A Note on the Heretical & the Political

In the last posting, I referred in passing to Versluis' The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism (2008) and we should dwell a little on its insights.

By taking the most extreme form of the heretical (from a post-Nicaean standpoint), that point where sexuality and spirituality commingle, he highlights what it is that, in practice, caused the authorities to engage in murder and torture, to destroy people whose role in society was otherwise relatively marginal.

Of course, there were moments when perhaps heresy might actually have overturned established order but these are very rare - in the confusion leading up to the Council of Nicaea perhaps, in the seizure of tracts of Southern France during the period of the Cathars, in the marginal lands where competing Christianities, Judaism and Islam fought for dominance.

But, for most of history right up until the fundamentalist onslaught on different sexualities across the world today, the amount of effort placed by authority in extirpating heretics is analogous only to that of homeland security loons in dealing with 'terrorists' and political dissidents and communist purgation.

When a real threat appeared, as in the case of Cathars, the Church had no compunction in turning genocidal. From whence does this appalling fear of what hurts no other derive?

Of course, there may be psycho-sexual motives behind all this. After all, many conventional religious were rutting away like mad despite their claims to celibacy. But there are also cultural and sociological reasons that are worth considering as having parallels even today.

Buddhism and left hand path Hinduism did construct a form of accomodation between sexuality and 'spirituality' but usually only on very exploitative terms towards minors. I have covered this in a review of Faure's Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality elsewhere. The West proved much more rigid.

First, the dissidents actively rejected Church bureaucracy and hierarchy. In so doing, they implicitly (though there is no real evidence of any explicit intention) rejected the alliance between Church and the magisterium.

The threat of dissent was political - secular authority might well do to conventional catholicism what the Catholic Church had done to paganism viz. stuff it to cut a deal. Any rival operations had to be cut out of the game as ruthlessly as Al Capone wanted Bugs Moran dealt with.

Since condemnation of pagan sexuality was central to the Church's claim that only it could restore order in the febrile atmosphere in and following the third century AD, then any bunch of dissidents who had an alternative plan involving the maintenance of order through expression of that same suppressed sexuality could be a material threat to its institutional power.

Second, they embraced the 'natural' (meaning what men do naturally and the wildness of territory beyond the reach of the bureaucracy of the day). This too had political implications. The christian, like the communist and the late-imperial victorian, model was totalitarian and this ultimately meant it must be about sex.

It was no accident that the members of a Gnostic sect were referred to as being 'brigands' (though they stole from no-one) and that the vicious polemicist Clement of Alexandria declined to give further details of the beliefs of Carpocrates lest he 'oufit a pirate ship'.

They were literally 'outlaws' ... or 'terrorists' perhaps. But since they were not a threat to property (the main concern of secular authority), what was the brigandage and piracy directed at?

Why, self-evidently, a threat that would 'thieve' ideological control from the aggressive elite group, the spiritual New Labour-like coup d'esprit of the Catholic intellectual leadership based on a class of priests and bishops who did not care for another round of martydoms.

Like Bolsheviks in 1918, the struggle was won and the wanderings and exiles must now cease. They had gambled at the table and won and were not going to risk their winnings again.

Third, the dissidents accepted the spiritual equality of women, not just as able to attain 'gnosis' through the intermediation of priests but as direct and equal communicants with the divine.

Note that this is not the rivalling of some mythic patriarchy with some countervailing matriarchy as some more dim-witted modern feminists have asserted but a far more profound sense of anti-authoritian 'gnosis'. It was not act an act of feminism but of personism or of autonomism within a community of the like-minded.

The essence of the rebellion against the Church was individualist and so egalitarian in a wholly different way from the slave-religion of the Catholic Church which treated all souls as equal under its leadership, much like the Party in the Soviet Union.

Political and spritual universalisms always contain the seeds of totalitarian social terror as we see today in the universalism of a degenerate liberal enlightenment.

Finally, the heretics' antinomianism, not libertinism but that sense that a 'gnosis' had created an internal moral authority that was higher than any law or regulation dictated from above by Church or State - or indeed community, presented a bridge over which the Church could march its ideological troops into the secular castle and demand action and thereby assert its ability to 'cut deals'.

After all, the alliance between Church and magisterium was always contingent on delivery of order at low cost through ideology (as the Lutheran revolt was to show in its relation to peasant revolts). The communism, terrorism and heresy of the Munster Anabaptists was a 'gift from heaven' in that respect.

The ideological brigandage was of no intrinsic concern to property (since most of these mystics most of the time were rarely communistic in the expropriatory sense) and European aristocratic society was often perfectly happy with strong women in positions of influence and power ...

... no, the secret to the murder and torture which, if the secular authorities did not do themselves then they permitted to be done on their territory despite public order risks, came down to the shared interest of both Church and property in holding down the individual and ensuring that he or she remained unthreatening and submissive.

It was the antinomianism that did for the the heretics of the past much as it does for today's heretics. The relationship between sexual mysticism and mainstream culture is thus highly political and parallels the relationship between radical political dissent, radical sexual freedom and the State today.

The modern political dissenter rejects the self-serving structures of liberal constitutionalism, operates outside the institutional structures of the elite and is egalitarian across gender and class but none of this is important when set against his or her growing 'antinomian' tendency - against the possibility that the State no longer has 'legitimacy', the right to make and enforce laws. And resentment of bad laws is growing ...

It is the crisis of our time now that anyone can be a sexual mystic without a knock on the door at five in the morning from a Dominican friar - but that economic failure, uncertainty, unending apparently inexplicable and murderous small wars and loss of identity are creating a potent brew in which the political dissident is always going to be one sentence from being classed a 'terrorist' ...

... and always at the edge of things is the system's longing for some all-encompassing ideology that will set boundaries. In the West, it is a manipulative NGO-led universalism that is now required to clean up the mess left by globalisation and it is this ideology that is discovering sexuality as a problem and not an opportunity.

The 'Mysterium' in the Post-Modern World

The 'mysterium' - that about which we must, ultimately, be silent but which always has some indirect expression in feeling, performance and, most imperfectly, thought and language - will never go away so long as human beings exist as human beings and not as reasoning machines.

This is not to say that the 'mysterium' is present in all lives. As Kierkegaard brilliantly pointed out in his The Sickness Unto Death, most people most of the time repress or suppress it because it is a cause of deep anxiety and even of despair.

For most people, and for most of the time, there is no means, whether through temperament, capability or social context, to engage and struggle with it successfully or with profit. The 'mysterium' is present as a lack or as an avoidance strategy.

It has to be said that the average human being has every right not to put themselves through the wringer if there is no inward drive for transcendence or any social value in transcendence.

On the contrary, condemnation of those who avoid mystery and strangeness is cruel, arrogant and stupid - it is for individuals to decide and not others. There is no special virtu in the transcendent or the mysterious ... far from it. It is just another mode of being, one amongst very many.

But for those who are forced into engagement with the 'mysterium', it is not the case that it has a fixed form which expresses itself identically throughout all history and amongst all peoples.

The core experience of it is probably standard issue but this core experience is so limited in scope that there is no space for those claims of an essential 'primordial tradition' much loved by cultural conservatives. This is an explanation after the fact. Traditionalism evades the rawness of mystery.

The mysterium can be best be characterised in its active form as a felt perception of the integration of subject (the observing mind that is unique to itself) with object (whatever is out there beyond the self).

It is perhaps close to Jung's individuation but momentary, a stage on the way rather than a final resolution unless something like the enlightenment promised by Samadhi is achieved which strikes this writer as little more than embracing the death instinct. Accessing the mysterium should be for something other than itself.

Because the self is a nest of perceptions, the centrality of perception in the process of integration means that the experience is paradoxically both true and illusory simultaneously - true to the self (which despite the post-moderns does exist as a felt reality) but a matter of utter meaninglessness to the world.

Neither we (as in the post-moderns) nor the world (as with the Eastern faiths) are illusory, we are simply incommensurate so that it is the lack of cohesion that creates the confusion. The desire to merge both into a higher reality is a failure to understand what we are as evolved animals.

This is what has always been confused as a unification with the divine - because what is 'out there' (the thing that is the object) has been assumed, without evidence, to be aware of the process of our observing, part of us in terms of consciousness. The desire that this be so becomes an obsession with some.

The desire to have the object become subjectified - subjectification - is far more an anti-human process than the much criticised but more true to life process of objectification. Objectification is somehow sinful and yet to be human is to objectify to survive.

This failure to detach the subject from the object by the very nature of the experience - the illusion of integration may be an illusion in relation to matter but can be a central transformative experience of self - has resulted in historical waves of culturally contingent interpretations of the mysterium.

A pagan sensibility, for example, might externalise the 'other' as nature or the gods - a relationship to the mystery of the material world which is then imbued with a knowing if not necessarily amenable divinity.

We see a weak version of this type of transcendental thinking re-emerging in the wake of the failure of the concept of God to meet modern mystery needs as a transposition of 'nature' onto the planet and the earth in an unsophisticated environmentalism.

It is the 'other' to which we must submit - the unknowable mystery becomes our master rather than simply what it is, a thing that is unknowable on which we can write our own script.

Christian sensibility shifted the 'mysterium' not only towards a mythic narrative of salvation through sacrifice but away from the engagement of mind with the imperfectly known world of matter. Christianity moved the mysterium radically away from the relationship between mind with matter as a mystery in itself.

It is the rediscovery of this latter mystery that would later inspire the atheist existentialists who sought to re-start philosophy from Socrates' pre-Platonic initial questioning. The post-pagan Christian sensibility took the transcendent illusion so seriously that it made it socially real and useful and evaded the truth with more invention.

The socialisation of transcendence, expressed in a war not only on gnosticism but on all forms of independent interpretation of transcendent experience, became the dominant authoritarian and even totalitarian mode of Western culture from the Constantinian settlement onwards.

Even today, as a mental model, this socialisation and weakening of transcendence survives not only as religion but as the cack-handed compliment paid to it by all-inclusive radical political philosophies, including the radical positivist liberalism that is wracking the world today.

The current approach to the mysterium is thus a confused and, fortunately for most of us, pluralist attempt to make sense of the relationship of mind to the 'other' on terms in which the 'other' is privileged as having, if not always a mind, some meaning that operates as if it was mind.

This is so because the mysterium has now been thoroughly socialised - which is absurd because only individuals and not societies have minds that can relate to matter in a transcendent and fully experiential way.

Transcendence has lost the quality of being enabled by a framework that permits the space for transcendence rather than of offering models of transcendence to which we are expected to conform.

The re-seizure of a direct relationship between the individual mind and existence began in both America and Europe in the nineteenth century in small pockets but it only found critical mass in conservative intellectual circles in the early twentieth century in Europe and then in radical social circles in California at mid-century.

Since then, this antinomian and complex movement of revolt against the socialisation and weakening of transcendence has exploded across Western culture.

Moreover, it appeared in forms so disorganised and anarchic that it had no character that might permit it to be borrowed or adapted to ensure order for elites as Constantine managed to purloin the Christian model from 313 AD. It defies socialisation and order. And yet its forms and not its core soon became appropriated by essentialists again - whether in neo-fascist, pseudo-leftist or new age forms.

Fascist elements flirted with the European wave and the American wave ended up losing itself in the irrational exuberance of an inchoate liberalism but the phenonenon persisted as challenge to the prevailing order and its scepticism as to essences and system, its chaos, now vaccinates us through our new media.

This disorder permits multiple models for transcendence, of engagement with the mysterium, that allow a person to adopt anything of value to them including 'the reality of the illusion'.

The 'reality of the illusion' is when the transcendent experience really does seem to connect with something 'out there' that has a mind that connects through the experience with the mind of the subject. This is when the insane subjectivation of reality is chosen as a divine madness for a transformative gain.

Nevertheless, those who would be able transcendentally to connect that part of the mind that is subject (self) with inner object (the unknown self) and acquire it as part of the subject remain a minority and a confused minority at that.

The modern revolution in individualist transcendentalism arose from a psychologism that was based on healing and on science but perhaps lost its appeal because it still placed gnosis in the hands of leaders, priests, intellectuals and gurus.

The phenonenon of Osho tells us all we need to know about the absurdity of this world - a philosophy of individual transcendence based on cultic paranoia and the leadership principle. Set at sea, most minds tend to the pseudo-liberation of a hidden social fascism. They cannot let go of meaning.

It is true that those who take a severe psychological perspective on subject/object relations and accept an intellectual model for self-investigation seem doomed to take much longer over their own transformation than those who experience the instant transcendent moment. So how can this be squared?

How can one retain an Apollonian rational scepticism about one's situation yet capture Dionysiac excess and madness to reboot the mind into creating a world closer to the actual hidden nature, the occult self, which is constrained by the social and by history?

A transformative power may lie in the mind adopting an illusory model of existence to effect a transformation but then abandoning the illusion once the transformation has taken place. Dionysius trumps Apollo and then wends his drunken way far from the subject when he has done his job ...

Believers in absurdities - God, the divine, the planet, the nation and even history - with their opportunities for a 'Pauline moment' of revelation are not going to go away. The risk always remains that their mad enthusiasms may result in the socialisation of one illusion over others and a return to the intellectual dark ages.

On the other hand, without a challenge to the inherited models designed for adequate socialisation, personal transformation strategies are likely to wallow around waiting for a transformative moment that cannot come because the individual is not permitted a framework for independent investigation and experimentation.

Space is needed for the 'dark night of the soul', risk, transgression and transcendence. What a modern mystery school might do, in this 'revelation', is return to pre-Augustinian Western roots as much as it embraces continental philosophy, returning humanity to Socrates to invent a defiant purpose in the face of science.

This is, of course, what Nietzsche and Heidegger would like but we might need effective methodologies for individual or small group transformation where the social framework that is required is one of ensuring that antinomianism does not descend into cultishness and exploitation.

Such 'technique' may lie embedded in European culture beneath the now crumbling facade of ascetic and historicist Catholic orthodoxy. But are these and other traditions not distractions if we continue to accept their false essentialist premises? The collapse of lineage in thought may not be such a bad thing.

Eastern spiritual lineages may offer a thousand paths but they may also have become sclerotic in their traditional language of spirit so that we have the comical absurdities of exported sanskrit, lazy states of Aum-ness or the importation of Tantra as sexual partnership guidance without any sense of the real struggle that the transcendental experience requires.

The thousand flowers of the broken Western tradition still point to freedom not only of choice but from tradition so that each individual can explore to the depth that they require to achieve individuation rather than dabble in an expected expression of the transcendent according to pre-ordained religious forms.

As Arthur Versluis points out, Western mystical thinking has depended on the constant rediscovery of banned or suppressed texts. These then have to be understood out of original context in order to be made useful. Yet the text is the burden of the West as well as the reason for its relative energy.

When a text is the standard for society - whether the American Constitution, the Bible or the Communist Manifesto - it suppresses free, innovative and creative thought but where a text is a choice, then it can be the trigger for new thinking to meet new conditions. But true freedom is abandoning the text altogether.

Both Kierkegaard and Bohme were wrong about God and meaning but they and others opened the door that enabled us to question the socialisation and formalisation of meaning by society rather than by ourselves in a direct relationship to it. But they also had to be jettisoned to progress.

We should command, control and throw away in a struggle against all forms of traditionalism and conservatism. We must know our enemy - ancient texts and old ideas - but learn how to unlearn them when they become useless as working tools.

From this perspective, the modern mysterium permits paganic science its due as the basis of understanding without meaning but it restores meaning to the individual as the master of science and history, of science and history as mere tools, and the ability to challenge one's own socialisation by others.

Rethinking Sexual Mysticism ...

The association of a claimed spiritual impulse with sexuality is a mystery in two senses - it is a mystery in the religious sense that it is present but inexplicable and it is a mystery in a second sense that most people just do not get that it is possible.

This is not just because most people in the West have grown up within a cultural tradition that firmly separates spirit (or mind at its most transcendent) from matter (or body at its most functional).

Many Westerners understand body as brute and often inconvenient matter but they are now unsure whether spirit exists except as illusion, a derangement of the neurons.

To cope with the very concept of sexual mysticism or of a sexual spirituality requires that we struggle with two very different ways of seeing.

There is the personal privileging of sexuality as a means of expression and that process by which 'transcendence', the experience of existing beyond the immediate self, has meaning in and of itself. Not everyone gets either of these concepts, let alone their integration.

The privileging of sexuality is deeply counter-cultural because that privileging is wholly associated with simple gratification of desire, with the sin of lust. A 'swinger' is more comprehensible to most people than a sexual mystic because the former are simply acting out a common desire without restraint.

Most people sit on a continuum between a-sexuality and radical desire that has little room for the numinous.

On the other hand, transcendence is also problematic because it is associated with external forces, mostly God but often today with a more vague sense of the divine or perhaps of some essential reality beyond reality.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I position transcendence as a materially-based experience that is valid in itself (as experience) but not validly described outside the experience except in materialist terms. This does not make the experience invalid, merely additional explanations invalid.

Whatever God, the divine or reality beyond reality are to individuals, they are set apart from matter for most people and so, sex being associated with desire that is seen as 'material', they are not seen as sexual. Indeed, the sexual may be so associated with matter that it becomes associated with 'dirt'.

The sexual mystic is a liminal figure, an absurd figure in many people's eyes, even more so than the 'mulatto', the bisexual and the transgender have been in the past - and all those other figures in society who partake of both or neither of the binary components of our conventional thought.

Black/white, light/dark. good/bad. But these figures between the boundaries are not liminal at all, They are at the point of convergence of binaries. They represent ambiguity. Either/or. Neither/nor. Most people are uncomfortable with ambiguity. Yet dealing with ambiguity is central to individuation.

Why the discomfort? Because ambiguity is often the first step to anxiety and anxiety is the first step to coming-to-terms with the actually existing human condition. For some of the highly sexualised, the introduction of the numinous confuses things - why add obfuscation to a 'natural' act?

There is no reason why the swinger is necessarily a psychopath in this. Their unspiritual sexuality is consensual and many swingers will have strongly monogamous relationships when it comes to affection and property. There is no intrinsic superiority in the numinous.

For the highly spiritualised on the other hand, the sexual is just so, well, 'dirty' - literally, in the exchange of body fluids and the mess - and deriving from the lack of loss of self in the god-head or in the eternal because of the association of the act with the body and the material .

Even where texts have not demanded that a person treat sexuality as a highly regulated and non-spontaneous activity, the psychology of formal religion appears to demand that sex be avoided as sin or distraction.

Yet, for a small minority, the linkage between the sexual and the mystical is logical and healthy. In some personalities, the experience of orgasm excites mental visions of the eternal, the infinite and the numinous.

The entire experience of sex is, to such persons, deeply magical or spiritual (the terms are not quite interchangeable).

The real puzzlement to these people is why an innocent, private, consensual and deeply personal association of the link between sex and the divine is the cause of so much fear, anxiety, horror and oppression in the majority.

But I must go back to being honest here. I accept the experience of the transcendent but I do not accept the experience of the divine as something taking place beyond the mind of the subject.

Those who have experienced intense transcendence through religious experience, drugs or sex - or even contemplation of art or nature - can find the experience so overwhelming that all reason flees. The experience is embraced as true-in-itself, as an absolute.

There is no arguing with such persons - nor are they wrong in their noble illusions. The experience is true because it 'is'. Sex, like drugs, is highly specific, though, in giving us a path way from experience to this felt illusory (objectively) but real (subjectively) transcendence.

Both involve chemical transformations within the body, whether instigated by the introduction of chemicals or through forcing chemical change within the body through (say) touch ... but the essence of the matter is the same, the triggering of transcendence through radical chemical and neuron adaptation.

The objection of the religious and post-religious secular community to sex and drugs is 'moral' on the spurious basis that no external force other than, successively, God's grace or pure reason should intervene between man and the transcendent.

This is the gap, however, into which priests and intellectuals have insinuated themselves. But God is now either dead or very personal indeed to post-modern man. Reason is on its last legs as adequate explanation for our conditions of existence.

This is not to say that sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll should be put in their place (far from it - these are often evasions) but only that there is a hole which people are having to fill without paternal or maternal guidance and each person will have their own right way of filling it.

This raises many issues of 'value' that can be boiled down to the simple unconscious acceptance of a person as either an existential being (experiencing things as a material being in relation to the world) or essential (attaining knowledge of hidden things in the world that actually exist 'out there').

This is the occult of the inner soul in conceptual competition with the occult of the universe.

Hitherto all discussion of sexuality in a spiritual context has centred either on the impossibility of sexuality or narcotics (as opposed to reason or ascetic discipline) permitting access to the divine or, alternatively, of sexuality and narcotics being the most natural pathway to a divinity that exists above and beyond humanity.

In other words, both the majority of believers who deny a link between sex and spirit and those few who assert a direct link between the two share an assumption that there is 'something out there' which rejects or accepts the gift of sex.

But once the divine is lost conceptually in a secular society (as it has largely been in ours), the only sex that is left is the sex that is no longer denied (as it is by the deniers of the link) but which also has no transcendent quality.

From this point on, it is just, more or less, pleasure - unpleasant, erotic, brute, playful or whatever - but just pleasure without meaning except, at best, as personal bonding.

This last statement might shock but most people in the modern world can now only see sex as a matter of brute pleasure or personal bonding. This leads us to the dichotomous cultural relationship between sex as commodity and sex as personal development and as a relationship tool.

This clearly creates its own binary structure of dark and light, good and evil, with advocates on both sides.

Perhaps we might now re-think this in the light of science and of the fact of sexual mysticism in the past (such as that of the Greek mystery tradition and Gnosticism) by suggesting that, while the sex of pleasure and of commodification and the sex of bonding are real phenomena, there may be a third phenomenon of sexuality as felt transcendence that requires no God or divinity at all.

Such an existentialist sexuality is liminal and so disturbing by its nature. It exists not just to release tension or excite (as in the pleasure model) nor is it designed to be 'social', to build bonds.

It might just as well exist as an individual act of transcendence with participants who share the same ends and who replace the divine as external with the divine as internal, as an inner transformative power.

This, of course, relates to spiritual alchemy. We might argue that the alchemical, a chemical process within the body, was falsely related to the external and to a ladder of perfection.

An existential sexual mysticism might be interested not in 'rising' towards divinity but in finding moments of Dionysiac purity which are internally transformative within existing reality.

Instead of union with God or the external divine, the sexual process would now be directed at individuation, a more Jungian concept, but one which is not merely imagined but is actuated.

And not only through sexuality - we have mentioned sex and drugs but these are of no greater consequence than art, higher mathematics, ritual and performance, asceticism, deep meditation or long walks!

There is no intent here to throw the baby of technique out with the bathwater of essentialism - for, if we think long and hard about it, it becomes clear that, though the sexual mystics of the past were unable to separate the experience from the theory, their methods were often finely tuned towards achieving the actuality of a felt transcendence.

We can envisage a Western sexual mysticism closer to the mentality of the Taoists or the more radical Tantrics, by which transcendence in order to effect transformation and individuation becomes a form of science in its own right.

Even symbolic notions such as the alchemical idea of 'as above so below' or that of archetypes, as developed by Jung, can be used in a scientific way, much like higher mathematics, to transmute the leaden life of conformity and easy acceptance of a constructed social reality into a dynamic and revolutionary critique of the 'given', far more focused than the cynicism of the Chaos Magicians.

Needless to say, such thoughts will disturb those who really do believe that there is a divine 'out there' instead of inside ourselves. It will also unnerve those who cannot think in these terms at all but only in terms of the laws of physics.

Those who are interested in neither God nor science but only in pleasure will be equally puzzled at why anyone should be mad enough (in their eyes) to add bells and whistles. But these 'platonists', positivists and hedonists are not being asked to become like the new alchemists.

They are merely being asked to be more tolerant of a different way of seeing than their ancestors have been.

In the past,control, repression, contempt or ridicule have been the natural modes of society towards all three styles of approaching sexuality, all tending to indicate fear and anxiety rather than understanding.

To conclude, it is likely that the 'sexual mystic impulse', a component of what might be the 'new alchemy', is always going to be for the few - but not because the few want to keep it to themselves but because the many simply cannot get sexuality as anything more than pleasure and power.

There is nothing elitist about this new alchemy. On the contrary, it is for anyone who wants it. To remove the pleasure and the power of sexuality from the social, from constructed social reality, and return it to individuals as individuals in direct communion with each other, may be the most profoundly revolutionary act of our time.