C.S. Lewis and Transposition

Imagine a funnel. It begins wide, and as we go down, the passage gets more and more narrow. Suppose the wide part is the realm of the Spirt; and suppose the narrow part is the realm of Nature. To understand this better, think of the same idea in the realm of our experience. For example, Mozart can be played by all the instruments in an orchestra; or, he can be played on a piano. If it's played by an orchestra, the composition has more layers and sections, embodied by different instruments. But if the same piece is played by just a piano, then all those layers and sections have to be filled in by just the piano.

Do you see the idea of a funnel again? The richness and many-layered orchestra (and let's say Mozart meant it this way) is funneled down to the one-layered piano. This isn't to say the piano piece is more or less beautiful; that is another question. We're saying, in this case, the music in one medium (the orchestra) is transposed to music in another medium (mere piano).

Think of our own emotions. When in love, we might have a sick feeling. This might be the same feeling you have when you're sea-sick. But if you're sea-sick on a ship, you're not in love, you're miserable. But we liked the sick feeling when we were in love, and we hated it when we were miserable on the ship. Here, 2 emotions - love and misery - transpose down to the body as the same feeling: sickness. This might mean that the world from which love and misery come is richer and many-layered, compared to the world our bodies inhabit. The richer medium decends into the lower medium. But it seems that - in some sense - the bodily reaction (sickness) IS the emotion (either love or misery), in some symbolic way.

What if this is an analogy between my body and my soul, Nature and Spirit? Think of the people who inhabit Flat-land. In Flat-land, there is only 2 dimensions, the line and the point. Let's say there is a denizen in Flat-land named Tom. Suppose we tried to tell Tom about our 3-d world. We tell him that lines and points inhabit space, and space is governed by time; this mysterious entity called time makes objects in space change, mature, decay, and die. And unlike the 2-d world, we have no pencil-marks, and the colors aren't made from the ink of crayons and markers. So far, it seems Tom would think our world less real, drab, and repulsive. After all, to Tom's mind, ink and pencil-marks dominate his conception of what Reality is, and change, maturity, decay, and death, while incomprehensible to him, sound hollow.

Tom has no idea how much more rich, multifaceted, and variegated our world is compared to his. And that if he inhabited our world for 1 minute, he'd never want to return to his. He'd see that there is no need for pencil-marks and ink, because the objects of experience possess their own color - that in his world, the objects in our world have been transposed, or funneled down, to ink and markings; and that objects define their own movement according to independent laws of Nature. He'd see a variety of near infinite complexity that no drawing could ever fully capture. He'd see that change and maturity allow for growth, discipline, character, relationships, love, and processes of soul-making. He'd see that a foreknowledge of his own decay and death could make him more grateful and responsible for what he had, in the time he had it.

Could this be our predicament regarding Heaven, or the world of Spirit? Perhaps in Heaven there's no eating, sex, time, or art. But could this just include our conceptions of them? Couldn't this be like telling Tom that in our world, there's no ink or pencil-marks?