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Hallucination, Intuition, and Analysis Terminable and Interminable
Once again I don’t have time or energy to look up the reference, but in The Magus (unless I am remembering it only from the movie version, which Fowles also wrote) John Fowles has his psychological-initiator magus say that humanity (or as they said in those days, “man”) has asked questions of ultimate meaning from the beginning, “and of all the gods to whom he has asked it, not one has ever returned an answer.”
Well, no, actually, too many have. Ever since Julian Jaynes proposed his far-fetched theory of the breakdown of the bicameral mind, that the Greeks were all afflicted with a form of schizophrenia in which their internal monologues were literally dialogues between two autonomous aspects of their consciousness, there have been attempts to explore how split-off mental functions might account for everything from the oracle at Delphi (volcanic vapors blocking off the oxygen) to Daniel Pinchbeck’s multiple-message oracles. And of course none of us would pay attention to an internal voice; we would hie ourselves off to a physician to find out what had gone haywire in our physiology.
Given our capacity to know more unconsciously than we know consciously, it would be surprising if every once in a while somebody’s voices didn’t hand over a remarkable piece of insight. Occasionally, the insight seems sufficiently beyond any known input into the individual’s prior knowledge to make us take notice, but generally the stuff that comes out is pretty much standard self-delusion. Years ago I was given, by someone who knew of my interests, a strange book translating the angelic revelations received by Jewish workers in a Hungarian camp during the Second World War. It was a strange book because the motivations of the compilers (I need to find the thing again and track down the title) were far from clear; the book contained the usual set of metaphysical announcements of What It Is Like, but all the promises and predictions the angels gave regarding the workers themselves were wrong. As I recall, the compilers took the revelations seriously, which seemed extremely odd given the fact that not one of the testable assertions was accurate.
I have a rigorously atheistic and indeed mechanistic friend (who looks forward to the day when machine intelligence will indeed outpace our clogged human thought processes) who also considers herself psychic and insists that every phenomenon of parapsychology will eventually be explicable in terms of the physical universe. Well, of course; even the Renaissance Hermetists believed that the gods and the worms were not made of different stuff, just differently arranged stuff. The Buddhists, same thing, and there may be a historically verifiable cognitive connection thanks to Silk Road communications in late antiquity. But as Ioan Couliano would have observed, there are only so many logical possibilities within which to construct a system. If you fill in all the boxes, one of those systems is going to turn out to be the right one, in a very loose sense, without having any experimental evidence for it. It may be only a coincidence that the system that most closely approximates our present state of knowledge is also one that devoted itself to rigorous exploration of states of consciousness, without benefit of and indeed totally opposed to the derangements of chemical substances. (Whether they were subject to the vagaries of internally generated chemistry is another matter. Given the insistence on the renunciation of convincing internal visions and extraordinary powers alike, one would think they were…these are the schools of Buddhism I’m talking about, not the Hermetists.)
One of the rules of thumb passed along by the various staretzes and spiritual masters of other traditions seems to be, trust your intuitions but not your voices. There seems to have been already fifteen hundred years ago the realization that at any given moment, you know more than you know you know, but if somebody invisible tells it to you flat-out, don’t believe it for a minute. (But write it down anyway, because it might turn out to be something real after all.)
The fitting of experimental observation into a painfully worked out imaginative framework (the theologians of the West were logicians; the theologians of the East were poets) presumably explains why Maximus the Confessor sometimes sounds like Sigmund Freud.
Unfortunately most of the people throughout history working with the same techniques and materials have not been made of the same stuff. As a psychoanalyst said on exiting a Greek monastery, “They are all neurasthenics in there!” I don’t know when and can’t remember where it ws (the place was cited), but the story is told in some Orthodox monk’s book. To this outburst, his basic response is, “So? Next question.” (Although there is a tendency in every generation to celebrate how good things were in the old days, the prevailing tone among Orthodox monastics is, “There are no great spiritual masters left, and we are all a bunch of dolts bumping around in the dark.”)
I bring all this up because a publicist has pressed into my hands (well, not literally; has mailed to me after a phone call) a book I was looking forward to reading as another schlock novel spinoff of currently existing trends. It is in fact not a giant of plotting or prose style, but to my dismay it is yet another case of someone’s extravagant interpretations of decades of encounters and experiences. It isn’t just a case of someone dropping small hints of personal experience into a generally made-up tale; she really believes her version of, this time, the Baigent and Leigh business. She drops allusions in her acknowledgements that make me cringe; she evinces her capacity for apparently believing some small press’s translation of documents that in actuality date from the fourth century (not the Gospel of Mary Magdalene), but I remember reading these pseudepigrapha at age sixteen in M. R. James’ The Apocryphal New Testament and wanting to believe them too.
I don’t feel like tangling with this one. It is just too tiring after a while to chase coincidences as feeble as the business of March 22, especially since Thomas Pynchon produced such inspired mumbo-jumbo (just a little Ishmael Reed reference there) about the “watersleep to firewaking” in the Lyle Bland segment of Gravity’s Rainbow, an alternative mythos of a living earth that shares the sensibilities of Henry Corbin, but certainly not that of the Baigent and Leigh crowd.
In any case, people tracking any belief whatsoever with sufficient intensity seem to have strange and objectively verifiable coincidences happen to them. How likely was it that James D. Tabor, the chief scholarly proponent of a different royal-bloodline theory (that Jesus and John the Baptist were presenting themselves as the expected two messiahs of the Aaronic and Davidic line), should stumble, along with his graduate students, upon a freshly plundered tomb containing archaeological fragments germane to his researches? The natural tendency is to assume that he made the whole thing up, but since he names his authenticators he has made it easy to debunk him if he did. His publishers convinced him to give his newest book a sensationalistic title to cash in on the Dan Brown phenomenon, though his story sounds more like a real-life Indiana Jones.
He teaches, by the way, at UNC Charlotte, which is, relatively speaking, just up the interstate from where Bart Ehrman encountered Guy Stroumsa at a propitious moment regarding Morton Smith’s secret gospel of Mark. It is sheer accident that it is also the university where my mentor Richard Underwood propounded his witty metaphors of Hermes the Trickster as the prophet of the dead Father who could also affirm the life of the Father by telling the truth, but never quite the whole truth.
Once again I don’t have time or energy to look up the reference, but in The Magus (unless I am remembering it only from the movie version, which Fowles also wrote) John Fowles has his psychological-initiator magus say that humanity (or as they said in those days, “man”) has asked questions of ultimate meaning from the beginning, “and of all the gods to whom he has asked it, not one has ever returned an answer.”
Well, no, actually, too many have. Ever since Julian Jaynes proposed his far-fetched theory of the breakdown of the bicameral mind, that the Greeks were all afflicted with a form of schizophrenia in which their internal monologues were literally dialogues between two autonomous aspects of their consciousness, there have been attempts to explore how split-off mental functions might account for everything from the oracle at Delphi (volcanic vapors blocking off the oxygen) to Daniel Pinchbeck’s multiple-message oracles. And of course none of us would pay attention to an internal voice; we would hie ourselves off to a physician to find out what had gone haywire in our physiology.
Given our capacity to know more unconsciously than we know consciously, it would be surprising if every once in a while somebody’s voices didn’t hand over a remarkable piece of insight. Occasionally, the insight seems sufficiently beyond any known input into the individual’s prior knowledge to make us take notice, but generally the stuff that comes out is pretty much standard self-delusion. Years ago I was given, by someone who knew of my interests, a strange book translating the angelic revelations received by Jewish workers in a Hungarian camp during the Second World War. It was a strange book because the motivations of the compilers (I need to find the thing again and track down the title) were far from clear; the book contained the usual set of metaphysical announcements of What It Is Like, but all the promises and predictions the angels gave regarding the workers themselves were wrong. As I recall, the compilers took the revelations seriously, which seemed extremely odd given the fact that not one of the testable assertions was accurate.
I have a rigorously atheistic and indeed mechanistic friend (who looks forward to the day when machine intelligence will indeed outpace our clogged human thought processes) who also considers herself psychic and insists that every phenomenon of parapsychology will eventually be explicable in terms of the physical universe. Well, of course; even the Renaissance Hermetists believed that the gods and the worms were not made of different stuff, just differently arranged stuff. The Buddhists, same thing, and there may be a historically verifiable cognitive connection thanks to Silk Road communications in late antiquity. But as Ioan Couliano would have observed, there are only so many logical possibilities within which to construct a system. If you fill in all the boxes, one of those systems is going to turn out to be the right one, in a very loose sense, without having any experimental evidence for it. It may be only a coincidence that the system that most closely approximates our present state of knowledge is also one that devoted itself to rigorous exploration of states of consciousness, without benefit of and indeed totally opposed to the derangements of chemical substances. (Whether they were subject to the vagaries of internally generated chemistry is another matter. Given the insistence on the renunciation of convincing internal visions and extraordinary powers alike, one would think they were…these are the schools of Buddhism I’m talking about, not the Hermetists.)
One of the rules of thumb passed along by the various staretzes and spiritual masters of other traditions seems to be, trust your intuitions but not your voices. There seems to have been already fifteen hundred years ago the realization that at any given moment, you know more than you know you know, but if somebody invisible tells it to you flat-out, don’t believe it for a minute. (But write it down anyway, because it might turn out to be something real after all.)
The fitting of experimental observation into a painfully worked out imaginative framework (the theologians of the West were logicians; the theologians of the East were poets) presumably explains why Maximus the Confessor sometimes sounds like Sigmund Freud.
Unfortunately most of the people throughout history working with the same techniques and materials have not been made of the same stuff. As a psychoanalyst said on exiting a Greek monastery, “They are all neurasthenics in there!” I don’t know when and can’t remember where it ws (the place was cited), but the story is told in some Orthodox monk’s book. To this outburst, his basic response is, “So? Next question.” (Although there is a tendency in every generation to celebrate how good things were in the old days, the prevailing tone among Orthodox monastics is, “There are no great spiritual masters left, and we are all a bunch of dolts bumping around in the dark.”)
I bring all this up because a publicist has pressed into my hands (well, not literally; has mailed to me after a phone call) a book I was looking forward to reading as another schlock novel spinoff of currently existing trends. It is in fact not a giant of plotting or prose style, but to my dismay it is yet another case of someone’s extravagant interpretations of decades of encounters and experiences. It isn’t just a case of someone dropping small hints of personal experience into a generally made-up tale; she really believes her version of, this time, the Baigent and Leigh business. She drops allusions in her acknowledgements that make me cringe; she evinces her capacity for apparently believing some small press’s translation of documents that in actuality date from the fourth century (not the Gospel of Mary Magdalene), but I remember reading these pseudepigrapha at age sixteen in M. R. James’ The Apocryphal New Testament and wanting to believe them too.
I don’t feel like tangling with this one. It is just too tiring after a while to chase coincidences as feeble as the business of March 22, especially since Thomas Pynchon produced such inspired mumbo-jumbo (just a little Ishmael Reed reference there) about the “watersleep to firewaking” in the Lyle Bland segment of Gravity’s Rainbow, an alternative mythos of a living earth that shares the sensibilities of Henry Corbin, but certainly not that of the Baigent and Leigh crowd.
In any case, people tracking any belief whatsoever with sufficient intensity seem to have strange and objectively verifiable coincidences happen to them. How likely was it that James D. Tabor, the chief scholarly proponent of a different royal-bloodline theory (that Jesus and John the Baptist were presenting themselves as the expected two messiahs of the Aaronic and Davidic line), should stumble, along with his graduate students, upon a freshly plundered tomb containing archaeological fragments germane to his researches? The natural tendency is to assume that he made the whole thing up, but since he names his authenticators he has made it easy to debunk him if he did. His publishers convinced him to give his newest book a sensationalistic title to cash in on the Dan Brown phenomenon, though his story sounds more like a real-life Indiana Jones.
He teaches, by the way, at UNC Charlotte, which is, relatively speaking, just up the interstate from where Bart Ehrman encountered Guy Stroumsa at a propitious moment regarding Morton Smith’s secret gospel of Mark. It is sheer accident that it is also the university where my mentor Richard Underwood propounded his witty metaphors of Hermes the Trickster as the prophet of the dead Father who could also affirm the life of the Father by telling the truth, but never quite the whole truth.
