security blankets

Sitting here again, staring at the blank window of Blogger, wondering how to launch on my nth blog-post.

It's not that I've run out of things to say. Indeed, I feel there is too much to say, that I'm always scratching the surface and introducing topics that need to be addressed in more depth.

This morning I've keyed research notes from three different books: The Epic Cosmos, Asimov's Guide to the Bible (Old Testament), and The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. I felt a deep stirring within me as I typed this paragraph from James's famous book:

The experiences which we have been studying show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? Why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled by different men, and will each time give some characteristic kind of profit, for which he cares, to the handler, while at the same time some other kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed. Science gives to all of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis. Religion in the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons. Evidently, then, science and religion are both genuine keys for unlocking the world's treasure-house to him who can use either of them practically. Just as evidently neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other's simultaneous use. And why may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes? On this view religion and science, each verified in its own way form hour to hour and from life to life, would be co-eternal. Primitive thought, with its belief in individualized personal forces, seems as far as ever from being driven by science from the field today. Numbers of educated people still find it the directest experimental channel by which to carry on their intercourse with reality.

There you have it: different strokes for different folks--and different strokes for the same folks at different times. The reality that each of us lives in is much broader than any particular belief-system. All of our fanaticisms are so many efforts to reassure ourselves that we've found the ultimate security blanket. But William James didn't need a security blanket. He could calmly look at the world and embrace it with a warm but discriminating and passionate eye.

From Asimov's book I'm typing up material on the Book of Judges--a period of (as usual in the Bible) conquest, slaughter, and revenge. Precious little of it could be called in any way edifying. Not able to lay your hands on all of the "inheritance" promised you by God? Go find a city that looks a bit weak, attack it, kill the residents, and live there. Problem solved--until someone roots you out of the place and levels it to the ground.

It's still much the same, not only in the "Holy Land" but everywhere else: people continuing to do the same things, hoping for different results. I'm afraid there's no alternative: we need to give up the security blanket of our tribal gods, and the sooner, the better.

happiness: how to

If we were to ask, "What is human life's chief concern?" one of the answers we should receive would be: "It is happiness." How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is for most men the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure. Even more in the religious life than in the moral life, happiness and unhappiness seem to be the poles round which the interest revolves.

Thus (compressed) opens lecture 4 of William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, entitled "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness", delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901.

James goes on to examine the spiritual strategy of seeing the world and everything in it as good. In some cases this positive, optimistic outlook is inborn in an individual; in others it is acquired as a worldview, as part of a system. Based on a conviction that creation must be good, one simply sees it that way. You look for the good, and wherever you look, you find it. When presented with suffering or evil, you quite possibly don't even see them. If you do see them, you refuse to acknowledge them as in any way negating or vitiating the basic good of creation; rather, they contribute to the greater perfection of the world.

As James points out, there is much to be said for this outlook. To name just one tangible benefit, many people have been cured of serious physical ailments simply by changing their attitude and refusing to succumb or even to acknowledge illness. Miraculous cures happen, but they happen only to the "healthy-minded". Modern experiments have shown that having a positive, optimistic attitude magnetizes good fortune: good luck comes to such people. They even find money lying on the ground that is missed by pessimistic people (I kid you not--read The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman). And, all things considered, what does negative thinking really have going for it anyway?

Still, although James is impressed with the achievements of the "religion of healthy-mindedness", he feels that these people have not really engaged with life as fully as those who find religious faith from a condition of having a "sick soul"--those who experience great suffering and evil. These, to him, are the spiritually "twice-born", whose faith is deeper because it is not in any way blinkered with regard to the dark side of life.

Happiness is a central concern of Buddhism. The behavior of all sentient beings, without exception, is seen as a ceaseless, restless, and futile striving for happiness. As a practitioner, you learn that your thirst for happiness is itself the cause of your suffering. This condition is given the technical name samsara, the best definition of which is: "wanting things to be other than they are."

One of the boldest statements about happiness that I've found is in The Practice of Tranquillity and Insight, a text on Buddhist meditation by Thrangu Rinpoche, abbot of Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton. In fact, I read this while I was a monk at the Abbey. I was jolted when I read on page 6:

The attaining of day-to-day happiness is...the result of shamatha and vipashyana.

Shamatha and vipashyana are technical meditation terms: Sanskrit for "tranquility" and "insight". Tranquility is what most of us associate with meditation. The mind becomes calm and relaxed. In that state it becomes capable of insight, also known as "clear seeing": seeing things as they are. True clear seeing, true insight, is possible only with tranquility. You can have tranquility without insight, but you can't have insight without tranquility.

So there you have it. According to Thrangu Rinpoche, happiness is indeed attainable, and requires very little in the way of wealth or props. It really comes down to whether you believe him. Considering the radiant, genuine smile that seems to be his normal facial expression, I see no reason to doubt it.

Jesus

In yesterday's post I offered one of my lifewriting vignettes of my earliest formative memories. The memory of climbing the cliff is no doubt part of my conscious memories now because of its enduring power in telling me who I am and what my life is about--it's part of my personal mythology.

Today I'll offer another one. Again, I would have been about five years old. This one I labeled "Jesus":

I'm playing with some kids who live down the road. They live just above the bend where the dock is. Their house is white with green edges. We're playing in the garage which is inside the house (our garage is by itself). The older sister is a little older than me. She seems to know a lot. She's telling me about a man who's in a book she's holding. His name is Jesus.

"They killed him," she says.

"Who did?" I say, worried.

"They hammered nails right through his hands," she says, narrowing her eyes.

I feel my face start to crumple with horror. I can see long steel nails.

"They hammered nails through his feet."

I cringe in the torment of pain. How could someone hammer a nail right into someone else?

"They stuck thorns in his head."

"In his head?"

"Yes."

I'm baffled and horrified by the cruelty. I had no idea.

"Right in his head?"

"Yes."

I feel a swoon of pity and shock. I have to go home.

There you have it: my introduction to religion.

the lion's roar

According to Joseph Campbell, religion begins with art. Before there is any such thing as a church, or a priest, or a prophet, there is the poet: the sensitive soul to whom comes inspiration, a vision, an experience, and the capacity to give it expression.

If the poet's words evoke a similar inspiration in others, then there is the possibility of the spread of a spiritual idea. Depending on how powerful and infectious this original idea is, there is the possibility of institutionalization: the development of a social structure based on the idea. A sect is born, which may possibly, depending on many factors, grow into a religion.

One of the points that Campbell makes in his Masks of God tetralogy is that in our modern age the traditional institutional religions have lost their inspiring force. In the Christian West this loss of inspiration was already happening in the 12th century, just when the cities of Europe were throwing up cathedrals to exalt the God that everyone said they believed in. But the most sensitive souls of the time, the poets, recognized in their own hearts that the forms of Christianity, then more than 1,000 years old, had ceased to inspire educated people. The rites had become a mere routine, and the pulse of genuine life and meaning had to be sought elsewhere.

Where? God was dead. Where was the living water of spiritual value to be found?

This sought-for spiritual life, according to Campbell, became symbolized as the Holy Grail, and the new spiritual story that could excite modern imaginations and rouse modern hearts was the quest. This vision was articulated not by priests, schooled in an already institutionalized faith, and not by prophets, proclaiming the words of a god already known, but by poets, sensitive to their own experience and their own genuine perception of value. They were not professing a creed, not repeating words given them by others; they wrote about what they truly thought and felt. They looked into their own hearts and reported back.

In this way a work of art can turn into a rite: a structured experience that leads one to particular feelings and insights. The architecture and services of a church are intended to have this effect. Originally it certainly does (or the church could not survive), but over time it becomes stale. Endless repetition of the same experience loses its living force, and boredom sets in. It becomes mere duty, habit.

Speaking for myself, I can say that certain works of art--especially novels--have acted as rites for me. The single most powerful instance was reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce when I was 18. I did not understand conceptually what I was going through while reading it, but it was emotionally powerful and undeniable. I experienced the power of language, of poetry, to reconfigure my soul. As with any effective rite, it changed me; I was a changed person, a deeper person, on finishing that book. It initiated me into the sensibility of a poet, and passed to me some of the mental and emotional tools I would need if I were to take up that calling. It showed me how to open to the creative life, how to be an artist.

In Vajrayana Buddhism there is an expression: "The lion's roar is fearless". The lion's roar is the truth. A tyrant can kill 10 million people but cannot scratch the truth. Each of us can die and will, but the truth cannot be killed. Fear of death, though, has us cringing from the truth--hiding, concealing, denying, avoiding. The artist, when he or she is true to his or her vocation, embraces the truth as he or she finds it--and proclaims it, whatever the consequences. That is the lion's roar, sending a shock and a shiver of alertness through all the other creatures within earshot.

This vocation is supremely worth following, wherever it leads. Like any sacred thing, it must be kept pure. It is a desecration to use it for petty motives of social or financial gain. That is the artist's equivalent of simony.

Right. On with it.

not afraid

In yesterday's post I talked about Who Are We?, a nonfiction book project that I work on as a kind of hobby apart from the fictional opus that is the (supposed) subject of this blog.

But I have other projects on the go as well. They might not actually be developed enough to be termed projects, but I have them on the go in any case. Within the folder labeled Writing on my PC, for example, one of the subfolders is labeled Thinking. In this folder I have set up a number of Word documents, each devoted to a topic area--things that I like to think about, at least sometimes. One of these is Identity, of course, but there are others, things like Evil, History, Purpose, and Story.

What do I think about these things? What do I believe?

Here I record my thoughts, mainly sparked by material that I read. In a sense these files are my way of entering into dialogue with the authors I read.

Where are all these files going? I don't know. They represent what William James called "thought in movement"--the thinking process of the mind seeking the stillness of "thought at rest", the condition of knowledge or belief that can serve as the basis of action. (I've talked about this in previous posts, such as this one.)

I think one function of religion is to put an end to such questing. Rather than being suspended in uncertainty, unknowing and therefore unable to take action, we click into a belief system that seems to work for us. A revealed, worked-out religion provides a backstop of belief: answers to the basic, most searching questions.

If it's a religion that we are not raised in, then it can't be just anything, of course: a chosen religion has to suit our outlook, has to be "believable". In my late teens and 20s I searched hard for this believable faith, and eventually found it in Buddhism--more particularly in the Vajrayana Buddhism that I discovered (or was led to) in my quest.

I would not say that I've left that faith altogether behind. But my relationship with it has changed. There are a number of reasons for this, or factors in my decision to distance myself from the practice of those teachings. An important one, as I've expressed before, is the realization that I felt I could not be fully free as an artist so long as I held a received faith as my truth--my final "belief". I can hear my Buddhist companions expressing dismay that I could make such an elementary mistake: to regard Buddhism as a "faith". As one Western teacher of Buddhism put it: "I became a Buddhist because here no one ever asked me to believe anything."

That's true--but only up to a point. It's certainly true that our training was never to accept anything merely on someone's say-so, not even that of our teacher or the Buddha, but to test the words against our own experience. In this way, Buddhist practitioners become realized people--people whose knowledge of the teachings may be slight, but is nonetheless genuine and practical. They are not mere parrots or Bible-thumpers. (I had a couple of these appear at my door yesterday--two attractive young women asking me whether I read the Bible. Yup, read it.)

But there are aspects of Buddhism that must be taken on faith. One is the doctrine of karma and rebirth: that we continually experience the results of actions we've made in the past, including an infinite series of previous lives. (Interestingly, while many Westerners struggle with both karma and rebirth, I have no problem with either and believe in them both.) Another, of course, is that there is indeed such a thing as supreme, perfect, complete, great enlightenment and that the Buddha attained it. This is made easier by being in the presence of an authentic teacher or guru, such as Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche (whom I never did meet or see in person), who is a living example of such enlightenment.

Furthermore, over the centuries and millennia Buddhism has accumulated a great deal of elaborate doctrine and what amounts to a theology of enlightenment, Buddha-realms, bodhisattvas, and so on. It's said that very advanced practitioners experience these things directly--but I wouldn't know.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not criticizing these teachings, which in my own experience I can say are profound, powerful, and extremely effective. They have survived for a reason, and have caught hold in the Western imagination for a reason. But as an artist, I saw, only very gradually, a need to go my separate way. Even in a great world faith, I found I was in it, but not truly of it.

I may have made a very big mistake.

So be it. As an artist I find my credo not in any sacred text, but in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in the words of his hero Stephen Dedalus speaking to his friend Cranly:

You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.

sick souls

I've recently been reading again from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, a book developed from a series of talks he gave at the Gifford lectures on natural religion in Edinburgh in 1901-02.

The first three lectures lead in with a general discussion of his topic--looking at religion primarily from a psychological point of view. Lectures 4 and 5 are together called "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness", and deal with optimistic religious experiences, using as his main example the "mind-cure" school of religion that seemed to be all the rage at the time he was speaking. This held that one can quite abruptly change one's life for the better by having faith in the guidance and help of a higher power, visualizing health and happiness, and refusing to dwell on or even acknowledge pain, illness, or depression in one's life. As James demonstrates, this approach had proved itself to be widely effective and powerful--indeed could not have become so popular if it had not.

But in lectures 6 and 7 he moves on to "The Sick Soul"--the opposite outlook, which does not deny pain and sin, but looks these right in the face, acknowledging them to be a permanent feature of the human and even cosmic landscape. I'm still working my way through lecture 6, but already have been exposed to some powerful remarks that remind me very much of some of my Buddhist studies, which likewise emphasize the futility and impossibility of finding lasting happiness in life, so long as one relies on clinging to impermanent things.

As James says,

Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world: in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure.

In illustration of this, he quotes Goethe in 1824:

I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.

Whew. Or this, from Robert Louis Stevenson:

There is indeed one element in human destiny, that not blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.

Sobering words. They seem to suit my mood at the moment. Reading as much history right now as I am, especially sweeping views of the whole of human history (I've just finished Michael Cook's A Brief History of the Human Race), it's hard not to see it as a march of folly, the gradual acquisition of more powerful means to achieving the same dismal ends.

The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, writing in the 1930s, saw militarism as one of the main features of a decadent and moribund society, a kind of social disease that would prevent the arising of a decent human civilization for as long as it persists. Well, we live in a world that is vastly more militarized than it ever has been, with more killing power distributed into more hands.

Being the biggest and best-armed is no help. Toynbee points to the legend of David and Goliath as the example of how supreme power breeds complacency, and brings about its own destruction through means it feels no motivation to foresee. Even when a heavily armed power toils to stay up to date, upgrading its military systems, as the ancient empire of Assyria did, it eventually reaps the whirlwind of militarism.

Assyria dominated the Middle East from about 1000 to 650 BC, but its oppressive strength bred tremendous resentment in its neighbors, and eventually all the conquered rose against it and destroyed it. When the Greek general Xenophon led his 10,000 mercenaries back from Persia toward the Black Sea in the 5th century BC, he passed Nineveh, the ancient fortified capital of Assyria. He and his men were amazed to find such a vast and heavily built city utterly vacant. Xenophon was unable to discover the truth about who had built the city, or when. The very name of Assyria had been forgotten.

transplanted faiths

I seem to be in a time of painful, unsettled emotions. It’s probably not due to any one cause, or if it is, that cause is buried within the structure of my psyche.

In years gone by, meditation was a leveling influence in my life. When I was working on The Odyssey in the early 1990s, I was under tremendous pressure and stress for months on end. I used to cycle up to the rec center early in the morning for an aerobics class, and I practiced meditation as much as I could, which sometimes was not much. Even so, I was more irritable and beleaguered than usual for myself.

Meditation practice gradually enables one to see one's own insanity. Not real insanity, of course, but the everyday neuroses, which I once defined as "causing needless pain for oneself and others." I've been a huge beneficiary of that practice, but I haven't done it now for several years.

I got away from it, not because I wanted to stop meditating, but because I felt that my relationship with Buddhism had changed fundamentally. I realized that in order to be fully who I was, I could not accept the teachings holus-bolus, even though I had found them to be so profound, helpful, and fulfilling. Maybe it wasn't so much a decision as a recognition: I was not fully with the program.

Spiritual traditions cannot be transplanted unchanged. To move a religion is to transform it, possibly into something unrecognizable. This is a point made very well by Hans Jonas in his excellent book The Gnostic Religion. He notes that after the conquests of Alexander the Great, the worlds of East and West mixed to an unprecedented degree. People of widely different culture and belief found themselves crammed together in the new Hellenistic cities that arose in Alexander's wake. To the extent that they interacted, their ideas started to compete directly with each other.

One effect of this was that spiritual beliefs often came to be stripped of their local, cultural content. In the case of Judaism, for example, the notion of its message applying only to a tribe of people descended from Jacob would have made it of no interest or use to people from other backgrounds. Jews found themselves having to assert the universalism of their God and their religion against other traditions--Yahweh was not just a local, Jewish God, after all; He was the king of the universe! Persuading other peoples of this message meant emphasizing the aspects of Jewish belief that were "portable"--that could be accepted as valid by non-Jews.
So Judaism, like other religions, entered the marketplace of ideas. When it was taken up by certain Romans in Rome in the century before Christ, it was taken up in a selective and incomplete way, which would have been dismissed as completely invalid by pious Jews in Palestine. The Romans were drawn to the non-Israelite aspects of the system, its universal ideas.

In a similar way Buddhism has come to the West. If it is to survive here, it must undergo more or less radical change. The aspects of it which are ethnically or culturally Asian won't survive, since these elements are foreign to Westerners. The universal aspects are not foreign to Westerners, and it will be these that form the basis of Buddhism in the West.

Meanwhile, my own relationship with it is unclear to me. I have let that unclarity jam my relationship with meditation. Meditation in itself is not "Buddhist." And yet it also does not happen in a vacuum; teachings surround the practice, and they must surround it if it is to be of any real benefit.

So: still stuck.

from magic to religion

Time to type in a quick blog-post. I'm pushing the pace a bit so I can get to a current copywriting task that has a close deadline. Although very few deadlines in life are "real", as an independent contractor it's well to meet them if possible.

Still, over morning coffee (and I'm still on my second mug) I like to type in some research notes. Today it was from Frazer's classic The Golden Bough, chapters 44 and 45, about "Demeter and Persephone" and "The Corn-mother and the Corn-maiden in Northern Europe", respectively.

Obscure, you say? Maybe. Personally I'm finding Frazer's book, first published in 1922, even more fascinating on this read-through than I did when I first read (most of) it in 1978-79 on my trip to Europe with Tim. I remember back then picking up the hefty paperback with a sense almost of obligation, as something I should read, but usually finding myself more drawn in than I expected. The Golden Bough bogs down only in amassing examples of Frazer's various points, which amassing he did in order to show the truly worldwide scope of his theory, as well as to offer maximum support for an argument that he expected to be resisted by the reader.

For Frazer looked into a great many of the strange, even baffling, customs, rites, and superstitions of the world, on every inhabited continent, and saw order and purpose. We receive traditions, our culture, and act out things as it were automatically, in the same way that our body performs things by habit. Thus, in the same way that we put up and decorate Christmas trees and hide Easter eggs and dress our kids in costumes to go trick-or-treating, other people dance around maypoles or call the last sheaf of harvested wheat the Old Woman or give up their children to be roasted alive in a bronze bull.

Frazer's project, which took him decades, had him tracking the gradual evolution of magic into religion--for he contends that magic is the more ancient view of the world, what he regards as a primitive form of science. In his view, an animistic view of the world, in which every object had its own life and soul, not unlike the way we regard the world as young children, evolves into a world in which invisible but anonymous spirits animate things, able to flit from one to another, until eventually these spirits become identified as individuals--as gods, with names and biographies. Ultimately, in Frazer's rationalistic eyes, this view becomes superseded by a scientific outlook, in which the forces of nature are seen in their most objective and also effective way. No doubt in deference to his readers, he pays lip service to the validity of Christian belief, but it seems unlikely that Frazer, having examined so much world mythology, and having described so many beliefs and rites that are essentially the same as the Christian myth, personally bought into any religion as more valid than the others.

Reading The Golden Bough is still an eye-opener for me. Our whole rationalistic, scientific worldview is like a thin shim of ice on an ocean of beliefs and feelings that are alien to it. I'm relatively unsuperstitious, but it's still there within me, a vague fear sometimes of not doing things a certain way, of not following the "proven" path. Even my father used to wear a special pair of red socks to do video-editing, because they made the equipment work. It was a joke, of course--and yet I'm pretty sure he wore the socks. Frazer would understand that immediately as an instance of "contagious magic": probably Dad once wore these unusual socks, which may have been noticed by colleagues, and on that day the editing equipment happened to perform better than usual. The coincidence of two unusual events links them causally in the "savage" (that is, our) mind. Thereafter, if Dad had failed to wear the socks, and the equipment had failed to work properly, he would have had only himself to blame. Who knows, maybe his colleagues would have sacrificed him to the god of video-editing.

I was planning to read only a little into The Golden Bough this time, since I felt I'd never have the oomph to make it through all 934 pages. But I'm on page 610, and still absorbed...

searching for beliefs

I'm searching for my beliefs.

It has been a lifelong search, and it's not over. In fact, at this stage, it seems quite possible, even likely, that it will never be over. The awareness that my beliefs are provisional and lack a solid foundation has held me back, I think, in my worldly life, my career.

To my great satisfaction and delight, William James tackles the question of belief head-on (the way he tackles everything) in a chapter of its own in volume 2 of his Principles of Psychology, chapter 21, "The Perception of Reality". He opens the chapter thus:

Everyone knows the difference between imagining a thing and believing in its existence, between supposing a proposition and acquiescing in its truth. In the case of acquiescence or belief, the object is not only apprehended by the mind, but is held to have reality. Belief is thus the mental state or function of cognizing reality.

He goes on to say:

In its inner nature, belief, or the sense of reality, is a sort of feeling more allied to the emotions than to anything else.

He says that belief resembles consent or willingness. Then:

What characterizes both consent and belief is the cessation of theoretic agitation, through the advent of an idea which is inwardly stable, and fills the mind solidly to the exclusion of contradictory ideas. When this is the case, motor effects are apt to follow. Hence the states of consent and belief, characterized by repose on the purely intellectual side, are both intimately connected with subsequent practical activity.

There it is, something that I have long maintained myself: beliefs are the mental states that specifically guide our actions. Once again I find in William James support for my own thoughts, arrived at via different means in a different world.

It follows that having strong, stable, and harmonious beliefs will make one vigorous and consistent in one's actions, which clearly will lead on to success in one's aims, all other things being equal.

James would go on to develop this idea further into the philosophy of pragmatism, which holds that truth itself has no meaning apart from its practical consequences--a view that I myself have pretty much come to hold, again via an independent route.

Beliefs have different intensities, or levels of conviction. James puts it thus:

The quality of arousing emotion, of moving us or inciting us to action, has as much to do with our belief in an object's reality as the quality of giving pleasure or pain. Generally, the more a conceived object excites us, the more reality it has. The same object excites us differently at different times.

At the high end of the scale is the feeling of certainty--true conviction. On this James quotes Emerson:

Our faith comes in moments,...yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.

And this, to me, fascinating observation by Bagehot, the 19th-century British journalist and founding brain of The Economist newspaper:

Probably conviction will be found to be one of the intensest of human emotions, and one most closely connected with the bodily state,...accompanied or preceded by the sensation that Scott makes his seer describe as the prelude of a prophecy:

At length the fatal answer came,
In characters of living flame--
Not spoke in words, nor blazed in scroll,
But borne and branded on my soul.

A hot flash seems to burn across the brain. Men in these intense states of mind have altered all history, changed for better or worse the creed of myriads, and desolated or redeemed provinces or ages. Nor is this intensity a sign of truth, for it is precisely strongest in those points in which men differ most from each other.

The intensity of conviction is not a sign of truth. But it will get us deliberately flying aircraft into high-rises and invading Middle Eastern countries.

What is this thing?

Like everyone else, I take actions through the day. Right now I'm writing this blog-post. That means I have certain specific beliefs, in James's view, that are propelling me to this action. I believe that writing this post is furthering my interests or aims somehow. His point would be that those beliefs, whatever they are, are already there; they already exist and are active, whether I'm aware of them or not.

But I would like to be aware of them. I would like to bring my beliefs into the realm of my conscious understanding--to consent to them consciously and willingly, rather than unconsciously. I don't want to be the passive victim of a useless, destructive certainty. I don't want to hijack airplanes or invade countries.

I'd just like to know what the hell I'm doing, and why.

The Great Chain of Being

Rain drips outside, somewhere in the dark beyond my closed office blinds. I've been keying notes from Neil Forsyth's The Old Enemy over my morning coffee.

Ideas, ideas. Another book I'm enjoying right now is The Great Chain of Being by Arthur O. Lovejoy, an examination of the influence of the ancient idea of God's "fullness", first developed by Plato. According to Lovejoy, in this published series of lectures he delivered at Harvard University in 1933, this idea of a perfect God (for Plato, the idea of "the Good") necessitated its expression in creativity, a kind of overflowing of its goodness in the creation of forms--other, lesser ideas to begin with, but then, because of the inexhaustible superabundance of the all-Good, myriad other forms as well. This idea was developed by subsequent Platonists, especially by the 3rd-century AD philosopher Plotinus, who formed the idea into a systematic theory of emanation--the generation of ideas and forms from the central Good, or God, to fill the universe with everything.

According to Lovejoy, this idea has been tremendously influential throughout subsequent history, down at least until the 18th century, and no doubt is still shaping our thinking, subtly, today. For the idea came to be framed as the Great Chain of Being: the notion that there is a hierarchy or ladder of creation, leading from the lowest, least sentient things (rocks) up to the very highest (God, the Infinite Good), with every possible gradation in between. Humans are midway on this great Chain, the highest of material beings or the lowest of the spiritual beings, depending on how you look at it. For the Chain made angels necessary, representing the links of the Chain above us, leading on up to God. An unknown author of the 5th century AD, writing under the name of St. Paul's student Dionysius the Areopagite, set down the hierarchy of angels (nine different orders, from ordinary angels up to the seraphim who attended the throne of God). Since leading medieval theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, accepted the pseudo-Dionysius as an authority, his hierarchy has more or less stuck ever since.

Lovejoy points out that there are inherent contradictions in this idea of the Chain of Being, contradictions that have caused great tension in thinkers and people generally since the formation of the idea. For, on the one hand, the spontaneous urge of every being in the Chain is to seek to move higher, to approach more closely to the all-good Creator who is the source of all happiness. Yet, on the other, every created thing and being is a handmade expression, so to speak, of that Creator's superabundant goodness, worthy of His attention, and therefore, you might suppose, intrinsically excellent in its own right, and certainly not to be despised. In a nutshell: the very notion of a Chain of Being suggests a hierarchy of higher quality to lower, while at the same time every link in the Chain is a divine creation and therefore, presumably, all equally valuable.

The contradictions in this idea have put Western humanity under great stress for a couple of thousand years now. For on the one hand, we are enjoined to seek higher things, to purify and spiritualize ourselves so that we may unite with God, shunning the mere matter of His creation; while on the other we experience a natural joy and attraction for the world at our own level, our senses and our own physicality, all of which are God-given and therefore divine. So what's the right thing to do?

Well, I haven't finished the book. And I don't expect Lovejoy to come down on one side of the debate or the other. But I find my mind magnetized by this type of inquiry. As Lovejoy points out in his introduction, this is not philosophy in the strict sense, for his study is more wide-ranging than mere philosophical analysis. Following the evolution of an idea means looking into diverse fields, such as the arts, sciences, and politics, to see how the idea shapes people's attitudes and actions, often unconsciously. He likens the study to chemistry: the historian of ideas looks at complex "substances" and dissolves them to discover the elements of which they're made. Cool!

I may finally have found an academic discipline that I could pursue more or less wholeheartedly.

This is just a taste. There's much more to say about ideas, their history, and my own relationship with them. But that will be for future posts.

inspiration

Something else I've been meaning to talk about: inspiration.

I'm thinking here not of artistic inspiration, particularly, but of inspiration in general, as defined thus in Webster's:

1 a: a divine influence or action on a person believed to qualify him or her to receive and communicate sacred revelation; b: the action or power of moving the intellect or emotions

What we call artistic inspiration, of course, is a stepped-down version of this divine influence.

I got thinking about it while reading the book Zoroastrians by Mary Boyce. Early in the book she sketches the revelation of the ancient Iranian prophet (around 1500 BC) whom the Greeks called Zoroaster, contrasting his teaching with the previously existing beliefs of the Indo-Iranians who at that time still lived on the steppes east of the Caspian Sea--before the migrations that would split this group into the peoples we now call Indians and Iranians. As I read, I found myself becoming inspired by Zoroaster's message.

The Indo-Iranians had many gods. They were a pastoral people whose nomadic lifestyle allowed only a simple, mobile cult. They regarded the elements of earth, water, and fire as sacred, and their rituals included simple representations of these things. Also sacred to them was what they termed asha--the natural order of the world. Asha manifested itself in human society mainly as justice and as truth in speech, something the Indo-Iranians took very seriously. Being true to one's word was especially important in two actions: in making an oath, and in making an agreement with another person. The god who oversaw oaths was Varuna; the god who oversaw contracts was Mithra. Whoever violated an oath or a contract could expect punishment from the god in question.

As the Bronze Age unfolded, the invention of the war chariot revolutionized warfare in much the same way that gasoline-powered vehicles revolutionized it in the 20th century, by making it mobile. A single war chariot could wreak havoc on a large contingent of foot soldiers at that time. The charioteer, dashing, bold, powerful, and wealthy, became a new icon--the prototype of the knight and cavalryman, or even our modern race-car driver. The Indo-Iranians tamed horses on the steppes, and had access to rich deposits of copper and tin that enabled them to make weapons. A new caste of mercenaries and brigands was born.

A charioteer didn't want a life of herding sheep or cattle; he could take whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it. So began an era of systematic domination of humble pastoralists by aggressive warriors.

This was the era into which Zoroaster was born. Apparently he looked around him, saw violence and injustice, and one day, while fetching water in a river to perform a rite, had a vision of the supreme god Ahura Mazda ("Lord Wisdom"), who gave him a new understanding of the world and his mission in it.

Ahura Mazda, the lord of goodness and truth, upholder of asha in the universe, had an opponent, Angra Mainyu ("Hostile Spirit"), who like Ahura Mazda had always been, but who was bent on upsetting the order of the world. He was the source of injustice, lies, and evil in the world. Most of the other gods of the Indo-Iranian pantheon, including all those worshipped by the warrior caste, were on the side of Angra Mainyu, not Ahura Mazda. Zoroaster learned that the whole universe was a struggle between good and evil, between truth and falsehood, between justice and injustice, and the mission being given him was to educate his fellow people about this, and get them working on the side of Ahura Mazda--bringing good and order into the world.

To make a long story short, Zoroaster was indeed able to convince enough people of his message to launch a major world religion--the world's first revealed religion, and eventually the official religion of the mighty Persian empire, and a major influence on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His teachings followed the migrations of the Indo-Iranians into what we now call India and Iran; Zoroastrianism was one of the influences on the northern Mahayana Buddhism of India just before and after the time of Christ.

Zoroaster preached goodness and truth. And he stressed that each individual human, man and woman, young and old, mighty and humble, matters in the cosmic struggle against evil. Every word, deed, and thought that we have counts. At every moment of our lives it makes a difference, to the universe as a whole, what we think, say, and do. We need to decide whose team we're on, and then play our part to the fullest.

When I read this I was inspired. I no difficulty seeing why Zoroaster could find followers with this message. It was a categorical summons to what was highest and best in people, presented in a myth, a story, they could believe. I was reminded of how I have been inspired, again and again, by the teachings of Buddhism, for much the same reason: it was, is, a summons to what is highest and best in us, to apply ourselves to our lives with attention and diligence--to do the right thing.

I venture to suppose that inspiration is the most powerful force in the human psyche and in the shaping of world events. And I can see why Zoroaster taught that Ahura Mazda, Lord Wisdom, must and would eventually win this cosmic struggle--it was inevitable. Angra Mainyu would be finally and permanently defeated, because while greed and power-lust can motivate people, they can never inspire them. Somehow Zoroaster was tapping into this difference in motivating forces in the human psyche, which must in turn of course be related to reality, the structure of the universe after all. His message was meaningful, fulfilling, and optimistic. If everyone must live by some set of beliefs, why not these?

The wind of inspiration blew through me. I recalled the times--many times, I'm glad to say--I've felt in my life that there are good, important, worthwhile things for us--all of us--to do in the world.

Ideally, artistic inspiration can be part of that.

evil: an introduction

Reading period last night: Shantaram, and a book that arrived in the mail the day before yesterday, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty by Roy F. Baumeister. Mmm--who wouldn't want to get inside that?

Evil is important to my story. It's not particularly a story of good vs. evil, as in a crime melodrama, but rather the issue of evil, its source and its continuing appearance in the world despite ostensible divine rulership, is central to religion in general and to the evolution of Judaism in this period in particular. Increasingly, scholars of that period are recognizing that there were two main streams of Judaism: the Mosaic stream, based on the laws of Moses and the Torah he revealed to the Israelites; and the Enochic stream, based on the revealed teachings of the patriarch Enoch, who was taken to heaven and given instruction and heavenly tablets directly by angels. Enoch never died; he was simply taken up to heaven while still alive. The Mosaic stream eventually became rabbinic Judaism and the foundation of the religion as it exists today. The Enochic stream was the source of the Essenes and other Jewish groups who were less connected with Mosaic Judaism.

Enoch taught that evil entered the world by way of angels who rebelled against God. In particular, a certain group of angels became infatuated with human women, and mated with them to produce giant offspring who in turn caused all kinds of trouble. These rebellious angels taught humans various things that helped perpetuate evil (as they saw it) in the world, in particular weapons for war and adornments for women to make them irresistible to men, thus promoting fornication and sex in general. In the process, the whole cosmic order as established by God was contaminated, and could not be cleansed again until the end of time, when God would cause evil and its agents to be destroyed so that the original paradise could be restored. The rebel angels became demons, and their leader would become the figure we know as Satan.

In contrast, the Mosaic stream did not mention a rebellion by angels, and for the most part did not emphasize Satan or his role in world history. In the garden of Eden the first humans were tempted to disobey God, setting a precedent for humanity: people would continually disobey God and suffer the consequences. In this context evil is not so much an active enemy of God and the good, but the giving in of individuals to the temptation to sin.

So what is evil? I wanted to find out more, so I bought Baumeister's book, and one or two others (not here yet). He is setting out to explain evil from a psychosocial perspective, using factual data (that is, only real-world examples, not fictitious ones that are often used to illustrate evil and its operation). One of his first points is that actual evil--the way it actually happens in real life, and the attitudes of its perpetrators--is strikingly different from evil as it is portrayed in stories. Far from being cruel, sadistic types who take pleasure in hurting, most evildoers are bland functionaries, people who lack strong emotions about what they do and generally have a workaday attitude. Perpetrators of large-scale evil find themselves fussing with details of how to get more bodies crammed into ovens or how to optimize the use of ammunition for mass shootings.

All very interesting. Baumeister makes the point that evil is largely in the eye of the beholder, particularly in the eye of the victim, since perpetrators never see their own actions as evil. Personally, I find this hard to accept. While it's true that perpetrators may not see their own actions as evil, this doesn't make evil a subjective thing. Surely the Golden Rule is the touchstone for evil: how would I like this to be done to me? What if you were the torturer and I were the one strapped to this rack?

This topic, again, is vast. Think I'll go read some more on it.

singlehanded construction

Heavyish rain pours down on this dark but warm day. Kimmie and I both felt recovered enough from our colds to take a walk out in it, and even lug our liquor purchases (3 large bottles of wine, 1 bottle vodka, 1 bottle vermouth, 6 bottles beer) home on our backs. Whew. We've changed out of our wet jeans and into lounging attire: sweatpants etc.

Kimmie has spent much of the day baking: mainly something to do with chocolate, and lots of it. The Kitchen Aid that we bought a couple of years ago has been whirring continually.

As for me, I nosed ahead with notes for chapter 20. My inquiries took me back to the character Hillel, now called Hillel the Great, and the different Jewish theologies of that period. Locating the beliefs of my characters is long, slow work. Hillel is now a legendary figure, often leaned on as one of the immediate precursors of rabbinic Judaism, which did not really exist as such until after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in AD 70. He is now most famous for his so-called negative formulation of the Golden Rule: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go, study."

The last directive--"go, study"--was a key instruction of Hillel's; he believed that an ignorant man could not be truly devout. By the time of his death he was hailed as a second Ezra, the scribe famous for seeking new glue to hold the shattered nation of Israel together after the first destruction of its temple and its deportation to Babylonia: universal adherence to the Mosaic Law. Scribe was a job-title of the Hellenistic world generally: scribes were the bureaucrats in Eastern monarchies responsible for record-keeping, including the keeping and interpretation of laws. In the Jewish context, the scribe was a kind of sacred lawyer: a man learned in the Law and its interpretation. With the destruction of the first temple in 586 BC, the priests had lost their raison d'être and those proficient in the Law rose in prominence. When the temple was rebuilt in 517 BC the priests would recover their function in maintaining its cult, but the scribes would continue to grow in importance as expertise in the Law would become a full-time occupation in its own right. The priests and the scribes would form the main pools from which would arise the parties known respectively as the Sadducees and Pharisees.

Hillel was a Pharisee. But the name Pharisee also covered a wide range of attitudes and beliefs, all held (more or less) together by a common acceptance of what's known as the Oral Law, the spiritual equivalent of what we would call the common law: the law of precedent, as established by judgments already made on contentious issues. There was a vast tradition of such judgments, often competing or even contradictory judgments. Everything depended on the authority of those making the judgments. Hillel introduced a systematic methodology for reasoning from scripture in order to rationalize the procedure for arriving at new judgments, and increase the likelihood of consensus. His interpretive system was derived from the techniques of literary analysis already in use in the wider Hellenistic world.

I perused the material I've keyed on Hillel--he has his own document in the Characters folder. Hm, the last entry I made here was in March 2005.

When Kimmie and I walked home from the liquor store down on Esplanade (all uphill), we trudged up the lane between 4th and 5th streets. Off that lane, facing Lonsdale, is a three-story apartment building, coated in pink stucco. It has been under construction for at least the last eight years, and is still unoccupied. While I was still working at ICBC I would walk past it every day, and observe the slow progress. There was never more than a couple of guys working on it at any one time, and often only one guy. Our theory was that the lot owner had decided, for some reason, to build the whole thing single-handedly. Indeed, that's what it looks like. What must it be like for him? I think I know. You finally finish installing the balcony doors on the third floor, then look down at the piles of gravel and dirt you had dumped on the lot 17 months ago: "Ah yes--time to start the landscaping..."

mirror of the past

Steady rain falls through colder air.

Morning notes: A History of Technology and Alexander the Great. From the former I'm now learning about early metallurgy. The specific subheadings this morning were "Beginnings of Metal-Working" and "Gold", both by R. J. Forbes, professor of pure and applied sciences in antiquity at the University of Amsterdam. From the latter I'm now learning about the culture and administration of the Persian empire that Alexander, its soon-to-be conqueror, is taking on. The Persians, tolerant of and open-minded about the cultures they absorbed into their empire, freely intermarried with their new subjects and appointed them to high administrative positions. From their new subjects they absorbed ideas about religion, statecraft, and even how to structure their own royal court.

Alexander, a man in his 20s, in his turn found it advantageous to adopt the methods of the Persians, installing many of his vanquished enemies as satraps and administrators over the territories he was putting under his control. This ecumenical approach was to become the hallmark and defining characteristic of the succeeding Hellenistic age, when Greek-educated Macedonian kings would rule over Oriental domains. It was the first great melting-pot of East and West, and for that reason I see it as a mirror of our own global village.

The imposition of Greek-style political and social systems on nations that had never known these, as far east as Afghanistan, triggered a kind of answering wave from the East, the vital power of Asian religion and mysticism, which washed over the Western societies of Greece and Rome before they realized what had hit them. Gradually, then increasingly, citizens of these seemingly supreme conquering civilizations became converts to religions of the East, which promised direct personal experience of contact with the divine, the absolute--a far cry from the dry, habitual relics that were the state cults of the West. From the East came the idea of the immortal soul and its status, and Western women and men--mainly in that order--discovered a thirst for salvation.

The Western cults had little to say to seekers of salvation; the Eastern had plenty to say. The cult that became known as Christianity was one of these, and for a number of reasons it would triumph in the spiritual marketplace that was Rome and, later, Europe.

Little by little, piece by piece, I put the puzzle together in my mind. The ancient world is a mirror of our own. My very fascination with it is the surest evidence that this is so. I see myself reflected back there, and therefore I see us all.