Greenthought Part II: Moth as Mind

Ain't no toll booths on the Via Negativa, babies.

“My goal is not to explain the universe, but to help guide others to have a direct experience of reality. Words cannot describe reality. Only direct experience enables us to see the true face of reality.” —Siddhartha Gautama, aka The Buddha

“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” —Kierkegaard

"All theory is gray [...] but the golden tree of life springs ever green." —Goethe

"No ideas but in things" —William Carlos Williams

"God is better known by not knowing." —St. Augustine

“It is only after you have come to know the surface of things that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible. —Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar

"What do I know?" —Montaigne

…

That’s a lot of quotations for an online jot, isn’t it? But there’s probably no point in pretending that this little pet theory of mine isn’t any better than a magpie’s mound of bottle caps and gum wrappers. All of this Greenthought stuff may just be mystic agnosticism for treehuggers like me, but there may be some ideas in here that you might find useful for your own formulations. (Again, this is about “whoa”, not “woo”.)

I just encountered the term “mysterianism” this past week (I’m probably very late to this particular party). It’s a useful label for a long-held suspicion of mine. In many ways it dovetails with this Greenthought business that I once thought was so clever.

As best I can tell, Mysterianism pertains to the philosophical implications of physics and cosmology, but the idea also applies in core ways to metaphysics and religion. It more or less asserts that the deepest mysteries of the cosmos will never be truly known by us, let alone resolved. Nothing in our evolutionary history has prepared us for such a task. There are many attainable truths regarding existence, but it appears that a significant portion of these truths are simply beyond our physical and intellectual reach. In short, mystery and change are the only constants we know of.

We freakish apes have enjoyed a brief and spectacular run, but the idea that our infinitesimally limited frame of reference would fully map onto all levels of existence as it really is seems about as likely as an oyster waking up one morning and setting about building a printing press.

This late phase in our civilizational cycle is awash in abstractions (eventually leading to what Giambattista Vico called “the barbarism of reflection”), but as a species we’ve historically had far more use for what serves life than for what serves truth (I’m lifting from Nietzsche here). What we call “truth” is a set of particularly useful errors; even mathematics ultimately falls under this category, despite its breathtaking triumphs.

“Useful errors” isn’t pejorative. The way we’ve managed to game our surroundings to the degree we have is horrifying (according to Sir David Attenborough, 96% of Earth’s mammalian biomass consists of humans and our livestock), but it’s also deeply impressive. Even so, we probably shouldn’t get our hopes up about divining the big truths of existence. For this we should be grateful: Our species falls prey to all sorts of pathology and dysfunction when it’s denied a frontier for too long. Homo sapiens, “the thinking ape”, is a misnomer. We had bodies long before we had minds, and so we were wanderers long before we were thinkers. Homo vagus, “the wandering ape”, would have been a more apt binomial for us.

Our sciences are pretty good at explaining the “how” of things, but we seem to be completely hopeless when it comes to the “why” of things. Theology is what we call the systems of stories and bylaws that satisfy our quixotic quest for this telos, this “why”.

Long posts like this may suggest otherwise, but at this stage in my life I’ve grown impatient with clutter of all kinds, including theology. Ideally I’d like to have very little between me and my experience of the world. This is an impossible task of course, but it gives me something to shoot for.

Maps are useful, but at some point it’s refreshing to put them aside and just take in the terrain before you. If you’re lucky, you get a moment of pure sensation. Emerson had a similar experience as a young man; he described it as feeling like a “transparent eyeball”. Maybe that’s what Nirvana is: a momentary blurring of one’s self and surroundings, forgetting yourself in the flow. I’ve been lucky enough to experience moments just like this when drifting alone in my kayak down slow, winding Pine Barrens rivers on summer evenings. Not a thought in my fat, bald head: It just happens. But as soon as my mind notices it’s not having any conscious thoughts, the curtain falls. The trick is to accept this oscillation as natural. It’s a temporary state you can visit, but you can’t embody it. You’re a living thing: You’re supposed to be in constant flux. Go with it.

It’s easy to slip into that flow state when you’re in a wild place. In my view, the intricate, ancient web of life permeating this world is as close to the divine as we’re likely to get. Not everyone feels the need to view such an experience in terms of the divine, but I think most people, myself included, tend to vacillate in and out of that frame of mind as needed. When you’re thirsty, drink. When you need to build a bridge, use a plumb line. When you feel the need to tap into the eternal hum, groove.

I‘ve never had much use for zazen, aka meditation. I find that my mind becomes still and enters that flow state only when my body is in motion. I view prayer as the opposite of a flow state, not because prayer is religious in nature, but because prayer is conscious, active, and intentional. I can’t consciously or actively put myself into a flow state: I slip into it passively. It happens whenever I forget myself and become absorbed in the moment. A flow state is more like praying with your body rather than with your mind.

If Greenthought has an approach to the divine, it’s apophatic, aka the via negativa, abandoning the description of attributes and instead describing what something isn’t rather than what it is. The anonymously-written medieval Christian mystical text, “The Cloud of Unknowing”, proposes that to experience the numinous/divine/god, one has to abandon one’s ego and enter a sphere of profound silence. The mystery of existence, of which we’re a small feature, is beyond any concepts and so is without any defined image or form. In the words of the unknown author: “[…] go after experience rather than knowledge. On account of pride, knowledge may often deceive you, but this gentle, loving affection will not deceive you. Knowledge tends to breed conceit, but love builds. Knowledge is full of labor, but love, full of rest.” I once heard this idea expressed more succinctly by a Catholic priest: “The heart can go where the mind cannot.”

It took me an embarrassing length of time to realize that to cling to the rational while denying the need for the non-rational is itself irrational. It’s also inhuman. Better to be rational about one’s non-rationality rather than taking one’s rationality to irrational lengths.

Greenthought centers itself in the “natural” (what is conceivable to us). Like any skeptical framework, it acknowledges and entertains but doesn’t dwell in the “supernatural” (what is inconceivable to us). Metaphors for the known and unknown forces of existence are useful and often delightful (artists need something to do), but theology tends to obscure the unvarnished wonders of reality with its maps and models, which to me seems like a failure of engagement with what is because one’s mind is clogged with what should be.

Greenthought is a means of appreciating this world, delving deeper into the strangeness of reality and seeing it with fresh eyes. It’s a “shallowness” born of profundity. Its depth is found in the inexhaustible surface of life, to paraphrase the fabulist author Italo Calvino.

Through both natural and supernatural processes, the cosmos has gained consciousness through us. It’s become a cliché, but nevertheless it remains an astounding fact: We are quite literally the cosmos experiencing itself. This is the only known place in the entire cosmos where inert matter has attained living consciousness. We are that very thing. We may eventually discover how it happened (hot seawater on volcanic glass?), but it’s doubtful that we’ll ever discover why. Either way, life is both a precious joy and an awful burden. It brims with beauty and horror, each giving rise to the other. The imperatives of life are beyond good and evil. Like the universe that spawned us, we’re paradoxical to the core. We are one way or another until we aren’t; all living things must occasionally contradict themselves in order to survive. Consistency is an abstraction that exists only in the human mind.

Obviously, the mystery of existence isn’t necessarily divine just because it’s beyond our understanding. But when only mystery remains in a line of inquiry, then a person can be forgiven for entertaining the possibility of the divine. I sometimes do, myself. Would it be “true”? Not likely, but is that even the right question to ask? Shouldn’t we instead be asking if it helps us thrive? I realize that some may cite the “god of the gaps” fallacy here, but this is the best we can do while still retaining some rationality. Life is hard for a lot of people. We should cut them some slack.

Greenthought may sound like Pantheism, but Pantheism regards nature—the cosmos—as “god”. While I deeply sympathize with Pantheism, I usually cop to the Ignostic position, which insists that we can't fully define the meaning of the term, "god" in the first place (obviously this is also a mysterian position). Words fail to truly grasp the unknowable. But what does that skepticism get me other than darkness and silence? Maybe that darkness and silence isn’t such a bad thing. The Zen Buddhists don’t seem to mind it.

Any line of speculation I’ve ever taken inevitably leads back to mystery. I’ve come to view it as a destination in itself: Mystery was our midwife as we slowly emerged from the ancient darkness where no mind existed. Mystery has shaped and honed our strange form of consciousness from the beginning. Imagine how confined we’d feel if we had it all figured out. The Latin phrase pax in tenebris (peace in darkness) seems a fitting motto.

I’m hesitant to assign a symbol to such a sensibility as Greenthought. But when I think about a mind thriving in the “luminous darkness” of uncertainty, I picture a beautiful moth soaring through a void: A winged island of life whose origin and destination are unknown, and always will be. We can’t find the light in that endless darkness because we are the source of that light. We’re as close an approximation of the divine as we’re ever likely to know. We are life.

~A