Goines On: Had he died but not realized it?

Click image for more vignettes

As Goines began the day’s walk, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t already died and was just walking around in a daze imagining he was still alive. If that were so, then – in some sense anyway – there was life after death. If you could call the way he was feeling life.
    Why do you feel this way? He asked himself – aloud, for he was dictating his thoughts into his iPhone. The day before had been one chore after another from getting out of bed at 6 a.m. until 4 p.m.: he did the usual daily household chores before they drove to Chapel Hill and Durham to do errands, and then carry in and put away their purchases at the Wild Bird Center (a 50-lb bag of sunflower chips, which the spunky young woman tending the place had easily carried to the car for him, but which he struggled to even get out of the car at home) and at Costco. And then help Mrs. Goines prepare lunch, and then eat lunch and clean up the kitchen again before doing a few more chores he couldn’t even remember now. But he did remember feeling at times as though he might fall down – not fall down and break something, but fall down dead, no delay.

Goines On: Getting Goines going

Click image for more vignettes

Goines felt anything but physically ready as he approached the electrical box where he usually did at least one of his two sets of push-ups. But he had to try, if only to confirm that he wasn’t up to it...or to discover that maybe he was up to it, that maybe he could get going this morning, however his body felt. Might he, for example, even do his two sets of 50 push-ups with only, say, a minute’s break between them? Usually he’d walk another quarter-mile or so before doing the second.

Goines On: Self-talking

Click image for more vignettes

Goines had recently recommended night-time affirmations, or auto-suggestions, to his friend Lane, who was plagued almost every morning by a morass of dark and troubling thoughts. Such auto-suggestions (or self-commands) had helped Goines avoid that same sort of morass, time and time again, for years, whenever Goines felt the need. And it helped Goines think of solutions to problems as well. The “trick” was simply to convince himself (his subconscious, although he wasn’t exactly sure what that was) that it would do whatever might be necessary to wake him up in a good, or “positive” frame of mind, or to come up with an idea.

Seven Years Ago Today: A funny from Bertrand Russell

By Moristotle

[Originally published on October 25, 2010, not one word different, but a better photo of Mr. Russell has been substituted.]

My wife didn’t laugh when I read her the following excerpt from Bertrand Russell’s 1909 essay, “Pragmatism,” but I did, and I hope you might too:

Thor's Day: Of a mystical bent

Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875-1926)

By Morris Dean

[Originally published on January 22, 2012.]

About three years ago, I included myself among “others of a mystical bent,” and I even quoted Rilke. Admitting to a mystical bent surprised me as much as quoting Rilke; I hadn’t meant to get into anything like that.

Third Monday Musing

Que sera, sera

By Rolf Dumke

“That mysterious flow,” wrote Paul Davies about time in the February 2006 Scientific American. We all experience it as an unstoppable flow from a given past to a flighty present, onwards to an unknown future. But, he argues, for physicists this is a mere illusion: time does not fly or flow. It merely exists. See Davies’s book, About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (1995, Simon & Schuster).

Another response to Valentine's Day's sense of fire & life?

Henry Suso (1300-1366)

When I facetiously referred to self-flagellation in "Morris & Ken have made up" (January 27), I identified the scourge as a possible instrument of my self-mortification for offenses committed.
    I had, of course, heard of more serious methods, such as Flannery O'Connor's character Enoch Emery's wrapping barbed wire around his chest (Wise Blood, 1952). I hadn't, however, heard of the following "irrational extreme to which a psychopathic individual may go in the line of bodily austerity," as William James mildly put it in The Varieties of Religious Experience: Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901, 1902. James quotes "the sincere Suso's account of his own self-tortures. [Henry] Suso, you will remember, was one of the fourteenth century German mystics; his autobiography, written in the third person, is a classic religious document" [p. 281 of the Library of America edition of William James: Writings 1902-1910]:

Mystical bent?

William James (1842-1910)

Yesterday, I referred to myself as "of a mystical bent." Admitting this surprised me as much as quoting Rilke; I hadn't meant to get into anything like that.
    Maybe I'm ready to try to say what spirituality (or being spiritual) means for me?
    Phrases like reverence for life [Albert Schweitzer], benevolence toward the humblest living creature [Charles Darwin], practice compassion [Dalai Lama], and The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth [Chief Seattle] come to mind.
    What can I say? Dwelling on such concepts in the awareness of nature and of our life on Earth casts a sort of numinous spell over me, a feeling that resonates with William James's characterization of mystical experience as "a deepened sense of significance." And, even when I'm not "having the experience," I try to maintain an abiding sense of the deep significance of things, the deep significance of choices and actions.
    James even excuses my inability to say much about this deep sense: "There is ineffability: the subject of a mystical experience cannot find words to describe it."
    Rainer Maria Rilke came close, very close indeed, in his Duino Elegies and other writings:

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.
                [–Sonnets to Orpheus, XXIX, Stephen Mitchell's translation]

A funny from Bertrand Russell

My wife didn't laugh when I read her the following excerpt from Bertrand Russell's 1909 essay, "Pragmatism," but I did, and I hope you might too:

The legitimate conclusion from [William James's] argument [that if we don't have the necessary information for deciding between, for example, "God exists" and "God doesn't exist," we ought to choose one anyway in order to have a 50% chance of being right] would be that, in such cases as William James has in mind, we ought to believe both alternatives; for in that case we are sure [emphasis mine] of "knowing" the truth in the matter. If it were said that to believe both is a psychological impossibility, we would rejoin that, on the contrary, it is often done, and that those who cannot yet do it need only to practice the "will to believe" until they have learnt to believe that the law of contradiction is false—a feat which is by no means as difficult as it is often supposed to be.

Who said philosophy couldn't be a barrel of laughs?
_______________
Another passage a page further down:

To go about the world believing everything in the hope that thereby we shall believe as much truth as possible is like practicing polygamy in the hope that among so many we shall find someone who will make us happy.

Bertrand Russell was a great writer. Did you know that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950? Well, he was. "..."in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought."

A zoo for refused heritage?

In the final chapter of Daniel C. Dennett's long and difficult book about evolution (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995), he reminds us that

The philosopher George Santayana was a Catholic atheist, if you can imagine such a thing. According to Bertrand Russell..., William James once denounced Santayana's ideas as "the perfection of rottenness," and one can see why some people would be offended by his brand of aestheticism: a deep appreciation for all the formulae, ceremonies, and trappings of his religious heritage, but lacking the faith. Santayana's position was aptly caricatured: "There is no God and Mary is His Mother." [pp. 514-515]

Then, Dennett confesses to somewhat the same predicament:

But how many of us are caught in that very dilemma, loving the heritage, firmly convinced of its value, yet unable to sustain any conviction at all in its truth? We are faced with a difficult choice. Because we value it, we are eager to preserve it in a rather precarious and "denatured" state—in churches and cathedrals and synagogues...keeping alive traditions, rituals, liturgies, symbols, that otherwise would fade. [p. 515]

Personally, I don't get it. I just don't feel anything for the traditions, rituals, liturgies, or symbols of religion, and I was amazed to read that Dennett doesn't feel the same way. (I wondered whether he was being disingenuous.) He even includes an Appendix with the musical score for a song that he used to sing "when I was a child, around the campfire at summer camp, at school and Sunday school, or gathered around the piano at home":

Tell me why the stars do shine,
Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell me why the sky's so blue.
Then I will tell you just why I love you.

Because God made the stars to shine,
Because God made the ivy twine,
Because God made the sky so blue.
Because God made you, that's why I love you. [p. 523]

Dennett seems to have had an exceedingly sentimental childhood. My experience, even of Sunday school and summer Bible camp, wasn't like that, either in fact or in memory.
    I much prefer my wife's emended needlepoint:

Who plants a seed
Beneath the sod
And waits to see
Believes in DNA

    But I recognize the author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea again when Dennett goes on to say:

But hasn't there been a tremendous rebirth of fundamentalist faith in all these creeds? Yes, unfortunately, there has been, and I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism...Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is.
    ...My own spirit recoils from a God Who is He or She in the same way my heart sinks when I see a lion pacing neurotically back and forth in a small zoo cage. I know, I know, the lion is beautiful but dangerous; if you let the lion roam free, it would kill me; safety demands that it be put in a cage. Safety demands that religions be put in cages, too [emphasis mine]....
    ...the deliberate misinforming of children about the natural world. According to a recent poll [early 1990's], 48 percent of the people in the United States today believe that the book of Genesis is literally true. And 70 percent believe that "creation science" should be taught in school alongside evolution. Some recent writers recommend a policy in which parents would be able to "opt out" of materials they didn't want their children taught. Should evolution be taught in school? Should arithmetic be taught? Should history? Misinforming a child is a terrible offense. [pp. 515-516]

I must add that Dennett suggests a zoo for religious heritage not only to protect us from religion's dangerous elements, but also to preserve it "because it was," as we preserve all sorts of archaeological and historical artifacts. Religious and other cultural artifacts are unique and, like species of nature (which, in a way, they are too), once lost, cannot be re-created.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

To my probably deserved embarrassment, I'd never heard of Rebecca Goldstein. But I've heard of her now, from my intellectual alter ego Sam Harris, in an email from samharris.org:

New Novel about the New Atheism: Rebecca Goldstein's, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God
"So extravagantly witty and smart that it's making everything else I've read recently seem drab."
    —Ron Charles, Senior Editor at The Washington Post Book Review

"Comic and supremely witty, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God is both a satire of the academic world and a feast of philosophical and religious ideas."
    —Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams [an excellent work, which I have read; by the way, Lightman is on the MIT faculty, along with Goldstein's husband, linguist Steven Pinker]

"You do not have to perpetrate an act of faith to confront the question of why there is something rather than nothing. It is faith itself that consists of nothing. Rebecca Goldstein, on the other hand, is quite something."
    —Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great [ditto]

"Rebecca Newberger Goldstein does it all. She has written a hilarious novel about people's existential agonies, a page-turner about the intellectual mysteries that obsess them. The characters in 36 Arguments for the Existence of God explore the great moral issues of our day in a novel that is deeply moving and a joy to read."
    —Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated [not yet]

    I get from these recommendations the same thrill that I got from the ad I saw (in 2005?) in The New York Times Book Review for Harris's book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. I knew it would speak to me on my own wavelength.

And the list of Goldstein's publications is intellectually provocative. From a research university's online library catalog:

Goldstein, Rebecca, 1950-
Betraying Spinoza : the renegade Jew who gave us modernity
    New York : Nextbook : Schocken, c2006. [Spinoza!]
The dark sister
    New York, NY : Viking, 1991. [according to Wikipedia, "a postmodern fictionalization of family and professional issues in the life of William James"]
Incompleteness : the proof and paradox of Kurt Gödel
    New York : W.W. Norton, c2005. [a filched book about Gödel's incompleteness theorem graced my summer of 1965]
The late-summer passion of a woman of mind
    New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c1989.
Mazel
    New York : Viking, 1995.
The mind-body problem : a novel
    New York : Random House, c1983. [don't you worry about this too?]
Properties of light : a novel of love, betrayal and quantum physics
    Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2000. [let me know if you can explain quantum physics to me]
Strange attractors
    New York : Viking, 1993.

An Ian McEwan-class novelist? I'm rubbing my hands in anticipation, having this morning requested Properties of Light from my local library.
    36 Arguments for the Existence of God sounds like some excellent "talk about faith," possibly of the sort Russ Douthat had in mind in his op-ed piece, "Let's Talk about Faith", in Sunday's New York Times:

When liberal democracy was forged, in the wake of Western Europe’s religious wars, this sort of peaceful theological debate is exactly what it promised to deliver. And the differences between religions are worth debating. Theology has consequences: It shapes lives, families, nations, cultures, wars; it can change people, save them from themselves, and sometimes warp or even destroy them.

Boldest comment yesterday

Comment #518, by HPLeft of Brooklyn, New York, on William Kristol’s October 6 New York Times op-ed piece, “The Wright Stuff”:

The phrase “God damn America” goes back at least as far as William James, a far greater intellectual than anyone in Bill [Kristol]’s failed but dangerous movement, in the aftermath of revelations of US atrocities in the Philippines during the Spanish American War. To criticize America when it is responsible for wanton acts, the kind that Reverend Wright likely has first-hand knowledge of, is the soul of patriotism. In contrast, to spin away responsibility for crimes against humanity and democracy, as Kristol and his like do every day, is the soul of treachery.

HPLeft was referring, I suppose, to the concluding paragraphs of Kristol’s column:

I pointed out [on the phone to Palin] that Obama surely had a closer connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than to Ayers—and so, I asked, if Ayers is a legitimate issue, what about Reverend Wright? She didn’t hesitate: “To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that—with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave—to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.” I guess so. And I guess we’ll soon know McCain’s call on whether he wants to bring Wright up—perhaps at his debate with Obama Tuesday night. I asked at the end of our conversation whether Palin, fresh off her own debate, had any advice for McCain. “I’m going to tell him the same thing he told me. I talked to him just a few minutes before I walked out there on stage. And he just said: ‘Have fun. Be yourself, and have fun.’ And Senator McCain can do the same.” She paused, and I was about to thank her for the interview, but she had one more thing to say. “Only maybe I’d add just a couple more words, and that would be: ‘Take the gloves off.’ ” And maybe I’d add, Hockey Mom knows best.

Being pragmatic about this

I've been buoyed today by comments on my post "Grave second thoughts." A theme of the post and of the comments is that good people acting as individuals can (or should try to) make the world a better place. Maliha, for example, speaks of "walking the walk" when it comes to religion:

The meaning of "walk the walk" goes beyond rituals...extending compassion, working for justice, and being commited to the spirit of the law as much as the law itself.

And after I admitted that I myself had been "tilting at windmills" with my impractical, idealistic proposal for a "new, consolidated Abrahamic religion," that thoughtful and compassionate blogger Scary Monster reminded me that

To dream and hope for the improvement of life is neither foolish nor a waste of time. It's the questions we ask ourselves and each other that will eventually bring things into balance.

In questioning the sources of my quixotic bent, I guessed that I might have been

motivated by my 1960s, Beatles desire to find a way for currently unreconciled groups to "come together now, love one another right now"....

And Maliha responded:

At the risk of sounding Hippy, I would like to see a "love" revolution, which will bring us closer to ourselves and to each other. I saw this saying (is it from the Bible?) on a church notice board once:

When the power of love overwhelms the love for power; only then peace will reign [she was paraphrasing].

I thought it was really gorgeous.

And, serendipity of serendipities! I investigated a new visitor to Moristotle who also commented on the post ("Jolene42") and discovered that her motto on her own blog is

When the power of love becomes stronger than the love of power, we will have peace.

And she attributes it to Jimi Hendrix!

Anyway...

A little later, I was driving to pick up our poodle Wally at the groomer's and listening to R.W.B. Lewis's biography of the James family (The Jameses: A Family Narrative, pp. 562-563), when I heard this passage:

The whole contrast of the difference between pragmatism and rationalism, James then said [in Lecture VI on pragmatism at Columbia University in 1907], was now in sight (italics his):

The essential contrast is that for rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future. On the one side the universe is absolutely secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures.

In the closing lecture, William James enlarges on that last image of an adventurous universe. The grand issue arises of "the salvation of the world"; and as against the pessimists who declare it impossible and the optimists who think it inevitable, the pragmatist takes the view that the world's salvation is possible. The pragmatist, says James, believes that the world can be bettered, here and there, bit by bit, in patches—and this by the moral and intellectual actions of individual human beings. "Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow...why may they not be the actual turning-places and growing-places...of the world [italics added by Lewis]—why not the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making, so that nowhere may the world grow in any other kind of way than this?"

And this brought me right back squarely up against one of the things that most struck me in Sam Harris's book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Religion: his attack on the philosophy of pragmatism was no less hard-hitting than his attack on religion. (Pragmatism, he said, is relativistic, but truth is truth.)

It is fitting that my circling back from Harris to reconnect with my belief "in Something that we know as God/Allah/or whatever other name" should circumscribe the enabling philosophy of William James.

Grave second thoughts...

Hardly twenty-four hours after posting my proposal of "a new, consolidated Abrahamic religion," and I've already been wondering, What was I thinking? Even the Baptists can't get together over their own set of core tenets. How are Jews and Christians and Muslims generally going to do so?

People splinter into religious groups. That's what people do.

My momentary vision of a "consolidated religion" was likely motivated by a desire "to find a way to improve society and relations with those we share the world with," as the blogger puts it who goes by the handle "Scary Monster" (though the person is a mild-mannered school teacher). Or motivated by my 1960s, Beatles desire to find a way for currently unreconciled groups to "come together now, love one another right now"...? Pie in the sky.

And what made me think that anyone would sign up for "a consolidated religion"?! That's about as naive a hope as the one I had as an adolescent, that all we need to do to gain another person's agreement is to "reason together" about the facts. That empty hope rested on the false assumption that everyone can see the facts the same way. Alas, disagreement goes much, much deeper, to the assumptions, values, agendas that powerfully control how we perceive the world (and the "facts") in the first place.

The desire or need for individuals to "apprehend themselves [as standing] in relation to whatever they may consider the divine" (as William James wrote) will have to be each individual's project and struggle. I momentarily lost sight of that, which has been as core a belief of mine as regards religion as I have. I think I must have been drunk to imagine that I could "will to believe...a set of encompassing [Abrahamic] tenets"...me who only recently decided to give up wavering between believing and not believing [in] the special divinity of Jesus Christ, coming down as not believing it! And me who eschews dogma, the very thing that "encompassing tenets" would surely amount to!

What a short-lived fantasy it seems to have been, my proposal of a consolidated, Abrahamic religion! What a suspect proposal to have spent words on!

The only part of the post that I think really sticks, for me personally, is James's idea that our own subconscious is the "hither side" of the "more" that is God.

Oh, terrestial/celestial muse,
inspire me, please,
to think on spiritual matters clearly,
without jargonese,

Show me how to find my way
and, if I find it, what to say.

A new, consolidated Abrahamic religion?

I have taken a few days to think, away from writing about my spiritual journey, hoping at some point to write a more or less comprehensive "credo" here. I expect, still, to do that. But I've come to realize that such a statement will be the accretion of less comprehensive writings along the way...so I might as well let those relative fragments continue to come out.

Maliha wrote something the other day (in a comment on her post, "Black and White Truth," which she says she wrote partly as a result of her dialogue with me) that has resonated with me since. She wrote, "Belief in a certain religion is a willing choice that a person has to make."

One reason this has resonated with me, I'm sure, is that in my reading of R.W.B. Lewis's biography of the James family (The James: A Family Narrative), I've been struck powerfully by philosopher William James's psychology of the will, and also by his writings, first as the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901-02, which he worked into his masterpiece book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. For example:

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men [and women] in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine [James's own emphasis].

And what in religions is called "God" (or "Allah" or whatever), William James identified as "a more":

Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the "more" with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life.

Readers familiar with some of my earlier thinking may appreciate the power with which this strikes me. And they probably know about my use of a muse. Well, of course, and as I understand, that muse is my "subconscious." But by calling it a muse as though it were an independent entity I acknowledge that in some sense it transcends me, certainly transcends my consciousness.

Anyway, the nub of all this is the notion that we are all, through our consciousness and our subconsciousness, directly linked to...God/Allah/what you will call it. This isn't a new notion for me, but a rediscovered old notion, so that I am experiencing a rebirth of religious understanding or belief. (I mentioned something akin to this earlier in a comment to Victor on my post "Monday Musings.")

Maliha's remark about will encourages me to be reminded that I can simply will to believe this again.

And Friday I listened to a podcast from Yale University on reconciliation between Christianity and Islam. I was struck perhaps most of all by the realization (or another reminder, actually, for I already knew this) that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all Abrahamic religions. One speaker emphasized how important it is today for there to be dialogue among individuals who really believe their religion (whichever of the three it is), not among politicians who say they represent the religions....

But what I got from the podcast, personally, was the vision that a set of encompassing tenets could be shaped to define a single religion for Jews and Christians and Muslims to congregate within. I was thrilled to think that I could will to believe such a set of tenets. Jews would somehow have to reconcile with Jesus Christ, and Christians would somehow have to reconcile with Muhammad. Muslims seem to have already pretty much reconciled with Moses et alia and Christ (if I understand Islam aright).

Please let me know, if you would, what you think about the notion of a consolidated Abrahamic religion.

"Sanguine [religious] healthy-mindedness..."

Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banguet.

Psychologist and philosopher William James wrote that, in his masterpiece in the psychology of religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).

James (1842-1910) identified two religious mentalities: "the religion of healthy-mindedness" and the religion of "the sick soul." Both mentalities seemed to be present in James himself, for I doubt that he could have had the insight quoted above in any way other than by introspection.

In my own way, I've had the same experience. I've had numerous moments in my life of feeling so fulfilled and joyous that I've actually voiced the opinion that "I could die this moment and in perfect happiness have no regrets whatsoever." But I've also faced the "skull grinning in at the banquet." This life is (or may be) all there is, and may not be enough. It hasn't been enough, anyway, for me to have read all of William James's brother Henry's novels yet!