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A Field of Pure Knowing
What is the human soul? Is it some phantom-like part of us or is it a living dimension of the universe from which all life flows? The later is what Samuel Taylor Coleridge taught and his brilliant description of this living soul was so powerful that it ignited a vision that entranced the American Transcendentalists and was passed along and incorporated into the philosophy of the American Pragmatists.
Let’s start with a quote from Coleridge.
LIFE is the one universal soul, which, by virtue of the enlivening Breath, and the informing Word, all organized bodies have in common, each after its kind. This, therefore, all animals possess, and man as an animal. But, in addition to this, God transfused into man a higher gift, and specially inbreathed: — even a living (that is, self-subsisting) soul, a soul having its life in itself. “And man became a living soul.” He did not merely possess it, he became it. It was his proper being, his truest self, the man in the man.
Later in this paragraph he claims that in this soul “nothing is wanted but the eye, which is the light of this house, the light which is the eye of this soul, this seeing light, this enlightening eye, is Reflection.”
Underneath all of the universe and underling all human beings is a self-subsisting soul. How can we picture such a soul? We might be tempted to imagine it as a ghost like apparition that lives just under our skin, the man in the man – our spiritual self. I think Coleridge meant something much more profound than this. He seems to be referring to a field of pure knowing. He called it Reason.
I believe that when Ralph Waldo Emerson writes “I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” He is being directly inspired by Coleridge. Emerson, again echoing Coleridge, spoke of the soul as “the background of our being” and explained that “From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things.” Decades later when Charles Sanders Peirce formulated his understanding of “firstness” and William James claimed that we lived in “a world of pure experience” both were, directly or indirectly, carrying forward Coleridge’s vision.
What is this vision of the human soul? The soul is pure knowing without any object known. It is pure subjectivity with no object in existence. And it can be pictured using the image that both Coleridge and Emerson employed…light. Imagine a field of pure light emanating from within or from behind you. If the light were coming from within or from behind you and were spreading out in all directions, what would you see? Nothing. The light would spread out from where you were but none of it would reflect back into your eye because there were no objects for the light to reflect off of. Imagine this for a minute. You exist within a field of pure light, but you see nothing. This is the vision of the human soul that Coleridge sent to America and it lodged itself into American philosophy.
Thee we float in an ocean of light, seeing nothing. We can picture ourselves as Emerson’s transparent eyeball – the seeing light, the enlightening eye. We are surrounded by infinite potential for knowing with nothing yet known. Then an object appears in the blackness of this field of light and instantly we see it. The potential for seeing was there all along, the transparent eyeball was waiting in anticipation As soon as an object appeared it was seen immediately. Emerson said that these “announcements of the soul” are what are commonly called “Revelations.”
The human soul, or the Reason, is a dimension of pure knowing that is the substrate of reality. We live in a universe that is at its core pure universal intelligence. This concept will find its way into the evolutionary philosophies of both Charles Sanders Peirce and William James and I will explore both in future posts.
Somethingianism
I was totally struck by the ‘think about this’ of this week with the video about the ‘possibilians’ by dr David Eagleman talking about the enormous mysteries of our universe. Today in my newspaper is was FrontPage news that 90% of the Dutch people believe in ‘something’, and they used the term ‘somethingians’ which describes almost the same.
Yesterday I read a historical novel about the lives of a group of extremely poor people who managed to get to America around 1890. What I was struck by was how narrow these lives where.. before marriage the partners where allowed to have secret sex because the girl had to prove she was fertile before marriage. If she did not get pregnant she was totally ridiculed and had to marry a wooden doll instead. What hit me most was the intense suffering of the people involved, the shame of the girl, the parents, the family because their dignity was ruined. There was no way out. The reason I write this is that for them America was what is for the Universe: they know some practical things about the land, but their mind could not cope with it.
The function of spirituality seems to be on the one side to cope with the Unknown, but on the other side it is connected to the need to get away from the suffering caused by narrowness. Reading this book was almost too painful because of the narrowness of those minds. So what is illumination. It is a way out of the narrowness of our own minds. How much illumination has happened in 100 years of evolution, even though competition as motor of evolution is still close in our minds.
I have a book about after death experiences which I took up after reading Jeff’s beautiful blog. They call it ‘endless consciousness’ and it is most of the time experienced as ‘light’. Going beyond our narrow minds, no objects. If they look in a 100 years at a description of our lives and ways of thinking now, they will be nauseous as I was reading the novel, because they will be totally enlightened to what we are. The light is what is still ahead of us, free of the matters bothering us now.
the scientific search for the soul.
I am just reading amazing stuff on Dr David Eagleman. When he was mentioning Skinner half way the article I thought I should mention it here, because of Carl talking so often about Skinner.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/25/110425fa_fact_bilger?currentPage=all
Here is a piece of it:
For decades, brain researchers had taken their lead from behaviorists like B. F. Skinner. They treated their subject as a machine like any other, with inputs, outputs, and a shadowy mechanism in between. But Crick and a handful of other researchers believed that it was time to pry open Skinner’s black box—to at least begin to identify the mechanics of individual awareness. “When I started out, you basically weren’t allowed to talk about it,” Eagleman says. “Why does it feel like something to be alive? Why, when you put together millions of parts, does something suddenly have a sense of itself? All of this went out the window after B. F. Skinner. And it took a guy with Crick’s gravitas to come in and say, ‘You know what? This is a scientific problem—the most exciting of our time.’ ” Crick called it the scientific search for the soul.
Jeff – I like where you write, “The light would spread out from where you were but none of it would reflect back into your eye because there were no objects for the light to reflect off of.” I intuitively sense the truth of that. It’s beautiful and profoundly simple, and also enlightening to that dimension of us that is beyond the mind. Thanks.
This is the image that stikes me too. Light, light everywhere but not a ray to see.
Lama Surya Das on Twitter:
It behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
That’s a shrewd answer to a tricky qutieson