Phronema

I have been reading Nelson Pike’s Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism. As the title suggests it is a philosophical approach and he is very clear; asks very sensible questions and takes nothing for granted. His problem, and I think it is a problem generally, is that he does not give enough attention to emotions. This is understandable. Emotions, like mystical experience, are entirely subjective and are not available to others, unless mediated symbolically through art, music, language and metaphor. Ideas and concepts can take on an objective existence of their own. They become what Popper called World 3 objects. As such they can be studied and they can be evaluated according to the criteria available to World 1 and World 3. But this does not get us very far. Towards the end of the book, after pages of exhaustive analysis, Pike comes to the conclusion that ‘theistic experience is possible’.

Although emotions are not available for objective study we cannot leave them out of the equation. Somehow they have to be integrated into the various human ‘sophies’ and ‘ologies’. Because ultimately it is emotions, feelings, which bestow meaning and significance. We know this. We have always known this. If something does not feel right then no amount of thinking, rational logic, will make it right. Now, the question is – why should subjective, ephemeral feelings be the arbiters of meaning rather than ‘eternal’ truths? When feelings endorse what we believe to be true there is a harmony and a sense (feeling, again) of unshakeable certainty. The resulting sense may be of peace and security, or it may be of the pointlessness and futility of human existence. But there is a solidity, a certainty which is not easily shaken. When feelings and beliefs conflict then there is discordance, a disharmony which may result in worry and anxiety, and in the suppression of feelings, or in the suppression of beliefs. Either way, all is not well.

Whatever else it means, being human means being a psychosomatic entity, a unity. Platonic and Cartesian dualism, just from my own limited experience, are not valid options. My body has a far greater impact on my mind than the other way round. Dualism provides a solution to the problem of existence after death. The death and decomposition of the body simply means that the more important spiritual element can migrate to another body, or to another mode of existence. But if one is a psychosomatic unity then death presents a problem. There is no arguing with the finality of death and the decomposition of the body.

This is where dualism is so handy. It provides a neat, simple and readily understandable solution. It offers hope in the face of the terrible reality of death of the body. There are all sorts of supporting factors. People have out of the body experiences, near death experiences, mystical experiences in which the body is somehow transcended. It is even possible to visualise an existence apart from the body, as a mind aware of all that is going on. But, and this is where the problem of the emotions makes things complicated, emotions are physical. They are bodily feelings that emerge in the amygdala and proceed to the neo-cortex. They impose themselves on the rational mind. They are almost entirely independent of the rational mind and very little affected by it however much the mind might want to impose its will on the emotions. According to Joseph LeDoux

Neuroanatomists have shown that the pathways that connect the emotional processing system of fear, the amygdala, with the thinking brain, the neocortex, are not symmetrical -the connections from the cortex to the amygdala are considerably weaker than those from the amygdala to the cortex. This may explain why, once an emotion is aroused, it is so hard for us to turn it off at will.
(http://www.cns.nyu.edu/ledoux/overview.htm)

Two questions emerge – to what extent are emotions the result of physical factors? This is important because if it were possible for the mind to exist apart from the body would it be able to feel emotions? The idea of existing in a blissful state of apatheia is not satisfactory. (Anyway bliss is a feeling.) If it is emotions which convey meaning and significance what is the point of existing as a passionless centre of awareness? One might as well be a computer.

The other question is – what is a person? Do the two alternatives, an embodied spirit, or a conscious psychosomatic unity exhaust all the possibilities? My feeling (feeling again) is no. Both of these possibilities reify what is more a process than a thing. A person is never a fixed entity but a constant process of becoming. Secondly, neither take into account the extent to which a person is constituted by relationships. To be human is to relate. I, as a person, am not circumscribed by my skin. My being extends into the being of others as does theirs into me. And not just other persons.

But enough. The more I write the more I realise how little I understand. There is a gulf between between the rational arguments of people like Pyke and LeDoux and the experience of countless others. How kind of Pyke to acknowledge the possibility of theistic experience, something that for so many is an undoubted reality. And do we now fully understand the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of emotions and feelings? One of the Upanishads says somewhere, “He who speaks does not know, he who knows does not speak.”

What is it that makes something truly significant? This has been popping up in my thoughts one way or another these last couple of weeks. It struck me that only what we experience is real, real for us. I can understand what exercised Bishop Berkley now. Reality is continually expanding and contracting according to our state of awareness. One of the bad things about being ill is that the preoccupation with bodily pain and discomfort shrinks the circumference of perception to the limits of that body. The universe becomes a bed of pain. The glory of the night sky, the extravagance of sunsets, the light-hearted laughter of children, the lazy buzzing of flies on a summer day, all these cease to have existence and meaning. Only the constricted and contracted me exists, only what goes on within the tight circumference of the body is real.

This raises the scary question of which is the real me. Is the real me just a fluctuating bubble of awareness which has had its moments of expansion and will one day shrink until it disappears without even a discernible pop. You can see this in old people as they sit for most of the day in their armchairs, dozing and gazing vaguely and the television. Their world is confined to fading memories of ancient excitements. The mind recoils and refuses to be so extinguished, even though it knows that it has no control over what happens to it, even though it is aware that one by one its memories are slipping into the dark pool of forgetting. Let them out of sight for too long and they slide away unnoticed and are gone. Is this it? If it is, nothing is real. Meaning is the feeling of this moment. I cannot accept this but on the other hand this is what experience shows me. Is there another experience? Can one break out of the confines of this oh-so-limited and puny body/mind?

Thinking about that tag of Aquinas – whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver – or something similar. It is obvious at one level. A dog sees things as a dog, a cat as a cat, etc. It is less obvious when it comes to people. It is noticeable in matters of race, nationality or gender, it is less obvious and more difficult to explain when it comes to attitudes to life and questions of meaning. What is the difference between a saint and an ordinary person? It is not the case that both see life similarly and that one chooses the path of heroic virtue and the other does not. It is more subtle than that. The difficulty for the ordinary person (if there is such an animal) is that he cannot see things other than as an ordinary person. The challenge is first to become aware of this limitation; to come to see that there are other modes of being, some better, some worse, and that it is possible to change modes. Better in what way? Better in the sense of being more happy and fulfilled, in the sense of knowing, in the sense that one comes to be rather than to have, is proactive rather than reactive, in the sense that one draws nearer to the truth.

(Quidquid recipitur secundum modum recipientis recipitur.)

I keep thinking about the relationship of body and mind. It struck me the other day that it is no coincidence that the Noble Eightfold Path has six prescriptions which concern the body and only two, the last two concern the mind. Formerly, when I read it, or about it, I tended to take the first six for granted. Of course this is the right way to behave. How like the Sermon on the Mount, and so on. The interesting ones, though, are the last two, and especially the last one – right concentration. This is the one that gets you to enlightenment. But now I am beginning to realise that they are all important. There has to be a unity of body and mind and the first six are the foundation on which the final two depend. It struck me too that they go very deep.

Thinking further it occurred that Paul’s experience, described in Romans 7 when he found that his body and his will were not under his control and he did the things he did not want to do, is an example of this. It is no good trying to achieve right mindfulness if the body and the senses are dictating the agenda. But how to achieve control over them? With Paul it was a conversion experience, or perhaps more than one, and even then it was never complete and he complained about a thorn in the flesh he could not eradicate.

I think it has to be the first seven steps of the Path all working together. The thing about meditation, or mindfulness, is that it is not really effective unless it pervades the whole day and all its activities. Unless it does this it remains a struggle with the body, with distractions, feelings and moods. When it does begin to permeate the day, mindfulness is there catching these moods and feelings as they begin to arise and is able to put them into context before they become full-blown and powerful. Why struggle with an emotion or feeling in the full flood of its surge? You will either lose and later feel guilty and base, or you will have an exhausting emotional struggle and in the end feel empty and unsatisfied because you desperately wanted to do something but were not able to. It inevitably leaves behind an itch yearning for satisfaction and, sooner or later, it will be satisfied. There will come a moment of weakness and you will succumb. This is what Paul experienced and what we all experience. Even after Paul’s conversion experience, long after he could say, ‘I live now not I but Christ lives in me’, he had to struggle with ‘the thorn in the flesh’. Mindfulness allows us to be aware of thoughts and feelings as they arise and before they grip the attention.