There are Seven Levels!

Reader Curious George notes that in yesterday’s post I made “a passing reference to ‘levels below the material’ that ‘should not detain us right now.’ However, I should indeed like to be detained right now -- I would like to apprehend the whole spectrum from the highest to the absolute lowest at least once."

“Can you help out here?”

What, you want to try to eat the the whole existentialada of lumin development in one siddhing? I dare you!

This reminds me of the first time Paul McCartney dropped acid. He had such an important insight that he searched frantically in his hotel room for a pencil and a piece of paper to get it all down. Not trusting himself to preserve that precious insight, he handed it to an assistant, Mal Evans, for safekeeping. In the morning he remembered the note, and asked Mal to read it to him. On it was scrawled the words,

“There are seven levels.”

And of course, McCartney was correct. It reminds me of when I entered graduate school, and we were learning about various models of the mind. Naturally, when you first start out, you don’t actually “know” anything about the mind at all. So you are given various theories and models, many of which are not only incompatible but completely contradictory -- everything from psychoanalysis on one end to behaviorism on the other, to neurobiology below and Jung above.

The professor mentioned that the mind was ultimately like a watch. We can only see the face, so we really have no idea why the hands move. Therefore, our theories are just models about how the watch works, but we can never know the thing in itself -- the noumena behind the phenomena. Primitive animists imagine a couple of squirrels chasing each other, while modern primitive materialists imagine a fancy machine or computer.

This is one of the reasons why highly educated people are often the most confused. That is, as they become more educated, they eventually become committed to a particular model of reality, and then confuse the map with the territory. They then spend the rest of their life trapped within their little model and doing battle with other academics who have a different model. This is why, if you look back at the history of ideas, it is often difficult to understand the passion generated in various battles, since we can see in hindsight that both parties were completely wrong.

Regarding the nature of reality, there are only three possibilities: 1) The world really isn’t all that weird. We can understand it; 2) Reality is pretty damn weird, certainly weirder than our current models would suggest; and 3) No, you’re both wrong. Not only is the cosmos stranger than we suppose, it’s stranger than we can suppose.

You’re always on safe ground if you opt for the latter, as you can be sure that our current scientific models will eventually be replaced by even weirder ones. Imagine -- just a little over a hundred years ago, the most elite minds on the planet were thoroughly committed to a model of reality that was completely overturned by Einstein and others. No one then imagined that the universe was expanding or that it banged into being at a specific point in time (indeed, creating time as it did so).

So when you ask how many levels there are in the cosmos, it depends to a certain extent on how you look at it and how much acid you have taken. At the very least, human beings are condemned to span two great dimensions -- the exterior and the interior, an objective pole and a subjective pole, the “great outdoors” and the even greater within. The more general category of existence simply presents itself on the one hand as ponderable matter, and on the other as a pondering subject. These are not opposites that can ever be resolved, but complementarities that give rise to perpetual ambiguity in the space in between.

Now in Rom 8:22, Paul says that "the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs," and that "we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body." In other words, not only is creation itself a process of birth, but the locus of that birth process is within our very bodies.

Sri Aurobindo speaks of existence as “God’s covenant with night.” In his poem Savitri, he writes,

And laid on the Spirit the burden of the flesh,
That Godhead's seed might flower in mindless Space

If existence represents God’s “plunge into the night,” as being descends from level to level, then spiritual development reverses this cosmogonic process, so that human beings, in their vertical aspect, potentially span all levels of creation, from top to bottom.

And that is the end of this post for now. I can see that there’s no point in trying to finish it this morning. The baby woke up earlier than usual, so my services were required while Mrs. G., who is revovering from a cold, slept in. More on the seven levels tomorrow!