The Pit of the Random

The real world has the contradictory appearance of being random and yet lawful, almost as if randomness itself is a law, so that, to grasp it, we need recourse to the laws of probability. The inner world reflects the outer right enough in most respects—so much so that William James thought of consciousness as a flow of, well, random-seeming bits and pieces—like those particles of dust in a beam of light transecting a dark room. It happened when I was a good deal younger too—but happens more frequently now. I enter a room with energy and purpose—and then freeze in place because I can’t remember why I came here. The purpose usually comes back again in a moment—but there, for a while, the “stream” took a turn even as my body was moving purposively, and the stream blocked out the purpose.

What I say above was rendered by John Bunyan, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, as his famous Slough of Despond. Here is what he said:

This miry Slough is such a place as cannot be mended; it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore is it called the Slough of Despond: for still as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition, there ariseth in his soul many fears, and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place; and this is the reason of the badness of this ground.

The very same concept, functionally, is present in Ibn el Arabi, the great Sufi poet, who spoke of “the turbidities of the obfuscation required by the world of nature,” which “turbidity derives from doubts and the unlawful.” These words in explanation of a great verse (I’ve quoted it before here, but it bears repeating):

She is the ease of whoever

   burns for her,

      transferring him from the levels

         of mortal man

out of jealousy, lest her sparkle

   be stained

      by the turbidity

         in the pools.

[Ibn el-Arabi, The Interpreter of Desires, 38-39]

Three versions of the same phenomenon—the baldly secular; a consciousness focused on sin, expanding that concept to the world at large; and a poetic rendition in which the Beloved cleans up her would-be lover to be worthy of her.

Our ability to see our condition—and in so many different ways—attests to the enormous capacity for transcendence innate in us but not in those particles of dust. And at the bottom of that is that we can see reality in greater fullness. But it requires detachment and rational thought reached in reflection, not in the turbulence of action.

Experienced Continuities Between Dimensions

I have now been almost three years, or thirty-three months, in that state in which—my mind being withdrawn from corporeal things—I could be in the societies of the spiritual and the celestial and yet be like another man in the society of men without any difference; at which spirits also wondered;—when, however, I intensely adhered to worldly things in thought; as when I had care concerning necessary expenses, about which I this day wrote a letter so that my mind was for some time detained therewith , I fell, as it were, into a corporeal state, so that the spirits could not converse with me, as they also said, because they were as though absent from me. A case rather similar occurred before; whence I am enabled to know, that spirits cannot speak with a man who is much devoted to worldly and corporeal cares;— for bodily concerns, as it were, draw down the ideas of the mind and immerse them in corporeal things. [Emanuel Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, March 4, 1748]

This quote, taken from the second volume of Swedenborg’s Spiritual Diary, suggest that under certain conditions—not understood as to causation—some people are able to perceive another reality which appears to be continuous with ours. Information about such experience is rarely recorded and, when it is, is brushed aside. So also are Swedenborg’s own experiences. The fact that he was a notable scientist, writer, and a high-ranking civil servant before his experiences began (at around age 57), and that he continued to maintain his high social standing until his death at age 84—traveling the world and in social contact with Swedish society, not least the royal family at its peak—is brushed aside by those who, for dogmatic reasons, simply cannot accept Swedenborg's testimony. But the experience, while rare, is not isolated. Quite ordinary people have such experiences too. Not surprisingly, they do not make a great fuss over them. And sensibly so. Society must have a certain adequacy even to consider such possibilities. And (as I keep pointing out) in periods when organized religion has the hammer hand, people who have such experiences are frequently treated with much greater severity than in our own. In our own they may be marginalized, ignored, and prevented from publishing. In others they are sometimes executed. One such case is that of the Persian mystic and writer Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi (1155-1191). Another mystic I recently mentioned, Mohiuddin ibn el-Arabi, escaped that fate because he had better high-level connections.

I’ve had occasion to look at this subject before in an earlier post, where I first introduced the writings of Henry Corbin—himself a writer who examined the lives of all three of the mystics I mention above. He originated the phrase mundus imaginalis in an attempt to give a name to the dimension to which these individuals all had access. I’ll say more as occasions present themselves.

The Turbidity of the Pools

In the last post I quote a verse by ibn el-Arabi (1165-1240), the Arab but Spanish-born mystic. Ibn Arabi is one of the greatest Sufi masters, one of the outstanding poets in the Arabic language, and a prolific writer. For that reason, I will borrow his own commentary on the verse I quoted, taken from Chapter 276 of one of his monumental works, The Meccan Illuminations (Al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya). I have this quote from William C. Chittick’s work, The Self-Disclosure of God, State University of New York Press, 1998, p. 347.

What I mean by these lines is that when the lover who has this attribute [turbidity] falls in love, the beloved exercises a ruling property over him and transfers him to the beloved’s self. The beloved drapes him in its own clothing and brings him out of the turbidities of the obfuscation required by the world of nature—this is when the beloved is knowledge. If the beloved is deeds, turbidity derives from doubts and the unlawful; if the beloved is a spirit disengaged from matter, it derives from natural appetites; if the beloved is an angel, it derives from mortal humanity; and if the beloved is God, it derives from everything other than God. Thus the truthful lover is he who is transferred to the attribute of the beloved, not he who brings the beloved down to his own attribute.

Now despite what I assume to be Chittick’s excellent translation from the Arabic, this sampling will make clear to any reader the problems of understanding a twelfth, thirteenth century mystic writing in another language.

The verse itself speaks to something in us that we grasp at some level. The explanation suggests an entire cosmology, hierarchically arranged. Above is clarity, light, and perfection. At the bottom is the turbidity of nature, which Ibn Arabi renders as a pool. He pictures it as water, clear and translucent at its highest levels but made murky by the settling of material at its bottom—where any action can cause the turbidity of matter to hide the light.

The explanation also produces different aspects of the higher: higher knowledge, action, spirit, angel, and then God at the peak. All of these, in poetic compression, are the she of the poem. The force of attention directed upward—love for the higher—is shown as lifting us up, out of the turbidity of the pool. Thus our attention turned to the heights is answered by an action that lifts us into clarity—provided that we are sincere. We don’t do it. She does it. If our motives are low, we pull the high down into the confusions of materiality, stain and obscure it, and lose whatever grace it can bestow. Part of Ibn Arabi’s purpose in this chapter is to show that rational reflection cannot and does not reach the heights. Its own activity merely increases the turbidity in the pools. That is, come to think of it, the unambiguous message of all mystics. You don’t think your way to the heights. It is a response to the vision of beauty. But that vision itself, arguably, cannot arrive if the murk is too dark.

More Magical Verse

She is the ease of whoever
   burns for her,
      transferring him from the levels
         of mortal man
out of jealousy, lest her sparkle
   be stained
      by the turbidity
         in the pools.
[Ibn el-Arabi, The Interpreter of Desires, 38-39]

A woman slender, lissome, of fresh beauty,
   for whom the heart of the sad lover is longing.
The assembly is filled with fragrance at the mention of her,
   and every tongue utters her name.
[Ibid, 117]

Translations from by Arabic by William C. Chittick. I’ll say more in another post.

Are Spirits in Another Place?

In the writings of famous mystics like Ibn el Arabi, Swedenborg, and others we encounter people who could see or hear spirits while fully awake—but these entities were not visible, audible to others. I’ve also encountered in the writings of other mystics claims that they saw spirits as points or shapes of colored light, the colors seen indicating the spirits’ variable levels of development. In more technical jargon these are labeled as “photisms,” and visions of photisms sometimes accompany certain deep states of meditation; they may also manifest spontaneously.

The question now arises: Where are these phenomena located? I myself think of them as being in another dimension, but all I mean by saying that is that they are ordinarily inaccessible to me. I know. This is a sloppy way of thinking. It’s equivalent to saying that the electromagnetic spectrum is also in another dimension because we can’t perceive it. Right now, sitting on this couch, multiple radio and television programs are passing right through my body, but I neither laugh at the jokes nor shiver at the prompting of the horror movie’s music because—well, I don’t see or hear a thing.

When I want to be more precise, I think of this “dimension” as present all around me but—like the electromagnetic—existing in a field of its own that interpenetrates matter because it is much more subtle. As conscious living beings we are also present in that field but unaware of it. Our bodies are too noisy and command our attention. To put this another way, we are simultaneously present in multiple worlds, but our attention is principally in one; in our current state we are most aware of the physical. But my thought is that our consciousness, intelligence, will, higher emotions, and intuitions are of the subtle kind—are not produced by our bodies. Rather, in many of our activities, we use the body to live a subtle life in the physical domain.

Some spirits and ghosts, in other words, are right here where we are. They come and go—as we come and go across the planet. They may live here or far away—and come here only on visits. Our physical world seems infinite in extent as is that other—and both have “many mansions.” There need not be a spatial difference between this world and the Beyond. Both may occupy the same space. When we speak of the Beyond, we may well be speaking of a state of density different from our current one. From this one we have the devil of a time seeing that one (unless specially endowed). From that one, similarly, the physical may be damnably difficult to see and to contact without the kind of space suit that we here call the body.