hence Aquinas’ extensions. In effect he added existence as a third component—and was thus able to assert the reality of angels and of God. Man is matter, substantial form (essence), and existence. An angel is substantial form and existence. And God’s essence is his existence. Elegant, but one wonders about the role of matter in all this. If genuinely higher beings are possible without it, what purpose does matter actually serve?

And every time I think of this, the same thought occurs. Hylomorphism is problematical. I’ve held for a long time that the scheme should be abandoned—but it hangs on because its tough to abandon a functioning raft as we try to build a new one while still sailing choppy seas—read our ignorance in this dimension. What is matter? What is form?

The concept of matter has become genuinely problematical now that we have some operational knowledge of electromagnetism. It should have been equally problematical for past ages too if they had thought more about air and light. Our own theories about the nature of atoms cause them to manifest as forces, not really as tiny solids held by forces. And as solidity disappears, form morphs (pun intended) into the behavior of forces.

Form has always been, as it were, a handy way of distinguishing classes of tangibilities one from others, with accidents (individually distinguishing features) a kind of work around the limitations of a fundamentally imprecise concept. The concept is indispensable in ordinary thought, of course, but really only means “the way things appear and act,” thus what is usually called their phenomenological aspect. We know that they exist by means of our perceptions; if we can see or feel or smell or hear them, we cannot doubt that they are there. The separation of phenomena and noumena is at root only a mental game; no experiential proof of the distinction may be had. And so are other separations, though less obviously: form and matter, or, as above, force and behavior. If something exists, it behaves—simply by enduring.

There is a game side here—and a practical one. The practical issue is our ability to perceive—and intersubjectively, thus many people having the same perception. Seeing ghosts or angels (to cite two that defy hylomorphism) is a rare and almost always individual experience—and from such perceptions no science can develop. Aquinas extended the concept to angels—by adding his double composition—because angels figure in the Bible, a source of information he saw as transcending the ordinary realm. If vast numbers experienced angels, we’d think of them as casually as we think about air.

For me, washed as I am in the waters of modernity (polluted although they are), hylomorphism is a cul de sac. I’ve suggested on this blog elsewhere that thinking of form as intention promises a fruitful way out. In nature the intention is transcendent, in human products traceable to us. In living nature the intention may be some third agency, above or below. Intention works very nicely as a substitute—and introduces the missing link in logic: agency.

Now as for what spirits are doing here in the material dimension, where we need intricately engineered bodies even to perceive, that is a really good question.

Crises and the Inner Life

Certainly in times of crisis—perceived or real—various tensions between the social and the interior life become apparent. By “perceived” I mean, for instance, the current atmosphere produced by news of markets, political deadlock, misfortunes in war, and the like. These macroscopic phenomena don’t directly influence the daily life of most people right now, but they produce stresses in those whose personal horizons—in space and time—are expansive. Those who live in the narrow here and now and largely centered in the self, don’t react either to anticipated triumphs or dooms in the wider, in the outer world.

Interesting this. Empathy for others requires expanded personal horizons—thus caring for others. Superior judgment requires expanded time horizons—thus action with a view to future outcomes. But such characteristics link the person more closely to the world and thus distract from the inner life. The inner life might be encapsulated in the phrase “practicing the presence of God”—or, in other traditions, characterized by the word “detachment,” that detachment being from the world. Do empathy and foresight, markers of the higher life, conflict with the inner, the highest form of the higher life?

If someone is genuinely detached from the world, does that mean that he doesn’t care? Is that a kind of selfishness? Never mind the problems of the world. I’m after my own salvation, my own nirvana. What about mendicant orders (Christian and other) that let ordinary people labor for food that they accept because they have a “higher” vocation? Is there a problem here?

The problem is real—but only if we think in a linear way. One of the most maddening aspects of the higher life is that it isn’t linear—thus that it points out of this world, is at right angles to the three dimensions. When I manage to grasp and hold on to this—rarely for more than five minutes at a time—and crises tend to remind me—the problem disappears.

Detachment or conscious awareness of God—there is no spot where God is not—must coincide with, transcend, and at the same time fuse with caring for others and looking far ahead. It is an attitude, a will, to care while being inwardly separated from the great chaos all around. Identification is the technical word here. We can effectively act without being identified. To do this is the hardest thing in the world—but is rewarded with subtle energy by whatever name called. Neither those who are stressed by crises—nor those who just ignore them because they have no direct effect—are properly detached. Both represent linear adaptations to what is coming down. Detachment means to care, to act, and yet to be at peace, no matter what. The most popular version of this general view is a poem called Desiderata. It was written by Max Ehrman in the 1920s (link). One of its most quoted lines is this one: “And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” Not a bad thought to hold as the Dow, this moment, struggles to reach 11,000 at 11:40am eastern time.

Paradoxical Calculus

If we take the teachings of Buddha seriously, the first act of every day ought to be a conscious effort at detachment. More: That state of mind, detachment, should follow us throughout the day and be the last effort of the night. Paradoxically detachment is the route to empathy. Thus a withdrawal is necessary to be able genuinely to reach out to others. The argument for that in a bit.

Without detachment everything slides into a kind of relativity where another calculus rules. It says: “I exist only in so far as others see me.” This is the calculus of conventionality: attention seeking and bestowing—and we bestow it in efforts to get it. This calculus, habitual although it is, is paradoxical because, if true, then we don’t really exist, not in ourselves. We are strictly a social construct.

All genuine religion is grounded on the perhaps curious notion that Genuine Reality is invisible and intangible. My logic runs thus. The one “other” that always sees me (and thus, using the conventional calculus, makes me real) is God, and if God did not then I would cease to be. But I can’t see God and hence I can’t be sure. Hence the exaggerated role of “faith” in western religiousness. The eastern seeker wishes to reach the Genuinely Real, the pure Buddha Mind, and asserts that all else is illusion. Therefore the only thing that isn’t evanescent is what cannot be perceived at all—because the Buddha Mind is as invisible and intangible as God. Therefore, for all practical purposes, it is Nothingness. And when we at last do experience it, then we have infinite bliss. At the functional level union with God and Nirvana are equivalent, aren’t they? Anything beneath the total sovereignty (read absolute detachment or union with God) is suffering. Is that true or isn’t it?

It seems to be. The area of ambiguity—the only area that is ambiguous in all of this—is intimacy. Therefore we prize it. Intimacy is soul-to-soul communication. It is not really available in group settings. It is also incompatible with radical detachment, strictly speaking, although (ambiguity again) the Buddha’s action (in staying in the world to help others) implies empathy. Genuine empathy and intimacy are virtually one. We don’t seek intimacy for our own sake but for the sake of the other. Here I am reminded of the Sufi story of the lover who pleads for admittance into the chamber of the Beloved. The voice within asks: “Who is it? Who wishes to enter?” — “It is you,” says the lover in response. Until the “me” becomes the “you,” there is no intimacy. That overflow of empathy arises when we succeed in self-extinguishment—or, to put it more dramatically, we love so much we throw ourselves away. For “self” here we must read the unreal self, the projected ego structure. The paradox is present, therefore, in intimacy too. Absolute withdrawal produces absolute empathy. Naturally-occurring intimacy is a foretaste of what is possible writ large—in intimacy a small self-sacrifice, once more paradoxically arising, most frequently, from an initial sexual attraction.

We don’t exist—and I mean this genuinely, literally—if what we are is merely the outer psycho-physical structure. That structure is nothing, as in nothing “real,” because it does not endure, is perishable. If we identify with it, we’re identified with nothingness. Conversely, we are everything if we identify with the seeming nothing of the absolute and indestructible. So the problem is that famous Maya. There is a deceptively real and a genuinely real. The deceptive seems more real than the genuine. We cling to it. And therefore we suffer.

Now of course, when I spend five minutes of serious thought on the matter, I realize that I cannot genuine love unless I’m actually present, real, and free. Therefore genuine love is necessarily a function of detachment—from the unreal. Buddhism is only paradoxical when we think that the fleeting is permanent—and the permanent isn’t there at all. When we correct for that, Buddhism is simply a practical method. But can we teach that sort of thing in grade school? Not very successfully, I don’t think. But it is better to teach unselfishness than self-esteem. The latter arises without any need of help, never mind artificial nurture—unless we’re raising consumers rather than educating souls.

Drinking Good Water

In philosophical matters it is quite easy to reach firm convictions with very little help from others—by sheer observation. Here is a demo of what I’m saying; the quote is from the eighteenth century but true for all time. And, strictly speaking, to chart our own course through life, we don’t need much more than such personal proof if we are earnest, honest, and determined. Nevertheless, such is the harshness of this dimension, it is a happy moment when we find ourselves confirmed by others who are similarly qualified and similarly earnest. Such confirmation is the more welcome when the prevailing view, high and low, contradicts our personal discovery. It takes some fortitude to withstand a vast social consensus. The wise know this well. Hence there is this Sufi story intended to warn and to strengthen:

A man who studied under a wise Guide learned from this sage that soon (the Guide named a certain day in the near future) all of the water would change. Those who drank it would go mad. The sage suggested that the disciple gather and safely store fresh water deep in a mountain cave where the destructive influence would not reach it. The Disciple did as he was told. After that the Guide departed for another place—and soon after that, as he had predicted, the waters changed. Amazingly, all of the people began to change as well, and while society remained in some way unchanged, it had become quite mad. The Disciple continued to drink his own water and only rarely ventured among people where—when he spoke to others—he saw that they thought that he was crazy now. But he had kept his sanity while they had lost theirs. This went on for a long time—but the Disciple began to feel an ever growing, indeed yawning loneliness. And one day, in desperation, from his feeling of sheer isolation, he gave in, drank the local water in the village—and went mad himself.

Big Brother now once more loved him. It is good to know the truth. But we need the friends who stand by our side when the world goes mad.

Relegare or Religare?

In religious acculturation the most important element is barely touched upon—so that we don’t even recognize the very experience of it when it arises spontaneously. We don’t in any way link it to religion. I find it interesting that the etymology for religion Cicero once offered is right on target—at least for me. He thought the word derived from “again” and “reading”—relegare. When we expand the concept to include pondering on things, as in reflecting upon, we are very close to the idea of contemplation—thus to “reflecting on the higher or the elevated.” Others have preferred deriving the word from religare, meaning to fasten or to bind fast, thus pointing to a bond between the human and divine. But the sense of that word (binding) also holds the notion of an obligation, an obligation laid on us. And, indeed, my own religious acculturation had plenty of that. It was commandment-based. Do this; do not do that. And there are consequences. Thus religion came in the form of behavioral dicta—not at all dissimilar to “Look before you cross the street—or you might be run over,” the main difference being that the “run over” portion of the teaching was projected in time to a vague and misty sort of place. We were even taught to pray under the rubric of obligation—never ever under the rubric of nutrition. Yet prayer is the closest we get to contemplation in these contexts—and the genuine religious life is actually centered on it.

We were children, of course. The acculturation was more social than religious. Religious acculturation ought to be life-long, and should have institutional support to channel the wisdom in more or less formal ways, but this isn’t in the cards. Usually after 10, maximally after 18 years of age, religious education altogether ceases. Not surprisingly the vast majority is far more ignorant of religion than, say, of high school science. Now, to be sure, coming from a family where Montessori education is highly regarded—and entirely ignored by the world—my view of the rest of education, never mind religious, is equally unprintable. Therefore the religious life, when it is actually practiced, especially by a few members of the laity, is the world’s most hidden activity of all.

At least in West—saying which I engage in one of those ploys you’ll find in Games People Play. (To take the air out of some windbag mouthing generalities, wait until he finishes and then say, “Yes, but not in the East.”) Some religious traditions—I’m thinking of Buddhism—place detachment and inward-directed contemplation much more prominently than the avoidance of sin, obedience to doctrine, and ritual practices—or the euphoric acceptance of Christ preferably in a crowd with lots of people shouting hallelujahs. Perhaps in those Eastern reaches more of the acculturation sticks and lasts beyond childhood.

What comes first? Inner awakening—which is fed (literally, actually, tangibly) by contemplative activities—or behavioral conformity? The first is first, I think. If it is not awakened and active in the person, morality of behavior, even after it has become a habit, is much too easily eroded by unhappy circumstances. Inner awakening is like a spring. Once it flows, it is avidly watched—and when the turmoil of life starts to clog up its channel, the motivation to clean it out and help it flow again arises right out of the pain of life.

Concerning nutrition and prayer in the Christian tradition, I suggest this earlier short post.

Happy Hunting Grounds

When something cannot be described using words or graspable analogies, how can that something motivate people to seek it? Yet such is the case with ecstatic experiences. Those who report them use words like these: “It cannot be described!” “It transcends all that we know!” “Ineffable!” This can—and is—rendered into dreary technical jargon: The very means we try to use to describe or understand it are also the very veils that hide this unutterable Wonder. More amusing, sometimes, are imaginative aggrandizements like this: Compared to it the greatest Joy that you could possibly experience is like a tiniest black ant hiding at the bottom of the deepest canyon in the deepest ocean in the darkest hour of the longest night. Etc.

I much prefer descriptions of the world we get from some of the Native American tribes. They spoke of the Happy Hunting Grounds. Not sophisticated? Catering to the already excessively sensuous nature of humanity? — Or could the Happy Hunting Grounds be much closer to the truth than the Unimaginably Ineffable reached by extreme and towering mortifications after uncounted lives of failure? The Happy Hunting Grounds can at least be described in some ways. The greatest of humanity’s ecstatics utterly fail to communicate. What they say reminds me of a perfectly-wiped blackboard: we’re staring at nothing at all.

So who is closer to the truth? Could the ecstatics have it right? Or dare we trust the Iroquois? Well, here I would begin by pointing out that the Iroquois were an exceedingly sophisticated people; the Iroquois League had features of government that, if we could reproduce them, would please us indeed—but would also impose disciplines incompatible with a consumption culture. Let’s not dismiss the Iroquois, the Cherokee, or the Algonquians just because we’re ignorant of them and managed to erase them (for a time) from the cultural landscape.

Meanwhile there are some genuine problems with the ecstatic view. If the ecstatics are right, radical discontinuities are present in the cosmos. This comes into view when we compare the life we know in this dimension, the efforts we’re supposed to make to reach salvations, and the rewards we are supposed to gain. Effort and reward are incommensurably disproportional. It does not matter which cultural tradition we consult. Eternal damnation or eternal (but indescribable) bliss? Eternal suffering in rebirth after bloody rebirth, old age, etc., over and over again? Unless in this life we make so heroic an effort of the will to extinguish ourselves that we suddenly become divine? When incommensurability is present, it becomes problematical to speak of meaning. The Arbitrary raises its head—however benevolent its visage.

Over against that Ungraspable, the Happy Hunting Grounds make a lot of sense. The way I see it, life here and life beyond must have some differences, to be sure—but also some continuities. Without both, meaning disappears. In the Happy Hunting Grounds, hunting is still necessary—but it is easier, happiness is greater, the game is ample, and easier to catch. The myth projects a transition to a higher sphere in which the features of the mental landscape retain some element of recognition—not this life here and then an indescribable flash of light. I’m inclined to trust humanity’s traditional views against the extreme experiences of those who assault heaven with boundless fury determined to rob it of its secret. I find it interesting that ordinary people, reporting on near-death experiences, also suggest the kind of continuity the Amerindians did by speaking of hunting grounds. People who’ve undergone an NDE are themselves transformed by the experience, predominantly for the better. And they do have something to say—although, to be sure, they also have difficulties putting that world into the language we use to describe this one.

My own views of the ecstatic are fleshed out here. To give it a brief summary, it appears to be contact with something analogous to energy, experienced as extraordinarily powerful and positive. It appears to heighten benevolence and intellect—but fails to bestow knowledge. It is interpreted as contact with a person—but only by some. Among the traditions, the Sufis are cautious about it, their teachers frown. And official Catholicism (although derided for this) does not rush to embrace the experience either—and quite rightly so.

Tools, Not Lords

We must keep words in their places: excellent servants but very bad lords. Poets innately know this, thus words dance to their tune rather than the other way about. In my world the outer (let me call it that for just a moment), thus that to which words refer, is the governing reality; the symbols that evoke it are just tools. Some people fasten on words as if these had a heft, tangibility, and immutability—but experience has taught me that the same sound or written form often means quite contrary things all depending on the mysterious “outer” the speaker or writer actually holds in mind.

I’m after that tangibly real. But when I get away from ordinary, physical things, that real becomes invisible; in actual experience it’s just a feeling inside me. Take words like soul or self. Therefore, to save time, my initial interest when picking up a book, say, is to discover the writer’s existential stance. If it greatly differs from mine, I rapidly lose interest. Stance, of course, is unimportant if the reporting is about simple, generally observable facts, but if the matter is murky, aesthetic, or requires interpretation, the person’s stance becomes important—if for no other reason than to save time. A person’s existential rooting, to use another word, determines the meanings he or she will attach to the words.

I spend a great deal of time pondering the writings even of people whose general stance agrees with mine, especially writers far away in time, thus when my context of the life in those times is thin. I spend time wondering what invisible feelings the words they use actually represent. What did they feel when they used this word or that? What did the Buddha mean when he used the word anatman (no-self)? If there is no self, what is the point of nirvana? It couldn’t mean what the summaries say, what the dogmatists ignorantly hammer home, bludgeoning us with a patent contradiction. Well. Today I chanced across a very brief but very potent post on The Zennist, here, titled “Prior to nirvana.” It’s worth a trip there to read it. Here we have the kind of explanation that makes sense to me—entirely in harmony with genuine, hard introspection—which is the real root of knowledge, rather than that which concept-juggling yields. In a nutshell, the Zennist argues that the self the Buddha called no-self  was the corporeal entity, this current composite—not at all the self that I have in mind when I use the word.

The Body in Question

With a respectful nod to Jonathan Miller, who produced a TV series and then wrote a book using that title, both being products that gave us much delight, I want to borrow the title for use in another context. My context is more, shall we say, philosophical. Much the same thought often arises as I age and, waking in the mornings, become aware of my body—as a body. It is that with accumulating years the elegant traditional classification, known as the Great Chain of Being, seems less and less persuasive. To save me lots of words I’ve produced a little visual poem to summarize a vast philosophical structure, that very chain. It had its origins in Aristotle and then came to be formalized, in western thought, before the Renaissance came.

Post-Renaissance this structure started to unravel. The very word, chain, signifies necessary relationship—and that chain began rust from the top down so that, by the nineteenth century (Nietzsche and the death of God) the chain had lost its meaning. It was gradually inverted. the Mineral came to rest on top—and all else derived from it, by chance and happenstance, not by a logically elegant relationship.

At the root of this conceptualization are Aristotle’s ideas of potential and actuality, both having real existence. At the top actuality is total, at the bottom we find pure potential. Humans, in the middle, are the mysterious transition from the realm of becoming to the realm of being. As we ascend from the bottom, more and more potential is actualized until it is total Being in God. But what with the inorganic at the top, the whole concept of being loses all interest for the obvious reason that the original duality of potential and actuality is lost.

Now you might think that I would strongly embrace the Great Chain of Being. I appear always to be on the side of tradition. But that’s not the case here. The more aware I become of the body in question, the less inclined I am to see either life as a whole (plant, animal, etc.) or human life as natural to the grand scheme of Creation. The body becomes more and more visible (indeed feel-able) as a kind of temporary tooling for a limited purpose—the longer you live the keener the knowledge of that. I wake up and remember telephone calls bringing me news of my own generation’s physical problems: the parts are making troubles; this fails, that needs a fix, chemical help, surgical assists, etc. That perfect balance in the center of the chain of being might make sense to someone just to either side of forty, not to someone past three-score-and ten.

The machine-like nature of the body is a problem in elegant schemes of this sort. At the same time I think that a duality does underlie reality. But when it comes to human centrality—a kind of centaur-like existence, neither horse nor human, properly speaking—there I feel genuine intellectual discomfort. When I contemplate that state, especially when its old, gnostic ideas present themselves either in pagan forms, like genuine Gnosticism, or in the Christian variety which speaks of a fallen world. It is only in a fallen world that spirits can possibly be required to be prisoners of machines.

Déjà vu

I’ve mentioned this experience once before on this blog (here) when commenting on Carl B. Becker’s Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death—in that context regretting Becker’s exclusion of that experience from the subject matter that he covers under the category of the paranormal. Then I mentioned the experience again in yesterday’s posting—and the post promptly brought some visitors who were using a Google search with the phrase. My own conviction is that the experience is the most widely-known instance ordinary people have of precognition. In my own case—and I think this is generally the case—I experienced the déjà vu feeling much more frequently in childhood than later, but these experience still recur, if very rarely. They’ve always fascinated me. Indeed it was when I first encountered J.W. Dunne’s writings that I felt sure that I’d approached some kind of explanation of the phenomenon.

Déjà vu literally means “already seen” in French. The phrase was first used by the philosopher and parapsychologist Émile Boirac (1851–1917) in a letter to the French journal Review Philosophique and later in his book, The Future of the Psychic Sciences. In that book he also proposed the word metagnomy as a substitute for clairvoyance, thus “knowledge of things situated beyond those we can normally know” (link). Frederick Meyers (1843-1901), the founder of the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR)†, called it promnesia, using a Greek formation meaning prior memory. The simpler common-language French phrase won the linguistic battle. Déjà vu is simply a very powerful sensation that some situation, right now, has happened before. Indeed when it does, we often know what will happen next, including what people will say.

The notion that we are remembering a dream—and a precognitive dream, at that—is totally persuasive if we have ourselves actually had one or more such dreams which we remembered at the time when had them—so that when the déjà vu moment later actually arrived we already knew that we had dreamt it.

The Paranormal Encyclopedia.com here notes that one psychology professor at least, in 1896, Arthur Allin, then of the University of Colorado, Bolder, had suggested that the source of déjà vu was forgotten dreams. The modern explanation, summed up by Wikipedia here, rejects precognition as an explanation and trots out a long list of other supposedly more scientific explanations of that squirrelly sort that make those of us  sublimely confident in the Big Picture smile with bemusement.

†The SPR has an American counterpart, the American Society for Psychical Research, Inc., reachable here.

Precognition: Some Curious Trails

If you looked for a thinker who has expended serious thought on precognitive dreaming—and did so before this 2011—the one name that would surely surface is that of John William Dunne (1875-1949). Since publishing his book, Dreamer, Andrew Paquette joins Dunne as another.

J.W. Dunne, born in Ireland, worked as an aeronautical engineer in England. His book, in multiple (and drastically-changing) editions, is An Experiment with Time (1927) arose from multiple experiences of his own in which he dreamt of events that, later, actually took place—both private and very public events. His theory, Serialism, was an attempt to explain it.

Paquette is an artist of some renown, with multiple achievements in comic books, video games, teaching, the fine arts, and as an author and teacher in computer graphics. He is also a psychic of obviously high gifts—a very well-written report of which experience is his book, Dreamer. He discovered these talents following a precognitive dream, the first of many (see my last post here).

I could, but almost hesitate to, add a third name to the list, that of the Russian, P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), who developed his own theory in A New Model of the Universe. Ouspensky did not address the subject of precognitive dreams narrowly, but his model, presented in the book mentioned above, appeared at about the same time as Dunne’s book (1931).

The first two (Dunne, Paquette) both assume that the future we see in dreams actually exists, with the implication that free will is at minimum problematical. Ouspensky provides a model of time in which this preexistent future is potentially present, but its manifestation (actualization) is due in part to choices. Therefore in Ouspensky’s scheme, the future we dream can be changed—if we make other choices—but the event that we actually live was also there, hiding in potential right alongside the more painful alternative that we avoided by acting differently. We’re dealing here with very original people; therefore it may not come as a total surprise that Ouspensky believed in eternal return, thus that he lived the same life, over and over again—a fact to which he attributed his experiences of déjà vu, whereas others in turn explain that sensation by saying that we’ve dreamt the future the night or the week before but just don’t remember the dream. Sorry, but that’s the nature of this subject…

Dunne and Ouspensky both think in terms of geometrically arranged times. Dunne projects a serial succession, one time existing above the other—so that from T2 you can see the entirety of T1; thus from T2 the observer sees T1’s life all at once, from childhood to death, all at one glance. Dunne imagined an infinite regress of times—and staunchly defended this heterodoxical view. Ouspensky’s model, presented on pages 343-406 of his book (Vintage, 1971) presents an infinite time in which a multi-dimensional matrix contains an infinite number of lines, each linking points of possibility. One life is thus a single branching line traced through this (to the human mind unimaginably complex) matrix of possibilities. The line is what we actualize; other possibilities, other lives we might have lived, remain in the matrix. (One is reminded of the many-world theory we owe to physicist Hugh Everett (1957)—with the difference that in Everett’s scheme, each world tangibly exists.)

Alas, precognition is a genuine problem. If we see the future, something must be there to see. Is it a tangibly existing hard real something? Ouspensky avoids the problem of free will—the existence of which we assert from experience—by moving preexistence to a quasi-real matrix of potential. You might say that he reifies Aristotle’s potential. But if we accept hard preexistence, we must find another explanation for free will. One solution Paquette presents is that we choose to live a life, a life shown to us, in the sublime world, and in great detail, before we’re born. Thus we exercise choice outside this life but not in it. But Paquette is no doctrinaire; his focus is on rich actual experiential data. He reports precognitive dreams that come out almost, but not precisely, as dreamt; thus choice is exercised here. Sometimes he says that everything’s fixed; he also asserts that we are here to develop. He does not resolve the contradictions that thus sprout here and there; no coherent cosmology has yet (I’m still not finished with his book) emerged that might explain how we can possibly learn anything in a life in the midst of which the most crucial element of agency, choice, is denied us except as an illusion.

The fully worked-out models all reflect a modern form of thought in which it is not at all common to ponder such divine powers as omniscience—or to take them seriously. At the same time, the actual experience of precognitive dreams frequently features instances showing that (1) they do indeed happen, (2) are confirmed later in very large part, but (3) then sometimes do not end tragically, as they did in the dream. This would suggest that the assertion of a fixed future must be opened up in some way, thus minimally as Ouspensky opened it. Another way to do that is to suggest that agencies may be involved—other than ourselves, that precognitive dreams may be in the category of communications. Let me flesh that out a little more.

The best way to do this is to imagine that the future may actually be visible—thus projected to the eyes of minds—without being tangibly there. At some resolution all events and things are energy in motion, at all kinds of levels of coarseness and subtlety, mental and physical. Our reality may be more transparent to higher beings than ourselves. God, of course, is omniscient, but angels (not least guardian angels) may be multiscient, or much-knowing, just eyeballing the vast energetic flow and, furthermore, communicating instantly with one another. And if you hate the very notion of an angel, why not every human being but not in our ordinary waking selves but genuinely near-angelic when we are asleep. Either way, the future may already be here, in projection, and the distant future as well as the near—but the nearer the more detailed. And our sleeping selves may see it (or may have it framed as dreams by guardian angels). And some of us are more gifted, alert, or open to these things than others—and the dramatic is more likely to catch our attention than the ordinary.

What we are seeing, then, are patterns of the future, not the actual rooted and cemented tangible reality of it. Therefore it remains open to change, certainly at the level of personal detail, which is what matters to individuals. It is simply a general kind of communication of reality, in projection, which is present quite naturally based on the very design of reality. And if apprehended can sometimes be a source of help in need.

One of the more interesting aspects of the paranormal, and Paquette notes this fact in his book, is that willful attempts to produce psychic results tend to fail dramatically. A prominent explorer of this phenomenon is J.E. Kennedy (for some of his papers, see this link). One aspect of this well-documented observation is that paranormal phenomena may possibly be a means of communication, form beyond the borderzone, to humanity here, to indicate that something more exists than we can actually see. It’s there like water, but nobody is forced to drink. And precognition may be a means of signaling that fact to many people in times when great disasters loom ahead—already clearly visible from “over there,” not fixed in every detail, but visible, from patterns already forming now.

Notes on Paquette's Dreamer

A fascinating book, by Andrew Paquette, titled Dreamer (O Books, 2011). All through the years I’ve complained about the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg saying that it is all analysis, not enough raw material. Well, here we have a case of all raw material, not enough analysis. Paquette is a gifted psychic, by profession an artist—commercial, fine, etc. Mostly in dream-scapes, he reports on experiences that range far beyond the borderzone. He discovered his talents by dreaming the future, rather dramatically, while working in the Netherlands. He dreamt of a hold-up in which he was killed, shot, died, and rushed back to New York as a spirit to his then girl friend, later wife, to tell her of his misfortune—still in his dream. And then woke up—still in the Netherlands and very much alive. Some time later the event actually took place, but, in the midst of it, remembering the dream with great shock as, again, two men, in the same locale, actually took hold of him,  he managed to escape his assailants.

Here we have a classical dilemma. He dreamt the future with one outcome. It happened, and identically, more or less, in real life—but only up to a point. Then the recall of the dream itself served as the cause of his action to escape the consequences. So how do we explain what appears to be a contradiction. The future is visible, hence apparently fixed. But the future is changeable, hence subject to action arising from knowledge and will.

In a much more minor way, I’ve been concerned with dreams, including the precognitive kind, for more years (I think) than Paquette has lived. My own powers are drastically muted compared with his, but I’m open enough to recognize the same objective reality over there that he reports. Multiple posts on this blog deal with some of my observations.

Thus far I haven’t penetrated very far into this modest but rich book (less than 300 pages). I may have additional notes on Dreamer as time goes on.

Chemical Civilization or More Comments on ID

Human imagination has limits of sorts—not at the individual level, to be sure, but when we get more collective, certain thoughts never seem to occur to groups—at least not in public writings. The Intelligent Design movement in biology (I call it the new biology), using very powerful reasoning, based on observation, not on first principles, has concluded that actual design underlies biological systems. The proposition surfaced—and in the wink of an eye ID proponents were tarred with the brush of creationism. If life is actually designed, the only possible explanation anybody can come up with is that the designer must be God.

The leading thinker in this field, in my opinion, is Michael J. Behe, a biochemist. I rank him thus because he stays close to the actual observational data at the lowest possible level—and he isn’t tempted to knee-jerk reactions. His two books are Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution. These are must reading for anyone who wishes to understand the ID proposition. I’ve quoted Behe earlier to show that he does not name the designer but simply insists that design is present in life. In his second book, which is largely concerned with malaria, a disease caused by a one-celled organism (a so-called protist) of which the most virulent kind is Plasmodium falciparum, Behe faces the “designer” question squarely when he says:

Here’s something to ponder long and hard: Malaria was intentionally designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts…. What sort of designer is that? What sort of “fine-tuning” leads to untold human misery? To countless mothers mourning countless children? Did a hateful, malign being make intelligent life in order to torture it? One who relishes cries of pain? Maybe. Maybe not.

I discovered “intelligent design” before that movement began when—already a father with children—I studied biology on my own and discovered what I called the unmistakable signs of what I called technology—present at the cellular and sub-cellular level. I was then professionally engaged in technology assessment—the human kind—and the conclusion seemed obvious. Being also a science fiction writer, my own intuitions rapidly produced the concept of chemical civilization. (That subject is mentioned multiple times in this blog; here are one, two, three, and four posts on the subject.) What I saw in Brigitte’s textbook (Biology Today, Random House, 1972, which is the book I had been reading) was precisely what I saw in my work-life, but more sophisticated in design at the sub-microscopic level—namely technology of the human kind. It wasn’t perfect; it showed the same tendencies as our own—thus definitely goal-seeking arrangements of chemicals to get certain jobs done, by far not perfect, frequently not elegant at all—but working. I imagined this civilization peopled by what I called “little people”—invisible to us, utterly invisible, who made machines by nudging atoms around to achieve some end which still remains murky except, on certain days, to the primitive cosmologist who cohabits this body with me.

The picture I have of life is of an intelligent striving but by a civilization that cannot see the whole picture at all—indeed is striving mightily to see anything at all. We are one of its most successful ventures, because we do, indeed, see a little something ourselves—still not enough, but something. The very fact that life eats life, nature red in tooth and claw—and the fact that life is innocent, innocent, innocent—right up to our appearance—tells me that intelligence is present but, above the chemical, not vision of the sort we sometimes manage. Assuming that our observations are correct—that something intelligent but certainly not even very scient, much less omniscient, is the causative agent of life—indeed that it is life, as we really understand it, and bodies are merely tools it needs in this weird dimension—assuming all of that, quite interesting cosmological ideas surface—and indeed this blog is filled with such speculations.

Now to my opening statement concerning imagination. Nowhere in the ID literature have I thus far encountered serious speculation of the sort that imagination and a little thought—particularly about the fractal nature of this universe—suggests, namely that intelligence may be diffused in the universe and may be as common as matter, thus that many orders of intelligence may exit—to be sure all of them created. Deep down I am a creationist, but not of the primitive variety. Some of us, anyway, accept two orders already—the human and the angelic, beneath the Ultimate. Why not, minimally, a third? My conclusion? It might best be expressed, perhaps, by modifying a popular saying. Keep it simple—and you’ll stay stupid.

On the Trail of the Grail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mysterious Survivor

A coincidence of various stimuli got me thinking once again about Darwinism and Intelligent Design. One such was discovering the Journal of Scientific Exploration, thus a pointer to science as practiced close to the borderzone; I’ve made notes on that earlier here. Another was seeing Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator, courtesy of Netflix. The film makes a very calmly reasoned case for transcendentalism by, among sources, mining the insights of the ID community. I’ve written some notes on the ideological aspects of ID on Ghulf Genes here under the title of “Battle of Clerics.” In that I focused principally on the unfortunate aspects of a debate where philosophical positions clash and cannot be resolved. The actual scientific work that people like biochemist Michael Behe pursue I’ve always admired. That sort of work, seems to me, is genuine science—open-minded, in other words—much like the material presented by JSE. Third on my list of stimuli is my use of the word devolution in the political context on LaMarotte—and remembering, later, that the New Yorker had used that word to lambast Michael Behe in an article published in 2005. The article’s subtitle was “Why intelligent design isn’t.”

But let’s examine that dismissive phrase. The new biology, as I might call it, is quite excellent natural philosophy; it is reasoning about nature based on observation. What the ID movement sees is the marks of intelligence in living beings. It’s obviously there, as I pointed out on Ghulf Genes. Long before the ID movement had its birth, I spent some month studying biology in depth, but as a grown man and already an expert on technology. What I saw in living things, and this time in detail, was just that, technology—indeed exactly the same kind of technology I’d been studying for years already in human society; the big difference between the two was that the biological variety was much, much more sophisticated—and the agencies behind it invisible. And therefore, being also a science fiction author, I hit on the notion of a “chemical civilization” to explain it. In other words, I do agree with the ID proponents, and did so before they came to be known. Obvious intelligence underlies life. No doubt about it.

Now what is not intelligent is to assert that matter can, by sheer chance, produce intelligence—with nothing else added or present. Matter shows no sign whatever of having the potential to manifest life, never mind intelligence. The two concepts on which the whole of Darwinism (neo- or otherwise) rests are natural selection and survival. Natural selection for what? Survival. But what or who is this Mysterious Survivor? Well, it is a chance convergence of chemicals, per Alexander Ivanovich Oparin (1894-1980)—who pushed evolution back to the level of chemicals. By chance they converged, by chance they accidentally formed some more chemical combinations within themselves, the DNA, which by chance coded for proteins that formed, first of all, the walls that they had earlier accidentally formed without the help of DNA and also, by good luck, the enzymes (also proteins) that actually read the DNA later and, reading it by forming RNA, aligned themselves accidentally in such a manner as to form a machine that could, reading RNA this time, form other proteins as well. And presto we have the self-reproducing cell. And having shown that this could be, and all just by accident, the rest is history, a history that, by accident, formed Alexander Ivanovich Oparin, who, by the accidents of birth and education could finally explain it all to the accidentally formed Soviet citizenry.

Considering the mind-boggling improbability of all this, the little child who cries that the emperor is naked might be viewed as intelligent. And that, ultimately, is what the new biologists are actually doing. They point to a gap in the logic that leads from a handful of elements—but by no means all—to self-moving creatures that exhibit purposive arrangements internally, like that handy DNA code. Is it their unforgivable sin that some of the more philosophically minded among them, looking to fill the gap, point to God rather than, like their opponents, to the equally mysterious divine Complexity. The sin, it seems to me, lies in the meanings associated with these two concepts. God is assumed to be intelligent, a source of law, suggesting a relationship between creator and creature—whereas Complexity demands nothing at all while giving us whatever we want in the way of explanation. And where power to explain is sought, Complexity is certainly omnipotent.