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Towards Corrected Models of the World
…Everything
we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must
be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected. —Richard Feynman
The world is populated
with spirits—persons having no material substance—and with humans who can perceive those spiritual persons independently of
the five senses. The spirits are in communication with the world, and one of them controls, albeit loosely, its development.
Humans themselves have spirits along with their material bodies and sometimes are able to perceive one another independently
of the five senses. Large groups of humans united in goal and belief can take on a new spiritual identity to become, so to
speak, a comprehensive person.
This picture of the world with its persons is close if not identical to that of traditional
Christianity, but it is far from the world that science acknowledges. The scientific world is a world of things, not persons.
To avoid introducing unnecessary entities in explaining phenomena, scientists deliberately eliminated as much of the personal
from their work and methods as possible. Subsequently, for many scientists the elimination of persons went from being part
of a method to an article of faith.
A book by Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar, crystallized for me as
I read it the essence of the conflict between science and religion. Gell-Mann is a Nobel prize-winning physicist who predicted
and named the quark, one of the most important constituents of elementary matter. My Ph.D. thesis research sought evidence
for quarks in cosmic ray air showers.
Gell-Mann seeks to accomplish with his book something similar to what I am
attempting with this book. Just as I hope to make the world safe for my personal experience by setting forth an intellectual
framework congenial to my experience, so Gell-Mann through his book has fitted his experience into a framework that he finds
congenial. One objective of defining and articulating a personal worldview in this way is to secure for oneself an intellectually
comfortable future. A problem is that the framework I am constructing is diametrically opposed to the one Gell-Mann has constructed.
We both cannot be right.
Although I contrast myself here with Gell-Mann rather than someone else primarily because
his book is fresh in my mind, the contrast is not so much with him as a person but with him as a representative of a kind
of scientist—a kind, incidentally, whose perspective is much more common than my own.
What caused us to develop such
opposite perspectives? Can our experiences of the world really have been so different? I can understand partly where Gell-Mann
is coming from. In high school I occasionally entertained notions of atheism. Once, after telling a teacher I sometimes
felt God did not exist, he exclaimed, “Yes, it’s a terrible feeling, isn’t it?” “Actually, no,” I replied, “it makes me feel
liberated and superior to those who need religion.” But I did not take enough pride in such liberated feelings to develop
a lasting attachment. I was still the obedient son taking the prescribed path. Later, by clearly showing himself to me,
God forever eliminated the possibility that I could ignore him. This latter kind of experience, which Gell-Mann and I do
not share, is at the root of our differences.
Our essential differences, of course, range much wider than just the
difference in religious experience. Nature for me since childhood has been primarily what one communes with, as a poet, for
example, to establish emotional rapport, to refresh the spirit. Nature to more typical scientists, especially physicists,
is a thing from which to abstract patterns and quantities. For many practical purposes the patterns and the quantities are
the things of value. But it is a mistake, which scientists sometimes make, to imply that the patterns and quantities are
what is most important about nature. Patterns and quantities are abstractions. The things themselves are more important
than our abstractions of them.
At the root of the conflict is the completely different view Gell-Mann and I have
about what is fundamental. To him the elementary particles and the theory that accounts for them are fundamental. To me
the person, God the person, is fundamental. Gell-Mann has high confidence that science can handle anything. The paranormal,
if it exists, he says, would be a suitable subject for science just because it exists; and we would have to label the phenomena
normal rather than paranormal, because anything that truly exists is normal. Gell-Mann has this confidence partly because
of an apparently unshakable faith that every phenomenon or entity must derive from the elementary constituents of matter and
their interactions. As open as it is, there is no room in Gell-Mann’s framework for persons not made out of matter. For
him God as spirit either is irrelevant or does not exist.
In contrast, I acknowledge God as a relevant spiritual
person. He has become an undeniable, major part of my experience. I derive my meaning primarily from interacting with God.
Because God is preeminent, persons are fundamental. Everything that is not a person has value only to the degree that it
contributes to persons.
To Gell-Mann the emergence of human persons was a historical accident of no lasting consequence.
To me it is one of God’s crowning achievements. To Gell-Mann the human person is merely the most complex of the known “complex
adaptive systems,” among which can also be computers and well-equipped robots.
For scientists to treat humans as
biological accidents who are perhaps even less meaningful than elementary particles is to turn the world inside out for most
people. People know intuitively that they are persons and that their interactions with other persons usually are their most
meaningful. Nonscientists acknowledge that scientists generally have well above average intelligence but, partly because
scientists sometimes seem unable to value persons appropriately, many people think of scientists as intellectually skewed
and do not trust them to have the common sense needed for making really important decisions.
God is a person. The
world has come into being through him and now serves his purposes. Therefore we should expect the world to be compatible
with him and in some way to reflect his personal nature at every level. Because God is a person, the parsimonious and materialistic
framework of science, while valuable for analyzing the world’s components, is incomplete. It lacks something important.
This chapter will address the lack and take a first step towards supplanting the materialistic framework of scientific models
with a framework better suited to God.
Many scientists, possibly a large majority, believe that all observable phenomena,
including the behaviors of elementary particles, atoms, molecules, single-celled life forms and humans, result ultimately
from principles of physics. The complexity of behaviors is such that we cannot expect to derive them from physics, but we
can do so in principle. To derive behavior in principle means that no new understanding of fundamental physical relationships
is needed.
At bottom this encompassing belief in the principles of physics reduces simply to the belief that matter
is all there is and that spiritual persons are human fabrications. Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins give expression to
this belief when they imply there is no room for God in the world.
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Such confidence in physics and in materialism
as currently understood is unwarranted for reasons I consider almost obvious, even apart from my spiritual perceptions. But
to explain why requires a brief review of one of science’s greatest achievements, the elucidation of the world’s hierarchical
structure. People have acknowledged hierarchies in the world for millennia. Most hierarchies included God or gods. But
scientists have shown that the physical world has an elaborate hierarchical structure of its own.
At the most elementary
level, according to present understanding, are classes of particles called quarks, leptons and photons. Quarks combine in
various ways to make up the next level, that of mesons and baryons, among which are the well-known proton and neutron. Protons
and neutrons combine to make atomic nuclei, nuclei combine with electrons to make atoms, atoms combine to make aggregates
called solids, liquids or gases. But most atoms on Earth individually combine further with atoms of the same or different
kinds to form molecules. Molecules combine to make their own solids, liquids or gases; but some of them combine further to
make living entities belonging to the domains archaea, bacteria or eukarya. Single-celled eukaryotes (cells with nuclei)
combine to make, among many others, the large plants and animals of our world, including humans. Social scientists include
one more level, human society, in the hierarchy.
An understanding of this hierarchy underlies much of modern technology;
but before the advent of modern science the hierarchy was almost completely unsuspected. People with analytical minds in
earlier centuries, to be sure, believed that complex things were made up of simpler, more elementary things. Such beliefs
no doubt inspired the ancient speculations of Heraclitus and Democritus on the nature of physical reality. But people had
little or no inkling of the hierarchy as we know it today. To discover and elucidate it has brought well-deserved credit
to scientists and their methods.
Twentieth century physics was very successful in explaining one step in the hierarchy,
namely, the step from atomic nuclei and electrons up to atoms. This explanation is no mean achievement. Given what we know
about electrons and atomic nuclei, who would have guessed that from them we would get substances like sulfur, diamond or iron?
Earlier knowledge that opposite electrical charges attract one another provided a basis for saying that negatively
charged electrons should attach themselves to positively charged nuclei. That was a start, but it took the theory of quantum
mechanics to explain the rest. The Pauli exclusion principle along with an understanding of the various quantum numbers gave
the electron shell structure, from which one can deduce the periodic table of chemical elements. Many other properties of
atoms follow from other quantum mechanical principles and detailed calculations. Not all details can be calculated from theory,
but the theory has been sufficiently successful in simple cases to convince physicists that only complexity stands in the
way of predicting everything about atoms. No new basic principles are needed.
If it is possible to predict everything
about atoms, then atoms exist as material entities outside any possibility of influence from spiritual persons such as God.
Atoms must be totally controlled by the physical relationships deduced by scientists. It then follows that everything made
of atoms, such as the human body, should also be a purely material entity incapable of interacting with God. Thus the success
of atomic physics seems to have caught would-be spiritual people in a steel trap of materialism.
Earlier, in the
chapter on science, we saw that the methods of science cannot rule out the possibility of miracles no matter what. There
the arguments focused on gaps in the capabilities and methods of scientists. Here the goal is more ambitious: It is to change
the way we look at matter so that interaction with God might seem not only possible but natural.
There is a way out
of the steel trap of materialism. The first hint of how to escape lies in quantum theory itself. No existing theory can
predict what any given particle, for example, a specific electron in a given atom, will do. Quantum theory predicts only
a distribution of behaviors that a large ensemble of such particles ordinarily will satisfy. Although the range of such behaviors
for practical purposes is often narrowly circumscribed, the fact that each particle seems free to do its own thing within
that range opens possibilities. One possibility is that matter at the level of electrons is quite unlike anything called
matter that we perceive in our daily living. In fact physics is emphatic in saying that such matter is very different from
anything we know at our own scale of existence.
In high school I came across a book written to popularize atomic
physics. It compared experiments on atoms to firing rifle bullets into pianos in a darkened room. Observers who initially
knew nothing of musical instruments had to deduce the properties and functions of a piano from sounds at impacts and from
splinters and chips that flew off. From the sounds and the chips the observers might eventually come up with a fairly good
model of a musical instrument, but it might not look much like an actual piano. And functions of some parts such as the pedals
might remain obscure.
So the way out of the steel trap of materialism lies partly also in the way we gain information
about matter. Our experiments often use crude probes. We know enough from our probing to recognize that electrons do not
behave like any matter in our daily experience, and yet our models for electrons, as all our models, necessarily come out
of our experience. Physicists often recommend looking only at the mathematical models and not trying to imagine physical
models. Any physical model we come up with is going to be very unrealistic.
If we could ever meet an atom at its
own scale, it might become easy to believe that it was something God could interact with. It would definitely not seem as
inert and predictable as a grain of sand. We can safely conclude that scientists know a great deal about atoms, and their
achievement is impressive, but we do not need to trust them if they tell us atoms are necessarily outside God’s influence.
We now know, in fact, that atoms as individuals seem almost as mysterious as spiritual persons, when we attempt to get past
the abstract models to the things themselves.
Although the ability of scientists to calculate properties of atoms
and molecules from their constituent parts is impressive, their ability to predict subsequent steps in the hierarchy of physical
being is less impressive. Specifically, the ability to predict properties of single living cells from their constituent molecules
leaves much to be desired. The deficiency is actually much more profound than this statement suggests.
From atomic
nuclei and electrons, physicists can predict atoms; and from atoms of various kinds they can predict simple molecules. But
from molecules would anyone have predicted life? Would any scientist with a list of the huge number and great variety of
molecules that go into a single living cell ever have predicted that such molecules would organize themselves into an extremely
complex entity that would interact as a unit with its environment to preserve itself, to grow, to reproduce itself?
Scientists
studying living cells can elucidate the roles of the various molecules within and describe how the cells function. But unless
they believed that the molecules initially had an inclination to join with a great diversity of other molecules and organize
themselves to form a functioning organism, I assert they would not have predicted life. What this means is that there is
something missing from the principles of physics, something needed besides the purely mechanistic chemical bonding and unbonding
of atom to atom and molecule to molecule. We need an additional principle that says that molecules have an inclination to
organize themselves into organisms.
The physical obstacles to molecules’ actually organizing themselves into life
forms are immense, as is well known to those who have tried to generate life or even replicating molecules in the laboratory.
But unless molecules have a tendency to join with others and organize themselves for a common purpose, I believe no living
organism would ever have come into existence.
It took the relatively recent discovery of quantum mechanics for scientists
to be able to predict atoms from their constituent parts. But atoms are trivial in complexity compared to living cells.
Quantum mechanics fundamentally changed the way we look at matter. A principle that could allow us to predict life from the
molecules would change the way we look at matter even more fundamentally: In some forms and in some environments bits of
matter seem to “want” to join forces with quite different bits of matter to create organisms.
It is a major achievement
to explain cell physiology, to say how the different molecules of a cell interact to promote the cell’s survival, growth and
propagation. And such explanations superficially seem to require no new physical principles. But explanations of cell chemistry
always focus on isolated reactions, not on the whole cell as a living unit. Explaining cell chemistry in this piecemeal way
is not the same as explaining life.
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To explain life we must find principles that enable us to predict
why molecules collaborate in the first place to make an organism. Unless we can predict from principles why molecules form
organisms in the way we predict why atomic nuclei and electrons collaborate to form atoms, we cannot claim to understand life.
Someone with an unusually rich imagination might be able to conceive that the molecules working together in the most
primitive forms of life could have initially assembled purely by chance in conjunction with known physical principles. But
for them to remain together and work together for their own preservation and propagation as a unit I think should surprise
even someone with a wild imagination. If purely mechanistic chemical reactions were all that was happening, why wouldn’t
the assembly of molecules simply disassemble as readily as it assembled? To believe that principles of mechanical molecular
interaction should give the living unit an incentive to work for its own preservation and propagation requires a faith that
is less justified than any belief in a god. A way out of this materialist’s dilemma is to attribute to molecules themselves
a tendency to collaborate with diverse other molecules to create an organism.
The next step in the hierarchy of physical
being takes us from single-celled life to forms with many cells. Plants and animals with many cells nearly always have many
different kinds of highly specialized cells. Bone cells are very different from muscle cells, and nerve cells from fat cells.
To say we understand many-celled life, we must explain why cells of different kinds collaborate to make organisms
that are much more elaborate than single-celled organisms. As before, to explain many-celled life it is not enough just to
determine what function each specialized cell has in the body. Many-celled organisms to be sure often have a survival advantage
over isolated single cells, but that fact does not address the question of why the cells joined forces to begin with.
Once
again, to predict many-celled life forms from single-celled life forms requires a principle of collaboration: Single cells
under the right conditions must have a tendency to collaborate with other cells to form a unified entity, an organism higher
up in the hierarchy of being. To assert that many-celled organisms resulted simply from “a new kind of glue-like chemical
that held the cells together” [Gell-Mann] is to beg the question. Cells stuck together do not make a many-celled organism
that will strive as a unit to preserve and propagate itself; instead, they become only a collection of single cells that have
lost their freedom.
Aggregations of single cells have actually been observed collaborating to form something like
a many-celled organism. (See article by Richard Losick and Dale Kaiser in Scientific American, February, 1997.) Certain
kinds of bacteria seem perfectly content to live as individuals as long as they find their environment congenial. But under
severe stress they congregate at a central location and join forces to generate a many-celled structure that improves chances
of survival for their species. Individual bacteria in different parts of the structure physically change themselves to take
on specialized roles for the benefit of the structure rather than for the benefit of the individual, just as individual cells
in many-celled organisms take on specialized forms and roles to serve the organism. Many-celled organisms, to be sure, grow
by cell division, not cell accretion. Yet this demonstrated impulse towards collaboration in single cells intriguingly hints
at possibilities for the initial evolution of many-celled organisms.
The physical or biological scientist’s hierarchy
of the physical world stops at many-celled plants and animals. Social scientists go on to include human social, economic
and political organization as a final level in the hierarchy. There are no higher levels—unless, of course, we go on to objects
like galaxies, which are in a different hierarchy. We have just seen that the principles of physics in their present form
do not account for at least two steps in the hierarchy, the step from molecules to the single living cell and the step from
single cells to many-celled life. Both these steps require a principle of collaboration in addition to the physics. We might
add that human social, economic and political organization also requires a principle of collaboration.
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Humans
recognize another feature in themselves that physical principles also do not explain, namely their own consciousness. Once
again, explaining consciousness is not the same as showing how the brain works. It is necessary instead to predict from a
knowledge of the body’s components and structure that consciousness should emerge.
Although several scientists, notably
Francis Crick of DNA fame and Christof Koch, are working on this problem and have hopes of making real progress, I am skeptical.
Philosopher Jerry Fodor has claimed that those who think science can explain consciousness don’t really understand the issues.
A position on the subject that appeals to me and may ultimately help to explain a lot is that of David Chalmers. In his
December 1995 Scientific American article Chalmers asserted that consciousness may be an irreducible “fundamental feature”
of the world, like space-time in physics. In other words, consciousness cannot be explained, it cannot be derived or logically
shown to emerge from physical properties of conscious beings. It exists as an elementary feature of…what? Certainly humans,
but is that the extent of it?
If consciousness is a given, where in the world might it reside? One can effectively
argue that only humans have true awareness of a self. René Descartes (1596-1650) went even farther in claiming that all animals
other than humans were unconscious. But it seems clear that many animals, especially mammals, perceive and respond to their
environments in much the same way as humans. Some psychologists have attributed consciousness to animals whose behavior seems
purposeful. Herbert Jennings (1868-1947) argued effectively for the existence of something like consciousness even in protozoa.
Because no instrument outside human perception exists that can detect consciousness, and therefore much we say about it cannot
be proved wrong, let us take the extreme view, in order to see where it might lead, that consciousness exists in some form
at all levels in the hierarchy of being.
All spirits having no material substance and all entities made of matter,
including elementary particles, let us say, are conscious at some level. That all matter should be possessed of consciousness
is not a new idea. Gottfried Leibnitz (1646-1716) proposed that elements of matter were capable of at least some rudimentary
kind of perception. An advantage for religion of having matter be conscious is that it is easier to imagine how God could
influence it to work his miracles. But if all matter possesses consciousness, it is obvious that levels of consciousness
vary considerably. Humans must have higher levels of consciousness than rocks.
The only proof of consciousness we
are ever likely to have is from introspection, from our intuitive recognition and acknowledgment of the property within ourselves.
Extrasensory knowledge of others reinforces belief in our own and in others’ consciousness. For the most part, however,
we assume other humans are conscious because we observe them responding to the world in much the same ways that we do. Most
of the time we assume rocks are not conscious because they do not behave like us. But the criterion of behavior is not definitive.
It is easy to imagine, for example, that a human with severely impaired physical functions might be conscious but unable
to behave in ways that would normally indicate it.
Because direct access to human consciousness is limited, and no
instrument can detect or measure it, introspection is left as the only tool for examining it. Electrical probes and positron
emission scans can examine brain function and allow us to study neural correlates of consciousness but not directly consciousness
itself. By introspectively examining the various levels of consciousness in humans and postulating causes for the variations
in levels we may come to have an inkling of what consciousness might mean for impersonal forms of matter.
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Physiology
tells us that sensory information arrives at the brain in the form of electrochemical signals. But what we perceive is nothing
like electrochemical impulses; on the contrary, the objects we perceive seem to be real entities in our environment.
Furthermore,
whenever we perceive persons or objects, we seem to perceive whole persons or objects. When we perceive another human a moderate
distance away, for example, we do not first detect shapes, then colors, then details of limbs, head and torso that we finally
combine in our mind to make a perception of a complete human. On the contrary, our impression almost at the very beginning
is that of a complete human. Our mode of perceiving wholes applies also to books, chairs, trees, cars or any other familiar
object we see from a moderate distance. We instantaneously perceive objects as wholes.
Let me clarify. If someone
sees half a melon on a table, the fact that we perceive wholes does not mean that the person mistakenly sees a whole melon
instead of the actual half. Rather, the perception of half a melon is a whole perception, a whole perception of half a melon.
It is the perception itself that is whole, instantaneous, complete. The perception is not built up from details furnished
to our senses from the object, but the perception comes first, and the details follow. In other words, our minds continually
make snap judgments based on a minimum of sensory information and then modify those judgments, if necessary, as details become
available.
If the human we perceived at a moderate distance comes closer, we may then begin to perceive individual
parts. But initial perceptions continue to be of wholes. We may notice the face or foot or hand, but if so we initially
tend to perceive the face, foot or hand as a whole face, foot or hand. To perceive details of each requires focused effort.
So perception ordinarily works from whole objects down to details, not from details up to whole objects. This top-down order
is fortunate, because it allows us to size up our environment almost instantaneously and decide quickly where to focus our
attention.
When we perceive objects as wholes, it is not the real objects in our environment that we perceive, but
it is rather some representation of those objects that we bring out of storage from our memory. We know that we do not perceive
the real objects for at least two reasons: First, sometimes we perceive an object of one sort and on closer inspection it
turns out to be something different. Our subsequent discovery that we were fooled, however, cannot retroactively change the
content of the initial perception. Second, when we come upon an object that is unfamiliar, we find we are unable to perceive
it as a whole. We have nothing like it to bring instantaneously out of storage from our memory, so we resort to perceiving
only the kinds of details of it that we do have in our memory, details such as shape, size, color and texture.
Note
the similarity between a scientific theory and the model that we bring out of storage from memory whenever we perceive familiar
objects. Both the theory and the mental model unify details of experience and allow us to deal with whole objects and whole
phenomena instead of the details. Hence, from the point of view of grasping and working with objective reality outside ourselves,
constructing and applying a scientific theory is just and extension of the common human ability to create and hold mental
models of objects.
Perception thus much of the time comes out of memory in the form of mental models. Our senses
simply tell us which models to draw out of memory and how they are arranged.
Memory dominates, however, only until
we begin interacting with the objects. Interactions occur through further information from the senses. The interactions
can and often do force adjustments to our memorized representations and can demand responses of us.
This view of
human perception is like an amalgam of Gestalt views with the “unconscious inferences” of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894).
Gestalt psychologists emphasized that people tend to perceive wholes and demonstrated that some perceptions are of wholes
even when the things furnishing the sensory stimuli are quite different from the things people perceive. Helmholtz observed
that we draw almost instantaneous conclusions (i.e., make snap judgments) about objects in our environment from sensory stimuli
that have practically nothing in common with those objects. “Inference” in his usage implies that the conclusions we arrive
at result from earlier learning, or, in other words, have been drawn from memory; and “unconscious” implies that such conclusions
are largely automatic and outside our control.
But not all perceptions result from earlier learning. Sensations
such as color seem more closely related to sensory stimuli than to information drawn from memory.
Perceptions that
depend on memory depend on prior learning and hence may be subject to change by unlearning. For example, if we see an object
with an abundance of leaves, branches and a thick trunk we might immediately perceive a tree. But the object could be simply
a good replica made of plastic. If we were to see enough such replicas in a given environment, we would start perceiving
plastic trees there instead of real ones.
Similarly, if a scientific theory comes to be replaced by a better one,
we eventually unlearn the ways in which the old theory led us to perceive, and we start seeing in a new way. We say that
our model of the world is now corrected.
If perceptions can be unlearned, they obviously come partly out of memory.
If a perception such as that of the color yellow cannot be changed no matter how long or hard we work at it, it is less likely
to have been learned and more likely to come from something in our physical makeup. Experimental psychologists can determine
which is which. In discussing perceptions the focus here so far has been on our ability to recognize entities outside ourselves
rather than on private feelings; it is largely our perception of physical entities outside that depends so much on memory.
The important point here is that, before interacting with their environment, people perceive wholes, not electrochemical
information. They feel as though the whole objects of their perceptions are the real objects of their environment, but actually
the wholes they perceive are largely drawn from memory. The sensory information by itself is comparatively sparse and bare.
The memory instantaneously fills in multidimensional details and imbues the sensory information with rich meaning. Thus
it is memory elaborating and filling in information from the senses that makes perceptions seem so real and vivid. But this
is not the whole story.
Almost everyone has a strong sense or perception of something called the self. If perceptions
are wholes, and if they come largely out of memory, one might think that the perception of the self or any perception of spiritual
beings such as God comes also largely out of memory. Perception of God thus might be downgraded from something wholly miraculous
to something more natural and ordinary. The reality is more complicated.
It is relevant to distinguish between two
kinds of self, the objective self and the core self. The objective self is an object that we have learned from experience.
It encompasses the parts of our body as well as our gifts and accomplishments plus personal failures that we have not suppressed.
It is what we present to the other objects of our environment when we wish to interact with them. (To be more specific,
the objective self also has at least two aspects, one that we want others to see and one that we hide; but this distinction
is not important here.)
The objective self is an object like the other objects of perception, and as such our perception
of it comes largely out of storage in memory. In contrast, the core self is never an object that comes out of memory. It
is characterized by activity apart from any physical property. Whenever we perceive it we recognize it as the aspect of our
self that perceives and wills. We know that it exists in our body but is not the same as our body; at least, we cannot identify
it with any set of bodily parts. It is vastly simpler. Like a spirit it seems to be only a point of being.
The
key to the core self is that it can be simultaneously the perceiver and the perceived. This capacity for self-awareness is
at the root of human consciousness.
Developmental psychologists sometimes talk about how a child becomes aware in
stages that the various parts of its body belong to itself. The child slowly learns to distinguish between its body and the
environment. They are talking about the learning process required to create the child’s objective self.
But even
a young child has also a core self. Evidence that awareness of the core self exists even in babies comes from Jean Piaget’s
studies of children less than two years old. Such children, Piaget found, behaved as though the appearance or disappearance
of objects depended upon their actions, when in reality there was no connection. Such illusion of power indicates a being,
a self, that believes it possesses the power.
My own impression of infants’ behavior is that the newborn’s world
is not solely a “blooming, buzzing confusion” but is organized around its perception of a core self. The infant’s awareness
of its existence as a self, however rudimentary, provides a foundation upon which it can organize its perceptions right from
the start and efficiently begin learning about its environment.
Knowledge of God is like knowledge of the core self.
It does not come out of memory but consists in interaction, the interaction of one’s own spirit with his spirit. Such knowledge
involves one point of being interacting with another point of being, and it is characterized primarily by activity and not
at all by features such as color, shape or texture.
Activity in this sense is purely spiritual and does not involve
physical motion. Despite the complete lack of physical characteristics, it is possible to recognize the spiritual person
with whom one interacts as a unique person different from all others. How this recognition occurs is a mystery. It is as
if a spiritual person has something like a unique flavor that we can recognize.
I judge that I attain my highest levels
of consciousness when I am involved in such interaction with spiritual persons. The act of knowing a spiritual person, another
self, reinforces my perception of my own core self. I am never so real as when I am in the embrace of God.
Some
writers have described the mystical experience as one involving deep relaxation. Perhaps what they call a mystical experience
does involve relaxation. What I call knowledge of God at the highest level of conscious awareness requires a high level of
mental alertness that is far from relaxation. In relaxation one allows the parts of one’s body to do their own thing; in
knowledge of God one brings all the parts of one’s body into complete union, makes them into a single point of being. To
exist as such a point of being requires high alertness and self control.
(Chapter continued on next page)
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