Concerning the reality we shall experience after we die, humanity has two predominant projections. It seems to me that both are based on actual experiences of individuals later further elaborated by speculators who haven’t been there. I call the first ecstatic, the other communitarian. Both appear in variant cultural frames. In the Buddhist tradition nirvana is a kind of pure bliss about which I can’t find any elaboration; in the west it is union with God or the beatific vision. Both appear to me to be passive states; but those who hold this view (or have experienced it) deny that. They report a union, an identity, a fullness, a completeness, an unlimited power, an all encompassing knowledge. For a detailed rendition of such an experience I’d point to that of Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s given in Pathways Through to Space. This work has an eastern, Hindu flavor; its merit is that it comes from a modern twentieth century American who’s trying to communicate it in a framework accessible to us. Anyone genuinely interested in the matters discussed in Borderzone will get something valuable out of reading that book. The iconic and briefest summary is Meister Eckhart’s famous line: “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” The same sort of unitary experience is reported of Plotinus and is found in Islamic mysticism too. I cannot help but think that experiences of this type—very powerful that they are—have shaped humanity’s theologies in major ways. It seems to me that Plotinus’ own unitive experience must have been the basis of his cosmic conceptualization of the One. And ideas like omnipotence and omniscience are mirrored in the experiences of ecstatics—Merrell-Wolff’s for instance or those of Mansur Al-Hallaj, the Persian-Muslim mystic martyred for proclaiming “I am the Truth,” and “There is nothing in my cloak but God.”
I’ve had a minor but potent youthful experience of this type myself (reported here). That should have made me lean in this directions, but, instead, I’ve come to think of it as a valuable inoculation against this view of reality. In all reports of this type of experience I recognize my own—and I’m grateful for the experience because I have a personal basis for evaluating others’. Mine took place spontaneously rather than in the context of passionate struggling, questing, and willful attempts at realizing the transcending—as is usually the case. Thus I see the phenomenon of ecstasy as perhaps caused by a certain state of concentration which releases energies we only experience very, very filtered in ordinary life. And it is an experience of energy rather than of transcending will or intelligence; the cognitive or willful aspects of that experience come from our own consciousness not from that which temporarily envelops us. For these reasons, over a lifetime, I’ve been much more inclined toward the other major human projection of the Beyond.
That projection envisions communities of vast size and diversity in immaterial or “other-material” spaces somewhere invisible to us from here. The simplest expression of this projection might be the “Happy Hunting Grounds” said to have been the destination of some Indian tribes. (With hundreds of real tribes, every human ideology has been presented in Indian lore, not least straight-forward materialism.) The most elaborate such projection I know of is Swedenborg’s, divided into three realms: a lower hellish, a middling spiritual transitional world, and an upper heavenly. Swedenborg’s has a biblical flavor, but missing is the redemptive role of Jesus of Nazareth. People have read similar structures into the Koran. This view also has a strong basis in Near Death Experience reports which picture the earliest moments of entering such communities. Heaven and hell are also part of the Christian world conception—suggesting that it makes room for both, a unitive beatific vision and a “life” in heaven or hell. One is for the upper, let us say, and the other for the less educated classes. And in Buddhism, of course, we also find, perhaps also just for the lower classes, all manner of splendid heavens and dreadful hells, usually numbered seven, a number humanity genuinely likes.
To be sure, the unitive/ecstatic projection is much simpler, tempting the intellectual mind to reach for Ockham’s razor. But Ockham intended for the simplest theory accommodating all of the evidence. I’m much more drawn to the “naive” view of the masses of humanity—which, in the East, for instance, lifted Mahayana Buddhism, with its grand heavens and deep hells, into the most populous branch of that religions—even if, one imagines, it is altogether incompatible with the Buddha’s own view or experiences. If we take the unitive experience as the ballgame, one person in multiple millions born will be saved, the rest plowed under once again. And the vast cosmos of stars and galaxies has no meaning whatsoever. For once I find myself with the masses and look at the elites with a very puzzled face.
Showing posts with label Plotinus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Plotinus. Show all posts
Monday, September 6, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
On Corbin's Three Levels
One of the most interesting conceptualizations I’ve ever come across is Henry Corbin’s three-level world. He himself would hasten to deny that this projection is his. He would say that it is Persian and that it appears first in the Zoroastrian picture of the cosmos but is then later repeated, at a higher octave, in Shi’ite mysticism. All this is laid out in Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. The book begins this way. The first of several introductions is a presentation of the middle world, the mundus imaginalis.
The three worlds are those of matter, those of the imagination, and those of the intellect. In Corbin’s presentation the middle world is mediating. It mediates between the highest world (cherubic intelligences) and the lowest (the material). The imagination spiritualizes matter and makes intellect accessible through images. The world where this mediation takes place is the mundus imaginalis. This realm is found in the Qur’an [25:53] as the barzak; the barzak it is the separator between two seas, the salty, brackish—and the sweet.
Qur’anic images always resonate better in me than the abstract notions derived from one or another kind of scholasticism. Muhammed was a poet, that is why. Poets rank thinkers. Sorry, but they do. I like the notion of that spit of land separating the brackish from sweet. I’ve been unable to comprehend—genuinely inwardly—the possible attractions of a world of pure intelligence...perhaps because the intelligence means only abstraction to me, nothing more, and in that I discover, in turn, nothing but a mechanism. But also—and this is really the same issue—I’ve always favored the projections of a Qur’anic heaven, cast in terms of sensual joys over those of the West. We can’t really imagine—I can’t anyway—any kind of heaven in which pure thought produces ecstasies. That might attract the mathematician but certainly not the poet.
To this I would add a couple more comments before I actually get into the core of my reaction. The first of these is that the Mazdaist tradition seems altogether to lack any kind of cherubic level of intellect, as such. Certainly never one expressed as such. I can’t find it—not in Corbin’s summaries presented in the referenced book nor elsewhere. What I do find is magnificent moutain-scapes and waterfalls and goddesses and splendid mansions hugging cliffs. What I find is a grand and uncompromising dualism. That’s preliminary comment one.
Preliminary comment two is that in Corbin’s exposition of the mundus imaginalis I never encounter any discussion of the highest world, the world of Intelligence. The middle world might mediate, but Corbin does not discuss, beyond mentioning and pointing to, the third world, the cherubic. And the reason for this, I suspect, is that the highest level is just a place-holder, is only present by way of completing a triad. It isn’t important for Corbin. His interest is in that second, median world. He is the prophet of the mundus imaginalis; he found it; he is bringing it to the West.
* * *
If we seek Corbin’s actual project, it is to establish the reality of the spiritual world. He conceived of our world as having retained two worlds, the physical and the intellectual, and to have abandoned the third. For the moment let’s not label it; but what he clearly had in mind was the spiritual. He pictured the modern world as active in understanding the material universe (by practicing science) and to have continued to maintain a world of thought (by practicing philosophy). But in this process meaning has been lost, the soul has been abandoned. Thus he sets out to rediscover Atlantis, as it were. And he does discovers it: it is the mundus imaginalis. He chooses the imagination as its active force and expression, contrasting it to intellect on the one hand and sensory perception on the other. This matches what he observes in modern life where, on the one hand, all of reality is based on measurable physical phenomena on the one hand and philosophy in its analytical forms has become a juggling with concepts, concerned therefore purely with language. (This, mind you, is an interpretation of Corbin, not what, in so many words, he expresses in precisely this way.) Imagination serves a very good purpose here. In modernity it is the fictitious, frivolous, and the fantastic. It is derived from matter in modern psychology and is also classed with the sensory in scholastic circles. Therefore, seeking an organ for the detection of the soul, he finds imagination, separates it from the physical, gives it rank and status, and raises it to a high rank, below the intellect but above the sensory. And, furthermore, being the organ for the detection of the immaterial, he also renders it immortal.
Terrific, I would say. Laudable. Corbin is right, of course. We have abandoned the spiritual—and, doing so, we’ve abandoned our essence. He projects a middle world to make room for the soul. But it is a middle world only because he ranks the intellect so high. In this he conforms to the traditions at least of the western world. We find this in ancient Greece already, worked to a very sharp point indeed in Plotinus. But, alas, for me, something doesn’t resonate. But what?
Let me try to give expression to this what. I find it hopelessly difficult to separate the functions of the self enough to make them genuinely free-standing realities. By this I mean intellect, feeling, willing, imagination, intuition, and perception. To me all of these things are ultimately and irreducibly one. I cannot separate any one of these forces one from the other even for a nanosecond and still retain a coherent sense of what a true agent, a conscious self, might be. Nor can I therefore reasonably give these powers a hierarchical arrangement—or conceive of reality as ordered by them in a tri-partite or any other arrangement. Schopenhauer, for instance, would deify the will, not the intellect. Same problem.
No. One cosmos, one order, a single integration. I don’t deny a hierarchical arrangement of reality. Something about that concepts everything within me finds almost self-evident. But the way I feel it, think it, intuit and imagine it, the cosmos presents itself at its very highest level just as it does at its very lowest. You might say that up there, in the cherubic realm, the cherubs have delights and joys, and insights, and see wondrous images as, down here, we do as well. It’s all in the degree. No facet of the cosmic diamond predominates anywhere—or is absent even in the deepest chasm of reality.
* * *
Henry Corbin’s thought delighted me from the moment I encountered it years ago in a volume titled Swedenborg an Esoteric Islam. And he continues to delight me. I’m not criticizing, here, far from it. I’m engaged in sorting my thoughts about his very up-to-date and very helpful contributions to a new age that is in process of birth.
The three worlds are those of matter, those of the imagination, and those of the intellect. In Corbin’s presentation the middle world is mediating. It mediates between the highest world (cherubic intelligences) and the lowest (the material). The imagination spiritualizes matter and makes intellect accessible through images. The world where this mediation takes place is the mundus imaginalis. This realm is found in the Qur’an [25:53] as the barzak; the barzak it is the separator between two seas, the salty, brackish—and the sweet.
Qur’anic images always resonate better in me than the abstract notions derived from one or another kind of scholasticism. Muhammed was a poet, that is why. Poets rank thinkers. Sorry, but they do. I like the notion of that spit of land separating the brackish from sweet. I’ve been unable to comprehend—genuinely inwardly—the possible attractions of a world of pure intelligence...perhaps because the intelligence means only abstraction to me, nothing more, and in that I discover, in turn, nothing but a mechanism. But also—and this is really the same issue—I’ve always favored the projections of a Qur’anic heaven, cast in terms of sensual joys over those of the West. We can’t really imagine—I can’t anyway—any kind of heaven in which pure thought produces ecstasies. That might attract the mathematician but certainly not the poet.
To this I would add a couple more comments before I actually get into the core of my reaction. The first of these is that the Mazdaist tradition seems altogether to lack any kind of cherubic level of intellect, as such. Certainly never one expressed as such. I can’t find it—not in Corbin’s summaries presented in the referenced book nor elsewhere. What I do find is magnificent moutain-scapes and waterfalls and goddesses and splendid mansions hugging cliffs. What I find is a grand and uncompromising dualism. That’s preliminary comment one.
Preliminary comment two is that in Corbin’s exposition of the mundus imaginalis I never encounter any discussion of the highest world, the world of Intelligence. The middle world might mediate, but Corbin does not discuss, beyond mentioning and pointing to, the third world, the cherubic. And the reason for this, I suspect, is that the highest level is just a place-holder, is only present by way of completing a triad. It isn’t important for Corbin. His interest is in that second, median world. He is the prophet of the mundus imaginalis; he found it; he is bringing it to the West.
* * *
If we seek Corbin’s actual project, it is to establish the reality of the spiritual world. He conceived of our world as having retained two worlds, the physical and the intellectual, and to have abandoned the third. For the moment let’s not label it; but what he clearly had in mind was the spiritual. He pictured the modern world as active in understanding the material universe (by practicing science) and to have continued to maintain a world of thought (by practicing philosophy). But in this process meaning has been lost, the soul has been abandoned. Thus he sets out to rediscover Atlantis, as it were. And he does discovers it: it is the mundus imaginalis. He chooses the imagination as its active force and expression, contrasting it to intellect on the one hand and sensory perception on the other. This matches what he observes in modern life where, on the one hand, all of reality is based on measurable physical phenomena on the one hand and philosophy in its analytical forms has become a juggling with concepts, concerned therefore purely with language. (This, mind you, is an interpretation of Corbin, not what, in so many words, he expresses in precisely this way.) Imagination serves a very good purpose here. In modernity it is the fictitious, frivolous, and the fantastic. It is derived from matter in modern psychology and is also classed with the sensory in scholastic circles. Therefore, seeking an organ for the detection of the soul, he finds imagination, separates it from the physical, gives it rank and status, and raises it to a high rank, below the intellect but above the sensory. And, furthermore, being the organ for the detection of the immaterial, he also renders it immortal.
Terrific, I would say. Laudable. Corbin is right, of course. We have abandoned the spiritual—and, doing so, we’ve abandoned our essence. He projects a middle world to make room for the soul. But it is a middle world only because he ranks the intellect so high. In this he conforms to the traditions at least of the western world. We find this in ancient Greece already, worked to a very sharp point indeed in Plotinus. But, alas, for me, something doesn’t resonate. But what?
Let me try to give expression to this what. I find it hopelessly difficult to separate the functions of the self enough to make them genuinely free-standing realities. By this I mean intellect, feeling, willing, imagination, intuition, and perception. To me all of these things are ultimately and irreducibly one. I cannot separate any one of these forces one from the other even for a nanosecond and still retain a coherent sense of what a true agent, a conscious self, might be. Nor can I therefore reasonably give these powers a hierarchical arrangement—or conceive of reality as ordered by them in a tri-partite or any other arrangement. Schopenhauer, for instance, would deify the will, not the intellect. Same problem.
No. One cosmos, one order, a single integration. I don’t deny a hierarchical arrangement of reality. Something about that concepts everything within me finds almost self-evident. But the way I feel it, think it, intuit and imagine it, the cosmos presents itself at its very highest level just as it does at its very lowest. You might say that up there, in the cherubic realm, the cherubs have delights and joys, and insights, and see wondrous images as, down here, we do as well. It’s all in the degree. No facet of the cosmic diamond predominates anywhere—or is absent even in the deepest chasm of reality.
* * *
Henry Corbin’s thought delighted me from the moment I encountered it years ago in a volume titled Swedenborg an Esoteric Islam. And he continues to delight me. I’m not criticizing, here, far from it. I’m engaged in sorting my thoughts about his very up-to-date and very helpful contributions to a new age that is in process of birth.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Mystical Experiences
The Experience and Its Content
Genuine mystical experiences are all in some ways ecstatic. The word ecstasy comes from Greek roots for “outside” and for “stand,” thus meaning to “stand outside” of oneself, to be taken out of oneself. These states have a passive character in that the subject of the experience has no choice in the matter. Not that he or she wants to have a choice. The experience is joyous. But the ability to resist it isn’t there. You’re falling, and there is no way to arrest a fall.
When I was around seventeen, I once went off to a choir practice in the evening. A ten-block walk lay ahead. At the time I lacked even change enough to take the streetcar. I left on foot because I’d promised to attend. It was almost dark. As I was walking along, such an event unfolded. It came on without any discernible trigger; my state of mind was calm, indifferent, indeed even a little sour. I didn’t really want to go. I was only going to honor a commitment. Nothing changed outwardly, but my perception of reality underwent a drastic change. Energy seemed to flow from everything around me. Trees, bushes, houses, the concrete sidewalk, the black street surface, everything glowed, vibrated, seemed in motion. The effect was immediate and intensely emotional. Within seconds I crying—crying tears of joy. Later, trying to find a way to link the experience to something, anything, that I had seen before, I thought of some of Van Gough’s painting in which the scenes appear to tremble, to be on fire. The principal feeling I had was that “everything’s alive,” and this realization, at that time, made me feel joyous. The feeling lasted for about as long as it takes to walk the length of a city block. After that the feeling faded.
Compared to other accounts that I have read, mine was a relatively mild experience—but for me the strangest and most unusual event of my life. I was a convinced atheist at the time, and, indeed, I continued in those convictions for several more years. You don’t have to be a narrow-gauged materialist to be an atheist. More pronounced experiences of this kind, “stronger versions,” you might say, have a distinctly noetic quality, a strong sense of knowledge is present. Something of that was also present in my feelings, but not as pronounced as in others’, a feeling of exaltation and sense of knowledge. People in these states feel that they finally understand everything; they have the sense of having penetrated the deepest secrets of the universe.
Over time I’ve become convinced that the noetic quality of these experiences is more feeling than knowledge. There is a real difference between feeling that you know and actual knowing. When something is on the tip of my tongue, it isn’t knowledge yet. And in the case of mystics, whatever it is, it stays on the tip of the tongue. Real knowledge leaves something behind, something tangibly graspable. Published accounts or philosophical works of people with the mystical experience, sometimes called the unitive experience, don’t really have content beyond the sort of empty symbolic knowledge we get from mathematics. By way of example I would point to Plotinus’ Enneads in the Graeco-Roman era, the writings of Meister Eckhart in the medieval, and the books of Franklin Merrell-Wolff in the twentieth century. Merrell-Wolff’s works are of great interest precisely because they are modern and more accessible for that reason. In Pathways Through to Space he describes his actual experiences; in The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object he attempts to build an interpretation of his experiences. Anyone hoping to discover in the second work something genuinely interesting about any world that side of the borderzone may as well abandon all hope now. Ain’t nothing there. Or, to put it more charitably, we get the essence in the title: “consciousness without an object” is a bit like the sound of one hand clapping. The ultimate content of the Enneads is in a way similar: There is the One. From the One we have Intellect and Soul. This trinity defines Reality. Meister Eckhart’s famous saying: “The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me,” delivered in one of his sermons, is similar in its ambiguity and inscrutability to most other pronouncements that come from the mystical experience.
To sum up my take on the reports of “unitive” mystics, they rather resemble something analogous to men reporting, after seeing the ocean, that they have seem something awesome and grand, overwhelming, majestic, and beyond the horizon—and never mention water, salt, wind, waves, sand, shorelines, surf, shells, seagulls, or flying fish either.
My own experience, mild although it was, had the same character: powerful feelings, deeply memorable, but containing no meaning beyond a sense of transcending energy everywhere. Everything’s alive. The energetic quality of these experiences is even more tangibly described in Merrell-Wolff’s account. He speaks of a “current” that he clearly felt flowing at times when he had his experience. I sometimes have the feeling that concepts like grace and its Muslim version, baraka—and theories based on emanation—are possibly based on experiences of this sort.
A Personal Point of View
My object to his point should not be misinterpreted. I’m not in the least dismissive of the experience of enlightenment, as it is often called, reported by towering figures like Plotinus, Buddha, Eckhart, or our own Merrell-Wolff. I simply have a point of view which, in its own way, may have some merit.
My view is that our world is very intricately woven, first of all, not merely the life processes built up of stupendous cells—each of which is at least like a major city—but also the elemental world as a whole—many constituents of which have had to be fashioned in the wombs of two different suns in sequence (at least as currently held). Human fate, relationships of love and kinship, memory, pain and suffering, creative life, history, society, and endlessly more—all this shows a picture of tremendous value and complexity the simple dismissal of which as illusion, or as the thinning out of a denser reality, strikes me as of necessity inaccurate at minimum.
I’ve written extensive about life as a vector pointing at something. Consciousness, which seems to have been hard won by a process lasting eons, I take to be a marker of a boundary between dimensions. Its character as a boundary is further substantiated not, I emphasize, by unitary states that point to a kind of dissolving unity with overwhelming Power but, rather, by the much more messy experiences of those who partially touched the neighboring dimension. Let me call them modern shamans: the healers, the psychics, the people who exhibit paranormal gifts. Of these people Swedenborg produced the most coherent reports; here I ignore his work in biblical exegesis, which was his way of trying to make sense of things. The proof of his writings comes indirectly in the form of his paranormal experiences to which very “sound” contemporaries attested. (Kant, for example, had a friend of his gather the evidence.) These “shamans” are messy. Weeds of madness sprout everywhere around them. One concerns oneself with people like this at the risk of one’s own respectability. Yes, people like Swedenborg—who had a distinguished record as a natural scientist—but also people like Edgar Cayce, idiot savants, and other strangelings of the same sort. Carl Jung spent time on that border too. These cases are of great interest precisely because they are messy (like Reality). They indicate transcendence and they do produce a certain minimum content.
It does not surprise me at all that (a) scientists and other respectable thinkers keep their distance, (b) that the Church handles these cases with exceeding caution—after all the Church must guard its respectability too; and (c) that some few perfectly sane people of great curiosity do go there; these are people like me who have nothing to lose.
Yes, there is a real frontier. Unitary visions belong here too but not by any means as the final word on the subject but as transitions toward a better understanding. What little content seeps through the cracks, coming from the shamans, indicates a much richer reality “beyond,” at least as rich as our ordinary cosmos, including vast and coherent societies, environments with similar but yet different laws, etc., of which Swedenborg’s heaven and hell are examples as prepared for the masses of his time; his madness-riddled diaries are the messy raw material. The Taoist tales and Shiite religious accounts belong to this hidden Library of Alexandria.
My own conviction—which I’ll elaborate more later—is that ecstatic and so-called mystical experiences are contact with the lifestream as it rises into this, not as it passes into the next dimension. But to develop that argument I need more space, and this post has become rather long.
Genuine mystical experiences are all in some ways ecstatic. The word ecstasy comes from Greek roots for “outside” and for “stand,” thus meaning to “stand outside” of oneself, to be taken out of oneself. These states have a passive character in that the subject of the experience has no choice in the matter. Not that he or she wants to have a choice. The experience is joyous. But the ability to resist it isn’t there. You’re falling, and there is no way to arrest a fall.
When I was around seventeen, I once went off to a choir practice in the evening. A ten-block walk lay ahead. At the time I lacked even change enough to take the streetcar. I left on foot because I’d promised to attend. It was almost dark. As I was walking along, such an event unfolded. It came on without any discernible trigger; my state of mind was calm, indifferent, indeed even a little sour. I didn’t really want to go. I was only going to honor a commitment. Nothing changed outwardly, but my perception of reality underwent a drastic change. Energy seemed to flow from everything around me. Trees, bushes, houses, the concrete sidewalk, the black street surface, everything glowed, vibrated, seemed in motion. The effect was immediate and intensely emotional. Within seconds I crying—crying tears of joy. Later, trying to find a way to link the experience to something, anything, that I had seen before, I thought of some of Van Gough’s painting in which the scenes appear to tremble, to be on fire. The principal feeling I had was that “everything’s alive,” and this realization, at that time, made me feel joyous. The feeling lasted for about as long as it takes to walk the length of a city block. After that the feeling faded.
Compared to other accounts that I have read, mine was a relatively mild experience—but for me the strangest and most unusual event of my life. I was a convinced atheist at the time, and, indeed, I continued in those convictions for several more years. You don’t have to be a narrow-gauged materialist to be an atheist. More pronounced experiences of this kind, “stronger versions,” you might say, have a distinctly noetic quality, a strong sense of knowledge is present. Something of that was also present in my feelings, but not as pronounced as in others’, a feeling of exaltation and sense of knowledge. People in these states feel that they finally understand everything; they have the sense of having penetrated the deepest secrets of the universe.
Over time I’ve become convinced that the noetic quality of these experiences is more feeling than knowledge. There is a real difference between feeling that you know and actual knowing. When something is on the tip of my tongue, it isn’t knowledge yet. And in the case of mystics, whatever it is, it stays on the tip of the tongue. Real knowledge leaves something behind, something tangibly graspable. Published accounts or philosophical works of people with the mystical experience, sometimes called the unitive experience, don’t really have content beyond the sort of empty symbolic knowledge we get from mathematics. By way of example I would point to Plotinus’ Enneads in the Graeco-Roman era, the writings of Meister Eckhart in the medieval, and the books of Franklin Merrell-Wolff in the twentieth century. Merrell-Wolff’s works are of great interest precisely because they are modern and more accessible for that reason. In Pathways Through to Space he describes his actual experiences; in The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object he attempts to build an interpretation of his experiences. Anyone hoping to discover in the second work something genuinely interesting about any world that side of the borderzone may as well abandon all hope now. Ain’t nothing there. Or, to put it more charitably, we get the essence in the title: “consciousness without an object” is a bit like the sound of one hand clapping. The ultimate content of the Enneads is in a way similar: There is the One. From the One we have Intellect and Soul. This trinity defines Reality. Meister Eckhart’s famous saying: “The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me,” delivered in one of his sermons, is similar in its ambiguity and inscrutability to most other pronouncements that come from the mystical experience.
To sum up my take on the reports of “unitive” mystics, they rather resemble something analogous to men reporting, after seeing the ocean, that they have seem something awesome and grand, overwhelming, majestic, and beyond the horizon—and never mention water, salt, wind, waves, sand, shorelines, surf, shells, seagulls, or flying fish either.
My own experience, mild although it was, had the same character: powerful feelings, deeply memorable, but containing no meaning beyond a sense of transcending energy everywhere. Everything’s alive. The energetic quality of these experiences is even more tangibly described in Merrell-Wolff’s account. He speaks of a “current” that he clearly felt flowing at times when he had his experience. I sometimes have the feeling that concepts like grace and its Muslim version, baraka—and theories based on emanation—are possibly based on experiences of this sort.
A Personal Point of View
My object to his point should not be misinterpreted. I’m not in the least dismissive of the experience of enlightenment, as it is often called, reported by towering figures like Plotinus, Buddha, Eckhart, or our own Merrell-Wolff. I simply have a point of view which, in its own way, may have some merit.
My view is that our world is very intricately woven, first of all, not merely the life processes built up of stupendous cells—each of which is at least like a major city—but also the elemental world as a whole—many constituents of which have had to be fashioned in the wombs of two different suns in sequence (at least as currently held). Human fate, relationships of love and kinship, memory, pain and suffering, creative life, history, society, and endlessly more—all this shows a picture of tremendous value and complexity the simple dismissal of which as illusion, or as the thinning out of a denser reality, strikes me as of necessity inaccurate at minimum.
I’ve written extensive about life as a vector pointing at something. Consciousness, which seems to have been hard won by a process lasting eons, I take to be a marker of a boundary between dimensions. Its character as a boundary is further substantiated not, I emphasize, by unitary states that point to a kind of dissolving unity with overwhelming Power but, rather, by the much more messy experiences of those who partially touched the neighboring dimension. Let me call them modern shamans: the healers, the psychics, the people who exhibit paranormal gifts. Of these people Swedenborg produced the most coherent reports; here I ignore his work in biblical exegesis, which was his way of trying to make sense of things. The proof of his writings comes indirectly in the form of his paranormal experiences to which very “sound” contemporaries attested. (Kant, for example, had a friend of his gather the evidence.) These “shamans” are messy. Weeds of madness sprout everywhere around them. One concerns oneself with people like this at the risk of one’s own respectability. Yes, people like Swedenborg—who had a distinguished record as a natural scientist—but also people like Edgar Cayce, idiot savants, and other strangelings of the same sort. Carl Jung spent time on that border too. These cases are of great interest precisely because they are messy (like Reality). They indicate transcendence and they do produce a certain minimum content.
It does not surprise me at all that (a) scientists and other respectable thinkers keep their distance, (b) that the Church handles these cases with exceeding caution—after all the Church must guard its respectability too; and (c) that some few perfectly sane people of great curiosity do go there; these are people like me who have nothing to lose.
Yes, there is a real frontier. Unitary visions belong here too but not by any means as the final word on the subject but as transitions toward a better understanding. What little content seeps through the cracks, coming from the shamans, indicates a much richer reality “beyond,” at least as rich as our ordinary cosmos, including vast and coherent societies, environments with similar but yet different laws, etc., of which Swedenborg’s heaven and hell are examples as prepared for the masses of his time; his madness-riddled diaries are the messy raw material. The Taoist tales and Shiite religious accounts belong to this hidden Library of Alexandria.
My own conviction—which I’ll elaborate more later—is that ecstatic and so-called mystical experiences are contact with the lifestream as it rises into this, not as it passes into the next dimension. But to develop that argument I need more space, and this post has become rather long.
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