Dreaming the Future Closer

The conversation over on the previous entry (including  Oli pointing me toward this), combined with revisiting some of the stuff I wrote and read as young’un, has posed this very basic question for me: how do I understand what spirit is and how it operates? 

I have a sketch of an answer, one that would need a good deal more detail, but serves workably for sharing.

 First, I don’t think of spirit, whether in the form of our higher self or in the form of the divinities we offer praise, exists as a thinking thing quite like ourselves.  I don’t think, for example, that these words that I am writing emerge from the great high me, channeled directly to you, no matter how in touch with my higher self I really am.

This writing (any writing, any expression of thought be it verbal or pictorial) is just too historical, too caught up in the particular trajectory of this life, this world, this time, to itself reside in the great spiritual beyond.  I remember reading around medieval Islamic philosophy at one point and seeing this articulated pretty well: the soul that I am, that extends beyond death, is not ‘me’ but a divine schematic of me. 

In art, in writing, in action, that schematic (it’s a poor word, but it will do for now) is better or worse realized.  But it’s realized through the material accoutrements of our being, and its realization is historically particular.  If pushed, I would suggest that the schematic self and our more mundane self meet along the thin line of our will, our agency. 

I suspect that’s a muddy process and one that gives ethics it’s reflective character.  We don’t have transparent access to our best self and must, tot he best of our ability, seek out ways to clarify our access.  That entails sharpening our tools—our words, our thoughts, our actions.  In a spiritual community, much of our ‘obligation’ to each other lies on this shared effort to improve our tools.

This is spiritual labor, which we don’t often appreciate.  While, yes, spirit permeates the world, the world can be made a better or worse vessel for that spirit.  One of the real miracles of evolution is our brain and nervous system, this remarkable channel for expressing spirit.  As spirit alone, I cannot write, I cannot speak.  But as embodied me, with this great world of words and people to draw upon, my capacity for expression soars.

Henri Bergson uses this metaphor to describe why he remains suspicious of efforts to reduce consciousness to the brain.  He compares it to a coat hanging on a nail.  If the nail is removed, the coat falls to the ground, but does not cease to be a coat.  In a similar way, remove the body, and spirit does not cease to be spirit, but it does lose a good deal of structure.  It falls into a heap.

Which gets us back to this question of how we treat each other and how we treat sacred things.  The destruction of holy things is a real loss, akin to destroying the part of your computer that turns binary data into this screen.  The substrate remains, but in a less intelligible and workable form.  It cuts off one of the avenues through which that spiritual part of existence is able to move into and upon the world. 

There may be reasons for doing this sort of damage, but the trick is not to take it lightly, to appreciate the deeper implications of destruction, of iconoclasm, and violence.  Since such violence and destruction (as degradation if naught else) is inevitable, it’s also an occasion to consider how we face those moments of loss, great and small.  Confronted with the loss, we have more tools at our disposal than just mute horror. 

Beneath that, too, there are occasions where loss, where destruction, is itself a sacred act, a clearing of one thing so that another may continue to be or come to be.  It’s worth remembering that beneath the destruction there remains that indestructible side of things, though it be not like what is lost. 

Loss is real loss, not an illusion to be papered over with apologetics and theodicy.  That is, in the end, what gives ethics its force.  That no loss is absolute, gives to ethics its hope.