Experimental Approaches to Contemporary Gnosis

Contemporary 'new spirituality' presents us with a number of problems: it employs patently false narratives in closed communities; it presumes to have access to a world beyond the more sophisticated materialism of contemporary science (or it appropriates a fake 'quantum' version of materialism); and it holds to a primitive essentialism in a time of existentialist insights.

Keeping Hold of the Esoteric Baby

But there is a danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water in rejecting simplistic belief in universal consciousness, demanding a cogent materialist explanation for everything under conditions where the material world is imperfectly understood and failing to understand the social and individual function of this no-thing called spirituality.

The very term 'spirituality' is slippery and rightfully presented by the analytical philosophers as virtually meaningless. What we are talking about is 'belief that gives meaning', an inward state that need have no connection with any objective reality but which can be constructed as 'shared' in order for it to be built into the edifice of a practice, a cult or a religion.

How can we recapture 'belief that has meaning' as a legitimate aspiration in a post-modern culture but in a way that still takes account of science and stops scientific materialists from claiming that they know far more than they do. They may know that Creationism is foolish but they do not know 'for a fact' that many other things that others believe that they know are decisively and provenly false.

The plethora of new religions provides a pathway of possibilities once we have removed the bad history in most of their mythic narratives, once we have stood back from the anthropological and sociological aspects of cultish-ness and once we have critiqued guides and leaders who are often half-educated at worst and naive at best. But what is then left?

What is left is, first, a series of techniques for accessing the very material but untestable or definable elements of the mind that amount to what most people mean by spirit or soul and, second, a competing set of analogical narratives for describing what is otherwise not describable, certainly not in positivistic scientific terms.

We might see a gnostic mentality (rather than gnostic dogma) as useful in being able to tap into the language of such mythic and artistic narratives. The primary narrative is one of spiritual alchemy to ensure that we, and not society or our pasts, are in control not only of our conscious minds but of a great deal of our unconscious (aka spiritual) minds as well.

Many of these techniques might conceivably be derived from the further reaches of the New Age Movements and from Neo-Paganism but they are much more likely to derive from a dynamic and critical appreciation of the occult and esoteric movements, shorn of its mumbo-jumbo and seen as sets of practice defined as successful by its material effects or transformative illusions.

New Age Insights

Let us get the New Age and New Pagan communities out of the way. Much of theosophy may be arrant nonsense but there are, no doubt, great insights in Krishnamurti's rebellion and in Ouspensky as interpreter of Gurdjieff - two men who took flawed models and used them as the basis for further thought.

There may be important value to be acquired in the 'technologies' of Steiner and Subud but also in the whole school of positive thinking and 'placebo effects', of 'attunement', of aura and colour effects, of an attitude of mind towards personal development and even, with caution as to its actual use, the insights of NLP.

The Emissaries of Light and the Template Network may actually have discovered techniques that deserve further investigation and a great deal could be learned from Raelian sexual and social philosophies (if you can detach them from their mildly demented but amusing and harmless foundation myth). So let's put these on the list for critical investigation.

Neo-Pagan Insights

Neo-Paganism can teach a sense of place as placebo and the creation of imaginative mythic narratives (such as the Matter of Britain) that permit the creative construction of art, literature, sacred places, and the revitalisation of local myth, folklore and the 'faery' tale. Such a place may be a City or suburb or garden or corner of a room as much as a field.

It can also inspire us to the logic of sustainability without requiring the absurd reification of Nature into some benign essence which it is not - let alone the meaningless New Age version that builds a brutal cold Goddess out of Gaia, the planet. The divine feminine may even be interpreted a divisive invention to buttress ego-problems in a flawed society so let's throw that one out of the window.

The planet is certainly a system that we should understand but it adapts blind to our existence and is no divinity. Nature is de facto cruel and wasteful. Sustainability has to be functionally related to what it is to be human amongst other humans, a personal and social as well as formally environmental sustainability.

Finally, there is shamanic technique - inauthentic perhaps against surviving indigenous traditions but recoverable in urban settings or linked perhaps to place and past without racialist or ethnicist overtones. When the British adopt Voodoo, they adopt this technique as their own.

We might then 'play' with Raymond Buckland's Seax-Wica, with Robert Cochrane or with Heathenry but we should set our hearts against accepting forgeries and false histories which merely repeat the Christian tradition of propagandistic lying and re-interpretation of history to 'win souls'. We can be better than this.

Occult Insights

And what of the Occult and Esoteric? There is ancient mining to be done in the Kaballah and in the Tarot as psychic ordering mechanisms, without any necessity for the Gematria (which strikes me as a somewhat autistic technique but one which may add value to some).

There is certainly no further benefit to be had in mystic lineages and traditions, in hidden masters or in ancient pre-Husserlian dogma. The esoteric also gives access to sex magick, possibly over-rated as a tool but, nevertheless, one that taps directly into who we are and how we relate to others. Perhaps an honest sexual magic that is more sophisticated, shorn of fetishistic ritual and reconstructed as a mutually guided vitalism, might be more useful to most of us than our current culture of ‘naughtiness’ and fear.

Without falling into the trap of traditionalism, a core knowledge of neo-Platonic, Judaeo-Christian, Egyptian, Persian, Sufi, Hindu, Chinese and other East Asian traditions does not require that we accept their essentialisms but merely that we understand our own existentialism better through the prism of the choices of the past.

The study of correspondences, of sympathetic magic, of visualised ritual (arguably, the best sexual magical ritual of all) and of transgression within a self-constructed ethical framework is not irrationalism but hyper-rationalism if the study is directed at questioning not merely the reality of the phenomena with an open mind but the meaning of the experience of the reality as reality.

Within the occult tradition, Thelema is a religion of sorts with insights if fundamentally flawed as a counter-intuitive derivative of Christianity, over-elaborated by the successors to Crowley, especially the retrograde Typhonian and subsequent 'dark' traditions. 'Love is the Law' begs the question of what Love is but it is a sound starting point that is glossed on the right hand by the Wiccan 'an harm no-one'. What is not required is some wise inner circle speaking as if the masses were scum. What is required is an egalitarian and libertarian (as captured by Jack Parsons) approach that brooks no formal or restrictive religious structures.

There is practical psychology hidden away in this territory as well. The early Dion Fortune was reacting to a fundamental issue for most of us in mentalising responses to bullying. She also offers a bridge to that sense of place (Britishness in her case) in neo-paganism that we discussed earlier.

There are the insights of Chaos Magick (Carroll, Hine, Anton Wilson, Spare, even the eclectic acquisition of Dick and Lovecraft) which offer ultimate opportunities to detach ourselves from belief in order to test technique scientically before returning to belief when we are ready.

And, finally, there is the Left Hand Path of Vama Marga Tantra as tool for personal empowerment. Transgression and aggression, even violence, are active forces in the world and we must command them, lest they command us.

Conclusion

We have here quite a menu of techniques that do not need us to believe in the absurd and can enable anyone to find the meaning that will mean most to them. I have not even started to address the world of the hyper-real - meaning derived from films, fantasy novels and comic books. There is certainly no need to fall into the error of the desert religions in requiring some divine entity or that of the East (in assuming a mythic universal consciousness) or descending into a countervailing nihilism.

The technique as technique is a path way to more than simple New Age personal development and fluffy well meaning or untenable mythic narratives amongst small cults or a perpetual adolescent belief in actual dark demons. It is the pathway to personal choice about how to construct oneself out of the raw material of oneself - the most advanced type of materialism.

Personal development techniques and a critical review of past traditions, a sense of place and a commitment to a new definition of sustainability and an active exploration of transgressive and irrational operations within an existentialist ethic may construct more meaning that works for us than all the loss of self into some predetermined religious framework.

In short, we do not need religion at all. We do not even need to be hung up on spirituality. All we need to do is take command of that bit of ourselves for which science has no current explanation and make it work for us.

The Challenges for Post-Christian Europe

Christianity in Europe is far from dead. It has split into many elements, liberal and conservative, communitarian and evangelical, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and free-thinking, with many offshoots including imported and indigenous 'new religions' derivative from it (often from America). Yet the cultural model of idealism towards and faith in the other ('God'), salvation and (to a greater or lesser extent) tradition and good works still makes up a considerable part of the European branch of Western culture. Into this complexity, the Judaic element is added with its own mix of liberal and conservative, comunitarian and free-thinking ideals and we have, more recently, the re-irruption of Islam with elements that are hyper-traditionalist as well as others seeking the path of assimilation and collaboration following the Jewish precedent.

The mix becomes ever more complex with time. The religious wars of the early modern period and the Enlightenment brought us not only the opening for Judaic thought and for both liberal Christianity and an evangelical and traditionalist reaction to it but an opportunity for atheism and 'ideology' which became the basis for secular faith systems - nationalism, both authoritarian and liberal, liberalism (the currently dominant ideology), various forms of socialism (as complex as Christianity and perhaps even to be considered a Judaeo-Christian heresy adapted to science and materialism) and, finally, anarchisms, existentialism and scientific atheism. We might add, more latterly, neo-paganism, whether innocent and associated with post-fascist traditionalism, and the so-called hyper-real religions developed out of popular culture and modern myths such as those surrounding UFOs.

Have I missed any? Theosophical movements may have declined but Buddhism has a position in European society and there is space for nearly all the non-tribal Eastern religions as exemplars or philosophies of life. You may add to taste what I have forgotten. Whichever way we look at it, the sheer scale of the variance of belief is staggering compared to the early modern and modern totalitarian attempts to impose monotheism or a single ideology on a population - let alone the 'tolerant' conformity of a hegemonic Christianity in the liberal world of the nineteenth century. This is the chaos of late paganism or of the East held together only by the monopoly of force that a secular authority can maintain. Historically, it has often been convenient for that force to take one religion and endorse it and crush others if that will bring victory or order - Constantine springs to mind.

If there are modern tendencies in that direction, they are not towards imposing a religion but uniting forces against a religion - radical Islam. Both traditionalists and liberals are conflicted even here, some choosing confrontation for the sake of 'purity' and the imagined past and others seeking accommodation with the majority of Muslims as shared peoples of the book or just as political realities in our inner cities who have to be taken account of. But, unless political order completely breaks down (if it does do so, it is at the crumbling far periphery of the European Project), the presumption of the authorities remains one of tolerance, secular order and allowing religious moderates to enter into policy-making within the framework of democratic persuasion and political organisation. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the indifferent and the agnostic - those who have no real interest in the myth of the spirit or invisible creatures - have votes and want to be consumers and producers first and rely on the movies not the churches for their access to the fantastic.

But underpinning this struggle within and between the myths and legends that came in with a desert wind between the first century BC and seventh century AD under the Pax Romana and then as a political tool for kings and emperors subsequently and then with the reaction to obscurantism (often creating new obscurantisms) that took place from the sixteenth century to the twentieth and with the arrival of spiritualities from below under American, Eastern and nationalist influence later still, there are ancient mental models that preceded these waves of external and democratic mental change. We should ask whether and where they shave life and potential today (or present dangers perhaps). I have identified six that still exist below the surface of or alongside the Christian sub-stratum in our cultural-archaeological dig. You may think of others but I suggest these are the six that make up our indigenous pre-modern European culture and act as 'to-hands' for political and cultural actors in our future.

Strand One - The Athenian Texts

In each of these cases, we are less concerned with what these traditions actually were or meant in the past and more concerned with what they have come to mean and what they could mean in the future. Nowhere is this more true than with the mythology surrounding Athenian democracy. Although it is now righly criticised as a flawed democracy with slaves and a subservient role for women as well as implicitly xenophobic, in its historic context it was a remarkably robust system for sovereign independence and then empire before being crushed by Alexandrine imperialism. The core of the ideology is of a closed democracy as necessarily the 'good society' and it stands as challenge to multicultural fluidity of the globalising West. Historically, it was influential on American democracy and on Jacobinical republicanism and so, by twists and turns, on both liberalism and fascism as well as on all forms of republicanism. It stands as an ideal with continued potential for misapplications of notions of purity and conformity on the one hand and self-determination and freedom on the other.

Strand Two - The Dialectic Between the Roman Republic and Empire

The Roman Republic and the subsequent Empire might appear to be opposites as models for the future. They could be contrasted in later generations as narratives of decadence or of failure but they also present a particularly strong narrative of increasing order undermined by internal dissent, over-accommodation of the barbarian (external ideologies and forces) and accommodation with the popular (the Roman mob and Christianity). They are an 'object lesson' - the story is one of an ideal perverted and one where the ideal could be restored. That ideal is universal law applied by force. It is an ideal of conservative perfection at heart and it became an influence on Napoleonic and British imperialism, a driver for American perfectionism and empire and for Italian fascism but is also an 'at hand' for the increasingly frustrated European Project, even the West (as self-conscious political cause,) by which they could create an 'ideal' from which order might be imposed on fractious populations, Political Islam and Russia be resisted in their feared incursions (although Russia might equally be cast as Eastern Empire and the US as Western Empire to taste) and some accommodation be made with the dominant faith groups (a resolution devoutly wished for by the Vatican).

Strand Three - The Romance of Arthur

This might be considered peculiar to the British and lost now to the nineteenth century but it stands for something else that is derivative from Christianity yet exists not to be Christian first and foremost. It is a redirection of the inherent potential for warlordism and piracy in elites into social responsibility - the imperial version of corporate social responsibility. It is ideal behaviour as an aristocracy presented as 'service' (even if it is pretty flexible as to the question 'to whom' is the service owed). Today, we see it as an ideology of technocracy and managerialism where managers seek to assert their authority over what they see as anarchic social forces - whether finance capital or the mob. The ideal is romantic and is an irruption of the Roman past into, first, the medieval and then the modern present, first as restraint of feudalism, then as restraint on imperialism and now as restraint on capitalism. This the Western equivalent of mandarin confucianism. The 'to whom' is key - the Crown, the State, the Empire or the People. The vision is a form of liberal conservatism, a top-down granting of boons to the commonwealth, that could be useful if universal law is applied by force in the European Project since force requires an accompanying ideology of restraint. Or it could be used for the reconstruction of the power of a service elite following scandal after scandal in political, financial and bureaucratic elites in particular nation-states.

Strand Four - The Volkisch

Volkisch ideology invented history by intellectuals with time on their hands for the petit-bourgeoisie. It might be thought to have crashed in flames in the cellars and bunkers of mid-twentieth century Europe. Its origins lies in pre-Christian barbarian cultures and is at the root not only of neo-nationalism but of northern democracy. It has potential resonance three generations on from Hitlerism for two reasons - revisionist history can provide more rationale than liberals may like for the rise of nationalism as response to disorder in the 150 years before the conflagration and current conditions of hyper-modernity and multiculturalism almost require the existence of something to which those whose identity is threatened or who are economically disadvantaged can rally. What will emerge is unlikely to be precisely what existed in the past. It does not appear to be a very pan-European identity but more a populist identity based on language and place. It is thus in a dialectic tension with the first three strands.

Strand Five - Political Neo-Paganism

Neo-paganism is very much a minority sport, a clubbable business of small very liberal or hyper-conservative sub-sets of the population. The instinctive preference of most Europeans is Abrahamanic or secular. Although there is an association of Germanic and Nordic paganism with the Radical Right (although we should note that the murderous Breivik cast his violence in terms of Christian retribution and righteousness), the real contribution of neo-paganism is a withdrawal from politics into self-reliance and a theory of the 'natural', not the naturally pre-defined person (neo-pagans are as likely to adopt very fluid notions of identity as to follow the norms of Assatru) but of a natural world which provides us humans with meaning and order. If anything, this is a mode of resistance to social order and can present itself in terms of either the Right or the Left as traditionally understood. It tends to be passive rather than active but will engage in the world to protect, conservatively, its own - generally a locus or an 'environment' - from intervention. It is a proto-barbarian element in dialectic with the proto-Rome of the European Project.

Strand Six - The Shamanic

Finally we find ourselves in the lowest stratum of all. There may be a rich Eurasian shamanic tradition - the manipulative magician as community catalyst through altered states - but this has been culturally pushed to the periphery of the Continent. What has happened instead is an importation of indigenous peoples' shamanic experience through anthropology and the revived interest in psychedelics via the United States and it is this that has tapped into the oldest strata of all within the European cultural tradition. This is a culture of potential resistance to excessive order and, if you spend time observing it, one of withdrawal from elites and also a determination to defend place and person against authority much like Strand Five. It is anarchic but not in the destructive meaning of the term. It sits waiting to undermine fixed identities and beliefs through instant personal revelation and a direct communion with other realities - delusory perhaps but not much more so than the hyper-reality of post-modernism.


If we go back to Breivik, he looks, in his Christian political eschatology, more like the last brutal gasp of a decaying unified vision of Europe as a Christian Continent than the precursor of meaningful revolt. The Far Right (or at least an important faction of it and its populist element) is clinging to the Christian myth as political tool and to create a bulwark against the most significant 'other' - Islam - but they have lost the plot under conditions where a majority of Christians think in more socially liberal terms and where the most recent Pope has had to re-fashion his rhetoric in this liberal direction in order to hold on to his base.

Our model of contemporary Europe is of a flailing empire trying to maintain order with no clear authoritarian ideology to support it - beyond a sort of vaguely Kantian ideology of liberal rights and a collapsing 'peace' ethos driven from above by the elites themselves. There is no Cult of the Emperor, no belief in King and Country, no belief in the Dictatorship of the Proletariat than can push all rival political ideologies to the margins or into private life and even silence. Tolerance means maximal variation (which is creative but chaotic). This is what most of us rather like because it gives us the freedom to have a private life and yet to try to drive our world view into the political process by stealth and in a free competition within shared rules. But it also means that the political elite becomes an alien bureaucracy that looks weak and ineffective when it can do nothing or little about those who break or do not share the rules - just as the rule breakers are increasing in number.

There is no stasis in culture and politics. All systems that degrade like this either collapse (the European Project is undergoing an economic, security and political crisis all at the same time) or a crisis transforms the system into a new system with new rules and new structures of power - much as the Roman Republic transformed itself into the Roman Empire or the British Empire into a multicultural airstrip and banking quarter. We might oversimplify the strands we have identified into 'Roman' (that is Empire and Order) or 'Barbarian' (that is Freedom and Self-Determination) models by suggesting that the first three strands (a closed civics, universalism backed by force and the ideal of a service elite) are being challenged and contested by the last three (the politics of language and place, the defence of the individual and the tribe from authority and the primacy of personal revelation). The challenge and the contest will be, eventually, political involving some form of armed force either as repression or rebellion.

Judaeo-Christianity remains a formidable force for Order (as we are seeing in the return of the conservative Right in Spain) and is even hegemonic in some parts of Europe, notably Poland, but its power should not be assumed to be hegemonic across Europe. Even active Judaeo-Christian political forces can speak in secularist terms - such as in terms of support for or migration to Israel or defensive demands for protection from criminal Islamists. The Charlie Hebdo revolt was, we must not forget, about the right to be blasphemous as much as a populist negative revolt against the claims of radical Islam. This gives the European Union the character of the Roman Empire before Constantine - a fracturing culture maintained by a fractured political authority with the old religions no longer able to provide the necessary cohesion. If a cultural revolution takes place it is unlikely to come from the Vatican,. We cannot know what such a revolution will be if it does come but either an assertion of a European ideology of order, a sort of fascism-lite with added Kant, or an accommodation with radical liberal, tribal and even libertarian populism seem to be the current probable trajectories. We'll see.

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.