What I am going to say in this entry is already familiar to many of you readers so if you like, you can just skip it. But it might be of interest to readers who don't know me personally and have never heard my often wine-fueled flights of philosophical fancy. How do you resolve the impasse between hard-headed, reality-minded scientists and religious believers? Before I even start, I will add that my solution will not appeal to "traditional" religious believers, so it will remain a "minority" or eccentric solution.

The way to resolve the conflict, as I see it, is not to accept either one way of thought or the other, or place them in "separate but equal" segregation, but to change the way you think about reality in the first place. In our modern era, which is dominated by rationalism no matter what side of the question you stand on, there is a strict dualism between "real" and "not-real," which is also called "imaginary." "Real" things are in the "real world," and you can see them, measure them, use them, eat them, break them, buy them, or do whatever we do with "real" things. "Real" things are also material and physical, though even the hardest reality guys sometimes make exceptions for things like mathematics or physical laws. For reality-minded scientific types, this is all there is in the "real" world: material, real things which can be scientifically investigated. Even music, for instance, can fall into this category as it depends on material things like instruments which produce sound.

The rest is imaginary, unreal, or "conceptual:" fictional worlds and characters, abstract qualities, stories and mental images, myths and religions. Since religion is, to a science type, non-material and composed of legends and peculiar doctrines and stories about events which do not follow the laws of physics, then it is irrelevant unless it presumes to make claims about the "real world," or tell people what to do in the "real world," at which point it can be attacked.

But what if that old dualism wasn't all there was? What if, instead of "real or unreal," there were any number of possible realities, each of them coherent and believable within their own spheres? And what if "imaginary" worlds or beings had, in fact, their own reality, accessible not through telescopes or material senses, but through human consciousness?

This is hardly a new idea, this notion of multiple realities. The Platonists of old were well-aware of it, and from the Hellenistic philosophers and mystery cults, it passed into what is known as Gnosticism, which is considered a heresy and "bad religion" by mainstream Christianity and Judaism. Gnosticism has never died, despite the efforts of the mainstream groups to stamp it out. It still has a bad reputation as excessively proud, individualistic, and snobbish, or otherwise just plain weird. Yet Gnosticism inspired a myriad of esoteric ideas and schools of thought, some of whose memory and ideas extend down to the present day, for instance, Kabbalah, Theosophy, and various "New Age" groups.

Once we get here, of course, things start to go downhill fast, as we are in shady company. But the ideas still have worth. What if, between the scientifically verifiable "real world" and the abstract existence of mathematical and physical laws, there were many layers of reality, each of them equally "real," each of them filled with things that show up in the imagination and the dreaming mind and creative consciousness, rather than the microscope?

This "middle world" has in fact been much written about by mystical thinkers over the centuries. The Sufis, mystical devotees of the Islamic world, called it the "world of seeming" or "world of images," which the great French scholar of Islam, Henri Corbin, wrote a great deal about. Corbin called it the "imaginal world," which is a nice way to name it, though it sounds perhaps too much like "imaginary." The "inner" or "middle" or perhaps easiest for us, "mythic" world isn't just for Islamic mystics; it appears in both Western and Eastern religion and philosophy. You could call it the "visionary" world, but that has the connotation of weird hallucinations. In Christianity it is sometimes called the "spirit world" or "in the spirit," but deliberate journeys of imagination and myth into this world are strictly forbidden. God alone can lift people's minds there. But that world is real, as real as anything of earth or glass or stone.

The well-known scholar (and practitioner) of shamanism (a primal form of religion practiced among aboriginal peoples) Michael Harner describes this layout of multiple realities by defining an "ordinary state of consciousness" and a "shamanic state of consciousness." The same person experiences both, sometimes at the same time. As Harner puts it in his perennially popular book THE WAY OF THE SHAMAN, "…animals that would be considered "mythical" by us in the ordinary state of consciousness are "real" in the shamanic state of consciousness…"Fantasy can be said to be a term applied by a person in the ordinary state of consciousness to what is experienced in the shamanic state of consciousness." Unfortunately, the word "fantasy" has been debased in our modern world into something childish, silly, and time-wastingly unrealistic. And scientific types would say that religion is a "fantasy." Is there any way around this?

This is where I return somewhat to the Steven Jay Gould solution. The worlds, despite being all real, are separate. They exist simultaneously, layered side-by-side with each other. But the "imaginal world" does not force its way into the "real" world and attempt to make itself conform to the "real" world's laws and experimental programs. It is there for the human imagination to reach into. And what is there? Why do we need to bother with this world at all? Isn't the "real world" full enough of wonders that we don't have to invent any more in some fantasy world and call them real? As a person who depends on creativity and imagination to get my work done, I spend plenty of time accessing this world. What appears in this world eventually gets translated into art in the "real" world. And it has a direct relationship to what goes on in both myth and religion. I'll explore more of that relationship in my next posting.

Posted at 3:44 am | link