Hyman Bloom and Mystical Experience

The New York Times today brought news of the death of Hyman Bloom, the Boston-based painter of mystical art. In the obituary is the account of a mystical experience Bloom had in 1939 at age 26. I note this here because it shows, once again, that the mystical is not something ancient, a phenomenon of dark ages or of ages of superstition. It happens to people who are in some way open. Such experiences coincide often enough with artistic and visionary temperaments so that one cannot help but to assume a cause-effect relationship. I usually express this by gesturing with a hand above my head and saying that such people are “open,” as if they had a hole in their skull. This openness manifests in milder forms as well, thus as intuition of a certain kind, and those who have it cannot view the world in the same way as people for whom the region beyond the border is entirely opaque, the wall so solid that not even vibrations reach the hand that inadvertently touches the stones.

The Ambiguities of Moral Action

Let me, for starters, delimit the scope of the moral, thus to separate genuinely moral from what might be called spontaneous useful action. All action is aimed at achieving something good, and we can define good simply enough by saying that it’s something pleasing to us. The issue of moral choice never really arises unless there is a conflict between goods—thus until a situation arises in which we must deny ourselves something for a so-called “higher” good or undergo a pain or deprivation in order to benefit either a future instance of ourselves or to help other people. If there is no conflict, there is no morality involved. Morality always involves the willing acceptance of some kind of deprivation. To eat the French fries may not be a moral act, but to eat the spinach, if I don’t like it, may be—because it is good for me. Similarly, doing services for others in exchange for something else is just exchange. I’m merely pleasing myself by means of other people. When I spend a day helping the old lady next door move her furniture to a small apartment half-way across the city—and I rent the truck and do all the labor—then I’m doing something just because, under the circumstances, I find it appropriate.

Moral action thus seems to require the development within us of a kind of sympathy—both for an enlarged sense of our selves and for other people. In the first case, I enlarge my sense of self from this immediate moment to the larger sense of myself over a long period of time. In relation to others, I include the community as part of my narrow being, hence I give of myself to the collective. In both cases a sense of sympathy and unity must be present as a motive. The sensory pay-offs of abstemious behavior or good deeds are quite minimal.

Now the ambiguities of moral action arise precisely because such action demands this inner state, this intuition, this something that I call a sympathy. And we are not the sole agency that participates in the formation of this feeling. Nurture plays a very big role. Our sense of sympathy is an inner presence formed reciprocally with the community. Suppose a child grows up in a harsh and violent environment where an abusive figure dominates and sets the tone of most hours of the day—whether he or she is present or not. Here I am reminded of Saddam Hussein; he grew up in the shadow of a violent stepfather with criminal tendencies. If our earliest experience is of a certain kind, just how free, later, is our will to ascribe to the “world out there” a benevolent aspect? Why should it—when its own experience has been of a world of irrational and arbitrary threats against which only deception, dissimulation, and countering violence are really effective foils?

Ambiguity further plagues this subject because even people who grow up in the worst of circumstances still retain a sense of moral rights and wrongs. This sense may be deformed, but it won’t be absent. The person will know what hurts him or her, and he or she ought to know to avoid doing to others what he or she does not wish to experience. The good deeds of people scarred like this may be more difficult to discern, but may be present. The Biblical admonition, “Judge not, that ye be not judged” [Matthew 7:1] is based on the perception of this ambiguous character of moral action, the roots of which are so clouded and difficult to see. To shake our organic rootings in actual experience so that everything appears clearly, sharply, and in the right focus, requires a long journey sometimes—and sometimes is present early thanks to the grace of fortunate birth, parents, and optimal circumstances. And even then, the drag of the sensory, the personal, and of the here and now are great enough to lead us into error.

Twisted Together

The concept of complexity suggests an approach to thinking about values. Complex means, minimally, twisted together, entwined. Something made of many parts linked together in meaningfully related ways has more value than something simple existing without relationships. A slice of bread has more nutritional value than a lump of sugar with the same caloric value. Both produce energy in the body but the bread will provide more balanced nutrition owing to its more complex structure.

Another case. You come into a new community and meet two people. Both belong to important and well-connected families. One of them, Arthur, is a leading figure in his family, young but already widely accomplished. The other, Beaumont, is his family’s problem child, the source of many conflicts, with a very patchy history to put it generously. — This, by the way, is how a novelist develops a plot. He says: Who’s going to be more valuable to you in your work in the new community: Arthur or Beaumont? The truth is that odds heavily favor Arthur, and in most cases he will be very helpful; Beaumont may be entertaining, but he’ll be a problem sooner or later. The novelist knows this—knows how people eyeball situations—and therefore has a nice plot situation that might be exploited.

Both are complexly related to their families, but Arthur is integrated and Beaumont is not. This fact suggests that “relationship,” by itself, is not a sufficient condition for value. Relationships are central, but they range between love and hatred. Attraction and repulsion are more neutral terms, but speaking of love and hate permits us to think in terms of willful, feeling agents. We might hypothesize that creation is a movement in the direction of complexity, thus in the direction of an attractor. Destruction then may be envisioned as things spontaneously falling apart because an attractor has been removed; in its absence that which used to cohere no longer does.

Complexity, however, won’t solve the problem of morality. What is it about Beaumont that always produces trouble, mayhem, contention, flare-ups, wrecks, uproars, and the like? Why is it that whatever Arthur touches, it always turns green? Is it a willful quality? Is it grace? Is it nurture, nature, karma? Don’t look at me. I don’t have the answer. I think it is a will that freely decides, but I can’t justify that thought by the mechanics of logic.

Logic depends on concepts, but in Beaumont’s (or anybody’s) actual case, a point comes where a weird concept spoils the logic. Beaumont acts on his perceptions of reality; in his own mind he chooses the good. He seems unable to perceive the full context of his choice, unable to see that, more complexly considered, the choice he makes will lead to a negative outcome. That inability to see: is that also a choice? or is it a real inability. Logic can’t untwist that one for us. When I do bad things, I willfully ignore what I do perceive. Hence arises my belief that evil is chosen knowingly. But I can’t honestly speak for Beaumont.

This all sounds innocent enough, but its implications are quite major. We’ll have to go there.

Mind-Produced Reality?

There is a mystical line of speculation suggesting that beyond the border, that side of life, what we see is the creation of our own minds. Suppose you, an elderly lady, die, and, having been brought up in the Christian tradition—and your conscience reasonably clear—you expect to be in heaven. Heaven is all things good and beautiful—hence you behold beauty, harmony, see lovely lights, hear splendid music. Or suppose that you’ve just been shot dead in a store that you were holding up, but you didn’t see the owner in the hallway, holding a rifle, and just as you try to pistol-whip the clerk, by way of saying “I mean business,” you’re shot, fall to the ground, crawl to the door of the store, and die on the sidewalk. Got it? Good. Now you, a hoodlum, old enough to know that hold-ups are a no-no, a vague conception of Christianity alive in your noodle too, over there, beyond the border, you don’t anticipate the best. Rather the opposite. This mystical speculation therefore suggests that you’ll see devils advancing on you, a sea of flame behind them silhouetting horns and three-pronged spears. You would say “Woe is me!” but, alas, you haven’t read enough to know that phrase. Instead you say, “Oh, shit.”

Now what about this notion that the mind creates reality?

I’m fairly convinced that the idea arose because we do seem to create reality in dreams. I’ve had the experience countless times, usually in quite banal dream situations. Here is one that I recall. In this dream I had to cut something out, a picture from a printed piece of paper. I was standing at a table then and, in dream memory, there was nothing on that table except a cup, pencils, and the sheet. But now I just reached to the left, over there, and sure enough a pair of scissors in my hand, but, I swear, it materialized, manner of speaking. It wasn’t there before. I noted this fact in the dream itself. Indeed that thought caused me to awaken. And I lay there thinking about it—and that’s why I even remember this snippet. But I’ve noted this phenomenon many times before. I think of people, and there they are. But other things far more outrageous also happen, not least—and everybody has experienced this—the scene suddenly changing, without any transitional state. People will say: I was gardening, and the next thing you know I’m in this, like bazaar…

Dream reality, in the dream, a little less so when remembered, precisely for the reasons just outlined, seems very real. But the progression of events convinces me that what we experience as concrete reality is thoughts expressed in three-dimensional picture form. Thus when I think of scissors, I hold them because I thought of them. The gardener is in a bazaar because an association, perhaps a memory, brought a bazaar to mind, a place where once she’d seen some tool she needed at that moment. The reason why scenes change abruptly is because they do. They do so in our head. I just thought of Kroger, a big fruit display. If I were asleep, I might be in that Kroger.

The thinking behind this theory—based on the dream although it is—is that outside of bodies our mind becomes our only home and that, in consequence, we are subject to its spontaneous productions whether we will it or not. The good will enjoy heavenly pleasures, the evil will be tortured forever. End of story.

Something in me dislikes this notion. Let me look and see what it is. The notion has no anchorage in anything except dream experience, and that I’ve managed to explain that to my own satisfaction. Furthermore, why would that be so? What, if anything, would that have to do with galaxies, say, or shells on sandy shores? For any real life beyond this frontier, the other side would have to have some kind of immovable, resistant reality by means of which we should be able to orient ourselves. Without an objective over-against, our own minds would have no meaning whatsoever. Do I think that the elderly lady and the hoodlum will have identical experiences over there? No, I don’t. But the notion that this whole fantastic universe exists merely so that, having spent a lifetime doing—whatever, you fill in the blanks—so that, thereafter, I can spend it reliving my brief jaunt at Woodstock in 1969—Naw. I find that preposterous.

Oh, by the way, just a figure of speech. Too old for Woodstock. And had I been the right age, I’d have been too busy doing something really fun…

Poets and Philosophers

There is a temperamental difference between poets and philosophers—and this difference has corollaries. Philosophers want answers. Poets want projects. Reality offers an infinity of answers, none of which is satisfactory. As a consequence the philosophical will drives on relentlessly until it has reached a concept that dissolves all further questioning. This answer, in one form or another, is God—albeit its expression may be a kind of negative, like the concept of nirvana. A brief but comprehensive formulation of this may be found here, although the context is broader.

The experience of creative endeavor is quite different. Engaged in one, the poet is totally absorbed—sometimes tortured, sometimes elated, but always completely engaged in the project. When the effort is finally done, when the feelings of regret have begun to fade (“I wish I could have done it better, this is wrong, that is weak, etc., etc.”) the poetic mind, after a brief and contemplative interlude, in which the project’s aura is still present, begins to search for what is next. The motivational structure of the poetic mind is endless creation. The sheer fact that engagement in it is to be in eternity, not, repeat NOT in time, takes away all of the negatives that usually accompany the feeling of “same old, same old.” For the creative person there is no such thing. There is the bliss (sometimes manifesting as agony) of being in the creative flow. Then nothing else matters—indeed everything else is just a distraction. And there is the void at all those times when, as yet, the new is not tangibly present, even as a seed.

Our cosmological systems are built by philosophers. They end in ways the poet can’t genuinely value. His or her reaction is, “And then…” This sort of thing is treated with negative rejection by the philosophical mind. It wants closure. The poet wants the story to go on—if not in this project then in another. Poets create mythologies. They have no problem whatsoever with a story that never ends. But it must have a wave-like pattern, with rises and falls, with obstructions, conquests, defeats, and triumphs. And like a child, when the story is over, the poet will want to— hear it again.

Mind you, poets have no monopoly over creativeness, and many philosophers are among the most creative people of all. But in that case they too are poets…

A Modern Platonist

It is an odd characteristics of human behavior that labels give us comfort even when we don’t properly understand a thing. We give it name. We get used to the name. And after a while we feel as if we understand something just because we’ve classified it. Miraculous healings are a case in point. We assign them to a higher order; we endow this order with limitless powers; doing so we escape the burden of explanation; we can avoid specifying exactly how the higher order achieves a miraculous healing. Some people—those who won’t buy the “higher order” explanation—also adopt magical tactics of explanation. They speak of spontaneous healing without explaining how it could possibly have worked—how this particular very rapid spontaneous healing differs from the ordinary slow kind. Alternatively they deny the health condition: there was nothing wrong in the first place, the ailment was imagined. And so it goes.

While this is a characteristic human approach, good theories are also formulated by careful observation, the discovery of where the limits of knowledge are, by naming or circumscribing the unknown element, and then trying to penetrate that region in some new way. An example of this approach, which might have some relevance to miraculous healings, is the concept of morphic fields proposed most recently by Rupert Sheldrake (1942-), a British biologist. You pursue this idea in detail in Sheldrake’s two books on the subject: The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988) and A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance (2005).

Morphic field theory has (in my opinion, anyway) a close kinship to the Platonic concept of eternal forms, but in a modern variant. The term itself is taken from the Greek for “form.” The idea is that any organized aggregate or any kind has a field associated with it; this field may be likened to a memory of how something is organized, thus as a deposit or a record. The field and the organized entity are linked one to the other, as we are to our memories. Thus we continuously add to our memories and, when needed, we retrieve them and they guide us in our activities. Substitute morphic field for memory, and you have a reasonable grasp of Sheldrake’s theory. In Sheldrake’s scheme our own personal memories, however, are just one instance of a morphic field. Our bodies have their own field; the bodies of humanity as a whole have another. In this theory, morphic fields are associated with all organized entities. The fields hold the patterns that describe each—individual or collective. Actual events are taken up into the field and stored there, modifying the pattern.

An interesting idea. It is structurally much the same as hylomorphism, suggesting that everything is a duality of matter (hyle) and form (morphē), an Aristotelian proposal. We’re already used to that idea, therefore it doesn’t strike us as outlandish—whereas Sheldrake’s much more detailed concept of “fields” out there, somewhere, holding a more dynamic sort of form—and zillions of them, for individuals as well as whole species and subspecies—strikes us as weird. But the idea produces less and less resistance as you ponder it over time. At least that is what happened in my case. My reflexive reaction was to say: “We don’t need another whole order of things out there.” Then, later, it occurred to me that I did not object to the Platonic/Aristotelian form-matter conceptualization when I first heard it, although the same “doubling” of everything is also implied there. Why didn’t I object to that? Because I was younger? But enough. Let me continue and sketch in how this idea first surfaced.

The idea was first proposed, not using the same phraseology, by a very important biologist and thinker, Hans Driesch (1867-1941); he is considered the father of embryology. Driesch discovered something rather astonishing. He was experimenting with sea urchin embryos. He cut them in half and then waited to see what would happen. To his astonishment, the embryos developed despite having been halved. They developed into real, living sea urchins, but much smaller ones than those that nature normally produces. This work became the foundation of modern embryology. Driesch, however, came to be classified as a vitalist, thus placed outside scientific orthodoxy in retrospect. Why? He could not explain the phenomena he was observing without recourse to what he called “a unifying non-material mind-like something…an ordering principle which does not add either energy or matter” to the process. This “something” is what Sheldrake later called the morphic field. The term itself is actually a generalization of a more narrow descriptor introduced around 1907 by another biologist, the Russian Alexander Gurwitsch. Gurwitsch spoke of “morphogenetic fields”; he offered it as a suggestive hypothesis, little more than that; his use of the “genetic” suffix limits the concept of biological development, whereas Sheldrake enlarges it to any organized phenomenon. Ross Granville Harrison and others went on to explore this “field” phenomenon in experiments, but their work was marginalized later by emerging mechanistic theories. What this shows is that Sheldrake has a lineage in scientific exploration and speculation, all arising from the puzzle that embryonic development produced—and still does. To this day we do not know with any kind of precision what guides embryonic development. The modern view that chemical feedback loops do the whole job would have to be proved by detailed mapping of all the chemical reactions, showing that they take place by rigid determination, each step necessarily forcing the next. We have no such proof.

* * *

Now it might be objected that “morphic field” is also nothing but a label, nothing more useful than “miraculous.” But here I would point out that a theory of morphic fields—separate from the actual organism—is a much more useful concept for understanding phenomena like miraculous cures. Let’s take it seriously for a moment. Let’s say that every body is formed from a pattern stored “off-line” as it were, thus in a field at least analogous to electromagnetic fields; those also exist, mysteriously, “out there.” Sheldrake describes the interaction between a morphic field and the organism as taking place by what he calls a resonance. He largely leaves it at that, but the suggestion is something akin to a frequency or a vibration; the frequency to be sure, would have to be of a much more complex sort than we associate with electromagnetic waves. Here I would use the example of a memory which has multiple modalities: image, sound, emotion, even smell: a complex experience retrieved as a packet. A morphic resonance related to the body, would similarly have chemical, structural, and dynamic aspects, including electromagnetic states, temperature, and so forth.

Now let us assume that states of disease or malformation come about, in part at least, because something interferes with the proper communication between the organism and its field. Let us assume, further, that a powerful flow of psychic energy, such as a healer is able to generate, stimulates the body of the sick person once more to “tune in” to its field. If that actually happens, rapid healing may take place. It would, indeed, be spontaneous—in the sense that processes that would have taken place slowly and naturally anyway now take place rapidly, possibly helped by the excess energy also present.

This sketch represents a somewhat more thinkable alternative to the concept of a miraculous healing—but that’s all it is, a thinkable hypothesis. This field has not been developed. The reason for that is simply that current theories have no room for non-material mind-like somethings. Sheldrake appears intent in persuading his fellow scientists to engage in meaningful experiments that will definitely establish the reality of morphic fields. His aim has not been to commit cosmology, to echo George Will. Therefore he has avoided speculations of the sort that arises as corollaries to his ideas: What comes first? The field or the organism? Is this a purely naturalistic phenomenology? If yes, pure materialism is better, is more parsimonious. Morphic fields are obviously less than perfect—else we’d never have deformed embryos and malformed babies. I regret, to be sure, that orthodox science is as hostile to metaphysics as it is to theories that wander across the borderzone in search of explanations—which may be the right ones, once fully fleshed out. Not in the current form, to be sure. But the direction may be the right one.

What Does "Higher Power" Mean?

One of the more interesting books around—especially for people who read such blogs as this one—is Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. The book is by Rupert Sheldrake and is subtitled “And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.” The amazon.com link to the paperback is here. I read the book in fascination. I consider Sheldrake to be one of our time’s most original thinkers about biology. He is also a creative experimenter and a genuine scientist. In certain narrow circles of scientific orthodoxy, to be sure, he is a heretic. But never mind them. What the book demonstrates is that dogs as well as other animals appear to have what for them—for us too, for that matter—are “higher powers.” Telepathic abilities are classed as paranormal at least. Animals also evidently have powers of orientation in the wild inexplicable by ordinary sensory capacities. They seem to have a kind of sight that, traditionally, we call “second sight.” Yes, they’re at home in border zones much as some people are. And, as with us as well, the talent isn’t uniformly present. Nor are these capacities limited to mammals; birds display such powers too.

I start here with animals to make a point. We have a reflexive way of assuming that higher powers, when they manifest, must come directly from God—and if not from God then still from some higher, conscious entity. I’ve pondered this matter for quite a long time and have another take on the matter. But let’s begin with some sorting.

* * *

By “higher powers” I mean phenomena like miraculous healing, ecstatic states, and prophetic visions. In these cases God does the healing, God manifests in the ecstatic states (or the mystic experiences union with God), and God sends the prophetic vision. To be sure, in all of these instances, the phenomenon itself transcends ordinary experience; it is therefore logical enough to use a word that signifies the Transcendent writ large as its cause. But when people speak of God this way, they have something more concrete in mind. They imagine an Agency, distinct and separate, acting deliberately in this specific case whereas, in all other cases, God acts in a more nebulous and indirect way. This must be what people mean. If God sends me a prophetic message but lets you read tea leaves, the only way to understand the distinction is that God intervenes in reality deliberately in some but not in other cases.

People don’t usually invoke divine action to explain telepathy. It is a paranormal power but mild in effect and common enough to be assigned to a lower agency, say to a “talent” or to a “gift.” But notice that even here, using the word “gift” suggests a divine dispensation given to some, not to others. By contrast, people rarely assign a run of bad luck to God. But why not? If in one case God rewards us for being good, in others he might punish us for our careless acts of stupidity. Finally, when in legalese we speak of an “act of God,” what we mean then is simply “accident”; the lawyers don’t intend to suggest that floods, lightning strikes, or tornadoes are literally acts of God.

I think I’ve outlined the issues sufficiently here to show that referring strange, unusual phenomena to God serves no rational or meaningfully explanatory purpose. I strongly lean toward the view that God cannot be pulled down to our level and assigned roles in our ordinary experience. Technically this is known as negative theology: man should not presume. Furthermore, the use of God as a mechanism of explanation amounts to little more than saying, “It happened because it happened.”

* * *

Let’s look at these phenomena from another perspective. Let’s look at miraculous healings. Healers are often involved. They often speak of a flow of energy or of a power that aids them—and they report feeling this whatever in themselves. The consequence, namely healing, is assigned to a “higher” power only because the healing is extraordinary. It is also highly desirable. We give the desirable a “high” value. But what exactly happens in a healing? Some kind of rearrangement of matter takes place. Cancerous cells are destroyed, their remains carried away as waste. Chronic chemical, hormonal balances are restored because the organs that produced or failed to produce them are realigned in proper ways. Something physical happens or no healing could possibly take place. This process requires two factors, it seems to me. One is some kind of knowledge about the right arrangements of the biochemistry and bone structure involved. The other is some kind of energy that removes obstructions and speeds up a process that, in ordinary healing, takes its own sweet time. Let’s examine these factors.

The knowledge may be present in the body already, but the body’s mechanisms may be too weak to implement the healing. In that case the healing stream overcomes weakness, energizes natural processes, possibly catalyzes reactions, and thus leads to rapid recovery of a status quo ante. An alternative possibility is that the healing current itself carries both knowledge and energy. That concept needs special parsing.

When we speak of “energy” in these cases, the justification for using the word is the reported experience both of healers and those who are healed. But the energy involved is not the sort we usually experience—thus mechanical pushes and pulls, gravitational attraction, electrical current, heat, or, more generally, radiation. The very reason why such healings are “miraculous” is because something very different is present. Or is it?

Here things become complicated because, ultimately, we don’t really understand what life really is. We think it is ordinary energy manifesting in material structures. But let us suppose that life itself is just as transcendent a phenomenon as the healing current itself. We don’t think so because we’re all too used to its normal manifestations. One possible explanation of miraculous healings is that they are a temporary intensification of life energy, something that always flows through our bodies but in a relatively thinned-out form. It may be possible to tap into it in such a manner that it flows much more abundantly, and when it does, it will manifest its ordering powers rapidly, setting this right where, in our body, it encounters disturbances in what should be the healthy pattern.

* * *

I began this post with a reference to Sheldrake. I’ll also end it on that note. Sheldrake’s theories of morphic fields suggest a way of thinking about miraculous cures along the lines I’ve just sketched in above. I’ll discuss that application of the morphic field theory in a future post and continue this outline then. For now, as the medievalists used to say, satis.

Miracle Cures and Healers

If no human being had ever experienced a miracle, faith healing, or the operation of some kind of strange, inexplicable power, I am sure that we’d still have religious practices, but they would all be of the variety we know as the worship of the collective. All rise. And now some celebrity will sing the National Anthem, possibly in a way we don’t even recognize. Three soldiers stand down there with the flags. And many people have a hand over their heart. State religion. Patriotism. Play ball.

We carry within us a vague intuition that all this stuff around and about us isn’t the be-all and the end-all here, but when we encounter the transcendental up close and personally, then we really know something. Then we take it seriously. And nothing gets our attention more swiftly and fully than hearing about cures. It is an astonishing fact—but nonetheless a fact—that great healers keep appearing among us, not many, but they keep appearing, and they do so no matter what stage of culture we have reached. When they do arise, a cult will invariably form around them either within the bosom of some established church or external to it.

Solanus Casey (1870-1957), a healing saint and a Capuchin priest, is one such figure in my own neck of the woods. As the author of the brief Wikipedia article about him puts it: “Many miraculous cures have been associated with Father Solanus’s intercession, both when he was alive and after his death. Pilgrims from around the world continue to make pilgrimages to the tomb of Father Solanus.” Casey is on the way to sainthood, having been given the “Venerable” designation by the Vatican. He is an example of a healer whose cult is embedded in a church.

Another modern example is the German Bruno Gröning (1906-1959). He was a carpenter by trade and later earned his living as a factory and general laborer. He emerged from obscurity in 1949 and became a very popular faith healer; his powers caused him to become embroiled in controversy. Controlling elements of the medical community opposed him; the state eventually forbade him to engage in healing activities. Thanks to the efforts of Greta Häusler, one of his early followers, the Bruno Gröning Circle of Friends has become a global organization with footprints in many countries. We find the same patterns wherever we go, never mind the locally dominant religions. Hopeful believers visit the graves of many famous Muslim saints with the same expectations—and occasional miraculous healing experiences—as they visit Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, and Jewish figures.

The fascinating aspects of this phenomenon are three-fold. The healing power flows through a person, comes to be associated with a fixed place—hence pilgrimages to grave-sites or regions where the figure was active—and cures continue to take place after the individual passes away. It is also evident that the powers of the healer, and most likely the power of the person to be healed, both arise spontaneously. In the healer the power comes first; alignment with some religion or independent activity follows. Neither Casey nor Gröning were intellectuals. Gröning had very little formal education; and Casey, although he graduated from seminary, was ordained a “simplex” priest; this meant that he could neither hear confessions nor give homilies: his superiors didn’t think he had the intellectual capacity for such tasks. One smiles. The power in the person healed manifests, it seems to me, in response to the stimulus of the healer—but the healer need not be there. Otherwise post-mortem healings would not take place.

I have no doubt that some kind of energy does flows from or through these saints—but I suspect that it is always all around us. They manage somehow to concentrate and to direct it. It flows through them with great strength perhaps because something in us that normally blocks or weakens it is absent in them. It is very difficult to credit that the healing power is associated with a geographical location—easy to assume that it is everywhere. Casey lived decades in New York before he arrived in Michigan. But location—a grave-site, for example—may have bearing on the person to be healed. The healing may be a process in which receptivity to the “current of healing,” to use Gröning’s phrase, must first be stimulated. This receptivity may be enhanced by faith. Being at the place where the saint is buried or where he or she spent a life may heighten the receptivity.

There is ample evidence from many cases that the “faith” required to be healed is not something intellectual. Complete unbelievers are actually healed. But how great, really, was their disbelief? They went to see the healer, after all. This coincidence of intellectual doubt but contradictory action of the will illustrates how complex we are. What we think is often not even half the story. And many of us are far from sufficiently integrated.

Heart Exam: Continued

Conceptual thought has a devil of a time capturing dynamism. Motion is a good example. We experience it without trouble; we find it tougher than nails to describe precisely. We have to do it piece-meal. The object was here, but now it is there, and whatever happened happened in between. We don’t know what it was, but have a name for it. We call it motion. But of course, we can usually find a spot half-way between here and there. And between that half-way point and here, there is another point that’s also half-way in between. To describe motion precisely, we have describe the tiniest increments. This is what calculus is intended to do: slicing and dicing space and time into infinitely small increments and then artfully summing them up. We get an illusion of control. At the conceptual level we never really get there—because we can’t reach infinity, but close enough for government work.

All right, but what does that have to do with heart? In looking at the dynamics of human development, we also engage in many differentiations. We have an experience of Self, but to grasp it intellectually, we parse it apart: intellect, emotion, imagination, will. They don’t exist independently, but the names do. But if we look at any one of these aspects or abstractions—these slices and dices of the Self—we detect even finer distinctions. Our feelings have many different qualities. There is raw emotion at one and joy at the other extreme; in between we find an infinity of other states. There is the emotion of watching Charles Bronson deal with the bad guys in one of the Death Wish movies. Raw emotion. There is the complex emotion at the end of watching The Death of a Salesman. There is the rock concert and Handel’s Messiah or Judas Maccabaeus. There is Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. To describe the curvature between these poles would require a kind of literary calculus no one has ever devised.

In dealing with the range of our capacity we associate different manifestations of the soul with different organs. We associate intellect with the brain, emotions with the gut, imagination with the eye, will with the fist, and all of the higher expressions of our nature with—the heart. Well, we’re finally there.

A somewhat hidden example of this is courage. Courage is an aspect of the will; and by real courage we don’t mean a man who, say, assaults a bigger, stronger fellow in a fit of rage. Rather, we call courageous someone who, in an extremely dangerous or risky situation, is able to overcome his fears to achieve a higher good. The word itself masks my point. Courage derives from the French coeur and ultimately from the Latin cor, both meaning heart. An interesting side note: the obsolete meaning of "courage" also includes mind, spirit, and temper. When we intend to speak of a lower kind of courage we label people who have it gutsy.

As we saw in the last post, Pascal associated a higher kind of reason with the heart. Paracelsus differentiated lower and higher forms of imagination. He called the higher form of it true imagination (imaginatio vera), the lower form fantasy. There is also a kind of intellectual imagination which we label foresight, thus imagination based on calculating the complex vector of events—in which the weighing of probabilities is to the front.

If heart is thus associated with a kind of thought, a kind of imagination, with courage, and with higher feelings, of which the highest is self-less love, it might be argued—I argue this point—that what tradition calls the heart, and treats as if it were a higher organ—is just a way of making a differentiation between a highly but comprehensively developed self and one that is more primitive and still largely undeveloped. The self as it appears most commonly is strongly conditioned by societal norms. Concerning this form of the self, Idries Shah has this interesting comment about this as yet undifferentiated form of the self. Writing in Learning How to Learn (pp. 157-157) he writes:

Remember that the human being is so intensely standardized that an outside observer, noting his reactions to various stimuli, need not infer an individual controlling brain in each person. He would be more likely to infer the existence of a separate, outside brain, and the people as mere manifesters of its will.

If we examine the polarities I’ve noted above using movies and other works of art, the chief difference between the low and the high is level of complexity. To appreciate the high, the self has to be developed enough to do so—and not simply intellectually. The self as a whole has to be developed, the will as much as the emotions, the imagination as much as the intellect. We are here faced with a dynamic of development. When we observe higher expressions of the self, we grope for a different way of rooting them. We recruit the heart as the organ. For lower expressions, we locate them in those organs most tangibly associated with different manifestations of the self that permeates the human body.

The Heart

Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point. The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. [Baise Pascal, Pensées §277]

Shah does not hesitate to make the claim … that nearly all we claim as “religion,” as “higher feelings,” as “mystical experience,” is no more than emotionalism. We are taught that there are emotions and intellect, but not that there is something else possible, beyond both and not to be confused with either. [Doris Lessing, in her Introduction to Learning How to Learn, by Idries Shah]

In artistic and spiritual matters, problems of communication arise. Art will illustrate this. When I was in college, “What is Art?” used to be bandied about with a certain irony. My friends and I argued about the subject for hours on end. One side held that beauty was in eye of the beholder; it was subjective through and through. The other held that beauty existed in reality, out there somewhere, beyond the beholder; but the beholder had to be capable of perceiving it. The debate no doubt continues. I belong to those who think that art holds something real, something apart.

I worked once for a major research institute. We rarely ever left the main building by its front entrance; we used back entries and exits going to and from parking lots. I was in the lobby one day waiting for someone to pick me up for a trip to the airport. Leather furniture, fancy tiled entry; the wide glass expanse opened on a distant fountain and a sculpture. As I waited, my eye fell on a large painting hung over the leather couch. My eye swept over it indifferently. Then I did a double-take. It was a Madonna and child. “Wow!” It was beautiful. Renaissance. I'd never seen it before. The Institute had an arrangement with a neighboring art gallery. The paintings changed from time to time. I looked around. The reception was farther inside; I was safely alone. I stepped up on the dark-leather couch to examine a small golden tab affixed to the frame. I jumped off, nodding to myself. It was a Fra Lippo Lippi. Something had reached me from that picture. I knew that something with the heart.

Problems arise precisely because the quality we’re talking about transcends the operations of the way we ordinarily see reality. The crux of this problem is that different people have different capacities. The seed of these capacities everyone must have, but they develop by chance and effort. Things get more complicated. Art appreciation, and piety, can be and are often faked, based on external signs—especially if a pay-off can be had. Only those who have the real stuff dare to turn away from what isn’t genuine. They can smell the genuine. There is no better way to put it. It isn’t visible. It’s felt. Something speaks. Many things on display in a gallery reveal themselves to people like that as mute, deaf, blind—even when the themes are grand, the names immortal, and the display is splendiferous. Others may also feel this but may be uncertain. They think that, perhaps, they lack some sophisticated skill. No. They already have it; they just don’t know that they do—because their experience is limited.

In traditional societies in which the transcendent dimensions still has standing, the organ of this perception is called the heart. Obviously it’s not the blood-pumping muscle. Heart is merely a way of speaking. But neither are emotions in the glands or mentation really in the brain. We have a way, a capacity, to perceive the energetics of a higher order, and if we say that it’s the heart, why not?

I’ve merely touched the subject. This much will serve as an introduction. But I’ll come back and look more closely at this capacity, experienced, if mildly, all the time, very difficult to disentangle from conceptualization and emotion: the very capacity we have to use in order to see, feel, or hear anything at all in the regions of the border. By way of concluding this initial posting on the subject, let me simply add that energetic activity of intellect (in the sense of a passion for debate) or of the emotions (excitement) both act to inhibit the function of the heart. And when they do, we cannot see much and understand even less about the mysteries of being than we ordinarily do when we’re just bored.

Mystical Experiences: An Elaboration

The questions I’ve always asked myself about the mystical experience are these: What is it that mystics experience? Is it God? Or could it be something else extraordinarily energetic? Here I hasten to introduce qualifiers. I’m not in any doubt, myself, that God is ultimately the source of everything. But in the mystical experience, the claim is not that people experience some higher or more energetic order. It is that they have experienced, if only briefly, union with God. To illustrate this:

The Sufi mystic Al Hallaj (858-922) once said, “I am the Truth”; that statement cost him his life. Meister Eckhart (quoted in the last post) identified his eye with God’s—ambiguously enough, to be sure, to escape drastic censure. Angelus Silesius (1624-1677), another mystic, wrote in a poem: “I know God cannot live one instant without Me:/If I should come to naught, needs must He cease to be.” My modern example, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, said the exactly same sorts of things, especially in Chapter VI of his Pathways Through to Space but also sprinkled throughout his book elsewhere. Merrell-Wolff was a modern, wrote in the modern manner, and we understand from him that he fully understood the difference between his limited self and what he called the SELF. So also did, I have no doubt, Al Hallaj, Eckhart, and Silesius. But what they felt was a powerful identity with this higher something in their moments of exaltation—and identified it with the Absolute.

Other characteristics common to this experience are feelings of power and exaltation. The person feels all-knowing. The self seems vast and limitless. Everything seems mysteriously present in the experience—and is also known and understood. And over against that exalted feeling, ordinary life appears to be a mere illusion, nothing, shards, and insubstantiality.

But when the experience is over, the powers felt and the insights temporarily possessed seem to depart again. Nothing new is left over. The experience is most definitely energetic. Franklin called it a “current of bliss” and, in his description, even used electrical analogies. Bruno Gröning (1906-1959), a German faith-healer, spoke about the Heilstrom, the healing current. My own limited experience was also an unmistakeable perception of a powerful but benign vibration, of life and of vitality. It brought the very concrete I walked upon to life.

Now it strikes me that all of the people who have such experiences—except the few who experience them spontaneously—engage in inward practices like prayer and meditation, usually coupled with self-disciplines the aim of which is to shut out distractions, including those produced by the body itself. They are quite willfully seeking some internal origin. When the Buddha sat down under the bodhi tree just before his own personal breakthrough, he was determined to remain there until it happened. To be sure, the onset of the experience happens when it does. It can’t be forced. Sometimes it coincides with the effort. Often—as many Zen stories illustrate—something quite irrelevant triggers the satori. But effort is present in the context. A preparation is present. The focus, the personal viewpoint, has changed. And very often, these practices are also undertaken in a religious context. It is not therefore surprising that the experience itself should be explained in a religious way. The mystic is assaulting heaven—and the gates open! Overwhelming grace descends.

Long years of pondering this subject has gradually convinced me that the mystical experience is probably a temporary exposure to the life force—which, in my thought, originates in God. But I think of this concentrated and all-knowing energy as the creating impulse itself, not its culmination. By contrast with it the individual feels that ordinary reality, as we perceive it, is just ashes and cinder, but as I parse this complex of experience, it seems to me that the Creator intends the world to be—and to be what it is—a fantastic elaboration all of which, when you force your way back to the upwelling point of this energy, is still all fused into a single unity.

To put this in more mechanical terms, the aim of creation is precisely what we see around and beyond us, namely the vast societies of life, the churches militant, suffering, and triumphant. The vector of this great energy is in the direction of complexity, not fusion. Opening ourselves to the grace that flows is definitely desirable, but when it flows so potently as to disable us, we may have gone too far.

In this context, time and again, I’m reminded of the Sufi differentiation between those who do and those who do not have the option, as Idris Shah once put it in one of his books. What does this saying mean? To me it means that genuine spiritual achievement is to cultivate our ability to choose. In a great storm of any kind—not least one of vital energy—we have no option. For this reason Sufi sheiks did not approve of ecstatic experiences, thinking that those who underwent them were insufficiently trained. The real unveiling, when it happens, is something else. You retain the option.

Mystical Experiences

The Experience and Its Content

Genuine mystical experiences are all in some ways ecstatic. The word ecstasy comes from Greek roots for “outside” and for “stand,” thus meaning to “stand outside” of oneself, to be taken out of oneself. These states have a passive character in that the subject of the experience has no choice in the matter. Not that he or she wants to have a choice. The experience is joyous. But the ability to resist it isn’t there. You’re falling, and there is no way to arrest a fall.

When I was around seventeen, I once went off to a choir practice in the evening. A ten-block walk lay ahead. At the time I lacked even change enough to take the streetcar. I left on foot because I’d promised to attend. It was almost dark. As I was walking along, such an event unfolded. It came on without any discernible trigger; my state of mind was calm, indifferent, indeed even a little sour. I didn’t really want to go. I was only going to honor a commitment. Nothing changed outwardly, but my perception of reality underwent a drastic change. Energy seemed to flow from everything around me. Trees, bushes, houses, the concrete sidewalk, the black street surface, everything glowed, vibrated, seemed in motion. The effect was immediate and intensely emotional. Within seconds I crying—crying tears of joy. Later, trying to find a way to link the experience to something, anything, that I had seen before, I thought of some of Van Gough’s painting in which the scenes appear to tremble, to be on fire. The principal feeling I had was that “everything’s alive,” and this realization, at that time, made me feel joyous. The feeling lasted for about as long as it takes to walk the length of a city block. After that the feeling faded.

Compared to other accounts that I have read, mine was a relatively mild experience—but for me the strangest and most unusual event of my life. I was a convinced atheist at the time, and, indeed, I continued in those convictions for several more years. You don’t have to be a narrow-gauged materialist to be an atheist. More pronounced experiences of this kind, “stronger versions,” you might say, have a distinctly noetic quality, a strong sense of knowledge is present. Something of that was also present in my feelings, but not as pronounced as in others’, a feeling of exaltation and sense of knowledge. People in these states feel that they finally understand everything; they have the sense of having penetrated the deepest secrets of the universe.

Over time I’ve become convinced that the noetic quality of these experiences is more feeling than knowledge. There is a real difference between feeling that you know and actual knowing. When something is on the tip of my tongue, it isn’t knowledge yet. And in the case of mystics, whatever it is, it stays on the tip of the tongue. Real knowledge leaves something behind, something tangibly graspable. Published accounts or philosophical works of people with the mystical experience, sometimes called the unitive experience, don’t really have content beyond the sort of empty symbolic knowledge we get from mathematics. By way of example I would point to Plotinus’ Enneads in the Graeco-Roman era, the writings of Meister Eckhart in the medieval, and the books of Franklin Merrell-Wolff in the twentieth century. Merrell-Wolff’s works are of great interest precisely because they are modern and more accessible for that reason. In Pathways Through to Space he describes his actual experiences; in The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object he attempts to build an interpretation of his experiences. Anyone hoping to discover in the second work something genuinely interesting about any world that side of the borderzone may as well abandon all hope now. Ain’t nothing there. Or, to put it more charitably, we get the essence in the title: “consciousness without an object” is a bit like the sound of one hand clapping. The ultimate content of the Enneads is in a way similar: There is the One. From the One we have Intellect and Soul. This trinity defines Reality. Meister Eckhart’s famous saying: “The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me,” delivered in one of his sermons, is similar in its ambiguity and inscrutability to most other pronouncements that come from the mystical experience.

To sum up my take on the reports of “unitive” mystics, they rather resemble something analogous to men reporting, after seeing the ocean, that they have seem something awesome and grand, overwhelming, majestic, and beyond the horizon—and never mention water, salt, wind, waves, sand, shorelines, surf, shells, seagulls, or flying fish either.

My own experience, mild although it was, had the same character: powerful feelings, deeply memorable, but containing no meaning beyond a sense of transcending energy everywhere. Everything’s alive. The energetic quality of these experiences is even more tangibly described in Merrell-Wolff’s account. He speaks of a “current” that he clearly felt flowing at times when he had his experience. I sometimes have the feeling that concepts like grace and its Muslim version, baraka—and theories based on emanation—are possibly based on experiences of this sort.

A Personal Point of View

My object to his point should not be misinterpreted. I’m not in the least dismissive of the experience of enlightenment, as it is often called, reported by towering figures like Plotinus, Buddha, Eckhart, or our own Merrell-Wolff. I simply have a point of view which, in its own way, may have some merit.

My view is that our world is very intricately woven, first of all, not merely the life processes built up of stupendous cells—each of which is at least like a major city—but also the elemental world as a whole—many constituents of which have had to be fashioned in the wombs of two different suns in sequence (at least as currently held). Human fate, relationships of love and kinship, memory, pain and suffering, creative life, history, society, and endlessly more—all this shows a picture of tremendous value and complexity the simple dismissal of which as illusion, or as the thinning out of a denser reality, strikes me as of necessity inaccurate at minimum.

I’ve written extensive about life as a vector pointing at something. Consciousness, which seems to have been hard won by a process lasting eons, I take to be a marker of a boundary between dimensions. Its character as a boundary is further substantiated not, I emphasize, by unitary states that point to a kind of dissolving unity with overwhelming Power but, rather, by the much more messy experiences of those who partially touched the neighboring dimension. Let me call them modern shamans: the healers, the psychics, the people who exhibit paranormal gifts. Of these people Swedenborg produced the most coherent reports; here I ignore his work in biblical exegesis, which was his way of trying to make sense of things. The proof of his writings comes indirectly in the form of his paranormal experiences to which very “sound” contemporaries attested. (Kant, for example, had a friend of his gather the evidence.) These “shamans” are messy. Weeds of madness sprout everywhere around them. One concerns oneself with people like this at the risk of one’s own respectability. Yes, people like Swedenborg—who had a distinguished record as a natural scientist—but also people like Edgar Cayce, idiot savants, and other strangelings of the same sort. Carl Jung spent time on that border too. These cases are of great interest precisely because they are messy (like Reality). They indicate transcendence and they do produce a certain minimum content.

It does not surprise me at all that (a) scientists and other respectable thinkers keep their distance, (b) that the Church handles these cases with exceeding caution—after all the Church must guard its respectability too; and (c) that some few perfectly sane people of great curiosity do go there; these are people like me who have nothing to lose.

Yes, there is a real frontier. Unitary visions belong here too but not by any means as the final word on the subject but as transitions toward a better understanding. What little content seeps through the cracks, coming from the shamans, indicates a much richer reality “beyond,” at least as rich as our ordinary cosmos, including vast and coherent societies, environments with similar but yet different laws, etc., of which Swedenborg’s heaven and hell are examples as prepared for the masses of his time; his madness-riddled diaries are the messy raw material. The Taoist tales and Shiite religious accounts belong to this hidden Library of Alexandria.

My own conviction—which I’ll elaborate more later—is that ecstatic and so-called mystical experiences are contact with the lifestream as it rises into this, not as it passes into the next dimension. But to develop that argument I need more space, and this post has become rather long.

Our Mysterious Awakening

We never even think about our origin—which is the subject of our meaning—until our consciousness is able somehow to separate itself from the turbulent flow of our experience. Something in us must detach, something must reflect—or catch a reflection.

Consciousness thus becomes a mystery in turn. In one sense it is a partial description of a feeling—the feeling of our agency, the feeling that we are a Self. We couldn’t feel that we are individuals, people, responsible beings if we remained unaware. Neither could we choose to act this way or that without awareness. Thus the other major element of our fundamental nature, our will, is possible only through awareness. Indeed the very concept of an agency includes both at the same time and irreducibly so.

But our nature is paradoxical. Muted forms of agency—and therefore of consciousness and of will—are everywhere displayed for us in living creatures from birds to lions to giraffes. And most of the time their behavior is equivalent to ours. What divides us from the animal kingdom is our ability to become holy or evil. Neither path is open to a mule. And the paradox itself is murky and reveals additional degrees.

Thus, for instance, I genuinely wonder about the “humanity” of a pair of thugs who, under orders from a boss, kill two innocent people in an attempt to extract information from them (an actual case). I wonder about the “humanity” of the boss as well. I wonder about the human label applied to shady financiers who obtain houses from the desperate by fraudulent schemes they know will soon end in forfeitures. And on. In these people consciousness is present at levels well above a mule’s. They must know that they are causing harm. Are they really conscious? If they are they’re deliberately choosing evil. Is that possible? I assert that it is on the basis of personal experience—and I rather think that all of us have chosen evil knowingly in the past, finessing the acts by rationalizations. The difference between the criminal and Everyman lies in the degree. Evil does not always qualify as crime; it is a sliding scale.

Thus consciousness and agency in animals continues at a heightened rate in humans, but still on a certain scale, the difference in us now being that we deliberately choose. And when our choice is real—and if not real it’s not a choice—we use our will to lean now in one direction and now in the other.

The situation just described is a central feature of our meaning—must be. How it fits into the scheme of origins must still be developed.

Genuine consciousness really arises as a “separation” from the general flow of turbulent experience. Something must detach, something must reflect—or catch a reflection. More and more I’m coming to see awareness as a force or as a structure that emerges out of a material casing—not in the modern scientific sense of an “emergent phenomenon” but rather as a seed that catches on and begins development until at some point it reaches the light. It’s not an achievement but requires a favorable environment or endowment nonetheless. It seems to me that once it’s present it will assert itself thereafter—not because a person is virtuous or diligent but simply because this soul-force is strong and sovereign. It is not equivalent to intelligence but without its presence in awareness, intelligence is limited in reach.

Our Mysterious Origins

Two kinds of instructions reach us in childhood. Put in the generic terms, one is to excel; the other is to serve the community. These are usually summed by the phrase: “Be good.” The sheer fact that we are here is never discussed. It’s self-evident. Our relationship to others is also obvious. We begin in a dependent role. Indeed, we continue to be dependent until death. What changes is that, later, we have more freedom in choosing our network of connections. If we’re lucky. We are formed by interaction on the one hand, by internal urges and needs on the other. The early advice we get is essentially correct—improve, serve. For most nothing more is needed. Life flows on hemmed in by these banks. And because our needs and mutual relations continue to the end—and societies always have a routine explanation for existence, some kind of story or ideology—something must happen to make us question the conventions. Some kind of inner urge—or external stimulus—must trigger questioning. When that happens, it can shock, or stimulate, us. We’ll be temporarily disoriented.

In life’s normal give-and-take, where the bumps and jostles stay within a well-accustomed range—and pleasures and joys are customary too—nothing presents itself to make us question our place and function. But when the cake of custom cracks, tragedy strikes, troubles arise, strange ecstasies (however brought about) make us lose our balance, then we also temporarily lose our sense of place. The degree of disturbance will suggest the degree to which we’ll question our place. Individual sensitivities will either magnify or minimize the shocks. Shocks lead to learning. With time we include more and more of reality into our compass. We expand our horizons, adjust our sense of alignment. But, here again, personal traits and education will lead to different outcomes.

Children exposed early to cosmic orientations—as I was, growing up in a Catholic environment—will spontaneous integrate cosmic stories. To grow is to integrate external influences with our own intuitions. We are far from blank boards on which environmental influences scribble out our fate. We take elements of the cosmologies we’re taught and integrate them (or suspend them) depending on the answers from within. If receive philosophical “objects” as children, we integrate them right alongside all the practical: it is all one to us.

Indeed, thinking about it, it’s obvious that the precise name of things is not all that important for the child. As children we learn quite early—intuitively, as it were—to handle abstractions skillfully. Concepts like God or king or good or evil rapidly come to occupy a place in a structure of relationships. Quite early in our lives we develop a clear concepts of negatives too— in the sense of “empty,” “lost,” or “gone.” All concepts have physical analogies, but we find it easy to abstract: we see the general concept of “lost” whether we have lost a shoe, glove, or a pencil. We have concepts of time long before we learn to read a clock. “Just a minute,” our mother will say. We have a clear and painful sense of waiting. Space is no more problematical: here and there, far and near.

But that which is most central to our being is deeply hidden. We never question ourselves. I still rather clearly remember my initial reaction in college to hearing the concept of “being” formally discussed. I experienced a certain surprise, mixed with bemusement. It struck me as droll that ancient wise men should have labored so hard thinking about something so obvious; and I thought it vaguely illegitimate to separate “being” from that which “was”—as if you could. I did not then realize that the dance around “being” was the late and advanced articulation of something rather more basic and fundamental. It is the problem of ultimate orientation, namely the issue of “What am I doing here?” Analyzing that simple but stark question one comes up with its opposite, Nothingness. But nothingness isn’t particularly helpful except for philosophizing. Like mathematicians, philosophers manipulate symbols using rules of logic. Philosophy tempts people with the mirage of answers. It can be difficult and complex; these difficulties and complexities more or less hide how empty the enterprise actually is unless it stays firmly anchored in experience.

Meanwhile the stark question is legitimate. It is central to grasping the human condition—even if philosophy as such—formal schemes like Kant’s for instance—cannot answer it. Not viscerally. Not at the level where we live. Only a myth can even come close to the essence of the thing. The manipulation of the labels we attach to experience resembles the operation of a kaleidoscope: we produce ever new patterns but by moving the same old colored bits of glass in a confined space; nothing really changes except the arrangement.

What is most central to our being is its meaning. Our existence, by itself, is not answer enough. So long as a consensus satisfies us, so long as our orientation is adequate for daily needs, the issue of what we’re doing here rarely arises: we’re working, resting, having fun. Life is a flow of experience, stimulus, response. We’re carried on a river of time. We have no knowledge of our origin—we woke up already floating on the river—and the terminus of our voyage is still far away. Moreover, we can easily imagine ourselves continuing on beyond our passing or, if so inclined, imagine ourselves falling into a dreamless and permanent state of sleep.

Nor does this condition, even once it’s realized, exercise people excessively unless something radical is also present, arising from within. If our condition is reasonably comfortable—or can be imagined to improve—we accept traditional wisdom, shy from the seemingly hopeless effort to tackle the problem. We say, “Well, that’s the way things are.” Half of our nature is pragmatic, straight-forward, practical, and sensible. We optimize. Part of optimization is not to bother reinventing wheels. We learn in childhood to accept explanations from our elders—and traditional wisdom is exactly that. We don’t relish becoming engineers, plumbers, or seamstresses when the electricity fails, a pipe bursts, or something tears. First we seek our comfort and adaptation at least cost. Next we rouse ourselves to organize fixes to things that really go wrong. Even when things become quite hopeless, the vast majority of humankind apparently chooses dumb endurance in the face of adversity—exactly as animals do—swamped by that half of our nature which is nature. We hang in there, we hunker down. We have to wander a long ways, and already highly sensitized, before we ever even reach the borderzone.

Suppose There Is No Borderzone

Suppose that reality consisted entirely of what we see and that which we can measure by our scientific instruments. Those who live in a reality defined like that have to see people like me as stubbornly clinging to a vast illusion. Turn-around is fair play. I view people who think like that as hopelessly benighted. Not that there is any virtue or vice attached to either view. Both are natural. The difference lies in some kind of openness to the hidden reality—a capacity to perceive it. I can no more help reaching my conclusions than the materialist his. Turning such things into moral categories is a mistake.

What piques my interest is that people can live side by side with contradictory views of reality. I was reminded of this this morning while reading an article in the New York Times’ Science Section concerning life on other planets, an interview with Alan Boss, a gent on the forefront of the hunt for earth-like so-called “extra-solar” planets. So far as I know, there may or may not be life on other planets; but the categorical assumption in this article is that if the right conditions prevail, there will be life—because life is considered to arise spontaneously from matter. The certainty is on the same level as that concerning gravity: where there is mass, there will be gravity. When it comes to gravity, I agree. When it comes to life, I don’t.

Wherein lies the difference? In the materialist conception, there is no such thing as an agency independent of matter. One need but trace that way of thought to discover that concepts such as selves, souls, or minds are all derived. They are derived from matter. Put another way, if you destroy the material substrate associated with the manifestations of selves, selves vanish. Those who haven’t delved deeply enough into the technical literature of modern science are unaware of the fact that this is orthodox thought today. In the traditionalist thought, agency exists separately from material manifestations. Traditionalist modes of thought diverge in all sorts of directions, to be sure, but they agree that humans are agents. They do not grant the same status to other living phenomena. I do. I think that the logic of the situation drives you there. Therefore I see agency behind every form of life. And if I see agency, I conclude that it is something permanent rather than subject to destruction.

When you think the way I do, it becomes obvious why I take an interest in all kinds of cosmologies and myths. The study of matter is interesting, but for me not exhaustive of all things real.