Even in a Savaged Landscape…

If a Lutheran impulse lurks within me, as I noted yesterday, I also have, you might say, a marginally existentialist temperament. When looking for a starting point for making sense of life, I find that point anchored in personal consciousness (with all of its powers included, of course). Before thought, there must be a thinker; before experience, there must be someone to have it. But my position does not extend to affirming what authentic existentialists do, namely that “existence is prior to essence.” For the hard-core existentialist, each human essence (“what we are”) is created by the person’s voluntary action. Curiously, as I grasp this—to the extent that I do—the existentialist’s “existence” is what Aristotle seems to have meant by potential. Potential is a devil of a concept. It must be there, but yet it isn’t—yet. In any case, for me, the core self has “features,” right out of the box, thus something that we are—long before we’ve done anything at all. We are a power of awareness and of will.

Been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Anxiety. It is an admirable, brief summation of Sartre’s philosophy from the perspective of “the eternal feminine.” I owe Brandon Watson for pointing me in that directed quite some time ago. The book is inaccessible to people who’ve never grappled with Sartre—in whose Being and Nothingness the various core concepts de Beauvoir uses are first defined with plentiful examples; de Beauvoir does not bother with definitions: she is addressing other existentialists. But once those notions are firmly renewed, de Beauvoir’s work is helpful. Reading it came the thought: “Lord, that twentieth century! An absolute desert, a ravaged landscape. And yet spirituality rises from that wreckage nonetheless.”

Reorienting myself in this arcane world of thought and feeling born of ruin, I came across a wonderful short paper by Gordon R. Lewis, of the Conservative Baptist Seminary (Denver, CO), titled “Augustine and Existentialism” (link). Lewis traces the essence of existentialism back to Augustine (354-430). Augustine’s view is only marginally existentialist; he would also have found problems in putting essence second. He, of course, lived in a time of disintegration—that of the Western Roman Empire. The cultural landscape might have been similarly savaged.

I’ve come to think, reading another existentialist, Hans Jonas, in his The Gnostic Religion (link on this blog) that the same spirit, minus philosophical machinery, also inspired Gnosticism, a phenomenon that predates Augustine (say second century AD), with the Hellenistic order coming unraveled. The same phenomenon sprouting, each time, from a landscape of cultural chaos.

A Minimalist Conclusion

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

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

We are meat, we are spirit,

We have blood and we have grace,

We have a will and we have muscle,

A soul and a face,

Why must we die?

…

We are human, we are angel,

We have feet and wish for wings.

We are carbon, we are ether,

We are saints, we are kings.

Why must we die?

Why must we die?

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

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

P of E Revisited

Fate insists that I use initials in this post today. My earlier title was “S, SM, & S.” A quite reflexive thought arises often lately, namely that modern technological civilization is the root of evil. But then I always hastily correct that by saying, “Before that arose came slavery—and, look, a mere 161 years ago it still held black people in bondage within a day’s driving distance from here.” This sequence of thoughts, repeating, has caused me to label it as Slavery, Satanic Mills, and Such. The last phrase is a stand-in for the longish rest of my inner rant. It begins by saying that ours mirror the late Hellenistic times. That era had its slavery in spades although fossil fuels were neither drilled nor mined. But the Hellenistic age had its mass culture and its decadence. And in those days arose varieties of very chaotic religious impulses known collectively as Gnosticism. The next reflection is that in periods like that a kind of self-assertive valuation of the human combines with a sense of anguish at mushrooming evils. In Gnosticism this took the form of pushing off the blame for everything onto the quasi-divine Demiurge. I’m Okay but Things are not. And if only I can hold that idea firmly and effectively in mind, know it, in other words, then I am saved—hence the name of that belief from the Greek for “knowledge.” In our times that view is expressed by raising Victimhood to a high status; our demiurge turns out to be the System.

But the slogan points to a lot more, not least “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” thus the fact we rarely reflect upon, namely that life—at least above the level of the vegetative order (excusing the Venus flytrap for the moment)—exists by destroying other life. Every time I shudder at yet some other facet of modern civilization and the process starts over, eventually I revisit P of E. You have been on tenterhooks to know, haven’t you. The Problem of Evil, of course.

(If “tenterhooks” now bothers you, in turn, I hasten to explain that they are clothes pins, tenters having once been wood frames on which to fasten lines on which to hang cloth for drying. Tenters have been replaced by a combination of the garage and the house in our day—except for those stretch-frames down in the basement by the ironing board.)

But back to P of E. In the East Hinduism, and Buddhism to a lesser extent, adopted vegetarian approaches to diet consistently enough, these arising from a kind of troubled realization that there is a problem out there—and that it might be deeply built into the very Creation itself.

But when Hellenistic times finally wind down—and they do—the real switch that takes place is to stop blaming the demiurge and to look within. Then we get the doctrine of the Fall. That’s where my inner process usually ends. A fallen world explains much better why we might all be in this dimension, thus, in a way, out of place. But if we are then surely each and every one of us must carry the blame directly, not by inheritance from careless Adam, careless Eve. Christianity did not evolve in the direction of vegetarianism. Is that because Greek philosophical culture, honed to a fine edge by the clever sophists, made careful distinctions between humans (don’t eat) and lesser breeds without the law (eat some but not horses, dogs, or nightingales). But I wonder if in some other dimension the souls of wheat and rye will threateningly swarm around me in the future for having eaten thick slices of bread every morning for breakfast as far back as I can think.

The Grace of Recognition

Part of existence for all of us—it comes sooner or later to all—is a feeling of abandonment. Here I mean a certain you might say existential kind of feeling. At times like that we oddly yearn for a sign out-of-the-blue, as it were. And it must come, in that particular way, not through the usual routes of ordinary attention. It must be unusual. It must counter a feeling I’ve always expressed to myself by “a stranger in a strange land.” That biblical phrase—no Heinlein didn’t frame it though he used it as the title of a novel—is not exactly on target in its own context. Let me reproduce the context by way of showing the peculiar power of the highly compressed Biblical narrative. Here is Exodus 2:16-22:

Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters: and they came and drew water, and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. And the shepherds came and drove them away: but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their flock. And when they came to Reuel their father, he said, How is it that ye are come so soon to day? And they said, An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds, and also drew water enough for us, and watered the flock. And he said unto his daughters, And where is he? why is it that ye have left the man? call him, that he may eat bread. And Moses was content to dwell with the man: and he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter. And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.

So much for the phrase, which, for me, echoes something deeply embedded in a Gnostic kind of consciousness that sometimes rises.

Now the odd thing is that quite minor happenings, thus meaningful coincidences—which by their nature are both, meaningful and yet pure chance—serve to relieve the sense of strangeness whereas, surrounded as we might be by caring others in our own environment, that feeling of abandonment might still be present. The existential confirmation almost requires that it be untraceable to causes. Thus neither family, friends, nor public recognition serve the purpose of providing meaning—because we can easily trace the sources of these supports to a mutual kind of give and take. True love serves this purpose—when it first dawns. It then appears miraculous. Celebrity is vanishing if our head is screwed on right. Then we see that we are merely mirrors in which others see themselves. And complete strangers who come to understand us well, with whom we feel a kinship, rapidly enter, for functional purposes, the role of friends and family.

But here and there an odd event, very often of the most minor kind, lifts our moments of abandonment because we then get a hint that we might actually matter beyond the realms of mere cause and effect.

Hans Jonas

Precisely because Christianity came to dominate the civilization of the West—it was the successful competitor among many others as the Roman Empire fell apart—its competitors are much less known. One of these was Gnosticism; it manifested in several different strands; these never fused into a single major religion. To speak of a “gnostic religion,” therefore, is to use a metaphor. Those who wander into these woods soon discover that the written remains are sparse, essentially inaccessible without major archeological help (in a manner of speaking). The historical, sociological, and intellectual background is opaque. The texts are, ultimately, tedious. Indeed the interest in Gnosticism today—and stretching back about a century—is itself proof that Western civilization (it used to be called Christendom) is beginning to fall apart. We have entered precisely the same kind of historical period in which Gnosticism once flourished. It was itself one of the “new age” phenomena of the Roman imperial period.

But there is an interest. And with that in mind I would suggest that people with a serious interest in understanding Gnosticism should obtain The Gnostic Religion, written by Hans Jonas. The book originally appeared in 1958. It is available today as a paperback from Amazon and other sellers. Jonas’ is a comprehensive presentation of the subject, placed in its own historical context. He carefully preserves, but properly sorts, the confusions and complexities. He lays out the significant doctrines in sufficient detail, traces the branches of Gnosticism, and, at the end, he also attempts to link the phenomenon to his own era. To put it in a nutshell, he links Gnosticism to existentialism. Which, by the way, initially surprised me. But after pondering the matter, I saw the justice of Jonas’ joining of the two. And, yes, I’d read the whole mind-numbing length of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. I’ve lived on the Borderzone a long time. I began, in my youth, with people like Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard. I once actually read a whole paragraph of Husserl! Heiddegger’s name is one I recognize, and I can give a decent capsule of his central concerns. So I had, you might say, the minimal adequacy to recognize where Hans Jonas was coming from—and whither he was headed.

If the last paragraph is intimidating, it is meant to be. Life on the Borderzone is not light entertainment; it can be used for that—but then so can most things. The materials I present here, however, will benefit the solitary few who hear the call to understand in a genuine way. And where Gnosticism is concerned, a good starting point is Jonas’ book.

Hans Jonas (1903-1993) was a German-born philosopher; he died in the United States. He studied under Husserl and Heiddegger and was drawn to Gnosticism by presentiments within those doctrines of similarities to his own existential leanings. Jonas had many careers—and in philosophy at least three. His earliest phase was the study of Gnosticism and the linking of it to modernity. Later he became what might be called an environmentalist. And last, he developed his own existential view of biology and life in general, casting it in ethical terms.

Gnosticism, for me, is a window into the realms beyond—with an emphasis on the beyond. After having read The Gnostic Religion, encouraged by the powerful insights contained within it, by its synthesizing powers, by the hint that, as the next step, Jonas might advance into the brighter light by means of Gnosticism, I spent around fifty dollars to acquire Jonas’ chief later writings. But this time I was disappointed. When I look through the existential window, I see Being, as it were; but the hard existentialist—and Jonas was of this variety—when he looks through that window, he sees Nothingness. And then the Stoic bravery is to act responsibly despite the yawning nihil over there. But that doesn’t make sense to me. Then, again, I’m of the next generation over.

The Song of the Pearl - II

Most people today who’ve even bothered to read the original of this Gnostic tale, to which a pointer is provided in the last posting, will tend to be baffled that any modern person could possibly take it seriously—much less as a valuable indicator of anything real. Here is a tale the grasp of which requires a certain kind of mind able, at least temporarily, to detach itself from the conventional scientific/rational mode of thought. Here we have the story of a person dispatched as a child into a foreign country by his parents to snatch a pearl guarded by a gigantic serpent. Why? So that, possessing it, the child will be enabled to become the heir of a kingdom? That’s what the text says. The entire premise, taken at its literal value, is nonsensical. Why would a child be sent to foreign parts? There are no giant serpents guarding magical pearls. What is back-story here? In what way is the child (already the offspring of a king) required to fetch a pearl to be the heir? What’s in that pearl? And, having said this much, we haven’t actually gone much farther than the first three paragraphs, roughly, of the story. Pure nonsense.

My first reaction, therefore, is to try to understand the context. I see this tale as a vivid illustration of a theory. The story would only make sense to an audience that already knew the concepts to be illustrated. It would then become a memorable way of holding in mind what the doctrine, in conceptual form, already contains. Fairy tales all work the same way. There is a hard content the tale illustrates. Elements of Cinderella and of Snow White carry echoes of the Song of the Pearl; and some have associated it with the biblical tale of the Prodigal Son. The Acts of Thomas, in which this tale is embedded, date from the third century of the current era. I doubt that people in that time believed in gigantic serpents either—or in magical pearls. What we are therefore dealing with here is a theory dressed as a tale. But it can be put in conceptual language too.

To extract that meaning, I note the following. The child originates in another world; it has a high status and is surrounded by luxury. It is sent away to a distant and dangerous place in order to obtain something of value that will qualify it later for its appointed role in life. Those who send it are aware of what they’re doing. They replace the child’s fancy garment with a simpler one. They send off the child assisted by two guides. But the guides eventually depart. The child adapts to its new environment. He meets a noble companion with whom he lives and shares his property. Eventually, in the process of participating in the new reality, he falls into forgetfulness and sleep. But his parents become aware of this development; they manage to send a message to awaken the now grown-up person. The message causes the man to remember something already imprinted on his mind—his status and mission. Thereafter he obtains the pearl relatively easily. Indeed, in some sense, the pearl is the remembering, the recapture of the child’s lost knowledge—in Greek its gnosis. This is, after all, a Gnostic tale, and knowledge is salvation. During the journey back, he leaves his earthly covering behind and dons the glorious, bejeweled garment he had left behind.

We could get sophisticated here and say that the two guides (why two?) are the hero’s earthly parents; the noble youth he meets and lives with may be a stand-in for a female, not a lad but, instead, a mate, and recognize, in the symbol of the serpent, his body itself, a vast network of circulation and of nerves. The pearl held by the serpent is itself the child now turned into a youth—who, by taming the serpent, by subordinating the body, obtains the great gift of transcendent knowledge.

What interests me in this story, as I’ve already noted in the last post, is that the tale describes what appears to be a necessary process. Life on this plane, based on this theory, has a definite value. It teaches something that, in that other order, the “East” of the tale, is difficult or impossible to get. The entire process is marked by intentionality: the child is sent, guided, has a companion for a while, and is then awakened by a message from on high. Once this message has reached him, his efforts to subdue the snake are accomplished with very little drama. There is no major battle here between the valiant prince and the dragon. For these reasons I view this kind of cosmology as developmental. It provides an explanation of the descent that, if all goes well, if the sleep is interrupted, if the message reaches its target, is followed by an ascent, the agent involved richer by the process.

I would conclude this by pointing out that so many of the stories we first heard as children—in which heroic women and men overcome obstacles and challenges, fight monsters or wicked witches to discover themselves, at the end, to be queens and kings—all of these tales carry the message contained in that letter that the hero of the Song of the Pearl receives from the East. But these are just children’s tales…. So? So back to reality. Let me get on the Internet and check out how my derivatives are doing….

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.

Trapped: Another Model

Suppose that a community of souls becomes entangled—caught up, trapped—in the quite alien order of matter. We’ve looked at something similar, namely a community that voluntarily enters (I used the word “invades”) the alien realm; I labeled that a “weird” model. What I’d like to look at here is a variant, one in which the entanglement is involuntary.

If this is familiar ground for you, you’ll only notice subtle differences. I based the weird model on Hindu conceptions. In that tradition the soul descends voluntarily but, descending, is so shrouded in ignorance that it becomes a captive on the Wheel of Karma. Escape is only possible by bursting through that veil of darkness by a supreme act of self-denial. The focus in Hinduism is on the ignorance and the escape. The voluntary character of the descent doesn’t get much ink. The involuntary model of entanglement or capture is based on another tradition, Gnosticism. That mode of thought views the soul as innocent; the emphasis is therefore on the capture and on the agency responsible for it (not us); escape is not by self-denial but by realization, insight, knowledge: gnosis.

But let me put Gnosticism on the back burner for now. Its doctrines were forbidden and persecuted in the West; consequently they never acquired the clarity and high philosophical development that Christian and Hindu doctrines manifest. Merely to outline Gnosticism in its endless variants would be confusing. Those who wish to go there, however, might well start with Hans Jonas’ superb work, The Gnostic Religion, Beacon Press, 1958, available here. Let me, instead, put the model in terminology readily accessible to a Westerner using a naturalistic style of framing—meaning that I will neither invoke nor exclude any higher beings in the process.

To see this process we must imagine a cosmic order quite similar to the one we experience down here on earth, namely one in which vast realms coexist under discernible—but not easily discernible—laws. A strong element of randomness is present, at least from our perspective. Beneath that randomness a deeper order may in fact represent absolute necessity, but as we see, weird things can happen; the lightning might just strike the cat, and why it did we’ll never know. Assume, further, that an order of soul, such as I’ve outlined it before, exists within this cosmic whole; it has its own laws and powers, including consciousness and will; it is different in kind from the other phenomena, be they subtle or dense; the soul-order may very well exist in a more subtle kind of material order—suitable to its natural unfolding. It is perfectly consistent, in this model, to hold that God exists in some mysterious way behind all that we are able to discern, indeed that what we see is the creation, and, further, that it may well still be under way. But this God is very obviously the Deus absconditus, not the intervening deity of the Old Testament.

Next assume that in the course of the cosmos cosmosing, as it were, on the model of Spinoza’s “nature naturing,” the cosmos doing what the cosmos does, energetic phenomena well above the pay-grade of the souls happily living their lives in what, to us here, would be a kind of heaven, a disaster would take place. It would be a disaster only from the point of view of the soul-community affected, not in any absolute sense. By way of an example, let’s suppose that a new sub-universe forms in a big bang, and in the process a region of the soul-order is swept away in the consequent enormous explosion and becomes hopelessly disrupted, confused, and its subtle matter wildly mixed in with matter of quite another density. The souls caught in this vast melee would, of course, continue to exist. They are immortal. But they would be greatly disoriented, confused, and their habitation a hopelessly shambles without the accustomed rhyme and reason.

There you have it: an involuntary model of entanglement.

Let me next compare this model to the other two in order to discover if it has any merit. In this model a vast yawning distance opens between God and the soul. In the creation model God personally forms the body and breathes in the living soul; the narrative is that of creator and creature, of command and of obedience. The interaction is continuous. The absence of God is due to the soul’s own disobedience. In the Hindu model the soul is itself a separated tiny instance of God, hence an identity relation continues. And, of course, the separation is voluntary and, with the right effort, can be healed. The Gnostic model, by contrast, produces a very high verisimilitude to actual human experience—which was at least materially a whole lot more miserable even for the middle classes when Gnosticism flourished; it flourished for a couple of centuries before and after the transition between BC and AD. The Gnostics found this world intolerable; they wanted somebody to blame. God could not be blamed. Like all other human communities, the Gnostic were also keen defenders of God against charges of collusion with evil. They chose a secondary agency, much higher than man but lower than God—and they held that this demiurge created the world we see, full of its mayhem and absence of meaning, is a botched job; a hapless imitation of the creator. In the Gnostic doctrine, the demiurge deliberately keeps us asleep so that we’ll stick around. Breaking through our ignorance means liberation.

I will close this presentation by outlining another possible explanation which the modern mind might find more plausible. It isn’t pantheism nor yet lineal creationism. Assume that creation is continuous and God is behind it—but apart. God is not evolving, but the world is. God isn’t finished yet; another chapter is being written. And this evolution, consequently, takes place in resonance with God’s intentions. The aim of existence, in other words, isn’t placid equilibrium but infinite development. We had no choice in being here, but we do have a choice. We can participate or we can decline. If we decline, we’ll find our equilibrium in due time. If we volunteer to take part in the creation, the future may hold many more wonders. Pop psychology might call that “tough love.”

Ex Nihilo

The three cases I laid out yesterday may not be sufficient adequately to explain the full range of reality. Those cases involved A. the soul’s eternal existence, B. its creation at birth, and C. its emergence from matter. Our context was memory. Based on the fact that the vast majority of us do not remember existing before, the second case, B, appeared most logical.

That “model,” however, entangles us with the concept of God creating souls ex nihilo at the moment when ova are fertilized by semen. That idea ultimately rests on the assumption that the creation of every human being requires God’s personal intervention precisely as described in Genesis: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (2:7). I’m happy for those for whom this verse is answer enough. But I’m moved to understand reality at another level. Much as the Greeks—who launched the civilization that stands in a parental role to ours—disliked the notion of creation ex nihilo so do I. From a purely logical stance, if God created the universe, it did not come from nothing; God was present. Ex nihilo creation, as I see it, is an interpretation of Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Understood poetically, this is a wondrous statement. To parse it apart strikes me as courting disaster. You have to get into a quagmire of interpretations from which you’ll never get past the word “beginning.” No human has satisfactorily explained time. And precognitive dreams, for one—the existence of which I cannot doubt—make me doubly sure that exegesis of this verse in hard conceptual terms is going nowhere.

This leads me to evoke another poetical image of creation originating, as best I can determine, with the Gnostics and the Neo-Platonists, but present also in Hindu beliefs. It is the notion that our reality is the emanation of the Godhead, thus a kind of overflow of an infinite plentitude. This is equivalent to the concept of a continuing, ongoing, and, indeed, eternal creation. In this idea the created world does not spring from nothing. On the contrary, it is God—but with a difference. The idea is also discernible in the Jewish Kabalistic image of sparks from a broken divine vessel falling into the void—our own mission being to raise the sparks again: the old theme of descent and ascent.

What makes this poetic image—its model recognizably being solar radiation, but no one claims that it originated that way—unappealing to the West is that it is perhaps too naturalistic. In the Judaic conception—which is at the root of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the emphasis is on an active God in active and personal relationship with his creation. It is a model assertively based on moral behavior. Its very premise rests on command, its disobedience, the consequences of it, and the resolution of that error.

What underlies the emanation concept is quite another emphasis. It is that creation is a diminished, weakened, or dispersed aspect of divine plentitude. The agencies that we observe did not arise from nothing but are separated instances of God; their limitations are due to the separation. This model is equally impossible to render into hard concepts because as the ex nihilo concepts defies explanation by involving time, so this one, through the concept of separation, involves space, and neither one yields to human understanding—as Kant well understood. In what way, precisely, can a spark be separated from God who is everywhere? If we could make sense of that, we might equally well make sense of “in the beginning.” The moral element is also present here but embedded, from the outset, in the individual agent who, being a particle of divinity, carries consciousness and therefore the essence of morality, of free choice.

These problems of space, time, and responsibility have plagued philosophers throughout time. The Gnostics shifted responsibility to an intermediate semi-divine meaning, Sophia, one of the higher emanations of God—but not Sophia personally but to one of her agents, the demi-urge. No human thought can get around the problem that if God is all God must be ultimately responsible—not least for freedom and therefore evil. Swedenborg tried to deal with this using the concept of “permission” in rather tortured ways. In the Hindu conception, a part of divinity develops a yearning for limitation, for experiencing it. This conflicts with the notion of God as all knowing. We cannot escape the problem—and I will certainly not solve it. The issue I’m trying to address—and strictly for myself—is that of ex nihilo creation versus another conception of how reality might be explained.

The ex nihilo model is consistent with our experience of memory. The other model must rely on forgetting. That is where I will go next. I’m not the first to think that it is a good way to go. I will end with a bit of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” by way of introducing what is to follow:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Motivation

I’ve noted long ago—when I first began pondering such matters—that thinking about the origin of life inevitably leads to speculation about cosmological origins. You find yourself going in that direction every time because, I think, the logic in the question posed, and in the facts under examination, force you to take that path. You realize that life is a transcending phenomenon—and at least one of its exemplars is an agent—ourselves. And since we did not make ourselves, seeking a transcendental origin for a transcending phenomenon leads to very basic cosmological questions.

The motivation for the search itself is the love of wisdom, the root meaning of philosophy. If you feel it you’ll certainly also know it. The activity is of its essence contemplative and justified by itself. The genuine lover strives to attain the beloved and has no other motive. The suitor of the princess who doesn’t actually care for the princess but cares only to impress the king—he is a sham. I emphasize this point for a reason.

My discussions of cosmologies—or religious faith systems, for that matter—take place in a philosophical context and are thus part of my search for truth. The last thing I have in mind is to persuade anyone of anything. I’m simply living a part of my life in contemplation. I’ve benefitted a great deal from others’ thought, hence I share mine too. My understanding of agency is that it’s sovereign. Thus every human being is free to make up his or her mind. As the German song has it: Die Gedanken sind frei.* It seems obvious to me that compelled faith—or faith based on ignorance—cannot be real. Thus it seems to me that sincere philosophical discussion will strengthen genuine faith and only weaken unexamined forms of it—which is a service.

The problem I’m addressing has two aspects, one low, one high. Let’s take the high one first. Many faith systems base themselves on revelation, a phenomenon that can be viewed philosophically but cannot be reached by philosophy. By this I mean that philosophy can neither prove nor disprove that God speaks directly to humanity. I have my own understanding of revelation, but that is what it is, an understanding. I believe it to be true, but I cannot prove it. In my view revelation reaches all of humanity in multiple forms; several orthodoxies would deny this. In matters of faith, individual sovereignties may indeed clash. And such clashes cannot be resolved at the level of faith. But they can be discussed philosophically in a generous spirit. And that’s the spirit I try to cultivate in myself.

The low aspect is that faith systems can and often do manifest a tribal character; the best people in these systems always deplore this. Some people, however, out of ignorance, mostly, treat their beliefs as ideologies and view any discussion of them, if outside the “inside” consensus, as an attack. Similarly, they treat those in agreement with their formulations as part of the tribe. But the discussion may not be an attack at all; it may be an appreciation; and the person sympathetic to the faith system may not be a true believer.

This long comment, at this place, seems appropriate. I noted that yesterday’s posting, with its prominent use of the word “Hindu” in the title, caused several partisan websites to broadcast my posting to constituencies. And in each of the two sites (Blogger and WordPress) with the identical content, readership surged to all-time highs. Alas. Time to say the above. High time. In the future I expect to draw fire (or praise) from those who dogmatically deny (or affirm) reincarnation, those who view Gnosticism as a heresy (or truth), and yet others who quarrel with (or adhere to) Catholicism or Islam. Du calm, as my daughter in France might say. This is just philosophy. It follows the Beloved wherever She may wander.
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*Thoughts are free.

The Fable of the Island

The Gnostic idea is almost never contemplated by modern people realistically, not even by those with a transcendental bent. The chief reason for that, perhaps, is that the organic world is too well made to assign it to a bumbling demiurge. At the same time there is pattern in nature which, alas, suggests the—natural. It is therefore difficult to see Nature as the creation of an all-knowing and perfect craftsman. There is too much reliance in it on chance and circumstance. It is for this very reason that in Catholic tradition, anyway, the Fall of the world is stipulated in order so that we can have it both ways. This tradition envisions the “original” creation as perfect. The “natural” world comes about later as the consequence of the Fall. Concerning the Fall we might paraphrase Voltaire and say that if it hasn’t happened we’d have to invent it. Pick any period in history at random and you will see a clear madness overshadowing human reality. Meanwhile the natural world retains its sanity and innocence while also displaying a maddening ambiguity: unconscious consciousness, unaware wisdom, blind teleology. For a quick capsule of Gnosticism, look here.

Idries Shah offers what he calls a fable in The Sufis (Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964) vaguely reminiscent of the Gnostic myth but quite different in thrust. It depicts a fall, but in a different way—as a necessary adaptation. I count myself a friend and admirer of the Sufi tradition—drawn in its direction precisely by such formulations as Shah’s fable of the Island. Shah proposes—not as a factual situation but as a framework for thought—that humanity might be pictured as a community living in a much more perfect state. Its leader foresaw a change coming about which would cause the community’s habitation to be unusable for an extended period of time. In consequence a new place, an Island, is found as the home for the community, but with conditions such that the individuals must undergo a radical transformation to survive in the new environment. These adaptive transformations are so profound that return to the more favorable climes of the motherland requires a long and arduous process. The community moves from a subtle and superior world to a coarser and grainier reality; to make the process easier on people, most members are caused to forget the original country except in the vaguest sort of way; they’re shielded from the past to lessen their pain of loss. There is a good deal more to the fable, but this much will suffice here. Naturally I would suggest that people read the book—at least its first chapter, where the fable is presented.

Unlike most myths, Shah’s fable avoids producing a full-blown cosmology. What he presents (at least as I interpret it) is a picture of large scale interactions between dimensional realms—interactions severe enough so that their inhabitants must adapt themselves to unwished-for events. The fable works as an explanatory framework under certain assumptions. One is that many communities of beings exist, thus a vast concourse of freedom. The communities live in similarly many environments, the environments themselves subject to lawful changes: a realm of necessity. Shah leaves untouched how all of these communities and environments might relate to one another. Suffice it to say, simply, that freedom and necessity, in interaction, can produce major changes requiring adaptation; and some of these will be better than others.

We might call this a modified Gnostic myth—or a modernized, secularized Gnostic tale. Instead of an errant aeon called Sophia, the cause of the world’s fall from a level of subtle sophistication and deep purpose to a much coarser level of materiality and chance is explained in terms of something like climate change (in an era when that phrase did not have modern connotations of global warming). But never mind. This fable also depicts a fall, and that’s really my point: some kind of a fall must be assumed. The negative aspect of the Fall is required by the “natural” arrangement of things; our world is far from perfect. The presumed higher origin (the higher region from which we fell) is required by the presence here of consciousness and intelligence. I myself consider the doctrine of intelligence as an “emergent form of matter” ridiculous because logically insupportable—really a form of magic. For those who can accept the modern Big Bang theory without unease (I myself am very uneasy about it), the Big Bang might actually represent a factual underpinning that weird things happen in the cosmos out there.

This fable-making is really a balancing act. You have to admire nature, meaning organic nature; you cannot go to the lengths Gnostics went and simply dismiss all of it; we know too much to agree with that sentiment. What Shah’s fable does is to introduce a neutral point of departure (disturbance of our habitation) and a creative response to it by an already conscious community. Indeed the “island” might be viewed as a very good symbol for the Earth. Not a lot of places in the material cosmos are suitable for life. The cause for the evil we experience as genuine evil, meaning willful evil, is ignorance produced by the occultations of a new habitation. The price we pay for a reasonable fable is to defer grander explanations to another time. There is no explanation here of how either the community or its environment originated. And even that is justified: Why should we presume total knowledge of everything in our community of being? Especially while, as Shah would have us see, our job now is to make it back again from our temporary abode on the Island to the lands where we originated.