Rainbows and Bathwater

maintaining old metaphysics in a new world

In the human apprehension of the world, there are many layers, many membranes through which the raw information is processed, categorized, contextualized and judged for value, that by the time we as humans perceive anything at all—be it the visual image of a tree, an unfamiliar sound in the darkness of the night, the intentions of another being—the information itself may indeed hardly be considered the same.  It is for this reason that philosophers through the ages, from Plato to even Baudrillard, have urged us to use reason to temper our perceptions.  And yet, as Baudrillard has argued most recently, we have become so enraptured by our illusions in the modern world that those illusions have come to contain as much reality as any reality that may (or may not) be objectively provable.

In that same vein, I assert that our eye is as much the projector of reality as it is the perceiver of it (as long as we include within our definition of reality the beliefs, opinions and perspectives of others) and in such case we must conclude that reality is not a static but a co-created artifact. 

I have argued elsewhere for a model of the universe that includes five dimensions (the 3 dimensions of physical space, the 4^th dimension of Time, and the 5^th dimension of Consciousness), and I wish to offer here some further texture to that model, as well as some anticipation of resistance from what I like to call the Cult of Rational Nihilism—that modern edifice of positivism, that has been born of the scientific paradigm and has come to dominate Academia.  I call it a cult because it bears at its root a metaphysical assumption that if a thing cannot be explained by reason and replicated in a lab it cannot possibly exist.  This is perhaps a misperception or even a prejudice of mine, but more and more I find within the halls of the Ivory Palace that the requirement for externalized evidence and replicability, the foundations of good science, which are perfectly appropriate within that field, have become the judiciary even for fields which attempt to reach beyond the physical world.  Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, I might quote, and thus the innate human desire to exceed our previous bounds of perception becomes sicklied o’er with presumptions of a void that may be filled with new worlds.

And here, then, is the point I wish to make: in the post-Enlightenment world, in which the dangerous fundamentalisms of religion have terrified most reasonable folks, in which the pragmatism of science has provided us with such profound and luxurious command over our immediate physical surroundings, we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, and are busily forsaking the magnificent potential to bridge the two.  Religion—at least the mystical religions I have always held the most fondness for—explores the deeper senses of the human being in an effort to better perceive firsthand the subtler forces of cause and effect that work through the interstitial space between particles, as it were.  Religion is fundamentally unprovable because it relies upon idiosyncratic experience.  For instance, I could tell you that god speaks to me all the time, and she generally does so with the voice of a Southern Black Grandma.  I could tell you that I have had visions in shamanic journeys that have led me directly to resources in the waking world and to answers for some of my most challenging puzzles.  I could describe in great detail the vast worlds that unfold in my inner universe (and yours) and the numinous blanket of loving presence that exists there.  But if you have not experienced that reality yourself, it is quite easy and reasonable for you to say that it does not exist.  You could describe a rainbow to me in great detail, but if I have always been blind, it would be quite simple for me to argue that the whole thing is your imagination. 

But I ask you this: what is the imagination in the first place?  We often think of the imaginary as the opposite of the real.  And yet, just as Plato argued so long ago, the world of Ideas is the very source for so much of what is now real, if not all of it.  This paper that I am writing now.  It has existed only in my mind, in my imagination, you might say, up until this very moment.  And yet, does the simple act of transcribing my thoughts into digital form that you can then read and share in—does that act confer upon this treatise more reality than it had before?  Or does it simply change the nature of its reality, bringing it to a lower branch upon the Kabbalistic Tree of Life from crown toward kingdom?  In the mystical traditions, there has never been any doubt that the Imagination, the realm of Kether, the world of Platonic Forms, inheres to its own brand of Reality.  The Aboriginal Australians even go so far as to say that the Dream world is the real world, and the waking world the Dream and how can you contradict this assertion without making a metaphysical claim?  Many eyes have gazed upon this rainbow, and describe it in such similar terms, and yet the blind continue to refuse even to humor an attempt to explain.

Perhaps in my blindness, I could be convinced that rainbows do in fact exist if enough people tell me about and describe them in similar, replicable ways, or offer me a reasonable explanation for the refraction of the light spectrum through water.  But only because I am willing to remain open to considering such possibilities.  In other words, only because my inner universe is receptive to the perspectives of others am I able to use the scientific method well.

This then, is my final conclusion:  The Cult of Rational Nihilism has its place in the pantheon of Earthly religions. Science is a profoundly important and useful tool and it has enabled us to cast off at least in theory the old gods of Dogma and Religious Imperialism.  But I hold that consciousness, the experience of being aware, is a dimension unto itself.  It is an a-priori, already-existing universe that we, as conscious beings can access, but only idiosyncratically, only by peering back behind our own eyes.  And because of this fundamental nature, it is inherently unmeasurable and (at least superficially) unreplicable and therefore represents an entire sector of the cosmos that is by definition unapprehendable by science.  There are of course practical dangers in drafting public policy according to idiosyncratic experience.  We have to let the old gods remain dead.  If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him, say the Buddhists.  If I try to convince you that Jesus was white and he told me personally that white supremacy is god’s plan for humanity, please feel free to shoot me.    However, there is a baby in that bathwater.  There is a conscious spirit that animates each of us, and it is participating in a vast universe that is knowable, but not in the rational, replicable ways of knowing.  We must turn our backs to that bathwater raining down, turn our faces again to the Sun of our imagination, and a rainbow awaits. 

Truth vs The Truth

I recently watched the film "The Invention of Lying" by Ricky Gervais. There were some truly hilarious moments, I thought, but I found myself thinking deeply afterward about the nature of lying and Truth.

Curiously, I noticed in the film that there was a distinction between "lying" (i.e., intentionally speaking "something that isn't") and voicing one's opinion, with which other people may disagree. This is an interesting distinction to me, since I think that speaking one's opinion as fact, or speaking one's Truth, has as much a tendency to shape the perceptions of others as does outright lying. I do think there are plenty of people who purposefully misrepresent what they know in order to manipulate or achieve a personal, perhaps benign, end. However, I also think that many of us become so convinced that reality is a certain way, we tend to assert that view as fact, while it is almost certainly our own perspective. And that's really the crux, and the reason I felt compelled to write about this: what I find most fascinating about the concept of speaking the truth is that we assume that there is one, that the truth is out there, waiting to be discovered. Philosophers call this idea "positivism," the notion that reality is the way it is, fixed and absolute, and humans' job is to discover and describe it accurately. It is a fundamental assumption in Western thinking, and THE foundational assumption of science as we know it in the modern world. I tend to take a slightly different view.

We create the truth by speaking it, at least as much as we uncover something that was already there. This idea is most obvious in emotional relationships between people. One person tells another "You're beautiful," that person begins to believe it, and that belief in turn creates a confidence, a radiance that is indeed beautiful in a way that others can perceive. The negative side of this is obvious as well, when one person tells another that they're a loser and will never amount to anything. The statement that "You're beautiful," or "You'll never succeed," are naturally not "truths," according to any pragmatic definition of the word, but rather value judgments, assessments, opinions. And yet, with enough power behind them, or frequency, they can become reality.

We see the same principle in history, which is so often written by those in power. To say that Columbus discovered America-- a simple truth that is taught to most American children in Kindergarten and 1st grade-- is of course deeply problematic. Not only did Columbus never set foot on the mainland of North America, you can't really "discover" a place where people have been living for thousands of years. The statement is deeply ethnocentric (biased toward European cultural perspectives) and is fairly inaccurate. And yet it has become "fact," or The Truth for several generations of Americans.

My point in all of this is not just to say that the truth is relative to one's cultural perspective, which is true, (ha), but to go even further to say that the truth is at least half ours to create. We must, however, create it together. As William Stafford put it:

It is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep.
The signals we give-- yes, no or maybe-- should be clear;
the darkness around us is deep.