Accomplishing everything at once
The symbolic path
Consider the emergence stack. Out of quantum foam emerge subatomic particles. Then atoms, molecules, living cells, organisms. Organisms with nervous systems. Organisms that are capable of “culture” (which far from being the end radically opens up and accelerates the emergence game)...
There is this general idea, that the lower layers are “more real” than the upper ones. “If you look closely you’ll see that after all an organism is nothing but cells. Molecules are nothing but atoms”. And so on goes the way of reductionism, down to the very bottom.
There are good philosophical arguments, made elsewhere, in favor of the opposite being the case: namely that what is higher in the emergence stack is in fact more real than what’s in the lower layers. These are out of the scope of this article. What I’d like is to point to a phenomenological resonance with this thesis.
If we look at our day to day life, our sense of how meaningful the present moment is fluctuates quite a lot. We walk by the same tree every day, and then one day we stop and see the way light, shadow, color and wind play among its leaves and branches. The tree looks more beautiful, more real. Why doesn’t it always look that way? What has changed?
Or take family meals. Why is it that sometimes a meal feels more significant than the average meal, at the same time more accomplished in itself, and yet more consequential?
I’d like to argue that our sense of meaning is heightened exactly when we (temporarily) manage to embody higher levels of the emergence stack. A moment feels more real because we are more real in that moment - or, put more radically: the meaningfulness of the moment itself is the higher reality, always there in potential, yet only right now reached, participated in, realized.
There is a striking relatedness in the etymology of “religion” and “symbol”. The former comes from the latin “religare”, to bind. The latter from the greek “sun” and “ballein”: “to throw together.”
Phenomenologically, the religious and the symbolic are related, too: if successful (if authentic) they precisely correspond to an increase in that sense of meaningfulness. In fact, it seems to me that while religiousness, religion is the project, the search for higher levels of meaning, the symbolic is the answer to that search, the means by which that meaningfulness is attained.
We tend to think of the symbolic as “mere metaphor”, as a shadow or a reflection, something “not so real”, that stands for something else, that’s supposed to be more real - but that’s definitely not there, in the symbol itself. “It’s just symbolic.”
This conception mirrors our tendency to think of the higher levels of emergence as less real, and I believe - and this is the intuition that sparked this article - that it’s because it’s basically the same misconception, about the same thing.
Consider the meal. We go about it the usual way, until suddenly we realize the potential long term impact of everything we do as we partake in it. How we lay out the table. Whether we give thanks or not. What we talk about. The meal, as ritual, reveals itself. Suddenly it feels like we are part of something much greater than us. All the meals that ever happened, will happen, and could potentially happen, have varying degrees of effectiveness at gathering and nurturing their participants, and thus form a hierarchical whole. And we get to decide, to a degree, how fully to participate in that reality. In other words: our meal becomes a stand in, a symbol of all meals and all that can be accomplished in a meal yet most often isn’t. But the meal is not symbolic in the sense of referring to something “somewhere else” in a separate, ethereal, world. Rather, it’s more like the lifting of a veil, or the opening of a portal, through which the form, “big m” Meal, can become manifest more here. The meal becomes more what it is. We are higher in the stack.
What does this portend? A path, of course. A ladder up the stack.
At any time, we can ask: what is the most symbolic thing that I can do next? How much meaning can I gather and weave into my next action? And the better we get at this, the more real our life becomes, that is, the more, on one hand, it becomes pragmatically effective, and the more, on the other, it will feel filled with the shine and crisp texture of a higher reality.
“The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.”
―C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
What, then, would it be like to perform an action that gathers everything and symbolizes everything…?
amazing read. thanks for sharing the insight. cultivating the whole by practice of ritual.