ABSTRACTION AS AN EXISTENTIAL PROFILE OF
THE HUMAN MIND AND EXPERIENCE

PRAGMATISM AND IDEOLOGY PREVIEWED


The American frontier of civilization has been harsh. Early survival required a uniquely pragmatic style of thought which William James characterized as tough minded. (In his essay on PRAGMATISM ((1907)). This entailed a slowness to believe the varieties of hearsay that folks now fuss more seriously about: stories, myth, legends -- and farcical fantasies; anything for some herd excitement to rally around.*

* Notably the kind of credo used as a crutch by the starved personality portrayed in Eric Hoffer, THE TRUE BELIEVER (conformist 1950's): lacking individual character to stand alone without verbalized group identifications. Consider the geeky example of Osama Bin Laden.

Much subject matter for finger-wavin' debate boils down to the likes of query from a child prompting the famed "Letter to Virginia." Is there a Santa Claus? Yes, went the answer -- at least as a matter of symbolic truth. Maybe not in any "factual" sense -- though that kind of truth is always more or less problematic anyway; considering the notorious unreliability of even eyewitness evidence.


INTRODUCING JACOB'S LADDER TO THE OBVIOUS


For it is indeed in the nebulous realm of archetypal symbols that the most vital connections in human thinking are effected -- high enough on the abstraction ladder for little ideas to combine into bigger ones.*

*Sources for this essay include Jung et al., MAN AND HIS SYMBOLS (1978) and Joseph Campbell's "Power of Myth" (Conversations with Bill Moyers ((1988)). An analytic model of human abstraction came from John Dewey, RECONSTRUCTION IN PHILOSOPHY (enlarged ed. 1948). See also the "Mentor" Anthology, THE AGE OF BELIEF (Fremantle ed. 1955) about how the medieval philosophers were always lookin' for great constellations of truth called "universals," which they came to expect from the writings of Plato. (They were actually on the track of Jung's "archetypes.")

AUTHENTIC AMERICAN VALUES


Courthouse square at Galena: humor headquarters

The oldtimers of Stone County, Missouri thrived in "symbolic" environs; with their comical mastery of the tall tale to express traditional values which they could take with a grain of salt.*

*Consider the collections of Vance Randolph: PISSING IN THE SNOW (1976); WE ALWAYS LIE TO STRANGERS (1951); and WHO BLOWED UP THE CHURCH HOUSE? (1952). Actually the greatest liars of the mountains were so honest you could usually tell when they were pullin' your leg (at least with native discernment).

They retained America's foundational style longer than most -- in relative isolation among the hills.

Thus it was hard to convince the oldtimers of anything. In fact a famed funny case once indicated that it was not grounds for divorce (Stone-County style) to call one a bullheaded "hillbilly." Instead such terminology expressed "envy."

*Moore v. Moore, 337 SW2d 781
(Mo. Ct. App. 1960), reversing a divorce granted in Stone County to an "aggrieved" husband.

Those oldtimers reflected the roots of American character as analyzed in Riesman's sociological masterpiece, THE LONELY CROWD (conformist 1950's). The title depicts an intermediate phase in the evolution of national character; during which some rough edges are getting sanded off.

Riesman therefrom projected a flowering phase - combining the first two - called "automation." This means about the same thing as "individuation" (Jung) and "self-actualization" (Maslow). It was called "consciousness III" in Reich, THE GREENING OF AMERICA (summing up the 1960's).

We're talkin' here about the real Americana: Back to nature for a context from which to observe the obvious -- beyond the second-hand recreations of reality found in the words of conjecture and belief. (Like William Blake suggested: cleanse the "doors of perception" of verbal flak and you can see forever.)


A HARDHEADED LOOK AT RELIGION


From a traditional center of Jeffersonian self-government

Accordingly, Stone-County thinkers like the legendary Frank Payne could take religion with that venerable grain of salt. His ribald commentaries were prized at election time; when my old man once heard him caution against turning power over to the "long-prayer boys."*

* Though illiterate, Frank had gleaned this gem from a Pauline letter admonishing against excessive piety. (As a boy I heard the more "educated" intellects May McCord and Dewey Short agree that old Frank had taught them to think.) My old man too wondered why everyone's so excited about Bible stories -- which obviously resemble the mythological tales of frontier America. (Consider the mighty legend of John Henry.) A lot of old-world booklearnin' had to be rethought to produce that kind of backwoods clarity -- in a new land.

Of course Frank Payne's warning has just about been realized -- all over a world at war over beliefs. A surge of authoritarian / patriarchal fundamentalism is soiling the more civilized urgings at the compassionate core of all three western religions -- which now dominate the earth (as empowered by western technology). The darker side of each religion claims exclusive access to One Truth dictated by God.*

*Consider II Corinthians 11-4 where Paul said other prophets were false; misled by a great trickster disguised as an "angel of light." But he never questioned whether that invisible "villain" might get disguised as God himself and trick Paul too. How could he ever know for sure? See also Thessalonians 2- 4 where Paul announced that he's delivering a one-true message from his source (whoever it was).

Actually that primitive western concept of a "personal God" is so befuddled by definitional technicalities -- about what "He" is or is not -- as to become virtually meaningless: a proverbially loaded term.

Theologians argue, for example, that God is not-nature; even though the latter is a more abstractly universal term, epitomizing more comprehensively our yearning for an elusive source of spirituality. But they have second-guessed nature by finding "evil" therein, thereby foreclosing usage of the word in practical theology. Moreover, they have thus managed to alienate the West from nature, engendering our love-hate relationship with it.*

*Albert Schweitzer, THE PHILOSOPHY OF CIVILIZATION 110 et seq. (1st American ed.) said this results from the Old-Testament view that only Heaven is uncorrupted by the evil of this world; which moreover is perpetually consigned to war, within and among ourselves, by the "absolute" distinction between good and evil according to Joseph Campbell, THE INNER REACHES OF OUTER SPACE 16-23, 30-44 (Harper & Row 1986).

It might nevertheless be helpful, as semantical exercise anyway, to substitute the word "nature" (with all its concrete if ambivalent meaning) for "God" in serious theological discussion. And see what happens. Maybe the experiment could dislodge a lot of cobwebs; as a matter of putting two 'n two together.

In any event, the big fuss today is about differing versions of the divine dictate. "God" supposedly plays favorites, showering some selected elect with exclusive prerogative-to-proclaim the one Big Truth (which western book-learnin' has softened us up to expect). Of course there's never any direct evidence from the "God" side of these covenants claimed.

All these prescriptive proclamations go to lookin' pretty presumptuous. Such high-soundin' assumptions suggest the title for Joe Campbell's series of books about mythology called THE MASKS OF GOD. His idea is that the rather irreverent descriptions cut us off from the real Divinity behind the veil of verbiage.*

*Campbell told Moyers about the Hindu Brahma -- beyond any ability of words to conceive. Campbell also evidently influenced the novel by his friend John Steinbeck, TO A GOD UNKNOWN about pioneer Americans.

THE SERPENT’S DECEPTION


All the blatantly incomplete intellectualizing has led the world into a theological muddle. The western churches haven't even figured out the opening riddle of Genesis: the serpent's deception about good and evil.

The Cheyenne Indians (recounted in H. Storm, SEVEN ARROWS ((1972)) diagnosed the white man's resulting plight; faced as they were with annihilation by invaders multiplying madly across the land like flies. Fouling the rivers. Down come the trees and the sacred buffalo. What drove that man so crazy?

Their native (quite "sociological") analysis finally pointed at the "black robes" (missionaries) going around tellin' everyone to either go to church or to hell. That's a good term for the authoritarian / patriarchal fundamentalists among us. Their deadly dictate demands setting good and evil apart as "separate things" -- as identified artificially by language (which is evidently the "forbidden fruit" of Genesis).

Consequently, we honkies tend to think -- as abetted by western either/or logic -- in terms of "black or white with no gray." All or nothing . We're good, and that's that. But the Indians are bad -- so long as they remain heathens anyway. Unwashed. Most Americans are growing (too slowly) beyond this "belief trap."

We're still frankly obsessed by what Alexis de Tocqueville called "incoherent notions of right and wrong." We're tearing ourselves to shreds because of it; with some sense of righteous duty to always correct the slightest wrong-doing in others. Tocqueville observed that the Indians were less burdened by such nonsense.*

* Chapter one of DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA (1835). At least our yankee pragmatists have demonstrated that right versus wrong is an unwieldy tool for resolving human issues. "What works" is simply more direct. It's downright inefficient to always go about searching for someone to blame for whatever mess.

Theological confusion has furthermore licensed the "black robes" to justify about any outrage in the name of "God." Consider the 9/11 attack on the towers.

Pious Christians too have long refined the blistering attack on unwashed sin. At least it's thankfully been awhile since they actually burned anyone alive (most recently along only lunatic fringes like the klan taking too seriously authoritative intimations about the supposed superiority of a selected elect -- self-appointed -- in some exclusive "washing" club). Nevertheless, institutional Christianity has developed ominously (especially since the Romans took over) into a virtual antithesis of the humble Jesus supposedly worshipped.

Ironically though, Jesus reportedly rebelled against the pharisaical piety that leads black robes -- then and now -- to throw rocks at adulterers. And go about correcting "sin" in everyone but themselves.*

*See the scathing poem of Robert Burns, "Address to ... the Rigidly Righteous":

"O ye wha are sae guid yoursel,

Sae pious and sae holy,

Ye've nought to do but mark and tell

Your neebours' fault and folly."

Whatever happened to the real Christianity of love and forgiveness? Well, Chesterton observed that it's never been tried. It's too hard to give up cherished hatreds and hypocrisy.

Akansas Border (Rackensack)

Theologian Houston Smith quite casually suggested (in a talk before the Chautauqua Institute which I saw on C-Span a couple of Christmas times ago) a simple way to start unraveling the whole theological riddle, from the serpent's deception on: logically analyze good and evil more like the yin and yang of China, where he was raised by Methodist missionaries.*

*Or the forked tree of SEVEN ARROWS: good and evil are integral parts of that same tree, which the white man tried to split with his words.

The idea is to think of good and evil as intertwined to be balanced; instead of trying hopelessly to eliminate one or the other (as though they were "separate things"). Take natural reality as we find it.

THE SPLIT BRAIN


Plato's REPUBLIC contains a pristine design from nature for civilization which was adapted but brutally distorted in Augustine's authoritarian CITY OF GOD as the main intellectual basis for Christian dogma.*

*See generally the incisive books of Elaine Pagels at Princeton Theological about Augustine.

Anyway, does anyone still remember Plato's original "riddle of the line"? (introduced at the close of BOOK 6 REPUBLIC). It concerns human mental faculties ("affections of the soul"). He ranked reason and understanding (generating "knowledge") as the highest; conjecture and belief as the lowest (generating "opinion"). The lower faculties enable left-brain intellectualizing that tends to drown out the higher ones with incessant "chatter" -- which has dominated western thinking, and now the whole world, with distracting torrents of confusing words.

The holistic thought of an adult requires all four faculties; only in the kind of self-controlled balance that generates genuine common sense. An upshot appears in the book of Psalms: "Be still." And thereby get acquainted with however much of Divinity we are equipped to know in the programming of our higher faculties.

Similarly, Anthropologist Carlos Castaneda passed on (especially in JOURNEY TO IXTLAN) the most practical advice I ever heard, from the Mexican Indians: controlling the chatter of our "inner conversation" is a threshold to enlightenment (adulthood). Talking to ourselves and others constantly is an unrecognized habit: using language as the preferred vehicle of thought, to the neglect of our higher ability to think aesthetically in pictures.*

*I once found in a used-book store a paperback by some physician entitled, TURN ON THE MOVIE INSIDE YOUR HEAD (mind's-eye). Northrop, THE MEETING OF EAST AND WEST (mid 20th century) advises a better balance between our "intellectual" and "aesthetic" faculties. The West has developed the former; the East the latter. They need to exchange notes on the respective experiences engendered.

What happens when the incessant chatter is toned down? The rest of the gestault mind (head, heart and body) kicks in, clearing up everything we've been trying to figure out with words. The whole-mind emerges from trees of verbal technicality to behold the whole obvious forest of nature before us.*

*Compare Betty Edwards, DRAWING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN (1979): minimize tellin' yourself how to draw the picture and let the rest of the mind work at it -- starting from the more visual right-brain. See generally the reports of Dr. Roger Sperry who pioneered split-brain science around mid-century. It has advanced fast into common colloquial lore.

In short it's time for an exodus from the closed-mind of Plato's cave. We live in that basement to the neglect of a glorious castle of the mind upstairs among our higher (non- verbal) faculties. We've been equipped by natural biology to activate them though -- through simple silence -- and thereby observe a "neglected beauty of the obvious. "*

*From the opening page of Llewellyn, THE COMMON LAW TRADITION; DECIDING APPEALS (1960). He also co-authored (with Hoebel) THE CHEYENNE WAY (1941) indicating much we can learn about legal philosophy from the "situation sense" of those smart Indians. They were also pretty fierce. Ask Custer.

NATURAL MORALITY


Natural biology has further equipped us with pleasure, pain and itch as tricky guides toward adulthood. Morality is thereby lodged in our very sinews, down to the bone -- as a matter of classical natural law. Put simply, doing justice feels good. Tyranny hurts. We're equipped with the requisite conscience, and moral sensibilities that immediately register outrage in the gut upon seeing, say, brutal man beating woman, child, or horse.

The whole business is far simpler than theologians have yet imagined. Maybe Plato said it best (before religious rules got so complicated) in Book 9 REPUBLIC: the just person (adult) can maximize enjoyment of life. (Some incentive, no?) Of course that requires judicious juggling of short- and long-term pleasures. Those of the mind turn out better than those of the flesh ; considering that the former lead toward the unsurpassable ecstasy of oriental "nirvana."

John Keats, "Ode..." adds this: "beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know." Joseph Campbell summed it all up for Bill Moyers:

"Follow your bliss."

Therefore let's all relax and have some fun, for a change. SEVEN ARROWS imparts a Cheyenne vision (to paraphrase) with humans casting off masks of pretense at the witching of a masquerade. They look openly at one another for the first time, with wonder at whatever the fuss has been all about, take hands and dance around the "flowering tree of life."

PLATONIC EDUCATION IN SUBTLETY


We've been laboring in a hard school of knocks replete with many riddles to unravel. SEVEN ARROWS even suggests that ancestral "tricksters of learning" are always toying with our minds out there somewhere. (It might be well to reconsider the role of that old "angel of light" -- introduced in II Corinthians 11-4 -- in this light.)

Anyway, it's time to take seriously Plato's implication that an audience of celestial schoolmaster(s) is always grading our performance as "actors on a stage" (Shakespeare's rendition of the obvious). There may even be something to the mythological rumor that everything we do and think goes on "candid camera" in a great "Library" beyond the sky -- or a Book of Life -- which might well unsettle the gratuitous aggressor.

There's no denying that it has indeed been work. Aristotle taught the West to dissect the world, like a frog in biology class, then label the parts. The resulting empirical science has facilitated our learning -- as we do it -- how to build a considerable civilization; featuring enough technology to get us on the moon, for starters.

Inevitably though, we students got to thinkin' we could finally find one big truth by verbally excluding the "false": the Big Remainder. We're accustomed to that refrain as a shadowy implication of the elementary logic that has been taught specially to westerners. (Technically speaking, it's a syllogistic regression from reductions required: either this or that.) The entire analytic has soaked into our hide -- even amongst the least "bookish" who somehow never heard of Aristotle.

Ernest Hemingway evidently got tired of the usual refrain and concluded -- with words I heard closing the movie made of his last novel (ISLANDS IN THE STREAM) -- that there's not just one truth. "It's all true."*

*That sounds more like the "aesthetic continuum" of nature appreciated in the orient (with its open-ended logic of "either/and") -- as described gorgeously in Northrop, THE MEETING OF EAST AND WEST -- than our own proclivity to chop it all up into discrete objects; with lifeless labels attached (either "true or false'" etc).

Of course the arduous word games and logic choppin' (generating "half-truths") have shocked our animal sensitivities; evidently as a traumatic catalyst for the rebirth of "spiritual" human from such beginnings. *

*Joe Campbell told Bill Moyers about activating for this purpose the "heart chakra" (from Hindu yoga); which probably corresponds with the recently discovered nerve center called "belly brain" by western science

Furthermore, such chatty exercises have prepared westerners for a special role as scholarly thinkers; once we rejoin the coalescing brother/sisterhood of humanity (from savage to civilized) in the garden of nature -- from which we were exiled to live "alone" in a dry Wasteland (devoid of spirituality as described by T.S. Eliot) long enough to learn our books.

Yes, there's been something of old Cain gapin' behind all our fancy words and technology. (An "ugly American", notably.) We’ve borne barbarically the self-appointed "white man's burden" of civilizing the earth; with characteristic disregard for the pragmatic commandment: "Judge not lest ye be judged." (And the Golden Rule.)

Standing forth instead as just-scholars will entail practicing the art of conversation; as mastered by the oldtimers of Stone County -- more for sheer enjoyment than tryin’ to "prove" whatever to one another. *

*That means listening to the other guy, and not just tellin’. Eloquent Indians like Chief Joseph and Seattle complained that you couldn't talk with a white man. For he already "knows everything."

Hopefully the rest of humanity will forgive us for a supposed "superiority" arising from the desperately confusing bondage to books.

Now the opening words to our Declaration of Independence restore (to me, anyhow) a beautiful sense of infinite mystery in their inclusiveness: "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." (derived from perhaps the most useful ideology ever devised by westerners, centering on classical natural law.) For that's about all anyone can sensibly say in some dispositive sense.

FUTILE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY


Facing reality head-on, accordingly, entails acknowledging much chanciness therein. Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle can be extended from physics to human experience generally; along with shamefaced recognition that futility is embodied in the title of John Dewey's QUEST FOR CERTAINTY (1929).

For it's only in words that we discern some willow-the-wisp prospect of knowin' exactly what is goin' on. Socrates apologized that he sure didn't know. It seems that only a pseudo certainty can be achieved with words; whereas nature just doesn't precipitate precise presentments.

All humans can apparently hope for epistemologically -- to update Kant's CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON (1787) -- is to catch the drift of whatever reality we are biologically equipped to share in; with common rationality (from classical natural-law philosophy). And go for it! There's adventure in the risk.

RENAISSANCE


Santayana said the main human attempt is to reach the Immediate.*

*In REASON IN RELIGION (1905) wherein he further suggested that religious ritual can do more for our naturally spiritual reverence than belief in verbal dogma.

It turns out that Santayana's quest is synonymous with growin' up. For it requires an adult focus on right-now; again taking with that proverbial grain of salt the distracting urgency of words (which carry us hither and yon across time). For after all, they are only secondarily ephemeral recreations of reality; no more than conjectures about it. The real cosmos is always out there to be perceived -- beyond the screen of language (which merely labels "shadows" on the interior walls of Plato's cave).

Yes, we dissected the world in one classy grade school (having progressed at least that far, let us hope). Now it's time for a graduation exercise putting it all back together. We've even got old Hegel's advanced logic to guide the reassembly:

Thesis-Antithesis--SYNTHESIS...

NEW PARADIGM


Science will need to transcend the grade-school strictures of verbal dichotomies; especially the way mind and matter have been set apart as "separate things" artificially (in much the same way as good and evil have). Consequently, scientists have mainly gleaned "inert" matter for answers -- even for the presence of "life."

I heard somewhere that Plato said nothing is real in-itself (but only in relation to other things). Accordingly, I have suggested elsewhere that matter is an effect of mental processing whereby our perceptions cancel out the energetic turbulence of sub-visible "particles" to produce "solid" objects. Thus we're mainly talkin' about energy where matter is concerned; and I heard Joe Campbell suggest to Bill Moyers that where there's energy there's consciousness.

Indeed "life" seems to exist at-large, comprising what Jung called the "common unconscious." The idea is that our minds are like little ham radios hooked into a super-consciousness existing both inside and outside of ourselves.*

*Maybe modern science rejected tribal animism prematurely, and everything is pregnant with a life-force; like the way Johannes Kepler reportedly regarded the sun -- and the oriental "che." Consider also the suggestion from medieval philosophers like Aquinas that the "thoughts of God" abide at-large; as channeled into the individual psyche.

Obviously the peculiar frequency of each "ham radio" can be adjusted to wider communications than accounted for by sensory perception; encompassing prophesy, remote-viewing and other supposedly mysterious phenomena. Perhaps the super-consciousness can be conceptualized as an ethereal (electromagnetic?) continuum -- susceptible of having been rigged by whatever creator(s) to accommodate patterns of causation beyond the mechanical ones we immaturely associate with Newtonian "clockworks."

Thus the continuum may have been programmed for the patterns of repetition and coincidence studied scientifically by Jung and hypothesized as "synchronicity" in THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE. Carl Sagan ignored this study when he scoffed at astrology (in his "Cosmos" series several years ago). "How would it work?," he asked; thereby reflecting the traditional world-view of mechanical materialism. He seemed oblivious to Jung's pioneering toward a new paradigm for science.*

* The demand for this is amply demonstrated in Leshan & Margenau, EINSTEIN’S SPACE & VAN GOGH'S SKY (1982). The overall suggestion is that human aesthetics, mysticism and normation can be approached scientifically; despite the old verbal stricture that only what "is" can be studied but not what "ought to be."

I once gathered a further pivotal suggestion from Jung's "Psychological Commentary" to the TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD: Despite human reliance on the "fixity" of matter, we can't know absolutely what our surroundings are objectively like, in some final analysis. For perceptions are finished products of interior mental processes. In my experience it is impossible to tell whether even out-of-body events can fully transcend this bias.

Thus it is suggested that any test for what is "real" be withdrawn from exterior surroundings to the existential experience; thereby relinquishing any verbal attempt to grade events as real to less-real. That accords with Abelard's intractable Ontology: anything we dream up is real (for at least the dream is an actual experience.)*

*Also in line with occult teaching that every thought (and dream) is projected from our head to take shape onto an ethereal screen permeating our existence -- inside and out.

Thus even the "delusions" of John Nash, pictured in the movie "A Beautiful Mind," were real to him -- even if those around couldn't see them. His story could thus provide a fresh perspective in which psychological science might ask: Who is really crazy or just confused by words? Or by what Zorba the Greek advised the young scholar in the 1960's movie: "You think too much." Psychiatrist R. D. Laing was demonstrating in the 1970's that "madness", resulting from enhanced mentation, could be allowed to run its course in order to cure the common human "schizoia" (found especially in even "normal" westerners) diagnosed by Laing in such books as THE DIVIDED SELF and THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE.*

*Maybe it's time to reconsider all "hallucinations" in light of another pioneering study by Jung; FLYING SAUCERS (and other writings on the UFO craze). It's downright primitive to suppose they must come from other planets. How about other "dimensions"? Consider also the wild "nagual" events reported in the books of Carlos Castaneda starting around 1970.

The experience of mental adventures has frankly revealed to me no way to tell for sure which phenomena may be staged from whatever source outside our enclave of visibility, and which are generated inside the head. Epistemology just doesn't present any final answers along these lines. Maybe science can find out more someday, when released from grade-school strictures.

IMPLICATIONS


Accordingly Martin Luther King's vision of a "Promised Land" may well be a pragmatic plausibility. At least when folks act, with enlightened self-interest, more like adults than children. Everything could turn out like Shakespeare too originally envisioned, at the close of his mighty TEMPEST:

What a brave new world to have such people in't.

Jim McCord
Stone County, MO
Summer 2002

From Branson West
(Formerly Linchpin on wilderness road to Rackensack)

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