All Things Are Full of Gods, page 51
HEPHAISTOS: [Smiling patiently but sardonically:] All right. So we began five days ago with science and we end now with mysticism? Is that really the path we should have taken?
PSYCHE: [Lifting the rose from her lap, where it has been resting for some time, and gazing at it almost quizzically for several seconds before speaking:] What, after all, is science? Surely it must involve making sense, among other things, of personal experience, and attempting to quantify the evidence of those who can attest to certain kinds of experience. All the great religious cultures have their contemplative traditions, don’t they? And all of those traditions seem to testify with remarkable consistency, even unanimity, to certain dimensions of the experience of transcendence. Naturally they do, you’ll reply, but only because the brain in certain states is likely to induce a particular kind of experience—or a particular kind of representation, as you’d probably be more likely to say—and so of course there’s likely to be a general agreement between persons and peoples on the features of that experience or representation. What, though, does that prove even if it’s true? There are no doubt brain-states associated with every experience, transcendent or mundane; why, then, should the trivial truth that mystical or contemplative insight is correlated with a distinctive set of neural activities be taken as evidence that such insight is merely a psychological state, without a real object? By that logic, the reality that there’s a brain-state associated with hearing a performance of Bach means that I can’t believe in the objective reality of that music. Whatever the case may be, I know this: to imagine that a “science of mind”—a science of irreducible first-person experience—is possible in terms purely of the third-person facts of neurophysiology, without reference to what mental interiority discloses to itself about itself, is worse than folly. The only “science of mind” that might actually reveal the intrinsic nature of the mental would be something like the contemplative disciplines proper to the great mystical traditions of the world’s religions. There can be no real science of mind that’s not, to put it bluntly, a spiritual science.
What, then, do those traditions tell us? For one thing, they tell us that, when one looks inward toward that vanishing point of unity—that abiding witness—at the ground of all mental agency, one is looking toward the simplicity of God. More inward to consciousness than consciousness itself is that scintilla or spark of divine light that imparts life and knowledge to the soul. Those willing to make the interior journey toward their minds’ deepest wellspring reach at last a place where they find their own mental agency to be utterly dependent upon God knowing God. Then, too, when they look out toward the world from this vantage, they find themselves turned toward that same source: the divine unity of the being and the intelligibility of all things. In either case, the pilgrim soul encounters God’s eternal self-manifestation. And this spiritual science, as I call it—this extraordinary state of consciousness—perhaps provides us with a model for understanding our ordinary experience of the mind’s relation to the world about us. The real experience that each of us has in every moment of cognitive and conscious and purposive mental agency becomes comprehensible when understood as being grounded in the more original unity of that perfect identity of being and knowing that is the divine . . . the transcendent ground of all that is. One need not be carried away from oneself in a mystic ecstasy to glimpse that place where, as Meister Eckhart says, the soul’s ground and God’s ground are one and the same ground . . . or where, as Plotinus would have it, mind or nous finds its source in the undifferentiated One from which all existence flows . . . or where, as ibn Qunawi says, delimited being, al-wujûd al-muqayyad, returns to its source in the Nondelimited Being, al-wujûd al-mutlaq, of the divine light . . . or where, according to Sufi tradition, the inmost soul, the ruh, finds its ground in the “secret,” the eternal sirr within each of us, which forever remembers God, the One, al-Ahad, the source of all consciousness and all being . . . or where . . .
HEPHAISTOS: Yet again, I implore you, don’t recite an entire anthology of mystical aperçus at me. Your meaning is more than clear.
PSYCHE: [With an amused smile:] You’re right, I get far too carried away at times. I beg your indulgence. I’ll simply say this, then: all the great contemplative and philosophical traditions, East and West, insist that the source and ground of the mind’s unity is the transcendent reality of unity as such, the simplicity of God, the one ground of both consciousness and being; and a great deal of both cogent philosophical reasoning and personal spiritual experience tends to support the claim. I’m not trying to prove anything to you, my dear friend; all I can do at this point is indicate a vision of the whole of things that, to my mind, makes sense of things. And that vision is one of an original oneness underlying all things, knowing and revealing itself in the nuptial union of soul and world, and making itself known to us in the structure of all experience. There’s a conceptual space, let’s say, where the unity of mind, in its teleological co-extensiveness with all of reality, meets the unity of being and becomes indistinguishable from it; and at that point—if we think it through with sufficient care—we should discover that the irreducibility of mind to physical mechanical causes and the irreducibility of being to physical mechanical events are one and the same irreducibility. Mind exists as having the infinite fullness of being as its antecedent finality and proper content; being becomes manifest in having the infinite openness of mind as the place of its disclosure. So too, once again, life and language are irreducible to mechanical causes, as both are simply different names for mind . . . for spirit, that is—infinite spirit, eternal spirit, spirit immanent and transcendent at once—expressing itself, revealing itself, communicating itself in everything. Once more, simply enough, in both its origin and end, Ātman is Brahman—which I take to be the first, last, most fundamental, and most exalted truth of all real philosophy and religion alike.
[For several moments, no one speaks.]
CODA
The Age of the Machine
I
Common Sense and Mystery
When more than five minutes have passed without anyone speaking, HEPHAISTOS sits up, slowly rises from the grass, straightens his clothing, and seats himself on one of the unoccupied benches. A moment later, PSYCHE rises from her place next to EROS, crosses the lawn to where HEPHAISTOS is now seated and hands him the rose blossom, bending forward to kiss him on the cheek as she does so. They exchange wan but affectionate smiles. She returns to EROS’s side. HERMES watches all of this with an enigmatic expression on his face and then, finally, breaks the silence.
HERMES: Tell me, brother, has any of what’s been said over these six days convinced you of anything?
HEPHAISTOS: [After a moment’s consideration:] No.
HERMES: [With a weary sigh:] I suppose I must believe you . . . or, at least, believe that you believe what you say.
HEPHAISTOS: Well, actually, I’m not being strictly truthful. You’ve all convinced me at least that you have respectably sound reasons for your convictions, and that the vision of reality you apparently all share is fairly coherent within its own terms. That much I already knew, I suppose. And, to be honest, you’ve convinced me—more than I had expected you would—that physical reductionism is, on the whole, an inadequate approach to . . . I suppose, to mind, life, and even language. It may indeed well be that system-level realities—the semantics of life, as Psyche likes to say—are neither reducible to, nor strongly emergent from, lower levels of natural order.
HERMES: Oh. But, then, that seems quite a concession.
HEPHAISTOS: I’ll even confess that, by my reckoning, I’ve lost this debate.
HERMES: Well, then, that . . .
HEPHAISTOS: But that’s a far less generous concession than you might at first think. I see now that I was always destined to lose it, not only because you three are fine thinkers and talkers, or because our good and glorious Psyche has the best philosophical mind of the four of us, as well as the quickest wits in debate, but because the topics we’ve been arguing over are so intractable that the work of destroying our inadequate theories concerning them is far easier than that of constructing better theories. I began our debate believing that I needed only assume a defensive position to prevail, since I imagined I had common sense on my side; but common sense is a faithless ally. In fact, it’s an illusion where mysteries as complex as these are concerned. In the areas we’ve been struggling over, every theory is, strictly speaking, indefensible.
EROS: Ah, but now you’re playing the mysterian again, which is your least appealing role. I prefer the phlegmatic, unyielding rationalist. Moreover, that’s not how I would describe what’s been going on these past several days. If you like, we can prove the point one way or the other. All you need do is assume the critical stance, and then see whether we can defend our position better than you can yours.
HEPHAISTOS: Well, of course you can. Your position conforms to the way our thinking is structured to see reality and to understand itself. The whole point of the reductionist project is to subject the manifest image to a withering scrutiny in order to expose its dissimulation of the scientific image. But the manifest image remains the manifest image, and for obvious reasons. Hence, it will always look more like common sense in the end, and the very structure of our mental machinery will almost always make us prefer it to the alternative. That machinery, as a matter of practical prudence, can’t acknowledge what it truly is to itself without considerable emotional and cognitive difficulty. We can find our home only in the world of the manifest image; the world of the scientific image is habitable by no one. So, when you three argue for your little tercet—life is language, language is mind, mind is life, going around and around forever—you think you’re proving that reality at its basis has the structure of intentional meaning, whereas all I hear is a broadly Kantian proviso that such a structure of meaning is the way in which the mind naturally must represent reality to itself in order to function, and that it’s still this naïve but natural view—this manifest image—that the sciences must prescind from in order to penetrate to the really real.
PSYCHE: Oh, Phaesty, don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re now trying to convince yourself that you’re justified in taking the weaker position precisely because it’s weaker. That’s perverse. It’s a subterfuge. What you call the “scientific image” offers no shelter not because it’s so pitilessly rational and correct, but simply because it’s radically incomplete, and doesn’t capture more than a shadow of reality in its fullness. In fact, it’s not a scientific image at all; it’s just the mechanistic image, the world reduced to its most basic lineaments, which modern persons have been indoctrinated to think of as reality’s “true nature” just as a metaphysical prejudice. But there’s no such world, at least not as a reality in itself; it’s a figment of materialist dogma and nothing more . . . a syntactic shadow of being’s boundlessly eloquent semantics of self-communication. The real world is the fully semantic realm of experience and understanding and . . . well, life itself.
HEPHAISTOS: Let’s not quarrel. I’m conceding that common sense is in fact on your side. For just that reason, however, you shouldn’t be too confident in your conclusions. I award you the laurels, yes, but I won’t surrender the field. To be honest, so much of the reasoning by which we make sense of reality is the consequence rather than the cause of our beliefs, as you yourself have said. Your arguments have been good enough—again, the critical task is easier than the constructive—but perhaps not quite as irrefutable as you want to think they are. Needless to say, your mind’s ability to understand reality—assuming that this too isn’t something our brain makes us exaggerate to ourselves, by hiding the fragmentary nature of our own experience from us—would indeed be much easier to account for if you could prove the reality of some infinite coincidence of mind and being underlying all things . . . the mind of God, that is, where the knower and the known are a single ground and a single act. But you shouldn’t deceive yourself that so grand a metaphysical conjecture can be secured just by a phenomenology of, oh, I don’t know . . . perhaps looking at a rose.
PSYCHE: I believe it can. At least, I believe it can be shown to be . . . the most plausible. . . . [Pausing and scowling to herself:] And, anyway, you know I’ve any number of other philosophical reasons for believing in God. We all three do.
HEPHAISTOS: Yes, and I’ve many reasons for not believing—and, as it happens, for refusing to believe. You’re right, of course, that common sense does not in fact favor the materialism or the philosophical naturalism or (let’s be candid) the atheism I profess. In fact, the classical concept of God may be the most commonsensical idea there is, as it explains practically everything with exquisite logical parsimony. Atheism will always be the dialectically weaker position for the simple reason that it can’t account for much of anything—not being, not mind, not life, not that realm of absolute values that you say preoccupies our intellects and wills . . . not even, as we’ve said, language. But it’s the stronger position in my eyes precisely for not pretending that it explains the inexplicable. And I think it’s the better and more responsible position for quite a different reason: not because belief in a transcendent God offends against common sense, but because it offends against common decency.
HERMES: [In an impatient tone:] Now, what does that mean?
HEPHAISTOS: [With a somewhat incredulous shake of his head:] How good it is to dwell in heavenly places, and to enjoy the imperturbable bliss of the gods. We keep ourselves at so comfortable a distance from the world we once inhabited that I suppose it’s easy for us to forget what a theatre of horrors it so often is—the pain, the misery, the mires of blood . . . disease and death and despair. How rapturous the three of you become when speaking of the grand cosmic epic of life and mind—of spirit pervading all things, working toward transcendent ends, shaping the temporal in the light of the eternal and the finite after the fashion of the infinite. Does it ever occur to any of you, however, to consider the monstrous price—the sheer hideous, extravagant expenditure—required to bring that ravishingly sublime spectacle about? “Evolutionary oceans of blood” I think I called it a day or so ago, and the three of you allowed the remark to pass without notice, like a snowflake skipping off the impenetrable surfaces of your divine consciences. Yes, life down there where the younger children of nature still dwell is full of beauty and tenderness and majesty and joy; it’s also—and, I should say, preponderantly—a vast abyss of darkness, pain, death, and hopeless sadness. So, all right, let’s gaze at rose blossoms in a deathless paradise and raise hymns to the transcendent intelligence from which the universe flows; let’s even look down from time to time to the terrestrial realm below, but only cautiously, so as not to see more than we care to see, and let’s rejoice in the flowered meadows, at least during their brief and gorgeous efflorescences, and in all the other delights and diversions that that small, poor world affords, so long as they last: love and sex and friendship, and indeed every pleasure of the flesh and mind that invites the soul to join in the delirious dance of life. But let’s also recall that all that world’s enchantments, considered in proportion to the whole of cosmic existence, are at most tiny evanescent flickers of light amid a limitless darkness. The price paid in exchange for those ephemeral pleasures and giddy moments of transport is ever so much more exorbitant than what’s gained: children dying of monstrous diseases, in torment; nature steeped in the blood of the weak, and then too of the strong; the long march of history across battlefields engorged with corpses, and through an interminable sequence of conquests, enslavements, spoliations, and mass murders. Everything those poor brutes down there love vanishes, and then they do as well; every attachment they cherish is merely the transient prelude to an enduring bereavement; every accidental happiness terminates in an essential sorrow. And what consolations do they have to bear them through their tribulations and despairs? Religion, perhaps? What a miserable anaesthetic that is. Religious systems are, as often as not, systems of emotional terrorism, commanding assent and submission by threatening amplitudes of suffering even greater than those of ordinary earthly life—eternal hells, for instance, or interminable karmic cycles of transmigration through states of misery, and so on—for anyone who has the temerity to complain of the injustice of being dragged into an existence of such horror and of then being held responsible for one’s own fate. Really, what does it matter if there truly is this transcendent God you go on about so often? Why shouldn’t that God be an object of indifference on the part of rational beings? Or of vehement hatred? If there’s such a reality as infinite mind, especially if it’s supposedly also the seat of all eternal values, shouldn’t we expect this divine reality to exhibit some sign of infinite moral intelligence?
