Ontology & the Question of Free Will

Attempts to argue for the universe as either matter or consciousness are theoretically made absurd by the overwhelming argument for all things being, ultimately, one. It is neither that all matter is imbued with consciousness nor that consciousness is merely matter in another form but that consciousness and matter are just variations on the same theme of existence.

Consciousness is not merely a form of matter - all matter is imbued with the potential for consciousness by its very nature as existence. The fact that part of matter-consciousness (existence) is conscious of itself and part may not be (and the fact that that part of it which is conscious is only partially conscious of itself in its full nature as part of existence) holds no meaning other than, tautologically, to say that it is, in itself, raw existence, an unknowable simplicity from which complexity in both matter and consciousness emerges.

Since a consciousness cannot be conscious of anything other than its being a part of matter-consciousness and since an object of matter in itself represents only a part of matter-consciousness, matter-consciousness is constructed out of vast numbers of items of matter and of consciousnesses and of combinations thereof. Persons are just segments of matter-consciousness, both matter and consciousness integrally combined.

So, we, as items of matter-consciousness that have emerged out of complexity, are faced by an immense gulf not only between us and other items of emerged matter-consciousness (other persons) but between us and the unknowable raw existence that, taken as a whole, is a matter-consciousness (not only in space-time but perhaps many dimensions beyond this) of which we can know nothing.  If we are inclined to draw the conclusion that there is no gap between God and the world, we are entirely at liberty to do so but the statement means nothing because the identification of God with raw Existence merely makes God another name for that raw Existence.

How can you worship or engage with that raw Existence in which you are so embedded – God is merely yourself only immensely bigger without greater value than its sheer bigness. This is like praising a man for his size rather than his character. You may do this but it is idiotic. If raw Existence is divine because it is pure matter-consciousness, then the small bits of matter-consciousness that we call persons are no less divine insofar as they are sparks of similar material. But if we poetically call them sparks from the divine being, the abyss between these sparks, constructed over millions of years of evolution from star dust, is so great in space and time that to ask for unification with this God who is Existence is essentially to seek non-existence for this small creation and a denial of its potential role in the creation of more matter-consciousness. To turn to God or the universe at this point is tantamount to the death instinct, a determination to damn the process of creation itself.

This world is no illusion (as some Eastern philosophies might have things be) for us. The illusion lies in setting ourselves in a world in which our matter-consciousness and that of the universe are seen as not part of a world that includes both matter without consciousness and the possibility of consciousness existing without matter to anchor it. All is one but this oneness has no meaning because it represents an absolute meaning that says nothing to the parts of the whole. Our own beings are partial within the ‘one’ but are still entire as and within themselves.  This is our struggle as persons – to recognise that ultimate reality is unknowable even as we search for it and that we cannot ever know whether this ultimate reality has anything that we might conceivably understand as consciousness embedded within the gross form of matter-consciousness. In this sense, we cannot know whether there is some God as some might argue for Him. Such a God would be of such an order of difference from its human creations that its traditional function in human society must be regarded as totally meaningless.

Even the concept of unified space-time may not capture an ultimate multi-dimensional reality that may go beyond all possible current conceptions of both space and time. Being so unknowable we may speculate but, as persons, we must turn away and embed ourselves in the affirmation of our own matter-consciousness, as persons embedded amongst others like us and in a state of matter with less consciousness than ours or none (except as potential).  The knowledge of this is liberation because, once we remove an expectation of duality in the universe, we instantly realise our own absolute freedom. This is not transcendence because we cannot separate ourselves from our condition in the world but, in understanding how we are embedded in it, we can see that we do not ‘have to look over our shoulder’ or consider ourselves distanced or detached from some state of grace or purity that, if it exists, can never be comprehended or attained except in a choice for non-existence and a return to star dust and beyond.

So our life choice becomes simple and liberating – either abnegation of our own creation as independent matter-consciousness into extinction or the affirmation of our brief flowering of creation as a stepping stone to self awareness or to the creation of more matter-consciousness in the many forms given to us by our circumstances (from art to children). Abnegation and the death instinct or affirmation and the will to existence - these seem fairly clear and liberating choices in either direction. Wherein does the heart of our individual matter-consciousness lie? We cannot know raw existence and we cannot know (in any absolute sense) the matter-consciousnesses of others. We imperfectly know our own selves because we operate in our own space-time in which external matter (including matter mobilised by other consciousnesses) forces us into positions of not-knowing at every moment. We can know little and some of what we know we must suppress to survive.

The point at which we face the nearest equivalent to a raw existence that is beyond space and time is the pale simulacrum of our relations with others and of our experiential relationship with ourselves. Not knowing others is not like not knowing our instruments (like rocks and cars) and not knowing ourselves is not like not knowing others. Instruments of matter are just tools for our needs and desires so that we can choose to treat other minds as matter (instruments) or as ‘like us’ - in terms of their being subjects for investigation and creation. Our social and material conditions naturally tend to an instrumental approach to other persons – business, politics, law – but love, family, tribe can, to different proportions and degrees, be non-instrumental, although, even here, we can find a hidden instrumentality where one mind seeks to create another in their own image rather than to allow that other mind to be true to themselves.

Much of the psychic pain of humanity lies in being treated as an instrument and yet being treated openly as an instrument (as in a conventional society) is still often far preferable to the tragic condition of being treated as a hidden instrument, a creature constructed to be like a golem or shabti for the psychic service of another.  The only means of escaping from this tendency to instrumentality (much of which is required so that society, which creates the conditions for creation, can remain in operation) is to question what one wants for oneself as person and to choose either to resist being used as a tool or limit one’s own use of others as a tool only to the essential for one’s own survival. Resistance is necessary because some persons are going to see their own survival in terms of a will to social power in which treating others as instruments is seen as an aspect of their own survival – our resistance, in this sense, is never futile.

How does one learn to resist the tool-using instincts of others and make sure one uses one’s own tools at hand in a way that is effective rather than wasteful? After all, this is not a matter of morality. In practice, a better understanding of oneself is likely to limit wasteful tool-using because there will be an understanding that using persons as tools just for the sake of it is like digging holes randomly – unnecessary and unproductive labour. This mimics morality but it is not a choice that is being made for the other person in full consciousness of the other’s interest. That is another matter! The answer is that thought is less useful than experience. Experience requires challenge and experimentation in which the matter-consciousness or, rather, one’s own ‘being’ is understood to be embedded in relationships, perceptions and the matter of one’s body and of the constraints placed on that body. Challenging all these extensions of self is to challenge oneself.

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Just as the matter/consciousness dichotomy does not stand up to scrutiny, neither does the free will/determinism dichotomy (any more than that of body/mind).  At the level of the absolute, there is no free will because everything is contained within itself beyond cause and effect just as it is beyond measures of space and time. But, in the state of imperfect matter/consciousness that represents our own being in the world, although in absolute terms there is no free will, in relative and sufficient terms free will is essentially true.

Free will arises as soon as the Absolute fragments. Each component of reality has its own destination and the mindless bumping of bits of matter/consciousness into each other eventually creates a consciousness within matter that starts to dictate the conditions of its own survival – moving away from threat or towards acquiring ‘more’, the eventual affirmation of its own existence. This might be termed a will to power at a stretch but it is really a will to exist, to survive, in opposition to the extinction instinct that lets oneself be bumped and grinded through reality like an object, an instrument of more conscious entities or blind chance.

Free will is thus intrinsic to non-absoluteness. A fragmented absolute creates free will through the accumulation of consciousness in matter.  It is implicit in the first differentiation of undifferentiated matter-consciousness and it continues as potential until matter-consciousness becomes undifferentiated once again (even if the logic of the situation is that there is little reason to exercise that free will if a state of non-differentiation, the death of fragmented matter-consciousness, is imminent - except perhaps as wilful defiance).

Of course, to say that the universe itself has some sort of will is as meaningless as any other pure consciousness statement about it. It has the potential for free will in theory somewhere in the evolved future but only the matter-consciousness that arises out of its potential has that free will and then only to the limited degree permitted by the various constraints created by material limitations and limitations in consciousness. The paradox of free will is that it is always potential until a will makes the potential actual. This moment of clarity, when the will chooses to be, is the point of divinisation of matter-consciousness. If it exists, divinisation succeeds existence and does not precede it in creation. It is matter for the future not a guide from the past.

The universe, by contrast, may have had the immense potential for will but nothing was in place to trigger it as an act of will until sentient creatures (here or elsewhere) were enabled to do so by the right formation of matter-consciousness. Yes, the Absolute may have had will (one definition or characteristic of God) theoretically but we can never know this nor argue that this wilfulness can have any meaning for us other than that it may have abnegated itself in the creation of the universe. Indeed, one might argue that if the Absolute/God had will of this nature then it willed itself to suicide in order, knowingly or not, to create the conditions of our existence – a rather interesting theological speculation that suggests that the death of Christ on the Cross might be a metaphor for that moment of supreme sacrifice. However, this also suggests that the universe was built on the death instinct and that our affirmation of life is little more than a paltry late attempt to reproduce that first will at the very margins of Existence. As always in these cases, speculation is useless and wasteful.

Like, say, Kashmiri Shaivism, the philosophy of Being I am upholding here is monist. Unlike it and similar schools, it is non-idealist because the fragmentation of matter-consciousness means that no subject is identical to another subject. However, their existence and free will is derivative of ultimate matter-consciousness even if they are often completely ignorant of their state. To be ignorant of one’s existence and free will is to suspend the consciousness aspect of matter-consciousness in favour of the matter aspect. Although no value judgement can be attributed to this (after all, all aspects and representation of the universe are of equal value in an absolute sense), there is a material difference in that matter-consciousness between that which is aware of itself and its power and that which is not (even if that which is not may have access to more material resource it may be of no greater utility to it than a tiger catching a goat, a means of survival but not one of becoming more than a tiger).

The existence of the trigger to the exercise of free will is a mystery. It may be taught and learned or it may come from within as genetic predisposition or by chance. In this, its appearance has all the attributes of ‘divine grace’. This is what is understood by some religious people when they observe that mere effort to achieve a state of grace (works) can be wasted and that grace is dependent on the will of God. This is a metaphor for a truth that the trigger is not to be found in all persons but arises only in some at some times - and in a way that is so mysterious that it is tempting to attribute it to an active consciousness at the level of the Absolute.

The truth in this is only metaphorical. The trigger is simply an attribute of a certain state of matter-consciousness and may not be activated at all if a matter-consciousness is stable in their existence (i.e. their matter-consciousness requires no trigger). What is true is that working too hard at thinking does not provide the trigger. The trigger comes from conditions and the way to trigger the trigger is to want not the trigger but some other change for which the trigger of the exercise of free will is the solution. This gives us a clue to the role of imagination in the creation of the trigger. The universe is constrained by logic and by the laws of cause and effect – although at the extreme quantum level, space and time offer different models, our existence as matter-consciousness is wholly bound by these rules of matter.

Imagination, like the quantum levels deep within our brain, body and universe, is less constrained. Reason permits our management of instrumentality, i.e. the use of tools including those of society, but it is imagination that can defy logic and the rules of cause and effect – as can other altered states of consciousness including ecstasy and dreams. In this, the Eastern religions were correct. The world of matter and its rules are illusory (at this Absolute level). The two illusory universes of matter and imagination, however, still manage to ‘work’ and how we can re-imagine matter through imagination provides the creative tension necessary for consciousness to develop. The will, in this context, operates within our psychologies at a level beyond both reason and imagination and it is at the juncture between these that we learn how to exercise that will freely and how to become.

What Is This Thing Called 'Spirit'?

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.

Kundalini Thinking

Some believe that there is an unconscious and instinctive, indeed libidinal, force that can be felt as a physical phenomenon. Others deny its existence. Those who say it exists win the argument for the simple reason that, if they feel it, then it is there as a reality for themselves. If it is a reality in the context of their own perception, then, unless they are outright liars, even if it cannot be measured scientifically, it exists - end of story.

A mental state does not require general social approval to exist. It merely has to be experienced as real. A delusion is a real mental state but it is a delusion in the context of social and not individual reality and so not a delusion about its own state of delusion-ness. We may go on to apply all sorts of metaphor to such a felt libidinal force. We may develop vitalist theories or call it a serpent power or a goddess or use lots of sanskrit gobbledygook. We may try to make it more than it is by giving it value and romance - but at the end of the day, it is simply what it is: a sense of experienced reality that is real to the person experiencing it and different from mundane 'normal' existence in the world.

This force may, of course, not be experienced identically in every person who experiences it (as we write there is a furore on the internet over whether a dress is blue and black or white and gold which is really a furore over human perception in the face of the variable outputs of our electronic world) but there are some common denominators in the descriptions of such forces (once we get past the spiritual guff) that suggest that people who have this sense, whether intrinsic to their nature or intermittently experienced, are all experiencing the same phenomenon.

There is no issue with saying that the experience might be bio-chemical nor that the experience has such meaning to a person that this meaning might force a person to engage in some sort of struggle with others, indeed with society, to be permitted to engage with his or her own experience as good and worthwhile. It might be this that forces us to have to face the 'reality' of Islamist gnosis. Experience of, and existence with, this force is a defining issue in human freedom because the spiritual guff may well be nothing more than a pragmatic attempt to 'justify' (when no justification should be necessary) something that is difficult to communicate and is not a universal phenomenon in a social context. The issue is not the normalisation of people but the harm done to others by abnormalised experience - which would brings us back to statue-smashing Islamists.

For historical and cultural reasons related to the pragmatic exercise of power and the discomfort and anxiety of the those who cannot comprehend this force, or perhaps to relieve the anxiety of those who experience this force but are not given a language for it that is positive, the force’s own existence and value may be denied but only as once it might have been denied that the earth could be round. It may be that the person who feels this force is faced with such resentment and incomprehension from those who do not feel it that they are obliged to create a mythology and religious or cultic context rather than be able simply to say what should be said - 'this is what I am and you just have to live with it'.

Perhaps organized religion was and is the revenge of those who feel this force on the uncomprehending only, in one of many paradoxes that will we see in this Note, to see this revenge appropriated by pragmatists who thereby exerted their revenge on the revengers in turn! The lack of a language of assertion in the modern world for those who feel this energy means that the force-full are always placed on the defensive. This defensiveness extends to their very natures, in the round, as people different to the pragmatic mainstream. They constantly have to justify their difference!

A barrier is equally set up for 'intermittent' experiencers who learn to experience their difference in shame or silence instead of discussing their moments of difference openly or being permitted to create some personal meaning out of it, while those who live in a permanent state of relationship with this force are obliged to become not merely silent but secretive - or cloak themselves in that cultic nonsense we have already noted.

Perhaps much of the essentialist nonsense surrounding spirit that seems to have led to the absurd institutions of organised religion come down to little more than this - that non-sense has been a necessary defensive weapon for those who feel this libidinous force in an uncomprehending society. They are obliged to re-cast that which is not permitted in order to be open and then turn it into something false but socially acceptable. Of two main strategies for coping, our culture may have chosen the wrong one in the past because of resource constraints and the need to maintain social order but our social order may now no longer require communitarian falsehoods.

There is the opportunity to replace a strategy of silences and displacements with a new strategy of assertiveness and for the stripping away of all those accretions that force those who have a sense of their internal biochemical power to give absurd meanings to a surprisingly simple phenomenon. Social authoritarians remain rather frightened of this force because it is creative and innovative but it is also centred on a gnostic relationship to itself as not only desire is but as all other forms of high emotion and constructed meaning are so centred. High emotion and intense meaning are frightening to many people. The co-existence of non-reason with reason causes anxiety.

For social authoritarians, an inner force that cannot be reasoned into ‘normality’ must be repressed and contained. In the worst case, it becomes redrafted as 'sin' or even into particular 'sins' such as Lust which may then be rationally contained in a numbering system (the '7 Deadly Sins', for example). Nor is this force to be assumed to be simply sexual (the sexual may have a higher or lower place in its expression in particular individuals). The force is a general force that is not easily explained in conventional language. It may also have very different expressions in different people - the 'desire' that exists within it is also a form of yearning or love that need not at all be focused on, say, orgasm at all.

The force may equally well be focused simply on a state of being, one that has had accreted to it terms like 'spiritual' but whose terms are far too limited by such language, language designed merely (as I suggested above) to contain, channel and socialise something infinitely more complex that, in itself, needs no myth of universal consciousness or divinity. The ancient Indians would have seen this force as sleeping, dormant, a potential in the human condition. I am not so sure. Their analysis is based on a determination to see human beings as operating within some universal type or essence of human nature.

It is far more likely that it is present or not present to different degrees of intensity, possibly even circumstantial in its form to environmental conditions, in different persons, often at different times of their lives. This lack of essence to the force is why it presents such a difficulty to men and women who demand fixed essences instead of accepting existence as Heraclitean flux. It is why it is not merely contentious but a subject of anxiety, horror, social control and re-invention.

Whatever this thing is, it presents two immediate problems – how do I describe it to myself in order to manage it and how do I explain it to the world? Both exercises require that it be expressed linguistically or in terms of some ritual which, in itself, starts to remove a person from the actual experience. The degree to which this ‘force’ is shared is the degree to which it becomes exponentially attenuated so that the intense connection between individual persons (‘love’ included) becomes revised into a weak spirituality that ultimately leads to the psychic onanism of universalism and the covering of the experience with cultural layers and language that bend the experience into tribal or, again, cultic paths.

To some extent, it might be useful to create a theory of the force – in the Indian tradition, there are introspective models that lead to concepts of energy channels (nadis), subtle energy (prana) and essential elements (bindu) within a subtle body. Something similar takes place in the Chinese Taoist and Western alchemical traditions. But it is important to see these descriptions as allegorical and not as necessary truths. They exist to manage, control and communicate but not to ‘live’. The practitioner who believes in these forms has taken a step away from the truth.

Hindu, Chinese and Western language of the force should really be seen not as truths in themselves but as different technologies of 'spiritual' exploitation to which many other technologies of the past and the future might be added – including, possibly, a monist materialist scientific one as the science of mind and body progresses. The descriptions of the schools all taken together are mistakenly read as referring to some ‘perennial philosophy’ where the underlying reality is assumed to be of some universal quality where consciousness is to be set against matter. This is absurd because it mistakes the effect for the cause.

Instead, we have to think of the sensation of 'spirit' as an intrinsic quality of some forms of matter, arising naturally under certain conditions of evolution, where ‘spiritual technologies’ merely represent pre-scientific methods of dealing (through experience) with something that scence should theoretically (though possibly never actually) resolve through its methods of investigating the material plane, the only plane that ‘matters’ for descriptive purposes. This presents us with another paradox because the language that best describes what is going on is a phenomenological language, a description of experience in which cultural and personal metaphor, even poetry or visual symbolism in the form of art, best describes what is to be scientifically explained.

A scientific explanation may thus lie not in the description of things in mathematical terms but in the refinement of shared artistic representations that accumulate to become a paradoxically 'scientific' description of the phenomenon, one that has to be ‘felt’ as true because the artistic description in its right context (looked at with apollonian detachment) becomes the intellectual ‘last man standing’ - based on ‘praxis’, the doing of things that elicit or make use of the force. There is an existent Hindu technology (not the only technology) of systematically raising, containing, directing and using the force that is sensed as a physical sensation of movement from base through spine and upwards. This is Kundalini yoga.

The point today, though, is that such techniques should be looked at afresh primarily as technologies and not permit obfuscation with strange Sanskrit words and unscientific explanations that require the experience to represent more reality than it can take. We have covered this at length in our Tantra series but both these technologies and drugs should be able to recreate high-level experiences of a delusory nature that have effects on persons that are highly fulfilling and life-changing without demanding belief in God, gods or universal consciousness.

A further paradox must be that the delusion of universality becomes an apparent reality, not the ostensible reality of the vision (the absurdities of universal consciousness or reincarnation), but the felt reality of dramatic changes in personality, mind and the relationship between mind and body and then between mind, body and social reality. Some Indian sages will be usefully clear that the energy of which we speak is just the natural energy of the self but they then go on to make the unproven and unprovable assertion that this self is somehow dissipated as universal and is to be found in every being at the same time. This may help us to love rocks, spiders and frogs but it is a distraction.

Instead of seeing our experience of the universal as an attribute of an integral self to be mastered and understood, the Hindu sage somewhat foolishly takes the attribute for the whole and then dissipates the self into all sorts of creative invention. The ultimate absurdity becomes planet-worship, where rock displaces mind. This is not merely the general-universal but universals that then become re-personalised as God or turned into a nothingness (Nirvana) that is supposed to be higher than Man and still have meaning as a No-Thing in which he is to be merged in the future rather than contended with as 'Le Neant' in the present.

Humanity is unlikely to be free of its own delusions until it can face the awful fact (to many of its number) that its experiences are entirely contingent on the material structures of the brain in the body. This is not cause for gloom but for joy because it states that the person, though destined (at this point in history) for death, is his own invention and is not merely the fluff on the back-side of eternity.

Above all, this is an opportunity to recapture the various mythologies about the inner force and make them work as technologies rather than as eternal belief systems. By yet another paradox, this may 'save' the religious impulse by permitting many systems to co-exist as technologies without going through knots trying to find some perennial common denominator at the philosophical level.

To believe for the purpose of transformation in, say, Freyja or Shakti, is a wholly legitimate method of personal transformation, so long as the practitioner fully understands that, existentially, he is engaged in a technology in which the goddess both exists (as means) and does not exist (as ultimate reality) at the same time. The end of the technology is very similar to that of the ancient sages – a ‘gnosis’ or self-realisation that has been falsely connected to the idea of God or to an external wisdom. To think that some 'divine' external force transforms us is to diminish the power of one's own intrinsic resources.

Wisdom is connected to a self-knowledge that need have no connection with the universal except that it is an illusory experience shared biologically with some others of one’s own species, without any necessary specific connection to what it appears to be. The genius of self-knowledge lies not in knowing the other (impossible) or knowing the universal (illusion) but in knowing that the knowing of the other or of the universal is an illusion but one that is embraced as transforming.

Again we are into a paradox because the transformation into a state of understanding that all universalisms and all other-knowing is illusory – which may cause a passage through the ‘dark night of the soul’ – is ultimately so liberating that this knowledge of our lack of knowledge permits a much healthier relationship with others and with society. It is this state that the sages will refer to as an ‘awakening of inner knowledge’ or ‘pure joy, pure knowledge and pure love’ but is here taken to the next stage existentially, one where one observes objectively the illusion of this knowledge so that it can become the 'highest' form of knowledge – the knowledge that the illusion lies not in the Self but in the projection of Self into the universal.

From this perspective, a key figure in our understanding (though the existentialist perspective in this paper is different) is Jung who linked the process of Kundalini yoga with individuation. Another such figure is Wilhelm Reich who identified the ‘drives’ involved with more perspicacity than he has been given credit for – a failure created by his many other errors of judgement. Jung put it succinctly (in relation to the Eastern exploration of these issues): “… the concept of Kundalini has for us, only one use, that is, to describe our own experiences with the unconscious”. We only differ from Jung in our view of that unconscious as being possibly far more materially based than perhaps he considered likely.

The issue raised here is thus only whether individuation must be illusion-full (essentialist) or illusion-less (existentialist). We are discomfited in the West by the value placed on being ‘without illusions’ in spiritual matters but a position that is filled with illusion (whether generated by meditation or Ayahuasca) is not, in value terms, any better or worse than one that is without illusions (existential) or perhaps is one of having the illusion that one is without illusions.

There is a point where we cannot know anything but merely are forced to make choices (even if less than conscious choices) of the level of illusion we find acceptable. It is merely the contention of this Posting that full individuation probably requires that we go beyond the comfort zone of the illusion of having gone beyond material illusion into high essentialism (the construction of pragmatic but false meaning) and re-engage with our materialism as 'no-meaning' other than the meaning we create out of our material being (existentialism).

There is, however, no obligation on us to do so and no moral superiority in moving beyond the ‘spiritual’ back into the material. It is simply a choice for full individuation – an individuation that might well be in danger of detaching oneself entirely from the social (as pre-eminent value system) and into a state that might almost be considered intellectually post-human. This would simply be, then, a matter of choice ... the embracing of Existence, including the felt forces of Existence, without illusions because Life is in itself sufficient to justify the ways of Man to Man.

Against Words & Tradition -Ten Propositions for Discussion

1. Each person perceives the world marginally differently at each successive point in time and each generation of persons perceives the world collectively in a way different from other generations. To hold a truth from past experience as self-evident is absurd. New conditions create new truths and all conditions are, in some respect, new conditions.

2. Experience is more than language. All our senses and our sense of being are engaged in knowing the world. The word spoken is only a part of knowing and scarcely the most dominant or reliable part of it. The word written is more distant still from the word spoken in its representation of the true state of affairs in the world.

3. How we use a word and the context of the word is more important than the word itself. The text tells us nothing without the context in which the text is used. The text in itself is a false friend. Our use of the text is what matters.

4. Words can never capture the totality of human experience. Words are a simplification of experience and so of being in the world. To use a word is immediately to begin to tell a lie.

5. When we say that two things are the same, we are not able to say that they are the same, we are merely saying that it is convenient that we treat these two things as the same for our purposes and our purpose only derives from words if we choose to make words our purpose. Knowing our purpose beyond and behind words is a more valuable purpose than inventing a purpose from the words to hand.

6. The space that we exist in is a space in relation to our perception of that space. There are as many worlds as there are persons perceiving a world in which they perceive themselves as existing.

7. To define a thing is to remove it from its existence as experienced by a person in the world -  definition is the begining of the process by which lies are told.

8. Existence is not logical. It merely exists.

9. Metaphysics cannot exist in words. It can only exist in experience, if it exists at all - which is to be doubted.

10. We are what we do in the world in the flow of time. We have no essence beyond our act in a moment of time and personality is an accumulation of such acts under conditions where the next act will not be precisely like any act ever done before.