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
opposite of freedom, but you will think of it as freedom. The characteristic
of your illusion of freedom that betrays it as the direct enemy of freedom
is the driven quality of the movement.
Genuine freedom means release from this constantly revolving cycle. It
involves what in the East they call escaping from the "wheel of life."
Genuine freedom is a situation where you put the opposition between being
and non-being in their proper place: you remember that they are only relatively
real and relatively good. While you live with them because you must, you
do not identify yourself with them. They remain for you merely the horizontal
axis of existence.
When you keep them bound together on this horizontal axis and let them
reach their farthest distance from each other, they can rise above themselves.
They then can converge at a point above the horizontal axis, a point that
reconciles them while preserving their opposition below because it transcends
them. That point is Absolute Nothingness and it completes the image of
human existence as a triangle where Being and Non- Being dangle and circle
one another but are held up and together by an invisible vertical pole so
that the whole arrangement outlines, not a triangle, but a cross.
The path of spiritual growth is movement up this vertical line to Absolute
Nothingness. To follow this path, you must accept that you contain the
contradiction between being and non-being. Then you must stop the wheel
where the two keep pursuing each other. And, finally, you must seek the
point on the horizontal line where they meet. That point is nothing, the
negation of all things. Where they meet, they annihilate each other. Once
you find that point and place yourself in this spiritual state, then you
can see the struggle between being and non-being from a perspective outside
both.
Living or acting from this triple state of consciousness -- consciousness
of being, of non-being, and of the relative negation of both of them --
you will grow up the line closer and closer to the absolute Negation. The
level of your growth will be determined by how near to, or far from, you
are to the Absolute Nothingness that is no longer dependent upon the denial
or negation of either being or non-being. The negativeness of Nothingness
will gradually shrink if not evaporate and turn into a great "Yes."
The progress is inner. It is toward peace. This peace is the peace not
of death but of life. You have become still. You have stopped the merry-go-round.
Others still on it may see you as aloof, withdrawn, and even leading a
"boring" and deadly life. Actually, your life is more active,
intense, exciting, and joyful than they can imagine.
12. The Paradox of the Sexes
Because reproduction is crucial to any species, we humans find ourselves
in a perpetual struggle over our sexual identifications. This struggle
expresses itself both in our lives and in our concepts. A common example
of these is crisis in sexual identity. The conditions that usually bring
on the severest forms of this crisis arise when alterations in "real
life" make established concept-identities that once were compatible
with practical relations between the sexes incompatible. This can take
place when basic alterations come about in the prevailing system of sexual
relations. "Economic" changes in a nation might come about mechanically
or without deliberate human intervention. Out of our striving to better
production, we create an "industrial revolution" that permanently
alters the actual relationship between the sexes in many areas. If the
concept of male and female or masculinity and femininity is no longer compatible
with the new "organic" or "material" relationships,
large numbers of us experience "identity crises." Something has
to give. Either we revise our social relationships to conform to our "self-concepts"
or we adjust these identities to conform to the new social realities.
Both "negative" and "positive" forces drive the changes.
For example, women in technological societies at the end of the twentieth
century generally found that they "had to" get jobs outside the
home in order to have a family income adequate to the demands of life.
This kind of "necessity" never falls on all equally no matter
how severe the upheaval in social conditions. An example of this disparity
is the number of excessively wealthy men who could provide, either with
or without working themselves, for the well-being of the whole family even
as more and more married women to work outside the home to support theirs.
Despite numerous exceptions, for many the whip of need will be a negative
force sufficiently strong to drive them to revise their relationship to
the world and, eventually, their definition of themselves.
The positive goad to transformation in identity is rooted less in reality
than in illusion. The change in social conditions presents women with a
liberation from the imprisonment of being. They experience the external
challenge to their old identities as an opportunity for freedom. "Liberation"
at best is only a first step in the achievement of "freedom."
It is the negation of the negation.
For many, the old identity negated human personality. It restricted and
frustrated it. Ending or negating that negation both feels good and looks
like freedom. Freedom, however, requires that you attain spiritual Nothingness.
Without Nothingness, the liberation cannot lead to freedom. Instead, liberation
will destroy even itself as you "select" a new identity that is
compatible with the new social realities. Thus, you create a new prison,
one that looks like a "choice" and an exercise of freedom. This
change feels "good" because it ends the pain produced by the tension
between the new social system and the old identity. This good feeling generates
the illusion that you have achieved what you want. Because you feel you
are getting what you want, you think you are free.
Unguided by Nothingness, liberated spirit thus re-invests itself in something.
This illusory investment is the product of spiritual crisis and spiritual
search. However honest your effort, your lack of spiritual development
leads you back to the old symbolic powers that appeal to spirit. These
include the myths and rituals that were part of your own past or, more often,
of a tradition that pre-dated it. Spiritually disturbed Westerners look
for guidance in the East or among the shamanic pre-historical origins on
their own continents whether they be native American or ancient European.
Unguided, however, except by ignorant popularizing religious charlatans,
they will find that these old symbols awaken and excite spirit. Instead
of using them for the purpose they originally were constructed for, however,
they are used by them. Ironically, the old tools of human freedom that
worked at least in limited ways in the ancient world but were dependent
on conditions prevalent then become in the modern world techniques of enslavement
to the new world order.
The same thing happens when you turn to ancient religious rituals as happen
when you appeal to ancient symbols and myths. Certain ancient peoples used
alcohol, cocoa leaves, or peyote as part of their rituals of liberation
and freedom. Like them then, you today can use these as methods of moving
toward both liberty and freedom. However, almost everyone turns them into
tools for mere liberation. The drugs act on your brain in a way that facilitates
the breakdown of the old perceptions of being (of what things "are").
Thus, your "mind" is "liberated." But the final outcome
is likely to be one of three catastrophes: either (1) the "recreational
use" of the drugs where they actually let you sustain your old being
by giving you periods of temporary escape from the pressures and contradictions
that living in a new way on the basis of an old identity produces or (2)
"permanent liberation" that makes it impossible for you to live
in any "real world" or world of "things" or (3) a "temporary
liberation" from the old that produces an inner chaos that drives you
to engraft a new rigid form of being more easily and willingly into your
soul.
Of the three, of course, the second is the most hopeful. It is also the
most painful. You experience being as an alien. You belong nowhere. Others
may not realize it, but you do. You may survive without being found out
and labeled a traitor, a criminal, or a "queer," but only in an
unauthentic mode of existence. You live a fake life, and you know it.
The good in this deceit is that it is inherently unstable both for you
and for others around you. You are unstable. You generate instability.
Chance or personal fate or grace may yet lead you to genuine helpers in
spiritual growth. However, apparent helpers may just as well lead you to
"reform" and adopt the normal identity or to identify with your
alienated status whereby you declare your alienated state healthy and accept
it as a state of being. You become a "criminal" or a "queer"
but redefine it as good. You become an enemy to the "normally"
good. They become enemies to you. Thus, the war between the two sides
preoccupies both of your lives. It preserves your own original confusion
and the hidden confusion of the normals, but because it externalizes it,
it makes it safe for, and a means of preserving, the prisons of being everyone
lives in.
In spirit there is no sex. Sexual differentiation dissolves. Both Socrates
in Athens (Plato, Republic, pp. 713-714) and Jesus in Jerusalem, the two
greatest sources of modern culture, insist on this point. In the realm
of spirit, all beings are equal. In patriarchal Greece, Socrates proclaimed
that in the government that rules through the intelligible realm of wisdom
over the real world there is no distinction between men and women. Both
hold power to the extent that they are spiritually developed. Jesus (Mark,
12:25) claims that in "heaven there is neither male nor female."
In the realm of spirit and before God, even the most basic distinctions
in being make no difference. All are equal in the eye of God.
The attempt on the part of those who understand intellectually that all
human beings are composed of elements that are separated and distributed
between the sexes (in different ways, of course, from culture to culture)
to unit or "marry" the "masculine" and "feminine"
elements within to create a "whole" person is doomed to failure.
The very conceptualization of "masculine" and "feminine"
and absolutely any other conceptualization establishes a polarity that is
incompatible and irreconcilable within and without. By themselves outside
marriage and by themselves within it, their polarities can never become
one. Only the path of negation indicated by Socrates and Jesus of neither
masculine nor feminine leads beyond the contradictions in being to the reconciling
Nothingness. To seek both/abd, paradoxically, is to end with neither/nor,
while to seek neither/nore is to end with both/and.
The connection that allows for unification is the discovery of Nothingness
at your deepest core. By finding that, and only by finding that, can you
descend into whatever being the inner standard concealed in Nothingness
guides you to. Just as a marriage that is grounded in the being of two
personalities alone and not the Nothingness discovered by each is doomed
to failure whether "it" continues or not, so, too, the union that
is grounded in the being of two concepts within ("masculine" and
"feminine") is doomed to failure. Both will consist of endless
and unresolvable conflict and continuing disintegration. Nothingness is
the preserver or "savior" of the being of the person and the beings
of the world. Whoever would save their being, will lose it. Whoever loses
it to the Nothingness, saves it. The fear of Nothingness is the great killer.
Often, where opposites collide, you think force can keep the peace. Neither
individual nor social order can survive through enforcement. Nevertheless,
both individuals and societies (unfortunately, all-too-often religious societies
above all) always find themselves severely tempted to try to forestall disintegration
by enforcing being. They try to coerce you to "be" good and avoid
"evil." This is both hopeless and heartless. Being is not saved
by force but only by redemption from above. To threaten others with punishments
for abandoning being, whether the punishment is to come from earth or heaven,
is the surest way to guarantee decay and disintegration. To increase punishments
as a way to reduce crime cannot end but in the increase in crime. Launched
on the road to peace on a railway of punishment is not only to have to keep
moving at an accelerating pace since the increase in crime always exceeds
the ability to punish but also to be fated to end in a disastrous crash.
Neither decreasing nor increasing punishment holds the hope of survival
because both movements are derailed in the realm of being. The level they
operate on cannot touch the forces that are generating the violence. None
of the somethings we can devise will manage the problem. Only the Nothngness
holds hope of a definitive improvement in the human condition.
13. Sex, Science, and Servitude
In how it deals with sex and love, the approach of Western Civilization
to explanation reveals most brilliantly what it otherwise muddies most thoroughly
-- the consequences of the loss of Nothingness. What it exposes of its
failures in the case of love and sex, applies to all kinds of attraction.
Aristotle's four facets of what makes up an explanation of anything (knowledge
of the material it is composed of, its "form" or essential character,
the agency that brought it into being, and purpose or end it is directed
toward), illustrates the impoverishment of the modern mentality. What ultimately
accounts for the wealth of goods produced by contemporary industry was an
approach to the world of things that emphasizes two of the four dimensions
of understanding.
The "matter" of any "thing" is the "indeterminate"
(Aristotle, p. 100) element of it that is combined with its "form"
or essential character. Matter is always malleable. It is capable of "receiving"
more than one form. The scientific trick that gives us the impression of
liberating ourselves from the dominion of nature is for scientists to discover
which matter is most malleable. They can then show us how to put it into
whatever forms we choose. This science searches always for the "simplest"
things -- for the ultimate elements of atomic particles that make up every
"thing" and so can be changed into any "thing" in the
universe. The closer science gets to knowledge of the most primary of matter,
the more power it places in the hands of technology and industry to impose
upon it whatever forms that please human beings.
The practical sciences (such as engineering) aspire to use the third of
Aristotle's elements. This is the agency that brings form to matter. They
want not merely to understand these forces but primarily to find how the
human race can take hold of and use them. They therefore seek a material
malleable, not in absolute terms, but in terms relative to the public desires
or market demand. This material they appropriately call "plastic"
to emphasize its primary characteristic of malleability. The purely plastic
in terms relative to our desires, the matter that we can give any form,
has never yet been found. Progress in the practical sciences of production
is confined to tracking down those forms appropriate to the most plastic
material under our power. The significance of this orientation will be
apparent shortly.
Growth in our knowledge of plastic matter seemed to promise not only a
better life by getting us the "things" we need but also the expansion
of human liberty in the material world. The great industrial revolution
universalized this promise. Before, only the exceptionally rich and powerful
could choose forms to be imposed on plastic matter. After, whole masses
in societies command this choice. The great liberal movements of the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and twentieth centuries were all partly inspired by this new
possibility. However, the range of plasticity of the matter found most
plastic as well as the large quantity of products demanded in the economically
liberal societies limited the number of forms that could be imposed practically
on matter. The outcome of these developments guaranteed that less and less
power of choice of form could be placed in the hands of human individuals.
Therefore, the very liberty "from nature" generated by the scientific
knowledge of more and more plastic matter reversed itself and became less
and less liberty. It meant subordination to the mass market. The power
remained, but it was less and less in human hands and more and more commanded
by the nature of the system of production itself.
To accomplish this feat without resistance from a "liberty"-minded
citizenry, industry had to gain the ability to control the "forms"
or essential characteristics of goods that people wanted. It is this development
that lead to the "information revolution" -- the successor to
the "industrial revolution." Where the industrial revolution
appeared to place matter into the hands of human beings, the information
revolution took power away from them. It did this (as the term "in-form"
clearly illustrates) by enabling the information industry to place "forms"
into their minds. Thus, it gained an inner or invisible control over their
hands. A new practical science emerged, a technology that sought the power
that industry had acquired over matter. This "information" technology,
however, treated the human mind, the human power of intelligence where "forms"
are known, developed, and selected, as if it were matter. Information technology
treats the human mind the way industry treated minerals -- as the most malleable
of substances to be formed in shapes chosen, not by the technologists but
by the system itself.
There is much talk in the contemporary sciences, technologies, and industries
of malleable matter (both physical and mental), of forms that can be imposed
on it, and of the force or power to accomplish that imposition. There is
little talk of the ends or purpose of all this activity except in the sense
that the perfection of the form is the producers' purpose. The goal or
purpose of car-builders is to build a "better" car. That is the
purpose of the specific activity and the specific function. This system
of production casts specifically human goals and purposes outside itself.
Workers may have the goal of making money as their personal goal. Economic
science may describe this goal but, under liberal theories, may not criticize
it. You may want a racing car; economics can describe your desire and discover
how many others share it, but it cannot judge the value of the desire.
The open secret of contemporary social science is that your desires are
created by attaching your generalized loves and longings to specific forms.
Those specific forms are the ones your mind picks up from the information
industry in both its self-conscious manifestation in "advertising"
and its more unconscious manifestation in "news and entertainment."
From the beginning "news," "entertainment," and "advertising"
have been essentially the same. They were all designed as systems of "information."
Information is the force that enslaves the human being the most today.
No liberation is possible now unless it entails liberation from information.
It is not enough to be able to "choose" what information you
will hear. Your choice is already "informed," a victim of a form
already put in you. Liberation in today's world requires a rebellion against
information as such. Indeed, what is regarded as the "best information"
("The New York Times," "Dances with Wolves," "ABC
News," "Consumers Reports") is the worst.
That such a rebellion today looks not only impossible but absurd attests
to the strength of the grip that the information culture holds us in. We
seem to be our information. We are told from childhood that there are only
two aspects of fundamental reality: matter and form. We are only matter
and form. Later, some of us can acquire purpose and power, and both of
these are based on our matter and form. Our matter is the indeterminate
substances that we are composed of (cells, food, chemicals, electrical charges).
Our form is the "genetic code" that informs this matter of its
direction and the "information" we pick up in the process of living
from "others."
Our access to the formless, the Void, the Abyss is either denied or defined
as wholly negative. Therefore, it manifests itself to us as only the absence
of things, as the no-thing rather than the Nothing. We are taught to be
terrorized at the loss of forms and delighted only by the change of one
form to another. The new, the novel, becomes our delight because, on the
one hand, it is the abandonment of the old form that we felt constricted
us, on the other, it is the gaining of the promise of fulfillment from the
new. It is delightful mostly, however, because it allows us to pass through
the terror of the formless that we long for but fear. This passage energizes
us, negatively, with fear and, positively, with love to pursue the new,
the novel, the entertaining, the newsworthy. Even books and articles that
inform us of the power of the information industry we absorb as news and
entertainment as we "return" to old forms of human existence embedded
in myths and religions of the past. Everything becomes style and fashion.
The rapid passing of one form into the saleable next. What delights us
most and so seems to be the greatest expression of our freedom is the force
that binds us into the chains of new information.
Lacking spiritual access to the formless from where all forms descend,
we become the victims of form not only in all our relationships, not only
to the world of things, but also to the world of others. We are "formed."
We have been "informed." Those whom we love are a call to liberation
in the "formless," but we can neither understand nor answer the
call. While excited by it, its danger, and our terror of it, we interpret
the formless that comes knocking at the door of our closed forms as only
the promise of a new form. Rather than letting love choose you and turning
yourself over to it for a higher destiny, you choose "to make love"
or "to have sex" with an object. You can no longer "fall
into love" in a way that annihilates your being. The terror of formlessness
leads you into two opposite directions: either to cling to the form you
chose in an unholy marriage denying the feelings that draw you from the
prison to the formlessness you dread or to flee to a novel form to save
yourself from the threat of formlessness when it becomes irresistibly attractive.
What is at stake in the contemporary world is the entire basis of consciousness
at the root of Western civilization and of its greatest successes. There
will be no end to the suffering and destruction of this era in all realms,
from the scientific, the industrial, and the informational to the emotional
and the sexual, from the individual to the world, until we recapture access
to the formless and develop those spiritual tools that are our heritage.
14. Knowledge and Explanation in Education
A huge variety of the problems of contemporary formal education have a
single source. Educational leaders have inverted the proper relationship
between primary knowledge and secondary knowledge. They have placed the
secondary above the primary. They have not done this consciously or deliberately.
In fact, they could not because they cannot even make a distinction between
the two. Nevertheless, they have either made the primary secondary or pretended
it did not exist and have regarded the secondary primary as either above
the primary or the only kind of knowledge.
There are many ways to distinguish primary knowledge from secondary knowledge.
Essentially, secondary knowledge is derivative and cannot stand alone.
It depends on primary knowledge. Its quality can be only as high as the
primary knowledge it arises from. One way to distinguish the two is to
consider primary knowledge as knowledge proper or as the only kind of knowledge
and secondary knowledge as subsequent explanation. You will then see that
reason has two distinct functions: one is to enable us to understand and
to grow in knowledge; the other is to explain what we know.
You know that something is in front of you. You have a name for it: "apple."
But you do not understand "what it is." Therefore, you seek
explanation. Typically in contemporary education and modern science you
try to come up with an explanation by reasoning from what you know to what
you do not know. You know an "apple" and you know a "tree."
Because you usually see the two either attached to each other or near each
other, you suspect a relationship between them. As you carefully investigate
the two "realities," by watching them over time you discover more
and more patterns in their relationship. You conclude that the trees produce
apples, and apples produce trees. You claim that trees are the "cause"
of apples, and apples are the "cause" of trees. This gives you
the major portion of your explanation of the apple. It is the tree's way
of making another tree. Your investigation has led you to knowledge that
you did not derive physically (from seeing, tasting, smelling, touching,
listening to the apple).
Your new knowledge of the apple is metaphysical since it is based on a
judgment of "cause and effect" that can never be known through
the physical senses.
There is no doubt that this kind of research increases the quantity of
our knowledge. However, the quality of the knowledge acquired in this way
is limited both by the mechanism of "causal" reasoning and by
the original knowledge such reasoning depends on. You accepted the "objects"
you investigated and thought about. You assume falsely that you derive
the content of the knowledge that goes into your thought and so determines
the quality of your subsequent explanation as well as the quality of consequent
"knowledge" from your sensations. You think that it is given
to you immediately and without any biased intervention. This, however,
is not the case. The very first perception of the "apple" is
already a combination of various sensuous stimulations (of eyes and nose)
and a mental structure (a concept). The quality of the explanation and
the "knowledge" it allows depends upon, or is "secondary"
to, the quality of the original perceptions you used in thought to derive
your explanation. The quality of our primary knowledge (the perception)
determines the quality of your secondary knowledge (the explanation).
The quality of this primary knowledge depends, in turn, on two things.
In the case of the "apple," it depends on the sensitivity of
your sense organs and the complexity of the concept that allows you to experience,
not simply undefined shapes and colors that immediately hit your sense organs,
but a "thing" and a specific "kind" of thing. Growth
in the quality of our knowledge depends not primarily on growth in your
skills at deriving explanations from reasoning or thinking to but on growth
in your ability to know directly, originally, and pre-conceptually.
Your explanation of an apple (It is a tree's way of reproducing itself),
once accepted, becomes part of the concept of apple you carry around in
your mind so all your subsequent perceptions of apple will "contain"
that added dimension. It will have expanded the concept that guides your
senses to perceive the "thing" they perceive. All explanation
is dependent on a prior perception of a "thing," and a "thing"
perceived is a combination of sensation and concept. Ultimately, the quality
of your knowledge depends on the "first" and most immediate primary
knowing that leads you to create your initial concept.
Such primary knowledge is of highest quality when it is most immediate
or when alien concepts (those that themselves did not originate in immediacy)
least intervene. What we all have the most immediate and intimate contact
with is our "selves." This is the basic ground of all knowledge
of object or subject. The command of the Greek oracle -- "Know thyself!"
-- is famous but its significance is rarely understood. Knowledge of self
is the key to knowledge of everything. The quality of self-knowledge determines
the quality of all knowledge. It was with this in mind that Socrates undertook
his search for wisdom, the knowledge of the truly real and the truly good.
Socrates' method of reason was fundamentally different from the one
his student, Aristotle, developed in the Metaphysics. In this work, Aristotle
explored the nature of explanation (secondary knowledge). Socrates, however,
had sought to deepen the immediacy of primary knowledge. He would raise
its quality and, by virtue of that, enhance the quality of all knowledge.
His method was essentially to call into question the ground in primary
knowledge of the secondary knowledge that others asserted. By shaking that
ground, he would force himself and the others to deepen the primary level.
His was a form of reasoning that prepared you for direct illumination,
for greater insight, for brighter light. Since all the dimensions of reality
and value as well as all our abilities to know converge in ourselves, his
kind of self-study both improved the powers of knowledge we are born with
and led us to direct our attention to all aspects of what we wanted to know
more about. Therefore, our gain would be twofold: we would benefit not
only from knowing the truly good better so that we would have a clearer
guide to our choices in life but also from having a better starting point
in our subsequent attempts to explain things using reason in the style of
Aristotle.
The failure of modern education is not that it does not focus on self but
that it tries to use methods that are inappropriate for self-knowledge.
It seeks to explain the self. Its utter failure to provide moral guidance
or to illuminate sexuality illustrate its fatal flaws. Modern "educators"
try to help the young know about sex, for example, by explaining it. To
get their explanation, they have had to start with a definite concept of
sex and then apply Aristotle's reasoning to it. They can explain sex as
biological or a means to reproduction or "psychological" or a
means to "personal satisfaction." They cannot, however, help
the young gain a better immediate insight into the meaning of sex itself.
This is partly because modern educators invariably follow a "hidden
agenda." The very rise of "sex education" in the classroom,
for example, is likely to come about to avoid diseases such as AIDS. The
very concept of sex is, therefore, already absolutely pre-judged and no
explanation can go beyond this bias.
Most education is directed at "achievement" rather than wisdom.
Its goal is not to enlighten the young but to get them to excel on standard
achievement tests or develop pre-defined skills. None of this would be
bad in and of itself were it based on the more fundamental development of
self-knowledge and the use of more fundamental kinds of reasoning. The
problem of contemporary education is that it is hollow at its core. Hollow
there, it is hollow everywhere else regardless of how rich and full, broad
and deep, it looks.
Adopting new educational methods is no solution. Only a complete turning
away from education that centers itself in explanation or secondary knowledge
alone will work. The turn toward primary knowledge can come about, however,
only if those in charge themselves understand the distinction and are themselves
devoted to improving their own primary knowledge. This change requires
a transformation. You cannot command it. You can only enkindle it.
15. Fact and Truth
One of the distinctions most lacking in the contemporary mind because of
modern education is knowledge of the vital difference between truth and
fact. The problem is not merely that we often use these terms interchangeably
(along with "honesty"). Mostly it is that our verbal confusion
keeps us unconscious of the important actual difference between them. Ignorance
of the distinction makes a whole dimensions of life invisible. Truth and
fact are distinct. Moreover, they can be directly contradictory. Both
the search for, and the accumulation of, facts can serve to keep you distant
from truth rather than draw you nearer to it.
Plato considered "philosophy" to be what the word itself means:
love of wisdom. Wisdom he took to be knowledge of the true real and the
true good. Philosophy, therefore, was the love of knowledge of the true
good or true real, or, to put it simply, the love of truth. (Plato, Republic,
pp. 756-761) As long as you confuse "fact" and "truth,"
it is easy when you pursue knowledge of the facts to profess yourself to
be a philosopher and to enjoy the ancient title "Ph.D." or "Doctor"
(literally, "teacher") of "Philosophy" (of the "love
of wisdom").
The best and most accurate definition of the term the "truth"
is the "faithful." This is the meaning truth still had in the
twentieth century when applied as an adjective to "love." True
love is, of course, not "factual" love but faithful love. It
is enduring love, constant love, unchangeable love. When Plato talks of
the true real and true good, he means the faithfully good and the constantly
real. It is important to understand this when you read Plato because only
if you do will you see how practical and immediately useful to life philosophy
is. Only with this understanding of the term can you make sense of the
notion that the ruling element in individuals and societies must be philosophical.
Genuine philosophers are those who are interested in knowing the faithfully
good. Knowing it, they possess the principle that, when they use it to
guide their lives, leads to the best life -- the most consistently good
and happy life -- possible.
We cannot help but be ruled by what we perceive to be good. Whatever we
actually pursue as good is a good but not always faithfully so. Even when
you murder somebody and later say you recognize that murder itself is bad,
you did it only because then you experienced it as good. Understanding
the motivation of murderers is vital to all of us because their illusions
of the good can reveal how any of us can get derailed from following the
truly good to pursuing the mere appearance of good. To understand and benefit
by your understanding of the motives of murderers, you have to surrender
the comfortably false belief that murderers are just evil people we should
destroy. Instead, their bad motives are rooted in a loss of consciousness
or, since we usually think of the moral domain in the issue of good and
bad, a lack of conscience.
Consciousness or conscience specifically refer to knowledge ("scientia")
that is together ("con"). Murders are deliberate acts. Murderers
perform many of them only after they carefully use their reasoning power
to determine the most efficient methods. However, they always commit the
murder without "conscience." Murderers initially err in two ways.
They share both of them with us. First, they place faith in an unfaithful
good they define rather than join their will with the genuine faithful transcendent
good. Second, they stop conscience from functioning so it does not reveal
the contradiction between how they define the good in different ways in
different places. This set of errors generates a lack of conscience
Murderers lose conscience in two ways. First, they may fragment the good
so that they can focus on one good thing to the disregard of others. They
are fully aware of what they are doing but are not conscious. Their knowledge
of the good is in pieces and the pieces are alien to each other, not unified
but in conflict. Because of this, murderers can be "cold-blooded"
and calculating. Second and alternatively, they may let emotion overwhelm
their consciousness. The murder is then a "crime of passion."
We forgive crimes of passion more easily. We can see that we all suffer
occasionally from loss of conscience because of passion. Sometimes we cannot
think about what we are doing. Something prevents us from calculating and
reasoning out the various goods in life and their relative importance.
We fail to coordinate our diverse ideas of good. If we avoid even minor
crimes such as impulsively stealing a pencil in a store, it is only because
we are lucky enough to be caught by reason or by immediate conflicting emotions
of shame. We can forgive those carried away by extreme passion partly because
their failure makes us feel good about our self-control. We may believe
they should be punished in some way. Still, if their conscience returns
and they feel and show great remorse of conscience, we may be willing to
accept that as punishment enough. Otherwise, we advocate punishing only
as a correction -- either to show them consequences of losing themselves
to passion or to produce pain itself that will condition them to avoid crime
regardless of the level of their reasoning.
"Cold-blooded" murderers always frighten us more. This is so
partly because they demonstrate how we can take the tool we need in order
to maintain conscience -- reason and its reflecting on the range of goods
and evils in our lives -- and reverse its function. We can reason not to
figure out the relative bad of crime and why it is evil but to commit it
more effectively. However, we resist facing how close we are to murderers
and feel such fear and such alienating hatred toward them for a more important
reason. The cold-blooded murderer reveals the relativity of our own consciences.
Where, for example, we do not steal or kill because we fear punishment of
either informal social-pressure or formal imprisonment, "cold-blooded"
murderers appear to us as the image of courage. They act on values we share
with them but conceal in ourselves. We think that if they are not severely
punished or executed that they are getting away with something. We can
think this only if we ourselves value what they have done. If they steal,
we would like to but are afraid of punishment. We do not see that their
greatest punishment is in committing the crime and in their state of being
without conscience that permitted them to perform it. We really suspect
that if they get away with it they are better than we are and better off.
We can hold this attitude only because we do not have a sense for the truly
good but trust and pursue only partial and illusory goods. The truly good
is good always and everywhere. The truly bad is always and everywhere bad.
If we resent it when crooks "get away" with theft, it can only
be because we think theft is sometimes good and sometimes bad even though
we define it as only bad. We have made the relative, passing, and changing
good into an absolute good or a truly good when we say "never steal."
Thieves reveal the relativity of the good of "never stealing."
They find stealing to be good and we subconsciously agree.
The problem that catches us in illusions, bad conscience, and criminality
is a basic failure in faith. We falsely place our faith in the good of
things because we forget that there is no "thing" or activity
that is ever truly good or truly bad. Killing can be good under certain
circumstances, and throughout history societies have entrusted certain people
to determine when. To kill someone to prevent them from killing you or
from stealing your land or your country has often been defined as good even
by those who say they believe killing is always bad. All things and activities
are only relatively, partly, or falsely good and bad. The true goodness
in any action or thing is, in essence, outside the thing. It's presence
depends on, or is relative to, how much the activity or thing participates
in or contributes to, the truly good that exists only as a No-thing.
Life itself is the basis for growth in knowledge of the truly good or real.
That is why wisdom is associated with old age or at least with experience.
We learn the limited value of the goods we pursued in our youth as we acquire
them. Our consciousness grows and along with it our conscience. "Candy
is good on the tongue but not on the teeth." This kind of perfecting
of our knowledge depends on how far we can free our minds from the things
to principles that stand above them. We can free our minds in this way
only if we first have faith that there is a principle above them we do not
yet know.
Facts. Once you accept idea that wisdom or knowledge of the truly good
is acquired by experience, you would expect it to follow that you should
seek truth by exploring the facts you experience in life. The physiologists
who experiment with dental decay are appealing to experience. When they
discover a fact, it seems to contribute to wisdom: "Sugar causes tooth
decay." In establishing this fact of experience, however, they are
merely figuring out how things relate to each other in terms of enhancement
or destruction. Sugar is bad only relative to another thing, "teeth."
If you wish to save your teeth, don't eat sugar. However, whether you
should save your teeth at the price of giving up sugar neither you nor the
physiologist dare explore. Medical prescriptions always presume a truly
good. Otherwise they would not be prescriptions but only suggestions.
Tooth decay is not an absolute bad but a relative bad just as tooth preservation
is a relative good not an absolute one and just as death (the ultimate decay)
is only bad relative to life.
The primary problem with the attempt to establish what is good and bad
by the facts is that facts see the good in things. The more you decide
factually what are good things and bad things the more your mind gets absorbed
in things. The more it gets drawn into the myriad of things, the harder
it gets for you to coordinate the goodness and badness of all of them.
Thus, factual research, both for those who do it and those who use its conclusions,
undermines conscience and consciousness. Consciousness and conscience each
entail the ability to hold together in a whole, in a unity, both the real
and the good. The quality of your conscience or consciousness is not the
quantity of facts it contains but the quality of unity it attains among
them. This is why your consciousness does not expand as you get more information.
Indeed, the increase can challenge and even shrink consciousness.
The lowest kind of unity in both conscience and consciousness is the unity
of coordination. In consciousness, scientists can coordinate facts. If
you rely on coordination, when you study facts, you will seek to produce
out of your research "unified field theories." Such theories
strive to unify as many as possible of the facts that are known. In conscience,
it is the same. The lowest level of conscience coordinates as many goods
as possible. You use consciousness and conscience to coordinate the good
of a diamond you wish to steal from a jewelry store with the injury to another
person, the damage to the fabric of the society you live in, and with the
good of avoiding a prison term. Conscience coordinates the good of the
taste of sugar with the good of preserving your teeth.
Eventually, full coordination is ultimately impossible. It grows harder
day by day as you have more and more experiences and gain more and more
factual information. If you keep struggling to maintain coordination, your
whole life gets absorbed in the process of reasoning that examines and compares
all goods. Rationality is utterly derailed. It becomes an enemy of life.
Even as you struggle using it more and more in the hopeless striving for
harmony through coordination, your life inexorably disintegrates.
Only the truly good, the faithfully good, can preserve consciousness and
conscience and so preserve and enhance your life. You can find the way
to the preservation and enhancement only if you abandon the search for the
good things and seek the truly good itself. You need to explore not whether
some thing is good or bad but what makes it good or bad. Then you will
turn away from the thing itself and toward the "no-thing" and
the principles that are outside and above them. Only when your soul is
seized by a unity of good instead of a diversity of goods do you find the
truly good to guide you in decisions about the relative goods. These goods
themselves will become faithfully good when your knowledge is correct.
The consequences of your choices of good and bad things will reveal whether
they are or not. Hence, these consequences become an opportunity for further
insight into the truly good.
Today's prevailing bent of mind unfortunately presents you with only two
unhappy alternatives. First, you can "be rational." This means
you explore the facts of what is real or good. Second, when that task of
explanation looks as impossible as it must to most of us today when we confront
the massive factual knowledge of modern science, you can "be impulsive."
This means that you think you should act in terms of what looks and feels
good to you at the moment. You should not "analyze" whether it
is or not. The unhappiest of all outcomes is where you "are rational"
in part of your life (the "serious" part, your work life) and
"are impulsive" in the other part (your leisure, your "free"
time when you are out shopping at the mall). Then you can conceal, forget,
or eliminate by alternating between them the symptoms that would otherwise
reveal the failure of both "rationality" and "impulsiveness."
You live a radically fragmented existence without conscience or consciousness.
Lacking standards rooted in the unity of existence, you think you are happy
and at peace. You are living a lie. You are a living lie, but you can
see neither of these truths.
16. The Message is a Medium
At the point in the twentieth century when the information revolution was
becoming self-conscious, Marshall McCluhan introduced the famous slogan,
"The Medium is the Message." Directing his attention first at
television, he noticed that not only it but also all media had an impact
on the content of the message you receive. This important insight that
the method of communication biased the content of communication he explored
in great detail. He illustrated the essential difference between reading
the printed word and watching pictures on a flat illuminated rectangular
surface while hearing voices from a box. While his insights have become
part of common knowledge today, they have had their greatest impact on the
communications industry. There, experts have enabled the powerful political
leaders and corporate economic forces to take full advantage of the impact
of the medium of television on us. Even as critics expose the way political
commercials with biased pictorials and emotionally laden language and, worse,
"news" composed of "twen ty-second" sound bites accompanied
by flags waving behind political candidates, subverts a democratic process
that requires deliberation and thought, the manipulative power of such devices
has rapidly increased. In McCluhan we have another example of how scientific
knowledge that supposedly should liberate us, gets appropriated by the forces
that enslave us.
This does not mean that his insights are unimportant or can make no contribution
to the preservation of human freedom. If we go just one step beyond his
fundamental concept of media being the message, we can preserve his insight
but also remove from their hands the manipulative power it gave the powerful
over us. McCluhan's insight does not protect you from being manipulated
by those who know how to exploit it (Miller).
You can extend the insight you gained from McCluhan by realizing that his
slogan is reversible: "Every message is a medium." Communications
theory makes a mistake when it assumes that the message is "information."
This assumption is that somehow the message "contains" or "carries"
a meaning it can confer on you. It is an error that is very tempting particularly
to a new and growing intellectual discipline that is seeking "scientific"
status. For example, such an assumption allows communications theorists
to associate themselves with geneticists in the "hard science"
of biology. They can consider verbal messages or television messages to
be the same as electronic messages on telephone lines and the same as the
"genetic code" or message that directs the origin, growth, and
development of all life forms. It has to be a great temptation to contemplate
the possibility of a universal human theory based on communications concepts.
Communications theory dreams it can unite "the body" and its
chemistry and physics with the mind and all art and philosophy through the
concept that the origin of all life rests in messages. Communications theory
can thus aspire to the status of the new "master science."
The first thing that even communications theorists readily admit is that
human messages always have three components: one is objective (the writing,
the picture itself) and the other two are subjective (a sender and a receiver).
All three contribute to the meaning of the message. This means you cannot
identify messages with any "thing" -- neither objective things
nor subjective things. They are essentially relational and exist only in
the relation. Anything you can identify as "the message" is actually
only an element in the medium. The message itself is essentially outside
things, or metaphysical. It is knowable only through the exercise of spiritual
powers of intellect. Moreover, outside the actual relationship, no one
can know the meaning of the message. Even within the relationship this
meaning may not be understandable. It all depends on the status of the development
of participants' spiritual powers. Looked at from a slightly different
angle, how much you participate in any message is equal to the level of
your spiritual development. You may participate in messages more completely
where you are only an observer than those who look like they are more directly
involved in the relationship than you are.
It is not only "messages" that are media but also every "thing"
that messages refer to. Our very experience of things is encrusted with
pre-established meanings. Thus, they themselves are media that point to
these messages. Spiritual development entails moving through the three
levels of "reality" or the three levels of "things."
In terms of our knowledge of things, reality may be divided into three
levels: the "sub-real," the "real," and the "super-real."
Let me give an example of these three that has significance for today's
unfortunate manipulative use of communications theory. The "sub-real"
is where you of look at reality symbolically and mythically but you do not
realize you are. In a television commercial, you may actually see a Jeep
symbolically. This means your experience of it is not of what it "really"
is. Instead, the meaning you pick up when you see it is "power"
or "potency." The commercial presented the Jeep in terms of all
the things it "can do" and, therefore, as "possibility,"
"potential," or "power." It means not only all the
things it "can do," but also all the things you "can do."
It is the promise of the annihilation of your impotence. That is why you
feel you "can't do" without it. If you think you are merely attracted
to the "real thing," the Jeep itself, to that extent you are living
in a "sub-real" world. It is only under such circumstances that
you easily fall victim to the power of rapacious corporate sales people
and unscrupulous politicians.
Corporate leaders and politicians gain power over you, however, not only
because of the "sub-reality" of your perceptions and so the "sub-reality"
of your reality but also because they "escape" "sub-reality"
themselves. They perceive things as they are. They are realists. To them
the Jeep is only a thing they can use as a tool of manipulation to entice
from your pockets a pile of silver and gold coins. They are hard-headed
and refuse to live in a world of "fantasy." If they are attracted
to power, they know it and go after it. They do not go after the symbols
of power as if they were power itself. They are so "realistic"
that they understand that other people are impressed by the symbols of power
as if these were power itself. They understand that a huge office, luxuriously
appointed, is a symbol of their power. So, they surround themselves with
these, not because they want them, but because they give them more real
power over others.
This system of linear exploitation of the "realists" over the
"sub-realists," however, breaks down. It cannot be sustained.
Those who see the real and consider themselves "realists" see
the "sub-real" symbolic confusion in others, but they do not see
it in themselves. Because they fail to understand the principle that the
things themselves crave, the "realities," are messages that carry
meanings outside themselves, they also fail to grasp that they themselves
are victims of sub-reality as well. They may perceive and profit from how,
because others cannot see its symbolic meanings, they can make them perceive
great value in a Jeep itself. However, they are unlikely to perceive how
their desire for money and profits is also based on meanings they ascribe
to money and profits that are not in them. We may conclude that the so-called
villains who exploit others using the tools communications theory supplies
to them are themselves the greatest victims of the same illusion.
But their situation is even worse. Not only corporate executives but also
those they hire to do the manipulation in advertising, those who seem most
aware of the power of symbol and exercise it most directly over those lost
in the sub-real, will find themselves, off the job, the victims of symbol
and sub-reality. They may not hunger for the Jeep they so cleverly sell
but for the Jaguar or for the ski trip to the Colorado lodge owned by the
man who lusted after and bought one of their Jeeps.
This system of delusion and self-delusion is inevitable under conditions
prevailing today. Both communications science and its practical applicators
are able to perceive the "sub-reality" that dominates others and
not that which dominates themselves. This is because they lack any independent
or "absolute" standard for identifying when "realities"
are symbolic and when they are not. The standard is purely relative. You
can see the illusory nature of the desired objects in other people when
they are different from yours or when you are yourself creating their illusions.
You can see them only relative to where you are not involved yourself.
Moreover, you can profit from your superior knowledge in specific areas
only if you force yourself to work where you are not excited by the material
product of your labor. To be selling illusions consciously to others not
only plagues your conscience to death but also requires that you maintain
a pretense both to them and to yourself that you really care about Jeeps.
The duplicity becomes unconscious and, at the same time, an emotional drag
on your ability to concentrate and be successful at your job. The quality
of your product, the product you yourself do not really care about, inevitably
deteriorates and you can delay or slow the deterioration only by deceiving
yourself that you do care. Such deceit will require that you, off-the-job,
indulge yourself in purchasing illusions that sustain your illusion that
you have a meaning in work.
What must happen to break the cycle of enslavement is to realize that both
messages about things (television commercials) and things themselves (Jeeps
and other "real" things) are media. Neither of them is ultimately
"there." They all point to a "super-reality" -- to
what is "above" "reality." Without this higher realm
you can only move from "sub-reality" in certain areas to "reality,"
but this movement will require that you drop deeper into "sub-reality"
elsewhere.
The passage from "reality" to "super-reality" can proceed
by starting with the same process of dis-illusionment that brought you from
"sub-reality" to "reality": the failure of "cold
reality" to satisfy you so that the more you pursue and acquire "real"
things the more you realize their hollowness. But the most important part
of the movement is for the dis-illusioned realist to return to the symbol
and myths that they unconsciously attached to "things." Once
you see that what you were actually seeking after was not "in"
the thing but beyond it, then you can start pursuing through things to the
true meanings they represent symbolically. The first transformation that
will take place in your being is that you will relate differently to things.
You will not abandon them, but you will no longer be attached to them.
Your search will be with them and through them but not to them. Ironically,
your relationship with things will be better than before; you will become
a true realist who takes the message of the medium called things for what
it is. You can do this only because you take the message of the symbol
and myth for what it is. Both "realists" and "sub-realists"
are bound to confuse the two. Only a "super-realism" that operates
beyond the realm of things (it is metaphysical) discovers the standard adequate
to measure all "things."
17. Myth and Mental Illness
The notion that disturbances of the soul or psyche are illnesses gained
ascendancy only in the nineteenth century. This idea culminated with Freud
and psychoanalysis. It has been parlayed into a major industry and is the
foundations of a major public service, community mental health. "Mental
illness" as a concept of disease that parallels physical illness is
vague and pervasive. Some psychologists have argued that "mental illness"
is a myth. (Szasz) Mental illness does exist. Psychology just has not
explained exactly what it is.
That we identify what "in" us is afflicted with the disease with
such unclear and diverse labels as the "soul" or "psyche"
or the "mind" indicates just how vague they are. Mental illness
is a disease of the "mind" in so far as mental artifacts are involved
in it. It is a disease of the "psyche" or "soul" to
the extent that distortions in these artifacts bring havoc to our state
of being.
To the extent that you have not been inwardly absorbed into the prevailing
social reality, to the extent that you are alienated from it whether consciously
or unconsciously, words lie in wait for you like a trap ready to spring.
This trap does not initially imprison you. Instead, it offers you an escape
from the prison of normal existence. To the extent that we all live in
a reality composed of "things," we are all alienated from it.
Remember, the things are not ultimately real. They do not speak to us directly
as they are. Words and names participate in creating them. Thus, names
mediate our direct contact with life. Names and the "things" they
create outwardly unite us to, but inwardly distance us from, the world.
Some people, however, suffer not just from this general and common alienation
from the world. They endure an uncommon and particular, if not unique,
estrangement from it. These people especially can be mirrors to us. They
can help us become aware of our own common form of alienation. Without
them, we would have a hard time seeing it, let alone understanding it, precisely
because it is so common.
None of us is integrated into all the groups that compose our societies
but most of us are integrated into some. Most of us are still members of
families, we still share with fellow workers the comradeship of the job,
and we share with the vast majority of the members of society being "law-abiding"
citizens who are sexually "normal." There are, however, vast
numbers of us who are not just alienated from other people's families or
professions but also from any family or any profession. There are the jobless,
the unemployed, the physical or spiritual orphans, the criminals, and the
homosexuals.
In Saint Genet, John Paul Sartre illustrates how criminals and homosexuals
have to live in a world that is not theirs. It is not theirs because, by
virtue of their identities, they are alienated from "good" society.
(Sartre) The very language of the society that alienated them, the language
that constitutes the essence of both natural and manufactured things, confers
a proprietary relationship on normal citizens impossible for the dispossessed.
Since I own property, when I see my neighbor's property I see his relation
to it as the same as mine. His property is not my property but it is property,
a reality I can grasp in my "own" terms. If you are propertyless
or, worse, if you are a thief to whom property is always somebody else's
relationship to things and someone who is hostile to you, the meaning of
the term for you is one of negation and alienation. The very perception
of the reality of "property" is hostile and alien. The world
is hostile and alien. What you see, you experience as a reproach. Good
citizens who are integrated into society see jewelry or diamonds; you, unable
to wear or possess them, see "ice." You give them your own names,
names that reflect how they relate to you or as they show themselves to
you. They are clear and they sparkle but they are not life to you but death.
They are not warm but cold. Once you have a different name for them, you
will see them differently. Others who are similarly alienated adopt your
name for them and so share your perception. When you talk with them about
"ice," they understand what you mean. The term designates a reality
and a meaning you share among yourselves, but not with good citizens.
All of us are radically alienated from the structure of being so long as
we regard ourselves as good and integrated citizens. We experience the reality
of the world and of ourselves through the artificial names of our common
social life. Therefore, we always can slip into consciousness of our alienation.
You may facilitate this by drugs, or traumatic situations such as the death
of a loved one. However, you need neither. It can happen one day as you
walk down the street. You are suddenly struck by the radical "strangeness"
of the world, by the hollow cars racing down the street, driven by desperate
people like yourself rushing to get to work while dreading the destination.
Anything at all can suddenly appear absurd and incomprehensible: a fork,
eating itself, haircuts every two weeks, shaving every morning, perming
your hair only to watch it go limp in days, endlessly filling your car with
gas, polishing it as you watch it rust. Into that unexpected experience
of estrangement or alienation from normal reality, names pop into your mind.
If they are powerful enough, you actually can see the world through these
words so that you perceive the long line of cars as ants with fins.
This transformation, stimulated by your state of being, moves from the
purely mental response of drawing up an "inappropriate" word and
moves to affect your actual relation to the world when you see the ant-line
progression. The event itself constitutes a liberation from the illusions
of normal reality through your liberation from the conventional terminology
of names that constructs the reality you perceive. Regardless of the strength
of your "abnormal" perception, you can move from it into two opposite
directions. One of them is called "mental illness." The other
is "transcendence."
Since you have been, until the moment of breakdown, so fully integrated
into society and absolutely lost in believing in the reality of its logic,
you may be frightened. You may wit"ÇÉÑÖÜáàâäãåçéèêëíìîïñóòôöõúùûü°¢£§·¶ß®©´¨Æر<>¥µªºæø¿¡¬«» ÀÃÕp;-""''÷ÿצ¤<>ff·,"ÂÊÁËÈÍÎÏÌÓÔÒÚÛÙ"°¸"hdraw
from it, stand back, and consider what has happened an "hallucination."
If you cannot end it, you may declare yourself "mentally ill"
or you may start living on the basis of your new perception so that you
cannot force yourself to join the long line of finned ants on their way
to the oblivion of work. Thus, either your "choice" or actions
of your friends and family will place you under the judgment of psychiatry,
that "branch of medicine" that deals with mental problems. Whether
you seek out the help of a psychiatrist or others commit you to one because
of your abnormal behavior, you will be given a new name. Psychiatry may
label you "a schizophrenic."
You are diseased. You are genuinely disturbed and not at "ease."
However, your real disease is not that you are seeing things differently
from others. It is that you are unable to give up your old belief that
normal reality is out there and established by the world instead of being
created by names and concepts. You, therefore, experience a contradiction
in your experience of reality. You can give up neither your old belief
or the new. Both you and the normal majority of citizens and the psychiatrists
know that contradictions are impossible. Reality cannot be both humans
in cars on their way to work and finned ants fleeing to oblivion. Even
if you do not, the normals and the psychiatrists know ahead of time which
of these alternatives is genuine and which is an hallucination. They think
you are sick as long as you refuse to abandon the "hallucinations"
and return to the safety of normal perceptions. Actually, however, you
are sick as long as you cannot use both your contradictory perceptions to
gain a better understanding of life as it actually is. You stay sick when
you cannot understand that the normally ordered reality is violent and alienating
to the human spirit and you cannot grasp that the alternative words that
construct an alternative realities are symbols trying to reveal a truth
to you.
A way out might appear, an alternative both to the disease of hallucination
and to the return to the disease called "normalcy" the "hallucination"
temporarily released you from. You could look to art or religion. You
could become a poet or an ascetic. Instead of abandoning your new perceptions,
you write a poem portraying your dreadful experience of the traffic in the
streets. Instead of going back to work yourself you resign, retire, become
a hermit, join a religious movement or monastery. You act and live on the
basis of your impressions. Normal people respect you, make charitable contributions
to support your monastery or buy your poems. You may even set your poetry
to music and become rich and famous lyricist for rock music.
These are not solutions. They are not ways of transcending your plight.
This is so, first, as far as you yourself are concerned in your new relation
to yourself and to life. Both your poetry and your asceticism are only negations
of the negation. They are only rebellions against the established order
you had lived before. They therefore depend on it, and in the process of
rejecting it, actually live off it. You replaced one kind of prison with
another. The other is even worse than the first because it feels like liberation
from prison since you enter it in order to break out of the old order.
It is a mere rebellion. You have simply taken a permanent and paid vacation
from the norm.
That art and religion have led you into a cul-de- sac is made still more
evident because others pay for your vacation. The good people whose lives
you abandon to indulge yourself and whose lives you criticize support you.
As a poet and a saint, you have become their temporary vacation. They
pay you to live on the edge. You do for them what they want to do but cannot
do. They cannot even recognize that they want to do it By buying your
music or by contributing to you charitably, they simultaneously affirm the
desire in themselves, distance it from their consciousness, and prove that
their normal life is superior to yours because you need them and it to support
you. They make you unauthentic but only because you first were unauthentic
yourself. Dual and opposing un-authenticities living off each other, feeding
off each other, and dead in each other's embrace.
Popular or critical success is death to both the poet and the ascetic.
Sanctity defined is sanctity debased. Poetry defined is poetry betrayed.
The level of fame of the saint and the rock star is the measure of the
betrayal of humanity they embody. False art and false religion and the
falsity of normal existence all join to proclaim the slogan of falsity:
"You can't argue with success!"
Under conditions today, success is a sure sign of falsity. Failure, however,
can mark either genuine achievement or falsity. Any successful poet or saint
who has the smallest degree of sensitivity understands that when either
the mass of normal citizens or a small band of critics honor you without
following you, you have become a fraud. The most successful "poets"
in the modern day, the rock stars of a few decades ago, such as Elvis Presley
or Jim Morrison, have the sensitivity to know that something has gone wrong.
They either start deteriorating and decaying or they abandon their success.
Some are merely performers. Their art is the performance itself so that
they find it nearly impossible to abandon the lie and keep performing until
they die at an early age a hulking and decayed shell of their hopeful youth.
Others, like Morrison, are also writers who hobble away on the crutch of
poetry while abandoning the masses.
Neither of these strategies works. They fail for the same reason that
poets and ascetics who keep denouncing normal life and even insulting their
fans remain frauds. The celebrities are sensitive enough to know that the
adulation they get is an insult, but all they can do is insult their adulators.
They have found negation in adulation and have negated it, but they have
not found a way out. Poets and ascetics have only two fates: to allow
themselves to be absorbed back into the norm by adopting the official status
of being a thing to normal society (being "the poet" or "the
ascetic") or constantly rebelling against every being that they start
becoming or that others ascribe to them.
There is, however, a third alternative, a path to genuine health. It does
not entail negating the fans by insulting or abandoning them but accepting
failure at their hands. There is a path of genuine poetry and genuine sanctity.
It is the path of failure. However, if you understand the value of failure,
you can still fall under the illusion that you can choose failure. Instead,
you must choose success and being. Only then can you genuinely experience
rejection and failure. You cannot react by either affirming or rejecting
this rejection. Both are paths back to the lie.
When the experience of alienation that you share with those who others
call "schizophrenics" comes and the world grows absurd, you cannot
sustain the normal meanings and names for the things you see. You see things
not differently from the normal. You actually see different things. You
can, however, accept this as a boost outside the world. You can accept
it as a revelation that all things are artificial and created. Standing
outside things, you master them. Mastering them, you resurrect them. You
have used your alienation from the world to gain the world. Most use their
alienation from the world to lose themselves and the world.
18. Ideology: Right and Left
Aristotle in his Metaphysics (p. 267), agrees that all things that are
subject to movement or change are composed of contraries. For him, contraries
are direct opposites such as man and non-man. Yet he criticizes others for
believing in this principle without indicating how it is that the contraries
came together and remain together. His answer is that there is a third
element in all changeable beings: matter. Changes occur in "form"
or essential character. They do so because essential character is contradictory.
Matter is both the subject of change and the container of the antagonism.
He even cites Empedocles claim (p. 268) that it is love that unites opposites,
but disposes of it by claiming that since love is in the two opposites,
it itself is inadequate to account for their unity.
What draws the opposites together is the "appearance of the good."
(p. 267) This appearance of the good is the "final cause" that
precedes the emergence of anything. It stimulates the energy that draws
the two opposites into unity and preserves them in unity.
Now, "appearance" has a double meaning. The first is that the
good "makes an appearance" or "manifests itself." This
appearance, occurring in the presence of the opposite and not without its
presence, then engenders the love that draws the two together. The opposing
parts originated as opposites in an original fragmentation of the one good.
This one, therefore, is the matrix, the mother, the matter out of which
it came. The affirmation of "man" was a fragment of the good.
In its being created, it required its opposite "non-man." The
good created the opposite simultaneously. "Man" can have no reality
except alongside its contrary "non-man." This analysis clarifies
Aristotle's notion of "matter." It shows that for him "matter"
is not some sort of molecular substance things are made of, and so it disposes
of the distortions his successors imposed on his original ideas. The "material
cause" is really nothing but the good there in the beginning but also
the good all being is drawn toward and united in.
There is, however, another meaning to the term appearance." We normally
distinguish between "appearance" and "actuality." Using
this meaning, the "appearance of the good" refers to what looks
good but is not actually good. It is what we mistake for the good. The
ambiguity of the term is fortunate. It can contain a paradox that comes
closest to reflecting the truth: in every appearance of the good that stimulates
love or attraction, the good is actually there but is likely to be mis-perceived.
You will mis-perceive it when you do not understand his metaphysical character.
You will fail to understand that character so long as your faculties for
metaphysical understanding are not developed. In specifically social relations,
when a man falls in love with a woman, it is always occurs because the good
manifests itself to him. If, however, he thinks the explanation of his
love is her reality, he has mis-perceived the source of his love. In pursuing
her, he will achieve not unity and the good but only a reverse reflection
of his own conflicts. By confronting them through and in her in marriage,
he may or may not elevate himself above to the good itself that inspired
him.
The human being is susceptible to illusions far beyond any other animal.
This is because we, more than any of them, live in reality. Because we
live in a realm of pre-defined objects, we all-too-easily invest our love
in them. However, when you live from illusions of the good by falsely investing
spirit in things, you will suffer. The suffering signifies the error.
If you devote yourself to truth, your pain will teach you and show you the
error and how to overcome it. For example, you might be attracted to candy
bars. Because a good appears when they do, you fall into the illusion of
believing it is in them. However, if you keep eating them, your teeth begin
to decay, your stomach aches, you grow obese. In short, your body starts
to disintegrate. What shows that sugar was not good, although it "participated"
in the good or reflected it, is that instead of unifying the opposites combined
to constitute your body, it led to their disunity.
Bodily health is the harmony of all the opposing elements that compose
it. Medicine is properly the science that attains knowledge of the good
that maintains that harmony. Thus, health and medicine are great figures
or symbols for well-being as a whole. They are finally inadequate because
neither focuses on the good itself but on a relative good, the good of "the
body." The body is a pre-defined object. It is not reality but a
prejudice about reality. Its well-being, sought as a final end, is there
fore an illusion of the good. Human existence, more concretely understood,
contains the contraries life and death. "Health" and "medicine"
identify themselves with the well-being of the body. Therefore, they associate
the good in existence only with life and not with death. Medicine is helpful
only relatively. It improves our knowledge of the good relative as compared
with the lesser knowledge we had before. That a candy bar is good is a
worse or more constricting illusion than that the life of the body is good.
The life of the body is a greater good or is closer to the good itself than
the good of eating a candy bar even though, by itself, it too is a limited,
relative, and illusory good.
Only when you consider human existence as a whole -- as the mass of contrary
relationships themselves -- rather than isolate out a defined object or
thing however great, do you have a chance to reach its highest quality.
An exploration of the good invested in a candy bar or the good invested
in the body reverses a principle that is applicable to existence itself.
In the whole of your existence wherever you pursue something under the
illusion that it is good, you will suffer when you attain it. The famous
notion that it is a curse to get what you want expresses this paradox.
The greatest curse is not for Romeo to lose Julliet to death. It is for
him to get her. The intensity of his passion for her is proof that she
is an illusion of the good. By getting married, both would suffer great
pain. Not getting each other is not any better. Then, each continues in
the illusion of an unfulfilled longing. There is only one way out of this
kind of illusion. Both Romeo and Julliet, like each of us, must kill the
"thing" they love. Because such love is never for the thing,
only by "killing" it do we get to truth. Of course, this "killing"
must not be interpreted to mean factual killing. Instead, it is the killing
of seeing through the illusion. Factual killing only preserves the illusion.
It even grows stronger because of guilt and remorse.
What holds any group of people together, what unifies the greatest number
of most extremely opposite people is the appearance of the good itself.
The genuine unity and harmony of a diverse nation is the greatest evidence
of goodness in it. Since everything that appears good to a people actually
participates in good in some way as either a fragment or a model of the
good, it will always unite them at least partially. Where the actuality
of the good has been partial or the people have mis-perceived it, however,
the more of the good the society focuses on is achieved, the more the society
will disintegrate. It will lose its unity. Its wealth or "productivity"
will decline. Crime, corruption of political and economic leadership, and
alienation of all will grow.
It is in the face of this disintegration that ideologies of the right and
left emerge. Everyone senses the decline and finds their lives threatened
by it. If, because of the eclipse of the metaphysical and the deterioration
of the spiritual tools that allow you to grasp it so that "the good
itself" is rendered invisible, the inevitable reaction to the threat
and the deterioration is either fantasy or a deliberate appeal to illusion.
Let us say a nation has been collectively seized by the good of attaining
riches. More and more compete with their neighbors for riches. Instead
of actually uniting everyone, the "unity of all under the good of riches"
produces a false and temporary unity. It generates conflict over wealth
and the increasing dispossession of some so that others may possess more.
Since no amount of riches is satisfying, there is no end to the quantity
of wealth some will seek even if it means the starvation and homelessness
of others.
One ideology that emerges as a fantasy to stave off the inevitable disintegration
and collapse of the nation is the "liberal" ideology. It holds
to wealth as the good but sees the possibility of re-distributing the wealth
so that total well-being might be greater. It promises that the nation
can make "progress" by taking collective action, through taxation,
new laws to restrict the obscenely wealthy, to control their despoiling
the earth, and so on. As a promise, this program represents another appearance
the good. A "fairer" distribution of national resources is at
least a fragment of a genuine good. As long as it defines progress in terms
of distribution of wealth, however, it still serves the original illusion
and, in practice, is bound to fail. It will not achieve redistribution,
and, even were redistribution to take place, it would not bring about greater
individual satisfaction and national harmony.
Thus, disintegration continues. The reaction is the "conservative"
fantasy. It is a fantasy, like the "liberal" one, that lives
off the threat of disintegration. The rise in crime energizes it. Sometimes
it gets support even by complaining publicly about the continuing exploitation
of some by others. This is especially true when conservatives can point
out that the very leaders of the liberal program that promised a fairer
distribution of wealth themselves begin to acquire more than their fair
share. Unlike the "liberal" fantasy, however, the "conservative"
fantasy also lives off, depends on, or is relative to the liberal fantasy.
Liberals do not need conservatism in order to come into being, but conservatism
needs liberalism. Conservatism can stay alive only if it keeps alive the
"evil ideology" of liberalism. "Conservatives" need
to blame the disintegration of the society on the progressive program and
are successful because the evidence will support their charges. However,
"conservatives" fall into the fantasy of claiming that simply
by rejecting the liberal program and returning to the love of wealth pursued
"freely," the nation will prosper. According to "conservatives"
the only reason why crime is increasing, the quality of products is deteriorating,
and everyone is feeling "malaise" is that the society had fallen
under the grips of the liberal ideology.
It should be easy to see now how political cycles of liberalism/conservatism
can rule, how those with even a little historical sense become cynical and
opportunistic, and how the illusion of those who grow cynical and opportunistic
is the worst of all. It is the attitude that finally completes the disintegration
process.
As conditions worsen, the actual absence of unity generates energy through
antagonism and frustration. If the frustrated direct their energy into
further fantasies or illusions of either the liberal or the conservative
variety, they con preserve the illusion of unity but only as long as the
nation dwells in the realm of rhetoric. Disintegration in reality keeps
growing and unhappiness spreads. First leaders from the left and then,
discrediting them, leaders from the right develop beautiful words that capture
the image of the good itself. The greater the disintegration the faster
the flight from one side to the other and the more the oscillation takes
place in the realm of rhetoric alone. In the final phase, ideology becomes
self-conscious. Liberals and conservatives alike begin to realize that
neither ideology makes any real difference in the actual unity of the nation.
Both sides recognize that disintegration is increasing. They cease to believe
in ideology or in their fantasies. They grow concerned that none of them
can lead to any real improvement and conclude that it is fantasy itself
that is the unifying principle. Thus, cynical opportunists become the leaders
of the nation. They are the ones who are best able to present pure fantasy
to the public, to present pure "appearance" of the good. What
they say has not even a particle of actual possibility in it, and they have
no intention of trying to turn the "appearance" into reality.
They consider themselves as the symbol of the nation. To them, the nation
has no reality accept in them and the fantasy they represent. They utterly
disregard the suffering of the nation. They no longer make any attempt
to learn how the good itself was embedded and lost in the fantasy. The
separation of fantasy from actuality is complete. Actual disintegration
accelerates beneath the illusions their pure ideology generates. Pure ideology
has cynically renounced everything except itself. It has become ideology
that the leaders consciously generated only to make citizens feel good about
the ideologue. Citizens, naturally, are only too happy to accept uncritically
the comforting lies.
The whole society becomes a system of massive self-delusion. The worse
things get -- the greater the despair, crime, delinquency, addiction, etc.
-- the less people, whether they be merely citizens or leaders, want to
deal with them. When they can no longer avoid them, they turn them into
entertainment. Thus, they appear to be interested in crime, rape, murder,
etc., but refuse to see that their own conceptions of good are responsible
for causing the suffering. Clever political leaders talk constantly about
the disintegration but only as a device where they awaken the threat and
fear in all of us only to appeal to our will to narcoticize ourselves by
blaming some other ideology rather than theirs and ours for the catastrophe.
19. Deformities and Abilities
Normal human beings are understandably repelled by deformities. Deformities
look unhealthy and unnatural. Once you understand, however, that the shape
that gets deformed is itself already unnatural and possibly unhealthy, then
you can see how great the value of certain kinds of deformities is.
The ancient world is filled with symbolic stories of the transformation
of the formed into the deformed and the transformation of the deformed into
the transcendent. Two examples will suffice for our purposes here. The
first is the myth of Oedipus and the other is the story of Christ.
Of the so-called miracles of Christ, two stand out above all. He treats
the blind and the lame. "The blind see and the lame walk." (Luke,
7:21) In these "miracles," it is vital to distinguish between
two things: the state of being and the possession of abilities. The key
to understanding such "miracles" is that Christ does not change
the objective state of the being of the victim. Blindness in the sense
of the eye that does not work remains. Lameness in the sense of twisted
legs does not go away. What happens is the effect or consequence of the
distortion in being is reversed. The "miracle" is actually a
paradox. The blind remain blind, yet they see and they see better than
the sighted. The lame remain lame, yet they walk and they move better than
the straight-legged.
Oedipus is deformed from birth. The puzzling action of his father Laius
in piercing his feet as an infant before he exposed him to death gave him
his name, Oedipus or "the swollen-footed." At the end of Sophocles'
tragic play "Oedipus Rex," Oedipus destroys his eyes and so renders
himself blind. Like the story of Christ's miracles, the tale of Oedipus
is a "riddle" or a paradox. The lame, swollen-footed Oedipus can
actually "walk" so well that he defeats replaces a king. Moreover,
while he is able to "solve" the riddle or paradox of the Sphinx,
he cannot solve the riddle of his own birth and life until he destroys his
eyes. Blinded he, like the "seer" Teresias who tells him the
riddle of Oedipus's birth, can see. Walking well while lame, Oedipus walks
without vision or wisdom and so commits actions that doom not only himself
but his offspring to exile and defeat at the hands of his successor, King
Creon.
The great follower of Christ mirrors in his own experience the symbols
of the miracles Christ performed directly on those he met. On the road
to Damascus, Paul is "blinded by the light." The light that enlightens
is associated with blindness, even though it is in his case a passing blindness.
It lasts only until his conversion is complete. Subsequently, however,
and throughout his life Paul proclaimed that he suffered from a debilitating
"wound in the flesh."
A core of the most ancient rituals of "religion" combine these
same two elements. (Ginzburg, pp. 237-247) Initiates are both "blinded,"
as in the Elysian Mysteries where they apparently are led into complete
darkness before the cave is illuminated, and made "lame," as in
the cult of Dionysius where the celebrants danced lamely on one foot. (Ginzburg,
pp. 237-238) Initiation required that you utterly stop "seeing"
as you did normally and that you ceased acting or moving ("walking")
as you did normally. Initiation, therefore, involves a ritual death that
is actual and complete as far as the self is concerned. Only after completely
blotting out the old knowledge and the old living could you return to existence
"reborn."
Christ can establish a universal religion because he requires no specific
ritual of initiation. This is an amazing accomplishment. He did it by
teaching initiates to recall the "incapacities" already present
in their lives -- their "lies" and "mis-actions."
These subjective images and desires and those objective actions were to
be designated as "sins." He showed how "sinners" were
both right and wrong. They were right because they were rebelling against
the "non-being" of "being." No normal social and individual
standard of good is absolute good. When society and the individual enforce
the norm over themselves and others, the negative aspects of it, the elements
of "non-being" in it, grow stronger and stronger. Sensitive individuals
cannot but inwardly rebel. However, they are tempted to rebel against what
both they and their societies are convinced is good. Subjectively experiencing
lust as well as committing objective acts of fornication both are judged
as bad or as "sins." However, the longing to commit sin or the
ground it arises out of is always a desire for the good lost when they absolutized
the conventional ideas of good.
The error of "sinners," however, is to reject also the good elements
that are in the conventional ideas of good. In reacting to the "non-being,"
negation, or "bad" contained in the defined "good,"
they also reject the "being" it contains. Thus, we arrive at
the paradox that, from Christ's point of view, sin remains sin but it also
is the universal path to salvation from sin. Sin is a deformity, but one
generated out of the previous deformity of partial and limited "morality."
Merely saying "no" to the second deformity leaves you with the
first and the first will eventually regenerate or reconstitute the second.
This is what Christ shows when he convicts the good citizens of hypocrisy.
Those who condemn acts of lust themselves continue to lust. Their desire
to punish those who act out of lust arises not because they find the acts
bad but precisely because they experience them as a good they are denying
to themselves. They hate the "sinner" not because of the sin but
because of their own envy or resentment that the sinner is getting away
with something that they are too weak or fearful to indulge themselves in.
The wise always forgive the sin since they understand that the sinner is
impelled to it by a call to a good higher than normal morality. Sinners
are redeemed and preserved (or "saved") to the extent that they
transcend the contradiction between "being" and the "non-being"
within it by moving to the Nothingness that is the ground of both. The
very being of "the world" is saved through the "sin"
or impulse to "non-being" that leads to Nothingness.
The essence of this new and universal religion of Christ is two-fold:
1) It taches how to use the sin that all of us experience in one form or
another to break free both by rejecting the non-being of being and particularly
by forgiving others and so we ourselves find forgiveness. And 2) it demonstrated
the redemption of the sinner in the story of Christ's life that shows the
path to the Absolute Nothingness called "God."
Unlike earlier religions of blindness-that-sees and lameness-that-walks,
Christianity is not a cult. It does not need a ritual of initiation to
produce the change in individuals. It is exactly because it is not a cult
that it is universal. No one anywhere is ever denied salvation. It is
also universal in the sense that it is the universal solution to the decline
and destruction of individual and social life. The rituals of the cults
not only depended on specific forms of blinding and rendering lame but also
had to be formulated to serve specific social and individual ways of living.
What Christ proposes breaks out of the specific and the particular as well
as the general. You can use whatever lameness and blindness that is peculiarly
yours and devolves particularly upon your culture. Using them, you can
gain access through the specific aspects of "non-being" they contain
to the universal Absolute Nothingness. Moreover, the specific elements
you used to get to Nothingness are the specific vehicles for transcending
and elevating the old forms so you can preserve and return to them.
Even to place Christ's proposal into the same category as ancient cults
and refer to both as "religion" is to miss the significance of
the dramatic distinction between them. However, looking at both together
can reveal the common principle they share. It is that deformity is the
path to a higher form. Unless they realize this, then both individuals
and societies will get caught up in the constant cycle of warfare. On one
side stand those who experience the non-being in being (the evil in good).
They cannot but see, feel, and act from that knowledge to injure those who
experience the being in non-being. Facing them, stand those who experience
the being in non-being but fight to repress it in themselves and to destroy
it in others or to destroy the others who cannot deny it in themselves.
Crime and passion unleashed are not black stains on the white purity of
the soul of the individual or nation. They are instead revelations that
the whiteness seen is only a whitewash. The irresistible attraction to
look at, to feel about, or to do the dark deed, is always ambivalent. While
not good itself, it is good when it reveals the bad in what was presumed
to be good. The sin is forgiven and transformed but not blotted out or
annihilated. Crimes, passions and those who will not stop acting in a criminally
passionate way must be similarly forgiven and transformed, not obliterated.
20. The Spiritual Value of Sports
It is rare but not unheard of to learn two invaluable lessons through participating
in sports. Both are in the mystical tradition and are never evident in
conventional approaches that see great value in athletics for other reasons.
The first entails "positive" learning and the second, and more
important, involves "negative" learning. The first is joy; the
second is suffering.
The positive lesson is simple to gain, but hard to use and easy to abuse.
Sport can be an expression of the physical path to higher consciousness.
Stress on the body can release the hold on consciousness that the "created
world" of "reality" normally has.
Examples of how your acceptance of ordinary "reality" can bind
your consciousness to its lower levels include how it creates individual
and group motives. One such motive generated by ordinary reality and related
to sports is "wining the game." This value is relative to, or
created by, the game itself. Athletes, however, can transcend this kind
of motivation and, in the midst of the intensity of playing, can find joy
in the ecstasy brought about by the activity itself. They discover the
possibility of transcendent values and motives.
The prison of normal consciousness can also take the form of the confining
you to the simple, common perception of the "real" world as a
world of "things" or objects. Here the illusory principle is
that things are just as you perceive them--a "tree" is exactly
the tree you see. The fact of the matter is that what you see, at best,
are only those aspects of "the world around you" and of "the
tree" that your language forces you to focus on. Athletes, absorbed
in their actions, can find themselves in a transcendent state where they
lose contact with this conventional reality. They experience the possibility
of perceiving in a manner that reveals an altered reality.
Clever coaches often drive their athletes to levels of exertion that induce
this state of ecstasy precisely because it makes the athletes more vulnerable
to nearly complete control. They can become utterly dependent on their
coaches for direction once they find themselves, because of the vulnerability
of the ecstatic state, in an intense relationship with them that is different
from, but more intimate than, marriage. Lucky athletes, however -- those
who are even moderately self-reflective and especially those who participate
in individual sports such as running -- can find enormous liberation through
the ecstasy. They can, first, begin to enjoy for its own sake the ecstatic
annihilation of ego and the world. Then, they can recall the experiential
knowledge of that private realm when they return into the artificialities
of the normal "world." This double consciousness can liberate
them from its control and from the control of those, who, like coaches,
appear to rule in it.
It is easy to attain the state of ego annihilation and ecstatic joy. However,
in itself, this attainment is both empty and dangerous. It is not the goal.
It is not an end but a beginning. If you fail to go beyond it, it would
have been better for you never to have achieved it at all. This is so not
only because it will make you vulnerable to the real power of others but
also because the pleasure of achieving this ego-less state can become both
an addiction and a means of escaping life rather than encountering it and
fertilizing growth. Physiologists are right to associate chemicals such
as endorphins with this state because it is the same basic state as can
be achieved through other chemicals as diverse as alcohol and LSD. Unlike
sports, drugs, particularly the so-called "hallucinogenic" variety,
produce the "transcendent" experience usually where "authority
figures" are lacking and this, as well as the intense nature of the
experience itself makes it hard for organized and oppressive societies to
appropriate its power by using it to control you for the service of their
own ends. Public authorities consider such drugs "dangerous"
precisely for that reason.
Other vitally important lessons that you can learn through participation
in sports are that the human organism is massively adaptable to, and geared
for the pursuit of, "goods" higher than simple physical and emotional
pleasure and that the only means available to achieve this adaptation to
the higher good is accepting a special kind of voluntary suffering. The
popular coaching phrase, "No pain, no gain," does contain a bit
of wisdom. It is like any powerful lie. Successful lies can only be successful
because of the slice of truth they contain. A lie that is absolute or contains
no truth cannot exist. Coaches distort the truth of the slogan in two ways.
First, they employ pain to get athletes' minds and bodies to adapt to the
goals of the sport, the interests the coaches, and the desires of the fans.
The very bodily development and skills so admired in athletes as well as
what they had to endure to acquire them are visible expressions of degradation.
The "developed" body symbolizes how the person is degraded by
becoming a means to the "good" or goals of the game. This is so
even though coaches and fans can deceive athletes and athletes can deceive
themselves by the flattery of using the prevailing false images of "perfection"
into thinking that this degradation is elevation or that the successful
and famous athlete is a superior human being rather than an inferior and
degraded one. Even where the degradation is not for the sake of the artificial
goals of games and coaches, however, it can still exist. In the "sport"
of bodybuilding, for example, the degradation that submits the person to
the goal of perfection of "the body" itself instead of to the
good of the whole human being in the service of life itself, sometimes takes
even physical shape in the way overdeveloped muscles begin to look grotesque
and repulsive to anyone not themselves afflicted by an addiction to bodybuilding's
spiritually derailed images of physical perfection.
One piece of evidence that reveals how the truth element in the slogan
"no pain, no gain" is distorted is that, while the principle may
be applied to other parts of life, athletes do not make it universal. For
example, in the sport you might follow the slogan and "play over"
or "suck up" the pain in order to run faster, but then you ignore
the rule, avoid discomfort as much as possible where food is concerned and
end in nursing your body excessively. You become scrupulous as to what
you eat so that your stomach will not be upset or so that the nutritive
level will be as "balanced" as possible. Bodybuilders have been
known to be so obsessive about avoiding distress in their bodies other than
the stress that makes their muscles grow that they will change their habit
of sleeping on their sides when they are told it might be uncomfortable
and cause less blood flow in one arm thus destroying the perfect lateral
harmony of both sides of the body. Rather than allowing their bodies to
suffer in a way that would permit them to adapt to and so to "gain"
in their ability to survive under unpleasant conditions, they indulge their
bodies to the maximum with wool mattress pads over yielding water beds.
Moreover, many athletes become positively obsessive about avoiding any
foods that disturb their digestive processes or put uncomfortable demands
on their internal organs to the slightest degree.
The mysterious Georgian-Russian thinker Gurdjieff once noted his surprise
about how American children were taught to eat food when he visited the
United States around the middle of the twentieth century. Parents, influenced
by "health experts," taught their children to chew their food
thoroughly before swallowing it. In some cases, "thoroughly" was
even identified as being a certain number of chews that were actually counted.
This seemed like a good idea to physicians because it made the task of
the stomach easier and so appeared to facilitate the entire digestive process.
The problem is that in indulging the stomach, you fail to take life into
account. Gurdjieff's point was that you need to train your stomach in your
youth to accept only partly chewed food so that in your old age, when your
teeth have weakened or been lost, your stomach will be prepared to digest
un-chewed food. Similarly, medications given to children for minor diseases,
especially if they are given regularly, do produce a weakened constitution
in adulthood. It is even worse if young adults raised in an environment
of excessive nursing care and nurtured in athletics by sports physicians,
later continue to nurse their own bodies and spirits along.
You misuse pain or suffering when you deliberately use them to create and
sustain illusions of authentic achievement. They can create such illusions
both because of a built-in orientation and mechanical response in all of
us that tells us we never do something painful except for a higher good.
Therefore, if we are doing something painful deliberately, we immediately
feel that it must be for a higher good. This spontaneous response is both
supported and reinforced by the consequent "perfection" or "bettering"
of specific things in life such as our bodies or sports skills. You use
pain and suffering properly only when you accept them for the sake of a
truly higher good you know directly. Since you can only guess at what is
a higher good before you pursue and achieve it, you are always in danger
of falling under the spell of the kind of illusions that enduring pain tends
to generate -- the illusion that a phony and artificial game goal such as
kicking a ball into a net is a genuine personal goal.
You can find out that pain is necessary for genuine growth in many ways.
The trick is how to make sure you are using it properly. You can avoid
distorting the knowledge and so derailing it to perverse purposes if you
understand ahead of time why the distortion occurs and what kind of pain
leads to genuine growth. There is a specific reason that athletes and the
rest of us who reach the transcendent ego-less state, whether by physical
exertion or by other means, abuse it by making it a way of escaping from,
rather than an access route to, freedom and a more human life. It is that
the contrast we see between this transcendent ego-less dimension we discover
in the ecstasy of physical activity and the dimension of our normal life
of ego and "reality" causes us pain. This pain that is the only
kind of suffering that is valuable and necessary for growth and creativity.
Only this pain can guarantee genuine gain. Living with one foot in each
domain and willing to endure the chronic moderate as well as the occasional
intense pain that this awkward position entails ultimately generates a genuine
joy. Then your life becomes both truly your own and elevated. Higher consciousness
induced by ecstasy has no value unless you use it to bring your life closer
to the good.
21. Purification of the Flesh
Human flesh needs purification. The principle problem with asserting this
is that it sounds as if the thing named flesh were somehow naturally dirty.
What needs purification in you is not the flesh as such but the muddying
of consciousness that occurs when it becomes your basic guide and standard
for living.
Animals that are not human as well as children who are but whose humanity
is undeveloped, are naturally ruled by the pleasures and pains of the flesh.
These pleasures and pains are what Plato calls our "appetites."
As far as we know, they guide animals all the days of their lives and carry
them on to the highest fulfillment they can attain given the circumstances
of their individual births and lives.
This kind of ruling principle is appropriate to the human being only in
the very earliest stages of life. The Greeks also called these appetites
the "passions" because they were forces that dominated us and
we "suffered" under them. Children need adults to guard them
against the free reign of their appetites at least until they reach an age
when they are able to use language. Then they need help to learn how to
identify, develop, and pursue goods that transcend their appetites or passions.
Of course, adults who have failed to achieve their own human development
are likely to direct their children in ways that are worse than if they
left them to their appetites. Faulty adult guidance includes not only the
obvious -- adult sexual perversions and criminal tendencies -- but also
and more importantly those directions that they think reflect the genuine
good of the child. These include imposing dietary rules and getting the
children involved in social activities such as "summer camp" and
sports.
There are at least two flaws in relying on appetitive pleasures or passions
to guide you and motivate your action. As long as these flaws are in you,
society cannot allow you freedom and autonomy. Instead, it must intervene
and impose external control if it intends to preserve the human race physically.
Unless it does so, deluded by illusions, you will violate others and undermine
the unity and harmony of the whole. The flaws in using the appetites as
ruling standards stem from what makes human life essentially different from
that of other animals.
The first flaw exists because the pleasure principle that dominates appetites
such as those for sex and food does not include the special characteristics
of the human form of sexual activity and eating. When you rely on it for
guidance in directing your life activities, it yields a certain animal satisfaction,
but it fails to deliver to you what you are longing for. Your fulfillment
as a human being in a sexual relation, for example, requires that you are
present as a whole person to another and that you remain both interested
in, and attracted to, the whole person of the other. The appetite for sexual
activity guided only by the desire for pleasure in the sexual act will produce
for you and for society not human happiness but human disaster.
Even Freud conceded that human beings could enhance their pleasure and
satisfaction by means of "sublimation." Freud borrowed the term
"sublimation" from the natural sciences. For chemists, to "sublime"
a chemical is to purify it. To sublime a desire is to purify it as well.
You purify human desires, how ever, not by reducing them to their simplest
molecular state but by expanding them to achieve the complex compound of
elements. It is in "unifying" our range of diverse desires in
each act that represents the highest satisfaction possible to the human
being. It is the pleasure, the motive, that is sublimated or made"sublime"
not the object or thing. Mature human beings, as Freud pointed out, are
psychologically independent and free. Around the time of the onslaught
of puberty, they begin to gain the human faculties that enable them to discover,
and be guided by, an inner standard that transcends and supersedes the animal
appetites.
An even more important problem exists when you try to live guided by the
pleasures of the flesh. It is that, when you do not purify these pleasures
to achieve the complex compound state where they encompass a wholeness in
the relationship between you and the world, they automatically manufacture
false compounds. They get "encrusted" with desires that are extraneous
and irrelevant to them. The bodily desire for sex, for example, gets loaded
with different isolated, unpurified, and otherwise unsatisfied hungers.
This is, in fact, a correlate of the first flaw. When you cling to a way
of living that is guided by physical or emotional pleasure and fail to achieve
the human form of eating and entering into a sexual relationship, then the
complex of human needs gets confused in your consciousness with the simple
desire for food or sex. It is widely known, for example, that what you
think is a hunger for food so strong that it leads to overeating can actually
be a displaced representation of an unfulfilled need for human friendship.
Even though you have hundreds of "friends," you may have no genuine
friend and so remain lonely. The human loneliness you experience is still
beyond your capacity to understand since you have never experienced a true
friendship -- a relationship of two whole individuals -- and no one even
tells you that it could exist. Under these circumstances, it is easy for
you to mistake an unfulfilled need for companionship that you cannot identify,
let alone understand, with a desire for food.
Of course, you do not realize this confusion. You really think you desire
all that ice cream. The problem is even more knotty because your desire
can be inverted. You may restrain yourself from "self-indulgence"
consciously because you think that getting fat is unhealthy when your desire
to avoid obesity is actually the displaced motivation of a human need for
power or perfection. Neither the desire for food nor your desire for health
are merely and abstractly of "the body." You cannot understand
why your "body" does not obey when it is so obvious that it "needs"
no more food and so you persist in endlessly tormenting yourself with self-denial.
The same condition arises with the attitude that seeks out relationships
with others in order to satisfy "emotional" needs. These needs
are also of the "flesh" and "animalistic" as long as
the prevailing motive is emotional pleasure. In fact, to distortions and
illusions are even more prevalent in emotional pleasure than they are in
physical pleasure. It is much easier to confuse a genuine longing for your
own development as a human being -- the hunger to acquire independence and
strength, for example -- with a desire for another person. The person either
can represent strength to you or, because of their excessive dependence
on you, can give you the temporary illusion of your own strength. In order
to purify your desires from the encrustations of error you need to stop
acting solely for the emotional pleasure and search out, from the patterns
of your desires and how they fit into the rest of your life, what the pleasure
really means or represents. Your pleasures are always only signs and symptoms
that your reached some kind of good. They are not the good itself nor should
you trust them, alone and without reflection, to accurately indicate the
goodness of what you are doing when you feel them. Alone they cannot tell
the difference between a genuine fulfillment and the illusion of a fulfillment.
Absurd outcomes are sometimes the only evidence -- if you are willing to
look at them and understand what they demonstrate -- of this kind of impurity.
Take the example of your desire to get a fifteen-speed bike to ride for
exercise. You think your primary goal in getting the bike is for physical
well-being. Your insistence on an expensive racing bike, however, indicates
you are after something else. Finally, the fact that the fifteen speeds
are designed to make the riding easier, and thus less valuable as exercise,
proves conclusively that something is afoot here that you are completely
unaware of. It may be that you have displaced your true longing for inner
perfection into a desire for the most perfect bike you can afford. Your
mind is exceedingly clever when it seeks mechanically to conceal disturbing
and painful truths it would rather avoid such as evidence of the undeveloped
state of your humanity. This skill is only more demonstrated by additional
rationalizations such as that the fifteen speeds allow you to maintain a
more constant level of energy output that conveniently abstruse medical
experiments claim is best for your "cardio-vascular" system.
The aim of asceticism is purification. Purification is not self-denial
but self-realization. It can help you release yourself from the illusions
of desire. In this way you can purify and elevate your desires. Yet asceticism
itself can become a displaced goal of perfection. It can create the illusion
that the acts of self-denial themselves constituted the achievement of purification
and elevation. Wrong-headed asceticism leads to the delusion that the "flesh"
as an external object is bad and must be denied as much as possible. People
who have an ascetic tendency must be especially alert for this kind of derailment.
They usually end up in their own absurdities such as ascetically refusing
to indulge in large, fat, meaty meals but overindulging in the acquisition
of houses, cars, fifteen-speed bikes. Just as the tendency to indulgence
in the fleshy, distorted, derailed, and decadent pleasure of food can be
corrected through a proper exercise of asceticism, so, too, the tendency
to preserve the same distortion by rigid refusal to indulge in the fleshy
pleasure of food that constitutes an alternative method of self-delusion
and sees "self-denial" as a good in itself can be combated by
ritual indulgence in it. Both asceticism and indulgence are only methods
or means; they must not become ends. The end is spiritual self-enlightenment.
The goal of self-enlightenment is always a richer, fuller, and more authentic
life.
22. Spirit and Sanctification
Human life cries out for sanctification. To sanctify some thing is to
make it holy. The key mark of holiness is wholeness. Truth is not true
unless it is whole. Good is not good unless it is the whole good. Life
becomes true and good by becoming holy. To lead a holy, true, and good life,
you need to take the whole into account in all your actions and to be wholly
present in each of them.
Sanctification is a necessity of human life because, unlike all other forms
of known life, only the human form is spiritual. Every relationship you
have to yourself and the world is spiritual. Indeed, the spiritual is the
essence of each such relationship. Consequently, the meaning of absolutely
every "thing" in life is spiritual. This is so because everything
that exists for us is the product of a relationship.
You do not see a tree because it is there as a tree. The tree you see
is the product of a relationship between a mystery that is there and your
senses and other spiritual faculties. To believe that any "thing"
you see exists "out there" is the most fundamental of mistakes.
It is an illusion. Thus, the Ancients spoke and wrote of the world as
the realm of illusion. This was not because the thing "out there"
was illusion. It was instead because whatever we experience through our
senses we artificially create out of material present to us but material
we immediately process through the spiritual faculties of our minds. At
the same time, we find it nearly impossible to live in the world perceiving
all that we see as illusion.
Sanctification is the process that returns each thing in life back to its
spiritual roots. It allows you to realize the spiritual essence of every
thing. It gradually transforms the goods in life into true good. Unless
you follow the path of sanctification, you remain lost in the relative goods
of the material world. For example, living in the material world of the
automotive industry, you believe you should do a good job at building automobiles.
However, this goodness is relative to the good of the automobile. When
automobiles grow destructive, then building good ones is no longer good.
In fact, you should stop building them altogether. This is so for every
good you pursue in life. Not one of them is immune from both the distortions
of illusion of the good and brought about by the destructiveness in their
pursuit.
Because of this condition, normal life presents you with three alternatives.
First, you can get lost in pursuing a relative good and spend your life
under the illusion that it is worthwhile. Second, you can flit from one
good to another. Initially, one good catches you in an illusion; then you
get disillusioned; afterward, another good catches you temporarily. This
cycle can go on indefinitely. Third, you can grow disillusioned with all
goods and become cynical of the world and suicidal of your Self.
All of this happens because your investment of energy, your longing for
good, is always spiritual. It is always for what is beyond every good thing
and any good feeling. You will remain unaware of the nature of this spiritual
quality unless you develop your spiritual faculties instead of continuing
to use them in their underdeveloped state. As long as you have not developed
them, you will always commit the mistake of thinking you want the good thing.
It is not that this thing you seek is bad. It is evil. It caught you
up in an illusion. Evil is the illusion of thinking that something is wholly
good or genuinely good when it is only a partial good or a false good.
Illusion is behind every bad thing you do. This evil principle brings badness
into life. The love of money leads you to steal. You stole because you
had falsely invested spirit in money. You fell under the illusion that
it could give you the spiritual good you were after because you did not
understand you were after a spiritual good at all. Indeed, because you
are a child of the modern age, you lack nearly all knowledge and understanding
of the true spiritual quality of your life.
Through a strategy of sanctification, you may, however, overcome your ignorance
and escape the basic illusion of the world.
To achieve sanctification you need to follow a double strategy. The first
and most familiar side of the method of sanctification is renunciation.
Asceticism involves your recognizing that you are drawn to something for
less than holy motives. Since you do not yet know how to enjoy it in a
holy way, you give it up. You need to take this ascetic step in peace.
You must not feel gloomy or think that you are giving up anything worthwhile.
Your path is not so much denial as one of cheerful waiting. You willingly
wait until either you see a way of relating in a holy way to the thing you
gave up or you realize you were actually after something quite different
from what you thought so you no longer want the thing you gave up. Thus,
you are freed to find fulfillment elsewhere.
The other side of the work at sanctification is more active. The simplest
way to practice it in the beginning is merely to focus on the greatest number
of goods possible at every moment. This includes physical, emotional, and
transcendent goods. Dwelling on your own physical and emotional goods permits
you to encompass both the objective and subjective sides of your life.
This is fairly simple. However, when you start including the physical and
emotional goods of others, the task grows harder because to do so you have
to enter the transcendent realm. This is because you can know the good
of others only metaphysically. It takes a spiritual kind of knowledge.
It involves your sensitivity not only to things or to a relationship between
your senses and what is there. (Remember, all things are a relationship.)
It also involves your judgment of the nature of the relationship. This
judgment is outside the physical and the sensed. It is metaphysical and
spiritual. To see a good in a family and a good in serving its physical
and emotional well-being requires a judgment that is not of the senses.
Sanctification of your pursuit of money happens when you start thinking
about what you are doing to yourself and others to gather it. This launches
you on a quest of paying attention to more facets of your life simultaneously
and following them. Again, your considerations may start with the physical
and emotional damage your money-making wreaks on yourself and others. This
is the awakening of conscience. The more elements of life you taking into
account and more dimensions of good you encompass in your pursuit of money
the more your conscience develops. There comes a point, however, when you
will find you cannot unite the goods you see and bring them together in
making money. Thus, your actions, and so your life, grow less holy. You
find that when you serve the good of your family, you directly contradict
serving the good of your business customers. Your only solution is to find
a higher and purer kind of spiritual good.
It was to satisfy this need to identify and follow a higher, or more spiritual,
good that the language of symbol, the logic of myth, and the method of religion
developed.
The notions both that there are gods and that they are more "real"
than "reality" are symbolic. They represent neither fantasy nor
a primitive, pre-scientific explanation. They represent actual experiences.
However, they are not sensuous experiences, and they are not theories based
on sensuous experience. They stand for specific spiritual experiences.
The possibility of living for god does not mean that you abandon yourself
to a being or idea alien to yourself. Instead, it means that you abandon
an illusion of self for a better knowledge of self and that you live for
that truer self.
Of course, you could get seized by the spiritual significance of a myth
unconsciously. The myth excites you. However, you could interpret the
words in the story physically rather than metaphysically. Consequently,
you fervently believe that there is a physical being called "god"
that stands above you in the sky or in some physical realm that just happened
to be momentarily invisible to your eyes. You are convinced you must serve
it. Then you would be treating symbol, myth, and religion as nearly all
in the modern age treat them: not as names, stories, and ceremonies that
identify and invoke spiritual experiences, but fantasies you fall under
in the name of "faith" or reject in the name of science.
Of all the dimensions of life that demand sanctification, none is more
important than sex. Moreover, it is only from the sanctification of sex
that flow the other vital sanctifications -- of motherhood, fatherhood,
sisterhood, brotherhood, and the family.
Sexual attraction and sexual relationships always have a spiritual essence.
It is there in the beginning and remains there until the end regardless
of how you misinterpret and misuse them in your sexual activity. The worst
thing you can do to sex is to make it an end in and of itself. To pursue
sex as a final and isolated goal, is to lose entirely its spiritual meaning.
Since sex is so important, since it is a form of spiritual call that is
central to human life, you lose the essential core of your humanity when
you approach sex unsanctified.
The highest material understanding of the spiritual essence of sex is seeing
it as a means of human reproduction. The highest material expression of
spirit in sex is when you perform sexual actions only in the service of
reproduction. Thus, you see that any sexual act that does not focus on
the possibility of conception is a crime against the spirit.
Those who reject this suffocating notion of sex are justified, of course,
because the highest material expression of the spiritual core of sex is
the lowest spiritual expression of it. It is after all a wholly biological
view that sexuality appears in adolescence because the individual is ready
for sexual reproduction. No, the true spiritual essence of sex is more
revealed by the idea that adolescent children are so intensely awakened
to sexuality not because of purely biological changes that enable them to
reproduce but as a call to become whole human beings themselves after biological
and social forces have conspired to give them a falsely narrow physical
and social sexual identity. Their call to sex is a call to break out of
the narrowness of that identity through the help of another who represents
where they must grow. They will prosper in this task if they grow up in
the midst a spiritual tradition that supports them in sanctification. This
system will encourage sexual asceticism or abstinence and guide the young
to understand the inner spiritual meaning that stimulates their love. Love
redeems all sexual acts. This is so, however, only when you understand
that love is divine. It always and only calls you to the holy, unifying,
one god. When you see sex as the call to give birth to the holy one, then
sex, guided by that knowledge, is sanctified. When it is sanctified, it
reveals and expresses its true spiritual character.
Ordinary notions of sexual liberty do not express true freedom. When liberty
means the power to perform whatever sexual act pleases you without interference
from anyone or anything, it is sexual slavery or addiction. True freedom
in all spheres is the freedom of the spirit from its derailments into illusion.
The liberty to possess another body, whether for an evening or a lifetime,
is like the liberty to posses property. Practiced in the modern world,
these liberties enslave both possessor and possessed. The modern idea that
equates liberty and freedom as this sort of possession is slavery wearing
freedom's mask.
There is no freedom save freedom of spirit from derailment in objects.
There is no freedom from derailment save through the purification of spirit
where its embeddedness in things. The only path to this purification is
sanctification.
ty.
23. Spirit and Immortality
Your essential character -- what makes you what you are throughout all
the changes you endure in your life -- actualizes itself on two levels.
What you are in yourself and for yourself always remains pure spirit.
This is the primary level. Only by using your spiritual mental faculties
at this level can you know your true self and the truth of others. Departing
into second-level knowledge to experience others, knowing things and people
as objects. You have conceptual definitions of them. When you approach
others as objects, then you also can know yourself, and so live your life,
only as a thing. You live and know on the basis of concepts. Since the
ground of your being is relational, you can exist in three ways because
you can approach the relation differently. First, you can know and live
on the basis of direct or spiritual sensitivity. Second, you can know and
live, utterly unawakened to that sensitivity, in the realm of the senses
and emotions. Third, you can know and live partly awake and partly asleep
to your spiritual sensitivities.
The notion, drawn from Aristotle, that the primary factor in all explanation
is knowledge of the essential character, the "form," of things,
can account for the existence of "spirits." "Spirits"
are different from gods and demons. Gods, demons and angels are spiritual
forces that you have identified and named; "spirits" are unnamed
actualized beings known only spiritually. Consider for a moment this notion
of "form" or "essential character" as generated out
of relationship. You emerge as a form or gain an essential character on
the basis of the intersection of all the relationships that meet at the
point you call yourself. Imagine a physical analogy to express the spiritual
no-thingness of relations. The form or physical shape of a thing cannot
be "in" the thing. It exists by virtue of its environment. You
say it "occupies space," but space is not absolute emptiness
except abstractly in your imagination. The shape of a thing physically
is the contact between inner and the outer universes. Your flesh keeps
its form by virtue of both the forces within it and the air and water and
earth around it. To know your own shape directly is to experience the relationship.
To know your shape indirectly is to name the things within and without
(bones, flesh, blood, skin, air, water, earth).
When a "physical thing" (a thing that is a product of objectification
or creation by names and concepts) dies, it seems obvious that this shape
disappears. The essential and concrete character of that thing is annihilated.
But a different way of understanding would conclude that such annihilation
may be an illusion. It is literally, a "badly-lighted" perception
of what happens. The thing as an object seen by our senses and felt by our
emotions is artificially created in conjunction with a mental concept.
This tree does not exist in and for itself as "tree." It exists
as tree only relative to you as a thing and relative to your limited concept-perception.
There is a legitimate view, (one that may outrage your logic and your ordinary
awareness of reality but one that is nevertheless conceivable if you stretch
your mind) that holds that directly, in itself and for itself, an essential
character or form, once achieved is never annihilated. Of course, it does
not continue to exist in the realm of things and the sequence of things.
It does not "exist" in space and time since these are both relative
to things. And yet it does exist.
Rupert Sheldrake, a well-respected biologist, in his revolutionary study,
A New Science of Life: The Theory of Formative Causation, has accumulated
empirical evidence that genes alone cannot account for the persistence of
a life form. His notion is that once a form comes into being, more instances
of that form have a better chance or an easier time of also coming into
being. His studies give factual credence to Aristotle's claim that form,
an independent causal factor for things, pre-exists. These forms would
be directly knowable using, not the senses and the feelings that are bound
down inevitably into concept, but instead the spiritual faculties of the
mind. Relying initially on the less-developed spiritual faculties, those
that are closest to the senses, you may find, if you are at all spiritually
sensitive, that certain individuals or even mythical stories of "non-factual"
heros and heroines inspire (in-spirit) you. In either instance, an essential
character has touched you.
Sheldrakes's theory, however, holds that the greater its numbers when an
essential character first emerges, the easier it is for its subsequent generations
to emerge. Thus, the same or similar intersections of relationships re-produce
themselves. The core problem of science is that it abandons the primary
level of knowledge by spirit. Instead, it studies essentially only those
characters that have emerged in masses and that it has labeled and defined.
Thus, it can see only them. The unique it cannot see (Aristotle, p. 51).
But, most important of all, science not only cannot understand but positively
must deny the creative act that re-orders the relationships that intersect
at a point. It could see the essential character of Socrates as a male
human being but never understand nor predict the concrete act of creation
that makes Socrates unique in history. To live by scientific knowledge
is to die.
While we all have spiritual sensitivities, not all of us develop them.
Moreover, your senses or emotions may encrust them, and you may avoid or
deny them. If you remain, by choice or by fate, spiritually sensitive,
you will pick up many forms or essential characters around you directly.
While most of the people you meet today are unlikely to be exceptional
characters, some are likely to be exceptionally bad or good. If you are
a spiritually sensitive soul, you will be influenced by them. Moreover,
sensitive people may be able to "pick up" the essential characters
or forms of those who have "died." Being spiritually sensitive
but not spiritually developed in the sense that they do not understand the
nature of the spirit, they confuse the forms they are experiencing with
real "objective" beings. Thus, they mistakenly embody these forms
as things they call "ghosts" and "spirits."
There may be more truth in the words that Thomas Berry records of Chief
Seattle than most of us will be ready to admit: "When the last Red
Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a
myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead
of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in
the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the
pathless woods, they will not be alone." (Berry, p. 173) This ancient
notion of the survival of essential character in "non-sensuous"
ways may be more than fancy. The experience so many of us do have of finding
inspiration to the development of our own being when we silence our senses
and our minds and stand alone out in the forests and the fields may be evidence
of spiritual contact we all-too-often neglect and abuse.
Finally, while all of us have access to eternity only few of us may achieve
personal immortality. These two are hardly the same even though there is
a connection between them. Eternity is the spiritual dimension where dwells
the entirely intangible standard of absolute good and absolute no-thingness.
"Immortality" applies to things or beings. It may reside in the
form or essential character you were able to develop in life. To the extent
that this essential character was truly yours, you attain personal immortality.
Your form becomes truly yours only when it is a product of your struggle
with the opposing intersecting relationships that give you being. Then
your character really belongs to you. To the extent that you lived life
mechanically, however, accepting the dominant and prevailing form or essential
character of your times, your immortality is not your own. You have not
attained personal immortality but participate in immortality only as a member
of the human race.
You may, of course, get help from others of the present and past, those
blessed with personal immortality, for the development of your essential
character. Inspired by myths and ancient ancestors -- a Socrates, Christ,
Buddha, Mohammad -- you may find, acquire, and develop your own spirit.
You enter into the company of these immortals before death, and when you
die you remain with them. It would matter little whether your life remained
in the memory of others still alive as do the stories of Christ and Buddha.
You would remain, like the Native American Indians with your essential
character communing with all spiritually sensitive future generations.
Unfortunately, all essential characters that are exceptional in any way
equally attain spiritual power and influence. A basically malevolent essential
character can have malevolent influence when alive, when preserved in stories,
and, once dead. Its form reverberates throughout the ages as much as the
that of the purest saint.