Paired Cosmologies

The two cosmologies I want to look at both assume a complex Reality with a God. Representatives are Christianity and some forms of Gnosticism. The two appear to be quite different. In one the phenomenon of life in this our own reality is an intended outcome; in the other it is an aberration. The first suggests an order or arrangement in which God intended at least one category of living entities to populate some tiny portion of the vast emptiness of space. The second maintains that a community of life either erred or by some accident fell into a pocket of reality (i.e. the Universe) where life is not really at home.

Both of these cosmologies demand a certain view of the life-phenomenon and of the universe of matter-energy. To simplify it, for most people “life” simply equals “human life,” but it is interesting, at the graduate levels, to include all life. I’ll stay with 101. To have any kind of view at all, one must be a conscious agent, obviously, equipped with powers of reasoning, an agent for whom what it sees should be meaningful.

Those who’re satisfied with limited meanings, thus those that ordinary life produces (pleasing, displeasing outcomes) neither member of the pairing I propose is meaningful. Life is just a form of matter; nothing above it is required except motion; and matter-as-energy provides that.

All those who can entertain the pairing, above, as possibilities will see reality as a top-down structure. We know that we didn’t make ourselves—even if we can, more or less, chemically trace the making of our bodies. If we were “created” at our formation as embryos, therefore already in this realm—or if we were “created” in a higher sphere first and later, as agents, “descended” into the world of matter—in either case, we were created, and created with limited powers.

The first cosmology, “intended,” easily explains our ignorance at birth. We start as entirely undeveloped potentials; the potentials unfold as we live our lives. In the second, “aberration,” we originated somewhere else, being quite knowing there, but as we descended into the world of matter we were blinded in every possible way, not least by losing our memories. Sticking with the second now, bodies then become a kind of tooling that had to be developed over vast eons of time as a means by which, using matter to see by, we regained, to a limited extent, the power to orient ourselves again in this inhospitable setting to the nature of this reality. Then as we advance our powers gradually develop, we begin intuitively to see again that we are strangers in a strange land. We begin our trek toward the Borderzone—once again equipped, we hope, to make it all the way back again to where we came from.

One indication that this second position has merit is the strangely engineered character of bodies generally. They are systems quite analogous to advanced machines, but more sophisticated. They show a kind of design. Indeed we are still tinkering with them, as witness genetic technologies of healing. By contrast, our inner selves, which seem to have been created rather than fabricated, a kind of seamless perfection appears to be present.

Is this, the second position, incompatible with the first? I don’t think so. The great myth of the Fall, which begins in Paradise, argues for a convergence of these two models. We might take Paradise to be the intended place for souls, for life. And it seems located beyond the Borderzone. Our original home. The fall itself may be read as the “aberration” that caused us to be here. In Genesis we’re driven out of Paradise. But we might have left voluntarily. Sometimes what seems novel and intriguing—and the lower reaches may have opened to our view by a nearby happening, like the Big Bang—hides a lot of trouble and mayhem if carelessly explored. The Gnostics blame the demiurge for making that Big Bang mess—and thereby capturing the innocent. Genesis may be more on target by pointing at a certain overreach—or was it an underreach?—by fully conscious beings. In any case, great troubles cause great labors. And when they are finally over, we tend to be more sober and wiser. Thank God for Jacob’s ladder—and other help sent us from Above.

If Only We Knew More

How to combat that strong feeling—which at times arises just by looking at the world with a cold eye—that our sojourn in this dimension is altogether pointless. There is a glimmer of intuition, always, that that cannot be. And it arises spontaneously enough so that its source is not something that reaches us from others, although it may well come from on high. The world’s revelations, formed into religious doctrines, may, after all, be viewed as the imaginative fleshing out of that tiny intuition by those who’ve lived before.

When such thoughts assail me I like to remind myself that I don’t know enough, and also cannot—not by reading the tea leaves of this dimension. I don’t know the prehistory of our appearance here; I don’t know enough about the world that follows—although I believe (that intuition again) that something beyond exists. The presumption is that if I knew something real about both, the reason for our stay in this dimension would fall into place. Let’s look at these two ranges of inaccessible knowledge.

Prehistory. This realm would seem less depressing if I knew with certainty that souls originate in this dimension “naturally” or that they have been “caught up” in some also natural event like the formation of a cosmos. These are two cases of many—but perhaps the most obvious. In the first (Prehistory A) the presumed model is some kind of emanation, thus that all of reality is in some sense “flowing” out of a divine center. Part of that flow is the conditioned, part the unconditioned order. The conditioned is simply the visible cosmos of energy and matter, the unconditioned manifests as freedom, intelligence, and, most primitively, life. Here the only “authority” we have is Swedenborg’s. He asserted that all “angels” were at origin like us; they emerged from the dark domain, our sunny world or one like it. I say that because Swedenborg did not view the earth as the only cosmic point where life begins a journey “back to God.” The structure of this narrative is that the created soul is quite unconscious but has all the necessary potential, including life itself. And that embodied life is just a phase of the development of this potential. The soul has many stages of development both before and after it arrives in the “beyond.”

The pros and cons of this projection are that life here is a necessary phase. That immediately gives our life here meaning. In this view life arising anywhere in the universe, if conditions are suitable, would seem normal. It would make sense that we have engineered bodies as temporary “vehicles.” The view is also compatible with reincarnation theories if rebirth is occasional and due to the “unfinished” nature of the reborn soul: it has not developed enough. Among the cons is that the model does not fit the Christian cosmology—which has another prehistory, call it Prehistory C. Other problem are its emanationist structure, which is not rationally explained and obviously based on a physical analogy like the radiations of the sun. To be sure, all creation myths are ultimately incoherent, but a “natural” origin seems less meaningful than a deliberate decision by a conscious God, which is what Prehistory C contains.

Prehistory B is the other case. In that one a preexistent community of souls is plunged into a (for its members) unnatural situation by a cosmic event, the model being the Big Bang—which is not an event of “creation” but, rather, the formation of a kind of bubble in a much greater and vastly more dense “Mother Cosmos.” The community lived in the “space” where that bubble formed. The “density” here can be understood in various ways beyond the simple. It might have more dimensions; it could also mean that our cosmos has greater coarseness, its Mother greater subtlety. The change, in any case, is abrupt and in a real sense destructive of an “environment” in which the preexistent community had its being. The unfortunate community is therefore obliged to adapt in some way and then begin the process of returning to Mother.

Let’s look at the pros and cons of this case too. In this view life here is an accidental phase in the life of a soul community. It projects onto the cosmos, and the matrix of which it is a bubble, a “natural” condition such as we experience here, i.e., shit happens. Whatever happens may be lawful, but it seems random as we experience it. Our condition, however, at least makes some sense. We’ve been plunged into an environment to which we’re not adapted, and all that we observe is an attempt to make the best of a bad situation—not least escaping from it into a more suitable one by appropriate development. Our world has fallen, but it isn’t our fault. It just happened. Our inability to remember our preexistence in a “higher” world would also make sense. Cosmic accidents may have swept our memories away—or adapting to this one favors their suppression—filtered out by our brains. Pro: our situation at least makes sense. Con: there is neither rhyme or reason to the situation. Any meaning is referred to something beyond either this cosmos or its accident-prone Mother. Cosmologies tend to do this: they push meaning further away, rather than supplying it. In any case, no Divine Presence is anywhere discernible beyond the seemingly lawful behavior of matter/energy—but only when we give it close study.

The World that Follows. Knowing the world beyond would presumably illuminate our knowledge of this one. Such knowing would require at minimum (1) memory of this existence there, (2) retention of our powers of reasoning and movement (to enable us to look around), (3) ability clearly to perceive the conditions of that world, and (4) the presence of other beings like ourselves. We could then carry out a survey and discover if others had also lived in a “fallen world.” If some had but others had not, Prehistory B would appear more plausible. If all had, Prehistory A would have more weight. We would be able to discover if others over there had a coherent view of reality. If they did, the reasons for that could be ascertained. If not—if the same puzzlement reigned over there as does here—in that case the quest for answers just continues. What is inconceivable is that there is no answer. Our deepest intuition is that there is. That intuition is not merely a glimmer of knowledge. It is also a hunger and a thirst—for meaning and for righteousness.

A Primitive Intuition

Matters I’ve been mulling over recently, and have touched on here and there on Borderzone, include the sorting of “deliberate” and “chance,” the nature of space-time and whatever might be the environment “over there,” and the notion that if higher realms extend beyond this one, they must be superior.

Deliberate? The world has been deliberately fashioned, never mind when and how. Chance? The same, but the cause is chance. I favor “deliberate” and would do so with enthusiasm were it not for observation which says “chance”—but not pure chance. The very existence of teleology (read “life”) suggests an invasion of this realm by something alien to it. And the highly engineered character of life suggests something like a tour de force—not a feeling that arises when I contemplate the formation of planets or of suns.

The actual patterns strongly contradict the top down theology of Catholicism (which is “deliberate”) in that they suggest a conflict between the existence of randomness and of omniscience, omnipotence, etc.

The emanationist model fits observation but is hard to reconcile with the presence of intelligence; it’s there, after all, in us. Intelligence, combined with omniscience, makes it seem weird that “waste” should be present in Reality or, what amounts to the same thing, that there should be such enormous ranges of purposeless material in existence.

Turning to intelligence, what makes zero sense is an evolving God. Reduced to a hard essence, such a “god” would be a creature. Therefore it does not surprise me how the Gnostics reasoned—imagining a very detached, indeed an indifferent and utterly unknowable God. But I have a primitive sort of intuition. Can’t imagine the Gnostic model even if I understand its logical rootings. Nor can I imagine creation as an emanation. That’s far too physical a description; the sun’s the model there. Can’t rightly credit a “fall” either—although it feels right. Can’t rightly credit it confidently in detail as the disobedience of a genuinely knowing community. The cosmic disaster model (Big Bang, say) fits things nicely—including viewing it as a kind of Fall. But it introduces the random into an equation where it could only mean a god who isn’t really in control. The atheistic solution works until we encounter life and intelligence.

It is a puzzlement.

Yet I also know that life and intelligence, together, absolutely force the conclusion of a living and intelligent Divine or Whole which must have all of the perfections Catholicism ascribes to it. There I stand, as it were, up against all of the observable contradictions. Is this where faith comes into the picture? It’s not difficult to believe because, as I say, I feel it as a force, compellingly. But the external evidence all testifies against in. Intelligence and life are, of course, internal evidence.

This sorts my current preoccupations, although that space-time business will take at least another day. The two “inputs” are contradictory, but in a hard choice I have to go with the inner. As for a genuine sorting? Something to die for.

Spacetime and Mindmatter

The core of Sufi teaching is that some kind of higher organs form in us as a consequence of right attention (mindfulness) to experience. The presumption (mine) is that the person so formed is enabled to function properly in the next dimension. “Salvation” in this context has a developmental meaning.

In the Western Christian concept, salvation is projected principally as a divine gift, but achieved by the will to live in accordance with divine law known through revelation and believed in—and that belief itself is a function of the will. We shall fail in this effort, human that we are, but it is the consistency that counts, the sincere intention and its steady implementation. The backstory here is the Fall; it degraded our natures. Therefore the model is that of a blissful state, a descent therefrom for faults of our own, and a return to bliss achieved, as it were, by a reform of our fallen nature. Call it re-development.

The first model suggests that we came into being unfinished, mere potentials, and that ascent is akin to growing up. The second suggests perfectly created beings who fell and must recover.

The Eastern model suggests, more or less explicitly, that souls are really gods but ignorant of their status—and a fall of sorts is implied because that ignorance may have been acquired willfully. If so, these gods have lost the crucial aspect I associate with divinity. And to speak of “sparks of God” does not correct the problem. The meaningful idea of God, for me (an adherent to negative theology that I am) does not support, in relation to God, any kind of division, whether into sparks or not, any kind of evolution, attributes, acts, thoughts, or anything else farmable in thought. Something like the Cosmos may have attributes, may evolve, etc. We can say nothing about God.

So where to go from here? Seriously. How to see this correctly?

Humanity, it seems to me, has no answer. The totality of wisdom consists of different ways of interpreting the contradiction between consciousness and the mindless over against. Dualism of the radical kind (Mazdaism) is one answer. In that view the mindless is one, the mindful the other polarity, both preexistent from eternity. The omnipotent creator (Western monotheism) at least accounts for mind, but don’t ask too many questions about the mindless; the answer will be that God does what he will. Denial of the mindless is the third approach; all is mind; the rest is illusion (e.g. Buddhism). Materialism completes the picture by denying mind; all is matter.

The solution is probably hidden in this quaternity. The most mind-blowing fact in experience is that we can dream the future. Just once, unambiguously, is enough. I’ve experienced it (link). Such an experience convinces me that our concept of time is very iffy. And if of time, probably also of space. In the Real world, and I do not mean this cosmos here, the contradiction I identified above may not be present. Occasionally, for very good reasons, well understood over there, big bangs generate cosmoses of space and time to get some necessary work accomplished. Once over there, we’ll understand it. And we’re all bound over there. Our problem here is cosmocentricity, if you like. We can’t imagine a reality without space and time, mind and matter—nicely separated. Einstein tried, with his spacetime continuum. But don’t try to picture that. Failure is guaranteed.

Cosmic Vistas

Speaking of faith (last post), my own persuades me that humans are something more than energy- and matter-consuming and waste-producing machines. The part of us that transcends this structure appears to be superior, not the product of the machine but, most likely, the reason why the machine is there in the first place. Our minds tell us that we’re here for a purpose—and that purpose is not merely to help others or to leave behind fine memories, in other people’s minds. Therefore our purpose points beyond the machine. The machine is a tool. But why would we need such tools? Here is an instance where knowledge thins out and only speculation remains.

The traditional speculations are largely descriptive: matter, life, intelligence. Life is subdivided into vegetative, animal, and human. The first two have souls that die, the third one does not. We can go beyond this and include angels—that have no bodies. And considering that bodily differentiation make us individually recognizable units but sharing one species, the speculation (Thomas Aquinas’, for example) has it that each angel is also its own species. With angels we leave the created order. Under this schema, humans are always embodied—and death is the consequence of the Fall. After resurrection we shall have bodies again; as for what kind (will they sweat, defecate, have to eat, etc.) on that the speculation rather thins out. Here faith, which I hold must be supported by intuition, fails me. I don’t detect a resonance.

Let me unpack it a little more. I resist the notion that only humans have immortal souls. The biosphere beyond us must have a meaning too—and what if it is the same meaning as in our own case? At the same time, I have no problem thinking that there was a “fall” of some sort and that it has necessitated “bodies.” Further, the notion that death is the consequence of the Fall makes good sense. These tools, being material, cannot last forever. It may also be highly desirable that they drop away at regular intervals. When the job is done, we lay the tools aside.

The Fall, of course, complicates matters. If we take the Judeo-Christian transmission, before it came was Paradise—presumably a place where bodies existed and, indeed, had to ingest food. Why else those forbidden apples that caused the fall? And if ingestion, then also defecation. Or should we accept that depiction of Paradise in symbolical terms—described so that fallen humanity would understand it? In that case Paradise is a previous condition; the eating of the apple is a symbolical depiction of some sort of failure. And all that followed, not least being here, and bodies, and apples, and all the rest—came later. As a consequence.

That we are in a fallen state is rather obvious. That we are personally responsible for being here makes sense; therefore the cause of the Fall was not merely Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience. Let’s view that, too, as symbolical short-hand. Thinking ourselves as stranded here by some cosmic disaster—don’t you dare go near that Big Bang, child, I don’t know what I’ll do if you disobey—introduces an irrational arrangement into reality—and if I wanted that, Materialism has a much better explanation. Occam’s razor, and so forth, would make me choose that.

That, finally, leaves me but one other speculative option. Call it some heavenly Outward Bound program intended to put the newly created soul-beings into a very rough environment in which to learn how to become genuinely human. That model suggests that life here was created by a superior heavenly community, carefully engineered to develop slowly until students could be sent down here to learn and to develop. That one, I’m afraid, produces even less resonance than any of the other models. That this realm, functionally, is a developmental realm is certainly true. But as for its creation, I think the Fall from a paradisaical realm is a better explanation. Whether to develop or not to is left to those who’re here. And failure to develop probably means one thing: Staying here—whether in a body or not. And it is better to be in a body rather than not. We can at least handle, rearrange, and play with matter—rather than simply contemplating our fallen state.

Pure Feeling Tone

If a particular line of thought produces darkness or despair, one thing that it indicates is that it might be wrong. The feeling tone cosmologies produce is therefore a guide to their core meanings quite apart from their conceptual content. If one of these produces energy while another drains it (or substitute hope or hopelessness), the energizing structure is closer to the truth. Or at least that’s an interesting hypothesis.

Using this particular test, systems in which the masses of humanity are doomed or “left behind” are certainly discouraging—and this is underlined by the way these systems describe the requirements for salvation or “enlightenment”; the requirements are altogether beyond the achievement of the masses of humanity.

The core of such negative cosmologies is a kind of naturalism. Put into secular terms, salvation in this world might be described as becoming a billionaire; the masses can never get there. The core of naturalism, in turn, is the absence of a meaningful transcendant structure; these systems have no God or, if they have one, that God is vastly distant and uncaring.

What supports negatively-toned cosmologies is observation of ordinary reality—which is certainly naturalistic. Its most consistent form, materialism, dooms everybody, even billionaires. Meaning in such structures is entirely invisible except in limited forms such as the meaning of words.

Positively-toned cosmologies produce meaning. They do so at the grand scale by enlarging reality so that it has, for us, invisible regions arranged hierarchically under God. In the most positive of these, God is all-loving. The systems get more concrete in promising salvation to all using only such powers as every person possesses (will, intelligence, morality, benevolence, etc.).

Such cosmologies acknowledge the observable reality here and explain it by the mythos of a fall or of a distance from the Divine—which last must not be understood as spatial distance. They also acknowledge the tremendous difficulties of living in this realm and provide communications from the higher realms to guide us and saviors to help us.

Opiate of the masses? Hey! Where can I get some of that stuff? Or, more seriously put, what if the hypothesis is right and a hopeful cosmology is closer to the truth?

The Right Question

The two hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812 brought special programming yesterday in course of which I heard old men, buffs of naval glory, holding forth, in tones of veneration, about old ships and what amounts to the same-old gruesome violence that has been hallowed now by time’s passage.

This got me thinking first (curiously perhaps) about railroad buffs. But such odd segue ways often suggest that more is coming. Sure enough. The thought soon jelled. I was thinking of narrow historical time streams that serve people in place of cosmologies—evidently so because they’re intensely preoccupied. Other such next came to mind—those centered on literature, music, royalty, movies, etc.—identification with each of which then becomes a narrow but serviceable cosmology of sorts. The values each represents become the values of their aficionados. That bit about old ships, I thought, rests ultimately on nationalism, thus identification with a collective—much as there are aspects of literature and music in which youthful rebellion has become a cultural imprint, thus a kind of teen-age stance transmuted into opposition to authority and passionate support of ever growing “rights.” To serve as sufficient orientations for inner life these orientations only really require that a sufficiently large number of people should share them and that channels of communications should exist to form communities of belief.

Next came the thought that there are many arrested cosmologies—on the analogy of Arnold Toynbee’s arrested civilizations. All people in youth ask the right question. That question is “What is it all about?” Arrested cosmologies come into being because many people don’t go far and deep enough to answer that question for themselves. They stop short. They find some answer that seems fitting and don’t look any further. If that question is too easily answered, people don’t advance.

It is too easily answered if the questioner is easily satisfied. A person is easily satisfied if he or she is focused on social adaptation rather than really wanting the truth. In the former case, adopting some prevalent view enables that person to fit in. To be effective, the question should be nagging. Intellectual rigor and curiosity should be present too. The person’s time scale must be very expansive and include at minimum that person’s death—or, in considering broader social questions, like civilizations, it should look back and forward for minimally several millennia.

The way to judge cosmologies is to see the degree to which they conform to observable reality, inner and outer. Do they go far enough? Are they sufficiently inclusive? Do their own views of other such communities accurately describe those they critique? If the effort to answer the question stops in early adulthood, it may nonetheless be correct—but it won’t be that person’s own. It takes a lifetime. The question should still be actively present on one’s death-bed.

Views of the Guiding Hand

In attempts to look up what Arnold Toynbee had to say about “higher religions,” I went to find my copies of Toynbee’s two-volume (abridged) A Study of History. Soon came memories that I had tried to do this before, two or three years ago. My volumes had absconded, probably lent out, never returned. My replacement copies arrived yesterday from Amazon, and I spent some time with the book. It was a revealing experience.

Toynbee is a wonderful historian and writer—if you enjoy complex sentences and soaring cascades of thought. My admiration for him has only grown. But now, so many, many years since I’d last read him in the same sustained and concentrated manner, I noted some aspects of his viewpoint that I had not awarely done before. To be sure, I had noticed that he saw a pattern of progress in history; but I had not, in the past, viewed that fact as in any way remarkable; back then I took it in stride. Now I noticed that a change in my views has taken place since, and significant enough so that I now feel the difference. The change does not concern Toynbee’s significant, enduring contribution to the study of history, namely his view of cycles: the rising and decay of civilizations one after the other. Those observations are built on very solid foundations. What struck me yesterday is that Toynbee projected into this process a higher dispensation guiding the “evolution” of humanity.

Sometimes it helps to have a good mirror. I noted that my own views, since those early days, had become other-worldly. My focus had changed so that, these days, I see the meaning of human experiences coming from a transcendental point—whereas events in this dimension are entirely to be explained using empirical observation alone. Hence the cycling of history makes “naturalistic” sense; what evolution is present in history is not in any way different from similar and strictly adaptive patterns in living nature. Toynbee saw meaning in the collective behavior of humanity here; somewhere along the line, I had stopped doing so—in that the explanation of what history displays does not need a higher reference; collective life altogether swamps the transcendental traces enfolded within it.

The difference here comes from cosmological assumptions. One view sees meaning here and assumes that being in this realm is right and proper for humanity—thus that it is God’s intended arrangement. The other sees paradise as God’s intended place for our kind of beings; this, the fallen realm, is therefore not intended. Hence the real meaning of being here is—to escape. That project is, of necessity, individual; the action is in the soul, not in social or physical arrangements.

Here is another way to put that. If there is a Guiding Hand, it seems pretty hapless. It seems to act against resistance, and who or what could possibly resist God? At the same time, we can’t simply deny the phenomenon of guidance altogether. It is tangibly perceptible at the personal level. It has many names; grace will do. It’s not merely “in the head”; it manifests as well as “signs,” thus as meaningful coincidences, inspiration, healings, miracles, and wonders. In the western tradition these phenomena are assigned to divine interventions. But why reach so high for an explanation? The “guidance” may also be explained—to pick a suitable analogy—as the “atmospherics” of a higher order still, if only partially, reaching this fallen level and, down here, touching those who are by luck or effort receptive enough to discern them. The seemingly “hapless” character of this guidance is not due to God but to the unevenly distributed gifts of those whom inspiration actually reaches. And if we view such individuals as a community, that community has a slight—but only a slight—influence on history, not enough to speak of progress. The numbers thus touched seem ever in the same proportion no matter what time in history we care to examine. The further back we look, however, the less we see it; while the same old, same old five-, six-thousand years ago is still clearly perceivable. There is no progress—except at a ninety-degree angle to space, time, and history.

The Attraction of the Natural

Traveling in the Borderzone in contrast to visiting occasionally—which is all a busy life permits—means to be alone or, what amounts to the same thing, to be interested in odd matters most people can’t or don’t bother to fathom and think kinda weird. Here comes one of those. I’ve long found the naturalistic far more attractive than the arbitrary explanations of reality. On the one side things evolve, flow, change, emanate. On the other God created everything. Mind you, the poetics of Genesis manage to do both. Its leading verse contains the latter in a sharply rendered concept (“created”); its second the former as wondrous images:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. [Genesis 1:1-2]

The naturalistic view is that paragraph if stripped of any conscious agency, a meaning that the word “created” unmistakably carries. The first sentence would be missing; the second would replace “Spirit of God” by “energy.” Energy introduces motion without endowing it with the features of a person, an agent.

The attraction of the natural arises in me because that’s what I see at the large scale—thus, say, looking out at the sky, with or without a telescope, or down at the earth from orbit. The sun is blazing but nothing tells me Why. It is so great that, when it finally goes into its death stage, it will extend out and way beyond the earth. The earth will simply melt away in its heat. And yet this thing is but a microscopic little thing in one galaxy—and our galaxy is one of countlessly many. From space, at least by sunlight, the earth may have a vague green sheen, here and there, but life, as such, is quite invisible, the merest rash a few degrees of centigrade, either way, would rapidly eradicate. Nothing about this gives us any explanations, and the scale is such that it is incommensurable with the human—or even the blue jay-ish.

The maddening aspect of the naturalistic, however, is that it simply doesn’t cover everything. It works up to the level of life. The chaos can yield different kinds of atoms that will then attract or repel each other and thus form various bodies by a cosmic evolution provided that the chaos is moved by “energy.” To be sure, by adding motion, as such, we are already introducing an agency, by the back door, as it were, but never mind. What the naturalistic does not cover, not at all, is the life phenomenon. And least of all human self-awareness.

Pantheism is great at a distance but becomes very problematical up close—thus when we encounter either end-seeking form-preservation or consciousness. What all modern naturalistic systems attempt, vainly, of course, is to explain how the lifeless can suddenly take on life, the purposeless develop purpose, and the mindless evolve mind ex nihilo. These explanations have trended from the mechanistic to the ever more ephemeral. Each advance in physics has had its corresponding exploitation by cosmology. Thus we have the clockwork universe, then atoms, then quanta, then morphic fields, and last complexity, whatever that is, sort of floating in the air or hiding in the core of reality, with a tropism for increasing itself; until minds form.

Temperamentally I am a naturalist. But when it gets down to decision time I’m forced, by the very logic of things, to side with the arbitrary, which is to assert that the only way we can squeeze any meaning out of this chaos is to discern invisibly behind it a genuine conscious agent. Its flowing garments, while they may not be fully alive still carry a kind of impress or memory of their creator, and that emanation itself is what makes the natural world magical and attractive. But there is something inexpressibly more wondrous beneath.

The Palm Tree

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

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

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

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

The Serious Question

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

Why The Reverent Music?

I watched a two-hour presentation of Nova’s Finding Life Beyond Earth on PBS. It’s easy to summarize the substance. What we need for life is oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon, liquid water, and a source of heat. Voila! Nova tries to answer the question of whether or not we are alone. Interesting question. It does so by looking at photographs of planets and moons in the solar system searching for water, the right elements, and volcanoes. Now there is nothing particularly new or surprising here. It is the consensus of our times that life is just a natural form of matter that springs forth as soon as the appropriate conditions for it are present. So why use majestic, reverent, grandiose, exalted music when scouring the planets for these grubby particulars?

Although the Nova series began in 1974, I first consciously noticed reverent music and a materialistic thematic fused in a film when I watched Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, created by Carl Sagan in 1980. A thought then arose—and it keeps recurring every time this fusion reappears. The thought was: “Aha! Atheism as religion!” Behind that was the observation that Sagan attempted to reinforce emotions of exaltation by playing that swelling music while showing grand pictures—while his intellectual message was that there’s nothing beyond these wastes of gas and burning orbs and galaxies piled upon galaxies as far as telescopes could see. He was thus hijacking an ancient human reaction—that the wonders of nature are the works of God.

Mind you, life may have originated out there somewhere. Scientists whose views I value have asserted such things. One is Fred Hoyle (1915-2001). He was a pioneer theorist on the formation of elements inside stars (stellar nucleosynthesis) and a steady-state cosmologist. He thought that life came from outer space. In a lecture titled, Evolution from Space, given at the Royal Institute in London in 1982, he said:

If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of in pondering this issue over quite a long time seems to me to have anything like as high a possibility of being true.

My own entirely unscientific notions don’t require comet-borne sperm and viruses, but I agree with Hoyle on insisting on design—and disagree with modernity that it arises from a handful of elements, water, and heat by lucky accident. And we’re not alone. But that’s not the reason why.

Cosmologies are Optional

Action is always possible, but understanding rests on knowledge. We act on feelings, but these do not invariably communicate knowledge. We give recurrent feelings names, but the names do not inherently explain the feelings. Let me proceed with an example: hunger. As one venerable Zen statement has it, When hungry, eat. When tired sleep. Hunger produces eating, but it will take many years before we’re old enough even to understand that eating sustains our bodies. And for most of us—unless we look it up—precisely what it is that causes hunger remains a mystery. In effect it has no practical bearing on anything. Most people live and die without understanding anything about hunger beyond the feeling, which produces the action of eating—indeed they live and die without thinking much about all of the many radiations of that simple, daily experience.

So now you’re curious. Well, let me tell you something. Your curiosity will not be satisfied—as your hunger easily is. It’s a long story. In the center of our brain resides the hypothalamus. It is a kind of regulator. It receives input from the nervous system and causes the endocrine system to take various actions. The endocrine system causes glands to release hormones. The liver signals glucose levels to the hypothalamus. When these levels are too low, that organ causes release of hormones that produce the feeling of hunger. There are some twelve such hormones involved, but the most important is one called ghrelin. When hungry, ghrelin levels rise. With food intake, fat cells generate leptin, and their presence inhibits ghrelin’s effectiveness in signaling a state of hunger. These two hormones, therefore rise and fall, one motivating the urge to eat, the other inhibiting it. And the shift from one state to the other is signaled by blood sugar levels examined by the hypothalamus.

But this is not the end of the story. Real understanding requires us to answer why appropriate blood sugar levels should be present. Very long story. Eventually we have to ask: Why are bodies necessary? How did they come about? What is life? Is it prior to or produced by bodies? Are we, who feel the hunger, just another name for a collective of hypothalami, nerves, glands, ghrelins, leptins, glucose, and all the rest? Or are we, who detect the hunger, and act on it—or refrain to maintain slender figures—something separate? And if so, did we originate when semen penetrated ovum? Did we come later? Or did we exist before? In either case, why?

Good heavens. I was thinking of breakfast, and here I am, committing cosmology. But cosmology is optional, isn’t it? It seems to be on another level entirely, in a different category. Action and feeling suffice me if that’s where I want to stay. But what organ, then, makes me long for understanding?

On Physical Cosmologies

Back in the 1950s I acquired a five-volume series of essays from Scientific American. One of these was titled The Universe. Part IV of the book carried two essays, one by George Gamow and the other by Fred Hoyle, summarizing, respectively the “Evolutionary Universe,” read Big Bang, and “The Steady-State Universe.” It is revealing that a book from a scientific publisher, issued in 1956, should have given the Steady-State theory equal billing. Since then the Big Bang has come to rule virtually absolutely—so that physicist who challenge it are systematically marginalized.

Despite my frequent references to that theory on this blog, I was already dubious about it in the 1950s, and the more I learned about the subject in detail, the more so. Does that sound odd coming from a person who has a pronounced belief in the transcending? Doesn’t the Big Bang seemingly offer scientific proof for Creation? My personal starting point, however, isn’t science (never mind scientific orthodoxy) but experience—the experience of the self. The arbitrary nature of the Big Bang troubled me from the outset—indeed so does the notion of Creation. I became somewhat reconciled to the theory thanks to David Bohm’s writings. He minimizes the Big Bang and conceives of a much greater Implicate Order of which our universe is but a small “wavelike excitation.”

The Big Bang theory rests on a single observation by Edwin Hubble, namely that light from distant galaxies is shifted to the red of the spectrum. When a stellar or galactic body is moving toward us, the light is blue-shifted; when moving away from us, red-shifted. In our own neighborhood, the Andromeda galaxy is moving towards us at a speed somewhere between 62 and 87 miles per second. It is a blue-shifted galaxy. Hubble interpreted his data as an instance of the Doppler effect, dating to 1842. It says that the wavelength of anything wavy (sound, light) is enlarged (red) or minimized (blue) by the motion of the emitter. Red means moving away from, blue moving toward us. He concluded, therefore, that the universe was expanding. The Big Bang itself, therefore, is an inference. If the universe is expanding over time, at one time it was smaller. Tracing that motion back, Hubble put its age at 2 billion, Gamow in the 1950s at 5 billion, and today it is nearly 14 billion years. With every passing year the universe gets older—because observations discover yet older galaxies based on the red-shift measurement.

The assumption that red-shift measures taken from cosmic objects represented their movement was so well-established an idea in the 1950s that Fred Hoyle himself, steady-stater although he was, felt obliged to propose that new matter was continuously being created all over the universe. This new addition of matter then accounted for the observed expansion. To be sure, if the universe is not expanding, indeed is eternal and has no special space containing it, thus space produced by matter, as modern theory asserts, Hoyle need not have bothered.

The modern theory that space and time are both functions of matter has always bothered me as well. Something inside the self, which is where I begin, resists the notion of a universe curved in upon itself. So what is outside that curvature? But this view has also produced the very odd notion that the galaxies Hubble saw moving, thus causing the Doppler effect, weren’t really moving at all. Instead, space was expanding between them. But if space is expanding, why is Andromeda rushing toward us? The hapless explanation for this—and for clearly observable galactic collisions—is that “local” clusters cohere by gravity, and space only expands between galactic clusters. So space, supposedly, knows where it may—and where it may not—expand. If instead we opt for another view, namely that the galaxies are really moving, impelled by dark energy, then there is something wrong with our spacetime concepts.

Back about a decade-plus ago, in the course of writing a book, I looked into the Big Bang theory much more intensely than I had done before. In the course of that work I discovered one of the marginalized groups of astronomers and physicists who have reason to believe that the red-shift of light may not always and invariably—particularly at cosmic scales—signal movement at all. The basic discoveries of this were based on astronomical observations of quasars, quasi-stellar objects. The responsible party was Halton Arp (1927-). He observed quasars physically linked to galaxies. If red-shift measures movement, the galaxies are much closer to us and the quasars very far away. Yet they are directly and visibly linked to the galaxies. Indeed, most quasar are associated with galaxies and some have theorized that galaxies produce them in their spiral arms. They are part of the local system, but based on Hubble-style interpretation of their red-shifts, they appear to be vastly more distant. The illustration, below, shows two linked galaxies and, within the connecting band between them, two quasars. The numbers are the red-shift measurements: the greater the number, the farther away.

This is a big subject, but permit me to summarize. Arp has theorized that the red-shift observed in galaxies and quasars may not be due to movement at all but to an intrinsic and as yet unknown characteristic. The evidence is very strong. The orthodox response to Arp is a story very few people know about. He may well have falsified the Big Bang theory, but it will take yet another generation, maybe several, before this shall be acknowledged.

Needless to say, there is substantial community of scientists who are critics of the Big Bang; they’ve taken on that theory and produced much evidence, and cogent arguments, to show how it fails. But Big Bang has become an orthodoxy now. It has formed its own reservation, as it were, and critics are unwelcome. Another physical cosmology, based on plasma physics, also exists. It is a steady-state theory with substantial observational and experimental work to back it. But this post has gone on too long already.

Let me conclude by pointing to the first in a nine-part video series on YouTube called The Big Bang Never Happened (link). Once you see it, YouTube presents other parts of the series on its menu. If oppressive orthodoxies interest you, if science fascinates you, if cosmology is something you wish to study, this is not a bad place to start. The illustration I am showing is a screen-shot from that video, but taken from Part 3. The major galaxy shown is NGC 7603.

What the Muon Told Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Paradigm

The image that now begins to emerge of the Cosmos—by means of NASA’s measurements of the effects of dark energy—provides yet another hint that Idries Shah’s fable of the beginnings might be true. I’ve been of that opinion for many years now. Among the myths it comes closest to agree with the cosmos of physics, at least if we accept David Bohm’s suggestion that our universe is a tiny Explicate Order emerging from the vast Implicate Order that is the greater, thus the Cosmos. (I discuss the first subject here on Ghulf Genes; more on Idries Shah’s myth is on this blog here.)

The downside of Shah’s formulation is that it does not suggest the sort of “personalistic” cosmology we’re used to, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But it contains an assertion of conscious intelligence in the Cosmos while also matching what we are learning from our astrophysics, thus a “beginning” (the big bang)—which can be read as the disturbance of an order of equilibrium—and the unfolding of that new event in a lawful way that we’re now seeing disclosed in the astrophysical observations of the visible universe.

Conversely, the myth also matches what Bohm hypothesizes, namely that alongside the Implicate and Explicate orders reality also manifests a Conditioned and an Unconditioned order. The latter permits intelligence and consciousness. Our own freedom and consciousness, to be sure, are the only direct observables of that order.

That in this realm we are most definitely disconnected from an ocean, if you like, of that Unconditioned order, thus from the realms of spirit and higher intelligence, which may well be equivalent to the ocean of the Conditioned, the physical, which now surrounds us, is also evident. And hence the grand thematic I once envisioned (in an unpublished work called What Does Life Want?) namely a return to that earlier unity, seems quite on—because even the universe, thus the visible, unfolded material realm and thus the conditioned order seems also to be striving for a reabsorption.

We can’t get closer than that, I assume.

The Dance Hall of the Dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Notes on The Fall

The story of the Fall commences roughly on the third page of Genesis; where it falls depends on print size. It is the very opener of the story. The story of Creation sketches in the setting, but the setting is not elaborated. We hear something more about Adam and Eve and how they came about, but nothing like a history of their lives in Paradise. The human events begin with the Fall. If this were not our own at least inherited myth—inherited by way of the decline of the last civilization and the myth’s acceptance by our own, in Christendom—but there promoted to the status of revealed truth—thus if we see it from the outside, objectively, it would be quite correct to surmise that it is a myth attempting to explain the mystery of human existence and suffering. At the same time, it recognizes our very high state in the order of nature, our transcending capacities—while also explaining the dark side, man’s war against himself and nature and, above all, the absolutely unavoidable—death.

We might also read the third chapter of Genesis as a head-shaking and despondent look back to another and ancient time. Tiny pockets of “paradise” have actually survived into ours: primitive hunting and gathering societies (e.g. Papua New Guinea, Amazon region, some island societies). The Fall in Genesis could thus also be read as a view of the transition between such primitive societies and the later agricultural dispensation, the last vastly more complex and riddled with conflict. The herding phase was an intermediate between the two here and there. That this surmise is also correct is evident. Agriculture is prominent in Genesis 3:17—and it is the new thing; it is part of the curse.

Now, of course, we tend to view the primitive as holy, the complex as riddled with evil. The higher the knowledge, the more complex the society always tends to be. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge is thus—shifting to another culture—the opening of Pandora’s box. But sentimentality is clearly at work here. To know anything genuinely means to live it. The hunting and gathering life undoubtedly is also just—life. What characterizes it, when we find it, is ample resources and low levels of conflict; those two are obviously linked. That we find it is already a kind of fall—at least for the people who’ve been found. The next thing you know, they’ll be greedily wanting gas-engines for their boats. After that, kiss paradise good-bye.

When I ponder it, the paradisaical state is present all around us as the animal kingdom. It is primitive society—but without the presence of mind. It lives without our form of consciousness, without history, and without memory. Animals don’t consciously notice death taking others; no fear of it is present—as it it’s also absent in little children. Thus the ultimate Fall is the rise of consciousness as such—and secondarily those transformations in the environment that cause knowledge to increase and also to sharpen. Knowledge is only mildly present in the primitive, and always closely twinned with particulars; it is extraordinarily sharp (conceptual) in a vast, rich, and dying technological culture. Its level increases with every advance of civilization; conflicts multiply; and tools for giving it force become obscene, like atomic bombs.

Having said this much, the core issue sharpens. It is the stupefying observation that something sublime, like awareness, produces evil and the more it develops, the more its dark shadow grows. This is a real issue. Genesis attempts an explanation. The problem is disobedience. But Genesis’ explanation is paradoxical. The idea of obedience contains within it two crucial elements: freedom and knowledge. Adam and Eve knew something—before, as it were, they did. The knew about the Tree of Knowledge. They had been told about it. Something of the fruit of that tree had been given to them before Eve ever reached for that famous apple. The writers and editors of Genesis were people just like us—stupefied by the paradox of reality. And they, too, punted. The explanation must lie deeper than anything that we can now see from the shadows of this valley.

Blog posts should not grow into chapters. These comments will continue. I want to extract more from this, not least something more on death and its linkage to transcendence.

Ah, Point of View

Is the cosmos really a wasteland? Or does it just look like that? Herewith yet another angle on the naturalistic view of life and everything. One unavoidable feature of that approach is that the cosmos, at minimum, has ranges (regions) where meaning in our sense, thus as displaying purpose, is undetectable; at maximum it means that the cosmos lacks meaning as a whole. Modern materialism votes for the latter. My own view differs. I feel that meaning is present in us but not, discernibly, in the inorganic realm, The limitations of our view are really my subject this morning, and I’ll get there soon, but to continue with the build-up: If meaning is present in us, it seems to me logical to expect it to be present beyond us as well, and “writ large,” too. This makes me a dualist in that I conceive of “carriers of meaning” and of “matter” as realities different in kind. Materialism envisions degrees of difference only. Thus it supposes that common elements, arranged appropriately and moved by energy, at some point suddenly break into consciousness. I find that view a great deal more difficult to swallow than belief in God; belief in God merely means that if I have consciousness and a sense of agency, that feeling must also have an origin. I didn’t cause my own awareness.

The notion of a dualism, of a passive and of an active principle, is deeply embedded in human thought. It’s there as prime matter and form in the Aristotelian stream, as the receptive and the creative in Taoist philosophy (or, Okay, call it poetry, if you like); it’s present as indestructible matter and immortal soul in traditional western thought, as particle and wave in physics. We even encounter it in matter; it is dualized as energy and matter, and the announcement of their equivalence in Einstein’s e=mc² is one of the moments of “revelation” in our times. Genuinely fascinating. Matter turns out to be a kind of congealed or crystallized form of energy; matter is therefore extraordinarily, if only potentially, energetic. The energy is still there, holding quarks together by the strong force and holding the particle-waves, the electrons, statistically hovering over atomic nuclei. The quarks themselves may be, for all we know, the tiniest balls of purest fire, and it isn’t all that outrageous to imagine the cosmos itself as a vast echo of a (for us) inconceivably great burst of energy. Indeed that is today’s orthodox doctrine concerning the origin of the universe, the Big Bang theory. The universe is running down, to be sure, hence we find its congealed, crystallized residues as solid matter—but only from a particular point of view—thus only as seen by creatures of our size. And that’s a potent qualifier, when I ponder it.

I enjoy vastly to enlarge or greatly to miniaturize the scale of things, the speed of time. Doing so reminds me that we may be living in a reality which is a whole, whole, whole lot greater than we imagine. Thus something that looks like a wasteland to us at our scale, may very well be full of fascinating meaning to another agency at a scale greater than ours. Similarly, processes that look extraordinarily mechanical to us—thus, for instance the chemical processes inside our cells—may be chuck full of agency. Sometimes I playfully think of that as “chemical civilization,” actually organized and managed by “little people.” Here is an analogy. Many decades ago now, long before superfast computers were available for modeling, at a research institute where I was working we used an inclined board on which we created grooves to represent traffic systems. We covered this board with glass and then poured rice kernels into this system to detect where traffic jams would likely occur at different times of day. We modified the design until traffic flowed with optimal smoothness at rush hours—and submitted that arrangement to our client. Rice kernels worked perfectly well to simulate cars each driven by a conscious person. From certain points of view, human behavior is altogether predictable statistically, and never mind free will, day dreams, genius, sainthood, and all the rest.

The cosmic vastness certainly looks like a wasteland to me. But, ah, point of view. To repeat what I said a few days ago, the ancients had an even more limited view than ours. Their thought, their speculation forms the background, the habituation that colors ours. For these reasons a “naturalistic” cosmology, under which we would seem to be out of place, fits what I perceive—but may not be the real truth of the matter. That is why cosmology is at best a kind of playground of the mind on very hot days as we watch the bees in the backyard.

Sketch of an Outlandish View

I want to examine the “naturalistic” explanation of life and humanity from yet another angle today. That label, “naturalistic,” is peculiar to my own thought. I’ve explored this notion numerous times on this blog before, most recently touching on it in The Hungry Ghost and, earlier, in On “Teleology” and the “Fall” as well as elsewhere. The gist of the notion is that “life” is an arrangement whereby an “out-of-place” spiritual community is making an attempt at finding its original home or attempting to return to it. I realize that this is an outlandish sort of idea in the West (or elsewhere, for that matter). But in the West particularly both the philosophical development of thought and religious belief (based on the Creation) produce a habit of thought. Some observations about that mode of perception today…

It strikes me that what we call the scientific method is one modern form of rational thought about the things we see about us. It attempts to observe accurately, to define precisely, and then to reason logically. The ancients—and here I’m thinking of Aristotle—had an observational field limited to the earth. They did not have, as we do, genuinely good pictures either of the solar system or of the enormous expanse of the galactic Out There. For them the incommensurability of life and cosmos was not really a visceral experience as it is for me. They had no knowledge or systematized evidence of what we call evolution—albeit a general idea of development was present. They hadn’t explored the immense age of the earth, named its epochs, or assembled the evidence of the Cambrian Explosion. But they did engage in rational thought in a systematic way. Their concept of “substance” as a matter-form duality actually rested, it seems to me, on an observation of life, with examples drawn from human handicrafts: the bronze or stone statue, for example, in which the material is the matter and the statue, as statue, is the form. This separation of form and matter was, in other words, based entirely on the most peculiar and rare phenomenon of cosmic reality, namely living things. This dualism, as it turns out, fits living entities very nicely indeed, but it doesn’t fit the cosmos with any kind of precision at all. Yet it’s the cosmos that is the dominant reality, becomes that when we ponder its size and extent.

It is in life that we encounter something shaping matter (or a subset of its elements) into countlessly many forms the utility of which, the “ends” of which, we can investigate and actually discover to some point. The ends or purposes of hydrogen or helium escape our attempts at discovery altogether; by a vast stretch we can give hydrogen a minor meaning as a necessary component of life—but there is far too much of it out there for life alone to justify its existence; and our bodies don’t use helium; it’s just out there. Plato projected eternal forms by way of rescuing the concept from the ever-changing flux that continuously destroys specific manifestations of them. Plato seems to have thought that forms must somehow exist somewhere, solidly, permanently, as it were, to cause physical manifestations of them to appear and to reappear. But Plato also seems to have reasoned by looking principally at life rather than, say, at clouds of nebulae, stellar collisions, or the great wasteland of our own, local asteroid belt. Would he have arrived at the same theories if he’d had access to the rich photography of the Hubble telescope?

The form-matter duality is much better explained using quite different concepts while retaining the structure of this hypothesis, thus its dualism. Instead of saying form, let’s speak of intention. Instead of speaking of prime matter, a vague sort of unformed material substrate never actually encountered, let’s think of matter simply as inorganic matter. Instead of substance let’s think of life. What we know as life is an intention manifesting in matter, forming it into entities for some kind of purpose or purposes. Of these we can certainly identify the most obvious, the act of enduring over time against all odds in specific and more or less repeating forms. It’s only in life that we encounter genuine reproduction.

But if form is intention, how do we explain the rest of the cosmos—indeed almost everything other than life; because life itself appears to be next to nothing in the universe. In life we see forms supporting intentions. In the rest of reality we also see form but no intention whatsoever. A rose bush and an amoeba, very different in size, shape, and appearance, are both nevertheless engaged in an identical project, and this project has an aim. But what is the aim of an enormous cloud of hydrogen out there? Is it to become a sun? What is the aim of suns? Their projected life is to explode in novae and to expel their now heavier elements into yet another cloud of matter or to become super-heavy dwarf stars. There is no discernible meaning in any of this—except, from our point of vantage, perhaps one.

Here I have in mind the sculptor chipping away at that rock to make a statue. All eyes are on the statue or on the sculptor. We don’t consciously, precisely notice the substantial amounts of detritus that have accumulated, and still accumulate as the sculptor works, on the floor and on the statue’s supporting structure. Particles large and small, chips tiny and sizeable, litter all of the surfaces—and at some distance from the work-space itself stand piles awaiting the dust pan…while old accumulations of waste await disposal at a landfill in battered old buckets or barrels. A highly scientific study of that floor, conducted with laser measurements and microscopes, might actually reveal the same random distribution of objects of all sizes we actually see when we look at the depth of light years into outer space. It’s a wasteland out there! It’s beautiful, awesome, full of light. But so also perhaps would the sculptor’s rubble appear to us if we were small enough to see the electrons of that waste shining brightly, each electron the size, relative to us, of a sun…

The cosmic chaos, of course, is not absolutely random. Nor is that pile of chips under the statue. Inorganic matter carries a kind of residual of meaning. We express that meaning by speaking of the laws of nature. Hydrogen is not a carbon. Something constrain matter in the cosmos to spherical and circular forms when certain degrees of density are reached. I’m tempted myself to see in this fact clear evidence that the cosmos really is a waste or residue of something meaningful but not visible to us. And this view is compatible with my naturalistic notion that our community of life may indeed be out of place. In the western religious conception, however, this view finds very little resonance—despite what seems to me obvious proof for it. In our tradition (Genesis, etc.) the cosmos is made—to be what it is—by the will of the divine. It cannot therefore be viewed as the residue of some other divine activity which only leaves, in the cosmos, the faintest of traces of agency, in the form of laws—but nothing else even enough to hint at any kind of meaning.