The complete contents of this site are available here. Borderzone began on Google’s Blogger platform, and it will continue there. The reason for this change is that ads are now appearing here over which I have no control, and my alternative is to pay for the site ($99 a year as this is written). The Blogger platform is free and no ads appear. The WordPress version will remain here for a year. After that I will delete it.

I’ve always liked this platform and its excellent services. Nor do I blame WordPress for trying to pay of its services…

But religions are intuitive structures. Not surprisingly, therefore—and almost by way of a kind of Law of Compensation—the Our Lady becomes a very major symbolical figure, at least in Catholicism. Her statues and images are everywhere—and rare the office of Jesuit professors I used to visit in college where a prominent painting or statue of Mary was not the distinctive art in those offices. Indeed I remember reading, with approval of course, Robert Graves opining that the enduring quality of Catholicism as a religion, and (he might have added) its continuing strong attraction of converts everywhere, is due to a cultural correction introduced into the extraordinarily masculine theology by popular intuition. Once you open up that indivisible number, One, and thus (however explained, however theologized away) multiple persons appear—which, of course, happens in every religion sooner or later, if the real essence of it is strong—the numbers will multiply and the Feminine will make its appearance.

Catholicism makes a kind of conceptual but in practice meaningless distinction between veneration and worship. It is permissible to venerate the Virgin Mary but not to worship her. Doing that would be Mariolatry (rhymes with idolatry), a word of Protestant coinage dating to the eighteenth century.

Religions have a life of their own—and the cultural realities of it have more weight than the theological skeletons that are largely always out of sight. Thus also Buddhism evolved from a kind of very focused, ascetic elite pursuit into the Mahayana, with far more members than any other of its endlessly growing strands. But women in Buddhism are still written in very small letters. How many people know, for example, that the Buddha had been married? Or what Mrs. Gautama’s name had been? Well, for the record, she was the Princess Yahodharā. And she and the Buddha had had a boy called Rāhula. Learn something new every day.

It is possible to detach enough so that the difference—between ourselves and all else physical—turns visible. But it’s not habitual. The curious thing is that all habituation is of the physical variety whereas naked awareness always requires an act of the will. We can habituate ourselves to repeat actions or routines that wake us up, but, amusingly, no sooner are they really habits than they stop being effective. It’s very tough being real, easier to flow. And as we do, we like to say, It’s a jungle out there.

The experience certainly produces both a radical devaluation of the world and sometimes an equally radical indifference to it. The world is suddenly seen in a very new perspective. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who spent his life writing the most profound works of theology, had a mystical experience while saying mass late in 1273. He stopped writing. Asked to resume his work, he said: “Everything I have written seems like straw by comparison with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me” (source). He did not resume his work.

D.T. Suzuki, in Essays on Zen Buddhism, First Series, quotes the Buddha saying, p. 137: “These questions are not calculated to profit, they are not concerned with Dharma, they do not redound to the elements of right conduct, nor to detachment, nor to purification from lusts, nor to quietude, nor to tranquillization of heart, nor to real knowledge, nor to Nirvana. Therefore is it that I express no opinion on them.” The questions referred to were: Is the world eternal? Is the world not eternal? Is the world finite? The source given is the Pottapada Sutta (in which a beggar, Pottapada, asks the Buddha questions). That word Dharma is a killer, by the way. It means all sorts of things, including “doctrine.” In this context it is best understood as “the path.”

One of the striking features of the unitive experience is that those who’ve undergone it never say anything concrete, never mind new, about the world. They have a feeling of overwhelming knowledge, but it produces nothing they’re able to articulate. What we get from them is a valuation. That’s plain enough in Aquinas’ statement—as in the Buddha’s. Aquinas now dismisses his own works as more or less worthless—more or less because straw isn’t entirely worthless. The Buddha asserts that answering questions about the nature of the world is irrelevant to the achievement of the experience of nirvana. Valuations.

The most accessible written source about a full-fledged modern unitive experience is Pathways Through To Space (1973) by Franklin Merrell-Wolff (1887-1985). The book is readily available still and makes fascinating reading. Merrell-Wolff then tried to give some explanations in his The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object. That second book, in my opinion, has virtually no content—nor does a later one in which he includes commentary on his second book.

Having looked at such matters for many years now, I’ve gradually come to see the unitive experience minimally as a non-starter for cosmological thought. Those who’ve had it are overwhelmed by knowledge, but it’s content is inaccessible, not least to themselves. Now let’s suppose that it is—and I don’t by any means think that it is—an experience of the Ultimate. But if that is the case, it gives us two polarities and absolutely nothing in between. At one pole is Everything at the other Illusion—or something valued not at all. But how one relates to the other—and why it is that life-forms are so very, very intricately engineered, and ditto the elemental world beneath that engineering—that is never even remotely illuminated by this very energetic experience of enlightenment.

ALEX TREBEK (selecting, reading card): Enigmas for $300. “When the cold weather comes, the fowl flies up in the trees, while the wild duck goes down into water.”

CONTESTANT (ringing bell): What is Zen?

Now we say that space has three dimensions—but if we think in measurements, that’s not really true. I can measure a diagonal distance as well, thus from the left-hand upper corner at the ceiling to the right-hand bottom corner on the floor. That particular measurement (dimension) is a kind of mixture of the three. But that number, three, is conventionally accepted (except by people who play with fractals). And the playful mind then imagines that there might well be a fourth space dimension—and if a fourth then why not many more? For that to be real, the fourth would have to be at right angles to all three of the usual kind. Now our brain will balk. “Enough already,” it will say. “Can’t picture that. Cannot measure that. And if I can’t measure it, it’s not a dimension.” But people are more than their brains. They can’t imagine it, but they can use a symbol for representing it. And that symbol will work just fine in various equations—and hence we have whole fields of mathematical physics in which such phrases as N-dimensions will be tossed about quite lightly—although the few remaining Large Hadron Colliders, like the brain, simply refuse to bring us any physical proof of such dimensions.

Why mystical scribblers have learned to love the word is quite understandable. They deal with very-tough-to-explain experiences and want to find a place for them—one dimension over as it were. Now as for science fiction writers, they’re up against it too. The nearest star to us is 4 light years away. Light travels at the rate of 671 million miles per hour. Using the highest speed achieved by a manned rocket, Apollo 10, we can just about approach 25,000 mph. But that speed is less than one percent of the speed of light (0.004% to be exact). SF writers therefore must travel a great deal faster than light—but Einstein stands at that gate holding a flaming sword. SF therefore has recourse to the speculations of mathematical physics, produces worm holes that get around the problem, and suddenly the star ships are all over the galaxy in the flash of an eye, and only the galactic rim is a little more distant and takes a few days…

While we’re waxing dimensionally, I must mention Time as a dimension. But is it really? The neat thing about the Familiar Three is that we are free to move in them—now to this side, now to the other. Up then down. We can go back and we can go forth. But time presents a problem. We can only go in one direction. That seems to me a disqualifier. The way Time manages to get a foothold in the respectable society of dimensions is by transforming itself into a symbol, usually rendered as t. Once a symbol it can enter the sacred precincts (or are they dimensions) of abstract thought, marry space to become spacetime, and coyly hint that even time travel is possible if only we could harness the energy of a quasar to power our little time machine.

Although the Nova series began in 1974, I first consciously noticed reverent music and a materialistic thematic fused in a film when I watched Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, created by Carl Sagan in 1980. A thought then arose—and it keeps recurring every time this fusion reappears. The thought was: “Aha! Atheism as religion!” Behind that was the observation that Sagan attempted to reinforce emotions of exaltation by playing that swelling music while showing grand pictures—while his intellectual message was that there’s nothing beyond these wastes of gas and burning orbs and galaxies piled upon galaxies as far as telescopes could see. He was thus hijacking an ancient human reaction—that the wonders of nature are the works of God.

Mind you, life may have originated out there somewhere. Scientists whose views I value have asserted such things. One is Fred Hoyle (1915-2001). He was a pioneer theorist on the formation of elements inside stars (stellar nucleosynthesis) and a steady-state cosmologist. He thought that life came from outer space. In a lecture titled, Evolution from Space, given at the Royal Institute in London in 1982, he said:

If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of in pondering this issue over quite a long time seems to me to have anything like as high a possibility of being true.

My own entirely unscientific notions don’t require comet-borne sperm and viruses, but I agree with Hoyle on insisting on design—and disagree with modernity that it arises from a handful of elements, water, and heat by lucky accident. And we’re not alone. But that’s not the reason why.

In Aristotle (as best as I can gather), what we call real is substantial. Therefore neither matter nor form can exist alone. It is their fusion that makes reality. Hence unformed matter and immaterial form both produce categories the ontological status of which is rather fuzzy. It is potential—which gives time itself a strange sort of role. In Bohm, at least conceptually, a hierarchy is suggested. The Conditioned Order, just viewed linguistically, demands a conditioner—whereas the Unconditioned Order can be imagined standing alone.

The mere existence of two orders, one hierarchically beneath the next, suggests that the lower of the two has some meaningful purpose. What is that purpose? Is it the medium in which the mind can give itself expression?

Now to flesh this out a little. The Ultimate Mind can condition all matter. But we know that other levels of mind exist as well—minimally like ours. And if minds like ours exist, they imply an Ultimate mind. And we also know that lesser minds are capable of arranging matter but unable to alter its ultimate “conditioning.” We also know that matter itself manifests in a continuum—from invisible electromagnetic waves on up to planets and such. And gross, dense matter can and does block the flow of the electromagnetic. We know that. If the power of lesser minds is insufficient to even to “arrange” electromagnetic waves—and here I mean directly, by simply willing—and those minds found themselves (voluntarily or otherwise) in a region where dense matter predominates, wouldn’t those minds have suddenly felt a sudden drastic loss of functionality? They would have found it difficult to give themselves expression using subtle matter (not enough of it around) or to see each other (blocked by coarse energy everywhere). And what if self-expression and relationship, thus interacting with their like—were the sources of their creativity and their exercise of love? Would they have felt lost in space and time—and blind?

Such is the grounding for my concept of chemical civilization. The presumption is that long ago we found ourselves genuinely lost—thus in an environment of coarse material density. Next we discovered that our only power to influence matter in this region was at the subatomic level—but sufficient to begin using local matter to build tiny and then ever greater machines—until we could finally, by means of those machines, see ourselves and begin to arrange the matter of this region of reality.

It’s just a suggestion, of course. But such a line of thought, it seems to me, has explanatory powers much greater than many of our other myths. It suggests that the two, the conditioned and the unconditioned, may very well be everywhere—but happiness demands that the agents at every level must be matched to their environment so that they can create and relate. And when they’re not, “going home” becomes Job One.

Let me start with the first by focusing on a single word, Grace. The first dictionary definition of that word is “unmerited divine assistance given humans for their regeneration or sanctification.” The first example Merriam-Webster’s online version gives is “She walked across the stage with effortless grace.” The last three examples mention God. One of these is “By the grace of God, no one was seriously hurt,” but you won’t see that in newspapers. They will substitute “fortunately” for the leading phrase. Neither the deeper meanings of the word, nor its role in religious controversy, is present here.

The word does have such meanings in Christianity. There it is a gift of God linked to salvation and said to flow from right deeds and holiness. Luther disputed this by asserting that faith alone saves—and grace is unnecessary. Its meaning therefore as an active, indeed necessary, support, arising from a real and transcendental source has very much thinned out, more or less replaced by modernity’s secular explanation for all mysteries: chance and probability.

Now concerning the subject of nutrition. In her science fiction novel, Shikasta, Doris Lessing tells the story of a galactic empire, but of a different kind. Multiple planetary settlements have taken place over many eons from the star system Canopus, in the constellation of Argos. All kinds of species have been, as it were, planted, and they are evolving. Sustaining their evolution is an energetic emanation called Substance-Of-We-Feeling, abbreviated SOWF. It isn’t necessary for simple survival, but it is what sustains harmonious development. All is well for a long, long time—but then the emissaries from Canopus notice that something very troubling has taken place. An unexpected cosmic realignment causes the flow of SOWF to thin. Another empire, Canopus’ enemy, Puttoria, attempts to exploit this situation. A degenerative disease begins to affect settlements, among them Shikasta (read Earth); it’s not a physical disease; it is the higher levels—spiritual life, community life—that are affected.

The story of Shikasta, of course, merits interpretation as a new or as a renewed revelation—this one emanating from Sufi roots. Doris Lessing was associated with the Sufi teaching projected by Idries Shah from Britain. When I first read Shikasta, I had to smile when I encountered SOWF; to me it was an obvious reference to Sufism; later I discovered that others had had much the same thought. Lessing’s series of novels, collectively known as Canopus in Argos, is the framing of a cosmology in modern terms, thus accessible to a secular and technological age. SOWF functions as Grace—a gift, a source of higher nutrition, regenerative, as Webster’s has it. Lessing’s intent, to be sure, is far from suggesting that God is a distant galactic civilization. The effect of her, alas, very difficult fiction is to make such ideas of a conscious and meaningful cosmic plan—in which, as it were, energetic emanations like Grace play a vital role—visible to modern minds and, when thought about, illuminative of ancient and by now moribund structures of belief we’ve come to dismiss as backward superstitions.