The Pressure of Time

Our relationships with time are a good indicator that we are creatures of eternity. We don’t like to be governed by time. “Plenty of time,” has a reassuring sound, so does “No hurry.” The person who is “never in a hurry but always on time” seems like a paragon. We resist deadlines, hate waiting in lines. When we want it, we want it now. When in pain, we want it to stop instantly.

The pressure of time has everything to do with bodies. Resisting the pressure is functionally identical with resisting our urges. Doing so we rise above them—and outside of time. As always, in such matters, obeying the pressure in order to help others appears to be the exception to the rule. When someone is hurt, when the house catches fire—the sirens will sound. But helping others, and in quicktime, is also to transcend time. It demands that we put aside our narrower aims for a higher one.

Here also we find the logic for the Catholic concept of the mortification of the flesh. Modernity views that sort of thing with revulsion and contempt—in part because over-zealous and excessive practices in the past have left lurid images. To be sure. It’s possible to overdo everything, even the good and needful. Nevertheless, when we look at any kind of spiritual endeavor, we shall discover in it an effort to transcend the material realm; it is nearest to us in our bodies.

We have a wonderful little Sunbeam water heater—obtained because the %@#$ microwave oven took ever so long to heat a cup’s worth of water. Our Sunbeam produces a cupful of boiling water in about a minute and fifteen seconds. My days start by using it. And, ridiculous as this may sound, that minute causes me daily aggravation. Why? Well, the freeze-dried Taster’s Choice is in the cup with cream and sweetener in much less than that minute, and then I have to endure the agony of waiting!! Therefore, daily, I engage in resisting time. Plenty more opportunities, every day, to practice virtue. Almost anything at all gives me opportunities. I don’t need a pole to stand and live on—nor lashes on my naked back with leather thongs. Time itself provides unending stimulus to fight its downward pull.

Managing Dreams

I went to sleep last night giving myself a strong instruction: None of those horrid waking dreams, please! Such dreams are always about “going home,” but I’m usually lost in an urban landscape, and the landscape always gets ever more horrid. Then, as bad conditions escalate, I wake up in an effort to get away. The process is more fully described here.

Well, during the night that followed I had only one waking dream. In it I was at home and heard the doorbell ring. It had a single chime, meaning the back door—where craftsmen usually ring the bell—rather than multiple chimes, meaning the front door. Then I had the image of a huge yellow, big-wheeled shovel on the driveway. This woke me up.

Evidently “myself” had gotten the message—and when the time had come for me to wake up, it woke me up without the help of horror stories. You might say. Having such a shovel put to work in my yard would, of course, be a bit of a tale of woe!

Weak, Paradoxical Terminology

When we try to describe transcending experiences, we use words rooted in matter. Such experiences have the character of invisibility, intangibility—to others. We then insist that what we experienced was real, using a word that comes from the Latin res, meaning “thing” or “matter.” But, of course, what we assert, using that word, is the thingishness of something that isn’t—a thing.

Personal experiences are labeled subjective, a word that has a strong tinge of unreality—because experiences cannot be shared. But when we insist that, to the contrary, our experiences are objectively real, we are using the Latin for something “tangible,” placed right in front of us, visible, graspable. But others can neither see nor grasp these experiences.

In German reality is Wirklichkeit, derived from the verb wirken, “to effect, to act,” hence in English “actuality.” Now that is better than “reality” because it is more descriptive of what we experience, which is a kind of power. Is energy a thing? Or is, rather, matter a kind of solidified energy?

These thoughts arose when, greatly amusing me with its truth, I read a post by The Zenist last Thursday (link) in which he suggests that first-person (“subjective”) experiences may be defined as paranormal—because “the dictionary essentially said paranormal was beyond the range of science and recognizable phenomena.” Right on. My own view has long been that life itself, never mind Mind, is the radical discontinuity in reality. (I can’t get along without that word.)

Paradox also arises because the closest we can actually get to the real Real is by examining our own experience of being aware of being—but that is subjective and therefore to be dismissed. The objective manifestations of our selves are bodies that we’ll leave behind. And rooted here are some Sufi teachings suggesting that, in this realm, we’re upside down. We think that res makes Mind whereas, in actuality, Mind makes res. Turning things right side up, we are prior to things and superior to them. Therefore if we want to use words perversely to mean their exact opposites, that’s Okay. We are the boss.

Precision and Pattern

The philosophical and the scientific ways of looking at the world seem closely related. Both aim at precision. The philosophical aims at precision in the management of concepts, the scientific at precision in measuring phenomena. There are problems in both encampments. Concepts are damnably fluid and heavily dependent on the cultural atmospherics present where they arise and, for a while, abide. Nature is very coy and hides herself from measurement at the extremes—yet it is at the extremes where the doubts are: quantum physics and astronomy.

By contrast the poetic way of perceiving reality seeks meaning in patterns. Its operant faculty is intuition and imagination. In all three of these categories, needless to say, intellect, imagination, and intuition are at work, and if one of these faculties is weak, the results are merely so-so. But there is what might be viewed as a temperamental difference or leaning involved; some people are comfortable with precision, others with a much fuzzier gnosis. The great merit of the poetic view is that it produces a sense of certainty—its chief drawback that the poet can’t turn his insights into dogma or into technology; no money in it, you might say. The reason is that the poet is denied precision. The philosopher cannot reach closure; he or she might stare at the inaccessible noumenon, as Kant did—but the poet is right at home with Noumy. The scientist is denied meaning, but in seeking the mechanics of reality, his horizons keep expanding just like the universe is supposed to do; back to the drawing board is a recurring theme.

Borrowing brings happiness to all. Borrow a little science to enlarge the patterns, a little poetry to admire the shifting phenomena of nature, a little science to bolster concepts, a few eternal ideas to give them radiance.

Dreaming Unemployment

A harrowing dream reminded me how difficult detachment  really is if something harsh disturbs our life—like unemployment. In my dream I had been laid off from a huge corporation. My dream-self felt middle-aged and therefore  I was without hope of ever getting a job again. As the dream was ending, I was heading home, dreading to have to share the news—yet the sky was sunny and great office towers glittered in the distance. My dream memory then produced my actual age—an age when almost no one works any more. That woke me up—but the residual feelings were still unpleasantly there.

Was my ill-named Unconscious compensating for my frequently repeated praises of “detachment” as a kind of cure-all? The dream seemed to say: “Wake up already! Have a taste of the real thing!” In dreams the conscious mind is absent; the emotions have free reign. Yes. I tend to understate the difficulties when the challenges are harsh. When we are young detachment takes a much more active form: Grin and bear it, Stiff upper lip, When things get tough the tough get going. Yes. Detachment is too technical a word. Mindfulness is better. Getting hold of one’s emotions is what’s indicated. While in this valley we can’t really detach completely. Never mind sovereignty. Can’t have it here. Other people are involved, the good of the community. What we can do is act responsibly—while practicing stoicism and holding fast to our faith in the reality beyond us, even when it shows no sign of presence. What we often need is prayer—and faith that it will all work out.

I hope I got the message. I don’t want that dream recurring. I’d better face the bitter cold out there, the treacherously slippery sidewalks, and go out on a long walk, not the wimpy short one. Then next time I might dream of Florida in February, the highlight of our 2012.

Ivory Coast

Horrid intrusions of the random serve as reminders of our condition in this pocket of existence. Some sixty people, many of them young, were crushed to death in a stampede in Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast, as a fireworks event ended and people were heading home through narrow streets. Life is about meaning, but such events are a tremendous challenge to that intuitively felt conviction. It reminds me that, here, we’re not at home. We may be here for a purpose, but that that purpose is beyond the three dimensions moving through time. The sixty or sixty-one dead (the final number has not yet emerged), may be home now, or maybe not. Some may be born again; others have passed on.

The very setting and nature of this event—where we find it difficult to console ourselves by blaming somebody, where the victims were clearly innocent, just attending a festive event—underlines the precarious nature of our reality. It is illogical to assume that it was arranged, somehow, by divine sanction from above. At the human level, the event was massively policed; the disaster took place as the authorities relaxed; the actual triggering cause of it will probably never be discovered: just someone panicking.

But what needs remembering is that those sixty or more people—they are still with us, if invisibly. Their journey in this dimension may be over or may resume. What this realm of ours actually is, how it relates to the whole, that remains a subject of contemplation. But for the stout of heart such events serve as a corrective to the sleep that usually holds us. The lamps must be kept lit, the eyes must be kept open, even as we contemplate souls leaping out of crushed bodies somewhere in Africa. Our prayers go out to those they’ve left behind.

The Invisible

Wir sind mit dem Unsichtbaren näher als mit dem Sichtbaren verbunden.

We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible.

     Novalis, Das Allgemeine Brouillon, §251.

Novalis was the pseudonym of the short-lived eighteenth century poet, thinker, mystic, and civil engineer George Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hadenberg. He died of tuberculosis at 28 (May 1772 to March1801) but left behind a monumental work that greatly influenced his times. At that age I was just beginning to grow up. Novalis means something to us because he died in Weissenfels, the first German town Brigitte inhabited on her long migration from Lodz, in Poland, to the United States.

I’ve noted this “closeness to the invisible” in the Muslim culture a while back (link, “Closer To You Than Your Jugular Vein.”) What struck me today, reflecting on the life of Novalis again, was that some individuals are far more aware of this, far earlier in life. The invisible is literally flooding them, their intuition is on fire, and in some notable instances, Mozart comes to mind as well, they produce magnificent works and then, in a flash, they are gone again—almost as if their stay here is shortened when, evidently, their work is done.

Novalis’ most extensive work is Das Allgemeine Brouillon, notes on all kinds of subjects produced in 1798-1799. A direct translation of that title is The General Muddle, muddle being the translation of brouillon that Novalis borrowed from the French. It has taken a long time to get it translated into English: 2007. The translator was David W. Wood. He gave it the more grandiose title Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia. George Hadenberg, of course, burning very brightly, had it right to begin with: this is the realm of muddle; the order emerges when we leave.

An Excess of Abstraction

Or In Praise of Mythology. All of my heroes have significant flaws—as in they, too, were human—but my admiration for them arose in the first place because they had wonderful insights. I was reminded of that this morning when by happenstance a post here about a year ago—about the Zuni world conception (“The Dance Hall of the Dead” link)—came to mind. I read it again. Now there is a mythological view of the transcendental. And in light of that a post of mine yesterday, about a “science of the spiritual,” fell into better focus. The thought arose: We suffer from an excess of abstraction. We also, of course, suffer from an excess of technology, brittle noise, unnatural flickering motion on millions of screens. That all this should suddenly be forcibly present to me this morning next reminded me of Carl Gustav Jung and his theory of compensation: our greater mind, which he, unfortunately, named the Unconscious, acts as a corrective to the busy working of our conscious mind—and in sleep, in dreams, it reminds us of the Bigger Picture. So I might have dreamt something, although I don’t remember it.

Fleshing this out a little, I am reminded that through vast ages past humanity lived in nature—not in the artificial monstrosity of urban aggregations. Books were nonexistent for most of those times. Collective culture took the form of myths, great narratives, poetry, images. Even after books had come to be, the masses could not read. Here, for instance, a verse by the French poet François Villon, attributed to his mother (1461)†:

I am a woman poor and aged,

I know nothing at all; letters I never read;

At my parish monastery I saw

A painted Paradise with harps and lutes,

And also Hell wherein the damned are boiled:

One gave me fright; the other joyfulness.

Even in this day and age of ridiculously excessive abstraction, real religious feeling continues to be expressed in mythological forms, even on the flickering TV. CNN, for instance treated us to a rich tapestry of images in its re-broadcast of The Two Marys*—images which, in effect, overwhelm the decidedly modernistic message of the accompanying voice-over.

Not everything is concept. And to call all that remains mere emotion is also quite wrong. In the mythologies of humanity a magical fusion takes place of the many facets of soul-experience. And in the next world over, no doubt, we shall once more live “in nature,” not in the calculator our heads have become.

————————

†A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel, Viking, 1996, p. 105.

*See also The Two Marys: The Hidden History of the Mother and Wife of Jesus, by Sylvia Browne, Penguin Group, 2007.

A Science of the Spiritual

At the conventional level, thus in common public discourse, a rather deep abyss separates the spiritual and the so-called scientific. It is an either-or situation. Science represents a materialistic monism (although not all scientists do). The spiritual are presumed to believe in one or more supernatural beings who stand above visible reality in a governing, law-giving, rewarding and punishing relationship. The reason for this is that, viewed from a distance, most highly developed religions project a narrative in the form of ruler-and-subject—easily understood by human societies in which that pattern is always present.

This description, to be sure, is a gross simplification—but that’s what animates public discourse. It ignores the fact that science has reached levels, certainly in physics and to a lesser extent in neuroscience, where hard materialism is ever less sustainable. It also ignores the fact that higher religions have arisen transcending the primitive ruler-subject model. To be sure, the higher faiths still rest on primitive foundations as a consequence of historical origins, thus Christianity on Judaism. At the same time the earlier religions, influenced by higher religions, have also, at their leading edges, become much more spiritualized. Every religion now has a mystical level—an elite expression.

Also present, in very tentative form, is a genuine science of the spiritual. My hope is that the likely brutal transition to a post-fossil-age will not plunge us back to primitivity. If we manage that transition well, the science of the spiritual will continue to grow. If not, it will sink out of view as harshly doctrinaire religious management of masses once more arises. Alchemy is an example of such a science—hidden and submerged by the collapse of the Roman Age.

By a “science of the spiritual” I mean a vastly enlarged scientific venture to understand reality, and particularly spiritual reality, free of the strictures of dogmatically managed Revelation—thus authoritarian religion. Revelation itself, to be sure, would be a central concern of this new science, viewing it as human experience of the transcending regions but, to be sure, interpreted by the very people who have had them—and then socialized yet more, for purposes of human governance, by others.

This science, so far is it already exists, has made me wonder more and more if perhaps human encounters with the Beyond might not be over-stated by those who have experienced them—and this for reasons that are mutually reinforcing. One is that their expectations are formed by religious ideas—thus occurring in the context of religious practices. The other is that the actual “heavenly” environment is both more natural to humans and yet also quite unfamiliar, therefore it is overly stimulating. Good evidence for this comes from Swedenborg’s accounts; his long exposure to that world had made him familiar with it. He also saw enough to see the vast complexities of reality beyond the border. At the same time, it may well be that being anchored in a body is not very helpful for understanding that world, that much learning is ahead for us before we’re fully acclimatized there, that (per Swedenborg and others, e.g., Robert Monroe) low adaptations are available and also common there; and, finally, concerning that last point, that spending some time in this our own more constricted “world of boxes,” to cite a phrase from Carl Jung’s account of returning from a near death experience, may benefit those of us who have lived a life here attentively. It may enable us to aim higher when we actually get there.

A science of the spiritual, given the abyss that separates science and religion today, will tend to appeal to neither the spiritual nor to the scientific camps. But there is always a third way.

Notes on Catastrophism

Fringe elements latch on to any suitable calendrical event to head for high places there to await the End Times or Doomsday. Today is such a day. The Mayan Long Count Calendar, this time, serves as the motivation. I’ve presented the background on that in some detail on Ghulf Genes. In summary, No, the Mayans themselves did not believe the world would end today. But then the people among them who made calendars were more akin in spirit to our scientists than any other subgroup of our current humanity.

Thinking about this—first of all ancient cultures’ great fascination with precise measurement of sky events, second the vast public fascination with end times, be they caused by divine command or cosmological accidents—I suspect that two quite different motivations are present, one for each, although, once upon a time, they coincided. To put this in plain words:

I think that once long ago—and perhaps repeatedly—humanity actually experienced genuine near-collisions with space objects, indeed in what might be called historical times. This or these caused enormous destruction. Therefore societies felt themselves obliged to observe changes out in space. They could not prevent recurrence, but at least they could know if something dreadful loomed ahead. Therefore we find “observatories” such as Stonehenge scattered over the ancient world. These are interpreted as religious sites. But if they were that, why the awesome precision in observation that they permitted. Similarly, there are astronomical observations anchored in calendars, similarly accurate. It’s telling that the Mayans produced extraordinarily accurate observations of the phases of Venus. For more on this I suggest the writings of the Immanuel Velikovsky; he is derided by orthodox science—but that, perhaps, adds justification for reading him. What we have here is a quite plausible link between accurate astronomy on the one hand and real sky-conveyed catastrophes on the other.

As for the popular fascination, that, I think, has its roots in our psychology. Doomsday, viewed as a concept, is in a real sense a projection onto the entire society, and on the world itself, of something that will happen to each of us individually. We shall all die—and as we do, everything, at least everything we’ve grown accustomed to, will disappear: people, culture, rocks, planet, and sun. Knowing nothing beyond that with certainty puts us in a scary place, if we think about it. This will all end. And when times are tough—and they are always tough—Doomsday also holds a faint little promise: when it comes, our troubles will all end. And then, to complete the picture, a small still voice within us also suggests that absolute disappearance is not our fate. Therefore what comes in Doomsday’s wake may be the longed for millennium.

To this I might add that we may not be naturally fashioned to live in a uni-directional time stream. And when we leave this dimension and enter another kind of time, then we shall be home again. Aldous Huxley captures the feel of that in his novel, Time Must Have a Stop. And that sentiment, buried deep within us, also plays a role. It causes us to resonate with widely publicized events signaling just that, time’s stop…with a kind of shivery feeling in which loss and gain are strongly mixed.

If Only We Knew More

How to combat that strong feeling—which at times arises just by looking at the world with a cold eye—that our sojourn in this dimension is altogether pointless. There is a glimmer of intuition, always, that that cannot be. And it arises spontaneously enough so that its source is not something that reaches us from others, although it may well come from on high. The world’s revelations, formed into religious doctrines, may, after all, be viewed as the imaginative fleshing out of that tiny intuition by those who’ve lived before.

When such thoughts assail me I like to remind myself that I don’t know enough, and also cannot—not by reading the tea leaves of this dimension. I don’t know the prehistory of our appearance here; I don’t know enough about the world that follows—although I believe (that intuition again) that something beyond exists. The presumption is that if I knew something real about both, the reason for our stay in this dimension would fall into place. Let’s look at these two ranges of inaccessible knowledge.

Prehistory. This realm would seem less depressing if I knew with certainty that souls originate in this dimension “naturally” or that they have been “caught up” in some also natural event like the formation of a cosmos. These are two cases of many—but perhaps the most obvious. In the first (Prehistory A) the presumed model is some kind of emanation, thus that all of reality is in some sense “flowing” out of a divine center. Part of that flow is the conditioned, part the unconditioned order. The conditioned is simply the visible cosmos of energy and matter, the unconditioned manifests as freedom, intelligence, and, most primitively, life. Here the only “authority” we have is Swedenborg’s. He asserted that all “angels” were at origin like us; they emerged from the dark domain, our sunny world or one like it. I say that because Swedenborg did not view the earth as the only cosmic point where life begins a journey “back to God.” The structure of this narrative is that the created soul is quite unconscious but has all the necessary potential, including life itself. And that embodied life is just a phase of the development of this potential. The soul has many stages of development both before and after it arrives in the “beyond.”

The pros and cons of this projection are that life here is a necessary phase. That immediately gives our life here meaning. In this view life arising anywhere in the universe, if conditions are suitable, would seem normal. It would make sense that we have engineered bodies as temporary “vehicles.” The view is also compatible with reincarnation theories if rebirth is occasional and due to the “unfinished” nature of the reborn soul: it has not developed enough. Among the cons is that the model does not fit the Christian cosmology—which has another prehistory, call it Prehistory C. Other problem are its emanationist structure, which is not rationally explained and obviously based on a physical analogy like the radiations of the sun. To be sure, all creation myths are ultimately incoherent, but a “natural” origin seems less meaningful than a deliberate decision by a conscious God, which is what Prehistory C contains.

Prehistory B is the other case. In that one a preexistent community of souls is plunged into a (for its members) unnatural situation by a cosmic event, the model being the Big Bang—which is not an event of “creation” but, rather, the formation of a kind of bubble in a much greater and vastly more dense “Mother Cosmos.” The community lived in the “space” where that bubble formed. The “density” here can be understood in various ways beyond the simple. It might have more dimensions; it could also mean that our cosmos has greater coarseness, its Mother greater subtlety. The change, in any case, is abrupt and in a real sense destructive of an “environment” in which the preexistent community had its being. The unfortunate community is therefore obliged to adapt in some way and then begin the process of returning to Mother.

Let’s look at the pros and cons of this case too. In this view life here is an accidental phase in the life of a soul community. It projects onto the cosmos, and the matrix of which it is a bubble, a “natural” condition such as we experience here, i.e., shit happens. Whatever happens may be lawful, but it seems random as we experience it. Our condition, however, at least makes some sense. We’ve been plunged into an environment to which we’re not adapted, and all that we observe is an attempt to make the best of a bad situation—not least escaping from it into a more suitable one by appropriate development. Our world has fallen, but it isn’t our fault. It just happened. Our inability to remember our preexistence in a “higher” world would also make sense. Cosmic accidents may have swept our memories away—or adapting to this one favors their suppression—filtered out by our brains. Pro: our situation at least makes sense. Con: there is neither rhyme or reason to the situation. Any meaning is referred to something beyond either this cosmos or its accident-prone Mother. Cosmologies tend to do this: they push meaning further away, rather than supplying it. In any case, no Divine Presence is anywhere discernible beyond the seemingly lawful behavior of matter/energy—but only when we give it close study.

The World that Follows. Knowing the world beyond would presumably illuminate our knowledge of this one. Such knowing would require at minimum (1) memory of this existence there, (2) retention of our powers of reasoning and movement (to enable us to look around), (3) ability clearly to perceive the conditions of that world, and (4) the presence of other beings like ourselves. We could then carry out a survey and discover if others had also lived in a “fallen world.” If some had but others had not, Prehistory B would appear more plausible. If all had, Prehistory A would have more weight. We would be able to discover if others over there had a coherent view of reality. If they did, the reasons for that could be ascertained. If not—if the same puzzlement reigned over there as does here—in that case the quest for answers just continues. What is inconceivable is that there is no answer. Our deepest intuition is that there is. That intuition is not merely a glimmer of knowledge. It is also a hunger and a thirst—for meaning and for righteousness.

Sticks and Stones

One of the ways in which we become very, very well-adapted to living in a physical environment is that we tend to ignore or minimize those messages we hear frequently enough so that they’re familiar but which, at the same time, don’t hold a threat of harming us. If someone reads a lot about spiritual matters, the eastern doctrine of Maya, thus that the world is an “illusion,” rapidly loses whatever thought it might have originally occasioned. It does not seem to be borne out by direct experience. Here the typical reaction is that of Dr. Johnson who, in reaction to hearing Bishop Berkeley’s idealism labeled, by his friend Boswell, as impossible to refute, kicked a stone with great force and said: “I refute it thus.” Funny, yes.

Doctrines of this type are difficult. How can something solid be an illusion? What is rarely offered, by way of counterpoint, is that our most immediate experience of life, self-awareness, is absolutely immaterial. The thought process that went through Dr. Johnson head, the impulse that set his foot in motion, the words he formed before he spoke—all three of these had zero substantiality. So we do have, as it were, two different but equally real experiences of reality. One of these you cannot kick—but you can’t kick without it. And the dead stone that got the kick cannot for the life of it (which it lacks) cry “Ouch!”

Okay. For materialists thought and will and feelings, indeed self-awareness too, are all material. But they haven’t proved their case at all. Hence I ignore them.

Now these doctrines arise from actual experience. It is the experience of the contrast between two worlds, a spiritual and the physical, that gives rise to them. Once the spiritual has really been experienced in a genuine way and for long enough so that it sinks in, the world of matter is discounted, as it were. It is shown to be, in terms of real value, so very much inferior to the material world as to take on the aspect of illusion. Simply to label it thus, as illusion, is not a very sophisticated way to make the point—but the person experiencing the contrast also realizes that it can’t be proved without the experience.

The contrast between the physical and the mental however, are accessible to all of us—and serve as a point from which the hoary old doctrines may be examined. We all of us, virtually all of the time, are living in our minds, not in the physical world. Having one’s tooth drilled might be the exception that proves the rule. And where our minds originate is a great puzzlement. But reasonable reflection on it does suggest several things. One is that mind is vastly superior to matter. Another that it must come from a realm quite different than the one we inhabit now. So there is a mild case, at minimum, for a higher world. And those who have experienced it assure us that it is more real, more solid, than sticks and stones and bones.

Illusion? Why ever not? But the word must be applied with a modifier: relative. This world is relatively less substantial than the subtle world where our minds originated—and where they are bound again. Meanwhile our brains are organized to look out for sticks and stones—and to value only immediate threats and immediate gratifications. It is this, our excellent adaptation, that make us kick the stone or bang the table to make a limited if dramatic assertion of our own superiority.

Negative Pleasures

Negative pleasures seem to be the pleasures of old age, but then I think back...and then I’m not so sure. Anyway, what am I talking about? I’m talking about the absence of stress. But absence of stress is equivalent to an absence of stimulus. And if one is quite readily stimulated, the absence of stimulus is in itself a pleasure.

Reading Berdyaev’s The Beginning and End again after a long stretch of years, I find him speaking of the passionate life. He doesn’t mean the life of the flesh, but nevertheless he is much taken with “passion” and with “dynamism.” At one point he is exploring the German mystic Boehme’s writings about the Ungrund. That is a kind of Nothingness out of which God creates. Berdyaev is also influenced by Hegel—not enough to agree with Hegel that God is evolving in history, but the dynamic view in Hegel appeals to him.

Now reading quotes from Boehme in that book (not included in the compilation that I own, perhaps because of their seemingly heterodox flavor) it occurred to me that Boehme’s inward experiences are ultimately the same as other “unitive” experiences of great mystics. In these there is some kind of experience of the rootings of the self but projected onto God (in my view). The mystics experience energy and take it to be God. But it might very well be the life-force that they feel. Boehme looked deeper than most and hence experienced Nothingness and, arising out of it, a powerful desire. But that may be the experience of an origination, not an experience of God or of God feeling desires; or it may be an apperception of his own fallen state—and the desire to escape it.

The object of that desire I see as something Berdyaev may have viewed as a passive sort of state. I call it sovereignty—the state in which I am above passion taken positively (a drive) or negatively (a suffering).

If stimulus is associated with life in the physical realm then its absence enables us to experience what lies above that realm. That absence frees the attention. Something of value may “flow down” from above; and if we perceive it, we will cultivate the “negative pleasure” in order to enable ourselves to capture it.

An observation that seems to come to all explorers of the Borderzone is that feelings common in bodily life have a two-tiered character. There is pleasure and then there’s joy, for instance. There is eros and then caritas. There is grasp and there is understanding. There is stimulus and there is intuition. The second in these pairings is always more subtle. Berdyaev’s book, referred to above, is filled with such distinctions, although not presented systematically. There is being and non-being in his own philosophy, for instance, and it is non-being which gets the favorable nod. The state of “being” is the fallen state. Words, words, words. Why not just say “the spiritual.” That nothingness, that negativity, is actually a much higher and very real value. And the negative pleasures are higher values that become accessible when a kind of equilibrium between the lower and higher is achieved—the state of “sovereignty.”

There would seems to be a big difference between this dimension and the one where we are going—but yet it will be a familiar sort of place. Things here will correspond to things there—but what a difference. We can experience that difference by contemplating the difference between stimuli and intuitions. Here everything is mixed up and it is tough to sort things out.

Wearing a Dunce Cap

I have been wandering of late in the company of a distinct minority within the Age of Christendom. By and large it is the company I’ve kept throughout my life even if, quite often, sometimes for years on end, I’ve been socializing with the same minorities in other cultures—Persian (Mazdaism), Arab (Sufism), but also touching the Chinese (in Taoism). This walk, of late, began with Duns Scotus whom I met, in my childhood, by way of the dunce cap and, growing up, I never questioned the prevalent but mildly expressed view among my teachers in Catholic schools from lowest to highest that Scotus was a rather dim light, if not a small shadow-thrower, in the vast brilliance of St. Thomas Aquinas. Dunce cap? Worn by those who do not get it. You can make one out of some sheets of newspaper, making them into a cone. For the origin of that shape I show a fifteenth century painting of Scotus (who himself lived mostly in the blessed thirteenth century, 1266-1308); the Flemish painter was Justus van Gent (link).

Scotus belongs to the Platonic line traceable backwards by way of St. Augustine (354-430). Augustine himself was part of this minority, close to Manichaeism in youth, a gnostic view which itself has links back to Mazdaism. He lived in a time when the New Dark Age of the Roman Realm was up and running in a serious way. The Visigoths sacked Rome when he was 56 in 410 AD. Therefore his view was darker and more pessimistic than that of Aquinas (1225-1274) who lived as the light of the Renaissance began to signal its own coming with a faint rosy color beneath the horizon. And Aquinas’ great influence was Aristotle who lived just as the Old Modernism, Hellenism, was about to be launched by his pupil, Alexander the Great.  

Let me capture these distinctions in cartoon-like fashion, as it were. Plato stood in relation to Aristotle as Scotus stood to Aquinas. In Plato we see the mature philosophy of a passing religious age, in Aristotle the foreshadowing of a modern time. The same may be said of Scotus and Aquinas, with the small but not very important difference that Aquinas was 41 years older than Scotus whereas Plato was 43 years older than Aristotle. In inwardly-directed religious ages, awareness of the fallen nature of humanity is to the fore. In outwardly-directed secular ages, self-assertion rises. The feeling tone derives from the focus of attention.

So I was reading Berdyaev. He proclaims himself a Platonist, Christian existentialist, and he viewed Duns Scotus as the greatest of the Scholastics. It was the kind of statement that caught my eye, surprised me. I underlined it heavily, adding exclamation marks in the margin—the last time I had read the Russian sage some decades ago with great approval.

So here we have a minority strain of pessimism and a majority dominance of optimism—both within an almost invisibly small cluster of communities that even think about permanent transcendence. I’m still of the pessimistic camp but getting there, in age, I mean. And the odd thing is that, well past the three-score-and-ten, I am feeling optimistic now. If one goes deep enough in any direction with a kind of junk-yard-dog persistence, amazingly the light begins to dawn. I wonder. Does the light eventually dim for the really persistent optimists? If so, my intuition guided me correctly in my gloomy youth.

Sub Specie Temporis

When contemplating the likely life-course of certain individuals “under the aspect of time,” I often experience genuine pain. But when I do it “under the aspect of eternity” the pain gradually lessens. This comes from my conviction that being here, in this time-sodden dimension, is (to put it neutrally) temporary. There is a way out. We will all eventually find it. Oddly, the Age of Fossil Fuels, which we worship as Progress, has been a kind of curse. That influx of free energy has reduced the level of hardship for many, many people a bit too much; therefore it has made it harder for a similar number to discover what our job on this earth is. Therefore we pay for the ease of modernity with massive private failure at the individual level in neglecting life’s Job 1.

The Latin phrase, sub specie aeternitatis, got it legs in the seventeenth century. It was first used by the short-lived lens-grinder and philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) in asserting that Reason derives from God, that its use permits us to see things under the aspect of eternity, not of time. Curious business, this wisdom in another language. Latin seemingly elevates concepts. Lots of learned people have used it since Spinoza. Something in us resonates with that meaning. I remember reading it for the first time as a youngster used by Arnold Toynbee in one of his works—and immediately latching on to it as if I’d found a treasure. Of such stones, to change the image, are built the steps out of this dimension.