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.

Kropotkin's Message to the Young

“ If you reason instead of repeating what is taught you; if you analyze the law and strip off those cloudy fictions with which it has been draped in order to conceal its real origin, which is the right of the stronger, and its substance, which has ever been the consecration of all the tyrannies handed down to mankind through its long and bloody history; when you have comprehended this, your contempt for the law will be profound indeed.

" You will understand that to remain the servant of the written law is to place yourself every day in opposition to the law of conscience, and to make a bargain on the wrong side; and, since this struggle cannot go on forever, you will either silence your conscience and become a scoundrel, or you will break with tradition, and you will work with us for the utter destruction of all this injustice, economic, social and political.”

Peter Kropotkin, An Appeal to the Young (1880)

Ch'i

We might want to use a Chinese term to describe what is not normally accepted as 'real' in Western culture only because it cannot be quantified. But we do not have to accept all aspects of the Chinese term as it would be expressed in Chinese culture. It is just that this alien word (to Westerners) may be the best that we have to hand. I use Ch'i rather than Qi deliberately. Qi is the genuine Chinese article whereas I have appropriated the word Ch'i for Western use precisely because it has been rejected in China. 

This is not the same thing as, say, the Way of Wyrd. Wyrd is more implicitly directed by the Fates or Norns or Odin or some active force in Nature (as you would expect amongst Westerners) whereas the Dao, of which Qi is a manifestation, is a flow without direction, just a constant balancing of opposites. My Ch'i (as opposed to Wyrd or Qi) is not dissimilar from Orgone, another more modern variant on the theme, and is a monist materialist concept. In the end, you either sense it in yourself or you don't and, if you don't, so be it.

This is not to assume a Western vitalism. There is no reason to suppose that Ch'i does not have a material base albeit one that might change our perception of matter. Nor does it necessarily arise outside of ourselves or be connected to the world as a force that is greater than ourselves. It is probable (we think certain) that there are many individuals with Ch'i rather than a great Ch'i in which all individuals participate. The Ch'i gives out an illusory image of the universal (a theme of our Tantra series) because, since Ch'i exists here and there, evolved materially within us as individuals as our life force, then that Ch'i and this Ch'i (it is believed) must be connected so that evolution itself and the world possess Ch'i. There is no necessity in this 'leap of faith'.

This fallacy is an attractive alternative to God but it is not just that it cannot be evidenced (neither can God) but, as we say, it is not necessary. All the Ch'i we need is obtainable within us and in the relationship of ourselves to our environment and those closest to us. High emotion is Ch'i. Detachment is Ch'i. Desire is Ch'i. Withdrawal is Ch'i. The myth of universalism may be socially useful and comforting but not only is it not necessarily true but it threatens to overwhem the life force within us, our own Ch'i, by immersing it in nature or in the 'divine' or in the social as a form of loss of self that is little more than death before its time. To kill the integrated mind-body 'ego' is to kill the person without benefit other than a lifting of current and often creative anxieties.

Ch'i is an individual's vital energy, necessary for action, managed by a well-integrated will. The Ch'i of an individual can be degraded by negative external forces (including the death instinct) - by poor environment and the actions of others above all but also through a failure of will. Thus we do not have to become essentialist or animist in presuming some universal Ch'i at all. We can see Ch'i developing in us and our predecessors throughout the evolutionary process - on a path where we, humans, may be the terminus or mere staging post to something trans-human with even more energy than we have. We may want to assume that part of our individual mission is to enhance the Ch'i of others.

The cultivation of one's own Ch'i is a life's work. There is wisdom in seeing it as malleable to one's state in time, an elderly and mature Ch'i is different in quality, though not more valued, than a young and vibrant Ch'i. The old seek the vibrancy of the young but the young trade this for the experience of the mature. Ch'i also spreads out from the individual or it can be drawn in. Its influence is its glamour or its charisma. Its expressions are imagination and desire as well as brute power. It is moral not because it is required to be moral by the universal or the social but because it becomes absurd to be cruel and greedy. Bankers, bureaucrats and lawyers rarely have good Ch'i but it is not impossible that they might.

The body has a Ch'i that is both mental and physical. Good health represents the balance and flow between the mental and the physical. If you are ill and it is not absolutely organic, something is blocking your Ch'i or you are out of balance and have insufficient Ch'i or your Ch'i is being exhausted by external forces. Only you can know what you require - including outside help. Medicine here is the search for that which externally can restore Ch'i and internally restore balance. In this sense, we have much to learn from radical Western and from Eastern cultures evemn if we would be fools to abandon modern science when it comes to organic crises and failures. Ch'i may be physical or mental in its aspects but in its totality it cannot be divorced from the body or be operative without a mind.

There is no shame in categorising Ch'i medicine as 'placebo' or as complementary to more obviously materialist organic and psychotherapeutic methods. Ch'i is a third pre-emptive base line of health alongside those lines requiring organic and psychotherapeutic expertise. Ch'i is also a benign environmental solipsism. The world's aesthetic beauty and calm becomes an extension of oneself and returns to heal the inner self, adding force to Ch'i. Good Ch'i affects desire for the world, moderating it to what is most central to the person and enables a measured acquisition of goods - not only health but wealth, energy and luck.

A person aware of their own Ch'i constructs a safe and secure environment for itself without body armour against others or indulging its own fears and anxieties by choosing the death-options of religion, addiction or intellectualism. A Feng Shui mentality is not magic but an alignment of the perceiving mind with environmental reality. A Feng Shui of society does the same task by placing all persons in alignment with their Ch'i. There is no English word for this thing, this being-in-relation-to-the-world which cannot be reduced to matter in our understanding yet is ultimately part of the material base of an integrated mind-body. It is beyond science but also greater than spirit or mind. It is the existing of ourselves.

A 'Sick' Society - What It Really Means ...

Managing the self as both body and mind, where both have an influence on each other, where both have significant unconscious aspects and where both are dependent on external inputs (such as nutritional on the one side or perceptual on the other) is an art and not a science. It takes place in real time with multiple changes in many components. If, as physicians have suggested, severe stress results in atrophy of the hippocampus and this reduces the memory resources available to allow the body to react appropriately to future stress, this has consequences.

It means that we must engineer our environment (which includes society) to avoid severe stress and we must seek means to engineer our bodies to recover from past severe stress so that they can deal with current and future stress. A degree of social engineering and a degree of corrective personal engineering may be necessary to enable us to live the good life and to make informed decisions about preserving it, but the choice of what constitutes the good life always remains an individual and not a social one.

Social or bodily engineering that creates stress or is non-consensual or is imposed from without (except under the most extreme of diseased or psychotic conditions) is counter-productive. There is a point of balance at which most people most of the time will have to accept their 'difference' from the normal as ‘just who they are’. Take the range of mental issues created by dysfunctionality of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis [HPA axis]: anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, insomnia, post-traumatic stress, borderline personality disorder, ADHD, deep depression, burnout, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel and addiction.

The decision on where these issues are dysfunctional is too often a social one and not an individual one. The social often imposes the very demands on the body that result in the mental problem and then the social, instead of changing its own practices, seeks its own solution to a problem that it created. As a result, and this applies across social policy to issues of social exploitation and abuse, instead of a serious problem of painful dysfunction being dealt with under conditions of personal care for a relatively few, large numbers of people divert skilled time into patching up so that people can go back into battle.

Much of modern psychological medicine has degenerated into a form of ‘normalisation’ and into a castigation by implication of 'difference'. This has happened, as in social policy, because a large class of persons can only get a living and meaning from acting as definers of others. We all see the absurdity of a doctor working through the night to save the life of a man who is to be executed next morning. At least the patching up of warriors and workers has the cynical social purpose of defending the system or keeping its economic wheels turning but, today, we are in a different condition again.

Mass health and social services provision has created a half-baked world where a vast class of persons exists to maintain people whose trauma and miseries are real enough but are as likely to be created by social circumstances, poor nutrition and crowded conditions as they are by something organic. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, our economic structures now depend on an industry of helpers and a vast mass of persons who must be helped. They do not rely on strong, willful, self-reliant individuals in a position to intevene directly to support the weakest members of the community - we drive the vulnerable into a 'system'.

The sheer scale of the resources required to maintain this system means that the socially isolated and the psycho-somatically ill are increasingly taking resources from the minority who badly need short term sustained intensive help. These last just fall into the mass - the helped - to add more customers for the growing class of helpers. The height of absurdity is reached when our entire culture becomes geared to helping those who appear to need to help by hiring them as helpers ('full employment'), a worthwhile palliative up to a point but one which, in effect, simply accepts that the way we conduct our social affairs should be 'normalised' as a shared 'lesser misery'.

The poverty of aspiration is staggering. The height of our aspiration is now that everyone has a 'job', a functioning role in a dysfunctional system. Nobody appears to be able to consider how the system might be made more functional - perhaps everyone just accepts that it cannot in a form of conservative pessimism that has merely been re-labeled ‘progressive’. Worse, this conservative pessimism on the 'official' Left (which is now the ruling order regardless of party) must bring everyone under the same health and welfare model. No matter that placebos, shamans and herbal medicines might actually reduce demand on the system. These must always be avoided in favour of more expensive interventions (although we re-assert here the absolute primacy of scientific medecine).

Herbal medicines almost certainly regulate the HPA system and, under experienced guidance, can be made to accord with individual body chemistries. The placebo effect may offend rationalists but works - and if it works, why not embrace it pragmatically? Our concern should only be that people do not use alternative self-medication in preference to scientific medication but only to supplement and self-treat in the grey area between serious dysfunction and apparent health. The truth is that a purely scientific approach to the body-mind continuum is not truly scientific when dealing with most needs most of the time - as opposed to serious need some of the time. It is an ideology of rational intervention that has reached its lowest point with the recent bureaucratic interference by the EU to ban the use of herbal substances as ‘untested’. If the fear is that people will believe the local witch can cure cancer, then the fear is justified but if the fear is that people will choose minor irrationalities that offend the sensibilities of rationalists, then the fear is neurotic - and, oddly, irrational.

This ideology of excessive mass scientific interventionism, as opposed to precautionary advice on nutrition, exercise and mental health based on treating people not as children but as autonomous adults, is the last gasp of an over-simplified scientific materialism and it deserves underground resistance at every level. The real reason why this ideology is dominant is because we are talking here about economics and power and not about any real concern for the self development and empowerment of those autonomous individuals.

Welfare systems arose out of real need - the sort of need that still exists in much of the emerging world. Unfortunately, like roads, the solution creates more demand. Because basic care and emergency intervention required taxation, the class interest of the public sector and the need to keep the taxpaying majority supportive came to meant that 'universalism' spread services widely instead of where they were needed most. Hence the anomaly of a massive, expensive and unnecessary child benefits system in place while over a 1,000 kids in a rotten English borough faced appalling sexual abuse because the resources of time and money were not there to protect them.

As demand and expense has increased, the subsequent and necessary 'cutting' process has meant that the same services are just more thinly spread. There is a failure to invest in the wider social infrastructure that caused the stress-related illnesses in the first place and neglect of those who most need expensive but decisive intervention. We now have a grossly inflated public sector whose politics are a deadweight on the economy and on our culture, enforced 'cuts' which harm those in most dire need for political reasons and a grossly dysfunctional social structure that drives psychological and psychosomatic illness.

And what is at the heart of this degraded system in which the 'official' Left is fully complicit? Scientists have found evidence to suggest that social subordination leads to chronic stress - the subordinated are less aggressive, less in control of themselves and constantly anxious about dominant others in our own species. Does this not sound familiar? We have a culture that is ostensibly free but one in which there is no connection between the mass and political decision-making, in which the economy is volatile and dependent on 'global factors' and where most wealth and power trickles down from a tiny group at the top of our tree. We may as well be apes.

And the consequences of this widespread social subordination is chronic stress, expressed as psychosomatic illness and neurosis but also as a lack of engagement in the local community or in enterprise, as addictive behaviour and impulsiveness (especially with bank credit before 2008) and as cynicism. Our politicians are obsessed with grandstanding overseas (apparently we are diminished in the eyes of some Parliamentarians because our Prime Minister is not grandstanding in Kiev instead of worrying about Rotherham), process and keeping the busted system ticking over but none of them understands the central problem of our time - how to return a sense of power and meaning to the people they clearly despise in their hearts or see just as fodder for their own drive to have the power to 'do good' at them or for them instead of with them.

Given our conditions, our problem is not that we are too aggressive as a population but that we are not aggressive enough. Every now and then, some extreme case of violence (such as Raoul Moat, the Ipswich serial killer or gun-killings in South London) creates a surge of anxiety about the psychopaths in our midst but these are tiny events in a country of over 60 million people. What is far more worrying is that the vast bulk of our huge population simply takes the unutterable amount of ordure heaped on them by incompetent governors and experts without protest - and then goes home, gets sick and thanks the system for treating them for the disease the system brought on them in the first place. We are back to the world of Milgram. The few who can capture the machine, the alpha apes, can command millions ... and that should really worry and depress us.

The Revival of Microcosm and Macrocosm

Each person's biochemistry is as unique as their fingerprint. The interaction of the components of a complex system - hypothalamus and pituitary in the brain and adrenal near the kidneys - controls our reactions to stress and regulates many body processes (digestion, immune system, mood and emotions, sexuality and energy storage and expenditure). Much of how we react to the world - inner bodily comfort, sense of wellness, emotional state, lust and desire and our Will insofar as our Will is also the energy we can apply to a purpose - is managed by a system that links our complex mind (brain) with our body, both of which are only intermittently under our conscious control.

Is this a system that we should try to command through our reason - a rather futile intent on our part since our reason can influence but perhaps not command very much - or should we try to understand it, live with it as it is in general terms and manage it in the best interests both of mind and of body regardless of our conscious wilfulness? If mind and body are not in close accord, surely this system will, indeed must, break down through psychosomatic symptoms or even lead to total bodily or mental breakdown.

Although organic collapse of either body or mind is more than possible regardless of the other, most people most of the time are not well in body or mind because of a failure to bring the non-conscious Will of the body into alignment with the desires and instincts of the mind. To place on top of this the reasoning Will (a functional tool for the acquisition of resources and shaping of things) is almost certainly to over-burden it. We have a balance required here between disease (the collapse of the body) and psychosis (the collapse of the mind), both of which will have effects on the other. It is the inward turning of Reason on to the Body-Mind (not the same process by any means as the application of Reason, the tool, to the Body-Mind, of scientific medicine) that is most likely to disrupt that balance.

Standing between the two, Body and Mind, on the one side is psychosomatic illness - all those petty pains and illnesses that come at times of stress - and, on the other side, neurotic illnesses where the mind works but not very effectively. The calibration of our mind and body is thus a life's work and there can only ever be very personal adaptations of our general human condition. There are no external rules only the guidance of science, probability and possibility. Chance and necessity.

For example, a 'normal' circadian cortisol cycle (early morning rise to a peak in under an hour, then a fall, then a rise in late afternoon for a fall that reaches a trough in the middle of the night) might be disrupted and abnormally flattened by the demands of the social - the demand that one work at peak performance, for example, for eight hours at a stretch. The question is whether we are to try to 'normalise' an imposed new abnormal pattern through the exercise of Will – in other words, adapt to chronic fatigue by willing ourselves into not what we want or need but what the social wants or needs as 'rational' (for itself or others). This question of intervention or adaptation is a political question - a microcosmic version of the macroscosmic questions of intervention and adaptation in (say) international relations. And the microcosm and macrocosm find themselves in the same relation, that of the natural body to the unnaturalness of the social to that of the natural organically developed historical community to the demands of the Liberal (or any) Absolute.

This is where 'Will' is at the heart of things. With each apparent malfunction of 'normality', the person or the community can choose to seek help or find the inner resources to restore functionality or it can embrace the malfunction and propose to become adapted to the 'abnormality'. The 'abnormality' may soon become normal to the person or to the society despite the underlying damage to both mind and body, the psychosomatics and neuroses of statecraft as much as of the single human being . A genetic or minority 'abnormality' might be dysfunctional under conditions of 'normality' but be highly functional under abnormal social conditions. Evolution teaches us that the abnormal may, over a considerable period of time, become 'normal', leaving the previously normal as now abnormal.

We should not be dismissive of the potentiality of the abnormal but the evolutionary value of abnormality is incremental and works over great swathes of time - driving the abnormal into normality, as in the drive for the New Scientific Man or in transhumanist fantasies where minds cannot keep up with technologies, is driving humanity not into transcendence but into dysfunctionality. Instead the abnormal should be allowed to flourish in the now because of its incremental potential in the future and that includes abnormal cultures and communities as much as persons/ Homo Sovieticus is matched in its self-induced psychosis by the Rights agenda of Liberal Internationalist loons. This is why we must have both a general theory of social normality (which observes it at a distance and decides whether it suits the person), one that treats the claims of the social critically, but also a private theory of the self, against the insanity of denying the ever-present Self, where the Self is to be measured against its own and not society’s standards of normality and abnormality as it moves from birth to death. All is flow, nothing is fixed and Reason is a tool and nothing more.

Jealousy

Jealousy is like rage ... a fact of experience. But, like rage, it might also be taken as a signal of an underlying issue relevant to one's dealings with a person who is being emotional. Yet it is not a justification for accepting their emotional world view as yours simply out of fear of their emotion's effects on you. Respect does not mean acceptance of their world view, just acceptance that they have this world view. It is just a fact that must be taken into consideration.

For a strong emotion not to be respected, recognised and even (without compromising oneself) accommodated to the extent that one can is a sign of callousness and even of stupidity but to allow another's strong emotion to dictate terms to you on fundamentals is a sign of weakness on the one side and of bullying on the other. At its worst, low level permanent jealousy, anger or misery become a form of psychic vampirism by which one person becomes increasingly defined by the mental chemistry of another person. Thus can we define the worst of relationships.

All emotions have this quality either of potentially enhancing dialogue and personal growth or of being agents of control and attempted ownership but jealousy is the most interesting of all. It is the most explicit in its central claim - that X, in some way, has (actually almost certainly unjustifiable) ownership rights over Y. In fact, X can never own Y unless Y permits ownership (at its worst a form of masochism and at its best love). If the ownership is not freely given and that gift sustained on free terms over time but only depends on the fear of the effects on X's biochemistry of the intensity of Y's biochemistry, then the ownership implicit in X's jealousy is simple bullying. Acquiescence is then little better than slavery and may be cowardice or stupidity.

This is why an intense emotion is a major testing ground for a relationship and should strengthen it whereas chronic emotional pressure will either weaken that relationship or turn it into something neurotic and perverted - into the 'autism for two' referred to in 'The Coming Insurrection'. The two sins of emotion in a relationship lie at the two extremes of emotional perversion - not to express emotion strongly on the one hand and to use emotion as a controlling tool of ownership on the other. We all know from observation that struggles for power and dominance in personal relationships are as intense as that of States for energy resources. The fear of the righteous use of emotion - the explosion designed to communicate the otherwise incommunicable - is looked at with fear and loathing in our culture and for good reason.

First, an emotional explosion has to be seen in a context of distrust that the other party will respect the outburst, listen, learn but stand their ground on essentials while conceding ground on inessentials - and be acute enough to understand that the essential is not in the detail and that compromises are possible in many directions and most of the time. Second, our culture is made up of people who fundamentally lack self-esteem, of any pride in themselves, and who live in a world of zero sum games where a relationship is always won or lost like a game of poker rather than developed, expanded or shared like a game of chess.

The typical type in our modern culture has invested so much of themselves in the mirror of the other that they dare not show an emotion that might break that mirror (even if it is just as likely that it would strengthen the relationship), while 'chronic emotion' can be used as a weapon to constrain, hem in and define the other as fenced property. Instead of seeing another relationship (perhaps of simple friendship) added to the whole as an opportunity to redefine and strengthen the primary relationship for the long term, to improve its quality, the 'jealous' reaction would rather pull down the whole pack of cards and walk away. Is this not the case in so many destructive divorces, destroying the lives of children, where one party is simply too proud not to demand all-or-nothing?

The acute emotion of jealousy (or rage) is vital in pre-empting the death grip of convention on a relationship and, if not causing unhappiness, then promoting its decline into formality, role-playing and even the status, sexually and socially, of being a zombie, the sort that can have no conversation beyond house prices, pensions and what each does for a living. Western humanity lives in a permanent state of feeling threatened. The saddest aspect of it all is that we feel most threatened of all by the loss of an 'other half', another malign intervention of Platonic mythology. That fear ends up at the very root of a deathly conformity that leaves us functioning robotically or depending for salvation on secret vices.

The paradox is that our cultural obsession with 'cheating' (not so much in Europe where the matter tends to be dealt with as a form of cultural blindness but certainly in the US) creates the very crisis that it fears. By setting down absurdly 'perfect' relationship standards in the first place, we are driven as a culture into secrecy and fetishism and towards a lack of accountability - indeed anything and everything is done that is possible to avoid a confrontation over meaning in a relationship, one that might involve the expression of positive or negative emotion.

The misery lies not only in any actual loss (though people may have been living a limerent lie for a long time, one that needed to be faced) but in the constant nagging fear of loss and of loneliness. 'Autism for two' raises the stakes by making couple-dom central to the culture in a way that ensures that there can be no intimacy elsewhere. Above all, personal potential may be constantly defined in the terms of another emotional centre, one who casts themselves as successively victim or inadequate when they are neither of these, just different and to be respected as different. New distrust emerges as a result of misplaced past trust, based on an illusion of perfection, whereas a truly sound relationship would have involved a proper dialogue over emotion, under conditions where both parties would trust each other enough to allow truth-telling.

Think on this. How is it even possible that one party 'cheats', that is, is unable, because of our culture, to share with their primary partner the needs and desires that led them elsewhere?  Why are so many women and men frightened of telling the truth to what are, in effect, their best friends if they are, indeed, 'perfect soul-mates' which, of course, they are not. No such thing can exist without compromises that may prove too hard to maintain over long periods of time. The answer is obvious, people 'cheat' not because their primary partners are not soul-mates but because soul-mates are never simply simulacra of the partner and things do change - and should change if we are not to be zombies. No one can take the burden of being a perfect soul mate without subsuming themselves under another and denying all individuality. People 'cheat' because they cannot have a 'perfect soul mate' conversation about not being 'perfect'.

The cultural assessment of all this soon descends into a dim-witted bar room gut sense that a 'cheater' is a slut (if a woman) or weak and inadequate (if a man) but it might equally be said that the 'cheater' is simply a terrified coward in not standing before their primary partner and expressing desires and needs about which there may indeed be an accommodation. Jealousy is not envy but these alleged vices are close and if we look at envy (by, say, one woman of another's looks and attractiveness) we see similar central problems of self esteem and resentment and similar ambiguities over the expression of feeling.

Like jealousy and anger, envy is a fact. To condemn it morally is absurd. A wise person avoids jealous, angry and envious persons if they can but that may not be possible in an existing relationship so it is the contrast between the acute and the chronic that we have to look at. An acute burst of envy sends a signal that seeks reassurance just as an acute burst of anger is the first statement in a negotiation and jealousy is a call for dialogue. Chronic envy or 'ressentiment' is a soul-destroying absurdity, like chronic anger or jealousy. It calls for either an acute moment of catharsis or a fundamental breach.

How many people go through lives of resentment, depression (which is just rage turned inward) or unhappiness and self-doubt because they were unable to ball up their feelings and throw them at their partners as a demand for dialogue? Yes, economic and social entrapment (the fine business of holding things together with a mortgage or having a bunch of relatives who have pre-defined you) may make this difficult but not to do so is to allow oneself to be trapped and defined not only by the other but by all the others behind them. In effect, you will be socialised into chronic misery.

Negative emotion is thus essentially conservative. A person has land-grabbed a bit of social existence and now wants to keep what it has (jealousy) or resents someone else's lucky or more skilled land-grab (envy). Such conservatism is at the root of all that is nasty in politics, society and culture. It is corrosive. But all these emotions have their purpose. We are told that they arose out of evolutionary conditions to ensure that a man did not waste resources in raising others' offspring and a woman had the resources to raise her own but evolutionary biology as justification for jealousy is a cop-out. These are unscientific assumptions but they are widely believed and so become true.

The issue is not jealousy at all but being deceived or lied to, yet our culture has created the conditions for continuous deception because of the zero sum game most of its frightened, isolated players are engaged in. The discovered can lose everything and be subject to barracking and intolerable shaming and socially enforced guilt so it is no wonder that he or she lurks in the dark instead of expressing themselves responsibly in the light. The social has constructed its own dark and dreary underworld.

What is more interesting is the psychological truth that, whilst resentment, depression and misery result in the almost complete de-sexualisation of couples as they spend more time together, high emotion will trigger passion and sexual intensity. It might even be argued that a determined compliance with each other (generally, sado-masochistic in that one party is dominant) is tantamount to the slow murder of a relationship by strangulation, whereas a sense of danger and risk, but above all, dialogue, paradoxically maintains the bonds that brought two people together in the first place.

To do all this effectively, however, requires an acceptance that no person can ever be owned, that they are dangerously unknowable free agents and that risk and loss are challenges that enhance life - and, then, since all is paradox, the dead 'autism for two' might well be replaced by an unbreakable bond between persons and misery might be replaced with 'joie'.

A Final Warning from George Orwell

The Only Right Left Standing - The Autonomous Individual Potentiating

Last week, we wrote on 'rights' which we think of as little more than demands and claims which cannot speak their name but must be cloaked in evasive language because the prevailing hegemonic system - whatever it may be - has pre-appropriated moral language for its own historically defined ends. Our view remains that demands and claims should be made in the name of autonomous individuals and of groups that would do no harm to others and that these demands and claims can be made without requiring any of the customary fluff and bluff of unjustifiable moral assertions from half-crazed activists.

Perhaps one 'right' (that is, demand) seems to be completely forgotten amongst the comical plethora of rights to cover every attribute that a person may have or not have. This is the 'right' simply to be a person - or rather to exist as who you are and not as you should be in the eyes of others. A person, above all, should have the right to live in accordance with their own biochemistry and to make private choices about attempts to change that biochemistry by any means at their disposal - carefully cultivated 'poisons', sexually, risk-taking, playfulness, transformation or whatever. The 'right' is associated with a very simple responsibility - the only responsibility - which is to take personal responsibility for harms to oneself and others. Even their death is the business of persons alone although my own prejudice is entirely towards the impulse to a life well lived.

The only reasonable exceptions are when the rights of others are diminished on the same terms as they are claimed - violence against the person springs to mind. The only sanctionable obligation should be to nurture one's offspring and, secondarily, all the young of the species, because these are persons in the making who need help to become persons. A nation of greedy self-regarding narcissistic pensioners piling debt on the young is an obscenity and the political liars who created this state of affairs beneath contempt. This commitment to the future and disregard for the dead weight of the past and 'tradition' makes me unusual amongst those who have come from a Left tradition in feeling deeply uncomfortable about abortion (as denied potentiality) while accepting, pragmatically, that the balance of interest directs us to a woman's claim to choose.

But, once born, there is nothing lower 'morally' than the person who abandons or mistreats a child. So perhaps one right - the right to autonomous development - can be salvaged from the absurd moralistic mess of contemporary liberal nonsense. I have to face the fact that this ends up with a core moral position not entirely alien to the Catholic Church albeit without the necessity of God or the flummery of the Church. This is the full acceptance of the 'right' or claim (or demand from the life force) of each person to be an autonomous individual to meet their full potential and not to be killed, injured or have the resources required to make choices removed from them - if the Left had consistently held to this principle some of the nastier brutalities of history might have been avoided.

Each person also as a subsidiary 'right', or claim or evident demand, arising out of this autonomy to be met, that is, to engage in precisely the levels of intimacy and commitment that suit them and no one else.  Of course, this is where our world view really does part company with the Iron Age restrictions of Catholicism. But, however we try to salvage them, all rights are a fiction other than this right of autonomy because only the autonomous right arises from the simple fact of a consciousness aware of itself in the world, an emergent right to be treated as the essence of a whole person's relation to Being, one who is always more than their attributes (thereby damning all forms of identity and essentialist politics) and who has an integrity of body and mind for which they can take responsibility themselves if permitted by social conditions. The Leftist aspect, of course, is thus not the evasions of rights ideology - that repulsive faux-left thinking of the petit-bourgeois graduate - but the commitment to create social conditions that give equal chances to all persons to be highly self-potentiating autonomous individuals in their own 'right'.

On Rights Activism & Its Reactionary Nature

'Rights' are a fiction in a state of nature. If a 'right' appears on the scene, it should really be interpreted as a demand for something that someone has not got. It is a creation of the social. An appeal to some moral high ground on the basis of 'rights' is generally a rallying call for those who have not got something that others have (freedom, decent healthcare or whatever) to get together and force those with more power to concede to their demands. So far, so good.

But, at a certain point in history, people who see that others have not got something that they have and, for whatever psychological reason, think that these others should have what they have, will become 'rights activists'. They will try to grab yet higher moral ground for 'rights' as an abstract concept not apparently directly related to their own interest. This, of course, masks the interest they come to have in activism as an identity and as a racket for getting funds, ultimately from the wider population as taxpayers and consumers, redirected into their own pockets. This secondary development of rights ideology is dubious intellectually. A struggle for power cloaked in the language of rights (a healthy business psychologically and politically) becomes displaced by a more disturbing infantilisation of others using that same language. This secondary form of activism denies the opportunity for those without rights, through struggle in their own interest, to learn self-reliance and pride in their own liberatory achievements.

The final decadent phase of rights activism is when the activists have completely displaced the 'have-nots', denying them the right to engage in struggle at all, claiming that the 'have-nots' are not educated or resourced enough to represent themselves and so must be represented absolutely by NGOs or international organisations. 'Have-nots' become no more than passive subjects of well-meaning charity. The agenda is conservative. Much of human history has involved dynamic acts of resistance by the 'have-nots', often violent and self-interested - the myth of Spartacus tends to hide the fact that his probable intention was not to liberate all slaves but to liberate his community of slaves and enslave the enslavers. This politics of struggle became troublesome when a later theoretical equality based on the next world was organised by socialists and anarchists into an ideology of struggle and equality in this world. This had two major elements.

The first and most important element was the pragmatic emergence of effective resistance organisations amongst the politically and economically weak on their own account just before and in the wake of trade and industrialisation - in dissident churches, in pirates and autonomists as described by Hakim Bey, in trades unions and co-operatives and in political parties embedded in a community of relative have-nots and designed not to help people into the fairy-land of heaven but to build Jerusalem on earth.

The second element was a troubled and sympathetic bourgeoisie, increasingly added to by the sons and daughters of 'have-nots' who could hybridise the culture of the middle classes and the struggle for power within the community into political leaderships of transformative power. By the early twentieth century we had roughly five major types of well-organised liberatory struggle competing to transform the condition of the masses alongside the actual winner of that struggle, the free consumer market - i) the organised labour movement with its political party links, ii) the hybridised worker-intellectual party of European social democracy, iii) communism where a cadre of intellectuals act as bridge to our post-modern Leftism, iv) anarcho-syndicalism which subordinated the intellectual to the worker (at least in principle) and v) anti-imperialist liberatory movements which further hybridised what was going on in Europe.

The first type is now decadent - a hollowed out shell with only attenuated tribal community links run by cadres of professional politicians who have shifted from the politics of community to that of identity, from economic redistribution to cultural politics. The second type is taking much the same trajectory but placing its trust in bureaucratic and corporate top-down relations with the masses that mimic that of communism. Communism is almost defunct. Anarchism is now merely a ludic form of performance art for deracinated urban types. And the anti-imperialist movements have nearly all degenerated into statist rule from above, little empires in themselves, or murky and increasingly nasty traditionalisms. In short, the liberatory Left has virtually collapsed to the point where the best it can do now is emote in useless demonstrations, vigils and petitions or raise money and undertake volunteer work to save increasingly non-human idealistic visions such as that of the environment or those of grand abstract projects for poverty alleviation that do far less in a year than a wealthy capitalist can do in a day through a philanthropic foundation. Indeed, if anything, it is the super-rich that seem to be saving the world and not Leftists or the Progressive State.

The organised mass of the population is no longer organised because it no longer needs to be organised in the so-called free world and is not permitted to be organised outside it. Most people are broadly free in the free world with the only daily threat to them (as opposed to the manufactured ones that are convenient for the 'deep state') being the incompetence or malice of the very State that their ancestors had sought to capture in order to create Jerusalem. This leaves the other second element without a purpose - a huge minority of educated (to graduate level) middle class people who are virtually unemployable in the productive sector (or only in its more 'creative' services side) and who are desperate for meaning in their lives. It is this class that has decided for the last thirty years or so to take up the 'white man's burden' and fight for the rights of others - and all very conveniently for the conservative forces that still have all the rights that matter such as access to power and resources. So long as liberal bourgeois intellectuals are running around speaking for the 'voiceless', and so long as any meaningful struggle by the 'voiceless' can immediately be labelled as terrorism once it crosses all those boundaries that were crossed in the past to build the modern world, then the 'voiceless' can be neutered and contained as threats. By speaking for such people, the post-modern intellectual has given those masses no opportunity to speak for themselves or to learn by doing - through struggle.

But what if we stopped demanding specific 'rights' and simply asked to be respected as equal persons who are subject to no one. If we did this, the struggle for 'rights' ends when we have organised ourselves. We do not need activists and we do not need experts. We can return cynically and appropriately to rights as cover for our interests as persons and learn to understand that other persons have equal rights insofar as they are persons and not identity fictions. We do not then need liberators because we liberate ourselves. Those who appear beyond the hope of liberty grow, as we did two hundred or so years ago, into their own liberators from within in a struggle that gives a community dignity and respect. Better this than being infantilised by a bunch of outside neurotics wanting to express themselves narcissistically through their ownership of others' claims and aspirations.

Let us give a very contemporary example of the villainous call and response effects of liberal rights activism in the world. The aggressive drive for liberal rights has made the rights activists and their young middle class heroes and heroines in the field feel good but what has it actually achieved. It has put obscurantist, authoritarian and traditionalist regimes on their guard and allowed them to present universal values as imperialist and colonialist. The drive to impose such values by force fifteen years ago self-evidently strengthened traditionalism and resulted in its winning over of indigenous masses or a good proportion of them to conservative values. In many parts of the Middle East, dynastic rulers are now actually more progressive than the general population. Compare thissituation with the liberatory Marxist discourse in the Middle East of the 1970s or even the secularist discourse of Arab nationalism with the dominant discourse nearly fifty years later. These are the same people in the same culture but they have gone backwards in time as a defensive move against incursions that undermined local core values and identity. Self respect came to demand obscurantism over decency. Now the anti-imperialist struggle is directed as bloody terrorism against those same liberal intellectuals who most promoted those apparently universal values. In short, it is the blundering of liberals that has created the current terrorist threat.

Another example comes from Russia and is not so different from the provocations of Charlie Hebdo. Femen did not act to persuade through rational argument but purported to represent freedom without the consent or understanding of those desperate to be sexually free. They performed filthy mannered 'artistic' events that gave good local cultural cause for repression to the Right. By all means say that you think religion is oppressive or nonsene (I do all the time) but do not be so narcissistic as to go into a church, a sacred place to others, and behave in an offensive manner - it is like a drunk insulting a man's portly partner in a pub and calling her obese. It would just be bad manners and the drunk is lucky if the man whose partner they insult is the sort of man who will quietly get up and leave - the likelihood of the drunk being punched on the nose is equally high and the drunk should take responsibility for his behaviour. In Russia itself, the lives of gay people are now infintely more unpleasant and potential liberatory progress has been reversed because of the narcissism of a bunch of 'artists' and 'intellectuals'. Im this case, I stand with the ordinary gay guy in Novosibirsk and the ordinary Muslim in Homs against the egoism of the abstract thinker. So, "non, je ne suis Charlie parceque Charlie est un utter prat."

What we have in these cases is an anomic bourgeois liberal intellectual class that has no functional role in our society other than one based on 'performing' in order to be noticed like a court jester or ducking and diving to find ways to pay for their lifestyle by becoming a circus seal before the media and the sources of funds. It may be a narcissistic artistic performance with allegedly political ends or it may be the performance of the institutional network that gets funds because it really does no more than entertain or meet the agenda of our own type of fanatic or it may be the NGO that has turned itself into a mini-enterprise seeking funds from states and philanthropists to ensure its activists can live the lifestyle it craves. Whatever it is all must 'feel' that they are 'doing the right thing' (even though their blunderings are often doing the wrong thing and worsening the total situation). Occupy is the sad epitome of this mentality. I find it heartening that, though naive in this matter, Russell Brand is at least trying to think through what is going on on his own account - if only more did.

These people are, quite literally, decadent - neither courageous enough to enjoy the fruits of their class status nor honourable enough to donate their skills effectively to help the masses self-organise and transform society on their own terms in a political act of will. They are deracinated third rate minds who mistake their own abstract concepts and theory for considered evidence-based thought and who evade the reality of their situation - as parasites on a surprisingly effective and well run free consumer society that could be better. If we could break free of these bourgeois liberals, all of us, we certainly would not then need them to rule in our interest. We would become persons.

Abraham, Hagar and Sarah - Death in the Desert

According to the Bible, Abraham took a slave girl (Hagar) as his concubine and then married her to provide an heir, in agreement with his existing wife Sarah. Hagar produced Ishmael but then Sarah conceived and produced Isaac. Sarah then demanded that Abraham drive out both Hagar and Ishmael into the desert (and so to probable death). Abraham found this difficult and he only did it when he found out that God 'wanted him to do it'. We are creeped out now by people who say that 'God wanted them to do it' but this is the Iron Age Levant.

Many relativistic excuses (mostly post-facto based on the fact that 'it all turned out right in the end') can be made for the behaviour of these persons but this story is at the very root of the mythos of three world religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). It has been accepted without thought as representing God's word and so as a fundamentally ethical story. Perhaps it is time to start thinking about this and not say simply that this is just a story that history has made irrelevant. It is a story of great cruelty and we must ask what it came to imply for later humanity.

The first implication of the tale is that sexuality is a practical matter. Production of children, not pleasure, are at the root of the story. This is perhaps the most forgivable aspect of the tale ethically because times were hard and there was a logic to the attitude. A pragmatic ethical polyamory or polygamy may be one logical lesson of this history, yet this is the one rejected by at least two of the Great Religions that derived from it. The story of Hagar understandably permits a more open attitude to concubinage in Islam but both Judaism and Christianity were to adopt a position where Sarah's matriarchal rights were to be privileged over both those of the patriarch himself and the concubine/first wife.  For three thousand years, this has been presented as moral - but is it?

Far from being patrarchalist, Judaeo-Christianity starts its story, the story that then leads to Abraham and Isaac, with a tale of matriarchal struggle and power, of female competition. It tells us straight way that the subsequent three thousand years are the story of the triumph of one woman over another rather than that of a man over women. It undermines from the beginning the claim that Judaeo-Christianity is patriarchal and only patriarchal.

The second implication is the positive denial of emotion, of love, implicit in the story and the cruelty and resentment of the dominant matriarch. Abraham is twice denied his feelings by God - both here in regard to his feelings for Hagar and later in his feelings for Isaac on the sacrificial altar. God rewards the catty older woman over the younger. The 'patriarch' himself seems to have no power himself to bring the two women into line - it is his weakness before female rivalry that is the most noticeable feature of this part of the story.

What is going on here? Levantine man clearly had feelings. He was a human being. It seems that God does not approve of feelings, of emotion coming from within. Such emotion must be subordinated to the abstract - the theory of what is destined, written long after the event - and therein lies the tale. God's law, in the end, appears to suit Sarah as dominant wife and God himself as Authority. Patriarchal authority does not belong to the human patriarch at all - his wishes are ignored and he takes the easy way out. The authority belongs to an abstract and invented entity intended to buttress the power of the matriarch. It is as if the Great Goddess (if she ever existed) has proved a lot less useful than a Great Father because only through the latter can male physical power be re-appropriated for the real head of the household, she who is to be obeyed, though perhaps I take things too far and should not over-interpret the text.

But God does help Sarah to become dominant over Abraham in this matter and then takes Abraham away later to enforce his own direct dominance over him in the matter of Isaac. This is not a tale of patriarchal power at all but a tale of the assertion of priestly power (represented by this invented abstract thing called God) over the male by means of a Godly favoured female, a female given implicit domestic power in order to define the terms of the Law. The feminist analysis of Judaeo-Christianity is thus deeply flawed. It refers to patriarchalism when the Judaeo-Christian tradition is, much as Nietzsche described it, an alliance of weakness, of priests or intellectuals and middle class, property-owning women, designed to tame the free choices (which include sexual and emotional choices) of males and exclude other women.

This may not be a bad thing in itself because it depends where you stand in the game and there is only good or bad in relation to one's stance in that game. A certain form of order triumphed and made its rules stick. It is a contingent set of rules but, whether good or bad, it should still be seen for what it is and not for what it would be convenient for us to think it is in our later age. The Catholic Church, of course, took the Judaic system and went one better by (at least in theory) sexually neutering its priests so that all sexualities in the domestic setting were concentrated on the dominance of a mother advised by eunuchs. Marriage was to transfer the male from libertine to dog and excluded females to be sentenced to be sluts or nuns. Male sexuality and any female (or homosexual) sexual competitors were shunted to one side. God stood for an exclusivity that was prepared to eliminate (metaphorically and socially) its rivals through force of customary law, an elimination performed on Hagar.

And what of Hagar? She did all right in the end, being at the core of a polygamous Islam, but we can relax only if we take at face value that her destiny was one of providence and not, in fact, chance. She and her son could have died out their in the desert and only an 'act of faith' (ho, hum!) says that that was never going to happen.

So, what was the cost of this system of social control designed to bring order to society (for that is what this story is about)? Abraham is weak - he allows his natural feeling for a woman and their child to be thrust aside by the strictures of priestly (God's) and matriarchal law. Natural feeling will be torn from him later (saved only at the last minute) but this first case is not just abandonment, it is also also attempted murder. Let us remember - both Hagar and Ishmael are sent into the desert, in effect, to die. So a weak man and a proud and manipulative woman (with a little help from an ideological construct called God) sentence a weaker woman and a child to death without once questioning the morality of their action. Yet this morality (or lack of morality) is at the very centre of Western culture. Is a murderous callousness at its very heart?