Readings: of The Ghost in the Machine

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from the fourth essay, “Thinking Again,”of Marilyn Robinson’s book, Absence of Mind – the Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self:

As Bertrand Russell pointed out decades before Gilbert Ryle coined this potent phrase [i.e “the Ghost in the Machine”], the old, confident distinction between materiality and nonmateriality is not a thing modern science can endorse. Physicists say a change in a split photon occurs simultaneously in its severed half, at any theoretical distance. As if there were no time or space, this information of change passes instantly from one to the other. Is an event that defies any understanding we have of causality a physical event? Yes. Can the seeming timelessness and spacelessness that mediate this change also be called physical? Presumably, since they have unambiguous physical consequences. Then perhaps we cannot claim to know the nature of the physical, and perhaps we ought not to be so confident in opposing it to a real or imagined nonphysical. These terms, as conventionally used, are not identical with the terms “real” and “unreal,” though the belief that they are is the oldest tenet of positivism. The old notion of dualism should be put aside, now that we know a little about the uncanny properties of the finer textures of the physical.

This consideration, which has long lingered on the periphery of my knowledge base—as an uninvited squatter of sorts—has indeed (now that Ms. Robinson has so forcefully rubbed my nose in it) caused me, of necessity, to put aside my old notion of dualism.

I have not been a positivist. But I have been a dualist of the type: Spirit Good / Matter Bad. As such distinctions become ambiguous, however, so must that species of dualistic assumption. The only sort of dualism left standing would be that of the Good as opposed to the Evil. But if, as we are sometimes told, the Evil has no real existence, but is only an absence of the Good, then what? It’s all Good?

You tell me. I’m stumped…
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Reflections: A Challenge to Dual

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Of the person who first uttered the proverb, “Too soon old, too late smart,” you might surmise — given the source from which you probably first heard it — that he was a Jew. The odds there are good. But on one thing you can bet your silver samovar: whoever said it first was old.

The truth conveyed by those six little words tells you everything you need to know about life on the material plane. It encapsulates everything said at much greater length by Ecclesiastes. Beneath the agonizing weight of it, you may come to realize that the putative old Jew who first had the honesty to express this thought was, ipso facto, a (gasp!) Dualist. His tardy realization is that he was fucked from the git-go because his realization was tardy. Unless we choose to single-mindedly pursue the path of sainthood our physical plant breaks down before our spiritual growth can be completed. Unless we early-on see the adversary in the materia we almost certainly will not do so.

Concerning those who take an anti-Dualist approach in their contemplation of human existence we can say that each is either a credulous naïf or that he is lying to himself. It was Jesus Christ who identified Satan as “the prince of this world.” Therefore, don’t listen uncritically to those who say “It’s all good”—do your own math.

The anti-Dualists can’t give you a satisfactory explanation of the Problem of Evil for one simple reason: one needs to have become a Dualist before one can even begin to contemplate the problem honestly.

To be in the world is a universal given. To be of the world is an individual choice.

Is the material world not beautiful? You betcha! And was not Lucifer also the most beautiful of God’s angels? (*BIG FRIGGIN' WINK*) Ah! there’s the snare.

For all the verbiage expended to insulate one from the obvious, the issue really isn’t that complicated. And for you, it may not yet be too late.
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Religion: Bhakti Über Alles

We can conclude our considerations of Schweig’s “Textual Illuminations” on his translation of the Bhagavad Gîtâ, by examining two more paragraphs in the section discussing the yoga of the Gîtâ. I will then relate this back to our earlier discussing of an alternative interpretation of the myth of Eden and the Fall of Man. The first paragraph:

“When the soul is bound to this world, it is subject to the powerful conditioning of the ‘qualities’ of nature. Furthermore, when a soul is reborn, the life of that soul is largely determined by the positive and negative effects arising from the activities of one’s previous births. The worldview of the Gîtâ, however, blends conceptions of free will with this deterministic view. Free will is a necessary ingredient in love; that love cannot be coerced or controlled is axiomatic for the Gîtâ. This subtle but critical theme shows that souls are given the power of choice, without which there is no possibility of love.” (p. 250)

Since the gunas, the above mentioned ‘qualities of nature,’ include negative effects on the soul, it is clear that a human soul possessing free will, and interacting with the material world, with all of its distractions and enticements, would not be able to love, and thus be reunited with the Divinity, unless that soul possessed the knowledge of good and evil—the faculty of discernment—allowing for the free choice of Love, i.e., the Good, to be made. In the following paragraph, Schweig writes:

“The love call of God, found within his sacred teachings, awakens free will, enabling the soul either to accept the cycle of endless birth and rebirth that binds the soul to this world, or to choose a path leading to the eternal world that frees the soul from the cycle of suffering. This mortal world, the Gîtâ implies, exists so that souls can exercise choice, without which there is no possibility of love.” (p. 250)

Therefore, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in Eden must be seen as a necessary instrument in the Grand Plan of creation. And what follows from this is that the Serpent—that most “subtle” creature in the Garden—is a messenger of wisdom, rather than a purveyor of sin and death. Schweig’s paragraph concludes:

“The implication is that there can be no true love in the divine world without an alternate world. Thus this world, ultimately designed to facilitate love, is brought into being by the divinity to give souls the freedom to love.” (p. 250)

“Alternate world”: Anyone for dualism? This mutual love of God for his creatures and his creature for Him, is known in Sanskrit as “bhakti.” In order for bhakti to happen, what is called the “Fall” in the Old Testament must happen. Without its occurrence, Adam and Eve would possess no more spiritual gravitas than a pair of Disney bunnies. This leads us directly onto patently heretical, Gnostic ground. If God, as presented in Genesis, has forbidden the knowledge of good and evil, then this God may be the Creator of the material universe, but he is clearly not the God of Love. We must see this God as the Demiurge, not as the “all pervading, imperishable Brahman” of the Gîtâ; not as the supreme One of the Platonists, nor as the utterly transcendent, infinitely removed God of Simone Weil; and, most controversially, not as the all-loving Abba proclaimed by Jesus Christ.

Reflections: Life in the Material World

[N.B.: if you would like to read this essay on dualism from the beginning, scroll down to the August 13th post, "Reflections: Heresy?"]

Why was the Serpent’s proposal to Eve so effective? Why was the satisfaction of every physical need, combined with complete ease and security, not enough for our human parents? In Chapter XXXIII of his Republic, Plato provides a possible answer:

"…As hunger and thirst are states of bodily inanition, which can be replenished by food, so ignorance and unwisdom in the soul are an emptiness to be filled by gaining understanding. Of the two sorts of nourishment, will not the more real yield the truer satisfaction?
Clearly.
Which kind of nourishment, then, has the higher claim to pure reality – food-stuffs like bread and meat and drink, or such things as true belief, knowledge, reason, and in a word all the excellences of the mind? You may decide by asking yourself whether something which is closely connected with the unchanging and immortal world of truth and itself shares that nature together with the thing in which it exists, has more or less reality than something which, like the thing which contains it, belongs to a world of mortality and perpetual change.
No doubt it is much more real."

Prior to eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve were essentially nothing more than a pair of beautiful pets; they were not fully human, as we understand human. It would seem that, according to orthodoxy, the price of full self-consciousness and of our moral free agency, and therefore of our full humanity, is living with the perpetual burden of Original Sin.

Orthodoxy states that the sin of Adam and Eve is responsible for bringing death into the world, but the text of Genesis does not fully support that doctrine. It is made clear, for one thing, that Adam and Eve will be eating, and to eat is necessarily to kill that which is eaten. To the contention that Adam and Eve were immortal prior to the attainment of self-consciousness are opposed verses 22 and 23 of the third chapter of Genesis:

[22] And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
[23] Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

Clearly, it was for the very purpose of keeping Adam and Eve from acquiring immortality, along with wisdom, that they were expelled from Eden. So, the Serpent did not exactly lie when he told Eve that she would not die as a direct consequence of eating that apple. And the Serpent also spoke the truth when he said that Adam and Eve would become godlike by eating it, as God himself affirms. Plausibly, then, everything that orthodoxy attests to be the fallen state of nature is, in reality, a necessary condition of material existence. The material world is not the highest Good under heaven; but neither is it Fallen because of a human act. It is as it must be, in order to have material existence. It becomes, therefore, the human project to transcend our material nature and strive to become holy, like God. This is what Jesus commands us to do: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” [Matt. 5: 48]

So, what is the nature of the Serpent? Is this the first appearance of Satan, the principle of pure evil, in the Bible? Interestingly, the book of Genesis does not characterize the Serpent as “evil,” but merely as “subtle.” It is clear that the agenda of the Serpent is to coax the humans into an act of defiance against the rule put in place by the Creator. But we have seen that the consequences of this act of disobedience are not shown to be unequivocally bad as they might be interpreted, for instance, by the philosophy of Plato.

The Serpent is sometimes portrayed in a positive light in world mythology, and sometimes as an embodiment of evil. Some snakes are, after all, poisonous. But others are a boon to man in controlling the numbers of vermin. The Serpent is sometimes, as in Genesis, seen as wise, and is sometimes equated with Satan:


"Although in the minority, there are at least a couple of passages in the New Testament that do not present the snake with negative connotation. When sending out the twelve apostles, Jesus exhorted them 'Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.'Matthew 10:16)."


…and,


"In the Gospel of Matthew 3:7, John the Baptist calls the Pharisees and Saducees visiting him a "brood of vipers". Later in Matthew 23:33, Jesus himself uses this imagery, observing: 'Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Gehenna?' ("Hell" is the usual translation of Jesus' word Gehenna.)"


And these are some of the reasons why the various degrees of dualism found in Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, and the teachings and philosophies of some of the many mystics and sages are of interest to me.

Interlude: Fiat Lux Redux

Before finishing completely with the first chapter of Genesis and moving on to a consideration of the two trees that God placed in the Garden of Eden, I want to take one last look at the implications of “Let there be light.”
We are told that, after causing it to come into existence, God “divided” the light from the darkness and called the light “Day” and the darkness “Night.” We usually think of darkness as the absence of light; that is, we think of darkness as something which has no existence independent of the existence of light. Light is the up, if you will, to the necessarily corresponding down that is darkness. Yet it was light that God created, and then separated from the apparently preexistent darkness. It would therefore seem that, actually, light is the absence of darkness. In terms of physics, this is may be a nonsensical way to look at it. But, as a metaphor for the spiritual lives of men, it seems to me to embody a profound truth.
Consider, for instance, the minimalist New Testament recapitulation of the Creation in the Gospel of John:

John.1
[1] In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
[2] The same was in the beginning with God.
[3] All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
[4] In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
[5] And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

Here, light is equated with life, with the Word, that is, with the Christ, and the Christ with “the light of men.” We recognize this light as that spark of the divine by virtue of the possession of which man is said to be made in God’s image. And all the rest is a surrounding darkness that obscures the light, imposing an ignorance of its salvific presence. Darkness is not, then, merely a neutral absence of the goodness that is light; rather, it is an obstacle—a kind of firewall between matter and life.

We, in our ordinary thinking, do not consider darkness to be a mere absence of light; we experience it as a menacing presence to be feared and avoided. We are afraid of the dark, afraid of the night and of the menacing spirits which populate it. The devil, Satan, is referred to as the Prince of Darkness and as the Prince of This World. As the embodiment of evil, Satan is also the embodiment of a dualism; a struggle of Darkness against the Light; of spirit against matter.

The ultimate futility of this struggle on the cosmic level is reversed on the microcosmic, terrestrial level, where the darkness of sin, and the allure of evil, so often, and so easily, overwhelm the will of the spiritual pilgrim, placing an endless series of stumbling blocks on the path of his arduous journey toward the Source of all light. We will see this struggle acted out by the dramatis personae playing their existentially predestined rôles on Eden’s tragic stage.

Reflections: Dualism - In the beginning

Dualism

1: a theory that considers reality to consist of two irreducible elements or modes
2: the quality or state of being dual or of having a dual nature
3 a: a doctrine that the universe is under the dominion of two opposing principles one of which is good and the other evil b: a view of human beings as constituted of two irreducible elements (as matter and spirit)

Of the four dictionary definitions of “dualism” above, I am most interested here in parts "a" and "b" of number 3. Orthodox Christianity, at least as expressed in Catholicism (as I understand it, which is admittedly not that well) would deny the truth of each of these definitions. In the biblical book of Genesis, it is stated that when God had finished with the Creation, he saw that it was good. As God the Father is the sole Creator of everything, and since God is omnibenevolent, it follows that everything in Creation must be good. Logic tells us that a Creator who is all-good could not create a bad thing. Neither, in a non-dualistic, monotheistic universe, could there be a second creative principle, entity, or being that is responsible for the existence of evil things. Therefore, evil can have no objective existence. So “3 a” above cannot be applied to a valid description of the creation, as perceived by orthodoxy.

When considering human beings, orthodoxy teaches that spirit and body together form one unit and are not viable as separate entities. According to Catholicism, for instance, both the body and the soul are created by God at the instant of conception. The general resurrection at the end of time will be a resurrection of actual physical bodies—the same bodies possessed by each individual before his death. So “3 b” above describes an erroneous way to look at humanity. But I have problems with this interpretation of the book of Genesis. I find the mythical imagery and symbolism of the first two chapters of Genesis -- those which deal specifically with the Creation -- to contain elements suggestive of dualism.

To begin with, the first two chapters of the book of Genesis are clearly comprised of two distinct versions of the creation myth. This fact, in itself, suggests a sort of structural dualism. This structural dualism can be shown to be necessitated by (at least) two different authorial conclusions concerning the processes of the Creation. Without going into the various scholarly disputes concerning the number and religious biases of the hypothetical author(s) of the book as a whole, we can here propose that the juxtaposition of the two differing versions of the same creation myth demonstrates a need felt by the ancient editors to acknowledge the competing, or composite, truths of a dualism of the type suggested by dictionary definition "2" above.

The creation myth as presented in the first chapter of the book of Genesis actually ends with the third verse of the second chapter: "And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it; because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made." [All quotes will be from the King James version, unless otherwise noted.] In chapter one, the Creation goes without a hitch, from "Let there be light," to resting on the seventh day and instituting the sabbath. In Chapter One, there is no creation of Eve from Adam's rib; rather: "...God created man in his own image...male and female created he them." There is no afterthought here; no reaction to the problematic perception of Adam's lack of a mate. By contrast, in the 18th verse of the second chapter, we have: "It is not good that the man should be alone..." Not good? Mistakes were made?

In chapter one, after God has separated the waters into seas, thus creating dry land, we have, beginning at verse 11: "And God said, 'Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit...' and it was so... and God saw that it was good." But in the fifth verse of the second version, "in the day the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field before it grew; for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground." There seems to be a strange lack of foresight on the part of the Creator here. It also seems that Adam, once he is created, is destined to be a field hand, tilling the ground (after God gets around to moistening it) in order that God can plant that vegetation, the ideal forms of which he has previously created in heaven. Finally, in verse 6 "...there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." It is not clear from this account whether God caused the necessary mist to rise from the earth, or merely took advantage of it when it happened spontaneously. There is no mention of the man being made in God's image.

So it is clear that the two versions of the creation myth, as presented in the first two verses of the book of Genesis, tell similar stories which differ in subtly important ways. The second version presents a Creator who does not seem to have thought of everything in advance, who backtracks and improvises as various contingencies arise. In the first chapter, all goes smoothly; every plan and act of God is really is wholly good in the beginning.

At Chapter 3, however, things begin to go very badly indeed, and it is in these circumstances that the implicit dualism of the book of Genesis becomes even more readily apparent. We shall next consider the two trees God had planted in the midst of the Garden, and the nature of the talking serpent who is so instrumental to the Fall of Man and to the doctrine of Original Sin.

Reflections: Heresy?

I am definitely not orthodox in my Christian beliefs. I have been called a Marcionite by some of my Catholic friends, although I knew nothing about Marcion until being labeled his follower prompted me to look him up. Having done so, I will admit to agreeing with some of Marcion’s ideas.
I have also been called a Manichaean. Until I was called that, everything that I knew about Mani and his teachings was what I had encountered in the Confessions of Augustine of Hippo. I believe that I was called a Manichaean because my beliefs tend to be dualistic.
I was characterized as a Marcionite, it turns out, because I agree with Marcion that the Hebrew scriptures (or Old Testament) give an erroneous picture of God the Father. I would put the Old Testament on the library shelf next to the Iliad and other mythical classics in the Western tradition.
I consider my dualism to be Platonic, or perhaps, Neoplatonic in nature. I have been reading Plato since my college days, and I consider Socrates, as presented by Plato, to be a saint equal in spiritual insight to any of the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures. I have read some Plotinus, and tend to agree with his thoughts concerning the antagonism between spirit and matter, and the transcendence of the One.
I have also been called a Gnostic.
As time goes on, I will be presenting some of my ideas on these things. The links to the Catholic Encyclopedia are provided in order to make specific those heresies to which I have been assigned.