Dreams are a mystery in part because we give them only fleeting attention. I’ve given them a lot of heed over the years—as might be expected of a person of my temperament. What I may say here, to be sure, is the subjective view of one. I offer them as hypotheses—to be subjected to personal verification by others.
I classify dreams into five categories as follows: (1) morning, (2) deep, (3) significant, (4) telepathic, and (5) precognitive. Bear with me. We’re entering a thicket. The categories may be quite meaningless, but I hope to give them some flesh below.
Morning Dreams. These are dreams we have in the morning just before we awaken. Most of these, I find, may be described as ordinary thoughts that, however, employ “dream grammar” to make themselves understood. Very few people have the necessary skill or patience to translate morning dreams into concepts, but when they bother, their dream unravels relatively easily into something of current concern. The skill required is symbolic analysis—easier said than done. The dream content is usually simply a sentence of this sort: “I wonder if Close Relation has gotten the dreaded Test Result yet?” Not infrequently, the dream itself echoes thoughts we fell asleep with—and as the brain comes awake again, it replays those thoughts again, presented to the not-yet fully awakened personality in symbolic form.
Deep Dreams. These are the dreams of the night from which we awaken because they woke us up in fright or pleasure, usually the former. They tend to be large, confusing dramatic series in which many different events take place, separated by odd discontinuities. We can recognized a discontinuity or shift when people say, relating the dream: “Then suddenly I was downtown, and this bus was coming toward me…” Or: “Then things changed. I wasn’t by the river anymore but at a market…” These dreams tend to be visually vivid; we are active participants, completely absorbed in actions, often seeking difficult objectives. All sorts of people may be present, all manner of interactions may take place, the environment may be very odd, and yet we accept it, or weird things in it whereas, in a waking state, we’d be paralyzed by astonishment. I think such dreams are in the same category as extended daydreams when we’re contemplating past events or projecting to the future—angrily reliving some past problem, usually with people, and rehearse what we should’ve said or done…or daydreams of what we hope to do in the future. Thus deep dreams, like morning dreams, are more or less spontaneous streams of consciousness, but because our sleep is deeper, they are more extensive, elaborated, and richer in content. The discontinuities are caused by new associations produced spontaneously by the brain and presented to us in the form of another scene.
Significant Dreams. These are dreams of the deep kind, usually, but distinguished from those by a peculiar coherence and united thematics. They are significant precisely because, on awakening, we are immediately and fully aware of their meaning or portent. I’ll present such a dream soon and return to this subject them. Significant dreams are of great interest to me because they seem to transcend the two earlier categories. Something else is present in them—call it the presence of another agency at work, possibly another higher level of ourselves. These dreams are artfully constructed. They’re rich with meaning. The other two kinds are just mental operations as usual, but conducted with the self only half or not at all aware. The brain is awake enough, however, to store memories.
“Telepathic” Dreams. This is a category I’m not yet entirely comfortable including. My experiences are somewhat limited, but the few dreams I’ve had have been striking. The label itself isn’t very satisfactory. I’ve had a number of dreams of being in situations where I was a person I could not really identify with, doing and saying things I would never do or say in real life—and, even in the dream itself, I am quite aware of this. These have tended to be “morning” dreams. They put me in very realistic situations with not a shred of the fantastic. What is fantastic is to be in the situation at all. Only the minority of these dreams involve me being an extremely stupid person doing very stupid and usually more or less criminal things. In the majority of these telepathic dreams I experience being in unusual occupations or very interesting but quite alien family situation. I’ve tried to explain these dreams to myself by saying that, somehow, I’m tuning in the lives of other people somehow, experience slices of them (of memories? of actual experiences taking place now?), but feel identified with a person who isn’t really me. Telepathy is a handy explanation.
Precognitive Dreams. This is a well-known category. I’ve had one unmistakable precognitive dream that I’ll relate in another posting and discuss it there in full. What I dreamt was ordinary but unusual enough not be mistaken for a memory. And the action of the dream actually took place two days later. Precognition itself, proved by such phenomena, is a vast subject in which my insights are those of an ant regarding nuclear disarmament.
More on this subject will follow, of course, but I need to have this recorded for future reference.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Hypnagogic Visions
One of the most obvious exceptions to “absence” in sleep is the fact that we have dreams. Not that we’re aware of dreaming; when that awareness comes, we’re soon awake again. Dreams are a huge subject, so I’d like merely to crack the door today and talk about what seems to me a closely related subject, hypnagogic visions.
Some people have them, some claim they never do. Let me give a simple example of what for me are relatively common experiences (once every other month). I’m going to sleep, eyes closed. What I actually see is darkness, perhaps some moving, disappearing points of tiny light. Not infrequently the splotchy background may feature flickering phenomena with geometrical or other flowing, swirling, colored designs. Images or hints of faces, figures, masks, and other weird stuff may appear. This is the stuff I usually see before I’m out and gone. Sometimes the light increases markedly—and a scene appears. Yet I’m still awake. The state of attention here is very important. It must remain present, and with it knowledge that I’m actually watching. But the emotions must be very calm or else the scene will vanish and I’ll be hard-awake rather than mild-awake—in a manner of speaking. If all goes well I’ll soon find myself in motion, but not as in a body but as a consciousness at eye-level roughly. The motion is involuntary, and stopping or redirecting it is enormously difficult, but not impossible. As the effort increases, the scene begins to dim. The scenery can be quite ordinary (landscapes, farm scenes, urban scenes) and occasionally quite fantastic (out-of-this world architecture). Sometimes I see people, sometimes quite large numbers. Such visions, however, rapidly become dreams and—on awakening—I remember a dream-like progression as the last thing.
Here is an actual vision, one of the more recent; in this one, and others that follow, I emphasize that I was fully self-conscious throughout:
The vision was not exactly dramatic. I was staring into a wet gutter; it seemed to be raining. My awareness seemed blocked to left and right by walls. I had the most extraordinary trouble moving forward. The gutter-vision was quite static. I strained intensely trying move forward and to my left (to look around the wall) but couldn’t. After quite a long time movement began spontaneously. The gutter and the left wall itself began to move forward together, me with them. As this happened a dark vista opened behind me, to my left side. There I saw what seemed to be a much lower wall. Next I rose higher and looked into a garden beyond it, as it were—but all in black, barely visible, yet I felt the forms of fancy bushes and flower-beds inside it. The darkness had been caused by my efforts to move. Beyond the garden rose a vast structure in the center of which I saw a quite outlandish and faintly shiny huge figure of an ogre-like giant—but not a living creature but, rather, a vast decoration on the face of the building that fronted on the garden. My last memory of this vision is my looking up at this shiny but black figure. Then I was gone.
Such visions are routinely described as hallucinations. Hallucinations are thought to be imaginary visions; the word itself comes from the Greek to “wander in the mind.” Note, please, “in the mind”—rather than in a real place. Simply accepting such a characterization seems to me too easy—unless someone has a much better explanation of what imagination really is and how it works. Among my hypnagogic visions was one where, in an outdoor scene, I “climbed” a berm of dirt topped by a wire fence. Looking over it and down a very short distance, I saw a huge herd of elephants all moving in excitement from the left hand to the right inside a kind of gully. Imagination? The scene was totally realistic; the elephants looked very real, very dusty, quite alarmed. I hadn’t heard the slightest sound, not before, not as they were rushing by. Some of my visions showed me architecture so strikingly novel the structures were literally out of this world—meaning quite discernibly products of mind, but not, repeat not, mine. Among my vision, on the other hand, are urban scenes or vistas of quite recognizable modern forms, not at all surprising even if strangely vivid. It seems to me at least equally plausible to hypothesize that the settings of hypnagogic visions are actually real places, some in our own dimension and some in others. Our presence in them, however, is in out-of-body states. How we enter them, why these rather than those, why today but not tomorrow, and by what paths or venues we get there, that remains a mystery.
* * *
My limited experience isn’t much to go on, but some things I note for future exploration. Hypnagogic visions have dream-like settings. They differ from dreams in an important regard: the consciousness is not dreamlike. Another way to put this is that one can evidently experience dream-like visions in conscious states.
Some people have them, some claim they never do. Let me give a simple example of what for me are relatively common experiences (once every other month). I’m going to sleep, eyes closed. What I actually see is darkness, perhaps some moving, disappearing points of tiny light. Not infrequently the splotchy background may feature flickering phenomena with geometrical or other flowing, swirling, colored designs. Images or hints of faces, figures, masks, and other weird stuff may appear. This is the stuff I usually see before I’m out and gone. Sometimes the light increases markedly—and a scene appears. Yet I’m still awake. The state of attention here is very important. It must remain present, and with it knowledge that I’m actually watching. But the emotions must be very calm or else the scene will vanish and I’ll be hard-awake rather than mild-awake—in a manner of speaking. If all goes well I’ll soon find myself in motion, but not as in a body but as a consciousness at eye-level roughly. The motion is involuntary, and stopping or redirecting it is enormously difficult, but not impossible. As the effort increases, the scene begins to dim. The scenery can be quite ordinary (landscapes, farm scenes, urban scenes) and occasionally quite fantastic (out-of-this world architecture). Sometimes I see people, sometimes quite large numbers. Such visions, however, rapidly become dreams and—on awakening—I remember a dream-like progression as the last thing.
Here is an actual vision, one of the more recent; in this one, and others that follow, I emphasize that I was fully self-conscious throughout:
The vision was not exactly dramatic. I was staring into a wet gutter; it seemed to be raining. My awareness seemed blocked to left and right by walls. I had the most extraordinary trouble moving forward. The gutter-vision was quite static. I strained intensely trying move forward and to my left (to look around the wall) but couldn’t. After quite a long time movement began spontaneously. The gutter and the left wall itself began to move forward together, me with them. As this happened a dark vista opened behind me, to my left side. There I saw what seemed to be a much lower wall. Next I rose higher and looked into a garden beyond it, as it were—but all in black, barely visible, yet I felt the forms of fancy bushes and flower-beds inside it. The darkness had been caused by my efforts to move. Beyond the garden rose a vast structure in the center of which I saw a quite outlandish and faintly shiny huge figure of an ogre-like giant—but not a living creature but, rather, a vast decoration on the face of the building that fronted on the garden. My last memory of this vision is my looking up at this shiny but black figure. Then I was gone.
Such visions are routinely described as hallucinations. Hallucinations are thought to be imaginary visions; the word itself comes from the Greek to “wander in the mind.” Note, please, “in the mind”—rather than in a real place. Simply accepting such a characterization seems to me too easy—unless someone has a much better explanation of what imagination really is and how it works. Among my hypnagogic visions was one where, in an outdoor scene, I “climbed” a berm of dirt topped by a wire fence. Looking over it and down a very short distance, I saw a huge herd of elephants all moving in excitement from the left hand to the right inside a kind of gully. Imagination? The scene was totally realistic; the elephants looked very real, very dusty, quite alarmed. I hadn’t heard the slightest sound, not before, not as they were rushing by. Some of my visions showed me architecture so strikingly novel the structures were literally out of this world—meaning quite discernibly products of mind, but not, repeat not, mine. Among my vision, on the other hand, are urban scenes or vistas of quite recognizable modern forms, not at all surprising even if strangely vivid. It seems to me at least equally plausible to hypothesize that the settings of hypnagogic visions are actually real places, some in our own dimension and some in others. Our presence in them, however, is in out-of-body states. How we enter them, why these rather than those, why today but not tomorrow, and by what paths or venues we get there, that remains a mystery.
* * *
My limited experience isn’t much to go on, but some things I note for future exploration. Hypnagogic visions have dream-like settings. They differ from dreams in an important regard: the consciousness is not dreamlike. Another way to put this is that one can evidently experience dream-like visions in conscious states.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Where Do We Go In Sleep?
Does sleep prove materialism? If our consciousness is the capacity of an immaterial agency, and we are that agency, why do we go away when the brain has to rest?
Let me examine the assumptions hidden in my question above. To make things as clear as possible, let me start by saying that I want to exclude dreaming states for purposes of discussion. Dreams need special attention—and will get it elsewhere. Now to the question. I assume here a duality of body and mind. If I didn’t, the question would be meaningless. To recognize this duality explicitly, I can rephrase the question: “Where does the soul go when the body sleeps?” I assume, further, that body and soul are separable entities; note the distinction: not just separate but separable—else I couldn’t use the word “go” in the question. I also assume that the state of sleep is the sole property of bodies and that souls don’t require sleep—hence they can “go” somewhere. I pose the question in the first place because the last assumption necessarily suggests that consciousness continues even during sleep, but I am unaware of that—and if I am that consciousness, my absence in sleep produces a contradiction. I’m simultaneously asserting that during sleep the soul is both conscious and unconscious.
Let’s next look at these assumptions. Duality rests on my observation of the mind’s behavior, particularly its freedom of action in directing my motions at will. I don’t observe this behavior of self-motion anywhere in inorganic nature. I have a clear understanding of the difference between reflexive, automatic behavior, assigned to mechanical arrangements, and voluntary behavior. The voluntary behavior also requires a cause, and that cause is the soul-mind-agency. In order to move the body, this agent must be in some way independent of it.
That body and soul are separable is not a matter of ordinary observation; experience proves the contrary, otherwise I would never experience pain; I would just go away until it stopped. The notion of separability is a theoretical projection based on my experience of the independent status of my soul, ultimately grounded in free will. But I have no experiential basis for asserting that I can “go” anywhere without old flesh-and-bones tagging along.
My assumption that sleep is solely a property of bodies arises because I cannot find an organic basis for soul. The very concept requires that soul be free of mechanistic determinations. If it isn’t, it would be the body. If soul is independent of the body, it would not seem to require sleep. But that is a relatively weak assumption. By calling soul independent, I have not actually described it very comprehensively. It too may need a constant or intermittent renewal in some way, but, if so, I can’t know anything about that. As Aquinas argues, soul knows itself by its actions, not directly; hence by corollary, soul cannot know anything by its inaction—which is its evident state during sleep.
How then do we deal with the contradiction of a conscious-unconscious soul during sleep? Three possibilities suggest themselves.
· Souls Also Rest. As just suggested above, souls themselves may require restoration and have the functional equivalent of rest. Sleep may, in fact, be viewed as produced by soul-fatigue, produced when a soul, that has exhausted its vital energies, lowers its life-maintaining activity, and the body, in response, slumbers off.
· Souls Are Conscious But Bored. Under this option, souls remain conscious during sleep, indeed continue to have mental freedom to do as they like, but there is no sensory stimulus coming their way. A big black nothingness is what they mostly experience because access to other realms is impossible from this material order. Memories are formed, but they are of the kind almost immediately forgotten. Nothing happens that’s worth remembering.
· Souls Have Experiences, But Memories Aren’t Stored. In this explanation, souls do have experiences, but what with the brain being asleep, it doesn’t store memories of these experiences and, hence, in the waking state, we can’t remember what we saw and felt in our perhaps native dimension.
Notice that in two of these cased (Bored, Experienced), the function of memory is central. In Case Bored, the mind produces memories with or without the brain’s intermediation; memories are of the same kind (let’s say on the same frequency as ordinary memories) and treated in the same way. We don’t usually remember large boring stretches of experience or simply compress them into a very brief token. The other case, Experienced, assumes that for ordinary remembering the brain must be actively involved; the soul may experience events in some other order, may store memories of these events as well, but on another frequency—which is not accessible to the brain but may be accessible to the soul once it is freed of this dimension.
Now some further comments on these cases. The first suggests that the mere assertion of “immateriality” for the soul is inadequate. Hidden within it is the assumption that soul requires some kind of energy for its own maintenance—which it passes on to the body. So the soul becomes more complex, indeed dualistic in turn, consisting of capacities on the one hand and a sustaining energy on the other.
The second depends on the assumption that different orders or regions exist and that the soul, native in another one, is caught in this one, at least while in the body, and unable to experience, at least effectively, any other. Therefore, deprived of sense stimuli, it sees nothing when the brain shuts down. Boring.
I have nothing more to add to the third case. Each of these cases has a certain plausibility and problems. All depend on variant models of reality which are entirely speculative and supported only, and only in part, by highly subjective experiences of the paranormal. Some of that “evidence” I hope to examine in future posts. Here it might be well, once more, to emphasize the problem of knowledge. We have no idea what a soul is, only the experience of its activity; we don’t know how it got here or why it’s tied to bodies. For explanations we must open books of myth. Tough sledding, this business of the mind.
Let me examine the assumptions hidden in my question above. To make things as clear as possible, let me start by saying that I want to exclude dreaming states for purposes of discussion. Dreams need special attention—and will get it elsewhere. Now to the question. I assume here a duality of body and mind. If I didn’t, the question would be meaningless. To recognize this duality explicitly, I can rephrase the question: “Where does the soul go when the body sleeps?” I assume, further, that body and soul are separable entities; note the distinction: not just separate but separable—else I couldn’t use the word “go” in the question. I also assume that the state of sleep is the sole property of bodies and that souls don’t require sleep—hence they can “go” somewhere. I pose the question in the first place because the last assumption necessarily suggests that consciousness continues even during sleep, but I am unaware of that—and if I am that consciousness, my absence in sleep produces a contradiction. I’m simultaneously asserting that during sleep the soul is both conscious and unconscious.
Let’s next look at these assumptions. Duality rests on my observation of the mind’s behavior, particularly its freedom of action in directing my motions at will. I don’t observe this behavior of self-motion anywhere in inorganic nature. I have a clear understanding of the difference between reflexive, automatic behavior, assigned to mechanical arrangements, and voluntary behavior. The voluntary behavior also requires a cause, and that cause is the soul-mind-agency. In order to move the body, this agent must be in some way independent of it.
That body and soul are separable is not a matter of ordinary observation; experience proves the contrary, otherwise I would never experience pain; I would just go away until it stopped. The notion of separability is a theoretical projection based on my experience of the independent status of my soul, ultimately grounded in free will. But I have no experiential basis for asserting that I can “go” anywhere without old flesh-and-bones tagging along.
My assumption that sleep is solely a property of bodies arises because I cannot find an organic basis for soul. The very concept requires that soul be free of mechanistic determinations. If it isn’t, it would be the body. If soul is independent of the body, it would not seem to require sleep. But that is a relatively weak assumption. By calling soul independent, I have not actually described it very comprehensively. It too may need a constant or intermittent renewal in some way, but, if so, I can’t know anything about that. As Aquinas argues, soul knows itself by its actions, not directly; hence by corollary, soul cannot know anything by its inaction—which is its evident state during sleep.
How then do we deal with the contradiction of a conscious-unconscious soul during sleep? Three possibilities suggest themselves.
· Souls Also Rest. As just suggested above, souls themselves may require restoration and have the functional equivalent of rest. Sleep may, in fact, be viewed as produced by soul-fatigue, produced when a soul, that has exhausted its vital energies, lowers its life-maintaining activity, and the body, in response, slumbers off.
· Souls Are Conscious But Bored. Under this option, souls remain conscious during sleep, indeed continue to have mental freedom to do as they like, but there is no sensory stimulus coming their way. A big black nothingness is what they mostly experience because access to other realms is impossible from this material order. Memories are formed, but they are of the kind almost immediately forgotten. Nothing happens that’s worth remembering.
· Souls Have Experiences, But Memories Aren’t Stored. In this explanation, souls do have experiences, but what with the brain being asleep, it doesn’t store memories of these experiences and, hence, in the waking state, we can’t remember what we saw and felt in our perhaps native dimension.
Notice that in two of these cased (Bored, Experienced), the function of memory is central. In Case Bored, the mind produces memories with or without the brain’s intermediation; memories are of the same kind (let’s say on the same frequency as ordinary memories) and treated in the same way. We don’t usually remember large boring stretches of experience or simply compress them into a very brief token. The other case, Experienced, assumes that for ordinary remembering the brain must be actively involved; the soul may experience events in some other order, may store memories of these events as well, but on another frequency—which is not accessible to the brain but may be accessible to the soul once it is freed of this dimension.
Now some further comments on these cases. The first suggests that the mere assertion of “immateriality” for the soul is inadequate. Hidden within it is the assumption that soul requires some kind of energy for its own maintenance—which it passes on to the body. So the soul becomes more complex, indeed dualistic in turn, consisting of capacities on the one hand and a sustaining energy on the other.
The second depends on the assumption that different orders or regions exist and that the soul, native in another one, is caught in this one, at least while in the body, and unable to experience, at least effectively, any other. Therefore, deprived of sense stimuli, it sees nothing when the brain shuts down. Boring.
I have nothing more to add to the third case. Each of these cases has a certain plausibility and problems. All depend on variant models of reality which are entirely speculative and supported only, and only in part, by highly subjective experiences of the paranormal. Some of that “evidence” I hope to examine in future posts. Here it might be well, once more, to emphasize the problem of knowledge. We have no idea what a soul is, only the experience of its activity; we don’t know how it got here or why it’s tied to bodies. For explanations we must open books of myth. Tough sledding, this business of the mind.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Brain-Mind Duality: Implications and Issues
I want to look at mind in another way today, more comprehensively that earlier, thus from a rational as well as an empirical point of vantage. These views seem to be in conflict, hence we have “issues” to discuss. The rational approach produces the conviction that mind can’t be an “emergent” phenomenon; it must, it seems, come from another realm. The empirical approach, by contrast, teaches us that a material faculty—the brain—is “almost” always associated with mental activities. I want to record my reasons for putting quotes around the “almost,” but I’ll do that later. Here I want to focus on the difficulties of the brain-mind linkage generally.
From a logical point of view, mind is immaterial, above nature, “metaphysical,” in fact. But if that is so, and reason says so, what is it doing in a body? Why can lesions in the brain block any evidence of it? Why do people sometimes lose their memory after injuries? Why does schizophrenia render individuals defective?
Heads: If mind is transcendental, why does it need a chemical tool?
Tails: But let’s turn that around and show the other side of the coin. If mind is just an emergent property of matter, then what in the name of heaven does life want? What explains the deep urge in matter to wish to become conscious, to struggle, to experience joy, to undergo the humiliations of aging, to suffer, and finally to go out like a candle and turn back into matter once again?
These are the two faces of the coin. Throughout history, people have favored heads over tails. Times like our own, casually materialistic, have also recurred at intervals (usually when civilizations were decaying), but never have masses of people actually adhered to materialism in large numbers in ancient times. Epicureanism is a prominent earlier example. Only small elites, enjoying ample wealth, have ever done so, and not all members of those. Our age is unique in one way only. Thanks to fossil fuels, large majorities have risen high enough from subsistence so that materialism can be accepted by relatively large masses of people, at least passively. The majority of mankind, even in the twenty-first century, still calls for heads. The polling evidence for this is accessible here for the United States and here for the world.
I expect to discuss in other posts the traditional arguments, doctrines, and speculations that attempt to present explanation for the more plausible argument, namely that material bodies make sense for a transcendental agency. They all demand models of the cosmos. Here I simply note the fact by way of introduction.
I’ve discovered, mulling these matters over for years, that other more down-to-earth issues are of considerable interest once we brush away the materialistic explanation and at least for argument’s sake accept the transcendental nature of mind. Most of these issues are in empirical, experiential category. They either support or complicate the explanation. One example and I’ll close.
The core of this example is consciousness and sleep. Where is consciousness when we turn in for the night? If it is extinguished, it would then seem to require a fully functioning brain to manifest it at all. But that would also imply that brains come first, hence mind is an epiphenomenon. This happens to be a favorite materialistic argument, and any one on the other sides is obliged to address it. Now for a corollary. If consciousness remains intact during sleep, why don’t we remember anything about those periods? That question hides a number of others connected with memory, some of which I’ve already touched upon earlier: how are memories stored, how are they retrieved, how are they lost. And what do we find pro or con in studies and writings related to the paranormal.
From a logical point of view, mind is immaterial, above nature, “metaphysical,” in fact. But if that is so, and reason says so, what is it doing in a body? Why can lesions in the brain block any evidence of it? Why do people sometimes lose their memory after injuries? Why does schizophrenia render individuals defective?
Heads: If mind is transcendental, why does it need a chemical tool?
Tails: But let’s turn that around and show the other side of the coin. If mind is just an emergent property of matter, then what in the name of heaven does life want? What explains the deep urge in matter to wish to become conscious, to struggle, to experience joy, to undergo the humiliations of aging, to suffer, and finally to go out like a candle and turn back into matter once again?
These are the two faces of the coin. Throughout history, people have favored heads over tails. Times like our own, casually materialistic, have also recurred at intervals (usually when civilizations were decaying), but never have masses of people actually adhered to materialism in large numbers in ancient times. Epicureanism is a prominent earlier example. Only small elites, enjoying ample wealth, have ever done so, and not all members of those. Our age is unique in one way only. Thanks to fossil fuels, large majorities have risen high enough from subsistence so that materialism can be accepted by relatively large masses of people, at least passively. The majority of mankind, even in the twenty-first century, still calls for heads. The polling evidence for this is accessible here for the United States and here for the world.
I expect to discuss in other posts the traditional arguments, doctrines, and speculations that attempt to present explanation for the more plausible argument, namely that material bodies make sense for a transcendental agency. They all demand models of the cosmos. Here I simply note the fact by way of introduction.
I’ve discovered, mulling these matters over for years, that other more down-to-earth issues are of considerable interest once we brush away the materialistic explanation and at least for argument’s sake accept the transcendental nature of mind. Most of these issues are in empirical, experiential category. They either support or complicate the explanation. One example and I’ll close.
The core of this example is consciousness and sleep. Where is consciousness when we turn in for the night? If it is extinguished, it would then seem to require a fully functioning brain to manifest it at all. But that would also imply that brains come first, hence mind is an epiphenomenon. This happens to be a favorite materialistic argument, and any one on the other sides is obliged to address it. Now for a corollary. If consciousness remains intact during sleep, why don’t we remember anything about those periods? That question hides a number of others connected with memory, some of which I’ve already touched upon earlier: how are memories stored, how are they retrieved, how are they lost. And what do we find pro or con in studies and writings related to the paranormal.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Memory
Sufi-Style Joke
A drunk is looking for his car-keys by night in the circle thrown by a street lamp. His strange behavior draws the attention of a passer-by. He asks the drunk why he’s crawling around feeling the gutter. The drunk mumbles his answer. The passer-by looks around. “Where’s your car?” “Down there,” mumbles the drunk and points into the deep shadows far off under thick trees. “Why are you looking here? Did you drop them here?” “No,” says the drunk, “but there’s no light there. Can’t see anything back there.”
Where’d You Put Those Memories?
Today the New York Times announced successful experiments by neuroscientists to suppress selective memories in mice and rats. That memory is linked to brain chemistry no one doubts, but no one has succeeded in showing that memories are actually stored in the tissues of the brain. That they are stored there is an article of faith; the problem is that no one has produced a testable hypothesis of how that storage is accomplished. What we do know is that different parts of the brain are associated with different activities; the assumption therefore is that memories are polled at certain brain locations for certain behaviors. By inhibiting activities in neuronal synapses using chemical substances of a certain design, we can now interfere with or block memory.
Rupert Sheldrake has proposed the idea* that memory is stored in what he calls morphic fields—off-line, as it were, not in tissue. Memory narrowly defined is but a part of a much more ambitious conceptualization Sheldrake offers to explain the enduring forms we find in nature as a whole, including their evolution. His theory is modestly naturalistic in outline but has enough flavor of the transcendental (undetectable and subtle fields accessed by resonance equally undetectable) so that he is treated as a pariah and heretic by orthodox science.
This is an example of the iron curtain philosophical presuppositions produce in the Borderzone. We cannot actually get any closer to understanding mind—or one of its functionalities, like memory—if we dogmatically restrict our search for answers to places where our light actually shines.
__________
*In Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature. Sheldrake's site is here.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
How Do You Know?
When we hear someone using the phrase in the title above, we’re witnessing epistemology in action. The Greek root of that word is knowledge-knowledge or knowledge-information, knowledge about knowledge, theory of knowledge. English is murkier; it is a Mississippi of a language so that its water is thick with the mud of other tongues. German lives closer to its roots and renders epistemology as knowledge-teaching (Erkenntnislehre); that word defines itself for the young German and doesn’t wear a haughty mask of impenetrability like Epistemology. But behind that Greek mask lurks some fellow asking: “How do you know?”
That is an interesting question, isn’t it? We ask it all the time. We ask it of the TV set, of books, and of our less trusted informants. The most authoritative answer to it is “I was there, I saw it” — or variants: “I had the operation. You want to see my scar?” It is equally fascinating to follow such a dialogue if the questioner isn’t immediately satisfied. If the answer points to a third party, for example, the questioner will next proceed to establish the third party’s competence, his state of knowledge, how he obtained it. We all do this. We are Everyman. When Everyman is trying to get an answer, he can be a ferocious epistemologist without a trace of Greek or philosophy anywhere in sight. Now if we listen carefully, it turns out that the questioner is seeking a two-fold set of facts: One, is the information based on direct experience and, Two, is the source of it a competent, mature, and honest observer. If there is a chain of informants, each must qualify, not least the last person actually responding to the How-do-you-know. Failing to get to this point, the questioner may wave off the answer and dismiss it saying: “Well, that’s just a rumor.”
I find it useful to examine epistemology, or what lies behind it, from this perspective, as understood in ordinary life. In that context there is never any talk of the Correspondence Theory of truth over against the Coherence Theory, no debate between epistemological monism and epistemological dualism. The questioner assumes correspondence to be true unless he has reasons to doubt it; he also demands coherence. Correspondence in this context simply means that what is observed is really there: the words refer to concrete realities. Coherence means that a presentation of data is logically structured. Our questioner ignores the dualism-monism issue as a brand of philosophical baloney. Dualists say that there is a difference between the sensory data reaching the mind and what is really out there—the phenomenon/noumenon pairing. Monists say the two are one and the same thing: “When I see an apple, an apple is what I see.” “Hairsplitting” says our questioner. “Get on with it. I just want to know what happened.”
The questioner’s dual interest, in direct experience and in the adequacy of the reporter, is of interest to me particularly in the context of the mind and related areas: paranormal experience and proof of a beyond. I note here especially that Everyman routinely assumes that people are reliable channels of information provided that we know something about them and their limitations. Indeed Everyman assumes that they are perhaps better sources than instruments. Everyman has reasonable doubts about instruments, jigs, tools, and the like and applies to them the same rules of competency. Some products work better than others. Brand XZ is junk, as he is likely to say. His approach to reality is integrated. He assumes the presence of mind in others and knows how to judge its qualities by various other indicators. But he is no fool; not everyone with arms and legs qualifies as a good informant. I stress this point because orthodox science, in contrast to Everyman, has a positive bias against human experience, never mind the competence of the reporter. It insists on physical measurements as the sole proof of anything. That is the reason why a peculiar form of psychology called behaviorism could get any traction at all: don’t believe what people say; only believe observable behavior.
I make these points at length because, in days to come I want to examine some of empirical evidence—meaning experiential evidence—for the transcendental nature of aspects of reality. In that context it is useful to have in mind how we can know. In virtually all matters that touch on paranormal phenomena, for instance—telepathy or precognition, let us say—good cases are based on the experience of people; the experience itself, however, is inaccessibly to anyone other than the experiencer. A telepathic message is perceived; it doesn’t come as a sound through the air that instruments can capture. Precognitions typically come in dreams. We never say: “Here! Let me run off a copy of my dream for you.” What we encounter in these cases are actual phenomena—but inaccessible except through a single mind. They are direct experiences. How do we know they really happened? We can only know by testimony. How can we trust the testimony? Can we ever do so without a Xerox of the dream? Everyman’s answer is that mind is competent to judge reality to a sufficient degree so that we can confidently speak of certainty. Not all will be believed. But then, to be sure, our physical tools also fail frequently enough so that absolute certainty is pretty much out of our reach.
That is an interesting question, isn’t it? We ask it all the time. We ask it of the TV set, of books, and of our less trusted informants. The most authoritative answer to it is “I was there, I saw it” — or variants: “I had the operation. You want to see my scar?” It is equally fascinating to follow such a dialogue if the questioner isn’t immediately satisfied. If the answer points to a third party, for example, the questioner will next proceed to establish the third party’s competence, his state of knowledge, how he obtained it. We all do this. We are Everyman. When Everyman is trying to get an answer, he can be a ferocious epistemologist without a trace of Greek or philosophy anywhere in sight. Now if we listen carefully, it turns out that the questioner is seeking a two-fold set of facts: One, is the information based on direct experience and, Two, is the source of it a competent, mature, and honest observer. If there is a chain of informants, each must qualify, not least the last person actually responding to the How-do-you-know. Failing to get to this point, the questioner may wave off the answer and dismiss it saying: “Well, that’s just a rumor.”
I find it useful to examine epistemology, or what lies behind it, from this perspective, as understood in ordinary life. In that context there is never any talk of the Correspondence Theory of truth over against the Coherence Theory, no debate between epistemological monism and epistemological dualism. The questioner assumes correspondence to be true unless he has reasons to doubt it; he also demands coherence. Correspondence in this context simply means that what is observed is really there: the words refer to concrete realities. Coherence means that a presentation of data is logically structured. Our questioner ignores the dualism-monism issue as a brand of philosophical baloney. Dualists say that there is a difference between the sensory data reaching the mind and what is really out there—the phenomenon/noumenon pairing. Monists say the two are one and the same thing: “When I see an apple, an apple is what I see.” “Hairsplitting” says our questioner. “Get on with it. I just want to know what happened.”
The questioner’s dual interest, in direct experience and in the adequacy of the reporter, is of interest to me particularly in the context of the mind and related areas: paranormal experience and proof of a beyond. I note here especially that Everyman routinely assumes that people are reliable channels of information provided that we know something about them and their limitations. Indeed Everyman assumes that they are perhaps better sources than instruments. Everyman has reasonable doubts about instruments, jigs, tools, and the like and applies to them the same rules of competency. Some products work better than others. Brand XZ is junk, as he is likely to say. His approach to reality is integrated. He assumes the presence of mind in others and knows how to judge its qualities by various other indicators. But he is no fool; not everyone with arms and legs qualifies as a good informant. I stress this point because orthodox science, in contrast to Everyman, has a positive bias against human experience, never mind the competence of the reporter. It insists on physical measurements as the sole proof of anything. That is the reason why a peculiar form of psychology called behaviorism could get any traction at all: don’t believe what people say; only believe observable behavior.
I make these points at length because, in days to come I want to examine some of empirical evidence—meaning experiential evidence—for the transcendental nature of aspects of reality. In that context it is useful to have in mind how we can know. In virtually all matters that touch on paranormal phenomena, for instance—telepathy or precognition, let us say—good cases are based on the experience of people; the experience itself, however, is inaccessibly to anyone other than the experiencer. A telepathic message is perceived; it doesn’t come as a sound through the air that instruments can capture. Precognitions typically come in dreams. We never say: “Here! Let me run off a copy of my dream for you.” What we encounter in these cases are actual phenomena—but inaccessible except through a single mind. They are direct experiences. How do we know they really happened? We can only know by testimony. How can we trust the testimony? Can we ever do so without a Xerox of the dream? Everyman’s answer is that mind is competent to judge reality to a sufficient degree so that we can confidently speak of certainty. Not all will be believed. But then, to be sure, our physical tools also fail frequently enough so that absolute certainty is pretty much out of our reach.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
The Origin of Mind
If mind does not arise from matter, its origin becomes a metaphysical question by definition and hence escapes empirical proof. Mind is a phenomenon in the original sense of that word, meaning a fact or an event (from the Greek “to show”), but mind is not a phenomenon in the restrictive modern sense meaning something knowable by the senses rather than by thought or intuition. Positive science can only study phenomena it can access by light, contact, chemical, or electromagnetic means. Hence, to use a common analogy, it can only study the radio and never the meaning of the newscast that comes across the airwaves: the brain but not the mind. In similar fashion science can study metabolism and enzymes but cannot come to grip with life itself. It treats both mind and life as emergent phenomena, another word I’d rather render as “transcendent,” meaning that the phenomena cannot be reached by instruments.
Looking at mind in this way suggests that our most fundamental experience of life, being here and knowing that we are, cannot be studied or understood by methods that produce anything but subjective certainties. The operation of the will is a fundamental aspect of the mind. Not surprisingly, therefore, some portion of humanity will always disagree with what might be a common consensus of humanity. The human view of gravity is quite uniform by contrast for the simple reason that those who defy it tend to depart.
Here we have a situation where we know, in a way, but not in another. It’s a common human ailment. Some few have very strong and vivid experiences of transcendental states, but the rest of us must rely on an intuitive judgment of the traditional explanations and then go from there. What are these explanations?
To look at these it is best to stop using “mind” and using “soul” or “self” instead. Tradition prefers these latter expressions. The traditions divide into two big streams. There are many others, but two serve to illustrate the human consensus.
In one, the tradition principally of the West, the soul originates in God and departs in a manner of speaking to live in the midst of the creation. It is destined ultimately to return once more to God. The West thus sees a process of descent followed by an ascent, a cycle of existence with God, away from God, and then once more united. Such a description must not be understood too literally—as if God had a location. The intent here is to indicate a subjective experience of distance even if, as we used to recite in our Unity congregation, “There is no spot where God is not.” In this tradition God creates the soul at a point in time and, as it were, in the form of a seed that must develop through its experiences which, ultimately, result in the completion of the cycle.
The other stream of tradition, exemplified by Hindu beliefs, sees each soul as an emanation from the divine Self, identical to but still a separated part of the divine. It plunges into the lower depths of the creation and, doing so, becomes occluded—but also able to experience itself in new ways by means precisely of this delimitation. The soul occupies a vast range of different bodies in this process until it has shaken off its illusion of limitation and once more becomes one with the Self—thus returns to itself. This too is a descent and an ascent. The difference here lies principally in the definition of the soul. In Hindu beliefs the higher aspect of the soul is God. In the Western tradition, the soul is a creature.
A stark summary such as the above helps the mind focus on the question before us, the origin of mind. A vast literature surrounds these simple descriptions spinning fantastic accounts that elaborate the fundamental idea—which is simply that mind, in both cases, originates in the highest form of being imaginable by a human…mind. In the Western case this mind of ours is formed in the “image and likeness” of its Creator. In the Eastern version, it is the Creator limiting itself deliberately in order to experience its own creation. There is an arbitrary element present in both versions. In one God creates because—well, because he does. In the other the divine Self shrouds itself voluntarily in order to experience. This arbitrary element, however, is strongly present in us as well—and should therefore not surprise us.
The striking aspect of this view of origins is that the human mind, when it looks out at the chaos of the cosmos, when it strains in order to understand what it is and how it might have come about, sees, on looking, an image of itself writ large.
Looking at mind in this way suggests that our most fundamental experience of life, being here and knowing that we are, cannot be studied or understood by methods that produce anything but subjective certainties. The operation of the will is a fundamental aspect of the mind. Not surprisingly, therefore, some portion of humanity will always disagree with what might be a common consensus of humanity. The human view of gravity is quite uniform by contrast for the simple reason that those who defy it tend to depart.
Here we have a situation where we know, in a way, but not in another. It’s a common human ailment. Some few have very strong and vivid experiences of transcendental states, but the rest of us must rely on an intuitive judgment of the traditional explanations and then go from there. What are these explanations?
To look at these it is best to stop using “mind” and using “soul” or “self” instead. Tradition prefers these latter expressions. The traditions divide into two big streams. There are many others, but two serve to illustrate the human consensus.
In one, the tradition principally of the West, the soul originates in God and departs in a manner of speaking to live in the midst of the creation. It is destined ultimately to return once more to God. The West thus sees a process of descent followed by an ascent, a cycle of existence with God, away from God, and then once more united. Such a description must not be understood too literally—as if God had a location. The intent here is to indicate a subjective experience of distance even if, as we used to recite in our Unity congregation, “There is no spot where God is not.” In this tradition God creates the soul at a point in time and, as it were, in the form of a seed that must develop through its experiences which, ultimately, result in the completion of the cycle.
The other stream of tradition, exemplified by Hindu beliefs, sees each soul as an emanation from the divine Self, identical to but still a separated part of the divine. It plunges into the lower depths of the creation and, doing so, becomes occluded—but also able to experience itself in new ways by means precisely of this delimitation. The soul occupies a vast range of different bodies in this process until it has shaken off its illusion of limitation and once more becomes one with the Self—thus returns to itself. This too is a descent and an ascent. The difference here lies principally in the definition of the soul. In Hindu beliefs the higher aspect of the soul is God. In the Western tradition, the soul is a creature.
A stark summary such as the above helps the mind focus on the question before us, the origin of mind. A vast literature surrounds these simple descriptions spinning fantastic accounts that elaborate the fundamental idea—which is simply that mind, in both cases, originates in the highest form of being imaginable by a human…mind. In the Western case this mind of ours is formed in the “image and likeness” of its Creator. In the Eastern version, it is the Creator limiting itself deliberately in order to experience its own creation. There is an arbitrary element present in both versions. In one God creates because—well, because he does. In the other the divine Self shrouds itself voluntarily in order to experience. This arbitrary element, however, is strongly present in us as well—and should therefore not surprise us.
The striking aspect of this view of origins is that the human mind, when it looks out at the chaos of the cosmos, when it strains in order to understand what it is and how it might have come about, sees, on looking, an image of itself writ large.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Can Mind Emerge from Matter?
The question is equivalent to asking whether or not anything useful can appear by accident. On the surface it might appear so. If a steady drop hollows the stone, as the German proverb has it, nature might form a nice-enough spoon by hammering one end of a narrow stone with droplets long enough. But the object wouldn’t be a spoon until some mind recognized the utility of that shape and at one stroke transformed that hollowed stone into a tool. Yet this transformation wouldn’t actually change the stone physically. It is the mind that does this transformation, this re-purposing as modern usage has it.
Implicit in the very concept of utility produced by chance is that some agency must recognize the utility of an object. Until that happens, the object is simply a fact of nature without meaning. Chance hasn’t produced anything useful yet. The object is thus in an order of indifference. When a utility is discovered in it, it comes to coexist, as well, in an order of purposes and meanings.
The difference between a consciously produced object (A) and one formed by accident (B) is that, in the case of A, A’s future useful function guides its very production. In the case of B a function is discovered after an unconscious process that had no intention whatsoever.
In the evolutionary scheme of origins, mind must be material by definition. It must be a function of the brain. The brain is a chemical machine the parts of which—and the convergence and proper linkage of the parts—had to come about by random events of a chemical nature. In this scheme utility is defined by advantages accruing to the individual in whom the changes take place. That individual is more likely to reproduce than another unluckier creature that lacks those advantages.
In this scheme useful innovation takes place entirely without any other agency than the fact that changes produce advantages in reproduction; by this means they aid the survival of the species.
What’s wrong with this picture? Well, it mixes things up a little bit. The picture presented is actually the same as the picture of the drop-hollowed stone. Concepts such as “advantage” and “survival” are not actually present in the naturalistic description of our origins. We’ve introduced those from the outside. Such ideas properly belong in the order of purpose and meaning. If the life process is an extension of the chemical behavior of matter, we cannot really speak about advantages or of survival; we can only talk about outcomes. It is only from our perspective that survival is a value. It is a judgment, a hierarchical ordering of outcomes entirely missing in nature.
What we are facing here is the improbability of deriving from one order (Y) the emergence of another order (Z). If Y does not already contain or possess Z, it cannot produce it. We want the material and specifically the chemical order to produce the order of purpose and of meaning. But in the material we only ever encounter necessity and chance. Here, of course, I’m leaving the whole subject of life as such entirely unexplored. I’m merely pointing out that you cannot derive perception, thought, will, and imagination from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on.
Attempts to do so ultimately rely on the invocation of complexity. It is the modern way of naming the order of meaning and of purpose. Complexity, however, is ultimately only the very intricate arrangement of the same old components. Complexity theory therefore, logically speaking, demands our acceptance of a magical element that simply “emerges” when enough of the same old chemicals are rearranged intricately enough. No explanation of this emergence is ever provided. Thus no one is ready to say why and how the last element linked to the whole would cause it suddenly to burst into consciousness. We are asked to take it on faith. It’s an empirical observation. Really? Before we take that leap of faith, however, another earlier one is required. We must first accept that only the material is actually real.
Implicit in the very concept of utility produced by chance is that some agency must recognize the utility of an object. Until that happens, the object is simply a fact of nature without meaning. Chance hasn’t produced anything useful yet. The object is thus in an order of indifference. When a utility is discovered in it, it comes to coexist, as well, in an order of purposes and meanings.
The difference between a consciously produced object (A) and one formed by accident (B) is that, in the case of A, A’s future useful function guides its very production. In the case of B a function is discovered after an unconscious process that had no intention whatsoever.
In the evolutionary scheme of origins, mind must be material by definition. It must be a function of the brain. The brain is a chemical machine the parts of which—and the convergence and proper linkage of the parts—had to come about by random events of a chemical nature. In this scheme utility is defined by advantages accruing to the individual in whom the changes take place. That individual is more likely to reproduce than another unluckier creature that lacks those advantages.
In this scheme useful innovation takes place entirely without any other agency than the fact that changes produce advantages in reproduction; by this means they aid the survival of the species.
What’s wrong with this picture? Well, it mixes things up a little bit. The picture presented is actually the same as the picture of the drop-hollowed stone. Concepts such as “advantage” and “survival” are not actually present in the naturalistic description of our origins. We’ve introduced those from the outside. Such ideas properly belong in the order of purpose and meaning. If the life process is an extension of the chemical behavior of matter, we cannot really speak about advantages or of survival; we can only talk about outcomes. It is only from our perspective that survival is a value. It is a judgment, a hierarchical ordering of outcomes entirely missing in nature.
What we are facing here is the improbability of deriving from one order (Y) the emergence of another order (Z). If Y does not already contain or possess Z, it cannot produce it. We want the material and specifically the chemical order to produce the order of purpose and of meaning. But in the material we only ever encounter necessity and chance. Here, of course, I’m leaving the whole subject of life as such entirely unexplored. I’m merely pointing out that you cannot derive perception, thought, will, and imagination from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on.
Attempts to do so ultimately rely on the invocation of complexity. It is the modern way of naming the order of meaning and of purpose. Complexity, however, is ultimately only the very intricate arrangement of the same old components. Complexity theory therefore, logically speaking, demands our acceptance of a magical element that simply “emerges” when enough of the same old chemicals are rearranged intricately enough. No explanation of this emergence is ever provided. Thus no one is ready to say why and how the last element linked to the whole would cause it suddenly to burst into consciousness. We are asked to take it on faith. It’s an empirical observation. Really? Before we take that leap of faith, however, another earlier one is required. We must first accept that only the material is actually real.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Mind
It is astonishing, indeed revealing, what a lot of meanings a word like mind leaves in our dictionary—and meanings it leaves out. In Webster’s Collegiate (my 1967 copy) the word is defined as recollection, memory, an element (in individuals), conscious events and capabilities (in organisms), intention, desire, a condition (of mental faculties), opinion, view, disposition, and mood. There are other more derivative meanings in addition.
Concerning the definition of mind given above as an element, the exact words are these: “the element or complex of elements in individuals that feels, perceives, thinks, wills, and esp. reasons.” In this context element may be taken to mean a part or a function. In any case it is something that acts in certain ways.
The Latin root hidden deep under Old English and East and West Germanic derivations is mens, already meaning “mind.” The root of the Latin is the Greek menos meaning spirit. In romance languages like French the ancient meaning is carried forward; mind is esprit. In German the term is Geist; the word also means ghost or spirit. In German other words, including “soul,” are used as equivalents, the majority being narrower aspects of the mind. Hungarians, who speak my mother tongue, translate the English mind by using thirteen different words eleven of which, much as in our own definitions, are simply functions of consciousness; the two remaining words used are one that is “mind” as a single entity; the other one is “soul” or “spirit.”
Although we, as English-speakers, use the mind to include its richer connotations of something transcendent, our dictionaries are more piously coy and avoid linking mind and spirit except in often-skipped recitals of etymology. It’s slightly indecent in secular times even to suggest that something like “spirit” may be related to the mind, hence the use of words like “element”; it has a safely material connotation. The modern mind! This reminds me of Theodore Dalrymple’s tongue-in-cheek definition of murder as “The knife went in.” You can find the story here. The knife went in, perhaps, because the element decided that another martini wouldn’t hurt…
I turn to dictionaries as I turn to the media—not in order to discover authoritative truth but to find raw materials from which the truth might be built up with effort.
Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that the ultimate proof of transcendence is found in consciousness—by means of the power of the mind to reason. An example of the line of thought one tends to pursue is expertly presented by one of my favorites, the Maverick Philosopher, here. Webster’s element, ultimately, must be defined as an agent, the very owner of the mind itself; the mind is one of this agent’s capabilities.
Concerning the definition of mind given above as an element, the exact words are these: “the element or complex of elements in individuals that feels, perceives, thinks, wills, and esp. reasons.” In this context element may be taken to mean a part or a function. In any case it is something that acts in certain ways.
The Latin root hidden deep under Old English and East and West Germanic derivations is mens, already meaning “mind.” The root of the Latin is the Greek menos meaning spirit. In romance languages like French the ancient meaning is carried forward; mind is esprit. In German the term is Geist; the word also means ghost or spirit. In German other words, including “soul,” are used as equivalents, the majority being narrower aspects of the mind. Hungarians, who speak my mother tongue, translate the English mind by using thirteen different words eleven of which, much as in our own definitions, are simply functions of consciousness; the two remaining words used are one that is “mind” as a single entity; the other one is “soul” or “spirit.”
Although we, as English-speakers, use the mind to include its richer connotations of something transcendent, our dictionaries are more piously coy and avoid linking mind and spirit except in often-skipped recitals of etymology. It’s slightly indecent in secular times even to suggest that something like “spirit” may be related to the mind, hence the use of words like “element”; it has a safely material connotation. The modern mind! This reminds me of Theodore Dalrymple’s tongue-in-cheek definition of murder as “The knife went in.” You can find the story here. The knife went in, perhaps, because the element decided that another martini wouldn’t hurt…
I turn to dictionaries as I turn to the media—not in order to discover authoritative truth but to find raw materials from which the truth might be built up with effort.
Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that the ultimate proof of transcendence is found in consciousness—by means of the power of the mind to reason. An example of the line of thought one tends to pursue is expertly presented by one of my favorites, the Maverick Philosopher, here. Webster’s element, ultimately, must be defined as an agent, the very owner of the mind itself; the mind is one of this agent’s capabilities.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Ears That Hear
One of the more interesting philosophical questions—for me, at any rate—is how people get their fundamental stance. By fundament stance I mean their structure of beliefs. Here, of course, I’m principally interested in a subset of the population that engages in the subject rather than merely adopting a position more or less by passive acculturation. This distinction may not be important, however: virtually everyone makes choices and feels leanings.
On the one side we have people—on offer over against them are structures of belief. To keep it simple the big ones are Monism and Dualism. Monistic structures may be materialist or idealist. I would class Pantheism as a monism. The dualistic systems are all, almost by definition, transcendentalist. By that I mean that a dualist believes in two radically different realities, usually labeled matter and spirit; the dualist holds both to be genuine, real, and coexisting in the human form.
I myself strongly lean to the belief that innate sensitivities and intellectual powers, acting in combination, determine a person’s “fundamental stance.” I know, I know. This position, unpacked a little, sounds rather Calvinistic. A Hindu-style karmic belief is also compatible with my hunch. Applying that logic, we might say that a person’s karmic burden may make that person more open or opaque. To give yet another possibility, a “developmental” model of soul formation would be compatible with this notion of innate endowment—provided that we see souls cycling through this lower dimension gradually acquiring the powers to transcend it. In any case, ordinary observation seems strongly to support my view. Some people just don’t get it, as it were—but all other things are equal. Some who “get it” act wretchedly anyway—and many who don’t are exemplars of morality. This is an observation about talents, not about morality.
To emphasize the last point, it would seem that all people are going in the same direction (upward, in the dualist view) but the felt conscious awareness of this process is rather vague, dull, or muted in some—sharp, painful, and clear in others. Whether the individual actually makes progress along the vector is not determined by the innate feeling but by something else. Thus absolute determinism is actually foiled—but a process strongly influenced by elements of chance (such as body-type, genetics, circumstances) is allowed.
On the one side we have people—on offer over against them are structures of belief. To keep it simple the big ones are Monism and Dualism. Monistic structures may be materialist or idealist. I would class Pantheism as a monism. The dualistic systems are all, almost by definition, transcendentalist. By that I mean that a dualist believes in two radically different realities, usually labeled matter and spirit; the dualist holds both to be genuine, real, and coexisting in the human form.
I myself strongly lean to the belief that innate sensitivities and intellectual powers, acting in combination, determine a person’s “fundamental stance.” I know, I know. This position, unpacked a little, sounds rather Calvinistic. A Hindu-style karmic belief is also compatible with my hunch. Applying that logic, we might say that a person’s karmic burden may make that person more open or opaque. To give yet another possibility, a “developmental” model of soul formation would be compatible with this notion of innate endowment—provided that we see souls cycling through this lower dimension gradually acquiring the powers to transcend it. In any case, ordinary observation seems strongly to support my view. Some people just don’t get it, as it were—but all other things are equal. Some who “get it” act wretchedly anyway—and many who don’t are exemplars of morality. This is an observation about talents, not about morality.
To emphasize the last point, it would seem that all people are going in the same direction (upward, in the dualist view) but the felt conscious awareness of this process is rather vague, dull, or muted in some—sharp, painful, and clear in others. Whether the individual actually makes progress along the vector is not determined by the innate feeling but by something else. Thus absolute determinism is actually foiled—but a process strongly influenced by elements of chance (such as body-type, genetics, circumstances) is allowed.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Left to the Poets
All communications ultimately rely on shared experience, and if the experience is subtle, making it known turns problematical; one can’t rely on adequacy in the listener. The world to which Henry Corbin points, the mundus imaginalis, is actually accessible to us, but our experiences of it, especially if they are mild (as mostly they tend to be), we routinely class as mere emotions; we mislabel and dismiss them.
Corbin himself, writing in preface to his Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, writes as follows about the imaginal realm:
The poetically-gifted (in my language “poetic” includes all of the arts) are our most experienced travelers in the imaginal world, not, to be sure, because “imagination” is often involved in the creative arts but because these arts draw their sustenance entirely from the “third” world that Corbin claims modernity has written off. Here the potential for misunderstanding is even more marked. If we select, say, ten novels from the library entirely at random, running through the fiction aisles, maybe with some special luck we’ll manage to pick up one book strongly marked by the poetic spirit. The rest will all be mere entertainment, indeed ordinary secular works. Artistic talent and poetic gifts don’t always coincide. The greats are not always fluent, the clever are rarely poets. Here that common phrase applies: “I know it when I see it.”
There is a Sufi saying that “The mystery hides itself.” This applies with special force to the genuine products of the poetic power. Only those who have ears will hear. The perception remains always private and cannot be socialized—another way of saying that it cannot be conveyed unless the hearer is himself, herself able to hear the message.
Corbin himself, writing in preface to his Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, writes as follows about the imaginal realm:
…the fact remains that between the sense perceptions and the … categories of the intellect there has remained a void [in modern times]. That which ought to have taken its place between the two, and which in other times and places did occupy this intermediate space, that is to say the Active Imagination, has been left to the poets.The poetic and the spiritual are rarely conflated for the simple reason that we class “spiritual” perceptions with religious piety whereas we place the “poetic” in a mental region marked with the sign of Eros; Eros we classify as an inhabitant of the sensate dimension. Herein lies a vast potential for misunderstanding.
The poetically-gifted (in my language “poetic” includes all of the arts) are our most experienced travelers in the imaginal world, not, to be sure, because “imagination” is often involved in the creative arts but because these arts draw their sustenance entirely from the “third” world that Corbin claims modernity has written off. Here the potential for misunderstanding is even more marked. If we select, say, ten novels from the library entirely at random, running through the fiction aisles, maybe with some special luck we’ll manage to pick up one book strongly marked by the poetic spirit. The rest will all be mere entertainment, indeed ordinary secular works. Artistic talent and poetic gifts don’t always coincide. The greats are not always fluent, the clever are rarely poets. Here that common phrase applies: “I know it when I see it.”
There is a Sufi saying that “The mystery hides itself.” This applies with special force to the genuine products of the poetic power. Only those who have ears will hear. The perception remains always private and cannot be socialized—another way of saying that it cannot be conveyed unless the hearer is himself, herself able to hear the message.
Henry Corbin
Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was a great, original, but obscure French philosopher, no doubt the most searching interpreter of Iranian religious culture to the West in the twentieth century—but by no means restricted to that scope. Most of his writings are centered on Mazdaism and Shi’ite Islam. A truly excellent introduction to Corbin is Tom Cheetham’s The World Turned Inside Out. That book, as I’m sure Cheetham himself would agree, is a mere introduction to Corbin, much as Corbin’s entire opus is itself but an introduction to a vast cultural treasure no one can casually absorb. Great obscurity—but equally great splendors—await those who enter here.
Corbin is perhaps best known for introducing the concept of the imaginal world, what he labeled the mundus imaginalis. Not to be confused with the imaginary or with the fantastic, Corbin placed this realm in an intermediate cosmic space between the world of matter and the world of pure intellect, a plane of visionary experience, to which our access is by means of a power Corbin associated with the true imagination, Paracelsus’ imaginatio vera, a visionary power Paracelsus placed in the heart. A culture that cannot recognize this faculty in man and does not help it to develop is doomed to a flat cosmic landscape and an existence polarized between sensory perception and intellectual speculation, unaware of a vertical orientation that gives meaning to existence.
I came across Corbin in an odd way. I was reading an article in Arcana: Inner Dimensions of Spirituality, a journal centered on Swedenborg’s teachings. It occurred to me that Swedenborg’s experiences and those of the twelfth-thirteenth century Ibn el-Arabi had a great many parallels. I sent an e-mail to Leonard Fox, then the editor of Arcana, and suggested that someone ought to be commissioned to write an article on this linkage. Fox answered by suggesting that I read Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam by Henry Corbin, which Fox himself had translated from French into English. I’d never heard of Corbin before. For me this was a significant discovery—and the recommended book my introduction. The first half of the book is titled Mundus Imaginalis—thus I began at the most crucial node of Corbin’s own teachings.
An excellent general-purpose entry point for anyone is Cheetham’s website entitled The Legacy of Henry Corbin.
Corbin is perhaps best known for introducing the concept of the imaginal world, what he labeled the mundus imaginalis. Not to be confused with the imaginary or with the fantastic, Corbin placed this realm in an intermediate cosmic space between the world of matter and the world of pure intellect, a plane of visionary experience, to which our access is by means of a power Corbin associated with the true imagination, Paracelsus’ imaginatio vera, a visionary power Paracelsus placed in the heart. A culture that cannot recognize this faculty in man and does not help it to develop is doomed to a flat cosmic landscape and an existence polarized between sensory perception and intellectual speculation, unaware of a vertical orientation that gives meaning to existence.
I came across Corbin in an odd way. I was reading an article in Arcana: Inner Dimensions of Spirituality, a journal centered on Swedenborg’s teachings. It occurred to me that Swedenborg’s experiences and those of the twelfth-thirteenth century Ibn el-Arabi had a great many parallels. I sent an e-mail to Leonard Fox, then the editor of Arcana, and suggested that someone ought to be commissioned to write an article on this linkage. Fox answered by suggesting that I read Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam by Henry Corbin, which Fox himself had translated from French into English. I’d never heard of Corbin before. For me this was a significant discovery—and the recommended book my introduction. The first half of the book is titled Mundus Imaginalis—thus I began at the most crucial node of Corbin’s own teachings.
An excellent general-purpose entry point for anyone is Cheetham’s website entitled The Legacy of Henry Corbin.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
The Roots of Dualism
In consciousness the presentation of content must be viewed as separate from the perception of content. William James does that, in effect, by discussing the role of attention. The materialistic mode of thought, however, by speaking of attention rather than of the soul or the self, obscures what in effect can be seen as a radical duality. James himself (in Talks to Teachers) rejects the possibility that consciousness can be the consequence of mechanical processes. In this context he means the composite of presentation and perception. The nature of whatever it is that bestows attention to the flow of consciousness is altogether inaccessible to observation, as James himself notes. That this whatever picks and chooses what to notice and what to neglect is the basis for the faculty we call the will. James holds for a free will but thinks that its freedom cannot be proved. To lean in one direction or the other is itself a choice.
The traditional approaches to the mind are based on a narrative of reality in which responsibility is central. In effect you cannot have a meaningful narrative without real characters, thus agents. Agents without freedom of will cannot claim to be agents. Whatever cosmic narrative we choose, the characters within it must have freedom of choice. They need very little else. Angelic communities may rebel, for instance, and this alongside a presumption that they are immaterial. You might say that from the traditional perspective the fact that humans have bodies is almost incidental to their core being. In that agency must have free choice and free choice cannot be conceptualized without understanding of the choices before the agent, the very notion of agency includes consciousness and will in a single complex; you cannot remove one without negating the other.
The content of consciousness must be separate from the act of perception if language is to correspond to reality in any meaningful way. When I say "I am aware of XYZ," I'm positing two distinct phenomenal realities. One is awareness and the other is XYZ. Aquinas argued that the self cannot become aware of itself except by its acts. We can examine this assertion by pondering Franklin Merrell-Wolff's notion of consciousness-without-an-object, M-W's idea of the absolute. That phrase is without meaning. Consciousness-without-an-object is akin to the paradoxical concept of Aristotle's potential, a capacity out there in some ontological limbo without actuality.
In this relationship I discern a fundamental dualism beneath reality. If consciousness is, something else must be there too. The object seen cannot at the same time be the object that sees. Once we accept this, we have a reasonable basis for looking at reality. We have minimal orientation. Neither a materialistic nor a pure idealistic position is tenable. The materialistic view denies the reality of an agency. The idealistic denies the reality of anything over against the agency; it treats everything as a mirage produced by the mind.
The traditional approaches to the mind are based on a narrative of reality in which responsibility is central. In effect you cannot have a meaningful narrative without real characters, thus agents. Agents without freedom of will cannot claim to be agents. Whatever cosmic narrative we choose, the characters within it must have freedom of choice. They need very little else. Angelic communities may rebel, for instance, and this alongside a presumption that they are immaterial. You might say that from the traditional perspective the fact that humans have bodies is almost incidental to their core being. In that agency must have free choice and free choice cannot be conceptualized without understanding of the choices before the agent, the very notion of agency includes consciousness and will in a single complex; you cannot remove one without negating the other.
The content of consciousness must be separate from the act of perception if language is to correspond to reality in any meaningful way. When I say "I am aware of XYZ," I'm positing two distinct phenomenal realities. One is awareness and the other is XYZ. Aquinas argued that the self cannot become aware of itself except by its acts. We can examine this assertion by pondering Franklin Merrell-Wolff's notion of consciousness-without-an-object, M-W's idea of the absolute. That phrase is without meaning. Consciousness-without-an-object is akin to the paradoxical concept of Aristotle's potential, a capacity out there in some ontological limbo without actuality.
In this relationship I discern a fundamental dualism beneath reality. If consciousness is, something else must be there too. The object seen cannot at the same time be the object that sees. Once we accept this, we have a reasonable basis for looking at reality. We have minimal orientation. Neither a materialistic nor a pure idealistic position is tenable. The materialistic view denies the reality of an agency. The idealistic denies the reality of anything over against the agency; it treats everything as a mirage produced by the mind.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Cosmic Models
When we imagine myths of the world, even one of a small part of it, the tale must match the subject. Now any one human life certainly fits the personal scale, but it cannot be viewed except in a broader context: we all live our lives embedded in history’s flow. I was a small pebble but rolled along by the enormous weather of the twentieth century. You cannot reach a moderately educated level unaware of history’s depth or nature’s incredible complexity.
Whatever the human story, it is a vast tale of great moment and scope and cannot be reduced to simple concepts. In effect reality, even the portions of it we can see, cannot be fitted to a line of logic; it requires a saga at the least. To say that much is also to admit that we cannot really know the big picture in the full. It’s damnably difficult even to know a small part of the physical world. I recall one of my incarnations and remember how little we know about something like cement—and we know a lot about it.
This by way of commentary on models of reality. The philosophical attempts that come close to being satisfying have an architectural character or depict a dynamic process, usually triadic. Monistic systems tend to be rather pathetic because they have no point.
The Aristotelian scheme, completed by Thomas Aquinas, is a static structure built up out of the duality of matter and form. These may be rendered as the potential and the actual or, in other phrasing, the virtually nonexistent (unformed matter) and absolute Being, pure form or actuality, God. “Potential” is one of those wonderfully ambiguous concepts; it exists in a way but in another “not yet.” The Thomistic system ultimately feels incoherent; it has matter but doesn’t really need it. In a cosmos where immaterial beings exist, materiality requires some kind of justification; the theory doesn’t justify it. To be coherent this philosophy requires that duality be extended upward (ever more subtle matter to match ever more exalted spirit) or spirit must be extended downward (matter is thus densified spirit).
Taoism is a triadic, dynamic system in that it provides a creative and receptive (Yang, Yin) which account for the dynamism of the Tao. As a description of reality the Tao is flawless: freedom and necessity in motion forming an unnamable third which is their origin and their expression. The Tao is the ultimate cosmic building kit. You find it hidden beneath just about every cosmology ever made. It’s there in Aristotle, Yin being matter, Yang being form. At it is, however, it requires enormous restraint simply to accept as is. People are tempted to elaborate.
Monistic systems take one or the other of the two elements of Tao and exclude the other. There is Schopenhauer’s Will—which is everything. There is materialism’s Matter—ditto.
The philosophies, however, ultimate stop short of meaning. There is no personality here—although in systems where it’s introduced, it is the Yang. The great sagas introduce meaning by way of a drama in which the two are in conflict for one or several cosmic ages. We are usually minor participants, sometimes at the center (as in Christianity). And our fates are part of the greater history of a vast heavenly turbulence.
The really effective cosmologies—such as, for instance, the fable of the Island—provide a story that goes beyond our direct experience in order to explain its intuited origins and its felt continuation beyond death, but do not attempt to lay down an absolute and final meaning for the entire process. Our inner guidance actually rejects a final explanation. Our intuition (mine anyway) says that the ultimate picture is not knowable from our perspective.
Whatever the human story, it is a vast tale of great moment and scope and cannot be reduced to simple concepts. In effect reality, even the portions of it we can see, cannot be fitted to a line of logic; it requires a saga at the least. To say that much is also to admit that we cannot really know the big picture in the full. It’s damnably difficult even to know a small part of the physical world. I recall one of my incarnations and remember how little we know about something like cement—and we know a lot about it.
This by way of commentary on models of reality. The philosophical attempts that come close to being satisfying have an architectural character or depict a dynamic process, usually triadic. Monistic systems tend to be rather pathetic because they have no point.
The Aristotelian scheme, completed by Thomas Aquinas, is a static structure built up out of the duality of matter and form. These may be rendered as the potential and the actual or, in other phrasing, the virtually nonexistent (unformed matter) and absolute Being, pure form or actuality, God. “Potential” is one of those wonderfully ambiguous concepts; it exists in a way but in another “not yet.” The Thomistic system ultimately feels incoherent; it has matter but doesn’t really need it. In a cosmos where immaterial beings exist, materiality requires some kind of justification; the theory doesn’t justify it. To be coherent this philosophy requires that duality be extended upward (ever more subtle matter to match ever more exalted spirit) or spirit must be extended downward (matter is thus densified spirit).
Taoism is a triadic, dynamic system in that it provides a creative and receptive (Yang, Yin) which account for the dynamism of the Tao. As a description of reality the Tao is flawless: freedom and necessity in motion forming an unnamable third which is their origin and their expression. The Tao is the ultimate cosmic building kit. You find it hidden beneath just about every cosmology ever made. It’s there in Aristotle, Yin being matter, Yang being form. At it is, however, it requires enormous restraint simply to accept as is. People are tempted to elaborate.
Monistic systems take one or the other of the two elements of Tao and exclude the other. There is Schopenhauer’s Will—which is everything. There is materialism’s Matter—ditto.
The philosophies, however, ultimate stop short of meaning. There is no personality here—although in systems where it’s introduced, it is the Yang. The great sagas introduce meaning by way of a drama in which the two are in conflict for one or several cosmic ages. We are usually minor participants, sometimes at the center (as in Christianity). And our fates are part of the greater history of a vast heavenly turbulence.
The really effective cosmologies—such as, for instance, the fable of the Island—provide a story that goes beyond our direct experience in order to explain its intuited origins and its felt continuation beyond death, but do not attempt to lay down an absolute and final meaning for the entire process. Our inner guidance actually rejects a final explanation. Our intuition (mine anyway) says that the ultimate picture is not knowable from our perspective.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
The Fable of the Island
The Gnostic idea is almost never contemplated by modern people realistically, not even by those with a transcendental bent. The chief reason for that, perhaps, is that the organic world is too well made to assign it to a bumbling demiurge. At the same time there is pattern in nature which, alas, suggests the—natural. It is therefore difficult to see Nature as the creation of an all-knowing and perfect craftsman. There is too much reliance in it on chance and circumstance. It is for this very reason that in Catholic tradition, anyway, the Fall of the world is stipulated in order so that we can have it both ways. This tradition envisions the “original” creation as perfect. The “natural” world comes about later as the consequence of the Fall. Concerning the Fall we might paraphrase Voltaire and say that if it hasn’t happened we’d have to invent it. Pick any period in history at random and you will see a clear madness overshadowing human reality. Meanwhile the natural world retains its sanity and innocence while also displaying a maddening ambiguity: unconscious consciousness, unaware wisdom, blind teleology. For a quick capsule of Gnosticism, look here.
Idries Shah offers what he calls a fable in The Sufis (Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964) vaguely reminiscent of the Gnostic myth but quite different in thrust. It depicts a fall, but in a different way—as a necessary adaptation. I count myself a friend and admirer of the Sufi tradition—drawn in its direction precisely by such formulations as Shah’s fable of the Island. Shah proposes—not as a factual situation but as a framework for thought—that humanity might be pictured as a community living in a much more perfect state. Its leader foresaw a change coming about which would cause the community’s habitation to be unusable for an extended period of time. In consequence a new place, an Island, is found as the home for the community, but with conditions such that the individuals must undergo a radical transformation to survive in the new environment. These adaptive transformations are so profound that return to the more favorable climes of the motherland requires a long and arduous process. The community moves from a subtle and superior world to a coarser and grainier reality; to make the process easier on people, most members are caused to forget the original country except in the vaguest sort of way; they’re shielded from the past to lessen their pain of loss. There is a good deal more to the fable, but this much will suffice here. Naturally I would suggest that people read the book—at least its first chapter, where the fable is presented.
Unlike most myths, Shah’s fable avoids producing a full-blown cosmology. What he presents (at least as I interpret it) is a picture of large scale interactions between dimensional realms—interactions severe enough so that their inhabitants must adapt themselves to unwished-for events. The fable works as an explanatory framework under certain assumptions. One is that many communities of beings exist, thus a vast concourse of freedom. The communities live in similarly many environments, the environments themselves subject to lawful changes: a realm of necessity. Shah leaves untouched how all of these communities and environments might relate to one another. Suffice it to say, simply, that freedom and necessity, in interaction, can produce major changes requiring adaptation; and some of these will be better than others.
We might call this a modified Gnostic myth—or a modernized, secularized Gnostic tale. Instead of an errant aeon called Sophia, the cause of the world’s fall from a level of subtle sophistication and deep purpose to a much coarser level of materiality and chance is explained in terms of something like climate change (in an era when that phrase did not have modern connotations of global warming). But never mind. This fable also depicts a fall, and that’s really my point: some kind of a fall must be assumed. The negative aspect of the Fall is required by the “natural” arrangement of things; our world is far from perfect. The presumed higher origin (the higher region from which we fell) is required by the presence here of consciousness and intelligence. I myself consider the doctrine of intelligence as an “emergent form of matter” ridiculous because logically insupportable—really a form of magic. For those who can accept the modern Big Bang theory without unease (I myself am very uneasy about it), the Big Bang might actually represent a factual underpinning that weird things happen in the cosmos out there.
This fable-making is really a balancing act. You have to admire nature, meaning organic nature; you cannot go to the lengths Gnostics went and simply dismiss all of it; we know too much to agree with that sentiment. What Shah’s fable does is to introduce a neutral point of departure (disturbance of our habitation) and a creative response to it by an already conscious community. Indeed the “island” might be viewed as a very good symbol for the Earth. Not a lot of places in the material cosmos are suitable for life. The cause for the evil we experience as genuine evil, meaning willful evil, is ignorance produced by the occultations of a new habitation. The price we pay for a reasonable fable is to defer grander explanations to another time. There is no explanation here of how either the community or its environment originated. And even that is justified: Why should we presume total knowledge of everything in our community of being? Especially while, as Shah would have us see, our job now is to make it back again from our temporary abode on the Island to the lands where we originated.
Idries Shah offers what he calls a fable in The Sufis (Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964) vaguely reminiscent of the Gnostic myth but quite different in thrust. It depicts a fall, but in a different way—as a necessary adaptation. I count myself a friend and admirer of the Sufi tradition—drawn in its direction precisely by such formulations as Shah’s fable of the Island. Shah proposes—not as a factual situation but as a framework for thought—that humanity might be pictured as a community living in a much more perfect state. Its leader foresaw a change coming about which would cause the community’s habitation to be unusable for an extended period of time. In consequence a new place, an Island, is found as the home for the community, but with conditions such that the individuals must undergo a radical transformation to survive in the new environment. These adaptive transformations are so profound that return to the more favorable climes of the motherland requires a long and arduous process. The community moves from a subtle and superior world to a coarser and grainier reality; to make the process easier on people, most members are caused to forget the original country except in the vaguest sort of way; they’re shielded from the past to lessen their pain of loss. There is a good deal more to the fable, but this much will suffice here. Naturally I would suggest that people read the book—at least its first chapter, where the fable is presented.
Unlike most myths, Shah’s fable avoids producing a full-blown cosmology. What he presents (at least as I interpret it) is a picture of large scale interactions between dimensional realms—interactions severe enough so that their inhabitants must adapt themselves to unwished-for events. The fable works as an explanatory framework under certain assumptions. One is that many communities of beings exist, thus a vast concourse of freedom. The communities live in similarly many environments, the environments themselves subject to lawful changes: a realm of necessity. Shah leaves untouched how all of these communities and environments might relate to one another. Suffice it to say, simply, that freedom and necessity, in interaction, can produce major changes requiring adaptation; and some of these will be better than others.
We might call this a modified Gnostic myth—or a modernized, secularized Gnostic tale. Instead of an errant aeon called Sophia, the cause of the world’s fall from a level of subtle sophistication and deep purpose to a much coarser level of materiality and chance is explained in terms of something like climate change (in an era when that phrase did not have modern connotations of global warming). But never mind. This fable also depicts a fall, and that’s really my point: some kind of a fall must be assumed. The negative aspect of the Fall is required by the “natural” arrangement of things; our world is far from perfect. The presumed higher origin (the higher region from which we fell) is required by the presence here of consciousness and intelligence. I myself consider the doctrine of intelligence as an “emergent form of matter” ridiculous because logically insupportable—really a form of magic. For those who can accept the modern Big Bang theory without unease (I myself am very uneasy about it), the Big Bang might actually represent a factual underpinning that weird things happen in the cosmos out there.
This fable-making is really a balancing act. You have to admire nature, meaning organic nature; you cannot go to the lengths Gnostics went and simply dismiss all of it; we know too much to agree with that sentiment. What Shah’s fable does is to introduce a neutral point of departure (disturbance of our habitation) and a creative response to it by an already conscious community. Indeed the “island” might be viewed as a very good symbol for the Earth. Not a lot of places in the material cosmos are suitable for life. The cause for the evil we experience as genuine evil, meaning willful evil, is ignorance produced by the occultations of a new habitation. The price we pay for a reasonable fable is to defer grander explanations to another time. There is no explanation here of how either the community or its environment originated. And even that is justified: Why should we presume total knowledge of everything in our community of being? Especially while, as Shah would have us see, our job now is to make it back again from our temporary abode on the Island to the lands where we originated.
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