(esoteric / exoteric 15)


             Our premise throughout is the presumption of a radical change. But the essay here is not about its history. Objectivity alone is a simple and direct enough expression of how this change has emerged as ‘the modern’.
             Objectivity is a radical modern development. We try to project it back into the earliest records and cultures, but our efforts become anthropology. And while there is undoubtedly science at the center of anthropology, a significant aspect of its methodology is allegory. In other words, we see no signs of the factual certainties characteristic of science, in history prior to its modern roots in the medieval or in cultures apart from those in which objectivity has become a dominating intellectual perspective.
             What we will argue here is that objectivity radically alters the spiritual basis of the religious enquiry.

             The only place where we can experience the possibility of religion, the possibility of the divine, is in the direct or indirect enquiry into the nature of our own consciousness. But the potency of perception and self-awareness, as we have defined them here, are necessarily grounded in the spontaneity of value, as it appears in the solipsistic field, and this can only be defined as ‘spirit’, and understood as always immanent and pervasive.
             What we will argue here is that this now ‘dominating intellectual perspective’ also radically alters the modes of and approaches to ‘spirit’.

             Kundalini is literally the Eye of the tail, the Eye of the body awakening as self-illumination. The experience was presumably rare, even among avowed practitioners. But if, as we are suggesting, the experience of objectivity radically alters the possibilities for approach toward spirit and its functional practice in the enquiry into consciousness, then obviously it is not only possible, but also necessary that much of the basic mode of spirit, culturally, has also changed.
             That is, objectivity posits the possibility of radical changes in esoteric experience – what is commonly called ‘mysticism’.

             The ‘new’ experience is the radical validation of the separated Eye.
             Scientists who treat their validating experience of objectivity as an essentially religious experience – but deny religion and / or assert secular necessity – present the psychology of religious fanatics. What is projected is the hypocritical denial of the unique validation of the self inherent in such experience.
             But it is precisely the unique validation of the self as the corresponding member in the equation which ‘validates’ a given fact that constitutes the empirical basis of the experience as ‘objectivity’.
             And an enquiry into this equation will reveal something quite other than a simple validation of inert necessity.

             To some extent, I view key moments of my own experience as a partial paradigm.

             I would say that Einstein’s Special Theory is now the paradigm for the experience of objectivity. What this paradigm points to is the moment. The moment is complete in itself. The only ‘real’ time is ‘now’. But ‘objectivity’ establishes that ‘time’ itself is also ‘real’. Sequence and cause are not simply intellectually adventitious.
             These are the actual empirical aspects for ‘experience’: the mutuality of wholeness and cause. In the wholeness, light is ‘instantaneous’, i.e., of an ‘infinite’ speed. In ‘time’, light has a discrete or ‘finite’ speed.
             This would appear then to suggest a purely ‘subjective’ cause for the paradox that light travels simultaneously at a ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ speed. What controverts that assertion is, on the one hand, the objective experience potential in the grounding Lorentz Transformations and, on the other, evolution itself. The ‘reason’ that we experience paradigm objectivity here is because this ‘duplicity’ of consciousness has ‘also’ emerged from ‘inert’ matter.
             The empiricism expresses the absolute nature of the equation in terms of the validating closure of ‘objectivity’, an experience which validates self and world, as well as the ‘given fact’.

             But this profound intuition remained unrevealed for me until I explored the moment. Perhaps the fact that I explored the moment through oracles is very much time-conditioned by the environment of the 60s and 70s. But oracles are based in the premise of the moment as value, a premise necessary to experience as we practice and understand it. The immediacy of value response defines by wholeness and process; that is, it serves as the conditioning function for ‘moment’. Of necessity, any legitimate moment is a given value. The fact that this solipsistic whole is also ‘experience’ requires it.
             What we are isolating, of course, is the moment as power. And this empirical abstraction of power gives us the key to reflexive consciousness, since the ‘power’ is not only embodied force, it is also ‘pure’ value. It is the ‘delay’ in the reflex – the necessary separation in awareness that reveals ‘the witness’ – made tangible at the level of both body and value awareness.