Premonitions

Herewith a link to a straightforward story presented by National Public Radio of a young boy's premonition of his own death (hat tip to a member of my family). For those of us of a modern mind but curious and hardy enough to patrol the borders of this zone, nothing is more interesting than reports from our immediate time of what counts as empirical evidence of a wider sphere of reality than is officially countenanced.

Notes on Existentialism

The formalism that this philosophy seems to represent is that there is a difference between Being and Existence, that earlier philosophies saw being as prior and durable and existence either as secondary or as something “added” to essence; thus essence before existence. Existentialism, to the contrary, turns this around: “existence precedes essence,” as formulated by Sartre.

Despite reading Kierkegaard and Sartre (now also reading Heidegger), I’ve always felt untouched by the above philosophical formulation for the simple reason that, try as I might, I can’t detect a shred of difference between existence and being. That difference must have roots in the philosophical notion that goes back to Plato, namely that form is eternal and matter is changeable and therefore instances of it are “corruptible.” Thus existence requires materiality. My own puzzling over the form-matter duality led me in other directions. Here are some points on that:

• In the modern understanding of matter, we find structure (“form”) at the lowest possible levels. In other words, we always find matter already formed.
• We understand reality in terms of processes. Any even superficial study of embryology or the development of plants from seeds reveals a process.
• I resolve the form-matter dualism by holding that form is an intention. The intention behind something that “comes about” may begin very fuzzily, but the steadfast intention guides the process of creation, sometimes by fits and starts. Intention fits my observations (and explains things) much better than a static form or matrix existing in some transcendental realm which is then expressed as a materialized form.
• I see things coming about only in two ways: by chance or by intention. Production of phenomena by chance only requires energy and matter; preexisting things have to be in motion. All other entities that come about come about by intention. And in those cases, “intention precedes existence,” not the other way around. So—if I associate intention with form and from with essence and essence with being (esse means being in Latin)—I am an essentialist.

But aside from this formulaic approach, I feel that existentialism, as it actually originated, introduced valuable new ways of thought—never mind the cosmic conclusions drawn from it by various thinkers. It might have been better if this school of philosophy had been called subjectivism. The genuine rooting of it is a focus on the actual experience of being, existence, or whatever words you wish to use. Heidegger called it “being there.”

In my own thinking about this subject—strictly privately, in hundreds of pages of diary entries extending back decades—the point of departure has always been consciousness, self-awareness, the sharp, alert, awake sort of thing—not the psychologists’ description of mentation. I realize now (my readings of Sartre and Kierkegaard took place in the 1950s and 1960s) that my approach is also grounded in a subjective polarity. I’ve always tended to put the ancient Greeks and the scholastic off to one side—not because their work wasn’t elegant and beautifully developed but because for me it has always seemed to be a game with concepts the direct likes of which I could not detect in myself or in my experience. If I consult my own experience and approach, then my methodology is certainly existentialist. Coming no, going yes—you might say.

Concentration

It strikes me that one of the distinguishing characteristics of being human, thus of consciousness and self-awareness, is the ability to concentrate at will. Animals are quite capable of concentration too, but it is not under their voluntary control. I observe this on every walk I take, especially this time of year. The squirrels are in the final phase of their preparations for the coming winter. They’re all over the place. And I can see how the environment directs their attention and compels their action. Every squirrel, every time will climb the nearest tree or hide under the nearest bush if, as I walk by them, I get close enough to them.

Voluntary action is the hallmark of transcendence. It requires a kind of separateness from the physical. The separation is rarely very great, but there it is. It is that “cubic millimeter” of separation Carlos Castaneda attributed to his real or invented sorcerer-guru, Don Juan. I am, of course, not talking about reflexive actions; controlling them requires extraordinary training. Nor do I refer to spontaneous heroism in situations of sudden crisis—self-defense or defense of the child. I once saw the strangest sight. It was a chipmunk “standing up” to one of our cats. It had been cornered; there it was, about to be killed. It rose on its hind legs and made warding off motions at the cat while making a hissing sort of sound. The cat, for whatever reasons—perhaps my immediate proximity distracted it—did not immediately act. The chipmunk then absconded. But for a moment, heroically, it was ready to face down the vast predator that over-loomed it. I don’t mean that sort of thing. We—whatever that word means—are tightly woven into our bodies. What is amazing is that we can indeed over-come the material at will.

What this suggests to me is that culture—personal as well as collective—will manifest itself in forms that signal concentration and detachment. By contrast, decadence will manifest itself as an increase in spontaneity, informality, and distraction. My classing spontaneity with decadence will rub some people wrong—rubs me wrong too, you might say. But I’ll say more about that in a moment. Processes that proceed in an automated way, stimulus followed by response, resemble the natural, the lower, the physical. Processes triggered by intentions, where the intention follows and guides the development—these are of a higher order.

The life process itself, as I see it, is the action of something high gathering strength and gradually freeing itself from its entanglement in the lower. Therefore life has direction. It is teleological. It manifests in increasing levels of order—and this order opposes, counters the random arrangement of the physical. Chance operates in the material plane, mind creates order. In humans the first possibilities of genuine detachment occur, and these manifest as concentration and conscious volition.

The process, in the human realm, has a cyclic pattern. Thus it manifests as cultural development followed by exhaustion and decay. Oddly enough our very success in organizing matter leads to decay. The pressures of necessity ease up. In consequence we relax our concentration, let go of our formalities, and permit ourselves to be distracted. Distraction requires much less effort. It is going with the flow, as it were. Ours is an age of exhaustion—and let’s not be deceived by our fantastic wealth, brilliant technology, and celebrated diversity. The whole structure of life today is organized to maximize distraction. That is what a culture of consumption produces. Things, things, things. Faster and faster. Flicker and flicker. Instant gratification is followed by equally instant dissatisfaction. Which calls for an immediate fix. And so on it goes. By contrast any activity that requires sustained, focused attention will appear as boring, old-fashioned, out-of-it rather than with-it. I maintain three blogs. Of these one is amusing, sharp-witted, and stimulating. One is cultural in focus but entertaining on a higher level. And this one is much more concentrated. Which one has the least readership? You guessed it. This one. Why? It requires concentration to follow.

Now a note about spontaneity. There is a lower kind which is reflexive. And then there is the higher kind. It is the higher kind that we actually admire and see manifested in the great works of art. But that kind of spontaneity arises from a great surplus of power built up over long periods of sustained effort, mastering higher forms of expression. And when it begins to operate, it looks effortless and yet produces wonderfully ordered structures. That spontaneity is valuable. The other kind even the drunk displays in various amusing and destructive forms.

Immortality

When we speak about the real, we are using a word derived from the Latin word res, meaning thing. The common designator “real estate” points to the most basic object of ownership, the fixed, permanent, physical, and immovable. When we use a phrase like “airy-fairy,” we mean the poetic, the imaginary—the insubstantial products of the human mind that cannot be pinned down because they’re not “concrete.” It is thus rather curious that the belief in some kind of immortality is so ancient and persistent. This belief takes various forms. In Asia the body is thought to perish but the soul or essence to move on, taking up another body to inhabit, unless the person has succeeded in escaping the Wheel of Karma and therefore rises to some higher realm. In the West we have a curious structure of beliefs. The soul is held to be immortal; the body dies; the soul exists in an imperfect manner after death; but at the end of time there is also a resurrection of bodies.

When the philosophers get involved, things get more complicated. Aristotle had the idea that if anything survives after we die, it is some “intellectual core.” As best as I can make out, this view is incompatible with Aristotle’s general scheme of things—the scheme of matter-form substantiality in which only the combination of the two is real; unformed matter and immaterial form exist in a kind of limbo called potentiality. Aristotle can be interpreted to say that personality remains in that surviving “intellectual core”—or that what survives is an impersonal intellect, hence the person disappears with death. In Plato’s view the survival of the soul is derived from its very definition; the soul is defined as simple; the simple cannot be corrupted because it has no parts, hence it is immortal. That is a neat argument, but beyond that it throws no light.

The understanding of the man on the street—and I class myself with him—is that immortality is meaningless unless we, ourselves, personally survive and have capacities for thought, memory, feeling, will, and action. Thus immortality for me is essentially linked to consciousness, and by consciousness I mean all of its usual tooling. In theories of reincarnation there is a radical forgetting between death and birth. Functionally that sounds equivalent to materialism for me unless more is asserted. The essential something that I am is lost in the process. Therefore this kind of “survival” lacks content and meaning.

I think that belief in immortality arose because, without it, all meaning disappears. Immortality is neither narcissistic nor a self-pleasing delusion. It is a necessary condition for any kind of meaning to be present at all. Consider. We live, strive, suffer, and hope; we love others, we work together, struggle, and share joys. What is the point of all this if it leads to nothing? Why did my Mother live, love, struggle, and suffer? And yes, she did suffer a great deal. What was the meaning of her efforts, the love she dispensed to four generations, the sacrifices she made—if she just vanished, after all that, without a trace? So that immortal genes could propagate—as some would have it? So that immortal memes could pass through her mind? If her existence is considered terminal, all of her acts had meaning in a process of life viewed impersonally, but she did not.

Life takes its deepest meaning from its directional flow, its end-seeking character. All of its moment to moment experiences also take their meaning from the onward flow. If the end of life turns out to be nothing—disappearance, cessation, vanishing—then the entire process loses its meaning as well. We understand this in our depths but, faced with the rude fact of death, we find it abruptly contradicted. It doesn’t take too much puzzling about the matter to conclude that the answer to this process must lie hidden in another dimension, on that side of the borderzone.

This line of thought is of the very essence of at least personal philosophy. The public, professional forms, of course, range over a much wider field of concepts; passions run high, schools compete, egos strive, etc. I am an old man at present, over seventy, so it might be thought that this sort of thing gets urgent when you’re nearing the ultimate passage. But, I must confess, this kind of thought preoccupied me even when I was a mere youngster in the Army and quite a wild man and about as far removed from philosophy as you can get.

China’s Religious Experience

I’ve always considered the religious forms native to China the most sophisticated—at least in comparison with religious forms in India and in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim world. The last three, of course, are closely related. The specifically Chinese forms are a belief in spirits, especially those of the ancestors, and Taoism, a much later mystical form, in which the ultimate is pictured as a transcendental All. The chief similarity of Chinese and all other religions is that it is based on a conviction that a spirit world exists beyond this one. The chief difference lies in the absence of a personified God, a God whose characteristics are based on the human model. The great benefit of the religious view for the Chinese people has been that a sophisticated view of the All High is almost impossible to exploit for political purposes. Hence China has been spared the vicious religious wars that have plagued other parts of the globe.

Of course, as many, many people have observed over time, The Chinese temperament is practical and down to earth. Indeed, calling it a “temperament” is probably wrong. It is a cultural blessing, in a way—and in China the culture has been pretty continuous for at least 4000 years. No lesser person than D.T. Suzuki has elaborated this very point. Suzuki, a Japanese, is the chief introducer of Zen Buddhism to the West, and in his Essay in Zen Buddhism, he too stresses the point. Zen, as he points out, is as much a Chinese creation as an Indian, and Zen Buddhism is practical and down to earth.

This works out well. Ancestor worship enlarges the sense of living in this dimension by extending it into the invisible. The ancestors are seen as able to influence one’s banal fortunes in this dimension—and we can please ancestors by upholding the ethical norms. So at the bottom of society. At its highest levels, the concept of Heaven, impersonal but not unaware, has been developed as the sanction of rule. Those whom Heaven favors, have the Mandate of Heaven. Those whom Heaven would depose are deprived of the mandate and, no matter what they do, they will swept away. It is the only culture on the planet in which the personal virtue of the ruler is conceived of as directly related to success in governing a realm—and in which the ruler’s chief activity is to let ordinary people live while keeping the lesser lords from exploiting them. That works for me.

And then, at the very highest levels, the mystical and philosophical, the conception of divinity is appropriately high, always reverent, never inclined to suggest that you can bribe, fool, or otherwise influence the highest. It shall prevail, through any and all contingencies at precisely the distance from us which we also feel when contemplating our own puny selves.

On Love: Well Worth Reading

Herewith a pointer to what I consider to be a superb, brief post entitled “Aquinas on Amor” on Siris. It is a repost of an entry that first appeared last year. Aquinas had a crystal-clear vision, and here it is summarized with skill and parsimony. Click here to see it.

Our Strange Environment

Someday we may discover—after we have passed the border—just how strange an environment surrounded us in life, especially if we spent our time in a modern, highly mechanized urban civilization, out of intimate contact with nature.

Out in nature we’re always in close relationship with living systems, whether we live an agricultural, hunting-gathering, or a herding life. Of course I don’t mean modern agriculture with all of its endless machines and chemical underpinnings. These thoughts occur because I’ve been reading, again, the novels of Alexander McCall Smith, creator of Mma Ramotswe, Botswana’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective. In that book quite frequently we are reminded of an earlier way of life, herding cattle in the arid regions adjoining the Kalahari desert in Africa.

The other root of this notion arises from retirement—and age. In a way, with leisure, I’ve been thrown back into my youth, a period of greater openness, then, as now, to the world of intuitions and ideas, not in the sense of concepts but of perceptions of a higher character. And these, it seems to me, are often indistinguishable from the perceptions that reach us by way of the natural world—the plants, the grasses, the trees, the birds, the animals. The living things, strange though it may sound, are also the worlds of poetry, music, epics, tales, novels, great dramas, and immortal myths.

That on which we focus our attention—that, in turn, takes root in us. Attention is a kind of identification. If we attend to the myriad issues and problems of modern life, that modern life invades our soul and takes up its residence in us. And our perception of reality then becomes, well, industrialized. We see everything in terms of the outer—because we attend to it, indeed must do so.

One of the powerful tools we have to combat this invasion of our natural waters by alien flora and fauna is recurring, periodic detachment. That doesn’t have to take the form of meditation, diaries, worship, or things of that nature. We can also recover our fundamental reality by walks in parks, gardening, or working with our hands outdoors or in.

With age—in which experience has amassed a great deal of visceral as well as formal knowledge—attentive listening eventually produces the strange feeling that what we take to be reality is an artificial construct. It mostly hides that which are, in our essence, and that which really surrounds us, not just in the immediate quarter-mile or so but including the heavens above reaching infinitely far outward (on the visible plain) and in realms only known from myths (in the invisible).

Keep notes. Someday we may have occasion to compare them.

Border Region ABCs

Sometimes we have experiences in which the facts are crystal clear, yet these facts conspire to produce in us emotional contact with something grand: awe, love, union, exaltation. We might actually shiver. To make this sharper: We understand the situation perfectly well. At the same time we have emotions. The two coincide and it is impossible to separate the two sets of facts, the cognitive grasp to one side, the feeling to the other. They go together. They are mutually supportive.

I contrast this to experiencing pure music—no words. We may have powerful emotions, but there is no cognitive counterpart. We can project a cognitive frame in order to explain the music. We might imagine a marriage in heaven, say, and the great climax of the music as the final embrace. Or we may imagine a victorious army taking possession, at last, of the field of battle. But these are—projections. We supply the cognitive frame. It isn’t really present in the music in any even remotely visible or graspable form.

Similarly we sometimes experience cognitive insights entirely devoid of any feelings except, perhaps, a certain satisfaction that we have finally understood the puzzle. We may have an Aha! moment, but it is just a flash.

We can label these three experiences as A, B, and C. Now the question arises, which is the best?

I pose this question because, in accounts of mystical experiences—a good example is the medieval, fourteenth century anonymous work called The Cloud of Unknowing—the middle position, B, pure feeling and the impossibility of knowledge, is held out as the ultimate. And in countless other accounts of a similar kind, however they might be labeled, the same conclusion is drawn.

Now I characterize these three experiences using other imagery. I see B and C as polarities. The ecstatic state is pure emotion but, if carried to its ultimate expression, it is equivalent to annihilation. Not surprisingly, annihilation is one meaning of nirvana, and, I would submit, so is the idea of union with God. So great is the difference between creature and creator, that the first united with the other is nothing at all. The pure cognitive breakthrough, C, pure intellectual grasp, also carries a negative connotation for me. It is ultimately far too abstract. That is why metaphysics bores me. Pure concepts, pure numbers—who cares.

The only interesting experience, for me, is the first, A, in which the two polarities appear in relationship and, at best, in union—but not in fusion. Knowledge and feeling are present and remain distinct, each supporting the other.

But this position implies duality and hence is denigrated. In pure idealism or mysticism, monism reigns supreme. In one the intellect, in the other feeling are viewed as illusory. Monisms, invariably, lack all dynamism and life. To have real union, you must first have separation. And this very separation is the womb of life. It spawns the desire for union and the energy whereby the separated strive for union again. If you believe the mystics, this striving terminates in annihilation. My intuition shakes its head. For me each union is but the prelude to another separation, followed by another motion upward in a spiraling ascent.

Knotty Issue - Art

I am not altogether happy with the last post (Art, Spirituality)—another way to put it, that post needs elaboration.  The problems are these:

• The arts require the spiritual dimension, and all those who engage in the arts do, in a sense, borrow the fire of the gods.
• But in the arts, as in everything else, the intention is the determining factor. I noted correctly that art is the language of spirituality, but it can be a borrowed language to speak about more mundane things. At the same time, if will is moved by a perception of the spiritual realm, thus if the artist is obeying the Muse rather than using energies that flow from her to shape some intention directed downward, as it were, the art will still be illuminated from above, but it is the intention which governs the ultimate expression.

These two issues explain why all sorts of arts—commercial, pure entertainment, the fawning art that celebrates power and fame, the arts of propaganda, and quite evil arts intended to gain profit from lower drives are all, by some, classified as art. To the extent that these differentiations are blurred or overlooked, the last entry is incomplete. These are knotty issues. Let me elaborate on each of the two points above.

Borrowed Inspiration

Here is an example. Someone published a novel a couple of decades ago entitled On the Beach. The intention behind this novel was fundamentally political—anti-nukes. Yet it took the form of an artistic creation, with characters and plot. It evoked emotions, used imagination, etc. Now the novel just happened to be relatively undistinguished, but often quite advanced works of art appear, each moved by an agenda drawn from the lower levels of existence. The creative process, no matter what the artist’s intention, is energized by that aspect of ourselves which reaches beyond the here-and-now. Thus it borrows energy to achieve worldly aims. Now, arguably, all human creations have a range of motives in which the lower levels are also present. But great art is distinguished from the ordinary kinds by a motive obeying an attraction from above, aiming to unite with the mysterious higher—not in order to sell or influence anybody but purely for the sake of art, thus purely from a perceived spiritual inspiration. Such art is marked by its orientation. Never mind the details: the substance, the story, the style. The inner orientation is what makes the difference. In these situations nothing is borrowed “in order to.” The work proceeds from love. The pursuit of the arts, in this second form, is a spiritual striving. To be sure it isn’t felt as such because, in our culture, spiritual action is almost always pent up in kennels, as it were. If the activity is not outwardly religious, if it isn’t lit by the lights of dogma, is not intellectually aligned with the religious, and/or is not characterized by various kinds of voluntary self-denial, asceticism, and the like—then it is denied the definition.

The Ambiguity of Art

Such denial is in part very much justified precisely because the category, art, is such a muddled mixture. This is nicely documented by the prevailing the tongue-in-cheek question we’ve all heard used, always with a touch of irony: “Yes. But is it art?” To see art in its two prevailing modes, as serving lower purposes and as a kind of worship, requires adequacy. No arbitrary rules can be applied. To see requires a developed eyesight—and only those who have ears can hear it.

Art, Spirituality

The arts are the language of spirituality, but the complexities involved in this subject—cultural, social, personal, and, alas, commercial—make it difficult to see this. I’ll attempt a little unpacking today. Certainly in my youth the arts were viewed as a kind of rebellion against bourgeois customs. My youth extended from birth to twenty-five, let’s say, thus from 1936 to 1961. But this rebellion or upheaval predated my birth if, say, looking at painting, we see expressionism as an early sign of this collective mood. It goes even farther back if we take Romanticism as the model. It had its roots in the eighteenth century but flourished in the nineteenth. My own view is that the process—we’re talking about the Western Culture by and large—had its origins early in the nineteenth century. It took religious as well as artistic forms, and all of these were, in one way or another, impulses that moved against rationalism as it peaked in the Enlightenment, thus at the divide between the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, marked dramatically by the French Revolution.

The preponderant thrust of rationalism was outward, world-bound, and leveling. It’s ultimate expressions are “All is matter” and “God is dead.” The artistic reaction to this—ignoring the foolish behavior of all young people, including mine when I was young—is to deny and to oppose it. The denial does not automatically translate into an embrace of ritualistic (and never mind dogmatic) religiousness. But what the arts all sustain is something else, something higher, something above, something transcending.

Humanism is a marvelous synthesis of enlightenment thought energized by the new intuition. I always marvel reading, for example, Thomas Mann’s Sufferings and Greatness of the Masters—a book I re-read once a decade, roughly. It is such a splendid example of bridging the chaos between the Enlightenment and what is yet to emerge, a new Age of Faith. I am of the generation, perhaps a precocious member of it, that fully understands the Thomas Manns of the world, my grandfather’s generation, but can already discern the promised land that they could feel but could not intellectually affirm. I am the beneficiary of the dramatic devolution of rationalism into something ugly and destructive. That hadn’t happened yet in the formative years of that generation; and when they lived through the shattering experiences of two World Wars, they still clung to the blended value system that they had fashioned in youth.

Art as rebellion is a youthful gesture, jejune—and perhaps for that reason appealing to the masses. The model of the artist is the Pied Piper not the pitchfork wielding revolutionary who—all too soon—transforms himself into the commissar. In that rebellion is a conflict, it draws the media. Therefore rebellious writers and painters, people who like to exploit shock for fame and money, achieve at least visibility and, if clever, if able to adapt and channel their rebellion, can also achieve wealth.

Real art—which need not always be great art, but certainly great art above all—arises from travelling in the borderzone of life on this earth. It looks like rebellion, at least to some, because it fails to conform to the norms of fossilizing custom. The able artist will strip his work of obvious signs of rebellion, knowing full well that such behavior is posturing. Artistic inspiration is a grace. The artist is an instrument and, once aware of this, intent on making him or herself a fitting means to something mysterious. This is but one layer of an onion; the subject is inexhaustible.

The Householder

The household still figures in a meaningful way in modern statistical measurement (e.g., household income, number of households, etc.), but it has never carried any kind of spiritual connotation. Not so in the East. In Sufi circles, for one, at least in the tradition that I know a little something about, the Naqshbandi, to be a householder is deemed to be the minimum qualification for higher learning, thus for the spiritual path.

This stands in contrast to the Western and some Eastern traditions where higher forms of dedication appear to demand that the seeker abandon the usual life occupations, take up a celibate or ascetic style of living, and devote him- or herself entirely to the pursuit of God. The life of the artist, similarly, is viewed in the same way. Above all, as an artist, do not be bourgeois, for God’s sake! You must pursue a life in garrets, unattached, eccentric, and unpredictable. The nine-to-five is a definite No-No. I’ve always found this amusing in that—as secularization has spread like a brushfire over the last couple of completed centuries—the scribbler, painter, sculptor, musician, dancer, or actor have been required, in an odd sort of way, at least outwardly, to imitate the saint. Only sexual freedom—but to be enjoyed strictly outside the constrictions of marriage—has been granted these not-quite-volunteers to be the secular saints of the West.

When I came across the householder dictum in the writings of Idries Shah—and his writings are, above all, traditional Sufi teachings presented in varied and carefully selected assemblages to the modern Western reader—I felt a sense of confirmation. I’ve always subscribed to idea that hierarchies exist, but never to the notion that you could join them by merely conforming your behavior to some set pattern. Similarly I’ve considered the notion that the artist may be (or to be genuine even must be) an unreliable, unpredictable, irresponsible, and destructive rebel simply ridiculous: as if there is something magical in poems, novels, paintings, etc. that balances out a man fertilizing women at a whim, abandoning them and their children when another whim arises, and his body to alcohol and drugs because spontaneity trumps everything else. Pure, ignorant baloney.

I have always had difficulties with priesthoods—and this despite the fact that I believe in real hierarchies among the living and beyond. Priesthoods are the institutionalization, in effect the reification, of something much more dynamic and mysterious. Priesthoods have a certain functional role to play, alas. This comes home to me looking at the Muslim world. There the Prophet expressly forbade the forming of a priesthood, yet ranks upon ranks of lawyers came to represent that functions, and we have a priesthood there, too, in all but name. I bow to necessity. I’ve no objection to priests as functionaries. I oppose priesthood as the presupposition that a priest has a higher status than, say, a carpenter.

Why the focus on the householder in Sufism? In functional terms the householder is a responsible person who has managed the basic adaptations to the world and to society. One thing at a time. Before a person aspires to a higher level, she or he ought to be mistress or master of the fundamentals. This is very good doctrine, it seems to me, and equally pertinent to the would-be artist.

The Journal: A Tool of Contemplation

In my experience keeping a journal is one of the most valuable tools for contemplation. But a word about that word: certain words have awkward shadows. By contemplation I simply mean a centered inner state, balance, calm, and clarity. It might be put into the language of martial arts and called readiness; in that category readiness is also means emptiness. Nothing interferes with the steady look at reality as it is. I also like the word “sovereign,” used as an adjective, because in a state of contemplation we feel above the fray but not superior to it in a down-the-nose sort of way, just above it, ready to act, able to refrain, mistress or master of the self.

A contemplative journal is not a record of what I did yesterday. To-do lists are much more efficient for tracking. The point of an inner journal is to help me become aware. Its subject matter, in my case, is often something that troubles, irritates, or exercises me. I look at that and examine why I’m agitated. In due time—usually about a page of handwritten material later—the problem begins to sort. Another half-page later, calm begins to manifest. The irritation has receded. I see it clearly now. My various internal constituencies have calmed down. I am aware of the sources of my anxiety. These are almost always reflexive and therefore unexamined reactions. They combine and produce a collective shouting. I examine the matter with awareness, like an Inspector General, uninvolved. Then I see why I was reacting, see the point or pointlessness of it. If there is a point, I can jot it on a to-do list. In nine cases of ten, the root of irritation is something minor or unimportant—as seen under the species of eternity.

I don’t use the valuable time of journal writing—best done first thing in the morning—for tackling intellectual, analytical problems. Those are best done when I’m already “present.” Intellectualizing has no effect on inner states unless the activity is difficult enough so that it really deepens concentration. The process of journal-keeping serves me to clear away useless or energy-consuming “states”; states, in this context, are moods, preoccupations, emotionally-toned anticipations, anxieties—but also feelings of triumphalism (“Just wait till I tell him that! I can hardly wait to see the confusion on the bastard’s face.”). Upcoming events have a way of throwing a shadow backward from the future—even relatively minor events, e.g., having to go to the dentist for a cleaning or a checkup. These shadows disturb my equilibrium. Big meetings, trips, presentations—indeed any and all occurrences that in some way involve the self, disturb routine, or offer opportunities for momentary failure or success. These shadows are like strings—and I’m the puppet. But I want that feeling of sovereignty. From within that feeling, I am not at all concerned with the outcome. I am above it. I’m in a state of readiness. Que sera, sera. And I feel that without any kind of accompanying resignation or reservations. That is sovereignty, and looking at the day to come in that state, focusing on the up-boil of emotion-laced mental contents, until I see them objectively—that is the real value of journal-keeping of this kind.

These practices, to be sure, demand that we already have an effective cosmology. We must see ourselves as capable of worth. We must see ourselves as intended by something higher than ourselves; we must know, even if temporarily we don’t feel it, that we are empowered to be self-governing souls by our creator. If we seek our own worth in the very turbulence that we are fighting, we will merely (to change the metaphor) stir the pot. Nothing will change. We may just work ourselves into a greater fury or depression. We must become aware of hard rock beneath or steel within our own spine. In the Unity movement (but it is just one example), negation and affirmation are recommended. We must deny every lower manifestation of the mind, every associational stream attempting to suck us back into the problem; we must affirm our transcending origin and destiny. With practice and with time, the stable of Augias will be cleared of manure, even if we have to reroute a river to get the job done. Thereafter, things will improve if we keep returning to the inner silence that we can produce by the right application of attention—in this practice expressed as words on paper.

Public journals—blogs are today’s best example—do not serve this function. They are means of communication in which an audience is always at least potentially present. Journal-keeping is not communication. It is more akin to housecleaning or taking inventory. In many traditions mirrors are used as a symbol. Cleaning the mirror is the object—so that it is capable of reflecting the higher light. Windows work as a good symbol too. Life’s dust and grime obscure them. But the sun shines beyond the pane if we attack the surface with Windex, that favorite of mine.

The Contemplative Life

The last three weeks in my own life illustrate the reason why, in every culture, contemplative orders or aggregations have come into being and still persist despite the violent churn of Modernity around the globe. A sudden up-surge of work caused me to turn my head away from blogging—and the blog that I neglected most was Borderzone. We live in a layered environment in which the most demanding is the lowest level, the physical; the social is next; we will neglect it when we are ill or injured; and we neglect the one above that, the mental and the spiritual, when turbulence draws our attention downward.

I was editing novels I wrote about ten years ago to prepare them for publication. These books are not exactly time-bound in that they deal with an imagined future, and if anything has changed in the outer world since about 2000-2001, it has merely confirmed the trends that I used in my sagas as the base of my projections into the twenty-first century and beyond. But the effort to pummel these works into shape had to be done in the eternal Now, and my attention pulled me well in-land and away from the borderzone.

The men and women who formed and still inhabit the zone of contemplation, to give it a novel name, scorned the kinds of self-centered motives that make me wish to see my work enjoyed by others. For this reason they created environments for themselves in which “the world” was walled off to the maximum extent.

This has some curious aspects. One is that I wrote these novels while I held a demanding job and typically worked about 10 hours a day, not counting two hours of commuting. The writing itself, then, was a form of contemplative activity. It energized me and kept me sane. I used to carve out the time in the early morning, rising at 4 a.m. to write until 7. Contemplation is not, repeat NOT idle musing and idyllic walks. It is creative work. Its chief outer manifestation is concentration, but with the mind and heart in an invisible dimension. This is as true of writing as of sculpting—or cooking, or singing, or scientific work. The other aspect I would touch upon is that the contemplatives typically do a great deal of work, but they set boundaries to it, keep it as routine as possible, and pursue it in a structured manner. Some historians assign virtually all credit for the agricultural restoration of Europe to St. Benedict (480-547), at a time when the shattering of the Roman Empire and wide-spread depopulation had allowed large tracts of Europe to grow wild. In due course, the monastic orders, of which the first was the Benedictine, slowly accumulated immense wealth that, as other historians suggest, was the capital that Europe seized to underwrite the Industrial Revolution. In other words, not mere musing and idyllic walks with the occasional holding out of a begging bowl. But this sort of thing is not taught in our grade- and high-schools, therefore it comes as a surprise to some.

Indeed the contemplative life is not the contradiction of action, per se. But it has a very conscious and sophisticated view of action and thus harnesses its power more effectively. My own short-comings as a contemplative were demonstrated in the last several weeks. I allowed the excitement caused by revisiting my vivid imaginary worlds to break my usual routines. Live and learn. It’s possible at all ages. Indeed trying to do so is a sign of youth. A neighbor passed on to me just the other day a wise old saying that I hadn’t heard before: “If you want to stay young, keep going uphill.”

The Experience of Helen Keller

Self-observation tells us that consciousness manifests in many forms. Sharp self-awareness is rather rare. In times of stress and trouble, during infatuations, during illness, disasters, or after winning a sizeable lottery—while daydreaming, watching TV, musing at the wheel, and even doing habitual work—the self is in various states of identification. For all practical purposes, it is one with, unified with, its own experience. The sense of self is vaguely present at all times, but the consciousness of the self is dormant. It requires concentration to take control. “I had to get a hold of myself,” people say—but indicating what? They mean that they had to break the identification and become aware. With consciousness fully present—rather than held captive by experience—directed action becomes possible. Arguably a principal difference between people is the degree to which they are able effectively to detach. The word is paradoxical because, in this context, to be detached is to be present, whereas to be identified means that the self is absent in a state of semi-sleep. Shocks awaken people.

The Case

To illustrate the thesis I present the fascinating case of Helen Keller (1880-1968). Keller lost her sight and hearing in an illness at the age of 19 months. She was beginning to learn to speak, was imitating phrases that she heard. She had also learned the word for water and remembered it (as “wah-wah”) throughout her painful period of mental darkness. Thus her acquisition of language had at least begun, if only barely. Then she fell into a world of total silence and darkness. It is clear from her autobiography that she was conscious in a way—but conscious in the way I’ve labeled as identification. She felt a need to communicate and tried to do so with some success by using signs and gestures—pushing, pulling, imitating the motions of cutting bread to get bread, and so on. She felt powerful frustrations. And she enjoyed sensory experiences using her remaining powers of movement, smell, and touch. But full consciousness dawned in her only as she was approaching her seventh birthday. This happened while she felt the flow of water on one hand as her teacher, Anne Sullivan, spelled out the word for water with finger-motions on Helen’s other hand. Suddenly Helen understood. This was a revolutionary and dramatic experience for her! As soon as she had understood that a certain pattern of finger-touches stood for water—and that the experience of water thus had a name—her heroic and splendid career began. She had been enabled to experience abstraction. As she put it later, “The mystery of language was revealed to me.”

Discussion

Let us ponder this mystery, the mystery of naming. It consist of the association of two radically different phenomena with one another. In Keller’s case the two were the flow of water and a series of touches. Her mind made the conjunction: this is that. Her power of consciousness grasped this difference and sameness. But the association was presented to her by another person, and repeatedly, until Keller “got it.”

Keller’s experience, of course, was of a fundamental type, akin to something like the taste of chocolate. To convey what any taste actually is using words alone comes down to empty gesturing unless the other party shares the experience. But if the other does, just naming it suffices. In Keller’s case, one cannot say much more than simply to assert that such an association, between this and that, is obviously possible; we’ve all experienced it. But why then was this particular experience so revolutionary in Helen Keller’s case? During her long period of silence and darkness, she had already begun to use a kind of language—a language of motions. Why did her pushing (to signal “go away”) and pulling (to signal “come”)—and the discovery that these signs got appropriate responses—not give her the grand experience of understanding that a signed word gave her later?

My guess is that the discovery, the mystery of language, is the discovery of abstraction—but also that abstraction really points at something more than merely “abbreviation.” The motions she used earlier were such abbreviations, but they didn’t give her that moment of Aha! It seems that the abstract points to or reveals some aspect of another reality which, by means of the abstraction itself, suddenly becomes perceivable. Thus the emotion Keller felt came from the sudden opening to the dimension of Intelligence. In her own report, she spoke of having a feeling of suddenly remembering something long forgotten. Pushing and pulling were too closely associated with the physical facts of go-away, come-hither to serve the purpose of abstraction. The word “water” spelled with fingers, however, did have this alien quality of otherness and therefore its magical effect. The finger-spelling was radically different from the flow of water Keller actually felt on her other hand. An effort of inner linking took place. A new world opened.

The word “symbol” derives from the Greek word meaning “sign.” Language provides an alternative world of signs for every conceivable aspect of reality. By its very nature, language is arbitrary, illustrated by the fact that humanity uses many different languages. This quality, this arbitrary assignment of this for that, where the this has no resemblance whatever to the that, demands a corresponding motion or act by the perceiving intelligence, a perceptive act. When this act takes place effectively, the self awakens to a power dormant until then. The mystery of language, therefore, appears to be its power to evoke a recognition of meaning.

Curiously the perception of meaning, like the taste of chocolate, is a primordial experience we can’t describe. In a manner of speaking we acquire meanings long before we do. For most of us the recognition of abstraction is not an explosive experience, as it was for Helen Keller. Meaning is intrinsically associated with naming. For the child, early on, a table covered with objects is just a sensory landscape without meaning until the child discovers that that red object over there is called a “cup.” Once the object and the symbol are connected, the cup has meaning even as all the other stuff remains a landscape. “Buckle, Mami,” one of my daughters used to say in her crib, still tiny. She meant her bottle. Her hunger, her desire to have some milk, had been resolved into a clear meaning with a name. She had acquired a power more discriminating and efficient than simply crying.

Language awakens intelligence by separating the self and its surroundings (including its internal experiences like pain or pleasure) into a triad of relationships: there is the self, there is the object, and there is its abstract representation—its meaning. And meaning, to be sure, is a deeper concept than mere abstraction. Using that representation, the child can understand the object and, in turn, manipulate it in the mind itself and in communication with others. But using this insight, the self itself becomes an object of thought. An inchoate sensation becomes me; me becomes Jane, initially. Later, more ceremoniously, the last name is added: me becomes Jane Xavier.

Now the chief lesson I draw from this case is that language is a tool, a means. The capacity for understanding must be present and is innate. It isn’t language that produces intelligence but intelligence that manifests by using a tool. And once the tool is present, the powers of the intelligence are able to expand.

Understanding and Intellectual Grasp

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

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

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

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

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

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