From Flesh To Spirit: a Defence of "Excarnation"

Noel Cheer, Sea of Faith Network, New Zealand
With Some Help From Carl Jung

" … we must ask ourselves if the psyche is not after all a secondary manifestation—an epiphenomenon—and completely dependent upon the body. In the light of reason and of our commitments as practical [people] to an actual world, we say yes."

Chapter IX of Modern Man in Search of a Soul, by Carl Jung, (1933)

When I plunged into yet another debate with members of the world-wide Sea of Faith Internet discussion list, I wanted to steer the conversation away from the Christian metaphor of "incarnation" and on to something far more useful. I particularly wanted to move from "top-down" as the principal model by which we account for human nature to a "bottom-up" version.

Although I used the invented term "excarnation" for this, such an approach is often referred to (and criticised as) "materialism", perhaps because this approach invites us to observe, in a commonsense way, that our art, philosophy, literature, technology, politics, religious expression, all owe their existence to human beings who are thinking, feeling subjects ultimately grounded in, or dependent on, material causes.

That is not to say that our experience of Mozart's music or of a brilliant sunset are themselves material phenomena but it is to say that at every stage, from genesis to revelation, something material is essential. If there were no paper, no piano, no eardrums … then there would be no Mozart music. If there were no sunlight, no dust particles, no water vapour, no eyeballs … then we could have no experience of sunset. Such experiences can be manifest in us only by something physical impinging on our brain or endocrinal system or nervous system or the very meat of our organs.

We are learning to trace the structures that genes code for and to discern how these structures themselves produce complex process and products that could not have been inferred from a knowledge of their genetic provenance. This is mentioned in order to dissuade the reader from subscribing to the "gene-for-characteristic" fallacy and to draw attention to the fact that the human brain is the most complex ordering of matter known to us. It is the device wherein all of our experiences are interpreted in a complex set of processes that we experience as our "mind". The burgeoning field of "neurotheology" given voice by Newberg and d’Aquili in Why God Won’t Go Away not only provides an early mapping of brain-activity-to-mystical-experience, it also suggests that evolution, in favouring some developments (e.g. sexuality) accidentally gave us an enhanced spiritual sensitivity.

Even transcendence, the process by which we are elevated from the limitations imposed by our animal provenance and at least aspire to the status of spiritual creatures, has a fleshly material substrate whose imperatives we attempt to rise above. The hermit, the stylite, the sunyasin, the sky-clad Jain, must all breathe, eat, defecate and get a good night’s sleep. Their material nature is the point of departure that remains with them no matter where their journey takes them.

The "bottom up" model that I am proposing asserts that even the encounters that people claim to have had with spiritual entities can be adequately accounted for by a function of the mind that Carl Jung referred to as "daimonic". This is the irrepressible upwelling of very powerful feelings from the unconscious regions of the mind which are then construed as external events or persons by the powerful inferential capacity of the conscious part.

The "activities of the primitive brain" is another name for Jung’s "collective unconscious", which does not produce fully-formed images but rather propensities which are given shape by the workings of the later-developed "higher" levels of the mind. Moods and attitudes and the like are clothed in the shapes of people and places and events—and played out as dreams or even as waking experiences, by the conscious mind. As a result, the owner of the experiences of these upwellings may confuse an interior mental event with an encountering with exterior agent. We might cite Joan of Arc and the Apostle Paul’s fall from his horse as examples.

The classical Greek philosophers gave us whatever notions of a soul-independent-of-a-body that still persist in our society, especially in the works of Plato where we find the notion that the body is the temporary home of the soul. This leads many to think of the brain as a conduit of consciousness, in the way that a telephone receives information which was generated elsewhere. This model is agreeable to those who believe in the objective reality of "out-of-body" experiences, transmigration of souls, reincarnation and at least some versions of life after death.

On the other hand, the Hebrews took the view that the body expresses the person, in a way analogous to a piano making sounds. The available evidence appears to better support this view. We should note that classical Christianity abandoned its Hebrew roots in this and other matters, and adopted Greek metaphysics.

We are hamstrung by the lack of both an adequate conceptual framework and an adequate vocabulary by which we might talk about human consciousness. The explanations offered by our 18thC scientific concept-system do not work. Indeed, classical science has nothing of interest to say about consciousness. Perhaps it is as David Chalmers suggests: that we may need to recognise in consciousness a new fundamental entity, a new "irreducible property" like the classical "length", "mass" and "time". Perhaps Popper too has a point: that we need to posit another order of reality ("World 2") in which consciousness —though grounded in the Newtonian "World 1") —operates autonomously. Popper’s "Worlds" are not super natural—they are, like consciousness, aspects of the world that we all share.

The mind comes to terms with the external world by making inferences, some of which are grounded in external reality ("that is a table") and some which are not ("there's a monster under my bed"). Some people infer a super-natural order of reality and think that we were created by it ("incarnation" is compatible with this view), rather than acknowledging that it is the other way around ("excarnation").

We should not suppose that an "excarnationalist" point of view disvalues our religious impulses and practices when it insists that the physical brain is necessary for a spiritual life – but we would be going beyond the evidence to suggest that it is sufficient.

There’s a wonder and a mystery here, that our spiritual nature arises out of our physical nature. The "true" parts of us – consciousness, aesthetics, spirituality all of which "sit" on top of this physical nature – proclaim a mode of existence for which our conventional scientific language has no words. What more may we discover when we have some concept by which to organise such thoughts?