Defending the Tram

In re David Brook’s new book, The Social Animal, the issue is not really about the conscious or the unconscious mind, and which predominates, but ultimately about the presence or the absence of a genuine agent who may be held responsible.

One reviewer (Will Wilkinson in Forbes) quotes Brooks summarizing the thrust of his book. It is “the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connection over individual choice, character over IQ, … and the idea that we have multiple selves over the idea that we have a single self.” These are supposed to be (and no doubt they are), the revolutionary discoveries of modern psychology and brain science.

I note here the incoherence of this characterization, so prevalent everywhere these days. If we have multiple selves, who has the emotions? How do we define the character (singular) of multiple selves (plural). I know, I know. We also speak about public opinion, as if it were something tangible, the national interest, as if there was a concrete something actually capable of having an interest. But now we find it projected backwards into the individual who, on close inspection, turns out to be a crowd.

If someone hired me to defend this characterization on rational grounds, I’d want to be paid in advance—because my chief argument would be, “Well, I don’t mean that precisely, but you know what I mean.” I would, in other words, appeal to a presumed understanding in my public that modern science denies the actual presence of a soul, an individual, an agency because science can’t decant it, hold the glass beaker up to the light, and then, pointing, say: “There it is! Can you see it? It’s swirling in there.”

The presumption here is that belief in an actual conscious person capable of genuine choice is a “traditional” belief, meaning old, pre-scientific. Also obsolete, hoary, dated, primitive. Therefore the discovery that we are a more or less cohering, continuous, but ever-changing phenomenon—but inhabited by a multiplicity of selves generated by the phenomenon—is “revolutionary.” But if we really are this phenomenon, then there isn’t really anyone there to notice that a discovery has been made. The “revolutionary” modern theory may be rendered as a street-car line in which the real objects are the power lines and the car that runs on rails. The passengers who come and go, our multiple selves, are not really what it’s all about. The revolutionary theory is about as easy to defend as this description of a streetcar line.

The Length of Life

How to value the length of a life? The standard answer? The longer the better. But in modern thought qualifications follow. Yes, provided that our health is good and our means suffice to give us comfort. No if the person is in pain and the prognosis is continued suffering. In such cases medically-assisted suicide seems right—indeed is legal in some places.

Cosmologies shape common views. Ours is that life is everything, but bounded by what we call the quality of life; its end is absolute, thus the more of it the better. In religious cultures—let me take the Catholic which I understand fairly well—the length of life, as such, is not the value. What matters is the soul’s state when death claims us. If we die in a state of grace, thus sinless for the moment, having repented our earlier sins, our age is of no consequence. But a long life, however comfortable, is worthless if we die in sin. In this tradition life is God’s gift. Suicide is sinful, whether medically-assisted or not. Most tellingly, suffering is viewed as an occasion to develop our soul’s capacities and never a sufficient motive for taking a life, our own or another’s . Prolongation of such a life by artificial means is, however, not required. Underlying this view is that life is just a segment in a human existence; what matters is the quality of soul, not the quality of life. Indeed the two are not necessarily complementary.

In the traditional view life is also valued, but for another reason. The longer a person has to find the truth, the better. Those disinclined to use words charged with transcendental implications, as truth is, development will do as well. But transcendence—at least of corporeal life—is nonetheless implied.

If life has meaning, human existence suggests a developmental purpose. It is fleeting; it is a mixed sort of something; at best we’re in a kind of normal equilibrium, not on cloud nine. And it ends. But most lives way outlast our breeding years, all else equal. If the selfish gene is really king around here, why permit decades upon decades of “useless” survival. Our grandchildren would surely breed even if we did not interrupt our active senior years occasionally to try to entertain them. Why does nature give us those extra years? The following generation isn’t, as it were, hanging on our words of wisdom. In my maturity I wasn’t into listening either. Is all of this just the advance of technology? Was three-score-and-ten coined in a high-tech civilization? Or were those people still just herding sheep?

The sequence seems to be: education, service, preparation. Youth, maturity, old age. Preparation for what? Preparation for the next life. It makes sense to me, all this, but length of life, particularly into the declining years, only makes sense if I see the world through a transcendental lens.

Doctrinal Battles

Even a barely grown-up spirituality will shy from the doctrinal battles that rage between and within religions. Engaging in such battles is, of course, an indication that the person is attracted by the world. More: such combative activity is probably a violation of the very spirit of the religion the person wishes to defend or to promote. With inner growth comes insight summed up most succinctly here:

When you arrive at the sea, you
do not talk of the tributary.
[Hakim Sanai, The Walled Garden of Truth]

One Sufi master suggested the role of religion (conceived, I think, as doctrinally hedged about) in this snippet:

There are three forms of culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self-development. [Hujwiri, Revelation of the Veiled]

The sentence above suggests a sequence that I here liken to maturing. Each of the three stages mentioned has its place and merit. Each contributes to a person’s development of true humanity. “Following rules” is quite something other than doing battle with others, including merely abstract battle, over the rules that they prefer. That a famous author declines to be in communion with this or that tradition of a faith doesn’t merit mention, never mind highlighting, unless the intention is to promote one’s own or to belittle another group’s convictions.

To rise above doctrine is not to dismiss it. That approach is used by those who insist on staying on the level beneath the religious. To rise above doctrines means to accept them all, to ignore their detectable flaws and seeming contradiction, and to receive the grace that they carry. Another Sufi saying I’m very fond of, in this context, is that “The channel doesn’t drink.”

Rohanda or Shikasta?

When we speak of “the Fall,” should we speak of the Fallen World or, instead, of Fallen Man? That’s an interesting distinction for me. Yes, I know. For some the most fundamental feature of the fallen world is that living beings feed on each other: predation. That seems to put evil squarely at the heart of nature—based on sympathy. I wouldn’t want something to hunt and eat me. And that seems also to answer the question simply. Fallen world. A place where the living, to live, eat other living creatures, that has to be a fallen world. End of discussion?

Predation and its link with the Fall comes from Isaiah in two verses (Revised Standard):

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
and the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them. [11:6]

Isaiah liked this cluster of images. Much later he repeats them:

The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
and dust shall be the serpent’s food. [65:25]

In the first volume of her exalted sort of science fiction beyond SF, Canopus in Argos, Doris Lessing projects an image of the planet earth in its paradisaical state, its fallen state, and then again restored. The first volume is called Shikasta, the name of the planet after the Fall, as it were. She derives the word from the Persian word for broken. The earth before the Fall and after the restoration is called Rohanda, derived from fruitful (from Tolkien’s Rohan, I assume). In a most telling chapter showing the restoration, people suddenly notice that predatory animals no longer hunt; they consume vegetation, much as in Isaiah we see the wolf and the lamb grazing side by side.

In my mind the discussion doesn’t really end there. Staying in the West for the moment, I note that vegetation, poor domain, benefits neither from the End of Time in Isaiah nor Lessing’s restoration. Grass still gets eaten. The fruit of the trees is still in peril. We justify the eating of meat by arguing that animals have no meaningful consciousness—and plants even less. But how do we know that?

Expanding our view to encompass the East as well, we see the notion of the Fall extended. The world isn’t just fallen. It becomes entirely illusory, maya. And in Buddhism, where eating meat or destroying even insects is forbidden, the Vegetable Kingdom still remains our prey.

For me the discussion is still open. And in my context the world, as such, seems innocent. And the weight of original sin seems to rest squarely on humanity alone.

(Image: Edward Hicks (1780-1849), “Peacable Kingdom” (link).)

Whose Illusion?

More in touch with the natural world, as on a brief but real Great Lakes vacation, or carefully observing living creatures, as we have been doing here with butterflies—in my own awkward case such experiences invariably produce cosmological notes. And one of these is that the Eastern notion, namely that this world is Maya or illusion, cannot be correct.

I am looking at a wondrous book on Papillons† (in three languages). Here’s a fascinating picture of a certain Grass Moth. And then I’m told that “The Grass Moths, all of which are small, form a large family with a great variety of forms and about 15,000 species worldwide. Many of them can wrap their front wings around their bodies when at rest, so that they are then difficult to make out.” 15,000 species! Of one kind of moth. That’s an illusion? Whose illusion is that? We’re not born knowing such things. Somebody had to count all those varieties of Grass Moths. Well, if Wikipedia has got it right, the Order Lepidoptera, where the Grass Moth belongs, has, all told, an estimated 174,250 species.

On the way home from the pool last night, Brigitte stopped and pointed at a tree. “Look at the bark of that tree,” she said. “Have you ever seen something like that?” We both stared at the trunk of a tree, fascinated now—having passed it at least fifty, sixty times in the past several years.

The notion that the world is an illusion is the interpretation that Eastern traditions give to what is known as the unitive vision. In the West it is interpreted as union with God. Multiple posts on this blog touch on the subject—this experience—which I take to be content-free and energetic in nature. Being that, its interpretation is shaped by the traditions, knowledge, and philosophies of those who have them—therefore by culture.

Western religions are monotheistic; they conceive of the world as created by God. Therefore it can’t be an illusion. An awareness of an enormous contrast, between ordinary experience and this ecstasy, is also voiced in the West, but not quite in the same negative terms as the East has produced. But the Western version, boiled down to its essence, is to say that the world is less than God. The Eastern version drives this to its extreme. The big contrast is that in the West we conceive of God as the absolutely Other—whereas, in the East, the person who has the experience—now of the world, now of Samadhi—is the same person. Therefore it is the experiencer who has the illusion and, for all practical purposes, is also its cause. Logically speaking, he or she is God. But to escape this problem, the East, when pressed to put it into concepts, imagines us as tiny particles of the Ultimate—but still able to create 174,000 species of Lepidoptera? Or is that a collective effort?

The secular version of the experience is Cosmic Consciousness. If the secular has a religious mode at all—and it will have it once it experiences ecstasy—it is pantheistic. Therefore Cosmic Consciousness is a fitting sort of explanation. Oddly enough, the secular version may be the most concise and perhaps accurate; it simply projects energy. In a pantheistic conception, no one is really present, and the Lepidoptera are simply produced by chance variations. That, of course, I find impossible to believe. But that we’re experiencing the cosmos, rather than God, that I think might be right on. Thus I resist assigning the “unitive experience” any transcendental rank. It is content-free but very energetic. The creation, meanwhile, in its extraordinary diversity and intelligent arrangement, tells me that there is more to the world than merely an overwhelming feeling. Ponder the following quote from the same book, this time illustrating two butterflies mating, rear touching rear:

With flying insects which comprise many species, such as dragonflies and butterflies, nature has to make sure that mating cannot take place between representatives of different species. This is achieved by extreme differentiation of the exterior genitalia, so that male and female organs fit together like key and lock. These distinctive features provide the lepidopterist with accurate classifying aids and help him to distinguish between otherwise very similar species. [Papillons, p. 40]

---------------
†Zauberwelt der Schmetterlinge, The Magic of Butterflies, Papillons, by Gunter Steinbach and Werner Zepf, Sigloch, 1998. The image shown (own photography) is of the Common Buckeye, Junonea coenia, not of the Grass Moth. The Buckeye is a butterfly that looks a little like a moth because of its brown coloration.

Hylomorphism—Persistent Critter

Hylomorphism reared its head again in blogs I occasionally read—and every time it does I think of Thomas Aquinas’ extensions of Aristotle’s definition of substance (fusion of matter and form). He extended that definition by adding the principle of a double composition; in that the pairs are essence and existence. In Aristotle unformed, prime matter and immaterial form have a kind of shadowy quasi-reality until they meet and interact—but when form and matter separate again, as at the death of a human, nothing is left. Hence Aquinas’ extensions. In effect he added existence as a third component—and was thus able to assert the reality of angels and of God. Man is matter, substantial form (essence), and existence. An angel is substantial form and existence. And God’s essence is his existence. Elegant, but one wonders about the role of matter in all this. If genuinely higher beings are possible without it, what purpose does matter actually serve?

And every time I think of this, the same thought occurs. Hylomorphism is problematical. I’ve held for a long time that the scheme should be abandoned—but it hangs on because its tough to abandon a functioning raft as we try to build a new one while still sailing choppy seas—read our ignorance in this dimension. What is matter? What is form?

The concept of matter has become genuinely problematical now that we have some operational knowledge of electromagnetism. It should have been equally problematical for past ages too if they had thought more about air and light. Our own theories about the nature of atoms cause them to manifest as forces, not really as tiny solids held by forces. And as solidity disappears, form morphs (pun intended) into the behavior of forces.

Form has always been, as it were, a handy way of distinguishing classes of tangibilities one from others, with accidents (individually distinguishing features) a kind of work around the limitations of a fundamentally imprecise concept. The concept is indispensable in ordinary thought, of course, but really only means “the way things appear and act,” thus what is usually called their phenomenological aspect. We know that they exist by means of our perceptions; if we can see or feel or smell or hear them, we cannot doubt that they are there. The separation of phenomena and noumena is at root only a mental game; no experiential proof of the distinction may be had. And so are other separations, though less obviously: form and matter, or, as above, force and behavior. If something exists, it behaves—simply by enduring.

There is a game side here—and a practical one. The practical issue is our ability to perceive—and intersubjectively, thus many people having the same perception. Seeing ghosts or angels (to cite two that defy hylomorphism) is a rare and almost always individual experience—and from such perceptions no science can develop. Aquinas extended the concept to angels—by adding his double composition—because angels figure in the Bible, a source of information he saw as transcending the ordinary realm. If vast numbers experienced angels, we’d think of them as casually as we think about air.

For me, washed as I am in the waters of modernity (polluted although they are), hylomorphism is a cul de sac. I’ve suggested on this blog elsewhere that thinking of form as intention promises a fruitful way out. In nature the intention is transcendent, in human products traceable to us. In living nature the intention may be some third agency, above or below. Intention works very nicely as a substitute—and introduces the missing link in logic: agency.

Now as for what spirits are doing here in the material dimension, where we need intricately engineered bodies even to perceive, that is a really good question.

Crises and the Inner Life

Certainly in times of crisis—perceived or real—various tensions between the social and the interior life become apparent. By “perceived” I mean, for instance, the current atmosphere produced by news of markets, political deadlock, misfortunes in war, and the like. These macroscopic phenomena don’t directly influence the daily life of most people right now, but they produce stresses in those whose personal horizons—in space and time—are expansive. Those who live in the narrow here and now and largely centered in the self, don’t react either to anticipated triumphs or dooms in the wider, in the outer world.

Interesting this. Empathy for others requires expanded personal horizons—thus caring for others. Superior judgment requires expanded time horizons—thus action with a view to future outcomes. But such characteristics link the person more closely to the world and thus distract from the inner life. The inner life might be encapsulated in the phrase “practicing the presence of God”—or, in other traditions, characterized by the word “detachment,” that detachment being from the world. Do empathy and foresight, markers of the higher life, conflict with the inner, the highest form of the higher life?

If someone is genuinely detached from the world, does that mean that he doesn’t care? Is that a kind of selfishness? Never mind the problems of the world. I’m after my own salvation, my own nirvana. What about mendicant orders (Christian and other) that let ordinary people labor for food that they accept because they have a “higher” vocation? Is there a problem here?

The problem is real—but only if we think in a linear way. One of the most maddening aspects of the higher life is that it isn’t linear—thus that it points out of this world, is at right angles to the three dimensions. When I manage to grasp and hold on to this—rarely for more than five minutes at a time—and crises tend to remind me—the problem disappears.

Detachment or conscious awareness of God—there is no spot where God is not—must coincide with, transcend, and at the same time fuse with caring for others and looking far ahead. It is an attitude, a will, to care while being inwardly separated from the great chaos all around. Identification is the technical word here. We can effectively act without being identified. To do this is the hardest thing in the world—but is rewarded with subtle energy by whatever name called. Neither those who are stressed by crises—nor those who just ignore them because they have no direct effect—are properly detached. Both represent linear adaptations to what is coming down. Detachment means to care, to act, and yet to be at peace, no matter what. The most popular version of this general view is a poem called Desiderata. It was written by Max Ehrman in the 1920s (link). One of its most quoted lines is this one: “And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” Not a bad thought to hold as the Dow, this moment, struggles to reach 11,000 at 11:40am eastern time.

Paradoxical Calculus

If we take the teachings of Buddha seriously, the first act of every day ought to be a conscious effort at detachment. More: That state of mind, detachment, should follow us throughout the day and be the last effort of the night. Paradoxically detachment is the route to empathy. Thus a withdrawal is necessary to be able genuinely to reach out to others. The argument for that in a bit.

Without detachment everything slides into a kind of relativity where another calculus rules. It says: “I exist only in so far as others see me.” This is the calculus of conventionality: attention seeking and bestowing—and we bestow it in efforts to get it. This calculus, habitual although it is, is paradoxical because, if true, then we don’t really exist, not in ourselves. We are strictly a social construct.

All genuine religion is grounded on the perhaps curious notion that Genuine Reality is invisible and intangible. My logic runs thus. The one “other” that always sees me (and thus, using the conventional calculus, makes me real) is God, and if God did not then I would cease to be. But I can’t see God and hence I can’t be sure. Hence the exaggerated role of “faith” in western religiousness. The eastern seeker wishes to reach the Genuinely Real, the pure Buddha Mind, and asserts that all else is illusion. Therefore the only thing that isn’t evanescent is what cannot be perceived at all—because the Buddha Mind is as invisible and intangible as God. Therefore, for all practical purposes, it is Nothingness. And when we at last do experience it, then we have infinite bliss. At the functional level union with God and Nirvana are equivalent, aren’t they? Anything beneath the total sovereignty (read absolute detachment or union with God) is suffering. Is that true or isn’t it?

It seems to be. The area of ambiguity—the only area that is ambiguous in all of this—is intimacy. Therefore we prize it. Intimacy is soul-to-soul communication. It is not really available in group settings. It is also incompatible with radical detachment, strictly speaking, although (ambiguity again) the Buddha’s action (in staying in the world to help others) implies empathy. Genuine empathy and intimacy are virtually one. We don’t seek intimacy for our own sake but for the sake of the other. Here I am reminded of the Sufi story of the lover who pleads for admittance into the chamber of the Beloved. The voice within asks: “Who is it? Who wishes to enter?” — “It is you,” says the lover in response. Until the “me” becomes the “you,” there is no intimacy. That overflow of empathy arises when we succeed in self-extinguishment—or, to put it more dramatically, we love so much we throw ourselves away. For “self” here we must read the unreal self, the projected ego structure. The paradox is present, therefore, in intimacy too. Absolute withdrawal produces absolute empathy. Naturally-occurring intimacy is a foretaste of what is possible writ large—in intimacy a small self-sacrifice, once more paradoxically arising, most frequently, from an initial sexual attraction.

We don’t exist—and I mean this genuinely, literally—if what we are is merely the outer psycho-physical structure. That structure is nothing, as in nothing “real,” because it does not endure, is perishable. If we identify with it, we’re identified with nothingness. Conversely, we are everything if we identify with the seeming nothing of the absolute and indestructible. So the problem is that famous Maya. There is a deceptively real and a genuinely real. The deceptive seems more real than the genuine. We cling to it. And therefore we suffer.

Now of course, when I spend five minutes of serious thought on the matter, I realize that I cannot genuine love unless I’m actually present, real, and free. Therefore genuine love is necessarily a function of detachment—from the unreal. Buddhism is only paradoxical when we think that the fleeting is permanent—and the permanent isn’t there at all. When we correct for that, Buddhism is simply a practical method. But can we teach that sort of thing in grade school? Not very successfully, I don’t think. But it is better to teach unselfishness than self-esteem. The latter arises without any need of help, never mind artificial nurture—unless we’re raising consumers rather than educating souls.

Drinking Good Water

In philosophical matters it is quite easy to reach firm convictions with very little help from others—by sheer observation. Here is a demo of what I’m saying; the quote is from the eighteenth century but true for all time. And, strictly speaking, to chart our own course through life, we don’t need much more than such personal proof if we are earnest, honest, and determined. Nevertheless, such is the harshness of this dimension, it is a happy moment when we find ourselves confirmed by others who are similarly qualified and similarly earnest. Such confirmation is the more welcome when the prevailing view, high and low, contradicts our personal discovery. It takes some fortitude to withstand a vast social consensus. The wise know this well. Hence there is this Sufi story intended to warn and to strengthen:

A man who studied under a wise Guide learned from this sage that soon (the Guide named a certain day in the near future) all of the water would change. Those who drank it would go mad. The sage suggested that the disciple gather and safely store fresh water deep in a mountain cave where the destructive influence would not reach it. The Disciple did as he was told. After that the Guide departed for another place—and soon after that, as he had predicted, the waters changed. Amazingly, all of the people began to change as well, and while society remained in some way unchanged, it had become quite mad. The Disciple continued to drink his own water and only rarely ventured among people where—when he spoke to others—he saw that they thought that he was crazy now. But he had kept his sanity while they had lost theirs. This went on for a long time—but the Disciple began to feel an ever growing, indeed yawning loneliness. And one day, in desperation, from his feeling of sheer isolation, he gave in, drank the local water in the village—and went mad himself.

Big Brother now once more loved him. It is good to know the truth. But we need the friends who stand by our side when the world goes mad.

Relegare or Religare?

In religious acculturation the most important element is barely touched upon—so that we don’t even recognize the very experience of it when it arises spontaneously. We don’t in any way link it to religion. I find it interesting that the etymology for religion Cicero once offered is right on target—at least for me. He thought the word derived from “again” and “reading”—relegare. When we expand the concept to include pondering on things, as in reflecting upon, we are very close to the idea of contemplation—thus to “reflecting on the higher or the elevated.” Others have preferred deriving the word from religare, meaning to fasten or to bind fast, thus pointing to a bond between the human and divine. But the sense of that word (binding) also holds the notion of an obligation, an obligation laid on us. And, indeed, my own religious acculturation had plenty of that. It was commandment-based. Do this; do not do that. And there are consequences. Thus religion came in the form of behavioral dicta—not at all dissimilar to “Look before you cross the street—or you might be run over,” the main difference being that the “run over” portion of the teaching was projected in time to a vague and misty sort of place. We were even taught to pray under the rubric of obligation—never ever under the rubric of nutrition. Yet prayer is the closest we get to contemplation in these contexts—and the genuine religious life is actually centered on it.

We were children, of course. The acculturation was more social than religious. Religious acculturation ought to be life-long, and should have institutional support to channel the wisdom in more or less formal ways, but this isn’t in the cards. Usually after 10, maximally after 18 years of age, religious education altogether ceases. Not surprisingly the vast majority is far more ignorant of religion than, say, of high school science. Now, to be sure, coming from a family where Montessori education is highly regarded—and entirely ignored by the world—my view of the rest of education, never mind religious, is equally unprintable. Therefore the religious life, when it is actually practiced, especially by a few members of the laity, is the world’s most hidden activity of all.

At least in West—saying which I engage in one of those ploys you’ll find in Games People Play. (To take the air out of some windbag mouthing generalities, wait until he finishes and then say, “Yes, but not in the East.”) Some religious traditions—I’m thinking of Buddhism—place detachment and inward-directed contemplation much more prominently than the avoidance of sin, obedience to doctrine, and ritual practices—or the euphoric acceptance of Christ preferably in a crowd with lots of people shouting hallelujahs. Perhaps in those Eastern reaches more of the acculturation sticks and lasts beyond childhood.

What comes first? Inner awakening—which is fed (literally, actually, tangibly) by contemplative activities—or behavioral conformity? The first is first, I think. If it is not awakened and active in the person, morality of behavior, even after it has become a habit, is much too easily eroded by unhappy circumstances. Inner awakening is like a spring. Once it flows, it is avidly watched—and when the turmoil of life starts to clog up its channel, the motivation to clean it out and help it flow again arises right out of the pain of life.

Concerning nutrition and prayer in the Christian tradition, I suggest this earlier short post.

Happy Hunting Grounds

When something cannot be described using words or graspable analogies, how can that something motivate people to seek it? Yet such is the case with ecstatic experiences. Those who report them use words like these: “It cannot be described!” “It transcends all that we know!” “Ineffable!” This can—and is—rendered into dreary technical jargon: The very means we try to use to describe or understand it are also the very veils that hide this unutterable Wonder. More amusing, sometimes, are imaginative aggrandizements like this: Compared to it the greatest Joy that you could possibly experience is like a tiniest black ant hiding at the bottom of the deepest canyon in the deepest ocean in the darkest hour of the longest night. Etc.

I much prefer descriptions of the world we get from some of the Native American tribes. They spoke of the Happy Hunting Grounds. Not sophisticated? Catering to the already excessively sensuous nature of humanity? — Or could the Happy Hunting Grounds be much closer to the truth than the Unimaginably Ineffable reached by extreme and towering mortifications after uncounted lives of failure? The Happy Hunting Grounds can at least be described in some ways. The greatest of humanity’s ecstatics utterly fail to communicate. What they say reminds me of a perfectly-wiped blackboard: we’re staring at nothing at all.

So who is closer to the truth? Could the ecstatics have it right? Or dare we trust the Iroquois? Well, here I would begin by pointing out that the Iroquois were an exceedingly sophisticated people; the Iroquois League had features of government that, if we could reproduce them, would please us indeed—but would also impose disciplines incompatible with a consumption culture. Let’s not dismiss the Iroquois, the Cherokee, or the Algonquians just because we’re ignorant of them and managed to erase them (for a time) from the cultural landscape.

Meanwhile there are some genuine problems with the ecstatic view. If the ecstatics are right, radical discontinuities are present in the cosmos. This comes into view when we compare the life we know in this dimension, the efforts we’re supposed to make to reach salvations, and the rewards we are supposed to gain. Effort and reward are incommensurably disproportional. It does not matter which cultural tradition we consult. Eternal damnation or eternal (but indescribable) bliss? Eternal suffering in rebirth after bloody rebirth, old age, etc., over and over again? Unless in this life we make so heroic an effort of the will to extinguish ourselves that we suddenly become divine? When incommensurability is present, it becomes problematical to speak of meaning. The Arbitrary raises its head—however benevolent its visage.

Over against that Ungraspable, the Happy Hunting Grounds make a lot of sense. The way I see it, life here and life beyond must have some differences, to be sure—but also some continuities. Without both, meaning disappears. In the Happy Hunting Grounds, hunting is still necessary—but it is easier, happiness is greater, the game is ample, and easier to catch. The myth projects a transition to a higher sphere in which the features of the mental landscape retain some element of recognition—not this life here and then an indescribable flash of light. I’m inclined to trust humanity’s traditional views against the extreme experiences of those who assault heaven with boundless fury determined to rob it of its secret. I find it interesting that ordinary people, reporting on near-death experiences, also suggest the kind of continuity the Amerindians did by speaking of hunting grounds. People who’ve undergone an NDE are themselves transformed by the experience, predominantly for the better. And they do have something to say—although, to be sure, they also have difficulties putting that world into the language we use to describe this one.

My own views of the ecstatic are fleshed out here. To give it a brief summary, it appears to be contact with something analogous to energy, experienced as extraordinarily powerful and positive. It appears to heighten benevolence and intellect—but fails to bestow knowledge. It is interpreted as contact with a person—but only by some. Among the traditions, the Sufis are cautious about it, their teachers frown. And official Catholicism (although derided for this) does not rush to embrace the experience either—and quite rightly so.

Tools, Not Lords

We must keep words in their places: excellent servants but very bad lords. Poets innately know this, thus words dance to their tune rather than the other way about. In my world the outer (let me call it that for just a moment), thus that to which words refer, is the governing reality; the symbols that evoke it are just tools. Some people fasten on words as if these had a heft, tangibility, and immutability—but experience has taught me that the same sound or written form often means quite contrary things all depending on the mysterious “outer” the speaker or writer actually holds in mind.

I’m after that tangibly real. But when I get away from ordinary, physical things, that real becomes invisible; in actual experience it’s just a feeling inside me. Take words like soul or self. Therefore, to save time, my initial interest when picking up a book, say, is to discover the writer’s existential stance. If it greatly differs from mine, I rapidly lose interest. Stance, of course, is unimportant if the reporting is about simple, generally observable facts, but if the matter is murky, aesthetic, or requires interpretation, the person’s stance becomes important—if for no other reason than to save time. A person’s existential rooting, to use another word, determines the meanings he or she will attach to the words.

I spend a great deal of time pondering the writings even of people whose general stance agrees with mine, especially writers far away in time, thus when my context of the life in those times is thin. I spend time wondering what invisible feelings the words they use actually represent. What did they feel when they used this word or that? What did the Buddha mean when he used the word anatman (no-self)? If there is no self, what is the point of nirvana? It couldn’t mean what the summaries say, what the dogmatists ignorantly hammer home, bludgeoning us with a patent contradiction. Well. Today I chanced across a very brief but very potent post on The Zennist, here, titled “Prior to nirvana.” It’s worth a trip there to read it. Here we have the kind of explanation that makes sense to me—entirely in harmony with genuine, hard introspection—which is the real root of knowledge, rather than that which concept-juggling yields. In a nutshell, the Zennist argues that the self the Buddha called no-self  was the corporeal entity, this current composite—not at all the self that I have in mind when I use the word.

The Body in Question

With a respectful nod to Jonathan Miller, who produced a TV series and then wrote a book using that title, both being products that gave us much delight, I want to borrow the title for use in another context. My context is more, shall we say, philosophical. Much the same thought often arises as I age and, waking in the mornings, become aware of my body—as a body. It is that with accumulating years the elegant traditional classification, known as the Great Chain of Being, seems less and less persuasive. To save me lots of words I’ve produced a little visual poem to summarize a vast philosophical structure, that very chain. It had its origins in Aristotle and then came to be formalized, in western thought, before the Renaissance came.

Post-Renaissance this structure started to unravel. The very word, chain, signifies necessary relationship—and that chain began rust from the top down so that, by the nineteenth century (Nietzsche and the death of God) the chain had lost its meaning. It was gradually inverted. the Mineral came to rest on top—and all else derived from it, by chance and happenstance, not by a logically elegant relationship.

At the root of this conceptualization are Aristotle’s ideas of potential and actuality, both having real existence. At the top actuality is total, at the bottom we find pure potential. Humans, in the middle, are the mysterious transition from the realm of becoming to the realm of being. As we ascend from the bottom, more and more potential is actualized until it is total Being in God. But what with the inorganic at the top, the whole concept of being loses all interest for the obvious reason that the original duality of potential and actuality is lost.

Now you might think that I would strongly embrace the Great Chain of Being. I appear always to be on the side of tradition. But that’s not the case here. The more aware I become of the body in question, the less inclined I am to see either life as a whole (plant, animal, etc.) or human life as natural to the grand scheme of Creation. The body becomes more and more visible (indeed feel-able) as a kind of temporary tooling for a limited purpose—the longer you live the keener the knowledge of that. I wake up and remember telephone calls bringing me news of my own generation’s physical problems: the parts are making troubles; this fails, that needs a fix, chemical help, surgical assists, etc. That perfect balance in the center of the chain of being might make sense to someone just to either side of forty, not to someone past three-score-and ten.

The machine-like nature of the body is a problem in elegant schemes of this sort. At the same time I think that a duality does underlie reality. But when it comes to human centrality—a kind of centaur-like existence, neither horse nor human, properly speaking—there I feel genuine intellectual discomfort. When I contemplate that state, especially when its old, gnostic ideas present themselves either in pagan forms, like genuine Gnosticism, or in the Christian variety which speaks of a fallen world. It is only in a fallen world that spirits can possibly be required to be prisoners of machines.

Déjà vu

I’ve mentioned this experience once before on this blog (here) when commenting on Carl B. Becker’s Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death—in that context regretting Becker’s exclusion of that experience from the subject matter that he covers under the category of the paranormal. Then I mentioned the experience again in yesterday’s posting—and the post promptly brought some visitors who were using a Google search with the phrase. My own conviction is that the experience is the most widely-known instance ordinary people have of precognition. In my own case—and I think this is generally the case—I experienced the déjà vu feeling much more frequently in childhood than later, but these experience still recur, if very rarely. They’ve always fascinated me. Indeed it was when I first encountered J.W. Dunne’s writings that I felt sure that I’d approached some kind of explanation of the phenomenon.

Déjà vu literally means “already seen” in French. The phrase was first used by the philosopher and parapsychologist Émile Boirac (1851–1917) in a letter to the French journal Review Philosophique and later in his book, The Future of the Psychic Sciences. In that book he also proposed the word metagnomy as a substitute for clairvoyance, thus “knowledge of things situated beyond those we can normally know” (link). Frederick Meyers (1843-1901), the founder of the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR)†, called it promnesia, using a Greek formation meaning prior memory. The simpler common-language French phrase won the linguistic battle. Déjà vu is simply a very powerful sensation that some situation, right now, has happened before. Indeed when it does, we often know what will happen next, including what people will say.

The notion that we are remembering a dream—and a precognitive dream, at that—is totally persuasive if we have ourselves actually had one or more such dreams which we remembered at the time when had them—so that when the déjà vu moment later actually arrived we already knew that we had dreamt it.

The Paranormal Encyclopedia.com here notes that one psychology professor at least, in 1896, Arthur Allin, then of the University of Colorado, Bolder, had suggested that the source of déjà vu was forgotten dreams. The modern explanation, summed up by Wikipedia here, rejects precognition as an explanation and trots out a long list of other supposedly more scientific explanations of that squirrelly sort that make those of us  sublimely confident in the Big Picture smile with bemusement.

†The SPR has an American counterpart, the American Society for Psychical Research, Inc., reachable here.

Precognition: Some Curious Trails

If you looked for a thinker who has expended serious thought on precognitive dreaming—and did so before this 2011—the one name that would surely surface is that of John William Dunne (1875-1949). Since publishing his book, Dreamer, Andrew Paquette joins Dunne as another.

J.W. Dunne, born in Ireland, worked as an aeronautical engineer in England. His book, in multiple (and drastically-changing) editions, is An Experiment with Time (1927) arose from multiple experiences of his own in which he dreamt of events that, later, actually took place—both private and very public events. His theory, Serialism, was an attempt to explain it.

Paquette is an artist of some renown, with multiple achievements in comic books, video games, teaching, the fine arts, and as an author and teacher in computer graphics. He is also a psychic of obviously high gifts—a very well-written report of which experience is his book, Dreamer. He discovered these talents following a precognitive dream, the first of many (see my last post here).

I could, but almost hesitate to, add a third name to the list, that of the Russian, P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), who developed his own theory in A New Model of the Universe. Ouspensky did not address the subject of precognitive dreams narrowly, but his model, presented in the book mentioned above, appeared at about the same time as Dunne’s book (1931).

The first two (Dunne, Paquette) both assume that the future we see in dreams actually exists, with the implication that free will is at minimum problematical. Ouspensky provides a model of time in which this preexistent future is potentially present, but its manifestation (actualization) is due in part to choices. Therefore in Ouspensky’s scheme, the future we dream can be changed—if we make other choices—but the event that we actually live was also there, hiding in potential right alongside the more painful alternative that we avoided by acting differently. We’re dealing here with very original people; therefore it may not come as a total surprise that Ouspensky believed in eternal return, thus that he lived the same life, over and over again—a fact to which he attributed his experiences of déjà vu, whereas others in turn explain that sensation by saying that we’ve dreamt the future the night or the week before but just don’t remember the dream. Sorry, but that’s the nature of this subject…

Dunne and Ouspensky both think in terms of geometrically arranged times. Dunne projects a serial succession, one time existing above the other—so that from T2 you can see the entirety of T1; thus from T2 the observer sees T1’s life all at once, from childhood to death, all at one glance. Dunne imagined an infinite regress of times—and staunchly defended this heterodoxical view. Ouspensky’s model, presented on pages 343-406 of his book (Vintage, 1971) presents an infinite time in which a multi-dimensional matrix contains an infinite number of lines, each linking points of possibility. One life is thus a single branching line traced through this (to the human mind unimaginably complex) matrix of possibilities. The line is what we actualize; other possibilities, other lives we might have lived, remain in the matrix. (One is reminded of the many-world theory we owe to physicist Hugh Everett (1957)—with the difference that in Everett’s scheme, each world tangibly exists.)

Alas, precognition is a genuine problem. If we see the future, something must be there to see. Is it a tangibly existing hard real something? Ouspensky avoids the problem of free will—the existence of which we assert from experience—by moving preexistence to a quasi-real matrix of potential. You might say that he reifies Aristotle’s potential. But if we accept hard preexistence, we must find another explanation for free will. One solution Paquette presents is that we choose to live a life, a life shown to us, in the sublime world, and in great detail, before we’re born. Thus we exercise choice outside this life but not in it. But Paquette is no doctrinaire; his focus is on rich actual experiential data. He reports precognitive dreams that come out almost, but not precisely, as dreamt; thus choice is exercised here. Sometimes he says that everything’s fixed; he also asserts that we are here to develop. He does not resolve the contradictions that thus sprout here and there; no coherent cosmology has yet (I’m still not finished with his book) emerged that might explain how we can possibly learn anything in a life in the midst of which the most crucial element of agency, choice, is denied us except as an illusion.

The fully worked-out models all reflect a modern form of thought in which it is not at all common to ponder such divine powers as omniscience—or to take them seriously. At the same time, the actual experience of precognitive dreams frequently features instances showing that (1) they do indeed happen, (2) are confirmed later in very large part, but (3) then sometimes do not end tragically, as they did in the dream. This would suggest that the assertion of a fixed future must be opened up in some way, thus minimally as Ouspensky opened it. Another way to do that is to suggest that agencies may be involved—other than ourselves, that precognitive dreams may be in the category of communications. Let me flesh that out a little more.

The best way to do this is to imagine that the future may actually be visible—thus projected to the eyes of minds—without being tangibly there. At some resolution all events and things are energy in motion, at all kinds of levels of coarseness and subtlety, mental and physical. Our reality may be more transparent to higher beings than ourselves. God, of course, is omniscient, but angels (not least guardian angels) may be multiscient, or much-knowing, just eyeballing the vast energetic flow and, furthermore, communicating instantly with one another. And if you hate the very notion of an angel, why not every human being but not in our ordinary waking selves but genuinely near-angelic when we are asleep. Either way, the future may already be here, in projection, and the distant future as well as the near—but the nearer the more detailed. And our sleeping selves may see it (or may have it framed as dreams by guardian angels). And some of us are more gifted, alert, or open to these things than others—and the dramatic is more likely to catch our attention than the ordinary.

What we are seeing, then, are patterns of the future, not the actual rooted and cemented tangible reality of it. Therefore it remains open to change, certainly at the level of personal detail, which is what matters to individuals. It is simply a general kind of communication of reality, in projection, which is present quite naturally based on the very design of reality. And if apprehended can sometimes be a source of help in need.

One of the more interesting aspects of the paranormal, and Paquette notes this fact in his book, is that willful attempts to produce psychic results tend to fail dramatically. A prominent explorer of this phenomenon is J.E. Kennedy (for some of his papers, see this link). One aspect of this well-documented observation is that paranormal phenomena may possibly be a means of communication, form beyond the borderzone, to humanity here, to indicate that something more exists than we can actually see. It’s there like water, but nobody is forced to drink. And precognition may be a means of signaling that fact to many people in times when great disasters loom ahead—already clearly visible from “over there,” not fixed in every detail, but visible, from patterns already forming now.