Secular Times

Secular times produce their own values. They clear off the vast accumulations of authority. In place of traditional values they focus attention in the readily observable. The readily observable has utility. The inner experience has value. The first produces science; it may be tested by experiment. The second cumulates and becomes authority as individual experiences are interpreted, concentrated, formalized, and passed on; but authority can only be tested by personal experience—because the transcending is not observable.

The key word in the last sentence is interpreted. To illustrate, let’s take the case of “dreaming the future” mentioned in the last post. It’s an astonishing and rare experience. How is it explained? One interpretation is that our long-standing views of time are in some way incomplete. Another is that some invisible, superior agency sent the dream as a message. Yet another is that the dreamer is lying to garner attention—tough on the critic if he soon dreams the future in his turn.

Authority is a cumulation of the preferred interpretation, in such cases. The preference will be a function of prevailing views at that time. That interpretation is then further structured and refined by intellectual reasoning mostly by people who did not have the experience themselves.

The deposit of authority is not destroyed in secular times, to be sure. The old books are still there. Resistant groups still, as it were, live it. The curious person has access, so to speak. What secularism does is to devalue authority, and doing so it clears the decks. It serve to renew. It represents a genuine renewal because authority, like tradition, carries a vast detritus of error as well as truth. Much of it is well worth dumping, the valuables well worth retrieving and polishing again.

I had dug up some buried compost three years old. In that I found an excellent black dustpan used outdoors; I thought that I had accidently dumped it with yard waste in a tall paper sack some time ago. I also found a silver spoon. Now ancient authority carries much more value than my compost, but at least you know how this thought arose. At rare intervals, even this traditionalist will praise Modernity.

Spacetime and Mindmatter

The core of Sufi teaching is that some kind of higher organs form in us as a consequence of right attention (mindfulness) to experience. The presumption (mine) is that the person so formed is enabled to function properly in the next dimension. “Salvation” in this context has a developmental meaning.

In the Western Christian concept, salvation is projected principally as a divine gift, but achieved by the will to live in accordance with divine law known through revelation and believed in—and that belief itself is a function of the will. We shall fail in this effort, human that we are, but it is the consistency that counts, the sincere intention and its steady implementation. The backstory here is the Fall; it degraded our natures. Therefore the model is that of a blissful state, a descent therefrom for faults of our own, and a return to bliss achieved, as it were, by a reform of our fallen nature. Call it re-development.

The first model suggests that we came into being unfinished, mere potentials, and that ascent is akin to growing up. The second suggests perfectly created beings who fell and must recover.

The Eastern model suggests, more or less explicitly, that souls are really gods but ignorant of their status—and a fall of sorts is implied because that ignorance may have been acquired willfully. If so, these gods have lost the crucial aspect I associate with divinity. And to speak of “sparks of God” does not correct the problem. The meaningful idea of God, for me (an adherent to negative theology that I am) does not support, in relation to God, any kind of division, whether into sparks or not, any kind of evolution, attributes, acts, thoughts, or anything else farmable in thought. Something like the Cosmos may have attributes, may evolve, etc. We can say nothing about God.

So where to go from here? Seriously. How to see this correctly?

Humanity, it seems to me, has no answer. The totality of wisdom consists of different ways of interpreting the contradiction between consciousness and the mindless over against. Dualism of the radical kind (Mazdaism) is one answer. In that view the mindless is one, the mindful the other polarity, both preexistent from eternity. The omnipotent creator (Western monotheism) at least accounts for mind, but don’t ask too many questions about the mindless; the answer will be that God does what he will. Denial of the mindless is the third approach; all is mind; the rest is illusion (e.g. Buddhism). Materialism completes the picture by denying mind; all is matter.

The solution is probably hidden in this quaternity. The most mind-blowing fact in experience is that we can dream the future. Just once, unambiguously, is enough. I’ve experienced it (link). Such an experience convinces me that our concept of time is very iffy. And if of time, probably also of space. In the Real world, and I do not mean this cosmos here, the contradiction I identified above may not be present. Occasionally, for very good reasons, well understood over there, big bangs generate cosmoses of space and time to get some necessary work accomplished. Once over there, we’ll understand it. And we’re all bound over there. Our problem here is cosmocentricity, if you like. We can’t imagine a reality without space and time, mind and matter—nicely separated. Einstein tried, with his spacetime continuum. But don’t try to picture that. Failure is guaranteed.

Behind the Veil

The following is an extract from Alfred Tennyson’s 1849 poem, In Memoriam A.H.H., cantos 55 and 56. The initials stand for Arthur Henry Hallam, a fellow poet and a young man who died at 22; he was engaged to Tennyson’s sister, Emily. The work was originally titled “The Way of the Soul,” and the quoted portions in a way summarize the “problem” we all face here.

LV
The wish, that of the living whole

No life may fail beyond the grave,

Derives it not from what we have

The likest God within the soul?

Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds,

And finding that of fifty seeds

She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares

Upon the great world's altar-stairs

That slope thro' darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,

And gather dust and chaff, and call

To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.

LVI

'So careful of the type?' but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone

She cries, `A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.

'Thou makest thine appeal to me:

I bring to life, I bring to death:

The spirit does but mean the breath:

I know no more.' And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,

Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation's final law—

Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek'd against his creed—

Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,

Who battled for the True, the Just,

Be blown about the desert dust,

Or seal'd within the iron hills?

No more? A monster then, a dream,

A discord. Dragons of the prime,

That tare each other in their slime,

Were mellow music match'd with him.

O life as futile, then, as frail!

O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

Although context provides the explanation, the word “type” used first in the second stanza of 55 means “species,” but that word would jar poetic nerves. Another as it were poetic work-around is in the last line of the first stanza, “the likest God within the soul,” where saying “the likeness of God within the soul” would much trouble the meter. Those fanes in the third stanza of 55? Banners.

The segments illustrate the problem faced by the sincere and active soul attempting to grapple with traditional understanding of the divine arrangements and actual observation. As Tennyson himself remarks in this work (Canto 96): “There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.” There is discernible here also the path by which portions of humanity reach a gnostic vision of the fallen world.

Cosmic Vistas

Speaking of faith (last post), my own persuades me that humans are something more than energy- and matter-consuming and waste-producing machines. The part of us that transcends this structure appears to be superior, not the product of the machine but, most likely, the reason why the machine is there in the first place. Our minds tell us that we’re here for a purpose—and that purpose is not merely to help others or to leave behind fine memories, in other people’s minds. Therefore our purpose points beyond the machine. The machine is a tool. But why would we need such tools? Here is an instance where knowledge thins out and only speculation remains.

The traditional speculations are largely descriptive: matter, life, intelligence. Life is subdivided into vegetative, animal, and human. The first two have souls that die, the third one does not. We can go beyond this and include angels—that have no bodies. And considering that bodily differentiation make us individually recognizable units but sharing one species, the speculation (Thomas Aquinas’, for example) has it that each angel is also its own species. With angels we leave the created order. Under this schema, humans are always embodied—and death is the consequence of the Fall. After resurrection we shall have bodies again; as for what kind (will they sweat, defecate, have to eat, etc.) on that the speculation rather thins out. Here faith, which I hold must be supported by intuition, fails me. I don’t detect a resonance.

Let me unpack it a little more. I resist the notion that only humans have immortal souls. The biosphere beyond us must have a meaning too—and what if it is the same meaning as in our own case? At the same time, I have no problem thinking that there was a “fall” of some sort and that it has necessitated “bodies.” Further, the notion that death is the consequence of the Fall makes good sense. These tools, being material, cannot last forever. It may also be highly desirable that they drop away at regular intervals. When the job is done, we lay the tools aside.

The Fall, of course, complicates matters. If we take the Judeo-Christian transmission, before it came was Paradise—presumably a place where bodies existed and, indeed, had to ingest food. Why else those forbidden apples that caused the fall? And if ingestion, then also defecation. Or should we accept that depiction of Paradise in symbolical terms—described so that fallen humanity would understand it? In that case Paradise is a previous condition; the eating of the apple is a symbolical depiction of some sort of failure. And all that followed, not least being here, and bodies, and apples, and all the rest—came later. As a consequence.

That we are in a fallen state is rather obvious. That we are personally responsible for being here makes sense; therefore the cause of the Fall was not merely Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience. Let’s view that, too, as symbolical short-hand. Thinking ourselves as stranded here by some cosmic disaster—don’t you dare go near that Big Bang, child, I don’t know what I’ll do if you disobey—introduces an irrational arrangement into reality—and if I wanted that, Materialism has a much better explanation. Occam’s razor, and so forth, would make me choose that.

That, finally, leaves me but one other speculative option. Call it some heavenly Outward Bound program intended to put the newly created soul-beings into a very rough environment in which to learn how to become genuinely human. That model suggests that life here was created by a superior heavenly community, carefully engineered to develop slowly until students could be sent down here to learn and to develop. That one, I’m afraid, produces even less resonance than any of the other models. That this realm, functionally, is a developmental realm is certainly true. But as for its creation, I think the Fall from a paradisaical realm is a better explanation. Whether to develop or not to is left to those who’re here. And failure to develop probably means one thing: Staying here—whether in a body or not. And it is better to be in a body rather than not. We can at least handle, rearrange, and play with matter—rather than simply contemplating our fallen state.

Faith

Faith is a difficult word to define—when you think about it. My old (1967) Webster’s seems to agree. The most interesting definition of it is 2 b (1): “firm belief in something for which there is no proof”; that is a commonly held view of it in a culture where the only things that serve for proof are physical observations. The Latin root it fidere, to trust, which Webster’s never uses by itself; but one must ask: When I trust, what are my proofs? Interior sources of proof have no standing in our culture because all internal experiences are derived, in turn, from brain functions; brain functions from physical actions of neurons, etc.

But ignoring all that, we can distinguish, nonetheless, between different roots of faith: external or internal. If the faith is in a learned transmission, the faith then resides in the transmission, thus it is a trust in the words or reports of other people that have reached us by an immensely long route of passing from mind to mind—and part of that proof is the very fact that so many people had passed it on. If the faith arises from a conviction that comes from my own intuition, it is a fact I cannot for the life of me describe. But it is very strong. And only that of which my own intuition thus approves do I accept as real proof. The physical? It sometimes gives me that feeling—but by no means always; and least so if the physical is a stand-in from something internal in minds other than mine. Transmission has drawbacks, not least that large numbers of people very often believe in things that are quite dubious—and hold such beliefs for many centuries.

The action of the will is not, in my opinion, engaged in faith. Faith must come first—and from the intuition. But will is involved in this structure in other ways. It may take effort to examine reality—to deepen understanding. For intuition to operate, it must be enabled to see. Another is to follow that intuition. I may not act in accordance with my own legitimately held faith. To do so, when my inclination is to ignore it, the will becomes involved. But to assert, by will, something I don’t inwardly believe is merely a gesture of some sort. It is not, to echo the existentialists, authentic.

The Organ of Intuition

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows naught. [Blaise Pascal, Pensées, §277]

We all have hearts, guts, and brains—also “heart,” will, and reason. I put that “heart” in quotes to signal what Pascal had in mind—which was not the cardiac muscle. In the modernist view only physical organs exist. Heart, will, and reason are epiphenomena, thus lacking hard reality. Epi- here means secondary or derivative. The heart is linked to love because lovers’ hearts beat faster as they think of one another or embrace; guts means will because our stomachs tense when we’re determined. The intellect is linked to brains by locational proximity: the eyes and ears that feed the brain—and the mouth that expresses the brain’s productions—are located in the head—which is mostly brains beneath a skull.

Human tradition knows better, it seems. We have spiritual powers already present before the fleshly organs even form. The organs are the means by which such powers manifest in a physical reality.

It pleased me to discover today that in Chinese traditional medicine refers to zàng-fǔ organs, thus functionalities of a transcending sort. Zàng being yin, fǔ being yang, shadow and light, the receptive and the creative. In that scheme the heart belongs to zàng and is associated with the soul. In Matthew 13, which begins with the parable of the sower, Jesus, explaining seeds that fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them, elaborates that case by saying (13:19): “When any one hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in his heart; this is what was sown along the path.”

Sown in his heart. Which has its own reasons. And is the first organ of communication with the divine. For me the heart is the organ of intuition—and has a privileged role. To be sure, our attempts to isolate the innate powers of the soul are always dangerous—unless very carefully conducted to gain understanding. They cannot be really disentangled unless they become disarranged. Intuition, will, and intellect must be in harmony and well developed; then the seed lands in “good soil” and bears much fruit; and here too, the results will vary—hundredfold, sixty, and in another thirty.

When we discussed the parable this morning, Brigitte hoped for thirty; I said I hoped for a thirteen-fold gain—competing in humility. She said, always ready to defend: “But that’s not an option Jesus presented, Arsen. I just go with the choices I have.”

Two Roots of Morality

Conviction, Observation. This post is the consequence of ricochets from two different blog posts I read in succession this morning. One is the fascinating story of the origins of the U.S. civil service on Siris (link), another is a comment on death on Maverick Philosopher (link). The first deals with corruption, the second with the strongly held beliefs of some that this life is all there is; on death we just go poof. It struck me reading these, in turn, that both morality and faith may have deep or shallow roots. Deep here means “inner” and shallow “outer.” I abbreviate these two roots further by using conviction for the first and observation for the second.

Conviction is a peculiar sort of—what? Feeling, state? I know it when I have it. A syllogism may have a compelling quality, but that compulsion or agreement falls short of conviction. I’ve met irresistible syllogisms I did not agree with—because at least one premise lacked something. A conviction, by contrast, is powerful even if the person who holds it cannot unpack it. Conviction, therefore, seems to arise from some inner intuition reaching us from a source that cannot be denied. A morality rooted in conviction is merciless—you violate it knowing full well what you are doing; you’re going against your own, firm judgement; and you know it.

Observation produces raw data. It’s what we see out there. A morality based on it produces an ambiguous picture. Lots and lots of people confirm a certain behavior; but others, and very often those who appear to be most successful, violate it. An outwardly-oriented person, essentially a stranger to him- or herself, in effect lacks morality: the observations have not sunk deep enough; the self has not engaged them effectively enough; the intellect has not examined them; they have not become internalized enough to evoke the intuitive judgement. Such people behave in response to stimuli; that something like “morality” is out there is, of course, also a social observation, but if their behavior violates it, there is justification for it. Others are doing the same.

Observation also shows that people die and don’t come back. The heavens do not cleave routinely to reveal a beatific vision. What purpose may be visible in reality is not exactly on the surface. It takes heavy digging. And living on the surface, what we see is what we get. Not so if we look deeper; and then conviction rises.

The Mechanics of Detachment

Detachment is a central concept in many living faiths—and certainly in all mystical traditions. It has an eastern flavor, but it is present in the teaching of Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, and in Sufism. “In the world but not of it” is a Persian saying. Detachment plays a role in secular culture, but there it is called concentration—which isn’t detachment but is an important aspect of it. It is anathema in commercial and pop culture.

In my own experience, being concentrated or centered produces a kind of indifference—not the negative kind but more akin to neutrality. The various practices intended to produce it, directly or as a by-product, all involve a shift of attention from “the world,” and that includes the body, to something higher. One common form of it is self-remembering, thus remaining aware, in the midst of everything, that I am still there, acting, seeing, reacting; thus it is a kind of separation of the self from the flow. The opposite is usually called identification. In the latter state the self is absent, entirely absorbed by the action, of whatever kind: physical, mental, emotional. For all practical purposes we aren’t really there—as agents. Detachment implies an act of the will. Simply being bored with something doesn’t mean that we’re detached. We’re then attached to boredom.

Paradoxically, being detached while acting makes the action much more efficient. Frustrations with some necessary or desirable engagement will sometimes trigger detachment. It wakes us up. Then we say: “Le’s see now…”—meaning, let’s see how to approach this problem most intelligently. At that moment, if the detachment is strong enough, all desire will be suspended—thus indifference will be present. With it comes a degree of freedom in which the options available will become more visible. Our intelligence will be enabled. Our judgment will be clear. The action chosen will be the right one. When detachment isn’t present, flailing results, and the results tend to get worse and worse.

In situations where the frustration is triggered by the environment at large—thus by definition things we can’t do anything about—if we can immediately reach detachment, we’ll be careful to ignore the event rather than let frustration grow in circumstances where no practical response is available. Scotching that seedling of frustration will save us energy—better used in other ways.

Constant practice of detachment causes it to surface when needed. It’s not a sexy sort of thing. It would be hard to market. Those drawn to spiritual practices by the promise of magical powers are rapidly frustrated. If wanting is the problem, what am I doing here? It is paradoxical to aim for a state in which a kind of sovereign indifference to everything is the result. But it’s very efficient. The alternative is to take our chances at the gaming tables of ordinary life: exultation in victory, despair in loss, uncertainty, the absence of freedom and control….

Dissipate or Concentrate

One of the more elegant but ultimately meaningless descriptions of “life” is as the activity of dissipative structures. The phrase belongs to Ilya Prigogine, the Russian-born Belgian physicist; he won the 1980 Nobel Prize for this description. So what is it that living structures dissipate? Energy. Prigogine studied what are called open systems, thus systems in motion but in disequilibrium. A river is such a system—a lake is not. He discovered that if you apply shocks to such a system, by further disarranging it, that intervention causes matter to organize itself. Let’s put a big boulder into the middle of a shallow, fast-flowing brook. The boulder compresses water between the bank and itself. Turbulence results. If the water keeps on flowing with the same force as before, vortices will form. They will retain their shapes while the water is flowing. Turbulence is water’s way of shedding, dissipating an excess of energy. In a manner of speaking, those vortices are alive—and remain so until the energy, produced by water and gravity, diminish. From such beginnings have arisen concepts such as the “self-organizing” character of matter. Life processes, therefore, are defined as dissipative structures at the chemical level. We are merely vortices in matter of a certain complex kind.

The meaningless character of this description arises because it views life as merely a byproduct of matter in the presence of energy. But life, of course, has a certain tricky originality as well. Vortices may form in brooks, but they don’t reproduce—certainly not by extraordinary complex routes requiring two sexes and the combination of two sets of DNA; or, at the simpler level, by separating twin strands of DNA and then, rebuilding them, parceling them out, one to one and the other to the other half of a dividing cell.

But life, surely, is a great feeder. Yes. It gobbles energy. It sheds, dissipates it not only in maintaining itself but in all kinds of other more entertaining activities galore—like texting with the thumb while driving a car. And this activity, the continuous use of energy, is certainly one description, and an accurate one, of what life does.

What’s in that energy? Suppose we make a slight adjustment to the conventional description. Suppose there is in energy—hidden within it somewhere—a subtle form of stuff that we need to develop ourselves as souls. Then, finding ourselves at the bottom of some vast dark cosmic chasm—probably because we strayed—and finding ourselves quite starved of the nutrition we really need, we began a process of concentrating energy in just the right way to extract that subtle substance from the coarse stuff reaching us from the sun—in order to help us climb out of the pit. And chemical civilization is born. In this slight adjustment of the materialistic view of life—without in any way changing its description—we introduce an intervention, our own. It is we who drop the bolder into that rapidly flowing brook—not mere chance. It is because we are involved, agents with a purposive nature, that life display a few more curious innovations, like reproduction, that we do not observe in the inorganic ranges.

Dissipate or Concentrate? What if our task is both. We dissipate the energy to get more that still holds the vital stuff we need to take wing out of the valley of the shadow.

Worn Like a Habit

The world is full of mysteries we barely even notice. Habit is the enemy of wonder. It saves us effort in every way and in that sense is a great blessing. At the same time wonder requires effort. It arises when something new floats into view and our habitual modes of reaction don’t instantly classify it into the known category and—for that very reason—nothing to spend time and effort on. We spend time and effort on what matters, and what matters is our comfort, physical first and then the more subtle kind. Least meriting sustained application are curiosities defying our efforts to understand them. Not surprisingly, therefore, neither the starry skies, nor a death in our circle, never mind puzzles in nature touch more than the margins of attention. In all three cases a widespread collective habit helps us escape the effort to think about the matter very long. There’s shopping to be done or the hamburgers need turning on the grill, or we roll our eyes a little and we think: “Well, science probably has an explanation.” Science usually does; but in pursuing that explanation  (it takes effort) we discover that science has its habits too and obeys the indolence that habit produces (its collateral damage) to frame answers in ways that in turn obey long-standing fashions.

The curious conclusion I reach is that real learning appears to demand a surplus of some kind of energy—one reason why in all spiritual paths on offer people are urged to minimize their attachments to the world, that word understood in one sense, so that they can really understand it, in another sense, at the core.

Those Subtle Bodies

For there is customarily put in question among learned men, whether all the Angels, that is, the good and evil ones, are corporeal, that is, have bodies united to themselves. Wherefore some think, who supporting themselves on the words of St. Augustine [in On Genesis], seem to say, that all the Angels before their confirmation and/or lapse had bodies of air formed from a purer and superior part of the air, able to work, not to suffer; and that for the good Angels, who persisted in the Truth, such bodies were conserved, so that in them they may be able to work and not to suffer, which bodies are of so great a refinement, that they do not prevail to be seen by mortals unless they have been clothed over by some grosser form, with which assumed, they are seen, and with which laid down, they cease to be seen; but to the evil angels their bodies were changed in their downfall, into the worse quality of the thicker air.  For just they were cast down from a more worthy place into an inferior place, that is into the shadowy air, so those tenuous bodies of theirs were transformed into worse and thicker bodies, in which they would be able to suffer from a superior element, that is from fire.

    [St. Bonaventure, quoted in Peter Lombard’s The Second Book of Sentences, Distinction 8, Part I, Chapter I]

It is instructive to discover that very high-ranking learned men in the thirteenth century, and Doctors of the Church would seem to qualify here, spent a great deal of time pondering matters beyond the Borderzone. St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), a Franciscan, was one of these. The entire Second Book of Sentences is available on the Internet (link), in Latin and in English translation, from which I’m quoting a mere snippet above—having eliminated parentheses and the bracketed insertion of Latin words.

While this sort of thing puts me in right honorable company—in that a good deal of my time is spent on quite similar contemplations—I know just how such a text must strikes the modern mind; my own is modern enough to feel it viscerally. The present consensus on angels within Catholicism derives from the dominance of Thomas Aquinas, who held that angels do not have bodies. Other views were held or actively examined within the greater community of faith in earlier times, as the quote indicates. For Aquinas the definition of substance as the Aristotelian duality of matter and form ends with humans (in the hierarchy of beings); but others, among them St. Bonaventure, thought that hylomorphism (to use the Greek tag) extended to higher realms as well; the “matter” of those regions, however, was of a more airy or spiritual (call it subtle) kind.

Swedenborg would have agreed. For him it was a matter of experience. For the early thinkers of Catholicism, authority was rooted in scriptures and their interpretations by thinkers of some fame and gravitas. But when I read texts such as the one above, I am reminded of Theosophical conceptualizations drawn from a completely different spiritual tradition—and of the writings of David Bohm who proposed, based on the study of physics, that the world holds at least two Orders—the conditioned order (“matter”) and the unconditioned (“intelligence”); I think of these, myself, as matter and agency. But when I am reading Bohm, I always think of Aristotle. And then I think: “What goes around, comes around. Nothing new under the sun.”

Mysterious Mirage

The passing of a friend and colleague—and the upsurge of memories her passing caused in our circle—reminded me again of the strangely luminous mirage a life leaves behind. The body’s gone but the essence abides; it’s real but formless. The mind can grasp and hold it with no effort at all, but the physical of it is barely even there, never mind possessing any weight. This thought recurs quite frequently now—that our lives are inner phenomena, and when someone dies it is a kind of whole that we remember in which the twins of space and time play almost no role at all and values, spirit, joys, and sorrows, words, laughter, memories, and tales together mysteriously fuse into one essence. One can try pulling it apart, but all of it coheres, the professional and the personal, the aspirations, history, events. Even people unlike Helen—she was a lover of words and books, an expert on grammar, a wonderfully funny story teller—people whose lives are lived centered on physical achievements or tangible arts pass and leave behind something irreducibly human and transcending the means or tools they happened to use to be themselves.

KIG

In a paragraph describing the characteristics of a deteriorated Sufi study group, Idries Shah (in Learning How to Learn), says the following:

Deterioration: Evidenced by the acceptance of simplifications, contraction of activity, messianic and panacea thinking, hierarchical behavior patterns believed to be sacrosanct, literal acceptance of the figurative and vice-versa, hagiography, providing social and psychological stimuli and/or reassurances, offering scope for personality-projection, assuaging desires for attention, substituting itself for diversions of a political, organizational, religious, psychological, social, academic, family or other groupings. [p. 175-176]

I’d read this before. This time one phrase caught my attention: “scope for personality-projection.” If that phrase does not produce a conscious reaction, the person reading it is blessedly free of engaging in this way of being “of the world.” It is, of course, a successful way of gaining attention—one reason why hostesses of old used a handy abbreviation: KIG. That stood for Keep It General: participate in the conversation and don’t grandstand.

The paragraph is rather fascinating, when read with some concentration. It draws the line between the broadly social ways of interacting—and those intended to help us realize that there is something beyond. 

Pure Feeling Tone

If a particular line of thought produces darkness or despair, one thing that it indicates is that it might be wrong. The feeling tone cosmologies produce is therefore a guide to their core meanings quite apart from their conceptual content. If one of these produces energy while another drains it (or substitute hope or hopelessness), the energizing structure is closer to the truth. Or at least that’s an interesting hypothesis.

Using this particular test, systems in which the masses of humanity are doomed or “left behind” are certainly discouraging—and this is underlined by the way these systems describe the requirements for salvation or “enlightenment”; the requirements are altogether beyond the achievement of the masses of humanity.

The core of such negative cosmologies is a kind of naturalism. Put into secular terms, salvation in this world might be described as becoming a billionaire; the masses can never get there. The core of naturalism, in turn, is the absence of a meaningful transcendant structure; these systems have no God or, if they have one, that God is vastly distant and uncaring.

What supports negatively-toned cosmologies is observation of ordinary reality—which is certainly naturalistic. Its most consistent form, materialism, dooms everybody, even billionaires. Meaning in such structures is entirely invisible except in limited forms such as the meaning of words.

Positively-toned cosmologies produce meaning. They do so at the grand scale by enlarging reality so that it has, for us, invisible regions arranged hierarchically under God. In the most positive of these, God is all-loving. The systems get more concrete in promising salvation to all using only such powers as every person possesses (will, intelligence, morality, benevolence, etc.).

Such cosmologies acknowledge the observable reality here and explain it by the mythos of a fall or of a distance from the Divine—which last must not be understood as spatial distance. They also acknowledge the tremendous difficulties of living in this realm and provide communications from the higher realms to guide us and saviors to help us.

Opiate of the masses? Hey! Where can I get some of that stuff? Or, more seriously put, what if the hypothesis is right and a hopeful cosmology is closer to the truth?

The Vale of Soul-Making

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

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

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

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