This is a new series devoted to delineating the definitions, boundaries and inter-relationships between the material and the spiritual realm. It has its genesis in a series of conversations with a very special young man, who elected to remain anonymous. He transcribed these conversations, which I then edited.
Why is this subject important? Because the very air we breathe, the culture in which we immerse ourselves, and the conceptual language that permeates our everyday life is materialistic. Not only do we live in a culture that makes the material the starting point of our perception and thinking, we scarcely know anything else. In this we at a great disadvantage. Our forefathers lived and breathed spirituality. Not so we, their descendents. We barely admit that the immaterial world exists. How then can we serve God when the very premise of His world, the spiritual world, is foreign to out thinking?
Warning: This is dense material. Please devote some time if you wish to follow this discussion. The common web browsing technique will not work when you read this. It does not lend itself to scanning or browsing. In fact, you might want to print it out an actually work at it. The rewards are, I think, worth the effort. What we try to accomplish in these series is to present a coherent view of the spiritual-physical interaction, based on philosophic thought, ancient and modern, as well as the conceptual system of Kabbala in a popular adaptation, with analogies and examples, so that evanescent and very fine concepts can therein be grasped. I’ll do my best but please use the comments section so we can clarify what is not clear or farther expand on the ideas that are presented here.
Model I - Abstractions
We need to define the spiritual in such a way that we can understand and work with it. We understand the physical and material world because we are intimately familiar with that world; we know it though our senses. I submit that the spiritual world can also be known though the senses, but these “parallel’ senses are inadequately developed in most people. Perfection of the spiritual ‘chush” is something that we will approach, with fear and trembling, in a future session. For now it suffices to say that these senses correspond to the senses we know but are employed by the levels of the soul that we must still discover and get to know. That is a goal and a process that takes decades.
We tend to define the spiritual world as anything outside of the physical. However, this is a negative, not a positive definition. What does that mean? It means that in order to know something, to work with it, to use and employ it, we need to know it positively. Thus, we need to define ‘spiritual’ as something that has specific features that we recognize and manipulate. In addition, not defining ‘spiritual’ positively means that we can never be sure of its boundaries. Where does physical end and spiritual begin? If we define spiritual as that which is not physical, it becomes hard to be certain that it exists, for, perhaps, spiritual phenomena are just products of the physical, or worse, a mirage.
The problem that human beings have in accessing the spiritual is precisely the senses. If we use senses to know everything, where is the spiritual to be found, how can we grasp something outside the physical world and therefore beyond our senses? This was precisely David Hume’s argument, and it now reigns in the world of modern philosophy. Therefore, we need a positive definition of the spiritual so that we know it when we come across it, so that we might recognize it as an independent entity, and so we can work with it operationally. We are looking for a functional definition and at this point it need not be rigid. However, it needs to be positive – what the spiritual is, not what it is not. The more we directly deal with it the more we will come to recognize it and to be convinced that it exists.
The first thing to do is, that contrary to what we are conditioned to think, we live in the world of spirit. Through the example of abstractions, we can know that we live surrounded by a sea of spirituality and that it is the very air that we breathe. How so? One problem with going from the material to the spiritual is that we have the impression that we live in the material world and the spiritual is ancillary, not relevant, important, “out there, an extra, a curiosity, not a necessity.” We need to realize that we live in the world of abstractions. The physical world is really a small part of our lives. The most brutish and lowly human being lives much more within the metaphysical world of disembodied concepts than not. We constantly manipulate abstract concepts – it is not “real” in the sense that you can touch it but it is very, very real to us. Without abstractions, life as we know it could not be.
Let’s take one concept, as an example. Loyalty, for example, has no physical corollary. Yes, it resides within specific examples of human behavior, but it is a stand-alone. We can’t put our finger on it and feel it, but we understand this concept and we can manipulate it. We recognize it and we can operate with it by measuring gradations of loyalty (who is more loyal or les). More, loyalty is a composite concept. Loyalty includes as its constituents appreciation, courage, dedication etc. Therefore, loyalty needs to be more particularly defined – loyalty that stems from appreciation, loyalty that manifests in courage, loyalty in the sense of dedication. Even the most brute person is living in a very abstract world; the criminal who uses a key relates to it as something that opens doors, not as a piece of metal. These examples demonstrate that we are by essence spiritual beings.
Abstract concepts are non-material but they also have a hierarchy as well as interrelations. In a language of Kabbala, concepts and abstractions can be grouped, ranked - a tree, roots and branches. We can group related concepts into groups that can be subsumed by another concept. For example, Loyalty is a composite abstraction (wisdom, courage, appreciation, fortitude etc) but all of them can be classed under morality, or beauty or other higher-level concepts. The higher raning conepts can be eventually grouped under the concept of The Good, what Plotinus called God. We see that we can work with spiritual concepts (classify, rank, show interrelations); in other words, we have a positive definition of spiritual, nonmaterial entities.
You might say that this is old hat, Neo-Platonism, antiquated teaching. This is true to a point. Neo-platonic philosophy teaches that ideas, and abstract equations, have a real and true existence. Our inner world is not a figment of our imagination or of our brains. Yes, this is neoplatonic but it is not all it is. We are just starting. I pledge to lead you to purer waters from this opening of an ancient brook. The point is that the “Spiritual” is not non-existent. Just because at this point of our growth we cannot use our senses to grasp it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Hopefully, eventually we will learn how to grasp the spiritual directly, or at least, agree that this can be done, has been done by prophets and inspired teachers, and is still to some extent possible for men of true religious faith and inspiration. What I want to get across at this starting point is the view of the world as a world in reverse (the spiritual is the main reality). This is a positive definition; we can work with it and function with it.
Question: Couldn’t it be claimed that there is no abstract, independent concept called “loyalty” – it is just a way of categorizing and defining a certain aspect of human behavior? Do we ever discuss loyalty in a completely abstract sense? Similarly with the key analogy: It is true that we relate to a key as “something that opens doors,” and we can discuss the concept completely abstractly (“This is the key to my success”) but isn’t the existence of a material key the starting point for all further discussion? Is there anything – other than G-d – that is entirely abstract but with which we nevertheless function and manipulate?
In order to answer this we have to go back to the strange fact that human minds are capable of explaining things and drawing out generalizations/abstractions that repeatedly and reliably predict that which is going to happen (the so-called Anthropic Principle). Similarly, it is strange that we describe laws of nature that were derived by observation and then in turn we can derive new laws that are then proven by experiment. If we derive the concept of loyalty from human interactions why is it so reproducible in new situations and future events? This is usually how we define “real” things – manipulative, reproducible, and predictable. Materialists seem to have a double standard for science and for everyday abstractions. If our experience can establish what is true about the material world, we should be able to d the same thing in regard to the spiritual world. The fact that we can define a concept of an immaterial “loyalty’ and then find it to be real in the sense of being reproducible, and ‘real, means that it exists independently of the examples in which it is clothed. This is, of course, not an ironclad argument for the independent existence of abstractions as spiritual entities but a strong one.
However it is impossible to convince a materialist. It is like trying to argue for the existence of French without speaking it – you learn a new language by becoming immersed in it and seeing the inner logic. Similarly, we will not approach the discussion of spiritual and material form the standpoint of the materialist, we will not attempt to prove the existence of the spiritual by using the framework and arguments of the materialists, but we will, instead, describe the spiritual reality, as we perceive it, and thus, present a logical, coherent and, we hope, ultimately convincing view.
