The Merits and Demerits of Quantum Explanations

Almost since the rise of quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small, speculative thinkers have formed a kind of aura around the field in attempts to help them give various puzzling phenomena  a scientific explanation. Among these are consciousness, the mind-body problem, telepathy, near-death experiences, and the like.

A philosophically serious attempt in this direction is an appendix in Hans Jonas’ book, The Imperative of Responsibility, 1979. The appendix (pp. 204-231 in the 1984 University of Chicago Press edition), is titled “Impotence or Power of Subjectivity, A Reappraisal of the Psychophysical Problem.” I have read many other such takes, to be sure, but none has shown any rigor, whereas Jonas’ work does. He tackles the problem that Descartes had already struggled with. Assume that we do have an autonomous spiritual self, however it is called (res cogitans by Descartes, subjectivity by Jonas); hereafter I’ll refer to it as “self.” How does this immaterial something interact with the physical world in a meaningfully causal way—or vice versa?

The merits of quantum mechanics as an explanation lie in the fact that it deals with the extremely tiny phenomena at the subatomic level—where the energies involved are also minute. The tentative solution to the mind-body problem is that the self, whatever it is, may have energy enough to move “matter” at the quantum level. Then, if an appropriate structure of amplification has evolved, thus a neuronal network like the brain, an immeasurably tiny intervention by the self can eventually result in a physical action like raising the arm or saying something, both because I want to. This has merit—and produces, at least in me, a kind of intuitive ascent. It points to a potential explanation—and Jonas does not go any further than that. The only assumption we have to make is that the self at minimum has some minute ability to interact with matter at the subatomic level.

The demerits of quantum explanations (and Jonas does not go there, but others do) is to suggest that the only difference between what we traditionally call the spiritual and contrast to the material is a difference in density or wavelength. Therefore souls are just as material as everything else—they’re just made of more subtle stuff.

Here I have the opposite reaction. I don’t believe a word of it. There may be subtle regions made of subtle matter, etc., etc., but matter, no matter how subtle, can’t possibly produce consciousness. The entity we call the self, therefore, is different from matter in kind, not just in degree. Nor is it absent in this coarse material realm. It’s plentifully present here in the ordinary world—and doing plenty of damage as well as good. And in both realms (coarse and subtle) it has, no doubt, a certain amount of force that it can exercise. In these dense regions, however, to exercise that force on the congealed energies we call matter, it needs amplification through machines—of which our bodies are the first and most potent versions.

Jonas wrote his appendix before extensive assembly of data on near-death experiences had even begun. One of the interesting result of those studies is the discovery that disembodied selves have the devil of a time interacting with other people—but an easy time passing through walls. But they do move about, more or less at will. Separated from their tool, the body, they are seriously handicapped here. But, presumably, not so in the regions beyond the border. Manner of speaking. And it would seem to me, those who first arrived here, finding themselves in this valley of dense matter, started to mess about with particles at the quantum level. And lo and behold. In the wink of a few millennia they had made the first living cell. First came chemical civilization, fashioned by nudging quantum particles this way and that. Next came life, then civilization. And now back to studying quantum mechanics again. What goes around comes around. But what they were then, and we still are, is something other than either energy or matter. This is a vale of body-making, not of soul-making.

The Soul-Life Link

Among the most interesting cases of out-of-body experience are those where some person spontaneously leaps from the body when anticipating death—as in auto accidents and in mountain-climbing falls. Sometimes the body isn’t even damaged—but the mind evidently thought it would be—and finds the ejection switch. Some kind of linkage must remain, however, because people return to their bodies again and therefore we have these accounts from them.

We do not know what happens in those more drastic case when the body is destroyed—when it doesn’t roll free of the wreckage or the ropes don’t snag on stone and the mountain climber isn’t “caught,” still alive. In those cases, presumably, the last link is broken, and the soul, having made a hasty exit, sees that it’s time to move on.

The body-soul duality is alive in well in ordinary thought. People do not think of themselves as chemical machines—or of the mind as a secondary product of brain function alone. As for what life is, they haven’t a clue. The orthodox scientific explanation is that it arises from chemistry. But let’s suppose that it’s the other way about. Suppose that what we call soul is life—or that life is the most primitive expression of soul. What we certainly know is that a corpse is dead—no soul is manifesting. And that alert people jump out of their bodies occasionally when it looks like the end has arrived.

Aristotle offered us the primitive soul, calling it vegetative. The animal has both a vegetative and an animal soul. Humans have both and, in addition, what Aristotle called the rational soul. Aspects of the same essence in successively developed stages?

Looking at these two concepts, soul and life, our habits of thought blur things. We think of souls as individual, of life as a broad phenomenon. To be sure, each manifestation of life, at whatever scale, is individual. Life, therefore, is a broad generalization of enormously large numbers of individual instances of it. We also think we have a soul—much as we have a body—but what if we are the soul?

Today’s “grown-up” explanation is a form of physicalist monism. There is no soul independent of bodies—no such thing as jumping out of the bodies. Consciousness is neural functioning. It’s chemistry, stupid. Grow up.

At the pace of a slow snail, this view is changing; but it will probably take another century or more before elite thought will have returned to a more comprehensive view in accord with experience and observation. In the lead are people who have unquestionable standing in the field of science, like Charles S. Sherrington (1857-1952) and John Eccles (1903-1997), both neurophysiologists and Nobel Prize winners. It’s difficult to expel them from the reservation, with such credentials, hence a more polite form of disagreement is noted. They are called dualists. To these I might add Wilder Penfield (1891-1976), a neurosurgeon with significant research achievements in the field. I will conclude with two quotes from him. Other prominent voices are those of Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994), a philosopher of science, and Roger Penrose (1931-), a mathematical physicist. And there are quite a few others.

Herewith then two quotes from Penfield, taken from his The Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain, Princeton University Press, 1975. The quotes suggest that the snail is moving.

Throughout my own scientific career, I, like other scientists, struggled to prove that brain accounts for the mind. But now, perhaps, the time has come when we may profitably consider the evidence as it stands and ask the question: Do brain-mechanisms account for the mind? Can the mind be explained by what is now known about the brain? If not, which is the more reasonable of the two hypotheses: that man's being is based on one element, or on two? (p. xiii)

Since every man must adopt for himself, without the help of science, his way of life and his personal religion, I have long had my own private beliefs. What a thrill it is, then, to discover that the scientist too can legitimately believe in the existence of spirit. (p. 85)

The Vale of Soul-Making

The phrase comes from the poet, John Keats (1795-1821). Keats was 23 when he wrote it; two years later he had died. It first appeared in a letter to his brother and sister. The letter, amusingly, starts with an account of getting a black eye having been hit with a cricket bat… Herewith I reproduce the paragraph in which he writes the phrase and then explains it; I’ve made minor punctuation changes to make it easier to read. Now I’ve known this saying virtually all of my life, but I read what lies behind it for the first time today. I wrote a rather long thing in my diary this morning. I ended that entry with that phrase—and then got curious about its origins. I read Keats and was astonished to discover that I had written essentially the same content myself this morning—to be sure in the words of a man about to turn 76 on the last day of this month. Herewith Keats:

The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is “a vale of tears” from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven—what a little circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world, if you please, “The vale of Soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it). I say “Soul making” Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence. There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions—but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception; they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God. How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them—so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion—or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation. This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years. These three materials are the Intelligence, the Human Heart (as distinguished from intelligence or mind) and the World or Elemental Space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive—and yet I think I perceive it—that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call the human heart the hornbook used in that School. And I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul! A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, it is the Mind’s Bible, it is the Mind’s experience, it is the teat from which the mind or intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the Lives of Men are, so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence. This appears to me [the] faint sketch of a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity. I am convinced that many difficulties which Christians labour under would vanish before it—there is one which even now Strikes me—the Salvation of Children—In them the Spark or intelligence returns to God without an identity—it having had no time to learn of, and be altered by, the heart—or seat of the human Passions...

     [Part of a letter written by John Keats to his brother (George) and sister (Georgiana) February 14-May 3, 1819]

Keats mentions a hornbook in this passage. Hornbooks were single pages mounted on a board with a handle and then covered by translucent horn material to protect the printing. The image of the hornbook I show comes from Wikipedia (link). The text of the entire letter is available here.

The Unaging Soul

The difference between the body and soul becomes a matter of actual experience as we advance in age. Our bodies call attention to themselves as their functions slow and problems manifest. The unity of the two structures weakens. This arises one fine day when we pass a mirror and the reflexive thought arises, “Who is that old man?”—and the question, for a nanosecond anyway, is quite sincere. Then comes the time when the unaging soul becomes quite aware of the fact that it is now in charge of a huge pet that’s getting very stumbly. Those who’ve owned an aging dogs and nursed it to its end will know what I’m talking about. As with dogs, so with our bodies. When they’re young they need to be restrained—and the exuberant messes they create need cleaning up—and so with bodies as they age. And in that process, gradually, there is a genuine, visceral sense of separation. The reaction will depend on temperament and situation. Poor old body—on the one hand. Damnation! I can’t do that any more!—on the other.

Some might argue that the soul ages as well, but I’d dispute that. That it doesn’t is quite obvious to those whose inner vigor has always been high, but I’ve also seen quite old, decrepit people suddenly come alive, laugh and joke like children, tell stories in excitement, their eyes suddenly full of light—when appropriately stimulated.

Identification with the body comes naturally in youth, persists in maturity, and then becomes virtually impossible in age. When that identification isn’t allowed to break, the price is depression or, minimally, grumpiness. These are the lessons of experience—rather than the derivations of some theory.  Indeed you can make use of the experience to judge various theories.

The theories are largely built by people in their youth and their maturity. When we get old they have less force; experience has come to rule. That we have unaging souls underlies belief in the afterlife. It is dismissed as the wishful thought of people who can’t go for gusto any more, but that is pure baloney. Death with total disappearance doesn’t phase a person of my age—nor, I’d venture to add, most people, especially those who suffer debilitating ailments. Hey. Let it stop. And if there isn’t anything thereafter, so what? What you don’t know can’t hurt you. The soul, however, isn’t all that sure that it will simply go out like a blown candle. Many people, indeed, hope it will. If it doesn’t, there is that uncertainty again that has plagued us all of our life.

But what has plagued us, all of our life, all arises from our physical dependencies, one way or another—our own and that of those we love and value: their bodies’ health, their children’s bodies’ health, their income, safety, on and on. What that unaging soul anticipates—beyond the body’s final pains—is the pain of separation from people we have loved and once more being reunited with people we haven’t seen for many decades now but who’re still there, we think, in the hereafter.

Contemplative Life

From the vast continents of ordinary life, the contemplative variety appears quite close to what here I call the borderzone—the edge of a flat earth, as it were, where the great chasm of eternity suddenly appears. Contemplatives? They are religious—and not merely nuns or monks or priests or bishops or abbots and abbesses. Such people, to the extent they live an active life, are not living the contemplative (or so it’s said). And certainly not laymen. And least of all the married.

But concepts like that, concepts like the contemplative life, do sprout near the borderzone—and not just within Catholicism—and if we look at them closely, they turn out to mean something other than they signal to the uninterested public. The concept of jihad comes to mind; by that we understand anything from Holy War to terrorism, but to the pious at the core of Islam, the word means spiritual struggle. All right. If you think me a propagandist for Al Qaida, that’ll be my jihad to live down. Or let us take the Buddhist concept of nirvana, defined as extinction, disappearance, the state of being blown-out, like a candle. The Online Etymology dictionary helpfully Latinizes the word as de-spiration—all life sucked out of you. And that is the “pearl of great price” the Buddhists seek? Nothingness? Well, “contemplative life” and “nirvana” are similar in this sense: to most people they suggest something negative, to others something of the greatest value. But to get the second meaning, one has to unfold the concept.

Perhaps the simplest way to approach this is to call contemplative life soul life or inner life. Now the problem is that a certain special way of seeing reality hides beneath these phrases. That way is a hierarchical conception of our dual nature in which the physical, hormonal, outer, and social are at the lower and a corresponding spiritual, empathic, intuitive, and communal are the higher level. And then the contemplative life is minimally defined as one where more of our being takes place inwardly, in the soul, than takes place outwardly, in the body, in the world. It’s as simple as that; but it is difficult because it takes gradual development even to tease these two realms apart enough to recognize that they each have a separate and real existence.

Let me illustrate this by examining words like mental (often associated with contemplation) and emotional (linked to the physical). By mental people mean conceptual, intellectual. By emotional they mean the heat we feel in the chest from anger or joy: the breath increases; you feel it, it moves you. The contemplation of an infinite regress or the square root of minus-one do not, by contrast, have any emotional toning (except for Brigitte, who invariably expresses her disgust!) Now let’s proceed to sort these concepts out.

First of all the mental is much more than merely concept juggling. It includes within it what we call consciousness, the definition of which I leave to those foolhardy enough to try and inevitably to fail. It includes the mysterious will—which is something other than reflexive action. It includes imagination, a faculty I do not (like Aquinas) associate with the lower realm. It does include intellect—which we do not find in the body-machine. It also includes the experience of being drawn toward some and repelled from other things—visible and invisible. Empathy and apathy: the real sources of emotion. That the body should immediately respond when we feel these things by mirroring the soul’s movements by hormonal discharges (hence the heat and the breathing) merely confirms the close linkage between soul and body, not that emotions are physical. The few that genuinely are are also merely reflexes we have in common with all animals. Thus I am absolutely sure that a disembodied soul will have emotions—and that emotions are not, repeat not, grounded in the sensorium.

The reader who nods reading this will do so from experience—thus because his or her inner life has developed its autonomy enough to have noted these two realms, their hierarchical relationship, and their potential independence. For someone like that, the suggestion that the contemplative life is real, outside of temples and cloisters too, will not be surprising—even if she or he is more accustomed to think of it as the creative life.

Eudaimonia

It seems to be agreed among the wise that the aim of an individual life is the soul’s development. That consensus is obscured because we encounter concepts like happiness (Aristotle), salvation (Christianity), and, in modern times, individuation (Carl Jung and others). If we just look at these words casually, happiness and individuation have quite different connotations; they’re very different from each other; and so is salvation from either of these. Individuation strongly suggests a process of development, sometimes dramatic, whereby a personality often displaying contradictory, disorganized, behavior, unaware of being highly conditioned by society, differentiates itself and achieves a kind of noble coherence and autonomy.

The casual use of a word like “happiness” almost suggests nothing much. We all want to be happy—and it means different things to different people. Aristotle used a word that has a great deal more depth. He spoke of eudaimonia. The word contains eu, a very positive concept signifying affirmation, well-being, and beauty. A daimon is a spirit or a minor deity. If we understand this idea for what it once meant in the Greek, it is “beautiful soul” rather than “happiness,” and in Aristotle’s context, it was the consequence of a process as well, the process of a well-lived life. The word can but need not have a spiritual connotation. Indeed, in Aristotle’s hands, it had a secular taste—one more reason why it is easily translated as happiness.

Salvation in the Catholic context—not necessarily in sophisticated scholarly contexts but as taught to children and the public—has a heavily moralistic flavor. It is the consequence of ridding the self of sin, of minimally dying (even if not always living) in a state of grace. That the soul is spiritual is not in question in this community. Salvation is a form of securing for this soul eternal happiness through union with God. Here happiness recurs after a great battle against the fallen self and its natural downward pull.

In its simplest expression in the Protestant context, development is minimized into a single act of faith; and in some branches of Protestantism salvation is not even a process: it is decided by God through foreknowledge before we’re even born. To be sure, the Reformation was a reaction against the excessive mechanizations of the spiritual by a Church that, by the sixteenth century, had become grossly corrupt (on average). And if we examine that single act of faith carefully, studying the process that led up to it, the period that follows it, we discover here another case of abbreviation, simplification, and of crude labeling. Catholic and Protestant religiousness, viewed in detail, is identical; it is the same process that produces eudaimonia in ancient understanding and individuation in the modern, secular conceptualization.

We live our lives in what Keats called “the vale of Soul-making.” The experience is the same, no matter the times, the prevailing cosmologies, the strength or weakness of religion. Concepts concretely underpinned by matter (“this hammer”) are easy to sort, but the great spiritual facts of experience are stubbornly subjective. One man’s God is another’s the Great Unconscious, one’s salvation is another individuation—but all of us strive, ultimately (if the spark throws its light into our soul) to become beautiful demons. Does that sound weird? To transcend the words is to rise to the reality.

Re-Reading Life After Life

Reading again Raymond A. Moody’s Life After Life, I was struck, this time, by the quotations from near death experience (NDE) reports concerning the functioning of the spirit or self, particularly its modes of self-perception, communications, and “senses,” thus hearing and seeing. The quotations that deal with time perception or extra-dimensionality also struck me as new—but it has been several years since I’ve last read this book with the requisite concentration it deserves. The book tends to produce a certain amount of trance—the page-turning kind—in part because it was written for the widest possible audience, because the quotations from NDE reports follow each other rapidly, and because the commentary is minimal in order to be maximally accessible.

Moody is generally ignored (so far as I can tell) by the learned—with one notable and, for me, significant exception. Henry Corbin devotes a paragraph to the book in his Prelude to the second edition of Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. Here is part of that paragraph:

All the more significant then has been the welcome given to a recent study which treats the “life after life” and presents the manifold testimonies of their actual experiences by people who, even though they had not crossed it never to return, had none the less really found themselves on the “threshold,” for their death had already been clinically confirmed. [Here Corbin footnotes Moody’s book.] There is no reason to be surprised that such a book should meet with a moving approval from some, testifying to a nostalgia which nothing has ever succeeded in snuffing out in the human heart. Equally there is no reason for surprise if the same book has been received with scepticism. Certainly, many traditional texts were quoted in connection with the testimonies reported in this book. But how many people knew them? In fact, some of these testimonies cannot be entertained let alone understood except on the condition of having at one’s immediate disposal an ontology of the mundus imaginalis and a metaphysic of the active Imagination as an organ inherent in the soul and regulated in its own right to the world of “subtle corporeity.”

Next to this paragraph I wrote in the margin, in amazement, “My God, I can hardly believe it!!” — Yes, but such are the consequences of writing for the general public rather than staying on the reservation.

Regarding Corbin’s references to imagination, I cannot deal with that in this post beyond saying that he saw the imagination not as an extension of humanity's sensory faculties but as a unique spiritual power, which he, following Paracelsus, called the true imagination rather than the ordinary fancy. Other entries on this blog under Corbin will provide the necessary context.

Reading Moody this time, what Corbin here labels “subtle corporeity” came sharply into focus, namely that selves “see” and “hear” with great acuity but cannot touch or grasp anything material, including living bodies. The hearing does not depend on air vibrations but seems due to thought perception; seeing is odd as well. Perception of the body varies; many perceive themselves as energetic structures, but experience these structures as somewhat extendable and with certain polarities, like up and down; others perceive actual bodies. While focused on this dimension people seem able to extend their attention out great distances and see, at those distances, from up close—while yet retaining a sense of having stayed in place. Reports of what selves see on that side of the Borderzone are complicated by the fact that the experiencers find themselves in an environment with more than three dimensions and a different experience of time. It takes them far less time to experience a great deal, interpreted as a more rapidly flowing time; experiences, like life reviews, while very detailed yet take no time at all. They struggle in expressing the experience in ordinary language the concepts of which are narrowly adapted to a three-dimensional existence and our kind of time.

I got to thinking how unfortunate it is that we are so tribal and clannish in all things, not least in the various arts and sciences. Moody is not viewed as providing extremely valuable data for serious examination for the simple reason that he preferred the more benign and welcoming attention of the general public to the hostile skepticism of those who claim a calling to study how reality works.

He Sold More than Razors

My reference here is to William of Ockham (1290-1349), famed for the principle of parsimony, usually rendered as Ockham’s Razor, which says that we should always prefer the simplest hypothesis able to explain the available facts. I came across Ockham in a conscious sort of way a couple of days ago, pondering the subject of the unity of the soul or self—and discovered that he asserted that intellect and will were a single unity. He is not alone in this. Among scholastics Duns Scotus held similar views; Aquinas said that “will and intellect mutually include each other,” but he set the dominant tone in scholasticism and gave the nod, the priority, to intellect.

Interesting, all of this. I’ve concluded long ago, based on little else than the sovereign power of intuition—and the lame sort of feelings I always get when abstractions begin to multiply and take on life—that the soul is a single unity in which intellect, will, and feelings are all facets of one thing; by feelings here I don’t mean sensory experiences but inward motions of the self—joy and revulsion, attraction and repulsion. The more I learned of Ockham—and it’s difficult to find things—the more I felt myself in sympathetic company.

Mortimer Adler, whom I admire, opted to omit Ockham from the Great Books of the Western World, a reliable source I managed to get cheaply long ago. (People buy such works with best intentions, but when the kids leave home, out they go, never read.) Internet summarizers of Ockham’s thought opt to focus on matters of modern interest, of which the soul does not happen to be one. My source of knowledge is therefore principally the Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, W.L. Reese, editor, where, for instance, I discovered that Ockham held man to be “a complete rational being, incapable of inhering in anything and not supported by anything” [p. 629, emphasis added]. Ridiculous although that sounds, bound as we are to our bodies, I’ve long, long felt the same intuitive certainty in the very face of all contrary evidence.

Perusing that article, I noted that Ockham’s views on matter and form are also more simpatico. He saw matter simply as matter (“body”) and form as its arrangement (“structure”) —which strikes me as much more pleasingly parsimonious than the ultimately Aristotelian notions of prime matter and form together somehow fusing to make substance. Prime matter must be conceived of as pure potential lacking all actuality, and form a kind of agency of actualization. The energy involved in this fusion is never seemingly addressed.

I also lean in Ockham’s direction in seeing intuition as the genuine source of knowledge. The Aristotelian/Thomistic division of intellect into a passive (read matter) and an active or “agent” (read formal) duality—rejected by Ockham—also strikes me as carrying the concept of substance-dualism too far—especially if you think of the soul as the real thing and intellect as one of its powers.

Ockham’s thought developed as it did, it seems, because he was intent on simplifying scholasticism. If I were intent on such a project, I too would be tempted to attack substance dualism and to examine such strange notions as, for instance, that God creates essences and then, in a separate act, gives them existence. Labors along these lines made Ockham a nominalist (“universals don't exist independently of minds”). It makes sense in Ockham's context, but when it comes to universals, my own intuition leans the other way. I plant myself in the realist camp (“universals have real existence”) because it seems to me that that something, the something that makes a horse a horse, simply has to have an independent existence somewhere. I can't help myself. I see real patterns out there. I don't “abstract” them from anything. I see them. I deal with the weirdness of “form” in the Platonic-Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition by thinking of that idea as intention. In the greater cosmos, the intentions are divine. In the narrow, human, I see a lot of universals that spring from human intentions.

My survey courses in college omitted Ockham too. Thus it was fascinating to meet the maker of the razor late in life. Much of what he appears to have said resonates. I like his notions of the soul’s unity, at least as I find it expressed in the singleness of will and intellect. And I like his reliance on intuition.

Forgotten Bricks

It amused me to note today, again, how selective humanity is in choosing what to remember and what to emphasize. I was looking up Plato’s views on the “simplicity of the soul,” which, I’d noted, reading another post, had come to be reduced, by twists and turns, to the simplicity of intellect. Now Plato’s doctrine of the soul’s immortality, based on its unity, immateriality, lack of any parts, and its invisibility is widely known, indeed has become a kind of token. But in the very same dialogue, the Phaedo, in which this conception of the soul is artfully developed, we also get the equally fascinating doctrine that souls pre-exist their births, that life results in death but that death generates life as well—a doctrine that Socrates explains by the analogy of sleep and waking, each generating the other. Ancient intellectual structures remain forever sound, as it were, but it is nevertheless possible to mine them for just those bricks and stones that fit a current fashion in architecture—while others are left untouched in their places. With Origen (185-254 AD), among the ancients, the notion of metempsychosis was still alive until purged from Christianity in the Second Council of Constantinople held in 553. That was at least one kind of fundamental change in the way doctrines of the soul had to be built in the future.

The Naming of the “Inward Parts”

In the traditional view of the human being, the person is the “inward parts.” This post concerns the naming of this most familiar but also most elusive something. Elusive, yes, but as a Sufi phrase would have it, “nearer to you than your jugular vein.” Nearer than the jugular vein because we’re not the body—although, to be sure, even at this fairly basic level views diverge even within the confines of traditional thought. In the tradition influenced by Aristotle the soul-body duality is of the essence of the human; in other indeed in most spiritual traditions the body is secondary, a vehicle, in relation to the soul it is as the garment is in relation to the body itself; at death we’re off, like a dirty shirt...

In my own language I always contrast traditional with modern, and by modern I mean materialistic, thus a view that denies any reality to what we might call a “detachable” soul. Yet the inward parts have their own designations even in the modern scheme of things—and, furthermore, not just using single words like ego, self, or personality but more complicated schemes. The Freudian comes to mind: Id, Superego, and Ego. Here the inward parts form a triad, reflecting the primitive child-like id, the sum of social conditionings called the superego (the parent within), and then the ideal Freudian ego which faces reality as it is, refuses to project any of its wishes upon it, and simply calls a spade a spade.

Now the world in which we find ourselves may be a “school” in which we are expected to develop; it may be a state of degradation into which we’ve fallen because of our collective sin (as in “the Fall”); it may also be a realm in which we find ourselves captured, seduced to enter it by rash curiosity; or it may be a temporary but necessary adaptation in response to cosmic events long since forgotten. Human cosmologies have all sorts of explanations, but these have certain elements in common and others that diverge. The divergent elements have to do with responsibility. The responsibility for being here may be ours. Or it may be caused by the failure or the arrangement of higher levels of being; and these may be superior and benevolent or inferior and rebellious. The elements that cosmologies agree on are that we must develop while we’re here, as persons not as collectives; we must develop either to escape this realm at all or, once freed from it by death, to reach the proper place “over there” rather than end up in a place much worse than this one. The development required of us is that of our inward parts. No amount of body-building or acquisition of wealth,  power, or mere knowledge will do us the least bit of good if our inner core, that permanent something, does not undergo a favorable change.

I find it interesting to contemplate the terminology used in different cultures to deal with this situation. In virtually all of them at least two states are recognized. One is the ordinary, unreformed, undeveloped self, the old Adam, the “mortal mind,” the unenlightened self. The other is the product of successful development. In Catholicism, minimally, this is the soul in a state of grace, thus purged of sin even if, before it reaches heaven it must still abide in purgatory for a while to burn away, manner of speaking, residual errors that in a Hindu system of belief would be called remaining karma. In Buddhism there are two states, the basic and as yet unreformed and the enlightened; once illumination has burned away all karma, liberation, and with it certain escape, has been achieved. No intermediate stages and ranks are stipulated, although the bodhisattva, equivalent to a high saint, is a person who, liberated, is still here or has returned to help others achieve escape. In the inner circles of spirituality, a hierarchy of development is always detectable. Thus we find in Catholicism a hierarchy of sinners, the virtuous, and the saints.

I’ve encountered the most extensive system of classification in Sufism. Here we learn of seven levels of developments. These are states of consciousness, or of souls. The word used is nafs, meaning breath or soul. Sufism unfolds a very sophisticated psychology that developed long before our own twentieth century forays into Freudian, Jungian, and other sophisticated psychologies. Seven, of course, is an arbitrary number we frequently encounter in these realms. I read that “seven” simply to mean a gradient from which seven points have been singled out for description. In this scheme we have the following selves or “breaths”:

Commanding
Accusing
Inspired
Serene
Fulfilled
Fulfilling
Purified and complete

Let me give some feel for the first three. The Commanding Self is the unreformed, ordinary self that develops naturally in society. It is what we’d call the ego or the personality, a structure of conditioned or acquired behaviors with only superficial consciousness. The Accusing Self is a soul that has developed enough to have a conscience; it is accusing—but accusing itself for failure and for heedlessness. It is the first level of actual development. All of these levels have their problems. In Catholicism, for instance, where soul-development is job one, this state of the self can sometimes slip into what is called a “scrupulous conscience,” which is a problem at this stage of development. The Inspired Self has developed sufficiently so that it is capable of perceiving the inflow of grace. The Accusing Self, having removed the barriers produced by this dimension sufficiently so that an inflow is possible, grace begins to work on the person and, as it participates in the development of the self, the self then ascends to even higher levels. Humble of necessity, I’ve never looked very far beyond the Accusing Self, but we do encounter instances of the higher levels in the flesh as well as in the lore.

Interesting, really, how systems of naming the inward parts develop—and how extensive the descriptions become when actual development proceeds beyond the first step or two. The absence of such concepts in ordinary discourse testifies to the general absence of interest in soul-development in the current culture. This then brings me to the “inspiration” for this posting. It was a program I heard on NPR’s Science Friday yesterday. There I learned that multi-tasking is not good for people. It causes the brain to focus rapidly on different tasks, and, in making these quick shifts, the brain experiences losses. Thinking of this as I was driving, I had to chuckle. Our culture’s problem is that it can’t even concentrate on one ordinary task at a time, I thought. And Job One, in this dimension, seems to be to concentrate with some real vigor on another world we cannot even see...

On Fields and Energy

Throughout time people have used concepts drawn from what these days is called science and have then applied to the spiritual ranges of experience (or vice versa). Our time is no different from others except in the flavor of the thing. The “spiritual” is below the salt these days, disparaged, and held to be naïve and superstitious. And use of such concepts as “field” and “energy,” consequently, are used by writers on the spiritual or the psychic not because they actually communicate anything tangible or graspable—but because these words enjoy a kind of authority, the authority of Science writ large. The question arises. Is it legitimate to borrow scientific terms to describe psychic experiences? Let’s take a look.

My Dictionary of Physics defines “field” as “A region under the influence of some physical agency.” Interesting definition, when you think about it: a field is a chunk of space. A football field is therefore aptly named; it’s a piece of ground under the influence of football. But the word is actually used in another way when people write it. They use it to mean electric, magnetic, or gravitational force. Its use in New Age or “metaphysical” parlance, therefore, is simply an assertion that some kind of psychic force exists of such a nature that its influence extends over space. Telepathy or remote viewing are thus legitimately described as field phenomena in that some force conveys information between points not capable of explanation using the medium of light, sound, electrical transmission, or chemical signaling.

Let me next turn to the concept of “energy.” Here is the dictionary definition. It is “the quantity that is the measure of the capacity of a body or a system for doing work.” Work (W) turns out to be any kind of force that causes change in something else. By definition, when body A exerts force on body B, A loses W and B gains what A loses.

What I find fascinating here is that the terminology of science is pure abstraction; it is conceptual. Space may be huge (earth moon enclosure) or small (the region my little magnet affects). Force or work may be of all kinds of different kinds—my lifting of a heavy grocery sack or lightning striking a tree. These are mental constructs of generic applicability—but narrowly applied to three known physical forces by science when a field is mentioned. But they can be legitimately used anywhere else as well—wherever we perceive action, work or force exerted over any kind of space. The chief difference in using such terminology in physical science and in so-called metaphysical studies lies in the instrument used.

In studying psychic experiences, the only suitable instruments are minds. And there’s the rub. Their powers of perception are enormous, but their chief drawback is their singularity. We cannot check an individual mind from within. We cannot precisely confirm what it is perceiving. The individual may lie. The individual may misinterpret what he or she experiences. Objective knowledge is therefore very difficult to obtain. Minds are fantastic instruments but very difficult to calibrate precisely.

This difficulty—of supervision, of confirmation—has some odd side-effects. It causes us to limit the application of science to what we call the material level. But the matter-mind duality, as usually applied, may be a fiction. One way to put this may be by saying that we’re incapable of detecting mind in matter or matter in mind—and in both directions because our instruments are too coarse. What I’ve seen of reality—the patterns of things in general—persuade me that this is so. We’re drawing artificial lines based on our ability—or lack thereof—to produce hard evidence, capable of confirmation by third parties, for perhaps the most important range of reality we experience, namely the psychic. But there is really nothing wrong with using concepts like field or energy—much in the same way as science uses these for magnetic, electrical, and gravitational forces—for other forces that we can observe. What is wrong in “metaphysical” discussions is the sloppy and casual use of such concepts—or the attempt to snatch a certain phony legitimacy for our claims by appealing to authority. Scientists no more understand what an electromagnetic field is than I understand what a soul is. But we are both attempting to grasp the operation of invisible forces by some of the phenomena that they leave behind.

The Accounting or Mapping Department

Words not only clarify, they may also obscure. I can’t help believing that what the schoolmen called Intellect is but the accounting department of the enterprise we call the soul. The counting house is important, to be sure, but the store or factory matter more. It seems clear to me that, as humans, we gain knowledge not merely and exclusively from sensory experience, which the medievals and moderns both assert; on the contrary, I think we also get knowledge from invisible dimensions. In both cases our knowledge is direct; our understanding flashes up or slowly dawns. I hold that the intellectual operations of abstraction and reasoning arise a little later—an eyewink or much labor later—as we engage in ordering and relating our direct and spontaneous grasp of reality into larger patterns of coherence.

Another way to put this is that the intellect produces maps, but maps are not, as it were, universals. We think of universals or essences—perceptions shorn of accidents, so-called—as in some manner superior to particulars. I see that as an assertion that maps are superior to the landscapes they depict. I’m very fond of maps; I’m devoted to patterns of all kinds; they’re indispensable for orientation but, ultimately, we never visit maps; we visit places.

The interesting fact here is the iterative functioning of what I view as the higher power of the soul, its intuitive grasp. The intellect is a servant; reason is a tool. Intuition first understands the particular and then, once intellect produces its patterns, intuition understands and grasps those in turn—enriched by both but never deceived by what is what: the landscape is the landscape and the map’s a map.

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.

Still on the Subject: A Spark of Divinity

If I examine my own impressions, the self feels like a sovereign unity. This feeling arises when I attend to it, thus in quiet moments. In the midst of action I am the action; I’m attending to reality out there. In times of conflict, indecision, or in a vortex of emotion my self is submerged, carried along like a body in a raging flood. Such times are rare, to be sure. The feeling of unity returns in times of calm. I can also forcibly summon it up in the midst of action if I have to. It is also, generally, the state when I am in repose.

The characteristics of the self remain constant over the years so that, looking back, it seems to me that I felt exactly the same at age seven as I do today. My self doesn’t seem to age. My knowledge has grown, my experiences have multiplied—but I treat both as possessions, not as the self.

To define what the self actually is is best done using negatives. It’s not my body, not my thoughts. The same applies to my emotions, to my memories. Thoughts are constantly in motion, emotions come and go, memories can be lost, found, made. Body, thoughts, emotions, memories are all phenomena I think of as possessing or experiencing. I experience them as external to me. The self, by contrast, is a constant. I can at least imagine losing body, thoughts, emotions, and memories and yet still imagine being there. What I can’t imagine is nonexistence. The concept falls apart. How can I imagine if I am not there?

I also experience the self as seeing, grasping, attending, and as acting. Seeing and grasping signify a power of perception—be that intellectual or sensory. Attending and acting are functions of the will. I comprehend and act out of the self itself, but understand fully that other functionalities are present; they facilitate this activity. Information comes through the senses and by means of memory. My actions are expressed through the body; my decisions guide bodily actions and, even if they’re not outwardly expressed, I still store them away as memories of having decided something in such and such a context. Not that I do anything to store a memory. I don’t. The brain does that for me and automatically. Recovery of that memory will also take place automatically if stimulated by the right experiences.

This then is a brief and relatively complete presentation of the subjective and thus the introspective view of the self. I am neglecting certain aspects—dreaming, intuitions, and what are called paranormal experiences. Just the above suffices to show that the core of being—and it happens to be accessible—is something very strange indeed. In its bound form it is nothing. In its fragile body, seemingly vulnerable. In its essence, indestructible.

Thoughts are Free

Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten,
Sie fliegen vorbei wie nächtliche Schatten.
Kein Mensch kann sie wissen, kein Jäger erschießen
Mit Pulver und Blei, Die Gedanken sind frei!

Our thoughts they are free, and no one can guess them
They fly right on by like shades—you can’t catch them
No human can know them, no hunter shoot down,
No way José and nay! Our thoughts they are free.

The quotes is from a German song with the same title as this post; the free and somewhat Americanized translation is mine. The poem “freely” wandered into my thoughts in the context of the last posting on the sovereign will—because our thoughts symbolize our essential character, namely our absolute freedom. No—as embodied beings held in the thrall of matter we are bound and fettered in many ways, but the core that we are is not. And this poem, which has strong political undertones—it was, for instance, prohibited in Germany during the Nazi years—was evidently composed to signal the ultimate defiance of the free soul against all constraint.

Heart Exam: Continued

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Our Mysterious Awakening

We never even think about our origin—which is the subject of our meaning—until our consciousness is able somehow to separate itself from the turbulent flow of our experience. Something in us must detach, something must reflect—or catch a reflection.

Consciousness thus becomes a mystery in turn. In one sense it is a partial description of a feeling—the feeling of our agency, the feeling that we are a Self. We couldn’t feel that we are individuals, people, responsible beings if we remained unaware. Neither could we choose to act this way or that without awareness. Thus the other major element of our fundamental nature, our will, is possible only through awareness. Indeed the very concept of an agency includes both at the same time and irreducibly so.

But our nature is paradoxical. Muted forms of agency—and therefore of consciousness and of will—are everywhere displayed for us in living creatures from birds to lions to giraffes. And most of the time their behavior is equivalent to ours. What divides us from the animal kingdom is our ability to become holy or evil. Neither path is open to a mule. And the paradox itself is murky and reveals additional degrees.

Thus, for instance, I genuinely wonder about the “humanity” of a pair of thugs who, under orders from a boss, kill two innocent people in an attempt to extract information from them (an actual case). I wonder about the “humanity” of the boss as well. I wonder about the human label applied to shady financiers who obtain houses from the desperate by fraudulent schemes they know will soon end in forfeitures. And on. In these people consciousness is present at levels well above a mule’s. They must know that they are causing harm. Are they really conscious? If they are they’re deliberately choosing evil. Is that possible? I assert that it is on the basis of personal experience—and I rather think that all of us have chosen evil knowingly in the past, finessing the acts by rationalizations. The difference between the criminal and Everyman lies in the degree. Evil does not always qualify as crime; it is a sliding scale.

Thus consciousness and agency in animals continues at a heightened rate in humans, but still on a certain scale, the difference in us now being that we deliberately choose. And when our choice is real—and if not real it’s not a choice—we use our will to lean now in one direction and now in the other.

The situation just described is a central feature of our meaning—must be. How it fits into the scheme of origins must still be developed.

Genuine consciousness really arises as a “separation” from the general flow of turbulent experience. Something must detach, something must reflect—or catch a reflection. More and more I’m coming to see awareness as a force or as a structure that emerges out of a material casing—not in the modern scientific sense of an “emergent phenomenon” but rather as a seed that catches on and begins development until at some point it reaches the light. It’s not an achievement but requires a favorable environment or endowment nonetheless. It seems to me that once it’s present it will assert itself thereafter—not because a person is virtuous or diligent but simply because this soul-force is strong and sovereign. It is not equivalent to intelligence but without its presence in awareness, intelligence is limited in reach.

Our Mysterious Origins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bodies, Bodies, Bodies

My heart is sad and lonely
For you I pine, for you dear only
Why haven’t you seen it?
I’m all for you, body and soul.

The body-soul duality is deeply embedded in language and thought—and has been from times long forgotten—not because we are subjects to illusion, as the materialists would have it, but because we sense both the difference between and the union of the two as a matter of course.

One of the intellectual habits that has always amused me is the use of the word “naïve” to characterize the way ordinary people see things. Thus it is naïve of us to think that we have selves or souls; the “advanced” view is that we’re mere coils of chemical adaptation. For this reason also I enjoyed first hearing of Dr. Johnson’s reaction to Berkley’s idealism. The quote is from James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — “I refute it thus.”

Humanity’s spontaneous feeling is that substantiality is anchored in matter. Common sayings bear witness to this feeling. “He is just a shadow of the man he used to be.” The Greeks thought of the dead—deprived of bodies—as shades. But a shadow is, nevertheless, a something, even if thinned out. The word ghost has the same connotations: somewhat translucent, so to say, not a very good light reflector, but still good enough to see.

The tough persistence of the Aristotelian matter-form substantiality is testimony to the fact that it’s easy to follow the conceptualization and to accept a duality in which one of the two elements is receptive (the yin of the I Ching, for instance) and the other is active (yang). Matter receives form and form imposes itself on matter. Functionally the western matter-form duality is identical with the yin-yang duality of Chinese thought.

Now you might say that the real is always substantial. You can’t see the form without matter and you never find matter without form. And here lies a problem. There is a problem if we think of the soul as the form of the body. The problem is that a soul separated from its manifestation is insubstantial. It is indeed the sound of one hand clapping. And some of us, anyway, don’t like this idea.

This spontaneous recoil from the thought of insubstantiality has produced interesting philosophical ideas, namely that bodies, other than those made of flesh and blood, actually exist. These other bodies are imagined to be the vehicles of the soul after our current “bag of bones” is buried or cremated. These vehicles are pictured either as “higher” or “lower” kinds of bodies. In Greek thought lower kinds of bodies, those of the shades in Hades, were thought to be of an order inferior to ordinary bodies, thus linked to the element of water only: moist bodies. And those of the higher kind were imagined as partaking of fire. Lower meant sinking; higher meant rising. Note please that in that era the words earth, water, air, and fire carried meanings somewhat analogous to our conceptions of chemical elements or subatomic particles. These people were neither stupid nor naïve; and they intended to be understood by their peers, not some future generation habituated to regard anything ancient as inferior. Therefore, saying what I say here, I’m not talking tongue in cheek. I take these people seriously.

Notice next that in theosophical circles the concept of the “subtle body” is accepted as one of these bodies beyond the “bag of bones.” Here the terminology we encounter includes terms like energy, as in energy body, and also the word vibration, which is suggestive of frequency, hence evokes images (in me, at any rate) of the electromagnetic, hence the energetic, spectrum. Notice further that in the Christian conceptualization, the resurrection body is spoken of as the glorified body—and glory is always associated with light—another pointer in the direction of energy. The glorified body is thus another way of saying subtle body; the difference is that in theosophical conceptions more than one higher body exists, in the Christian conception only one. One more note along these lines. In paranormal circles, we encounter the notion that ordinary bodies are surrounded by an aura, thus, again, an energetic sort of emanation, which is perceptible by certain gifted individuals.

These circles accept a curious conceptualization of nesting bodies—imagine Russian babushka dolls that fit inside each other. The outer body is the one we see; within is a spirit or subtle body; within that may be another yet; the glorified or luminous body. Part of the second is visible as the aura.

Bodies, bodies, bodies. I will return to this and say more the next time. For now the point I wish to emphasize is that at least a subset of humanity recoils from a simple notion of a matter-form substance in which the breakup of the union means the disappearance of the form at least, never to be found again. Therefore the human mind has projected the duality of body and soul beyond this dimension and imagines not only a higher environment for the soul but also the presence, there, of a higher form of matter. How else could the soul retain its substantiality. An examination of this cluster of suppositions will follow.