manifesto
Fundamentalism is the death agony of formal and legalistic religion. It’s being obliterated by what is essentially a religious force from the west. But the west fails to recognize that it’s own orientation is essentially a religion.
Wherever I look, wherever I see a major problem, I can ultimately trace it back to this source. Even ethnic and nationalistic forces are ultimately a function of this question of religion, because, if we are on the verge of a universal religious understanding, the self-definition of community is only vaguely ethnic or national.
‘Just another cultural visionary’?
Absolutely.
The solution is supersaturated. Just throw in a tiny seed crystal, and you don’t even get to see the crystals grow. Bam. Instant solids.
But the metaphor is a no-go, because the solution will persist in being supersaturated from here on out. And so anyone visionary is just another seed crystal, just another center around which the solution can crystallize.
So, we have this weird situation. I have to understand my own importance because I’ve seen it through and can connect the basic dots, draw the lines between the pieces of history and the pieces in the present and bind them all together. So what I’m doing is absolutely revolutionary. But, in context, I’m just another cultural visionary. And anyone who’s caught a significant enough piece of this to ground a vocation is just another cultural visionary in the same vein.
We’re on the edge of a real radical transformation. And we aren’t going to get it by just ‘being green’ or doing some activist thing, in whatever venue. What is necessary is essentially a radical transformation of consciousness within the frame of this altered understanding. Zen has a piece. The activists have a piece. Even the rotwangers have itty-bitty pieces. But we all tend to get lost in our cheap righteousness and isolation. The spacious mind of the Buddha may or may not include science in a way that actually engages it as a spiritual and religious reality.
Modern physics – the modern science of matter – has become ambiguous because it is quite clear that, in looking into matter, if we are not looking into mind, we are looking into a mirror for mind. We are also looking at something which is essentially intimate with our own experience.
Now, of course, this is not the whole of the picture. We have to remember that ‘objectivity’ is an experience that convinces us of the validity of the external. It is the ultimate validation of the experience of ‘otherness’, that value itself has independent existence. Obviously, throughout history, humans have had a tacit or implicit sense of the external ‘reality’ of value. But, until science, ‘proving’ it was philosophically elusive. Now we have a direct experience – an experience outside the range of everyday experience – that ‘proves’ it.
This is the experience of objectivity.
In other words, it is essentially a mystical experience.
The spiritual aspect of the experience makes me think that I have now entered the halls of grace. And the peculiar power of the otherness at the center of the experience, which is also somehow intimate, now makes me think of myself as one of the elect. As a general rule, of course, all of this happens sub rosa, so to speak – that is, without conscious reflection. But this is precisely the point. It is time to bring this out into reflective awareness and notice that the intimacy and cogency are Spirit and that the otherness in its own nature is an intimation of the divine – an intimation which if properly pursued will lead to an equally irrevocable conviction of the ‘existence’ of the divine.
We need a teleology without a formal eschaton, something based in the reality of Spirit as essentially a created function with transcendent possibilities, a conviction in the divine with a simultaneous understanding that our freedom absolutely requires our total responsibility for the planet, and the recognition that every teacher of any value has always insisted that it’s all or none.
So let’s get it on. ‘Just another cultural visionary.’ Absolutely.
Thanks for the farm!
I tend to 'wait for someone (god) to tell me what to do...'
Sometimes I glimpse the divine process of evolution and the sense that everything is as it should be....
The best part of 'me' is remembering 'God'.
I am trying to get to the point where art is the only distraction from this 'other' remembrance.
Then there are the dramatic events of the day, that I feed on. Like the Alberto Gonzales hearings Thurs. I take a perverse delight in current events. Like it is entertainment, yet I know the suffering that is part of the mix. Just horrendous. I suppose I'll get mine.
In anycase, your manifesto is enlightening in a true sense of the word.
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...about the tendency to wait for god to tell me what to do, comment...I am simply refering to what appears to me as a personal weakness, ie. looking outside myself for confirmation, validation, and direction...help, if you will.
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William
Your question goes to the heart of the matter in terms of 'religion' as I define it here. Spirit, like matter, is a created function, though obviously with different rules - a long topic in itself. But the question of God is the question of freedom - the peculiarly western take because of the peculiarity of western theism. The only solution -- the 'gnostic' solution, if you will -- is that God exists, but is inherently 'other' in terms of our experience.
This 'otherness' in our experience is a legitimate question. If all of this is my experience, then whatever its roots, it is a form of my consciousness AS my experience. Therefore I should have no sense of otherness about it. The sense of otherness is unaccountable. Saying I have become self-aware does not explain it, although it points to its necessity.
But because the otherness is a valid element in my experience, I can isolate it and go into it. When I go to its 'center' in my own experience, what I experience is the 'void space', but I experience it as a fulness. God is Other, therefore I cannot experience whatever God is. But that fulness is both 'Presence' and a conviction about the 'existence' of God.
Finally, parabolically or by corollary, the sign of this possibility is expressed in terms of the 'functionality' (for want of a better term) of value. Value is experiential. But value is also apparently independent -- something validated by the experience of objectivity.
Since value is experiential and necessarily particular (particularity or specificity being the characteristic of value), the power to experience value necessarily implies that the process of consciousness itself is a specific value -- that the 'I' is a functional value, a vocational entity. Finally, this is the only legitimate definition of the 'I' or self: a vocational process, a specific value sequence.
So the vocational process is both the expression and the seeking of God.
When we have grasped our vocation, the process is simultaneously external and internal. Seeking outside is seeking inside.
The paradox, of course, is that what we are looking for and finding cannot be defined in terms either of the specific process or of any particular purposiveness that prompts the process, that is, in terms of the 'motif' or motive for action.
I know the process is working in the writing, because I can 'hear' it. But finally, it is neither sound nor substance. So what is it? And yet when I can hear my written line clearly, I have certainty about whether I was or was not doing 'the work'. But I can't tell you how.
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Thanks for the comment. It is a great meditation. Otherness.
I remember your 'yogic roots'. And often think of you in terms of that rarified naga baba. I see your discipline in this life as an extension or evolution of the soul you are. I guess that should be obvious. Anyway, thanks again for the post.
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Jeremy, maybe you wouldn't mind elucidating the following from your 'manifesto'. Maybe talk a bit on what you mean by analytical aspect of the world that is commonly a general principle - ...'Some analytical aspect of the world – commonly a general principle – suddenly becomes absolutely intimate – so much so that it is as if it fills our consciousness and becomes our very nature – and absolutely simultaneously the same analytical principle of the world stands in pure and independent isolation, so that experientially I subsequently deem it to be a self-evident and self-validating fact.
This is the experience of objectivity.
In other words, it is essentially a mystical experience....'
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William
This is just a generic phrase for what science 'really is'. That is, when we have the experience of objectivity, we are invariably looking at some principle within the scientific frame, a principle of physics or chemistry or biology, or whatever. I say this to place it in opposition to the presumption that science is somehow automatically or inherently about 'matter' or 'causality', or that the experience is somehow a direct experience of 'reality', and not an experience mediated by a particular scientific principle. The experience of objectivity necessarily occurs in terms of a scientific principle. The sense of 'reality' arises through the experience of the principle. The presumption that the experience of reality is a direct connection with or reflection of a 'fact' or immediate condition of the world outside of the frame of the principle is false. So the nature of the 'experience of reality' which is 'objectivity' necessarily refers to the nature of the experience itself as experience, and not something external to experience. Although it convinces us of the validity of the external, the sense of validity can only be 'justified' in terms of the experience itself.
In other words, the whole citation you make here is a logical argument to prove that the 'validity' of 'objectivity' ultimately inheres in the experience itself. The EXPERIENCE of validity is therefore necessarily confined to the subjective frame. At the same time, since the validity is also spontaneously and absolutely assigned to the principle as well, we can only define this, finally, as 'mystical'.
I'm clear and confident about what I'm saying here, but, as I reread it, I'm not altogether satisfied with the expression. I recognize that it sounds convoluted. If you have a problem here, try to point to it, and I'll see if I can resolve it.
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Always good to contemplate the argument. At times it is very clear and even a source of good humor. At other times it is confusing to me.
Possibly you could talk a bit on the difference/relationship of scientific principle and 'reality'.
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William
My first awakening pivoted on Einstein's simplified explanation of the Special Theory of Relativity. It was the epitome and final moment of a process of the study of science as embodied in the experience of objectivity. That is, it convinced me of the objective nature both of the world and of validity itself. But it also opened me to the nature of the experience of objectivity. There are reasons why this is naturally characteristic of the Special Theory of Relativity, but that's complex and not necessarily relevant here.
But what it showed me, on the 'science side', so to speak, is that the vivifying principle of science is 'objectivity' as the experience which is objectivity. Apart from that experience, scientific principles are simply abstractions of greater or lesser significance. Theoretically, I could study almost any principle of science and basically assent to it without necessarily 'experiencing objectivity'. But the experience of objectivity is a kind of natural cumulative goal in the study of science. It is not the explicit motive or function of any particular scientific principle, but the general study of science seems predestined to eventuate in the experience.
For me, this is the 'reality' of science, the moment of the 'experience of reality' at the core of science. And when we understand its inherent subjectivity -- that it reflects 'value as experience' which is also the immediacy of the self -- essential objectivity and essential subjectivity merge, and we experience the intimacy of pure value which is prior to subjectivity or objectivity as distinct or separable functions or dimensions of experience.
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Thanks Jeremy, I'll revisit the thread and post. I truly love the teaching.
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