The Life of the Mind

This is really a note on aging; if you are young, come back as you’re approaching eighty. The notion today is that as we become ever more aware of a life of the mind the more keenly I feel and sharply see the ridiculous side of physical life.

By “ridiculous side” I mean my own body and its ingestions and excretions, its dirt, smell, fatigue; its aches and pains—not what I’d call “nature,” thus its trees and birds and sky and grass. These days I feel directly a kind of general disgust my Mother expressed when she was the same age as I am now. I understood her at the intellectual level; now I actually feel what she must have felt then.

The life of the mind is also difficult to characterize fully. It is mistaken for intellectual pursuits. Those certainly play a role but are by far not identical. The life of the mind is simply an awareness or a feeling and oddly, also, a place that is not really a place in the sense of a spot you can define by using coordinates; it is a country but not one on any map of the word. It is a state of consciousness. It is a quite active state but not in the sense that that word has when local TV talks of Action News.

In this dimension everything is linked to matter not least the life of the mind. That life is closely tired to what I’d call natural activities like taking walks and engaging in handicrafts or chores, chores of a quiet type, thus sweeping but not vacuuming. The work may be quite complex like gardening or carpentry or writing or cooking—provided that it is routine and neither willfulness nor anxiety are present in the chest. Reading may be a part of it but not all reading; the subject matter and the tone are highly relevant.

The more absent certain aspects of the physical life are, the more the life of the mind comes to the fore. And here I note that, curiously, the physical as such may be quite potently present in it as, for instance, grime and effort are present in gardening. The physical, therefore, has two aspects: the “natural” and the “social”; by social I mean the collective activity of humanity. And it is the latter that needs to be muted to a maximum extent to experience the life of the mind as fully as we are able.

The thought occurs that life’s course is designed to enable us to experience the life of the mind, the inner life. And in that process minimizing involvement in the hurly burly of collective life may be of great value at any age.

Catch-as-Catch-Can

The moods have their seasons, and sometimes, despite the lovely weather, they are filled with clouds. What’s the right attitude then? When the mood is cloudy and there is no background in events, the state is surely due to the state of the body. So I proceed from there. The right attitude is to remember the hierarchy of things. The heart need not echo the body’s state—nor, for that matter, the state of the world unfolded as I turn the pages of the paper. Our feelings of identification are habitual, and that habit probably has an adaptive purpose. We are actually free agents quite able to counter the natural signaling of our vehicle—which, if it were a dog, would simply curl up and sleep in moody states or, in others, simply follow the stimulus in total innocence. Now it seems that the body is designed to work quite efficiently without consciousness—in which case we would be apes; therefore, as nature has things, consciousness should not interfere much, or possibly not at all, with the “natural.” Identification, consequently, seems to serve a useful purpose. It keeps us “close” to the body’s state at all times, echoing it most of the time. But similarly—since the body cannot understand the abstract stimuli that we do—the body also echoes what is present in the mind; otherwise news coverage could not produce anger, disgust, and so forth; but it does. From the ape’s point of view the paper is just stuff of very little interest. Thus the two systems work together more or less seamlessly—well enough so that in Aquinas’ scheme of things the human—embodied rational being with immortal soul—is God’s own creations and a specific “order” of existence. Alas, that doesn’t sound right to me.

I am on the side of those who view the soul as captured in a body somehow—or entering it when it ought not. This is the great puzzle of this dimension because no one has as yet, so far as I can discover, answered my question. How or why did we take on these bodies? Was that a practical solution to some problem? If yes, the problem is still with us—because babies are still being born.

I ought to spell this out. Summer. Outdoors. I used to speculate at great lengths out here once. No end to such imponderabilities.

The discord or dissonance I feel arises when I contemplate the highly “engineered” character of bodies. This engineering is natural and evolutionary. It displays at the same time purposive arrangements and a kind of trial and error during its historical formation, the errors often corrected after a false start, with traces of those starts still present. Indeed the phenomenon reminds me of old farms—where the farmer solved problems in a catch-as-catch-can way, but once he chanced on a solution that worked, he left it in place. The blood-clotting cycle has all these earmarks. Purposive groping characterizes it, a groping that has over time piled layer on layer on layer, always aiming at—and exploiting—good results. Missing from this are the marks of high intelligence; present in it is a kind of ignorance, a will, and also a vague perception of some desired end. It works. But it’s not what I mean when I think of “creation.” I can think of a higher kind. The body resembles a human creation—drafts, revisions, errors, editings, and on and on. The mind, by contrast, is a marvel: it has multiple functions so seamlessly united that they form an indivisible whole.

This structure then, this body, holds us.

The life process as a whole is a system. All life uses water. At its base are creatures that feed on solar energy (or simply heat) directly, using elements to capture it. Above that level are entities that suck up water and minerals and fix carbon from the air. And all else feeds on other life.

What we see “out there” are the basic raw materials of life: energy and elements. And Something has turned these givens into the most incredibly diversified and form-maintaining (read reproducing) entities—so far as we have yet established, only on the earth; life everywhere is but a theory. Life has all the earmarks of a colonization. But from where? What life doesn’t look like is a “creation”; it’s more like an invasion of matter.

Earlier ages simply didn’t know enough about bodies, chemistry, the solar system (no fly-bys or Mars landers), or the cosmos (no Hubble) to see things the way I do. We still don’t know anything about how life started. Our theories that matter can form life by a chance event—energy and matter meeting in a certain happy conjunction—are inadequate. Where in matter is that mysterious Something that took advantage of (or perhaps arranged) that chance event to fashion reproducing, form-maintaining, indeed evolving entities. That was a radical departure from the norm.

Earlier ages, however, clearly discerned the differences between mind and matter, souls and bodies. And trying to explain this difference, they projected an essentially static cosmos in which Mind writ large created all that we see. Emphasis on static. They knew nothing about the Cambrian explosion. They thought the earth stood still: no satellites. They saw order in the repeating cycles of day and night, the phases of the moon, the succession of the seasons. And all is number.

Our age has produced observations and discoveries so stupendous that the old scheme seems utterly naïve. In the process, however, we have eliminated Mind altogether, whether written small or large. But what hasn’t yet transpired is the proper integration between old and new, an integration in which the truth in both is acknowledged, namely the reality of Mind and the now visible aspects of “body,” including in that word life as a whole, its carriers, and the cosmos in which they reside.

A different view emerges when we make the attempt: life as a colony or as an invasion of matter by Something mysterious present here and proceeding—not quite knowing where it’s headed—by catch-as-catch-can methods and Hail Mary passes.

Closer To You Than Your Jugular Vein

The phrase may lack all currency in the West, but all Muslims know it well. It is a quote from the Koran (QAF 50:16) and says: “We created man. We know the promptings of his soul, and are closer to him than the vein of his neck.” Interesting image. Closer than his physical life, you might say. The phrase came back as I was contemplating the great divide of invisibility between our dimension and the next one over. But what possible proof is there for that, the existence of the next one over? And then came the answer provided by my memory: “It’s closer to you than your jugular vein”—in which process, of course, what I meant was my own mind, my consciousness, not God, as the Koran has it, although I don’t dispute that either.

It is rather curious, when you think about it, that the proof of our transcending status, above the physical—however vital a physical it is—is the utterly ordinary, common, daily, indeed moment-to-moment fact of self-awareness. It isn’t sharply, clearly visible to us, this radical difference, because we are so intimately identified with our bodies—and a vast radiation of other structures that maintain them—that we do not realize that mind is impossible to build up from the same elements that form the jugular. Conventional wisdom asserts the opposite. Hence to really pin down the facts requires labor. If conventional wisdom had it right, however, Apple would by now have brought us Eve-pad. And looking at her screen some gloomy morning, she would say soothingly, but with an edge of challenge: “We’ve had a bad night—have we?”

Mind and Language

Reflecting yesterday on the wonderful nonsense of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and this in the context of two public events, caused an old conviction of mine to come to the fore again. The two public events were Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement that the Executive Branch would no longer defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the Supreme Court’s opinion yesterday on the privacy rights of corporations. For more on these see my post today on Ghulf Genes here. Both of these cases are intimately concerned with language, with definitions, in the first case of “marriage” and in the second of “personal privacy.” And in the case of Alice, we have a nonsense tale in which the intended meaning is as much hidden by the language of the book as it is revealed in an aura that surrounds it. Humor, generally but not alone, illustrates my conviction that mind uses language but isn’t created by it.

Exactly the opposite is claimed by evolutionary linguists, of whom a representative figure is Derek Bickerton, and his book, Language and Human Behavior, is a classical example.

My endless fascination with language arises precisely because we are forever judging, weighing, and choosing words, thus that we stand over them like sovereigns, that they serve us and not we them. This is vividly obvious in all manner of contexts. The letter of the law stands in contrast to its spirit, for example, and we see endless instances where some insist on the letter, others on the spirit. Language does not compel—people do. The two legal cases I mention above are telling examples as well.

The application of the word “person” to a legal entity, a corporation, is a kind of attempt to compel behavior by expanding the meaning of a word. A corporation is never a person in the sense in which I am. The mind knows that perfectly well. In DOMA Congress attempts to limit the meaning of marriage to a male and a female, but the words of the law do not compel—unless the sovereign mind that hears those words agrees. In both of these cases the spirit behind the definitions is the interesting aspect. In commercial law the spirit that turns corporations into persons is a spirit claiming rights it does not naturally have. In the case of DOMA, the spirit is similarly reactive, at minimum, and makes me cringe just a little. Do I think that breathing is the intake of air and its release again? Yes, I do. But do we need a Congressional act to know that? Do I think that marriage means the union of a man and woman? Yes, I do. But have we exhausted that meaning? “Let me not,” said Shakespeare in Sonnet 116, “to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.” Belay, belay. The thoughts are free—and unless real harm is done, let them use whatever words they choose to voice them. We don’t have to agree. You respirate, I breathe.

A Vast Network of Souls

     Twenty-year-old Willis had been away from his Pennsylvania home for several years, but he returned for frequent visits, especially after his grandfather’s stroke. The two had always been close…. One night, soon after his return from a visit, Willis struggled awake at his grandfather’s call. “Willis, Willis.” The room, ordinarily very dark, was lit up brightly and, momentarily, he saw his grandfather smiling at him. Startled, uncomprehending at first, Willis lay motionless for a bit, but he then put on the light. It was 1:10 A.M. He could sleep no more. At 6:00 A.M. a phone call from his brother came, but Willis spoke first: “Grand-pop died last night!”
     “Yes, but how did you know?”
     “He came to see me—it was about one-ten.”
     “Yes, that was when he died.”
[L.E. Rhine, The Invisible Picture: Experiences. McFarland. 1981, p. 20, quoted in Rupert Sheldrake’s The Sense of Being Stared At, Three Rivers Press, 2003.]

This quote by way of introducing Rupert Sheldrake’s fascinating book, The Sense of Being Stared At. You will find five other posts on Borderzone where Sheldrake is being mentioned, principally for his theories of morphic fields. Those theories are presented in The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988) and A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance (2005). I strongly recommend these works to any serious student of the paranormal. In Sheldrake’s hands, the paranormal becomes normal, and many puzzling phenomena receive a theoretical foundation. You will find summary of this theory on this blog here. I don’t want to repeat it. Suffice it to say, the theory suggests that all life-forms are able to communicate. And Sense of Being Stared At is a narrower and, in many ways much more accessible analysis of this contention, relating to humans as well as animals (and presumably plants), in ways that link to our everyday experience. A very succinct summation of the content of this book is presented by Sheldrake in two sentences on page 9. It runs as follows:

If the seventh sense is real, it points to a wider view of minds—a literally wider view, in which minds stretch out into the world around bodies. And not just human bodies, but bodies of nonhuman animals, too.

Worth reading. The book is available on Amazon here.

Understanding and Intellectual Grasp

At bottom understanding and intellectual grasp are really one and the same thing. Or are they? I ask the question for a reason. The understanding of something often dawns in my mind before I’ve actually articulated it, thus taken it apart into pieces and realized, in detail, how everything fits together. But even before I do that, I’ve already understood the object. Conversely, understanding may also arise suddenly from the puzzled handling of details, looking at them this way, that way. All at once I understand.

This is a peculiar experience. What is this feeling? What actually happens? Mysterious. A man will say: “Well, I just knew.” If then you ask him how he knew, you may sometimes trigger a retrospective inspection of the process; the account of it will depend on the ability of the person to see into his own innards. The speaker will begin to trace a process backward. We usually call it a process of thought, but the point I’m after is that thought is often not involved at all.

The man in this case will begin his account by examining slices of the process one by one, isolating them from one another. Put another way, the speaker reviews his stream of experiences over time and notes his reactions one by one, almost second by second. When this process originally took place, the speaker did not engage in conceptualization—did not use tokens, words. The process worked beneath the level of speech or its equivalent, thought. The speaker nonetheless absorbed the events and his reactions to them. Translating that process into speech (spoken or silent) is really what results in intellectual grasp. But we know the thing, we understand it, before we ever proceed to its mental formulation into concepts. Like many other people, I often don’t know what I know until I write it down, but, paradoxically, I knew that before I wrote it. But after writing I possess it more fully and completely. But what is it that I possess? It is a structure of symbols in meaningful relationships. And I’m persuaded by my experience that the meaning and the relationships preexisted my grasp of them. Hence the world is intelligible. Some disagree. They assert that no meaning exists out there, none whatsoever. We impose it by using speech. How we act on our understanding may, of course, depend on which fork of this divide we take.

Experiential footnote: I grasped this process years ago once when our washing machine broke down. I disassembled it enough to expose its pulleys, blocks, and belts. I stared at it for at least half an hour totally absorbed, fingering this lever, pushing that belt. I wasn’t analyzing. I examined the assembly by looking at it, now this part, now that; I was letting my mind absorb the picture by focusing on it in great detail. Suddenly, with a flash, I understood the damn thing. I just knew. Then I trusted myself to proceed to the next steps of disassembly—because I now had a feel for how the thing actually worked. The conceptual process began only as I proceeded. In two hours I had the thing running again.

Now putting things this way may seem to support the modern line of thought that intellect and consciousness are the consequence of language, that language could and did simply evolve by accidental changes in our throat so that simple grunts could become much more elaborated sounds. Etc. I take exactly the opposite tack. I think that our innate endowment, what I call soul or self, has hierarchically overlaid powers each seeking expression and realization as soon as it has the modes to actualize itself. Thus understanding is the foundation; the symbolizing intellect is the next higher layer; above the intellect yet other powers await unfolding. In the species homo sapiens nature managed to implement the means by which intellect could function, but it did so because a fierce energy within the self sought expression and exploited the accidents of nature. It is the intellect that creates language, not language the intellect. Same facts, different interpretation.

One corollary of this view is that understanding—in a pre-verbal sense—is present in animals, indeed in all living things, as well; so is, I would assert, the potential for our kind of consciousness. This view is consistent with my experience with Winston, our much loved labrador in Minnesota, who certainly possessed much understanding. I would also point those interested to the fascinating story of Helen Keller, a person whose physical defects prevented her exercise of an innate facility until rescued by Anne Sullivan. This is a fascinating and highly illuminating case. I’ve written it up—its here on this computer somewhere. This post suggests that I ought to find that analysis and present it in the future. It makes my case.

The Heart

Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point. The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. [Baise Pascal, Pensées §277]

Shah does not hesitate to make the claim … that nearly all we claim as “religion,” as “higher feelings,” as “mystical experience,” is no more than emotionalism. We are taught that there are emotions and intellect, but not that there is something else possible, beyond both and not to be confused with either. [Doris Lessing, in her Introduction to Learning How to Learn, by Idries Shah]

In artistic and spiritual matters, problems of communication arise. Art will illustrate this. When I was in college, “What is Art?” used to be bandied about with a certain irony. My friends and I argued about the subject for hours on end. One side held that beauty was in eye of the beholder; it was subjective through and through. The other held that beauty existed in reality, out there somewhere, beyond the beholder; but the beholder had to be capable of perceiving it. The debate no doubt continues. I belong to those who think that art holds something real, something apart.

I worked once for a major research institute. We rarely ever left the main building by its front entrance; we used back entries and exits going to and from parking lots. I was in the lobby one day waiting for someone to pick me up for a trip to the airport. Leather furniture, fancy tiled entry; the wide glass expanse opened on a distant fountain and a sculpture. As I waited, my eye fell on a large painting hung over the leather couch. My eye swept over it indifferently. Then I did a double-take. It was a Madonna and child. “Wow!” It was beautiful. Renaissance. I'd never seen it before. The Institute had an arrangement with a neighboring art gallery. The paintings changed from time to time. I looked around. The reception was farther inside; I was safely alone. I stepped up on the dark-leather couch to examine a small golden tab affixed to the frame. I jumped off, nodding to myself. It was a Fra Lippo Lippi. Something had reached me from that picture. I knew that something with the heart.

Problems arise precisely because the quality we’re talking about transcends the operations of the way we ordinarily see reality. The crux of this problem is that different people have different capacities. The seed of these capacities everyone must have, but they develop by chance and effort. Things get more complicated. Art appreciation, and piety, can be and are often faked, based on external signs—especially if a pay-off can be had. Only those who have the real stuff dare to turn away from what isn’t genuine. They can smell the genuine. There is no better way to put it. It isn’t visible. It’s felt. Something speaks. Many things on display in a gallery reveal themselves to people like that as mute, deaf, blind—even when the themes are grand, the names immortal, and the display is splendiferous. Others may also feel this but may be uncertain. They think that, perhaps, they lack some sophisticated skill. No. They already have it; they just don’t know that they do—because their experience is limited.

In traditional societies in which the transcendent dimensions still has standing, the organ of this perception is called the heart. Obviously it’s not the blood-pumping muscle. Heart is merely a way of speaking. But neither are emotions in the glands or mentation really in the brain. We have a way, a capacity, to perceive the energetics of a higher order, and if we say that it’s the heart, why not?

I’ve merely touched the subject. This much will serve as an introduction. But I’ll come back and look more closely at this capacity, experienced, if mildly, all the time, very difficult to disentangle from conceptualization and emotion: the very capacity we have to use in order to see, feel, or hear anything at all in the regions of the border. By way of concluding this initial posting on the subject, let me simply add that energetic activity of intellect (in the sense of a passion for debate) or of the emotions (excitement) both act to inhibit the function of the heart. And when they do, we cannot see much and understand even less about the mysteries of being than we ordinarily do when we’re just bored.

Limits

“The first thing a principle does is to kill somebody,” said Lord Peter Whimsey, the aristocrat-detective, the invention of Dorothy L. Sayers, speaking in one of her best novels, Gaudy Nights. Confessing my own limitations, I am here bound to report another Whimsey quote, in the same book (both courtesy of Wikiquotes, although I did read Gaudy Nights). There Whimsey said, “The facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.” To which I might add, by way of excuse, that if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Witty things always occur to me hours after the occasion for using them is past. Thus I better quickly marshal another quote to set the stage here, that by the most famous French diplomat ever, Charles-Maurice Talleyrand, who said: “Above all, no zeal.”—Which reminds me that he had the bad fortune to live with an even greater man always around, Napoleon. Napoleon once supposedly said to Talleyrand (and this sort of thing does build humility): “Look, you’re shit in a silk stocking.” I suppose I should render that more politely in French: “Ah, tenez, vous êtes de la merde dans un bas de soie.” Which reminds me of something else—of reading certain books in youth—I remember especially A Thousand and One Nights—in which, back in those days, the sexually explicit passages would be rendered in Italian! Groan! How that used to bug me. And my parents, speaking Hungarian, would switch to German when they didn’t wish us to understand what they were saying. But I’m now really wandering from the subject. Let’s get back to boredom.

Here I simply wish to emphasize that if the faculties of Man are single—expressing themselves in multiple modalities, each of those modalities has a boundary or limit. We benefit from them only when they are used in harmony. This is best illustrated with the intellect, the chief limit of which is also its greatest power. It can delimit any aspect of reality by separating it into a concept. This greatly increases our power of understanding, but only up to a limit. Hence Whimsey is correct. Principles, which are concepts dressed as absolutes, will kill people if other modes of perception are not permitted to come to bear. Hence also Talleyrand was nothing if not wise when counseling that zeal must be avoided. By curbing zeal, we give our other modes of being scope to enlarge our sense of the reality or action we are pondering.

One of the maddening but, in the long haul, most beneficial experiences we can gain by patrolling the border zone is that absolute certainties are unachievable. Wisdom is one of those great values that simply don’t lend themselves to exploitation. You can’t beat someone over the head with it, you can’t reduce it to a slogan, you can’t turn wisdom into money, power, or fame. If fame comes, it comes after you’ve departed. Conversely, any wisdom offered for sale or as the sure thing, you can’t miss, is certain to be counterfeit. Quotes are on my mind today, so let me end with one. Wisdom? Well….

So high, you can’t get over it.
So low, you can’t get under it.
So wide, you can’t get around it.
You gotta come in by the door.

Faculties: The One and Many

If I consult my own experience, I find that my various modes of being are a unity. I think of the self as a point, this despite the fact that I distinguish at least six modalities—thought, will, intuition, memory, emotion, and sensation. These are ways of perceiving the self in action; one of the meanings of modality, derived from the word mode, is form. The self may therefore be said to be a unity that manifests in different ways or forms. As we all know, these modalities may coincide, overlay, mix, fuse, etc. Each may be more or less quiescent. When I mow the lawn I immerse myself in the mode of sensation and of willing. My thoughts wander, my emotions rest except, from time to time, when I’m pleased by the attractive swaths of green that I produce; my intuition is in neutral; my thoughts wander; sometimes they latch on to a phrase left over from the last coherent run of mentation and keeps repeating that phrase over and over again; my memories are on automatic, but since my will is focused on making the lawnmower do its thing, their presentation—the stream of consciousness that still flows beneath the phrases I might be repeating, maybe something Latin and totally irrelevant but mildly pleasing—corruptio optima pessima, say—isn’t noticed. The repeating phrase need not learned, by the way. The last one I recall was “What’s hidden in that kitchen midden” which kept my mind playing like a child because it liked the rhyme.

The poet in me insists on the unity of self, but philosophers sometimes get caught up in the conceptual game too much. We separate and label the modalities, make of each a kind of hard and distinct something. Thus we have Schopenhauer who settled on the Will and would have it be the king. In modern psychiatric practice, Feeling is everything. I haven’t traced that peculiar emphasis back to its source in some philosopher or other, but it’s probably possible. But I always chuckle when Star Trek The Next Generation’s Deanna Troi (played by Marina Sirtis), the empath, we might call her, comes out with her true-and-tested question: “How do you feel about that?” The Intellect is the favorite of the philosophical community. It is the faculty philosophers hone to a fine edge and brilliant sheen; is it any wonder then that it must be the king of the faculties? For the more poetic mind, intellect has serious limits. As a young man I used to joke, heading to the bar with my friends after obligatory classes in philosophy saying: “If I stop suddenly and my esse should roll out in front of me—then I’ll believe I have one.” Juvenile, to be sure, but I make my point.

Here we have yet another instance of the one and the many—the conceptualization of which is a very hard nut for the intellect to crack but not all that problematical for the poet. The wonder of the human soul, in fact, is this oneness with multiple modalities. In this low realm we do get weird adaptations. When I see trees adapted to peculiar terrain, plants that grow immensely tall because they try to reach the tiny bit of light available to them, when I see strange creatures that inhabit the total darkness of the deepest oceans—at times like that I’m reminded of people in whom one faculty is massively developed but others have had no chance to unfold. My admiration is thus for those who develop fully on many fronts, and in harmony. I am on record as an admirer of St. Hildegard of Bingen, an exemplar of such persons who reach high states of development often overcoming, on the way, what appear insurmountable odds.

Where Do We Go In Sleep?

Does sleep prove materialism? If our consciousness is the capacity of an immaterial agency, and we are that agency, why do we go away when the brain has to rest?

Let me examine the assumptions hidden in my question above. To make things as clear as possible, let me start by saying that I want to exclude dreaming states for purposes of discussion. Dreams need special attention—and will get it elsewhere. Now to the question. I assume here a duality of body and mind. If I didn’t, the question would be meaningless. To recognize this duality explicitly, I can rephrase the question: “Where does the soul go when the body sleeps?” I assume, further, that body and soul are separable entities; note the distinction: not just separate but separable—else I couldn’t use the word “go” in the question. I also assume that the state of sleep is the sole property of bodies and that souls don’t require sleep—hence they can “go” somewhere. I pose the question in the first place because the last assumption necessarily suggests that consciousness continues even during sleep, but I am unaware of that—and if I am that consciousness, my absence in sleep produces a contradiction. I’m simultaneously asserting that during sleep the soul is both conscious and unconscious.

Let’s next look at these assumptions. Duality rests on my observation of the mind’s behavior, particularly its freedom of action in directing my motions at will. I don’t observe this behavior of self-motion anywhere in inorganic nature. I have a clear understanding of the difference between reflexive, automatic behavior, assigned to mechanical arrangements, and voluntary behavior. The voluntary behavior also requires a cause, and that cause is the soul-mind-agency. In order to move the body, this agent must be in some way independent of it.

That body and soul are separable is not a matter of ordinary observation; experience proves the contrary, otherwise I would never experience pain; I would just go away until it stopped. The notion of separability is a theoretical projection based on my experience of the independent status of my soul, ultimately grounded in free will. But I have no experiential basis for asserting that I can “go” anywhere without old flesh-and-bones tagging along.

My assumption that sleep is solely a property of bodies arises because I cannot find an organic basis for soul. The very concept requires that soul be free of mechanistic determinations. If it isn’t, it would be the body. If soul is independent of the body, it would not seem to require sleep. But that is a relatively weak assumption. By calling soul independent, I have not actually described it very comprehensively. It too may need a constant or intermittent renewal in some way, but, if so, I can’t know anything about that. As Aquinas argues, soul knows itself by its actions, not directly; hence by corollary, soul cannot know anything by its inaction—which is its evident state during sleep.

How then do we deal with the contradiction of a conscious-unconscious soul during sleep? Three possibilities suggest themselves.

· Souls Also Rest. As just suggested above, souls themselves may require restoration and have the functional equivalent of rest. Sleep may, in fact, be viewed as produced by soul-fatigue, produced when a soul, that has exhausted its vital energies, lowers its life-maintaining activity, and the body, in response, slumbers off.

· Souls Are Conscious But Bored. Under this option, souls remain conscious during sleep, indeed continue to have mental freedom to do as they like, but there is no sensory stimulus coming their way. A big black nothingness is what they mostly experience because access to other realms is impossible from this material order. Memories are formed, but they are of the kind almost immediately forgotten. Nothing happens that’s worth remembering.

· Souls Have Experiences, But Memories Aren’t Stored. In this explanation, souls do have experiences, but what with the brain being asleep, it doesn’t store memories of these experiences and, hence, in the waking state, we can’t remember what we saw and felt in our perhaps native dimension.

Notice that in two of these cased (Bored, Experienced), the function of memory is central. In Case Bored, the mind produces memories with or without the brain’s intermediation; memories are of the same kind (let’s say on the same frequency as ordinary memories) and treated in the same way. We don’t usually remember large boring stretches of experience or simply compress them into a very brief token. The other case, Experienced, assumes that for ordinary remembering the brain must be actively involved; the soul may experience events in some other order, may store memories of these events as well, but on another frequency—which is not accessible to the brain but may be accessible to the soul once it is freed of this dimension.

Now some further comments on these cases. The first suggests that the mere assertion of “immateriality” for the soul is inadequate. Hidden within it is the assumption that soul requires some kind of energy for its own maintenance—which it passes on to the body. So the soul becomes more complex, indeed dualistic in turn, consisting of capacities on the one hand and a sustaining energy on the other.

The second depends on the assumption that different orders or regions exist and that the soul, native in another one, is caught in this one, at least while in the body, and unable to experience, at least effectively, any other. Therefore, deprived of sense stimuli, it sees nothing when the brain shuts down. Boring.

I have nothing more to add to the third case. Each of these cases has a certain plausibility and problems. All depend on variant models of reality which are entirely speculative and supported only, and only in part, by highly subjective experiences of the paranormal. Some of that “evidence” I hope to examine in future posts. Here it might be well, once more, to emphasize the problem of knowledge. We have no idea what a soul is, only the experience of its activity; we don’t know how it got here or why it’s tied to bodies. For explanations we must open books of myth. Tough sledding, this business of the mind.

Brain-Mind Duality: Implications and Issues

I want to look at mind in another way today, more comprehensively that earlier, thus from a rational as well as an empirical point of vantage. These views seem to be in conflict, hence we have “issues” to discuss. The rational approach produces the conviction that mind can’t be an “emergent” phenomenon; it must, it seems, come from another realm. The empirical approach, by contrast, teaches us that a material faculty—the brain—is “almost” always associated with mental activities. I want to record my reasons for putting quotes around the “almost,” but I’ll do that later. Here I want to focus on the difficulties of the brain-mind linkage generally.

From a logical point of view, mind is immaterial, above nature, “metaphysical,” in fact. But if that is so, and reason says so, what is it doing in a body? Why can lesions in the brain block any evidence of it? Why do people sometimes lose their memory after injuries? Why does schizophrenia render individuals defective?

Heads: If mind is transcendental, why does it need a chemical tool?

Tails: But let’s turn that around and show the other side of the coin. If mind is just an emergent property of matter, then what in the name of heaven does life want? What explains the deep urge in matter to wish to become conscious, to struggle, to experience joy, to undergo the humiliations of aging, to suffer, and finally to go out like a candle and turn back into matter once again?

These are the two faces of the coin. Throughout history, people have favored heads over tails. Times like our own, casually materialistic, have also recurred at intervals (usually when civilizations were decaying), but never have masses of people actually adhered to materialism in large numbers in ancient times. Epicureanism is a prominent earlier example. Only small elites, enjoying ample wealth, have ever done so, and not all members of those. Our age is unique in one way only. Thanks to fossil fuels, large majorities have risen high enough from subsistence so that materialism can be accepted by relatively large masses of people, at least passively. The majority of mankind, even in the twenty-first century, still calls for heads. The polling evidence for this is accessible here for the United States and here for the world.

I expect to discuss in other posts the traditional arguments, doctrines, and speculations that attempt to present explanation for the more plausible argument, namely that material bodies make sense for a transcendental agency. They all demand models of the cosmos. Here I simply note the fact by way of introduction.

I’ve discovered, mulling these matters over for years, that other more down-to-earth issues are of considerable interest once we brush away the materialistic explanation and at least for argument’s sake accept the transcendental nature of mind. Most of these issues are in empirical, experiential category. They either support or complicate the explanation. One example and I’ll close.

The core of this example is consciousness and sleep. Where is consciousness when we turn in for the night? If it is extinguished, it would then seem to require a fully functioning brain to manifest it at all. But that would also imply that brains come first, hence mind is an epiphenomenon. This happens to be a favorite materialistic argument, and any one on the other sides is obliged to address it. Now for a corollary. If consciousness remains intact during sleep, why don’t we remember anything about those periods? That question hides a number of others connected with memory, some of which I’ve already touched upon earlier: how are memories stored, how are they retrieved, how are they lost. And what do we find pro or con in studies and writings related to the paranormal.

How Do You Know?

When we hear someone using the phrase in the title above, we’re witnessing epistemology in action. The Greek root of that word is knowledge-knowledge or knowledge-information, knowledge about knowledge, theory of knowledge. English is murkier; it is a Mississippi of a language so that its water is thick with the mud of other tongues. German lives closer to its roots and renders epistemology as knowledge-teaching (Erkenntnislehre); that word defines itself for the young German and doesn’t wear a haughty mask of impenetrability like Epistemology. But behind that Greek mask lurks some fellow asking: “How do you know?”

That is an interesting question, isn’t it? We ask it all the time. We ask it of the TV set, of books, and of our less trusted informants. The most authoritative answer to it is “I was there, I saw it” — or variants: “I had the operation. You want to see my scar?” It is equally fascinating to follow such a dialogue if the questioner isn’t immediately satisfied. If the answer points to a third party, for example, the questioner will next proceed to establish the third party’s competence, his state of knowledge, how he obtained it. We all do this. We are Everyman. When Everyman is trying to get an answer, he can be a ferocious epistemologist without a trace of Greek or philosophy anywhere in sight. Now if we listen carefully, it turns out that the questioner is seeking a two-fold set of facts: One, is the information based on direct experience and, Two, is the source of it a competent, mature, and honest observer. If there is a chain of informants, each must qualify, not least the last person actually responding to the How-do-you-know. Failing to get to this point, the questioner may wave off the answer and dismiss it saying: “Well, that’s just a rumor.”

I find it useful to examine epistemology, or what lies behind it, from this perspective, as understood in ordinary life. In that context there is never any talk of the Correspondence Theory of truth over against the Coherence Theory, no debate between epistemological monism and epistemological dualism. The questioner assumes correspondence to be true unless he has reasons to doubt it; he also demands coherence. Correspondence in this context simply means that what is observed is really there: the words refer to concrete realities. Coherence means that a presentation of data is logically structured. Our questioner ignores the dualism-monism issue as a brand of philosophical baloney. Dualists say that there is a difference between the sensory data reaching the mind and what is really out there—the phenomenon/noumenon pairing. Monists say the two are one and the same thing: “When I see an apple, an apple is what I see.” “Hairsplitting” says our questioner. “Get on with it. I just want to know what happened.”

The questioner’s dual interest, in direct experience and in the adequacy of the reporter, is of interest to me particularly in the context of the mind and related areas: paranormal experience and proof of a beyond. I note here especially that Everyman routinely assumes that people are reliable channels of information provided that we know something about them and their limitations. Indeed Everyman assumes that they are perhaps better sources than instruments. Everyman has reasonable doubts about instruments, jigs, tools, and the like and applies to them the same rules of competency. Some products work better than others. Brand XZ is junk, as he is likely to say. His approach to reality is integrated. He assumes the presence of mind in others and knows how to judge its qualities by various other indicators. But he is no fool; not everyone with arms and legs qualifies as a good informant. I stress this point because orthodox science, in contrast to Everyman, has a positive bias against human experience, never mind the competence of the reporter. It insists on physical measurements as the sole proof of anything. That is the reason why a peculiar form of psychology called behaviorism could get any traction at all: don’t believe what people say; only believe observable behavior.

I make these points at length because, in days to come I want to examine some of empirical evidence—meaning experiential evidence—for the transcendental nature of aspects of reality. In that context it is useful to have in mind how we can know. In virtually all matters that touch on paranormal phenomena, for instance—telepathy or precognition, let us say—good cases are based on the experience of people; the experience itself, however, is inaccessibly to anyone other than the experiencer. A telepathic message is perceived; it doesn’t come as a sound through the air that instruments can capture. Precognitions typically come in dreams. We never say: “Here! Let me run off a copy of my dream for you.” What we encounter in these cases are actual phenomena—but inaccessible except through a single mind. They are direct experiences. How do we know they really happened? We can only know by testimony. How can we trust the testimony? Can we ever do so without a Xerox of the dream? Everyman’s answer is that mind is competent to judge reality to a sufficient degree so that we can confidently speak of certainty. Not all will be believed. But then, to be sure, our physical tools also fail frequently enough so that absolute certainty is pretty much out of our reach.

The Origin of Mind

If mind does not arise from matter, its origin becomes a metaphysical question by definition and hence escapes empirical proof. Mind is a phenomenon in the original sense of that word, meaning a fact or an event (from the Greek “to show”), but mind is not a phenomenon in the restrictive modern sense meaning something knowable by the senses rather than by thought or intuition. Positive science can only study phenomena it can access by light, contact, chemical, or electromagnetic means. Hence, to use a common analogy, it can only study the radio and never the meaning of the newscast that comes across the airwaves: the brain but not the mind. In similar fashion science can study metabolism and enzymes but cannot come to grip with life itself. It treats both mind and life as emergent phenomena, another word I’d rather render as “transcendent,” meaning that the phenomena cannot be reached by instruments.

Looking at mind in this way suggests that our most fundamental experience of life, being here and knowing that we are, cannot be studied or understood by methods that produce anything but subjective certainties. The operation of the will is a fundamental aspect of the mind. Not surprisingly, therefore, some portion of humanity will always disagree with what might be a common consensus of humanity. The human view of gravity is quite uniform by contrast for the simple reason that those who defy it tend to depart.

Here we have a situation where we know, in a way, but not in another. It’s a common human ailment. Some few have very strong and vivid experiences of transcendental states, but the rest of us must rely on an intuitive judgment of the traditional explanations and then go from there. What are these explanations?

To look at these it is best to stop using “mind” and using “soul” or “self” instead. Tradition prefers these latter expressions. The traditions divide into two big streams. There are many others, but two serve to illustrate the human consensus.

In one, the tradition principally of the West, the soul originates in God and departs in a manner of speaking to live in the midst of the creation. It is destined ultimately to return once more to God. The West thus sees a process of descent followed by an ascent, a cycle of existence with God, away from God, and then once more united. Such a description must not be understood too literally—as if God had a location. The intent here is to indicate a subjective experience of distance even if, as we used to recite in our Unity congregation, “There is no spot where God is not.” In this tradition God creates the soul at a point in time and, as it were, in the form of a seed that must develop through its experiences which, ultimately, result in the completion of the cycle.

The other stream of tradition, exemplified by Hindu beliefs, sees each soul as an emanation from the divine Self, identical to but still a separated part of the divine. It plunges into the lower depths of the creation and, doing so, becomes occluded—but also able to experience itself in new ways by means precisely of this delimitation. The soul occupies a vast range of different bodies in this process until it has shaken off its illusion of limitation and once more becomes one with the Self—thus returns to itself. This too is a descent and an ascent. The difference here lies principally in the definition of the soul. In Hindu beliefs the higher aspect of the soul is God. In the Western tradition, the soul is a creature.

A stark summary such as the above helps the mind focus on the question before us, the origin of mind. A vast literature surrounds these simple descriptions spinning fantastic accounts that elaborate the fundamental idea—which is simply that mind, in both cases, originates in the highest form of being imaginable by a human…mind. In the Western case this mind of ours is formed in the “image and likeness” of its Creator. In the Eastern version, it is the Creator limiting itself deliberately in order to experience its own creation. There is an arbitrary element present in both versions. In one God creates because—well, because he does. In the other the divine Self shrouds itself voluntarily in order to experience. This arbitrary element, however, is strongly present in us as well—and should therefore not surprise us.

The striking aspect of this view of origins is that the human mind, when it looks out at the chaos of the cosmos, when it strains in order to understand what it is and how it might have come about, sees, on looking, an image of itself writ large.

Can Mind Emerge from Matter?

The question is equivalent to asking whether or not anything useful can appear by accident. On the surface it might appear so. If a steady drop hollows the stone, as the German proverb has it, nature might form a nice-enough spoon by hammering one end of a narrow stone with droplets long enough. But the object wouldn’t be a spoon until some mind recognized the utility of that shape and at one stroke transformed that hollowed stone into a tool. Yet this transformation wouldn’t actually change the stone physically. It is the mind that does this transformation, this re-purposing as modern usage has it.

Implicit in the very concept of utility produced by chance is that some agency must recognize the utility of an object. Until that happens, the object is simply a fact of nature without meaning. Chance hasn’t produced anything useful yet. The object is thus in an order of indifference. When a utility is discovered in it, it comes to coexist, as well, in an order of purposes and meanings.

The difference between a consciously produced object (A) and one formed by accident (B) is that, in the case of A, A’s future useful function guides its very production. In the case of B a function is discovered after an unconscious process that had no intention whatsoever.

In the evolutionary scheme of origins, mind must be material by definition. It must be a function of the brain. The brain is a chemical machine the parts of which—and the convergence and proper linkage of the parts—had to come about by random events of a chemical nature. In this scheme utility is defined by advantages accruing to the individual in whom the changes take place. That individual is more likely to reproduce than another unluckier creature that lacks those advantages.

In this scheme useful innovation takes place entirely without any other agency than the fact that changes produce advantages in reproduction; by this means they aid the survival of the species.

What’s wrong with this picture? Well, it mixes things up a little bit. The picture presented is actually the same as the picture of the drop-hollowed stone. Concepts such as “advantage” and “survival” are not actually present in the naturalistic description of our origins. We’ve introduced those from the outside. Such ideas properly belong in the order of purpose and meaning. If the life process is an extension of the chemical behavior of matter, we cannot really speak about advantages or of survival; we can only talk about outcomes. It is only from our perspective that survival is a value. It is a judgment, a hierarchical ordering of outcomes entirely missing in nature.

What we are facing here is the improbability of deriving from one order (Y) the emergence of another order (Z). If Y does not already contain or possess Z, it cannot produce it. We want the material and specifically the chemical order to produce the order of purpose and of meaning. But in the material we only ever encounter necessity and chance. Here, of course, I’m leaving the whole subject of life as such entirely unexplored. I’m merely pointing out that you cannot derive perception, thought, will, and imagination from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on.

Attempts to do so ultimately rely on the invocation of complexity. It is the modern way of naming the order of meaning and of purpose. Complexity, however, is ultimately only the very intricate arrangement of the same old components. Complexity theory therefore, logically speaking, demands our acceptance of a magical element that simply “emerges” when enough of the same old chemicals are rearranged intricately enough. No explanation of this emergence is ever provided. Thus no one is ready to say why and how the last element linked to the whole would cause it suddenly to burst into consciousness. We are asked to take it on faith. It’s an empirical observation. Really? Before we take that leap of faith, however, another earlier one is required. We must first accept that only the material is actually real.

Mind

It is astonishing, indeed revealing, what a lot of meanings a word like mind leaves in our dictionary—and meanings it leaves out. In Webster’s Collegiate (my 1967 copy) the word is defined as recollection, memory, an element (in individuals), conscious events and capabilities (in organisms), intention, desire, a condition (of mental faculties), opinion, view, disposition, and mood. There are other more derivative meanings in addition.

Concerning the definition of mind given above as an element, the exact words are these: “the element or complex of elements in individuals that feels, perceives, thinks, wills, and esp. reasons.” In this context element may be taken to mean a part or a function. In any case it is something that acts in certain ways.

The Latin root hidden deep under Old English and East and West Germanic derivations is mens, already meaning “mind.” The root of the Latin is the Greek menos meaning spirit. In romance languages like French the ancient meaning is carried forward; mind is esprit. In German the term is Geist; the word also means ghost or spirit. In German other words, including “soul,” are used as equivalents, the majority being narrower aspects of the mind. Hungarians, who speak my mother tongue, translate the English mind by using thirteen different words eleven of which, much as in our own definitions, are simply functions of consciousness; the two remaining words used are one that is “mind” as a single entity; the other one is “soul” or “spirit.”

Although we, as English-speakers, use the mind to include its richer connotations of something transcendent, our dictionaries are more piously coy and avoid linking mind and spirit except in often-skipped recitals of etymology. It’s slightly indecent in secular times even to suggest that something like “spirit” may be related to the mind, hence the use of words like “element”; it has a safely material connotation. The modern mind! This reminds me of Theodore Dalrymple’s tongue-in-cheek definition of murder as “The knife went in.” You can find the story here. The knife went in, perhaps, because the element decided that another martini wouldn’t hurt…

I turn to dictionaries as I turn to the media—not in order to discover authoritative truth but to find raw materials from which the truth might be built up with effort.

Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that the ultimate proof of transcendence is found in consciousness—by means of the power of the mind to reason. An example of the line of thought one tends to pursue is expertly presented by one of my favorites, the Maverick Philosopher, here. Webster’s element, ultimately, must be defined as an agent, the very owner of the mind itself; the mind is one of this agent’s capabilities.