Dancing on the Edge of Wholeness: The Transformative Power of Spiritual Existence as Activism
Abstract
Standing at the intersection where time and timeless eternity meet, the individual human in the midst of contemplation becomes aware of her true existence as a manifestation of divine wholeness. All the elements of time, space, and the universe seem to be interconnected, as modern physics implies by its acknowledgement of the gravitational singularity, in what physicist David Bohm calls “the implicate order”. The subtle activist, striving to consciously embody the nature of this singularity in the manifest realm, pervades the cosmos with the will of the whole, but does not melt into it. She dances on the edge of its will and her own by the acknowledgement of her distinct and individual consciousness. There is no more efficient or effective method by which to bring about an ideal state of peace, harmony, and fruitful co-creation among the beings of the universe than this type of active assertion of self-existence.
"There is always a moment in any kind of struggle when one feels in full bloom. Vivid. Alive... To be such a person or to witness anyone at this moment of transcendent presence is to know that what is human is linked, by a daring compassion, to what is divine... People, standing side by side, have expressed who they really are, and that ultimately they believe in the love of the world and each other enough to be that - which is the foundation of activism." – Alice Walker, from “Anything We Love Can be Saved: A Writer's Activism”
Standing at the intersection where time and eternity meet, the individual human in the midst of contemplation becomes aware of her true existence as a manifestation of divine wholeness. There is no more efficient or effective method by which to bring about an ideal state of peace, harmony, and fruitful co-creation among the beings of the universe than this type of assertion of one's self-existence, as Trappist monk Thomas Merton claims in his book, "New Seeds of Contemplation": "The absence of activity in contemplative prayer is only apparent. Below the surface, the mind and will are drawn into the orbit of an activity that is deep and intense and supernatural, and which overflows into our whole being and brings forth incalculable fruits" (Merton, 243). The intrinsic interconnectivity of all the elements in the universe ensures that all human activity, and even mere human being-ness (or so-called "inactivity"), distinctly impacts collective life. But it is the awareness of life from an identification with its spiritual source that imbues the human expression with the precision necessary to allow such expression to permeate the whole of creation, spread through all of space and time, increasing its integrity and resulting in increased peace, harmony, and unified purpose among its inhabitants, no matter how incrementally.
Well-intentioned inhabitants of our contemporary industrial society, which has rapidly spread over the globe, have worked in varying contexts to repair the destruction wrought by greed, lust, pride, and other so-called "sinful behaviors", some of them institutionalized and entrenched in powerful systems, created for society, that meet the needs of some but allow others to slip through their cracks. These well-intentioned people who work tirelessly for change that would ideally improve life for the collective are commonly known as "activists". Activism often involves specific and direct engagement with the dynamic one wishes to change; indeed, its very name implicates the importance of action in its application; activism involves the will to act. For instance, a peace activist with the objective to eliminate violence in the midst of war may petition governmental authorities to cease military intervention and seek alternative means of conflict resolution, an animal rights activist may release caged and abused animals being used in laboratory experiments, and a water activist may participate in a campaign to provide clean water to a displaced population in a refugee camp. While some activist strategies use these kinds of direct attempts to relieve immediate suffering, other activists seek to understand the root of such suffering so that it can be targeted and modified or simply pulled out of society’s “garden”. In such cases, a peace activist may use her energies to develop educational strategies that offer alternatives to conflict resolution that do not involve violence, an animal rights activist may develop technology that can be used in place of animal subjects for pharmaceutical testing and research, and a water activist may push for stricter regulations on the dumping of toxic pollutants by industrial entities. These indirect approaches do not address current suffering caused by societal ills, but their benefits are long-term and, theoretically, more pervasive. By addressing a perceived deeper cause of the targeted problem, the problem is less likely to continue to manifest in the future; therefore, one's action can be considered to be exponentially more effective than simply addressing the problems once they have already manifested, just as pulling a weed out by its roots is exponentially more effective (in ridding one's plot of weeds) than simply cutting it off every time it sprouts.
Non-violent resistance has been used in varying guises to address major social injustices throughout history by such influential figures as Henry David Thoreau (for the abolition of slaves in the United States) Mohandas K. Gandhi (for the independence of India) and Martin Luther King Jr. (for racial equality in the United States). Non-violent resistance paradoxically incorporates the element of apparent inactivity, or non-participation, into its mode of activism, and has had a profound impact on the way modern society perceives activist effort. It attempts to target the roots of the societal ills that it seeks to ameliorate, and to cut off the source of nourishment to these roots, which is typically human participation in systems that foster the oppression of some being or beings within the society. By simply recognizing her own presence as a participant within a larger system that is destructive in some way, the activist engaged in non-violent resistance removes herself from her collusion with it. Henry David Thoreau, addressing the issues of slavery in the United States in his treatise on civil disobedience, emphasized the importance of individual non-participation to the effectiveness of his cause. "If one honest man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this co-partnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefore, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever" (Sibley, 29). In this sense, the activist's apparentinaction (or perhaps we could instead refer to the activist’s “inner action") becomes a deeply effective means by which to create change.
It is likely that the impact that this type of action has had on the world's perception of activism is due to the integrity inherent in its practice. "A sacred goal demands sacred means" (Sibley, 103). The activist embodies the new world he attempts to bring about; Gandhi famously said it this way: "Be the change you wish to see in the world". The activist engaged in non-violent resistance becomes his ideal future, and in this sense, his very being-ness, actively displayed and deployed, becomes his plea for change. Though Gandhi was deeply inspired and influenced by the models of passive resistance to which he was exposed, such as Thoreau’s “Treatise on Civil Disobedience”, the emphasis in his model of non-violent activism was on spiritual integrity. He felt that the term “passive resistance” implied weakness, and he wanted to emphasize the inherent strength in his methods. He referred to this type of strength as “soul force”, or “satyagraha”. He said of satyagraha: "Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement "Satyagraha," that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence" (Sibley, 36). This shift, though subtle, was a powerful acknowledgement of the effectiveness that inner action can have when oriented by proper intent. The satyagrahis (practitioners of satyagraha) perceived themselves as deliberately taking upon themselves the consequences of the societal injustices they were attempting to resist. “In Satyagraha there is not the remotest idea of injuring the opponent. Satyagraha postulates the conquest of the adversary by suffering in one's own person" (Sibley, 39). This peculiar and paradoxical way of fighting for societal improvements was based upon the idea that the simple assertion of one’s existence is enough to impart change. Gandhi asserts that suffering is a necessary part of any transformation; thus, when the satyagrahi takes suffering upon himself, he makes of himself a channel for transformation to happen through him. "Progress is to be measured by the amount of suffering undergone by the sufferer. The purer the suffering, the greater is the progress (Gandhi, 113). Before taking any sort of direct action, the satyagrahis went through an intentional period of self-purification, in which they searched their hearts for their true motives. “They were to ask themselves whether they were too lacking in self-respect to command the respect of the opposition, and ponder how they could avoid the pitfall of reducing both sides to mere things instead of human beings" (Sibley, 237). This internal acknowledgement of her participation in the structure she wishes to change alters the satyagrahi's orientation from being an object held captive by the will of the dominating entity to a subject with her own will:
"An individual without self-respect is much more likely to become an instrument of a tyrant than one who, for whatever reason, has come to value himself. But tyranny and violence are both the root and the fruit of a lack of self-respect: the very exercise of tyranny and violence against the person threatens to reduce him to a mere thing; while at the same time his tendency to live at the level of the vegetable so much of the time will encourage tyranny and violence" (Sibley, 361).
By recognizing his own existence as a human being who is part of the dysfunctional system he wishes to transform, the satyagrahi changes the dynamic in which he is engaged. The power of satyragraha, or soul force, to effect profound change without brute force, and with minimal external action whatsoever, was revealed through the success of the fight for Indian independence in the 1940's. In this case, the root of the societal injustice being confronted was deemed by the activist community to be related to the subject-object relationship that existed between the British colonial powers and the native Indian population. Indian activists, desiring independence from colonial rule, recognized that the Indian population was treated by the dominant powers intrinsic to British leadership as an object whose very existence was to be in support of this government leadership - the governmental power structure did not allow the native Indian population to contribute to national policy on its own terms. Thus, by recognizing themselves as subjects capable of existing apart from the subject of British colonial power, by acknowledging their personhood amongst the general populous, these activists could inspire change.
In the face of the complex and dysfunctional dynamics that we face in today's world, it is of the utmost importance how an activist expends her energy. The living structures of our world seethe under the pressure of immense suffering caused by great imbalances of power among its inhabitants, and are seemingly on the verge of catastrophic collapse. The climate is rapidly changing, threatening to disrupt the delicate balance between earth systems, an estimated 27,000 species are becoming extinct every year, over one billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and the human population continues to rise, stressing earth's limited resources more than ever before. It is in our great interest to dig deep into the heart of these issues so that activist efforts are able to make an effective and pervasive difference in the world. A few questions arise: What is the root of these imbalances in our world? Where can we, as activists, find it? How can we know what are the best ways to make the differences we seek? Satyagraha acknowledges our power as individuals who contribute to the whole of which we are a part to find the root of imbalance that leads to destruction and suffering within our own souls. It inspires each person to create change in her local community by purifying herself through self-imposed suffering.
"Love and ahimsa are matchless in their effect. But in their play there is no fuss, show, noise, or placards. They presuppose self-confidence which in its turn presupposes self-purification. Men of stainless character and self-purification will easily inspire confidence and automatically purify the atmosphere around them" (Gandhi, 345).
But what if we were to dig even deeper to find the very source of the root of these same injustices, beyond the spiritual influence of an individual on his local environment to the spiritual influence of an individual on the entire manifest universe through all of time and space? The source of the universe is commonly referred to as God, and, for the purposes of this paper, will be referred to as the divine origin, which is reflected in and represented by wholeness.
Contemplation is a mystical practice in which the contemplative strives to achieve pure awareness of divine origin, and can be equated with the Eastern religious experience of intense meditation called samadhi. Though he acknowledges that contemplation is not something that can be adequately described because of its intrinsic ineffability, Thomas Merton refers to contemplative experience as the complete emptying of oneself to the point where there is no longer a self left to empty. "The mystic lives in emptiness, in freedom, as if he had no longer a limited and exclusive "self" that distinguished him from God and other men. He has, therefore, died with Christ and entered into the "risen life" promised to the true sons of God" (Merton, 210). Gandhi also acknowledges the power of submitting oneself utterly and completely to divine will in his attempts to bring about greater peace in his activist efforts. "A complete fast is a complete and literal denial of self. It is the truest prayer" (Gandhi, 318). He placed Satyagraha in a contemplative context by defining it as a type of power that can be discovered in the desire for divine connection, rather than in the midst of it. "The fact is that it has always been a matter of strenuous research to know this great Force (God) and its hidden possibilities. My claim is that in the pursuit of that search lies the discovery of Satyagraha" (Gandhi, 353). Satyagraha, in this sense, can be perceived as the empowered realization that one has a soul that participates in the functioning of the world. It is the spiritual equivalent to self-reflective thought. Descartes’ famous maxim “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am) becomes, with Satyagraha, “I am, therefore the world is the way it is”.
Contemplation takes this pursuit one step further by actually fulfilling it. In the moment of communion with the divine origin, the contemplative mystic paradoxically ceases to exist as a separate self. Theoretically, it seems that a contemplative orientation would ensure that activist efforts would be communally beneficial because of its connection with the center of the collective will of the whole. But the question arises: when there is no self left with which to act, who is the activist? Activism itself has arisen as a result of the human separation from divine origin that has occurred in modern times. Jean Gebser, in his masterwork “The Ever-Present Origin”, characterizes the evolution of human consciousness as having occurred in mutational leaps, each resulting in a markedly different structure of consciousness. One defining feature of this progressive evolution is that each leap thus far has removed humanity further from its divine origin; this psychic distance, however, has allowed humanity to awaken to its distinctive self, separate from the rest of the universe, and to begin to become aware of its role within the universe. Pre-modern spiritual expression typically involved an intimate relationship with divinity that was so intertwined with communal and individual reality that it was taken for granted as an immanent element of embodied life. As we have become aware of our own individuality as a species, however, we have increasingly desacralized our experience of the manifest world, repressing the embodied elements of divinity. Activism as we currently know it has arisen in response to the awareness in human beings that the world is imbalanced in some way and that one can express her own will apart from the will of divine origin. But Gebser posits the notion that we are currently on the verge of making yet another mutation in our collective consciousness. He calls the structure of consciousness that now appears to be trying to manifest itself within us the "integral" structure of consciousness and it is characterized by a reconnection with the origin of the universe through the increased perception of wholeness. This impulse towards reconnection with our divine origin has been expressed in a multitude of incarnations in recent decades. The primary feature of these expressions of re-connection is the element of conscious agency with which humanity can approach our relationship with our divine origin. Rather than returning to a state of blissful reconnection by losing the boundaries that distinguish us as individuals and melting into a whole that is greater than ourselves, we become conscious of ourselves and of the unique role that our distinct capacities can allow us to play within the larger universe community. Reconnecting with the whole of which we are a part has become a choice for us, a choice that has become increasingly attractive as we face the consequences of our self-imposed isolation.
The prospect of approaching contemplation in a conscious mode of being, fully aware that one has his own will and exercising it by choosing to re-connect with divine origin is appealing in the context of an activist orientation that addresses societal imbalance at the base of its root. Thomas Merton suggests that this type of conscious communion, by which one does not lose oneself, but rather recovers one’s individual self, is the ideal result of contemplative practice. "The mystic lives in emptiness, in freedom, as if he had no longer a limited and exclusive "self" that distinguished him from God and other men. He has, therefore, died with Christ and entered into the "risen life" promised to the true sons of God" (Merton, 210). The mystic loses herself as her mind and will enter the darkness of unknowing, but it is precisely in this moment of complete surrender that she paradoxically finds herself filled with the light of consciousness and the power to act according to divine will. "In this greatest perfection of faith the infinite God Himself becomes the Light of the darkened soul and possesses it entirely with His Truth. And at this inexplicable moment the deepest night becomes day and faith turns into understanding" (Merton, 135). This exact place of rebirth for the contemplative’s awareness of self is the moment when he recognizes his own existence as an individual being with his own capacity for will; however, the center of his consciousness, at his point, is so close with the consciousness of divine origin that they are indistinguishable from each other. By choosing to focus his awareness of himself on his identification with divine origin, the mystic becomes a new kind of activist, one whose action is not based solely on the imposition of his individual will on a suffering world; rather, his action is balanced by receptiveness to divine will, or the will of the whole. Similar to the non-violent passive resister engaged in civil disobedience or the satyagrahi, the activist engaged in contemplation creates change in the societal dynamics she wishes to transform by shifting her own relationship with them. By re-orienting her relationship with the divine origin from disconnection to communion through surrender, the mystical activist alters her relationship with the world as a whole. This kind of inner action requires a recognition that the rotten fruit in an imbalanced global society grows from a malnourished stem whose roots extend into the very heart of the interconnected universe, and that these roots can be accessed at the place where one’s own individual heart meets the heart of the whole.
It has only been in recent decades that humanity has begun to recognize its role within the universe as a co-creator of reality along with the divine origin. The contemplative mode is one of constant inner action, an exchange of wills between the whole and the individual. Merton acknowledges the power of contemplation to encompass this exchange. "It is as if in creating us God asked a question, and in awakening us to contemplation He answered the question, so that the contemplative is at the same time, question and answer" (Merton, 3). It is in this dialogue that the manifest world, as it is experienced by one’s consciousness, comes alive. "For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast" (Merton, 297). The progress of physics in its evolving attempts to examine and analyze the universe has, over the last century, led to a collapse of its conception of the universe, leading research to point back to the consciousness of humanity, the observer who is engaged in the examination. The model of modern science, rooted in a Cartesian representation of reality, in which there is a decisive split between mind and matter, and based upon the scientific method, has necessarily implied that there is a separation between the subject making the observations and the object(s) being observed. This same dualistic mindset has provided the foundation for modern activism, as it, in its traditional form, implies that one must take external action upon an objective world in order to make a difference. This mind-matter dualism, however, has been directly challenged by the theory of quantum mechanics, which has been verified with increasing precision through experimentation. Experiments and calculations involving elementary particles, such as photons and electrons, have seemed to indicate that their positions are somehow dependent upon the observer inquiring about them. Experiments like the famous double-slit experiment indicate that elementary particles, foundational to the universe, at times display wave-like properties. “The success of quantum mechanics forces us to accept that the electron, a constituent of matter that we normally envision as occupying a tiny, pointlike region of space, also has a description involving a wave that, to the contrary, is spread through the entire universe” (Greene, 90). The picture of the universe that quantum mechanics paints for us is a nebulous series of probability waves interacting in space and time. “The best we can ever do, according to quantum mechanics, is predict the probability that an electron, or a proton, or a neutron, or any other of nature’s constituents, will be found here or there. Probability reigns supreme in the microcosmos” (Greene, 91). Though physicists’ ideas vary regarding what causes a probability wave to “collapse”, causing the manifestation of a clearly defined particle in space-time, it is commonly believed that it requires the interaction of a conscious observer. According to the popularly accepted Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, “particles hover in quantum limbo, in a fuzzy, amorphous, probabilistic mixture of all possibilities; only when measured is on definite outcome selected from the many” (Greene, 112). These findings indicate that there is no way to step outside of our world to regard and assess it before taking action; indeed, the regarding and assessing themselves are actions. The observer is indistinguishable from the observed; they are completely intertwined. Thomas Merton expressed this same idea in mystical terms when he wrote about the manifestation of truth in the world through humanity: "As God creates things by seeing them in His own Logos, man brings truth to life in his mind by the marriage of the divine light, in the being of the object, with the divine light in his own reason. The meeting of these two lights in one mind is truth" (Merton, 291).
The repercussions of such findings on modern society’s perception of reality are dramatic. The knowledge that our conscious orientation in life, our inner action, deeply impacts the course of the universe, has the potential to dramatically shift the ways that we interact with ourselves, other beings, and the world around us. Activism, rather than focusing on “acting upon” injustice or imposing a rationally concocted strategy upon a societal problem, becomes a simple acknowledgement that the root of any problem that persists within the sphere of my observation extends into my very soul. Thus, shifting the focal point of my awareness for life and my role within it can change my experience of the world, and, therefore, can change the world itself. "If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another" (Merton, 122).
Quantum mechanics does not only challenge modern society’s perspective on its perceived separation between mind and matter; it also challenges our assumptions about where and when our actions make an impact. One of the implications of quantum theory for the basic structure of the universe is the presence of non-local connections among the particles that make up the manifest world. Bell’s Theorem (in 1964) and experiments, done most notably by Alain Aspect in the 1980’s, have revealed that it is possible for particles to impact one another despite lacking any localized interaction. This is called quantum entanglement, and implies that we live in a non-local universe, that, from where I sit, here and now, it is possible to impact parts of the universe with which I have had absolutely no contact. “Entangled particles, even though spatially separate, do not operate autonomously” (Greene, 114). Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance”. Quantum entanglement seems to imply that much, or all, of the physical universe is interconnected at some level. Amazingly, subsequent experiments have even shown that it is possible for particles to affect each other’s behavior not only across large distances of space, but also of time. Since the 1980’s, “delayed-choice” experiments have been conduced that look at the behavior of photons encountering beam-splitters have revealed that quantum entanglement can, indeed, take place over distances in time. “Something that takes place long after and far away from something else nevertheless is vital to our description of that something else” (Greene, 199). Despite modern attempts to assimilate Einstein’s rendering of time as the 4th dimension, the idea that actions taken now can affect the past in some way boggles the modern mind. Einstein acknowledged the difficulty of this concept for the human mind, seemingly caught up in the flow of time. “For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent” (Greene, 139). Though the results of the delayed-choice experiments do indicate an interconnected time-scape for reality, the modern interpretation of these experiments is that, rather than being able to actually change the past from the present, “future measurements influence the kinds of details you can invoke when you subsequently describe what happened today” (Greene, 198). It seems that the effective past, in this quantum sense, is dependent upon memory.
Quantum physicist David Bohm proposed the possibility of a deeper level of reality at which everything in time and space is interconnected, called “the implicate order”. The entire implicate order is enfolded into every element of the universe, similar to the way an entire hologram enfolded into every part of itself. Bohm calls the ground of the unbroken universe “holomovement”. “It follows that ultimately everything in the explicate order of common experience arises from the holomovement” (Bohm & Hiley, 357). One major implication of this compelling theory is that the entire universe, in some condensed way, is contained and enfolded within each individual human consciousness, potentially empowering each of us as activists to transform the world from within our own being.
“We see that each human being similarly participates in an inseparable way in society and in the planet as a whole. What may be suggested further is that such participation goes on to a greater collective mind, and perhaps ultimately to some yet more comprehensive mind in principle capable of going indefinitely beyond even the human species as a whole” (Bohm & Hiley, 386).
Bohm’s vision of the whole contained in each part can provide a framework for how to approach the type of inner activism that is being explored in this paper. Suffering and injustice in our world are indications of incoherence among its inhabitants, and the implicate order is a realm where the forms of the manifest world connect with the wholeness of an all-encompassing consciousness. How can we, as individual beings in explicate forms, interact with the implicate order within us to make the most effective and positive difference in the world, to stand in the glory of our role as transformers and co-creators of the world?
Bohm indicates, based on research from Jean Piaget, that awareness of the implicate order seems to be implicit to human beings, and gradually decreases over the course of childhood development. The reason for an increasing association with the explicate order, including common notions of space, time, and causality, is related to memory. “The activation of memory recordings whose content is mainly that which is recurrent, stable, and separable, must evidently focus our attention very strongly on what is static and fragmented” (Bohm, 206). An inner activism by which one finds herself by losing herself in contemplation achieves a state of immediacy in which she releases her grip on her conception of reality as it is defined by her past and opens herself up in stillness. Ironically, it is in this stillness of her mind that the contemplative experiences a feeling of movement. Perhaps she is unknowingly entering the dialogue between her individual own consciousness and wholeness, the holomovement, that breathes into her self in each moment. Thomas Merton speaks of this paradoxical activity that occurs in stillness.
"The man who has found solitude is empty, as if he had been emptied by death. He has advanced beyond all horizons. There are no directions left in which he can travel. This is a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. You do not find it by traveling but by standing still. Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity" (Merton, 81).
Releasing our conceptual notions based on our interpretations of our past experiences, and the extensions of these notions into our interpretations of the future allow us to become aware of the will of the whole. When we are able to live with an openness to the implicate order, our self-expression necessarily becomes coherent with the will of the whole, or the divine origin. In this way, the past and future from the perspective of the individual self, also transform to a state of coherence with the will of the whole.
At a time when our understanding of our role as humans in this evolving universe is shifting, the way that we act to improve our circumstances must also shift. As our understanding of the manifest world blurs into the inner world of our consciousness, it is time to acknowledge the power of inner action to improve the world. As the realization that we co-create the reality that we experience dawns on us, a simple shift in awareness can greatly empower us to strive more effectively for a state of harmonious communion on the earth. The task of our current age, beyond coming to know that we have a soul, is to use this knowledge to gain an empowered understanding of ourselves as co-creators of a whole and moving universe. Standing in this power is a type of civil disobedience; perhaps it could be called “spiritual disobedience”. When we can fully recognize ourselves as integral parts of the whole that contain the whole in a unique way, we realize that we can change the world by ceasing our collusion in perpetuating an imbalanced conception of it. In this way, our power begins with an awareness of ourselves as co-creators, and in our receptivity to the will of the whole, our very lives become seeds of a dream-like prophecy planted in the soil of today. Bibliography
Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. New York: Routledge, 1980.
Bohm, D. and Hiley, B.J. The Undivided Universe. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Gandhi, M. K. Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha). New York: Schocken Books, 1961.
Greene, Brian. The Fabric of the Cosmos. New York: First Vintage Books, 2004.
Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation. Trappist, KY: The Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc., 1961.
Sibley, Mulford Quickert. The Quiet Battle. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.
Finding Refuge in Love: Conscious Communion with the Natural World Through Death, Interconnection, and the Goddess
When I think of “home”, it does not spring into my mind, an idea represented as an image, abstract and fully represented. “Home” seeps into my body, mind, and spirit from a central place within me that undergirds them all. “Home” is sensual and embodied: it is the touch of my mother’s hand on my forehead, the scent of Indian spices cooking in oil, or the blue of my husband’s laughing eyes; it is the whirr of the dishwasher, the chirping of robins, or the taste of spinach lasagna; it is the giggle of my son, the whistle of the tea kettle, or the weight of a baby in my arms. “Home” is not a static place or concept, yet though it is ever changing, it is always a place of refuge. Terry Tempest-Williams, in her book “Refuge”, writes of the transformation of her sense of refuge as she endures her mother’s death. “I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my grandmother, or even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change”.[1] Before her mother’s death, Tempest-Williams’ refuge, as she experienced it, was found in places that seemed as though they were external to her. Although it was wrapped up in her perceptions of living figures, her mother and grandmother, and evolving landscapes, the Great Salt Lake Basin and Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, hers was a static conception of home, made safe by its perceived constancy. Although her refuge was a place to which she could go in order to feel safe, welcomed, and significant, it was not a place in which she could find herself as an embodied and empowered part of its makeup; it was a place that was wholly “other” than the part of herself with whom she identified. The dualistic perspective that modern western society has on the rest of the natural world involves a similar differentiation between subject and object. We, the citizens of the “developed” world tend to perceive the rest of the natural world as a group of static objects that are considered significant only in the case that they directly impact us, and not on their own merits. They have been reduced to puppets on the stage of our collectively narcissistic mind, seen as mere extensions of ourselves. Val Plumwood, in “Feminism and the Mastery of Nature”, discusses this dualism in the western mindset. “Western culture has treated the human/nature relation as a dualism and this explains many of the problematic features of the west’s treatment of nature which underlie the environmental crisis, especially the western construction of human identity as “outside” nature”.[2] This attitude toward nature has led to an assumption that it is inert and mechanistic, capable of being manipulated by human will. Ecofeminism is an acknowledgement that this dualistic split cuts to the core of western thought and has led to the oppression of all things associated with the material world, including the physical body, the creative and destructive forces of life, the interconnected diversity of life found in the earth community, and the feminine dimension of humanity. In her essay, “Critical and Constructive Contributions of Ecofeminism”, Charlene Spretnak writes of ecofeminism. “The central insight of ecofeminism is that a historical, symbolic, and political relationship exists between the denigration of nature and the female in Western cultures”.[3] Moving beyond the dualistic split that lies at the foundation of this relationship requires healing for humanity’s relationship with itself first. Plumwood writes poignantly of how western humanity has sought to repress and control the bodily aspects of its own nature, which are considered to be not just insignificant, but undesirable and even dangerously out of control. “The relation between the orders of reason and nature is constantly depicted as one of control and mastery. The body in particular and the lower passions … are to be controlled by ‘commands’, ‘threats’, coercion and violent discipline”.[4] The acceptance of our whole selves will inevitably lead to an embrace of the interconnected wholeness of the Earth system through an acknowledgement of our integral place within this system and its place within us. Fully healing the dualistic split, however, requires more than an acknowledgement of interconnectedness among earthly beings. Plumwood suggests that, in order to transcend dualistic attitudes regarding humanity and nature, we must move beyond both difference and sameness. “Two movements are therefore required to overcome dualistic constructions of self/other – recognizing kinship and recognizing difference”.[5] Recognizing difference requires an acknowledgment that multiple perspectives may be equally valid and an attitude that humbly honors the existence of other beings as subjects whose interpretations of reality are just as valuable as our own. Just as modern western society, in fear, has attempted to repress the power of the natural realm by conceiving of it and interacting with it as if it were mechanistic and predictable, Tempest-Williams conceived of her refuge as a static realm, made safe by its perceived predictability. In both cases, these conceptions of safe surroundings are only made stable because they have, in the human mind, been completely cut off from the true creativity found in the diverse wholeness of the world. Tempest-William’s success, then, in the evolution of her sense of refuge, upon embracing her mother’s death, provides insight into how our society can make a healthy shift toward an empowered stance of conscious interaction with nature that acknowledges both kinship and unique identity. Plumwood agrees that an embrace of death is a necessary part of the process. “A major philosophical challenge is to reconceive and reinterpret both death and the significance of human life in ways which are both life- and nature-affirming and death-accepting”.[6] This paper discusses the shift from a dualistic subject/object perspective on the human/nature relationship to a dance of inter-subjectivity in four steps: an embrace of death, an acknowledgement of interconnectedness with the whole, a sense of empowerment due to finding refuge within oneself by connecting with the Goddess, and conscious interaction with the natural world. It is only through a true embrace of death that we can become rooted in the whole and continually re-born; in this way, we can find an embodied home within our transforming selves and transform the world around us.
Honoring death as an integral aspect of the cycle of life is an important step toward redeeming the oppressed and rejected aspects of modern western life, the creative and self-sustaining powers of the natural world traditionally associated with femininity. Plumwood discusses the origin of the human/nature dualism found in western thought as capitulated in the philosophy of Plato, emphasizing its rejection of death as a meaningful part of natural human life. “The great accomplishment of Plato and the key to the enormous influence his system exerted was the creation of an intellectual framework for an otherworldly identity which claimed to cancel death”.[7] In the Platonic system, human significance and meaning is associated with the ideal and eternal world of forms, an abstract realm of rationality that is disconnected from the physical body, the material earth, and the cycles of nature. Thus death is interpreted as an escape from the natural realm, rather than as an integral part of it. “In otherworldly identity, death confirms and necessitates human continuity in terms of persistence of the human essence in a larger order beyond the world of changeable things”.[8] This perspective on death marks a major rift in western thought. When death is considered an escape from an ongoing and self-sustaining circle of life, the circle of life becomes broken. It is from this rift that the dualism dividing humanity from nature has grown. A healing embrace of death, then, as a dark but actively important element of life itself, rather than an ending that is empty and devoid of meaning and purpose, is an important step toward a life-affirming society.
I anticipated my mother’s death for many years. It was looming from the time she was diagnosed with cancer in 1996 until she died ten years later. My mother was the hub of my family and all my relationships; she was the center of my home and the unconscious source of my comfort. I knew that I would miss her when she was gone. I knew that losing her would be painful. But what I never anticipated before she died was the disorientation I felt upon her loss. My refuge, my home, and my identity all shattered the moment she stopped breathing. With my mother’s death came the death of reality as I had known it, the death of our family, the death of my cradle of security, and the death of myself. Still existent in the natural world, I had to be re-born, but my external context had disintegrated. In “Refuge”, Tempest-Williams reflects on the transformation of her place of refuge from a solid and external place (held by the presences of her mother, her grandmother, and the bird refuge) to a place she could access within her evolving self and feel wherever she went, despite her circumstances. It’s not an easy transition for her. Her mother’s death occurs amidst the backdrop of a flooding bird refuge with which she has also shared an intimate relationship. She struggles to accept the changes occurring in the context that has provided her with so much security; her mind strains against the changes in an attempt maintain the stability of its conceptions of her world. “I am not adjusting. I keep dreaming the Refuge back to what I have known… I blow on these images like the last burning embers on a winter’s night”.[9] In the same way, I, having lost the container that held my home and defined my identity in relation to it, had to come to terms with the transient nature of life and find my home and identity within a sense of the whole that acknowledged this changing nature. Just like Terry Tempest-Williams, I had to find a way to not just embrace death, but to surrender to continual death by finding my home within transformation, refuge in the ever-turning and self-contained circle of life. This shift gets to the heart of how western society must re-orient itself to the natural world, often referred to as a mother, if we are to find our identity beyond the crumbling container of our conception of it.
Tempest-Williams finds solace in her communion with the natural world as she learns to accept her mother’s death. She is inspired by a poem by Wendell Berry that seems to express the power of her own process as she embraces the circle of life in its wholeness, including death. “I come into the peace of wild things/ who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief. I come into the presence of still water. / And I feel above me the day-blind stars / waiting with their light. For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free”.[10] By allowing her being to resonate and commune in an embodied way within the flooding, changing bird refuge, Tempest-Williams is able to deeply feel her identity within the ever-turning circle of life. She is able to experience her interconnectedness with nature, which is fed by a creative flow, continually causing death and re-birth in each moment. In this way, an embrace of death becomes an embrace of constant change; an embrace of change becomes an embrace of death. She writes “Refuge is not a place outside myself. Like the lone heron who walks the shores of Great Salt Lake, I am adapting as the world is adapting”.[11]
Humanity is part of the earth system, and deep communion with the natural world upon surrender to its constant transformation allows us to experience our interdependence with the earthly community of beings. Rachel Carson, in her book “Silent Spring”, emphasizes the importance of this point. "The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment. Man, too, is part of this balance".[12] When we are rooted in our ecosystem, embodied and investing ourselves fully in the community that sustains us, we are more likely to act with integrity, for the good of the whole rather than ourselves, and the entire community is more likely to thrive. Bell Hooks discusses this in “Belonging”, her book of essays on a culture of place. “Living engagement with both a specific place and the issue of sustainability, we know and understand that we are living lives of interdependence. Our thinking and our actions are constantly informed by what Wendell Berry defines as ‘an ecological intelligence: a sense of the impossibility of acting or living alone or solely in one’s own behalf’”.[13] This surrender into and investment in the holistic earth community is an acknowledgement of the whole earth as home and refuge. Hooks writes of this as she reflects on her journey back home to Kentucky, and to the earth. “A true home is the place – any place – where growth is nurtured, where there is constancy. As much as change is always happening whether we want it to or not, there is still a need we have for constancy. Our first home is the earth, and it will be where we come again to rest forever, our final homeplace”.[14] The difference between Hooks’ understanding of earth as refuge and the limited conceptions of refuge originally held by Tempest-Williams and myself is vast. The earth is not external to me, but also lies within me, because I am a part of it. I am of the earth. It is the dynamic spirit of the earth community in which I find refuge as I embrace death, dissolve the dualistic split, and engage with the natural world. Some call this spirit the feminine principle; others call her Mother Nature, Gaia, or Prakriti. She will be referred to henceforth in this paper as the Goddess. As I find my refuge in the Goddess, as She, permeating the world around me and permeating me, becomes my home and context, I am inspired and empowered by Her.
Allowing the Goddess, who permeates the entire world, to express herself through us provides us with an embodied and empowered sense of our own unique identity that is rooted in inter-connection and love. As the world changes and transforms, so does this identity, yet it remains rooted in relationship with the Goddess. It is in this way that we can find comfortable refuge in change. Terry Tempest-Williams is able, through her transformation, to acknowledge that all that she had been provided from her mother’s presence in her life as her home and refuge is still accessible to her. “I am reminded that what I adore, admire, and draw from Mother is inherent in the earth. My mother’s spirit can be recalled simply by placing my hands on the black humus of mountains or the lean sands of desert. Her love, her warmth, and her breath, even her arms around me – are the waves, the wind, sunlight, and water”.[15] She embraces the Goddess as her new mother, her new refuge, and allows Her to become the new relevant historical context by which she is defined. “My physical mother is gone. My spiritual mother remains. I am a woman rewriting my genealogy”.[16] Tempest-Williams acknowledges here that it is she herself now who is rewriting her own genealogy, rather than it having been written by some projected authority figure, seemingly disconnected from her. She has become empowered to re-define the context in which her own identity is shaped by her embrace of the Goddess within her as her spiritual mother.
Terry Tempest-Williams begins, through this transition, to see herself in the world around her. “The heartbeats I felt in the womb – two heartbeats, at once, my mother’s and my own – are heartbeats of the land”.[17] She describes how the natural and untamed wilderness instructs and shapes her identity as she allows herself to become part of it. “A blank spot on the map is an invitation to encounter the natural world, where one’s character will be shaped by the landscape. To enter wilderness is to court risk, and risk favors the senses, enabling one to live well”.[18] One can feel at home anywhere when her home is found in the Goddess, who moves thorough everything, including oneself. Tempest-Williams alludes to this realization as she discusses her experience among a group of activist women who have been dropped off in the desert far from their external homes as punishment for breaking the law. “What (the authorities) didn’t realize was that we were home, soul-centered and strong, women who recognized the sweet smell of sage as fuel for our spirits”.[19]
Because the Goddess moves freely through everything on the earth with a destructive and creative flow, She is a context that is continually evolving. Thus, the identity that She shapes must also be fluid and open to constant transformation. Starhawk, in “The Earth Path”, writes of the Goddess as the flow that moves between and among co-evolving beings in the earth community. “What we call Goddess or God was the face and voice that people gave to the way the land spoke to them”.[20] When a member of the earth community allows herself to find a home in this flow and allows the boundary that defines her identity to become permeable to influence by other beings, she is truly interacting with them as their own subjects in all their fullness, rather than as projected images from her ego. This kind of subject-to-subject interaction exemplifies real love. This is the essence of Terry Tempest-Williams’ insight that her refuge exists in her capacity to love.[21] Allowing the ego-based identity to continually open to growth and transformation is to embrace continual death and re-birth, both of the ego and of the static and limited conceptions of the world that the ego creates, the egoic refuge. This is the essence of Tempest-Williams’ insight that as she learns to love death, she can find refuge in change.[22]
I, too, have felt that my identity has been shaped by my relationship with the Goddess and the natural world in its wholeness. When I was due to give birth to my son in the fall of 2010, I wondered how I would find the resources within myself to become a mother to him, especially since my own mother had already been gone for five years. My body and soul had become a home for this beloved creature, and I had now become a mother and a refuge for him. But I felt lost. I asked myself: where is my home, my mother, and my refuge? It was on an especially quiet evening of communion with nature, as I swam beneath a starry sky, that I was able to simultaneously discover both my refuge and my own capacity to be a mother through the person of the Goddess. I wrote the following that night: “I feel that this… spirit of mother, shudders now with anticipation, waits eagerly to enter my being,... to pour herself out through yet another ‘tap’ into the material world, through me! I see her in the moon and feel her in the waves, and she calls to me: “Meld with me, embrace me, become one with me, and know what it is to be mother - nurturer, care-giver, guide, provider of sustenance, agape-lover, compassionate goddess, embracer of the world, vessel of life”... In this way, I enter a tribe of women, I become my mother and every mother who has ever existed, and I come to know the Goddess in yet another way, entering gladly into her mystery, and into the Arms of the Universe and Life Itself”.[23]
As I have found the Goddess within myself and striven to rely on her as a foundation for my life, I have begun to feel that I am a unique part of a living, breathing organism that is much larger than myself. My embrace of all the parts of this organism, as we interact, shapes my identity. Full immersion into this organism in each moment is terrifying, because it means letting go of my static and secure ideas about myself and the world around me; however, letting go of these ideas and allowing outside influences to expand my horizon enables me to live a more vibrant life. Whatever my idea of my identity is, it is not a full acknowledgement of my true self, as it represses and denies the parts of me that are rooted in the earth community, embodied, and interdependent with other beings. Starhawk discusses the danger of this kind of denial. “Unless our spiritual practice is grounded in a real connection to the natural world, we run the risk of simply manipulating our own internal imagery and missing the real communication taking place all around us”.[24] Opening myself to holistic exchange is opening myself not just to deeper communion with my community, but also to greater honesty. Feeling that the Goddess wants to act through me empowers me to express myself and gives me the security I need to let go of the walls that previously defined and protected my identity. Terry Tempest-Williams, through her transformation, also acknowledges the tragic consequences of the limited conception of reality that has provided her with a false sense of comfort. She chooses to allow the walls that had defined her world to break down so that she can open herself to true connection with the world around her. “Denial flourishes in the familiar. It seduces us with our own desires and cleverly constructs walls around us to keep us safe. I want the walls down”.[25] This conscious deconstruction of the egoic self and world, and an embrace of love, the flow of energy between inter-connected beings, initiates the cultivation of an embodied and vibrant home for the wider world.
Entering into a truly inter-subjective relationship with the other beings in the natural world empowers humanity to consciously affect the world around us in the interest of creating a thriving community. Consciously cultivating a healthy community, however, first requires becoming conscious of the limited perspective that we are attempting to leave behind. Starhawk writes of the power that comes from becoming conscious of the frame through which we have interpreted life. When we become aware of the existence of this frame, we become empowered to choose a different one based on our priorities. “Magic teaches us to be aware that we are viewing the world through a frame, warns us not to confuse it with ultimate reality… part of our magical discipline is to make conscious choices about which frame we adopt”.[26] Starhawk chose to shift her perspective on the natural world by opening herself up to the ways that it spoke to her as a community of beings. “One of the most rewarding aspects of my own journey over the past decades has been a gradual process of deepening my aesthetic appreciation of nature into real knowledge and true understanding. That process became a journey that was to transform my life, my spirituality, and my understanding of the Goddess”.[27] Her growing inter-dependence with the natural world expands her perspective so she is empowered to act in ways that can benefit the entire community (including herself) rather than just herself. “Whenever we are able to live for a moment within that consciousness of the whole, we become more whole, more healed”.[28]Starhawk, in this way, acknowledges herself as an “I” embedded in a “we”, rather than simply an “I” surrounded by “non-I’s”. The human/nature duality of which Plumwood writes is healed in this openness to inter-relationship with the natural world. “In the intentional stance we open ourselves to possibilities and exchanges which are not just of our own devising. We can encounter the earth other as a potential intentional subject, as one who can alter us as well as we it, and thus can begin to conceive a potential for a mutual and sustaining interchange with nature”.[29] In this state, the center and focus of one’s activity becomes not just based on the ego or on a reflection of the ego, but on true relationship, connection, and love for oneself and the natural world; it becomes an expression of love for the Goddess, which is an expression of love for all beings.
As Terry Tempest-Williams lets go of her attachment to her conceptions of her loved ones as refuge and home, she paradoxically finds deep connection with them through her embrace of the cycle of death and re-birth. She senses their true presence pervading the world around her as she is able to feel the interconnectedness of the whole community of beings. “The headless snake without its rattles, the slaughtered birds, even the pumped lake and the flooded desert, become extensions of my family”.[30] She even finds that embracing the sadness of loss, embracing death, enhances her ability to love. “Grief dares us to love once more”.[31] She, like Starhawk, becomes conscious of her worldview, and consciously allows it to be transformed through her relationship to the natural world. The boundaries that kept her divided from the rest of the world, dependent on an external source of strength and inspiration were, for she and her family, partially expressed in the orthodoxy of her religion, Mormonism. Her self-described spiritual mentor, her grandmother Mimi, advises her to consciously change her perspective. “I let go of my conditioning…’Finally, I am rid of the orthodoxy.’ My advice to you, dear, is to do it consciously”.[32] As a result of the conscious shedding of her orthodoxy and all of the rigid ideas that had previously given shape to her world, Tempest-Williams, firmly rooted in the natural world, becomes empowered as an earth citizen to embrace the wholeness of its community as her new frame and to become an activist on its behalf. She writes of this shift in her as it was represented in a dream she had about women recognizing their special relationship with the land. “The women couldn’t bear it any longer. They were mothers. They had suffered labor pains but always under the promise of birth… A contract had been made and broken between human beings and the land. A new contract was being drawn by the women, who understood the fate of the earth as their own”.[33] The work that Terry Tempest-Williams does as an advocate for the natural world against nuclear testing, which has induced very serious illness in her family and community, both human and non-human, is a testament to the power of the internal paradigm shift by which one discovers her rightful place, embedded in the natural world.
The shift that Terry Tempest-Williams made to finding her refuge in her capacity to love by embracing death, recognizing her inter-connectedness with nature, finding the Goddess within herself, and choosing to engage inter-subjectively with the beings around her is the shift that our modern society must make if we are to reverse the destruction of the non-human world and the degradation of women that we are currently witnessing during this time of environmental and social crisis. We must learn to find security in change by centering our awareness on the self-sustaining constancy of the circle of life and, in this, way, root ourselves in a refuge that embraces transformation. This security will allow us to finally destroy the walls that have isolated us from the world around us, and will allow us to experience a love that pervades us and unites us more fully and deeply with the other beings in our community. This love, flowing through boundaries, will penetrate others and ourselves, healing and transforming the world to create a thriving environment in which refuge can be found within and all around us.
Prophecy and Presentiation: The Role of Prophetic Future for the Eteological Moment at Time’s Dusk
"Behold, it is the eve of time, the hour when the wanderers turn toward their resting-place. One god after another is coming home... Therefore, be present..." - Friedrich Holderlin
Human will, from a contemporary perspective, appears to be a powerful force for the shaping of reality as it manifests over time. It has been the growing realization of the human's sense of his own power (due to his apparently unique capacity for self-reflection) that has led to the psychic crisis of identity from which the entire philosophical enterprise springs and which renders him paralyzed by uncertainty as to the meaning and purpose of his condition. "Man is declared to be that creature who is constantly in search of himself - a creature who in every moment of his existence must examine and scrutinize the conditions of his existence". Perhaps it is because of this existential angst that humanity has become increasingly interested in human destiny, oriented forward in time, with eyes searching the horizon ahead for some indication of the condition of the future.
Prognostication has been one expression of human fascination with the future. In ancient times, the shapes made by entrails were examined as magical expressions of future events. "The divining of entrails as a means of foretelling events belongs to the time we have designated as the magical". But as human consciousness has evolved, so has its relationship with the future. While prognostication implies that there exists an established future, a destiny for the subject in question, modern human life in the industrialized world seems to imply something wholly different. The rise of industrial society feeds a growing compulsion to tame and control the entire world by human might. “Nature, the surrounding world, other human beings must be ruled so that man is not ruled by them”. This human attitude that increasingly drives societal behavior through the global market reveals a deeply rooted hubris based on the belief that the human is completely free to determine the course of the world by his own power and influence. Many contemporary references to the future are based on mathematical prediction and scientific characterization, which presume the entire to be completely measurable. A measurable world can be easily regarded, understood, and manipulated. “It is science that gives us the assurance of a constant world. To science we may apply the words spoken by Archimedes; ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the universe’”.
Jean Gebser, in his masterwork "The Ever-Present Origin" turns a skeptical eye to the contemporary human's tendency to consider himself to be the primary influence in shaping the course of reality as it unfolds. Gebser presents a theory on human consciousness, which posits that its evolution occurs in spontaneous leaps that he calls mutations. Each mutation results in a re-structuring of the collective human consciousness that re-orients its relationship to origin, or the spiritual ground of being from which the entire universe continually arises. There have been four major discernible structures of consciousness that have manifested throughout the course of human history: the archaic, the magical, the mythical, and the mental, each progressively more abstracted from living origin, exhibiting higher dimensionality, and each progressively more conscious of itself. Gebser theorizes that we are currently in the midst of a mutation to a new structure of consciousness, called the integral. The integral structure of consciousness can be characterized by its integration of all other structures of consciousness, latently co-present within the human. The integral human is able to apprehend all of these structures at once, making her free of their grasp. Though she is aware of the possibility for perspective in general, her existence is aperspectival. The structure we are currently leaving, the mental, by contrast, can be characterized in part by its abstract conception of the universe, resulting in a definite perspectival orientation. In particular, the mental human, having become conscious of the existence of three-dimensional space, has "spatialized" time, mistakenly representing it within her mind as a stable and frozen entity, a line upon which one can travel from past to future, and within which one can distinguish measurable and discrete segments. Gebser writes the following about the mental human relationship with the future. "He one-sidedly sets his sights on the future, particularly as he thinks - from his anthropomorphic attitude - that he can shape this temporal sector at will, as if it were dependent on him... There is the extensive web of relationships linking the mental structure with the magic, which in our day is visibly breaking through in its deficient form and is evident in the conviction of present-day man that he is the maker of the future".
The integral relationship with the future is much different from the mental. In an aperspectival mode, not only does humanity shape the future, but the future shapes humanity from within a new kind of present moment, to which Gebser refers as the “eteological moment”, based on the word "eteon", which is defined as a mode of perception in which one is "being-in-truth". "It is this (integral) structure… that also encompasses what is to come: the future, which even today is our co-constituent. For not only we form it; it shapes us as well, and in this sense the future, too, is present". The idea that the human does not completely create his future is a provocative one for this day in age, especially for modern industrialized society, which seems to be caught in the grip of an obsession with its version of human-led progress and growth. It is compelling to consider the meaning of Gebser's presentation of the integral sense of future, then, for the human sense of destiny, and perhaps more importantly, for the human sense of purpose in the integral age. Prophetic promise, found in the religious realm, is yet another perception of the future that may provide insight into the transformation that is necessary for our transition to an atemporal existence. This paper examines the relationship between the symbolic ideal future of the mental human and the integral latent future and presents religious prophecy as a transitional phenomenon through which we can reach the integral eteological moment, which contains within it past, present, future, and the timeless, and through which spiritual origin shines.
The future, like time, has an elusive presence for the modern (mental) mind. Though we regularly think of the future, and commonly accept it as real, it is difficult to determine with any certainty, as one considers it deeply, in what sense the future actually exists. As the present moment is the only region of time in which anything can claim to be manifest, to tangibly co-exist with the questioning subject at the moment of inquiry, it seems evident that the future as we know it is a purely symbolic form, existing exclusively within humanity's inner world of meaning. It is impossible to consider the future in this way without also acknowledging a corresponding past. These two concepts complement and balance one another, stretching out like two wings from the living present, lifting the subject's concrete, embodied, and sensual experience into the abstract realm of possibility. For the mental mind, the past and future signify opposing cardinal directions on a line consisting of quantifiable segments of time. They are built from impressions gathered moment by moment and given continuity by the imagination; in this way, a static context is created from which the mental mind orients and processes further experience. "As observation and attention show (keeping in mind that the word 'manifest' means that which is recurrent, stable and separable) the manifest content of consciousness is based essentially on memory, which is what allows such content to be held in a fairly constant form". As an individual abstracts from her sense experience to create an image of "the past", "the future" is instantaneously conceived along with it as an extension of the patterns that characterize the past in her mind. This characterization of the future in mental terms has been expressed increasingly explicitly as the mental structure of consciousness has begun to break down, manifesting in a deficient manner as rationality. Reality in a modern context has increasingly been interpreted from a reductionist perspective obtained purely through mathematical calculation. As statistical pattern-seeking tools have become grossly over-valued and misapprehended as measures of the whole of reality, the mental human has become convinced, from the disconnected and narrow perch upon which he stands, that the future can be entirely determined (and thus controlled) using these tools. Industrial technology is entirely dependent upon the notion of regularized motion that can be anticipated and predicted with great accuracy using mathematical calculation based on perceived patterns that have been reduced to formulae. Our society uses this method extensively in its attempts to anticipate and predict the future: for economic projection, weather and climate prediction, construction, sociological patterns, food and other resource production, and even increasingly in biological capacities such as the treatment of disease and the conception of children through reproductive intervention. This predictive method of approaching reality, a useful tool in and of itself for the identification of patterns in order to categorize experience, has become inflated in the mental mind and mistakenly placed at the center of the interpretation of experience; thus, industrial society has devolved to become compulsively dependent upon it. Gebser refers to the over-quantification of reality as atomization, which is characterized by the isolation and disconnection of each element from the whole. The conceptual world, as it is conceived in this way, begins to disintegrate, reduced to a series of isolated elements, apprehended in and of themselves, disconnected from each other and the heart of reality.
The rationalistic vision of the future, based on statistical projection, is just one manifestation of the atomization that has become prevalent in the now deficient mental conception of the world. It seems that time itself has become atomized. The conception of time as a spatialized and measurable quantity, apprehended in discrete segments, has begun in recent decades to be exposed as the illusion that it is. As it has become atomized in the mental consciousness, modern society has become obsessed with the sense that we must somehow capture time and save it. We feel that we never have enough time and that it “passes us by” much too quickly. “Only man today who is now awakening or mutating toward the aperspectival consciousness takes note of every hour of his apparent lack of time that drives him to the brink of despair”. This awakening anxiety is an indication that our conception of time has nearly completely disconnected from origin, and is thus frozen, devoid of life, and crumbling. “Someone who has no time has no space. He is either at an end – or he is free. He is at an end if he does not realize the implications of ‘having no time,’ that is, that space has absorbed time, or that everything has become rigid and lifeless; … or if he does not realize that time, when employed as a mere divider, dissolves space”. The most apparent articulation of the fallacy of the spatialization of time is Einstein’s “discovery” of time as the fourth dimension, a co-constituent of space. In his Theory of General Relativity, Einstein posits that space and time exist together in a mutually-bound continuum, countering the Copernican idea that the universe consists of an unbounded spatial universe moving through a continuum of time. This discovery confounds the mental mind, inviting it to stretch beyond its current paradigm. When time is envisioned as having “piggy-backed” onto a static three-dimensional structure of manifested reality, when it is spatialized as a static structure itself, the entire structure begins to crack under the pressure of its own decaying flesh. It, in this case, has lost its source of life, spiritual origin. “We are confronted here with the irruption of the fourth dimension into the three-dimensional world which in its first outburst shatters this three-dimensional world”. It becomes apparent through this realization that time is not a derivative of (or an accessory to) space, but rather that space is a derivative of time. "Time represents an aspect of the element of intensity which constitutes the world". Without time as a living intensity, connected to origin and foundational to the creation of space, space cannot exist. The conception of time as the fourth dimension, because it stretches the mental mind beyond its limits and invites it to perceive and regard time as a living constituent of the world rather than a static and measurable construct, can serve as a bridge to an aperspectival experience of time, to atemporality.
The discoveries regarding the behavior of elementary particles that have led to quantum theory have also challenged the mental conception of time as a spatialized structure. Heisenberg explains that "in very minute space-time regions, that is in those on the order of magnitude of elemental particles, space and time are remarkably obliterated in such a way that with respect to such minute times we cannot even correctly define the terms 'earlier' or 'later'". This phenomenon, non-locality, implies that there is no structure to space or time, that they are not “spread out” upon the ether of the universe, as the mental human may imagine them to be; it seems to suggest, on the contrary, that all of space is conjoined and all of time may be happening at once. The irreconcilability of the relativity and quantum theories, both of whose validity has been repeatedly affirmed experimentally, is perhaps the most telling indication in the realm of physics that the mental conception of the foundation of the world has reached its end. "In relativity, movement is continuous, causally determinate and well defined, while in quantum mechanics it is discontinuous, not causally determined and not well defined". If these theories both prove true for our universe, then there must be some deeper reality that unifies them at their hearts, one that connects human perception back to the whole. “A new kind of theory is needed which… recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails is unbroken wholeness”.
We feel that we are "stuck" in time. We, in our attempts at conquest, have reached the crumbling edge of our world, and have found there as our guide only a mirror that reflects back to us an image of our own deformed “I” and confronts us with the absurdity of our objectifying conceptions of the world. As the space-time container that has afforded us so much certainty throughout the modern age disintegrates around us and we contemplate the leap into the atemporal realm of the achronon, what will become of our impression of the future? What lies latent within the universe for us to discover about our part in the unfolding of reality? What will become of our destiny when there is no when? In order to find out, we must break through the boundary that is before us. We need neither a synthesis nor a transcendence of the dichotomies that frustrate us. What we need, instead, is an infusion of spiritual power into our perceptions. We need wholeness; we need integrity.
Gebser considers time to be the issue of primary importance for the incipient integral age. The integral structure of consciousness will manifest, he asserts, as time becomes concretized, that is, consciously apprehended, within the human experience. The integral human, according to Gebser, will be time-free. The achronon, or time-free state, is one in which all previous forms of time are present: pretemporality (archaic), timelessness (magical), temporicity (mythical), and abstract temporality (mental). "This is not a freedom from previous time forms, since they are co-constituents of every one of us; it is to begin with a freedom for all time forms". In the achronon, there exists only a present moment, which contains within it all of time, including the past, present and future, as well as timelessness. "The aperspective consciousness structure is a consciousness of the whole, an integral consciousness encompassing all time and embracing both man's distant past and his approaching future as a living present". The integral present moment is not the present as we conceive of it in the mental mutation (an non-substantial point on a timeline, conjoining an abstract and static past and future); it is an active and living present that requires the engagement of human consciousness for its existence. Gebser defines the term "presentiation" to refer to the act of "making present", which is a critical feature of the integral structure of consciousness. The moment within which all of time resides and within which everything is presentiated is referred to as the "eteological moment". Eteology, the form of perception for the integral age, is aperspectival and active in the sense that it both perceives and imparts truth simultaneously. It is a form of existence that resembles an interdependent creation of reality with origin, where creation does not refer to something coming from nothing, but to an on-going process of transformation and exchange. "Eteology... does not merely perceive objects in relation to objects, but perceives thinking itself: a detachment from the mental world without irrationalizing it". Understanding the eteological moment is a crucial task for the contemporary human if we are to determine how we are to make the leap from our current position, stuck in time, to a constant and participatory "perception and impartation of truth by man and the world". Gebser provides some guidance for how one begins. He writes: "there is a detachment from memory that is the initial step toward the supersession of time". Gebser seems to be referring here to the psychological bias of the abstract timeline that arises in the mental mind to provide a false sense of continuity to moments of experience. He emphasizes the deficient nature of unconsciously attaching one’s psychic-emotional perspective to his experience of past or future. “The division of measurable time into past and future is a form of deficient spatialization and psychization, if only because past and future are invariably characterized by their emphasis on joy and suffering. It is this characteristic of experiential tension that reveals the deficient and psychistic nature of the dualism. Anyone who indulges in this manner of thinking is confined to the psyche right down to the very level of his abstractions”. Becoming aware of the psychization of one’s own conception of time is a necessary step towards detaching from it. Gebser claims that memory can be especially insidious because not only does it color one’s conception of the past; it also unconsciously characterizes one’s sense of timelessness, pervading it with psychic attachments. “Memory is always time-bound; and what is even worse, it temporizes the timeless without transforming it into temporal freedom”. Memories are the shackles one’s psyche uses to enslave him to his disconnected ego. But as one detaches from his emotionally biased conception of the past (memory), he will simultaneously detach from his (likely unconscious) conception of its corresponding future as a guide that orients his behavior. Though detached from psychic bias, however, past and future, play their roles in the living present; they are integrated and consciously apprehended in the time-free state. "Our concern is to... render transparent our own origin, our entire human past, as well as the present, which already contains the future. We are shaped and determined not only by today and yesterday, but by tomorrow as well". A time-free future, based on moving wholeness, beckons and guides humanity in the eteological moment. What does it mean to embrace this future in the present? What does it mean to hold this future in our hearts? It can only be discerned aperspectivally; this means that we must apprehend the whole in order to integrate its perspective with our own. Detachment from memory is one step toward the openness required for true communion with origin, presentiation, and the perceiving and imparting of truth in the eteological moment. “The pure spirit, not being ‘aware of anything or of itself’ gains awareness of itself through man’s poetic statement wherever such statement is dominated by innocence… and sobriety, that is, spiritual clarity or the freedom from psychic and mental bonds”. This detachment is ultimately a detachment from an ego-centered conception of the world. This conception must somehow be superseded in order for the living eteological moment to prevail, and it is only wholeness, found in the presence of origin, that can lead the way forward.
The human relationship with origin, in the mental structure of consciousness, has been interpreted and mediated through religion. Gebser discusses the function of religion for the mental human as an expression of the bond with the aspects of the world that are not encompassed by his thinking mind. “Religion, which in faith or belief furnishes the last remaining tie to the world of the immeasurable and irrational, is in consequence placed in dualistic opposition to knowledge”. Though time as it is expressed in the mental structure of consciousness is not a part of religion in this context, prophecy, a religious phenomenon, is an acknowledgement of the future in some sense. Prophecy, as an expression in (mental) time that incorporates the remaining non-mental aspects of life into it, serves a synthesizing purpose. It is an expression that bridges mental knowledge with the world of the immeasurable and irrational, the world of faith. This bridging of duality is, though a transient one, an expression of wholeness in the mental human consciousness. Prophecy, because it is time-based, is based on an abstract conception of reality, as is all mental conception. Prophetic future corresponds with some conception of a (usually unexpressed) past and is projected from a context that has been imposed on sense experience in order to give it continuity, like rational, statistical prediction. However, a prophetic sense of time differs dramatically from the rational sense of time that is a deficient mental conception of reality. While statistical future is based on a symbolic context created from abstracted sense experience from the limited perspective of the individual (the ego) and is controlled by human activity, prophetic future is based on a symbolic context created from abstracted sense experience that incorporates the remaining aspects of reality and is led by a vision of the whole in which the individual is embedded. In this way, prophecy is a conception of the future that perceives and expresses wholeness, and (momentarily) reflects origin. An image of origin, through prophecy, thus enters into human experience, into the symbolic context of past and future (into time), and guides the mental human in the moment towards communion with itself for the manifestation of itself.
Prophecy is not simply an aperspectival prediction of the future; it requires human involvement for its manifestation. "The future of which [the religious prophets] spoke was not an empirical fact but an ethical and religious task. Hence prediction was transformed into prophecy. Prophecy does not mean simply foretelling; it means a promise". It is this promise of an ideal future that captivates the religious human, and it is the power of pure symbolic thought, only possible in the mental mutation, that enables it to occur. Cassirer, in his exploration of the human symbolic world of meaning and imagination, emphasizes the power of symbol to abstract, isolate, and consider not only images of concrete things, but also relationships among and between concrete things and relationships among and between their images. In other words, pure and abstract relationship itself can be considered in the symbolic realm. At its height, the ability to consider pure relationship, the relationship not just between specific elements of the universe, but the relationship between all the elements at once, an abstract acknowledgement of unity, is the ability to conceive of an abstract and symbolic reflection of the wholeness of spiritual origin. It is this image of origin that compels the mental human forward in a search beyond the image to recover true communion with it. “Here too man’s symbolic power ventures beyond all the limits of his finite existence. But this negation implies a new and great act of integration; it marks a decisive phase in man’s ethical and religious life”. The mental human sees in this reflection not only the entire universe, but also her true self embedded within it. Thus prophetic future emphasizes not the fate or destiny of the party in question (life as it will be), but rather the role of the human as he may participate with the universe to bring about a particular outcome (life as it ought to be). In this sense, prophetic future is a future that does not just inform, but invites. And in this way, mental abstraction at its peak invites the spiritual realm to emerge into consciousness and points the way toward the integral mutation, the concretion of time, and communion with origin.
Gebser indicates that a synthesis like prophecy must be continually created in each moment; it does not persist. “No synthesis has duration; it must be created ever-anew”. Thus the religious human, striving to fulfill the call of a prophetic future, must attempt in each moment to consciously cultivate a prophetic context within her mind. This requires the constant integration of ideal past and ideal future into the present moment. The subject, in this way, embraces transformation and releases her psychologized version of reality to become imbued with hope that is inspired by wholeness. She becomes, through this process, increasingly acquainted with and open to the presence of origin, and increasingly prepared for the integration of the spiritual into her consciousness. When she has become fully conscious of the presence of origin, the spiritual realm will emerge in her and she will fully perceive it. As she embodies the hope-filled conception of reality that has captivated her, both prophetic past and prophetic future are made present in her entire being. Though a mental version of the future (and mental time in general) remains in her mind, she is compelled by the wholeness of origin which communes with her consciousness to, in the eteological moment, create, sustain, and delight in the world.
Religion, as the mutation to an integral structure of consciousness occurs, becomes preligion, which is the mediator between humanity and origin in the integral structure of consciousness. “Our recognition of the transfiguration, the transclarification of the world – sustained by religion, religio, the bond with the past, though increasingly disrupted by reason – is becoming a bond, an obligation to the present, praeligio”. Religion, through the transformative conscious integration of prophetic conception, foreshadows preligion. Preligion requires an active and conscious manifestation of ideal future. There is no room in this mode of existence for prediction or hope because the ideal past, present, and future are no longer simply guiding abstractions; they are integrated. “Everything to be hoped for is latent in us and is realized through praeligio”. As we become fully conscious of the presence of origin through a living prophetic relationship with the whole, we will, in the eteological moment, perceive truth and, as we commune with origin, impart truth. We will perpetually create the world along with origin in a living present. Origin, through us, will incarnate to manifest itself in space and time. “The immense processes of transformation… are always back-leaps, so to speak, into the already (ever-)present future. This is they way in which origin, budding and unfolding in space and time, emerges on earth and in our daily lives”.
The prophetic future arises from the ideal of wholeness shimmering through the veil of time to call humanity towards itself. This future is always with us, waiting to be expressed. "Our sole concern must be with making manifest the future, which is immanent in ourselves". As we face the end of time as we know it, we must be prepared to enter into relationship with the essence of life that animates us. Guided by our abstract notion of wholeness, which reflects origin and holds the key to the presentiation of our hope-filled future, we will find our way to a living present in which the spirit shines on and through us, illuminating time and timelessness to irrupt in us and incarnate the prophecies of today.
Bibliography
Bohm, David. Wholeness andthe Implicate Order. London: Routledge, 1980. Cassirer, Ernst. An Essay on Man. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944. Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985.
Out of the Silence:Global Religion-in-Process Through the Articulation of Shared Contemplative Experience
“This new language of prayer has tocome out of something whichtranscends all our traditions,and comes out of the immediacy of love.” - Thomas Merton
Inter-religious dialogue refers to a conscious engagement with the frontiers of encounter among differing religious beliefs and the people who ascribe to them. This practice can have a variety of goals, of a practical or theoretical nature, but must always begin with an encounter on common ground in order for dialogue to truly take place. The parties involved must actually connect with one another, in some non-superficial sense, if they are to build on an authentically shared foundation. While Paul Knitter emphasizes the fundamental human common ground as it relates to religion as a recognition of suffering in the world, and a negative response to it, this paper seeks to explore the fundamental common ground of the recognition of a dimension of the universe that is beyond, or transcendent to, our immanent human life, and how a continually shared engagement with this realm, particularly through the rich soil of silence, fertile with unlimited possibility, can result in new religious expression, articulated in fresh language that can synthesize and transcend religious division, reflecting the multi-religious global community in which we live, complex with blurred boundaries of constant encounter, collision, and cross-fertilization.
Religious life, or an acknowledgement and engagement with a realm “beyond” the immanent human social and practical society can be found in virtually every human culture in known historical existence, and arguably in the life of every human individual on Earth. This is typically referred to as spiritual life, although in some societies it is simply part of the collective way of life and is not singled out as such. Culturally, since the Axial Age, the recognition of and devotion towards this “beyond” realm has typically been collectively expressed and formalized within a given community. This formalized expression is religion in the conventional sense. The transcendent, or “reaching beyond”, aspect of religion makes it specifically important for the guidance of a society, as the idea of a striving for something more is inherent in religion, and so it seems paramount that access to this realm of the beyond act as a grounding mat for human life, re-balancing it, continually reminding it how it ought to function, certainly from an evolutionary perspective, but this is the case even in a non-evolutionary perspective as well.
As globalization accelerates through the spread of the industrial economic model, increased corporate reach, a worldwide homogenization of the marketplace, increased international travel and immigration, and increasingly recognizable global environmental effects due to anthropogenic causes, it is inevitable that differing religious ideas and communities would brush up against one another in their interactions, it is inevitable that conflict would occur, and it is inevitable that the need for a common vision that guides our progression through time as a global community would arise. Just as there is a need for a culture or smaller-scale community to develop a system of metavalues to guide its society, this same need exists on a global scale. Regardless of whether it’s formally defined and acknowledged or not, the global societal realm will operate within some context. Up until this point, a secular context has been assumed and striven for in economic trade and industrial growth; however, assumed secularism leaves out perhaps the most important source of human values – the understanding of the “beyond”. Secularization takes appears to take on a “looking the other way” approach to conflict avoidance. One can hardly believe that the influence of religion on cultural value systems could simply be wiped away, yet this is the assumption under which our global society officially operates. Religion (or one's beliefs about the transcendent realm) is always informing one’s values, behaviors, and (especially) guiding visions, regardless of whether one is aware of it or not. It is of great interest, then, to consider how we, as a global community, can honestly and consciously engage the religious dimension of our existence to create a context that will nurture values and ethics that more holistically reflect fundamental human desires and will guide us in our mutual interactions among ourselves and as a human species interacting within the wider communities of our planet and universe.
As the world becomes smaller and values and beliefs intersect, a new context of values is being created. There is no doubt that values guide our actions, but because we do not, as a habit, engage with and reflect on the nature of these values, because they are not rooted in something authentic to foundational human experience and spirit, they are being created unconsciously. Here is where inter-religious dialogue can play a role of tremendous importance. Inter-religious dialogue that is taken up formally and deliberately concentrates this context-creating aspect of human life. It can be viewed as a sort of nursery for the nurture and growth of those values that can guide our global community. But if inter-religious dialogue is a nursery, and the values coming out of it are its fruit, where does its soil, that complex, dark, fertile and rich substance, come from, and how do we cultivate it? Where can we find our common ground?
Paul Knitter, in his theory of ethical pluralism, emphasizes an opportunity for common ground between religious traditions to be found in a common concern for the well being of humankind and the Earth community. “Because such a concern for soteria naturally and automatically creates solidarity, it will provide motivation and commitment for the task of interreligious conversation” (Knitter, 79). He rightly claims that it is a ground that does not privilege any “side” or perspective in the dialogue. “The dialogue does not begin by looking within the traditions, but rather by looking beyond them to the fires of human and planetary suffering that burn all around us” (Knitter, 80). Knitter asserts that suffering, because it is a universal human experience that cuts so deep, to perhaps the deepest place within a person, is an appropriate focus in the context of inter-religious dialogue in order to generate a sense of unity among participants. “Suffering has a universality and immediacy that makes it the most suitable, and necessary, site for establishing common ground for interreligious encounter. Francis Schussler Fiorenza is also cautious but clear in advancing the same claim. “Suffering brings us to the bedrock of human existence and cuts through the hermeneutical circle.”” (Knitter, 89). He claims that the response to suffering, in terms of practical solutions towards its relief in the world, can and should be approached practically within community, and that a focus on praxis can bring people together in a common focus. “It is precisely here, in our shared grappling with concrete, practical questions of poverty, injustice, and ecological policy that our horizons can be effectively and profitably fused” (Knitter, 80). Although Knitter does acknowledge engagement with the transcendent dimension of existence, he acknowledges it as a byproduct of seeking practical solutions for the world. “A soteriocentric global responsibility can also give more clarity and power to Panikkar's image of the Pneuma or Spirit in whom we have to have “cosmic confidence” if we are to believe that our ineradicable differences are the stuff out of which we can and must build communication rather than separation. We can see signals of the Spirit and feel the power of its presence in the way our global crises are calling us to a global responsibility … the universality of suffering has given a universal voice to the Spirit” (Knitter, 81). Knitter's approach is in complete alignment with the explorations and assertions of this paper, as the author agrees that one initial motivation for inter-religious dialogue arises in the face of global suffering and practical, immanent problems that must be addressed together through the development of practical, immanent solutions. However, Knitter's emphasis on suffering as the ultimate human foundational experience and the relief from suffering as the only effective response is found to be lacking. Practical engagement for practical solutions only can lack centered and holistic direction. “The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful” (Arnold, 19). This author would take Knitter's praxis-based approach beyond praxis, to emphasize the fundamental human experience of mystical connection with a transcendent realm, and engagement with this realm for a sense of communal direction, not just in terms of relieving suffering, but also in terms of development towards ultimate fulfillment, and communion with the spirit of unity found in mystical experience for its own sake. Knitter writes of “suffering demand[ing] a new paradigm of interpreting existence” (Knitter, 88); this author asserts in response that mystical contact with the transcendent realm is common ground that achieves the same effect, with the beneficial result of a focus on a united and harmonious future, rather than on only the alleviation of a painful and disjointed present, regardless of the method of alleviation.
Contemplative practices, observed in silence, with an attitude of openness to mystical contact, are powerful methods of spiritual discipline throughout the religious world. What is it about silence that is so powerful? We tend to, at first thought, consider, or even define, silence as the absence of sound - the negation of activity, striving, and most importantly, of speaking. But, on the contrary, many spiritual thinkers have in fact identified silence to be characterized by a sense of fullness rather than emptiness. As Johann Arnold says about silence in his book "Seeking Peace", “It involves more than not talking – it means learning to listen” (Arnold, 71). Ramana Maharshi says "Silence is not turning off the tap of communication but turning it full on" (Dalai Lama, 31). (from the introduction by Lawrence Freeman). But to what are we listening when we are silent? When no form, or finite idea, concept, belief, perception, or perspective is articulated, there is only formlessness. Formlessness is the "place" from which every form arises. Silence somehow seems to provide access to this realm of formlessness, the realm of the unspoken, unarticulated, and unmanifest. In this sense, silence allows for an attentiveness to infinite potential, pregnant with every possible form that could arise. Because religious values are structures, or forms, shaped and articulated ideas that guide the spirits, minds, hearts, and wills of people, shared silence can serve as a common foundation, or precursor, to religious forms, and is thus an attractive option for inter-religious dialogue. Because silence is full and rich, pregnant with infinite potential, it can be viewed as the soil needed for newly articulated global values regarding issues of "the beyond" to sprout forth.
Shared contemplative silence has been deployed as a method for bringing religious groups together, and participants have spoken highly of the experience as unifying and healing. "The Good Heart", a book that chronicles the encounter between Christian meditation practitioners and the Dalai Lama at the John Main Seminar in 1994 in London, at which the Buddhist figure commented on Christian scriptural passages, emphasizes the important role shared silence played in this encounter. "This experience of silence and thought-free being together, for each other, was the underlay of the dialogue" (Dalai Lama, 30). Extended periods of shared silence at the John Main seminar clearly played a supportive role in connecting the participants, despite the various religious backgrounds represented (most visibly that of the keynote speaker and his attendants, Buddhism, differing from the Christian faith of the seminar attendees). It seems that there is something about silence that can be healing and unifying in a way that any amount of spoken dialogue cannot. It opens up a shared space, a metaphysical common ground that literally dissolves difference, reflecting or creating a pre-manifestation of formlessness in all its fullness. Paul Tillich, in his book “The Courage to Be”, points out the healing significance of placing one's awareness in the eternal realm of formlessness. "The anxiety of meaninglessness is conquered where the ultimate meaning is not something definite but the abyss of every definite meaning" (Tillich, 159). Father Lawrence Freeman connects the encounter with this realm with silence. "Beyond these exchanges in language, however, there is a deeper experience beyond language and thought. In that experience, which is silence, uniqueness and difference, along with all other dualities, coincide: they meet in a unity that respects and fulfills difference and at the same time transcends division. This is love" (Dalai Lama, 19). Father Freeman touches here on why silence in particular can be so powerful. Because silence is a ground of infinite possibility, all separateness is demolished. Everything is unified in silence. It is precisely this quality of silence that can be conducive to peace-making aspects of inter-religious dialogue. Not only do differences fade in the psychic space of contemplation, but there arises a profound awareness of and respect for one's fundamental unity with all of life. Christian Friends, more commonly known as Quakers, have long valued silence for its unifying power. Johann Arnold speaks of their reliance on it as a consensus-building technique. “Friends felt that because silence drew one away from the self and into a greater sphere, it was the most fruitful state in which to find consensus and unity, even on a divisive issue” (Arnold, 72).
In inter-religious dialogue, for the purposes addressed in this paper, that of finding common ground from which to nurture deeply rooted global values, discovering and acting out of a sense of unity is of the utmost importance. It is not just a sense of unity, as a pervasive and homogenous medium that melts everything into everything else, from which silence draws its healing power. The unifying aspect that is to be highlighted here specifically is a growing awareness of the “other” in inter-religious dialogue, sitting next to an “I”, living life alongside of “I”, separate from “I”, yet one with “I” in some fundamental way. Thomas Merton, in his article “Creative Silence”, discusses this. “When we are quiet, not just for a few minutes, but for an hour or several hours, we may become uneasily aware of the presence within us of a disturbing stranger, the self that is “both I and someone else” (Merton). Raimon Panikkar identifies this as developing “me-consciousness” - the sense that the other is not an object, completely foreign to my self, and therefore acting upon my self, intruding my autonomous self, but rather that the other is not wholly other, that he is a subject as I am a subject, whose reality is as real as my reality, who is part of me on some level, and with whom my self is inter-acting. Panikkar says this. “I find in his actual presence something irreducible to my ego and yet not belonging to a nonego: I discover the thou as part of a Self that is as much mine as his – or to be more precise, that is as little my property as his. Now, this discovery of atman, the human nature, a common essence or divine undercurrent, is not, properly speaking, my discovery of it, but my discovery of me, the discovery of myself as me – and not as I: me consciousness” (Panikkar, Intra-Religious Dialogue, 38-9). This "me-consciousness" allows for a unique kind of unity that transcends one's immanent reality (in which one's awareness is centered and stabilized upon one's ego). Panikkar elaborates on the evocative power of embracing the "other" as one embraces oneself. "I cannot love him as myself unless I take my place on the one bit of higher ground that will hold us both - unless I love God. God is the unique locus where my selfhood and my neighbor's coincide, consequently the one place that enables me to love him as he loves his own self without any attempt at molding him. For this very reason I cannot love God unless I love my neighbor because God is that transcending of my "I" that puts me in touch with my neighbor" (Panikkar, Intra-Religious Dialogue, 49). It is in evoking a state of unity, which is found only in a realm beyond the seemingly disparate world in which we find our ego-selves, that Divine inspiration is encountered.
The theories developed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a 20th century Jesuit priest, paleontologist and thinker, attest to this idea of the underlying unity of creation being the gateway to the Divine, in fact, of the unity actually being the articulation of the fullness of the Divine. Teilhard de Chardin posits the idea of the "omega point", a point of unity for all of creation. It is love that guides humanity together through time towards this omega point of unification. “Love alone is capable of completing our beings in themselves as it unites them, for the good reason that love alone takes them and joins them by their very depths” (Teilhard de Chardin, 189). In this narrative, unity among creation composes Divine Presence. However, the unified mass of creation of which Teilhard writes is not an undifferentiated, homogenous mass; on the contrary, it is within the fully formed omega point that the uniquely diverse presence of every part of the whole comes alive in an inter-related network of relationships. “In confluence along the line of their centers, the grains of consciousness do not tend to lose their contours and blend together. On the contrary, they accentuate the depths and incommunicability of their ego. The more together, they become the other, the more they become “themselves.” How could it be otherwise, since they plunge into Omega? Can a center dissolve? Or rather is not its own way of dissolving precisely to supercenter itself?” (Teilhard de Chardin, 186). Similarly, the unity found in the silence of inter-religious contemplation through the embracing of the other as oneself evokes a transcendent spirit that allows each self, individual consciousness and unique belief system represented to be more fully articulated, and even celebrated in the fullness of its own being.
Because relationship requires interaction, and action involves motion, the transcendent spirit that emerges in shared contemplation has a moving quality to it. In Christianity, this moving element of the Divine is referred to as the Holy Spirit. Diana Eck, in “Encountering God”, elaborates on the beauty of the recognition of the other in her fullness, with an identification of the “divine undercurrent” of which Panikkar speaks, as the Holy Spirit. “There are moments in all human lives of what Martin Buber called the “I-Thou experience” – where eyes meet, where truth meets truth, where one being meets another. Love and suffering, beauty and horror provide us with the experiences of such moments. The I-Thou experience of full pretense is what Krishnamurti called 'choiceless awareness' – awareness without the grasping, naming, categorizing, and polarizing that distances us from experience. Full presence living. Ordinary human experience can name such moments. They are times of insight, recognition, and awareness. . . Holy Spirit. The “Go-Between God”, the invisible current of communication that streams between us when we truly recognize the presence of the other” (Eck, 121). Here Eck uses the Christian concept of the Holy Spirit to illustrate her point about mutual presence. When one takes on this attitude of “me-consciousness”, there is a moving quality to his consciousness. The Holy Spirit is often represented in Christian imagery as a dove, which conveys a sense of freedom in movement. Similarly, the Buddhist notion of anatman, or “no soul”, emphasizes the importance of living out of (placing one's awareness on) this moving and ephemeral sense of the self. This sense of movement, an inter-weaving between and around individual minds, and dipping into and out of infinite formlessness, is identified as an aspect of Divine character (and the Divine aspect of human character) in many traditions. In this way, silence, in its invitation to openness to one another, and to infinite possibility, opens a contemplative community to the element of the sacred in all of life, and to the presence of a Divine spirit that is moving, acting, breathing - that is alive.
This quality of the Divine that can be encountered in shared contemplative experience when its participants embrace their underlying unity can inspire a deeper understanding of reality and an intuited characterization of the realm of the “beyond”. This unarticulated sense of a spirit moves in and among the "selves" throughout the community, as well as between these selves and that ultimate fullness, the Divine origin from which everything arises. It is in this silent awareness of unity that the eternal realm of the “beyond” is encountered and can be experienced, as Raimon Panikkar points out. "According to most traditions, the contemplative experiences reality, God, ... here below, in the very act that is being performed, in the very situation that is being experienced. Contemplative life is already a heavenly status, a final life, as the mystical will say" (Panikkar, Invisible Harmony, 5). An awareness arises of the separation between this "heavenly status" and the immanent reality in which the ego dwells. Thomas Merton put it simply in his essay on Creative Silence. “Positive silence pulls us together and makes us realize who we are, who we might be, and the distance between these two” (Merton). Paul Knitter calls this an encounter with a "negative experience of contrast" (Knitter, 114), and refers to Schillebeeckx's term "pre-religious experiences" (Knitter, 114) consisting of a "forceful "no" to what the situation is, and then a resolute "yes" to how it might be transformed" (Knitter, 114). This gap between who we are and who we might be, and the moving nature of the spirit provides the sense that this spirit desires to give birth to something (as of yet unarticulated and unformed) from eternal fullness into manifest reality - a new revelation. Silence is the matrix upon which these unarticulated forms rest, the soil from which they wait to sprout into manifested reality. It is the "in-between" place, a gateway to manifestation. Panikkar writes poignantly about the sense of time that a contemplative practitioner experiences during contemplation, and specifically about this "in-between" quality, a standing in the gap between eternity and the time-bound manifest world, and refers to the penetration of the transcendent realm into this crossroad as the "vertical axis". He calls this sense of time "tempiternity". "It is obvious that this tempiternal now that the contemplative experiences is not just the crossing of a hurried past and an accelerated future. It is rather a cross that has in itself all the past because, having died, it has risen, and all the future because, although not yet dawned, it conserves all the luminosity of a hidden sun that can appear in any corner of the horizon. It is not by escaping from time - even if that were possible - that the contemplative discovers the tempiternal. It is rather by integrating it completely with the vertical dimension which constantly intrudes on the horizontal temporal line. Tempiternity is not the absence but the fullness of time, but this fullness is certainly not just the future" (Panikkar, Invisible Harmony, 10). It is this membrane into the manifest world, this full silence, that is the matrix out of which the articulated Word arises.
As powerful as silence can be for creating common ground among a group of disparate subjects, articulation from the silence has its own power, a tremendous yet subtle force that creates and transforms the manifested world. The biblical account of the cosmic creation story told in the gospel of John places the Word in a starring role : "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made" (John 1:1-3, NIV). Similarly, the Hindu account of the cosmic creation is that the universe arises from the sound, or word, "om". The Word is perceived as the building blocks out of which reality is created. Henri Nouwen, in his book "The Way of the Heart", speaks of the Word as such a builder. "Out of his eternal silence God spoke the Word, and through this Word created and recreated the world" (Nouwen, 56-7). If contemplative silence is the soil out of which values sprout within the nursery of inter-religious dialogue and contemplation, then the Word is the seed from which these values grow. The Word exists before articulation. It is the forms that bubble up, waiting to be spoken to life. The Word is the first appearance of a form birthed from the eternal realm into the time-bound realm, and in the Judeo-Christian tradition, this is referred to as revelation.
Not despite it, but precisely because of the diverse nature of an inter-religious gathering, the potential for powerful and appropriate global change is present as a result of shared contemplation, Divine encounter, and the articulation of revealed vision. Within every community, there is a common ground out of which shared ideas spring. This is the origin of the world's religious traditions. Communities of people, bound together traditionally by geographical location and lifestyle, interact on common ground, and from this common ground, their underlying unity, guiding values grow, are felt, and are expressed. The global community shares a common ground, and inter-religious contemplation and dialogue allow this common ground to be represented as accurately as possible and to be engaged deeply, authentically, and consciously. Ideally, contemplative practice strips participants' awareness down to its core, allowing for the temporary suspension of animosity and attachment to dogmatic views. The present moment is engaged and the eternal realm invited to penetrate the moment in the twilight state that Panikkar calls tempiternity, giving birth to revelations that are appropriate to the current communal state, moving it towards the shared vision which is ideally revealed ever-more-accurately through shared mystical experience, enriched by the ever-more-diverse presence of ever-more-diverse "others".
There is a mystery in communication among human beings, and between human beings and the rest of the universe. A form can bubble up to exist within the individual or collective heart, but when it is articulated, expressed, or spoken, it takes on a different nature. It becomes manifest. The resonant nature of intention with sound rings out throughout the already manifest world and penetrates it in a way that shakes it to its core, altering it and the course of history. Henri Nouwen speaks of this idea eloquently. "The word is the instrument of the present world and silence is the mystery of the future world. If a word is to bear fruit it must be spoken from the future world into the present world" (Nouwen, 49). The words that arise out of the contemplative silence of inter-religious dialogue literally have the power to create a new reality, in response to the present moment and its deficits (experienced as suffering, as identified by Knitter) relative to the centered, holistic, unified, and divinely-inspired revelatory visions received by the community of contemplative practitioners. As Panikkar has said, "Contemplation is the actual building of the temple of reality, wherein the onlooker is equally part and parcel of the whole construction" (Panikkar,Invisible Harmony, 27). The articulation, then, of those insights that are drawn from inter-religious contemplative silence, is tremendously important for creating fundamental, concrete, and specific observations, guidelines and goals for the operation of global society. Although the hope is for something resembling religious doctrine to grow out of this type of inter-religious dialogue, its quality, unlike religious doctrine, would be highly fluid. An over-emphasis on articulation as truth does not do full justice to the constantly changing reality of the present moment. Henri Nouwen quotes Chuang-Tzu on this topic in “The Way of the Heart”. "The purpose of the word is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words? He is the one I would like to talk to" (Nouwen, 49). When the Word is finally articulated, the idea that gave birth to it somehow dies, as the seed “dies” when the sprout shoots out of it. The articulated form is broken off from the root as the sprout is harvested. “There is a silent self within us whose presence is disturbing precisely because it is so silent: it can’t be spoken. It has to remain silent. To articulate it, to verbalize it, is to tamper with it and in some ways to destroy it” (Merton).The transformation of manifested reality is a process, and self-reflective humans, consciously engaging in this process, can choose to continually draw from the tempiternal realm encountered in shared silence, for a centered and deeply rooted blossoming of communal life. Henri Nouwen touches on this process-oriented articulation of truth, continually drawing from the formless realm. "A word that bears fruit is a word that emerges from the silence and returns to it" (Nouwen, 56). Although words are important for conveying values, their purpose is to articulate the revelations originating from the ever-moving “common essence or divine undercurrent” to which Panikkar refers."What I am against ultimately is the total dominion of the logos and a subordinationism of the Spirit ... And yet I am against all this, I repeat, without ignoring the function and power of the logos, this fellow-traveler of all reality, coextensive with it, but not exhaustively identifiable with it" (Panikkar, Invisible Harmony, 152).
This process-oriented approach to engagement with the realm of the “beyond”, the formless realm, precisely because it needs to be process-oriented, necessarily ought to take place within a community of subjects that operates as a community, committed to a shared engagement over time in the continual search for solutions for the alleviation of communal suffering and in the continual pursuit of truth. A continual engagement with the Divine spirit within a consistent community allows for a gradual and stable building of a foundation of trust, respect, and shared concern, which can be the context for the continual evolution and effective application of values, important in a turbulent world that urgently needs grounded and directed change. "What is needed is trust, a certain trust that sustains a common struggle for an ever better shaping of Reality" (Panikkar, Invisible Harmony, 175). Over time, this will allow for practical action leading to global transformation that is based on shared values, freshly inspired and continually articulated, and a more harmonious global community. "Action and contemplation have to join hands in an act of cosmic, human, and divine trust" (Panikkar, Invisible Harmony, 36). This requires remarkable faith in the community itself, as well as the Divine spirit, to reveal the transcendent realm continually and with integrity, and can be considered a continual creation of religion, guiding the spiritual life, but ever evolving, slipping through the hands as grains of sand when gripped tightly. “Here we experience the reality of cocreation, the dynamic within which the immanence of matter and the consciousness of transcendence unity to give birth to new traditions and spiritual paths in the crucible of dialogue” (Lanzetta, 118). Inter-religious dialogue, and, specifically, shared contemplation, is an absolutely critical practice for the accomplishment of this harmonious state, and in the pursuit of that Divine fruit, peace.
This intentional and continuous pursuit of Divine truth within community is an appropriate reflection for an aspect of the human experience, which Panikkar calls “the dialogical character of being”. "Imparative religion is an open process. A universal theory attempts to clarify everything as neatly as possible in one single place and ends eventually by stifling any ultimate dialogue. In my alternative the polarities remain and the ideal is not seen in a universal theory, but in an ever-emerging and ever-elusive myth that makes communication, and thus mutual fecundation, possible without reducing everything to a single source of intelligibility or to mere intelligibility... In a word, the dialogical character of being is a constitutive trait of Reality" (Panikkar, Invisible Harmony, 173). The capacity for an awareness of and self-reflective engagement with aspects of the human experience calls forth in us what is most uniquely human, and what can arguably be called our best collective Self. Teilhard de Chardin emphasizes the moment when self-reflection appeared in the universe through humanity as a critical turning point for evolution, when the divergence of lifeforms reversed and the joining together of life forms, drawn by love, began, with ever-maturing consciousness according to the law of complexity and consciousness. Ultimately, according to Teilhard de Chardin's vision, a global unity will be achieved, in which each “other” will be fully embraced and even encompassed within each “self”, fully incarnating the transcendent Divine spirit that dances through collective contemplation. It is only in silence that this spirit can be most robustly encountered, felt, and discerned, for silence, in its unarticulated fullness, is the gateway from the infinite fullness of the beyond to the articulated incarnate world. It is the matrix through which all of manifest reality must emerge, the soil through which religious expression and guiding meta-values must continually sprout forth, and herein lies its power. “In the garden of our hearts, the Divine waters the seeds of a new revelation and a new wisdom nowhere abated. Joined with the weaving together of consciousness and cells, our adoration and our longing become an altar upon which the universe breathes its own prayer” (Lanzetta, 130).
References Arnold, J. (2000). Seeking Peace. New York, NY: Penguin Putnam. Dalai Lama, Kiely, R. (1996). The Good Heart. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications. Eck, D. (1993). Encountering God. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Knitter, P. (1995). One Earth, Many Religions. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Lanzetta, B. (2007). Emerging Heart. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress. Merton, T. (1969). “Creative Silence” (The Baptist Student, vol. 48, no. 5). Louisville, KY: The Baptist Student. Nouwen, H. (1981). The Way of the Heart. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Panikkar, R. (1995). Invisible Harmony. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress. Panikkar, R. (1999). Intra-Religious Dialogue. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1999). The Human Phenomenon. Brighton, England: Sussex Academic. Tillich, P. (1952). The Courage to Be: New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Killing god
“We pray that we may be rid of god, and taking the truth, break into eternity, where the highest angels and souls too, are like what I was in my primal existence, when I wanted what I was, and was what I wanted” (229).
There is a well-known Zen Buddhist saying that goes like this: “If you meet the buddha on the road, kill him.” On its surface, this statement appears astounding. To kill the subject of veneration, the most holy and honored role model, the center of one's course of development, transformation, and love, is shocking. If the buddha were to die, where would the follower then turn? Her entire frame of reference would be shattered. Despite the initial shock at this statement, upon further reflection, the more clever among us can perhaps dig a little bit deeper to sense what is really meant by the saying. The reader might consider that this shattering of the reference frame is precisely what is necessary for the spiritual development of the buddhist devotee. Perhaps one realizes that whatever her idea of the buddha, whatever her relationship with the buddha, it is limited, and so if she is to see the buddha on the road, he is no doubt not the real buddha, as he is only a partially articulated representation of him, trapped within the limitedness of her own psyche. However, when we push this idea further, when we really contemplate the meaning of “killing the buddha”, we find ourselves at a drastic and terrifying precipice – that of our own consciousness – not only the intellectual conception of our own consciousness, but the actual limitations of our very selves – and when we face this kind of dizzying end, the edge of the world in a sense - then what are we to do? Meister Eckhart, throughout his writings, alludes to this idea of killing god. When he refers to the god that must be extinguished, the lowercase “g” is deliberately used, presumably to indicate the limitedness of our conception of the real God, with whom we are to pursue ultimate communion on the spiritual path. Eckhart says, referring to Jesus Christ's reference to the poor in spirit in his Sermon on the Mount, “Thus we say that a man should be so poor that he is not and has not a place for God to act in. To reserve a place would be to maintain distinctions. Therefore I pray God that he may quit me of god, for unconditioned being is above god and all distinctions” (Eckhart, 231). When I close my eyes and imagine that I am enjoying communion with God, I feel an intensity in the depths of my heart. I imagine God to be caring, full of grace, loving, and jealous for my obedience. At times, I strive to align my will to the will that seems to lie in that secret cave deep within me. I believe at this time that this cave is connected somehow with the rest of the universe. I feel that I am sacrificing my imagined control to the authority of the mysterious and all-knowing God who seems to truly be touching me with presence that challenges and moves me in ways I cannot always understand. I then feel that I am following God. What does it mean, then, to take Eckhart seriously when he says that the true spiritual follower “is not and has not a place for God to act in”? What does this mean for me and my notions of the god I imagine? What is the relationship between the god within me, the god I know, and the “real” God who dwells in eternity? Does the gateway to ultimate communion with God lie somewhere within the depths of me, through my god, or is this god simply a stone that I strike my foot against, blocking my way to freedom by providing a false sense of security, deep within the structure supporting my conscious sense of identity, my ego, and harshly differentiated from God? I believe that the next step towards this gateway to the unconditioned being, God, lies somewhere in the concept of His unchanging character. Eckhart, rather provocatively, addresses God's indifferent reactions to human prayer. He says “All the prayers a man may offer and the good works he may do will affect the disinterested God as little as if there were neither prayers nor works, nor will God be any more compassionate or stoop down to man any more because of his prayers and works than if they were omitted” (Eckhart, 85). God is eternally “immovably disinterested” (Eckhart, 85). God is eternal, unchanging. Time emerges from God, and He is not subject to it. Although certain “whole” characteristics may be associated with Him, even defined by Him, He is undifferentiated and thus all qualities, distinctions, and forms are contained within Him. God knows no desire except that steady light of All, the Whole, which one may experience as love, peace, or joy, but cannot be described in limited abstractions such as words. As Eckhart says “God is free of everything and therefore he is everything” (Eckhart, 230). So coming closer to this unaffected being requires transformation of the one (the qualified and differentiated human one) who desires communion. In order to come close to God, however, one does not grow towards Him; God is not something external at which one can grasp or move through space and time to join. Here the question arises: how then should one go about transforming in order to achieve communion with God? When I regard God, it is the god inside of me that I encounter. It is tempting to think that if only I were to meditate on this god, I would somehow come closer to the God it assimilates. But this is not the case. Paradoxically, the god within us is external; it is differentiated from our own awareness. It is impossible to recognize the existence of something if we are completely identified with it, and our consciousness needs to be separate from it in order to regard it, to sense its presence. Therefore, if we submit our will to a god that we can sense as separated off within some place inside of us, that is not truly the unmoving creator God, from whom everything springs. It is only an abstraction of God, frozen in time, cut off from God as source of life, limited by the horizon of our individual life experience, both conscious and un-conscious. That god is part of me, but I am not that god, and most importantly, that god is not the God I seek to know. It will never lead me to the God that lies beyond the confines of my individual psyche. The question then arises: How do I move from focus on an idea or conception within myself, to living fully within the ineffable mystery of the universe? If I maintain a will, a desire (even for God) and even a sense of self to direct (even towards God), are there not still distinctions between myself and God? When I encounter the limitations of my very self, how am I to make the leap from the precipice of my own awareness into (presumably) unification and identification with the true God, that unconditioned, undifferentiated being? Eckhart focuses on the idea of disinterest for this task. To approach life with disinterest means to not allow the conscious self to identify with the goings-on of life, to remove the focus of one's awareness from the surface motions of one's life. This does not mean, however, that there is an extinction of awareness. Eckhart illustrates the idea of practicing disinterest while still engaged in the goings-on of life by comparing awareness to a door swinging on a hinge. “I compare the breadth of the door to the outward man and the hinge to the inner person. When the door swings to and fro, the breadth of the door moves back and forth, but the hinge is still unmoved and unchanged” (Eckhart, 87). The “inner person” he refers to in this passage is very mysterious, but it is exactly here that we must place our focus as life occurs around us. One should not place one's awareness on the inner person, trying to conceive of her first, and then placing the awareness there, for that would be a regarding from a differentiated mental space, but rather one should align her awareness ever more completely with the inner person. Her conscious self, the ego, must be open to the inner person - that which, in the eternal realm, is completely united and identified with God, is of God, and ultimately is God. It is interesting to consider just what is achieved when the awareness is focused entirely on this inner self. Perhaps we can begin by considering the nature of the inner self. The psychological concept of the Self, as defined by Carl Jung, is an archetypal potentiality that serves as the center for the human psyche. It represents a state of psychic wholeness that “includes in it a supraordinate concept” (Jung, 1959, p.3). This potentiality is, according to Jung, identical to the God-image. It seems that it is with this Self that Eckhart is calling us to center our awareness, and it is this Self that is the true portal to God for any individual. The Self includes both the conscious and unconscious parts of the individual psyche, and also stretches beyond the psyche, towards the individual's ultimate potential. It indicates an openness, a process-oriented posture for the psyche. “The self cannot be localized in an individual ego-consciousness, but acts like a circumambient atmosphere to which no definite limits can be set, either in space or in time” (Jung, Aion, p. 183). The center of the conscious psyche (including conscious awareness) is the ego. It is ultimately the self-other relationship that becomes altered at a point of enlightenment, right vision, perfect disinterest, and complete poverty of spirit. When the ego is the center of one's consciousness, there is an “I” separate from all it encounters, experienced as objects; life is experienced as a duality between I and it. On the true spiritual path, it is the ego that must fade away so there is no longer any “I” to interpret the awareness. It is only when the boundaries of the ego are relaxed and open, allowing the ego to enmesh itself with the unconscious realm (including the supra-ordinate element) that one's awareness can be said to be focused on the Self. The “I” must be completely enmeshed with the Self, that center which keeps one foot planted in the manifest world and the other in the eternal world, without time, the realm of God. It is at this point, when the conscious mind is not abstracted from the rest of the universe, when it has no vantage point on which to stand and witness, that differentiation is eliminated. Communion of individual consciousness with the flow arising from the source of the universe, God, is achieved. It has been asserted here that it is the spiritual devotee who must transform through her awareness in order to achieve oneness with God, but the world around her also changes along with her, illusions fading and the veil of manifest reality beginning to decay. As she enmeshes herself with God, letting go of attachments to everything but God, not only do forms cease to have significance, they gradually cease to exist within her individual consciousness. The forms that manifest as symbols for the articulation of the graspings of the ego's observations never arise. Awareness rests in formlessness. Milarepa, the Tibetan buddhist mystic, had to endure great trials in order to prepare himself to receive the dharma of enlightenment. His spirit needed to become purified before it could hold the greatest of teachings. It was the trials he endured in obedience to his spiritual teacher's perspective that altered his awareness, burning away his false grasping at manifest forms, so that he could finally see life as it truly is, so that he could attain right vision, which is associated with enlightenment. “Samsara is the result of a wrong point of view. Nirvana is realized through perfect awareness” (Lhalungpa, 127). Eckhart also refers in his writings to this idea, that when one's vision is purified, the world around him responds. “God sheds light on everything. Everything will taste like God and reflect him” (Eckhart, 9). When awareness is focused with the inner self, one begins to experience the reality of eternity; for not only differentiated forms, but indeed space-time itself as well, is revealed as an illusion, a fallacy of mis-placed concreteness, manufactured by the ego's abstraction from the its true home, God or the Source of life. As the spiritual seeker is transformed and along with her the world as she experiences it, the god (as it was) too within her dies, gradually fading into obscurity, or else can be understood to have grown to embrace the pervasive, yet ever-moving nature of God Himself. The task of “killing god”, therefore, is truly a task in realizing one's own God-nature, in recognizing that I am God, finding my way back to myself. Where there is still an “I” to regard god, that god must be eliminated, and the space between the “I” and everything else must be annhilated. One must forget oneself and everything she experiences, and focus on the Self, which unites her present and time-bound consciousness with her true home and destination, which lies outside of time and space, to discover that she is God, longing for communion with Itself, to act out love eternally.
“God is one who acts within himself. It is here, in this poverty, that man regains the eternal being that once he was, now is, and evermore shall be” (Eckhart, 231).Resurrection in Me
You are the sun A steady blazing inferno One Source of light Bright
Pure and white You shine into my life Sometimes I see you dancing In the reflection of a window
Glimmering and twinkling with the joy of an afternoon, Crisp and bright My heart dances along with yours And then I know you are delight
Sometimes I see you stalking along the ground Towards bare toes buried in grass Somber and steady A mourning cry for the day passed And then I know that you are sorrow
Sometimes I see you in the controlled passion Of the candle's flame Hungrily consuming but elegant with simplicity And I know you are discriminating passion, a skilled lover
I see your piercing gaze Penetrating the butterfly wing To reveal the structure within And I know that you are judgement Redemptive but harsh
When you shed light Gently on the apple tree Patiently watching it grow You reveal to me you're nourishment And then I'm sure I know You're kindness
Sometime I see you as your fingers creep Across the lightening sky Filling in the backdrop for a new day With stunning combinations of elements Reminding me of the unlimited way You continually re-create possibility And I know that you are beauty
When your warmth alights upon my shoulders Holding me in your security I feel your embrace in my soul And I know that you are intimacy
Sometimes I open my eyes to your brilliance And I become completely blind Searing away my ability to orient myself in the now Your light becomes menacing shadow And I know that you are power
Sometimes I see you glinting like pinpricks Twinkling in the dark dark night of my soul And I know you're a mystery, coy and demure Pursuing your captivating shadow becomes my all-consuming goal
Caressing every contour without hesitation When you touch my face from above I know your grace with all my being When you reveal to me you're love
You haunt my dreams I think I know you But then you slip away From the grasp of limitedness Of my capturing gaze
Elusive It seems That sometimes you're just not there But what is “there” to a Being who Is truly everywhere?
Invading every crevice of the Cosmos Your presence sheds light on all beings equally Interacting with us from far away And living within us immanently
Some try to escape your touch, They change and shift and bend Some try to capture you And put you in a box Shaping your imprint for their own end
You shine steadily Steadily you shine Unchangingly You shine Burning away forms, space, and time
Allowing the illumination of some And the obscuring of others You shine onto it all
And enter into it all
When I consider all I see As reflections of the light Coming from you, Encountering me
When I realize how illusory is my frame of reference Every “now” bursting forth anew from your varying presence I know you are everything I know you are real I know who you are And I feel what you feel
There's a place in my heart Just for you, my god, my love And I both commune with you there And worship you above
When I reach this place of knowing I know Beyond the shadow of a doubt That you and I are One and I glow with the flow of you within me I celebrate my victory And rest in my assumed sanity
But then that's when I feel my ground begin to shake The structure holding me cracks And threatens to break Your soul to escape And you, my love, my heart, begin to die Inside of me, strangled by me – choked off by the dying “I” I realize again that I had limited you Relegated to A place within me That felt infinite But could never be free Ultimately For your all-pervasive everything Your everything You're everything
May I melt into you Without differentiation So all of my structures, my conscious interpretations Will disappear And I could dwell here In the now of eternity Right here With you Though there is no “you” to connect to
I it and you, you it and I Not outside time but beyond time We together in a permanently moving embrace In a place of undifferentiated no-space
May fertile silence infuse Words and articulations cease their speaking Movement, gesticulation no longer seeking To define the universe, this whole May I settle into the silence And find my true home as God soul
References Eckhart, Meister. (1957). The Essential Writings (Translation by Raymond B. Blakney). New York NY: HarperCollins. Jung, C.G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.9 Part 2). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lhalungpa, Lobsang P. (1977). The Life of Milarepa. New York, NY: Penguin Group.
From Chronos to Kairos: An Examination of Time Concretion as the Narrow Gateway to Eternity
May 6, 2010 The California Institute of Integral Studies EWP 9109: Gebser and Aurobindo on the Evolution of Consciousness Professor: Dr. Eric Weiss
In his landmark book, “The Ever-Present Origin”*, Jean Gebser emphasizes the importance of time in the transition from the mental mode of consciousness to the integral mode of consciousness. As we stand on the threshold of a four-dimensional notion of reality that threatens to shatter beneath our quivering legs, it is of paramount importance that we contemplate the form that time, or rather time-freedom, will take in the coming mode, as well as the nature of the intensity represented in the mental mode as time. This paper will explore these issues, and examine the narrow gate through which we must pass in the mutation from our current mode of consciousness to the future one; to make the great leap into the perceived abyss that lies before us at this moment in time.
What is time, really? In our society, we understand time to be a passing flow, much like water in a predictable river, always carrying us at a constant rate, ticking by in clearly defined and commonly experienced segments. But Gebser makes it clear that this is not the whole story when it comes to the phenomena we experience as time. He claims that time, as mainstream society in the modern age has perceived it, is simply an extension of space, which only abstracts a partial perspective of the experienced phenomena, portraying it as a quantitative phenomenon that can be “mastered”, rather than the complex and fundamental intensity that it truly is. “Chronological time is but one aspect of a more encompassing phenomenon: it is the mental aspect of that constituent of the world which manifests itself, not as space, but as a basic phenomenon of space” (Gebser, 284). The Greeks referred to this form of time as chronos. A British online encyclopedia defines it as “chronological or sequential time”. Kairos, on the other hand, was an altogether different form of time that was acknowledged by Greek civilization. This understanding of time embraces its qualitative aspects, and is described in the same source as “a time in between, a moment of undetermined period of time in which `something` special happens”. This paper will explore how the mutation from the mental mode of consciousness to the integral one, in terms of time, can be understood as a transition from chronos time to kairos time, from measurable time to time-freedom, from time-space-bound mechanism to dwelling in the realm of the infinite.
Gebser identifies time as the central issue in the mutation to the integral mode of consciousness, in which we are currently participating. The task at hand, in order for the mutation to occur successfully, is to accomplish the concretion of time into our consciousness, to experience it fully for what it truly is, rather than perceiving it from a wary distance, as we do currently. It is difficult, from this position on the evolutionary spiral, to apprehend the true meaning of time as it is meant to be experienced in the integral mutation; nevertheless, we must try, as conscious involvement in the mutation can help it to be that much more successful, peaceful, and fulfilling. Time is an intensity, as Gebser points out. It is “an ‘ever-present abundance’ or plenitude, spiritual and not psychic in nature”(Gebser, 357). It is a fundamental element in the universe in which we live, and in our relationship to origin, the most fundamental aspect of all. “It turns out that time … indeed is a world constituent” (Gebser, 286). In fact, it is likely that time arises fully and directly from origin, and may even be characterized by the flow of origin into human life. As humanity has undergone each (known) mutation of consciousness, we have ventured further and further away from origin, so that the light of our own consciousness has been able to grow brighter and brighter. As we have emerged into the blinding light of our own consciousness, our engagement with the ultimate realities of the universe (rooted origin) has become more and more abstract. This abstraction has allowed us to portray the universe in terms that we can conceptualize and synthesize in order to function; however, it has left us viewing life and our position within it from outside a window, so to speak, rather than engaging with it directly and fully. It has been only in the mental mutation that time has irrupted into our consciousness. The intensity that we experience as time, however, has taken on different forms throughout each mutation of consciousness. We can examine the ways it has changed as we have traveled away from origin, in our further attempts to characterize it in its more pure form.
In the magical mode of consciousness, Gebser writes that life was experienced as “a weakly conscious somnolent and trance-like state of magic space-timelessness” (Gebser, 163). The magical mode of consciousness is characterized by its one-dimensional nature, in which the human conception of the world is “point-like [and] unitary” (Gebser, 48). Although there is a vague demarcation of the material world from within origin, there is not a separation from it per se. Gebser indicates that at a place of unity, time serves no function, and indeed, does not even exist. “He becomes one with the unity to which all differentiation is unknown. There spatial boundaries and temporal limits are suspended” (Gebser, 163). This seems to indicate that time does seem to be at least partially characterized by separation, or some sort of self-other relationship between humanity and origin, which implies a dependence upon separation.
In the mythical structure of consciousness, time in some sense begins to exist, but is experienced as what Gebser calls temporicity. Temporicity is a form of time-awareness that is still completely space-free. As the light of humanity’s consciousness begins to dawn, it illuminates the images of the world governed by the psyche. The rhythmic motion of these images is likely the original cause for a sense of time. The sensations accompanying this sense of time correspond to the emergence of the soul, which, conceptually, is inextricably tied to time. “There must have been a far-reaching connection between the discovery of the first perceptions of regular, that is, periodic movement and the discovery of the soul. These movements were first discerned from the night sky, and the correspondence between its movements and man’s own rhythm and dynamics may have brought about man’s first sensation of time” (Gebser, 165). Again, we see that time, even in its earliest forms, appears to arise as a result of a separation from origin. In a state of complete unity with origin, the human soul has no reason for existence, but as consciousness begins to awaken and separate from origin, the soul is distilled from within origin, and develops its own life, co-emergent with the experience of time, and whose experience is described and defined by time.
As human consciousness approaches its peak of separation from origin, mutating into its mental form, time as we currently know it emerges. Time as we know it in our society is marked by, first and foremost, directionality. It is a constantly moving flow that we cannot escape – moving, it is important to note, from a beginning towards an end, from the past towards the future. “It is this directional character of ‘time’ which underscores its mental nature and therefore its constitutional difference from natural-cosmic temporistic movement which is mythical in nature” (Gebser, 173). But what is the true nature of this directionality, and again, what can this analysis tell us about pure time as a fundamental constituent of the universe?
Gebser discusses the notion of mental time as a divider, which gives us an idea of how directionality emerges. Time is associated with the dividing of the perpetual twilight of the mythical world by the light of the sun of day. The mythical world is associated with two-dimensional polarity, which acknowledges wholeness, but stretches its aspects into opposites that swirl around one another (as represented so clearly in the yin-yang symbol). As the mental mutation is encountered, the light of human consciousness grows brighter, cutting through the polarities and making of them dualities, separated elements of the whole. The human experience of reality thus becomes abstracted from concrete reality, that is, from origin. This abstraction, a partial capture or extraction out of a facet of origin, is by definition only a partial representation of reality. “Only concretized parts can be integrated; the abstract, and especially the absolute, always remain separated parts” (268). An abstraction cannot be whole, because it is not connected with the whole. In this way human thought has become unbalanced and thus directed, and, as the soul is with temporality, this is co-dependent with the form of mental time, oriented in a direction. “This world of virtual yet still sheltered movement, which was motionless, as it were, since every movement returned upon itself and cancelled its effect, burst apart when oriented thought temporarily halted the course of the sun: … With this, our “time” and “space” were born: orientation and direction, which the circle, being without beginning and end, was lacking. Only movement, that is, directed motion, could give rise to our experience of what we today call ‘time.’”(Gebser, 166-67). This form of time, according to Gebser, has given rise to the concept of three-dimensional space. “Our mentally oriented conception of ‘time’, the divider of mythical movement and the partitioner of the circle, severs its two-dimensionality and thereby creates the possibility of three-dimensional space” (Gebser, 177). Our reality has (in the mental mode of consciousness) become dependent on the three-dimensional conception of reality that our consciousness has built from our mental abstraction from origin. This matrix has arisen as a creation of our own conceptions of the universe for the purpose of orienting ourselves, and so that we can function with a (false) sense of security in this partial and directed existence, which is mistaken for ultimate reality, but is truly nothing more than a product of our own abstract musings. Thus, even time has become completely abstract, and entrenched within our spatialized notion of the world. We view time as a line, firmly entrenched within the three-dimensional grid that we take to be reality, stretching from past, through present, to future, able to be divided cleanly into uniform segments and thus analyzed and conceived of in mental terms. However, in a strict sense, past and future do not exist. Truly all that exists, always, is “now”, as the uprising of origin into human existence. The deadening of time in the mental mode of consciousness, making of it a mechanical, quantified spatial concept, is a direct consequence of the attempted mastering of time (along with every other phenomenon in the universe), which has occurred as a result of the mental mutation’s over-spatialization of the human conception of the universe. “For perspective-thinking man, time lacked all quality. This is the decisive factor: he employed time only in a materialized and quantitative sense…” (Gebser, 284).
With all this analysis behind us, we are obliged to again approach the question at hand: what is time in a pure sense? Can we find its meaning amongst the grasping at its character within foreign modes of consciousness that we have undertaken in these last few pages? Time appears to be a quality whose form and character are dependent upon the human consciousness’ proximity to origin. In each mode of consciousness in which it has played a role, it is related to a sense of motion that is initiated by a pulling away from origin, and is indicative of our drawing upon origin for the sustenance of the removed paradigm of whichever realm of reality we happen to be functioning within. Time is a fabrication based on distance from origin (to use a spatial metaphor).
Now that we have a better understanding of the meaning of time as a general concept, we can approach the question of the role of time in the coming mode of consciousness: the integral. Gebser discusses time in the integral mutation as being “concretized”, which refers to it being acknowledged in human consciousness in a pure form, not abstract and deadened, but rather in a living and directly experienced sense. “The coming to awareness of ‘time’ in its full complexity is a precondition for the awakening consciousness of time-freedom” (Gebser, 289). Concretion is the essential summation of the effect of the integral mutation on time, and we will attempt to explore the meaning of this concept here, by attempting to grasp the character and role of time in the integral mode. The most basic characteristic of the integral mode of consciousness is the perception of the universe as a whole; there is identification with the spiritual element of life, which is all-embracing, and a mode of perceiving that allows for all of the modes of consciousness and the process of their unfolding to be made translucent. “The new mutation of consciousness… as a consequence of arationality, received its decisive stamp from the manifest perceptual emergence of the spiritual” (Gebser, 541). Perspectivity will cease to exist as the whole is apprehended. “The whole can be perceived only aperspectivally; when we view things in a perspective a way we see only segments” (Gebser, 289). In the context of time, all forms of time throughout the modes of consciousness will, in the integral mode, be simultaneously experienced, resulting in a state that is perhaps best called time-freedom. There is an acknowledgement of time as a measure of proximity to and flow from origin, simultaneous with a communion with origin, as Gebser points out. “It is from origin, which is not bound to time, that all time forms constituting us have mutated. Origin lies ‘before’ all timelessness, temporicity, and time. Wherever man becomes conscious of the pre-given, pre-conscious, originary pre-timelessness, he is in time-freedom, consciously recovering its presence. Where this is accomplished, origin and the present are integrated by the intensified consciousness” (Gebser, 289). Because of the closeness to and identification with origin, humankind, in the integral age, will experience time as the present. The dynamic of continual interpenetration between humanity and origin is perhaps another way to envision time in this form. “This ‘dimension’ is only today coming to awareness, or, more exactly, is only able to come to awareness when it is no longer conceived of as ‘time,’ ‘movement,’ or ‘timeless being,’ but as the presence of origin” (Gebser, 179). The movement of constant communion between origin and humanity is represented geometrically (as illustrated by Gebser) by the symbol of a moving sphere, in which wholeness encompassing motion is captured abstractly. “The simple sphere is merely three-dimensional; only the moving, transparent sphere is four-dimensional. And only the transparency guarantees the aperspectival perception” (Gebser, 346).
The result of this orientation with regard to origin and the universe is, as Gebser calls it, verition. “Verition is neither a unification, a polarization, a postulation, nor a synthesis, but rather an integration by means of which origin – which places its imprint on the whole – becomes the perceived present” (Gebser, 271). Verition is a knowing, a direct experience of the present as it occurs. Gebser also seems to indicate that humanity participates in the creation of reality as it arises and dances in the space between itself and origin, which he describes as the “a-waring” and “imparting” of truth in the integral mode of consciousness. “[Time-freedom] is an acategorical element of systatic perception which makes possible the completion of synairesis, and thus it is the sustaining, indeed ‘a-waring’ and transparent, spatially incomprehensible amension”(Gebser, 356).
Now that a sense of the integral mutation lies more or less before us, the question now is how must we accomplish it? What is the way forward for the concretion of time? This is a complex and compelling question, but one of paramount importance in this age of time-anxiety. Humankind today stands at a very precarious place with regard to our sense of the reality of our existence, as it is rooted in a conception of time-space which is now crumbling under our feet. Gebser explains this phenomenon by pointing out the fallacy of the grounds for security in the mental mode. “He achieved this security by means of his new faculty of directing thought which enabled him to create world-systems and to grasp realities that gave him stability… The security of the mental structure was – in accordance with its nature – purely fictive, that is, a design and projection of security by the ego onto the external world” (Gebser, 288). Because of our recognition of the existence of time, but our inability to grasp its full character, we have conceived of time as a simple extension of the three-dimensional structure of space that we have erected in order to orient our directed thought. But as we have begun to grapple with time in this representation, it has become apparent that “space has absorbed time” (Gebser, 289), and that “time, when employed as a mere divider, dissolves space” (Gebser, 289). The work of Albert Einstein has been pivotal in the acknowledgement of time, and has paved the way for its eventual concretion. His theory of relativity posits space-time as a unified structure; relativity considers time to be a fourth-dimension, coincident with the three spatial dimensions that define the physical universe, and basically an extension of space. In this model, time is quite literally spatialized – quantified in purely physical terms. The problems that arise when viewing this theory through a mental lens reveal the limitations of the mental mode of consciousness. Whereas the desired avenue forward, for Gebser, in terms of the analysis of time is that of the supersession of physical space and towards a dimension of coherence in terms of other realms of the universe, such as psychical and spiritual, the positing of the fourth-dimension in physical terms only expands the physical-focused, abstract paradigm of the mental mind and thus results in disintegration. In the spacetime model, the physical universe is expanding, at speeds approaching the speed of light at its furthest limits. “It was Einstein’s theory of relativity which invalidated the previous exclusive claim of the Copernican world system and replaced it with the space-time continuum. As a consequence we can no longer conceive of the world as being infinite and unbounded but rather ‘finite yet unbounded’.” (Gebser, 287). The structure of space-time is encountering its own limits, and crumbling under its own weight due to its unstable nature. “Einstein’s theory of relativity …had to be conceived of in terms of constant decay and simultaneous renewal, paving the way for a process of expansion, as we might say, in consequence of the dividing capacity of the heterogenous quantity of ‘time.’ This process of expansion is a frenzied rush, pushing ever outward the boundaries of the microcosm as well as of the macrocosm, dissolving – indeed destroying – and exploding rather than overcoming the spatial structure” (Gebser, 353). Despite its discouraging aspects, the notion of a fourth dimension as a relative, rather than a static, absolute (i.e. dead) quality is a step forward in the process of the concretion of time. The fact that it forces the mental mind to face its limits is the most exciting aspect of the fourth dimension in terms of its usefulness as a bridge towards the integral mutation. It cannot be visualized, which points the mental mind towards a new mode of realization, one of verition rather than visualization. However, the fourth dimension must be considered a dimension that integrates, rather than piggybacks onto the spatial structure, as time is the basis for the arising of the three-dimensional matrix, and not a spatialized dimension itself. “Thus time does not curve space; it is open and opens space through its capacity of rendering it transparent, and thereby supercedes nihilistic ‘emptiness’”(Gebser, 353). We must face the crumbling limits of our disintegrating universe, open our eyes, and jump past them, to a deeper, more whole reality that causes our current conception of the universe to fade like mist before the moon. “The irruption of time is destructive only if we fail to realize what ‘time’ actually is. If we are able to realize this, the irruption is not a further and ultimate loss of shelter and security, but rather a liberation” (Gebser, 288).
Now at the dusk of the mental mode of consciousness and on the verge of a new paradigm, in a sense, we do stand before an abyss. Reality as we know it is the cliff, and it is quickly fading. The question arises: will we fall violently against our will into a new understanding of life and the universe, or will we consciously jump in such a way that leads peacefully to complete transformation, coherent to our best understanding of where we are headed? In what direction should we jump? We know that our new conception of reality must be beyond dimensionality, time-free, and space-free, a communion and dance of conscious connection with origin. But, again, how exactly do we arrive at this place of ‘beyond dimensionality’? Gebser illustrates this concept artfully, using a technique called ‘paradoxical thinking’. A paradoxical statement “mediates between oceanic and perspectival thinking” (Gebser, 259) by containing both rational and irrational elements within it. It draws a conditional inference (rational) between two phrases, while the phrases also seem to contradict each other (irrational). This type of thinking, though not perfect for propelling us into the integral mode of consciousness, does take us beyond the expected point of perspectivity when viewed through a mental lens. Gebser compares this phenomenon to “the axiom of parallels; it states that two parallel lines intersect at infinity” (Gebser, 260). Each of the phrases in the statement is represented by a parallel line, seemingly in proper relationship with one another. But at (the gate to) infinity, they meet, and beyond this point, they cross. And that is when we observe an interesting phenomenon. The phrases switch order, and the statement, when put back together “beyond the vanishing point”, is no longer rational. It instead has an irrational character; indeed, the phrases seem to contradict one another. The paradoxical statement forces the rational mind to go beyond the vanishing point at infinity, by forcing it to acknowledge rational and irrational elements simultaneously. Beyond this point, the mind is propelled into a new paradigm. It is forced to abandon the exclusivity of a perspectival way of perceiving. “It is a synthesis or compromise, a third form of thought in which there is a (consistently unsatisfactory) effort to unify opposites” (Gebser, 260). Synthesis is the only way to achieve resolution in the mental mode of consciousness, which creates dualisms everywhere one looks, as is a natural consequence of perspectivity. We see the importance of synthesis in the trinity principle of Christianity, which acknowledges the necessity of an intercessor to reconcile the abyss that lies between a dualistic conception of God and humanity. Paradoxical thought, in synthesizing the irreconcilable dualism between rationality and irrationality, forces us into a new paradigm at the vanishing point. Much like the concept of the fourth dimension, it begins to help us understand (from a mental point of view) the process by which we may enter into the integral mutation, into the realm of time-free amension, where the whole is regarded. “The disruption of space by time does not lead to emptiness, to nihil, to nothingness or nada, but to transparency… by surpassing dualism, we resolve the division of the world in favor of the whole” (Gebser, 529). However, paradoxical thought cannot make the transition for us completely. The inadequacy associated with it is primarily that it is still conception. The synthesis takes place in the mind, which can only deal with abstract ideas, removed from the living origin. Again, much like with the fourth dimension, it forces us to face our limits, which causes our abstract illusions to fade from view. In this case, we face the limits of the illusion based on the abstract relationship between subject and object. As consciousness distances itself from origin, and becomes more and more based on an abstraction of ultimate, whole reality, identity becomes further abstracted from soul until even it becomes a deadened concept, a collection of concepts, much like time being spatialized. The rational conception of identity is called ego. The ego is instrumental in the mental mind’s perception of reality, and the creation of the space-time structure. The ego also provides the mental mind with the sense that it is separate from the rest of the universe, that it is able to view and analyze is from a place of transcendence, from which its actions do not affect the rest of the universe. In a sense, this perception is correct, since the ego itself is very separate from the coherent wholeness; however, in another sense, this perception is an illusion, as the ego is abstracted from a deeper identity that is intimately connected with the heart of reality. The ego’s sense of separation can be referred to as the subject-object relationship, in which the ego is considered to be the subject, and anything in the universe that is apprehended is considered to be the object. The rational mind perceives the world with a clearly-defined subject-object orientation, but when it encounters the perspectival vanishing point, as it does within paradoxical thought, it encounters its own mirror image, the irrational realm, and the subject-object relationship is challenged; indeed, it begins to break down. Gebser acknowledges this as a productive (in terms of evolution) consequence of the paradoxical statement. “It may well be synonymous with a dissolution of the mirror aspect which is an essential element of the psyche; indeed, even the polarity principle itself may be regarded as a reflective or mirror principle, whose dissolution is the final retraction of a projection… The dissolution of this principle is nothing other than the supersession and concretion of the soul, and this the first step towards its integration (Gebser, 261). The subject-object relationship becomes stretched and stressed under the weight of the attempted reconciliation of rational and irrational elements. It is the point where these meet, and that we must look for the secret wisdom that we must glean for our leap into the new paradigm. It is through the perspectival vanishing point, the point of breakdown of our illusory conceptions, that we must aim, so that we can land squarely into the integral mode of consciousness. In this mutation, we must make of our entire lives a paradoxical statement.
It is clear that as we move into the integral mode of consciousness, the subject-object relationship in our consciousness will transform, and it is of interest to consider if and how it will persist in the new structure. In the integral mode of consciousness, although there is an identification with origin, and a perceiving of the whole, there remains an acknowledgment of a dissociation from origin in some sense, not quite an extracted individual “I” that remains to do the perceiving, but rather something in-between an “I” and “non-I”, or rather beyond “I”: something beyond the dualism of the subject-object relationship, yet not resembling a simple unity. If it were in complete unity with origin, humanity would no longer have its own consciousness and time would not exist. Gebser discusses this issue on page 532: “Egolessness is a deficient regression into magic while a mere egotism is a deficient continuation in the mental-rational structure. Only the overcoming of the “I”, the concomitant overcoming of egolessness and egotism, places us in the sphere of ego-freedom, of the achronon and transparency.” (532). He acknowledges that both subject (ego) and object must not exist within the integral mode, in order to “sustain the verity of the whole” (Gebser, 309).
Again we have arrived at the moving and transparent quality of the integral structure of consciousness. It seems that in this mode, human consciousness will continue to exist in a free state, but will be in intimate and clearly-experienced connection, and, interestingly, co-creation with origin. The material world will exist in some sense, but arising anew each instant in the space of creativity sparking between ourselves and origin. “We may regard such [spatio-temporal] materialization as a bridge that makes possible the merging or coalescence …of origin and the present” (542). The nature of this relationship is mysterious and profound. Whereas our consciousness has arisen from origin, we return home to apprehend it, to embrace it wholly, while maintaining consciousness, allowing time in some sense to continue to exist, even as a quality of relationship that can be defined totally by a “present” that simultaneously embraces all of reality. “This implies that preconscious origin becomes conscious present” (Gebser, 356). This sense of the “present” is ultimately valuable, and humankind’s role in manifesting it is crucial. “We too presentiate the whole by realizing that we are to the same degree active as well as enduring and passive, past as well as future. Man is in the world to sustain it as well as himself ‘in truth’, not for his or its own sake, but for the sake of the spiritual present. It is this spiritual present which elevates wholeness to transparency and frees us from our transient age, for this age of ours is not the present but partiality and flight, indeed, almost a conclusion. Only someone who knows of origin has present – living and dying in the whole, in integrity” (Gebser, 273). It is this “present” that we can look forward to fully manifesting in the age to come.
The entry-point to this state of time-freedom, ego-freedom, and dimensional-freedom is a specific point of exit from the illusory space-time, subject-object-oriented structure that currently holds us, which we are now outgrowing. As we surpass this limiting paradigm, we will enter into closer communion with the origin, perceiving and a-waring the whole. The gateway to this time-free realm is narrow and treacherous, and this is expected. Any transition, personal or collective, is typically marked by a sense of anxiety. In fact, on a collective level, anxiety may represent our discomfort with the current paradigm and our readiness for change, and could be the necessary emotional response that leads to the willingness for transition to occur. In the Christian scripture, the New Testament, Jesus Christ said, when referring to the way to the Kingdom of Heaven: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matt. 7:13-14, New International Version). The Kingdom of Heaven is a place where time has a different quality – it is a place of eternal time, described with the word kairos. Jesus Christ entered eternal time through an experience of darkness so well represented by the symbol of the cross, which creates a narrow point defined by intersecting lines, as does the geometrical representation of the paradoxical statement. Only when he entered through “the eye of the camel”, surrendering to the process of transition with arms stretched out wide, did he succeed in initiating the “redemption of the world”. Gebser alludes to the resonance of this prophetic myth with his ideas. “Will Christianity, in accord with the incipient mutation, change in keeping with the possibilities which are indicated for it? Will the church of the crucified become the church of the risen?” (Gebser, 339-40). It is only through this narrow point, the perspectival vanishing point, at which we encounter our greatest fear, the end of our crumbling world and our own disappearing self-image, that we can find hope for the transformation of our own consciousness into the next age, and thus for our resurrection into the realm of kairos time.
Although the mental analyses of the gateway principle conducted in this paper are not experiential guides that lead us fully to the integral mutation, they can serve as tools that assist us to use the best of the mental mode of consciousness to responsibly and faithfully transition to the mode that awaits us – the realm in which we will truly know that qualitative intensity known as kairos time, and the thrill of deep communion with the source of life, the origin.
* Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin. Translated by Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985.
The Soul of the Machine
The technological-industrial way of life continues to grow in and throughout human society. As the market economy and the values and lifestyle that go along with it sweeps over the globe and is adopted by community after community, it would seem that its progress would be aligned with human success and potential. After all, isn’t it we humans who first created and who now power this system? Isn’t it we who are fashioning our lives to fit into this great machine? Yet in light of recent discoveries regarding the damage this way of life is causing to the natural environment that sustains us and the social fabric of our existence, we find ourselves stuck in a system from which it is virtually impossible to remove ourselves. It seems to be rolling forward with its own momentum, and perhaps more importantly, its own will. Does this techno-industrial system have a soul? Can it be considered a living entity? This paper will explore the animate force behind the “machine” - what it is, how and why it arose, and what will become of it, in two forms: a narrative poem that addresses the relationship of humanity to the technological-industrial being from the vantage point of the collective human consciousness, and a traditional linear-logic-based academic inquiry.
The soul. Holding a smoke-stack cigarette, it stares at me with sparking eyes. Says – “Really, are you surprised, at how powerful I am? You built me like a man. Took the mechanical aspects of your hands, compounded them, used me to tie up the land, which taming was a burden to you. You put the fire of nature’s belly into one neat little point, rolled it up in this metal joint, placed gracefully at the end of my fingers. My fingers, your fingers, my fingers are your fingers. And they’re holding it all, right here. I’m smoking it”, it says... smoking it, smoking it. Smoke curls, curls up like tendrils framing a fearsome face. Absent of grace. Its legs keep a steady pace, marching forward with regular foot-falls that hypnotize me, set the measure by which I acknowledge reality - linearly. I’m mesmerized by its sway over me, its ability to out-perform me. It must be a god-like entity. Yet wasn’t it once part of me? Is this my soul staring back? What kind of mirror returns a reflection so black? It doesn’t feel like me, yet it compels me ever forward and I look down at my legs that are marching, marching, in line with this thing towards a future defined by the sharp-edged essence from which it springs.
The techno-industrial complex moves along its path with rigid, mechanical efficiency, blind to all human values but utilitarian production for its own survival and growth. It’s fitting that the vehicle holds such an important place in our society, because one is hard-pressed to think of our society’s system of production apart from the image of a moving machine, rolling efficiently forward towards its elusive goal. Alf Hornborg, in his book “The Power of the Machine”, details a model for how this system functions within a big-picture context. He acknowledges the parallels between it and a living organism. “Viewed as in some respects analogous to living biomass, the suprahuman “technomass” of industrial society must be fed specific kinds of substances in order to grow” (Hornborg, 93). Hornborg emphasizes that “structure can be maintained only as long as there is a net gain in order drawn from the environment” (Hornborg, 93). This order that feeds the system is defined as exergy. Exergy is “ingested” in the form of human (and sometimes animal) labor and natural materials, and processed to create industrial products for human use. In order for production to continue on, the system must be capable of harnessing more exergy than what is used to create the products for direct human use. Human labor is generated through the ingestion of food products, and some industrial products must be used for the accumulation of further natural materials, by the acquisition of local natural resources, as well as the trade of industrial goods for non-local natural resources (which implies a necessity for transportation). In this way, the techno-industrial system of production requires increasing levels of exergy in order to survive. Ever farther-reaching spatial expansion becomes necessary as the “machine” of industrial production continues to function in a world of limited natural resources.
What are you? I’ve studied its face. And it resembles mine. I’ve stared and stared at it, for the longest time because it looks like me, but I know it’s not. It tries to make me think it’s me, that in its arms I’m truly free. But I’m not duped so easily these days. What is it? I trace the line of its face with my finger, and it traces me in return. When I look in its eyes I let my gaze linger, searching for depth in its soul but I can find none. The touch of its flesh on my flesh burns like acid. This isn’t right. I check my senses, I check my sight. I try to lash out in anger with all of my might but in the mirror I see a farce of my fight. I feel like I’m stuck in an eternal night, staring at myself, but unable to express my complexity autonomously. This thing thinks it’s reflecting me but where’s my insight? Where’s the light of the soul in my eyes that should be flashing along with my wrathful cry? It’s me, but it’s not me. To be honest, it’s the ugliest sight I’ve ever seen. I hate you, reflection, whatever you are, because you’re so close to me yet so frustratingly far from who I want to be in the world I occupy. Did I think that by projecting onto you, I would find my true “I”? I wanted to worship my progressive capabilities, to alter material territories at the altar of “me” so I created you thoughtlessly. I did not fashion a being after my own heart and soul, but mistook a collapsed and simple hologram to be the whole self I own. And clothed it in flesh of metal and stone. Now, you’re a calamity. Is there any redeeming value in this estranged piece of me? Will I ever again feel autonomous and free? Or am I doomed to live out the course of history as a slave to this cold, marching, and one-dimensional zombie?
The techno-industrial system is, at its foundation, a means of production for the continued functioning of human society. Ultimately, it is about the human need for resources in order to maintain our own survival, yet this is no small matter. It influences, and even defines, the full measure of expression of our humanity in the world. Frank Elwell writes in “The Sociology of Karl Marx” that “for Marx, the entire sociocultural system is based on the manner in which men and women relate to one another in their continuous struggle to secure needed resources from nature” (Elwell, 2). It appears that, historically, human systems of production have been closed-cycle processes, wholly and deeply rooted in social and spiritual contexts and focused on the sustainable use of local material resources. By contrast, today’s industrial society is disproportionately focused on utility, seemingly blindly and relentless driving towards cold, analytical dissection of the universe, and unnaturally neglects basic human concerns such as social relations and spiritual meaning.
The Self, as defined by Carl Jung, is the God-image, the full potential of the human spirit as a reflection of the Divine in all its wholeness. Throughout this paper, I will use the term “human soul” to refer to this concept of the Self. Whereas a means of production initiated by and functioning for the good of the human species seemingly should arise as an expression of the entire human soul and how it relates to the world around it, it seems that, in modern society, the means of production has arisen as an incomplete expression of that soul, removed from the concrete reality of basic experience. The development of this incomplete expression has continued autonomously, and has seemed to take on a life of its own despite any collective change in consciousness, and is increasingly rendering the relationship of the human soul with its expression in the material world ultimately unfulfilling and frustrating.
Hornborg asserts that modern society has, since the late 19th century, functioned in service to the system of production rather than the other way around. “The abstract, neoclassical notion of “utility” thus emptied human livelihood of specific and intrinsic meaning in order to render it subservient to the industrial world organism” (Hornborg, 105). The goal of human life in this system is no longer the flourishing of the society as a whole, but rather the continuation of the cycle of utilitarian production, removed from human experience. Hornborg agrees. “”Production” is the goal in itself, answering to the needs of the technomass” (Hornborg, 103).
Human labor is a primary element that feeds the machine, and although humanity has become subservient to it in terms of purpose, the machine’s survival is completely dependent on human involvement at every stage. In this sense, any animate quality it has arises out of the life-force of humanity. As time passes and human consciousness continues to build on the wisdom of increasingly greater experience, it evolves along a primary axis. But because the machine’s needs have overshadowed the needs of those communities that have entered into it, and its most urgent need for survival is an ever-increasing production output for the accrual of ever-increasing amounts of exergy, the axis of evolution, in modern times, has been focused on the development of industrial technology. Technology, in a broad sense, is defined in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, as “the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area”. Technologies are, in any context, the mechanisms by which we engage with the material world. If humanity were to pursue evolution in a direction that embraced all facets of our human soul, the technology we would develop would most certainly serve a noble purpose for our development and the development and evolution of the universe ecology of which we are naturally a part. But in the context of modern industrial society, technology has served as a concrete, material manifestation of the abstract notion of utility that is the spirit behind the machine. This axis of development for the soul of the machine is misaligned with the holistic interest of the human soul. This has become increasingly apparent as we stand by and witness the devastation of the very environment that sustains us due to the industrial technological functions of the machine.
From whence?
I was seduced by your efficiency. You were trim, toned, and shiny, and you astounded me with your sense of purpose. I believed it was manifest destiny, for you to be taken out from me. And together we’d coast to eternity with a single purpose – to encompass the entire earthly territory. I was possessed by lust, obsessed, thought I must know more of what lay beyond the shore of my community. You were a glorious magnification of those parts of me that could explore. You grew more and more and before I knew it, you outgrew the limits of what I had intended. I was captivated by your transcendent glow. So I stood by and watched as you continued to grow, feeding on whatever I could sow and more, eating my world to its beating core. And still you want more and now I find myself with nothing left to give you. Yet you continue, ripping into the sinew and connective tissues that hold together my precious world. This whole project has become unfurled. A snake chasing after its tail cannot go anywhere, will never prevail. You are a great nothing, sweeping like a gale over hill and dale. And, let me tell you something, Great Nothing, you are destined to fail.
We have established the technological-industrial system of production as the material manifestation of the part of the human soul concerned with physical utility and divorced from ultimate meaning. But the question remains: what initiated this projection? For thousands of years, human civilizations lived upon the Earth, producing their necessities from the land and sustaining their communities with them. Sometime in the last few centuries, something abruptly changed in human consciousness that initially caused at least one mass of people-groups to drastically alter their means of production (and now we see the majority of the global population adopting this means). Karl Polanyi, in his book “The Great Transformation”, addresses this change. He notes that before a few hundred years ago, economics within human societies were conducted primarily by the principles of reciprocity, redistribution, and householding, which were practiced as a subset of complex socially and spiritually contextualized rituals. The sharing of objects for use was done “without any motive of gain or truck. Not the propensity to barter, but reciprocity in social behavior dominat[ed]” (Polanyi, 53). Market economies began to spring up with the emergence of long-distance trade, as “long-distance offer[ed] an opportunity for trade to occur “in an external sphere unrelated to the internal organization of economy” (Polanyi, 62). But even as these markets expanded from their limited beginnings in town centers at convenient cross-roads to become national in scope, eventually spreading throughout provincial areas, they were very heavily regulated in order to protect communities from monopolization and other dangers. A critical shift occurred as merchants began to develop more specific technologies for the production of their goods, and, eventually, the factory system emerged. They began to observe that the risk of accumulation and processing of raw materials was one that typically paid off in terms of sales, so they shifted their focus from commerce towards industry, from the needs of the community towards the needs of the mechanism for production. As this occurred, the need arose for a method of organization for the basic ingredients of production – labor, land, and money. It was at this critical moment that these basic elements of society, in particular, labor and land, became commodities, whose value was now defined through the eyes of the newly-emerged machine rather than through the eyes of the human community, and in this way, the machine swallowed the whole of the civilizations it came into contact with.
Although it is apparent that this critical shift in perspective occurred in the minds of those merchants who chose to focus on industry over commerce in 19th century Europe, the seed for this commoditization of the entire society was planted with the beginning of long-distance trade and the invention of the market, as Polanyi discusses. “That is why the control of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming consequence to the whole organization of society: it means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system” (Polanyi, 60). Value, in these situations, became divorced from its complex social context, rooted in full and concrete human experience, and took on a new meaning, determined by the merchant and his/her buyer, and denoted by a tangible item that stands as a symbol for this abstract sense of value - money. It seems that the abstraction of value was needed from the beginning because merchants needed a “level playing field” with one another in order for trade to occur. Subconsciously, as merchants from different cultures haggled in order to determine actual value, they were establishing a lowest common denominator between the complex value systems of their different home communities. In this sense, the abstraction of value that has led to the subsuming of society by the machine seems to be related to the shifting orientation in human consciousness during the middle ages towards physical expansion, as expressed in the spontaneous proliferation of long-distance trade. Jean Gebser’s theory of the mutations of consciousness supports this observation. The expansion of the market economy would fall right around the time of the height of Gebser’s mental mutation of human consciousness, which places an emphasis on the notion of physical space. Perhaps with the arising of this form of consciousness came the awareness of a world beyond one’s borders, and a burning desire for physical exploration, and thus long-distance contact and trade began. Gebser paints the image of the human evolution of consciousness as unfolding in a spiral pattern (in terms of a Newtonian notion of space-time), with human consciousness manifesting itself in a distinctly different orientation during each mutation, and there being four mutations per turn of the spiral, with each turn evolution progressing to a new level. Each mutation of consciousness has an efficient stage and a deficient stage. As long-distance trade grew, from the middle ages up to the late 19th century, and markets were heavily regulated, the human exploration of the world in a Newtonian spatial sense exploded, greatly enriching the content of collective human consciousness; but as the markets grew to subsume the human understanding of our own value (concentrated to simply labor in an industrial sense) and that of the land, the mutation turned towards its deficient form, and ultimately, the machine was officially born, as the climactic manifestation of the deficient form of the mental mutation.
The key to understanding how such an originally enriching development (the abstraction of value from the depth of experience to a more commonly-shared expression of value) could turn so sour lies in the idea of abstraction itself. The word abstract, according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, means “expressing a quality apart from an object”, and comes from the Medieval Latin word “abstractus”, which is the past participle of the word “abstrahere”, or “to pull away”. The Divine, as the ultimate ground of all being, can be considered to be the only fully concrete reality. If this is the case, any expression of the formless and infinite Divine into finite material form can be considered to be an abstraction of, “pulled away” from the only thing that is ultimately real. If reality were a cube, “expressing a quality apart” from this cube would be a square, a representation that cannot convey the full depth of the cube. In other words, an abstraction of the Divine is like expressing one facet of the (infinitely-faceted) Divine.
The concept of the will of the machine subsuming the will of the human soul in terms of expression is related to the Judeo-Christian religious concept of sin. The classical Greek word that is translated for “sin” in the biblical New Testament is “hamartia”, which is an archery term meaning “to miss the mark”. This image exemplifies the essence of the origins of the techno-industrial system, the machine, as it has been described in this paper. It is an incomplete, skewed, and imbalanced expression of the Divine soul, as expressed from the human soul through human consciousness and manifested into material reality. The expression has “missed the mark”. The verse Romans 7:13-15 from the biblical New Testament addresses the quality of sin that makes the consciousness acts as if it is its slave. It states “We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do”. It takes one further and further away from what one truly desires. We find this “runaway” tendency in the techno-industrial complex as well. There is a constant hunger for more, along with a constant feeling of frustration, a running after emptiness. Karl Marx acknowledged the slave-like nature of humanity that has resulted from abstracting value from its concrete origin. He said “Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence; the essence dominates him and he worships it” (Marx, 1964b, 37). In this way, the machine is a manifestation of collective sin.
The collective human soul, or Jung’s Self, is considered to be a reflection of the Divine, containing infinite complexity within itself. However, when expression occurs through human consciousness, and the formless takes on form, it is as if a seed is created and planted in a bed of soil, and from this moment on, as the seedling grows, the potential for this line of expression is limited by the limited nature of human consciousness at the moment of the seed’s creation, or conception. Oswald Spengler, in “The Decline of the West”, as cited in Tainter’s “The Collapse of Complex Societies”, asserts that civilization itself is a manifestation of a line of expression that is already hardened and dying. “A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities… The aim once attained – the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual – the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes civilization... As such it may, like a worn-out giant of the primeval forest, thrust decaying branches towards the sky for hundreds of thousands of years….” (Tainter, 78). Our modern techno-industrial civilization, the machine, is like a flower (or a tree, as Spengler presented) that has reached its full potential for expression, has bloomed, and is now wilting. It is the abstraction of value from the concrete human soul (rooted in the Divine) and its limited expression into material form that doomed the market-economy and ultimately, the machine, to eventually face its death.
The collapse that is inevitable for this kind of expression seems to be related to complexity. Tainter analyzes this idea at length. He points out that increasing complexity in a system renders it increasingly difficult to maintain. “Not only is energy flow required to maintain a sociopolitical system, but the amount of energy must be sufficient for the complexity of that system” (Tainter, 91). Civilizations that arise out of one facet of the human soul, or one “stem”, over time, branch off into more and more divided expressions of that same facet. Eventually, the stem can no longer hold up its own head. It crumples and falls.
Death. Like a full-in-bloom flower, you have been breath-taking at your height of power. Commanding all of nature to rise up and bow before your tower. But like a flower that has grown up into the soil of space-time, and now has nowhere to go but to die, you too have reached the end of your line. It’s time for you to succumb to the ravages of material death. I’m starting to hear that telling, that haunting, that rattling breath from you. And so as I step back from this vantage point, and look at all this from a greater view, my anger begins to subside, and instead I’m finding myself facing you with compassion. I want to urge you to go gracefully to your grave. I want you to know - you are part of this vast ocean, a wave of energy that has risen up from eternity to face finity with grace and dignity. And now your final task is here. I don’t know if you’re capable of fear, but you seem to be frantic in your quest to survive, as you face your incapacity to thrive. You’ve become top-heavy. A flower with too many petals cannot stand. So I’ll hold your hand as you return to the land. I assure you your life has not been in vain. This pain of acknowledging your inability to flourish completely is part of the system of life. Expressions of form from formlessness rise and fall out of and back into the soil of existence. As you lie down, all you were and are will come back around, because you will disintegrate into the primal ground. The next seed that grows will contain a little of what the ground knows because of you. You are a projection of a projection of the Being who is the Essence of holy and true. It urges me, humanity, to express my Divinity into material reality, ultimately becoming an infinitely-branched tree, pulling infinity through finity. So trust that you were only meant to be for a time. Sacrifice yourself for that ultimate seed, the one in whose potential lies the infinite tree. And go, techno-industrial civilization, gracefully.
The qualities of, and the process surrounding, the “soul of the machine” as depicted throughout this paper shed light on a pattern, or rhythm that seems to be an integral part of the structure of the universe, and the way in which the Divine calls humanity to evolve towards Itself. Despite the fact that the modern, techno-industrial civilization appears to be dying, its life will not have been for naught. The abstraction of value that has led to the blooming of the full potential of the seed created from that abstraction, the techno-industrial civilization, calls to mind the “hero’s journey”, a three-step process of development found in the work of Joseph Campbell. The basic principle outlines a process of development that consists of departure, initiation, and return. If abstraction of value in this case was “departure”, and the fulfillment of the full complexity allowed from that piece of the human soul is “initiation”, then the collapse of this civilization will be the “return” stage of development. The return stage is really an integration of the perspective gained through initiation into the original place from which the hero emerged. In Richard Tarnas’ essay “Is the Modern Psyche Undergoing a Rite of Passage?”, he asks whether human consciousness may be in the midst of just such a journey. “To see that long spiritual and intellectual journey, through stages of increasing differentiation and complexity, as having perfectly ambiguously brought about both a progressive ascent to autonomy, and a tragic fall from unity – and as having perhaps prepared the way for a synthesis on an altogether new level” (Tarnas, 6-7). In this case, the portion of the human soul that was abstracted from its formless Self, the portion that was defined as valuable at the height of the mental mutation, has been the hero. Its journey has led human consciousness and the material world along with it as it has flourished to its greatest potential. And now, upon dying, all that it has led the human consciousness to incorporate into material existence will be part of the soil from which form emerges out of formlessness, allowing the next expression of a part of the human soul to be more complete. Karl Marx echoed this sentiment when he said, speaking of humankind, “By… acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature” (Marx, Capital, vol 1, 174).
The propensity for a portion of the human soul to become prominent (become abstract and expressed into form), to grow into its full potential, and then die, adding its content to the soil of human consciousness, hints at a possible telos for the evolution of human consciousness. It appears that there is an axis of evolution drawing human consciousness towards the goal of incorporating ever more content into it. The human soul, as a reflection of the Divine soul, wants to be fully expressed in material form. If this rhythm of abstraction of an ever-greater portion of the human soul being expressed fully and then dying and incorporating its “body” into the background of consciousness were to continue indefinitely, the infinite complexity of the Divine soul, as reflected in the human soul, would be completely and fully expressed in material form. It is as if the Divine were aiming to encounter itself fully “on the other side” of material reality through human consciousness; indeed, to pull Itself fully through human consciousness as a garment pulling itself fully through a button-hole.
It appears that the machine is on its way to its death. But we can remain hopeful that the suffering it has caused, the alienation from our human nature we have experienced at our own hands, will not have been in vain. It is part of a much greater, mysterious rhythm of life in which we, humanity, are a critical player. It is our task now, to recognize this great manifestation of incompleteness for what it is, and to assist it in its staggering to its death bed. We are the great gardeners of the spiritual world, and as we stir the rich compost that is sure to result as it decomposes, may our dreams for a bright future fall as seeds into the soil of manifest potential, ready to reach out and attempt to embody wholeness.
Works Cited Elwell, Frank. 2003, The Sociology of Karl Marx. Retrieved December 7, 2009 Hornborg, Alf. The Power of the Machine. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2001. Marx, Karl. 1964b. Early Writings. Translated and edited by T.B. Bottomore. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol 1. Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers, 1887. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1944. Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse of Complex Societies. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Tarnas, Richard. “Is the Modern Psyche Undergoing a Rite of Passage?” Retrieved December 11, 2009.
Towards Wholeness as Expressed in Human Consciousness: Self as Spiritual Telos Through the Lens of Quantum Physics
California Institute of Integral Studies Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness
PARP 7400 - Psyche and Spirit Instructor, Sean Kelly
Abstract Jung’s concept of the Self is an archetypal potentiality uniting consciousness and the unconscious. This paper will explore the relationship of this Self to the transpersonal realm through the lens of quantum mechanics, and distinguish it as a spiritual telos, which draws the human psyche towards itself for the expression of wholeness in the universe. The concept of particle-wave duality found in quantum mechanics implies that the structure of the universe is better understood in terms of probabilistic, rather than definite terms. The atom, like the Self, has traditionally been considered as a self-organizing, basic element of reality. If we consider the Self in the context of this metaphor, in light of quantum mechanics, it opens up to a non-form whose contents are ultimately undefined. We find upon consideration that the content of the transpersonal realm of the unconscious in this model constantly “breaks into” the self, saturating it with possibility. It would appear that there exists a flow into the human psyche wherein greater content from the unconscious realm continually enters consciousness. This indicates a possible telos in the human universe towards the embodiment of ever more of the infinite whole that is presumably found in the transpersonal realm, beyond space-time. It appears as if the universe is turning itself inside-out, or outside-in, as it were, with humanity acting as its fulcrum. It follows, then, that the ultimate state for individual consciousness would be to conform to the self archetype, thus allowing psychic energy to come to life through it wholly and unimpeded.
Throughout history, people have sought answers about the ultimate nature and function of the material universe through the attempt to characterize the most basic substance of which it is comprised. The interaction of this tiniest of material elements with the energetic force that animates life as we know it is of tremendous consequence to our conception of the ultimate structure of the universe, and even of our own sense of meaning and purpose in our human lives. As we examine the topic throughout this paper, we must bear in mind that scientific theories are always abstractions of elements of reality whose essence cannot be completely articulated, and thus are always open for further refinement. However, as each subsequent generation builds on the knowledge of the last regarding the basic structure of the material universe, our abstract image of it becomes ever more subtle, complex, and, likely, accurate.
Carl Jung’s concept of the Self is an archetypal potentiality that serves as the center for the individual human psyche. It is an abstract representation of a state of psychic wholeness that cannot be characterized per se, because by definition, it “includes in it a supraordinate concept” (Jung, Aion, 1959, p. 3), but whose conceptual presence can nonetheless be substantiated via its appearance in the psyche in the form of spontaneous symbols. This Self, in Jung’s estimation, cannot be distinguished from the theological concept of the God-image, as he asserts in his book on the Self, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self: “Unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective value because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei. Hence all statements about the God-image apply also to the empirical symbols of totality” (Jung, Aion, p. 31).
The structure and function of the basic elements of the material universe as they relate to the non-material universe are of similar consequence to the structure and function of the psyche as it relates to the transpersonal realm, which cannot be distinguished from the Divine presence: Both consider the frontiers of the material and the interface between it and the intangible. As the human being contains a physical aspect, the body, that consists of these most basic elements of matter, and as this is partially identified with the concept of psyche, we can presumably discover insights regarding psychic interactions with the Divine from careful comparison with scientific analysis regarding the basic element of the material universe, typically referred to as the atom. In the same sense that the atom is an image used to describe a compound, self-organizing unit of elementary substance, the Self is an image used to describe the compound, self-organizing psyche in its whole individual form. Carl Jung concedes the validity of this instructive metaphor. “At the very least, therefore, the self can claim the value of an hypothesis analogous to that of the structure of the atom. And even though we should once again be enmeshed in an image, it is none the less powerfully alive, and its interpretation quite exceeds my powers. I have no doubt at all that is an image, but one in which we are contained” (Jung, Essays, 1966, para 405).
The concept of the basic, indivisible element of matter (in modern times known as the atom) has been studied and explored since ancient Greek thinkers such as Plato attempted to define an elementary unit of matter. But it has been in the last few centuries that characterization of its specific structure has accelerated. The most recent discoveries in this field, resulting in the birth of quantum mechanics, are of particular interest. As quantum theory grows more prominent and we shift our gaze from a Newtonian-atomic understanding of reality to a quantum one, we discover that the implications of this more subtle viewpoint on the nature of reality are stunning. This paper will explore the relationship of the Self to the transpersonal realm through the lens of quantum mechanics, distinguishing it as a spiritual telos that draws the human psyche towards itself for the unimpeded expression of whole and infinite complexity in the manifest universe.
One of the features of quantum mechanics that is of interest to understanding the interaction between the psyche and the transpersonal realm is particle-wave duality. It all began in the very beginning of the 20th century when Max Planck investigated discrepancies he was finding between experimental data and predicted results based on Maxwell’s equation regarding spectral content of light. He posited that exchanges of radiant energy could only occur in discrete chunks, called quanta, the intensity of which is wholly dependent on energy frequency. Einstein confirmed this theory by his own observations with light; however, radiant energy still seemed to behave in a wave-like manner in certain situations, like during the interference between multiple light waves. Thus radiant energy began to be defined as having a dual-nature. In 1924 (Pullman, 1998, p. 273), Louis de Broglie made the bold proposition that perhaps matter also had this same type of dual nature, and could behave as a particle or a wave, depending on the circumstance. He applied Planck’s formula for calculating energy using frequency (E=hν, where E=energy, h=Planck’s constant, and ν=frequency) to Einstein’s famous formula relating energy to mass (E=mc2, where m=mass, and c=the speed of light) in order to characterize the wave properties of a given particle. The formula he proposed was λ=h/(mv), where λ=wavelength, and v=the velocity of the particle. Erwin Schrodinger then took de Broglie’s research to the next step, establishing a wave function that revealed the relationship between the mass and velocity of a particle and the wavelength and energy of the corresponding wave, Δ2Ψ+(8π2m/h2)(E-V)Ψ=0. Because this is a second-order partial differential equation, the energy (E) values for which it works out are limited, confirming mathematically that energy is emitted in discrete amounts, as quanta. In 1926, Max Born presented a stunning new interpretation of this dual nature of matter and thus the elementary particles that makes it up: He introduced the idea of probability into the wave function. The square of the amplitude of the module of the wave function Ψ is equal to the probability that a particle will be found at a given point and given time. This idea is generally still accepted among physicists today.
The implications of a probabilistic view of particle-wave duality on our picture of the universe are nothing short of worldview-shattering. It basically creates an image of the composition and development of the material world as being made up of pure probability waves that only manifest as elementary particles under certain circumstances. When a particle does manifest, it is as though the wave function collapses into a particular space coordinate at a given instant in time. But what causes this manifestation to occur? The answer to that question begins to be addressed by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that the position and momentum for any elementary particle cannot be determined simultaneously. Although Heisenberg’s primary method of deduction for this principle was mathematical, he popularly articulated it using a specific illustration: If one attempts to determine the position of an electron, for example, using a microscope, upon observation, the photons emitted from the observer’s visual inquiry will perturb the electron’s motion, preventing her from obtaining her answer. The same is true for attempting to determine the particle’s momentum and its position being altered due to the observer’s involvement. It is the observer who causes particle manifestation to occur.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle imposes a complete paradigm-shift for the way we as humans examine the universe, conceive of the universe, and understand our role within it, by implying that matter is formed partially under the influence of a human observer. It introduced a fundamental indeterminism into our picture of the basic nature of the universe. Although some scientists have argued that we will one day return to a more deterministic view, developments in quantum physics have continued in this vein. “We must not deduce [from the uncertainty principle] that we are unable to simultaneously determine the position and momentum of an electron, but rather that the electron does not posses these two attributes at the same time” (Pullman, p. 294). The picture that has now emerged is of a completely probabilistic reality, with elementary particles popping into existence along with the influence of a human cooperator. “It is only when the result of the measurement is registered and recorded in the mind of a human being… that the wave function “collapses” into an observable reality” (Pullman, p. 280). One interesting consequence of this idea is that the concept of “existence” itself comes into question. What does it really mean for something to exist materially? Could it be that reality as we know it is nothing more than a complex co-creation among collective human minds? Schrodinger acknowledged the complications inherent in this line of thinking in his book, My View of the World: “The real difficulty of philosophy lies in the spatial and temporal multiplicity of individuals doing the observing and the thinking. If everything were confined to a single conscience, it would all be quite simple” (Pullman, p. 296).
With the Uncertainty Principle came a serious challenge to the existing picture of the foundational building block of the universe, the atom. Heisenberg “strip[ped] the atom of the last vestiges of personality” (Pullman, p. 291), as it proved to be too restrictive a metaphor to represent primordial substance as it was coming to be understood. As Heisenberg observed, “The smallest parts of matter are not fundamental Beings, as in the philosophy of Democritus, but are mathematical forms. Here it is quite evident that the form is more important than the substance of which it is the form” (Pullman, p. 291). The newest image that has arisen to give structure in human consciousness to the foundations of reality is that of a vast network of probabilistic fields, creating the world anew at every instant. “Reality boils down to an assortment of fields interacting with one another via their respective quanta particles” (Pullman, p. 347). This field-laden space is further homogenized by a more accurate depiction of what used to be called the “vacuum”, via an analysis using Heisenberg’s 4th uncertainty relation, which states - the shorter the lifespan of a particle, the more uncertain its energy. If we consider this idea for the entire spectrum of possible particle lifespans, we come to a further conception of the vacuum, what used to be considered to be the space between atoms, but can now be viewed more accurately as the void from which material particles emerge. If we imagine that, within the void, even populating the void, particles exist for an infinitely short duration of time, approaching zero seconds, then the energy required to sustain that particle would be extremely uncertain, to the point that it would approach a point of infinite possibility in terms of its energy and mass values. The required amount of energy would be borrowed from the void, and would need to be returned very shortly to it. Because these particles exist only in theory, they are called virtual particles. The “zero-state” of our universe is composed of them. This paints a picture of the foundation of reality as a rich and fertile soil bed, ready and eager to allow matter to spring forth from the realm of possibility. “Vacuum functions as a sort of permanent energy bank…it is actually continually filled with a host of virtual particles of all types...” (Pullman, p. 350). This picture of the void from which material springs forth conveys an active and involved energy source for the continual creation of the world, which is an idea that has not been embraced since the beginnings of recorded history, until modern times. “Democritus’ vacuum was an inert playground for atoms to frolic on. It has now been supplanted by an active vacuum participating in the making and evolution of the world” (Pullman, p. 352). This active vacuum is rich with infinite possibilities in terms of matter - what types of particles will arise, in which orientations, and in which combinations. “There is an obvious mechanism that allows a transition from virtuality to reality: It requires supplying enough energy to guarantee that particles will materialize” (Pullman, p. 350). This energy that is required is supplied by human consciousness. In some way, we are responsible for the material world around us. It does seem possible however, that consciousness permeates the entire universe, and exists also in some form in elementary particles. Neils Bohr asserted that basic self-organized structures do seem to exercise will. “Generally speaking, it can be said that a particular atom in a stationary state is free to make a choice between many possible transitions to other stationary states” (Pullman, p. 265). The interactions amongst conscious beings and their impact on the creation of the material universe is a very complex issue and can only be speculated upon at this point in time.
This image we have now cultivated of material reality and its unstable state, so dependent on the will of consciousness, primes us to consider ideal forms that exist in the realm of possibility, such as the Self, as goals for manifestation towards which the universe is oriented and that give rise to conjectures regarding the purpose of human life and the direction of the evolution of consciousness. The psyche is a realm of human “inner” experience that seems to encompass the idea of the “self”, but is not very clearly defined in terms of function nor limits. It includes both conscious and unconscious elements, and is the medium through which an individual experiences her life. The Self is to the psychic realm as the atom was at one time to the physical realm – an image representing a whole, self-organized element. Carl Jung characterized the Self as an archetype of wholeness towards which the individual psyche attempts to organize. “Fundamental… is Jung’s discovery that the psyche is a self-regulating system, capable not only of maintaining its own equilibrium, but of bringing about its own self-realization” (Aziz, 1990, p. 16). Given this parallel relationship between the atom and self, what does the transformation of the atom image into one of intersecting fields of virtual particles mean for our understanding of the Self? Considering the structure of the Self in terms of our old picture of the atom, we encounter a form, hovering in psychic space, calling the psyche to merge into its solidified shape, and once this has occurred, the individual has fully arrived. He has become the ultimate version of himself, knowing everything there is to know from the perspective of his limited form. He is a pure reflection of God – an eternal and unchanging God. The concept of an active void, filled with virtual particles as representative of the ideal psychic state, then, remarkably alters this image. The Self in this context is seen not as a set form, but rather, as a non-form. A psyche that incorporates conscious and unconscious contents would be one that resembles the “zero-state”, active void discussed earlier in this paper. The clearly defined conscious realm, with the ego at its center, is analogous to an atomic entity that has formed due to the manifestation of elementary particles with a nucleus at their center. As this conscious realm integrates unconscious elements, we can imagine it fading into a less clearly-defined wave function. Ultimately, at the point of maximum integration between the conscious and unconscious, we find the same relationship we considered when defining virtual particles: Consciousness is stable for an infinitely short period of time, approaching zero, and its contents are continually retrieved from the void. Consciousness, in this case, is completely permeable and, indeed, resembles a flow, defined by the infinite possibility inherent within the void. This paints a picture of an active and living Divine spirit flowing through humanity, reminiscent of the common religious metaphor of the Divine breath. The Self, then, no longer an ideal form holding steady in the realm of possibility, begins, with quantum mechanics, to instead resemble a process. This image matches Jung’s eventual definition of the Self, as outlined in Aion. “The self cannot be localized in an individual ego-consciousness, but acts like a circumambient atmosphere to which no definite limits can be set, either in space or in time” (Jung, Aion, p. 183). One point that is worth noting is that this state is not free from conscious involvement; on the contrary, the presence of virtual particles indicates not a passive openness to some external flow, but rather a dynamic and engaged openness, embracing and acknowledging all possibilities simultaneously, shivering on the precipice between formlessness and form, between eternity and space-time.
Jung identified a flow inherent in the universe that seems to pull the psyche towards this perpetually open state. “The question arose repeatedly: What is this process leading to? Where is its goal? From my own experience, I knew by now that I could not presume to choose a goal... it had been proved to me that I had to abandon the idea of the super-ordinate position of the ego… I was being compelled to go through this process of the unconscious. I had to let myself be carried along by the current, without a notion of where it would lead me. When I began drawing the mandalas, however, I saw that… all the paths I had been following… were leading back to a single point… During those years…, I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the self” (Jung, Memories, 1965, p. 196). He recognized the existence of the ideal state through the recognition of its appearance in the dream-state, both for himself and his patients. “Although “wholeness” seems at first sight to be nothing but an abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is nevertheless empirical in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in the form of spontaneous or autonomous symbols” (Jung, Aion, p. 31). The psychic process of assimilating to the Self is defined as a compensatory process, by which unconscious contents are pulled into engagement with the conscious realm of the psyche. Jung came to recognize this as “a kind of developmental process in the personality itself””. (Jung, Nature, 1945, pp. 289-90). The mystery behind this compensatory flow of psychic energy can be further examined by looking at another of Jung’s concepts – synchronicity. Synchronicity is a quality of the human relationship to the universe in which there appears to be a meaningful connection between occurrences in one’s interior and exterior realms of experience. When it occurs, an external event happens in an individual’s experience that resonates with something internally for them – this is often experienced as an answer to a deep question the person has held but not been able to answer, or a breakthrough that provides perspective the person has desired for the resolution of some internal tension but not yet achieved. Jung identified synchronicity as an indicator for the continual flow of contents from the unconscious to the conscious parts of the psyche, as Aziz points out in his book on the psychology of religion and synchronicity. “With a synchronistic experience of “absolute knowledge”, then, information that is not space and time-bound finds itself in the space- and time-bound world of ego-consciousness” (Aziz, p. 72). The mechanism of synchronicity, in this way, can be understood as the engine by which the psychic flow from the unconscious realm into human consciousness is generated.
The existence of synchronicity in our universe implies that this flow of psychic energy exists, in which virtual particles, the infinite possibilities of life contained in the breath of the Divine, vie to be incorporated into human consciousness. Content that has entered into the collective field of conscious experience does not leave, and thus it seems as if this psychic flow orients the universe towards greater and greater content being processed by human consciousness, leading ultimately to the Self-form as the psyche’s end-point. “The Self is “all the time urging us to overcome our unconscious” (Aziz, p. 21). What is the significance of this incorporation, and what does this tell us about the Self as the culmination of this process?
Considering synchronicity as one mechanism with which the universe (from a human perspective) functions, in terms of the involvement of human consciousness in the manifestation of material reality as we mentioned in a previous section, we find that synchronistic events occur as if the energy in the conscious part of the psyche that is focused on the manifestation of a certain occurrence via the desire to understand or experience one possibility from the void of infinite possibility is enough to cause the collapse of the probabilistic wave function governing that possibility, so that it manifests into material reality, where it can then be observed, digested, and incorporated into the human consciousness. David Peat addresses the significance of this processing for the evolution of the universe in his essay, “The Alchemy of Creativity: Art, Consciousness, and Embodiment”. He suggests that human consciousness is a part of a cyclical process of purification for the universe, likening its involvement to the alchemical process. “Its [Consciousness’] origin is … a process, an indivisible cyclical movement of projection and internalization, one of making manifest within the realm of the physical and then of ingestion, in coded or symbolic form, back into the world of the mental. In this creativity, resembles an alchemical cycle in which the creative gold is generated within the alembic of body and mind” (Peat, 1).
Because consciousness seems to be such an important figure in the psyche’s development towards the Self (what Jung calls the individuation process), it is important to look at its role in the Self-image. The relationship between the Self and the ego, which is defined as the center of consciousness, is a precarious one. It is clear that they must somehow encounter one another, as the Self is partially-defined as a state of the union of the conscious and unconscious, but it is crucial to identify the nature of this relationship. If the Self were to completely subsume the ego, Jung asserts, the results would be catastrophic. “It must be reckoned a psychic catastrophe when the ego is assimilated by the self. The image of wholeness then remains in the unconscious, so that on the one hand it shares the archaic nature of the unconscious and on the other finds itself in the psychically relative space-time continuum that is characteristic of the unconscious as such” (Jung, Aion, p. 24). We find that the ego is critical to the proper structure of the Self. “The ego must be the one to lead the process of integration” (Aziz, p. 26). As the psyche approaches the Self-form over time, the ego’s boundaries become permeable, maintaining their structure but opening more fully to the unconscious, eventually rendering it completely diaphanous through itself. Thus, in the relationship between the conscious and unconscious realms of psyche, “a third, transcendent position emerges” (Aziz, p. 25), the Self.
The Self as defined by Carl Jung and as discussed in this paper can be understood as a telos for spiritual development. This ideal psychic state is identified in different ways throughout religious culture, but is perhaps most directly analogous to the Christian concept of Divine incarnation into the (material) world. That the Self is a portal to the process of the infinite (unconscious) invading the finite (consciousness) makes it indistinguishable from the God-image, as represented in Christianity by the Christ-figure. “Through the Christ-symbol, man can get to know the real meaning of his suffering. The cause of the suffering is in both cases the same, namely, ‘incarnation’… The drama of the archetypal life of Christ describes in symbolic images the events in the conscious life [life of the ego] – as well as in the life that transcends consciousness [life of the self] – of a man who has been transformed by his higher destiny” (Jung, Dogma, 1948, p. 43). Material reality is tangible to us, because it is energy that has oriented itself in such a way and at such a scale that we can more fully acknowledge it, hold it, work with it, appreciate it, and incorporate it into our will. This idea points to the possibility that the manifestation of material reality in and through human consciousness defines space itself, and that the psychic flow into human consciousness defines time itself; in this sense, human consciousness creates and defines the realm of space-time. Over time (perhaps defining time), more and more content from the presumably infinite Divine is incorporated into human consciousness. If this process were to continue indefinitely, ultimately infinity would be completely manifested in space-time, at some point rendering space-time itself obsolete. If infinity were to pull itself through human consciousness, turning itself inside-out, the fulcrum point of the entire process where finite meets infinite, consciousness meets the unconscious, and light meets dark would be the archetypal Self. This image calls to mind the line from William Blake’s poem, To God: “If you have formed a circle to go into, go into it yourself and see how you would do”. Because we know nothing beyond what we are conscious of, the nature of the Divine and how It calls us forward on our path of development is something on which we can only speculate. For now, the empirical existence of the Self, as an image of wholeness, which appears to us as a light in the distance, provides us a direction by which to set our bearings, a place to rest our deep inner focus, and perhaps even a hope for the wholeness and peace for which we long as a universe community.
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