That's the Spirit

He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreached, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure.
— John Milton, Areopagitica, in The Sword of the Spirit, Walter Oakeshott, p. 78.


….Here, before bringing this book to a close, I want only to consider for several paragraphs a single step in the sequence from Spirit to matter in order to suggest how it escapes the problems that attend Descarte’s self-world divide by positing a single source for them both. (Descarte himself was traditional enough to posit God as the source of res extensa and res cogitans, but as has been said, philosophers have ditched that source.) I have not bothered the reader with proof-texting my assertion that traditional philosophy did not work from the premise of a subject-object split, but given the importance of the point it might be well to provide at least one example. Hilary Armstrong tells us that Plotinus, the Intellect (a technical term) “is the level of intuitive thought that is identical with its object and does not see it as in some sense external.”
     We should not conclude from the identity they worked from that traditional philosophers were blind to distinctions. Obviously, our inner lives and the world in which they are set are different in certain ways, but they derive from a common sense. Think of an inverted V. Its apex is Spirit, and the two arms that reach down from it are consciousness (or more inclusively, sentience) and matter. This section tracks their relationship.
     If consciousness is not simply an emergent property of life, as science assumes, but is instead the initial glimpse we have of Spirit, we ought to stop wasting our time trying to explain how it derives from matter and turn our attention to consciousness itself. The image on a television screen provides an analogy for what we then find. The television lights up its screen, and the film in the video we are watching modifies that light so as to produce any one of an infinite number of images. These images are like the perceptions, sensations, dreams, memories, thoughts, and feelings that we consciously experience — we might think of them as the contents of consciousness. We know that the images on the screen are composed of this light, but we are not usually aware of the light itself. Our attention is caught up in the images that appear and the stories they tell. In much the same way, we know we are conscious, but normally we are aware only of the many different experiences, thoughts, and feelings that consciousness presents us with. Consciousness proper — pure consciousness, consciousness with no images imposed upon it — is the common property of all. When (in retrospection or meditation) we detect pure consciousness, we have every reason to think that what I experience is identical with what you experience in that state. And identical with what God too experiences, not in degree but in kind. For at that level, we are down to what consciousness is, namely infinite potential — receptive to any content that might be imposed on it. The infinitude of our consciousness is actual — God experiences every possibility timelessly — but the point here is that our consciousnesses themselves are in fact identical.
     That is the left, subjective, arm of the inverted V. The right descending arm represents Spirit branching out to create the physical universe. Its instrumentality for doing this is light, or as scientists say, photons. (If I try to move to what might be beyond or behind or beneath photons — a strict impossibility in my case — a no-man’s-land opens up where nobody really knows what goes on.) Photons are transitional from Spirit to matter, because (as we saw in the chapter on “light”) they are only quasi-material while producing things that are fully material. Scientists would give their eye-teeth to know what the non-material component of photons is. For religionists, it is Spirit.
      Notice the parallel with consciousness here. All that we typically see, optically, is light that is overlaid with images of one sort or another. The photons that strike the optic nerve of the eye are known only through the energy they release, which energy produces in us the sensation of light. That light, though, is a quality of mind, for to repeat, we never see photons, which is to say light in the form in which it pervades the objective world. But the light that we see and the photons in the objective world derive from the same source and carry that the trace of that source — Spirit — within them.
     In some such way as this, traditionalists see physics affirming with Genesis that in the beginning there was light. And (as again we saw in the chapter on Light) there continues to be light, for light underlies every process of nature, wherever and whenever. Every exchange of energy between atoms involves the exchange of photons. Every interaction in the material world is mediated by light; light penetrates and interconnects the entire cosmos. “An oft-quoted phrase comes to mind,” physicist-turned-metaphysician Peter Russell remarks: “God is Light. God is said to be absolute — and in physics, so is light. God lies beyond the manifest world of matter, shape, and form, beyond both space and time — so does light. God cannot be known directly — nor [as photons] can light.” When on the religious side we think of St. John’s reference to “the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” and the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation’s reference to “the self-originated Clear Light of the Void, eternally unborn, shining forth within one’s own mind,” the correlation is remarkable. Reinforce it with this word from Islamic tradition. Abu’l-Hosain al-Nuri experienced light “gleaming in the unseen. I gazed at it continually, until the time came when I had wholly become that light.”
— Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters, pp. 264-266.