Mind, Body and Soul:
An Inquiry into the Spiritual Deraillments of Modern Life
by Ron Puhek
1. Life, Knowledge, and Spirit
When, in his Metaphysics, Aristotle reviews his notion of the elements
that go into an explanation of something (usually called the "four
causes"), he describes the first and "primary factor" as
"a thing's" essential character or "what it means to be that
thing." (p. 9) It is this first, most fundamental and spontaneous
question that generates the core problem of knowledge and forces us to turn
to the metaphysical for a solution.
The issue is that the "essential character" of anything does
not belong to it but is produced out of its relationship with other things.
More precisely we have to say that the thing itself arises out of relationship
since it is the relationship that constitutes its "essential character."
Children may ask you to explain an apple. You say that it (its "essential
character") is a "fruit." This essential character is not
independent but dependent. All the meanings of fruit such as, "it
comes from a plant," "it is part of the plant's reproduction process,"
"it is food for birds," are relational. Each of them is a way
"it" relates to some other thing. The essential character of
the apple is relative. It gains its being out of the pattern of relationships
it passes through.
All things that exist to us, both in being and in knowledge, are relative
to us. We only realize and know things where they live in relationship
to us. What relates to us in no way has no being to us. We cannot know
it. It does not exist. We may say that the "essential character"
of a shoe is "footwear," a shoe is no longer a shoe when you cannot
wear it. It loses its being or dies. Both its being and its non-being
or death are relative to us. It can be no other way. From our perspective,
we are the standard that creates the world. We are the absolute. Lest
we become arrogant in our power, however, we must remember that we are also
relative to others. Our relationship to them makes us what we are. Only
after we ourselves come into being out of relationship, can we know things.
Despite all this relativity of knowledge and being, we must avoid the temptation
of the twentieth century. We must not assert absolute relativism. Not
only is that assertion a logical absurdity, it is experientially invalid.
Truth does force us to conclude that all things are relative. This conclusion
gives every sign of affirming the contradiction that "all things are
relative except the statement that all things are relative." The contradiction
is resolvable, however, if you treat it as a paradox that drives your mind
beyond the context it was in before. Then you can understand that, while
all things, all beings, are relative, the absolute they relate to stands
outside things and beyond being. It resides not in "non-being,"
which is only the negation of being and depends on it for its existence,
but in absolute no-thingness.
The first point where you can gain access to the absolute, to the standard,
from where all things take their being, is the relationship itself. This
"relationship" is metaphysical. You experience it only when you
stop "being," when you "die," or when you no longer
live and see from the perspective of your being a thing. Then, of course,
you will no longer live in "the world" of things nor will you
see other "things."
Before we can explore the foundations of knowledge any further, we must
embark on the shakiest part of our enterprise. The quality of your life
and your knowledge depends upon the quality of knowledge of your relationship
with the world. The first awkwardness is dealing with the feat of imagination
that you need to perform if you are to learn how to expand your knowledge
so you can live better. You need to suspend the impression that "you"
enter into relationship with "things." This is because the relationship
is prior to "you" and to "things." You come into existence
out of relationship. You are the creation of relationship. What you need
to do next is to find some way of characterizing the relationship because
here ordinary language fails. Despite this failure, I press on, first,
in the knowledge that even as I write using mere words, my consciousness
remains grounded outside of language and, second, in the hope that as you
read these words yours will be too.
Relationship is both connection and disconnection. This is so for the
relation of existence as well as for the relations of knowledge. Using
ordinary terminology, but using it to represent experience, you can call
the fundamental relationship in existence "physical." Connection
and disconnection are going on in the simple processes of your eating and
breathing and even in the simpler processes of erosion and accretion of
rock. In ordinary contemporary life, we break down the basic relatedness
that constitute our perceptions into two fundamental kinds: the sensuous
and the emotional. You can create the distinction between them only after
the relatedness of life physically has proceeded so far that you have come
into being as a thing. That is when you have become self-conscious. You
are then an object or thing to your consciousness. Emotions represent your
contact with the world through the inner organs of sensitivity (heart, stomach,
overall flesh) that you have separated from what you experience through
your outer organs of sensitivity (eyes, ears, nose, skin). Even this separation
between the two realms of sensitivity was a product of life relatedness
and developed historically. It was not something the human race was born
with.
The third attribute of knowledge-relatedness today is mental. You do
not just sense and feel, you feel and see things. Things seen and felt
are constructs you build out of the constant flow of input of your senses
using mental artifacts. You "see" neither "tree" nor
"apple" with your eyes. You "feel" neither joy nor
sorrow with your unaided heart. Mind creates what you see and feel using
concepts and names. Out of the processes of living your mind develops the
powers to conceive and to name life. The development, however, takes two
opposite directions. Both our life and our knowledge can be organized and
directed by the many things we create. In your relationship to them, you
become a thing to them and to yourself. Your relationships to other people
then become also only "thing" relationships.
Thing relationships are paradoxical. Their organization is inherently
disorganizing. Their integration is disintegrating. Under their influence,
relationship fragments and becomes a discrete series of relationships.
Each is different. Each is colored by the different "thing" we
have construction out of one part of our fragmented relationship with the
world. Our very love relationships with each other generate tension and
estrangement. Our own being disintegrates because of the very "thing"
principles we adopted to establish integration. Disharmony rules in our
selves, our social relationships, and our relationships with nature. Unhappiness
and death reign supreme. In the end, our very presence disturbs and endangers
the very earth.
All this happens when mind looks down upon its own children, the things
it created, and seeks to preserve them. However, mind also can look up.
Mind makes the physical relationship sensuously and emotionally conscious
by the concepts and names only to lose itself in the process. This happens
when it takes the artificial "things" it created to be not artificial
but real. Then it lets the "real world" rule it. Mind, however,
can actualize and allow to develop the other side of physical relationship.
It can guide your very senses and feelings and what you sense and feel
to the no-thing so they return to the creative source, in the relatedness
itself. This fourth aspect of knowledge is the spiritual one.
Thus, there are four aspects of the knowing relationship: the sensuous,
the emotional, the mental, and the spiritual. Their genesis, both in individual
life and in the life of the human race, arises in layers: first, the physical,
next, the division into sensual and emotional made possible with the emergence
of the mental, and finally, the pinnacle of development, the spiritual.
What develops at the end--the spirit--was not there at the beginning.
It always was there but was lost, concealed, and had to be revealed and
developed. The no-thing was there at the beginning. It is the ground and
inspiration of the somethings. The somethings appear to replace it. Because
of their presence (because of the presence of things), time and change emerged.
Thus, what was, is now gone or lost. However, the loss that takes place
in time and space is only a loss of things. It is only from the perspective
of yourself as a thing that death, "non-being," or the negation
of your being is absolute. Beneath being and non-being, life and death,
rests the eternal no-thing, untouched by time and space. From nothing all
things come. To nothing all things go.
In our normal condition, our knowledge rules us. You live by what you
see as real and good. To see only "things" is to be trapped in
a cycle of death and disintegration. Individuals and whole societies that
see only things are terrorized by the threat of their loss (death) and suffer
from disintegration (crime, war, disorder). Disharmony reigns within and
without. The nurturing of the human, the preservation of human life, and
saving the planet earth require that we nurture BD؆ 0 , /
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have become desperate. We are lost in infinity. It is an infinity of endlessly
seeking to know more and more things (to know them through our senses and
our feelings). It is an infinity of ceaseless attraction to the spectacles
we call entertainment and to the investigation of things we call science.
Physically, we are driven to consume more and more, but so unsatisfying
is our relationship with all the things we consume that we sicken ourselves
with gluttony. We maintain the gluttony and avoid the symptoms of its sickness
by making the things we consume consist less of reality and more of appearance.
Gluttony has less and less of a fattening and so bad impact on our bodies
because we eat "food" that is not food and has no nutritive value.
Because the fake food takes more resources to produce, we are consuming
the planet and the universe in our madness.
This insatiable hunger is spiritual. Physically, sensuously, and emotionally
we are starving in our excess. What we are seeking through physical, sensuous,
and emotional "things" they cannot give us. Our minds must turn
from things below and toward the no-thing above. When this happens then
the physical, sensuous, and emotional relatedness is redeemed and the world
is saved.
The error that has made us reject the spiritual and cling to our empty
illusions is the notion that to adopt a spiritual path and attain a state
of transcendence over the world would mean we would have to abandon physicalness,
sensuousness, or sentiment. That is not so. Spiritual transcendence is
instead their elevation and their liberation from the lies of mentally-devised
"things." Moreover, the emergence of the spiritual is not the
abandonment of the mental. It is only by virtue of the mental that the
spiritual can come to the other three.
How is it possible to improve our knowledge and through it save our lives?
The first step today is to become "unraveled" or "unwrapped."
We need to lose the sense of "things." The strong impression
that they exist absolutely is due to how much we have allowed mental phenomenon
such as concepts and names to "wrap" the physical, sensuous, and
emotional relationship. Either grace or effort can bring about the "unravelling."
It is not hard to release the senses, the feelings, and the patterns of
life from the order the mind imposes on them. In fact, it happens constantly.
It is the primary function of vacations, entertainments, sports, travel,
and all kinds of mind and mood altering drugs. Alone, however, they unravel
you only to make it easier for you to get raveled in mind and work again.
They ultimately become addictions of the unfulfilled spirit. Playing a
sport dis-organizes your life. Watching a sport dis-organizes your knowledge
and usually both your senses and feelings. However, that happens only if
your everyday organized life is not as a player of sports. Those whose ordinary
lives the organization of a sport dominates can only get unraveled elsewhere,
either in some other activity such as sex and gambling or in the disorientation
induced through alcohol or LSD. What you need instead of mechanical raveling
and unraveling is to connect the ordinary relatedness--the activities, sensings,
and feelings of everyday ordered existence--to the no-thing.
Connection to the no-thing means you are guided mentally not by things
(either seeking them or avoiding their loss) but by nothing. The guidance
in the three relationships becomes inner not outer. When you run races
guided by the outer "things," it is to score points. When you
work, it is to make things or make money. When you are guided by the inner,
the no-thing, you run because there is goodness in the running and not because
it gives you a big muscle, good feelings, or praise for running faster than
someone else.
Only practice at keeping in contact with the no-thing in daily somethings
can teach you this kind of relatedness. The practice precedes the knowledge
and learning. You practice first and learn later from it. As you start
out, you need a master to keep you on the path. This is because in the
beginning, you will experience not a sense of the rightness of this path
of nothingness, but only the suffering that happens when you stray from
it. Suffering is your guide. The positive sense of right direction comes,
but only later.
2. Spiritual Derailments
Our physical relationship with the world -- the relationship that is conscious
through the senses, the feelings, and the mind -- is a relationship that
longs for its fulfillment in the spirit. In our relationships with other
things and other people, the value experience that takes the forms of emotional
and physical pleasure and pain expresses this call to spirit. Both pleasure
and pain summon us to seek and find an upward connection for, and a higher
meaning to, the physical dimension of our relationships. However, if our
minds are not alert and have not been awakened to the upper, the inner,
the spiritual level, then we misunderstand the call. We then misdirect
our attention and aspirations (the longing for spirit) into "things."
Because these things cannot satisfy it, the spiritual longing becomes a
turbulence (Boehme, Chapter 15) or a "bad infinity" of desire
(Hegel, p. 207). While this spiritual unrest accounts for the great energy
of Western civilization and its ability to defeat all other civilizations
either by conquering them or absorbing them, it also accounts for its own
disintegration and destructive effect on the health and even the very survival
of the planet.
This spiritual derailment, based on the impoverishment and retardation
of the spiritual power of knowledge called "mind," takes many
forms. The most prevalent today, however, is an unyielding drive to the
refinement of things. Once you are caught in investing your spiritual hopes
in things, once things inspire ou, this falsified spirit will drive you
to pursue both more and better things. Once you are materially rich (and
in modern civilization all of us are rich), then you feel you can get what
you hanker after only by making the thing better or more perfect as a thing.
Spirit energizes you to launch a program of refinement.
This spiritual derailment applies both to others as things and to self
as a thing. It can take the form of "home improvement" where
refining, renovating, and redecorating keep holding out the promise of
spiritual fulfillment they can never deliver. Thus, your task becomes endless
or infinite. You cannot get what you are spiritually after so you just
keep longing. The longing for the eternal or infinite gets installed in
the finite where it can never be fulfilled.
This infinitude of unfulfilled longing need not fix itself on one major
thing but can get attached to everything. You can become a "perfectionist,"
someone who demands the best of everything. Your clothes must be spotless
or you discard them. Your children must behave perfectly or you severely
criticize them. Wherever derailment occurs, its symptom is obsession.
Your obsession may be mild. No one may notice it either because of the
mildness or because they share it. Nevertheless, derailment of this sort
always appears in some form of obsession.
What you invest your spiritual longing in, of course, need not be what
we usually call "things." It can be another person. In an age
of spiritual derailment, social obsessions -- obsessions with "objects"
of affection -- will abound. When you are under the spell of objects of
affection, it is the same as when you are under the power of material objects.
You have only two ways of surviving under conditions of spiritual derailment.
The first is to persist in working to refine that person. The other happens
when you discover the hopelessness of trying to refine your objective relationship
with that person. You move on to another. You are obsessed not with one
but with many. While it is usually more obvious, to be obsessed with one
thing is no worse than beings obsessed with all things. Both varieties
of obsession generate violent turbulence. The energy and motion can convince
you that your life is rich in spirit, variety, and activity. In fact, when
spiritual derailment takes the form of fixation on objects of affection,
obsession with one other person is relatively rare. The rule in this case
is a series of obsessions with different individuals that parallels the
home-owners obsession with new things. The unyielding obsession with one
person usually occurs only when you have either been unable to create a
relationship with the one you "love" and continue to view them
from afar or that person gets disillusioned with and rejects you before
you do.
Sometimes the condition of spiritual derailment is extreme and so abnormal
that you seek out help from psychotherapists. There can, however, be no
"treatment" of, or "cure" for, spiritual derailment
without an entire reorientation of the mind away from objects and realities
to the higher spiritual ground of no- thingness. That is why ordinary psychotherapy
always fails to do anything but conceal the symptoms. Obsession is always
a spiritual disorder. You can achieve dramatic changes in even one of its
manifestations -- such as giving up an obsessed "love" relationship
-- only by establishing some other obsession. The new obsession might be
with ending obsessions, for example, or it might mean adopting an altogether
different kind of spiritual derailment.
You can also make a faulty investment of aspirations into "objects"
or "things" that are different aspects of your self. You can
get obsessed with "self-development." This obsession may involve
attempts to develop or "refine" your mental, emotional, or physical
faculties. One example of mental addiction is endless pursuit of and fleeting
pleasure in solving problems or meeting intellectual challenges. It may
involve anything from crossword puzzles to theoretical physics. You will
find it hard to identify this kind of spiritual derailment as a disease
because both to you and others around you, your activity appears either
utterly trivial and not something to take seriously or most worthwhile and
beneficial to society.
It is important especially for intellectuals -- scientists, artists, writers
-- to understand that their work could be a diseased obsession. It is fairly
easy for intellectuals to see body-building or house-decorating as sicknesses,
even though they may not consider them obsessions let alone as spiritual
derailments. When educated in a liberal environment, the intellectuals
would "tolerate" such behavior and not criticize it even though
they thought it unhealthy.
Body-building is a good example because it can show the essential character
of the spiritual derailment that invests higher spirit in objects. The
body is the most obvious way that we are a thing to ourselves. Betterment
of self to you can look like refining and perfecting the appearance, abilities,
or health of your body as a body. In other words, body-building perfects
the thing as a thing. Body building reveals most clearly the sure symptoms
of spiritual derailment. They include fragmentation and ambivalence. Obsessed
body-builders will feel both good and bad about their bodies. They will
be repelled and attracted to them. They will consider themselves, at one
moment, as the picture of health and beauty and, at the next, the apotheosis
of diseased ugliness. In fact, it is only this ambivalence that generates
the will to persist in the body-building activity. The disgust for imperfection,
which is the call from the spirit of something missing that is unfortunately
mis-interpreted in object/thing terms, generates the goal and activity of
perfection. The standard followed is not spiritual in the inward sense.
Body-builders assume that their inspiration is for a more refined or "healthy"
object or that the standard guiding their development is the thing called
a "body." Were they ever to achieve a perfect body so that the
refinement would be complete, then disillusion and despair would overwhelm
them. Since the perfection they seek, however, is not attainable through
the body, they may continue their activity endlessly. Their wills are sustained
both by the hope that betterment can gradually lead to perfection and by
comparison with other bodies in "competition" where nearly everyone
involved can feel better than some and worse than others. Bodybuilders can
find body-building contests inspirational whether they win or lose. The
ambivalence that generates the energy sustains them.
However, the same thing holds true for obsessive relationships to mental
powers or to other people. There, too, a condition of extreme ambivalence
generates activity. Intellectuals affected by spiritual derailment in the
development of their ideas will welcome competitions where they "publish"
their ideas either orally at conferences or writing in "learned journals."
Interchanges with their colleagues can be as "exciting" as a
body-building contest and just as "inspiring."
Spiritual derailment leads you into conflict with the personou are obsessively
in love with. It also affects you with ambivalence in your affections.
You will not be at peace with yourself in your love. All your relationships
with others will be "love-hate" relationships in varying degrees
of intensity. You will sense love as a desire for physical unity, but you
will fail to find the unity you seek in physical union. You will feel dislike
or a desire for disunity but you will not be able to separate yourself from
the people you hate. Your disunion will not destroy your unity. Your very
desire for distance is their presence when they are not near to you.
Both your love and hate relationships will be impoverished and destructive.
Making love will give a merely sensuous or physical pleasure that is as
fleeting as the activity. Trying to unify yourself as a thing to another
as a thing is ultimately fruitless. Emotional and physical pleasure will
last only so long as the attempt still can promise ultimate unification.
However, it can maintain that promise only while there is an active interchange
or attempt at unification. When the "making" of love ceases,
so does the pleasure. You feel a void and a pain.
Genuine fulfillment of the spirit does occur in relationship with things.
You should not abandon this relationship but elevate it. When your mind
develops and explores the spiritual dimension of the longing for the other
so you guide your love making by spiritual goals, then the objects are redeemed.
Unity with the other is then absolute and eternal. Love and hate as opposites
disappear in the higher attraction. Ambivalence no longer operates as an
energy generator. You are free from all obsession. Your sense of others
as well as your feelings for them take on an entirely different color or
dimension. Their presence is a joy that satisfies, and you can let them
depart in peace.
3. Gods and Demons
Among the strangest, most significant and yet most alien notions of the
ancient world is that of gods and demons. The rising interest today in the
possibility that individuals can be possessed by demons and require exorcism
to be freed only underscores the strength of the ancient ideas as well as
how far modern science is estranged from them. I propose to explore two
aspects of the problem of spiritual entities. They are, first, the meaning
of the traditional concepts of gods and demons and, second, the reality
of their presence today. Investigating the subject of gods and demons can
go far in helping serious thought make peace with certain of those aspects
of ancient wisdom it long believed science had superseded as well as with
the distorted remnants of that wisdom that are still alive and prospering.
The idea that mind mediates between two realms -- one it creates and one
it serves -- can help show the significance of the ancient idea of gods
and demons. Our minds establish the first realm, the world of "being,"
when we gain the ability to let names and concepts dominate our powers of
sensation. Only then do we see "things." The world of things
we sense and seem to live in is a product of relationship and of concept.
This created world distances itself from the other world even though the
other world generates the inspiration to create it through concepts and
to seek created "things" in it. This inspiration is spiritual.
It arises before "things" and from above and beyond them. The
religious term for this other realm is "heaven." In the Judaic-Christian
tradition the Ultimate, the Absolute, or God dwells in it. Both the ancient
Greek and the ancient Christian conceived of "gods" as messengers
from Heaven. They were channels of connection between the two realms.
In his investigation of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, St. Augustine
did not accept the notion that these "gods" were really "gods."
For a Christian like him there could be only one God. Thus, Augustine
did not call the faithful messengers that come to us from Heaven "gods."
Instead, he used the traditional Hebrew name "angels." Angels
are spiritual powers or forces that carry and communicate the will of Heaven
or the will of God. They fly from the world above to the world below.
As spiritual forces they are very powerful in human life. They are immortal.
In Christianity, angels appear with messages of God's will at the annunciation
of both the birth of John the Baptizer to Elizabeth and the birth of Jesus
to her "kinswoman," Mary. Augustine did not consider the "gods"
of ancient Greece and Rome angels but "demons" or "devils."
For him, demons and devils were fallen angels. Therefore, he viewed the
religions of Greece and Rome that celebrated them as demonic religions.
Much of the early part of is City of God is devoted to citing the evidence
that those gods were demonic. He does this by pointing to the disgusting
spectacles performed in their names in ancient Greece, their petty love
affairs and petulant disregard for justice displayed in the great tragic
poems and dramas, and the degrading sexual practices the Romans used in
religious ceremonies to honor their gods. (Augustine, pp. 324 & 344)
This notion of the "gods" as message bearers to the human race
and as being both good and evil was not unprecedented. Although Augustine's
specific terminology had not been prevalent, at least the notions his terms
represented were familiar. Plato, for example, in the Symposium (p. 309)
talks of Aphrodite, the roman Venus or goddess of love, in two ways. He
refers to both "the heavenly Aphrodite" and "the earthly
Aphrodite." The one draws us upward, the other downward.
Let's see if we can make sense of the ancient discourses on gods and demons
in a way acceptable to a modern mind. To do so, we need to recall two notions
(1) the gods (or angels) and demons are spiritual forces so that they are
"inner" in the sense that they work directly on the inspiration
of our will and (2) they are messengers from the Good (Plato) or God (Judaic
Christianity) "within" and "beyond" the world of "things."
With the help of these two principles, we may perceive how angels and
demons actually do function in life, what they represent, and how, because
of insensitivity to them, the modern world has been increasingly ruled by
the demonic or fallen angels.
Take the "god" or angel Gabriel who announced to the virgin Mary
the birth of her son Jesus. Such an angel is, of course, not a "being"
or a "thing" but an experience of a force that is spiritual.
Furthermore, you can consider the birth of any child from two different
perspectives. From the standpoint of the world of "being" or
"things," birth is reproduction of the species. However, from
the standpoint of the spirit, birth is the entrance of the spirit into things
or the revelation of the inner in the outer. In nearly every instance the
anticipation of parents for the birth of their children is spiritual. When
you are going through the birthing process from conception through pregnancy
to birth, you are inspired.
The problem is that your inspiration can be either angelic (or from the
gods) or demonic. Your angel is a "fallen" angel and allied with
the Devil or the creator of illusion if you interpret your inspiration to
be for the child as a thing. From the standpoint of "things,"
the life of Jesus was hardly "blessed. From beginning to end it was
an utter failure. The basis of this conclusion underscores the difference
between the angelic and the demonic. Parents who "love" their
children as things do enormous damage to them out of their love. Moreover,
they may be so devastated when the child grows up and leaves "home"
that they can only find comfort by replacing the child with a cat or dog
as a pet. They want a pet whose -- as they put it -- "unconditional
love" and complete dependency makes them feel good.
To love your child as a thing is to love the thing you see and feel instead
of what actually is there. It is an object your mind has fabricated out
of a choice of impressions. Moreover, you did not make the choice. Concepts
directed you to it. You want your children to be "good children."
That really means you want them to behave according to the concept of a
child that is yours and your society's. You want your children to be "successful."
That actually means you want them to "get a good job" or "make
a good income." The only good you are considering is a relative good
-- a good that is generated out of patterns of established relationships
and defined by conventional concepts. When they created them in the past,
our ancestors originally devised concepts out of inspiration. However,
their inspiration, like ours, could have been angelic or demonic. If you
do not continue to monitor and judge the created and relative goods using
the standard of the absolute good you can know within, on high, and through
certain faculties of thought alone, then it does not matter how Heavenly
their original source of inspiration was for they will grow demonic. Disconnected
from the nothingness as you live and connected only to "things, you
will do all in your power to keep your children tied down to the created
earth, dependent, and without their own spiritual light.
The Greeks and the Romans saw love, like war, as a god. That is, they
considered love a messenger or vehicle of the good in human life. Plato's
"heavenly Aphrodite" was the love we receive as a call from on
high. The call only came through the other person as an object or a thing.
It was not for the person. This call would lead two lovers beyond the
personalities they were before to the realization in being of a higher kind
of good. By ontrast, his "earthly Aphrodite" was the dimmer side
of the messenger of love where you invest your spiritual call of love in
the "other" being. The "earthly Aphrodite" is the goddess
of love that Augustine disparages as a demon. This demon exacts sacrifices
and promises magical rewards. Through potions and incantations, it allows
the lover to achieve the "object" of love. To worship at the altar
of the "earthly Aphrodite" is not only to worship a "demon"
but to generate a demonic love in your life, a love that is endlessly hungry
but never fulfilled. The "heavenly Aphrodite" brings peace, unity,
and harmony. The "earthly" brings only strife and stress.
In the light of these considerations, we can illustrate how the demon "gods
and goddesses" the ancient world identified now rule. Today, we do
not believe in gods and goddesses or the forces they represent. Consequently,
we almost entirely mis-perceive the spiritual quality of life. This decline
in perception began at the end of the medieval period and climaxed in the
"Enlightenment." Leading thought of the time either drove the
single spiritual force defined and recognized in the West, God in Heaven,
outside the world or, at best, saw it as involved in the world only as a
punishing ruler rather than a redeemer who preserved the world in its goodness.
The angels and devils of the Medieval world lost their reality except to
a few sensitive souls who found spiritual forces that they could not deny
raging in them and terrorizing them. Even they, however, either rested
in total ignorance of the significance of the inner upheavals that made
normal life impossible for them or remained absorbed in utterly fantastic
misconceptions. In their fantasy, religious frauds gave them images that
identified these spiritual forces as "beings" or "things"
that the fraudulent spiritual leader could magically exorcise and blot out.
In modern culture, the demonic "earthly Aphrodite" the Greeks
identified is one of the fallen angels ruling the world. This is obvious
in the case of Eros, the child of Aphrodite and the directly sexual relations
that excite and inspire us. Besides Eros, however, and only slightly more
subtly, the demons rule the economy, the strategy of advertising, and international
relations. The demonic god of war, Mars, rules our international conflicts
and Pluto, the demonic god of wealth, dominates our affairs. Indeed, you
can see the whole of modern life as inspired by one or more of these demons
and the energy of modern life as a whole nothing but a ceaseless battle
within and among these demons as to who shall prevail. The demonic goal
of our wars, civil and international, victory for the sake of victory which
is the perfection of the "thing" called war. The only restraint
on Mars when we enter his realm that would preserve us from this demonic
goal is Pluto and the plutocratic element of "business" within
all of our societies when it sees its riches diminished by the madness of
war. The demonic gods rule us. The only reason we accept their rule is
that the conflict among them produces an instability that looks, not like
the slavery it is, but like freedom it imitates.
Again there is irony in that, while the modern world prides itself so much
for having "gone beyond" the ancient world and for its illusion
of "progress," it has fallen victim to the old gods and demons
it thought it had put aside centuries ago. It is as if the ancient world
the modern had abandoned and mocked is exacting its exquisite revenge.
The modern mind cast off the very concepts from the ancient world that could
help it understand its plight. The old gods, once displaced by the One
God of Judaic Christianity and Islam that understood their subordinate function
and often rebellious activities, are re-asserting their influence. And
this is happening as spiritual ignorance renders us incapable of knowing
the One and freeing ourselves from their power. The final irony is that,
while their true meaning utterly escapes us, the very names of the old gods
are now returning along with the ancient religious ceremonies that celebrated
the demons. From covens of witches serving Wicca to scientists who call
on us all to return to the worship of mother Gaia (Earth), a veritable clamor
of ignorance drowns out our despair.
Let us neither exorcise our demonic inspiration nor yield to it and celebrate
its perverse names. Instead, we can use the insight of the two dimensions
we live in, that of "things" and that of the "no-thing"
to understand the nature of the spiritual power it exercises so that we
can return it from its fallen state, its absorption into the world of things,
back to its Heavenly home and divine function.
4. Drugs and Spiritual Derailment
The use of mind-altering drugs presents spiritual development with a special
problem. While to a limited degree they can advance spiritual growth, drugs
also can endanger and stifle it in a particularly noxious way. Ironically,
it may be the drugs commonly considered least harmful that pose the greatest
threat to the spirit. While still illegal, marijuana meets with general
popular toleration if not acceptance. A president of the United States
can admit to using it in his youth and still get elected. Marijuana, therefore,
stands as a good example of the paradox of the spiritual benefits and dangers
of mind-altering drugs.
Marijuana need not interfere with your ordinary life. Most people who
use it find they can live in a thoroughly normal way. Like alcohol, however,
it can upset the normalcy of life for a minority and cause them serious
difficulties adjusting to the real world. Their "breakdown,"
however, is not necessarily bad. From a spiritual standpoint, the inability
to live a normal life can be a blessing. This is because the drug induces
the upheaval by interfering with the false spiritual investments that dominate
ordinary life.
How it does it do this so that it affects some but not all who take it?
In a pure form, the drug does not use up the mental and physical energy
you need to live normally. To that extent, it would not interfere with
normalcy. However, it may turn your will away from normal concerns so you
choose to put more energy into what normal society finds useless and dangerous.
Since major spiritual derailments arise from inordinate investments of
energy into the objects the world values (everything from acquiring fancy
automobiles to having a beautiful body), the drug turns you temporarily
or permanently away from "having" and "getting" these
things and toward sensuously enjoying the natural beauties that surround
you.
Young people are particularly vulnerable to both benefits and curses in
this effect. Because most of them have automatically absorbed definitions
of what is good and bad (or normal "values") from others, the
energy they use in focusing on and for acquiring these good things and avoiding
the bad reflects two defects. First, it is directed at goods and bads other
than those they themselves know as good and bad. And, second, it steals
spiritual energy that does not belong to these objects and displaces it
from the realm of spiritual development to the material world.
Normally, when you are aware of it you can deal with this misdirection
and theft in two ways. The first -- more common in the past -- is to keep
a portion of your spiritual energy free from the world of things and to
use it to grow in your knowledge of the immaterial standard of good. Thus,
gradually, you could take over the direction of your life and invest attention
and energy only of a kind and to a degree appropriate to the things. The
second -- more common today -- is to let yourself get drawn more and more
into the world of things. When you find things empty and oppressive to
the spirit, instead of abandoning them, you respond by going after them
all the harder under the illusion that your feelings of emptiness and oppression
mean only that you had not yet got enough of them.
A drug like marijuana could stimulate your spiritual growth if you were
either already reserving spiritual energy from the world or were willing
to pay more attention to the meaning of your unhappiness with things. It
could allow you a quicker liberation from the false normal investment of
energy in the world of things. However, you could turn even the quick release
from the world's illusions into something bad. You could use the drugs
as a means to escape from the need to grow spiritually and a crutch supporting
a life of mad acquisitions. It would help you break out of the illusions
of the world of things but only for brief periods and in a way that did
not demand spiritual development.
The chance that this might happen leads us to consider the most serious
problem with the use of mind-altering drugs. It is that the experience
consumes spiritual energy that you would not, and maybe could not use in
normal life. This energy bubbles up and looks superfluous because you cannot
use it for any normal purpose. It reserves itself naturally for spiritual
growth but drugs give it a way of dissipating itself without contributing
to spiritual growth. It takes this pure spiritual energy and invests it,
not in things, but in the surface of things and illusions you attach to
them. This appearance lacks the substance of things. Moreover, it has
a unique quality. It can give you the illusion that it is no-thing or the
genuinely pure spirit that the spiritual energy craves. Therefore, instead
of advancing your consciousness and conscience, it retards and undermines
them both.
Normally when you look at the face of your parent or your friend, you see
not just the organized form of a face but, recognizing it, you also see
the many meanings that are not visible to your senses but dwell in spirit.
You see, for example, also the goodness and care they lavished upon you,
your mutual love, and the general relationship you have. All these spiritual
meanings and more you developed through, and now hold within, your three
spiritual faculties, memory, reason, and will. You gain access to them
in the act of recognition. Thus, every specific normal perception you experience
-- such as the face of a parent -- encompasses the whole breadth and range
of your spiritual knowledge and not just what is in your eyes and the simple
form your mind uses to organize the data they gather. The state of this
wholeness is what we call "consciousness." Your consciousness
is as developed and as deep as the quantity, quality, and depth of what
you recognize in every act of perception. Of course, your consciousness
is always partly false and limited. You may not have seen in the past a
dark side to your parents or your friend. Thus, you see them only in love.
The drug experience shatters the crystal of consciousness. it rips apart
the fabric of consciousness where it is weakest. You see only the shape
of a face and, instead of holding a firm and faithful pattern of meanings
along with it, your mind can attach any other meaning. It may suddenly
reveal to you the falseness of your former consciousness and attach ugly
meanings to the face, ones that repel you with fear or hate. The benefit
in this is the chance it gives you to repair false, and reduce limitations
on, consciousness. However, it also spontaneously -- often prompted by
the panic of falling through its holes -- stitches together patches of fabric
without regard to their proper place. Therefore, it can lead you into greater
lies because it gets you to connect to the face meanings that have nothing
to do with these people and are utterly divorced from who they are and are
to you in actual life.
In any case, the drug draws your spirit to focus on the surface, the face,
and on the play of varying meanings your mind can attach to it. To that
extent, it drains the specific kind of energy that you need if you are to
do the work necessary for actual spiritual growth. Spiritual growth in
consciousness would require you, for example, to harmonize all your knowledge
of people and be at peace with your actual relationship to them. The complexity
of the meanings you now associate with them, however, may overwhelm you
and your spiritual capacity. But even worse, whatever special spiritual
capacity you have you invest in the amazing experience of the drug. The
surface play of masks, instead of growth in consciousness and conscience,
attracts your spirit. You stop seeking the higher good that unifies your
understanding and your life and you dwell in continuing fascination with
what you see under the influence of the drug.
If you are young, you are particularly at risk when you use the drug experience
to escape the banalities and falseness of normal life and to adventure into
free floating imagery long enough. This is because of two things. First,
you are unlikely as a youth to have developed the spiritual capacity and
methods you need if you are to deal with unifying the complexity of the
valid information that is flowing in at you. Even if you have a naturally
brilliant mind, you can capture only part of it and you have only the distorted
categories of rationalist theories modern psychology and science have provided
to rely on. Second, regular and heavy use of the drug actually causes spiritual
energy to increase. It develops your spiritual energy without developing
your spiritual abilities. Thus, you get into a bind of increasing spiritual
energy that has nowhere to go except into deeper escape or into the frustrating
and suffocating channels of scientific-psychological theories. Moreover,
you may actually impress others with "insights" you connect with
these theories and with the "depths" of your understanding of
them. You are likely to fall into pursuing more intense but empty worldly
activities when off the drugs along with further refinement of the highs
you experience when on the drug. Once this happens, you are on the road
to disaster. Only intervention from above and outside can save you. A
grace or a gift will come, but the chances that you will accept it are
not good.
The upshot of all this is that mind-altering drugs are very dangerous,
particularly to those who would otherwise have the best chance for spiritual
development. These include those who are most emotionally, sensuously,
and intellectually alert. None are in greater danger than those who are
awake in all three ways. Those who are primarily visually sensitive, minor
artists, for example, might use the drug to loosen the hold of old images
and to stimulate and enrich the ones they then portray in their artistic
medium. A film director might endlessly praise marijuana for stimulating
his "creative" powers. It gives him, he says, a gold mind of
visual images to re-produce on the screen. When the critics praise as a
masterpiece the film he thus creates, it is not because it is an example
of great art but only because of the novelty of the images to them. In
this way the drug panders to the ego of the director as well as to the hunger
for spiritual diversion in his audience. In both cases the drug not only
perpetuates spiritual derailment but also enhances it. The greater the
natural genius the individual and the more all three of their sensitivities
are in balance, the more the world can appropriate them for its purposes.
The flattery of the world for this kind of prostitution of the spirit is
one of the hardest temptations for anyone, especially the young and innocent,
to survive.
In an age where the young lack spiritual guides, it becomes more important
than ever to help them understand, not that drugs are bad and must be avoided,
but the paradox of why they can be valuable and dangerous and why they need
to avoid indulging in them lightly. Only views that balance the spiritual
benefits and dangers can help the young understand the seriousness of drug
use. They need to know why drugs can be humanly bad even though they feel
that they free them from a normal society they find suffocating to the mind
and frustrating to the soul.
5. The Logic of Existence.
We need to change the essential character or form of our individual and
social life if we are to "save" or preserve them. We can bring
about the needed changes however, only if we can learn to use our minds
or our spiritual powers in a new way. We have to overcome twentieth century
rationalism. It is hard to conceive of the required changes and even harder
to describe them. The words that articulate them must be coherent, but
the very faulty principles of reason we are calling into question establish
the standard of what is coherent. The flaws in reason infect the standard
when you are using reason to judge itself.
Modern logic is based on a fundamental logical rule. We decide what is
sound reasoning by that rule. Aristotle articulated it so beautifully over
two thousand years ago that he made it appear to be undeniable. In one
sense it is undeniable. However, through the way we have applied it and
used it in life, we have made of it a deadly error. It is worthwhile to
explore the natural ambivalence toward Aristotle's principle: we need both
to fully affirm and fully deny it.
Ironically, this rule rejects ambivalence. It proclaims that you cannot
logically both affirm and deny the same thing. To identify the human as
one kind of being (rational, for example) logically precludes the opposite
(non-rational). Were I required to define the human being, however, I would
choose to use the ancient notion and say that the "human being is the
coinciding of the highest number of opposites become conscious." To
assert this definition of the human is logically to reject the notion that
the human being can be other than the coinciding of opposites. Using it,
you seem to accept Aristotle's idea that the choice of one position rejects
its opposite. Nevertheless, this definition actually raises a serious challenge
to the principle for the principle of logic that stipulates that ascribing
opposites such as "white" and "non- white" to the same
thing is illogical. The issue should be obvious. By using this definition,
you are asserting about humans both a specific characteristic and its opposite.
Thus, if your affirm "male," you must affirm "female."
If you affirm "animal" then you must also affirm "non-animal."
Most interesting of all, if you affirm "two-legged," you must
make room for the possibility of the contrary, "four-legged" and
"three-legged." The classical metaphysics of Aristotle, however,
leads you instead to believe that if you identify the human as "two-legged,"
then "four-legged" would not be equally possible in the human
but instead would be what he calls a "privation" -- a "deprivation"
of human reality and an evil.
This point can illustrate an intriguing way of looking at the significance
of the riddle of the Sphinx that Oedipus confronted on the way to Memphis
(Sophocles): "What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs during
the day, and three legs at night?" Oedipus' answer saved him from
being consumed by the Sphinx and demonstrated his keen insight as a seeker
of knowledge. Once you hear the answer, you say, "Well, that's pretty
obvious; what's the big deal in solving that riddle?" Oedipus replied
that the solution to the riddle was man. The fact of the matter is that
the answer is obvious only after you hear it. Those who can give the correct
answer to riddles like this one before they are told it have minds not lost
in entrenched assumptions about their own nature. Moreover, for Oedipus
the answer is prophetic. He walked, as we all do when children upon four
legs -- on our two hands and our two feet we crawled. Then he, like us,
walked on two feet. Finally, he walks on three legs -- two feet and a cane.
Oedipus actually realizes the wisdom in being that formerly he held merely
in knowledge only when blinded at the end of the drama. He can "see"
better without his senses than he did when he had them.
All beings, including the human being, partake or are grounded in the infinite.
We, though finite, have an infinite core. All the essential characteristics
that you can identify are finite. Even the identifying the human as the
coinciding of the highest number of opposites refers to a definite number
and so is finite. All the terms in the definition are finite. They are
conditioned by what you already know. You have a preconceived definition
of the meaning of opposites and of the meaning of "coinciding."
Any identification is finite and imposes on being a finitude that fails
to encompass or to respect fully its infinity. This imposition of the finite
also inevitably interferes with freedom. You deny your own freedom when
you identify yourself by and live from definitions.
Again, the significance of Oedipus' answer is not that he possesses the
knowledge of more than one way to define himself but that he has attained
the spiritual freedom that would allow him to come up with novel and potentially
unlimited definitions. "No-thingness" is the ground of our essential
character. From it all is realized and defined. Ultimately, nothing you
can say of anything is absolutely true. All that you say is only relatively
true. The standard of truth that is absolute resides in the Nothingness.
Just all defined realities are relative, so, too, are all defined values.
When you decide to go to Paris, it is only because you first decided that
it was good to go to Paris. The good of going to Paris, however, is relative
to a certain being that you had already become. Absolute value you could
know only directly and in the living impulse to become.
The fundamental flaw in the kind of reasoning dominant today and rooted
in Aristotle's rule is that its core consists of two quite different elements
that you need to disentangle. You cannot, however, disentangle them neatly
because the one is essentially connected to the other. The first of these
two elements are "terms" or "names." His notion of
pure logic, moreover insists that we think logically when we eliminate contradictions
in terms. We can think only if we use words such as "rose,"
"man," etc. The quality of thought -- its usefulness in life
-- depends on the origin of the terms it uses. This origin of terms is
their "meaning." The meaning of any name ultimately rests in
life experience. Thus, you experience pain and identify the source (where
a new aspect of your relatedness has arisen that is different from before)
and give it the name "thorn." But the origin of the name "thorn"
is relative. First, its reality is based on your value impulse (the pain)
to find out what is there. The experience of pain is the product of a relationship
and so is relative. Moreover, its reality as thorn is dependent on the
flesh that got pierced. An essential aspect of the meaning of "thorn"
is its ability to pierce flesh. Consequently, your concepts of "rose"
and "self" emerge and develop only relatively -- the meaning of
the term "skin" is defined relative to "thorn" and "thorn"
is defined as relative to "skin" and both are defined because
of "pain."
If your reasoning using the term "thorn" and "skin"
is to be fruitful, you must be able to use it in life. The use itself is
relative. You draw a logical conclusion about "thorn" and "skin"
that you apply to life in reality.
The second element in how we use reason as a way of knowing today is the
assumption that the terms used relate to life in one specific way. Aristotle
combined a vision of pure logic (the first element we just dealt with that
asserts the principle that your logic is sound only when the terms you use
in thought have non-contradictory definitions) with an equally valid principle
of actual life. This second element is captured in the expressions: "What
is, is, and what is not, is not"; "A thing is what it is and is
not what it is not"; "A man is a man and is not a non-man";
"A thorn is a thorn and is not a non-thorn." The last two of
these statements are based on the erroneous assumption that the names and
their meanings that logic uses and are relative, are instead absolute characteristics
of actual things existing in the world.
The very act of defining "skin" and "thorn" establishes
a subject-object division that you cannot escape whenever you use the terms
in the carefully defined way that you must follow when you are being logical.
The external "thing" and the internal "thing" are created
out of an act of dividing the original living relationship into defined
meanings.
The value of using paradox or dialectal logic instead of sticking to the
principle of non-contradiction, is that by forcing you to admit the existence
of contradictions ("Man is non-man"; "Skin is non-skin")
in things once you establish and define them destroys the prison of relative
knowledge ordinary logic locks you up in. The dialectic method of philosophers
such as Socrates and the way Eastern and Western "religion" uses
paradox to overcome the subject/object division and bring you to the absolute.
They deliver you to the ground the relative "names" and terms
come from. This ground is the relatedness itself. They also take you back
to the experience of good/bad that had impelled you to the act of definition.
The dialectical method is not a temporary escape from the terms and named
things to an ecstatic state but an approach that transcends the things while
recognizing their legitimate place in reality. Dialectics accomplish this,
of course, only if you use them properly. You must not turn them into intellectual
games of research and destroy. They work only when you risk doubting your
own self and the notions you have about your own reality and your own values.
Then the work of destruction that is the hallmark of dialectics can have
a positive and creative outcome in revealing to you the source of names
and the impulse to name. The paradoxes of religion go even farther, however,
and can allow you to overcome the relativity of"ÇÉÑÖÜáàâäãåçéèêëíìîïñóòôöõúùûü°¢£§·¶ß®©´¨Æر<>¥µªºæø¿¡¬«» ÀÃÕp;-""''÷ÿצ¤<>ff·,"ÂÊÁËÈÍÎÏÌÓÔÒÚÛÙ"°¸"
your direct experiences of pain and fear that are there before you name
them but still are relative. Dialectics and paradox make possible this
creative result because through them you can discover the ground of your
being and all the being that is knowable only from within, only in what
we have called spirit. It is only when dialectics for you is the practice
of death (Socrates definition of philosophy) or religious paradox is for
you the acceptance of absolute death or the death of everything (Christ's
definition of "the Way") that they lead you to spirit.
"Pure" reason in Aristotle's sense cannot be pure truly because
of two things. First, reason uses names that are rooted, however indirectly
and abstractly, in life. No name is "a prior" to life although
names such as "one" and "two" are prior to the objects
known and to the perceptions of them in the senses. Second, the name given
is always inspired by a practical motive in the act of naming. A living
value always prompts the act of naming. Reason, as a force that can move
by itself and for itself alone, does not exist. Any claim to pure reason
deserves an absolute critique.
By the same token, practical reason can never be wholly practical. It
is always affected by the structures of definition that are peculiar to
language and thought in logic. Science and technology can never serve practical
life purely. The illusion that science can be made a pure tool of technology
and industry is an illusion. It is a dangerous illusion because those scientists
who adopt it and those who seek to use them become unaware of the spiritual
purposes hidden in "purely practical" pursuits. Once hidden,
the spiritual purposes escape judgment. They may be beneficent or malevolent
spiritually even though they seem only good practically. Devotion to building
a better car can look good to the extent that it serves that purpose. However,
the hidden purpose of the spirit that may be seeking to conceal itself
from condemnation by hiding itself in "good works" is malevolent.
Then the outcome of the "good" activity will invariably be destructive.
We need a new rationalism. It would be one where the mind continues in
its scientific activity to look downward through the old logic that accepts
names and so deals with relative reality and value but recognizes its limits
in all humility and bows down before the superior mind that looks upward
through the logic of dialectics and paradox. It would allow itself to be
ruled by the mind that confronts the absolute death of all and everything
and so is liberated to the higher reaches of the spirit to touch the face
of absolute reality and absolute value.
6. Spiritual Movements
All human movement originates in spirit. Every movement of life is inspired.
We are spiritual creatures. It is our destiny to live by spirit. This
is why great movements always impress us. They are filled with spirit.
Filled with the spirit, they reveal human destiny, our destiny, to us.
They inspire us. Great movements are, of course, not necessarily good
movements. The most inspired movements in the world during the twentieth
century have been malevolent and destructive. These movements -- the German
Nazis, the Italian Fascists, and the Russian "Communists" -- burn
themselves out in the long run, but in the short term, they can be devastating.
Movements like them may eventually end human life on earth.
The remaining world-scale social movements today, except for some still-localized,
hopelessly impossible anti-modern "fundamentalist" movements,
are less inspired. They, therefore, may be less immediately dangerous but
also spiritually less hopeful. Three of them, however, are more significant
either because of the worldwide breadth of their impact or because of the
strength of their inspiration: the movement to social integration represented
by Europe, the movement of progress represented by Japan and China, and
the "green" or ecological movement. It is not, however, clear
whether any of these are leading the way to the birth of a new world and
a new world order.
What we need to preserve, let alone advance, human life on earth is a lift
and shift in spirit. These three movements instill hope for the future
because they manifest spirit. Whether they will give birth to the new way
we need, however, depends not just on the quantity of spiritual investment
in life but its quality. While they have positive energy, neither the movement
in Europe nor the energy of Japan and China represent a new spirit. Japan
and China represent not the wave of the future but the last gasp of the
past. The constitute the Eastern equivalent of the enterprising energy
that transformed the nineteenth century West. Because it arrived later
and more abruptly in the Far East, the contrast with the exhausted West
gave the impression that it was something new. Moreover, both the great
energy as well as the great success of Japan and China were possible only
because even at this late date they could tap into an ancient heritage.
Generation after generation back into the ancient past had built a huge
warehouse of spiritual energy. By investing it in material progress, Japan
and China temporarily could boost their growth until they use it up. China
and Japan only look different from the nineteenth century West because the
ancient heritage they are using up was different from the West's and because
the Western economic form they are adopting involves a later-developed technology
than the nineteenth century industrial machine that ruled the West.
The movement to unify Europe, moreover, is not so different from the federal
and confederal movements that established the United States and, for a time,
the Soviet Union. It's inspiration is internal economic needs and external
competition. It suffers from obstacles of nationalism and "cultural"
differences that have not yet wholly disappeared. Neither Europe nor Japan
represent a reformation of the essential character of established life.
They do stand for changes but ones that involve only an modification of
the basic form already in place. They are not ultimately creative because
they are rooted in things rather than in the source of true creativity,
the Nothingness.
The ecological movement, however, is different. It presents itself as
a challenge to the essential character of established life. It warns us
explicitly that individuals and societies cannot continue to live as they
have. They can no longer consume blindly without regard for the impact
on the rest of the earth. Their industries can no longer follow the profit
motive but must accept a standard that serves the well-being of the earth.
The changes this movement aspires to are indeed radical and its ideals
are indeed inspirational -- nothing less than saving life on earth. Nevertheless,
unless the nature of the movement changes, it is doomed to fall short of
the salvation it aspires to deliver.
The case of the ecological movement is important because it can illustrate
how fundamental is the spiritual disease the modern world suffers from.
It is not so much an affliction represented by the goals of the movement.
That we need what it aspires to, as we need what Japan and Europe aspire
to, is obvious to almost everyone today. Some who participate in this movement
are not motivated by their positive attraction to the beauty of an earth
less spoiled than it is. Hardly anyone, however, is not motivated by the
threat of an earth damaged and destroyed. The flaws in the ecological movement
that make it an affliction of the spirit rest in how it perpetuates the
errors in the current way we exercise our spiritual powers. The problem
is in how it uses these powers and not only in the goal it directs them
towards. Since the seat of our spiritual powers is the mind, the flaws that
are embedded in them affect all our reasoning, all our sensing, and all
our feeling. Once your mind defines the good in terms of things, then what
you think about as real and good, what you see, and what you feel will all
be spiritual derailments that place the absolute Nothingness of pure spirit
into the somethings your mind creates. Instead you need first to know the
Good as rooted in Nothingness and, second, to explore it by taking the concepts
of good and real things you live by dialectically and paradoxically to that
Nothingness. Our spiritual powers make us different from other animals
because of our sense of things. Unlike them, we seek not only to gather
enough food to satisfy our hunger. Instead, once we are filled, we seek
more for tomorrow. This way of seeing our good in the things rather than
in the experience of satisfaction can make us endlessly greedy. (Niebuhr)
You see food, you long for it, you work for it even though you are so overweight
you can hardly move.
What follows is not a condemnation of the ecological movement but a loving
attempt to correct its spiritual failures. This movement, of all that are
now visible and operating, appears to hold out the highest hope of the
spiritual transformation that will alter our essential character in ways
that are capable of achieving the goals we all recognize we need to reach
today.
While all movements have a spiritual basis, one of the great values of
the ecological movement is that it is becoming self-conscious of its spiritual
basis and, therefore, may be ready to explore it. It is not surprising
that one of the most well-known of ecologists who are investigating the
realm of spirit in the movement is a member of a religious order. Father
Thomas Berry is one of the most eloquent and famous of those who have captured
the spiritual meaning of the ecological movement. Because in such movements
there are always a great variety of participants and backers with hugely
different motives and perspectives and because it is very hard and unfair
to characterize and criticize in the same way even all with similar motives
and perspectives, I will focus on him.
While it is not surprising that a monk and a priest should have spiritual
concerns, it is surprising that Berry puts himself in opposition to the
very religious tradition that gave him birth. He not only criticizes effectively
the Church's role in contributing to, rather than fighting, the devastation
of the earth, but also appears to reject the essential religious practice
of the Judaic-Christians that focuses on attachment to a transcendent God
(Berry). In place of a "father" or parental God, moreover, Berry
would return to what the Church has identified as pagan, to the goddess
Gaia and to the ways of inspiration of the Native American Indians. There
is something worthy for a Church to gain by returning to refresh its insight
not only to its own historical roots but to the alternative forms that accompany
it and precede it historically. Moreover, the inspiration of the concrete
human being that is need today to build the essentially new character we
need today can come from anywhere. Reaching back to the ancient inspiration
for today's obsolete character is an invalu able technique for acquiring
the new. However, what matters most is not that you use the past but how
you use it.
A more serious issue is Berry's tendency to invest spirit in things. Of
course, it always sounds better, even to the outworn contemporary essential
character, to appeal to the more-encompassing rather than to the narrower.
On the physical level, it usually sounds more moral to seek money for your
family instead of for yourself. A program of activism that serves the earth
and even the cosmos, beyond all nations, always looks most noble. On the
social level, for you to strive to get basic survival food for all looks
more moral than advocating starvation for many and luxury for a few. Moreover,
it is a mark of a higher spiritual perspective to encompass and bring peace
and harmony to the largest number of different things. At any rate, the
notion that the larger area the standard of good serves the better it is
is embedded in our established essential character. This is why ecology's
claim that we must become "geocentric" rather than "anthropocentric"
resonates with us. The earth-centered ethic extends the older moral idea
that preferred the "anthropocentric" to the "egocentric."
Whatever the specific formulation, however, all these claims want you to
invest spirit in some "things." Whether the thing is a great thing
or a small thing is less significant than the fact that it is a thing.
The whole always feels closer to the One than any part or parts when the
context of your focus is the realm of things. However, the all or the single
part of the all can be equally close to or distant from the One in spiritual
terms. The Biblical "You shall not place alien gods before me"
is violated not only when you place your ego above the One but also when
you place the cosmos or the earth above the One. In fact, deifying the
larger or the whole is more deceptive a sin because it is harder to see
the betrayal of the One when you are sacrificing your egotistical or "anthropocentric"
good for the good of all. In the end, this kind of Pan-theism is the only
serious threat to the One of Nothingness.
Without the transcendent One, moreover, all that ecology seeks to overcome
returns to haunt it. First, where ecology rejects "anthropocentrism,"
it ends up asserting an anthropocentrism in its very rejection of it. Not
being aware of this, its anthropocentrism is more dangerous. Every vision
of the cosmos or the earth or even a "dream of the earth itself"
(Berry), is a human viewpoint. Because it is the assertion of a human being,
"geo-centrism" is only another, more concealed, form of anthropocentrism.
The only way that any viewpoint can be other than anthropocentric is if
it shows how to connect with a realm that transcends the person. However,
every verbal and intellectual formulation is of human manufacture. Only
by developing powers of gaining access to absolute Nothingness can you find
a way out of anthropocentrism. When you defend these so that you make contact
with the No-thing, then every expression, even an "egocentric"
one that affirms the human being as the center of the universe, over comes
anthropocentrism.
Ecology's problem is the same as the one certain expressions of feminism
ran into a few years ago. This flaw endangered feminism and contributed
to its decline. Most justly, this feminism first attacked male domination
as "patriarchy" or "patrism" and held that a feminist
perspective was a necessary corrective. Then it decided that you could
not be a true feminist if you were a man so that it turned separatist.
However, since the separate feminist group could not exist except by separating,
that is, by defining itself on the basis of being different from the masculine,
it itself was tainted by the masculine. Having nowhere else to go for inspiration,
it deflated spiritually. Its survival and recurrence have depended on its
ability to discover a transcendent nothing beyond the somethings of male
an female that any human being could attain, whether male or female. The
surviving and prospering elements of the feminist movement have found at
least some shreds of such a transcended perspective.
The ecology movement is implicated in a still more severe and constricting
kind of blind anthropocentrism as well. This anthropocentrism reflects
itself both in the overall attitude of the mind and in the specific ego
of the individual ecologist. Because the "geocentric" position
is devised and defined by human minds, it is anthropocentric. Moreover,
because it is personal and admitted by individuals, it becomes egocentric.
A "traditional male" may subordinate his interests to those of
his family and appear to himself and others to have overcome egoism when
in truth he has made his family part of his identity and so, in serving
it, he serves his ego. His ego is invested in being "a good provider."
What may look like self-sacrifice is, in fact, selfishness of the worst
and most insidious kind. You can never be certain that any spirited expression
of good, even the commitment to the good of the "family," is not
egocentric without using a standard from above to assess it.
But the case of ecology is special. That is because of its goal of preservation.
It seeks to preserve or save the earth. Its greatest fear is that if we
keep living as we have, we will destroy the earth. The goal of the movement
is to save the world. This is so even if not all of those involved in it
openly take on the mantel of "saviors" of the world or, more modestly,
of "saviors" of "endangered species." Saving life looks
like a thoroughly noble goal. However, it can be motivated by a negative
spiritualization, by an investment and loss of spirit in "things."
The positive forms of spiritual derailment happen when you take the inspiration
that leads you to create things and make yourself see these things as if
they were ultimate goods. The negative form of spiritual derailment is
when you fear losing them. However, both the negative and positive spiritual
derailments in the realm of "external" things are only reflections
of a prior and more devastating pair of derailments in the realm of "internal"
things.
The fundamental positive derailment is when you want to be a thing -- a
man, a millionaire, a good person, a biologist. The fundamental negative
derailment is when you work to avoid the loss of the thing you have become
-- that you have lost your spirit to. This is the malignant form of the
fear of death. A displaced fear of death can be the basis of your desire
to preserve the world of external things including the whole earth itself.
All things die, including yourself as a thing. The healthy wish to live
is rooted in absolute spirit not in the thing. When it gets invested in
the survival of self as thing or other as thing, it becomes a disease and
is itself death dealing.
The essence of the Christian message is embedded in Christ's words that
it is in the attempt to preserve thing-life that death comes while it is
in accepting the death of ourselves as things that life comes. Life comes
to the person who is grounded in the timeless Nothingness of pure spirit.
The Gaia of ecologists like Berry constitutes a regressive spirituality.
It deifies the false goddess, the demon, earth. Likewise, it deifies the
demon-god Pan (the All). The ecological movement needs to regain what it
has abandoned, the Uncreated message-sender who stands above the angelic
messengers like Gaia and Pan and whose presence alone assures we will not
demonize them.
The One is found in the realm of pure Spirit. Movements themselves have
an unfortunate tendency to pretend that they embody the One. Subsequently,
humble acolytes submit themselves to the deified movement. However, in
the very humility of affirming their subordination to it, become the most
malevolent of creatures. In this they are not representatives of the new
essential human character needed for our survival, but the last and most
deceived and deceiving representatives of the old order. As such, they
are no real threat to the dominant political, economic, and individual forces
that are enemies to the earth's survival.
7. Spiritual Alternatives
In the realm of spirit, we inhabit three realms and may reach a fourth.
There are three dimensions to the natural life of the spirit. They are
the earth (the elemental), the animal (the animate), and the world (the
social). Our ancient ancestors knew of at least two of the spiritual dimensions
that are independent from the world and our social role and ego: the earth
spirit and the animal spirit. Besides these three natural spiritual dimensions,
there is a fourth spiritual dimension that is not natural and belongs to
us alone on earth. This is the dimension of pure spirit. It was largely
unknown in our earliest ancestors that we participated in this spirit as
well. They thought of it usually as utterly beyond us just as it was beyond
the earth and any other animal. Some of them referred to it as wholly above
and beyond us--the Great Spirit.
The earth spirit is elemental. It is not the realm of the world. The
"world" refers to the social realm where spirit has been invested
in the products of human creation. The world is the realm of the fleshy
spirit or ego. The world and the flesh are both fallen realms because they
are natural and animal spirit that has been mixed with matter or spirit
that we have named and categorized. The world is the realm of objects of
human perception and rational thought. They are "things." The
spirit they draw out of us is also a thing. The more we involve ourselves
with things of the world, the more we become worldly, the more we invest
spirit in them and so are fallen ourselves.
The earth spirit is the realm of the four elements. These elemental spiritual
realms are earth, water, wind, & fire. We each participate in all four
of them, but one or two are usually stronger in different of us. Water
nymphs, earth elves, fire sprites are variations of forces that affect us
on this level. Each of us is like these elements. Their influence is independent
of the world and its ego.
More important in distinguishing among us and maintaining our independence
from social forms and roles, however, is our animal spirit. Just as there
are more animals than elements, so too are there vastly more animal spirits
possible for us. They therefore can be a more precise indicator of our
special nature and character. Each of us "has" a principle animal
spirit. Few of us know this and fewer still, know which animal it is.
In the more sophisticated of our ancestral tribes, each member had a ritual
name associated with a particular animal spirit. Sometimes an elder gave
you a name; other times you discovered it for yourself as the outcome of
a quest. This animal spirit name was sacred and was never revealed to anyone
who might become an enemy. Sometimes your whole extended family knew your
name, but often you gave it only to select friends or blood brothers, and
sometimes you kept it entirely to yourself.
This secrecy was necessary because others could gain great power over you
if they knew your animal spirit name. It represented what you were at a
deep level. Even today, we can recognize how animal names attributed to
certain people evoke special characteristics such as the names "Little
Beaver," "Deer Woman," "Big Elk." The spirit name
was not just a label or even a family identification but represented essential
aspects of your character or soul. Because it represented so much of your
true nature, enemies bent on manipulating you could gain much power over
you by knowing it. They could control you "magically" and through
a knowledge that went beyond the crudenesses and rational categories of
modern psychology.
Your animal spirit inhabited you in this life. It was that part of your
spirit you invested in and was created by your existence on the earth as
an animal. It was your "anima" or "animus." This Latin
term is the origin of the English word "animal." In the original
Latin, it meant "soul." It is your earthly self or soul. It is
not your highest spirit nor the spirit connected with the "Great Spirit"
or "Holy Spirit." The animal spirit is, therefore, vulnerable
to the fallen spirit of this world and to the ego you developed from it.
While naturally independent, the elk soul or beaver soul can be marshalled
by the forces of society and diverted from its natural animal operations.
In Christian terms, left unprotected it is vulnerable to the devil, demons,
or fallen angels.
All aspects of the animal spirit are vulnerable to corruption. The world,
the flesh (worldly ego), and the devil can capture and marshall in their
own service the very best attributes of your animal spirit. One of the
nobler animal spirits is the eagle. However, the soaring eagle's finest
qualities its sharp vision and the height it soars at the inferior forces
can use. For example, the world can take sharp vision and use it to design
bombs or to adapt it to pick out categories in other people as defined by
psychological science. The ego can adopt the height as a reason for pride
and a sense of superiority to others. Once both of these developments happen,
the devil can lead the eagle into malevolent ends. These corruptions of
the good qualities of the animal spirit are even worse than using the inferior
qualities for bad purposes. The eagle spirit's sharp vision, for example,
is only far sighted; up close, it cannot see. This lack of seeing is a
weakness but one that is more obvious than the corruption of the finer qualities.
Similarly, the beaver spirit's fine quality of being a hard worker is worse
when it gets directed into the world and dedicated to carefully constructing
ovens designed for the extermination of a human racial or ethnic group while
the beaver's rapacious destruction of timberland and the eagle's predatory
nature are easier to spot as they grow stronger and stronger in you.
It is not a bad thing to know your animal spirit nor to call yourself by
a sacred animal name. All kinds of self-knowledge are ultimately good.
It is valuable to know as many dimensions of yourself as possible. Kept
innocent, your animal spirit can protect you from the corruption of the
world. It is, however, bad to place the well-being of your whole soul,
unprotected, into the hands of your animal spirit. This would allow not
only the descent of your animal spirit into the world you live in but also
the capture of your spirit by the world.
This displacement of spirit into the ego that belongs to the world is less
a danger for early peoples than it is for moderns who romanticize the ancients
and their "religious beliefs." Ancient peoples were devoted to
keeping their animal spirit pure from the world. They had elaborate methods
and ceremonies of purifying, and they practiced them regularly. They also
balanced the attention they paid to their animal spirit with the knowledge
that there is a universal or great spirit above it. They were also usually
aware that the animal spirt could change as you passed from one incarnation
of it into another. It could automatically shift, for example, from peacock
to pig. This re-incarnation of the spirit animal was produced by the world
and the fleshy ego that was created by the world. Thus, a person performing
the role of "lawyer" could practice law first from the motive
of peacock pride and later, disillusioned, shift automatically into doing
it from the motive of pig money-greed. If your sacred teachings, however,
gave you knowledge of the possibility of re- incarnation, it also by that
knowledge informed you that you are something higher than any spirit animal.
There is a deeper you that passes through any changing incarnations.
The "religions" of the pure spirit are higher. Buddhism and
Judaic Christianity, for example, reveal the presence not only of an earthly
and an animal spirit within but also of a pure spirit. The Great Spirit
of the ancients is the Holy Spirit of Christianity and the Holy Spirit gives
birth, when the time is ripe in you, of the manifestation of this pure spirit
within you. The Christ is born of the virginal and untouched aspects of
the soul. This birth redeems and saves the earth and animal spirits from
their loss and corruption in the world.
8. Fate and Freedom
Our essential character as human beings, which is a reflection of the specific
kind of relatedness our existence consists of, has two dimensions. One
dimension is fate. The other is destiny.
We are fated as human beings to live in the light of a spiritual relationship
to existence. While our spiritual powers may be more or less developed,
we are fated to exercise -- we cannot avoid using -- them in the process
of living. The most basic of these powers is "the word" or names.
To be human, we have and must exercise the spiritual power of naming things.
Through names we can perceive in them what we cannot see by our senses
alone. Moreover, part of what we know of things through names is good and
bad in our relationship to them. The goods and bads that we cannot see
by means of either our senses or our feelings will still attract us to them.
The act of naming, which is itself an investment of spirit, is what actually
constitutes things as things for us. Thus, the whole world of things, including
ourselves as things, is a spiritually created world. It exists on a second-level
of actuality built on the primary. We should rightly regard knowledge of
it, however intricate and complex, as second-level knowledge. All who establish
names and teach them to others are creators and parents. They name and
teach others from their close or distant, developed or undeveloped, contact
with the ultimate spirit, the ultimate parent.
Such is our inescapable fate as human beings.
However, we have as part of our essential character, in addition to a fate
we cannot escape if we are to remain human, a destiny as well. That destiny
is freedom. Freedom is not our fate. It is not inevitable or necessary.
We are not born free. Nevertheless, freedom is the destination we are born
with. There is, however, no guarantee that you will ever achieve this destination.
You may never fulfill your human destiny. Even if you fail to fulfill
it, however, it always remains your destiny. You will always long for it,
and you will always suffer when it is absent. The great paradox of the
modern world consists in how much we define our era as the era of individual
freedom while we actually experience suffering the greatest lack of freedom.
Today, you may even think yourself to be free while you feel you are not.
One of the many reasons you may fail to achieve your destiny is that you
lack an adequate concept of freedom. The name "freedom" given
us from today's culture is not adequate. When you apply this name to your
longing, it will not capture its reality. You give an aspect of your life
spiritual meaning when you name it. It takes on a spiritual aspect by virtue
of your exercise of your spiritual power to name. It gains the state of
"reality" (or "thingness") and its spiritual character
when you name it. However, you determine the quality of its spiritual aspect
by the quality of the name you give it. The quality of the name will depend
on the development, not merely the exercise of, your spiritual power. For
example, there are at least three quite different kinds of names. One has
a specific and clear definition, the second has many and even contrary definitions,
and the third cannot be defined precisely. A "ruler" has a specific
and clear definition, twelve inches, as does a stop sign that signals "cease
motion." But "death" can have contradictory meanings. It
can be defined as "the end of life" but also as "the beginning
of life." Similarly, many of us use the name "love" in ways
that are meaningful even if we cannot fully define it.
You can conceive of the name "freedom" in terms of any of the
three kinds of meaning. If "freedom" means to you something clear
and specific such as "doing what you want," then it inspires you
to pursue doing what you want. However, if you persist long enough in this
pursuit, you will end not in freedom but in slavery. Your spiritual development
would entail your confronting the contradicting proposition that "freedom
is not doing what you want." Finally, your spiritual powers would
begin to reach their highest development when you cannot find other words
adequate to define "freedom" while the word itself and how you
apply it is rich in meaning to you.
To achieve our destiny, we need to develop our spiritual powers in the
fashion represented by these three kinds of meanings for the name "freedom:"
a defined thing, a confusions of contradictions, and an undefinable. How
things themselves look to us changes as the quality of our names grows.
Our relationship to these things (the second-level relationship in life)
also grows and improves as we develop.
What is known as the philosophy of "realism" is a derailment
of the spirit. It openly proclaims that things ("res" from the
Latin "things") are ultimately actual and that the best way of
living is being guided by them. Realism is the investment of spirit in
the things we have created by naming them. But more than that, realism
is the view that we do not create things by naming them but they are given
to us as things by our senses. This is patently an illusion.
I have already explored how the derailment of the spirit leads directly
to human suffering in the sense that nothing acquired can fulfill the hunger
so that in acquiring it, you either fall into despair of things or into
addiction to them. It is not, however, just the person, the subject, who
suffers under this derailment but also the things, the objects, themselves.
We generate a common problem once we act in the realm of things because
we then need to separate means and ends. The actual end is always spiritual
or transcendent of things. Now, however, one thing becomes the end -- the
one you have invested your spirit in -- and others become the means. In
its purest version, a means is something you care about not at all for itself
but only for what of your goal it will gain for you. Your mis-understood
goal can be almost purely spiritual and yet your pursuit of it can produce
horrible material destruction. Money, although it sounds like the most
"material" of goals, is, in fact, the most spiritual. That is
to say there is less to be gained by the money itself than nearly any other
thing we aspire to. You long for money because it is power. It is the
power to gain any "thing" your heart desires. As such, it is
the highest and most insidious material derailment of spirit. It loses itself
not in one thing but in all things, not in any specific thing or list of
things but in things not yet even conceived of. Money is not evil, but
your investment of spirit in it is.
Where money is the ruling value and goal, everything else you do becomes
a means to gaining it. That is why both the struggle to acquire money and
its use constitute an enslavement. You do things for money that you would
never do, things you hate to do. Thus, you know you are enslaved. However,
once you acquire the money, then you do things with it that feel pleasurable.
Pleasure gives you the illusion that you are free. However, the only reason
you long to do these things -- take vacations, have fun -- is to kill the
pain of the consciousness and residue of suffering that your enslavement
to money causes you. To that extent, you are a slave to the things you
hate to do not just when you are doing them but also when you enjoy escaping
from them. They are your ruler both in the doing and the avoidance.
The lowest level of spiritual development reflected in the things themselves
is "utility." You build a house so that you can have a place
to live. It is not, of course, the building process itself that inspires
you. Your building activity is merely a means to the goal you have invested
your energy and excitement, your "libido," in. It should be easy
to see how the quality of your work and of your actual house will always
be flawed to the extent that spirit is not invested in the things you do
-- the activity itself -- but only in the product.
As you invest spirit in more and more purely spiritual things, both the
quality of your experience and the quality of the things improves. If your
motive is "beauty," for example, rather than "beautiful things"
(Plato's distinction, Republic, p. 739), then the things you do serving
beauty become infused with your inspiration and your activity is inspired.
At the highest level of spiritual development, you gain names that take
on a quality of pure spirit. You invest in "the good itself" as
opposed to any "good things." Then, whenever you are acting it
is in the name of this spiritual standard. This achievement is the essence
of freedom: to be involved in the created world of things but to always
be motivated by the No-thing. This makes your life constantly intense and
exciting whatever thing you are doing and the things you accomplish themselves
gain quality. You overcome the separation of things into means and ends.
Things may remain as means to other things, but your motive is not the
other thing but utterly above things in the good itself. This is the attainment
of freedom and the fulfillment of human destiny.
Human existence is inevitably entwined in two realms, the realm of pure
spirit (the uncreated, the thingless, the No-thing), on the one hand, and
things (the investment of spirit through names, the created realm), on the
other. That is our fate. Our destiny is to develop our spiritual powers
so that we remain fully connected to both realms. This means, not that
you depart from "this world" of things, but that you live in it
fully and richly. You care for it and are taken care of by it, but your
ultimate motive is the purely spiritual. This destiny is not a stopping
place but instead a way of living. Our destiny lies in the midst of existence.
When you get "caught up" in the derailed investment and loss
of spirit in a thing, you suffer either in feeling bad or in the fact that
your activities are bearing poor fruit, you allow the suffering to drive
you to disillusionment with the investment in things, and, finally, you
permit it to lead you back to the ground in Nothingness. You can accomplish
this at least partially through a spiritual development that allows you
to acquire names whose meanings are contradictory and inexpressible. The
practice of living the connection is properly called "religion,"
which literally means "linking back." The names we develop in
our minds (the realm of spirit and spiritual development) are properly called
"symbols," which is the language of myth just as myth is the essential
method of thinking religion must use.
The major contemporary misconception of freedom is that freedom is the
ability or power to acquire things without external limit -- to "appropriate"
or make our "own" whatever we will. The error in this is double.
First, your spiritual longing can never be fulfilled by the external acquiring
of anything or anybody. You can never find the value or good you aspire
to in created things. Second, you cannot make "things" your own
as long as they remain things. Freedom cannot be a characteristic of what
we have but only of how we live. As a quality of life, freedom is the
life of the spirit led in the midst of things. It recognizes the actual
essence of things as creations of "spirit" in the form of names.
It stays with the spirit and returns to it.
9. The Absolute Other
To submit to the relative other (other things, other people, other that
is relative to yourself) is to be slave. To submit to the Absolute Other
(No-thing, pure spirit, the One, the Self) is to be free. Freedom is not
the refusal to submit the created self (ego, subject, or the self as thing)
to the uncreated. Freedom is the refusal to submit to other creatures (other
things and other people) combined with willingness to submit the created
self to the Creator.
The Absolute Other is not truly other. Only the relative other is other.
The only genuine other is the one the division into "things"
creates as other. This creation requires as its essence the division of
all things from yourself as a thing. The outcome is the seemingly adamantine
separation between subject and object and between the subjective and the
objective. The Absolute Other is the One that is beyond distinction. Since
all that is originates in the One, the Absolute Other, when you return to
it, you are through it at one with yourself and all "others."
Being at odds with yourself or "others" is the symptom and proof
that you have not found the One. It is also the goad that negatively inspires
you to search further.
When you do find it, you still see "others" as other but only
relatively not absolutely so. You recognize that the greatest crime is
to regard others not as other, not even as enemies, but to regard them as
absolutely other for that is a crime not only against them but against the
One that they and you participate in.
Since Sartre regarded God or the One as absolute Being and supreme Object,
he found himself both in the play "No Exit" and in Saint Genet
caught up in insoluble contradiction. His famous notion that Hell is other
people leads to the necessary conclusion that God is Hell since, as Being
rather than Nothingness, God is the ultimate Other. In Saint Genet, he
poses the ethical dilemma of saintly sacrifice in this way: what ascetics
sacrifice they must sacrifice happily and without stress otherwise they
are not choosing God above all things. On the other hand, what they sacrifice
must be the truly good, the best of the fruits of the earth, to be pleasing
to God. If true goods are sacrificed (those that have the fullness of Being),
then the servants cannot but suffer severely and will be honored for the
suffering; if they suffer severely, it means they have not given themselves
wholly to God but are clinging to whatever they sacrificed.
Sacrifice for Sartre has an objective side and a subjective side. Subjectively,
it must involve suffering on the part of those who make the sacrifice; otherwise
it is not truly a sacrifice. Objectively, it must be pleasing to God.
In the sacrifice, three "objects" participate: the object sacrificed,
the subject as objective ego, and the supreme Object or God. As long as
any one of these are objects, all of them must also be. You can pretend
to set yourself up as subject above the estranged objects, but in the end
you are object to their subjectivity. You become an object to the fruits
of your labor if they are objects to you; you become an object to God if
God is an Object or Being to you. Since the ground of all reality is relational,
a relation to any object means the reality of both sides is objective.
The objects may be very different and in any way save that all will be objects
essentially, and the more extensive the relationship, the more objectified
all will be.
Sartre does not consider that genuine saintliness transcends objective
relationships whether they are called "subjective" or not. Saints
overcome all objects and subjects because they overcome all Being in Nothingness.
The thing sacrificed is literally "made sacred" by your returning,
and returning it, to your mutual ground in Nothingness. The paradox is
resolved because sanctity reveals that true good is Nothing. It finds the
true good behind visible "things" and so renders "them"
valueless so that the saint does not care for them. On the other hand,
by finding the ground of Nothingness that inspires and brings them into
reality, it "saves" them and elevates them to become most precious.
Absolute Nothingness empties all things of their illusory value and fills
them with itself. The reconciling "third term" in our "dialectic"
of things as valuable and valueless at the same time is Nothingness. As
things, they have relative value so that in terms of the Absolute they are
valueless. However, when you realize that things are not things and have
Nothing behind them, they gain genuine value in the light of the spirit.
All this is why ultimately liberty, equality, and democracy are possible
only on a spiritual basis and, moreover, only to the extent that the spirit
is grounded in Absolute Nothingness.
The principle and practice of "free speech" in democratic societies
and voting and other political liberties that require dialogue are only
viable so long as the dialectic involved in the exchange of views brings
every position to Nothing and only through Nothing can the sides in dispute
be reconciled without "losing."
The eclipse of this Nothing or gradual departure from it dooms human society
to either of two undemocratic fates: chaos or the tyranny of "law
and order." Where liberty encourages individuals to takes sides, economic,
political, and ethical conflict will increase and move society closer and
closer to the chaos of paralysis and breakdown. Without genuine reconciliation
of opposites, the best that can be developed to counter these is "enforced
peace." "Enforced peace" is, of course, not peace at all
but rather the temporary attempt to bury the forces of conflict. In the
end, this will not work, and eventually they must burst out to produce an
even worse chaos.
"Liberty" itself cannot exist among persons who are "things."
Each separate thing must struggle for survival against others and either
defeat them, be defeated by them, or continue to play the game of conflict.
In constant tension, each lies in wait for strength adequate to defeat
the opponent.
"Equality" is the severest victim of spiritual decline. It is
an entire absurdity without the spirit of Nothingness. As things, humans
are utterly unequal. The only equality that things can have is sameness.
It is only as spiritual creatures that humans are superior to other creatures,
and it is only as spiritual creatures that humans are absolutely equal.
Where human spirit invests itself in the derailments of things (self things
and others), there inequality must reign.
The clearest objective inequality is between children and adults. Adults
are superior, but if the spirit of children in a society is closer to realization
of Nothingness, then to that extent those children are superior to their
parents. Of course, this is almost never the case since closeness to Nothingness
means the closeness of Being or thing to Nothingness. Children may be very
close to Nothingness but not as children or not as being something. For
example, a child wants a candy bar; the candy bar is a thing or being to
the child and the child (as subject) is a thing or being to the candy bar.
In this relationship the child is very distant from Nothingness and is
enormously derailed spiritually into the things "candy bar" and
"sweet taste." Nevertheless, adults who are full of being somebody
and something can view children as their salvation because in their negation
of being, the absence of development of it in them, children will represent
Nothingness to the adults although, all-too- often, adults will interpret
their possessive reaction to children as "love" and, unfortunately,
will be "inspired" to help the child "grow in being"
to become more and more like themselves.
Children who lack being cannot be free in the true sense and cannot be
equal in the social sense. Adults who are absorbed in being can be superior
in the social sense but not free in the true sense. Both are equal in their
lack of spiritual development and equally unfree--although in different
ways. Both can be equal as involved in the struggle to develop--the children,
from the Nothingness to Being and the adults, from being back to Nothingness.
The equality of adults among themselves is also rooted in their spiritual
striving in the discourse of social life to grow by means of each other
from their diverse being back to Nothingness. This is the only valid basis
for a democratic society.
10. Knowledge and the Realm of Spirit
Knowledge entails two dimensions of relationship and each dimension has
two aspects. The two dimensions are the "organic" (or being)
and the conceptual. The two aspects of relationship in each of these two
dimensions are connection and disconnection. This double dualism holds
in all relationships in the world including those between people.
Each individual concrete being as well as all classes of beings exist and
are generated by virtue of, and on the basis of, a relationship of connection
and disconnection. We even define beings only through this relationship.
We define them relative to each other, by their distinctions or discontinuities,
or by how they differ in their separation from others. The clearest analogies
for the organic connection/disconnection principle in us are the skin and
mouth and our senses. They both separate and unite us. Skin/mouth is a
good analogy of our "practical" connection/disconnection as the
senses are of our mental or "awareness" connection/disconnection.
These analogies illustrate how we are constituted as "beings"
or as "somethings."
The skin and mouth symbolize our practical organic relationship to the
world. They illustrate the relationship or the specific connection/disconnection
that establishes us as things or beings. The skin separates us from the
world but also connects us to it. The mouth closes and opens making connections
and disconnections with air and food. These analogies are tricky, of course,
because both "skin" and "mouth," instead of constituting,
are constituted "what they are" out of relationship. That is why
they are "analogies" rather than examples. We must think analogically.
No real example is possible.
In a similar way, the senses and the feelings are channels of connection/disconnection
that are analogies for the practical awareness that guides being in its
existence. Our eyes, as representing all our senses, put us in "contact"
with the world but only in a very limited way. Like our emotions, they
establish both connection and disconnection with the world. They let "in"
but they also filter "out."
Human existence, however, includes "knowledge" and knowledge
does not rely merely on these "organic" connections and disconnections.
Knowledge establishes itself on the basis of concepts. Since concepts
condition knowledge, they also condition practice. It is not only "organic"
relationship that constitute our being but also conceptual relationship.
Concepts determine our awareness and, therefore, influence our practical
relationship. The concept of "tree" adds to your eyes a specific
guide that conditions what you perceive or what you are "connected
to" and "disconnected from" sensuously. The concept of "food"
influences your mouth to let you "sense" exactly what "things"
you long to connect with and what "things" you want to avoid.
It is due to this layer of relationship, and through the mediation of concept,
that we are free beings -- liberated from the "organic." You
can create the illusion of liberation by denying or temporarily wiping out
the concept and relax in a feeling of infinity through meditation or certain
drugs. However, this is merely denial and repression. Moreover, it is
only temporary, a release from prison that depends on your coming from and
going back to it to sustain the illusion of liberation. Ultimately, we
are free only when the concept reflects the spiritual ground of all being.
You can establish your freedom only through concepts, not by escaping them.
This is so because concepts have access to, indeed, are channels for, the
spiritual realm. They have contact with a ground that is prior to division.
We do not have to live on the basis of organically established relationship
of disconnection/connection. Our concept of sex, for example, can transform
our practice so that it operates contrary to the "built-in," "organic,"
or mechanical pattern. If concept loses access to the spiritual realm,
however, it transforms its birthright, the liberation from the "organic"
into a worse kind of servitude so that we end up less free than animals.
Liberation is both dangerous and dreaded. Throughout history humans have
feared it as awful. The act of freedom through spirit that originally establishes
the concept as independent from organic patterns of relationship appears
as a magical transformation of being. Once established, any suggestion
of a return to spirit for a chance to change concept to respond to changing
existence holds the double threat of unleashing the organic and returning
to the chaotic Nothingness that being originally came from. Returning threatens
you with death and loss and also with chaos. Only spirit has access to
that Nothingness. However, it destroys established concepts and feels like
absolute loss. Its image is the image of death; its appearance is a death
threat.
Spirit is frightening and dangerous. For this reason, the wisdom of our
ancestors took spirit and protected, preserved, but all-too-often betrayed
it in religion. With or without the help and support of religion, once
you overcome fear and find yourself in the realm of spirit and Nothingness,
you gain access to the standard (ruler) of the universe of being (of all
Being, including our own). Subsequently, in an attitude of spiritual discipline
and obedience to this standard that is rare outside of religion or some
other spiritual "way," you can revise your established concept
and so refresh your knowledge, your connection/disconnection and your life.
In revising them, you renew your very being. From the standpoint of liberation
from the conceptual and the organic, Nothingness appears as absolute negation,
chaos, and death. However, from the standpoint of spirit, entering into
Nothingness makes life more rich and full.
Spiritual power is the power in us and with us that is beyond being. Any
science that is merely of "being" -- whose tools of knowledge
(primarily concepts) engage but do not liberate spirit -- is a useful but
an inferior and imprisoning kind of knowledge. A science that investigates
only somethings (whether they are perceived as "physical," as
in physics and chemistry, or "mental," as in mathematics) is the
death of knowledge as long as it closes itself off from spiritual depths.
Spiritual depths are found only in the experience of living. You find them
in the form of an abyss of no-thingness both sensually but, above all, emotionally.
This is why they are so dreaded.
Love is a great spiritual power that persists even when mind loses contact
with Nothingness. Its persistence is spiritual precisely because it draws
you beyond your self-concept and beyond your organism. A terrible fate
for love -- its inversion and its destructiveness -- comes to it when either
concept (where love follows preconceived notions of the nature, object,
or direction of love) or organism (where love follows "the body"
through physical or emotional pleasurable or unpleasurable feelings) capture
it. For the organism to capture love is particularly pernicious. This
is because love thus enslaved can look to you like its liberation from the
concept that had been constricting your life and so create the illusion
of your attaining human individual freedom.
The goal of love is always spiritual. It operates naturally only in the
realm of Nothingness (prior to the mechanisms of separation/connection of
the organism and the established concept. It always directs you toward contact
with the standard or ruler of the universe that originally brought the organic
and conceptual relationships of union/separation. It seeks always the undefinable,
the unnameable, the good itself. The spirit and its hunger lie behind the
craving for all things in life. Spirit is the origin of the concept that
serves but that can also enslave it. It is behind the "organic"
that represents it but that also can inhumanly restrict it. Because of
our spiritual faculties -- memory, images, concepts, and reasoning -- it
is the fate of our species to be entrusted with responsibility for the fate
of the earth. However, it is only in spirit that we can fulfill our destiny
-- neither the conceptual nor the organic is equal to the task.
It is easy to deny the spirit intellectually. It is easy to hold the view
that the concept is only an interference in, and destruction of, the organic.
It may even look obvious to the modern mind that concept follows organism
instead of organism's emerging after concept. This "biological"
reduction, which is so closely related to the charmed theory of our era
(progress through evolution's "natural" selection), contains the
paradox of using a spiritual power (it thinks and concludes conceptually)
to disparage concept and spirit in the name of "organism." However,
even the very energy that inspires those who develop biological viewpoints
and defend them with conviction is spiritual. You cannot account for it
by "natural" selection. Natural selection either occurs without
human mind or spirit or it pretends to contain the spirit. If it occurs
without human spirit, it does not need our analysis and whatever we do will
not stop it. If humans possess spirit and they are part of, and subordinate
to, natural evolution, then spirit or mind cannot stand outside it and so
cannot account for it. In human existence, wherever the spirit is bound
down or denied, an irreconcilable conflict emerges between the "organic"
and the conceptual. Moreover, it is an endless or infinite conflict.
When your body cannot accommodate the concept of your being "a real
man," you think you can achieve liberation only if you throw off the
concept. However, the concept you want to discard is determining both your
will and your action to discard it. The attempt to negate anything, including
concept, preserves the thing it negates and needs it to live. Moreover,
dread drives you either to return as a prodigal son to the old concept or
to seize one that better accommodates your "feelings." However,
the feelings are already established as real and known on the basis of a
concept (you "feel good or bad"; you feel "affection"
or "anger"). Thus, the rejection of concept is a dual affirmation:
you affirm the old concept in its negation, and, eventually, you abandon
the negation and affirm the old or a new concept.
The so-called "conservatives" who cling to the old concept from
the beginning do so only because their organism is in conflict and is rebelling
against concept. They fight for the concept to conceal the conflict as
a means of preserving and "saving" the state of being. The very
organism they seek to deny and overcome dominates their actions. They are
not negating but affirming it in the act of seeking to negate it. Ultimately,
neither an "organic" nor a "conceptual" victory is possible.
At the same time, however, adherents of neither can give up the fight.
The only resolution and unifying of these opposites is a return to pure
spirit out of the relationships of yes and no both in the organic and conceptual
realms.
11. Identification and Spirit
You can identify with being in two ways. Each of them creates a false
"identification." You can identify with positive "being"
or with negative "non-being." You can identify with either things
that are good or things that are bad. Humans create "things"
and their goodness and badness as well. Only from outside them, from the
standpoint of Absolute Nothingness, can you see that things are neither
ultimately real nor ultimately valuable. Their reality and value is relative
and always limited or partial. "Identification" means failing
to recognize the exact degree of the relativity of their reality. It is
to either overestimate it or make it absolute by failure to know the Absolute.
From the standpoint of Absolute Nothingness, the two identifications rest
on the same horizontal plane. Nevertheless, they are opposites. Each is
the negation of the other. Non-being is negation of being; being is the
negation of non-being. Being is not absolute affirmation nor is non-being
absolute negation. If, because of the impoverishment of the development
of your spiritual powers, you lack access to Absolute Nothingness, however,
you can hardly avoid the temptation to treat one or another of them as absolute.
Thus, you shift them from the horizontal plane and falsely place them on
the vertical plane.
"Normal" society seeks to determine what is positive, being,
good and real and to set them up above all its members. Society defines
itself by the being it creates. We individuals identify ourselves with
this "good" and "real." We are good men and women.
It is good, we say, to respect the property of others. It is good to enjoy
sex only within a committed heterosexual relationship. In doing this, society
and the individual also create "non-being." It is the antithesis
of what we identify with. We are not bad men and women. It is also what
we reject. It is bad to steal. It is wrong to enjoy sex in promiscuous
homosexual relationships. This "being" and this "non-being"
are both only relatively real and of relative value. A committed heterosexual
relationship is not absolutely good nor is a promiscuous homosexual relationship
absolutely non-good. Indeed, a committed heterosexual relationship may
be worse than a promiscuous homosexual relationship.
Despite the normalcy of doing it, it is dangerous identify yourself with
being. You think that having a strong and healthy body is good. You identify
yourself with one by willing to have it. Not recognizing the non-good in
this being you identify with, you think the more you go in the direction
of developing and having it, the better off you are. You begin to engage
in a process of "self-development" and become a "body-builder"
or, more modestly, a "jogger." The more you develop, however,
the more you suffer from the being you acquire and long for non-being.
Your activity becomes an addiction. You find you cannot give up because
it is "good" even as you suffer from it. You may even suffer
physically. Such pain is an indication that in your pursuing physical health
and well-being you are actually physically deteriorating. Instead of reforming
your identity on the basis of the new evidence of pain and injury, you either
run to a physician to repair the damage you keep doing to yourself or take
a pain-killer so that you can continue to "improve" yourself.
Your longing for non-being may remain wholly unconscious. You long for
the end of the tyranny of "being somebody," of having and maintaining
a "developed" body. Your longing for liberation from these manifests
itself as a "death-wish" or as nothing but a desire for the end
of life itself. Because the genuine desire that keeps interfering in your
"being" looks like a death-wish, you try to avoid it. You seek
to "repress" it.
Those who identify themselves as "thieves" or "homosexuals"
are inversions of the false vertical axis that dominates "normal"
individuals and society where being stands above non-being. The inversion
can happen only because the normal "being" is not authentically
higher than its opposite "non-being." They are both on the horizontal
axis. These inversions, out of accident or choice, liberate themselves
from the curse of being, the "ontological" curse of being somebody
good. They do not, however, free themselves from the curse of being something.
Their stand does start out as a true liberation from the faulty "good."
This liberation is, at best however, only the beginning of freedom. It
can get derailed in its movement. It opens two directions for you: back
to being and servitude and suffering or forward to Absolute Nothingness
and freedom. Without the development of your spiritual powers, however,
you are doomed to return to being.
Your return can take one of three modes, but they all are demonic. The
first is a return to "normalcy," to normal being, to being "good."
The criminal is "reformed." The homosexual "recovers."
The second is to remain in the inversion, but you can do so only if you
make the normal good into "evil" and the normal evil into good.
You make non-being into being and being into non-being. You come to believe
that stealing makes you superior to the good citizens or that homosexuality
is better at least for yourself than "normalcy." In either, case,
however, your being will be plagued by its relativity, its limited truth-value.
The more you identify with it the more your will resists the direction
the identification is taking your life. Thus, the relativity of the "good"
you affirm forces you either to surrender it or to fight yourself and others
who represent the opposite. In this way non-being itself takes over more
and more of your life. You live the non-being of your being.
There is, however, a third possibility for you, apart from spiritual development
and access to Absolute Nothingness. It is to cycle your identifications
between being and non-being. You experience the negative in your being
a good citizen or "body-builder," so you rebel against it. You
experience temporary liberation. Then you return to some kind of being,
either "good citizen" or "criminal" and become your
identity. No sooner has that happened than you experience its non-being,
and you rebel and are liberated. The only variety allowed in this third
option is the speed of your cycles of inversions and the content of your
personal identities. You reject what was on top as being for what is on
bottom as non-being and you return to being. Permanent rebellion makes
the essential character of your existence a turning wheel. The vertical
axis keeps spinning at a variety of speeds. This is the life of liberty
that Plato talks about. (Plato, Republic, pp. 813-816) It is the direct