The glass ceiling

I once knew someone who wanted to ‘sign up’ fully to religion was but was blocked by what he jocularly referred to as the ‘magic show’ of religion (essentially the notion of the existence and eternity of the soul or spirit as entities that pre-exist or at least exist without dependence on the material plus the notion of a God who intervenes via miracles, in the form of (a) the ‘major’ miracle-cycle of the incarnation and resurrection, (b) the ‘minor’ miracles of healing, the wedding at Cana, etc., and (c) the possibility of intercessory prayer activating actual intervention in the material world.) His view was that mind supervenes on the material, in other words that mind emerges from the physical body and dies with it, rather than consciousness operating through it. In other words, his view (if I may deprecate it) was that the radio programme [of consciousness] originates in the radio rather than being received through it: when the radio is destroyed, the broadcast is over.

Meeting this glass ceiling, he turned back to the material world as the locus of all reality.

I’ve taken a different view, ironically in part based on ideas from contemporary physics on the nature of physical matter and its relationship to consciousness (in short: that consciousness is primary / primitive and the material world secondary; all of this reported in the writings of the contemporary philosopher and scientist Bernardo Kastrup, who is the most recent prominent proponent of idealism in the line of tradition going back to Bishop Berkeley) and, more recently, based on the writings of C. S. Lewis concerning miracles (and other related questions about the logical fallacy inherent in materialism).

I no longer have a ‘problem’, as I once did, with the notion of an interventionist God or and no longer view miracles, the existence of non-material realms, etc. as incompatible with science (in short: the laws of science predict the course of a billiard ball as it proceeds across the table only presuming no one picks up a billiard cue and strikes the ball: the laws of science do not and cannot explain at core why the billiard balls exists, why the tables exist, why they themselves exist, why they are formulated as they are, what laws might apply in other planes of existence, how those other realms might interact with this one, etc.)

I have always known the above, at some level. I have known since I was a child that the material realm was absurd, insufficient, cruel and too cramped for people. The very fact that this offended me suggests I was aware that we were not built for it; my offence was predicated on the existence of a higher standard, to which the material realm was compared. Without such knowledge, no such judgement of the material realm could have been formed.

Over many years of detours, I have come back to the starting point, yet, rather than concluding that departure from the material realm altogether is the answer, I have concluded that the material realm is a facet of reality and that full existence requires transcendence.