A Ghost Story

 

Darkmoon, Pixabay.

Xerxes has seen a ghost. He had a vivid experience one night recently, while lying fully awake, of the weight of his wife getting out of the other side of the bed, shuffling off to the bathroom, then returning.

His wife died a year ago.

He also sometimes hears her speak.

Xerxes dismisses, although he cannot explain, the experience:

            “Tradition says that there is a soul, distinct from the physical body. The body ends, but the soul carries on.

            Reason balks at that distinction. We are embodied souls. All that makes us unique individuals depends on the combination of body and spirit. Our minds need sensory input from our bodies; without bodies, our minds cease to function, even to exist.

            Once we are gone, reason says, we are gone. Period.”

He gives no reasons he think this—he just says “reason.”

Many important philosophers reason the opposite: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Leibnitz, Descartes, Berkeley. Most of the world’s cultures reason the opposite.

Are they all wrong? Perhaps; but one at least needs to present one’s reasons.

“Our minds need sensory input from our bodies.”

This is easily shown to be false. We can think in a darkened room. We can dream while asleep.

You mean we need original sense-impressions at some point in order to form these mental images? Aristotle or Locke thought so. But Plato, for example, thought sense-impressions merely reflected ideal forms already in the mind. Berkeley pointed out that we have no idea whether the physical senses exist except in our mind—let alone the things we imagine they perceive. All perceptions, for all we know, are purely mental.

“without bodies, our minds cease to function, even to exist.”

All the evidence goes the opposite way. Everything mental seems to be eternal; only the physical can die. Anything that dies or disappears physically persists mentally. We call this “memory.” And aside from memories, abstractions, mathematics, emotions all seem immortal. You will say a memory or an emotion may “fad.” Yes, fade; but not die. It is always still there somewhere, and something as trivial as the taste of a madeleine or a particular smell may bring it all flooding back.

No need to even go into ghosts. Or so-called “near-death experiences” in which the consciousness survives clinical death, or out-of-body experiences. They are no doubt evidence, but they are needless evidence of the almost self-evident.

Some atheists claim that belief in an afterlife is merely “wishful thinking.” That might be true, if you invented a religion that believed only in a heaven, and not purgatory or hell. None do.

Essentially every human culture has come to the same obvious conclusion, based on the hard logic and the evidence.

In the Country of the Blind

Slovenian Dragon.

Here's what I suspect is the truth about the world. The world we perceive through our senses, I accept to be real. But the only thing we can be sure is real is the world of our thoughts. Given that lack of knowledge, it is at least equally likely that there is an objectively existing world that corresponds to our imagination, as that there is one that corresponds to our senses. We simply assume the latter, as Berkeley points out, without any real justification. We might as well also assume the former, yet we arbitrarily do not. We arbitrarily decide it is "not real."

Chinese Dragon.

Our one great warrant that the sensory world is real is the apparent truth that we sense the same things (albeit this is a bit circular--we can know of "we" only through the sensory world in the first place). But we have that same warrant for the world of the imagination. Not only do our fellow dream personages seem to experience the same thing in dreams, but even in the context of the sensory world, we imagine the same things, at least in broad strokes. For example, everywhere around the world there is an essentially similar concept of a huge winged serpent: if I say "dragon," you have a pretty distinct idea of what I am talking about. Everywhere there is a story of an ancient, world-consuming flood. The image and legends of Mary in Western Europe and Guan Yin in East Asia are eerily similar. When the Greeks and the Romans conquered or traded with some new people, they never had any trouble recognizing their own gods there. Christianity, Hinduism, and Taoism all imagine godhead, illogically on the face of it, as a supreme Trinity. Why is it, similarly, that the sound “ma” is or forms part of the word for “mother” in so many unrelated languages?

Thai Dragon (Nagaraja).

If one studies comparative mythology, the similarities are too great not to require some explanation. Jung noted these similarities, and the same similarities in dreams and hallucinations, and theorized that they somehow reflected the structure of the brain. But this does not make as much immediate sense as assuming they simply reflect an objective reality that these dreams or hallucinations are perceiving, as our eyes and ears perceive the physical world. Just, for most of us, not in as sharp focus. That is, there really are dragons, existing not physically, but spiritually, independent of our perceptions of them. There really are the gods Zeus, Thor, Krishna, and Ishtar.

Native American Dragon (Quetzalcoatl)

This, I think, was indeed the operating assumption of most cultures until fairly recently. Theoretically, it is still the operating assumption of anyone who is genuinely religious: the world is filled with angels and daemons of various kinds. St. Paul never denied the Greek gods, for example, existed. He said they were daemons.

Most of us see all this for the most part as if  through a glass darkly. Most of us lack the spiritual sight to see dragons clearly, although there always does seem to be something within us that can respond to a well-drawn image of a spiritual being. It takes an artist, or a shaman, to have a clear perception. Unfortunately, I suspect, in modern times, in our Western European culture, those with such shamanic perceptions are usually simply declared mad. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man, as H.G. Wells pointed out, is not made king. He is simply not believed. That there is no position in our culture for a shaman (or a prophet) means, by default, that many people are declared mad who would not be elsewhere. In Korea, for example, they would simply become mudangs, and would have a recognized job and social function.

Indian Dragon (Nagaraja).

Our dreams and hallucinations, and the ancient stories that enthrall us, to the extent that they can enthrall us and command our dreams, are then our warrant for a great deal of information about the spiritual world. From them, we know, for example, that the soul survives death. Creatures of the spirit world are generally, as an objective experienced fact, more or less immortal. We know that there is a heaven, and we know there is a place of torture, a hell. We know a vast range of things, preserved in our many myths and legends.

No kidding. There be dragons here.