Souls Sort Themselves

There are three forms of culture: worldly culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self-development. [Hujwiri, Revelation of the Veiled]

Suppose that we are guided by our own intuition. That this is so follows as the consequence of two facts. One is that the physical world is harsh. If we violate its rules we will be punished. In that dimension guidance is simply feedback. The second fact, as I’ve endeavored to show in the last post, is that intellectual arguments concerning higher matters, the metaphysical, are never compelling in and of themselves because they can’t be proved—as physical facts can be. But to orient ourselves, we must rely on something. That something concerning matters that can’t be proved (and are not harshly enforced by nature), is our own judgment. And our judgment is guided by a feeling from within: this sounds true; or, this sounds phony.

Let me be precise. Intuition, as the word itself implies (“tuition,” “tutoring” from “within”) is not something we do. It is something we experience. After an intuition is received, something else must follow. It is our agreement or disagreement. In other words, we can act contrary to our intuitions too. When the matter is in the area of knowledge, we can deny the knowledge or act contrary to it. When the intuition is the judgment of an action, thus in the moral sphere, we can override it. Hence “conscience,” in the sense that Catholicism uses that word, is intuition in one of its modes. The presumption here is, one, that we are guided; and, two, that this guidance isn’t our own or, if it is, it emanates from a higher aspect of ourselves.

This suggests that if we correctly understood and invariably followed our intuitions, the world would be paradise. What makes life “interesting”—in the sense of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times!”—is that our condition, the Church Militant of which are now members, is developmental in character. We’re moving up a spiral or, refusing to do so, sliding into an abyss. The downward movement is not interesting but must be acknowledged to exist. We live side by side with others. Most are moving up, some are willfully sliding down. The intuitive “hearing” of individuals varies; some are more and some less sensitive to this inflow; sensitivities, furthermore, can be enhanced by effort or dulled by ignoring the guidance. Intuition is not only accepted or ignored; its strength and effect are also influenced by innate intellectual and physical characteristics which appear to be randomly distributed. The intuition is there, but it may be more dimly or powerfully felt; it may be understood swiftly by some, slowly by others. Whatever the innate disposition, the will still plays a crucial role. The super-bright, for instance, may understand the intuition immediately, but if they don’t want to follow it, they will be very clever in rationalizing it away. Therefore the strength of the intuition is not as important as the direction the person has chosen to follow. It’s a free universe. The soul is sovereign however it may be enabled or delimited by the characteristics of its vehicle.

This then sets the stage for the suggestion that souls sort themselves out by using intuition and will. It is this sorting which produces the three cultural forms that Hujwiri uses to show the hierarchical arrangement of humanity in this realm. The foundational level is physical—where straightforward understanding of the ordinary world suffices; the religious sphere is on a higher level, but behavior is guided by semi-mechanical arrangements, rules. Here a higher dimension is already intuited, but conformity to it is expressed in the language of law, motivated in terms of reward and punishment, and expressed in ritual forms. The highest level is also the most free. Here the intuition is very strong and willingly followed. People at various levels of development find comfort in the culture that feels best. Not surprisingly, those on the lower levels cannot understand and therefore disparage the practices at the levels above. The highest level, however, is marked by understanding of the lower. It’s a good self-test to examine one’s own views, say, of religion, science, or mysticism. You’re certainly not a member of the spiritual elite if you bad-mouth legitimate science or ridicule the true believers.

The sorting process no doubt continues after death. And concepts like hell, purgatory, and heaven are mere labels, very roughly hewn, of other clustering of souls on the other side of the border zone. The sorting over there follows the inclinations of the soul. A way to illustrate that is to say that those who, in this realm, are seeking the depths will feel much more comfortable in hell than anywhere else…

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Ali Hujwiri (990-1077) was a Persian Sufi, teacher, and writer. He was born in what is today Afghanistan. He wrote Revelation of the Veiled, also rendered as Unveiling the Veiled, in Persian. The quotation cited, which I took from Idries Shah’s The Sufis, should be rightly understood. Hujwiri, like all Sufis, believed that the highly developed individual will not only understand but also practice the wisdom available at all three levels of culture.

Heart Exam: Continued

Conceptual thought has a devil of a time capturing dynamism. Motion is a good example. We experience it without trouble; we find it tougher than nails to describe precisely. We have to do it piece-meal. The object was here, but now it is there, and whatever happened happened in between. We don’t know what it was, but have a name for it. We call it motion. But of course, we can usually find a spot half-way between here and there. And between that half-way point and here, there is another point that’s also half-way in between. To describe motion precisely, we have describe the tiniest increments. This is what calculus is intended to do: slicing and dicing space and time into infinitely small increments and then artfully summing them up. We get an illusion of control. At the conceptual level we never really get there—because we can’t reach infinity, but close enough for government work.

All right, but what does that have to do with heart? In looking at the dynamics of human development, we also engage in many differentiations. We have an experience of Self, but to grasp it intellectually, we parse it apart: intellect, emotion, imagination, will. They don’t exist independently, but the names do. But if we look at any one of these aspects or abstractions—these slices and dices of the Self—we detect even finer distinctions. Our feelings have many different qualities. There is raw emotion at one and joy at the other extreme; in between we find an infinity of other states. There is the emotion of watching Charles Bronson deal with the bad guys in one of the Death Wish movies. Raw emotion. There is the complex emotion at the end of watching The Death of a Salesman. There is the rock concert and Handel’s Messiah or Judas Maccabaeus. There is Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. To describe the curvature between these poles would require a kind of literary calculus no one has ever devised.

In dealing with the range of our capacity we associate different manifestations of the soul with different organs. We associate intellect with the brain, emotions with the gut, imagination with the eye, will with the fist, and all of the higher expressions of our nature with—the heart. Well, we’re finally there.

A somewhat hidden example of this is courage. Courage is an aspect of the will; and by real courage we don’t mean a man who, say, assaults a bigger, stronger fellow in a fit of rage. Rather, we call courageous someone who, in an extremely dangerous or risky situation, is able to overcome his fears to achieve a higher good. The word itself masks my point. Courage derives from the French coeur and ultimately from the Latin cor, both meaning heart. An interesting side note: the obsolete meaning of "courage" also includes mind, spirit, and temper. When we intend to speak of a lower kind of courage we label people who have it gutsy.

As we saw in the last post, Pascal associated a higher kind of reason with the heart. Paracelsus differentiated lower and higher forms of imagination. He called the higher form of it true imagination (imaginatio vera), the lower form fantasy. There is also a kind of intellectual imagination which we label foresight, thus imagination based on calculating the complex vector of events—in which the weighing of probabilities is to the front.

If heart is thus associated with a kind of thought, a kind of imagination, with courage, and with higher feelings, of which the highest is self-less love, it might be argued—I argue this point—that what tradition calls the heart, and treats as if it were a higher organ—is just a way of making a differentiation between a highly but comprehensively developed self and one that is more primitive and still largely undeveloped. The self as it appears most commonly is strongly conditioned by societal norms. Concerning this form of the self, Idries Shah has this interesting comment about this as yet undifferentiated form of the self. Writing in Learning How to Learn (pp. 157-157) he writes:

Remember that the human being is so intensely standardized that an outside observer, noting his reactions to various stimuli, need not infer an individual controlling brain in each person. He would be more likely to infer the existence of a separate, outside brain, and the people as mere manifesters of its will.

If we examine the polarities I’ve noted above using movies and other works of art, the chief difference between the low and the high is level of complexity. To appreciate the high, the self has to be developed enough to do so—and not simply intellectually. The self as a whole has to be developed, the will as much as the emotions, the imagination as much as the intellect. We are here faced with a dynamic of development. When we observe higher expressions of the self, we grope for a different way of rooting them. We recruit the heart as the organ. For lower expressions, we locate them in those organs most tangibly associated with different manifestations of the self that permeates the human body.

Our Mysterious Origins

Two kinds of instructions reach us in childhood. Put in the generic terms, one is to excel; the other is to serve the community. These are usually summed by the phrase: “Be good.” The sheer fact that we are here is never discussed. It’s self-evident. Our relationship to others is also obvious. We begin in a dependent role. Indeed, we continue to be dependent until death. What changes is that, later, we have more freedom in choosing our network of connections. If we’re lucky. We are formed by interaction on the one hand, by internal urges and needs on the other. The early advice we get is essentially correct—improve, serve. For most nothing more is needed. Life flows on hemmed in by these banks. And because our needs and mutual relations continue to the end—and societies always have a routine explanation for existence, some kind of story or ideology—something must happen to make us question the conventions. Some kind of inner urge—or external stimulus—must trigger questioning. When that happens, it can shock, or stimulate, us. We’ll be temporarily disoriented.

In life’s normal give-and-take, where the bumps and jostles stay within a well-accustomed range—and pleasures and joys are customary too—nothing presents itself to make us question our place and function. But when the cake of custom cracks, tragedy strikes, troubles arise, strange ecstasies (however brought about) make us lose our balance, then we also temporarily lose our sense of place. The degree of disturbance will suggest the degree to which we’ll question our place. Individual sensitivities will either magnify or minimize the shocks. Shocks lead to learning. With time we include more and more of reality into our compass. We expand our horizons, adjust our sense of alignment. But, here again, personal traits and education will lead to different outcomes.

Children exposed early to cosmic orientations—as I was, growing up in a Catholic environment—will spontaneous integrate cosmic stories. To grow is to integrate external influences with our own intuitions. We are far from blank boards on which environmental influences scribble out our fate. We take elements of the cosmologies we’re taught and integrate them (or suspend them) depending on the answers from within. If receive philosophical “objects” as children, we integrate them right alongside all the practical: it is all one to us.

Indeed, thinking about it, it’s obvious that the precise name of things is not all that important for the child. As children we learn quite early—intuitively, as it were—to handle abstractions skillfully. Concepts like God or king or good or evil rapidly come to occupy a place in a structure of relationships. Quite early in our lives we develop a clear concepts of negatives too— in the sense of “empty,” “lost,” or “gone.” All concepts have physical analogies, but we find it easy to abstract: we see the general concept of “lost” whether we have lost a shoe, glove, or a pencil. We have concepts of time long before we learn to read a clock. “Just a minute,” our mother will say. We have a clear and painful sense of waiting. Space is no more problematical: here and there, far and near.

But that which is most central to our being is deeply hidden. We never question ourselves. I still rather clearly remember my initial reaction in college to hearing the concept of “being” formally discussed. I experienced a certain surprise, mixed with bemusement. It struck me as droll that ancient wise men should have labored so hard thinking about something so obvious; and I thought it vaguely illegitimate to separate “being” from that which “was”—as if you could. I did not then realize that the dance around “being” was the late and advanced articulation of something rather more basic and fundamental. It is the problem of ultimate orientation, namely the issue of “What am I doing here?” Analyzing that simple but stark question one comes up with its opposite, Nothingness. But nothingness isn’t particularly helpful except for philosophizing. Like mathematicians, philosophers manipulate symbols using rules of logic. Philosophy tempts people with the mirage of answers. It can be difficult and complex; these difficulties and complexities more or less hide how empty the enterprise actually is unless it stays firmly anchored in experience.

Meanwhile the stark question is legitimate. It is central to grasping the human condition—even if philosophy as such—formal schemes like Kant’s for instance—cannot answer it. Not viscerally. Not at the level where we live. Only a myth can even come close to the essence of the thing. The manipulation of the labels we attach to experience resembles the operation of a kaleidoscope: we produce ever new patterns but by moving the same old colored bits of glass in a confined space; nothing really changes except the arrangement.

What is most central to our being is its meaning. Our existence, by itself, is not answer enough. So long as a consensus satisfies us, so long as our orientation is adequate for daily needs, the issue of what we’re doing here rarely arises: we’re working, resting, having fun. Life is a flow of experience, stimulus, response. We’re carried on a river of time. We have no knowledge of our origin—we woke up already floating on the river—and the terminus of our voyage is still far away. Moreover, we can easily imagine ourselves continuing on beyond our passing or, if so inclined, imagine ourselves falling into a dreamless and permanent state of sleep.

Nor does this condition, even once it’s realized, exercise people excessively unless something radical is also present, arising from within. If our condition is reasonably comfortable—or can be imagined to improve—we accept traditional wisdom, shy from the seemingly hopeless effort to tackle the problem. We say, “Well, that’s the way things are.” Half of our nature is pragmatic, straight-forward, practical, and sensible. We optimize. Part of optimization is not to bother reinventing wheels. We learn in childhood to accept explanations from our elders—and traditional wisdom is exactly that. We don’t relish becoming engineers, plumbers, or seamstresses when the electricity fails, a pipe bursts, or something tears. First we seek our comfort and adaptation at least cost. Next we rouse ourselves to organize fixes to things that really go wrong. Even when things become quite hopeless, the vast majority of humankind apparently chooses dumb endurance in the face of adversity—exactly as animals do—swamped by that half of our nature which is nature. We hang in there, we hunker down. We have to wander a long ways, and already highly sensitized, before we ever even reach the borderzone.

The Song of the Pearl - I

The world’s mythologies seem to agree that humanity once lived in a perfect world: Paradise. The names we use are unimportant if they mean the same thing. So what happened? We find two explanations. One is that humanity sinned; as punishment we were expelled from Paradise into a harsher world. The other is that humanity was tempted to realize special pleasures or powers it hoped to gain in a realm it couldn’t see; once we descended into that lower realm, we got caught and entangled. In essence the two stories are the same. To sin is to want and grasp a lesser good. Both in the Christian and in the Hindu models, the same motives have the same consequence. Welcome to the Vale of Tears in one case, Welcome to the Wheel of Karma in the other. Notice that in both cases a vast community is involved. We see this most clearly in the Christian doctrine in which the guilt of the original couple clings to all of their descendants. The only rational way to see this is to assume that Adam and Eve stand for humanity as a whole. And let’s not get excessively rational. These are myths and we must understand them at the poetic level. Debates about sin clinging to DNA, for instance, are out of place; they’re not poetry but quibbling. Notice also that in both cases the lower state is due to individual decision; descent or exile is chosen by a free act of the will.

There are, however, two other myths on offer. Today they are minority views—and the views of very small minorities at that. One is the Mazdean (Zoroastrian) belief according to which we are here because we volunteered to take part in an act of creation. God willing I’ll get to that one in another post. The other is that we were sent in order to develop, rendered in the terminology of obtaining a great prize. In both of these myths we are innocent as we set out. In the other two models we are already guilty on arrival, even as “innocent” babes. In all of these models—whether innocent or guilty as we come—we can fail in our mission and, if we do, we remain in the realm of darkness. That realm of darkness is defined in different ways: in Christianity it is hell, in Hinduism and Gnosticism it is another life, in Mazdaism it is life with the dark force that represents one polarity of existence. Here I want to give a sketch of the last, the developmental model.

That model is succinctly rendered as the Song of the Pearl, sometimes as the Hymn of the Soul, found in one of the apocryphal books of the New Testament, The Acts of Thomas, embedded in that book but dating from an earlier time. You can read that song here. To reach the actual text, search for “108”; that search will put you at its beginning within the book. The song is quite short and easily read and there is the benefit of getting the information at first hand. But I will summarize it.

The story concern the son of a king who, in early youth, is sent from the “East” [read Paradise] down to Egypt in order to fetch a great prize, a pearl held by a devouring serpent. The child is stripped of its ceremonial garment and clothed in a yellow garb, provisioned and sent down. The child is guided at first but, at the borders with Egypt [read our world] he is left to himself. He remains conscious of his past until he partakes of the local food; it causes him to forget his real status (son of a king) and his glorious past home. He falls into a deep sleep from which he awakens only when at last a special letter, aimed at awakening him again, reaches him. This then causes him to remember why he came to Egypt and what he had to do. He proceeds to obtain the pearl by charming the serpent into sleep, obtains the pearl, and begins the trip home. Arriving there he strips off the filthy garment he had worn in Egypt [his body] and puts on the bejeweled garment of his native land [the spiritual body]. In due time he presents the pearl to the king.

The Song of the Pearl is usually classified as a Gnostic myth, but one finds it in various forms in Sufic and other traditions as well. Having reached us in the Acts of Thomas, it was obviously also valued by the early Christians.

Let me now add three personal reactions to this tale—and to models of development in general. These are summary in nature. I’ll use a future post to look at the myth in some detail. It takes more space than I have here.

First, let me strip away the mythical form and simply assume that a soul-community, an “order of the soul,” has discovered that life in the harsh confines of the material order is capable of educating souls—meaning to “draw out,” to realize hidden potentials. If we take that to be a plausible concept, namely that souls can be educated and improved, and that certain environments and experiences can further that development, the model starts sounding reasonable. But that model only becomes acceptable if we further assume that the majority of souls on earth will benefit, will gain something real from the process. This is not difficult to accept. The vast majority of people are decent—they live, struggle, and pass on. The degrees of improvement would vary, as they do in all models of education; and some few would fail.

Second, I would point out that near-death experience reports tend to confirm this model. They do not confirm all models in the same way. In many NDEs, the individual, wishing to go on and to realize the obviously superior values available on that side of the Borderzone are told that they must return; their time has not yet come; they have things still to accomplish. Some individuals also know this and return on their own accord, not because they’re urged.

Third, this model features a good deal of interaction between this realm and the higher one, the “East.” The soul is sent from there with appropriate provisions. It is guided on the way down, it is assisted while down here (although I’ve omitted that from my summary), it receives an enlightening “letter” from above. My own experience and observation is that communications, of sorts, do reach us here in various forms, most notably but not solely by means of intuitions and inspired revelations.

More on this in future posts.