The Real World

Straw Dogs and Spirits

In my entry entitled, “The Curse of the Matrix”, I argued, that the widespread and surprisingly ancient belief that everyday reality is illusory is, itself, a pernicious illusion. This time, I interrogate the idea of the “real world’ beyond the illusion. I suggest that this idea is as meaningless as the idea that we live in a world of illusion if false. My goal here is, in many ways, the same, namely, that we would do well to grow out of ideas like “true” and “false” reality. There is only one reality – the one we all experience. Whether this experience “takes place” within the bowels of an advanced supercomputer or within our individual and collective skulls is of no importance whatsoever to the nature and meaning of our experience. If this sounds interesting to you, lets dig in.

Imagine you are walking on a beach just after sunset. The sand is still warm from The Sun, a crescent Moon hangs overhead. Rough sand between your toes, salt spray upon your lips. The sound of the surf in your ears. As you listen, you hear voices. Are there other people in the distance or is it your brain trying to make meaningful patterns from random noise. Memories flood in – walking on the beach with someone special, playing in the surf as a kid, your grandparent’s stories about Cony Island, Atlantic City, Normandy. All the songs of surf and sea and sand.

The last paragraph – the words triggering images in your mind, the specific memories these words might have awakened, the sensory impressions from which the memories and images were formed, none of that was the REAL world. Or was it? What do we mean when we speak of the real world? Grains of sand under a microscope resemble jewels but the beach doesn’t (usually) look like a great expanse of diamonds. The heat from the sand, invisible infrared rays, the salt on your lips has no “taste” at all apart from the receptors on your tongue, the crescent moon above a complex interplay of light and shade on a ball of rock hundreds of thousands of miles away. The whole seen assembled from information accessed from and by tissue inside of your skull. Every bit of this story, or of everyday life, is “mediated”. There is no such thing as “direct experience”. There is always some “substance” beneath experience. But experience is always known in terms of INFORMATION. Experience is substance informed. We cannot derive the information about experience from its material substrate any more than we can experience music by looking at the grooves on a vinyl record or the pits on a compact disk. Yet without such a medium, it is difficult to imagine how information could ever be experienced at all.

In everyday experience we describe the material world in terms of immaterial qualia (this coffee is hot, bitter, dark, etc.). We could ask what “makes” coffee bitter and find, for example, that caffeine is bitter. But what makes caffeine bitter? Bitterness is a subjective experience that occurs when certain chemicals interact with specific receptors on the tongues of mammals. This process could, in theory, be described to aliens who had no such receptors or even tongues. These aliens wouldn’t experience “bitterness”. They might hear us going on about how much we enjoy the taste of coffee. Maybe they are a species that really prizes novel experience and resent us for being able to experience something so clearly enjoyable which they cannot. Perhaps they might be able to describe that feeling to one of us coffee drinkers. We might say “yes, you are feeling bitter about your inability to taste bitterness”. Why do we say that? Perhaps our alien friends might wonder how we could compare an experience we obviously enjoy to one that they do not? Clearly, there is more to bitterness than chemical receptors and alkaloids. Even a blind man can sing the blues. Isn’t that strange?

In his book “Words Made Flesh” Ramsey Dukes introduces us to Johnstone’s Paradox. Simply stated, if the world is composed entirely of matter and energy with no “spiritual” (non-physical) entities like souls, gods, ghosts, etc. then this world should be completely replicable within a sufficiently powerful computer. If this is so, it is highly unlikely that it hasn’t already happened. This is, in my opinion, the best argument for the claim that we live in a simulation like The Matrix. Yet it, like all “simulation theory” leaves open the question of whether there is any “original” world of which this one is a simulation.

Immersed as we are in a world of audio/video technology and with the promise of Virtual Reality always on the horizon, it is easy to imagine a technologically mediated experience that would “fool us” into taking it for the real thing. But the notion of a “real world” behind an illusory one is not at all new. In ancient Hebrew and Vedic thought there was already the idea that divine beings “wrote” the world (Hebrew and Sanskrit were both thought to be literally the language of God). Beyond this rather fanciful notion, humans have always had a deep (and, as it turns out accurate) intuition that the world we experience isn’t the whole world. But what is interesting is how often this intuition is expressed as paranoia about some malevolent agents creating a false world in which to entrap us. Why do we assume that, if there is a “real” world (a big assumption in itself) that we would have any way of experiencing it or verifying its authenticity? Are we bitter about our imagined lack of access to the real world? If we never experienced it, what makes us so sure there is such a place? The answer to these questions lies in our conflation of form with substance. A little geometry might help us to disentangle the two and begin to see just what it is that we seem to be denied access to.

A triangle is a figure with three angles that, when added together, equal 180° irrespective of how long the sides of the figure are. There needn’t be any material object which displays these characteristics, but if such an object exists, (three sided tables, three cornered hats, the gable of a peaked roof, etc.) we say that it is “triangular” in FORM. Three sided tables and three-cornered hats are physical objects that participate in the nature of the triangle, but the triangle neither arises from, nor is dependent upon these (or any other objects) to exist. The triangle is a METAPHYSICAL entity to which there might, or might not, be corresponding material objects. When we see the gable end of a peaked roof we do not usually say, “well yes, that LOOKS LIKE a triangle but I want to see THE REAL triangle”. Yet I believe

Western philosophy has been obsessed with the substance/form relationship since at least the time of Plato. We might remember Plato’s analogy of the cave – we (humans) are like people bound in a cave. We face the rear wall of this cave where shadows are cast from the world outside and take these shadows as real. Plato uses this analogy as a launching point to talk about how forms are more perfect than substance – how the roundness of The Moon for example is a poor substitute for roundness AS SUCH. The idea here is that the uneducated have an impoverished experience of reality because they only know appearances but do not understand the eternal forms upon which these appearances are founded.

As someone who studied philosophy, I have always been somewhat ambivalent about this idea. As a diviner, I am in intimate contact with archetypal reality, the world of the forms. But the notion that the world we perceive through our senses, and which appears to us in the inner world of dreams and visions is somehow inferior to the “real” world of pure form smacks of a puerile elitism which I would like to discredit. To that end, I will make a few definitive claims.

First, we only know the world of pure forms, whether we are talking about geometric forms or abstract ideas like beauty and justice THROUGH their representations in material form. This includes the material form of our own bodies which interact with and receive information from the rest of the material world. While I do not believe that the forms arise from the material world, these forms could never be known, even to one another without the substance (that which stands beneath) of the material world. This idea is central to Taoist philosophy which views the receptive, material world as co-arising with the creative metaphysical world of forms. In LiSe Heyboer’s translation of the I Ching we read:

Hex.1 is the contrast of hex.2, which is about practical reality. The laws of Heaven are 'behind' everything practical, they give life its structure. Heaven regulates the time.

And:

Hex.2 is complementary to hex.1 Earth can create reality, but needs the structures, plans and laws from Heaven. Try to find the balance between those two, plan with reality in mind, act based on clear rules.

Hex (hexagram) 1 relates to the world of form while Hex. 2 relates to the manifest world in which we all live. The latter embodies the former. The material world does not conceal a deeper, more “real” metaphysical or spiritual realm but rather embodies this world. Without the material world, the world of spirit (or the Gods) would have no means of expression. At the same time, all that can ever be expressed by the material world is of the spirit.

The material world is the medium in which the spirit world expresses itself. In astrology, for example, when we speak of Venus, we are not claiming that the second planet from The Sun IS Venus any more than we mean that you (or I or anyone else) IS our body. The planet Venus is one of many means by which the SPIRIT of Venus finds expression in the material world. Roses, copper, the color green, beauty, women, sisters, harmony, The Emperess Card in Tarot – all of these things are OF Venus, they express, but do not exhaust her eternal nature. This would be true whether these things were “real” or mere representations.

As an animist, I am committed to the idea that the material world is host to spirits. When a tree is cut down or a person dies, the main material anchor for some spirit is removed and that spirit is less tightly tied to the material world. But it does not disappear entirely. This is shown by the fact that, when our loved ones die, they remain with us “in spirit” as memories and stories, the contributions they made to the world and even the “hole” that they leave when they drop their body. That hole is as much my dead grandmother as her once warm body was. If she simply became a non-entity, why would I still miss her? This is why we tell stories of Gods and heroes and why we find appropriate material containers for immaterial sentiments, paper hearts, bunches of flowers, the perfect gift. Whether the story unfolds in the pages of a book, through a screen or via direct neuro-link, it is THE STORY ITSELF which is ultimately what we mean by “real”. But stories need bodies to hear and to tell. The material world gives substance to the form of these stories.

Afterwords

We humans have a long history of skepticism about the nature of reality. This skepticism arises from the intuition that our senses do not furnish us with a complete picture of reality. While this intuition is well founded and scientifically verifiable, it isn’t something we usually worry about when we are snuggling a baby or running from a predator. In such situations, real enough is good enough. Our skepticism is aroused once we have been the victim of some deception, whether by someone else or, by the limitations of our own senses and cognitive reach. People who have been wounded in love become skeptical of the reality of love; people who have been traumatized by religion become skeptical about the reality of the spirit world. Life can be brutal and disappointing, and it always ends the same. Our awareness of this fact is the foundation of all spiritual and philosophical traditions that hold mortal life in low regard and see a truer, more genuine life beyond. This is, I believe, at the heart of the persistent belief that real life must reside somewhere else. While this might seem like wisdom, it anchors much foolishness.

We take care of what we believe in. If the material world is a world of lies, why should we take care of it. If the soul is not real, what is the difference between being surrounded by a loving community and a staff of automated robots that can meet our every need with no needs of their own. On the other hand, if the spirit world is unreal than the only value anything in the material world can have is its immediate usefulness to us. A bit of reflection should suffice to convince the reader that to doubt the reality of either the material or the spirit world leads us to the same place.

Before concluding, I want to suggest a few Tarot cards for contemplation.

The Ten of Cups depicts a bucolic scene of happiness. A happy couple watches as their children frolic in the meadow before them, a small but lovely home nestled in the distant trees. Above, ten cups hang within the rainbow. The decan that this card represents (Pisces 3) is ruled by Mars who’s card is The Tower.

The Tower depicts catastrophe. Lightning sets the structure ablaze; crowned figures dive from the windows to likely death and injury. How is this scene related to the Ten of Cups?

Look at the rainbow that contains the abundant cups of joy. What do we know of rainbows? They are an illusion based on a precarious coincidence of light and suspended water droplets. Rainbows are not “things”, but rather, situations. The delicate configuration of circumstances that present us with the rainbow cannot last. Yet, to deny their beauty because of these things is to deny something deeply human.

The Tower, for its part, is known in older traditions as “the house of God”. In this card we loose everything solid and predictable, everything that insures and reproduces the idea of our mastery of reality. This was seen, especially by Christian occultists, as a good thing because it forces us to surrender our own judgements of what is right and real and throws us back upon the forces that brought us here – to quote the poet Patti Smith “the storm that brings harm also makes fertile”.

Happiness isn’t supposed to last. The mechanisms within our bodies that create what we call happiness are reward systems. They evolved or were engineered into living beings to encourage us to repeat things that contribute to the furtherance of life. Eating, resting, exercising, having sex, building something of beauty and value; all of these things contribute to the flourishing of life. And not just our lives as individuals, but life at large. To maintain the health and vitality of the material world insures that the spirit realm will always find a nest among us. There is no illusion here, no deception, it is just that our individual lives are not the priority of reality. Rather, we are vehicles for the spirit world, for resurrection and reincarnation. Lao Tzu taught that: “The Tao treats all things as straw dogs.” In ancient China, straw dogs were used as sacrificial effigies. Natural order shows no partiality to individuals but rather, uses the material world, and every part thereof including us, as vectors for the expression of spirit. The sense we sometimes have of being “used” is, in this sense true. Our bodies, and all things, merely “take form” (like a three-cornered hat takes the form of a triangle) but does not retain it. But we might also experience this taking form as a kind of thrill that the material world experiences when spirit moves within it, like the breath of God that moved upon the deep. Or, as LiSe Heyboer writes:

The earth lies motionless, time after time. Nothing moves, nothing lives. But deep in her darkness something is waiting. Patient, or asleep. Then the energy and the vibrations of thunderstorms touch her, and suddenly she is all over vibrant with life. Lightning, thunder, rain, they come and go suddenly, but a whole year of luxuriant growth has started.