The Contribution of the Eastern Religions

This posting is by way of a footnote within a series of philosophical notes (covering spirituality, issues of personal identity, ontology and free will). The question has been raised in discussion elsewhere whether the influence of the Eastern religions, central to the creation or elucidation of the 'existentialist cast of mind', was any better than those religions that personalised God in promoting the ‘death instinct’ (the abnegation of our own matter-consciousness) at the expense of the affirmation of life.

My interest here is only in the Vedantic-Buddhist tradition. Nothing that is said is intended to detract from the pragmatic use-value of the tradition for persons and societies now or in the past or to make claims about its (or indeed Judaeo-Christian or Islamic) ‘truth-value’. The issue of the ‘truth’ of a religion has already been covered and is considered by us to be meaningless but often useful. For something to be useful to us does not require it to be true in any absolute sense.

Too much can be made of the East/West dichotomy. After all, in the Indian tradition, there is a Supreme God in Brahma. Some traditions within South Asian culture make this Godhead personal even if the Buddhist strain then spins off into another dimension altogether. The point is that, in the continuum from the Jewish God through Brahma to Nirvana, despite the differences that made Pope John Paul II write so negatively of the influence of Buddhist thinking on the West, all have in common the submission of ourselves to a construction of meaning out of Raw Existence that represents a cast of mind which, whether filled with Christian hope or Buddhist withdrawal, places responsibility for being what one is firmly within a shared vision of Existence that is ultimately social and not truly individual.

I appreciate that this is not what appears to be the case in Buddhism but Buddhist abnegation is embedded in tradition and tradition is, by definition, social and not individual. In this posting, I want to pinpoint two things that we must avoid in dealing with the influence of the East (in this greater context) and explore what we can learn more positively from that influence.

The first thing to avoid is the narrative of decline. In this narrative, once a commonplace in the West but superseded by an equally naive belief in progress, we have lived through successive ages in a cycle of existence that represents decline from a Golden Age. We are now, it would seem, in the Kali Yuga or final Iron Age and can merely await the final cataclysm after which, we are told to hope, humanity will return to a Golden Age (which, of course, is actually perfectly meaningless to you and me because we certainly will not live to see it unless we believe in reincarnation). The literature on apocalypse and hope is wide and includes the radical Christian apocalyptic strain that would see not merely the fall from the Garden of Eden as one book end to the narrative but the end to the age of sinfulness in an apocalypse as the other. To some radical American evangelical groups, the ‘saved’ would be translated directly to Heaven and the rest would wallow in death, pain and suffering.

Although Nietzsche adopted the myth of the eternal return for metaphysical purposes, we have suggested elsewhere that the only metaphor that captures the most credible idea of a really existing God in the creation of our world (as opposed to all other possible worlds in space-time) is that of Its ‘deliberate’ suicide (the nearest we get to a Fall) into undifferentiated matter and ‘potential-for-consciousness’ from which small sparks of matter-consciousness (ourselves) emerge after billions of years of things and processes bumping and grinding into each other in a rather wasteful but nevertheless counter-entropic way until we (and probably other intelligences) come into existence.  This is not to say that there was a conscious intelligence that kick-started the chaos from which order arises or that such an alleged intelligence has any meaning for us but only that, whatever metaphor we use, the conclusion is not one of decline and entropy alone but of increasing complexity causing intelligence and consciousness, albeit in a wasteful way with many dead-ends, and emerging in counterpoint to material entropy.

Whatever narrative might emerge to feed the social order and to allay the despair of societies with limited resources, relying on false hope to get us through the day or to sustain the power of some over others, the best narrative that fits the facts of the matter is a progressive one. This is one of the very slowly increasing intelligence and awareness of individuals (not excluding aliens on faraway planets). The conditions of the best today are significant improvements in terms of the sophistication of matter-consciousness, compared with the state of matter-consciousness (our humanity) in the past. Getting depressed about our cruelty and stupidity as Ardrey's 'risen apes' misses the point that, apes though we may be, we have actually risen considerably in the last 10,000 years or so.

This 'rising' is not the same as increasing ‘happiness’. Happiness can exist just in not being aware of not being happy - much as a well-fed animal might live in the present. The Buddhist might reinterpret this as that tranquillity that removes all the future causes of unhappiness, including those transient states of pleasure that consciousness will remember with regret or become anxious about in expectation or desire. The alleged happiness of the animal (unconscious of threat until it is eaten or dies alone shivering of fever or old age in a pile of leaves) is what underlies the myth of the Garden of Eden and the Golden Age. It is both false (insofar as animals shift themselves under the influence of primal drives from contentment to hunger and fear of depredation much as we do) and the core of that cast of mind that turns away from life – abnegation again.

The determination not to face the pain of existence and the emotions that accompany existence is what underpins faith and its constructions, a way of thought that also has as its purpose, the building up of a workable society in which pain is a given and emotions must be mastered.  There is nothing wrong with this as ‘magic’ in the sense of spells designed to hold oneself and society together but its later sophistication at the hands of philosophers and intellectuals should not be exaggerated. Religion is always built on the sand of fear and anxiety (with a leavening dash of mystic ekstasis for some).

This leads us to consider the second ‘insight’ of the East that the Golden Age is an age of ‘piety’ and of adherence to standards of law, duty and truth (the concept of ‘dharma’). The religious cultures of the West have a similar belief in divinely sanctioned right order and for similar reasons. At this point, we must not be deflected into Marxist or similar radical critiques of religion as a tool that is being used to maintain the social power of the few over the many. Such critics seem to imply that the process of submission is deliberate but the revolutionaries, from Robespierre to the personality cults of the heirs of Stalin, inevitably find that they need some religion-substitute to maintain themselves in power. The response is instinctive.

The habit of submission is intrinsic to humanity. It has been so for most people for most of human history and the obligation has probably been worn lightly and often cynically – true believers in ideas are generally a minority of humanity under normal conditions. As we see in a modern free culture, left to ourselves we tend to believe collectively in many impossible things at the same time and as individuals some of us are quite capable of shifting belief with our conditions of life. Belief is a social phenomenon and is not often a gnosis from contemplation – even if it is the latter, the result can only be communicated within given cultural language so that mystics with similar experiences can develop Judaeo-Christian or Islamic or Buddhist or Shamanistic narratives in communicating what is essentially the same human phenomenon. Such diversity argues against truth.

The religious impulse is thus towards a conservative assessment of progress (that we are in decline) and to the solidification and elaboration of tradition is part of the fear of life that we have noted elsewhere. It is not bad intrinsically but it is not ‘true’ even if these sclerotic systems are best not over-turned (as the Communists demonstrated) lightly. If the idea of the ‘kali yuga’ is best left to natural miserabilists (of which there are many) and the idea of ‘dharma’ (and their Western cognates) is best left to fearful conservatives, then what (other than the proven psychotherapeutic effects of belief) can we best learn from the East if we want to abandon the negative attitude to life.

How can we experience, without illusion, our natural will as a process constantly moving forward socially and individually until brain decay sets in or until material resources run out? How can we negotiate claims that, without narcissism, are greater than those of the society in which an individual is embedded? The existentialist cast of mind is not anti-social or optimistic (since the first is asking to be crushed and the second to have no basis in the facts of existence) but it is still individualist, radical, liberal and an affirmation of life and will against pessimism. Its social conservatism is more apparent than real – a scepticism of new forms of belief that may move us along a notch as social consciousness but which will contain all the hallmarks of traditional systems in another form. No better examples could be chosen than Marxism-Leninism in all its variants or the localised tribal religions of radical nationalism.

What religions of the East in particular can teach us is refinement of psychological method. If we strip away the dead languages and forms of religions that should have no meaning unless lived ‘in situ’, the religions of the East have not been turned to stone by the institutionalisation and excessive systematisation of belief systems under an imposed authority (Christianity) or a social model that is defensive (Judaism) or offensive (Islam) enough to suppress the possibility of an Eastern-style psychology of mind management in the face of Existence.

Although there are techniques within the West that mimic Eastern traditions, it is the East, precisely because faith has been detached from power in terms of dogma (as opposed to ritual), that has preserved either the spark of life affirmation (Tantra) or the skills required to master mind (Tantric/Shamanistic Buddhism). Understanding Eastern ideology is a guide to the underlying principles in an Eastern thinking that is not existentialist by any means (it is always wrong, almost certainly imperialist, to ‘read back’ our concerns into traditionalist cultures).

The Tantric tradition in its relationship to Shiva (the destroyer) rather than Brahma (the creator) perhaps represents a recognition of what transpired after the ‘suicide of God’ to create creative chaos, in a way that makes creative transgression the formation of consciousness, just as survival within evolution requires innovation that might be as likely to be more brutal in predation as it is faster in evading predation. Brahma is not worshipped in general in India because, once creation was created, His work was done. This might be read as a dualistic acceptance of matter in decline (the pessimistic approach referred to above) or as a monistic ‘suicide’ or withdrawal as I have postulated.

Shiva represents the meeting of opposites. He contains within himself that very attribute of beyond good and evil that is central to existential ethics and to Tantra alike. Without destruction there can be no creation. The psychological truth behind this is that, in an impermanent and confusing world where we certainly do not have access to full information (more so today than in a relatively stable traditionalist society), our adaptation to existence on our terms requires the constant recalibrating of ourselves against not only other people and society but our own inherited habits and values. For example, I might be born and live a Calvinist but what happens when my conditions of existence are completely at odds with that faith? I can only go deeper into mal-adaptation and adopt a strategy of trying to bend the world to my inner need for fixity and certainty.

This, in turn, forces me to go outwards and oppress others into conformity or develop a stance of withdrawal from the world – both norms of Western and Eastern responses to change respectively. Or I can adapt my Calvinism to reality (reform) or, alternatively, ‘transgress’, even ‘break down’, in order to find new values that accord better with my nature, an admittedly painful process that might shatter other relationships because, instead of oppressing them into my world view, I am demanding that they do not oppress me into theirs.

Equally to the point, Shiva is Lord of the Dance. Dance is a process and not a thing. You cannot pick up a dance as a thing. You can only perform it or watch it. So it is with mental process. The mind is not a succession of things in the mind but a process of thought and feeling. Shiva is quintessentially the representation of the reality left behind after Brahma did his ‘thing’, his single act. Shiva is constant fluctuation and change. The Buddhist response to this fact of fluctuation and change is to try and find non-change in detachment. Most other religions try to deal with this crisis of change by fixing things in space and time through fixed rituals and dogma.

The Liberal Enlightenment is not much better in this respect – the American Constitution is a religious document, an attempt to fix political existence in political space-time. It is an argument against all written constitutions that they are essentially sclerotic in the very long run. They are religious acts. The association of Shiva with dance and fertility is also not accidental because the central source of discomfort to many people is the libido, not just sexual energy but the life force that underpins the creative and disturbing use of emotion as a tool of self development alongside or even in preference to calculation and reason.

Nor is it just a matter of procreation, the conditions of which institutionalised religions have always sought to control in some way. The sheer energetic pleasure of sexuality has been automatically relegated to the category of transgression because its libidinous energy is, alongside outbursts of violence, regarded as most dangerous to Dharma in East and West. Sexuality thus becomes repressed or ritualised. Even the modern Western penchant for neo-Tantra and fetish is no more than a liberation that is being fought on the enemy’s terms by which transgression becomes ritualised in homage to religion.

Far from being true liberation, the ‘namaste brigade’, expressing sexuality in ill-understood Sanskrit and out of traditional context, and the far more earthy and authentic native fetishists are engaged in a simulacrum of liberation designed to ghetto their desires so that the outside world will not feel threatened. They are still products of fear for all their ‘liberation’. Almost any Eastern concept of value, such as the metaphor of Shiva, needs to be re-translated into the real and actual culture of the West. The dance of more value than the temple dance to most Westerners might, in fact, by the tango – which, in its matching of erotic movement with a high discipline that is without direct sexual intent, is almost the perfect metaphor for the tamed libido. It is not, despite its origins, however, transgressive.

Alongside Shiva, we have the concept of the Great Goddess (Mahadevi) who is the feminine principle writ large. One fine principle of the East from which we could learn is the reaffirmation that men and women are, well, different because the matter part of the matter-consciousness is different regardless of social forms and conditions. Radical feminism in the West often misses the point because in its correct demand for social, economic and political equality, it attempts to turn both men and women into what they cannot be – types of consciousnesses detached from their material base. The Shiva-Mahadevi relationship expresses an erotic truth about the male-female relationship that need have no connection with the proces of dealing with the social, political and economic inequalities in the world of Dharma.

The specific energy of women (shakti) is for women to write about and define and not me but the association of Mahadevi with fertility is not some simplistic association with motherhood but a more complex sharing of feminine mastery of process (as opposed to the rationalism of things). Mahadevi is consort of Shiva, both equal principles expressed, in Tantric thought, by the power of the sexual act between them. In a later age, this can be translated to relations between any two people so that homosexuality and then more than two people as in the dance of polyamory are included but the essence of the dynamic is not procreation but creation – and not of things (necessarily a child, as Catholic intellectuals might prefer) but of processes that transform. This is not just bonking but being. The point is that Shiva is powerless without shakti – the thing is meaningless unless turned into process by a process (consciousness) working on thing-ness(matter).

We are this interrelationship of process and thing. There is perhaps no greater individual working of this than the sexual act where matter merges into pure mental process that, under the right conditions, without any concern for Dharma or what is proscribed by others, can transform the structures of the mind into new ways of thinking.  Such thinking is transgressive only to the degree that Dharma makes such acts transgressive but the art in this is to know that social definitions of transgression are of no consequence if the transgression is responsibly conducted in terms of equality of effects (between persons) and with a true, not feared understanding of consequences.

If the East gives us the creative mentality of Tantra (albeit that this needs to be removed from the Sanskrit and brought into English and de-fetishized), it also brings us ‘technique’. Thoughtful sexual congress is, of course, a technique but the merging of shamanistic and tantric elements into Tibetan Buddhism offer a range of explorations that do not depend on the visions of reality or the belief in reincarnation (Bardo) of Tibetan theocrats. Nor are we wholly dependent on Tibet for their further development – shamanistic techniques are part of the human armoury from Finland to the Amazon and from the back areas of Australasia to the reservations of the crushed American Indians.

If formal religion and the demands of Dharma have a victim, that victim is the a-moral mysticisms of the shaman even if shamans turn up in many guises hidden away in the interstices of all but the most oppressed and totalitarian of societies.  In our free liberal society, shamanic thinking is re-emerging amongst academics, urban rebels and the troubled middle classes even if neo-shamanism with its eco-political dimensions is liable to go the way of neo-Tantra and become a pale pink, tamed and convenient shadow of its real, earthy and often very dark original.

The merging of Tantric Buddhism and shamanism (almost certainly as a political compromise in the highlands of Tibet) has created a certain blind romantic regard in the fluffy liberal West for what was, essentially, an inefficient and oppressive theocracy not much better than late medieval Catholicism. Similarly, whether Kashmiri Shaivism or Tibetan Buddhism, the whole master-pupil relationship is fraught with implicit traditionalist oppression in which a young mind is not taught to explore freely and even (initially) chaotically under guidance but has their brains bent into a traditionalist order that may have no connection to their true will or needs.

The very idea of a master granting ‘permission’ to do anything is absurd even if, like the placebo effect, in Western medicine, the command and control and secrecy aspects of the system may have a role in its success. These are not paths for the free-born Westerner for any length of time and merely dabbling in a tradition is probably next to useless. However, the application of effort, even for misguided reasons, under conditions where the peasants toiled to keep a lot of idle monks in rice who had little to do but think, has resulted in an experimental laboratory of enormous sophistication for technique. This provides an opportunity for study in what these techniques can do for Western man, stripped of the religious overlay and the implicit ‘death instinct’ of Buddhism.

The West has taken up meditation with considerable beneficial effects. There is more work to be done in understanding the relationship between sound and mental states (mantras) and visualisation and ritual as transformative for some personality types (including the use of mandalas). Body movements (such as mudras) and breath control add body to perception as tools in the armoury of changing mental states to order.  Whether we want to attain the control of our autonomic system of some adepts is another matter – the question ‘why?’ is the greatest contribution of Western culture to humanity – but investigation into what amounts to control of perception in order to change mind states strikes this writer as containing the seeds of change for our ability to take command of our lives in the context of a world where we are constructed by the perceptions of others.

The detachment of Tibetan Buddhism has been criticised as an abnegation of life by me here and elsewhere but detachment (perhaps better understood in a Japanese Zen context) is a tool to the same degree as Tantric sexual transgression. There is no reason in principle why the same mind cannot make use, as tools, of both possible states of being – shamanic ecstasy and detachment at separate times and even at the same time. The height of human attainment might be those rare states in which one observes one’s own ecstasy or can be ecstatic within one’s own detachment.

In this context, the visualisation techniques in relation to Bardo may be of immense importance since they are really a sophisticated version of the shamanic journey into the underworld. The adept (in a manner not to be undertaken by amateurs) goes through a form of ‘death in the mind’ and comes alive by working back through the levels of mind until full perception is re-attained. This is analogous to the more chaotic and often lengthy process by which the ‘triggered’ existentialist recreates themselves out of the shattered remnants of old values (a minor key ‘transvaluation of values’).

The existentialist might argue that the discipline and ordering system of the Buddhist might remove from the process the value of the pain, suffering and shock of the admittedly mentally risky existentialist path. The risk is the art. The association of a ‘teacher’ or ‘psychotherapist’ may get in the way of a final resolution even if it stops some vulnerable people from topping themselves or going clinically insane. What speaks most strongly for the Tibetan way of seeing is that it pre-supposes the value of every moment of existence. It shares with the existentialist model an acute awareness of death not as something to be feared but as something that defines life.

The existentialist mind, without solace of reincarnation, merely turns this back on itself to intensify the existence of life including its engagement with the social and with the acceptance and enjoyment of the transient pleasures of life - as part of that high valuation of each moment of existence. Both traditions also understand the importance of impermanence which brings us back to a mentality that sees the world in terms of processes rather than things.

If you see the world as a collection of ‘things’, you are soon aware of entropy whereas a Heraclitean world of processes means impermanence and instability but it also means an awareness of positive changeas possibility and as actuality, a form of progression (at least in mental terms) as each mind state is succeeded by another that exists only because of the previous mind state. The Buddhist, of course, is seeking to pacify these mind states in order to achieve the tranquillity and calm that will ensure safe passage through the key days of reincarnation (Bardo) but the existentialist will be seeking to excite these mind states in order to create himself or herself.  Assuming no senile brain decay, the last state before death is one of no regret - the final state of a work of art that either leaves some legacy in the minds of others (signs and symbols) or things in the world or is simply a private viewing of the greatest work of art we will ever see - our own self.

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.

Reflections on Personal Identity

The common Western idea of personal identity has depended on continuity of memory since John Locke and is a central element in English individualism. This was contrasted with ‘mere’ bodily continuity, with mind and body firmly separated, which was assisted by another notion – that mind was associated with a ‘soul’ which had some being or continuity beyond the body after it had died (or even outside the body, while the latter was still functioning separately, in some schools of thought).

This idea of a continuity beyond death, based on a separation of body and mind, is still held by many people as a matter of faith. It gives psychological comfort to some but it has not been demonstrated as ‘true’ (scientifically probable). It is a possibilian concept. Continuity of memory, however, is a different kettle of fish. Since Locke’s day, we have seen ‘scientific’, certainly suggestive theoretical, evidence that conscious memory, accumulated in layers of perception and constantly constructing the ‘self’, is only a small part of the story.

We have Freud’s postulate of the unconscious to contend with but also growing evidence that the historic genetically constructed structures of the brain construct both our perceptions and the selection and holding of those perceptions in such a way that memory becomes a very slippery matter in its relation to what actually happened even in the moments before it is formed. Memory is not just the accumulation of perceptions into a form of identity but the unwitting selection of perceptions, one that relies on discontinuities, redrafts and revisions that are built-in to the ‘person’ by their genetic and experiential history.

There may be an inability to perceive some things or a determination to forget in the context of trauma or some other need. If personal identity is memory then that personal identity is not smoothly constructed in many cases but is a partly wilful and partly unconscious creation which involves as much forgetting as remembering. This is not incompatible with, say, the metaphysics of Nietzsche to the effect that we can be nothing other than we are and that we are doomed to repeat ourselves eternally.

The ‘will to power’ (in his sense) of an organism that integrates body and mind into a being that is also integrated into raw existence can easily accommodate the idea that we are not conscious of the discontinuities as well as conscious of the apparent continuities in our identity. Indeed, the mix of conscious and wilful (or apparently so) change in ourselves with part-conscious (or illusory) and with unconscious (or biological or environmental) changes to the forms by which our perception is structured is in greater accord with Nietzsche’s existentialism than with Locke’s gentlemanly English liberalism.

Modern psychologists are only the professional end of a truth universally recognised by most of us who can see the world in a critical way – that memory is as often false as not and so, by extension, that our personal identities are ‘false’ constructions that: a) depend on our body’s and earlier mind’s determination of what should be perceived and then held for future use; and b) are what that same mind should unconsciously choose to forget or bury deep in the process of creating the present which we can then call our ‘self’ at any one time.

Memory, in short, is not all that personal identity is but is only its expression to our consciousness. Placing the possibility of existence beyond the body to one side, our personal identity may be a memory at each point in our life but that memory is possibly false and our personal identity is probably false if we believe it to be true without further questioning. By a paradox, if we know and believe our memory and identity to be ‘false’, it becomes more ‘true’ (yes, truth can be relative here) because the entry of the thought of a false memory as possibility, even probability under certain conditions, gives us the opportunity to choose to be ‘critical’, that is either to accept our personal identity as ‘true’ for us in its falsity as an act of will and freedom (insofar as we can ever be free) or to investigate, critically, what may be false in order to make ourselves more ‘true’.

We are not valuing the ‘true’ here as the ‘good’ – being ‘true’ is merely defined as according with objective or at least scientifically validated reality. Being in accord with objective reality has no necessary relationship in itself with the value of ‘good’ but that is another debate.  Personal identity, in fact, is never anything other than ‘true’ in value terms because it is ‘true’ to the person that has that identity. The ‘falsity’ arises only when the person perceives a ‘falsity’ themselves in what they had held to be true, hence the argument in this note – that realisation of ‘falsity’ requires a new ‘truth’ or new identity formulation even if this is a reaffirmation of the ‘falsity’ as ‘truth’. In this way, once we understand that Locke’s assertion that personal identity is memory is to be taken as a truism of sorts, but one without much relationship to the objective truth of our condition in the world – that is, that ‘false memory’ means ‘false identity’ in any terms that are not totally subjective to the person and so represents more or less of a disconnect between persons and their world – then we can rethink that position in the world

This must generally result in one of three responses – denial, conscious reaffirmation of the given or critical investigation of the self.  Let us pause here and say that no value judgement can be ascribed to any of these responses. The denial that a person is anything other than memory, even if the memory (say) includes the assertion that the person was once Emperor of France when all the external evidence points to this not being case, is a legitimate human response to their condition in the world.

The assertion that the historic world leader and this person who believes themselves to be (wrongly) that past world leader are different in personal identity terms just because one accords with objective reality and one does not is merely a matter of the degree by which the identity is practically adaptive to the world. All those unaware of their ‘falsity’ have more in common, mad or not, than any of them do with those who are aware of it. Madness and 'inauthenticity' (to use an older and rather value-ridden existentialist term) are far from identical however. 'Inauthenticity' may be a necessary condition for personal survival in the world as it is constructed. Madness is a poor way of physically surviving in the world outside the most caring of welfare states, communities, tribes or families.

Each personal identity in its particular case of unawareness has been constructed to function for that person but both cases, madness and 'inauthenticity', have in common the fact that neither is aware of their condition or, until having become or made aware of it, are able to treat that condition critically. The thought experiment here is of the man who chooses madness in response to conditions and becomes mad - is this possible?  Did Nietzsche do this? Was this his genius? Human society, on the other hand, could probably not function easily without the vast majority of persons not questioning their condition for most of the time. Unquestioning is a necessary element in the construction of the social.

Left critics of the workings of society have been fully aware of this for some time, hence their frustrated assertion of the need to act to raise consciousness in order to effect change because, left to themselves, most people would accept existing conditions as true and construct their personal identities precisely to fit their environment. These people become their world – cogs perhaps but also able to survive where those who question might end up in camps or penury. It is the source of the instinctive conservatism of the mass of the population and the difficulty behind attempts to effect change even when all logic points to it.

But being or becoming aware of the fact that our personal identities are ‘false’ to the degree that our memories are false because we are our memories (albeit embedded first in a body with its memory and a society with its collective memory) creates only persons who are different not better and the uncovering of this truth about identity does not necessarily result in more than marginal change. The conservatism of society is often very logical – just as are the narratives of the great movements that challenge this conservatism.

Our bodies, meanwhile, are repositories of unconscious material memory. Their genetic component (without going down the route of the collective unconscious) means that a proportion of that memory exists from before the actual creation of that body. Societies too are repositories of collective memory. The habits and instincts of persons are easy to transfer from one community to another (certainly under conditions of modernisation) but also respond (without further self-questioning thought) to the ‘norms’ of a particular time and place which then impact on the formation of memory and so identity. Memory is constructed out of continuous socialisation and the relationship between memory and social identity is at the heart of 'tradition'.

To challenge one’s own personal identity may often involve challenging one’s own body image and capabilities, the ‘norms’ of society and the representation of oneself in society – it might even suggest radical action: gender change, migration, abandonment of tribe or faith (or acquisition of one).  The point is that knowing that one’s personal identity as a construct of false memory does not necessarily predispose someone to radical rather than conservative actions.

It enables radical choice, that is true, but radical choices, if based on unconscious reaction to the tension between society and material circumstances and ‘true will’ can be far from conscious. They may derive from a reaction to memory that makes them no more authentic than those of the conservative mind set who determines on full acceptance of his or her condition without further thought. Awareness that memory and so identity can be explored and reconfigured is a-political and even a-social.

The only virtue of awareness is that it does not rely on an unconscious balancing of mind, body and society (which clearly creates contentment for some but not others) but recognises that, where the mind is not in accord with body or society and where personal identity is not in line with something approaching ‘true will’, the person, in that moment of recognition, can make choices and that those choices involve the management of perceptions and the investigation of memory (or the abandonment of acceptance of memories as valid in the rejection of beliefs) in order to realign a person and the conditions of their existence.

In the case of beliefs, memory is certainly slippery. To believe something is a core element in personal identity and the shift of a belief from a present state to a memory of what was once believed represents a major shift of identity in itself. Chaos Magicians exploit this in order to play with their own identities in a way that strikes the vast majority of humanity as wasteful and absurd but these are not idle thought experiments in coming to a view on the stability of identity in our species.

So Locke is, of course, correct that our identity does rely on memory but we must recognise now that memory is constructed and false more often than not so that our personal identities are as much constructs of our bodies and society as of our conscious will and actual experience. Although this is true, this is not an excuse for a valuation of some minds as better than others just because of their awareness of this falseness of identity because no identity can ever be anything but false in an absolute sense. Nor can we necessarily draw the extreme conclusion that we have no selves (which is an entirely different argument, if currently fashionable one, to criticise another day).

Having an identity that is true to itself is still having an identity that is constructed or that has been constructed out of perceptions that can never tell the whole story about external reality (not to mention our ignorance of other minds and the workings of a society where so little can be observed directly by the subject).  An identity expresses the needs at any one time of a person who is made up of a mind set in a body constrained by social and technological reality. Thus, there is never any absolute freedom but nor is there any requirement for total determination of circumstances.

Liberation is merely a cast of mind, a calibration of society, body and mind and so a calibration of perception, of memory and of identity. The constant struggle between the psychological and physical continuity theories of identity thus rather misses the point. What might be better considered is a theory of constant discontinuities in which a body (and a society) and a mind with only apparent continuity are both required but in which the ‘normal’ integration of the two can be discontinued without either mind or body ceasing to have some ‘memory’ of itself.

A body without a mind is still the body of the person and can be reactivated as such under certain conditions (as after a coma) and that body would influence a new mind that entered it through its biology and brain structure. Perceptions and capabilities would change identity – we only have to consider the male/female difference and the effects on a mind with memories of another gender in a body swap to know how identity would adjust with biology. Continuity perhaps but also a recasting of memory to fit biology would be likely.

A mind might be reloaded or transferred or duplicated in a machine or another body but, from that point, the new material conditions would create new ways of perceiving and thought that would create a separate identity from any identical mental clone in another body, whilst still showing continuities with the past through inherited shared memory. In the memory clone case, each ‘person’ has a separate identity based on possibly small changes in material circumstance despite shared memories – reproducing the ‘I’m Sharon but a different Sharon’ problem of Battlestar Galactica.

Identity is not fixed but changes and shifts in relation to the environment. It is fraught with discontinuities even when simplified down to one mind in one body. The recognition of this complexity should make the psychological-physical debate redundant. It should also help us to be suspicious of the truth-claims made about ourselves by ourselves and by all other persons of themselves and create a scepticism about claims that any single mind can have the answer to any social problem without the help of other minds or that any person can have the ultimate solution, if there is one, to one’s own problems except oneself.