The Demons at the Border

Waking dreams in my case very often have the character of a “return.” There is a trip in the background, a clear sense of heading home, sometimes a sense of urgency—because something needs to be done when I arrive. “Return” or “trip” are also marked by the presence of trains, trolleys, buses, roads, and the like. Very often the surroundings are pleasant but, as I proceed, they become urban, industrial, slum-like, crowded, and ever-more depressing. A sense of being lost arises as well. The landscape keeps changing. Home is “over there”—but then the expected landmark isn’t where it ought to be. And quite often as the chaos increases, some kind of very unpleasant encounters also follow. In this morning’s waking dream, for example, I found myself confronted by people trying to collect a debt I did not remember owing. After long discussions it suddenly occurred to me that if I had borrowed money, I must have signed some documents. I began demanding the documents and—unless they were immediately produced—I threatened to hire lawyers. And with that energetic thought I found myself awake—angry but awake.

The Dutch psychiatrist, Frederick van Eeden (1860-1932), the man who coined the phrase “lucid dream,” also had such dreams; he recorded some 352 of them over a period of 14 years. Toward their end, as he reports, they often morphed into ordinary dreams. And in such situations he sometimes encountered demons. Van Eeden was not asserting the reality of demons per se. They might or might not be real. But he gave an interesting definition. “I call demoniacal those [dream] phenomena which produce on us the impression of being invented or arranged by intelligent beings of a very low moral order.” For more see this paper of his—in which he also describes how to deal with such creatures.

Old van Eeden came back into my memories this morning as I reflected on that unpleasant waking dream of mine. Such dreams get one’s attention. The episode with the would-be debt collectors, within the dream, took place after I’d finally finished my trip and I was “home,” home because Brigitte lived there, but at that moment she was “out.”

It occurred to me that those “returns” might actually be genuine—the return of the soul to the body after some excursion outside of it. That return is usually from a splendid place (a plane that some, like van Eeden, experience lucidly) to the realm of matter, the coarse, the cosmic slums, as it were, the turbidity of the pools. We must return but aren’t eager. And at that lowly level might be assemblies of those “left behind” after they died and still playing their wretched games.

It was Ibn el Arabi who wrote that in some ways the experience of dreams and of the higher realms have similarities—but dreams are an inferior and distorted perception of what lies beyond them. The lucid, perhaps? Here is how van Eeden describes the human state in lucid dreams:

In these lucid dreams the reintegration of the psychic functions is so complete that the sleeper remembers day-life and his own condition, reaches a state of perfect awareness, and is able to direct his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition. [See earlier link]

Both the ordinary and the lucid dream-worlds are symbolic, according to van Eeden. He defines symbol as follows: “A symbol is an image, or an imaginary event, standing for a real object or event whereto it has some distant resemblance. Now the invention of a symbol can only be an act of thought—the work of some intelligence.” Thus it is one—or many—minds that create environments and situations in the disembodied states we sometimes “dream.” Hence the “demonic” phenomena in waking dreams may be the projection of intelligent beings of “a very low moral order.” My own dream diaries have lots of examples; in virtually every such case, what ultimately wakes me up is the distinct feeling that “this isn’t me.”

Of Tunnels and Barriers

My library added a recent book on the near-death experience (NDE), Evidence of the Afterlife by Jeffrey Long, Harper One, 2010. I checked it out. After a while I realized that I was already aware of Dr. Long. He is behind a rather extensive web site on which hundreds of NDE reports appear; these are contributed voluntarily by the public and hence are something of a mixed bag. The book is intended for the public at large, not for students of the phenomenon. No bibliography; no index. Despite this leaning toward the popular, valuable insights, data, cases, and commentaries make the book valuable.

The book, in turn, led me to consult two already on my shelf. The first of these launched the whole category, Raymond Moody’s Life After Life (1975), the other is At the Hour of Death by Karlis Osis and Erlendur Harakisson (1986). Moody’s book is also an introduction of the subject to the public, but its structure, style, tone and cases on which it reports produce a sense of clarity. Moody built up his cases in extensive interviews with people who’d undergone the experience. These he then studied systematically. Osis and Harakisson studied the deathbed experiences of people who died; not NDEs these. The data they used came from interviewing doctors and nurses. There are some interesting differences between NDEs and deathbed visions; in the first people are brought back and report experiences; in the second they soon die. One difference is that in death-bed cases people experience neither a tunnel nor a barrier that separates this world from that one—but they are visited by apparitions of relatives, friends, or religious figures shortly before they die.

Concerning the tunnel, a subset of NDE subjects (33.8% in Long’s book) report passing through a tunnel, narrow passage, valley, or some such delimited structure; sometimes, not always, they also report sound effects; these that range from highly unpleasant to vibratory to musical.  The barrier comes later. It is reported as a stretch of water, a wall, a fence, a door, and so on: pass the barrier and you cannot return; some 31 percent reported a barrier in Long’s NDE database.

I went back to re-read Moody because, in his careful presentation, the tunnel phenomenon is closely associated with the actual near-death event; the heart stops, breathing stops, a vast pain is felt. When reported, it is the first experience of the NDE and appears to mark the point when the mind/soul leaves the body. The person doesn’t travel any actual distance; in most cases, after passage, he or she is still in the same room where the body is. The tunnel, therefore, must be taken as a passage from the body, not as a trip to a heavenly realm.

The barrier appears later in cases where the subject also reports visions of another realm; the barrier is located there. Interestingly, in many cases, this other-worldly setting overlays the actual room where the subject’s bed or operating table is located and where, even as the heavenly scenes progress, the doctors/nurses labor on the physical body; and the subject is aware of both simultaneously. As a consequence of profound feelings of serenity, the subject wishes to proceed “onward”—and then meets the barrier, only to be prevented from making that move because “the time is not yet.”

In Osis and Harakisson’s work, neither phenomenon is reported, most likely because it doesn’t take place. By contrast, however, the figures that appear convey to the subject their intention of taking the subject away.

This got me thinking. The NDE phenomenon, however evidentiary for the reality of soul-survival, may be something exceptional, not the usual situation at death—because it isn’t actually death yet. When the final hour arrives, there is no need to tunnel out of the body or to worry about barriers. The transition will happen quite naturally.

To this I might add two notes. The first: Multiple excellent, disciplined, and careful studies of the NDE exist, usually carried out by doctors, nurses, or a combination of these two professions. The best are published in scientific journals accessible only by paying rather steep fees or membership dues. I’ve seen a few but have no hard copy to consult. The second: If it all happens anyway, why waste time on this arcane nonsense? Well, if you are on a tall ship sailing, slowly, to China—and you’ve never seen that realm—you might be tempted to read the few sorry books on board your ship that say something about China, your destination. That they are few and sorry is a given if you are under sail rather than traveling by diesel-steam; but whatever their number or quality, you will study those pages with some curiosity.

A Primitive Intuition

Matters I’ve been mulling over recently, and have touched on here and there on Borderzone, include the sorting of “deliberate” and “chance,” the nature of space-time and whatever might be the environment “over there,” and the notion that if higher realms extend beyond this one, they must be superior.

Deliberate? The world has been deliberately fashioned, never mind when and how. Chance? The same, but the cause is chance. I favor “deliberate” and would do so with enthusiasm were it not for observation which says “chance”—but not pure chance. The very existence of teleology (read “life”) suggests an invasion of this realm by something alien to it. And the highly engineered character of life suggests something like a tour de force—not a feeling that arises when I contemplate the formation of planets or of suns.

The actual patterns strongly contradict the top down theology of Catholicism (which is “deliberate”) in that they suggest a conflict between the existence of randomness and of omniscience, omnipotence, etc.

The emanationist model fits observation but is hard to reconcile with the presence of intelligence; it’s there, after all, in us. Intelligence, combined with omniscience, makes it seem weird that “waste” should be present in Reality or, what amounts to the same thing, that there should be such enormous ranges of purposeless material in existence.

Turning to intelligence, what makes zero sense is an evolving God. Reduced to a hard essence, such a “god” would be a creature. Therefore it does not surprise me how the Gnostics reasoned—imagining a very detached, indeed an indifferent and utterly unknowable God. But I have a primitive sort of intuition. Can’t imagine the Gnostic model even if I understand its logical rootings. Nor can I imagine creation as an emanation. That’s far too physical a description; the sun’s the model there. Can’t rightly credit a “fall” either—although it feels right. Can’t rightly credit it confidently in detail as the disobedience of a genuinely knowing community. The cosmic disaster model (Big Bang, say) fits things nicely—including viewing it as a kind of Fall. But it introduces the random into an equation where it could only mean a god who isn’t really in control. The atheistic solution works until we encounter life and intelligence.

It is a puzzlement.

Yet I also know that life and intelligence, together, absolutely force the conclusion of a living and intelligent Divine or Whole which must have all of the perfections Catholicism ascribes to it. There I stand, as it were, up against all of the observable contradictions. Is this where faith comes into the picture? It’s not difficult to believe because, as I say, I feel it as a force, compellingly. But the external evidence all testifies against in. Intelligence and life are, of course, internal evidence.

This sorts my current preoccupations, although that space-time business will take at least another day. The two “inputs” are contradictory, but in a hard choice I have to go with the inner. As for a genuine sorting? Something to die for.

The Pit of the Random

The real world has the contradictory appearance of being random and yet lawful, almost as if randomness itself is a law, so that, to grasp it, we need recourse to the laws of probability. The inner world reflects the outer right enough in most respects—so much so that William James thought of consciousness as a flow of, well, random-seeming bits and pieces—like those particles of dust in a beam of light transecting a dark room. It happened when I was a good deal younger too—but happens more frequently now. I enter a room with energy and purpose—and then freeze in place because I can’t remember why I came here. The purpose usually comes back again in a moment—but there, for a while, the “stream” took a turn even as my body was moving purposively, and the stream blocked out the purpose.

What I say above was rendered by John Bunyan, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, as his famous Slough of Despond. Here is what he said:

This miry Slough is such a place as cannot be mended; it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore is it called the Slough of Despond: for still as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition, there ariseth in his soul many fears, and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place; and this is the reason of the badness of this ground.

The very same concept, functionally, is present in Ibn el Arabi, the great Sufi poet, who spoke of “the turbidities of the obfuscation required by the world of nature,” which “turbidity derives from doubts and the unlawful.” These words in explanation of a great verse (I’ve quoted it before here, but it bears repeating):

She is the ease of whoever

   burns for her,

      transferring him from the levels

         of mortal man

out of jealousy, lest her sparkle

   be stained

      by the turbidity

         in the pools.

[Ibn el-Arabi, The Interpreter of Desires, 38-39]

Three versions of the same phenomenon—the baldly secular; a consciousness focused on sin, expanding that concept to the world at large; and a poetic rendition in which the Beloved cleans up her would-be lover to be worthy of her.

Our ability to see our condition—and in so many different ways—attests to the enormous capacity for transcendence innate in us but not in those particles of dust. And at the bottom of that is that we can see reality in greater fullness. But it requires detachment and rational thought reached in reflection, not in the turbulence of action.

Names and their Reverberations

The more earthy, the more real. The realms of Matter and of Spirit. The transcendental. Trans-? Across, beyond. My own immediate association comes from that word, not transatlantic travel, thus trans- means above; the air, for instance. We consider air sort of insubstantial in everyday language—unless we find that we can’t breathe. Airy, therefore, has a reverberation of insubstantiality although, technically, air isn’t. Our thinking is earth-rooted. Language is always challenged when it attempts to grasp what can’t be physically held.

Different languages, different twists, but the fundamentals are the same. In German, for example, the word Geist principally signals intelligence although it also means “ghost”; it is “mind” which also appears to be insubstantial, like a ghost; but Germans have adapted ghost for mind and also for the spiritual, a word that we take from Latin, where it means “breath,” so there you are: airy.

I am reading Malcolm Moncrieff’s book, The Clairvoyant Theory of Perception. There he juxtaposes three-dimensionality and four-dimensionality, in effect attempting to give an earthy sort of foundation to the elusively transcending real by going from 3- to 4-. It’s a tough row to hoe. He emphasizes the words’ endings, those -itys, and says that he doesn’t mean the actual three dimensions of space nor yet the kind of fourth dimension mathematicians can and do project. He means something I would call “orders,” the 3D being the physical, the 4D being meaning. And since meaning is a common experience here in 3D-Land, he sees the two orders interpenetrating.

So why doesn’t he simply call it the spiritual order? Here culture shows its influence. Moncrieff published his book in 1951 hoping to make a contribution to the understanding of paranormal phenomena. But paranormal studies then had, as now they still have, aspirations of being viewed as sciences, and in that realm the spiritual is heterodox. Orthodox science is monistic. In quantum physics and such places it more and more resembles idealism pure and simple; the greater mass of science is still materialistic (physics is too hard to master); but both are monistic. Whereas, by contrast, the spiritual strongly suggests a dualism. Had Moncrieff written in the 1990s, he might have called his fourth-dimensionality quantum-mechanicity. That sort of thing is almost a reflex among people captured by the enormous fascination of the transcendental while wishing to stay on the reservation. The problem is that no matter how hard you strum the material strings, you don’t actually produce spiritual music, just the same old d‑itty entitled “Me too.” I think I’ll stick with the ghost.

Moncrieff's Clairvoyant Vision

Malcolm Matthew Moncrieff published a book in 1951 entitled The Clairvoyant Theory of Perception. I learned of it from a footnote in Carl Becker's book, Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death, where Becker refers to what I call “shielding,” thus the body’s way of shielding us from the perception of the subtle world. Alas. Becker was really referring to the Preface, written by Henry H. Price, not really to the substance of Moncrieff’s work. That work attempts to explain ordinary vision as a kind of limited clairvoyance. This disappointed me—but Moncrieff is very original in his approach to reality—if not on the subject of  “shielding”—so the book was worth the twelve dollars that it had cost me.

There is, to be sure, something of interest in the whole subject of vision, not the big kind but the ordinary, in the context of the borderzone. People who have had near-death experiences, usually while their bodies were in states of great extremity, often comatose, report initially seeing their own situation—their bodies on the hospital bed, doctors and nurses tending them. They also hear what is said. This suggests that souls have vision and quite without the help of physical eyes. In the very rare NDE report we sometimes hear persons explaining that their view was more comprehensive—not just “forward” in the direction of attention but encompassing also what was behind them. But most experiencers don’t notice anything like that. Yet other aspects of that experience are that the blind are able to see—at least during the experience—and many report that their minds are functioning with greater clarity. Could we call that clairmentation?

The simplest explanation of why we don’t see subtle beings is that our sensory apparatus produces too much noise. The distractions must be overcome. And sometimes people do see apparitions—when the son appears to his mother just at the time when he was killed during a war. These phenomena are accompanied by intense emotions, probably on both sides, and they temporarily overcome the distractions of materiality so that the subtle can briefly appear to say good-bye.

Curious Phenomenon: Dogmatism

I came across it today when looking up something about Charles T. Tart, a psychologist largely associated with paranormal studies. In that process I became aware of the manner in which Tart is treated by the scientifically dogmatic, read by materialists. I had to chuckle. I began life surrounded by religious dogmatism—and nearing its end surrounded by its opposite. Idries Shah says somewhere that those greedy for heaven and those greedy for wealth have something in common: greed. There is a common factor in dogmatism as well, although it is somewhat submerged. A small element in it might just be—disbelief. It would fit both kinds equally well. Why else the fierce clinging? Why the attempt, when actual coercive power is denied the dogmatist, to persuade the unbeliever? A personally held belief is not, evidently, sufficient for everyone. It must be held by many—and ideally by the society as a whole—in order to dispense its soothing anointment on the individual. Yes. It is odd to live in a society where most members of large and influential elites hold views of reality quite contrary to my own. Odd but not precisely threatening. I rant a great deal about Modernity myself, but, frankly, secular times in which the Market is god are by far the most pleasant in which to live. Heterodox books still find their publishers, assembly with like-minded people is still possible, and you can say what you like. The grown-ups, be they atheists, believers, or somewhere else in that spectrum, do not burn witches or parapsychologists. They’re grateful for knowledge, wherever it comes from.

Catch-as-Catch-Can

The moods have their seasons, and sometimes, despite the lovely weather, they are filled with clouds. What’s the right attitude then? When the mood is cloudy and there is no background in events, the state is surely due to the state of the body. So I proceed from there. The right attitude is to remember the hierarchy of things. The heart need not echo the body’s state—nor, for that matter, the state of the world unfolded as I turn the pages of the paper. Our feelings of identification are habitual, and that habit probably has an adaptive purpose. We are actually free agents quite able to counter the natural signaling of our vehicle—which, if it were a dog, would simply curl up and sleep in moody states or, in others, simply follow the stimulus in total innocence. Now it seems that the body is designed to work quite efficiently without consciousness—in which case we would be apes; therefore, as nature has things, consciousness should not interfere much, or possibly not at all, with the “natural.” Identification, consequently, seems to serve a useful purpose. It keeps us “close” to the body’s state at all times, echoing it most of the time. But similarly—since the body cannot understand the abstract stimuli that we do—the body also echoes what is present in the mind; otherwise news coverage could not produce anger, disgust, and so forth; but it does. From the ape’s point of view the paper is just stuff of very little interest. Thus the two systems work together more or less seamlessly—well enough so that in Aquinas’ scheme of things the human—embodied rational being with immortal soul—is God’s own creations and a specific “order” of existence. Alas, that doesn’t sound right to me.

I am on the side of those who view the soul as captured in a body somehow—or entering it when it ought not. This is the great puzzle of this dimension because no one has as yet, so far as I can discover, answered my question. How or why did we take on these bodies? Was that a practical solution to some problem? If yes, the problem is still with us—because babies are still being born.

I ought to spell this out. Summer. Outdoors. I used to speculate at great lengths out here once. No end to such imponderabilities.

The discord or dissonance I feel arises when I contemplate the highly “engineered” character of bodies. This engineering is natural and evolutionary. It displays at the same time purposive arrangements and a kind of trial and error during its historical formation, the errors often corrected after a false start, with traces of those starts still present. Indeed the phenomenon reminds me of old farms—where the farmer solved problems in a catch-as-catch-can way, but once he chanced on a solution that worked, he left it in place. The blood-clotting cycle has all these earmarks. Purposive groping characterizes it, a groping that has over time piled layer on layer on layer, always aiming at—and exploiting—good results. Missing from this are the marks of high intelligence; present in it is a kind of ignorance, a will, and also a vague perception of some desired end. It works. But it’s not what I mean when I think of “creation.” I can think of a higher kind. The body resembles a human creation—drafts, revisions, errors, editings, and on and on. The mind, by contrast, is a marvel: it has multiple functions so seamlessly united that they form an indivisible whole.

This structure then, this body, holds us.

The life process as a whole is a system. All life uses water. At its base are creatures that feed on solar energy (or simply heat) directly, using elements to capture it. Above that level are entities that suck up water and minerals and fix carbon from the air. And all else feeds on other life.

What we see “out there” are the basic raw materials of life: energy and elements. And Something has turned these givens into the most incredibly diversified and form-maintaining (read reproducing) entities—so far as we have yet established, only on the earth; life everywhere is but a theory. Life has all the earmarks of a colonization. But from where? What life doesn’t look like is a “creation”; it’s more like an invasion of matter.

Earlier ages simply didn’t know enough about bodies, chemistry, the solar system (no fly-bys or Mars landers), or the cosmos (no Hubble) to see things the way I do. We still don’t know anything about how life started. Our theories that matter can form life by a chance event—energy and matter meeting in a certain happy conjunction—are inadequate. Where in matter is that mysterious Something that took advantage of (or perhaps arranged) that chance event to fashion reproducing, form-maintaining, indeed evolving entities. That was a radical departure from the norm.

Earlier ages, however, clearly discerned the differences between mind and matter, souls and bodies. And trying to explain this difference, they projected an essentially static cosmos in which Mind writ large created all that we see. Emphasis on static. They knew nothing about the Cambrian explosion. They thought the earth stood still: no satellites. They saw order in the repeating cycles of day and night, the phases of the moon, the succession of the seasons. And all is number.

Our age has produced observations and discoveries so stupendous that the old scheme seems utterly naïve. In the process, however, we have eliminated Mind altogether, whether written small or large. But what hasn’t yet transpired is the proper integration between old and new, an integration in which the truth in both is acknowledged, namely the reality of Mind and the now visible aspects of “body,” including in that word life as a whole, its carriers, and the cosmos in which they reside.

A different view emerges when we make the attempt: life as a colony or as an invasion of matter by Something mysterious present here and proceeding—not quite knowing where it’s headed—by catch-as-catch-can methods and Hail Mary passes.

Closer To You Than Your Jugular Vein

The phrase may lack all currency in the West, but all Muslims know it well. It is a quote from the Koran (QAF 50:16) and says: “We created man. We know the promptings of his soul, and are closer to him than the vein of his neck.” Interesting image. Closer than his physical life, you might say. The phrase came back as I was contemplating the great divide of invisibility between our dimension and the next one over. But what possible proof is there for that, the existence of the next one over? And then came the answer provided by my memory: “It’s closer to you than your jugular vein”—in which process, of course, what I meant was my own mind, my consciousness, not God, as the Koran has it, although I don’t dispute that either.

It is rather curious, when you think about it, that the proof of our transcending status, above the physical—however vital a physical it is—is the utterly ordinary, common, daily, indeed moment-to-moment fact of self-awareness. It isn’t sharply, clearly visible to us, this radical difference, because we are so intimately identified with our bodies—and a vast radiation of other structures that maintain them—that we do not realize that mind is impossible to build up from the same elements that form the jugular. Conventional wisdom asserts the opposite. Hence to really pin down the facts requires labor. If conventional wisdom had it right, however, Apple would by now have brought us Eve-pad. And looking at her screen some gloomy morning, she would say soothingly, but with an edge of challenge: “We’ve had a bad night—have we?”

Knowledge

Any person who knew with absolute certainty that another reality exists above this one (and leave to the side, for the moment, how that knowledge was acquired) then that person, and a community of such people, would be operating in this world of ours according to the laws of that reality rather than more or less unconsciously adapting to this one. Here a new aspects of the old gnosis—and why knowledge, quite by itself, might be enough—emerges. Such knowledge makes all the difference. To be sure, effective action in this world would then also require much more learning—but the learning about this world would be from the new perspective. It would have quite another context. Faith, as that word is usually understood, is nine parts hope and one part knowledge; it is a weaker state.

But how does this knowledge actually arise? Can it arises more or less naturally?

In my own case the process began with observation and continued through research, thought, reasoning. Gradually. What words to apply to those activities? Exhaustive, wide-ranging, comprehensive. Those qualifiers are crucially important because they incline the investigator to feel obliged to explain whatever facts or phenomena actually appear. Each must be integrated effectively into a whole. The process began for me in trying to make sense of history—when I first entered the Army. The question was suddenly there: What are armies all about? The simple answer I already had, defense. But when you apply those qualifiers (exhaustive, wide-ranging, and comprehensive) that’s only a start. It doesn’t matter where the process begins provided that the effort is allowed to branch. From armies, history. So what is history all about?

Knowledge comes in two varieties: adaptive and truth-seeking. Adaptive learning stops when the action becomes clear; truth-seeking, by its nature, never stops. To follow one’s inclinations belongs to the adaptive category: adapting to desire. So you become all-knowing about literature. It can easily fill a career. To be sure, literature can also be a starting point provided that it becomes exhaustive, wide-ranging, and comprehensive. Soon you’re studying DNA and cells. The human tendency is to organize knowledge into domains and to leave the borders between them more or less neglected territory. Within those domains, lots of easy answers—also enough and exciting controversy to engage the specialist as a fan or opponent for a lifetime. But reconciling different domains is something quite different—especially when they appear to present quite opposing general views of life. And the work is not outwardly rewarding; yes, there are people who tackle such controversies and make a name for themselves; they will also “specialize” in two; but tackling all of them?

Knowledge also arises from life—as opposed to subjects. And lived experiences must also be harmonized with formal knowledge. Endless process. It’s best to keep it separate from earning a living. What might begin as faith (or absolute lack of it) turns into knowledge eventually. And once it is present, it makes all the difference. Not surprisingly, everything then looks—very different.

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.