Adventures in Hynagogia—3
“The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.”—A. Einstein.
“Mysticism remains the great science and the great art, the only power capable of synthesizing the riches accumulated by other forms of human activity.”—T. de Chardin
Teilhard de Chardin was a geologist, paleoanthropologist, philosopher, and Jesuit priest. With his personality split between mystic and scientist, he was driven throughout his career to find a way to reconcile these presumed opposites. All of his thought was grounded in Darwinian evolution, and he tried to harmonize the universal evolutionary processes he saw going on around him, and in the geological strata and fossils he studied, with his full embrace of Catholic theology. For his efforts, he managed to get his books banned by the church, and earned the inevitable cold shoulder of many hard scientists.
He saw the universe and the conscious life it had engendered as a forwardly evolving process, and embraced the idea of the noosphere (“sphere of reason”) as a new geological stratum in the evolutionary narrative, a melding of evolving mass human consciousness with new scientific knowledge. The unfolding universe, in de Chardin’s view, would culminate in the Omega Point—universal unity realized in divine consciousness—resonant with the second coming of Christ, the origin (alpha) and end point (omega) of the human story.
Christianity has a long history of syncretizing with other systems of thought and practice, and in the western world since the Enlightenment, the most important of the latter has been scientific rationalism. Human beings certainly can’t live on rationalism alone, so this process will either continue, or evolve into a new species of spirituality. The one thing that won’t happen is an atrophying of intuition. Evolution is an endless sequence of liminal periods, and like all of them, the one we are in presents opportunities. To even construct a self, the human psyche needs some kind of base—even more so to expand that self into a consciousness that transcends this physical life. Not that this life isn’t good—it’s just not, as we all know, good enough. The most rational person in the world will still need faith—that is, intuition. Anything that takes you beyond the realm of the senses is, as Kierkegaard said, a leap. There is no clear line between intuition and rationality: all rationality is born in intuition—something known that can’t be proved. Mysticism, de Chardin would say. Intuition and rationality are synergistic.
Human beings need something to guide them, and the only way to have that is to have faith in the ultimate intelligibility of reality. But faith doesn’t just mean believing something is true—after all, belief is just a wish, and anything we believe is susceptible to being disproved later, or outgrown. Faith is more a move of the mind, a determination to make one’s own foundation: it is simply impossible to create anything without that base. For me, faith is primarily a receptivity to the possibilities inherent in liminality, and not a torpedoes-be-damned clinging to fossilized beliefs. We see that clinging today in the public agitating for theocracy, for sharp lines drawn in the gray mist of the in-between—an attitude that masks fear as loyalty, suppressing the native curiosity and flexibility of the human mind. There’s no future in it. Adopting the party line takes no effort and carries no responsibility. Freeing your mind involves a great deal of both. The human mind, and its understanding of the nature of reality, will continue to evolve, and the forces trying to hold it in place will ultimately be impotent to prevent it from becoming what it wills to be. I can’t agree with de Chardin, or with anyone who sees the story of human consciousness as evolving toward some grand finale—an Omega Point—but I am receptive to the idea that transcendence is not discovery, but recognition. We are not surprised by our most profound insights—they seem somehow familiar. What could be more transcendent than the advent of consciousness itself?—a transcendence so familiar we take it for granted.
Becoming aware of hypnagogic visions is less a discovery of their content than a discovery of a new way of seeing. Of seeing, above all, the self closest to the true self, the most and least obvious of all. The one most comfortable with dissolving its constructed borders in the One, the one most certain that nothing is lost in the process, the one who always knows what is real, who absorbs everything, asserts nothing, makes no judgments, just watches—the one that is the little voice. The one that, empty of everything, is pure love.
In hypnagogia you can descend through the troupe of your selves, recognizing them as you go: the one afraid of everything; the one who tries to thwart everything; the one convinced all is lost; the one crippled by nostalgia, another sustained by it; one, outlandishly dressed, that thinks it cuts quite a figure; another in brigadier regalia that makes you turn off the light nine times; and on and on—and then suddenly, there he is—hardly on a throne—he has just been there the entire time. He predates and outlives everything—the alpha and the omega. And you wonder, how could it be that for so long you couldn’t see something that pervades your life? Is it because you resist seeing him?—or can’t see him because he is so obvious?—or try to negate him through jealousy?—or you feel a little Oedipal thing and like this experience of being off the leash for a while? Who knows?
Anyway, there he is. And now you’ve seen him.
He’s the most dependable, most unsurprising consciousness of all—it’s absurd that you wouldn’t know him. He is the anchor, the one with the right connections, and he just knows. He doesn’t have any emotion about knowing—he just knows—and his knowledge is saturated in your being. He is omnipresent. He is the surge of reassurance at rock bottom, the reminder that it’s all a story, and just as there was life before it, there will be life after. The pain, the fear, the regret, the remorse—of course they’re real, but when you’ve seen and recognized him, those emotions get put away in boxes in a forgotten room. Like your old papers that no one will ever read—in boxes in the same room. They haven’t lost their reality, only their emotional hold.
This is the end of all our exploring: seeing that you. And making that you, You.
Which is Enlightenment.
Or if it ain’t—thanks, Cormac—it’ll do till Enlightenment gets here.
March 25, 2024