Mind Under Matter

Propers: The Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 19), AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

There was a wind, but the Lord was not in the wind. And an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And then the sound of sheer silence—and the Lord spoke in the silence.

All of our readings this morning contain this same theme, that beyond the realm of our everyday experiences, beyond this world of change and chance, there lies a deeper, fuller, truer reality of bliss and joy and peace. Elijah finds God behind the elements of earth, fire, and air. Jesus strides steadily atop the stormy sea, which represents the chaos of a fallen world. Paul points to a faith that can endure all the trials and tribulations of mortality to overcome death itself.

There is more to this world than we know, more than we could ever know. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But are these all empty hopes, wishful thinking for pie in the sky when we die? What evidence have we for a world beyond our wildest dreams?

There’s a fellow over at MIT who’s been doing fascinating stuff, with consciousness and math, for the last several decades. His name is Donald Hoffman, and he finds himself in the paradoxical position of being a cognitive scientist who does not believe that our brains actually exist. Here’s what I mean.

There are two basic schools of thought when it comes to the nature of reality, and these are the dualist and the monist. The dualist believes that there are two fundamental things in the universe: mind and matter, the spiritual and the corporeal. This was the dominant school of thought in the Enlightenment, that the mind worked by one set of rules, while the physical universe worked by another. The ghost in the machine, if you will.

But the monist thinks that there’s only one basic thing, and that the other arises from it. The physical monist believes that everything is physical, everything’s mechanical. We have built machines that seem to think, and so we imagine that our minds are like computers. Of course, the elephant in the room here is consciousness. Why are we aware of what we are doing? Why be aware of anything at all?

This “hard problem of consciousness”—where the rubber meets the road between the mind and the brain—has led some scientifically minded professionals to assert, rather bizarrely, that there’s no such thing as consciousness; that it’s all just an epiphenomenon, a sort of magic sparkles that effervesce off the physical processes of the brain for no apparent reason. Awareness is an illusion.

Thus we have the spectacle of grown men and women consciously denying consciousness, willfully denying free will, of selves denying the self. It’s ridiculous on its face. Yet this remains the popular image: that we’re all just organic machines with computer brains and delusions of grandeur.

What’s interesting is that Hoffman’s research exactly contradicts this. As he explored the mind-body problem, as early as the 1980s, the math began to demonstrate that our most basic assumptions about reality—namely, that if we see something, it’s there—were false. They found a step in between our perception and awareness. This demonstrated, mathematically, that a thought does not necessarily depend upon something physical. In fact, matter as we imagine it might not exist at all.

Thus did Hoffman become a monist of a different sort. He found that mind did not arise from and depend upon matter, but that matter arises from and depends upon the mind. Consciousness, awareness, is what is most foundational. “The world cannot be a giant machine ruled by any preëstablished continuum of physical law,” wrote one physicist of his findings, because there “is no such thing at the microscopic level as space or time.” Try chewing on that one for a while.

But he wasn’t done yet. Seeking further acceptance of his theories and their proofs, Hoffman went on to demonstrate that the mental interface provided for us by evolution encodes the world around us not in terms of truth but of survival. The way that our minds interact with reality is to create symbols, which are neither accurate nor arbitrary. Reality, in other words, is not to be taken literally but symbolically. Everything that we can know is made of meaning.

And here’s the thing. None of these ideas are new.

When Hoffman speaks of how our reality, human reality, is an illusion, a projection, originating from and grounded in a deeper, infinite, conscious truth beyond our understanding, he isn’t saying anything that the great spiritual and philosophical traditions of the world haven’t affirmed for millennia. Not only Buddhists and Hindus but Jews, Taoists, Platonists, Christians, Muslims, all believe that God is the infinite conscious truth that is the source and ground of all being; that this world is in a sense an illusion, real but not the fullness of reality.

We have always known that logic points to a truth beyond logic, that reason points to a truth beyond reason. The difference is that Hoffman did the math. What we’ve all heretofore taken on faith—which is to say, what we’ve trusted from our individual and collective experiences of God—has now been figured out upon the page, or at least upon the screen.

I confess the math beyond me, but the greatest minds of our time affirm that it follows as logically and inexorably as two and two are four. There’s no uncertainty here. The world that we know is a lie, a half-truth at best. And infinite truth, infinite consciousness, lies beneath. Science and religion here speak as one.

In some ways we’ve come full circle. The ancients believed in monism, in one infinite mind being the Creator of all realities, of reason pointing beyond reason to truths revealed by faith. Any alternate worldviews have all collapsed around us. There are worlds beyond and beneath this world, truths beyond and beneath our truths. And this isn’t some woo-woo New Age nonsense all made up to sell patchouli. This is cutting edge science. This is MIT. There are mathematical proofs.

Imagine if someone could see beyond the illusions of this world to that which undergirds it; if a man, a human being, could ground himself in the infinite truth that births all reality; if he could see beyond the veil because he comes from beyond the veil. What would he then look like? What would he become? We believe that’s Jesus.

Jesus is the one who is both God and Man, who exists as that infinite truth, and also as one of us. And the state to which He brings us, where this world and the next meet, when we have one foot in heaven and the other on the earth, that is the Kingdom of God. That is the Church here and now. That is the Spirit within us. We are given in glimpses, in Word and in Sacrament, the revelation—the apocalypse, the unveiling—of reality as it truly is, infinite and eternal.

In other words, God. We are given God, in oil and water, bread and wine, and the Gospel rightly preached. Here does eternity break into time. Here is heaven on earth.

We are called to be like Jesus—more than that, to all be one in Him. We are to live out, as best we can, this truth that the world as we know it is not all there is. That everything we suffer, everything we lose, everything that is not good, is passing away to that greater truth, whence we all come and whither we all go. Goodness, beauty, truth: these things alone shall endure, for they are God. The love that we share, the people for whom we care, these are the realest things in our world.

Every one of us is a mind within that greater Mind, that ocean of consciousness who pours Himself forth forever in infinite love. That’s why Luther called us “little Christs” within the Body of Jesus. That’s why our greatest living theologian, David Bentley Hart, insists that each and all of us are “gods in God,” every one of us immortal, and every one of us endlessly loved.

And so science has proven what all of us know yet barely dare to believe: that money isn’t real; nations aren’t real; that you are not your job or your bank account or your khakis. You are a child of God, always and forever. And the only thing that ever matters in this fallen world is the love from whence we spring, the love that sustains us in every moment, every breath, and how we share that love with all: with all of humanity, all of the cosmos, and all of Creation.

Everything else is passing away. Everything else is a lie. And I thank Christ for that.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

 

 

Credit where credit is due: This homily was inspired by and draws heavily from “Adaptive Fictions” by Ted McDermott of Believer Magazine.

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