In my last entry I made the brief (but oh so compelling) argument that I'd found the true difference between liberals and conservatives, the atomic philosophical point that fuels the perpetually antagonistic stalemate of partisan politics and compels the twenty-four hour news channels into unyielding fervor. It is not about gun control, or abortion, or varying emphases on the term "freedom," nor any other conveniently superficial issue. No, it's simply a preference of expression - whether you believe that the 'answers' to the world's 'problems' should be expressed in terms of absolutes or thoughtful relativity, black and white or shades of grey. I'm going to write more about this now (and this time we'll see if I'm familiar with English words other than 'nuance' and 'distinction').
Even if you buy my first premise, you might be asking why I insist on linking the monochrome/greyvie population with the two major political parties. Won't such cavalier oversimplifications of people's hard-fought worldviews satisfy none and alienate all? Maybe. Actually, ironically, I bet that only the monochromes will feel put-off. The grey-vies will probably be pretty into it. Let's continue.
Black and White means Good and Evil, the basic proposition of traditional Judeo-Christian morality. Sure, everyone makes both good and bad decisions throughout their life, but at the end of the day you end up in one of two places: perpetual bliss or eternal damnation. There's no middle ground in finality, despite the middle ground of most people's decision-making career. Perhaps it's a matter of weighting percentages, as in you just need to shoot for 51% good to make the cut, but that seems a little arbitrary. For many it's a matter of having been saved by belief, so that their less-than-perfect track record on Earth is given a dramatic (and some would say unfair) boost in the final tally.
Eastern religion is usually attributed with the 'grey' slant on good and evil - there's no judgment here, both bad and good are necessary aspects of life, caught in an eternal dance where one never surpasses the other and neither ever disappear. This is the ying and yang, Shiva as Creator and Destroyer, and a whole rainbow of reincarnation options when it's all said and done. If you're kind of good, maybe you'll get to be a lion. If you're kind of less good, maybe you'll be a gazelle instead. There's no angst here as to whether the morality switch has been flipped on or off, because it's really more of a dimmer. The mood lighting of the soul. Am I saying that all liberals are Hindu at heart? Well, yes, but that's not very American, so no. I'd go with "kind of Christian," but...forget it, let's just call it Anglican and move on, shall we?
(I do think there is middle ground here, especially if you bring Emanuel Swedenborg into the discussion. Here we have a view of spirituality and the afterlife that seems compatible with both worldviews - DT Suzuki hailed Swedenborg the Buddha of the North for this very reason. This casting of heaven and hell still presents a basic dichotomy: Heaven is Good, and Hell is Bad. But, and here's the rub, there are infinite degrees within heaven and hell. Some people live "on the outskirts of heaven," others in the lower earth, or the desert, or to the north. There's a whole other heaven for polygymast Muslims who had the other nine commandments down. It's a varied place, with many shades.)
So this gets back to the political thing. I don't really care if you or I are grey or monochramtic in how we consider the minutiae of our lives, because we'll work with whatever we've got, but what kind of leader do you want? That's the question that I think most election rhetoric is really trying to get to. Do you want someone who will take a hard line on anything and everything, or someone who will thoughtfully muse on the possible repercussions of a given subject? Warrior chief or a philosopher king?
And I know you think I'm overstating the point, I hear your complaints, but in this case you're wrong. There are such thing as thoughtful conservatives, true. But when a grey-vie is reflecting on a situation, he knows there's no ideal outcome, and has already resigned himself to a compromise based on the various mitigating factors. The final decision is probably something like "okay, the best we could have done under the circumstances." A monochromatic worldview still allows for moral ambiguity, but only in the short term. The goal isn't to reach a compromise, but to make a decision - everything considered, is this good, or is it bad? And 'bad,' in this case, is an all-or-nothing proposition. Once the discussion's over, that thing, whatever it is, is not with us. Therefore, it is most likely against us (if you're unconvinced, just think Freedom Fries). And there's a good reason why most black-or-white decisions fall mostly onto the conservative platform. There are certain concepts that seem *obviously* good, like having babies. When you make the subject more complex, it becomes ambiguous, and there's no obvious good on the other end of the spectrum (not having babies?). If we're just shooting for 51%, this will fall back on the simplest good nine times out of ten. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Now, the next obvious question: aren't there hard-nosed liberals in the world, who make black-or-white statements about those very same ambiguous outcomes? Yes, there are athiests who get together in groups just so they can all not worship a god together. Yes, of course, and these people really are the worst human beings on the planet.
Showing posts with label Swedenborg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Swedenborg. Show all posts
Monday, September 8, 2008
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Overthinking the Interwebs
"Mythology creep" is a big issue for me. I spend most of my time fostering a massive internal mythology, and this process is largely flavored by my current environment and activities; the world around me seeps into my brain's deeper mechanics and the mythology-of-the-day paces itself by this rhythm. These days I work a lot with media; my job is really just the ongoing process of funneling media, diverting it off the main reservoir and redirecting it along a series of more focused streams and riverbeds. This means that I spend about eight work-hours a day in front of a computer, in addition to two or three hours of computer-based personal activities (including my twelve-step therapeutic regimen). So when I tell you that technology has played a prominent role in the mythology the last few years, you'll understand the emphasis with which I use the word 'prominent.'
Right now I just want to talk about how the internet figures in to the whole thing. Like most of my thematic obsessions, its tied directly to The Common Theme - the Swedenborgian concept of a viscerally graspable underlying spiritual reality. I hate trying to articulate the concept itself, because its exactly the sort of thing that language is really bad at, but here goes. The gist of the matter is that my thoughts are never coming directly from the physical world - that's obvious, I can't see them or taste them. I can however choose to do stuff in the physical world, and these actions will inevitably direct my thoughts down a certain path (diverting them off the main reservoir and down a series of more focused streams and riverbeds). I can also choose to focus on certain thoughts, or recall something lodged in recent memory, and what I dwell on is going to greatly affect my mood. There's a mechanism at work here, between the choices I make and the thoughts that I have (and vice versa), and the 'underlying spiritual reality' concept is just one description of how that mechanism might work. A description which I happen to think is true. While I'm walking down the street in Omaha, having a hypothetical argument with someone in my head who rubbed me the wrong way, my 'spirit' is simultaneously wandering amongst a society of hateful spirits, and it's their thoughts, their love of resentment, that is fueling my current mental fuming in Nebraska. I'm actually in hell in that moment, and in that moment hell is inside me.
I like to use this example to encapsulate the whole thing: when I was more of a teenager, every once in a while I would find myself in a conversation about the occult. Someone has a ghost story that happened to their uncle, and that reminds someone else of the actual haunted house they heard about where a dozen people or more have seen the same apparition of the dead woman in the floral spring dress. This goes on past dark, and at some point there's a discernible change in the room's atmosphere. Ghosts stop being this weird intellectual thing and become more of a remote possibility, and at any rate people are now looking over their shoulder every five seconds and will likely have a harder time going to sleep that night. I like to think about the spiritual reality mechanism here - that people have been talking about evil creepy spirits, and suddenly it feels like they're all around. Because, on a spiritual level, they are all around - they've been invited in, and are whispering gross nothings into everybody's ears.
So, the Internet. I was going to talk about that.
The thing with the Internet is that it provides (for me) a really conveniently excellent model of this spiritual reality business. Or, for that matter, the collective unconscious. In both cases, you've got this huge nebulous ocean of seemingly infinite possibilities. You can't index it or track its size, and yet to fish anything out requires only the will to do so (and a quick Google search). In one moment you could not have ever been aware that something even exists, and in the next you're presented with reams of information about it, web portals devoted to its preservation and forums to its discussion and encouragement. You can check something out once and leave it forever, or you can then adopt it as part of your regular internet routine, becoming an entrenched member of its community. And like the spiritual world, doing so requires very little more than simply the sheer act of curiosity. My internet browsing experiences are very much like this, and sometimes, depending on my mood, I end up in some pretty weird places.
Just to needlessly bring the two worlds together, I like to picture that some websites actually are hosted by ethereal servers in the spiritual world, that there are little pockets of hell with demons learning javascript and pumping out Flash ads.
I keep coming back to the idea that modern psychology is defined by the computer, which provided a mainstream analogy for component-based neurology to gain traction (different brain clusters process information differently, much like a CPU, RAM and hard drive, etc.) Before computers we were stuck explaining everything with tubes and steam, and had no use for things like the prefrontal cortex or limbic system. Does the Internet help explain the spiritual world in a similar way? Maybe it just confuses the issue. In my mythology the Internet always serves as a physical analogy to the invisible web of influences that connect humanity, but I might just be weird like that.
Right now I just want to talk about how the internet figures in to the whole thing. Like most of my thematic obsessions, its tied directly to The Common Theme - the Swedenborgian concept of a viscerally graspable underlying spiritual reality. I hate trying to articulate the concept itself, because its exactly the sort of thing that language is really bad at, but here goes. The gist of the matter is that my thoughts are never coming directly from the physical world - that's obvious, I can't see them or taste them. I can however choose to do stuff in the physical world, and these actions will inevitably direct my thoughts down a certain path (diverting them off the main reservoir and down a series of more focused streams and riverbeds). I can also choose to focus on certain thoughts, or recall something lodged in recent memory, and what I dwell on is going to greatly affect my mood. There's a mechanism at work here, between the choices I make and the thoughts that I have (and vice versa), and the 'underlying spiritual reality' concept is just one description of how that mechanism might work. A description which I happen to think is true. While I'm walking down the street in Omaha, having a hypothetical argument with someone in my head who rubbed me the wrong way, my 'spirit' is simultaneously wandering amongst a society of hateful spirits, and it's their thoughts, their love of resentment, that is fueling my current mental fuming in Nebraska. I'm actually in hell in that moment, and in that moment hell is inside me.
I like to use this example to encapsulate the whole thing: when I was more of a teenager, every once in a while I would find myself in a conversation about the occult. Someone has a ghost story that happened to their uncle, and that reminds someone else of the actual haunted house they heard about where a dozen people or more have seen the same apparition of the dead woman in the floral spring dress. This goes on past dark, and at some point there's a discernible change in the room's atmosphere. Ghosts stop being this weird intellectual thing and become more of a remote possibility, and at any rate people are now looking over their shoulder every five seconds and will likely have a harder time going to sleep that night. I like to think about the spiritual reality mechanism here - that people have been talking about evil creepy spirits, and suddenly it feels like they're all around. Because, on a spiritual level, they are all around - they've been invited in, and are whispering gross nothings into everybody's ears.
So, the Internet. I was going to talk about that.
The thing with the Internet is that it provides (for me) a really conveniently excellent model of this spiritual reality business. Or, for that matter, the collective unconscious. In both cases, you've got this huge nebulous ocean of seemingly infinite possibilities. You can't index it or track its size, and yet to fish anything out requires only the will to do so (and a quick Google search). In one moment you could not have ever been aware that something even exists, and in the next you're presented with reams of information about it, web portals devoted to its preservation and forums to its discussion and encouragement. You can check something out once and leave it forever, or you can then adopt it as part of your regular internet routine, becoming an entrenched member of its community. And like the spiritual world, doing so requires very little more than simply the sheer act of curiosity. My internet browsing experiences are very much like this, and sometimes, depending on my mood, I end up in some pretty weird places.
Just to needlessly bring the two worlds together, I like to picture that some websites actually are hosted by ethereal servers in the spiritual world, that there are little pockets of hell with demons learning javascript and pumping out Flash ads.
I keep coming back to the idea that modern psychology is defined by the computer, which provided a mainstream analogy for component-based neurology to gain traction (different brain clusters process information differently, much like a CPU, RAM and hard drive, etc.) Before computers we were stuck explaining everything with tubes and steam, and had no use for things like the prefrontal cortex or limbic system. Does the Internet help explain the spiritual world in a similar way? Maybe it just confuses the issue. In my mythology the Internet always serves as a physical analogy to the invisible web of influences that connect humanity, but I might just be weird like that.
Friday, April 18, 2008
The Common Theme
Going forward, I'd like to identify some basic thinking patterns which dictate the course the mythology takes. The ideas and characters and stories that I collect aren't completely arbitrary, nor is my decision to dwell on one area more than another. It's not like I really choose what I'm going to be obsessed with, or hand-pick what themes are going to haunt my day, but there is a loose guiding principle involved here. And I think I can identify it. Its name is Emanuel Swedenborg.
Swedenborg was a theologian from the 18th century who conquered every realm of science then available, exhaustively searching for the biological seat of the human soul. Failing this he went on to do some other things, before an angel appeared one day and asked him about his health. From this point forward Swedenborg claimed to live half in this world and half in the spiritual world, in heaven and hell and the places in between, all the while journaling his findings and explorations with the keen scientific mindset he'd adopted earlier in life. At first his writings were a loose collection of thoughts and observations in which he struggled to understand what was happening to him. And then, at some point he got it, and proceeded to write out thirty-seven volumes of methodical doctrine describing the internal meaning of the bible and the true relationship between the natural and spiritual worlds.
Now, this is quite a trip, and I realize that most people haven't heard about this guy before. If they have, it's probably by proxy, having read one of the authors majorly influenced by his writings. William Blake, Dostoevsky, Jung, Borges -- all pretty big fans of the Swedenborg. I've studied the man a lot (in fact, approximately half of my bachelor's degree is dedicated to his work), and I've arrived at the conclusion that there are two major conceptual repercussions to what Swedenborg wrote, and that when people read him, they tend to resonate with one or the other, occasionally both.
The first repercussion is religious: Swedenborg didn't start a religion himself, but he reframed Christianity in a major way, encouraging people to dive into the nuances of their faith, but also to live purposefully and thoughtfully. This blog isn't about religion, so I'm going to leave that there.
The second repercussion is philosophical. Despite what hangups one might have about religious thought (or not, I don't know who reads this), Swedenborg provides a world view that's pretty hard to compete with in terms of nuance and comprehensiveness. When talking to another friend who'd recently started reading Swedenborg, I thought he summarized it pretty well when admitting, "I'm not sure if there's any way to tell if what he's saying is true, but I think I could spend the rest of my life thinking about it." No matter what I happen to be processing in a given moment, there are certain Swedenborgian premises that preclude everything else. They're the starting point. And not even because I need for them to be true, or take them firmly on faith, but because philosophically, the skew they allow me to put on everything I observe is always going to be more compelling and meaningful to me than that provided by any other kind of mindset I've come across (not that I'm actively shopping for mindsets - there's only so much time in the day).
So, anyway, I'm not going to lay out Swedenborg here. Google would do a better job of that. But there are a couple points I want to hit on, that I see as the nucleus of thought around which the mythology spins. Since I'm going to do a lousy job anyway, I guess I'll pick two things.
1. Swedenborg's heaven and hell don't exist as ethereal realms that one mysteriously transports to after death. By his conception the spiritual world just exists, and the natural world (that we see and smell and feel self-important about) sits on top of it. Now, there's a lot involved in this, and if I could encapsulate it satisfyingly in one paragraph than there'd be no need to mythologize. But there are some basic repercussions to this framework that I can hit on, such as the idea that our thoughts don't exist in isolation, but are actually the influence of spirits who are with us in a given moment. When we choose to dwell on lust or whatever, our spiritual selves are simultaneously moving through societies in hell where they love that stuff, where we're encouraged to continue down that line of thinking. If we get over ourselves and forgive someone, maybe we'll hang out with angels for a while, and feel the lift of their heavenly societies. By this thinking, most people drift between heaven and hell a dozen times in a normal day, and this is par for the course for humanity. But as time goes on, and we tend to dwell on certain things more than others, we wear down a path and hang out in some places more than others. So after death, then, it's not a matter of some arcane judgment process and delegation to an appropriately themed mythological realm, but just a matter of picking which spiritual society one liked best when they were alive. For some, this is coming from a place of generally thinking that other people are swell and trying to help them out. For others, it's almost exactly like Sin City (really, whatever you want to say about that movie, I think it provides an inspired portrayal of how I think about hell). After joining that society a person gets to join in on blindly influencing people on earth, while still feeling the thrill of life and living, because the spiritual world is substantially more realistic than ours.
Simple enough, right?
I think that Jung's 'collective unconscious' does a pretty good job of making this idea consumable to people who aren't willing to bite off the whole Swedenborg thing at once, so my obsession with that (which has been documented fairly well so far in this blog) is really an offshoot of this other, more fundamental concept. And the shadow-form things that were crawling out of the hole, other obsessions that I haven't gotten into yet, they're all coming from a place of trying to articulate this concept of an underlying spiritual reality. Cuz I think it's kinda cool. Moving on.
2. This is really a cheat, because it's just another repercussion of the underlying-spiritual-world concept. The big difference between the natural world and the spiritual world (other than our natural ability to move freely and sporadically between heaven and hell like the emotional wrecks that we are) is that the natural world is tied firmly to time and space, and the spiritual world isn't. Or at least, "spiritually" (I'm getting as sick of that word as you are), time and space aren't the sticking points that they are for us. Space, actually, is just a measurement of Love, and the space between spirits is dictated by how much they're coming from a similar point of view, with similar intentions and affections. And time, really, is just a measurement of progression. So, for example, people don't clock-watch in heaven, but they do go through morning, afternoon and evening stages, but these advancements are tied more closely to internal changes of state than the metronome-railroad situation we've got here.
And I personally happen to believe that the natural world, through advances in technology and culture, is hurtling closer to the spiritual world every day in terms of how we interact with these basic dimensions. But that's a wee bit non-canonical, as in, it's my own obsession, not specifically endorsed by any religion or philosophy I've come across. But still, Time. Whew. I could talk about it for a while. It's featured pretty prominently in the mythology lately.
Swedenborg was a theologian from the 18th century who conquered every realm of science then available, exhaustively searching for the biological seat of the human soul. Failing this he went on to do some other things, before an angel appeared one day and asked him about his health. From this point forward Swedenborg claimed to live half in this world and half in the spiritual world, in heaven and hell and the places in between, all the while journaling his findings and explorations with the keen scientific mindset he'd adopted earlier in life. At first his writings were a loose collection of thoughts and observations in which he struggled to understand what was happening to him. And then, at some point he got it, and proceeded to write out thirty-seven volumes of methodical doctrine describing the internal meaning of the bible and the true relationship between the natural and spiritual worlds.
Now, this is quite a trip, and I realize that most people haven't heard about this guy before. If they have, it's probably by proxy, having read one of the authors majorly influenced by his writings. William Blake, Dostoevsky, Jung, Borges -- all pretty big fans of the Swedenborg. I've studied the man a lot (in fact, approximately half of my bachelor's degree is dedicated to his work), and I've arrived at the conclusion that there are two major conceptual repercussions to what Swedenborg wrote, and that when people read him, they tend to resonate with one or the other, occasionally both.
The first repercussion is religious: Swedenborg didn't start a religion himself, but he reframed Christianity in a major way, encouraging people to dive into the nuances of their faith, but also to live purposefully and thoughtfully. This blog isn't about religion, so I'm going to leave that there.
The second repercussion is philosophical. Despite what hangups one might have about religious thought (or not, I don't know who reads this), Swedenborg provides a world view that's pretty hard to compete with in terms of nuance and comprehensiveness. When talking to another friend who'd recently started reading Swedenborg, I thought he summarized it pretty well when admitting, "I'm not sure if there's any way to tell if what he's saying is true, but I think I could spend the rest of my life thinking about it." No matter what I happen to be processing in a given moment, there are certain Swedenborgian premises that preclude everything else. They're the starting point. And not even because I need for them to be true, or take them firmly on faith, but because philosophically, the skew they allow me to put on everything I observe is always going to be more compelling and meaningful to me than that provided by any other kind of mindset I've come across (not that I'm actively shopping for mindsets - there's only so much time in the day).
So, anyway, I'm not going to lay out Swedenborg here. Google would do a better job of that. But there are a couple points I want to hit on, that I see as the nucleus of thought around which the mythology spins. Since I'm going to do a lousy job anyway, I guess I'll pick two things.
1. Swedenborg's heaven and hell don't exist as ethereal realms that one mysteriously transports to after death. By his conception the spiritual world just exists, and the natural world (that we see and smell and feel self-important about) sits on top of it. Now, there's a lot involved in this, and if I could encapsulate it satisfyingly in one paragraph than there'd be no need to mythologize. But there are some basic repercussions to this framework that I can hit on, such as the idea that our thoughts don't exist in isolation, but are actually the influence of spirits who are with us in a given moment. When we choose to dwell on lust or whatever, our spiritual selves are simultaneously moving through societies in hell where they love that stuff, where we're encouraged to continue down that line of thinking. If we get over ourselves and forgive someone, maybe we'll hang out with angels for a while, and feel the lift of their heavenly societies. By this thinking, most people drift between heaven and hell a dozen times in a normal day, and this is par for the course for humanity. But as time goes on, and we tend to dwell on certain things more than others, we wear down a path and hang out in some places more than others. So after death, then, it's not a matter of some arcane judgment process and delegation to an appropriately themed mythological realm, but just a matter of picking which spiritual society one liked best when they were alive. For some, this is coming from a place of generally thinking that other people are swell and trying to help them out. For others, it's almost exactly like Sin City (really, whatever you want to say about that movie, I think it provides an inspired portrayal of how I think about hell). After joining that society a person gets to join in on blindly influencing people on earth, while still feeling the thrill of life and living, because the spiritual world is substantially more realistic than ours.
Simple enough, right?
I think that Jung's 'collective unconscious' does a pretty good job of making this idea consumable to people who aren't willing to bite off the whole Swedenborg thing at once, so my obsession with that (which has been documented fairly well so far in this blog) is really an offshoot of this other, more fundamental concept. And the shadow-form things that were crawling out of the hole, other obsessions that I haven't gotten into yet, they're all coming from a place of trying to articulate this concept of an underlying spiritual reality. Cuz I think it's kinda cool. Moving on.
2. This is really a cheat, because it's just another repercussion of the underlying-spiritual-world concept. The big difference between the natural world and the spiritual world (other than our natural ability to move freely and sporadically between heaven and hell like the emotional wrecks that we are) is that the natural world is tied firmly to time and space, and the spiritual world isn't. Or at least, "spiritually" (I'm getting as sick of that word as you are), time and space aren't the sticking points that they are for us. Space, actually, is just a measurement of Love, and the space between spirits is dictated by how much they're coming from a similar point of view, with similar intentions and affections. And time, really, is just a measurement of progression. So, for example, people don't clock-watch in heaven, but they do go through morning, afternoon and evening stages, but these advancements are tied more closely to internal changes of state than the metronome-railroad situation we've got here.
And I personally happen to believe that the natural world, through advances in technology and culture, is hurtling closer to the spiritual world every day in terms of how we interact with these basic dimensions. But that's a wee bit non-canonical, as in, it's my own obsession, not specifically endorsed by any religion or philosophy I've come across. But still, Time. Whew. I could talk about it for a while. It's featured pretty prominently in the mythology lately.
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