A Science of the Spiritual

At the conventional level, thus in common public discourse, a rather deep abyss separates the spiritual and the so-called scientific. It is an either-or situation. Science represents a materialistic monism (although not all scientists do). The spiritual are presumed to believe in one or more supernatural beings who stand above visible reality in a governing, law-giving, rewarding and punishing relationship. The reason for this is that, viewed from a distance, most highly developed religions project a narrative in the form of ruler-and-subject—easily understood by human societies in which that pattern is always present.

This description, to be sure, is a gross simplification—but that’s what animates public discourse. It ignores the fact that science has reached levels, certainly in physics and to a lesser extent in neuroscience, where hard materialism is ever less sustainable. It also ignores the fact that higher religions have arisen transcending the primitive ruler-subject model. To be sure, the higher faiths still rest on primitive foundations as a consequence of historical origins, thus Christianity on Judaism. At the same time the earlier religions, influenced by higher religions, have also, at their leading edges, become much more spiritualized. Every religion now has a mystical level—an elite expression.

Also present, in very tentative form, is a genuine science of the spiritual. My hope is that the likely brutal transition to a post-fossil-age will not plunge us back to primitivity. If we manage that transition well, the science of the spiritual will continue to grow. If not, it will sink out of view as harshly doctrinaire religious management of masses once more arises. Alchemy is an example of such a science—hidden and submerged by the collapse of the Roman Age.

By a “science of the spiritual” I mean a vastly enlarged scientific venture to understand reality, and particularly spiritual reality, free of the strictures of dogmatically managed Revelation—thus authoritarian religion. Revelation itself, to be sure, would be a central concern of this new science, viewing it as human experience of the transcending regions but, to be sure, interpreted by the very people who have had them—and then socialized yet more, for purposes of human governance, by others.

This science, so far is it already exists, has made me wonder more and more if perhaps human encounters with the Beyond might not be over-stated by those who have experienced them—and this for reasons that are mutually reinforcing. One is that their expectations are formed by religious ideas—thus occurring in the context of religious practices. The other is that the actual “heavenly” environment is both more natural to humans and yet also quite unfamiliar, therefore it is overly stimulating. Good evidence for this comes from Swedenborg’s accounts; his long exposure to that world had made him familiar with it. He also saw enough to see the vast complexities of reality beyond the border. At the same time, it may well be that being anchored in a body is not very helpful for understanding that world, that much learning is ahead for us before we’re fully acclimatized there, that (per Swedenborg and others, e.g., Robert Monroe) low adaptations are available and also common there; and, finally, concerning that last point, that spending some time in this our own more constricted “world of boxes,” to cite a phrase from Carl Jung’s account of returning from a near death experience, may benefit those of us who have lived a life here attentively. It may enable us to aim higher when we actually get there.

A science of the spiritual, given the abyss that separates science and religion today, will tend to appeal to neither the spiritual nor to the scientific camps. But there is always a third way.

More on Higher and Lower

The subject of religion is, of course, inexhaustible. Last time I pointed to Toynbee’s use of the term “higher religion.” His definition of that phenomenon is rooted in human communion with Absolute Reality. In higher religion, it is direct, in primitive religion indirect and mediated by society. The problem here derives from the fact that concepts are extremely malleable and their meaning depends on what is in the mind of the individual as he or she uses a word this time; tomorrow it may mean something else.

If religion is defined as communion with absolute Reality (to echo Toynbee again), this communion will have an almost infinite gradation and will of necessity reflect the almost infinite range in each human being, where an animal and a spiritual nature are inextricably mixed and, on the analogy of a smelting oven, are gradually sorted. The most basic communion here is the prayer for immediate Help!—asking an unseen Power to solve this very mundane earthly problem; that form of religious behavior is common in virtually any form that religion takes and in every individual, no matter that person’s actual state. The highest form that it takes absolutely depends on the individual’s stage of development, hence may occur no matter what form the prevailing religion, seen as a collective and therefore social phenomenon, may be.

Primitive religion, therefore, may then be viewed as a stage in which the principal social expression of religiousness is altogether pragmatic, focused entirely on earthly outcomes; its religious character derives from a belief that unseen forces may exist and may intervene in the visible dimension. Any well-known famous holy place where people leave slips of paper containing prayer requests testifies to the continuing existence of primitive religion today; there is one such place within driving distance of my house; and, yes: I’ve left such a slip there too. Sometimes we have a great need—and such a religious impulse is itself in a way initiatory to the higher ranges.

In Toynbee’s higher religions, which, of course, if they’re really alive, will be saturated with primitive religion still, the collective consciousness of the higher dimension is institutionalized and therefore formally taught. Such religions also serve as collective disciplines of the sort very helpful in stimulating and helping individuals advance spiritually. Alas, the disciplinary aspect of collectives (and there are none, religious or otherwise, that do not have it) tends to be the only one noted by those whom the inner message doesn’t reach. And this disciplinary aspect is always in the form of rewards and punishments.

The really higher religious phenomenon is only experienced in absolute freedom. Individuals who’re lucky enough to get that far know not to act in order to get rewards nor to escape punishments. Herewith a quote, from Idries Shah’s The Sufis. Shah here paraphrases Jalaluddin Rumi (p. 119, Octagon Press edition):

In the collection of his sayings and teachings called In It What Is In It (Fihi Ma Fihi), used as a textbook for Sufis, he goes even further. Mankind, he says, passes through three stages. In the first one, he worships anything—man, woman, money, children, earth and stones. Then, when he has progressed a little further, he worships God. Finally, he does not say, “I worship God,” nor “I do not worship God.” He has passed into the last stage.

Higher Religions

By higher religions I mean religions designed to bring human beings into direct communion with absolute spiritual Reality as individuals, in contrast to earlier forms of religion that have brought them only into indirect communion with It through the medium of the particular society in which they have happened to be participants.

     [Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History, Vol. XII]

Toynbee’s governing image of civilization was progressive in character, thus he imagined each cycle of civilization as yet another attempt at achieving a kind of transcendence; each one, thus far, has fallen short, but in the end, perhaps… This view then produced the notion that later civilization are in some ways an advancement on their “parents,” and that the higher religions arise relatively late in known history. Our own western religion, Christianity, would then seem to be a “first generation” higher religion because Zeus and Juno, let’s call it the Olympian religion, did not make Toynbee’s list—but we are the spawn of the Graeco-Roman.

He contrasted the “higher” to the “primitive” religions, thus essentially nature-worship. But his list of higher religions, in A Study of History, goes far enough back (to Tammuz coupled with Inanna in Babylonia, to Osiris coupled with Isis in Egypt) so that the category becomes almost meaningless. His much later list, in An Historian’s Approach to Religion, includes Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, both Buddhisms (Hinayana and Mahayana), Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Interesting listing. What strikes me about it is that all but one had a founding figure known by name; the exception is Hinduism; at the source of Hinduism we find only Vedic hymns. Toynbee would have had some trouble excluding Hindusim, but since worshippers of Tammuz and Osiris are hard to find, those two, along with others equally obscure, have been purged from the surviving list. Or was Toynbee intent only on naming still living religions?

A basic problem arises when we attempt to relate events in this dimension to human beliefs that transcend this realm. Therefore to view religion as a progressive phenomenon produces puzzlement for me. Maybe all religions are “higher”—as all children in Lake Wobegone are “above average.” Maybe in seeking the founders of primitive religions we are looking at shamans—who could not write and therefore their revelations are lost in the mists of time.

Theory, Technology, Experience

Take two broad categories of human activity, religion and science. In the latter we divide the activity into the theoretical (as in theoretical physics, which largely runs on math) and the experiential (observation, as in astronomy, geology and experiments as in chemistry, particle colliders, etc.). There is also a kind of middle ground where knowledge is turned to use: technology.

I got to pondering on the applicability of this three-fold division to religion. Just let me use that word for the sake of simplicity—but permit me to include in it any and all relations to the transcendental. The answer here is that these divisions map neatly to the religious as well. The theoretical includes all formal thinking on the subject, thus theology—which, like theoretical thought in science, rests on philosophical foundations. Experience of the religious is very rare if we want to restrict the word, experience, to very direct and unambiguous encounters with the transcendental. Such experiences are much more prevalent than that, but separating the transcendental aspect from the merely psychic becomes problematical. Technology, of course, maps on the practice of religion—at one end bounded by moral codes, at the other on conscious practices of love, prayer, and meditation.

Let me briefly enlarge on the last points—religious experience, technology. It is very difficult to tease apart higher and lower forms of experience. Is an intuition due to unconscious observations or to a “message” from beyond? When do I practice love in a higher sense? When do I merely obey biological impulses? These tend to appear in syntheses. I call morality a technology in that it is something learned, with rules, be it merely etiquette or something beyond it, like conscious acts of self-restraint and love. It begins in conscious, willed acts and then, as habit, functions as technology.

The reason why we do not have a science of religion is explained entirely by the public inaccessibility of the experiential modality of it—which, of course, is the foundation not only of religious but also of material life. Religious experience is fundamentally subjective.

The mildest forms of transcending sorts of experiences—I put it weakly, like that, because anything we can even remotely explain as physical we immediately remove from that category—are somewhat accessible to public study, thus telekinesis, telepathy, viewing at a distance. What we view as strictly miraculous, like bi-location, may very well be energetic in nature—but the energies involved escape our measurements. But there has been, nevertheless, a certain amount of systematic study of these you might say lower forms of border-violation.

The most interestingly new experiential data that emerged in my life time are studies of near death experiences (NDEs). NDEs have always been there, no doubt, but modern science itself, through medicine, has caused these to be reported much more frequently. We’ve been able to resuscitate many more people. And some of those involved in this (doctors, nurses) are directly involved with the experiential rather than the theoretical aspects of biology. A very credible body of writings has thus emerged—the credible parts being initial studies not their endless exploitation as pop literature. This is something genuinely new. Depending on our ability to maintain a hi-tech civilization, it may continue to inform us and provide an almost public body of data to ponder. It is almost public because NDEs recur and are documented—and have certain strong commonalities. If hi-tech will once more fade away with the fossil sunset, in five hundred years or so the NDE nexus will have been lost again.

Very curious times we live in. We’ve got our hands around matter, theoretically, experimentally—for a while. The psychic is much more elusive. Which does not mean that either its theories or its technologies may be neglected; they must be pursued with dedicated vigor.

Doctrinal Battles

Even a barely grown-up spirituality will shy from the doctrinal battles that rage between and within religions. Engaging in such battles is, of course, an indication that the person is attracted by the world. More: such combative activity is probably a violation of the very spirit of the religion the person wishes to defend or to promote. With inner growth comes insight summed up most succinctly here:

When you arrive at the sea, you
do not talk of the tributary.
[Hakim Sanai, The Walled Garden of Truth]

One Sufi master suggested the role of religion (conceived, I think, as doctrinally hedged about) in this snippet:

There are three forms of culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self-development. [Hujwiri, Revelation of the Veiled]

The sentence above suggests a sequence that I here liken to maturing. Each of the three stages mentioned has its place and merit. Each contributes to a person’s development of true humanity. “Following rules” is quite something other than doing battle with others, including merely abstract battle, over the rules that they prefer. That a famous author declines to be in communion with this or that tradition of a faith doesn’t merit mention, never mind highlighting, unless the intention is to promote one’s own or to belittle another group’s convictions.

To rise above doctrine is not to dismiss it. That approach is used by those who insist on staying on the level beneath the religious. To rise above doctrines means to accept them all, to ignore their detectable flaws and seeming contradiction, and to receive the grace that they carry. Another Sufi saying I’m very fond of, in this context, is that “The channel doesn’t drink.”

The Beloved and Her Veils

One of the fascinating limitations of existing in this low dimension is that we see the higher through veils formed of concepts, symbols. There is that image of the finger pointing at the moon—and the ignorant observer staring at the finger. I’ve always liked that image. The high cannot be uttered—but does that stop us? No. It can be experienced, and somehow we shall express it. The problem is much worse than the finger and the moon. The moon is felt, not seen. The finger is a web of words and images that spring from the hidden inward parts of the person who has the feeling.

It occurs to me that the ineffable has been described in endless ways, but that traditional ways of uttering and picturing the transcendent are, superficially examined, radically unlike each other. There are, for instance, spiritual traditions identical at their core but one we describe as “religion” and the other as “poetry.” Music is another such tradition—radically different enough from the other two so that it appears embedded in each of them. Vast confusions also arise especially for those who will not (or sometimes sadly cannot) fuse the intellectual with the intuitive effectively—and this because no detectable, hard boundary can be mapped between so-called lower and higher feelings; they’re always interwoven or, put another way, are identical, and what we call the lower is just the high at a coarse or “lossy” sort of resolution.

All three are veils—and at our least developed level we attempt to appropriate, co-opt them for service of the bottom layer. We exploit religion for social conditioning and deform it in all manner of strange ways; we name poets-laureate to praise kings or to worship nations; and music must accompany even our boring elevator rides.

I find it interesting that some traditions ban the visual arts, e.g. in branches of Christianity and in Islam; Islam also frowns on music. These customs, of course, arise from a vague sense that it is the Beloved, and not her veils, that should be at the center of worship. What those who’d ban images or sounds don’t seem to realize is that their doctrines, too, are merely veils—and that veils are unavoidable. In this dimension we must attempt to discover the hidden mystery as best we can.

Doctrine and Religion

This post is meant as a companion to the last—in which I attempted to define the personal experience of religion. I defined personal religion as an attitude and orientation in which an intuition of a transcending “beyond” has a genuine reality. While I view this experience as arising in an innate intuition of reality, an “intimation of immortality”—something that trumps, as it were, various conceptual formulations of it—I’m still fully aware that people have the use of intellect and reason and that a fully mature person will have a comprehensive view in which a conceptual framework will be present as well. Today more on the later aspect.

A doctrine literally means a teaching. In the western religious traditions, all of which are revealed religions, the teaching is the elaboration of a revelation directly or indirectly received from God. In the eastern tradition, and here I have the Buddha in mind, the teaching concerns the elaboration of the meaning of an experience persons had—and also about what they themselves said about it. In both cases a certain acceptance, usually labeled faith, is necessary before the doctrine, the teaching, can be considered on its own merits. The fundamental character of such teachings is precisely this faith or this acceptance. There is no way that the ordinary human, even with a great deal of diligence and effort, can replicate the experience on which the doctrine rests. Religious doctrines have a very different character from what we call hypotheses or theories.

To reduce the western religious conception to its absolute grounding premise, it says that the ultimate creator of reality intervenes in its creation at certain times in order to communicate its will to many people through one person. Acceptance of this premise is, I submit, required to go further into the specifics of a doctrine.

The Buddha’s teaching contains another basic assertion, namely that a realm of suffering exits where the illusion of the self is present. The self is created by attachments. When all these are withdrawn, we enter a kind of blissful annihilation.

People who have serious, sincere difficulties with either of these essentials will be left to form their own explanations of the nature of reality. What they must accept as given is that from time to time religious faiths arise from the experiences of individuals, that these experiences are very evidently of a greatly persuasive and very energetic nature—sufficiently so that they produce huge social phenomena that spread over time and, by and large, produce more benefits than harm.

Clashes between groups, the use of coercion to make unbelievers comply with the teaching, persecutions, wars, inquisitions, and crusades do not, alas, at all require a religious orientation. The religious aspect in these phenomena is incidental, not central. What is central in them is the drive to power. The twentieth century brought us ample, indeed rich samples of each of these negatives under entirely secular conditions.

It does not take a great deal of faith to believe in truth, justice, and the good. That comes with personal religion, as I’ve outlined in the last post. The doctrines, however, belong—because of their basic premises—to the realm of judgment.

Religion and Doctrine

I would here contrast religion as a personal experience and religion as a structure of doctrines. The first I would define as an attitude or orientation to reality—but with a twist. It holds within it an awareness of something beyond the tangible experiences of our day to day life—also something beyond projections derived from observing the world, thus such concepts as “humanity,” “nation,” “cosmos,” “history,” and so on. Under my definition Marxism would not qualify as a religion despite its detection of a “dialectical process” in history—however appropriately airy-fairy that sounds. Nor would atheism or materialism qualify. The last two would deny anything “beyond” the experienced. Atheists with odd intimations of positive meanings hidden somewhere invisibly have already committed heresy, as it were, in their hearts.

Intimation here is a good word although, for me, the German Ahnung, is best. Its derivation is from Die Ahnen, or the ancestors—and they’re definitely no longer here. Wordsworth’s title, Intimations of Immortality, fits my purpose nicely. My personal experiences of the religious take this form, the form of intimations, and they arise from poetry, myth, literary, and other artistic forms, including music. A sneering realist would label all this mere emotionalism—but I view such criticism as arising from the absence of inner powers rather than their presence.

Religion as experienced is an intuition. The moment concepts arise, and we hear of God quite early in life, we enter another realm. We learn to associate certain intuitions with certain structures of concepts. Intimations are intimate, personal. When I was young the concept of God produced in me images of a person in the sky. It did not connect with my own experience of awe—indeed has never linked that way in the intimate sense except in moments of extreme anxiety or gratitude. Odd, that, isn’t it. In certain moments when feelings rise beyond the normal range, when they transcend the average, we reach for the nearest concept of transcendence. There are no atheists in the trenches.

Experience teaches transcendence—and not just in extreme moments. But one does not experience it in a concrete, tangible way as one experience a tree, for instance, when climbing it as a child. The transcendental is ineffable yet felt as real. And the more open the top of one’s head, the more real it is and becomes. But between this experience and the doctrines of religions there is an enormous gulf—one so deep that the Grand Canyon would seem, by contrast, to be a mere line in the sand drawn by a wooden match-stick.

For these reasons I treat all scriptures as poetry—and view poetry as humanity’s highest achievement. I resist doctrinal claims to be communicating tangible realities, to describe in detail, however vague, what God intends or once might have done. Regarding that concept I hew resolutely to a negative theology and assert, no matter what I hear, “Not that, not that.” In the poetic mode I hear of “God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” in Genesis 3:8—and that’s fine with me, not least what came before and comes after. Eventually, by a long process, this inspiration turns into something that has nothing to do with intimations of the high; poetry is turned into doctrine; and by that time it has sunk out of my sight.

The Uncomfortable Neutral Stance

Is there a neutral way to approach what are invariably viewed as religious experiences? The answer isn’t obvious. Let me be precise to bring that out. Let me take the case of a person, let me call him A, who hears or reads about other people who claim to have had such experiences. Those reporting may say that God, an angel, or some other sacred figure has addressed them, that they’ve received a revelation, or simply that they’ve had experiences of a transcendental state. Now if A is an unbeliever, he will reject the truth of such reports outright—except to acknowledge the presence of some disarrangement in the claimant’s brain. If A belongs to a well-defined faith system, but the claimant mentions figures from another faith, and especially makes references to some doctrinal aspects of the same, A is likely to dismiss the revelation because it doesn’t fit his structure of belief; he may even think the revelation came from the devil. A Muslim will be dubious if the center of the revelation is the Virgin Mary; a Christian will be dubious if the central role is played by Mohamed’s daughter Fatima.

A neutral stance would seem to require that A must credit the possibility of a transcendental reality, indeed one in which actual persons exist—and also view all religions as essentially equivalent, thus as having equivalent claims. Neither believers nor unbelievers will grant a neutral A much standing. For the unbeliever A is too soft, too gullible. For the orthodox believer, A is “lukewarm,” uncommitted, wishy-washy, and probably some kind of muddle-headed pantheist.

This is a real issue. At the core of every religion is a narrative, a conceptualization, an historical context, indeed a logic that makes it unique, and making any two of them equivalent invariably renders both in some ways or to some extent false. The neutral stance, which happens to be mine (alas!) relies on human fallibility as the legitimate explanation of the claimed equivalence.

All human experience is filtered through the imperfect lens of our consciousness; this is as true of ordinary as of extraordinary matters. At the very root of transcendental experiences—thus the initial core experience of the founder of a religion or a major movement—a human mind encounters something totally unprecedented and undeniable. This must be explained in some way, and the person must use his or her existing knowledge, not least cultural heritage, to make sense of it. And that’s at the root. All religions then develop further, always taking centuries, and the intellectual formulation crystallizes long, long after the revelatory event. By the time a religion has a full complement of orthodox doctrines, many, many people have made their contributions to it and incorporated their fallibilities as well. It remains to note that the source of such developments, whatever it is that the original claimant underwent, carries an enormous force of benevolence within it. If it did not, the religion could not take hold and acquire its millions of followers.

An authentic neutral stance does not deny the reality of the high but sees in the interpretation of the experience of it the equally undeniable fallibility of man.

A Marxist Orientation

Reading a book in which Karl Marx’s development is skillfully presented, I got to wondering about people’s innate leanings. Marx tried his hand at poetry in youth but rapidly became an intellectual, initially very much influenced by Hegelian philosophy and also much concerned with religion—without, seemingly, even opening the door of it to understand its mysteries. He began to feel a certain comfort when he shifted his view to society and became a materialist. Then religion began to make sense to him as a coping mechanism to mitigate the pain of social conflict and of class oppression. And he was off.

Now, mind you, this man spent his entire life reading and scribbling. He was an intellectual. He was trying to understand the world, to orient himself. Thus he engaged in precisely the same activities I spent my time on when not actually working for a living. Why did my efforts take me very deeply into the religious phenomenon—and through all of the many rooms that surround it (psychology, mythology, hard science, literature, and history) whereas Marx quite rapidly settled on material production and its arrangements over time and expressed in political forms. All of those “rooms” of mine were, for him, by-products of that. Why did he never wonder what people are doing here in the first place? Wouldn’t that be the proper starting point? Of any orientation?

The way we’re inwardly constituted—our innate leanings—are ultimately the most decisive in how we approach our lives. The layer that totally entranced Karl Marx I took in one or two long strides before I’d ever reached my sophomore year—and also occupied my paid labors. The curious aspect here is that his approach was shared by so, so many others of the elites of his time so that he left a huge mark on history. That tells me something about the uneven distribution of gifts…

The Image of a Blast Furnace

Brigitte made me aware of an article Common Dreams.org reproduced from TruthDig.com by Chris Hedges entitled “After Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck with Nietzsche.” I read the article (it’s here) and then sampled some of the 260-plus comments (and counting) that this article produced. Cultural change is a subject I mostly deal with on Ghulf Genes, but I thought I’d record some reactions to this phenomenon here. It’s my conviction that we are slowly leaving the materialistic culture behind us; I date this trend from the early nineteenth century; I think it’s real and, in way, counter-intuitive, indeed barely credible. That is because cultural change is vast and slow. You barely see the new because the all highly visible aspects of culture stem from the last four hundred years or so and overwhelm the new. Occasionally good eyes can glimpse the upwelling of change; Brigitte saw this in Hedges' article and, more to the point, in the rather large reaction to it. There is a great passion and energy here, and also what strikes me as a great mixing of relevant and irrelevant matters.

This bit of public speech—some would call it a “conversation”—reminds me of the seemingly equally chaotic processes that take place inside a blast furnace. There ore is mixed with limestone flux and coke to produce pig iron. At this stage in our culture, we’re still in the early stages of smelting the raw materials from which the bright sword of a new order will be forged. The other stages still lie ahead—and will require much more heat and sophistication: the Bessemer furnace to make steel of the iron, further refinement of the steel, let’s call it the making of stainless. And it is with this very advanced material that the Japanese samurai sword-maker will set to work, beating the steel, bending it, reheating it, hammering it again—and many times over—in ever more careful processes of hardening, and sharpening. And at last a new culture will be formed.

However mixed and chaotic the current discussion is—and in circles that, thirty, forty years ago would not have been interested at all—it is good to see that the process has begun and that it’s drawing people who actually participate. At each stage the passion will be transformed into knowledge, the turbulence into concentration. And thus society will be transformed. A great deal of the heat and energy required for this process will come, alas, from the breakdown of the current order. Fortunately chaos hides order within it (we know this from chaos theory). I assert this of the big collective out there; that's what the exchange I cite represents, a public phenomenon. What happens at the individual level is something quite different; sometimes it is influenced by, but often it is entirely independent of, these cultural transformations. The old order has not died everywhere. The nutrients have always been there, even if hidden beneath vast layers of sediment.