The Merits and Demerits of Quantum Explanations

Almost since the rise of quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small, speculative thinkers have formed a kind of aura around the field in attempts to help them give various puzzling phenomena  a scientific explanation. Among these are consciousness, the mind-body problem, telepathy, near-death experiences, and the like.

A philosophically serious attempt in this direction is an appendix in Hans Jonas’ book, The Imperative of Responsibility, 1979. The appendix (pp. 204-231 in the 1984 University of Chicago Press edition), is titled “Impotence or Power of Subjectivity, A Reappraisal of the Psychophysical Problem.” I have read many other such takes, to be sure, but none has shown any rigor, whereas Jonas’ work does. He tackles the problem that Descartes had already struggled with. Assume that we do have an autonomous spiritual self, however it is called (res cogitans by Descartes, subjectivity by Jonas); hereafter I’ll refer to it as “self.” How does this immaterial something interact with the physical world in a meaningfully causal way—or vice versa?

The merits of quantum mechanics as an explanation lie in the fact that it deals with the extremely tiny phenomena at the subatomic level—where the energies involved are also minute. The tentative solution to the mind-body problem is that the self, whatever it is, may have energy enough to move “matter” at the quantum level. Then, if an appropriate structure of amplification has evolved, thus a neuronal network like the brain, an immeasurably tiny intervention by the self can eventually result in a physical action like raising the arm or saying something, both because I want to. This has merit—and produces, at least in me, a kind of intuitive ascent. It points to a potential explanation—and Jonas does not go any further than that. The only assumption we have to make is that the self at minimum has some minute ability to interact with matter at the subatomic level.

The demerits of quantum explanations (and Jonas does not go there, but others do) is to suggest that the only difference between what we traditionally call the spiritual and contrast to the material is a difference in density or wavelength. Therefore souls are just as material as everything else—they’re just made of more subtle stuff.

Here I have the opposite reaction. I don’t believe a word of it. There may be subtle regions made of subtle matter, etc., etc., but matter, no matter how subtle, can’t possibly produce consciousness. The entity we call the self, therefore, is different from matter in kind, not just in degree. Nor is it absent in this coarse material realm. It’s plentifully present here in the ordinary world—and doing plenty of damage as well as good. And in both realms (coarse and subtle) it has, no doubt, a certain amount of force that it can exercise. In these dense regions, however, to exercise that force on the congealed energies we call matter, it needs amplification through machines—of which our bodies are the first and most potent versions.

Jonas wrote his appendix before extensive assembly of data on near-death experiences had even begun. One of the interesting result of those studies is the discovery that disembodied selves have the devil of a time interacting with other people—but an easy time passing through walls. But they do move about, more or less at will. Separated from their tool, the body, they are seriously handicapped here. But, presumably, not so in the regions beyond the border. Manner of speaking. And it would seem to me, those who first arrived here, finding themselves in this valley of dense matter, started to mess about with particles at the quantum level. And lo and behold. In the wink of a few millennia they had made the first living cell. First came chemical civilization, fashioned by nudging quantum particles this way and that. Next came life, then civilization. And now back to studying quantum mechanics again. What goes around comes around. But what they were then, and we still are, is something other than either energy or matter. This is a vale of body-making, not of soul-making.

The Soul-Life Link

Among the most interesting cases of out-of-body experience are those where some person spontaneously leaps from the body when anticipating death—as in auto accidents and in mountain-climbing falls. Sometimes the body isn’t even damaged—but the mind evidently thought it would be—and finds the ejection switch. Some kind of linkage must remain, however, because people return to their bodies again and therefore we have these accounts from them.

We do not know what happens in those more drastic case when the body is destroyed—when it doesn’t roll free of the wreckage or the ropes don’t snag on stone and the mountain climber isn’t “caught,” still alive. In those cases, presumably, the last link is broken, and the soul, having made a hasty exit, sees that it’s time to move on.

The body-soul duality is alive in well in ordinary thought. People do not think of themselves as chemical machines—or of the mind as a secondary product of brain function alone. As for what life is, they haven’t a clue. The orthodox scientific explanation is that it arises from chemistry. But let’s suppose that it’s the other way about. Suppose that what we call soul is life—or that life is the most primitive expression of soul. What we certainly know is that a corpse is dead—no soul is manifesting. And that alert people jump out of their bodies occasionally when it looks like the end has arrived.

Aristotle offered us the primitive soul, calling it vegetative. The animal has both a vegetative and an animal soul. Humans have both and, in addition, what Aristotle called the rational soul. Aspects of the same essence in successively developed stages?

Looking at these two concepts, soul and life, our habits of thought blur things. We think of souls as individual, of life as a broad phenomenon. To be sure, each manifestation of life, at whatever scale, is individual. Life, therefore, is a broad generalization of enormously large numbers of individual instances of it. We also think we have a soul—much as we have a body—but what if we are the soul?

Today’s “grown-up” explanation is a form of physicalist monism. There is no soul independent of bodies—no such thing as jumping out of the bodies. Consciousness is neural functioning. It’s chemistry, stupid. Grow up.

At the pace of a slow snail, this view is changing; but it will probably take another century or more before elite thought will have returned to a more comprehensive view in accord with experience and observation. In the lead are people who have unquestionable standing in the field of science, like Charles S. Sherrington (1857-1952) and John Eccles (1903-1997), both neurophysiologists and Nobel Prize winners. It’s difficult to expel them from the reservation, with such credentials, hence a more polite form of disagreement is noted. They are called dualists. To these I might add Wilder Penfield (1891-1976), a neurosurgeon with significant research achievements in the field. I will conclude with two quotes from him. Other prominent voices are those of Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994), a philosopher of science, and Roger Penrose (1931-), a mathematical physicist. And there are quite a few others.

Herewith then two quotes from Penfield, taken from his The Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain, Princeton University Press, 1975. The quotes suggest that the snail is moving.

Throughout my own scientific career, I, like other scientists, struggled to prove that brain accounts for the mind. But now, perhaps, the time has come when we may profitably consider the evidence as it stands and ask the question: Do brain-mechanisms account for the mind? Can the mind be explained by what is now known about the brain? If not, which is the more reasonable of the two hypotheses: that man's being is based on one element, or on two? (p. xiii)

Since every man must adopt for himself, without the help of science, his way of life and his personal religion, I have long had my own private beliefs. What a thrill it is, then, to discover that the scientist too can legitimately believe in the existence of spirit. (p. 85)

States of Knowledge

A sophisticated psychology would have a “science of states,” thus of states of mind or of consciousness. Some traditions have developed to include this science; an example is Sufism (where I first encountered that phrase). We don’t find it in the West. An obscure nineteenth century American lawyer and philosopher, Daniel Greenleaf Thompson (1850-1897) called for such a science (“Science of States of Consciousness”) in his A System of Psychology (1884, link), but, as I say, he was obscure. How do I define that? Well, there is no Wikipedia article on him. Nobody took up his challenge. But what are they, those states? And where am I going with this?

We use the word to describe states of awakeness, sleep, alertness, concentration, daydreaming, emotional, dreaming, hypnagogic, ecstatic, delusional, and so on. In the Sufi view, these are all aspects of the first, and lowest, state of humanity. Above it rise six others, each a higher state than the ordinary one of being human (link). We think that we are finished when we haven’t even started growing yet. Where am I going? I want to point to the difficulties in looking at various visionary reports, dreaming included but beyond that, without the help of a much more sophisticated understanding of how the human mind behaves above (or below) the level of ordinary consciousness.

The big chasm that appears in such reports is one between cognitive states and the emotional. The first is centered, the other is in motion. People report ecstatic feeling, not least the feeling of understanding everything, but they emerge from these states knowing absolutely nothing new;  they retain a memory of the ecstatic feeling, however, and it signals that all is well in the universe. But is that enough?  Negative experiences are occasionally reported; in these, also, there is little or no content. I recall reading, with sharp interest, a Sufi tale some years ago in which a master chides a disciple when hearing an ecstatic report. Ecstasy? No. It’s a sign of insufficient development. Back to the workbench with you. The knowledge that informed the master here came from understanding the various “states” from his own experience. The developed state, in Sufism, is “to have the option.” The person must be centered and “all there.” Being carried in a maelstrom of emotion is to be passive. Understanding must be present—and free choice. If the cognitive is overwhelmed, the seeker isn’t there yet.

I also note that the Catholic Church echoes the Sufi master’s attitude by displaying wariness concerning ecstasies and caution about mysticism as a general approach. Pop culture, a culture of emotion and of going with the flow, doesn’t like this stance. It sounds authoritarian—whereas it may simply be knowing.

The sharp if simplifying distinction I am making here, between cognitive development and emotional highs and lows, helps in sorting what is today a popular but fringe literature on “spiritual” or “cosmic” states, the paranormal, near-death experience reports, etc. The cognitive, of course, is not merely the intellectual, but the intellectual must be present at its base; and there are also modes of perception that are labeled “emotional” when they hold a higher form of experience, joy. Not that geography really applies here, but in the regions beyond the borderzone, there are most likely qualitatively different regions, from low to increasingly higher coherence. And to travel through them successfully, a good inner map is helpful, a grasp of the different states, principally studied by self-observation in the here and now.

Related Posts:

Mystical Experiences

A Closer Look at Ecstasy

It's a Busy Border

My focus on this blog is on a (to us) invisible realm—the border of which is not to be discovered in three-dimensional space. Nonetheless, there is a border. And people pass from this realm to that one quite frequently—and also, possibly, the other way. Now statistics have never been cited here, but let me make an exception today. Just for a moment, let’s take the subject seriously and ask ourselves to imagine what the traffic across that border might look like. As near-death experience reports suggest, it appears to take place through one or multiple “tunnels,” so presumably these lead to border-crossing points complete with, ah, officials and such.

Well, let us first take those who are leaving here. In 2009, in the United States alone, 2.4 million people “passed on.” Our death-rate, measured in deaths per 1,000 inhabitants per annum, is respectably low: 7.92 people die (in statistics we also have fractional people, another mystery worth lengthy study).  The world death rate for the period 2005-2010 was 8.5. That translates into total death of 57.9 million in 2009. It’s quite a busy border, isn’t it?

Now if we make the assumption that new births also represent an “arrival,” in this realm, of souls that originate “over there,” and we stick to the year 2009, the following tabulation shows the traffic of arrivals and departures, down to the minute:

Birth and Deaths in 2009 in the USA and the World
	Arrivals		Departures
	USA	World	USA	World
Birth	4,131,019	139,126,082	2,437,163	57,882,029
Birth/death rate (per 1,000 population)	13.50	19.95	7.9	8.3
Per day	11,318	381,167	6,677	158,581
Per hour	472	15,882	278	6,608
Per minute	8	265	5	110

We have more coming than going, it seems—but the bottom line is that there is quite a busy traffic across the borderzone. It’s not at all as quiet, distant, and speculative as we normally assume. Hence dipping into some statistics creates a new perspective. I’ve spent about 20 minutes getting here. Around the world 2,200 people died in that span of time; 5,300 people arrived. Would you welcome an assignment as a border guard…in the borderzone?

What Dream Awareness Suggests

Webster’s sensible definition of being conscious is “perceiving, apprehending, or noticing with a degree of controlled thought or observation.” Whatever we experience in dreams falls short of that. Missing from dream awareness is Webster’s trailing phrase pointing to controlled thought or observation. In my own memories of dreams, I am always seemingly in motion; I have the feeling of being hurled or pushed along. I never stop to consider; never say, “Hold on a sec” and then examine something carefully. The process is passive—that of a leaf being carried by the wind. Indeed when the observations cause genuine thought to surface, the end is sure to follow in a moment. There are, of course, times like that in the waking state as well; the option to cry “Stop!” is, however, always present. And when I do stop the dream also ends, that is to say the automatic flow comes to an end. In a way I do wake up—being already, technically, awake.

That moment—the moment of awakening, the summoning of “controlled thought”—marks a transition from what psychology has come to call unconsciousness but might be more precisely labeled automatic or habitual behavior, also as identified behavior. When I’m watching some movie or program on TV, and all is going well, meaning that the writer-producer-director has managed to make me believe in the action enough so that I willingly, passively follow along, I am really dreaming—or it comes to the same thing. But then, when the situation suddenly jumps the shark, as the phrase has it—when I notice something I simply can’t believe or will not accept as legitimate—ah! there comes that moment again! I am awake. The identification is broken.

A quite similar process takes place when I engage in idle musing on some subject—thus letting the mind run along in neutral, presenting associations, digressions, whatever comes down the pike. Such a process is the opposite of “controlled thought,” of course—even if a problem, goal, or intention is vaguely present in the mind. Then along comes a particular thought or image or memory—and something in me responds to it by waking up. Aha! I’ve recognized something significant in this more or less pointless flowing. Here is something of value. I take hold of it. The musing then, of course, comes to an end.

Where do those thoughts come from? They’re from my memory. Are they all from memory? The question is idle because we cannot tell. The unconscious, therefore, (sometimes elevated to the Unconscious), is mostly habit and memory. Neither is particularly awesome or grand. When the personal unconscious is elevated into a kind of autonomous province, or enlarged by an even deeper layer into Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious, it begins to serve as a very fecund sort of realm. We populate it with equally autonomous archetypes and endow it with higher wisdom. It turns into a powerful, dynamic, multi-dimensional Rorschach blot useful in explaining anything. But in fact—and until someone can actually demonstrate how ancestral memories could possibly be present in us—the dream or the musing may just be us, inattentive for the moment. And Brigitte wisely suggests, the Collective Unconscious may be explained as our own memories of the culture as a whole, what portions of it we’ve managed to absorb.

The most striking aspect of dreams is precisely their quality of mindless flowing—but with the content of thought-fragments artfully woven into scenes. By whom or by what? The truth is that we don’t genuinely understand the layers that lie beneath genuine consciousness—as we do not really understand how the body manages its vast coordination of cells and its intra-cellular repairs, etc. Something in our dreams triggers that flow of thought. Here, also, we know too little. Is the brain rotating through recent thoughts? Or does the soul perceive realities somewhere that draw associations from our idle brain? No way to tell—unless we’ve had lucid dreams. And if lucid, are they really dreams? What I am quite sure of, however, is that consciousness is the genuine state of being a person; we are not the tips of some submerged grand-wisdom iceberg. The superior is above us, not below. Not that there is anything wrong with habits or with memory. With either one defective, keying this post would prove impossible.

Did She Know Something We Don't?

I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits: and ‘tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges,
You may open them both ways.

John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, Act 4, Scene 2

I saw this quote on Laudator Temporis Acti this morning.

Now that sounds rather intriguing as thus isolated from the context of this play, as if the Duchess knew something about the strange labyrinths of the After Life. But the image turns more prosaic as we look at it more in context. Herewith the Duchess speaking just before she dies by strangling:

What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut
With diamonds? or to be smothered
With cassia? or to be shot to death with pearls?
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits; and ‘tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges,
You may open them both ways: any way, for heaven-sake,
So I were out of your whispering. Tell my brothers
That I perceive death, now I am well awake,
Best gift is they can give or I can take.
I would fain put off my last woman’s fault,
I’d not be tedious to you.

The play was first performed in 1613 and belongs to the drama of its time in the context of England of that time—the Shakespearean era. The poor Duchess of Malfi. Her first husband died and she fell for the steward of her estate, well beneath her station. No matter. They married in secret—which enraged her two brothers who had their eyes on the estate. We'd call that a portfolio today. They connive and maneuver until, at last, she is strangled to death. But their own fates are also sealed. They eventually destroy each other. Gore upon gore. Now, mind you, there are some distinct similarities to this day and age if we look high enough up. And the folk in the pits in those days no doubt enjoyed this lurid tale as much as we delight in similar series...

Now that word, cassia. It is the name of the plant from which cinnamon comes and may mean either: the flowering plant or cinnamon itself. Since cinnamon was expensive then, it fits with the other “means” the Duchess cites. But John Webster perhaps also knew that cinnamon was used in Egypt as part of the embalming process, and so the word has additional “heavenly” resonance...

Reflections on Monroe

For people in my advanced age group (but you don’t have to be all that old) any kind of reminiscence with your mate, looking back, will bring to the fore rather sharply just how incredibly diverse and vast ordinary life is on this our tiny planet, right here and now. And if you add to that historical reflections on the deep past we know from records and narratives, that feeling merely expands until one shakes one’s head. Perhaps the most lasting impression of reading Journeys Out of the Body, by Robert Monroe (1915-1995), published first in 1971, is that the realms out there, beyond the physical—that people who have out-of-body experiences (OBEs) encounter—are vastly more complex yet, which, assuming that they exist, is not surprising.

I’d read that book many years ago. It came to mind when Brigitte and I fell into one of those wide-ranging reviews of the life we’d shared thus far. The subject had nothing to do with arcane matters, to be sure, but the sheer diversity that of what we’d seen surfaced as a mirage—and it reminded me of Monroe and some thoughts I’d had back in the Long Ago. The thought then was that the traveler sees what the traveler can understand—that the person reaching China and spending some days there will see far more than he or she can easily absorb—never mind can, just by means of that visit, deeply penetrate the higher layers of Chinese culture reaching back into the dims of time. Why shouldn’t that be so for the traveler who reaches regions that lie beyond the borderzone? I found Monroe’s book and checked my impressions of that time.

We lived in Virginia in the 1970s; Monroe lived there as well; he ran a broadcasting company. Washington’s Virginia suburbs were a hotbed of the New Age then, and once we attended a lecture by Monroe and therefore knew him inside the body as well. He had a bad cold at the time; the lecture was so so. For all I know I bought my copy of his book off one of those tables in the back so common at New Age and other kinds of conferences.

Monroe had many hundreds of OBEs. They began after he listened to some self-help tapes at night, intending to sharpen memory, a product his company was selling. His listening to the tape and his first OBE may not have had a cause-effect relationship, nor does he claim one; but in the history of psychic phenomena, concentration is a likely suspect when odd experiences eventually result. Monroe had four kinds of experiences. He labels these local, Location II, Location III, and precognitive. The first were OBEs in our ordinary reality; staying “local” turned out to be very difficult, and such trips therefore rare; the disembodied self appeared irresistibly drawn into Location II, an enormously vast and diverse spiritual realm filled with all kinds of strange societies. At entry to Location II lay what I call “slums”; other travelers have experienced and reported this as well, see for instance this link on Borderzone. Once passed them—and getting through them took some learning—Monroe was in a realm where he supposed heaven and hell are also located, but most of what he saw was neither. The laws of Location II were quite different from those in our realm regarding space and time; Monroe attempts but fails in explaining the difference—but one hears strong echoes of Swedenborg reading his explanations. Location III was a world he took to be another planet, quite like our own, obeying the same laws, but with different technology; the technology is neither high nor low, just different. His precognitive experiences were visions, experienced as beginning with a look through a hole in a wall. Many of these were confirmed; many were not, or not yet.

For someone somewhat versed in the mystical literature of humanity across a number of cultures, the strong impression is that Monroe really was there, that Location II is well-enough described; Monroe’s virtue lies in his emphasis on its mind-boggling diversity, something one also gets reading Andrew Paquette’s Dreamer. Another strong impression, for me, was that Monroe did not penetrate very deeply into that realm—not, mind you, spatially but in a grasp of what that life-beyond-life actually means. Despite his many, many trips, he seems to have been a tourist, not an explorer. His interest remained strongly focused on promoting this-worldly recognition of that realm, ideally attracting the favorable attention of science. And I find that rather interesting. He himself, in a way, also gives the explanation for this. One of the chief laws of Location II that he does note is that Like Attracts Like over there—something we also encounter in Swedenborg and in all manner of other reports. To best equip ourselves for the beyond, it seems, it behooves us to “eat” the right kind “food” in this realm.

Empirical Evidence

Is there empirical evidence for the existence of a soul? Well, let’s just see. The word empirical derives from the Greek empeiria, meaning “experience.” If we look more closely, the second half of that word is peira, meaning a trial, and the second part of experience, which is rooted in Latin, is peritus; it also means a test or a trial. Now because one must be alive to make a test or trial, empirical translates to “lived experience.” To be sure, since a “test” or “trial” is implied, the lived experience needs to be noted, it needs to be observed. Something on the lawn might be a stone—or it might be some knick-knack made of plastic that just looks like a stone. We experience our souls; it is the most common of any experience; so how can we doubt that it exists?

Here interesting new aspects arise. The phenomenon of having a self is not in doubt; it certainly isn’t doubted by people who haven’t been corrupted by materialist modes of thought. The issue really is whether or not the phenomenon, that self, is autonomously existent, thus apart from the body and its life. It is clearly related to living. As we pass by the open coffin at a funeral reception, the phenomenon is certainly missing—although an exhaustive examination of the body, of the sort that pathologists engage in, will show that the body is still all there—although it isn’t moving at the levels visible to the naked eye. Something is obviously missing. Is it the soul, life, or both? And is there a difference here? The body is dead, life has fled, but is the soul still there—somewhere?

The answer to the question posed above therefore appears to be: there is empirical evidence for the soul because we experience it, but if all experience is tied directly to the soul, evidence for its survival will not be available to us until, well, we die. Paradoxical.

To be sure, there are reports from people who have experienced other people having death-bed visions. And near-death experience reports convince at least those who have them that there is life beyond the body. But these are not intersubjective experiences; others can’t confirm the experience. They may be empirical for those who undergo them, but not for the public at large.

The above suggests that the evidence is narrowly empirical. The individual can know. The current scientific orthodoxy, however, still maintains that there is no such thing as a soul, merely an ego. And the ego is then defined as an evolved subsystem of a living system, and that that bigger thing is itself a process, not anything autonomous that you can detect apart from its physical manifestations. The ego subsystem, of course, can on occasion construct a wonderful sonnet or write a symphony under chance interactions of instinctual drives and outer stimuli that deform them. But when I wake up in the mornings, take a deep breath, and consider what lies ahead, the last thing on my mind is to remind myself that I’m just a useful subsystem constraining my instincts lest they go astray into maladaptive behaviors.

Layers

I delight in analytical discussions and sometimes wish I could engage in them myself—but the right subject never occurs to me. The Maverick Philosopher here comes to mind; his essays are often delightful. Sorting this I realize that some matters are suitable for the analytical approach; others escape it. My own concerns always stray beyond the factual regions, one of the realms where Reason is at home. I like to read essays, for example, that try to sort bodies and souls logically—to take a factually marginal subject, and marginal because objective data are unavailable; but an argument concerning that subject does not fit the analytical category very well either. It fades off into the collectively unprovable, private, experiential sphere. One can gain interior knowledge here, but “making a case” based on logic is impossible. And why would anyone want to? In that context arises the generally ignored (perhaps it also resists analysis) subject of adequacy. Why are some people seemingly constitutionally unable to discern the transmaterial? Those who can, by contrast, do not need analytical arguments to persuade them—although reading them might be fun. They know it in their bones.

Reason is also comfortable in the realm of concepts. There the factual may be ignored, but definitions rule. Given consensus on a definition, analysis can flourish—and if the definition is contested, that only opens even wider vistas for debate. But concepts are ultimately private labels for clusters of more or less crystallized experience—more or less crystallized because we constantly redefine them based on our experience. Nothing “coordinates” or governs these redefinitions. Concepts also hold quite different ranks in the heads of different people.

The concept of being is a case in point for me. It plays an enormously important role in major branches of philosophy, but shorn of any attributes beyond the bald fact of existence, it is meaningless for me; and with attributes added, it becomes unnecessary. Life, by contrast, is very interesting, and in my own modes of thought has a real conceptual role to play quite apart from specific instances where it might manifest. When I use a word like real, the meaning ranges way, way beyond the word’s etymological root of res, thing. The genuinely real for me is infinities beyond the thing.

Layers and levels become visible here, translucent, to be sure. The analytical here forms two: the fact-based beneath the conceptual. Under those layers lies the common speech of ordinary experience in which a kind of muddy order reigns but contradictions are a common weed; beneath that lies mute feeling. And above the analytical shimmer other layers of mind freed somewhat of the turbidities of this, our current, realm: the poetic and, above it, the mystical. At those levels the sound of debate is but a muted rustle.

The Vaunted “Real” World

Now and then it strikes me that the tumultuous, romantic—the adventurous, daring, dramatic, and tense—the sort of thing that fills romances like Poldark or seem to characterize the lives of femmes fatales like Alma Mahler of many lovers, say—is ultimately quite unpleasant when actually lived. The pleasures are brief, the turmoil huge, and the inner state fragmented and of necessity troubled—troubled if the individual even briefly thinks about the people who’ll be hurt. And if this awareness is absent, the person is being lived by passions rather than living a life.

The reason why dramas work is because the spectator can experience successive emotions in a necessarily foreshortened and compressed form but is spared the full, wretched experience. That experience is surely filled with agonies or, if awareness is absent, has the character of stupid, passive tumbling, falling, and spinning like some leaf blown by the wind.

The experience of life is quite different from the fictional “real” world people long to taste. The vaunted “real” is a mirage—or, put another way, is a servitude to passions, always wanting something, wanting to grasp it, hold it, to consume it—and when denied it suffering and writhing in the lack. The thought occurs that all of us inhabiting this realm were drawn to it by some such immature desire—only to learn that we were going down rather than up; we cannot find it here either, except in artful dramas; but those soon end. Longing of the lower sort is never fully satisfied in this life or, if satisfied, simply grows more virulent—while the hair thins so that that it must be combed over the bald spot, the thickening body is strangled by corsets, the sagging face lifted, the grey hair painted blue. Even the saints do not escape it—although they learn the lesson sooner. Dryness plagues them and the dark night of the soul…

When it comes to pearly gates the gate that led into this world, it seems to me, was the problematic one. It probably has a sign that says: Thus Far! No Farther! Those tempted to stray beyond into the borderzone, where passions writhe seductively tempting them to keep on going, may cross the border. Then the re-education of the stupid finally begins. At that crossing is another sign. It probably says: Welcome to the Real World.

Visualizing the Invisible

Words mean what the individual using them thinks that they mean. The person’s definition initially comes from others’ use of a word; there is a kind of cloud of consensus in which a word derives, but looking at dictionaries shows that multiple meanings may be present. And then, building on these, the individual may come to use the word to signal something that differs in significant ways from current usage. An example is phenomenon. The word is rooted in the Greek word meaning “to appear” and is related to phantasm, “an apparition, specter.”  In the eighteenth century is was used to mean “an extraordinary occurrence”—such as, say, seeing a ghost. Later, and ever more aggressively, the word has come to mean “an object or aspect known through the senses rather than by thought or intuition.” This is Webster’s second definition; it is specific in detail in an effort to underline the modern meaning. The first is simply “an observable fact or event.” Here is a word which points to contradictory objects, if we may call them objects at all: strange things we don’t know how we can possibly see—and the objects of ordinary experience. The materialist belief denies that anything can be seen by something other than the senses. Therefore, of course, there are no ghosts, spirits, or what have you. In my own use of the word its meaning is “anything experienced” whether or not sight, sound, touch, taste, or smell are involved or not. A thought is just as much of a phenomenon as the stubbing of my toe.

Let me next contrast two phrases, the “spiritual world” and the “subtle world.” The concept of subtle bodies came into English by way of the founder of the Theosophical Society, Madame Blavatsky, in the nineteenth century and originates in Hinduism. Subtle itself has its root in the Latin tela, web, thus something very finely, thinly woven: the subtle body. Spirit is rooted in Latin as well; it meant “soul” as well as “breath” to the Romans; when the breath leaves the body, all that’s left is that second definition of Webster’s above.

The two words here, at the root, are closely related. Gases are certainly the most “finely woven” of material substances; we might call them subtle matter, accessible only to the touch. Both in the sense of subtle body or spirit, they are convenient pointers to something real (experienced, phenomenal) yet altogether invisible. Over time, however, principally due to the rise of Christianity in the West, a rather wide gulf formed between the conceptualizations of a spiritual and a subtle world. The spiritual gathered to itself a vast body of theological accretions. The invisible world beyond the border took on a radically different character than the world we inhabit on our way there. It is a place of judgement, where our deeds in life are weighed—and all depending on the tilt of the scales we go to heaven, hell, or purgatory. In the first we contemplate God to all eternity; in the other we undergo suffering without end; the third is a kind of reformatory. Viewed as a useful motivational ideology, this model has a certain merit, although it ignores Jesus’ words in John 14:2, “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” Three mansion are not what I’d call many, hence there is some indication that the model may be not quite all there is to the end times; they may not be end times.  

The subtle world, by contrast, having a less didactic accretion of meanings, suggests at least two ranges of reality, a dense and a subtle, and if two, why not more, both going up and going down. That the spiritual world becomes quite clearly visible—if the faculties are free to see it—emerges from a study of near-death experiences and deathbed visions. From such sources we also learn that death is experienced as a sudden and very pleasant enhancement of the soul’s faculties, even if no “senses” seem to be necessary for the experience. The only sort of comprehensive view of the beyond on offer comes from Emanuel Swedenborg; in the world he projects there are plenty of mansion of all kinds, rising high and low. Souls are self-sorting. They find the place where they belong. In some real ways death is a transition, tempting me to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz: “Death is nothing but a continuation of life by other means.” And that continuation will much resemble life here as we lived it. And the invisible will also become visible.

If Dreams Are Thoughts…

…and that is what I think they mostly are, dangers arise because the contents of dreams have a distinctly objective feel. By this I mean that as we dream we never doubt the reality of the projection we experience, even when the dream performs amazing jumps. The dream reporter will then say: “The next thing you know, I was looking at a river…” but such abrupt transitions are accepted. And when we become aware of the dream’s strangeness—or real thought is required for some aspect of it—we wake up.

The danger lies in misunderstanding certain dreams as messages—not from our own thoughts but from some mysterious beyond. Most dreams are just a streaming of associative thought rendered as dynamic images. To be sure the thoughts of some, asleep as well as when awake, are circling around arcane subjects that, rendered in dream imagery, produce fantastic visions. The skill of the sleeping mind in producing visual renditions of abstraction is quite admirable as well as occasionally clumsy and amusing—once understood. Alongside dangers are boons. Sometimes we solve problems in our dreams. A famous example of such a boon was Friedrich Kekulé’s vision of a serpent biting its own tail, which came to him in a revery and helped him understand the structure of benzene, a subject that had long plagued him.

The absence of genuine consciousness in dreams—meaning detached self-awareness—is the most interesting aspect of ordinary dreaming. We appear to experience dreams as if we were embodied presences in them, but altogether absent is even a hint of how we would react if we were really present. If now as I am sitting in my backyard writing in the sun I would be suddenly at the airport waiting at a gate, I would certainly immediately feel that something was drastically wrong. But if this thought recurred in a dream, I would be at the airport; and, at that airport, all kinds of signs, elaborately realistic, would signal some kind of trouble.

These thoughts arise because, recently, I was revisiting Carl Jung’s conceptualization of the Unconscious, a realm peopled by archetypes. That theory arises from dream analysis. And it occurred to me then that unconsciousness is the chief marker of the dreamer; the dream itself is usually accessible enough. The really weird dreams are those in which we dream the future—and, sure enough, a short while later the dream event actually happens. But if a person dreams that God has told him to do this or that, a little cold water splashed on the face will not be out of place.

Now as for lucid dreaming, on that subject I have only hear-say. I know what “lucid” means in the waking state. I’d have to experience a lucid dream before I could judge. Some people might consider lucid what I do not. There is nothing like tasting for yourself.

A Tally of the Theories

What do concepts like the Fall, Maya, Fourth and Higher Dimensions, Alienation, and David Bohm’s Explicit and Implicit orders have in common? And here I might also mention Doris Lessing’s Substance-of-We-Feeling (SOWF). They suggests powerfully that our experience of reality, not least the entire whole we call the cosmos, may be something incomplete.

The Fall, of course, holds the idea of some kind of descent—from something high; in actual usage the concept of a spatial height is not what the Fall means. The spatial reference is a metaphor. Some condition or event is likened to a physical descent. The reason for the Fall, of course, isn’t clumsy climbing but disobedience. The process is also likened to an expulsion—from the Garden—into another and highly deficient realm. Here the imagery is horizontal, but its cause, disobedience, is the same.

The Sanskrit word Maya means illusion; it suggests the unreality of the cosmos. It is said to arise from ignorance, thus the false belief that what we experience has genuine essence. It is an appearance, not the real. Thus the cosmos lacks—reality, reality as fully constituted.

The dimensions above the three spatial (length, width, height) and time, thus a fourth spatial dimension (and successive others) were uncovered by mathematical contemplation. But extra-dimensionality, thus the possible existence of reality beyond the three, or four with time added, quickly captured the fancy of those who believe in a spiritual reality. It provides a modern, math-based “proof” of sorts that the spiritual intuition may be backed by science. We are not really home until we return to the Garden.

Alienation is the core of gnostic beliefs—of which a modern representative is Existentialism. We’re living in a world produced by an underling, the demiurge. Therefore we live as strangers in a strange land—and won’t escape until we know this (gnosis).

David Bohm, the physicist, conceived of a vast enfolded reality of which our cosmos is but a temporarily unfolded bubble. The Big Bang therefore produced a tiny bubble. Here too the symbolism is metaphoric; the Big Bang was a coincidence of the most minute wavelengths. Bohm also suggested, however, that there is a conditioned order, meaning deterministic to a fault, and an unconditioned order, intelligence, perceivable directly in humans.

Lessing’s fictional Fall is caused by the thinning of some mysterious psychic energy in the cosmos, that thinning assigned to a celestial event; it causes human behavior as we know it—but also affects everything else.

As the above illustrates, there is a strong tendency to project explanations of reality using dimensions directly or relatively—height, planes, space-time, distance, and such. The results, taken more or less literally, are incomprehensible. We cannot picture a fourth space dimension; if this table is illusion, it’s still certainly very hard. What precisely is present in the Garden that, if we had it, would make us happy? Harps on clouds won’t do it. At the same time, human intuition unfailingly answers Yes, yes, yes—producing the conclusion that we know something. But we have the devil of a time giving it expression in the language and thought modes of this Fallen world. And the inability also afflicts those few who manage to get a really good look at that Garden, another Dimension, the Implicate Order, or feel the winds of SOWF blowing right strongly a ways beyond Borderzone.

Some Interesting Parallels

Beginning in the nineteenth century—and continuing today—physics on the one hand and psychic research on the other have been on convergent paths, both showing that something beyond our three-dimensional world really exists. These two streams have not, as it were, “unified” yet—but it may be early days. Let me give a quick sketch of that.

Light is a wave—even that which reaches us from the sun and distant stars through a vacuum. But how can that be? As the physicist Michio Kaku put it (in Hyperspace, Oxford University Press, 1994) “[I]f light were a wave, then it would require something to be ‘waving.’ Sound waves require air, water waves require water, but since there is nothing to wave in a vacuum, we have a paradox. How can light be a wave if there is nothing to wave?”  Hence the science of old posited the existence of aether, a kind of subtle substance, to explain that waving. No proof of aether’s existence could later be established, but the subject keeps cropping up under other names (link on Ghulf Genes).

In 1926 the British physics professor Sir William Barrett, prompted by a case reported by his wife, nee Florence Willey, a surgeon in obstetrics, wrote a book entitled Death-bed Visions. It was the first such collection of cases ever published. One of her patients, Doris, experienced such a vision of her dead father. It was so convincing that Lady Barrett was persuaded of the reality of a beyond; her conviction energized her husband to undertake his own investigations. From such beginnings have come death-bed and near-death experience (NDE) studies. Now I suggest that they have something akin to the “waving” of light in a supposedly non-existing ether. These apparitions are very convincing; they are also sometimes inter-subjective, meaning that not just the person reporting the vision but third parties also see it. But based on current theories of reality, they are impossible. To call them supernatural is a bit of a punt. If something exists, it must be somewhere. So where is it?

In 1921 the German Theodor Kaluza published a paper which suggested a solution to the waving of light. With additions (in 1926) of a theory by the Swede Oskar Klein, this has been known as the Kaluza-Kline theory. It suggests that the vacuum itself was vibrating—and that it has a five-dimensional structure consisting of four dimensions of space and one of time. This outlandish theory simply could not be dismissed. Kaluza-Klein showed that if such a structure was presumed to exist, something theretofore impossible was quite easy to do: Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism and Einstein’s of gravity could be elegantly unified. This motivated scientific belief. Gradually the problems of Kaluza-Klein were worked out. The current field that represents continuation of that venture is superstring theory; the name of that “beyond” has become hyperspace—and it is said to have ten dimensions all told.

But let me take this back to the nineteenth century when the initial insights/observations first arose. In 1854 the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann first laid the foundations for a multi-dimensional geometry in a paper titled “On the hypotheses which underlie geometry.” Until this paper, the possible existence of a fourth spatial dimension was deemed an impossibility, but Riemann proved that it was not only thinkable but, at least mathematically, a fourth dimension—and any number after them—could be shown to behave quite lawfully and predictably. Not that the human mind is capable of imagining a fourth-dimensional structure, but we can know something about it. The Society for Psychical Research was founded a little later, in 1882. Among its initial committees was one on Apparitions and Haunted Houses.

As psychic and physical theories have advanced since, fascinating parallels have continued to emerge. Kaku’s book has quite an extensive listing of the physical consequences—if we imagine beings to exists in a fourth spatial dimension. Those beings could walk through walls in the third dimension, travel at the speed of thought, and see “into” matter. Wormholes exist (since their “discovery” much exploited in science fiction) connecting dimensions. In different dimensions, “time beats at different rates,” as Kaku puts it.

On the psychic side, using the near-death experience literature, we certainly have people, out of their bodies temporarily, walking through walls—and being unable to touch those still in bodies; their subtle hands pass right through bodies too; the often report having 360 degree vision and say that time is somehow “different.” In those reports a subset of people report passing out of their bodies through “tunnels”—emerging from which they see dead relatives and beings of light. In the literature on apparitions, we have speed-of-thought travel—as soldiers who died in battle appear hundreds of miles away to relatives to say good-bye. Clairvoyance presents cases of seeing-at-a distance, telepathy person-to-person communications without electromagnetic transmission of voice.

Michio Kaku’s interest is in the physical phenomena associated with hyperspace, above all the promise of the theory that it will eventually permit the complete unification of the four forces. These are the strong force (holding suns and atomic cores together), the weak force (associated with radiation), electromagnetism, and gravity. Going beyond, he identifies the possibility of time travel—and of the physical proof of hyperspace— but notes that extraordinarily high levels of energy would be necessary to produce either time travel or the proofs—or the formation of wormholes, for that matter.

I was re-reading Kaku recently and the parallels above came into my mind. Then it dawned on me that the current understanding of “forces” may be excluding something. There might be a fifth force as well, much as Kaluza and Klein discovered a fifth dimension. That subtle force—which certainly seems to transcend the three dimensions—may be the force of Mind. And just possibly it is sufficient, in its own way, of forming the necessary tunnels with virtually no energy at all—and travel in mere seconds into a kind of hyperspace I call the country beyond the borderzone. That the dimensions might interpenetrate is, of course, part of the hyperspace theory. That they do so is also a feature of NDEs—where people report being simultaneously present at their own deathbed as well as in what are, almost invariably, described as regions of great beauty and a marvelous light. Light seems to be a key in all of this...

Science Expanded

I noted with some interest in Osis and Haraldsson’s book† a history of the study of deathbed visions. It shows a definite trend in culture, namely the very gradual establishment of at least one segment of paranormal studies, those dealing with survival. We really are entering a new age. It is, of course, barely discernible because the vast overhang of a dying secularism shades it from view.

For such studies to proceed, the meaning of science must also change and, indeed, is changing. And for that change to be successful, an even more basic doctrine will have to be revised. It is the assertion that our only possible source of knowledge is the sensorium, thus vision, hearing, smell, and touch. These four, of course, are directly traceable to physical causes and in due course yield materialism. To enlarge the concept of science, however, we need not really have to go too far into some kind of mystic fog. All we need do is base science on experience. The moment we do that, we immediately include as legitimate subjects for study those experiences that reach us by means for which no sensory pathways are discoverable. That would include the entire range of the paranormal: telepathy, clairvoyance, apparitions, near-death experiences, precognition, and more.

Arguably this range of experience is rare. Its systematic study, however, beginning in the nineteenth century, has painstakingly accumulated evidence that such experiences are not reducible either to chance, mental delusions, or bodily malfunctions. They can be studied. The disciplined collection of data and their rational analysis is no less science than the same activity massively deployed to prove the existence of the Higgs boson.

What emerges from such an “expanded” science is knowledge, if not control, but the knowledge, especially from the death-related experiences of humanity, also greatly expands our conceptions of the possible meaning of life, something that a science operating in the straitjacket of materialistic monism has quite failed to deliver.

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†Osis, Karlis and Erlendur Haraldsson, At The Hour of Death, Avon, 1977, Chapter 3, “Research on Deathbed Visions: Past and Future.”