Prophecy

Boundaries of the Existential Self, Part 7

An ancient Egyptian shadow clock, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This is Part 7 of an existentialist memoir series. The first post is here.

By day two, as my initial confusion settled somewhat, I had conceded to myself that any person with a pre-existing belief in God would call this God. But I didn’t have a pre-existing belief in God. I was a lifelong atheist, and I was having an extended spiritual experience of a type that I had mostly discounted as even being possible. I wasn’t dreaming. I wasn’t on drugs. I hadn’t been meditating. There was the existentialism, of course, but—forgive me—I had always sort of thought that the weirder existentialists might have just had trouble holding their existential Angst. This was not a movement in the direction of less Angst.

Nor was I missing my critical faculties. I was, in fact, using what I would ordinarily think of as my critical faculties in order to be here in the first place, and there was no reason why I couldn’t keep using them. I was not sustaining this experience by belief. I could pose whatever questions I wanted.

Well, what would you have done, given that opportunity?

Faced with something that so clearly mattered, I treated it the same way I would treat anything else that was deeply important. I asked questions, making careful, fine distinctions. Here and now did not seem like the time to jump to conclusions. If this was, in some sense, evidence—albeit of a personal and subjective kind—then I should gather as much as possible, as carefully as possible.

So, yes, this might seem like God, but when people say “God” they mean a lot of different things at once, don’t they? What did I actually feel like I had evidence of, here? What was this? It was definitely intertwined with both morality and motives. Treating it like a Platonic Good came naturally to me, although I suspected (and indeed still suspect) that I was defaulting to a pre-existing comfortable concept by seeing it as such.

Despite the breadth of my description in Part 6, in the moment I did not find myself wanting to adopt a pantheistic perspective. Viewed as a moral concept, I supposed that there would be aspects of the world that would be more in accordance what I was seeing and aspects of the world that would be less in accordance with it.

Had it made the world? The world—famously—doesn’t seem like it was made by something that good, but theodicy is an age-old problem. How powerful was it? I couldn’t tell. Anywhere from omnipotent to powerless. How big was it? Really big. Possibly it could have made the world, I don’t know. Then again, jumping from “much bigger than what I think of as me” to “bigger than basically everything” was a bit of a leap. I am pretty small, in the scheme of things. There could be intermediate scales, if you see what I mean. How would I know the difference?

Could I conclude anything from it about whether there was any sort of life after death? Not by any immediate direct perception. Did it know everything? Did it “know” anything? I didn’t really feel inclined to personify it. Sticking with a vaguely Platonist perspective, I wanted to think of it as some sort of ideal, accessible by thinking, like mathematics. Except, normally you can’t have a mathematical concept in your head unless you already understand it, and I did not understand this! Still, I kind of felt like there was a sense in which it wouldn’t tell me anything unless I went and got it for myself, using my own knowledge as a help. I don’t think I could’ve used it to, say, predict the lottery or anything.

I felt, too, that I was in control of where I put my attention. You might say that it was, in some ways, like having the entirety of all moral truth laid out in front of me, except that I had to bring my own facts, and it wouldn’t correct me if I forgot to consider something relevant. You could make horrible mistakes, from here, if there was something that really mattered and you just forgot to look.

This, incidentally, answered my question of whether thinking this way would necessarily turn me into a self-righteous fanatic. The answer was in fact surprisingly simple. If you genuinely think you are following something outside of yourself—even if it’s associated with something that you formerly thought of as purely internal—then that raises the possibility that you could get it wrong, which permits the necessary caution. It was odd, to me, how impossible it had been to imagine that from the other side. Truly, you have to consider things properly before you can know what would follow from them!

But how was I supposed to hold on to any of this? It was all so big, so much larger than any religion could ever be. I couldn’t comprehend it myself, now, while experiencing it directly. When I stopped seeing it, when I eventually let go, would I be able to keep anything at all?

What if I tried to articulate just a small part of it? If I did, would that count as prophecy? That would be cool, you have to admit! Not that I was in a position to say whether it would be prophecy, mind you. Certainly, it would not be infallible. It would be a miracle, in fact, if someone were to articulate large parts of what I was experiencing without mistakes. I was inclined, despite the context, to disbelieve in such miracles; they might even be logically impossible. Verbal description of this would surely always be incomplete or imperfect; usually both.

Small parts of it, though, that might be possible. I am good at articulating things. Could I do it? I went to try, and found an unexpected difficulty.

I have, you might say, a kind of prearticulatory space in my head. I use it for all sorts of wording tasks. It’s great for summarising: read a long thing, turn it into something wordless, turn it back into fewer words. It can be good for mathematical conjectures, too, provided I remember that I’m not perfectly accurate with them, or indeed just for mathematical explanation, if people need me to explain something from several angles before it makes sense. Any time I have an idea in my head that doesn’t yet have a description, I can sit with it for a bit, and sort of pull out some words, and compare them with the idea.

I went to use my prearticulatory space.

It was occupied. Fully. Overflowing with this. There was no room for anything else. No room, for example, for me to make a wording, and compare it with a concept. If I had wanted to word even a small part of this thing, I would have had to make something else in my head that wasn’t this. I couldn’t do it.

I wondered, perhaps, if someone else could, though. Someone better at it than me. Maybe you could sort of squeeze the overflowing concept out of a tiny space, and—this would be the really hard part—keep that tiny space separate, so that you wouldn’t lose this by accidentally shifting it off the equilibrium, and then use the tiny separate space to make some words, so you could compare this with whatever wording you’d made?

That would be an absolutely gymnastic manoeuvre. I found myself wondering if this was what people meant by wrestling with an angel, or with God. Seriously, though, if Moses actually managed to get ten separate commandments out of this, then that was truly impressive. Any ten, honestly. They wouldn’t even need to be especially good ones, I’d still be impressed.

Is this actually a thing people did, thousands of years ago, in their own way?

It dawned on me suddenly that all of those people, back then, were people. Of course I knew that intellectually, but it was quite another thing to feel it with my whole heart. To think of some of them as contemplating their own versions of this same problem was to see them, and by extension every person around them—every person who ever lived—in vivid metaphorical colour, deeply foreign and amazingly, awe-inspiringly human.

I had to sit with that one for a bit.

When I returned to the articulation problem, it occurred to me that it might be possible to do an end-run around it. I couldn’t make words, but I could compare pre-existing words and see if they fit. I cast around for something likely and found consistent phrasing of my own, at hand. Specifically, “Regard people in depth and with sympathy.”

Having found—or perhaps stolen—that much, I didn’t push my luck in seeking anything further. I felt like I’d already done something pretty dangerous.

There are, of course, reasons why I haven’t talked about this part before. A person could definitely take this the wrong way, and since I wasn’t even sure, in the aftermath, how I wanted to take it, I figured I’d better shut up until after I’d had a good long think.

Of course I wondered whether I should be shouting my fragmentary wording from the rooftops. But I didn’t think so. Anyone inclined to believe it would probably not need the testimony of my own weird spiritual experience to take it seriously as an idea. It’s not like the ethos was new. Possibly, in fact, the best way to spread the idea would just be to act in accordance with it.

As the old Quaker saying has it, “Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.” Quakers, I have since learned, have quite a lot of ideas that might be relevant. They say, if you think you’ve heard something, you should ask who the message is for, and in what context. If I apply that angle, the answer is actually quite simple!

“Regard people in depth and with sympathy” is phrasing I came up with when TracingWoodgrains was setting up a new Reddit forum. He asked me, early on, if I wanted to help moderate, writing, “I get the sense … that you intuitively know the sort of thing we're aiming for.” I thought so, too, and had in fact already offered to form that intuition into something a bit more concrete. So I sat with it for a bit and pulled out some words:

I might go for a phrasing like "the moderation on this [subreddit forum] believes that you should regard people in depth and with sympathy" -- both other posters, and people who are likely to be affected by any ideas you post. Not that people would have to agree with the subreddit's point of view in order to post, but they'd have be willing to put up with being moderated on that basis.

…

There might be better ways to phrase it. Moreover, as compared to your moderation style, it probably isn't the only principle you're going by.

Trace wrote back in less than an hour:

You've very efficiently gotten to the core of what I'm hoping for. I like your phrasing a lot, and, ah, I've already adopted it into the sidebar.

So, who is this message for, and in what context? The obvious answer would be that it’s for running a subreddit, and it’s not for being taken as prophecy, it’s for being taken as a moderation guideline. In fact, one reason why I didn’t talk about any of this earlier is that it was still being used as a moderation guideline, and I didn't think implying it to be the Word of God or whatever would actually help with that. But, as happens sometimes with insufficiently dramatic internet dynamics, the subreddit has slowed down considerably over time. I haven’t had to moderate many close calls there in a while.

Still, we had some pretty worthwhile conversations. That includes the one that precipitated me seeing this, so, hey.

In context, that phrasing may have already served its purpose. Knowing that, perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you this to begin with. I wouldn’t want it to come across wrongly. I do think “Regard people in depth and with sympathy” is pretty good general advice, but as a description of this it’s basically like saying that a dodecahedron has at least one edge. It’s not that informative relative to the whole and it’s not even the first thing you’d notice.

One of the hardest things about writing this series has been confronting how much I fear being believed. It might be a silly fear, because I don’t plan on starting a cult, and I don’t subscribe to the kind of orthodoxy that might make people adopt me as an authority. However, the price I paid at the door is that I don’t get to pass responsibility on to anyone or anything else. So if I invoke this, either directly or by implication, then I am close to taking on more than I can bear.

I look at the ways people use¹ sacred writings and I’m actually kind of horrified. I mean, somebody goes to all that trouble of trying to write something deeply complex and meaningful, and then before you know it some other person is taking that writing to pieces and using it like a dead thing, fodder for an argument, a cudgel to beat people with. Listen, if you use someone else’s spiritual writing then you are, in some sense, trying to be in spiritual community with that person. You don’t have to take everything in the same way they would have taken it, but you should care about who they might have been and what it might have meant to them. You should try to treat them like people.

Me? I’m an existentialist. So, if you do follow anything I say, do it freely. I have no pretensions to the kind of advice that can be usefully followed without first seeing whatever good it might hold, using your own judgment.

Still, sometimes the world could use a few more risks, of the right kind. On that basis, I’ll go ahead and say it. Regard people in depth and with sympathy. I think we might need a lot more of that, just now.

The next post in this series is here.

1. “Use” as part of a religious practice, I mean. If you’re “using” sacred writings to criticize them then that’s a somewhat different matter.