Tao neither supernatural nor mechanical - I

Neither Supernatural nor Mechanical

Before we can attempt to discover what it is to hold something sacred, certain barriers must at least be mapped. Every speaker in such a discussion must make clear where he or she stands on a number of topics related to basic premises of this civilization as well as to religion and the sacred. It seems that the particular focus of the epistemological perplexity in which we all live today is the beginning of a new solution for the body-mind problem. A first step towards a solution is contained in the discussion of Jung‘s distinction between Pleroma and Creatura, such that mind is an organizational characteristic, not a separate ― substance. The material objects involved in the residential heating system – including the resident – are so arranged as to sustain certain mental processes, such as responding to differences in temperature, and self-correction.

This way of looking, which sees the mental as organizational and as accessible to study, but does not reduce it to the material, allows for the development of a monistic and unified way of looking at the world. One of the key ideas developed at the conference on Conscious Purpose and Human Adaptation, some fifteen years ago, was that every religion and many other kinds of systems of thought can be seen as proposing a solution or partial solution to the body-mind problem, the recurrent difficulty of seeing how material objects can display or respond to such qualities as beauty or value or purpose. Of the several ways of thinking about body-mind, many are what I would regard as unacceptable solutions to the problem and these of necessity give rise to a whole variety of superstitions, which seem to fall into two classes. There are those forms of superstition that place explanations of the phenomena of life and experience outside the body. Some sort of separate supernatural agency – a mind or spirit – is supposed to affect and partly control the body and its actions. In these belief systems it is unclear how the mind or spirit, itself immaterial, can affect gross matter. People speak of the ― power of mind over matter, but surely this relationship between ― mind and matter: can obtain only if either mind has material characteristics or matter is endowed with mental characteristics such as ― obedience. In either case the superstition has explained nothing. The difference between mind and matter is reduced to zero. There are in contrast those superstitions that totally deny mind. As mechanists or materialists try to see it, there is nothing to explain that cannot be covered by lineal sequences of cause and effect.

There shall be no information, no humor, no logical types, no abstractions, no beauty or ugliness, no grief or joy. And so on. This is the superstition that man is a machine of some kind. Even placebos would not work on such a creature! But the life of a machine, even of the most elaborate computers we have so far been able to make, is cramping – to narrow for human beings – and so our materialists are always looking for a way out. They want miracles, and my definition of such imagined or contrived phenomena is simple: Miracles are dreams and imaginings whereby materialists hope to escape from their materialism. They are narratives that precisely – too precisely – confront the premise of lineal causality. These two species of superstition, these rival epistemologies, the supernatural and the mechanical, feed each other. In our day, the premise of external mind seems to invite charlatanism, promoting in turn a retreat back into a materialism which then becomes intolerably narrow. We tell ourselves that we are choosing our philosophy by scientific and logical criteria, but in truth our preferences are determined by a need to change from one posture of discomfort to another. Each theoretical system is a cop-out, tempting us to escape from the opposite fallacy. The problem is not, however, entirely symmetrical. I have, after all, chosen to live at Esalen, in the midst of the counterculture, with its astrological searching for truth, its divination by yarrow root, its herbal medicines, its diets, its yoga, and all the rest. My friends here love me and I love them, and I discover more and more that I cannot live anywhere else. I am appalled by my scientific colleagues, and while I disbelieve almost everything that is believed by the counterculture, I find it more comfortable to live with that disbelief than with the dehumanizing disgust and horror that conventional occidental themes and ways of life inspire in me. They are so successful and their beliefs are so heartless.