Trying to define ‘spirit’ comes down to an
interpretation of Existence itself – does it even exist or is it an invention and, if it exists, is it based within matter or does it arise from consciousness?
These are probably non-questions if we start from the existentialist
position of accepting Existence’s ultimate un-knowability and then make the nature of spirit a matter of choice and so of belief.
That would be easier all round. If it is a choice made without any associated ability to know the truth of the matter
(full knowledge that is), this must suggest an attitude of tolerance
to those who make another choice than ours. We cannot know. They cannot
know. And so we each choose in our own way. Where do we go from here?
The Investigative Project
If we choose the primacy of matter, then we choose either a creator
of matter as (at the least) implicit (against which spirit is to be judged and by whom spirit is judged) or
we choose no creator at all but just pure eternal and boundless
materiality.
If we choose the principle of consciousness, we choose an implicit
immanent consciousness within Existence (even if it is ultimately
unknowable) or we choose our own integration into an unknowable
Existence as its own creator through our belief and action.
In simplistic terms, we have the theocratic systems, scientific
materialist systems, systems of immanence or systems of existential or
magical engagement. The choice for exploration in this text is the last
of these. A belief that might sustain us here is that we create ourselves and
our world even if we know that there are material limits to that
creation, ones that ultimately derive from the very unknowability of
Being.
That we can describe and even utilise matter does not mean that we can
know
matter and in perceiving, ordering, filtering and manipulating matter,
we and not some outside party are the creators of its use-value, even
when and as we use the creations of similar others for our own purposes.
So, those who believe in a God, those who believe only in scientific
materialism and those who believe that consciousness exists outside
ourselves in Being need not read on - except out of curiosity as to how
other minds than theirs might think.
What we offer is a concept of Being grounded in the
expansion of our own day-to-day consciousness to encompass itself and
what it can grasp
through itself – and through the mystery of its engagement with other consciousnesses that strive in similar ways to live and thrive.
Human, alien, machine, animal, plant or, in the spirit of
open-mindedness to possibility, brute matter without apparent life or
source of creation (whether from procreation or invention), the
unknowability but
potential equality of other components of existence remains a nagging constraint on us.
This expansion of our own consciousness is a constant revelation
based on a permanent struggle with Being in all its manifestations.
Liberation is existential yet acquired through perception and cognition.
Whether fully achievable or not within actually experienced social
reality, an individual reality can be developed in which, even if
momentary, an irrational and profound altered state of consciousness can
express a true will of sorts.
This, in turn, may point to an existentially constructed nature that may become, for a moment,
apparently all consciousness, boundless and without object. These moments may be less interesting (certainly no cause
for the abnegation implicit in such searching within systems of
immanence) than the transformation that takes place within the person
from
before to
after a moment of heightened experience.
The moment is, in this sense, far less interesting than the state of
'being' afterwards and its contrast with that state of 'being' that
existed before. The project may thus be four-fold:-
- To explore how subjectivity (the sense of self) can expand to
levels that can encompass a perception of the non-self of existence;
-
To explore how external representations and archetypes outside
both mind and body can be brought into the self in order to create a
willed internal order that unites body and mind in a wholeness in its
relation to the world;
-
To explore how the body itself can represent the self (the mind) in its journey to existential wilfulness;
-
To explore the role of ecstasy in particular (any form of ecstatic state) in engaging the body and mind as one whole
in the non-self of existence.
As we noted above, the issue is not the subjective state or the
reality or otherwise of the objects or persons used or engaged with to
change mental states but the transformed individual after such states.
Ecstasy (the Dionysiac impulse), for example, is a tool towards a subsequent state of being.
Concentration on the ecstasy itself to the exclusion of the
transformation is mere sensory play, a pleasure and an entertainment or
even a therapy of sorts but not an enhancement of one’s life in the face
of raw existence.
Some Notes on Method
A central issue in the history of exploring consciousness has been
the recognition that some personalities (without disrespect to others)
have a powerful internal drive towards engagement with these questions.
A second has been the attempt, often for apparently noble reasons,
by some who have followed this searching path to keep their findings
secret, to be transmitted only in a certain form to certain people as a
‘tradition’.
The first is a fact of nature, applicable only to some and not all,
and in itself certainly argues against religious universalism. The attempt to create a way of relating consciousness to reality
that all can understand not only requires excessive simplification but
it demands institutionalization and, in the end, the oppression of the
minority of those who could continue their exploration beyond tradition.
This has been the way of the great institutionalized religions of
the West, especially Christianity, Judaism and Islam, where the
necessity of a universal or ethnic message has perforce ‘dumbed down’
the spiritual.
The searching mind is only permitted to explore within the ethical
and intellectual framework permitted it by priests and elders. Mystical
traditions - whether Sufi or Qabbalistic or that of, say, Boehme - have
got around this but in a very unsatisfactory way, spirit operating at
half-cock so to speak.
Today, the clash of institutional norms with genuine personal
engagement in moral questions has never been clearer than in the
mishandling of recent child abuse scandals within the Catholic Church.
On the other hand, the secret society or the romantic belief in
Hidden Masters might charitably be regarded as a response to the
institutionalization of spirituality but this is being far too generous
about what is a process of exclusion rather than inclusion of the
searching mentality. It suggests that a few give themselves the right to the resources to
explore their individual spirituality without any recognition of all
those searchers who they leave behind.
Here is the Scylla of spiritual conformity where the search is
curtailed by custom (with perhaps various mystics or Swedenborg
representing the limits of what might be achieved by someone under such
circumstances).
There is the Charybdis of introverted tradition where the search is
limited by the very forms required to build a system that can maintain a
few adherents over many generations. The answer lies only in part in the tolerance and respect for others outlined at the beginning of this introduction.
For example, we might accept that sincere Catholicism is greater
than the monstrous and sclerotic clericalism of the Vatican while the
need for ritual and secrecy is a legitimate one for those seeking
immanence, even if it may be a block to a direct relationship with Being.
The recognition that ‘searchers’ are a substantial (rather than a
small) minority but still a minority suggests that the searcher paradigm
does not seek to create an institutional structure that will compete
with or universalise its discoveries.
The process of 'searching' is also driven ineluctably towards a free and open society
(though not necessarily in its current kleptocratic form) in which the
rights of other types of minds are respected so long as they permit the
full freedom to search – in other words that tolerance and respect are
reciprocal throughout society. The freedom to search is also implicitly a total freedom of thought
and expression, to transgress without harming others … in other words,
it is, necessarily and both despite and because of its minority status, a
liberal or rather libertarian attitude to life and to the lives of
others.
At the same time, the search is private so that the right to
micro-institutionalise the search into social forms, whether secret or
not, must be recognized wherever other like minds are found, especially
where such like minds may feel that they will face prejudice and social
or economic disadvantage. But the position that the search must be constructed and passed on in forms that are necessarily secret is untenable.
This position represents the triumph of form over content, the error that
because something has been authorised then it is true – indeed, this in
itself expresses the essential spiritual failure of institutionalized
structures of religion. Authority is never truth because the truth
shifts with new facts. Moreover, there comes a point where the safety of searchers will
require radical public expression as a defence against attack
especially if the search involves transgressions that harm no-one and
that require that ‘norms’ be questioned.
Secrecy isolates and the isolated person is the most vulnerable to destruction - as trades unions have showen us, there is strength in collaboration.
The path of self exploration and of calculated transgression can
learn from other spiritual approaches in both method and content but
each search will be personal and individual.
Social engagement in spiritual matters will be precisely linked to
the degree to which a person, without value judgement from others, can
find their path alone or not.
For some, indeed, there may be a return to an institutionalized
religious structure in the long run because, in fact, this best fits
their spiritual needs. Imagine Catholicism (for example) thus
invigorated!
So, to conclude, searching must start as anti-traditional and
eclectic even if it leads back to paths that are ultimately
existentially chosen as a tradition.
The only tragedy in this would be if the searcher, having discovered
a traditional or very particular destiny, pulled up the ladder behind
them, as that intellectual monster Augustine did, and deny others the
free right of search in subsequent generations. Such institutional sclerosis must always push us back to that form
of spiritual liberalism in which all are free to follow their True Will
in relation to Being.
The Starting Point – Structures of Reality
For the search to begin, it must be made axiomatic that material
reality exists as something that can be analysed and made useful for the
individual and social will. We extend our mind-bodies outwards to make
Matter work for us.
Interconnected in society over time, there is a continuum between
our social and historical selves, our extended bodies, our dependence on
and constraints from other selves (as social reality) and the utile
Matter in which selves are embedded. To deny Matter as real is to
complicate things unnecessarily.
Where the zone of doubt lies is at the extremes that are to be found
in the vortex of this reality – both at the smallest and broadest (in
space and time) limits of what our minds can comprehend and in the
mystery of our inner Being which we intuitively understand to be
interconnected with Matter.
This inner sense of Being, in reality, cannot be understood in
analytical terms, neither by us as thinking selves nor by society at
large.
The reason for this profound ignorance is two-fold: the limits of
perception (even extended through technology and through mathematics);
and our inability to fix the movement of matter in the mind. We see a complex self awareness, uncommunicable to others and played
out in a real time that is not always the same as perceived time.
Even if we could match brain states to mind states with considerable
accuracy, any attempt to reduce the mind to assumptions based on pure
materialism would be as presumptuous and absurd as assuming that the
limits of our perception in the wider universe must
necessarily relate to some omniscient God.
Thus, we have expressions of faith at both ends of the spectrum –
from one party in believing that what cannot be known necessarily leads
to deity because of ‘intelligent design’ and from the other that what
cannot be known in the brain must be purely material in nature and
structure.
Theists and materialists merely direct their faith in different
directions but with the same arrogant purpose of claiming more knowledge
that the evidence permits, one filling the vacuum at the macro-level
and the other at the micro-level.
Why should it not be equally true that there is nothing beyond our perception
or that there is a soul within existence
or that an inner soul is embedded in the body
or that soul is embedded within social as well as material reality?
Whatever is true, the functioning of whatever truth we choose operates beyond any possible human knowledge.
Perhaps (as much a matter of faith as that offered by the
materialists for the non-existence of spirit and soul or the deists for
the existence of God) we can take what we can experience of Being within
ourselves as the spiritual starting point (especially since we cannot
cognitively manage the universe!) We can then explore non-rational and non-materialist models for
entering into a relationship with Being or at least with that unknowable
reality that lies beyond perception and beyond mathematics.
Cultural Perspectives
Engagement with these issues may well reshape reality as we humans
experience it (which is partly social and partly perceptual as well as
objectively malleable) in a way that is precisely magical, that is
concerning the use of the Will (which has to be defined further) to
effect change in the world. Drawing down a very imperfect but transcendental perception of inner
non-material reality might well recast both man and society in ways
that we cannot yet predict - and which might cause fear as well as awe
and joy.
We might reasonably postulate that, in the brain, is material energy
(the electrical operations of the brain) but, beyond that, a
transcendent scarcely knowable energy (the consequent connections and awarenesses).
We (as ‘searchers’) in both worlds, ‘scientific’ and ‘spiritual’,
draw down from the last to the first as ‘searchers’ and, through
technological innovation, from the first to the last as ‘users’ – just
as we might if we created an AI that could tap into that same
transcendent energy on its own terms.
This changes our perspective on what it means to be conscious with
some potentially frightening conclusions that require caution and
compassion, given that each person lies somewhere different on the flow
of experience between matter and spirit.
The double danger is that moral value is given to those higher in
the cosmic evolutionary scale over those who prefer to live in a world
that is given and that we fail to recognize as equal those new
consciousnesses, machine or alien or evolved, that come to match our
position on the scale.
The first creates the danger of elitism, the weakness of many
followers of both Eastern and new traditions. The second creates dangers
of species-ism and the limitation of the good only to the
human species
under circumstances where much human behavior is vile - to its own type
let alone to others.
These are serious moral issues but they cannot be swept under the
table as they are by the great universal religions, which include
socialism and liberalism in this respect.
Other than compassion, the guard against elitism is that no person
can know the spiritual nature of another. No outward forms or
right conduct or right language can state that this person or that
person to be ‘better’ than another, certainly not the observer over any
observed.
In this sense, Christ was right that all persons might enter his
Kingdom of Heaven. No-one could say that they were ‘without sin’
and could judge another.
The point here is that the lowliest Indian peasant might be more
advanced in this respect than a top cosmologist at an American
University or the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. None can know.
All must be regarded as equal in potential for lack of any possible
evidence to the contrary.
Equality is the default position so long as other minds are
unknowable. Fortunately, sensible public policy in the modern world
militates against the arrogance of superiority amongst those who believe
themselves to be uniquely blessed.
The second drives us in the other direction. It must be a fear to
many that some may transcend the human condition through evolution, that
machines may transcend humans or that we may find aliens who do so.
This may be hypothetical and not require too much practical concern
today. However, this may arise, in some far distant future, and we must
then embrace such change and understand that the ‘rights’ accruing to
the less conscious (like animals) stand under the twin rules of
compassion and equity precisely because we may be in that place
ourselves some day.
Further Lines of Research
We have laid out the four-fold project but the pathway to
understanding the new consciousness are very similar to those of
traditional philosophy but with this one difference, that the analytical
takes us only so far.
The analytical and the experimental limits us by suggesting what
cannot be so in the present but it cannot tell us what might not be so
in the future. These are some of the central questions for us:-
-
What language is best suited to describing the moments of
transformation which might involve both a perception of personal
transcendence in a context of immanence?
-
What precisely is our True Will when actions based on cause and
effect appear buried in our history and in instinct? How do we exist as
actors in a drama in which the playwright is history and we may wish to
get off the stage at any time to make our own life choices?
-
How can we know anything when all knowledge is based on sensory
inputs that are biologically determined? What is behind our perception
of Being that would permit us to experience a relationship to it without
recourse to the abstractions of mathematics?
-
What is our relationship as conscious beings not merely to the
reality ‘out there’ but to the many varieties of consciousness,
semi-consciousness, altered states and non-consciousness (including
death) and to time?
- How do we regard the biological drives within our body and their relationship to mind? (Religions have been afraid of the flow of chemicals that shift
and change our perception and cause deep distress as well as great
pleasure: will engaging with these material aspects of the self be far
more fruitful in their potential for our True Will than seeking to crush
or deny our animal natures?)
-
What is the relationship between analytical thinking, the
management of the body and the use of images, sounds and other sensory
inputs from the outer world in constructing our own True Will?
-
How do we connect with the unconscious mind and body, our
autonomic system, so that we can learn to see things as our body sees
them and not just as our mind collates sensory information into a
simulacrum of reality?
-
Can we have a concept of evil even as we consciously seek new
states of consciousness and alterations of reality? Can we take
responsibility for consequences without avoiding necessary and creative
risks?
Conclusions
Even that philosophy of the East that has (arguably) the most
positive attitude to the world and is most tolerant of difference, Kashmiri Shaivism, still holds to the illusion that an individual can
‘rise’ from individuality to ‘universality’ through knowing their
innermost Self.
The illusion lies not only in the error that absolute knowledge of
the innermost Self is possible but in the equal error that such a Self
could ever be like other Selves and some Higher Consciousness i.e. be
part of something universal.
If the Self was known, it would not be universal and if it became
universal, then it ceases to be the Self. However, once the illusion is
removed, there are insights to be had from three of the four theories of
Trika –
-
There is the attempt to understand the totality of the universe
(or our relation to the absolute nature of Existence) which is not to be
confused with understanding the universe;
-
There is the realisation of the individual but as individual (interpreted in Western terms as True Will);
-
There is the recognition that all Existence depends on vibration
(which might recast as the recognition that all Existence is a matter of
waves and particles that we may never understand in full but which
offer theories of reality that we can seize upon to build a theory of
our relationship to Existence).
If we break this down further as tools for the four-fold project, with the illusion stripped out, then we have:
-
The tool of perceptual transcendence by which we alter our
consciousness periodically to bring massivity and scale to our thinking,
placing immediate and sensory concerns in their proper proportion as
units to be shuffled in alignment with our True Will;
-
The tool of constant self-questioning as to our own inner
true nature, notably the correct balance between our body, our history,
our environment and that powerful residual core of True Will, a
personality that rises beyond socially constructed reality;
-
The tool of science, directed both to the material base of
mind and universe, insufficient to tell us how things are in the
absolute but able to improve our own ability to align who we are with
the structures of matter into which we are embedded.
In this context, the aims of many religions may be illusory but
their methods, as technical operations (body manipulation, breath
manipulation, meditation, ecstatic practice, advanced visualization
linking body and mind), may be of value ... and the exploration of these ideas is one of the reasons why this blog exists.
