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august sixth two thousand eight
Aug. 6th, 2008 08:43 amHappy Feast of the Transfiguration, y’all. On which day we also commemorate the first military use of atomic weapons against a civilian population.
An incredibly ancient belief that collapsed with the advent of the Scientific Revolution (there were many such beliefs) was that there is an entire parallel universe that interpenetrates with and animates this one.
In this superseded view, our synapses and neurons and glandular secretions are just the strings of puppets that are being wielded imperfectly by sometimes inept puppetmasters, who are ourselves. We didn’t create the show, but we were born into handling these meat machines in a clumsy puppet theater (though we were “born into” the task in another world about which we currently know nothing).
So our jobs were seen as awakening to our condition as puppets and puppetmasters together, and trying to find out what we were up to offstage, when we weren’t engaged in identifying with the show we were putting on that involved self-discovery through an incredibly involved illusion that we might not have been the authors of at all, but only the stagehands and actors in a hugely unscripted piece of performance art.
We find something like this model in Egypt, in Central Asia, perhaps in South America though it’s hard to figure out from all the glyphs and paradoxical illustrations just what the mythic structures are trying to say, and I get enough of a headache just thinking about the ones found in the Fertile Crescent and points east. Africa seems to have evolved similar beliefs, in certain quarters.
This is not the same model, as far as I can tell, as the myth in which the soul descends, unites with spirit and body, and makes its way back home. In this one, the soul never leaves home at all, it just gets hopelessly stuck in its own theater production, because it isn’t necessarily the one who got the play started in the first place. It just has the job, for its own self-satisfaction, of figuring out how to perceive the production and walk out of it in a vast act of self-realized irritation with the fall into such a poorly plotted drama in the first place.
It seems incredible that humanity should ever have seen itself as involved in an immense version of The Truman Show from time immemorial, but if you look at the mythologies in which there are two souls, one in heaven and one on earth, which either do or do not get back together, or a whole parallel society in heaven in which folks are doing pretty much the same things they do on earth, that is what the belief implies.
Except that the folks in the other show are performing much, much better. And every once in a while we get a glimpse of what the other drama is like and the stage on which it is taking place.
This is a fairly cool science fiction novel, and it is many millennia old. It is perhaps the first great work of fiction created by those who believed that all spiritual actions must have a material channel, that an efficiently functioning material world is as necessary for the operations of spirit as an axe is necessary for the chopping of wood. No brain, no consciousness, in other words.
They just believed that there could also be brains of whose operations we know nothing, in the entities that those folks were pleased to call the Bodiless Powers.
None of it has to be true; perhaps none of it is; but it is remarkable that it should have been so forgotten that it had to be rediscovered by folks grumbling that there had to be something wrong with the way the world was interpreted…and who, as with anyone who has gone to the effort of figuring something out that was difficult to interpret, assumed that all this must be true because it took so much work to figure out what on earth the writers were talking about.
A phenomenology of such matters would not make this category mistake, and would let the odd realization stand as just one more view of how the world works. It would examine the experiential evidence that led to such views of how the world works, and would come to understand the contrary evidence that led to the view that any such view of how the world works must be preposterous.
If today we say “Stuff and nonsense!” to the idea that we are a self unknowingly manipulating what we think is our self, we can examine why we think we have good reason for so believing. The sociology of knowledge has given us tools with which to do this.
We can examine what constitutes “having good reasons.” This is where I came in, years ago, in my doctoral dissertation, with how we go about judging and deciding, and what goes into deciding what is valid evidence and what is not; and how our critical faculties have developed and how we mask our own self-deception.
But once we are aware of why we believe something must be true, we are also free to examine why we may have our crania inserted firmly into our rectal cavities, despite the physical difficulty of accomplishing this posture.
And I have suggested recently that some of those who believed in such models may have reached this level of critical self-awareness much sooner in history than we think; may have decided that the condition of having and not-having was theirs and that instead of identifying with the myth as it was given to them, they would use the parts of the myth that they knew for sure were operative (namely, how human behavior functions). But this is a just-so story on my part, and it may well be there were no such mystical skeptics avant le lettre.
An incredibly ancient belief that collapsed with the advent of the Scientific Revolution (there were many such beliefs) was that there is an entire parallel universe that interpenetrates with and animates this one.
In this superseded view, our synapses and neurons and glandular secretions are just the strings of puppets that are being wielded imperfectly by sometimes inept puppetmasters, who are ourselves. We didn’t create the show, but we were born into handling these meat machines in a clumsy puppet theater (though we were “born into” the task in another world about which we currently know nothing).
So our jobs were seen as awakening to our condition as puppets and puppetmasters together, and trying to find out what we were up to offstage, when we weren’t engaged in identifying with the show we were putting on that involved self-discovery through an incredibly involved illusion that we might not have been the authors of at all, but only the stagehands and actors in a hugely unscripted piece of performance art.
We find something like this model in Egypt, in Central Asia, perhaps in South America though it’s hard to figure out from all the glyphs and paradoxical illustrations just what the mythic structures are trying to say, and I get enough of a headache just thinking about the ones found in the Fertile Crescent and points east. Africa seems to have evolved similar beliefs, in certain quarters.
This is not the same model, as far as I can tell, as the myth in which the soul descends, unites with spirit and body, and makes its way back home. In this one, the soul never leaves home at all, it just gets hopelessly stuck in its own theater production, because it isn’t necessarily the one who got the play started in the first place. It just has the job, for its own self-satisfaction, of figuring out how to perceive the production and walk out of it in a vast act of self-realized irritation with the fall into such a poorly plotted drama in the first place.
It seems incredible that humanity should ever have seen itself as involved in an immense version of The Truman Show from time immemorial, but if you look at the mythologies in which there are two souls, one in heaven and one on earth, which either do or do not get back together, or a whole parallel society in heaven in which folks are doing pretty much the same things they do on earth, that is what the belief implies.
Except that the folks in the other show are performing much, much better. And every once in a while we get a glimpse of what the other drama is like and the stage on which it is taking place.
This is a fairly cool science fiction novel, and it is many millennia old. It is perhaps the first great work of fiction created by those who believed that all spiritual actions must have a material channel, that an efficiently functioning material world is as necessary for the operations of spirit as an axe is necessary for the chopping of wood. No brain, no consciousness, in other words.
They just believed that there could also be brains of whose operations we know nothing, in the entities that those folks were pleased to call the Bodiless Powers.
None of it has to be true; perhaps none of it is; but it is remarkable that it should have been so forgotten that it had to be rediscovered by folks grumbling that there had to be something wrong with the way the world was interpreted…and who, as with anyone who has gone to the effort of figuring something out that was difficult to interpret, assumed that all this must be true because it took so much work to figure out what on earth the writers were talking about.
A phenomenology of such matters would not make this category mistake, and would let the odd realization stand as just one more view of how the world works. It would examine the experiential evidence that led to such views of how the world works, and would come to understand the contrary evidence that led to the view that any such view of how the world works must be preposterous.
If today we say “Stuff and nonsense!” to the idea that we are a self unknowingly manipulating what we think is our self, we can examine why we think we have good reason for so believing. The sociology of knowledge has given us tools with which to do this.
We can examine what constitutes “having good reasons.” This is where I came in, years ago, in my doctoral dissertation, with how we go about judging and deciding, and what goes into deciding what is valid evidence and what is not; and how our critical faculties have developed and how we mask our own self-deception.
But once we are aware of why we believe something must be true, we are also free to examine why we may have our crania inserted firmly into our rectal cavities, despite the physical difficulty of accomplishing this posture.
And I have suggested recently that some of those who believed in such models may have reached this level of critical self-awareness much sooner in history than we think; may have decided that the condition of having and not-having was theirs and that instead of identifying with the myth as it was given to them, they would use the parts of the myth that they knew for sure were operative (namely, how human behavior functions). But this is a just-so story on my part, and it may well be there were no such mystical skeptics avant le lettre.
