The Palm Tree

Actually contemplating nature, from close up (as I am doing now on a Florida vacation), challenges the “model” I use for characterizing “life.” The unbelievably large numbers of so many different forms, all of which share a single purpose, produce an odd unease. The fundamentals are the same. Those forms—why most have lifting structures to hold up sun-capturing mechanisms. Their fruit production is aimed at reproduction. The to us observable aesthetic effect appears on sober study to be an altogether secondary by-product of functionality. The bright red blooms of a little tree near where I write this are there to attract insets. The color coordination pleases the human eye but is intended merely to attract the insects that seem to know that sugar is on offer. Trees cannot see—anything, including themselves. In them the agency is hidden. Individuality seems also motivated by survival; it ensures that while the individual may perish, the “category” will survive. In us the individual is paramount because we experience it directly, and while we obey the collective rule as well (one death is not the species’ death) we have no experience of a living species of which we’re just a part; the whole seems meaningless except as a collective, thus as something oddly inferior to the individual. But if plants, animals are individuals, thus if they too have an inner self, where are they? Where do they go when that palm-tree finally succumbs to storm or age?

Our imagination can’t produce a model for the ecology as a whole unless we imagine it made up of individuals like us. And to picture a palm tree as having meaning, we must project a self-aware identity inside it complete with memory and, indeed, as having a future beyond its years-long rootedness in some highly localized tropical environment.

The thing here is that simple being—experienced being—is altogether insufficient as a source of meaning without a timeless future existence. If all that I have seen, felt, learned is lost at my life’s end, the very seeing, feeling, learning seems utterly pointless precisely because I do not really live in the moment. I live toward another state which gives this moment, retrospectively, its justification. That after my passage others will experience similar thoughts and feelings in no way justifies lives long ago completed, or my life, or future lives. And what is true of me is true for the palm tree too.

Nor is a mere continuation of this process—life as we experience it, as the palm experiences its existence—a satisfactory solution. Here I’m thinking of reincarnation. If I’ve lived like, say, a hundred lives before—even if I remembered each such life—the totality of that memory would have no value at all except, perhaps, to give current history more detail. Those lives, like this one, would be overwhelmingly the same old round, for me—and for the palm tree too. As Huxley, if I recall correctly, said a while ago: Time must have a stop. It may well be that once we reach that happy future, when time for us at last comes to a stop—something we cannot now imagine—a great relief, a flood of memory, will cause us to realize that, finally, the trip is over and we are home again. And then it may suddenly make sense, all this: we’d realize that we had lived in a very odd state of compression, in a kind of unnatural groove—of time. And falling into conversation with a fellow soul, we might note that we’d both once lived “down there.” “So what were you when you were incarnated,” I ask my new companion. “A palm three,” he or she might answer. And then we could have a conversation about the differences…

Identification with the Body?

Thesis: The moods of a morning are the moods of the body. That would appear to be true, but my experience is that the dark mood isn’t usually present immediately on awakening. The body is at its most energetic at that time. The strongest sensation is the desire for coffee and something to eat. The mood darkens with looking at the paper. Indeed this morning I came down with the notion that the thesis is correct, but the moment I typed in the headline, the contrary idea presented itself and the mood had already vanished, thus I revised the heading by adding a question mark.

The morning mood may be an unexamined identification instead with my existential condition, of which being in a body is but one element; but at awakening I am in a well-rested body. The paper then reminds me of the cultural projection. A strong element of unconsciousness is present because the darkness I see there is not my darkness at all. If what the NYT projects were an actual situation, a here-and-now and out-on-the street situation, my reaction would be energetic, defensive, active: it would mean that things are seriously out of joint and therefore action would be necessary.

There is an identification behind that mood, but it isn’t with the body. Awakening, alertness, humanity often require a kind of energetic shaking all over, a kind of rising to the surface.

The Serious Question

The serious question is why we are here. To think that some agency of transcendent power put us here seems reasonable—reasonable simply because we are incapable, even with our current vast knowledge, of producing living bodies as intricate as ours—never mind producing all the rest—from bacteria to rain forests. The modern explanation—which amounts to saying that the pure, chance-driven collocation of the right atoms produced life (echoing Bertrand Russell)—is just a very elaborate punt of desperation. That desperation, however, is understandable. It is indeed problematical to imagine that nature is the deliberate creation of a Being of Divine Perfection. My own conviction is that God would not have need to fashion fantastically complex machines in order to make living creatures; God would simply say “Be!”—and we would be there. My conviction, further, is that that’s how it happened. But the beings thus made were souls; and they are simple, in the Platonic sense; they don’t have parts; they don’t corrupt. Complex bodies, metabolism, ecosystems, and so on—that’s some kind of second order creation the evident purpose of which is—what exactly? My own conviction is that it is an adaptation to some kind of challenging event, usually dubbed The Fall. That which we call “life” was created by the divine “Be!” It’s not the artful churn of chemicals that we call bodies. We need bodies for some purpose other than to live; they’re probably vehicles we gradually fashioned after sinking into depths we should have avoided. That work happened so long ago we’ve altogether forgotten how we managed it; or it was done by souls of much higher accomplishment than ours—but well below the Divine; the Divine does not need engineering; maybe the angelic levels thought they’d throw us a rope by means of which to climb out of the pit. Never a dull moment in this life—not even as the departure draws near. This by way of formulating some questions I plan to ask when I’ve passed the border.

The Two Mentalities

I was blessed early on by stumbling across excellent guides who helped me orient myself. One of these was Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968), a Russian sociologist who later became a U.S. citizen. His defining work was Social & Cultural Dynamics in 4 volumes, but a single-volume abridgement is also available. Sorokin proposed two fundamental human mentalities, and he summarizes them as follows:

One extreme is a mentality for which reality is that which can be perceived by the organs of the sense; it does not see anything beyond the sensate being of the milieu (cosmic and social). Those who posses this sort of mentality try to adapt themselves to those conditions which appear to the sense organs, or more exactly to the exterior receptors of the nervous system. On the other extreme are persons who perceive and apprehend the same sensate phenomena in a very different way. For them they are mere appearance, a dream, or an illusion. True reality is not to be found here; it is something beyond, hidden by the appearance, different from this material and sensate veil which conceals it. Such persons do not try to adapt themselves to what now seems superficial, illusory, unreal. They strive to adapt themselves to the true reality which is beyond appearances. [Pitirim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (abridged), p. 25]

The first mentality Sorokin calls sensate, the other ideational. He rightly asserts that the pure type probably does not exist, but he asserts that in most people one or the other will be predominant. He then proceeds to build a cyclic history from this in which Ideational eras are followed by Sensate eras, and in between will come a brief period where the two blend, of which an example is the Renaissance. Good enough, you might say, for sociological work. At the same time my own life’s experience (75 and still counting) totally confirms this classification.

Elaborating on this very basic classification (which brings to mind the introverted/extroverted pairing), Sorokin characterizes the ideational mentality by using negations. Such people are trying to negate the world—while the sensate embrace it.

My own experience suggests a more complex explanation. The real difference between these two extremes is actually a greater openness, in those labeled ideational, to the spiritual, intellectual, and subtle aspects of reality—which they feel to be higher. It’s not that they are negative toward the world. It is that they are much more positively drawn toward the higher—not because of virtue but because they sense it. Sorry about that word. But to the inwardly-oriented, intuition is just as keen a perception as the sensory. And it’s not as if those labeled sensate lack all awareness of the higher currents; they have them too. But they don’t perceive them quite so intensely and are therefore inclined, all things equal, to ignore them.

Vast domains of human conflict exist because these fundamental differences are not sharply and effectively understood by either side. They are therefore conflicts between those who see colors and those who’re colorblind. We cannot overcome a condition like colorblindness by logical discourse. Nor can the colorblind suddenly begin to see colors because they engage in acts of faith. Faith requires more than will. It requires cultivation of the intuitive nature enough so that it will yield an inner sensation of the truth of it; once that is present, faith is easy—indeed unavoidable. The human condition is very powerfully shaped by gifts. To see beyond the borderzone, indeed even to see it as existent, you have to see. And that power is not something that can be manufactured. We’re born with it. Conversely, those who are sensitive can also learn to act as if they do not really see—in order to conform at least behaviorally with the majority of the blind—but that’s just an adaptation. They still see, whether they like it or not. 

The View from the Body

Dramatic dreams of public transformation, of railway stations, dreams of being lost in cityscapes, dreams of hospitals.... In my case such dreams always mean the body, more precisely being “lost” in the body. When I dream of hospitals, these are the enormous institutions I remember from my Army days: unending corridors. My consciousness at such times appears at the right scale: the body is a vast domain and I’m a mere individual. But the dream-scale is probably not really exaggerated enough. The consciousness seems to me the size of the point as described in Euclid: it has no dimension at all, it has no size, but to make me see anything at all, the dream provides the narrative of little man in the big world. Such dreams wake me up; in them I’m always headed for some destination I perceive vaguely by general direction; or there is a gargantuan task to be accomplished but always with a pressing deadline. And in nine cases out of ten my own absorption in the task keeps me dreaming whereas the point is to awaken; hence problems arise. The environment begins to look more dangerous, desolate, disorderly—or if I am engaged in an enterprise, things start going wrong, then become worse, and at some point it’s actually too much—and I wake up just to escape all this.

Such dreams are invariably very vivid, the emotions very strong; it takes a while to shake it all off and to let the hormones used to rouse me be absorbed. So I’m still mulling the “lost” feeling or its equivalent, the great melt-down of the Important Project, during breakfast, not quite able to concentrate on the equally vivid images of social meltdown presented to me in the New York Times.

For quite a while now the explanatory narrative that jells out of all this is that awakening from genuinely deep sleep is a kind of return from another dimension. But it is a reluctant return. I really want to stay asleep a little longer. But that’s not what I’m meant to do. If the wondrous scenes do not awaken me with their delight, the dream begins to ratchet up the stimulus by turning that world into a much more frightening display. At last it’s done. I open my eyes. But then I have to drag the emotions, which adhere to the hormonal releases, along with the old body out of bed and down, groping for the light switches as I arrive.

Deepsea Diving

A neutral sort of way to understand “The Fall,” thus by a physical analogy, is to think of a radical change in environments. For human beings life at great depths in the ocean is not a natural way to live, to be. When we venture to such places, we need a supply of air and some protection against low temperatures and pressures. The world down there is deficient in the oxygen we need. The diving suit is an additional something that we require—and when we once more reach our proper environment, we take it off so that we can move more freely again, take deep breaths of the plentiful air, and enjoy the light of the sun.

One way to picture The Fall is by analogy. The realm where we rightfully belong may be pictured, walking with Theosophy for a moment, as a subtle world where we have subtle bodies—a world were those subtle bodies are nourished by energies of a kind not even detectable by science, a world where our light—indeed all radiations of the electromagnetic spectrum, the most subtle phenomena we know—would be considered coarse.

Now let us picture a very large community of that subtle realm either voluntarily or involuntarily falling into the coarse dimension of what we call materiality—where the electromagnetic, the most subtle there, is already of such density that it significantly interferes with the people’s proper functioning—as deep water interferes with ours. Suppose that they, deprived of the subtle ethers, can’t even properly remember what happened, cannot orient, get lost in the flux of matter, and even have major problems communicating one with the other.

Unlike us they do not suffocate in the material flux. They’re immortal, actually. They retain their subtle bodies but these lack the necessary force to influence the vast coarseness of matter much at all. But they find ways of adapting—although it takes millions of years. They begin to build themselves some diving suits beginning at the atomic level, where they are able to nudge the atoms this way and that. These suits—we call them bodies—gather and concentrate coarse energies—and they discover that these energies also carry residuals, to be sure, but still some real traces of the subtle ethers they once “breathed” as it were to energize their subtle bodies and used in other ways to maintain their memories and to communicate one with the other. This effort to make sense of The Fall, indeed to cope with it, becomes Job 1. And it grows in extent until, today, we call it life on earth. The object of that enterprise becomes—although vast numbers, having experienced confusion for so long, cannot all unambiguously grasp it—is to get back to the subtle world by gathering up enough of that subtle ether, call it grace, to make the trip back again.

Could be turned into a rather exciting TV series, actually—although, in season two or three, I’m fairly sure, the original theme will have been lost. But these higher beings, although greatly challenged by the environment, and vaguely remembering that they might have been guilty of some kind of disobedience, recklessness, or foolish curiosity are still immortal beings. And despite many failures along the way, still destined ultimately to succeed.

Night Journey to Randomland

Honest reflection reveals that our lives are entanglements with chaos. A positive spin might say that lives are a kind of tourism, like a visit to Disneyland, but life on earth is much more like a visit to Randomland. 

What happens is that we are born and then we cope, more or less successfully, until the trip is finally over. That short word, cope, has a lot of heft, of course. It summarizes, using a mere four letters, what amounts to an amalgam: a mishmash of reflexive and of thoughtful actions, of lucky choices and of grievous error, the embrace of impulses and the reluctant resistance of others. Viewed in retrospect, in detail, honestly, that coping isn’t actually pretty at all. But as we have gifts for coping so also we are talented biographers. We shape and ornament the story of our life so that it seems to make a lot more sense than it actually does. We “neglect” our errors and “highlight” the positive. The stories that emerge are, largely, tales of heroism. They are nicely understated—indeed sometimes they are understated so that they sound understated, but the heroism shines right through.

The chaos is most to the fore in those years from early teens to early adulthood. Most of us are lucky. We had good parent who steered our childhood through safe channels—but there are many who’re not so lucky. By early adulthood most of us have formed useful habits; these then more or less guide us—except for those eruptions that later we view as temporary insanities.

I’ve marveled at people who appear to have conventional lives—until, with growing wisdom, I’ve realized that even the most ordered, conventional, successful, and respectable careers are mere appearance—if only we knew the details. The random is hidden in these lives as well.

Although the experience is humbling, sobering, sometimes it’s useful to look at that biography of ours through a critical lens. Sometimes it happens when we awaken at three in the morning and can’t immediately go back to sleep again. And sometimes, thankfully rarely, panoramas of the past then open that at least hint at what might happen after we pass over the borders of the zone from Randomland to Otherland and undergo what people who have experienced them call a “life review.”

Sacred and Profane

New Year’s celebrations bring to mind for me the benefits bestowed by our humble status as a planet circling the sun in an imperfect circle, an ellipse, and at a tilt yet, thus giving us distinct seasons. To avoid the horrors of the Void (see last post), we have the blessings of a place—a certain orbit of the solar system—and the equal boon of a recurring time. The universe appears eternal and limitless, nobody has seen its edge, but we’re all right. We’ve got the minimum orientation we need to maintain our sanity.

To live in eternity, it is nice to have clear markers of the here and now. If we wander away from Here, it is good to know that we can return. And if we can pin a name to the Now we can also return to it. It’s Christmas time again. It’s New Year’s day. These arrangements defeat the horror of eternity; there are some for whom the mere conscious contemplation of it produces a kind of mental nausea. With our markers nicely in place, eternity ends at right regular intervals and we get a brand new beginning. Here it is. A brand new year.

This need to orient, to place, to mark the time—and to renew it—appears to be innately present in us. Emmanuel Kant wisely concluded that space and time are innate intuitive characteristics of our minds—created, as it were, to make sense of the experienced flux but not objectively real. Well, fine. They’re objectively real if we are. But then it occurs to me that dividing space into the here and time into the now—and regularly annihilating eternity by restarting it again—are also innate tendencies. And the oldest and most traditional views of humanity also project what we experience ordinarily into the transcendental realm. A good exposition of this subject is presented in Mircea Eliade’s work, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. This view asserts that as below, so above. It echoes the views of the oldest versions of Zoroastrian philosophy (and Zoroastrianism is most likely the oldest higher religion we know of) that all things here have their counterparts in the transcendental dimension. Thus earthly or profane space and time have their counterpart in sacred space and time. And the rounds of duration and renewal taking place there take place here because they take place there. Interesting view—long predating Plato’s notions of eternal forms. But, as we say, what goes around comes around.

Happy New Year!

Avoid the Void

Souls plunge into the Void, but the face that the Void reveals is an enormous confusion: it is an ever-changing flux of constant change—and its extent seems limitless. Making sense of this cosmic storm eventually produces an enclosure. At first it’s nothing more than an enclosing wall—something to keep the chaos out. Let us call this thing a cell, a world within the world. Mind you, it’s a very tough assignment. The wall itself is made of bits and pieces of the confusion—and only after the nature and behavior of each bit is minimally understood can we, the souls, link them together to make that wall. It gives us a momentary sense of place and of control. The wall’s no sooner made than it starts making trouble. It won’t stay in place; it comes apart. It must be constantly renewed. We must fashion better tools to capture and align the few bits and pieces we’d managed to understand. The wall is all.

Now mind you that plunge into the Void was probably something typically human, some kind of reckless self-assertion. We had probably been told that the Void is something to avoid. But we plunged in anyway and discovered the harsher version of that initial, gentle teaching. The harsh one says, Pay me now or pay me later. The descent did not elevate us, as we thought it would. It made us do tedious work. Finds those bits. Coax them together. Build that wall so that we can, if possible, collect our wits enough to look around.

Thus I imagine the origins of chemical civilization which, these days, we refer to as life. The cell is the first attempt to separate ourselves from the flux. Instead of exalting us, it drove us to near despair. Making that first habitation practical and self-sustaining took us, like, forever. And after we had done that job, we could still not see much of anything. So the labors continued, and they continue still.

The odd thing about that Void, of course, is that while ever more of it can be coaxed to reveal itself, after each vast billion-year step, we are still caught in chaos, as it were. We’ve made lots of tools since our cell days. Lots. And now our satellite-born telescopes provide us visions of the Void so massively thick with galaxies and nebulae that dizziness makes us reach for the nearest chair or desk (yet other tools) to hold us steady. Meanwhile we, ourselves, have formed, by our billions-great multitudes, yet another smaller kind of void called collective humanity—which it takes a lifetime vaguely to understand. Yes, we’ve built many other walls since then; call them ideologies, religions, philosophies, and such. They too keep coming apart and letting the original harsh Void come in again as doubts and upheavals, bloodshed and the rest.

Boy oh boy. The labor’s never done. Won’t be done until, at last, we find the wormhole by means of which we can wiggle out of here.

Gnosis Writ Small

Once I became genuinely persuaded that I was neither my body nor that my inner self is a product of a physical process, a radical change in attitude set in. This happened fairly late in my life—but that’s because it takes a long time really to understand what now seems to me an obvious but still very strange fact. Once the real gnosis takes hold, one realizes that something else must explain embodiment, something other than having been created at conception or being some spark that fell into the void. I for one have difficulty seeing this condition as part of a plan, call it divine. The artificiality (the engineered character) of life powerfully suggests to me that some sort of collective effort well below the level of divinity is in place to help us make an escape. Embodiment therefore serves a purpose; and since this purpose isn’t really bliss (this life just isn’t blissful), it must be a rescue effort. Several conclusions follow.

One is that simple knowledge of this fact is probably sufficient to escape. Whatever clouded one’s awareness up to that point where it dawned has been wiped away. No one having a strong awareness of another dimensionality, having seen a full lifetime here, can possibly want to “do it again”; and if the escape genuinely works, thus if the gained knowledge is enough to carry one out of the material range, that person won’t come back again—except on purpose, i.e., voluntarily. Another conclusion is that the “collective effort” must work on reasonably large numbers of people else it’s most deficient. We shouldn’t need earth-shattering satoris, and so on. Awareness of the spiritual reality—and that we belong to that—should be sufficient.

Where that dividing line manifests for different people is hard to pinpoint, but clinging to life would be a kind of negative indicator surely. Those who so cling don’t “instinctively” feel the other dimension. Here language is lossy. We use physical concepts, like visceral, in the gut, heartfelt, etc., to mean the hard sort of internal gnosis, and by hard I simply mean genuinely knowing. That gnosis then changes one’s attitude to life. Those still strongly of the world perceive my stance as negativity; in fact it is just realism. Hardline Buddhism is that stance—and it is incompatible with the conventional belief in life-at-any-cost. Those not yet at that stage can’t understand that the negative attitude is basically well-meaning, indeed benevolent. I don’t want to make life harder for people; I don’t want them to suffer. But they are hurting themselves by blindly living their lives in a sleep.

It’s possible, to be sure, to know all this with unquestioned conviction while yet, at the same time, remaining ignorant of the boundaries of our captivity in this realm. It may well be that extreme degrees of spiritualization are required and that, after death, we may find ourselves still stuck in this dreary dimension and, furthermore, even more limited than we were in our bodies. Then, of course, trying again may seem a perfectly sensible course. But my own sense is that once this feeling is present, it is a species of arrival.

Having Trouble Fitting this Odd Piece

The older I grow, and the more I get used to the strange realities all around me, the more a single aspects of “the puzzle” comes to the fore. It is the purpose of bodies. If we accept the reality of disembodied living beings (angels, immortal souls) then what purpose do bodies serve? No matter how I twist and bend, I cannot but conclude that bodies are machines, ingeniously engineered from chemical components making good use of the elements’ electromechanical properties. I mean all bodies, from single celled living beings on up to the highly complex such as ours.

Materialists have it easy. In their definition life itself is these machines. It is whatever they do, those machines, while they function as they should. A little circular. When they stop functioning, life disappears—because life is that functioning. Now that functioning itself first, eventually always ends. Second, while bodies are still working, their only real purpose is to keep on working. I search in vain to find any meaning in this rigmarole. It has no more meaning then the formation and temporary maintenance of a wave-form in the ocean started by some external cause like wind or gravity. Good explanation for bodies, but meaningless beyond that.

Meaninglessness is not a puzzle. It is just a big fat nothing. The puzzle arises when we contrast bodies and immortality. The problem is as real in the east as in the west. In both realms an immaterial real entity remains after the body gives up. In the east, if its illusions continue, it will be reborn. But it is difficult to imagine that “ignorance” and the resulting “illusion,” supposedly the causes of bodily existence, could have created the intricacies, say, of the blood-clotting cycle when, for hundreds of thousands of years people didn’t even know that it existed, never mind grasping its incredibly complex feedback loops. Maya is not an engineer. In the west we have to believe that an omnipotent creator must have engineered bodies, in the most sophisticated sense by arranging the fundamental aspects of matter at the lowest level, in a less sophisticated sense by imagining divine interventions in created nature. And then, in our case, the immortal soul is super-added, as it were. Why do those immortal souls need a “vehicle” to express themselves, to manifest will, motion, intellect? Why this duality when angels—even fallen angels—don’t need them?

The Gnostics gave all this a negative interpretation—much as the east does (illusion, ignorance). They thought of souls as captured by the Evil One and holding them here in a kind of prison. But, for my part, having at least looked at biology deeply enough to see its magnificent engineering, what I see there is something positive—not always elegant (the blood-clotting cycle is not very sleek)—but not a prison. The body is an enabler.

Our cosmologies are missing something. The piece meant for that hole in the logic doesn’t fit neatly. And using scissors isn’t allowed. Well, comes the time when we shed the chrysalis. Maybe then I’ll get the briefing I’ve not encountered on any lecture agenda as yet.

A Full Sort of Silence

The contemplative life trends towards silence, but that silence isn’t empty. It is full. The analytical approach to anything is to take it apart. But if it can be—taken apart—then it isn’t what we’re seeking, therefore the “Not this, not this” of Hindu religion. Not that the restless self is satisfied. Somebody, surely, knows something beyond a mindless, “No, no, not that.” On to the next teaching, the next guru. But if the teaching is promising at all, the Neti, neti once again appears in some other guise or formulation. The odd thing is that if you do this long enough, you actually learn something, namely that there is knowledge beyond words and an inner capacity, able to grasp that, gradually increases. Communicating that, using words, is hopeless, but the power can be felt. All religious teachings, all schools, all methods, sects, movements, and the like, therefore, are entirely introductory to something that only raw experience actually teaches. But the labor itself, the endless analysis, examination, weighing this, weighing that—the frustrations of the quest—are enormously useful in teaching the unlearnable, namely that Unity, as such, cannot be analyzed but is the very core of the self. 

Why Not Something Meaningful?

Over years now, time and time again, I’ve noted reading the mediumistic literature that the departed, communicating through a medium, never have anything really meaningful to say. We hear greetings and very short answers—never what, written down, might spell a complex sentence with clauses, never mind anything of paragraph length. Those who seek out mediums, of course, are people who want contact with those they’ve loved and lost, and they appear satisfied. They recognize voices or intonations. But if I were attending a séance (never have), I’d want to know what is over there, and I’d be wanting to hear something novel, anything novel at all.

Now this recurred to me because fellow-blogger, The Zennist, put up a pointer the other day to a film concerning the Scole Experiment (link), a 1990s account of various experiences of contact with the beyond. I watched a bit of that film and, doing so, and the thought came once again. One-word answers to questions. The séances are well-enough recorded so that one almost hears the strain and the effort in the voices from beyond that answer the questions. After I stopped the film, an association sprang up in my mind. These conversations sounded a lot like dialogs between two people one of whom does not speak the language very well. I’ve had that experience three times in my life—learning German, French, and English. You understand the question—because understanding comes before speech—but you struggle mightily to answer, because you lack the words.

Now it occurred to me that in spiritualistic encounters some analog to language might be at work. The spirit is striving to articulate speech either by using the medium’s vocal apparatus or trying to cause air to vibrate in imitation of spoken sound. This may be extraordinarily difficult for a person no longer directly linked to a physical body. Thus what does come out is the absolute minimum. Quite a few near-death experience (NDE) reports contain descriptions of attempts by those having NDEs to communicate—by touch or voice—with those they see around them, usually in a hospital setting. They absolutely fail. Not surprisingly, therefore, those who try to contact the dead reduce physical stimuli to a minimum—dark rooms, silence, concentration, etc. The skeptics interpret this as deliberate attempts to set up deceptions; indeed such conditions favor magicians and tricksters too; but they may be the minimum conditions for making any effective contact—not least the presence of a person who is already sensitive.

The difficulties involved, and the fact that the best that spirits can do is convey a small emotion and an indication that they are still there, convinced me long ago that the mediumistic enterprise is a fringe activity—and probably on both sides. As proof of the beyond these arcane sessions will never be persuasive for unbelievers. Systematic thought about our human condition will produce the right answer; and data on NDEs, if more data are needed, provide much better ancillary proof.

Transvaluation of All Values

Old Friedrich had it right, of course, but he gave it the wrong slant. The Friedrich I have in mind is Nietzsche. He coined this concept as die Umwertung aller Werte. He referred to religion in the broad sense and to Christianity specifically. He thought that Christianity was hostile to life, elevated the weak when, instead, we should admire the strong, worshipped the weak when we ought to worship, instead, the vital and energetic instead, etc. But Nietzsche was certainly a deep and profound thinker all the same, and if his conceptualization is distilled down from the big messy blog in which he managed to perceive it, it points at a great truth. In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience William James echoed this conceptualization somewhat, although much more mildly, when he contrasted sick-minded and healthy-minded individuals. They were contemporaries, needless to say, James born in 1842, Nietzsche in 1884, and such ideas were, alas, “in the air.” But it is possible to turn this insight upside-down in turn and then derive the genuine truth within it. Our times have happily (or unhappily) evolved a great deal since. We’ve come to know what the healthy-minded are capable of. Both died well before such plagues as communism, Nazism, and commercialism took hold, James in 1910, Nietzsche in 1900.

Curious this. It was “in the air,” the future. Nietzsche interpreted that strange emanation, either from the future or rising like a nasty vapor from his present, in a negative way and embraced primitivism. James felt the same thing but ended by up-holding the inherent value of those who were “soul-sick” and moved by a deep religious impulse. Freud and Jung, who followed them in 1856 and 1875 respectively, also went in different directions sensing the same air. Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion, meaning religion. Jung’s work anchored a broad movement back to religion by the West’s intellectual fellahin.

If we take values to represent the high—whatever meaning we want to give it—it is certainly true that the more stimulus we feel and the more intense it is, the lower we are in the scheme of nature. Pleasure is an intermediate here. The real stimulus is actually pain. And as in the physical, so also in other realms. I once read the comment in one of Idries Shah’s book, he was a Sufi teacher, that the most visible are of the lowest rank. That startled me at first back then, but I’ve come to see its truth. The most visible have power—and we worship power. Another tale that sticks in mind, in this context, I encountered in C.G. Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Here it is, very brief:

There is a fine old story about a student who came to a rabbi and said, “In the olden days there were men who saw the face of God. Why don’t they any more?” The rabbi replied, “Because nowadays no one can stoop so low.” [C.G. Jung]

A variant of “visibility” is that celebrity, when nothing else is present, is almost pure vacuity. Noise is low, silence is high. Motion distracts; indeed when it intensifies, it confuses the mind; therefore advertisers treasure nano-second flickers on the screen to cloud the judgment. The with-it are without it. Solitude is beatitude—except in an age of social networking.

Much has changed since Nietzsche wished to transvalue values and thus get rid of the last traces of Christian culture that still lingered in the late nineteenth century. Well, be careful what you wish for. The paradox is that to wish for nothing might get you everything. But it will be boring in the meantime, and there is no put-down in this day and age as potent as to call something B‑O‑R‑I‑N‑G…

To Be a Tree?

It may well be, if we but knew it, that the Project of Life in this realm provides innumerable avenues for spirits to escape the abyss that managed to suck them under. That’s at least a plausible hypothesis. Embodied experience may well be the Great Escape—and who’s to say that grasses, plants, trees, and animals are all a huge waste and only we, humans, merit salvation. One of the truly odd aspects of consciousness is that we can only ever experience one being from within—and we can touch others only, as it were, by hints and emanations. An answering smile, a look in the eyes of the other, a feeling of agreement sometimes signal that what I feel is also shared. And sometimes on long walks I get the most damnable feeling of communicating with the trees—and that they communicate with one another too. And that there’s no waste out there at all—and the dog has feelings, thoughts, and dreams. We cannot know what it is to be a tree, but sharing life with them at least hints that they may have their own way—and that it is at least as meaningful as ours.