THE TEMPLE

ON SIGHT AND SEEING - OEDIPUS REX: PART ONE

2010-07-11T07:16:00.000-07:00

"Then let it break! I must know who I am!" - Oedipus Rex

Thanks to Freud, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex is probably the most misunderstood play in the West. Before Freud, Oedipus' story was seen as the classic expression of the horror of a Universe in which one was trapped by events which one could not change or effect, where one's destiny one's was in the hands of inexorable Fate, and where, instead of love or justice descending from the Gods to Man, there was only cold, heartless necessity. After Freud, it became about the Oedipus Complex, the psychological trap Freud believed every man was doomed to become trapped in, and out of which all of Western culture and morality had evolved: the realisation that one's first sexual instinct was towards one's mother and therefore one's first murderous instinct was towards one's rival, the father. Out of this primal experience coupled with the ancient societal taboo against incest and parricide came the endless guilts, paradoxes and moral evasions that human culture found itself in. For Freud, every man was doomed to experience this, just as every woman, as reflected in the Electra story, was doomed to experience the same thing in reverse - sexual feelings for the father and hatred for the mother. Sophocles was only the first to articulate it as a universal. Oedipus' howl of despair and rage at the end of the play was every man's howl of agony at recognising this terrible truth within himself. Freud's excitement on encountering the play for the first time was almost religious in its intensity. Suddenly, for him, everything fell into place, his whole system seemed corroborated. So Sophocles' play, identified by Aristotle as the quintessence of what tragic drama was all about, became locked in a Freudian nightmare forever.

Neither of these interpretations of the play are necessarily wrong. Both give our understanding of it texture. But at the same time neither is necessarily what Sophocles intended when he wrote it, or, even if we can't say what he intended for sure, neither exhausts its possibilities. There are other ways of encountering and understanding the play, one of which may unlock something vital and potent within it that liberates it from its apparently cruelly deterministic aura of doom: that the play is, on a very profound level, about Sight. And not just about physical sight, but the profoundest sight available to us - sight into the deepest part of our nature.

To understand what I am wittering about, its worth looking at the way in which eyes and sight have worked historically in cultures that predate our own. The eye - eyes themselves - has always been an image of something profoundly sacred all over the world. In the East, the sign of Buddha's 'Awakening' or 'Enlightenment' is the fact that his eyes are permanently closed, unseduced by sense perception, the entangling and tormenting constantly changing and transient phenomena of this world of Maya, Illusion, which distracts the mind from itself and causes so much pain. The Buddha is 'asleep' to this world and 'awake' to the inner world. If any part of him is 'awake' it is the famous Third Eye, the Ajna Chakra, which provides mystical and intuitive insight into Truth. Sometimes known as the 'Gyananakashu', or 'Eye of Knowledge', it is regarded as the seat of the Antar-Guru, or Inner Teacher, communicating with the deepest part of ourself. Thus although the Buddha's physical eyes are closed, his spiritual eye is open in the profoundest sense, seeing things as they truly are.

In Hinduism, Siva's eyes are similarly closed, especially when he is presented as the Nataraja, or Lord of the Dance, negotiating the Wheel of Fire, his eyes sealed, his gaze turned inwards, smiling as he dances. Tradition has it that when his eyes open, the whole Universe will end, as the Universe is no more than his own dream. His creative counterpart in the Trimurti, Brahma, is similarly in a state of deep meditation or sleep, blind, once again, to physical phenomena, emanating Reality from his dreams.

In the West, the Eye has equally powerful connotations. The All-Seeing Eye which conspiracy nuts get so uptight about is an ancient image of the all-seeing, all-pervading presence of God (and not Alien Illuminati Zionist Mind-controlling Puppet-masters, sorry). It appears in Kabbalah in exactly the same way as an image of God as Universal Consciousness aware of everything. Its oldest derived source is ancient Egypt, where it appears as the Eye of Horus or Wedjat, a symbol of Royalty and Protection against evil (and not evil itself, sorry you conspiracy guys!). The addition of the All-Seeing Eye on the summit of a pyramid which appears in Freemasonry echoes not only the Eye of Horus but the ancient Egyptian Benben stone, the primordial mound that emerged from the Waters at Creation out of which everything came. Thus the Masonic image combines the All-Seeing Eye of Kabbalah and the Judeo-Christian tradition with the Creation myth of ancient Egypt, the pyramid also being a symbol of the Soul. In ancient Greece, the Eye was often painted on the prow of ships to protect them as they travelled, a practise borrowed from the Egyptians and other cultures. When sculpting a statue, the statue was not 'finished' and did not truly take on the likeness of someone or 'come alive' until the eyes were painted on (anyone who has ever painted a figurine should try this. Notice the difference between one which has no eyes painted on and one which does). Even in somewhere as remote as Easter Island, it is believed that the great stone heads of the Ancestors that litter the shores were not 'active' unless their eyes were placed in their sockets.

Eyes, then, have massive significance all over the world as images of spiritual insight, cosmic power, protection, guidance and, simply 'doorways to the soul'. The great poets Homer and Milton were both blind and throughout literature physical blindness, as we shall see, is often seen as a sign of inner sight and understanding. Tiresias, the ancient Greek Seer who is never wrong is blind and in Shakespeare's King Lear, Gloucester only begins to grope towards a painful self-knowledge when he has his eyes torn out by Cornwall. As he himself says of his own moral blindness after he has lost his eyes:

"I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;
I stumbled when I saw."

Physical sight does not mean one has insight. Indeed, as the Tao Te Ching tells us, the physical senses can distract us from everything:

"The five colours blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavours cloy the palate.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Rare goods tempt men to do wrong.
Therefore, the Sage takes care of the belly, not the eye.
He prefers what is within to what is without."

"He prefers what is within to what is without" - what more powerful statement could there be about the journey Oedipus is forced to go on? In another Taoist text, the Secret of the Golden Flower, the eyes are seen to be the gates of the Chi or Life Force, with Chi draining out of them unless we learn to redirect their energies back in. This vision of the discrepancy between Inner and Outer sight reappears in the Upanishads, when the Sage is encouraged to trace the source of sight away from the external world and within themselves, to the Spirit, or Consciousness which is their actual being:

"Know that when the eye looks into space it is the Spirit of man that sees: the eye is only the organ of sight. When one says 'I feel this perfume,' it is the Spirit that feels: he uses the organ of smell. When one says 'I am speaking,' it is the Spirit that speaks: the voice is the organ of speech. When one says 'I am hearing,' it is the Spirit that hears: th eear is the organ of hearing. And when one says 'I think,' it is the Spirit that thinks: the mind is the organ of thought. It is because of the Spirit that the human mind can see, and can think, and enjoy the world."

It is a common trick of sensory perception to make us believe more powerfully in the thing we perceive externally to us than the thing within us which does the seeing. How less certain are we of who we are, what our ground of being is, what our identity is, than we are of the tree we are looking at, or the film we are watching? What is external to us always seems more real and tangible than what is internal. Such is the conjuring trick of life.

In Oedipus Rex, we have two figures for whom sight is key - Tiresias, the Blind Seer, mentioned above, who has no physical sight but has total understanding and knowledge of the future, and Oedipus himself, the conquering King, who has physical sight but understands nothing. By the end of the play, Oedipus has become like Tiresias, similarly blind, but not yet with the insight the Seer has (that begins to come later in Oedipus at Colonus). That the play is about the often agonising progress of the individual to some kind of self-knowledge should be obvious. But there is more to it than this - and the nature of self-knowledge Oedipus comes to - which lies hidden in the play which cannot be understood unless one reads it on a level which few commentators do: the level of Initiation. For Oedipus Rex is much more than just a play. It is also an enactment of a Mystery, not just in the sense that Oedipus is trying to uncover his own true nature, but in the sense of a Mystery which unlocks the workings of the Unseen, just as, say the Dionysiac or Eleusinian Mysteries may have worked. To understand this, one has to understand two things about Greek Drama: that it was not drama as we understand it ie a form of entertainment, but part of a profound communal religious festival and that the form and structure of a Greek Theatre was not just designed to put on a play, but to explore the complex, multi-layered nature of the human organism, the interplay not of Man and the Gods, but of the physical and soul-self, the temporal self and the eternal...

AT THE GATES OF ETERNITY - SOME THOUGHTS ON SUFFERING

2010-07-06T13:07:00.000-07:00

"And He was withdrawn from them about a stone’s throw, and He knelt down and prayed, saying, “Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.” Then an angel appeared to Him from heaven, strengthening Him. And being in agony, He prayed more earnestly. Then His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground." - Gospel of Luke

"Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD; O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy." - Psalm 130

The picture above is by Vincent Van Gogh. Its name is At The Gates Of Eternity. He painted it in the last few weeks of his life, not long before he shot himself, dying two days later. As an image of human suffering and despair, it probably cannot be beaten, except, perhaps, by Edvard Munch's The Scream, which is now iconic. Who has not known the state of mind, the pain which the man seems to embody in this picture?

And that is kind of my point. Who has NOT known it? Who has never been in that black place which Van Gogh so powerfully evokes here, where everything seems terrifyingly empty, mental anguish is intense and one longs for some kind of comfort or release, even, dare I say it, an end? The thing that makes the painting so powerful is not that it is unusual, but that it evokes something everyone at some point in their life experiences. And yet how little - how LITTLE - do any of us own up to it? Instead we pretend, individually and as a culture that it doesn't happen. Pain, suffering is the big, black, dirty secret that we seem collectively to be too ashamed and afraid to talk about…

I had never seen this picture until a few weeks ago when I was working on Nicholas Wright's play Vincent In Brixton which is a fictionalized account of what might have happened when Vincent Van Gogh stayed in London for a few years as a young man, long before he even dreamt of being an artist. It was an interesting play to do, dealing as it did with love, the pain of losing love, despair, worthlessness, aspiration and the struggle for artistic expression. Pretty much everything that makes life what it is, basically. As part of the process, quite naturally, we all found ourselves increasingly fascinated and absorbed into the drama and character of Van Gogh, his battle to be an artist and his fight against the mental anguish he experienced throughout his life

Everyone knows the story of this great artist - the tortured but inspired genius who died penniless and unknown but produced what are now regarded as among the finest works of art of the modern world. Van Gogh struggled with despair, pain, mental illness and suffering for most of his adult life. His last words, spoken to his brother who was by his bedside as he died, were 'This sorrow will never end'. And yet his work is among the most vibrant and visionary we know. Is it possible that the intensity of his work - which seems to indicate a mind of such raw sensitivity - and the depth of his pain had some kind of correlation? That what made him such a genius also made existing here in this world doubly difficult for him? Of course, some commentators have said that he went bonkers because of the lead in his paints. This is entirely possible, but the fact that he showed signs of mental instability as a young boy suggests otherwise. And besides, all sorts of people get poisoned by something or other - aluminum in cutlery, lead in paint etc - but they don't all produce masterpiece after masterpiece on canvas. Such suggestions inevitably demonstrate the feebleness of what passes for 'scientific' assessments of a man's mind and experience, reducing the epic struggle of a human life to resolve the paradoxes that torment it in such a way that generations of unpoisoned people can relate to and find cathartic, to a daft and meaningless biological accident.

What became clear as we worked on the play - just as it had when I did Jane Eyre in the same theatre exactly a year before - was that if Van Gogh had been alive today, he would have diagnosed with something (depression, bipolar disorder, whatever) and slammed onto anti-depressants, perhaps never producing the works of art he did as a consequence. As we discussed this, the list of great artists who would have suffered the same fate seemed to drift on forever - Sophocles, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, T S Eliot, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, D H Lawrence, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett and many others - not to mention some of the greatest philosophers who found themselves seeking to address the problem of suffering and existential angst all their lives - Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Plato, Satre etc etc. We realized that even our religions all started with a response to the mystery of pain and suffering. What is the Old Testament but a series of stories about surviving overwhelming suffering and persecution, not just meted out by humans but also God (one of the books is called Lamentations for God's sake!)? What is the whole story of the Fall but an expression of the pain of experiencing Knowledge of Good and Evil - ie being conscious and self aware? What is the image of the Crucifixion but an image of facing agony - 'Oh Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?' - or the story of the Garden of Gethsemane? In the East, the whole idea of Liberation (Moksha or Nirvana) is about transcending human suffering. Indeed, the story of the Buddha's journey to Enlightenment begins with him encountering the presence of suffering in the world - an old man, a diseased man and a corpse - and embarking upon the quest to understand what human suffering was and how we might transcend it.

In other words, pretty much all that is noble, extraordinary and true about human culture comes from an awareness of the presence of pain in the world, the need to understand it, comes to terms with it and, perhaps, overcome and transcend it. So why on earth do we in the West (and perhaps elsewhere, I can't speak for other cultures) have this hopeless enfeebled and false attitude towards it? Why do we pretend its not there and run for the hills when it happens to people around us? Why do not represent it in our media, our arts and (gulp) our popular culture, which tries to present a vision of the world in which everything is just one long, grinning, life-long party to which, if you are not invited, you are a loser, a pariah, someone who is as welcome as fart in a spacesuit? In a discussion with one friend about this very subject, I was asked 'Do you think we are the only ones who suffer or do you think everyone howls when they close the door and are alone?' I thought for a moment and said 'No. Everyone suffers. If they didn't, Hamlet would not be the most famous play in the world.' I said Hamlet, but I could just as easily have said King Lear, or Macbeth, or Othello or Measure for Measure. My point was that the theme of suffering in world art and literature gives the game away. It is part of human life. It is integral to who we are. No-one escapes it. And yet increasingly we as a society try to brush it under the carpet or magic it away. The question is: why?

As we rehearsed Vincent In Brixton, a report came out from the Mental Health Foundation about the subject of loneliness. As certain Scientists never hesitate to remind us, the Scientific method is, of course, 'the best way to look at the world' (not Richard Dawkins this time but Jim Al-Khalili). The report said that loneliness was 'increasing', that it might be genetic, that loneliness could lead to unhappiness and depression, that it could shorten life expectancy but that the best thing we a lonely person could do was make friends and socialize more. One part of the report posited the idea that a lack of social interaction was linked to an increase in loneliness. Astonishing, no? I am sure you will agree that this is exactly the kind of startling revelation that we need from Science. Once again, what no-one had ever understood was made clear by rigorous application of the Scientific Method. Thank heavens for that! I look forward to exciting new research into whether bears shit in the woods, whether the Pope is Catholic and whether Paris is a city.

Not everyone met the report with awe and respect. One psychologist appeared in the Guardian complaining that medical science was increasingly pathologising things which were a fundamental part of the human experience, making the situation worse by pushing people who felt lonely or depressed into the belief that there was something seriously wrong with them, that they were mentally ill and thus failing in society, when loneliness and depression have been parts of the human condition from the beginning of history. Suddenly the human race was being divided into two sections: the 'healthy', well adjusted, non-lonely, permanently happy people and the 'sick', lonely, unhappy and maladjusted. Quite naturally, the Scientists doing the testing didn't add themselves to the 'sick' part of society, as that would be subjective. The result, if we started to apply it to how our society was ordered, would be to make those 'sick' people feel even worse because of their loneliness. It would be like extending the most miserable part of adolescence, when you felt the most socially inept in the face of more confident kids, into a universal principle for the whole of your adult life. Its hard to see how helpful such a conclusion is!

Earlier in the year, around Christmas, Depression was the subject which erupted again in the media after the author Marion Keyes posted an entry on her Blog apologizing to her readers for the fact that she could not write because her Depression was making her almost incapable of moving, let alone thinking. Suddenly people were coming out of the woodwork supporting her and saying 'Thank God you have said all this! I suffer from Depression too and the social stigma is intolerable!' In the Daily Telegraph (I was staying with my Grandmother) had an article by a doctor admitting to his own Depression and the need for it to be better understood. But his own conclusions, couched as the best medical science could say on the matter, were useless. Depression was identifiable if you could tick any of ten behavioral patterns, which included not wanting to get out of bed in the morning, not wanting to eat, feeling listless and exhausted, lacking self-esteem etc and, it was suggested, might be exponentially linked to things such as bereavement, family trauma, sexual abuse, losing one's job etc etc. One could not help wondering if Medical Scientists studying the subject had ever actually had emotional lives. Of COURSE bereavement, sexual abuse and other quite naturally painful and traumatic events which happen in someone's life cause misery, suffering, despair and grief - events one can read about in the lives of pretty much ALL the artists and writers I mentioned above. Does this mean that anyone who feels miserable because of something terrible that has happened to them is suffering from Depression, is sick and needs medication? Or does it mean that we are human beings with vulnerable emotional lives struggling to make sense of what is happening to them?

On the London Underground, a Mental Health Organisation had Frunk Bruno and Tricia bravely speaking out about their own Depression and Bipolar Disorders. I was very proud of their bravery in doing so, but even then Frank was quoted as saying that Bipolar Disorder could be triggered by 'Bereavement, family trauma' and other things and once again I found myself thinking - NATURALLY! Traumatic events cause mental pain, just as an injured leg causes physical pain. The problem is that the solution to an injured leg - pain killers - does not necessarily work with mental pain. According to another article I read during Vincent In Brixton, the UK, the US and the Ukraine all register as having the highest levels of Depression in the world. The anti-depressants culture in the UK and the US is, as we know, astronomical, with people being prescribed drugs when they are unhappy or going through understandable pain and trauma rather than because of diagnosable clinical Depression. Meanwhile trials are increasingly showing that most anti-depressants are placebos. Oliver James, in a recent article, actually said that a lot of anti-depressants are usually sugar pills, of no more 'medical' value than those Dawkins et al claim homeopaths are giving people. Paul Bentall's book Doctoring the Mind argues the same thing - that Psychiatric Treatment is not shown to be effective in so many cases, whereas other processes, such as the more traditional 'Talking Cure' (ie Psychotherapy or Analysis) or CBT work better. Both Bentall and James argue that those old hoodooey things compassion and understanding are more effective than any number of drugs in helping people work through their pain. In other words, its not a medical condition but part of human life. We need to start from there. Statistics (sigh) suggest that 1 in 4 people suffer from some kind of mental illness in their life. If this is true (and it feels more like 4 in 4 in my experience, now that we seem to be ranking being unhappy as a mental illness at the moment), then why are we pretending its not happening? Or do we think that high levels of suicide, alcohol or drug abuse are all signs of a healthy society? People like Richard Dawkins attack religious people for seeking 'false comfort', but which form of 'false comfort' is more injurious to the health? Its hard to decide...

And where do you stop? The US and the UK are two of the most affluent and comfortable societies in the world, where the threat of sickness and disease is seriously reduced, where few of the privations suffered by our ancestors (and even most of our contemporaries in the world!) no longer threaten us, where life expectancy is higher than ever and yet we are among the most miserable and depressed people on the planet. What does that say about our society? What is the missing ingredient which we are denying ourselves which could perhaps fill this hole and make us complete? And why are we not helping ourselves to cope with it beyond drugs and medications? Could it be a fatal lack of attention to the reality of our inner lives - that so-called fairy tale of subjective human experience that some of our most prominent Scientist tell us simply doesn't exist? After all, what is it that makes us feel pain? Aspirations not met, love not received, lives not lived, hopes crushed, dreams unfulfilled, loss, lack of self-esteem, dignity taken away. These are the things that cause suffering and depression. Sure, there may be physiological things too, but the sheer widespread extent of human pain suggests that this cannot be the only explanation, which means that its not drugs which will solve our problems, but addressing the core aspects of who we are as human beings, what we need and what we hope for.

And this is my point. Like everyone else, I have gone through my own fair share of pain - emotional, mental and physic - and despair. No-one avoids it. At least I have not met anyone who does. In my work - theatre - I deal with it every day. One thing I am grateful about in my chosen profession is the fact that no great play shies away from the struggles that human experience brings, from Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to Dostoyevsky's Crime And Punishment and T S Eliot's The Waste Land by way of Shakespeare's King Lear or Ibsen's Ghosts. It has meant that the reality that life involves struggles and dark periods has never been kept from me. But the sense that when I was going through them I was failing or a pariah is something I have not escaped, simply because this is so all-pervading in our culture. The loneliness of pain is something we all know about. Most of us feel when we are in that dark place that we are utterly alone, failing as human beings, excluded from this mythical breed of human who HAS NO PROBLEMS. And its all crap. That darkness is part of us. It comes about when we experience disharmony, disappointment, pain, loss. It is as legitimate as our feelings of joy, happiness, wholeness and fulfillment. If the greatest of our minds had to deal with it - and it was Winston Churchill who coined the phrase 'Black Dog' for his Depression - why should we demonize ourselves when we do?

The reason is, of course, that it frightens us. No-one wants to experience despair and darkness. No-one wants pain. With almost superstitious foolishness, we feel that one person's pain might be catching, which means that so often in a crisis so many people run to avoid it. Its then when we find out who our true friends are. We don't stigmatize someone who has broken a leg or had an accident, but grief, despair, emotional pain - these are things which still seem to be viewed as some kind of draining and emotional moral failure. Why should this be so? Is it because its harder to deal with and opens abysses of recognition that we don't want to face? Perhaps. But in that case, what is it about ourselves and our own vulnerability that we are so afraid of?

But I am not going to glamourise suffering. Its horrendous. Of course we want to avoid it. But in doing so we have deprived ourselves of any means of DEALING with it when we can't. By denying the reality of suffering, we deny ourselves the ability to deal with it. But making ourselves feel like outcastes when it happens, we intensify the suffering and make it worse. By pretending our minds are just illusions, the product of solely physiological phenomena, bereft of purpose or meaning or even choice, we deny ourselves the possibility of meaning in our suffering and reduce ourselves to helpless automatons.

And there is more to it than that. In losing any sense of life as a journey, we have deprived ourselves of any possibility of growth, of any notion that we can face our suffering, work through it, understand it and perhaps heal it, becoming stronger and wiser in the process. This was the whole basis of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism et al. It was the whole basis of Greek culture, of Western Philosophy, of books like The Brothers Karamazov, or plays like King Lear or Waiting For Godot, of the Psychology of Jung or even Freud. Human beings have inner lives which, if not nourished and understood, wither and die, causing more suffering. Reduction of us to meat machines or economic units disenfranchises us from ourselves, making it harder and harder to deal with anything by taking away the structures that give us meaning. One does not need to have a concept of God or religion for meaning to be restored. For each individual life has meaning enough - indeed even the sensation of meaninglessness depends upon the sensation of meaning. And this leads me onto my main point, which is that life needs to be faced in its duality - possessed of joy and pain. Indeed the two are merely sides of the same coin, so perhaps not a duality but a unity. Deny the existence of one and the other becomes meaningless. As someone once said, laughter that never ends is madness, as we see from the endlessly manic capering of 'celebrities' on TV. What has Big Brother been than one long catalogue of attempts to prove that mindlessness and grinning inanity is what life is all about - that one can avoid pain if one just tries hard enough not to experience it? What is the myth of celebrity culture but the belief that if one is famous, beautiful, rich etc all one's problems will miraculously vanish? And yet why do people aspire to being a celebrity? Exactly because they have problems which they want to vanish, problems which just get splayed on every street corner once that celebrity is achieved. Davina McCall, the Patron Saint of Celebrity Culture, said that when she got her first MTV show she cried all night because the emptiness she hoped it would fill, the sense of worthlessness she thought it would counter, didn't happen. And yet she carried on making thousands by peddling the myth that screaming Celeb Culture was the thing to aspire to. Of what use was that?

Unless we face up to our humanity - unless we do as the Buddha did, which was to leave the gilded cage of an existence in which all human suffering is hidden from us (a more accurate description of how we live in the West I couldn't think of!) - we cannot hope to overcome our own suffering or live life to the full. Indeed, we cannot hope to grow. The artificial elimination of suffering - through drugs, television, by hiding away the sick, the poor, the old or the dying - is not the actual elimination of suffering. Nor am I suggesting we should be seeking out suffering or that it is a wonderful thing. God knows I saw suffering as we can't imagine in India! But I also found that in not hiding it away in India, it made it all the more easy to face. I only mean that we need to embrace what life is again, to embrace its painful side as well as its joyous side and, perhaps, seek to unite these two things again so that they cease to be at war with each other. A society which ignores its own suffering is a society which lies to itself. Of course, if we want to dispel the lie, it means facing up to a lot of painful truths about who and what we are, relinquishing the myth of control and admitting that we have messy, watery, frightening emotional and spiritual lives which we might have to engage with. But those of us who have been in those dark places - ask yourself, did it help pretending that they were not happening or avoiding talking to anyone about it? If we were open and honest about it, which is different from being self-indulgent about it, who knows what kind of transformations would we cause in ourselves?

Vast amounts of the human race face these problems every day. It isn't easy being human. But we cannot be anything else. Perhaps its time to try. Otherwise, perhaps, we will be left like Van Gogh with his last words: 'This sorrow will never end'. But facing it need not be terrifying. It could be the most creative thing we could do. After all, look what it brought out in Van Gogh. Few of us want to go to the extremes he went to, but its worth asking the question: if someone had offered him total peace if he would only give up on his Art, what would he have chosen?

No-one wants pain. But if we want peace, we have to accept it is there. It is the only way to deal with it…

THREE GURUS: PART ONE: RAMANA MAHARSHI

2009-06-25T15:18:00.000-07:00

"A realised one sends out waves of spiritual influence in his aura, which draw many people towards him. Yet he may sit in a cave and maintain complete silence." - Ramana Maharshi

Well, I made it. Four months or incredible adventures across the vast landscape of India which took me from such epic sights as the Taj Mahal and the Great Temple of Thanjavur to the natural beauty of Karnataka and the backwaters of Kerala. I saw every religion known to man in operation - Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism, even Bahai (ok so I didn't see Taoism or Shinto, but nobody's perfect) - and drank deep on the mystic wonder of the country. It wasn't all roses. I saw and smelt more shit and faeces than I care to remember, although even that experience came to be an integral part of the whole journey. I remember getting out of a bus to take a photo of the most breathtaking sunset I had ever seen only to be assailed by a wall-like stench of stinking piss... But this was towards the end of my time there and so, almost completely assimilated, I realised then that it wasn't going to faze me anymore. Majestic beauty and utter squalor were all One... India had done its magic...

While I was out there, of course, I couldn't avoid the ubiquitous presence of the Guru. Everywhere you go in India Holy Men and Women abound. While such people barely exist over here, in India they are still very much part of the landscape. Indeed one of them, Sai Baba, claims that India is the last country on Earth where a Guru can completely incarnate. The argument is that the inherent spirituality of the people is still so communally great that, consciously or unconsciously, they can still provide an environment in which the soul of the Guru can fully realise itself. Inherent in this idea is that we are ALL involved in creating a spiritual condition in which things can grow. Thus a genuine Guru is an expression of a collective aspiration towards inner growth... Its a beautiful, anti-elitist idea and says something about how we are all able to make a contribution to the wellbeing of everyone else. But it takes a society which hasn't turned its back on the idea of spirituality to happen en masse. Makes you think about where we are in our part of the world with our rampant materialism and skepticism and what kind of environment that creates for the Spirit to soar....

Cultural comparisons aside (and they are always simplistic), the presence of the Guru is a key element of India. There are many bogus ones, many genuine ones and many scandalous ones with some Gurus, as we shall see, accused of being all three. Not all Gurus have enormous communities attached. Some remain obscure individuals in remote parts of the country with only a few dedicated followers. Others have international organisations attached. I encountered three on my travels, visiting two of their Ashrams and actually staying on one for the greater part of the week. To my delight, it turned out that the three I encountered, two of whom were dead, one living, were three of the most important in India, so I had the chance to encounter the singular power of these three men in person. I thought I would dedicate this post which marks my return to these three men - Ramana Maharshi, Sru Aurobindo Ghose and Sai Baba...

Ramana Maharshi was one of the most famous of all the twentieth century Saints and Gurus of India. So great was his reknown that Carl Jung, when he went to India, made a point of not visiting him. Not only did he not visit him, but he wrote a lengthy article about why he didn't visit him. What is interesting about this article is the fact that he doesn't really explain why he decided not to, except that he felt that India produced Holy Men like Ramana all the time, so there was no real reason to do so. Reading between the lines, one senses that the great man was a little nose out of joint at the fame surrounding Ramana Maharshi. Perhaps everywhere he went everyone said to him 'Oh you must visit his Ashram!' so often that he got a bit fed up with it. A shame, because although the article remains a rather wonderful description of India, it would have been wonderful to know what would have happened had the two men met...

Jung, genius though he was, was always a little suspicious of Indian thought. Although he admired the wisdom of the Buddha enormously, he was not so enamoured of Vedanta and Hindu Mysticism which, to his mind, was the antithesis of his own explorations. For Jung, the purpose of existence was to realise the Self through the Individuation Process. Roughly speaking, this was the evolution of the Self, its development and growth into its fullest nature. It was not the annihilation of the Ego but the transformation of the Ego into something greater than itself, hence his interest in Alchemy with its vision of the transmutation of Lead, the Base Metal, into Gold. For Jung, the goal was to become truly oneself, images of which he included Christ, Buddha and other high expressions of mythic culture such as Mithras, Osiris, Dionysus, Odin and so on. His suspicion, or perhaps wariness about Hindu thought was that to him it was just the opposite, preaching the disappearance of the Ego/Self into the All. Thus instead of realising the Self, in his eyes Vedanta was about annihilating the Self, vanishing it into nothingness. To Jung, this was the antithesis of everything he stood for.

Which is a shame, because the teachings of Ramana Maharshi are not too far from this. His Ashram was the one I spent time on. It was a wonderful experience, even though I was there for only a few days. Had I booked months in advance I could have stayed longer but I wasn't able to even find out where the Ashram was until I got to India, and even then only through the fortuitous event that one of my friends was visiting it while I was in Coorg at the School I was teaching. It is located at the foot of Arunachala, or the Red Mountain, near the town of Tiruvannamalai, a centre of pilgrimage in Tamil Nadu. Arunachala is revered as a physical embodiment of Siva in his guise as the element of Fire (Agni). Legend has it that he manifested as an infinite lingam, or column of flame to prove to Vishnu and Brahma how superior he was to them. Every year in November Sadhus light an enormous pyre there to commemorate this event and, down below in the town, there is an enormous, white-towered Temple honouring Siva as Divine Fire, one of a network of four other Temples in Tamil Nadu which represent his other guises as Divine Water, Air, Earth and Spirit.

Ramana Maharshi didn't found the Ashram, it grew up around him. He arrived at Arunachala as a boy of 16 having had a life-transforming near-death experience which made him understand his existence as Pure Consciousness. I will post his own famous description of the event in the Comments box as a note (1) but, in a nutshell, he underwent a living experience of death in which he felt his body go numb and inert like a corpse. Immediately as this happened, he realised the truth that his body was only a temporary vehicle for something more eternal within - the Higher Consciousness which the Vedantists call the Atman, or World Soul, of which our own individual Atma, or Soul, is part. Suddenly Ramana Maharshi lost all fear of death and from then onwards dwelt in an awareness of this state of Pure Consciousness. He tried to continue life as a schoolboy of 16 and then, thanks to a vision or sense of yearning, found himself leaving his home town of Madurai and undergoing a pilgrimage to Arunachala where he spent the rest of his life, having been guided to the place he needed to be.

Its worth taking a pause here and explaining a little bit about Vedanta and Hindu Mysticism which is the uniting factor of the three Gurus I am discussing here. The word Vedanta stems from the Vedas, the name given to the holy hymns and prayers which form the foundation of Hindu culture. These prayers were 'channelled' by ancient Brahmin Priests of the Aryan conquerors who first poured down into the Indus valley from the Himalayas millenia ago, Veda simply meaning 'Knowledge' (interestingly, the same term for the Western concept of Gnosis and, in a sense, Kabbalah, which means 'received tradition'). Vedanta is the movement or 'Way' which grew out of these divinely inspired hymns and the later Upanishads which supplemented their wisdom. Vedanta, to the surprise of most people who view Hinduism as essentially Polytheistic, is fundamentally Monotheistic. The Vedas and the Upanishads posit the existence of a single Spirit without Form or Limit known as Brahman. This Spirit is universal, omnipresent, immanent and transcendent, containing and sustaining everything, even the Gods. Brahma, Siva, Vishnu, Krishna, Ganesh. Lakshmi, Kali, Durga et al are seen as avatars of Brahman, expressions of this single Spirit which is everywhere. The idea is very much like the Ain Soph of Kabbalah, the One of the Hermetica, the Concealed God of Apophatic Theology, the Tao of Lao Tzu, the Great Spirit of the Lakotah Indians etc etc. Brahman is found in everything, simultaneously everywhere and nowhere and, most powerfully, in the human soul, as the Upanishads reveal. This is the source of their inherent beauty, a beauty which is also sublimely simple, for the Upanishads reveal the essential truth that Brahman is in us just as we are in Brahman. When we know this, and the knowledge is not dependent upon rituals or obedience or penance, 'we go to God' as the sages say.

Vedanta was of special interest to the Quantum Physicists, most particularly Nobel Prize Winners Erwin Schroedinger and Eugene Wigner for a very simple reason: Brahman was defined as Consciousness, or rather Universal Consciousness. The three key terms with which the Vedantists describe Brahman are SAT, CHIT and ANANDA which translate variously as Being, Consciousness and Bliss or Existence, Awareness, Joy (keen syncretists might want to think of the parallels between this trinity and the Trinity of Christianity). The central term, CHIT, is the key one here, as Consciousness is the prime element of Brahman. Given that the Quantum Physicists were keenly interested in the role Consciousness played in the operation and cohesion of the Universe, the Vedantic concept of CHIT was especially important to them. So it was to Ramana Maharshi and, as we shall see, the two other Gurus I encountered.

Ramana's fundamental teaching was that everything was Pure Consciousness. Indeed, Pure Consciousness was the only Reality. Understanding of this was found in the Atma, or Self, also translated as the Soul. If the Seeker could truly understand this, then the antinomies and conflicts of life would come to an end and he or she would dwell in a constant state of ANANDA, or Bliss, as Maharshi himself did. Thus the actual teachings he gave were very simple, often stubbornly so, for Maharshi was very hostile to all esoteric discussion or enquiry which distracted from the pursuit of this knowledge of the Self. Although he knew his way around all the different concepts of Vedanta, he discouraged speculation on Creation, the Nature of Reality, Reincarnation etc, not because he thought they were false, but because he believed what he called 'Self-Enquiry' was the true route to what he was teaching.

'Self-Enquiry' was the exploration of one's own Consciousness. As one's Atma was the seat of this Consciousness and the bridge to the Atman (World Soul) which was One with Brahman, Maharshi urged his followers to ask 'Who is asking the question?' - in other words to go inwards beyond the waking self into the Brahmanic Self which was behind it. Vedanta recognises four levels of Consciousness, each of which is contained within the four syllables of the Sacred Word OM, pronounced AUM. These levels are Waking Consciousness (A), Sleeping Consciousness (U), Dreaming Consciouness (M) and Brahmanic or Cosmic Consciousness (the Silence after uttering the Word). By asking 'How may the Knower be Known', by passing through the different levels of Consciousness, back through all the different illusions which we call the 'I' to the Universal Consciousness, the Seeker would discover the Brahmanic state of Pure Consciousness that each of us truly is. At this moment, Liberation would occur and ANANDA would fill the Soul... As Ramana said, with characteristic simplicity: "Just be the Self, that is all."

Maharshi lived and taught in the Ashram and in two caves higher up on the Mountain where he sometimes retired with only his Mother for company for extended periods of meditation. He never wrote anything and most of the books that contain his teachings were compiled by Disciples who transcribed his different conversations. If one is looking for elaborate cosmological systems or detailed moral teachings, one is likely to be disappointed, as Maharshi tended to turn every conversation back to his central point. Some listeners found themselves baffled as he tried to head them off from fruitless questions about, for instance, how Reincarnation worked. On one occasion, when a listener was expressing frustration that he had not yet had a vision of Siva, he said to him: 'What is more real? The vision of Siva or the person having the vision of Siva? Ask first who is having the vision.' As an example of how he would try to bring back any inquirer to his central truth it is probably unsurpassed.

Even such conversations were rare as more often than not, Maharshi preferred to 'teach' by sitting in silence among his followers, merely emanating his condition of dwelling in a state of Pure Consciousness. To we skeptical Westerners, this sounds ridiculous, mere poppycock designed to dupe the gullible at worst, a way of avoiding doing anything at best. But I can say from experience that a visit to the Ashram reveals the reality of what these silent teachings must have been. Rudolf Steiner, in his writings about Christ and the Buddha, speaks of how when the soul of these individual incarnate in physical bodies, they do important work but the work is, by necessity, impeded by the obviously obscuring nature of human communication. When they die, their physical bodies give way to an etheric presence - ie the earthly Christ becomes the Cosmic Christ or Holy Spirit, for instance - and the work of the former individual takes on a new, more universal, intuitive but at the same time more easily accessible and effective mode. The physical presence gives way to the all-pervading presence. If this is so, it explains the extraordinary atmosphere of the Ashram and its Meditation Room in particular...

The Ashram is approached by a ten or twenty minute auto-rickshaw ride from the bus station of Tiruvannamalai, which, like so many small Indian towns, is a mixture of wreckage, chaos, suffering and squalor but also warmth, vibrancy and life. The road outside the gates are lined by shops, beggars, crumbling temples and the whacked-out looking Sivaite Sadhus who tend them. Inside the Ashram the atmosphere is infinitely calm, as if noise and sound tread respectfully around the trees and buildings within. The only real noise one hears are the sudden, cacophanous outbursts of the many peacocks and peahens that roam freely there along with the monkeys that bounce around regularly. These peacock choruses are such a prominent feature of the place that they even found their way onto the intro of Kula Shaker's first single, GOVINDA, a song to Krishna put to a rock beat (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SyVaLpa_vc&feature=related). They roam around the small collection of huts and buildings that make up the Ashram, which include the administrative centre, complete with bookshop, the Temple to Siva, which includes a shrine to Ganesh and a monument to Ramana Maharshi himself, a dining hall, the Samadhis, or mausoleums of deceased Saints and Teachers, some other hust which serve as accomodation for the Priests and elders of the community and the Meditation Room.

In keeping with the spirit of the man, there is no strict regimen to the Ashram. What programme of events there is fits on a single piece of paper, most of which describes meal times and a few Pujas (ceremonies) and daily readings. No compulsory Yoga classes, no doctrines or teachings being pushed. Instead, one is allowed to roam free, respectful of others, to experience the place as one wants. The effect is to plunge you into a wonderfully calm, contemplative mood, in which nothing is expected of you and so everything becomes possible. One can sit in the main Siva Temple, made in exquisite marble, meditate, or simply watch the people coming and going, praying and circumambulating the shrine. It is the same for the monument to Maharshi and the other Temple building. One can listen to the readings, walk the shrine oneself, drink in the Vedic hymns sung by the Priests at key moments (even without knowing the Sanskrit the effect of the sound is incredible) or even, if one is so inclined, stay in one's room, thinking, resting and reading. At the opposite end of the scale, its possible to pass through a gate at the back of the Ashram and walk up the mountain to the two small caves where Maharshi used to live and meditate for years on end. Be warned, its something of a trek, and given the baking sun, make sure you take water. Oh, and watch out for the 'helpful' guides!

Meals in the Ashram are communal. One sits on the floor with everyone else and eats off a banana leaf food which is so delicious it baffles the mind. In fact these communal meals were a highlight of my stay there. The group feeling of equality, friendship, lack of pretention and togetherness was wonderful and gave me an insight into what life in a monastery or special community might have once been like.

But the real sense of presence is felt in the Meditation Room. It is here that the true magic of Ramana Maharshi is most tangible and where one understands what his 'silent sermons' must have been to experience. I went in on my first day, aware of the Room's reputation thanks to a leaflet my friend had given me which described the overwhelming feeling of the 'sense of Presence' there. I still wasn't prepared for the enormous emotional experience of going in.

It is a tiny room. When he was alive, this was where Ramana Maharshi 'held court' as it were, reclining upon the bed in one corner, while his followers and disciples sat and asked him questions. Now he is gone a life-size painting of him in the Room has taken his place. The powerful atmosphere there was indeed as tangible as I was told. As with the Aurobindo Ashram which I will get to in my next post, the silence and concentration there was something I had never experienced before. I can only describe it as a kind of 'negative silence', a silence beyond silence or below silence. The people within were so steeped in their own meditations that the air felt full of a kind of hidden energy, as if the air had been made especially heavy by the collective concentration of the people within. One didn't even have to meditate to have a profound experience and some of us just sat there, looking about us, staggered by the power of the emotions we were having. I have never been very good at mediatating, but here I could do so and the effect was extraordinary.

The sense of Ramana Maharshi being there in some way was absolutely real and didn't diminish each time I returned to the Room. On each occasion I was struck be the power of the presence in the room, which increasingly felt like it was in another world. The people there were often so deep in meditation it felt like they were floating outside their bodies, or at least in a very altered state. The sense of communication with something deep, profound and benign was very moving. I myself felt that some kind of dialogue was going on just below the frequency of waking consciousness. So powerful and real was it that if you asked me today, I would tell you that I had met Ramana Maharshi. I understood easily what the books meant when they said that often he would just sit there giving off his energy to all who were present....

I was only able to stay at the Ashram for a few days but I will always be grateful for the experience. I will never forget it, or the different people and Gurus I met there and around it. Tiruvannamalai is one of the holiest towns in Tamil Nadu and Maharshi's Ashram still one of the most revered and respected in India. Its a place where one feels genuinely welcome, not coralled or patronised or told what to think or do. The people I met there were all very genuine. There was none of the false spirituality I encountered in other places of the dreadlocked, beautiful-body, yoga-on-the-beach type, nothing New Agey or bogus, just something very pure and simple and, dare I say it, humourous, as if Ramana Maharshi's welcoming, slightly wry, crooked smile was glowing in every corner of the walls...

"That pure consciousness which is the reality, and which shines without a break, as "I AM" when the mind becomes calm, is the supreme bliss." - Ramana Maharshi

THE FLIGHT OF PEGASUS: AROUND THE WORLD IN A BIT OF TIME

2009-01-16T07:33:00.000-08:00

As of next week, I start my voyages around the world. I fly from London Heathrow to Mumbai via Kuwait (!!!) and will travel from there down to Mysore where I will be teaching homeless kids in a remote village somewhere for about a month. After that I will be journeying around India and possibly beyond...

I will be keeping up this Blog from time to time should some mighty ideas occur to me but will also be starting up a new Blog which will just be about my Palin-like adventures in the Far East (that's Michael Palin, not Sarah Palin). Its called THE FLIGHT OF PEGASUS and will be at:

http://flightofpegasus.blogspot.com/

If I have time and find myself at an internet cafe anywhere I will keep the stories coming!

Hope to see you there! Wish me luck!

Pegasus x

A STILL, SMALL VOICE: ISRAEL AND PALESTINE, A PERSONAL VIEW

2009-01-12T06:03:00.001-08:00

I wouldn't normally do this, but I have been asked by various friends to put this on my Blog. I wrote it a few days ago on Facebook. Well, here goes:

Amidst the chaos and pain of what is going on in Gaza at the moment, surrounded by the shrill horror and outrage being expressed all over the world, its very hard to keep one's feet on the ground, to hold onto one's perspective and to recognise that in this crucial moment, if we do not keep hold of our sanity, all hell might break loose (if it hasn't already). In a decade steeped in violence, in which hate-mongers on every side have pursued their illegitimate goals seemingly with any kind of international pressure or law removed, this event in the Middle East still doesn't feel like one of many. We have had the Second Intifada, Sept 11, Afganistan, Iraq, July 7, Darfur, the Bali bombings, Zimbabwe, 2006's assault on Lebanon, the violence in Tibet, the violence in Burma, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Georgia and Mumbai, but still the conflict in Gaza seems or being made to seem different. The fury is greater than any of the others, the desire to punish Israel greater than ever before, the condemnation greater than before and, dangerously, the determination on both sides to throw out all humanity and drive this violent confrontation to its bitter end worse than ever. I myself have been caught in stupid and futile arguments with pro-Israelis and pro-Palestinians blind to the suffering of their opponents. Cheerleaders for Hamas, cheerleaders for the IDF seem united only in their indifference to the reality of the deaths of innocents on either side. With the world poised so precariously, as we close a decade marked by immense tension between nations who want to identify Islam as the enemy and nations who want to identify non-Muslims as the enemy, this conflict threatens to drive us all mad and push us all into further bloodlust and killing in the deranged belief that somehow this will make the world a better place. So I felt that I, at least, wanted to say something about this present conflict, if for no other reason than to have some kind of personal catharsis of my own. A million words have been spent on Israel and Palestine. A few more won't make any difference. So bear with me, even though it might be long.

Before I start, to pre-empt hysterical attacks by frothing at the mouth nuts who will mistake my argument as anti-Israeli or anti-Palestinian, let me make my position clear. I hate this violence. I want it to end. I want the children to stop dying and I don't want to hear any more justification on either side for killing. I want an Israel and a Palestine living side by side in security and peace. I want the wider 'players' who have spent this decade stoking this conflict and making sure it doesn't get resolved fairly - America, Syria, Iran - to back off and allow a settlement to be forced through. We are all hoping that Obama will make moves in this direction. Alas, the problem seems intractable. But for all the screamers and shouters out there, let me make clear that my position is both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian. So shut up before you even begin to open your mouths. Or at least read the whole of what I have written and think about it before you begin to fire off.

So what do I want to say? I want to say something reasonable about this conflict, to remind us of the bigger picture before we all go mad and do something terrible we will regret for ever. Unless we keep our heads, we cannot expect anyone on the ground to. And we are looking at the consequences of not doing that right now.

First of all, what are the origins of Zionism? And what is Zionism? Well, first of all, the term 'Zionist' simply means someone who thinks there should be a state of Israel, or a state with a 'Jewish character' in the same way that France is a nation with a 'French character' or Japan is a nation with a 'Japanese character'. That's it. Within that definition are a host of shades of meaning. The original Zionists, for instance, were secularists and socialists, who wanted a secular nation with a Jewish character built along egalitarian lines in which Arabs, Jews, Christians, Muslims etc could live together much as the Indian National Congress of Ghandi and Nehru wanted for India. Let us call this Left Wing Zionism. This tradition was the dominant one in Israel until the 70s, when the balance of power tilted towards the Right, with Likud, lead by Begin, took power, ushering in the growth of what we might call Right Wing Zionism, which is inherently nationalistic, often bellicose, and sees the whole of what it calls 'Greater Israel' as the destined property of the Israelis. Proponents of this have included Begin, Shamir, Netenyahu, Sharon et al, men who believe that the West Bank and Gaza is theirs, that the Palestinians are a lesser or at least an 'alien' people and who have always been more prepared to use violence to further their ends. It was Netenyahu who began the process of ruination of the Oslo Accords after winning the election against Peres, following the death of Rabin (an election won with the help of Hamas who shattered Israeli belief in the Accords with a lethal series of suicide attacks during the campaign) and it was Sharon who, in alliance with Bush, sent in the tanks against the Palestinians during the Second Intifada (having triggered it by visiting the Temple Mount), destroyed the infrastructure of the PA, built the Security Wall which snaked into Palestinian territory and did everything he could to bypass the Palestinians in negotiating the future boundaries of the State of Israel.

Oops. Bit of a rant there. My point is that when people babble about 'Zionism', they nearly always mean the Right Wing kind, or their fantasy of the Right Wing kind. All Left Wing Zionist opposition to it - from Labour and Meretz, from the artistic and intellectual community, from the many Human Rights movements within Israel such as Peace Now - is ignored. All Israelis are tarred as would-be Sharonites. But this is simply not true. The word 'Zionism' is an almost meaningless term in telling you what someone believes. Daniel Barenboim, for instance, calls himself a Zionist but was a personal friend of Edward Said and insisted on giving concerts for the Palestinians even during the Intifada. Artists such as Joshua Sobol, the Israeli playwright who wrote the great play GHETTO, has spent his life working with Palestinians and Israelis, protesting against the Zionist Right and even speaking in the Knesset in protest against the violence going on in the Territories. And then there are the Refuseniks, the young Israeli soldiers who will defend Israel but refuse to serve in the Territories. The truth of Israel is intensely complex. It serves no-one to lump every Israeli into the group-all term 'Zionist' as if this word effectivly means 'Jewish Nazi Who Wants To Kill Palestinians'. And yet so often this is what happens.

Where did Zionism come from? Well its founding father, as it were, was Theodore Herzl, an Austrian Jew who kicked off the dream of a Jewish homeland as a political reality in the 19th Century. Zionism is so often viewed in isolation that it is almost always forgotten that it emerged in a climate where movements for national self-determination were gathering ground all over the world. In Europe, movements of national unity and independence were gaining ground in Germany, Italy and what was then the Austrian Empire. 1871 saw the founding of the unified states of Germany and Italy, four years after the political campaigns of Ferenc Deak had negotiated the double-monarchy of Austro-Hungary. After the failed rebellion of 1848, the Hungarian leadership had been agitating for equal rights within the Empire and, rather than lose everything, the Austrian Imperial family agreed to the compromise of a dual administration. Thus all over Europe formally oppressed or divided people were demanding representation. And not only in Europe. In India the Indian Mutiny/First War of Independence rocked the British establishment to its core and forced it to reorder its rule of the country. People wanted freedom and nationhood. It was in this climate that Herzl found himself inspired to agitate for a Jewish nation. Zionism didn't just sprout out of nowhere. It followed a logic. If a lot of other stateless or disenfranchised people could have a nation, why not the Jews? It kind of makes sense. And indeed its still a question I would like to hear a satisfactory answer to from those who call themselves anti-Israeli!

Nor was Zionism initially violent or aggressive. At the time of the beginning of Zionist immigration to the Middle East, there was no Israel or even Palestine. The region we now refer to was a backwater in the sprawling Ottoman Empire. The early Zionists hoped that as they appeared in the region, developed it and helped it to prosper, the indigenous Arabs would see the benefits and let a Jewish state take form. Deeply naive, perhaps, but it was what they told themselves. Violent Zionism didn't begin until the interwar years, when a Zionist settler called Jabotinsky developed the Iron Wall doctrine in reaction to the attacks Jews were experiencing at the hands of Arabs throughout the 20s and 30s. The official Zionist leadership - Weizmann etc - didn't like Jabotinsky because of his miltancy and still sought to find a way of co-existing with the Arabs and winning a state through careful development and negotiation. Jabotinsky' s view as one of those who took up arms to protect his fellow settlers, was that the Arab world would, quite understandably, never agree to a Jewish state and would oppose it militarily. The only way to force them to come to an accomodation with the Jews was to present an 'Iron Wall' - in other words to make the Jews so invincible that the Arabs would eventually realise that they could not be defeated by violence and would have to come to the table. What is significant about Jabotinsky, however, is that, unlike his successors such as Netenyahu or Sharon, he didn't believe in perpetual war. At some point negotiation would happen, even after a lot of fighting. At some point the time would come for a settlement.

At first Jabotinsky was expelled from the official Zionist movement who saw him as a violence- monger and an enemy to their efforts to develop peaceful relations with the Arabs. But inevitably as the violence escalated, even the official movement began to take on board some of his ideas. They never allowed the extremist parties such as Irgun and the Stern Gang to be part of the fold (something anti-Zionists ignore or forget when they attack Israel's history) but the Iron Wall doctrine still became a central part of Israeli policy. From 1948 to 1973 and, theoretically throughout the 90s, Israel's Labour Party operated in the belief that the day would come when no more wars would have to be fought and a peace could be made with the Arab world. Indeed, the peace treaties with Egypt in 1977 (sealed by Likud but prepared by Labour) and with Jordan in 1994 suggest that their belief might have been within reach - as were the optimistic days of the early Oslo Accords. But since the Second Intifada, the possibility of any kind of peace must seem so remote now. But its worth knowing about this Iron Wall policy when evaluating the Israeli 'disproportionate response' to Palestinian and Arab attacks. Israel operates with the belief that it is a tiny nation surrounded by enemies. It can only keep its position in these circumstances by maintaining total miltary superiority. If it shows any weakness, it opens itself up to attacks. Thus retaliation has always been a key element in Israeli foreign policy. Negotiations will only happen when they feel secure and in a position of strength, which is why the failure of the 2006 Lebanese War was so disastrous for them and why they are going all out against Hamas. Once the Myth of Israeli invincibility is lost, they believe they will be wiped away. This is not a justification for Israel's actions, its an explanation of the psychology behind it. Expecting the Israelis to operate along the standards of European nations who have lived in peace for 60 years is a hiding to nothing and a hypocrisy. They live under immense real and imagined pressure. Unless they are handled with this awareness, nothing will move forward. The Israelis will not negotiate unless they feel safe. And they don't.

The source of this 60 year problem is, of course, the famous (or infamous, depending upon your view) Balfour Declaration of 1917. In this Declaration, the Zionists secured from Balfour an expression of support from the British Empire for the establishment of a Jewish homeland so long as the religious or political rights of the Palestinians were protected. The British made this Declaration for two reasons. Firstly, they needed the Zionists' support in the region in their campaign against the Ottoman Turks, who were then allies of Germany and Austro-Hungary in the First World War. Secondly, because they never thought they would have to keep it as a promise. At the same time as the British were promising the Zionists a nation, they were promising the Arab tribes self-determination and nationhood if they agreed to help them against the Ottomans as well. Who cam forget the famous scene in Lawrence of Arabia in which Lawrence demands of Allenbrooke assurances for the promise he has made to the Arabs that they can have independence after the war? Allenbrooke hesitates for a moment, his face drops and then suddenly he remembers himself, smiles and then says enthusiastically 'Of course'. In the end, Britain never kept any of its promises either to the Arabs or the Jews. Instead, after WW1, France and Britain carved up the Ottoman Empire into protectorates and client states. Britain got Egypt, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Jordan while France got Syria and Lebanon. The aims of Arab Nationalism got nowhere and the Zionists got nothing. At the root of this conflict, then, lies the duplicity of the British Empire.

And it doesn't stop there. Britain held onto Palestine as a Protectorate until 1947 when the Arab-Jewish violence became too much. At the same time, the Zionists ,driven to desperation, had embarked upon a campaign (yes, a terrorist campaign) against the British authorities to force them to keep their promise in some way. All this came to a head in 1947 when Britain threw up its hands and passed the problem onto the UN. Its a common lie that Israel was created out of the world's desire to make amends for the horror of the Holocaust. This simply isn't true. If this was true, why didn't it happen in 1945 or 46? In actuality, the Jewish refugees from the Holocaust were being kept in camps all over Europe, with no-one willing to take them in - not America, not Britain, not anywhere. Most of them were told by the Allied authorities to go home to the countries they had come from - Poland, Russia, the Baltic States etc - the very populations which had enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazis to have them exterminated. Attempts by Jewish refugees to get to Palestine were blocked by the British. Driven mad by desperation, the Jews in the region embarked on the campaign of violence against the British authorities, a campaign not, alas, that different to that waged by Palestinians in the Territories over the last two decades. It was when all this became unmanageable that Britain gave up and, as with the issue of India and Pakistan, pulled out unceremoniously without ensuring a clean or just handover behind them.

The UN came up with an utterly unworkable plan which created a binational Israeli-Palestinian state in the region divided up like four quarters of a single state with Israel taking the top left and bottom right parts and the Palestinians taking the top right and bottom left. There were hopes that this would force the two communities to work together economically and politically. Some say that the plan was deliberately set up to fail. It was expected that the Arab states would reject the plan (which they did) and invade, driving the Zionists out. Indeed, the Arab armies were largely armed by the countries which had drafted the UN Declaration, while an arms embargo was put on Israel. The Jordanian Army was led by British officers (the famous Gen Glubb Pasha was head of the Jordanian Legion). The only nation to supply Israel with arms was, you will be surprised to learn, the Soviet Union under Stalin, who hoped it could be used as an ally against America in the region. Alas, this plan failed, although contrary to popular belief, America only became a staunch ally of Israel in 1967 after it defeated the Soviet-backed Arab states. Before then, it had remained either neutral or hostile, as in 1956 when it opposed the British-French-Israeli campaign against Egypt over the Suez Canal. From then until 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the region was another Cold War battlefield, just like South Africa, with Israel backing Saudi Arabia and Israel and the Soviet Union backing Egypt, Syria and Jordan at different times. Its no coincidence that the Oslo Accords happened at the same time as Apartheid had come down. The PLO and the Arab states no longer had the USSR behind them and America no longer saw itself as needing to support an ally in its struggles as it had done now that the old enemy had disappeared. George Bush Snr pushed forward the peace in South Africa, Clinton went for a peace between Israel and Palestine. In a time when there was no Big Bad Guy waiting in the wings, peace seemed in reach. Again, its no coincidence that, under Bush and the so-called 'War On Terror' support for the Right Wing in Israel from Washington has been unquestioning. Maybe without a wider peace, a specific peace in the region will not happen.

There is, then, a history to this conflict. One which we forget (or don't know about) but which the people on the ground do not. Indeed, it informs everything they do. The chaos of the 1948 War, in which there was an exchange of populations similar to that between India and Pakistan over Partition, is surrounded by claims and counter claims of ethnic cleansing and duplicity. About 300000 Jews were driven out of their homes by the Arab armies at the same time as 300000 Palestinians were driven out of theirs by the Israelis, a fact almost wholly forgotten, largely because the difference was that the Jewish refugees had a home to go to while the Palestinians didn't. Since then, after 60 years, the Palestinians remain far away from their dream of a homeland. Even their fellow Arab nations have not allowed them self-determination. Between 1948 and 1967 the West Bank and Gaza were annexed by Egypt and Jordan. Palestinian refugees in all the neighbouring states are not taken in or given citizenship, with the exception, now, of Jordan. Instead they languish in camps every bit as squalid as those in the Occupied Territories. Wars have been conducted against them by Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, often because of Arafat's attempts to overthrow the governments of those countries. In the Territories, the Palestinian people have been bombed, shot at, starved, imprisoned, blockaded, bulldozed and had settlement after settlement built on their land (this is an inescapable and unjustifiable fact even for those who are pro-Israel). They have been allowed precisely two elections - one in the 90s which Arafat won, cancelling any others which he thought he would lose, and one in 2005 which Hamas won. Even if one is a supporter of the state of Israel, it is hard to look at videos of the living conditions of the two peoples and not be disgusted by the disparity in comfort. What the Palestinians have had to put up with is hopelessly unfair to say the least. It is no wonder that the population has been driven almost mad with fear, suffering, pain and rage.

At the same time not a day or week has gone by in the whole history of Israel without some kind of attack across their borders. They have had to fight four wars against their neighbours - in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 - all against overwhelming odds (there were more tanks on the Syrian Border in 1973 than on the entire Russian front when Nazi Germany invaded in 1941) and have become embroiled in Lebanon again and again since the 80s. Meanwhile they have had to defend themselves against constant border attacks over the years from the PLO, Hizbollah and Hamas and relentless suicide attacks throughout the 90s, especially during the period of supposed negotiations during the Oslo Accords. Meanwhile on the airwaves, threatening proganda pours their way from Iran, Syria, Lebanon and God knows where from. Land-grab or not, the Security Wall is a symbol of how terrified and despairing the Israeli population is, however tough and defiant they may appear to the world. Nobody stops to think about the fact that unique among the nations of our planet, Israel is the only country which has some form of security wall around all its borders. It is totally encased in defences of concrete or barbed-wire and wood, protecting it from attacks from Hizbollah in the north, Hamas in the south and suicide bombs all along the border of the West Bank. If Israel do end up holding on to the Palestinian land west of the Wall, it will come at a cost. People often liken Gaza to a prison. Israel is destined to become one big bunker or fortress, or, dare I say it, one big concentration camp. It was Begin, I think, who described the borders of Israel as the borders of Auschwitz. Seen from an Israeli point of view, it is tragic that, having escaped the original borders of Auschwitz to found their own state, they find themselves hunkered down behind another military boundary, a terrible physical symbol of how the Jewish people still see themselves in the world - friendless and needing to defend themselves at all costs as no-one else will do it for them.

None of this is a defence of Israel or justification for 300 dead Palestinian children. What it is is an attempt to get into the heads of the two communities, to try to understand where they are coming from and why they do as they do. Because if we don't, if we go on thinking that the Palestinians or the Israelis just wake up every morning deciding, without any cause, to be violent, we will get nowhere. If we continue to believe that all Palestinians are rabid, unnegotiatable-with lunatics bent on killing or all Israelis are jackbooted racists barely restraining themselves from massacring all the Palestinians, we will go on lying to ourselves and justifying any act of terror and violence. One of the ugliest elements of arguments over this issue is the tendency of otherwise rational people to pick over every death and give it a relative value. Israelis should put up with rockets and suicide bombs because they are an evil country. Palestinians should put up with their schools being blown up with their children in them because they voted for Hamas. Its no good. In all the hysteria and condemnation over this issue, the calls for economic blockades, for punishment of the Rogue State of Israel, for support for the wiping out of Hamas, the marches for Israel and against Palestine or for Palestine and against Israel, where are the voices which are calling for peace, for negotiation, for a condemnation of violence on both sides? In short, where is the march in favour of BOTH Israel and Palestine?

Why is it impossible to recognise the legitimacy of both peoples' calls for justice, security, honour? Why should the Palestinians have to live in squalor, their rights taken away, with no home? Why should the Israelis have to live in a constant state of readiness to protect themselves against threats from Hamas, Hizbollah, Iran and Syria? When the Saudis pushed forward their Peace Plan again last year, Iran wasted no time coming forward to say it wanted no part of it. We all want a solution, but it will not just depend upon Israel and Palestine. The wider players will also have to agree to stop using the conflict as a way of increasing their control of the region.

What no-one seems to understand is that whatever the outcome, security and justice for Israelis and Palestinians is going to involve them having to find way to get on with each other. A military solution is impossible, as everyone knows but will not accept. The short-term catharsis of violence gives both sides the illusion they are doing something when in fact they are not. Hamas and Hizbollah's dream of destroying Israel and creating an Islamic Republic is never going to happen. Likud's dream of a Greater Israel without any Palestinians is never going to happen. Besides all that, there is absolutely no way that an Israeli and a Palestinian state existing side by side will not find themselves intimately interwoven politically, culturally and economically. The two sides are never going to get away from each other. The only way is to find some means of living together. But while we wait for Hell to freeze over before either side realises it, we will just go on seeing this futile carnage and have to endure the hysterical and hypocritical bleating from supporters of both that they are the real victims, that their acts of violence are justified while the other's is not and that, somehow, a dead Israeli child is more or less important than a dead Palestinian one, depending upon which set of killers you are waving a flag for.

The problem is that for anyone other than an Israeli or a Palestinian, this conflict is a kind of abstraction or political game. For the protagonists, it is real. Everyone enjoys getting on their high horse about this issue, demonstrating their indignation, thrilling themselves by their moral righteousness about their anti-Imperialist stance against the Zionist Entity or refusing to back down in front of 'terrorists' and the Axis of Evil. None of it does a shred of good. The only way is going to be negotiation. We know its hard. After almost a decade of knife-edge wheeler-dealing during the nineties, with the uselessness and corruption of the Palestinian Authority's leadership on one side, and the capriciousness and impossibility of the Israeli electoral system on the other, the Oslo Accords dissolved into disaster and the Second Intifada. People wanted violence more than they wanted accord. The tragedy is they were very close. I have read the documents on the Taba negotiations and they were a breath away from sorting it out. But violence won. The Israelis blame Arafat, the Palestinians blame Barak. We know negotiations are hard. But they are the only way.

Here is what I want to happen:

1) A ceasefire now in Gaza, before either side can claim a victory. That way neither side can lose face. If Israel get bogged down and cannot defeat Hamas, it will be a disaster for them as everyone will know they can be beaten. If they wipe out Hamas and flatten Gaza, it will never be forgotten or forgiven by the Palestinians. Stop the fighting now. Israel lets humanitarian aid in and lifts the blockade while Hamas agrees to cease firing rockets. All hostilities will cease. If need be an international force polices the borders, as Israel has asked for.

2) Once a ceasefire has been established the main international powers involved, or the Quartet as we call it, pushes forward with a non-partisan plan to bring both sides to the table for negotiations. This will involve Israel recognising Hamas as a democractically elected government and Hamas recognising Israel's right to exist. People tend to forget that Israel has been asking Hamas to do that. If Hamas are a democractically elected leadership and so should be recognised, so should Israel be recognised by Hamas, as it too has a democratically elected government.

The Palestinians should be represented by a power-sharing Government consisting of Fatah and Hamas, as was possible a while ago. Unless the Palestinians are united, they will never hope to get anywhere with Israel.

3) Taking either the Taba Negotiations of the Saudi Peace Plan, negotiations need to begin involving all the regional players - Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Egypt etc - to create a comprehensive and just peace for all parties. Incentives MUST be given by the international community to both sides to compromise and find a way towards common ground. If need be, threats of economic sanctions will have to be used to gain leverage, although it would be great to avoid this. George Bush Snr managed to force Shamir to the table with the Palestinians in the 90s by threatening to freeze the US subsidy to the country. If any party - and I mean ANY party, not just the Israelis if anyone thinks that is what I am saying here - refuses to cooperate, such leverage will have to be used.

4) All violence will have to cease on all sides - Hamas, Hizbollah, Israel etc. Both Israelis and Palestinians must be enabled to live without the threat of death coming through their door at any moment.

The only way in which there will be a solution is if this concerted, unified effort takes place. Everyone is hoping that Obama will embark on such a process once he is in power. But no-one knows if this will happen or if a settlement will be possible. All we do know is that there is no other way. The signs are not terrific. The arch-revenant of the Right, Netenyahu, the architect of the destruction of Oslo (and, some say, one of the voices which helped lead to the atmosphere of extremism that lead to Rabin's death), looks like returning like some creature from the Living Dead. Clinton couldn't make him play ball. Obama will have a real struggle to bring him to the table. On the Palestinian side, there are only signs of disarray, despair and disunity, with no clear, strong, pragmatic leader to unite their people. But if we don't do it, the pain will go on, the violence will go on and the conflict will continue to serve as a means to polarise the world community, to inflame passions and encourage extremists to further war and bloodshed. Other than a new push for peace, what alternative is there?

One thing we can all do is refuse to give in to hysteria and refuse to shout loudly for the punishment of one side or the other. We are not there. We are safe in our homes. Taking sides, while emotionally satisfying in the short run, will not help any more. We have to aim for something else - the reconciliation of the two peoples. If we can't do it from this distance, how can we expect them to?

And if we don't, we could find ourselves bearing witness to an even greater catastrophe, one which will devastate both communities. Its unthinkable. Ask yourself: do you really want that?

DISSING DICKY D: THE DELUDED DUDE: PART THREE

2008-12-28T13:38:00.000-08:00

So let's look again at what the Penis-Headed One has to offer about Quantum Physics. Firstly, he says that its conclusions are based on "assumptions" which are "so mysterious that even the great Feynman was moved to remark : 'If you think you understand quantum theory... you don't understand quantum theory'."

Well, perhaps by this reasoning Dawkins DOES understand Quantum Theory, because he clearly DOESNT understand it, as none of the basic principles of Quantum Theory are assumptions at all. Rather, like most science, they are observable facts (insofar as anything is a fact). Action at a distance or non-locality, in which separated electrons act as if they are unified even at infinite distances, the tendency for things at a subatomic level to exist as potentials until they are observed and interact in some way with something else, the ability of electrons to exist in two places at once, the fact that everything is part of a unified, seething mass of quantum processes, these have all been OBSERVED by Scientists. They have not been 'made up' or 'assumed'. Unfortunately for Dawkins, the controllable, understandable, discrete world of cause and effect on which his entire world view is based dissolves into holistic uncertainty when it reaches the Quantum Level. Poor him. No wonder he regards the whole field as 'that rarified pinnacle of twentieth century scientific achievement'! It leaves him clinging to a bit of drift wood after the Good Ship Darwin has dissolved into a sea of weirdness.

Nor is Quantum Science 'true in some sense' because it makes predictions well. It is as true as any other scientific observation. Nor is it rarified, as the findings of Quantum Science have delivered us concrete 'things' which include lasers, DVD players and so on, simply by the way in which we have begun to understand how things operate on such a tiny level. So Quantum Science is NOT rarified at all. It has delivered the much-needed material pay-off scientists like Dawkins need to feel safe about things... A Materialist does need something material to hold onto after all.

Le Dawks goes on to speak of the 'shatteringly paradoxical' and 'shatteringly wasteful' Copenhagen and Multiple Worlds Interpretations of Quantum Physics, both of which he says violate 'common sense', that superbly scientific tool which loosely translates as 'what we can see' and 'how we think things are' (for a giggle, find out how Einstein defines it). Does this suggest Dawkins perhaps doesn't understand what he is talking about, hence his repeated quoting of Feynman on this point? Or is he wary of Quantum Science because it challenges his mechanistic/deterministic world view? Well if its the latter, he isn't alone, as this remark from Einstein reveals:

"All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundation of physics to this new type of knowledge completely was as if the ground had been pulled from out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built." - quoted in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist

Poor Einstein! But at least he was brave enough to acknowledge what Bohr referred to as the sudden "insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions", as did Heisenberg when he said:

"The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science" - Physics and Philosophy

So Dawkins finds himself in the position the Church started to find itself in in the Renaissance when Galileo and other Scientists began to unearth truths about the Universe which contradicted their long-established view. Poor Dawks! Of course, one hopes he doesn't start erecting stakes in outside the Royal Society with the intention of burning Quantum Scientists.

Even worse for Richard, the great giants of early Quantum Science found themselves turning to ancient texts by deluded Hoodoo merchants from India and China to grasp a better understanding of what they were discovering (so maybe we DO need those stakes after all!). Here are a few Scientists you may have heard of referring to Lao Tzu, the Buddha and others:

"The general notions about human understanding... which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, or new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom." - Robert Oppenheimer

"For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory... [we must turn] to those kinds of epistemological problems with which thinkers like the Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonise our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence." - Niels Bohr

"The great scientific contribution in theoretical physics that has come from Japan since the last war may be an indication of a certain relationship between philosophical ideas in the tradition of the Far East and the philosophical substance of quantum theory." - Werner Heisenberg

So where does that leave Mr D? We have had Einstein acknowledging the 'religious geniuses of all ages' and now Oppenheimer, Bohr and Heisenberg all giving the nod to Buddha, Lao Tzu and the Upanishads! One might even surmise that these other Scientists had READ these texts, unlike Dawkins, who has not. But as we have seen, Dawkins doesn't need to, as he can spot a book covered in pasta from a mile off. Of course, once again, none of this proves God exists, but the argument that anyone who does believe this is an idiot and cannot possibly have anything to offer the Pure Endeavour of Science is starting to look decidedly thin...

The more we dig into Quantum Theory, the more outlandishly mystical its claims are about our Universe. We have established, for instance, that Quantum Theory points to a holistic vision of the Universe at a subatomic level. Even if one takes out the role of the Observer in establishing 'wave collapse', the concept of 'Entanglement' - in which when two electrons interact they become as one, thus fixing their states and, in larger 'Entanglements', forming material objects - leaves us in a mysterious situation in which everything is bound up with everything else. Worse than that for Dawkins, this 'Entanglement' is completely universal in nature. If the Big Bang theory is correct and all the Matter in the Universe was contained in a single point, then a) the Universe is no bigger in terms of Matter than it was then and b) every electron/proton/neutron in that Boson that has been thrown out into the Universe as we know it as is operating non-locally with all the others ie it is 'Entangled' and capable of operating along the lines of 'Action At A Distance', as mentioned above. This means that the Universe is, quite literally, an enormous web of interacting electrons, protons and so on. It genuinely is One, with all the independent things within it only appearing to be so, just as the Mystics have said. As Marcus Cheown puts it:

"There is a ghostly web of quantum connections crisscrossing the Universe and coupling you and me to every last bit of matter in the most distant galaxy. We live in a telepathic universe. What this actually means physicists have not yet figured out." - Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You

Of course, when Cheown uses the word 'telepathic', he doesn't mean it literally. What he means is that, given the observable phenomenon of 'Action At A Distance' and 'Entanglement' they act 'as if' they were telepathic. In other words they seem to exchange information between each other in a way we don't understand, or at least not yet. One suggestion is that the Speed of Light is being violated, but that would go against a central tenet of Relativity Theory. Another is that they interact through through the superimposition of an infinite number of Multiple Universes which come into being at the instant any Quantum Process has taken place. Another is that the 'Action At A Distance' indicates that the Universe operates in a state of unbroken wholeness. None of these please Dawkins much as an explanation. A shame. But there's no pleasing some people. And only an irrational fool dares criticise Science, don't you think? Thank God Dawkins has Feynman's quote to let him off the hook of trying to understand these ideas!

No, Cheown doesn't mean 'telepathic' literally. To mean it literally would mean the Universe had a mind, wouldn't it? If that were so, wouldn't it be a bit like 'God'? Ridiculous! Except some Quantum Scientists are saying just that. David Bohm, for instance, who I have mentioned before, reasoned that, just as our physical universe emerges out of a wider, potentially infinite sea of Quantum Processes (demonstrably true), so does Consciousness. Just as Matter is concentrated Energy, so is Thought, an elegant idea which might explain how the brain and human nervous system is able to convert electricity into Conscious Processes. Thus Matter and Consciousness are seen to be synonymous, just as Time and Space are thanks to Relativity Theory:

"We have shown in some detail that matter as a whole can be understood in terms of the notion that the implicate order is the immediate and primary actuality, while the explicate order can be derived as a particular, distinguished case of the implicate order. The question that arises here, then, is that of whether or not the actual 'substance' of consciousness can be understood in terms of the notion that the implicate order is also its primary and immediate actuality. If matter and consciousness could in this way be understood together, in terms of the same general notion of order, the way wold be opened to comprehending their relationship on the basis of some common ground. Thus we could come to the germ of a new notion of unbroken wholeness, in which consciousness is no longer to be fundamentally separated from matter." - Wholeness And The Implicate Order

If Bohm is right, it would overturn all the biological determinism of modern science with its view that Consciousness is an 'epiphenomenon' of the brain. It would overturn all Dawkins' smug notions of evolution as a purely random process, as Consciousness would have to be taken into account as part of the evolutionary process - something Quantum pioneer Wolfgang Pauli himself suggested. With this interpretation, instead of being dependent on Matter, Matter becomes a means by which Consciousness transmits or expresses itself, the two being one. Not only that, but by implication Consciousness would have to be a latent property of the entire Universe with us as concentrated, localised expressions of that Consciousness, just as our physical bodies are concentrated, localised expressions of the material/energetic quantum processes of the Cosmos. In fact Bohm's theory stands to reason, even if it is hard to 'prove'. If all Matter is non-local and entangled, independent material objects being just expressions of a universal Quantum Field, then how can Consciousness not be the same? If the boundaries of Matter are illusory thanks to the Field, how can Consciousness not operate in the same way? Just as we would have to draw a distinction between a general field of Quantum Matter and localised material objects (eg our bodies), we would have to draw another between a generalised field of Consciousness and localised, differentiated Thought (eg us). Alas, all this just lets in the back door every Mystical notion known to Man ie that the Universe is Mind, that God or Siva is 'dreaming' us, that the we are all microcosms of a macrocosmic First Thought or that as Buddhism says, 'mind and matter are eternally the same'. The nutty delusion-merchants were all correct. Einstein's Cosmic Religion comes full circle. And Dawkins' 'common sense' idea of Science looks like a dusty old dinosaur being picked over by a dessicated Cardinal, both clinging to their rather limited concepts of what the Cosmos might be.

It gets more interesting when one follows the implications of the Consciousness/Matter theory to its logical conclusion in terms of Relativity Theory. If Consciousness is interwoven with Matter which we perceive in three dimensions and if Time is the fourth dimension, interwoven with three-dimensional Space, then it follows that Consciousness must in some sense be the fifth dimension, as it is part of Matter which is the same thing as Space. It is also an Energy, as all Matter is Energy. And Energy at its basic level is Light. Thus the whole Cosmos is Sentient or Conscious Light forming itself into different shapes, some of which are more Conscious than others. And to take things one step further, we know that our physical Universe only exists thanks to its relationship with the Speed of Light. Its existence, therefore, is relative. Thus in one sense, it is an illusion, possibly one of many other levels of existence moving at different speeds, some faster, some slower, and all filled with Dark Energy and Matter, none of which we can see or detect... And if Everett is right, all of these Universes and levels of existence are splitting off into infinite number of other Universes all around us every moment of the day...

Sound silly? Sound almost Mystical to you? And yet these are all things which are being debated by scientists. The problem is that at the moment we cannot test or 'prove' any of it yet beyond thought experiments, theory and mathematics, so we have to rely on, er, faith, or at least abstract thought until we find a way to do so. As popular a theory as String Theory, for instance, would require devices the size of the Solar System to even begin to verify them. So what are we to do? Well we can go back to our safe little Dawkinsian world with its fixed, deterministic rules and close the door of the cage on ourselves. Indeed this is exactly what Ricky does do, putting forward his 'Middle World' theory of a human mind evolved so as not to see things as they are because it didn't need to. If it did, it would not have been able to maintain itself in our apparently three-dimensional world:

"Our mental burka window is narrow because it didn't need to be any wider in order to assist our ancestors to survive" - The God Delusion

A point put perhaps more vigourously by the arch-enemy of Science and the probably the greatest exponent of loony mystical bonkerdom, William Blake, when he said:

"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." - The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell

How could two such opposing minds come together and reach the same conclusion? Dawkins thinks only Science has tried to "emancipate ourselves from the Middle World, tear off our black burka, and achieve some sort of intuitive - [again that word Intuitive! What happened to Reason?] - not just mathematical - understanding of the very small, the very large, and the very fast?". He is wrong, very wrong. Science is one of the many ways in which we have done this, Mysticism has been another. The correspondences between the findings of both seem to point to some kind of unity of insight. Indeed the whole endeavour of the human race has been to penetrate to the truth of things long before Dawkins's heroes came along, which is why people who have explored Mysticism probably have no problem grasping the non-linear reality of Quantum Science (although New Age woolliness doesn't help). Not only that, but the ideas of some of the people he has most contempt for, or would have if he had heard of them, might just hold some answers. Then we might be able to combine the inner study of the Mystics and the outer study of the Scientists into something very special, something which might be able to bring us together instead of tearing us apart.

But as we hold our breath waiting for this to happen, we can be sure of one thing: God loves Richard Dawkins too!

DISSING DICKY D: THE DELUDED DUDE: PART TWO

2008-12-03T10:03:00.000-08:00

Before we get on to Quantum Physics, let's just rewind a moment to Einstein's notion of a 'Cosmic Religion' which Dawkins says 'we can all superficially sign up to'. If one looks at what Einstein actually said (which as we have seen Dawkins probably didn't), unfortunately for him, this vision of the Universe as one enormous harmony before which one stands with awe is exactly how the Mystics of all ages saw it. Einstein acknowledges as much by citing St Francis of Assisi, Democritus and Spinoza as sharing his vision. What Dawkins doesn't seem to realise is that these people ascribed a numinous intelligence to the natural world, believing that what we call 'God' revealed him/her/itself through Creation. In other words, the physical world was 'alive' in some way, suffused with some life-giving energy which lay behind the harmony we can see throughout it. It was contained something transcendent as well as immanent. Thus Einstein is not saying what Dawkins says he is saying ie that Cosmic Religion is just worship of the processes of Nature. St Francis, for instance, could not by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as someone who did not believe in God, and yet Einstein includes him in his roll call of geniuses. Now, this should invalidate Dawkin's argument, but it doesn't, or if it has, he hasn't noticed. So how can a bunch of hoodoo merchants possibly come up with something akin to what Einstein believed? Or rather what Dawkins THINKS Einstein believed? Well, at the risk of getting totally bogged down in 'definitions' and 'proofs' of God's and his/her/its existence, here goes at having a look...

The notion of a God which reveals itself through Creation is common to every single Mystical Tradition. In almost every instance this 'God' is not non-personal and both immanent and transcendent, therefore corresponding exactly to Einstein's definition of Cosmic Religion. Here are a few examples:

"God is whole and constant. In himself he is motionless, yet he is self-moving... He is hidden yet obvious everywhere. His being is known through thought alone, yet we see his form before our eyes. He is bodiless yet embodied in everything. There is nothing which he is not... He is the unity of all things... He is the Whole which contains everything. He is One, not two. He is all, not many. The All is not many separate things, but the Oneness that subsumes the parts. The All and the One are identical. You think that things are many when you view them as separate, but when you see they all hang on the One and flow from the One you will realise they are united - linked together and connected by a chain of Being from the highest to the lowest, all subject to the will of God" - the Hermetica

"The journey to God begins with the awakening to the concept that the phenomenal world is a veil which conceals the Divine. We begin the Quest by removing the veil, only to become aware that the veil and the Divine are one and the same thing. The veil is the theophany itself: the manifestation of the Divine through Its Names and Qualities. When we see the veil, we are seeing nothing but the Divine." - Laleh Bakhtiar (Sufi Mystic)

"The Ancient of Ancients, the Unknown of the Unknown, has a form, yet also has not any form. It has a form through which is the universe is maintained. It also has not any form, as It cannot be comprehended." - the Zohar

"There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all." - St Paul

"Exalted in songs has been Brahman. In him are God and the world and the soul, and he is the imperishable supporter of all. When the seers of Brahman see him in all creation, they find peace in Brahman and are free from all sorrow." - the Upanishads

Oh dear! Does this mean that Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews and a whole lot of other nutty deluded fools were closer to Einstein than we think? To be fair on Squawkins, his view is a LITTLE subtler than this. Here he is on Einstein's Cosmic Relgion:

"As I continue to clarify the distinction between supernatural religion on the one hand and Einsteinian religion on the other, bear in mind that I am calling only supernatural gods delusional." - the God Delusion.

Okay! I get it! In fact Dawkins is a closet Mystic who is united with the 'greatest religious geniuses of all ages' and would be happy to rub shoulders with the likes of Ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhardt and Rabbi Isaac Luria. Or maybe he believes in Tree Spirits and Water Nymphs? They at least are natural. Or the Great God Pan? Or Ogun? Or maybe Dionysus, the God of Indestructible Life? Somehow I think not, although he gets close to saying something like it when he says, quoting Einstein again:

"'To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious [says Einstein]'. In this sense I too am religious, with the reservation that 'cannot grasp' does not have to mean 'forever ungraspable'. But I prefer not to call myself religious because it is misleading. It is destructively misleading because, for the vast majority of people, 'religion' implies 'supernatural'. Carl Sagan put it well: '...if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity'." - the God Delusion

The muddle of this passage needs a little unravelling. Firstly, no-one did more to make 'graspable' the workings of the Universe than Einstein (considerably more than Ricardo himself), so it is fair to assume he didn't mean what Dawkins thinks he meant. This throws up another point which is what we mean by a Mystic. Dawkins says that a Mystic believes there are things which are beyond understanding 'and we should leave it at that' when in fact if anyone looks into Mysticism they will know that the opposite is the truth. The origin of the word Mystic is from the notion of the Initiate into Mysteries - in other words someone who is NOT leaving anything 'at that' but is trying to penetrate the inner Mysteries of the Universe. Dawkins assumes Mystics operate on Ignorance, when in fact a key element of all Mystical systems is the defeat of Ignorance, hence terms such as Gnosis or Enlightenment and the unusual fact that a lot of Mysticism deals with issues of Consciousness, the nature of Reality and the processes of the Cosmos regardless of the existence or non-existence of God. This is why so much esoteric study is as much about processes of Creation, study of natural phenomena an states of Consciousness as it is about spirituality, morality and 'God'. The writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, for instance, are a case in point. Whole chunks read like Science lessons and indeed it comes as no surprise that this most esoteric of books was a profound influence on people like Kepler, Newton and even, it would seem, the first splitter of the atom Ernest Rutherford, who included Hermes Trismegistus on his coat of arms, presumably not because he wanted to identify himself as a deluded idiot.

The Sagan quote shows, once again, the low level of understanding in evidence here. As Dawkins says 'for the vast majority of people, 'religion' implies 'supernatural' ". Alas, this applies to Dawkins too. In spite of his polymathic-telepathic knowledge of all the different things the world's religions 'imply', for Dawkins, 'God' is to be defined on the most primitive and basic of levels - a supernatural being outside Time and Space who punishes bad guys and rewards good guys, responds to prayers and favours his followers. Thus he is fighting on the same low level most of his opponents are on. The absence of a personal God is central to Mysticism, as Einstein pointed out. The Kabbalists, for instance, characterised God as an Infinite Field of Conscious Light (an interesting idea given Relativity Theory and E=MC2 as a paradigm for existence), with our world of physical things as an expression of that Light (again, see Relativity Theory). Granted, one doesn't find this spoken of much in Synagogues, but it is nevertheless a major part of Judaic thought. If one looks further than the Cornflakes Packet Guide To World Spirituality, one finds that the same definition holds true in Greek Orthodox Christianity, Platonism and neo-Platonism and - hey - pretty much all the other spiritualities of the world from Zoroastrianism, in which God's name is 'Right Thought' (Ahura Mazda) and all of Creation is made out of Light, to the Supreme Intelligence of Buddhism of which we are all part which is also pictured as an iridescent light. Out of all these visions of Light the material Universe unfolds, suffused by that Light even in its most dense forms of Matter. Once again, we are close to the ideas a certain Einstein came up with...

A God of limitless energy which reveals itself in created things is exactly what Sagan is clumsily lurching towards, defeating his own argument by suggesting that any God which is not anthropomorphic is 'emotionally unsatisfying'. Thus believers in any kind of 'God' are in a Catch 22 situation. An Anthropomorphic God is emotionally satisyfing but silly while a Universal God revealed in Nature is not silly but emotionally unsatisfying. So where does that leave us? Well, given the ubiquitous nature of of the latter vision of the Divine throughout the Mystical Traditions of the world, one would have to conclude that Carl is wrong, at least about the 'emotionally unsatisying' part. But I like the idea of Richard Dawkins the believer in a natural God. That would be fun, don't you think? He does, after all, say that Pantheism is 'sexed up Atheism'. Sounds plausible to me. If we look at the history of Pantheism as evinced, for instance, by pre-Christian cultures, they all thought along the lines of Dawkins, did they not? I would have thought so. Pop in a time machine back to the era of Paganism and ask them if their worship of the Great Mother was 'sexed up Atheism' and they would be bound to tell you 'Oh yes, Mr Dawkins! It certainly is! We are just pretending to worship the creative power of Nature as personified in Eoster/ Astarte /Danu /Ishtar /Isis etc. And while we are at it, what do you think of our theory of the structure of the atom?'

What Dawkins is doing is confusing his hatred of Religion with the possible existence of something more than the material. Dawkins' anger is towards the hypocrisy, double standards, superstition and repressiveness of so much Religion, be it Caste oppression in India, female circumcision in Muslim Africa, Creationism in the Christian Right in the US or hatred of homosexuals in the Catholic Church etc etc. Well, we can most of us sign up to that. Einstein certainly did! Dammit I can sign up to that! But because these practises take the existence of God as their justification has nothing to do with whether God, however we chose to define him/her or it, exists or does not exist. Many spiritually-minded people refuse to follow any religion because they dislike its excesses in much the same way as Dawkins does (me for instance). Equally, many people within religions retain a clear-sighted awareness of where their religions have gone wrong without losing their own personal faith. Likewise being interested in the existence of things like 'God' or the Soul does not mean you suddenly have to subscribe to what a bunch of Rabbis, Priests or Imams tell you. In other words, the reality of all these things is infinitely more subtle than Dawkins is willing to admit. Better minds than his have grappled with these issues from a religious/spiritual and non-religious point of view and come up with more fascinating and compelling answers.

Besides which, as a Scientist, Dawkins should be aware that the most current theories about the origin and workings of the Universe are so extraordinary that even ideas such as his take on Evolution become rather paltry in the light of what is really going on. In a recent book on Quantum Theory I found Cosmology described as 'the ultimate science', operating on a scale which dwarfs almost every other discipline we have, and yet this seems to be something he knows little about... which brings me rather neatly round to where I was going to come in: Quantum and Relativity Theory... Shall we take a look and see where these take us?

DISSING DICKY D: THE DELUDED DUDE: PART ONE

2008-12-02T14:21:00.000-08:00

As readers of this Blog will have noticed from my many references to the man, I am a great admirer of 'Popular Scientist' Richard Dawkins (pictured here without the penis which is normally seen growing out of his head). Polymath, genius, witty raconteur, possessed of enormous breadth of vision and empathy as well as raffish good looks, few can compare in terms of insight and understanding of the true nature of existence. His comprehension of the nuances which differentiate Theism, Atheism, Deism and Pantheism (he seems not to have heard of Panentheism. Too many syllables perhaps?) is breathtaking. And all this without actually having to find out about any of them! As he says in his book The God Delusion in rebuttal of those who accuse him of not knowing what he is talking about, he doesn't actually NEED to know what he is talking about in order to be able to talk about it:

"To expand the point, most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc." - The God Delusion

I'd just like to say what a pleasure it was typing that out. Touching genius is always exciting and for sheer poetry and use of language, that passage matches the best of any sacred book. Also, hats off to a man who believes in 'Reason' and 'Evidence' arguing in praise of his own ignorance. That is impressive. To reinforce his point, he moves on to rebut the accusation that he uses the 'Straw Man' method of attacking religion. This refers to the practise of creating one's opponent in one's own image - eg saying all religious people are stupid, behave like 'Robertson, Falwell or Haggard, Osama bin Laden or the Ayatollah Khomenei' (a direct quote, I kid you not) or believe in an utterly simplistic view of God, ignoring all other expressions of religious feeling - and so setting up an easy target to attack. Well argued as this is, it seems strange to claim one isn't doing this when only half a page before one has been proudly proclaiming that there is no reason to find out what any of these people actually believe. Such is Dawkins's genius that he can understand where his opponents are coming from through a kind of miraculous mental osmosis. He doesn't have to read books. Only those he is arguing against need to do that. He just knows. Amazing. To adapt the words of Bill Hicks, that's Reason in action for you!

I am being unfair, of course. Elsewhere in the book Dawkins shows that he is enormously well read on all sorts of subjects. On Carl Jung, for instance, one of the most interesting of explorers into the psychology of religion and spirituality, he has this to say:

"It is in the nature of faith that one is capable, like Jung, of holding a belief without adequate reason to do so (Jung also believed that particular books on his shelf spontaneously exploded with a loud bang)." - The God Delusion

Presumably Dawkins didn't feel he needed to actually READ anything of Jung's to come to this conclusion. It doesn't appear that he has even read the book in which he describes this 'exploding book' incident (Memories, Dreams, Reflections if anyone is interested). But then why would he need to? After all, Jung only helped revolutionise our understanding of how the mind works and went deeply into the nature of spiritual belief in all its forms. I mean, its not as if he knew anything about it. To say that Jung had 'no adequate reason' to believe in God would seem astonishing considering his lifelong work in the study of the mind, his voluminous reading and his friendships with some of the century's greatest thinkers. At the very least he could not be accused of 'not looking at the evidence'. But no matter. Dawkins doesn't have to read any of his stuff to know what he thought. All he has to do is look in the Oxford Book of Quotations or the back of a Cornflakes packet.

He's not all wrong, though. Here he is on Newton, a fellow scientist and one, he admits, who doesn't necessarily fit into his idea that no scientist ever, ever, ever, even if he said he did, believed in God:

"Newton did indeed claim he was religious. So did almost everybody until - significantly I think - the nineteenth century when there was less social and judicial pressure than in earlier centuries to profess religion, and more scientific support for abandoning it." - The God Delusion

I love this argument, one which he extends to all artists and thinkers before the nineteenth century (including people like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci) that as only stupid people have any spirituality all the most talented people in the world could only have been pretending to be religious. In other words, they were closet atheists, just like Richard, only bullied into pretending to believe in God. So there we go. Sophocles, Homer, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, T S Eliot - all these people were just pretending. Sounds plausible to me. After all, if they were not all pretending, then they must have been psychotic and mentally ill, which is what Dawkins suggests when he defines what he means by delusion.

But lets look again at that sentence about Newton, that he "did indeed claim he was religious". Of course, Dawkins is right here. He did 'claim' it. Here is Newton 'claiming' he was religious and his views on the relationship between his discoveries and God:

"Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done." - quoted in Isaac Newton: Inventor, Scientist and Teacher

On God and Nature:

"This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being. … This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called “Lord God” παντοκρατωρ [pantokratōr], or “Universal Ruler”. … The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect." - Principia, Book III

And here he is on Atheism:

"Opposition to godliness is atheism in profession and idolatry in practice. Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors." - A Short Scheme of the True Religion

Of course, Newton was only pretending when he said this. He was also only 'pretending' to be interested in arch-Hoodoo practices Kabbalah, Astrology and Alchemy (his translation of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus is one of the most famous in the world) and most especially when he wasted a lot of time and energy writing the first ever study of a Bible Code! Indeed, Dawkins would probably be deeply upset if, in an altruistic act of descent from his lofty Tower of Ignorance, he were to discover that Newton's studies of Alchemy were probably the most important single influence on the development of his Scientific ideas. Newton was in fact a militant anti-Atheist, unpleasantly so, as intolerant as Dawkins is in his non-belief. I sometimes wonder if Dawkins isn't actually Newton reincarnated, arguing from the opposite point of view to work off some weird karma.

The point I am trying to make is not that Newton's spirituality or Jung's erudition mean that God exists, only that Dawkins' argument that Belief is incompatible with Science (or even intelligence!) is totally fallacious, as is the idea that Science began in the last two hundred years. The roots of rational thought lie in ancient Greece, for instance, one of the most religious and myth-orientated cultures in the world, while cultures like the Egyptians and the Mayans achieved astounding feats of architecture and astronomy in spite of believing in a host of bizarre-looking Gods.This is not even to get on to the subject of the incredible variety of artistic achievement involved with a religious or spiritual world view. From ancient Greek theatre to the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, spirituality has gone hand in hand with the most extraordinary artistic creative power. But of course, I forgot: they were all only pretending.

Its not fair to slam Dawkins so easily. He does know a lot about religion. Really. Here he is on some of the more Eastern beliefs:

"I shall not be concerned at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism. Indeed, there is something to be said for treating these not as religions at all but as ethical systems or philosophies of life." - The God Delusion

There might indeed be, unless one had actually looked into them. If he had, he would know that Confucianism genuinely ISN'T a religion and never pretended to be. It was always a philosophy, so even bracketing it with Buddhism is wrong. As for Buddhism, well clearly Dawkins is happy with ideas of Reincarnation, the Threefold Body, the Greater Consciousness of which all is part, the Six Worlds in which one can be incarnated and the legend of Shambala? Is he familiar with the Boddhisatva Vow? Or the many Saints of Mahayana Buddhism? Or is it possible that, in fact, he doesn't know anything about it at all? After all, how could one fit all that information on the back of that already crowded cornflakes packet?

I'm not even going to get into Dawkins and Einstein, whose ideas on these subjects were much subtler and informed than his successor. Einstein was certainly not a Believer in any traditional sense but nor was he a Materialist Atheist like Dawkins. Indeed he was far more humanist than Dawkins, who, if you look deeply into what he says, is actually deeply reductionist in his Darwinism and his view of human nature. Nor did Einstein believe, as Dawkins did, that Religion had made no positive contribution to our culture or civilisation, or that no religious person was possessed of any insight or understanding:

"The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling [Cosmic Religion], which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no Church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with the highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as Atheists, sometimes also saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi and Spinoza are closely akin to each other." - The World As I See It

Doesn't quite sound like Dawkins does it? Curiously enough, Dawkins doesn't quote this passage in his book (must be that damned Cornflakes packet again!). Einstein genuinely WAS a polymath and someone who was well-informed. If he rejected something, he knew what it was first. He rejected organised religion having been brought up with it. I have some respect for that. Dawkins was brought up an Anglican (a little like judging Chinese food by a bowl of plain noodles) but stopped there. Einstein actually studied ethics, philosophy, religion, mysticism, art. Not for him Dawkins' muddling of religion up with spirituality & mysticism (or even God!). The four are all interrelated, but they are not the same. In drawing a distinction between figures such as St Francis of Assisi and the average Believer, Einstein shows an awareness of the nuances of what he is talking about. Indeed, he touches upon the universal spirituality which is shared by the Mystics of all cultures - largely because he actually knows about them. Dawkins does not. Its all just one big bowl of noodles for him (we are back to the Pastafarian gag). He's going to empty them on your head no matter what and claim he's come up with a dispassionate, rational argument while he does it. Oh. And I have just realised that I DID get into Einstein and Dawkins, having said I wouldn't. How irrational is that?

But its futile criticising Dawkins for his ignorance about the things he attacks. And nor do I disagree with everything he says, as my own comments on the problems of organised Religion on these boards might suggest. I'm not a Creationist and don't belong to any Faith. Nor do I take literally every idea I have put on these posts. For me, all of these Mystical Systems are metaphors for something else - higher states of Consciousness if you like, an enhanced understanding of who we are and what we might be. They are ways of talking about experiences we have, images we can use to release insights and free ourselves from stultifying ways of thinking. All well and good. But what I don't believe is that we are only lumps of evolved meat, nor are we vehicles for genes to propagate. And if he had even a bean of intellectual honesty (something he likes to bang on about a lot) he would admit that Darwinism does not explain the source or creation of life, only how it evolved once it started. Even if it did, it explains nothing about the origin of the Universe. One doesn't need to believe in God to know that that mystery still remains unsolved (although he does say 'We're working on it' which is good to know). Sorry, Richard. I don't buy it. What we do know is that Dawkins' view is reductive and exclusive. There's plenty of proof for that. He thinks he has the monopoly on the truth. He does not.

But you are not going to win this argument with Mysticism. As I say, its futile to attack Dawkins with spiritual ideas. If one wants to run rings round him, one must take him on on his own turf - Science. This is paying him something of a courtesy, as he won't do this for someone arguing against him, but never mind. So where does Science open the box he is so determined to close up and seal? Well, lets see what he has to say on a subject which we have already discussed on these boards:

"Quantum Mechanics, that rarified pinnacle of twentieth century scientific achievement, makes brilliantly successful predictions about the real world... This predictive success seems to mean that quantum theory has got to be true in some sense; as true as anything we know, even including the most down-to-earth common-sense facts. And yet the assumptions that quantum theory needs to make, in order to deliver those predictions, are so mysterious the great Feynman himself was moved to remark... 'If you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory'." - The God Delusion

Again, all well and good. But then he goes on to say that 'Quantum Theory is so queer that physicists have to resort to one or another paradoxical 'interpretations' of it. Resort is the right word." He then trots through the main 'interpretations'. Fellow militant Atheist Everett's 'Multiple Universes' Theory is 'staggeringly wasteful' while Bohr's 'Copenhagen Interpretation' is 'not wasteful, just staggeringly paradoxical' (although he doesn't say what it is or why). In the end, he says, all of this fails to satisfy either 'human common sense or intuition' (Intuition? What? The opposite to Reason?!), but 'the more macho scientists don't care' as long as 'the mathematics work'.

And this is pretty much as far as it goes in terms of discussing it... Dawkins suddenly slips off into a conversation about how 'queer' the Universe is, the ridiculousness of psychic goats and then how terrific it is that Science is asking these questions (as if nobody else ever has). Faced with the complete rebooting of our concept of 'Reality' suggested by Quantum Science, Dawkins runs back to his cave with his idea of the 'Middle World', or the 'common sense' reality we can touch or feel. Why? Well clearly for two reasons.

1) he doesn't understand Quantum Theory (that cornflakes packet again), nor does he want to, hence his nervous ridiculing of it and

2) because it completely violates every assumption - physical, scientific and metaphysical - upon which he bases his views...

VISIONS OF JOHANNA: THE LAST SUPPER: PART FIVE

2008-11-16T14:33:00.000-08:00

"As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you; if ye keep my command- ments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in these things, and abide in his love. These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full." - John 15:9-11

It is Paul who makes the connection between Love and the Holy Spirit overt:

"And now abideth Faith, Hope and Love, these three; but the greatest of these is Love." - 1st Corinthians 13: 13

It is a favourite device of the New Testament writers to refer to the Trinity in veiled terms through the use of three parallel words. Here Paul equates the Father with Faith (we have Faith in the Father because we cannot see or feel him), Hope with the Son (who gives us the message of the future) but we Love through the Holy Spirit. Thus Love in the guise of the Holy Spirit, or the Holy Spirit in the guise of Love which completes the drama of the Incarnation, pervading everything, uniting us with each other and with the Divine:

"No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit." - 1st John 4:12-13

Thus just as the great Kabbalists understood the role humanity had to play with God in healing the Universe, the great Christian Scribes of the New Testament understood how the energy of Love provided the perfecting connection to be made between God and all Creation. The great Beguine Mystic Marguerite Porete, drawing upon the ideas of Augustine, took this to its most sublime conclusion when she wrote that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost were to be understood as 'the Lover, the Loved and Love':

"Beloved, what do you wish from Me?
I contain all things which were,
And are, and shall be,
I am filled with all things.
Take from me all which pleases you:
If you desire from me all things, I will not deny.
Say, beloved, what do you wish from me?
I am Love, filled with the goodness of all things:
What you will, we will.
Beloved, tell us plainly your will."
- Marguerite Porete: The Mirror Of Simple Souls.

So Love and the Holy Spirit prepare us for the final chapter of John's account of the Last Supper, the great threnody to God from Christ, unsurpassed anywhere else in the Gospels. Everything is coming to a head. The Divine connection has been made between Christ and the Godhead. The most sustained communication with the Divine in the whole of the New Testament is about to unfold. If John's Last Supper is not already Mystical, it goes way beyond the boundaries here, as ideas of Man and God, Time and Reality, Gnosis and Faith merge into one.

The Chapter starts with a continuation of the process of Glorification mentioned before. As the 'circuit' is established in the first Chapter with Judas' exit, it is continued and intensified here. As Christ speaks directly to God, the language of the lines becomes pregnant with meaning, as if something is being channelled from on high, the Divine Energy being passed on to the Disciples. In so doing, something of Christ's Cosmic Nature slips through:

"These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. I have glorfied thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with thine own self with the glory that I had with thee before the world was." - John 17:1-5

That last line in particular is fascinating. It bends time, revealing Christ's nature as an expression of the Logos as being continuous across Time. In the wording is an echo of the words of the Sophia in the Book of Proverbs:

"The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was... Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him." - Proverbs 8:22-23 & 30

Some theologians equate the Logos of the opening passage of the Gospel of John with the Sophia as well as Christ, seeing the process of Creation as being an interplay between the male and female energies of God, the Sophia becoming a hypostasis with the Trinity. For the Gnostics, this was doubly so, with the Sophia and Christ being Syzygies of each other, or two parts of t the same entity. Whatever the case, there seems to be a Sophianic echo in these words, and a stronger revelation of the pre-existence of Christ. This is, of course, not the only place that this occurs in John's Gospel. There is also the cryptic discussion in Chapter 8:

"Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: he saw it, and was glad. Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham? Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am." - John 8:56-58

The inference here is that Christ as Logos appeared in some way to Abraham, perhaps as Melchizedek, as some commentators argue or as the 'three men' of Chapter 18 of Genesis. Whatever the case, there is a little timebending going on, just as there is in the description of the Trinity which begins Revelations:

"Grace be unto you, and peace, from him which is (the Son), which was (the Father) and which is to come (Holy Spirit)". - Revelations 1:4

We are being encouraged to think 'eternally', or non-linearly in terms of Time. Past, present and future are being seen as one. And as Christ's nature is potentially our own, as we shall see, it is being revealed that this non-temporal state is also ours.

A significant line in the passage quoted above ("And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.") reveals the essential Mystical/Gnostic element of the Christ message. Indeed, it is in this Chapter that we can understand why the Gnostic Christians valued John's writings so highly. For when Christ refers to 'knowing' God, he is referring to the Gnosis, the 'Knowledge' of God which was so prized by the Gnostics and so denied by the traditional Christians, who placed Faith as the primary source of Christian experience. If Christ is not talking about the Gnosis here, then what does he mean by:

"O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me." - John 17:25

And indeed this is where the Gnostic and non-Gnostic interpretations of Christianity should come together, contained in these central statements of Christ's doctrines. Christ speaks at length about "he that believeth in me" being rewarded, but without the 'Knowledge' of the Gnosis, which presumably lies behind the whole Incarnation, the Christ Message is pointless. Church teaching has always been about waiting until after death for the Beatific Vision of God. Here in John's Gospel, this is directly contradicted. Faith and Knowledge must come together to create the Union with God which is the centre of the Gospel message.

As Christ exhorts the Father, he brings in another element of the process of Theosis, the Name and the Word. As the Glorification continues, everything becomes about transmission of energy from the Father through the Son, onwards to the Apostles and, by extension, to all who come after. The ultimate end of this process is a relationship with each other which is identical to that of Christ with the Father:

"I have manifested my name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them mel and they have kept thy word. Now they have also known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee. For I have given them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and they have known surely that I came out from thee, and they believed that thou didst send me. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine: and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are one." - John 17:6-11

"That they may be one, as we are one" - what more Mystical a statement could there be? While Catholic and Protestant teaching has put a gulf between human experience and God, John compares the possible experience of the Disciples, and by extension us, as being exactly like that between Christ and the Father. So we see how the Christ Nature is potentially our own. John is not alone in this vision, of course. In Matthew Christ says "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Matthew 5:48), suggesting a state of perfection available to humans the same as that enjoyed by God. Once again, the radical nature of the Christ Message emerges. This is what Meister Eckhardt meant when he said that "The first fruit of the Incarnation of Christ, God's Son, is that man may become what the Son is by nature". Further, through the connection between Christ and his followers Christ is himself 'Glorified', just as he 'Glorifies' God and vice versa. Spiritual channels are being opened up between the Father, the Son and all humanity in which all become 'ensouled'. The image of Unification is absolutely clear. And in a passage quoted in an earlier post it is overtly described in terms of an inheritance, passed down through generations of followers from the moment of the Last Supper onwards:

"Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe in me through their word; that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one even as we are one. I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one." - John 17:20-23

Again we have that word 'perfect', the term given to the Cathar leadership (Parfait/Perfecti). Surely it refers to a state of Wholeness, of completion in the Spirit, the Healing the Soter/Saviour has come to do. Wholeness and Unity - these are the key elements of these words, a Wholeness and Unity which combine Love, Truth, Gnosis, Faith and the Holy Spirit, all merged into a Union with the Father and the Son which is both within and outside Time. Of these qualities, it is Love which is the most important, and it is with this that John's description of the Last Supper, with all its Mysteries ends:

"And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and in them." - John 17:26

Once more we learn of the indwelling of Love and Christ in us. There is no separation, no conditions, not even much talk of sin and very little of any kind of intermediary between humanity and the Divine.

These, then, are the Mysteries of the Last Supper, recorded at length by John. Their complexities are subtle and neverending, but lie at the heart of the energetic life of Christianity. It is no wonder, perhaps, that this Gospel out of the four has most appealed to the Mystics, whether heretical or orthodox. It expresses a grass-roots spirituality which, far from being anti-human, is profoundly humanist. The issue of what the Churches have made of this message, how it has been obscured, misunderstood, confused, ignored, denied and, let's face it, often violently suppressed, are the subject for another time. For now we may be grateful that with all the revisions and changes made to the New Testament over the centuries, somehow the Gospel of John has made it through with its greatest words more or less intact. Perhaps their obscurity has not helped, but that is the way with Mysticism, although one could also argue that their obscurity is how they have been able to survive the scrutiny of those who would happily keep us all in a spiritual prison and throw away the key. There is no concept of Original Sin here, just a description of a spiritual inheritance available to all, whether the historic expression of Christianity in our world understands it or not.

And in the hope that one can keep hold of the Spiritual Baby while throwing out two thousand years of stinking bathwater, this analysis of John's account of the Last Supper comes to an end...

VISIONS OF JOHANNA: THE LAST SUPPER: PART FOUR

2008-11-13T14:55:00.000-08:00

"These things have I spoken unto you, being yet present with you. But the Comforter, the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you... Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." - John 14:25-26

The chief agencies of this unified relationship between God and Man are Love and the Holy Spirit (as well as Belief). As we shall see, Love and the Holy Spirit are very closely related. In fact they are one. But for now, let us explore this notion of the Holy Spirit, the third and least-understood element of the Christian idea of the Godhead. In John's account of the Last Supper, Christ has certain very specific things to say about it:

"If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of Truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you and shall be in you." - John 10:15-17

Here and in the quote at the top of this page Christ is referring to the Holy Spirit as the 'Comforter', a rather weak translation of the Greek word 'Parakleitos', meaning "one who consoles, one who intercedes on our behalf, a comforter or an advocate". In this passage he also refers to it as 'the Spirit of Truth', or 'Alithea' in Greek. What is interesting here is that, just as he describes himself as potentially dwelling within us, so does he speak of the Holy Spirit, in words which suggest that it is the medium whereby God can and will dwell within us, just as predicted in the Book of Jeremiah :

"But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people." - Jeremiah 31:32

and the Book of Joel:

"And it shall come to pass afterward. that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." - Joel 2:28

In Kabbalah and Judaism, the Holy Spirit is known as the Ruach HaKodesh, 'Ruach' meaning, as we know from an earlier post, 'Breath'. For the Jews, this was the spirit of Prophecy, the energy with which the great Seers of the Old connected with God. For the Greeks, the word for the Holy Spirit, the 'Haghia Pneuma', meant the same: 'Holy Breath' ('Pneuma' meaning 'Breath'). In fact our word Spirit comes from the Latin 'Spiritus' which also means 'Breath', and yet nowhere has it ever been translated this way in our Churches. Understood in this way, as the Sacred or Holy Breath of God, it becomes synonymous with the Hindu idea of Prana, the Divine Breath of Brahman which infuses the Universe and gives us life. It is the energy which 'moved upon the face of the waters' in Genesis and which was breathed into the clay out of which Adam was formed by God. Suddenly Christianity connects with the primary aspects of Creation and the most universal pan/panentheistic ideas of the East. In a sense, the Holy Spirit is the point of connection between Western Spirituality and ideas such as the Dao of China or Brahman/Prana in India. It is no wonder, perhaps, that it has fallen short of the attention given to the more anthropomorphic and masculine images of the Father and the Son, and yet if Christ is to be believed, neither the Father or the Son can be understood without it. For the Gnostics, the Holy Spirit was the key to everything. In the Pistis Sophia, the so-called "First Mystery' is described as 'the Father in the form of a dove'. In other words, one cannot comprehend the higher reaches of the Godhead in any other way...

The Greek concept of the Pneuma existed long before Christianity reached the peninsular. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus posited the existence of the Pneuma as a fire-like energy which pulsed through everything, sustaining and giving life. If one reads 'Light' for 'Fire' one gets a sense of what he was getting at. Indeed most so-called 'Fire-worshipping' cultures, such as the Zoroastrians are actually revering Light, fire and flame being the most concrete manifestation of that Light-Energy available to the human eye. The subtleties inherent in the names and imagery associated with the Holy Spirit, be it as the Pneuma, Spiritus or Ruach HaKodesh point towards an extraordinarily complex and multi-dimensional appreciation of its true nature. Traditionally, the Churches have insisted that it is a male energy, thus creating an entirely masculine Godhead from which femininity is excluded, but if one looks deeper the reality is very different. At the very least the Holy Spirit is beyond gender, or is androgyne. If anything it errs more on the feminine than the masculine, as its appearance as a Dove at the River Jordan suggests:

"And Jesus, when he was baptised, went up straightway out of the water: and lo the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him." - Matthew 3:16

"And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him." - Mark 1:10

"And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased." - Luke 3:22

"And John bare record, saying, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him." - John 1:32

Given the non-synoptic nature of John's Gospel, the fact that it agrees with all the others over this central image suggests that it was a key one. The one other significant moment in the Bible which features a dove is in the story of Noah when, after the Deluge, a dove and a raven are released to find evidence of land. While the raven does not return the dove does with an olive branch, suggesting that the waters are receding. In Alchemy, the dove symbolises the purified White Rose which emerges from the 'Death' phase of the Nigredo. Thus here the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove represents the result of the purification process undergone through the Baptism of John in the sacred River Jordan. By any standards a dove is a female bird. Clearly, then, the Holy Spirit is not male, or at least not wholly male and, for its primary manifestation, it choses an image of femininity. Perhaps the Church should think again. But to do so would bring it line with the Gnostics who saw the Holy Spirit as the expression of the Divine Sophia. So perhaps not...

The story of the Baptism and the appearance of the Dove brings up another issue about the Holy Spirit - that of its relationship to the four elements, for as befits the highest expression of the Spirit, the Haghia Pneuma is identified with all of the elements except for Earth. John the Baptist begins the revelation of the Spirit by the distinction he draws between the Baptism he offers and that Christ will:

"And I knew him not: but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me: Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost." - John 1:33

The Baptist's point here is that with the New Dispensation ushered in by Christ, Baptism will no longer only have its material or physical dimension but will be endowed by its spiritual, more Cosmic one. The water of the earth will be transformed and transfigured by the 'water' that is the Holy Spirit. Quite literally, the Gospel is revealing the esoteric truth of 'As above, so below'. Christ reinforces this claim in his discussion with Nicodemus in a dialogue which again hints at the feminine nature of the Holy Spirit:

"There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: the same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know though art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him. Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb and be born? Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God." - John 3: 1-5

The imagery of birth and rebirth, of water and the Holy Spirit all points towards feminine energy. In almost all cultures, and especially in pre-Christian ones, the transformative moment for the Soul lies in the moment of reentry into the Womb of the Great Mother, or Divine Feminine. In an earlier post we looked at how the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone were echoed in the story of Mary Magdelene and Christ at the Tomb. Similarly, it should be remembered that the Creation was begun by the spirit of God moving "upon the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:2). In Kabbalah, the Spirit of God and the Waters here are known as the Higher and Lower Shekinah (ie Binah and Malkuth) or the Great Mother and the Daughter. The spiritual waters and the earthly waters combine to bring forth life. Thus, perhaps, in reuniting the image of water and the Holy Spirit within references to being born, Christ is suggesting a return to the wholeness inherent before the Fall. There is a connection here with the "bitter feminine waters" of Kabbalah too, sometimes referred to as 'Marah', which is the root word for the names Miriam and Mary. Once again, the Bible points towards a feminine energy when speaking of the Holy Spirit. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that in John's Gospel, one or more Marys are always present at the key miracles to do with Resurrection - Lazarus, the Tomb etc etc.

If the Holy Spirit is here identified with the element of Water, elsewhere it is Air and Fire. We have looked at how Pneuma, Spiritus and Ruach all mean 'Breath'. This makes immediate sense of Christ's references to 'the Wind':

"The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit." - John 3:8

Once again, there are echoes here of previous cultures which also identified the Spirit as Wind as a feminine energy. For the Egyptians, for instance, Isis was also known by the epithet 'The Wind of Heaven' and was the chief agency of the Resurrection of Osiris. The Pneuma as Wind appears in the New Testament most famously, though, in the Book of Acts:

"And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance." - Acts 2:1-4

Here the Holy Spirit is both Air and Fire. If one adds the imagery of Water, one sees that in the encounter of the Holy Spirit with our material world (Earth) everything is made whole, all four elements being united as one. Given the Spirit's transcendent nature, its oneness with God, it provides the fifth element, or Quintessence, which provides the goal of all mystical striving: Spirit, also known as Ether in the West and Akasha in the East. This in every way the Holy Spirit is the Healing Breath of God (David Bohm was always fond of pointing out that the word 'Holy' shared the same root as the words 'Whole' and 'Healing'). Through its agency, Christ fulfils his role as the Soter, the original Greek from which we get the English 'Saviour'. In its most ancient meaning, Soter simply means 'Healer'...

VISIONS OF JOHANNA: THE LAST SUPPER: PART THREE

2008-11-03T10:47:00.000-08:00

"I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness. And if any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not; for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world." - John 12:46-47

Before we move on, a quick word about this idea of Christ as the Cosmic Man. Ever since I can remember, this has pretty much been the whole point of the Christ Mystery for me, although it is of course inherent in all cultures. I remember standing in a bookshop once in Oxford in front of an image on a poster of a Byzantine icon of Christ Pantokrator (Christ the Creator of All) and being taken into a sudden meditative state of being. It was as if by looking at the picture I was taken somewhere else. The sensation was of falling through Time and Space into the Cosmos. Not bad for an afternoon's shopping in Blackwell's! Since then - and of course there was a little more to it than a poster in a bookshop - any contact I have had with most mainstream Christianity has been one of bafflement. Their's was not an experience I recognised.

As I have mentioned before, every culture has its idea of the Cosmic Man. In Kabbalah it is Adam Kadmon. In Hinduism it is Purusha. The idea is of all humanity held together in one great human form, the World Soul if you like, also known as the 'Atman' in Hinduism or the 'Anima Mundi' in the West. In Christianity it is both Adam and Christ, Adam being the 'Old Cosmic Man', bound by Time and Space, Christ being the 'New Cosmic Man' restored to Wholeness and Unity with the Father and transcending Time and Space. As Paul puts it, we are all both:

"And so it is written, the first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit... The first man is of the earth, earthy, the second man is the Lord from heaven. As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy; and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly... Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed." - Corinthians 16:45-51

The ideas is found first in the Upanishads, which draw no distinction between Purusha, the Atman and Brahman, the Spirit Supreme:

"Beyond the Spirit in man is the Spirit of the universe, and beyond is Purusha, the Spirit Supreme. Nothing is beyond Purusha: he is the End of the path. The light of the Atman, the Spirit is invisible, concealed in all beings. It is seen by the seer of the subtle, when the vision is keen and is clear... the knowing self in the Spirit of the universe, and the Spirit of the universe in the Spirit of peace." - Katha Upanishad

Similarly in Kabbalah, Adam Kadmon is so at one with God that it is almost impossible to distinguish them. The spiritual progression is from our own Spirit to the Cosmic Man, from which, or in which, we experience the Atman and, consequently Brahman. This, perhaps, is what Christ means when he says "I am the way and the truth and the life; no man cometh to the Father except through me" (John 14:6) and when he describes himself as 'the true vine' (another reference to Dionysus) in which we must 'abide'. Thus Christ as the embodiment of the Cosmic Man is the means, or the Path, if you will, whereby we in the West may achieve perfect union with the Father:

"Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe in me through their word; that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast seen me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one even as we are one. I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one." - John 17:20-23

Words which in themselves echo another embodiment of the Cosmic Man, Krishna in the Bagavad Gita:

"I am the same to all beings, and my love is ever the same; but those who worship me with devotion, they are in me and I in them." - Bagavad Gita 9:29

Thus Christ is expressing a Upanishadic vision of the Cosmos and our relationship with God. What is interesting is that in our part of the world, as opposed to that of the East, we have needed the figure of Christ to mediate the way. Dion Fortune said that each region of the world evolves spiritually in different ways according to the karmic challenge that region represents. She argued that we in the West are the most susceptible to Matter. We feel it more intensely than other cultures and seek to overcome it, hence the immense materialism of the West and its specific development of a scientific view aimed at conquering and harnessing it. Thus while in the East the vision of the Divine was universal - Brahman, the Dao - we in the West needed the image of the Incarnation, an overt image of God dwelling in Man, to break open our awareness of the Cosmos and its presence in us. Thus while other cultures had other kinds of Incarnations - Krishna, Osiris, Dionysus, Siva etc - the knowledge was given us through the image of one who was unmistakably human. Thus Christ is one of many expressions or avatars of the One, but holds a unique place in being the means by which this Mystery of was revealed to us in the West. While Krishna and the others were more Gods with human form, Christ was clearly both a man and a God as this was the only way in which this truth would be received:

"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest though then, Show us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father and the Father in me?" - John 14:9

The key thing with the Gospels, and the Last Supper of John in particular, is that Christ hasn't quite got there yet. In the history of Christianity there have been endless centuries of debate about the true nature of Christ. Was he just a man or wholly God? The Arians, Docetists and Cathars all thought he was purely Divine or made of Spirit, others, some Gnostics believed he was a man, Jesus, who became Divine as Christ. Others still, the Unitarians, believed he was purely human and doing God's will. For the Catholics he is God become Man, for the Greek Orthodox he is wholly human and wholly Divine and so on. In John, the true nature of Christ is at its most complex. We know from the outset that he is 'the Word made Flesh' who 'dwelt among us', that is, the Logos which is the prime creative energy of God. But he also speaks repeatedly of his role solely as the agent of the Father's will and not as an independent being:

"The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me." - John 14:10

But we have seen how a prime connection has opened up at the moment of Glorification, moving him much closer to God. Perhaps it is most close to the truth to say that, while Incarnate, Christ is the Word subject to Time and Space. In other words, God existing as a human, subject to weariness, emotion and danger until the moment of the Resurrection and later Ascension, when he is able to return to the Father and, henceforward, exist outside Time and Space, in other words, in his capacity as the Cosmic Man:

"I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because I live ye shall live also. At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you. He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him." - John 14: 18-21

Fascinatingly, all esoteric doctrines speak of a similar process for all the human race - the Soul's descent from the spiritual realms into the realms of Matter, incarnation into this world for as long as the moment when it recognises its Divine Nature and then begins the journey back (or forward, depending on your perspective) to the Source, the All. Thus Christ is an image of the fully realised man whose Divine Nature has been revealed to him and become his Soul Life. In this sense he is 'the Way' - ie the one who shows the way for the whole human race back to God. Thus, as the Gnostic Gospel of Phillip puts it, the receiving of the 'Chrism' (from the Greek Kharis, meaning 'Gift' from which we get the word 'Grace) makes one 'not a Christian but a Christ'. Should this feel shockingly heretical, it should be remembered that the opening verses of John's Gospel tell us that the Word is come to give us all "the power to become the Sons of God" (John 1:12). Likewise he tells us in the First Epistle that "we shall be like Him" (1st John 3:2). And should there be any doubt, Christ himself tells the Apostles in the Last Supper:

"Verily, verily I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father." - John 14:12

Not insignificantly, these were the words that German Mystic Meister Eckhardt used in his defence when he was brought up against the Inquisition for heresy. With great indignation he accused his accusers of going against Holy Writ in denying the promise given by Christ of the Divinisation of the human race. For the Church at the time any suggestion of humanity coming close to the Christ-nature was anathema (it is still not uncontroversial). Nevertheless it remains central to the view of many Christian Mystics from St Augustine to Julian of Norwich, Marguerite Porete, Johannes Tauler, John of Ruysbroek, St Teresa of Avila and many others. In the East, on the other hand, among the Orthodox of Greece, Russia and others, the notion is integral to their vision of Christianity. It is known as Theosis and is the ultimate end of the drama of Christianity - the Divinisation of everyone, a perfect Union with God for the whole human race...

VISIONS OF JOHANNA: THE LAST SUPPER: PART TWO

2008-11-02T08:52:00.001-08:00

"Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also." - John's Gospel 14: 1-3

As I mentioned in my last post, John's account of the Last Supper takes up five chapters. This is not insignificant, as the number five makes up the number of limbs of the Cosmic Man - two arms, two legs and a head - as well as the Pentagram, symbol of the Goddess, healing and protection. That Christ represents, or is to come to represent the Cosmic Man made whole is presaged by the symbolism of the Five Wounds of Christ. In Kabbalah, five is the number of the world above the four worlds of Assiah, Yetzirah, Beriah and Atziluth. This fifth World is Adam Kadmon, the World of Primordial Man who is placed closest to God. Some commentators claim that the four Gospels correspond to these lower four Worlds, with John's pointing towards the fifth, unrevealed one. It is fitting then, that John unfolds his Mysteries accross five chapters, the first documenting Christ's betrayal and the splitting of the Jesus/Judas self, the last being between Christ and God alone:

"These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee" - John 17:1

We will return to this chapter - almost a threnody to God by Christ - later, but it is fitting that this last chapter corresponds to the head of the Cosmic Man. It is the most Mystical in nature, the one in which the channel between the Father and the Son opens most powerfully. As Paul says "The head of every man is Christ... and the head of Christ is God" (Corinthians 11:3)...

As soon as Judas has departed, as soon as that part of the Divine Self has separated off, Christ begins his final words to the Disciples. His opening subject, the thing that comes before all else, is pretty clear:

"A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, that ye also love one another." - John 13:34-35

Love is his subject, before all else. It forms the centrepiece of the whole of the Last Supper, indeed of the Gospel in its entirety; not Sin, Hell, mortification of the flesh or any of the other things we associate with Christianity. Christ mentions his 'new commandment' no less than three times in all five chapters, and love comes up almost everywhere as the chief agent of transformation:

"As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love. If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love, even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love. These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you and that your joy might be full. This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all the things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you... These things I command you, that ye love one another." - John 15: 10-15

and later:

"For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God." - John 16: 26-27

Love becomes the central unifying force between Humanity, Christ and thus God, an idea given its full meaning in the FIRST EPISTLE OF JOHN which is the apotheosis of Love Mysticism at the heart of these writings:

"Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God and everyone that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.... Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us... he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." - First Epistle of John 4: 7-16

It couldn't be much clearer than that. Members of militant churches hoping to smite the Unbeliever, win a final showdown with Satan the Muslim and look on with glee while homosexuals, people of other religions and anyone not part of their particular team burn in the Last Days out to take heed of these passages. John doesn't buy any of that. If there is no love in someone, they know nothing of God. The Christian process of salvation starts here, in our relationships with each other. Indeed as John makes it clear here, God's love is not completed until we 'dwell in love'. This vision is not unique to John, of course. In Matthew Christ makes clear that love of God and of one's fellow man comes before anything else ("On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets" 22:40) but nowhere does it get a higher expression than in John. It is the presence of love within us that is key before any other consideration. Without it we are, as Paul says, 'as nothing'. We hear much about Christ's love for us and God's love, but John emphasises our love, not just for God but for each other, as being the completion of the Mystery. He is not called the Beloved Disciple for nothing.

The description of the Apostles ceasing to be 'servants' and instead becoming 'friends' is crucial here also, along with the growing convergence of the Father, the Son, the Apostles and all of humanity. As we are given the opportunity to 'overhear', as it were, Christ's words to the Apostles, we become the Apostles. In other words, we are being invited to share of the Wisdom and to have the same relationship with the Godhead that is being offered to them. Before the Gospels, in the relationship between God and humanity expressed in the Old Testament, the emphasis is primarily upon humanity, represented by the people of Israel, serving God and keeping his commandments. Of course this is an oversimplification, as the nature of the relationship grows and changes from Abraham through Jacob, Joseph and Moses to David and Solomon, whose Psalms and Songs illustrate a more intimate, inner connection with God. But there remains a distance that has to be bridged. This distance has, for all intents and purposes, been continued, if not made worse, by centuries of Church intervention which have made it conditional on a host of human edicts, laws and doctrines such as Original Sin and a Redemption dependent upon obedience to a given Priesthood. In fact the relationship being offered by Christ at the Last Supper is a condition of complete Oneness with no mediation. If anything Christ is speaking of the end of religion, certainly not the beginning of a new one, replacing it with a direct connection with God available to all:

"And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever; even the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him; but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because I live, ye shall live also. At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you." - John 14:16-20

It is no surprise, perhaps, that two of the key heretical or near heretical movements of the Middle Ages which preached a more intimate relationship with Christ were the Gottesfreunden of Switzerland and the Rhine and the Bogomils of Bosnia. Both words mean 'Friends of God'. Even the Cathars sometimes referred to themselves as 'Bonas Ames' or 'Bons Amis' - 'Good Friends' - indicating their desire to walk in this more intimate relationship with God and Man...

VISIONS OF JOHANNA: THE LAST SUPPER: PART ONE

2008-11-02T04:19:00.000-08:00

"Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because I live, ye shall live also. At that day ye shall know that I am in the Father, and ye in me, and I in you." - John's Gospel 14:19-20

In the much-abused religion of Christianity, preeminent among the more soulful of us are the writings of John. Lawgivers, hellfire merchants and eternal damnation enthusiasts have always preferred Matthew's Gospel or just skipped Christ altogether and gone to the more absolutist sections of the Old Testament or fast-forwarded to the mouthwatering revenge fantasies of Revelations. But for the Mystic, John's work has always been the Crown Chakra of the New Testament. From Augustine to Eckhardt to the Cathars to the Beguines, the essence of Christianity in its most cosmic form is found here. Of the four beasts of Ezekiel, John has always been associated with the Eagle. Here is where the Christianity Mysteries soar. Of course, being Mysteries, they inform but are not necessarily found much in the practise of Christainity as we have known it over the last two thousand years. Mysteries, as we have seen from the post on Demeter, are Inner Teachings, focussed often on Immortality and our Eternal Nature and thus, by their very nature, not always for everyone. This is as much because they aren't easy to understand as anything else. And yet the Christ Mysteries are what Christianity is all about, or at least should be, even though for several centuries their real implications have been deemed heretical by the Catholic and Protestant Churches at least. Before we finally kick Christianity into the earth, it might therefore be worth looking at what it might have had to offer before we risk losing it forever. Not easy considering so many peoples' antipathy to the story, largely thanks to the way it has been handled by the Churches for so long. But in the hope of not throwing the Mystical Baby out with the Material Bathwater, here goes with a discussion of John's Gospel. And those with a knee-jerk hatred of Christianity should either stop reading now, or at least read on with an open mind, because none of this is going to be familiar to anyone who associates Christianity with the Vatican or the Anglican Church...

John's Gospel is regarded as non-synoptic. In other words, it doesn't fit quite so easily with the other three, all of which seem to share a common narrative, set of characters and perspective on Christ. John's moves into completely different territory. It was the last Gospel to be included in the canon. Some commentators have argued that this was because of its popularity in spite of the authorities' resistance to it as being 'too Gnostic'. They simply couldn't ignore it without alienating whole armies of believers. Indeed, John's Gospel was always the battleground between the Gnostic sects and what was to become Christianity as we know it. Both movements claimed it as their own, something neo-Gnostics tend to forget. We have seen how the Cathars, for instance, revered it above all the others. The idea that the Gnostics utterly rejected any part of the New Testament as we have it now is completely incorrect. The many Gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi were not written in opposition to the canonical Christian writings but supplementary to them. For them all these writings formed an indivisible whole. Until the second century AD there was no schism between Gnostic and non-Gnostic Christians ('Gnostic' was itself a term used by the enemies of people like the Valentinians, whose founder, Valentinus, was for a long time a respected member of the mainstream Christian Church). That came later. Besides which, elements of Gnosticism remained in Greek Christianity and even informed the Western Churches, although in a less radical way than we might hope. After all, all 'Gnosis' means is 'Knowledge' as in 'Knowledge of the Divine' and if Christ's message was not about giving us a new 'Knowledge' of God and his relationship to Man then what was it? In the end, any Mystic is a 'Gnostic' in this sense, be they Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Pagan or whatever. Western Mystics like Eckhardt, Origen and John of Ruysbroek all had Gnostic elements in them. Christ, like Krishna, Buddha, Moses and Mohammed, was pointing towards a greater understanding of our relationship with the One and, in doing so, by implication with each other...

The centre point of the Johannine writings is the Last Supper. Most people are aware of the Sermon of the Mount as being pivotal to Christianity but the Last Supper is the source of its most Mystical element. If the Sermon on the Mount is the highest expression of exoteric Christianity (ie offering teachings on how to live communally), the Last Supper of John is the highest expression of esoteric Christianity. The Sermon on the Mount was delivered from a Mountain Top to the crowd, the Last Supper's conversation (and it IS a conversation and not a Sermon) is for the inner circle, the Initiates. The impression given is that we are hearing the words of Christ as they were delivered in private. They are to be read intimately, not as oratory. That John thought they were important is suggested by the fact that, of the 21 chapters of the Gospel that bears his name, the Last Supper takes up 5. That's more than a quarter of the whole book and far more than in Matthew, Mark or Luke's accounts. Clearly something important is going on here and it might be worth looking more deeply into what...

In essence, John's account of the Last Supper is an account of the Inner Mysteries of Christianity. If there is a Gnosis in Christianity, this is where it is to be found. As we saw in Eleusis, the Greater Mysteries took place in secret, in the Inner Sanctum. Here, they same is true. The events unfold in an upper room where the Apostles are gathered to celebrate the feast of the Passover, or Pesach, one of the most holy festivals of the Jewish year when the children of Israel celebrate deliverance from the Angel of Death and the beginning of freedom from the tyranny of Egypt. The doors are locked. The atmosphere is highly charged. John describes the events in extraordinarily dense and elusive poetry. Its not easy to understand everything that Christ is saying. Some of his words are as obscure as Zen Koans. Even the Apostles are baffled. But this is the whole point. Mystical truth can only be expressed through poetry and paradox. This has nearly always been the case. It is not linear in nature. It needs to be puzzled out. And in the puzzling out the Mystery is revealed.

The key to the narrative is the 'Glorification' of Christ. Fascinatingly, this can only happen once Judas has been sent out to betray him. I say 'sent out'. This is literally what happens. Christ knows exactly who is to betray him and gives him the signal:

"Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it. And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon. And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly." - John 13:26-27

Whole tomes could be written about Christ's relationship with Judas (even their names are echoes of each other Jesus Christ, Judas Iscariot). This is just a Blog. Esoterically speaking, a profound ritual is taking place here. For Jesus and Judas are shadows of each other, being two sides of the same entity. John's Gospel is always associated with the Eagle, one of the four animals of Ezekiel. The Eagle corresponds to the Star Sign Scorpio, the Eagle being the higher side of Scorpio, the Scorpion being the lower. Scorpio is the sign most associated with the Mysteries of Death and Rebirth and it is surely no coincidence that this is the very nature of John's Gospel. At this moment the Christ-Consciousness is splitting in two, letting go of the darker side. In Alchemical terms, this is the beginning of what is known as the Nigredo, the dark moment when the 'dying' process begins prior to the Resurrection into the White Rose. Thus Judas' actions have to happen, for without them the whole drama of the Resurrection cannot be fulfilled. Esoterically, the earthly elements of man must die away for the divine element to rise up. Judas will betray Christ, but he has to. It is part of the process. Interestingly, John does not include in his version of the story the ritual of the Bread and the Wine. In the others this act of Communion is key and one which Judas is part of, suggesting that he too partakes of the Divine Nature. In Matthew, for instance, Jesus makes a point of having Judas eat the bread and drink the wine even after he has identified him as his betrayer. John leaves this out, but includes Judas in Christ's cleaning of the Apostles' feet which precedes the Supper, suggesting that, even though he is 'not clean', he is still part of the new dispensation about to be revealed .

If John leaves out the ritual of Bread and Wine, he creates another element which does not feature elsewhere - the Beloved Apostle, who appears in the story here for the first time. For some reason these three figures - Christ, Judas and the Beloved Disciple - are in an alignment just at the instant of the betrayal. Saviour, Betrayer and Witness are all united in this single moment. The Mystery of the interdependence between this Christ-Self and Iscariot-Self is one of the most complex in the history of Christianity and perhaps conceals the secret of its greatest failure. The refusal to face up to the Shadow-side represented by Judas, as well as the projection of it onto the Jewish people, has poisoned the whole venture and trapped it in a condition of Dualism and paranoia which has lead to the betrayal of its own spiritual source. Origen suggested that the ultimate end of Redemption might be the salvation of the Devil, for which he was accused of being a heretic. Until Judas can be saved in the same way, until his role is properly acknowledged, Christianity will not be whole. Of course, the authors of the Gospels were subtler than their followers. Its worth remembering, after all, that Judas betrayed Christ with a kiss. In Matthew Christ goes so far as to call Judas 'Friend' before he does so...

Whatever the truth or otherwise of these speculations, the moment when Judas leaves the table and goes 'immediately out' is the key moment for John. It is the turning point of the whole Gospel. The text adds that 'it was night', another suggestion of the Nigredo moment. It is then that Christ experiences some kind of transformation or epiphany:

"Therefore, when he was gone out, Jesus said: Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God be glorified in him, God shall also glorify him in himself, and shall straightaway glorify him."

What is Christ going on about here? What is all this about 'Glorification', something we don't hear much about in churches and pulpits? Why is it important? In his book Meditation And The Bible, Kabbalist Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan outlines the many different shades of meaning of 'Glory' in the Old Testament. It is associated with Atziluth, the World closest to God and the Sephira Tiphareth ('Beauty'), often referred to as the Prince or Lesser Countenance, which bridges the Gulf between the King and our world in order to be united with the 'Daughter' or Malkuth, the Kingdom. Most significantly for us, however, is its association with the word 'Soul' outlined by Rabbi Maya Luzatto. Given the Jewish origins of Christianity, its debt to the Mysticism of the Israel, this suggests that, at the moment at which Judas leaves, Christ is fully realising his 'ensouled' Cosmic nature, hence the the two-way Glorification process between him and the Father, a process which would can only happen thanks to Judas. Even if one were not to understand it in terms of Kabbalah, John himself explains what Glorification means and why it is so important earlier in the Gospel in Chapter 7:

"But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified." - John 7:39

In other words, until Christ is 'Glorified', the Holy Spirit cannot pour through him into the world. Thus this moment when Judas leaves the Last Supper is the key turning point in John's version of the Christ story. It is now that the connection between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit properly begins and the possibility of human transformation, what the Greek Orthodox called Theosis, can happen. So without the splitting apart of the Jesus/Judas character, the Christ Mystery cannot happen, the Prophecy cannot be fulfilled.

From here on in, everything Christ says to the Apostles is suffused by the wisdom of this new relationship between God and Man. The bridge between Heaven and Earth has been established and the Holy Spirit, the Ruach HaKodesh, is the main subject of the words that follow. The Inner Mysteries of the New Testament are to be unfolded and not only to the chosen few but, through the agency of John, to everyone. This was the real revolution of Christianity, the Metanoia or Transformation of Consciousness that has effected everyone in the West since and which the Churches themselves have found very tricky to handle, particularly the Roman, which resorted to violence to stop it getting out: a universal connection, contained within every individual, unmediated, with the Divine..

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME: DAVID BOHM: PART THREE

2008-10-29T16:57:00.000-07:00

"The field of the finite is all that we can see, hear, touch, remember and describe. This field is basically that which is manifest, or tangible. The essential quality of the infinite, by contrast, is its subtlety, its intangibility. This quality is conveyed in the word spirit, whose root meaning is 'wind, or breath'. This suggests an invisible but pervasive energy, to which the manifest world of the finite responds. This energy, or spirit, infuses all living beings, and without it any organism must fall apart into its constituent elements. That which is truly alive in the living being is this energy of spirit, and this is never born and never dies." - David Bohm

Bohm knew that what he was proposing as a new model for understanding the Universe was in essence Mystical or Metaphysical. When asked if there was any difference between it and what the great Seers of the past said he replied: "I don't know that there's necessarily any difference". In his vision of the Cosmos as being made up of an infinite amount of levels of Order, each unfolding and enfolding in and out of each other, he was trying to offer the human race a new way of looking at itself and understanding 'Reality' based upon the implications of Quantum Science. For him, focussing solely on the Explicate Order, ie the material world in which we thought we lived, set us onto a hiding to nothing as it was only the most superficial level of our existence and, understood only in terms of itself, lead nowhere. When one looks at the endless cycle of problems we have created for ourselves in our efforts to control and exploit nature one can see what he meant. By obsessing about the empirical payoffs of cause and effect rather than viewing things holistically, we have done nothing but mortgage the future by banking up endless after-effects. Nuclear power? Terrific - except for nuclear weapons and nuclear waste. The Industrial Revolution? Terrific - except for massive exploitation of the human race and the near-fatal destruction of the planet. Modern medicine? Terrific - except for the endless side-effects and new problems and illnesses it has brought in its wake. For every positive achievement of Western Science there has been a negative. What Bohm hoped was that the shift in perspective Quantum Theory offered might liberate the human mind to change its focus, rethink its values and solve problems in a different way. For instance, exploration of the potentials in the Zero Point Energy field might yield cheap, harmless and possibly limitless amounts of energy to power our world, while the philosophical and metaphysical implications of the idea of Orders might finally prize the human mind of materialism and encourage it to think in a more holistic and wide-viewed way.

What Bohm was doing was offering us the possibility of a 'Transcendent Reality' which was not dependent upon the idea of a personal God with its attendant problems of tribalism, exclusivity, hierarchies or 'divinely-inspired' moralities. Quite naturally, inside the Scientific Community, no-one was very interested. Such considerations, for them, were not to do with Science, and Bohm was largely dismissed as a 'mystical' crank whose ideas were 'not Scientific'. His more generous detractors viewed him as a tragic loss to Science, acknowledging the greatness of his mind and understanding of Physics, but regretting his wasteful involvement in speculative realms which were outside his field - philosophy, metaphysics, the nature of Consciousness. In this view, Bohm was regarded as a tragically misguided man who got lost chasing fairies when he might have made himself a Nobel-Prize Winner had he stuck to the pure, hard-headed business of Science...

None of this stopped, Bohm, however, even though his continued rejection by his colleagues stung and hurt him. Undeterred, he continued to explore his ideas, striving to promote what he believed was a new way of looking at the Universe which might lead us forward. He became very interested in ideas of Consciousness which sought to ask probing questions about the innate assumptions we made about ourselves and the world. Fascinated by the research of Piaget into the development of Consciousness in children, he asserted that each of us had an underlying 'world map' which we used to interpret and understand everything around us. What we did not realise, he argued, was that this 'world map' was not 'Reality' but a way of understanding Reality. The danger was that unless we questioned it and kept it flexible, we would become ensnared by it, believing it was 'the Truth' instead of 'a Truth', turning what was a way of looking at things into a 'Necessity' which then became a barrier for a flowing relationship with the world. Thus a Christian or a Muslim, convinced of the 'Truth' of his or her way of seeing things could rigid and fundamentalist as his or her view of Reality became 'Necessary' - ie non-negotiable. Where Bohm really challenged people, however, was in extending this to less obvious, more subtle forms of rigidity, such as Science. Scientists like to think of themselves as disinterested, flexible, evidence-based people. Bohm suggested that Scientists were as hidebound by 'Necessity' as anything else, the tacit assumptions drilled into them in Universities and Colleges continuing to hold them back from looking at what was really there. His prime example was the refusal of Scientists to make the imaginative leap needed to embrace the implications of Quantum Theory. Bohm asserted that while most Scientists claimed they understood the implications of Quantum Science, in fact they were tacitly hidebound by mechanistic, Newtonian notions of how the Universe worked. So instead of looking beyong the Explicate Order at what might lie beyond, they were still trying to pull the Implicate Order back into line with the Explicate, thus preventing crucial progress from taking place. Quite naturally, the Scientific Establishment didn't warm to this, but one only has to look at the way Richard Dawkins, for instance, writes about Quantum Science to see that Bohm has a point. QM blows all linear theories of existence out of the water, as we have seen. What does Evolution mean if there is no linear progression or Time (or even Space!) in the Cosmos? Indeed, if the manifest Cosmos is essentially only a fraction of what is out there?

Bohm extended these issues into the wider dilemmas facing the world. Just as Scientists were still shackled to a Materialistic, Mechanistic view of the Cosmos, so the human race was tearing itself apart by its insistence on investing only in the short term and continuing to see itself as divided along endless divisions of class, gender, race, nation, religion, politics, ideology etc etc. A classic analogy for the Explicate and Implicate Orders would be the whole human race. The Implicate/Superimplicate Order would be humanity as a whole. The Explicate Order or Orders would be the division of that Implicate Order into all the different categories mentioned above, all of which by definition lead ultimately to conflict. Thus instead of looking at the bigger picture, the Implicate Order that is humanity, we obsess about the multiply divided Explicate Orders which separate us. This, for Bohm, was the key problem faced by our species today. Until we changed our perspective, we would go on turning in circles in a maelstrom of unproductive, tribal, short-term conflicts. Alas, we are seeing the reality of this today, with everyone enthusiastically dividing themselves along battle lines of religion, nation and income - America vs Islamic Terror, Russia vs the West, Palestinian vs Israeli, Right Wing vs Left Wing, Religion vs Science, Muslim vs Christian etc etc - when in fact the planet-threatening problems the human race faces demand global, holistic solutions set about as a species and not as divided communities.

This fragmentation was the disease that Bohm diagnosed as being the main problem plaguing humanity today. In propagating his vision of Wholeness, he hoped to begin the transformation of that condition into something else. Like Jung in his field of Psychology, Wholeness was the centre of Bohm's vision of both the way the Universe worked and his aspiration for the human race. This visionary focus informed everything he did. It was also what caused him to suffer derision at the hands of the Scientific Community. But for Bohm a Science which was not interested in the wider social, philosophical and metaphysical implications of its discoveries was no Science at all. In this he was joined by his early mentor Einstein, who also occupied himself with the bigger questions surrounding Science. But both were in a minority...

Bohm tried to answer the problems of our society by moving beyond the realms of Quantum Physics into the study of Consciousness. As well as Piaget, he also became fascinated by the cognitive processes at play in our minds. His view was the reverse of the standard one in play today. Rather than Consciousness being a byproduct of material processes, an 'emission' from our brains, he saw it as something we shared with the Cosmos, an intimate unfolding of something latent in everything. Just as we were made up of dense Light Energy, we were also made up of concentrations of Consciousness. As he explored the processes of human thought, many of which we never question, he made bold conclusions, suggesting that the meaning we gave things became part of their essence. He called this 'Soma-significance', using as an example a piece of printed paper. As a material object it is one thing, but the significance we give it through the cognitive experience of reading gives it an extra, multidimensional meaning which becomes an integral part of our encounter with it. Thus for Bohm Matter and Consciousness were intricately interwoven, the significance of our world as we encounter it being as much as part of us as we are of it. These speculations on Light went even further, as Bohm explored the way in which all the information in the Universe was enfolded and encoded in Light. Thus everything - the Implicate Order, Consciousness, Light and experience - all became moulded into one holistic vision in which everything is dependent upon everything else, like some vast symphony of notes. To read Bohm's speculations is to allow one's mind to explode with ideas and see the Universe in an entirely new way - and all of it is grounded in Science, not Revelation...

Bohm's interest in Consciousness drew him into one of his most productive and controversial relationships, that with the Indian Theosophist and Mystic Jiddu Krishnamurti. Bohm became interested in Krishnamurti's ideas on 'Emptiness' and 'the End of Thought' in which the Mind was so at One with itself and the Universe that it was completely clear, able to respond purely with the flow of the Cosmos. The two became great friends and recorded a whole series of remarkable conversations for posterity in which the discussed ideas and grappled with the problems of life and society. Alas, Bohm's association with Krishanmurti simply further embarrassed his Scientist friends, who felt he was wasting his time with a quack guru, but for Bohm the relationship was a crucial one, although it soured in the end when he discovered the gap between Krishnamurti's ideas and his actual practice. Krishnamurti ended up dropping Bohm when he felt that his friend could not ever reach the heights of Consciousness he had reached. Once again this hurt Bohm, but it didn't stop him pursuing his own vision. This was what was so remarkable about the man. If one watches clips of him speaking, one encounters a highly intelligent, visionary and deeply humane person who also appears profoundly shy, nervous and vulnerable, and yet in spite of all the setbacks he encountered - exile from America for being a Communist, derision from his colleagues for challenging scientific orthodoxy and being interested in Mysticism and rejection from figures like Krishnamurti - he never gave up on what he felt was the Truth. This frail, gentle man had something in him which would not surrender his integrity in return for ease and success.

The last major way in which Bohm tried to offer a way forward for the human race was creating something called a Bohmian Dialogue. Realising that the chief problem with human communication was dogmatism and refusal to listen, he proposed a new way of trying to engage in dialogue, something he also tried to suggest to the Scientific Community. He wanted to create 'an unbroken flow of thought' in which, rather than impose boundaries on ideologies (eg 'I am a Christian, you are an Atheist, he is a Marxist etc') they are allowed to interact and flow together so as to pollenate and enlarge one another. Too often, he pointed out, the existence of one idea leads to the belief that all others have to be wrong and eliminated. His frustration with Science was a reflection of this. He found its refusal to acknowledge other disciplines impossible and cited the famous story of Einstein and Bohr, who used to be profound friends, at a party in which they and their students refused to speak to each other because they had fallen out over their two great theories: Relativity and Quantum. Bohm argued that had they spoken and listened, had they seen each other's view as part of a greater one, they may have progressed. Instead they remained in deadlock because one of them had to be 'right'. Apply this to almost any other situation in any other area of society and you can see what Bohm was getting at. Is it so different to the Arab-Israeli conlfict? Or that between the US and Iran? Conflict depends on drawing boundaries and relying upon the absolute rightness of one's view at the expense of all others.

Bohm sought to overcome this with his idea of Dialogue in which he sought to create an environment in which people with differing views could air their opinions in a non-confrontational way. In essence it was how Plato conducted his philosophy and owed a lot to Hegel's idea of Thesis and Antithesis leading to Synthesis, but Bohm wanted to try and formalise it, thus creating a template which might influence how everything was done. Ideas were to be allowed to flow and play, mixing into something greater than each individual one. He set up groups all over the world and laid down guidelines for mediators.

Did it work? Well, in a mass sense, not so far, although he found the processes he officiated on productive. Bohm would have argued that this was an indication of how we were stuck in old ways of thinking. An idealist, Bohm was relying upon his own belief in human nature as something which could be generous and rational. Alas, the human race has continued to demonstrate that it likes the defining energy of conflict, violence, entrenched view and short-term, tribal thinking. Does this make Bohm into a fool? I hardly think so. He always pointed out that the proof of his thesis about the problem with our present era's ways of thinking was demonstrated by the spiralling violence, conflict and self-destructive energy in the world. If our modern vision was so good and enlightened and so superior to those of the past, then why were we making such an acceleratedly bad job of everything? Perhaps it is we who are the fools rather than he.

Bohm died in the nineties of a stroke on the way home from work. His wife found him in a taxi unconscious. Not long after he was dead, in spite of being rushed to hospital. He was buried in Waltham Abbey in the UK, the country which he had made his home since his short time in Israel. Before he set out on that last journey home he was putting the finishing touches to a new book and had told Sarah that he felt he was really 'on to something big'. To my knowledge, the book was never published.

These three posts are in sense a tribute to a beautiful man, one of life's unlikely heroes whose hopes and dreams for the human race went beyond his own personal comfort and fame. Bohm offered the human race a possible way of looking at the world which might still help us to extricate ourselves from the potentially catastrophic situation we are in now. This Winged Horse found him deeply inspirational. He was a prophet of a kind and one deeply concerned that we should find a new Consciousness to lead us out of the mess we are in. His vision of Wholeness, so unfashionable these days, showed a mind so wide-ranging and prepared to entertain infinite possibilities it is sometimes hard to keep up with him in his writing. Its a vision I share. Its a vision we need. I hope someone is listening!

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME: DAVID BOHM: PART TWO

2008-10-17T14:55:00.000-07:00

"Our ordinary view holds that the field of the finite is all that there is. But if the finite has no independent existence, it cannot be all that is. We are in this way led to propose that the true ground of all being is infinite, the unlimited; and that the infinite includes and contains the finite. In this view, the finite, with its transient nature, can only be understood as held suspended, as it were, beyond time and space, within the infinite." - David Bohm

So what were the ideas that Quantum Science had come up with that had changed everything? Well, thanks to the pioneering studies of Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and others Science had discovered that, once the building blocks of existence were broken down into atoms, electrons, quantas and quarks, the normally accepted model of the Universe didn't work at all. Rather than a regular, Newtonian, 'Universe as Machine' made up of discrete, independent objects operating according to fixed laws, it was an unpredictable mass of apparently conflicting energies and events. Suddenly 2 + 2 did not equal 4, or at least not always. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't. Indeed nobody was quite sure what 2 +2 did equal any more. More disturbingly, there seemed to be a paradox between what we saw, felt and experienced as the world (the 'common sense' view so beloved of Richard Dawkins and his team) and how that world actually operated on a quantum level. Everything we associate with Quantum Science since the initial discoveries- Multiple Universes, String Theory, Bubble Universes etc - has been about trying to work out what it all meant and how these two models of the Universe fitted together.

Bohm identified a number of major breakthroughs in our understanding of Science which presented serious challenges to the old Mechanistic view of the Universe begun by Newton. Now, I'm going to be super-careful here as I have tangled with several students of QM and they HATE it when people get woolly and imprecise about their subject. So, after a deep breath, here goes...

First off, it was discovered that Light could operate both as a wave AND a particle, sometimes at the same time. Einstein had posited that particles emerged from waves, but subsequent explorations demonstrated that this was not the half of it. In fact they were one. What does this mean? Well, we imagine light as pure energy flowing like a wave through the Universe. Through the so-called 'Double Slit' experiment, it was discovered that this was not the case, at least not always. In fact Light could also operate as a particle (ie not as a wave but as something more akin to Matter). Now, given that we established in the first post that everything was a form of Light, that means that everything can, potentially, operate as a wave and a particle - and sometimes as something in between. Confused yet? You will be, as it is also thought that Light only becomes a wave or a particle (ie it choses its state, as it were) when it is observed. Thus, theoretically, unless light was measured in some way, it exists in an intermediary state between a wave and a particle. Bohr was the first to discover this. Heisenberg's 'uncertainty principle' only reinforced this view. Thus everything 'observable' was thrown up into the air. Whereas once we had thought things operated along fixed, predictable Newtonian lines, now we realised that they didn't. From now on, we could not say anything for certain, but only make predictions based upon probabilities. To put it more simply, where previously we had thought that 2 + 2 = 4, since Einstein, Bohr and Hiesenberg, we could only hope it did. We could say that, more than likely, it would always come out 4, but we could no longer rule out the possibility that it could come out 5, or 3, or 4589. More than that, we couldn't rule out the possibility that the thing which decided whether it would come out as 4 or 4589 was the person looking at it, ie the Observer. Until something was measured in some way it could only be said to be potentially one thing or another. Suddenly the Observer and the Observed had become inextricably interlinked. 'Reality', as we call it, depended entirely on being measured. Until something came into the Consciousness of something else it didn't 'exist' in the sense we mean it ie in a fixed state. As the UPANISHADS put it: 'How may the Knower be Known?'

Bohm thought this was hugely exciting, particularly in its suggestion of 'the unbroken wholeness of the Universe' with Consciousness (ie Observation) as the mediating principle. But he was dissatisfied with the 'unknowability' inherent within it - ie that there was no objective Reality independent of the Observer. He thus came up with his own interpretation of Bohr's findings known as the Causal or Ontological Theory which posited the idea of 'Hidden Variables. He suggested that in some sense the wave/particle 'decision' was made by energy through an exchange of information between differing states. Thus energy 'knew' whether it should be a wave or a particle by interacting with its environment. In a flash the fragmented, alienating view of the Cosmos as Machine outside us that Newton and Descartes had given birth to was gone and replaced by a new order of things in which the everything was indivisible from its surroundings, everything interacting with everything else through a constant flow of quantum 'information' of which the Observer was part. I say replaced, perhaps I should have said 'restored', as everyone reading this will probably recognise this idea from all the Mystical systems in the world. Its classic Zen Buddhism and exactly the same idea as that espoused by Bishop Berkeley in the 18th Century. Subsequent Quantum Scientists have not liked the idea so much and now speak of 'entanglement', a state in which everything keeps everything else in place by simultaneously interacting. But this points, once again, to 'the unbroken wholeness of the Universe', even though it appears to take Consciousness out of the equation. Bohm's Ontological Theory with its exchange of information, although largely rejected by the Scientific Community, still seems to pop up in other guises and may still prove to be more commensurate with the facts...

Next, it was discovered that the movement of energy from one state to another was not continuous. In other words, nothing on a Quantum level goes from A to B to C but from A to F to H to Z to C, doing so in a process of release of discrete packages of energy. I know. I don't quite understand it either, but basically it means that, once again, the Universe does not operate along fixed, predictable lines, but jumps around all over the place. In the process, all sorts of mysterious things happen. An electron in a tree, for example, can simultaneously be somewhere else. The tree remains the same, but somehow the electron is both within it, giving it its existence, and somewhere else. Not only that, but if two electrons are separated and placed at any distance apart, they will continue to interact as if they were together. This, known as 'Action At A Distance' (or 'Spooky Action At A Distance' as some Scientists like to call it!), is one of the most startling elements of Quantum Science. No-one quite knows how this can happen. One theory is that the Speed of Light might be being violated, which would explain why we can't perceive what the process in action might be. But Einstein had said that the Speed of Light couldn't be violated, so that wasn't a very satisfactory explanation (although some Scientists now believe this is no longer an impossibility and have named these particles moving faster than the Speed of Light Tachyons). Another is that, quite simply, everything genuinely is 'entangled', so utterly linked to everything else that the old adage 'all is One' is inescapably true. Both shatter the classical model of Physics of the Universe as Machine, made up of independently operating parts. And yet it seems that the latter is how things are. Indeed we have based the last 200 years of Science (and everything else) upon it. So what is going on?

I am sure you are confused by now. Don't worry, everyone is. A famous adage among Scientists is that if you think you understand Quantum Physics then you don't understand Quantum Physics. And so far I haven't even mentioned things like Dark Matter, the invisible material which makes up more than 80% of the Universe, the theory of Multiple Universes or the existence of extra dimensions suggested by String Theory. These latter, by the way, are the reason we have built the Hadron Collider at CERN. We are trying to find them...

As you can tell, Quantum Science is even more mindboggling than Kabbalah or the Vedas! Or possibly not, as many of the early Quantum Scientists studied these ancient texts for metaphors with which to understand what they were finding out about the Universe. Be warned! It is a foolhardy Mystic who tries to convince the average student of Quantum Science that there is any parallel between Mysticism and their studies. New Agers and movies like WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW haven't helped, with Scientists reacting violently against any such suggestion for fear of long-haired crystal-hangers taking over their discoveries. Nevertheless the fact remains that Heisenberg, Bohr, Schroedinger, Einstein and Bohm all thought that there were correspondences between the Upanishads, Zen Buddhism and the Kabbalah and the picture of Reality they were building up.

What made Bohm a pioneer was that, before anyone else, he leapt head-first into the implications of Quantum Science and sought to find a new way of looking at the Universe. While everyone else was trying to cling hold of the Classical Model of Newton and Descartes, he realised this was impossible and sought a new interpretation. The problem was how one squared the seemingly solid, three dimensional world full of discrete, independent objects we experienced with the seething, interacting, sea of Quantum Phenomena Scientists were increasingly discovering were out there. What made the establishment nervous was that if the implications of Quantum Science were to be properly understood, then everything was 'non-local'. In other words, even though it seemed like the Universe was made up with finite, predictable laws along the lines of Newton's ideas, in actual fact it wasn't. Everything was infinite - gravity, matter, energy. Nothing was fixed. The possibilities were terrifying. Basically, everything we had based our Scientific enquiry on for the last three hundred years, including our whole idea of Reality, was wrong. What to do?

Bohm posited something called the Holomovement which he broke up into Implicate and Explicate Orders. I say 'broke up', but in fact the whole meaning of the Holomovement was one of complete unity - 'the unbroken wholeness of the Universe'. All the mysteries of Quantum Science, he argued, pointed towards an infinite number of levels of existence, or Orders out of which other Orders emerged. Thus there was an Implicate Order, a Superimplicate Order and so on. A simple analogy would be taking off in an aeroplane. On the tarmac, we are only aware of our immediate surroundings and have a limited understanding of what is around us. As the plane takes off, we realise that those limited surroundings are part of a wider environment which includes the landing strip, the surrounding planes and the airport. As the plane rises higher, we see the airport is part of an even wider context, that of the city it is part of. As it rises higher and higher, this gives way to the environment of the city and the surrounding area, then the country and so on and so on. Each of these new perspectives is like another Implicate Order out of which the previous Order 'unfolds'.

So Bohm envisaged a Universe of infinite Implicate Orders, each getting more and more complex and unified as they ascended (or descended depending upon your point of view). Our physical Universe he described as the Explicate Order, or the manifest order, which was the most concrete Order we could experience but which was contained 'enfolded' in the higher Implicate and Superimplicate Orders. Anyone who knows their Kabbalah will recognise the complex ideas of the Sephiroth and Four Worlds here. If Malkuth is the Explicate Order 'unfolding' from the Tree of Life, the other nine Sephiroth are higher Implicate and Superimplicate Orders (amusingly ten, the number of Sephiroth in the Tree, is the same number of dimensions Quantum Scientists believe actually exist). Equally, people familiar with Platonic/neo-Platonic ideas of the Tetractys and the World of Ideas will see a similar theory emerging. On a more simple level, if one imagines the Implicate Orders of Bohm as a great sea of Quantum Phenomena, our physical Universe is like land masses emerging from it.... an image which, once again, not that unfamiliar to us...!

Bohm knew that he had no 'proof' that this was how things were, but he felt it squared with more of the equations people were coming up with to do with the mysteries of Quantum Physics and suggested that this was a model of the Universe which we might find productive to work with. At the moment we have no apparatus to test almost any of the conclusions of Quantum Science but through the idea of the Implicate Orders Bohm mooted a way of beginning to know where to look. What excited him was the non-material possibilities of the idea. Suddenly the Cosmos was not at all finite but relied on the infinite for its existence. Fundamental to this vision was the idea of the Holomovement in which everything was interconnected, fundamentally One, including ourselves and our Consciousness. He became very interested in the idea of the Hologram as a paradigm for the Universe and our place in it. Each of us, he posited, was a microcosm of the macrocosm which, once again, was a classic fundamental idea of all Mystical endeavour from Plato and the Upanishads to Kabbalah and Rosicrucianism. Its only for the last 200 or so years that we have believed it was otherwise. Equally important to him was the implication of this theory that, ultimately, scientific enquiry and thought would never come to a rest. Given an infinite number of Implicate Orders, we would go on penetrating further into Reality, making dogma and fixed ideas a thing of the past. And it didn't stop there, for it was Bohm's fervent desire that with the transformation of our view of the Cosmos would come a similar transformation in our view of ourselves as human beings within it. As Newton and Descartes had changed the way people thought and behaved, the implications of Quantum Science might bring about a similar revolution in human behaviour, one of wholeness and connection rather than one of division, conflict and alienation...

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME: DAVID BOHM: PART ONE

2008-10-15T15:15:00.000-07:00

"In considering the relationship between the finite and the infinite, we are led to observe that the whole field of the finite is inherently limited, in that it has no independent existence. It has the appearance of independent existence, but that appearance is merely the result of an abstraction of our thought. We can see this dependent nature of the finite from the fact that every finite thing is transient." - David Bohm

Having ranted at length about the failings of Religion and Reason, perhaps it would be good to turn to something more constructive - like finding someone who might have tried to point the way to some kind of reconciliation of the two, thereby coming up with a potential vision of the future.

Well there is someone: Quantum Scientist David Bohm.

Before I start on the ideas of this remarkable man, I should clarify a few things about my last post. Although I have spoken negatively about the great historic movements of the past, I do so out of a desire not to dismiss them but to see where we have gone wrong and, therefore, where we might go right. All history is the story of the human effort to come to terms with life on this planet. We try these big ideas because, at least at first, they seem like good ones. One only has to look at the energy and excitement of early Christian or Muslim writers to see the inspiration the birth of their new religions gave them. Similarly the pioneers of the Enlightenment set out not to enslave the world or denigrate the inner life but to refashion it along more humane and just lines. All these processes were crucial parts of the long and painful evolution of our Consciousness on this planet. We are doing our best. If it keeps turning out wrong, well that is part of the cyclic process of development. Our natures are enormously complex, which is why I am suggesting that this time, before we embark on a new Grand Project, we turn inwards first and genuinely try to understand who were are...

Everyone would agree at the moment that in the present state of things, Religion and Science are at daggers drawn with each other. And not just Religion and Science, pretty much everything else! Everyone is very loud about the rightness of their own way, while seemingly utterly blind to where their own has gone wrong. Worse, on every side hostility to another point of view goes hand in hand with a shocking ignorance of another other. The Religion vs Science argument is a perfect example of this, with neither side taking the time to look beyond the most bone-headed expression of the other. Tragically, neither side can see the value and merit of the other, or the appeal. A value system based on an idea of the inner and another on the outer don't seem to see how much they need what the other has to offer. Thus we end up with religious people looking stupid by denying the palpably obvious and scientific people laughing at peoples' need for meaning and a sense of dignity. So we get nowhere.

This is why David Bohm is so fascinating, because he sought a means to rise above these divisions. Not only that, but he regarded them as deadly. The fragmentation of the world, its division into hostile camps miltarily, racially, politically, religiously and intellectually was, in his view, catastrophic as instead of working together to solve problems we were tearing each other apart, apparently unable to hold a position without utterly dismissing the validity of another. Even more interesting, Bohm was not only a great scientist, acknowledged by none other than Einstein as such, but also a great thinker, deeply committed to engaging with the problems of the world and interested in issues of Consciousness, Spirituality and Mysticism. A rigourous scientist, he counted as his friends and mentors not only Einstein, Oppenheimer and Feynman but also Jiddu Krishnamurti and the Dalai Lama. In amongst all this, Bohm felt that human Consciousness was the key to everything. Rather than being utterly separate from the physical world or the byproduct of chemical reactions, he believed it was the glue which held everything together.

Bohm was born in the 1920s in America. He showed immense early promise in maths and physics when a child and was fascinated by science and science fiction. He was part of the Manhattan Project, lead by Oppenheimer, which saw America drop the first nuclear bomb, believing at the time that it might be the means to bring an end to world conflicts. He since recognised that he was wrong. A lifelong Marxist who was interested in ideas which might bring us to coexist in a more humane and harmonious way, he fell foul of the MacCarthy trials of the 50s and was forced to leave the country, never to return (Oppenheimer himself is thought to have been instrumental in informing upon him). As his career as a scientist progressed, he became more and more fascinated by the findings of Quantum Science, seeing in it a radical challenge to the prevailing Mechanistic view of the Universe that had begun with Newton. For Bohm, that model for understanding the Cosmos and our place in it was gone. Relativity and Quantum Theory had demonstrated that the true nature of Reality was fundamentally different from that with which we had been operating with since Newton and Descartes. Not only did he see this as a major revolution in Science, but he hoped that it would lead to a similar revolution in human Consciousness and how we lived together. For Bohm, how we saw the Universe was simultaneous with how we saw each other. Just as Newton had changed everything with his discoveries, leading to the intellectual and spiritual transformations I have been ranting about, so, he believed, the new discoveries of Quantum Science might transform us again...

So what were these new discoveries that posed such a challenge to the Mechanistic Newtonian/Descartian view outlined in the last post? Since Einstein's famous equation E=MC2, it has been established that all Matter is Energy. Matter itself is just very densely packed energy. Thus the whole Cosmos is one infinite field of energy grouped into differing levels of dense and less dense Matter. Hence the equation Energy = Mass x the Speed of Light Squared. Moreover, the Speed of Light is the only constant in the Universe. Everything else exists relative to it. Thus Einstein's equation is saying that all the Energy in the Universe is equal to the Mass of all the Matter in it multiplied by the Speed of Light squared. Now that's a HELL of a lot of Energy and it explains why we can create a nuclear explosion by splitting a single atom. Have a think about that. It means that every atom in your body contains enough Energy to create a nuclear conflagration. That's quite something to ponder upon! What mechanism is it that keeps all that Energy locked safely inside Matter?

The Speed of Light issue is even more interesting. After he had come up with his Theory of Relativity, Einstein said that 'past, present and future are stubbornly persistent illusions'. What did he mean by this? Very simply, as the Speed of Light is the one Absolute in the Universe, everything that happens in the phenomenal world does so in relation to it. In other words, everything is relative to light. If we could move faster than we do, if we could catch up with Light, then we would experience Time and Space in a completely different way. If we matched the Speed of Light, we wouldn't experience them at all -hence the darkness of Black Holes, the density of which means they absorb even Light, thus obliterating Time and Space within them. If we could move SLOWER than we do, we would experience Time and Space differently again. It would become stretched. Our specific speed or vibration in relation to Light thus determines our whole experience of the Universe. We aren't experiencing Reality, only a Reality, one entirely governed by our relationship with Light.

Ergo Time and Space are relative. In an objective sense, they don't really exist. They only exist in a subjective sense, as 'stubbornly persistent illusions'. At the same time, extraordinarily, everything is dependent upon everything else. The phenomenal world is like it is because of its relationship with Light. Take Light away and it ceases to exist, or at least Time and Space would cease to exist which is the same thing... More than that, Einstein posited that the logical extension of this theory was that Time and Space were not separate entities. In fact they are the same, both aspects of each other emerging out of Light. We hear the term 'Time-Space Continuum' bandied about on Sci-Fi programmes all the time without thinking about what it means. Well, now we do. Suddenly "And God said 'Let there be Light'" doesn't sound like such a stupid proposition after all...

Pretty mind-blowing stuff... Gives you a funny feeling just thinking about it, doesn't it? We can barely imagine what things might look like if we moved closer to the Speed of Light or, indeed, if we moved much slower. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognise that this strikes at the very foundations of how we have seen the world over the last few centuries. The Scientific Method becomes largely redundant, as everything we are examining only exists in a relative sense. Any ideas of linear, mechanistic approaches to the Cosmos start to become a bit wobbly. So where does that leave us?

And if that wasn't enough, there was more. These ideas of Einstein's come under the title Relativity Theory. Quantum Science was about to discover even more bizarre things about the Universe and the way it works...

A PAUSE FOR THOUGHT: WHY BOTHER?

2008-10-14T10:31:00.000-07:00

"What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but disqualified for life." - Albert Einstein

In all the hoohah on these pages about Cathars and Kabbalists and the Soul and Yin and Yang and Babadoo Babading, one might be tempted to ask: "Why bother with any of this stuff? Why go back to these musty old tomes, these hoary 'truths', these dead ways of looking at things? What does any of it have to offer us today? Hasn't Science proven that all this stuff is just so much deluded hoodoo? We all know there is no God. And if there is one, he seems to either fucked it all up or given up on the whole sorry project. So why not knuckle under and get on with the world as it is?"

Good question.

And having posed it, its with a deep breath that I am going to try and answer. Because this is important stuff. Indeed one might say its the big question of our times. As a species, or at least in the West (we sometimes forget that our mindset is not the whole world!), we have done Religion and we are still doing Materialism, if not outright Atheism. But if there is a strange truth of our age, its that we have not quite given up on God or at least the idea that there might be something more than the physical in this world - in spite of the best efforts of well informed, intellectual giants and polymaths such as Richard Dawkins. But people interested in these things find themselves stuck between the Funny Hat Brigade who offer old truths, blurry New Agers who offer them up rechauffeed and the ice-cold comfort of the Materialists, who tell us we are little more than a bunch of chemical reactions which have successfully duped themselves into the illusion that they exist and somehow therefore matter...

The reality is that most of us have a nagging feeling that there IS more, a feeling that is no longer catered for either in the Churches and Mosques or the lecture theatres of Science Institutes. It is to do with dignity, a sense of Self and a sense of connection with something all around us. It is also, fundamentally, about the power and reality of the Inner Life. And THIS, it seems to me, is what is NOT provided for in our society today.

Since the Enlightenment, which happened in reaction to the appalling excesses of the Church, we in the West have lived in the belief that, in essence, we live in a Universe of Mechanism which can be understood, harnessed and perhaps controlled. After Newton, Descartes and Voltaire, the belief has been among most that rationalist, sceptical, empirical enquiry was the only basis upon which the human race could proceed. Never mind that Newton and Descartes both believed in God (Newton rather repellently so, a kind of anti-Dawkins!)! Reason was King, purified of all superstition, emotion and irrationality. If society could be run on Reason, our problems would disappear. And so it may yet prove to be.

As I say, this impulse, deeply humanistic in principle, was based on an idealistic view of human nature which, if it could be purged of its negative propensities, could create a Heaven on Earth of its own. After Inquisitions, religious wars, the hypocrisies of Priesthoods and Papacies, the suppression of dissent, the prevention of scientific enquiry and the celebration of blind, unthinking obedience to Men in Hats, who would not have signed up to the progressive vision of the Enlightenment? I myself would count myself deeply grateful for the division of Church and State and the development of human values the Enlightenment has brought us. I would much rather live in a secular state than a theocracy and only a fool would deny the advances in technology and medicine that have happened since then (although contrary to popular belief that didn't start with the Enlightenment!). Just as I don't dismiss what the Age of Religion did for us over the centuries, nor do I dismiss the Age of Reason. The problem is, as Billy Wilder pointed out in SOME LIKE IT HOT: 'Nobody's perfect'.

Where the oppression of the Church lead to untold primitivism and suffering, the Enlightenment has lead to another problem - the creeping devaluation of the interior life. For human kind is NOT a Rational creature. Or rather Reason is only a part of what makes us human. Reason is crucial in restraining ourselves from excessive, destructive behaviour but where it diverges from feeling, empathy, compassion and our deeper, more interior needs, it creates a new Hell every bit as destructive as the millenarian madness of fanatical religion.

Since the advent of the Enlightenment, we have seen a proliferation of great Social Ideas. These sprang directly from the new vision of the Universe set down by the scientific and intellectual giants of the period: Newton, Descartes, Hume. These three men, whose views on the Spirit were wildly different, nevertheless ushered in the ideas that would lead to the Scientific Method, Scepticism and distrust of human Consciousness as a yardstick for anything. Newton brought in the notion that the Universe was made up of mechanistic Laws which were purely physical, in which everything operated as discrete, independent bodies: the Universe as Machine. Descartes brought in the Deductive Method, whereby everything that could not be indisputably KNOWN was to be distrusted, the idea of Coordinates and the Mind/Body split. No matter that Descartes believed that God united Mind and Body, what has been passed down to us is a materialist interpretation of his ideas. For this reason I sometimes think of him as 'Poor Descartes'. A man who spent his life trying to prove the rational existence of God has, without knowing it, become one of the great icons of Rational Materialism.

Finally Hume brought forward Scepticism, saying that absolutely nothing that was not to be encountered by the Senses could be deemed 'real' in any way (and he wasn't even sure of that!). Of the three men mentioned here, he was the only materialist and offered up the first powerful intellectual argument against belief in God. As such he is regarded as a pioneer of Rational Atheism and a massive influence on figures such as Bertrand Russell (although even he was concerned by some of his conclusions!). Hume suspected all human Consciousness as being fundamentally flawed by its very subjectivity. Our minds, our emotions, could be misleading and were not to be trusted and so we needed to find other means to find the truth. We might THINK God exists, but that proves nothing, at least not in any objective sense. Thus, in the absence of verifiable proof we must operate as if God does not exist. We might even think WE exist, but that may be an illusion. In truth, Hume argued, the only thing that was absolutely certain was mathematics - pure, abstract thought with no emotional content or fug attached. Thus, once again, the logical end of Hume's reasoning was that in every way the Inner Life was a yardstick for nothing. It had no inherent value. Thus it could only be distrusted. Ultimately, he drew into question the whole idea of Self. Arguing that the Hume that was a boy was not the same as the Hume that was a man, he posited that the idea of the Self, of Identity, was, in essence, an illusion. And maybe he was right. A lot of modern biologists seem to think so.

Out of all these new intellectual currents arose the great Social Ideas I mentioned above. Some have been positive, some less so. All have been based on the mechanistic view that by changing the external realities of society the problems of the human race could be solved. In other words, just as Newton's model of the Universe saw it as a machine, so was everything else - society, the body, the mind, humanity in general. If the machine goes wrong, it can be fixed. If the machine can be designed properly, it will work well. Practically EVERY '-ism' we have lived by in the last two centuries has been based on this. Utilitarianism, Marxism, Communism, Nazism, Free Market Capitalism, Socialism, Neo-Conservatism, Eugenics, Social Engineering, Genetic Engineering etc etc. Our education has been based upon it, our medicine, even our culture. At its best it has brought about human rights, prosperity, stability and health. At its worst, human beings have been reduced to becoming units, cogs in a machine, economic counters, classes, masses to be herded, exploited, 'liberated', kept entertained etc etc etc. Where even utopian, idealistic approaches to social engineering have emerged, they have so often involved wholesale slaughter of thousands, if not millions who did not 'fit'. Think of Cambodia, Stalin's Russia, the French Revolution. If all these earlier -isms have bitten the dust, the last one we are dealing with is Free Market Capitalism in which everything, EVERYTHING justifies itself in terms of money and supposed economic prosperity. Art, culture, education, health, hygiene, town planning all become subject to market forces. If they cannot justify their existence financially, they risk going under. Everything is dispensible, even human life. We are told that we went to war in Iraq for oil. In other words, financial goals overrode human life on a grand scale. And that wasn't the first time! The Industrial Revolution itself ushered in an era of suffering and human exploitation in the name of material profit such as we had never seen before. And yet this was the supposed Age of Progress! As for how Darwinism was perverted and used to justify racist ideologies in America, Nazi Germany and South Africa, the least said about that the better...

In amongst all this the mental, emotional and spiritual life of the human race has become utterly devalued, often without us even noticing and sometimes with the best intentions! What has been the prevailing expression of our culture over the last two hundred years? What have our books, our poetry, our plays, our philosophy, our films, our songs been telling us about how we feel about ourselves? They tell us about alienation, despair, ugliness, violence, the degradation of sexuality to commodity and voyeurism, the loss of spirituality, the debasement of aspiration to drinking ourselves into oblivion and seeking some kind of sense of value in quick-fix 'celebrity'. And all this in an era where material prosperity, life expectancy and standards of health have been higher than ever! Those of us who want something more, who have a sense of what is inside us, not just the spiritual but also the emotional, are told not to worry, not to bother. We are called 'deluded', 'romantics', 'naive dreamers', 'sentimentalists'. We are told to just get on with it like everyone else, to face up to the 'real world'. Worse still, some of the more sensitive of us who find this existence difficult are slammed on drugs, as if the efforts of figures such as Jung and Freud to find a means to help us make sense of our inner lives was all for nothing. When a recent survey in the UK revealed that certain anti-depressants were placebos the howls of protest were intense. Journalists came out of the woodwork to reveal how they had been on anti-depressants for years (which was pretty galling considering so many of them were responsible for creating the cynical cultural atmosphere we live in in the first place). Statistics were revealed which showed the extent to which Depression was prevalent in our society - a staggering 10% of people were on some kind of medication. Something is seriously wrong with our country. Our culture is not nourishing us. And its hardly surprising given that our society is based on the tacit assumption that really nothing really matters other than money and that, given there IS no inner life anyway, what is the point of trying to nourish it?

And now the human race faces the consequences of this materialist culture. What has this recent economic collapse been about but the total giving over of our existence to the Great God Money? What is the consequence of the greed-driven industrialisation of our world started in the late 18th Century? Global warming and the threat of the extinction of the human race. And what is at the root of our resistance to doing anything about it? Our reluctance to have to give up our material wealth, power and lifestyle...

What is the solution? Going back to outdated models of spirituality and the Universe which have long since ceased to be vital and life-giving? Surely not. They were part of the problem in the first place! But at the same time the answers given by the post-Enlightenment crowd of Scientists, Social Reformers and Economists are not the way either. Both have had their day. Both have had their Golden Ages. Both have made their contributions and, doubtless, will continue to make them. But we need something else, something more. For sure, society needs to be organised, but not along lines which have contempt for the individual value of the people within it. We need a synthesis or something new altogether.

THIS is why we need to be bothered. The ideas I have thrown around on these pages represent some of the richest, most complex and most visionary ideas human culture has given us. But they are NOT dogma. They don't involve obedience, they involve exploration - of the Self, the Universe, of Consciousness. No-one was burnt at the stake for believing in the five levels of the Soul, they were burnt for questioning the authority of the Church, or denying the Council of Trent or the Transubstantiation. Further, Mystics are almost never enthusiasts for slaughter. Try as I might, I cannot think of any great Mystic of the human race who did not regard everyone as being part of the Universal Journey (oh wait, one: St Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached the Crusades and justified the Templars' ability to kill in the name of Christ). They may have regarded their particular way as superior, but all spoke of everyone being brought to God. Rumi spent time with Christians and Jews, Eckhardt read Maimonides and Avicenna, Isaac Luria urged the lifting of the prohibition against women and Gentiles studying Kabbalah. Mystics dream of the return of the whole human race to the One. And, ultimately, their vision is empowering. They make us think of ourselves in a different way. They make us look at each other in a different way. They make us turn inwards, not outwards and think about what that means. In an age in which so many of us feel increasingly disempowered what more valuable energy could there be?

Of course I simplify and no doubt overstate my case a tad. Not every Rabbi, Priest or Imam is corrupt. Nor is every Scientist or Social Engineer. Far from it. Similarly I realise that I have presented the last 2000 years of human endeavour as little more than a kind of extended disaster. This is not what I mean at all. But it is an almost universal principle that with true Mysticism comes a certain Humanism. As the Epistle of John puts it:

"If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother who he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" - First Epistle of John

Even if this were not true, the reality is that the mystical ideas I have been talking about try to elevate the reality of our Inner Life to new heights. The very idea of the Soul in its mystical sense brings with it the inherent dignity of each human being. Further, it acknowledges the deepest yearnings and aspirations of the human race and the profound sense of connectedness we feel between ourselves and each other. Paradoxically, the sense of alienation and aloneness we feel is directly proportional to the sense that we ARE connected to the world outside us. Unless there was the possibility of food, we wouldn't feel hungry... What we no longer have in our society is a universal sense of what it is to be a human being beyond the purely material. Nor do we have access to the deep emotional satisfaction which these ancient traditions offered people. The lack is a serious one.

Even if none of these 'Gods' exist in any physical reality, they exist in an extremely potent PSYCHIC reality, which is perhaps even more important. If we might have learnt anything from Jung it should have been that. Spiritual traditions emerge from an evolving awareness of what we are and how we relate to ourselves and the Universe. If we could understand this, we would cease to bind ourselves to the Gods and instead use them as tools for our own self-revelation, which is what they were supposed to be in the first place. They act as metaphors and images for important inner processes we all must go through. And this is our moment to do it. We live in a time when, for all its materialism, we have unique access to every spiritual tradition the human race has known over the last few millennia. Once we could be Christians or Buddhists and not know about each other. Now we cannot avoid awareness of each other. Some find this terrifying. Others, like myself, find it utterly liberating. For the first time in history we can transcend the limitations of our culture and roam over the ideas of the vast epic of human endeavour that is thought and feeling and discover how one tradition can suddenly shed light on another. What an opportunity to enrich ourselves, to open our eyes and give ourselves a chance to liberate ourselves once more with a new understanding of what it means to be alive and, perhaps, experiencing the existence that all spiritualities have pointed towards in their own way.

Does one need to believe in God to believe in the Soul? Who knows? But at least we can enlarge what we mean by these terms now in a way in which we haven't been able to for centuries. This is not to say that the advances of Science and the achievements of the Enlightenment have gone for nothing. Far from it! Only that a balance needs to be struck. All new major spiritual steps forward emerged out of a crisis in what came before. Judaism grew out of spiritualities in Egypt and the Middle East, Christianity out of Judaism, Zoroastrianism and other spiritualities of the time, Islam out of Judaism and Christianity. If there is a reason to open these tomes again, to bother with this stuff, its to lead us to a new birth, a new relationship to things, which will not be the same as the old way in its outward forms but will grow out of the universal sense of the Spirit in every tradition. And maybe we won't have to subscribe to a one-size-fits-all spirituality, but one which sees every individual as part of an immense tapestry, each contributing a unique colour and texture to a new vision a thousand times more beautiful than before...

Amen to that! Now on with the work! See what we can do...!

“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle.” -Albert Einstein

EASTWARD HO!: A BIT ON THE TAO

2008-10-13T16:09:00.000-07:00

"The Tao that may be spoken of of is not the Eternal Tao.
The Name that can be named is not the Eternal Name." - Tao Te Ching, Verse 1

Taoism was where I came in on this journey many moons ago. As a young lad of 16 I found myself one New Year's Eve staying at the Brighton home of a cousin of mine, Gillian, who was a Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at Sussex University. Two things transformed me during that stay. Firstly the sudden awareness that there were people outside of my immediate family who valued me and the ideas I might have and secondly the discovery of the Tao. I had with me on that visit a copy of the TAO TE CHING and a book about it by a man called Raymond Smullyan entitled THE TAO IS SILENT. Both books went off like a soundless explosion in my head. Suddenly the world seemed opened to a whole new set of possibilities. Gone were the impossible dualities and paradoxes of everything I had understood to be religious. What replaced them was a sudden awareness of something Cosmic in everything and the possibility of delighting in what is in THIS world.

I will never forget that New Year and have always associated it with my cousin Gillian who consciously and/or unconsciously opened a special door for me at that young age. She was a wonderful woman and a great mind who made it her business to try and revive intellectual adventure and interest in other cultures in the stuffy and insular world of British philosophy. Thank you forever, Gillian.

So what was it about the Tao that so appealed to me? Hard to explain, particularly given the fact that several millenia of Chinese culture has been given over to trying to explain it and, more often than not failing... So here is my (perhaps very Western) two penn'orth...

Unsurprisingly given its name, Taoism centres around the mysterious energy known as the Tao. Brilliantly for us, this word has no equivalent in English or any other European language. The best we can usually manage is 'the Way'. Sometimes the Buddhist term 'Dharma' is used, which is not much better for us as that too has no clear equivalent in the West. Needless to say that according to the author of the TAO TE CHING, Lao Tzu, trying to understand the Tao is simultaneously almost impossible while also essential to the Seeker looking to be one with it. This typically Chinese paradox which at the same time encapsulates Taoism's fundamental non-Dualistic truth exemplifies what is at the heart of this profound yet simple spiritual philosophy.

The essence of Taoism is the idea of the constant flow of the Male and Female/Positive and Negative/Yin and Yang energies. If one can become sensitive to this hidden flux, one is not drawn into dualism. In other words, one is neither inactive nor overactive but knows how to interact and flow with the flux of things in the right way. Finding this flow and working effortlessly with it is known as 'WuWei'. Again, 'WuWei', like 'Tao' has no clear equivalent in English.

WuWei, usually translated as 'Nonaction' (the best we can do) is not 'Inaction'. What it means is not PUSHING or acting with the Little Ego, the Selfish 'I'. By cultivating an awareness of the Tao, one's Little Ego becomes One with the Greater Ego - the Eternal, whether you want to call it the Greater Consciousness as the Buddhists do, the Ain Sof as the Kabbalists do, Brahman as the Hindus do or the Deus Abscondus as the Christians. This process involves immense inner work and the discovery of the laws of the Tao within oneself. Once all one's activities are thus governed by its flow, then all is well and wrong action cannot arise.

If you look at all mystical traditions, the term 'non-' or 'no-' comes up again and again. In Kabbalah, the Ain Sof is often translated as the 'Boundless No-Thing'. Brahman is often translated as the same... 'the Supreme Limitless'... Nirvana is 'Non-Being'. The Christian Mystic known as the Pseudo-Dionysius describes God as being 'No-Thing', in other words, something which contains nothing material. Ultimately, this is the Tao.

The wisdom of the Tao, like all other esoteric mysticisms, is recognising that all human value systems - whether wealth, fame, power, prosperity, even morality and immorality, good or evil - are human constructs and have no innate reality. To persue any of these creates a dichotomy and a duality. The more one wants to be beautiful, the more one is aware of one's ugliness. The more one wants to be good, the more one becomes aware of one's evil. The problem of duality in Christianity is a classic example of this. The more obsessed a Saint comes with wanting to be like Christ, the more sinful and abhorrent he finds himself. Through Action we pursue these goals, but only find ourselves tilting the seesaw, or falling off the Wheel. If Christianity could focus on the unifying principle of the Holy Spirit (the closest we get to the Tao in the West) we might get somewhere. Christ did, after all, describe himself as 'the Way'. But who listened? As it is, Christianity in its organised form has remained stuck on Dualism, as, I suppose, have Judaism and Islam, except in their Mystical forms...

The key is understanding the balance, the equilibrium that is the Tao, figured at the emptiness in a jug which makes the jug useful, or the emptiness at the centre of a wheel which makes it revolve. Ultimately Good and Evil, Beauty and Ugliness, War and Peace all fold into One in th Dao. Look at the Yin and Yang symbol. If one fixates on the duality, the symbol continues to revolve as a wheel. If one looks carefully, one sees that the Yin lies in the centre of the Yang and the Yang lies in the centre of the Yin. If one goes deep enough into one or the other one finds the opposite principle waiting for you.

If the Tao is properly understood and realised in one's life, Yin and Yang dissolve into One, the Moon Disc, the marriage of the two hemispheres of the human brain. THEN anything one does is in accordance with the Tao and there is neither Action nor Inaction, there is only Nonaction. By letting the Tao flow through us, the appropriate thing is done. The best illustration I have found of the idea of working with the rythmn of the Tao in Western Scripture is in this extract from the OLD TESTAMENT:

"To every thing there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to break up;
A time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get and a time to lose; a time to keep and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war and a time of peace." - Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Understanding WuWei is not easy to do. It requires immense work and a willingness to give up one's Little Ego to the Greater Ego. It also means immense spiritual work most of the time, although like all great Truths, the Dao is simple. A child could understand it. Which is why it is so complicated.

A great Chinese proverb says 'If the Truth were simple everyone would have told his brother'. I've had a go. There's a great deal more to it... as simple and as complex as you like... Take a look, but don't expect it to be easy!

I'M A SOUL MAN: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE BODY, SOUL & SPIRIT: PART TWO

2008-10-05T14:05:00.000-07:00

"It is the Soul, the Spirit, the Self that must be seen and be heard and have our thoughts and meditation, O Maitreya! When the Soul is seen and heard, is thought upon and is known, then all that is becomes known." - Upanishads

The Greeks identified the heart as being the seat of the Psyche/Soul and the head as that of the Pneuma/Spirit (see image in last post). This idea of the Nous, or Mind being the connection each of us has with the universal Pneuma continued into Eastern Christianity ie Greek, Russian, Byzantine etc which believes that each of us carries within him or her a spark of the Divine Nous or Consciousness. Unlike Western Christianity which holds to doctrines of Original Sin and, even worse, Utter Depravity (thank you Augustine and Calvin for those), Orthodox Christians hold that the Divine Consciousness within each of us, like a mirror, not only reflects God's light but can only be obscured, never destroyed. Thus for the Greeks the inherent dignity of humanity and its indestructible connection with the Eternal survived Plato and Constantine into the present day...

In fact the Greeks were a major source of thought on the Soul. From early on Radiant Bodies, Astral Bodies and Spirit Bodies were identified as being part of its make-up, some able to detach themselves from their physical forms and travel between worlds. Pythagoras, Plato and the later neo-Platonists all also explored the nature of the Soul, its relationship to the One and its existence in many lives through transmigration and reincarnation. Pythagoras was said to be able to recognise places and objects that had played a role in previous incarnations. Plato wrote in great detail about what the Buddhists would call the Bardo state, or intermediary state between death and rebirth. But it was the great neo-Platonist Plotinus who devoted his entire life to a study of the Soul, his monumental ENNEADS providing inspiration for all mystical writing in the West from Origen to Ibn Arabi to Isaac Luria. It was Plato and his successors who developed the idea of the Soul emanating from the One, the Godhead, incarnating in this body and seeking a return to its origin, an idea familiar to all the great traditions mentioned above. Indeed in Sufism this notion of the Descent and Ascent of the Soul is central to the whole idea of the Way. Here, the Soul incarnates and descends from the Godhead and exists in the flesh until the moment when it suddenly becomes aware of itself. At this moment of awakening, its situation becomes intolerable and, aware of its celestial origins, it begins to seek the means to return. It is at this moment that the Soul becomes suitable for embarking upon the Sufi Way, at which time the quest begins to be reunited with the Divine. I am sure most people reading this can remember the moment which 'woke' them up and began them on their own journey. Perhaps the Burning Bush before Moses or Paul's experience on the road to Damascus are dramatic images of this moment of self-discovery. Paul's awakening to the possibilities of the Soul is interesting in this context as it was from him that we derive the term 'Out of Body Experience', a concept found in the Merkavah Mystics of ancient Israel and the Prophet's Night Journey in Jerusalem:

"I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell, whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth) such an one caught up to the third heaven. And I knew such a man (whether in the body or out of the body I cannot tell; God knoweth) how that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful to utter." - 2 Corinthians 12: 2-4

It is this unity and origin with the One, the Over-Soul as the Theosophists put it, which makes the idea or existence of the Soul so important - the idea that there is a Cosmic Oneness of which all human Souls are part. In fact, once again, the idea is universal. In India, there is the Atman, or World Soul and in the West, the Anima Mundi, of which each of us possesses the Scintillans, or Divine Spark within us. In all instances, the World Soul is synonymous with the Cosmic Man, be it Purusha in India or Adam Kadmon and Christ in the West. And in all instances the World Soul and the Cosmic Man are united with whatever term the culture wants to call God - Brahma, the Father, the Ain Sof. In our inner selves, if not in our physical selves, everything is One.

By far the most comprehensive analysis of this connection in the West is found in Kabbalah. Here the three levels of the Soul already mentioned give way to two more, Chayyah and Yechidah. These are said to be operating on such a high level that they barely impact on our conscious lives. Nevertheless it is at this level that we connect to the Godhead in the most profound way. It is here that we find what I mean by our having 'never being severed from the Divine'.

We saw how in Kabbalah the threefold nature of the Soul consisted of the Nefesh, the Ruach and the Neshemah. Above this are the fourth and fifth levels, Chayyah and Yechidah. Chayyah is linked etymologucally to the word for 'Life' in Hebrew: Chaim (as in 'L'chaim'). Chayyah is, in sense, the Cosmic Life Force emanating from God, pouring down and suffusing everything. Even higher than this is Yechidah, which means 'the Only One' or 'the Singular One'. Yechidah is so intimately interwoven with God that it is almost indistinguishable. Isaac Luria explained this fivefold nature of the Soul by taking a Glassblower as an analogy. If Nefesh is the part of the Soul which, like the breath of the Glassblower, forms the shape of the glass object being created, Chayyah is the breath emerging from the lungs through the mouth while Yechidah is the idea of the breath in the mind. Thus on the most profound level (or the highest, depending on your perspective), we are at One with God. Needless to say, awareness of this can only usually be conceptual. Its almost impossible to actually directly experience this condition. And yet for the Kabbalist it is absolutely true. We are 100% one with God, even as we move in this world under the impression that we are an isolated part of Creation. Hence we are in a real sense 'never severed from the Divine'. This, presumably, is what Christ meant when he said 'I and the Father are One', suggesting that in this relationship lies the secret of what John says is our 'power to become all the Sons of God'.

And this is where the revolutionary aspect of the Soul comes in, for what is it that causes the most pain in this world we live? The sense of loneliness, of isolation, of meaninglessness, of being in a chaotic, fragmented universe in which at any moment someone or something could be out to get you? Fear, the belief that one is utterly alone, that the planet is a jungle where death and pain is just around the corner, where you cannot trust anyone - these are the causes of so much of our suffering and conflict. The Gnostics believed that this world of Matter was ruled over by a mad and blind God who sought to keep us from an awareness of the Soul. I have always thought that this was a perfect metaphor for life in which all access to the Spirit was snuffed out. A condition of fearful darkness in which even our material existence cannot be enjoyed. In the rediscovery of the Soul, that thing in us which connects us to everything - ourselves, each other, the Cosmos - is perhaps the means out of the situation we are in now.

So how do we begin to do this? Well to start with we have to believe in the existence of the Soul again. Easier said than done, as some people simply do not acknowledge such a thing, whether as a 'phsyical' reality or even a metaphorical one. This is a problem, as inherent in the idea of the Soul however one defines it is the dignity of the individual and his or her inner life. If this isn't acknowledged we don't have a chance. We will go on seeing each other as lumps of meat, economic units, expendable assets, things to be exploited and not sentient beings with an inherent value connected to each other. The only way of believing in the Soul's existence is to experience it.

Secondly, we have to rescue the Soul from religions and give it back to humanity. This is also tricky, as traditionally the world's religions have been how we have understood the Soul. All the wisdom I have cited here came from the very faith systems we are now so keen to reject. Outside them, discourse on the Soul is pretty hard to find, particularly in the market place where Matter is king. But if there is something to be learnt about the way the different religions speak about the Soul it is that the reality of the Soul is not only Universal, but NOT religion-dependent. The Soul came first, religious discussion of the Soul came second. Indeed all faiths came OUT of a new understanding of the Soul and its relationship with God or the One. If the problem with religion today can be defined it would be in terms of a reversal of this relationship. Instead of being a means to put people in touch with the Soul and set it free, religion has too often in our modern world been a way of binding it, obsessing more about what we do with our Bodies and with whom than how we might make contact with our own deeper selves. Intolerance, jihads, crusades, Inquisitions, suppression of women and destruction of cultures are not good ways of helping people discover their inner lives, although ironically the tyranny of religion is an inverse proof of the power of that inner life. If we didn't have one, it wouldn't be such a potent means of control.

The Soul, although an expression of the One, is not a herd animal. It needs to tread an individual path and it needs an environment to do so. When religion has facilitated the Soul, when it has served as a seed-bed for the Soul to flourish, when it has been Soul-inspired as it were, we have prospered. Historically, this has been the function of religion, to explore en masse what the Soul might mean. Every piece of information I have used in these posts has come from Christian, Muslim, Judaic or Hellenic sources - ie religious ones. The exoteric expressions of these religions enabled this esoteric discovery to happen. But religion, like everything else, is cyclic. What was once liberating is now largely lagging behind. The Soul needs to be freed. But as I mentioned earlier, how do we do so when all the terminology stemmed from those religions we need to move beyond? The answer is simple - we need to know where we came from. We owe a massive debt to these religions, they gave us a crucial framework for discussion of our spiritual natures. Like it or not, they are like our parents. However, if they are to survive, children need to leave their parents and become adults themselves which must inevitably involve rebellion and rejection. But perhaps once those parents cease to have power over us we can come to some terms with them, recognise what they have given us, pay hommage but move on into our own lives with that wisdom understood in a new way. Thus to reject the last 2000 years of spiritual development out of hand is foolish. This is why I refuse to take the fashionable 'all religion is crap' POV. We need to release the divinely-inspired beauty of what they have to offer from the man-made ugliness that has sought to subject us and find a way of speaking of the Soul without the connotations of guilt, punishment and misery that have made it such an undesirable thing to have for so long. The Soul needs rehabilitation! But if the environment is not given for it to thrive it will have to make its own. Thus religions - along with a few other things most likely! - will have to decide whether they will reembrace the Soul and nourish it or face going to the wall.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we have to understand the relationship between the Body and the Soul in a new way. If there is one thing all the different 'systems' of the Soul I have mentioned have in common it is that Body and Soul on all its levels are inescapably One. For too long we have allowed them to war with each other. The Soul gives us a gateway onto Eternity, but the ecstasy of that is entirely dependent upon us having a Body to experience it. The Finite defines the Infinite and vice versa. We need to stop seeing the Body as a prison for the Soul (a mistake even some of the greatest Mystics made) and instead see it as a tremendous OPPORTUNITY for its expression. We are here to experience life in the flesh in every way. There are things that the Soul cannot do without a Body. We are incarnate because the Soul wants it. Without it, it cannot experience Love, it cannot make love or properly understand its place in the Universe. What distinguishes us from the Angels is our combination of a physical body with a divine essence. That should be a joy rather than a curse. At the same time, the Body can become deeply impoverished without the Soul. Without it, the Body becomes utterly subject to the illusions of Time and Space and begins to fear for its own safety, becoming subject to the blind and mad God at which point the suffering of the Soul becomes so intense. Most importantly, sexuality must be restored to its rightful place at the heart of our experience of our Divine Nature. The greatest Mystics of all the ages knew this and couched their highest experiences in terms which were as much erotic as spiritual...

Greek Christianity speaks of the 'ensouled body' and the 'embodied soul', suggesting, perhaps, the real relationship between the two. Perhaps this is what we need to learn anew, setting the Soul free to fly again and allowing it kiss and be kissed by the Body once more. We have spent a long time going outwards with our behaviour. Its time to go inwards again and once we have discovered the treasure within, to inform everything we do without with that gold... It is a liberation and offers the possibility of a connection not only with the deepest things within us but the whole human race and, potentially, the Universe... Perhaps such a hope is naive. Perhaps the time is not available to us. But what more exciting horizon of opportunity could there be? A true understanding of the phrase 'the Kingdom of God is within you' each in our own individual way...

"Nothing under heaven can arrest the progress of the human soul on its long pilgrimage from darkness to light, from the unreal to the real, from death to immortality, and from ignorance to wisdom." Djwhal Khul, the Tibetan

I'M A SOUL MAN: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE BODY, SOUL & SPIRIT: PART ONE

2008-10-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

"There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another" - 1st Corinthians 15:40

Pretty much a bottom line with any interest in spirituality/ mysticism/ esotericism is the belief in the Soul. Fascinatingly, every culture in the world has a word for the Soul but not every culture has a word for war or money. I find that interesting as it suggests that, since anyone can remember, human beings have felt the need to invent a word for something we can't touch, smell, taste, hear or see with our physical bodies, but not for two things (war and money) that we nowadays think of as integral to human existence. Of course, Dawkinsians would say the word 'unicorn' exists but that doesn't mean there were ever unicorns. That's very true, but unicorns are a concept pretty much localised in European culture and its offshoots. There are no African or Aboriginal unicorns, for instance, but the Soul seems to be everywhere. It is universal in nature.

Of course, this still doesn't mean that we have Souls, only that all cultures have or have had a sense that there is something within us which is more than physical and which operates in a different way to the mind or any other part of our organism. The Soul is somewhere where we feel and experience things differently. It is a place of intense feeling. It doesn't grow old and seems to exist outside Time and Space as well as within them. Often it feels like a repository of wisdom of a kind we don't always have access to. When we refer to someone speaking 'from the bottom of their Soul' we mean they are speaking from the very depths of their being, from somewhere very profound. Even if we don't believe in the literal existence of the Soul we all know what it means as a metaphor. It is the deepest part of who we are. When one is in touch with one's Soul, as most people who are interested in the kind of thing this Blog is all about are or have been in some way, the experience is deeply beautiful, very moving and utterly fulfilling. Any sensation of feeling deracinated, alienated, unsettled vanishes and one feels connected to who one really is. This, universally, is how Mystics describe oneness with the Soul. It is Gnosis, Satori, Moksha, the Yichud, Union, whatever one wants to call it. Its what T S Eliot said when he spoke of the point of intersection 'between Time and the Timeless'. Once you have experienced it, you want to know more, you want the connection to BE more until it informs one's whole being on this planet. Its what Djwhal Khul called 'the Soul-Infused Personality' and the Medieval Beguine Mystic Hadewijch, 'Fruition'. I am sure anyone reading this will know what I mean...

Of course, the idea of the Soul has gone out of fashion in our well-adjusted, non-materialistic, unneurotic West. Apart from the scientific view argued by people like Senor Dawkins that if you can't see it it ain't there and if it can't be 'proven' in the lab it doesn't exist, there is the obvious reason that until recently a Soul wasn't a very desirable thing to have. After all, haven't we been told for centuries by different (but not all) Churches that in all likelihood our Souls are going to go to Hell? Who would want one if such were its fate? And who would want one if to avoid that fate you had to pay obedience to a lot of hideous and anti-life rules and regulations made up by men in funny hats who didn't follow them themselves? The existence of the Soul should enable one to experience Eternity. It should be a source of joy, 'like a sun in splendour' as the UPANISHADS say. How can it be if for the majority that Eternity was probably going to be spent burning in firey damnation? No wonder we have rebelled and identified purely with our material forms... The Soul has a lot of catching up to do! If we are to get it back, we perhaps need to look at what it REALLY is, not what we have been told.

The Greek word for the Soul was 'Psyche'. Right away we have something interesting there, for we have borrowed that word for our modern concept of Mind or Consciousness. For the Greeks, the Psyche was part of the threefold nature of Man in his earthly state, the other two being 'Soma' (Body) and 'Pneuma' (Spirit). Interestingly, the Pneuma was the highest part of the three, connecting us with the Eternal while the Soma was the most material, being the vehicle with which we operated in this world. The Psyche was the mediating principle which united the two. Thus the three elements of the Self became one. Soma was suffused by Psyche and connected to Pneuma and vice versa. Without the Psyche, the Pneuma could never experience the world through the Soma etc etc.

In the design of their theatres the Greeks reflected this threefold idea of humanity by the layout of their stages. The Chorus, representing the Soma, was by far the largest part, fanning out into the audience in a semi-circle. The Psyche was just above this and was the area of the stage in which the Heroes (ie Oedipus, Heracles, Antigone etc) operated. Above this again was the area known as 'the Gods', representing the Pneuma. It was here that the Olympian Deities appeared (eg Dionysus, Athena, Apollo etc). Thus the Greek stage constituted not only a complete vision of their view of the Cosmos (or Kosmos) but also a complete vision of the human organism. The Mystical meaning of this, of course, was that the Soma was as much part of the Psyche and the Pneuma as anything else. There was no dualism here. Equally important, though, was that the Gods were manifest in the Pneuma of humanity or that the Pneuma of the individual was part of the overall Pneuma of the Universe. This is something it is easy to forget. Thus the Greek Drama, which was a form of religious worship in itself, recognised the holistic relationship between Gods and Men. It is not Apollo who screws up Oedipus but the Apollo IN Oedipus, or the Apollo that IS Oedipus - ie his Higher Self that simply wants to be known at all costs. At the end of Oedipus' story he is taken up to Olympus by the Gods. In other words he moves from 'Psychic' knowledge to 'Pneumatic' knowledge having emerged from 'Somatic' knowledge when he answered the Sphinx's riddle. Thus the Oedipus Plays are not cruel dramas of the blind injustice of the Gods but an Initiatic Ritual into Higher Knowledge as Oedipus moves up the scale to the highest Insight, even though he suffers horribly in the process (largely because he resists it, interestingly).

Kabbalah has a similar threefold vision of the Soul. For the Kabbalists, we operate on three primary levels, all of which are poured into the human form, the 'Tzelem'. The lowest part of the Soul, that which compares to the Soma, is known as the Nefesh. This is sometimes called 'the Animal Soul' or 'the Vegetable Soul'. This is the part of the Soul which is intimately interwoven with every cell of our physical form. It experiences the passions, the emotions, the desires of earthly life with most vividness. It feels pleasure and pain. Kabbalists say that, at death, the Nefesh takes the longest of the three parts of the Soul to return to the Godhead. Stories speak of cemetaries full of the Nefeshes of the dead standing over their graves, mourning the beauty and intensity of what they have lost (the most powerful and convincing explanation of what we call 'ghosts' I have heard). The next level of the Soul is called the 'Ruach' and corresponds to the Psyche. It performs a similar function of mediating between the Nefesh and the third level, the Neshemah which is the highest level and the equivalent of the Pneuma. Interestingly, both Ruach and Neshemah are words with similar meanings: 'Breath' or 'Wind'. Pneuma, by no coincidence, means the same. All refer to the idea of the Breath of God or Spirit. If we remember, the book of Genesis speaks of God breathing his essence into clay to make Adam. In Christianity the original Greek word for the Holy Spirit was the Haghia Pneuma or Holy Breath. 'Spirit' itself is based on the Latin word 'Spiritus' which also means breath, so the meaning is the same everywhere. Somehow, Greek, Hebrew and Latin all identify the Spiritual aspect of humanity with the Divine Breath which is everywhere and passes through everything. It is exactly the same idea as Prana in Hinduism and indeed in all cultures. The Spirit and Soul partake of the very Divinity that is everywhere. As Meister Eckhardt, the greatest of all the Rhineland Medieval Christian Mystics, said:

"Know that God loves the soul so powerfully that it staggers the mind. If one were to deprive God of this so that he did not love the soul, one would deprive him of his life and being, or one would kill God if we may say such a thing. For that same love by which God loves the soul is his life, and in this same love the Holy Spirit blossoms forth; and this same love IS the Holy Spirit. Since God loves the soul so powerfully, the soul must be something very great." - Sermon 69

I've spoken of the threefold nature of the Soul/Human Organism as espoused here in Kabbalah and Greek cultures. Again, keen Jungians will be reminded of the Threefold Form of Buddhism in which the Buddhist experiences his connectedness to the Greater Consciousness which is everywhere and of which he is part through his own Lesser Consciousness and Body. In Christianity the same threefold nature is present in Body, Soul and Spirit (doesn't sound as good in English, does it?), although you wouldn't know it when you hear most Christians talk about it. Nor are they brilliant at seeing them as a whole. If the Body is as much part of the Spirit as the Soul or at least partakes of it most Christians, in the West at least (less so in the East) tend to want to cut the Body out of the equation. As we can see, if the Body contains the Breath of God, this is a fatal error. People need to read their Scriptures more. Here, surprisingly, is Paul on the subject:

"Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth within you?" - 1st Corinthians 3:17

"So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nouriseth it and cheriseth it, even as the Lord the church... This is a great Mystery." - Ephesians 5:28-29

In fact the threefold nature of the Soul/Human Organism is only part of the world's thinking on this. The Triune idea of Being actually only really deals with our existence in this world, which is suffused with Divinity enough in its Body/Soul/Spiritual dimensions. In reality, all the above mentioned cultures go much further, connecting us all to the Godhead/Cosmos/One in a much more profound way. When these other levels of the Soul are explored one realises that we have, in fact, never been severed from the Divine. In truth we are walking with it now. This is the most revolutionary aspect of the Soul I can think of and why, perhaps, we need to be thinking about it more...

DON'T DIS DEMETER: THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES: PART THREE

2008-09-30T15:46:00.001-07:00

"Those who take part possess better hopes in regard to the end of life and in regard to the whole of eternity.' - Isokrates

So the Eleusinian Mysteries drew to an end. After the Final Vision the Initiates partook of one more day of the Rites, this time involving food, drink and celebration in honour of the abundance and fertility of Demeter - the Gift of the Grain. Thus after Death had been faced and transcended the bounty of Nature was rejoiced in. After that, the Mystai were free to return to the world, their understanding of their place in it transformed...

Why are the Eleusinian Mysteries so important to us? For the Greeks, as we have seen, they were crucial: the axis, as it were, around which the Universe of Gods and Men revolved. For two thousand years (as long as Christianity has been on this Earth and longer than Islam) they performed this vital role for Greek culture, only being discontinued several centuries after Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Imitation Eleusises were founded in Alexandria and in other parts of the classical world but none are believed to have had the energy or pull of the original. The fame of the Rites reached even India. One story speaks of a Brahmin Priest traveling to Athens to experience the Mysteries and walking into the flames of the Final Vision in order to show his contempt for them.

What makes the Rites of Eleusis important is their influence on almost all the Mystery Traditions that followed them. In their exploration of Immortality and their focus on imagery of grain and corn they almost certainly found their way into the New Testament. We have seen how the iconography of corn is used in the Gospel of John, for instance and, of course, there are other such images in parables such as that of the sower of seed. Of course, we could easily say that corn is a universal image for Immortality and Resurrection and that therefore there may well have been no influence but the reality is probably much more subtle than that. Historians of religion have done a great deal to unearth how all sorts of pre-Christian Mysticism worked its way into the Gospels. We forget how at the time of Christ's birth and ministry nearby Alexandria was a focus for spirituality in the known world at the time. Alexandria was a centre for Jewish religion and mysticism, Zoroastrianism, Platonic, Pythagorean and Hermetic spirituality and the old Egyptian Mysteries. It should come as no surprise that the new spirituality of Christianity should not encounter and absorb these traditions. One can see this in one of three ways depending upon your view - firstly that Christianity was just a cobbling together of what came before, secondly that it took these images in order to trump them or thirdly that it became a synthesis of all that came before embodied in the human/divine figure of Christ. Whatever the case there would seem to be no doubt that the Mysteries of Eleusis found their way into the new religion. Taken with the Mysteries of Dionysus and their imagery of the Vine, those of Eleusis reappear in the bread and wine of the Last Supper. Initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries wore bracelets made out of red and white wool. Once again, those key colours appear as central to the process of achieving Immortality in both ancient Greek and Christian cultures.

As an image of the life-giving energy of the Divine Feminine, the Mysteries found themselves reworked in a complex way in the figures of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdelene and the Sophia. As if to point out that the Goddess could no longer provide Resurrection, the Virgin, unlike her Greek predecessor, is not able to bring Christ back to life, or so it would appear. Nonetheless in John's Gospel the two Marys and a third, Mary, wife of Cleopas, are present at the foot of the Cross like another version of the Triple Goddess. And just as the Eleusinian Final Vision took place in the Inner Sanctum, Christ's Resurrection, witnessed by the Persephone counterpart Mary Magdelene, takes place in the Tomb which is itself an image of the Womb of the Divine Mother. Interestingly, just as the Mystai witnessed some kind of manifestation in the blinding fire of the Sanctum, so Mary Magdelene encounters Christ shortly after encountering two Angels in shining white garments in the Tomb. Equally important is the fact that in all four accounts of the Resurrection, not only is the Tomb attended by women followers of Christ (natural given the customs of the time) but the miracle occurs after the Sabbath Day when the Feminine Aspect of God, the Shekinah, dwells with the people of Israel. Thus the life-giving energy of the Divine Feminine is inextricably associated with the Resurrection of Christ all of which, the two Marys, the Shekhinah, become expressions of the Wisdom of God, the Sophia. Without her and the energies she represents, the central miracle of the Christian Mysteries cannot happen.

In esotericism, the Rites appear vividly not only in the distinction between the Lesser and Greater Mysteries but also in things such as the Tarot, most particularly in the Empress Card as depicted in the Rider-Waite pack. Waite's Empress is pure Demeter-Persephone. Her robe is covered in pomegranates, associated with the Daughter while at her feet is the wheat of the Mother. Also associated with Demeter is the diadem of stars the Empress wears. In astrology, Virgo is linked to the Mysteries, being often represented as maiden carrying a sheaf of corn in each hand. People who have been on the ball will have noticed that the ten days of the Rites fell during harvest time, the period we associate with September, the month of Virgo. Thus they would have been presided over by this constellation which rules the ninth month, nine months being, of course, the nine months of gestation before birth. So all these images of femininity, fertility and fecundity all merge into one.

Even more interesting than all this is the presence of the Mysteries of Eleusis in the works of Shakespeare, particularly in the fascinatingly elusive Late Plays. It seems to have gone almost completely unnoticed, for instance, that the Masque that Prospero shows Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest is an enactment of the Mysteries, featuring Demeter, Persephone and Hades in their Roman guises as Ceres, Iris and Dis. That Shakespeare should have Prospero chose this story to commemorate the bethrothal of the two lovers seems to have gone completely unremarked by anyone since its premiere in the 17th Century. Similarly in The Winter's Tale the return of Hermione to Leontes at the hands of Paulina almost exactly parallels the Final Vision of the Mystai in the Inner Sanctum. In it Paulina, the Demeter-figure of the play in guiding Leontes and the others to Hermione draws them into a Chapel where a statue of the supposedly dead Queen is found. She then performs a magical ceremony which brings Hermione back to life, just as Persephone returns from the Underworld, when she is reunited with her King. No play marks the seasons like The Winter's Tale, the bucolic fourth act of which is presided over by 'thou Great Goddess Nature' before the process of regeneration of the end. Cymbeline has a death and resurrection (Imogen) and Pericles sees the wizard Cerimon resurrect Thaisa who goes on to become a Priestess of Diana in Ephesus. Somehow, for whatever reason, these ancient Rites of the Greeks seem to have come to Shakespeare's awareness and informed the redemptive vision of his final four plays.

Clearly the Mysteries of Eleusis have depths and reverberations we have not yet even begun to fully explore. Their profundity, their imagery and their influence continues to make itself felt even in our world today. For so long shrouded in mystery they have been neglected as an important phenomena by historians until this last century. Esotericists seem to have known about them and to have been aware of their deep significance, but in terms of the popular perception of what ancient Greek culture was all about, even in supposedly educated circles they have been largely overlooked until now. Whatever the truth about them, the fact is that the Greeks conceived of these Mysteries as the pivot of their Cosmos and world view - not the Mysteries of Zeus, or Apollo or even Dionysus. For them the fundamental source of Mystery, the means whereby the health and equilibrium of everything was maintained, was a ritual centred not around a masculine energy but one that was specifically feminine, not around any God but the Goddess in all of her three of her aspects. Zeus may have been the ultimate ruler of Olympus, but the Mysteries of Demeter, Kore and Persephone held the key to everything. Perhaps in our modern time with food shortages, GM crops and an environment badly out of balance the Eleusinian Mysteries have more to say to us than ever...

DON'T DIS DEMETER: THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES: PART TWO

2008-09-23T17:08:00.000-07:00

"We have been given a reason not only to live in joy but also to die with better hope" - Cicero

Corn was a central image of the Rites of Eleusis. Quite apart from the obvious association of corn with fertility and harvest (the Mysteries took place in September, the time of the drawing in of the year's yield) it was also a symbol of the immortality of the Soul. When corn is laid out in the sun the stem or stalk withers and dies but the cornseed itself remains. Thus the Body dies but the Soul survives. Not only that but the seed can be sown and thus give birth to a new sheaf of wheat, beginning the process again. Thus the Corn Mystery points towards the possibility of either Resurrection or even Reincarnation. When we remember that Plato and Pythagoras believed in Reincarnation, as did the Orphic/Dionysiac Gnostics, that this was the idea of Immortality the Eleusis gave its Initiates an insight into becomes a possibility. For the Immortality the Rites offered was not of the flesh, but of the Spirit. The Initiate was able to face death with joy and hope, understanding the true nature of existence as being more than the material. Rather like the message of a certain religious teacher to come, the Eternal Life being offered by Demeter was not a literal one of the body but a vision of a spiritual existence that went beyond the mortal.

"Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." (John 12:24)

Another key image was the Moon, the heavenly body associated with Goddesses all over the world. Like the Moon, Demeter, whose name echoes the Greek and Roman words for 'Mother', wandered across the Earth in her grief. Also like the Moon, the Mysteries celebrated the Goddess in her Triple Form, in this case Demeter-Kore-Persephone, corresponding, traditionally, to the cycle Maiden-Mother-Crone. This is symbolised by the famous image of the full moon flanked by two crescents, one waxing, the other waning, demonstrating not only the eternal cycle of Nature but, like the imagery of the Corn, of Death and Rebirth. For even though the moon waxes, reaches fullness and then wanes before disappearing, it quickly reembarks upon the process again. Thus the Moon image of the Triple Goddess dramatises the relationship between Permanence and Mutability, or physical death and spiritual immortality. Although the Moon appears to die, it is always reborn. Indeed, it never really dies. Its disappearance is an illusion we perceive, just as death is. What is essential always remains even if it is hidden.

The Rites took ten days as the Initiates reenacted Demeter's ten days of mourning before the return of her daughter. According to legend, the Goddess quit the company of the Gods and taking on the form of a wizened old woman (Demeter as Mother becoming the Crone), wandered among humanity in search of Persephone. No-one could lift her spirits except for the chief maid of the King of Eleusis who was able to make her laugh with her dirty jokes. Demeter was take in by the King and, in return, she offered to give his son Immortality. This involved secret rites of her own, the chief of which was placing the child in fire each night, an image of purification familiar to many cultures. Unfortunately one evening the Queen of Eleusis stumbled across Demeter doing this and screamed in shock, not understanding what was going on. In her fury, Demeter stopped the process of giving Immortality to the child but out of the encounter the Eleusinian Mysteries were born. Although shrouded in secrecy, the one element which all commentators agree on about the ceremonies was a blazing light or fire in the Telesterion, or Inner Sanctum where the Initiates had the final vision which gave them an understanding of Immortality. It would seem reasonable to suppose, then, that the fire in which the young Prince of Eleusis was placed each night was the same fire that formed the centrepiece of the Mysteries.

Initiates, known as Mystai (from which we get the word Mystic), began their procession to the Temple of Demeter at Eleusis from the sea where they engaged in a ritual purification ceremony in the water. Prior to the procession, along which they carried branches or bacchoi, they had to drink a special potion known as the Kykeon which involved a mixture of barley, mint and water. What the significance of this drink was is not clear but it is thought by some commentators that it may have had hallucinogenic qualities thanks to fungus found on the barley. This is not to say that the Mystai spent the Rites tripped out, more that, like the indiginous cultures of south America, hallucinogens were regarded as part of the process of opening the mind to the Cosmos. Another interesting element of the Kykeon was that it was drunk out of a cup which each Initiate was given. Again, keen Jungians will spot a parallel with a certain other legend of a Sacred Cup out of which Immortality-giving liquid was drunk...

After the purification and the Kykeon, the Mystai processed to Eleusis, at each stage reenacting Demeter's journey. At one point, in emulation of the maid who made her laugh, they were required to shout out obscenities and dirty jokes. The Rites were clearly far from solemn in this respect, being as much a celebration of life as a means of transcending its limitations. At another point, the Initiates found themselves at the Virgin's Well, the sacred Well that Demeter was said to have sat at during her wanderings before making contact with the people of Eleusis. Sacred Wells are, of course, a universal phenomena all over the world with mystical significance for all cultures. Think of the encounter with the Samaritan Woman at Jacob's Well in John's Gospel, for instance, or the preeminence of Chalice Well at Glastonbury both before and after the arrival of Christianity in England. As an image of the source of life and the abundance of the feminine energy of Nature they are archetypal.

No-one knows for sure what the culmination of the Eleusinian Mysteries were. The vow of secrecy Initiates undertook was punishable by death, thus we can only guess. Nevertheless a certain amount of fragmentary hints have given us some kind of idea of what it may have involved. The Final Vision (sometimes called the Beatific Vision) was the culmination of the Greater Mysteries which the Initiates undertook only after they had completed the Lesser Mysteries which prepared them for the ultimate encounter with the Goddess. It is from this distinction between the Lesser and Greater Mysteries that later esotericists drew their deliniation of things like the Lesser Work and the Great Work. In the Rider Waite Tarot, for instance, the Chariot Card is associated with the completion of the Lesser Work. The potential of this card lies in whether the drawer of it recognises that the Lesser Mysteries are what they have achieved. If they understand this, then they are destined to move on to the Greater, which are contained in the Magician Card. If they don't and believe they have already reached their goal, the danger is that their destiny will be that of Icarus or Phaeton, who fatally overreached themselves.

When the Mystai passed beyond the Lesser Mysteries into the Inner Sanctum, they were literally stepping into the unkown, so complete was the vow of silence surrounding them. Would they encounter Demeter herself? The sense of excitement and fear must have been overwhelming. In the Inner Sanctum they would have encountered the High Priests and Priestesses of Eleusis. The belief is that the final ceremony took place in utter silence with an ear of corn presented to the Initiates before the Sacred Flames. In this atmosphere of stillness and reverence, the corn was cut before the audience and in the blazing fire the Final Vision was revealed. Given the descriptions we have of Spirits and Phantasms being seen it is thought that the Initiates had an experience of Persephone herself manifesting in the flames. At that moment Mother and Daughter were reunited in the Mystai's gaze. Demeter was seen as having lead the Initiates to Persephone, creating a Divine Union between them both. For a moment the Two became One, as the Goddess/Mother of our world was united with the Goddess/Daughter of the Underworld.. Persephone had risen from Hades and been reunited with Demeter. In that brief, cosmic moment, death had been transcended in the oneness of the Goddess and the veil between the two worlds had been passed through. Thus the Initiate understood the true nature of Death and Life, that they were in fact one, parts of an eternal process that went beyond human comprehension. That the experience was unforgettable and transforming is demonstrated in these words from Socrates quoted in Plato's PHAEDRUS:

"But then there was beauty to be seen, brightly shining, when with the blessed choir the souls beheld the beatific spectacle and vision and were perfected in that mystery of mysteries which it is meet to call the most blessed. This did we celebrate in our true and perfect selves, when we were yet untouched by all the evils in time to come; when as Initiates we were allowed to see perfect and simple, still and happy Spirits and Phantasms. Purer was the light that shone around us, and pure were we."

DON'T DIS DEMETER: THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES: PART ONE

2008-09-20T14:59:00.000-07:00

"Blessed is he who, after beholding this, enters upon the way beneath the earth: he knows the end of life and its beginnings given by Zeus!" - Pindar

Should anyone tell you that Western culture is irremediably male-dominated, suggest they take a look at the Ancient Greeks. Spiritually, if not politically (and there has been discussion about that, recently), women were well catered for in the Greek pantheon. However powerful Zeus and the male Gods were, the female were just as potent. Artemis, Aphrodite, Hera - all gave a good as they got. Indeed, the focus of Hellenic Culture, Athens, fountainhead of almost all of European culture, had the Goddess Athena as its patroness. The Deity of Artificers, Warfare and, above all, Wisdom in its Divine Forms, no Greek Goddess was more revered by this great city as Pallas Athena. To see how she was able to coexist and operate with her favoured followers, one need only read Homer's ODYSSEY. Shekinah-like, she helps, guides and intercedes for Odysseus and his family against all the obstacles he encounters, arguing against Zeus to protect the wandering hero and, ultimately, guiding him back to Penelope, her earthly counterpart, for a Divine Marriage of their own. Pico de Mirandola, the great architect of mystical Renaissance Humanism, said in his ORATION ON THE DIGNITY OF MAN that Homer concealed the truths of Kabbalah in THE ODYSSEY. If Odysseus is the Kabbalistic Initiate, Penelope the earthly Shekinah and Athena the supernal (Binah), then the return of Odysseus to his Kingdom (Malkuth) to regain his Crown (Kether) through the reunion of the King and the Queen is, indeed, Kabbalah in a Toga. Its just a shame Odysseus wasn't Jewish... or at least if he was, he didn't look it...

Although political power was denied women in ancient Greece, religious/spiritual power was not. As High Priestesses of the different Goddesses, women were able to wield considerable influence culturally. Moreover, through the Goddesses women were able to explore and express their spirituality in a way as vivid as the men and, in the case of figures such as Artemis, in a way which specifically excluded men ie in a way which was exclusively female. If Aphrodite was the embodiment of feminine sexuality as a cosmic force, then Artemis was an expression of femininity in a form which did not need men. Hers was a private spirituality of childbearing, of girlhood, of coming of age. Artemis protected young girls, who ritually discarded their toys before her as they reached puberty and who processed in her ceremonies in the guise of bears, the animals most favoured by the Huntress. She also protected those who were shy and watched over women as they went through their gestation period. As a Goddess attached to the Moon, she was often identified with Isis. Indeed, Apuleius explicitly says so in THE GOLDEN ASS when the eponymous hero, having finally been transformed back into a human from a donkey, has his vision of the Goddess rising from the waves. Her Temple was at Ephesus and was so important the Romans agreed to let it stand as long as the Greeks renamed her Diana. It was also at Ephesus that she was represented by the famous multi-breasted Goddess of Nature that is so familiar to us today. Clever Jungians among you will think it no coincidence that Ephesus was where the Byzantines consecrated the doctrine of the Theotokos (the Mother of God) having identified it as the place where both the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdelene died. And all this in spite of Paul having tried to spoil the day by putting sellers of souvenir statues of Artemis out of business by preaching the risen Christ there. Clearly the Goddess has a powerful presence in that now Turkish Mediterranean port...

Chief among the Cults of the Goddess for the Ancient Greeks, however, were the famous Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter, Kore and Persephone. Almost forgotten today, these were seen as being right at the heart of Greek culture and civilisation and reserved for the very blessed. So important were they that on the one occasion where they could not be carried out by the people of Athens owing to the city being besieged by the Persians, the citizens of that state were astonished to see a procession of Gods, Spirits and Immortals carrying them out. If the Eleusinian Mysteries were not performed, the harmony of the Universe would be shattered, with fatal consequences for Gods and mortals alike. When war threatened to disrupt them so high were the stakes that the Olympians had to step in to save the day.

The power of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the reason why they were so important, was that they conferred upon the Initiate Immortality. For this reason they were kept utterly secret, lest their nature fall into the hands of the profane. Those who took part were obliged to swear never to reveal any detail on pain of death. Initiates included Plato, Socrates, Pindar, Cicero, Hypatia and all the Roman Emperors, including Marcus Aurelius himself (again, a measure of the importance the Rites had to the ancient world) but they were also open to non-celebrities and ordinary people, women as well as men. Given the feminine nature of the Deities involved women could hardly be excluded. Indeed, in all likelihood the original Initiates probably were entirely women.

The Rites followed the story of Demeter's loss and recovery of her daughter, Persephone. Legend has it that, in collusion with Zeus, Hades (Pluto, or Dis in his Roman form, hence the title of this post) abducted and raped the beautiful Persephone, taking her off to his Underworld Kingdom to be his Bride. Demeter, unable to find out what had happened to her daughter, went into deep mourning as she searched in vain for her. Eventually Helios, the Sun God, revealed to her what Hades had done and, in her rage and pain, she withdrew her energies from the Earth, causing a blight to fall upon it and refusing to lift this curse until Zeus ordered Hades to return Persephone. The impasse continued until Zeus could take no more and agreed to allow Demeter audience with the King of the Underworld. An agreement was struck whereby Persephone was allowed to return to her Mother but only on the condition that she took nothing with her from Hell. Demeter agreed to this condition, but in doing so fell into Hades' trap. For unbeknownst to her, Hades had persuaded Persephone to eat a single pomegranate seed during her stay. Unable to return it, Persephone was forced to remain in the Underworld for a third of the year while for the rest of the time she could return to her Mother. Thus the seasons were born. While Persephone was in Hades, Demeter's pain meant winter dwelt upon the Earth. But when she was able to return, around the time of our Easter, spring and summer came with her, as Demeter was joyously reunited with her child...

THE ENIGMA OF THE CATHARS: EPILOGUE

2008-09-02T13:35:00.000-07:00

"That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." Gospel of John

So why were the Cathars so important? Historically speaking, as the first great heresy to challenge the Church in the Middle Ages they paved the way for the vast array of heresies which followed in their wake. The Lollards in England, the Brethren of the Free Spirit in Germany, the Taborites in Bohemia and the Beguines and Beghards of Belgium, Holland, the Rhineland and northern France were all influenced and affected by the grass-roots spirituality they represented. Its a fascinating and little remarked fact that many of the areas where these heresies sprang up were Cathar centres. All had in common with the Pure Ones an emphasis on the individual as opposed to the State and the Church. All believed in the ability of the Holy Spirit to dwell within us all and many, the Beguines and Beghards in particular, appealed to traditionally disenfranchised sectors of society such as women and the poor. Even the Mystics of the Rhine such as the genius Meister Eckhardt, Henry Suso and Johannes Tauler, all of whom vigourously denied heresy and spoke against these movements from within the Church, shared with the Cathars a vision of God and Christ becoming 'born' within the human Soul. Significantly, all three ran into trouble with the Inquisition, Eckhardt in particular falling foul of their investigations. Doctrinally and politically the Cathars may have differed from these later groups, but their attempt to reestablish an Apostolic, Mystical Christianity more closely modeled on that of Christ which stood in opposition to the Church was clearly an inspiration on movements to come.

The Cathars were also the first to translate the Bible into the vernacular, a key element in all the heresies to follow. In an effort to break the monopoly on the Word possessed by the Latin-speaking Church, they translated whole parts of the New Testament into Languedoc French. In so doing they helped pave the way for figures such as Wycliffe and Tyndale in England and Luther in Germany. Ironically, it was Church suppression of the Cathars which probably lead to the ultimate decline of Rome as the primary expression of Christianity in Western Europe. Although the Church defeated the Cathars the brutality with which they did so created widespread revulsion and helped fuel the growth of heresy and reform movements across the continent. Militarily they had won but morally the Cathars were victorious. The stain of the Cathar Crusade and the Inquisition is still being worked off today.

Ultimately the stone the Cathars set rolling would lead to the Protestant movement, inspired by Luther, which eventually fought Rome to a standstill. Luther's Christianity was a far cry from Catharism. Indeed the Cathars would have probably resisted it as little better than Catholicism, but that was probably why the military and political force was able to swing behind it to defeat the Church. The pure form of Christianity the Cathars represented would never have been appealing to the ruling classes and, by its very nature, would have abjured the military might needed to defeat Crusaders and Catholic armies. At the same time, it would have been unlikely that Luther would have viewed the Cathars with much enthusiasm either.

Ironically, Catharism also effected the Church. As mentioned earlier, the Dominican Order was explicitly set up to combat the Cathars as exemplars of the Apostolic Ideal within Catholicism. It is widely thought that the Franciscan Order was allowed to be founded for similar reasons. The moral call for a return to the way of the Apostles the Cathars put out was responded to in kind. Ironically, the Spiritual Franciscans, the branch of Order who most sought to emulate the original Little Brother's way of life, also ran into trouble with the Church and were denounced as heretics.

In our own time, the Cathars have undergone an enormous upsurge of interest. In esoteric circles, their doctrines have been taken up and identified as key elements in the development of Western spirituality. An eccentric French intellectual, Napoleon Peyrat first began the Cathar revival in the 19th Century, weaving rather lurid and fantastical theories about them (Esclarmonde de Foix, mother of seven children and matriarch of the Foix family was recast as a young, beautiful Joan of Arc figure by him, for instance). In the 20th Century, preeminent esotericist Rudolf Steiner identified the Cathars as important antecedents to Theosophy and Anthroposophy. Some have linked the Cathars to the founder of the Brotherhood of the Rose Cross, identifying Christian Rosenkreutz as a Cathar survivor smuggled to a Templar refuge after the fall of Montsegur. The Cathar-Templar connection has caused a great deal of speculation, particularly given the association with the Holy Grail ascribed to these two movements. A sympathetic relationship between them is disputed but the Templars had a major presence in the Languedoc (indeed they saw it as a prime candidate for their Ordenland) and, perhaps not insignificantly, they refused to take part in the Crusades against the Cathars. Some commentators have pointed to the possibility of certain Templar families having Cathar members as indications of a link. It is thought that the Templars, who seem to have been great absorbers of other spiritualities from Sufism to Alchemy and Kabbalah, adopted certain key Cathar ideas. That both movements were dedicated to protecting the scandalous knowledge that Christ was married to Mary Magdelene and had a child by her is entirely down to the speculations of Dan Brown and Messrs Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh... In this Winged Horse's humble opinion, this is the least interesting possibility concerning the Cathar-Templar connection and reduces two visionary, mystical groups to the level of keepers of religious gossip...

Keen esotericists will have spotted within Cathar doctrine key spiritual ideas - Reincarnation, Subtle Bodies/Higher Selves (the Angelic Bodies in the air which so echo those described as being left in the Pleroma by the Christian Gnostics of Valentinus), the 'Spiritualising' of Matter (a fundamental aim of Alchemy) and a God of Light that transcends the material world - all of which have fed into modern esoteric ideas and are shared in common with Eastern spirituality. Not everything about them may be that appealing to the modern sensibility: the extreme austerity of Parfait life, the hostility (or apparent hostility) to the created world and the body, for instance. Some of what they did may even seem ridiculous: so determined not to lie were the Parfaits that they developed a tortured way of speaking in the conditional which often gave them away. But there is something about the Cathars which haunts the mind and animates the soul. The purity of their vision, their absolute spirituality, their egalitarian outlook, their refusal to back down or recant even in the face of death, their belief in the possibility of universal transformation through the Holy Spirit, all testify to a remarkable flowering of an ideal in a continent famous for brutality, violence, materialism and religious hypocrisy. Simone Weil remarked upon their famous holiness, denying the Church's right to judge them as heretics on the grounds of their clear love for Christ.

In France today, the Languedoc has so embraced its Cathar past that the region is now known as the Pays Cathar ('the Country of the Cathars'). There is an element of commercialisation here but there is also a very real pride in an episode in their history when something remarkable flourished and was stamped out. Certainly walking in the area, standing in Montsegur, travelling among the Pyrenees, crouching in the caves they hid in and exploring the towns and streets they walked, one gets the impression that the Cathars are far from being a dead spirituality. Released from the flesh by the Church in the 13th Century they are back and walking among us now...

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him nothing was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not..."

THE ENIGMA OF THE CATHARS: PART FIVE

2008-09-02T10:33:00.001-07:00

"These things have I spoken unto you, that ye should not be offended. They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whomsoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service. And these things will they do unto you, because they have not known the Father, nor me." - Gospel of John

It took four decades of bloody fighting before the Cathars were finally destroyed as a major presence in the Languedoc. The brutality of the conflict was unsurpassed, even by Medieval standards, with whole towns and communities put to the sword by the marauding Crusaders. Most notorious was the sack of Beziers where 20000 citizens were slaughtered when they refused to hand over 2000 Cathars in their midst. The story has it that when the gates of Beziers fell and the Crusaders poured in to kill the Cathars, they asked their leaders how they would be able to tell the difference between heretics and fellow Catholics. The answer came: 'Kill them all. God will know his own'. Records show that no-one survived the bloodbath. Beziers was razed to the ground.

Important Languedoc families came to the aid of the Cathars, some, like the Comtes de Foix, because members of their family were of the movement, others, like Duke Raymond of Toulouse, because he hated the incursion on his territory first by Crusaders and then by the northern French. Campaigns raged backwards and forwards, with Raymond and his sons leading the resistance, constantly being defeated but constantly looking for a way of rising up again to defeat the Crusaders under the savage Simon de Montfort. So hated was de Montfort that when he was killed during a siege of Toulouse by a slingshot fired by a group of women, a cheer went up across the entire city walls. Panicked by the death of their previously invincible leader, the Crusaders fled and the Languedoc people were able to roll back the invasion, albeit temporarily. At one point King Pedro of Aragon took the field to defend the region against Rome and was roundly defeated in a tragically bungled battle in which he and his entourage of Knights were surrounded and cut down to a man.

All this time the Cathar Parfaits continued to operate, resorting to more and more subterfuges to slip the net of the marauding Crusaders. As a means to root out the heresy, the Pope ordered the formation of the Inquisition by the Dominicans. The reign of terror this august organisation began spread all across Western Europe with whole communities informing upon each other to escape investigation. Friends and neighbours were denounced as Cathars, 'proof' was negligible and one by one the heretics were hunted down. Refusal to recant meant death at the stake. Even if someone was dead and condemned posthumously, their body would be exhumed and burnt as an example. In some instances terminally ill Cathars were carried to the stake in their beds and put to death. And yet recantations were almost nil. Most Cathars chose to go to their deaths rather than surrender their faith. Records show that onlookers and soldiers who lit the fires were astonished at the calm with which they faced their end. It would seem their unwavering belief in their impending release from Satan's world meant they feared nothing.

The final showdown took place at the now legendary citadel Montsegur (literally 'Mount Secure'), an extraordinarily remote fortress built on top of an almost insurmountable Pog in the Languedoc hills near Foix. The final onslaught had been triggered by the assassination by a group of Cathar sympathisers of a troop of Dominican Inquisitors. Unable to tolerate this final act of violence, the Church launched one last, decisive campaign. The remaining Cathar leadership holed themselves up in Montsegur, protected by mercenaries and sympathetic Knights and prepared to fight on. The held out for almost a year, hoping for relief from Raymond of Toulouse or the Comtes de Foix. But this time it did not come. Eventually the outer defences were breached and the outlook became hopeless. The Cathars and the Crusaders made a truce. Sick of the fighting, the Crusaders' terms were surprisingly fair. The Cathars would have a few weeks of calm before they had to hand themselves over and any who agreed to recant would be allowed to go free unharmed. On the final night before the truce expired, the Cathar leaders gave the offer to their followers and soldiers who had defended them to undergo the Consolamentum and become Parfaits should they wish to. Twenty four Croyants came forward to receive the Holy Spirit.

The next day the entire Cathar leadership were burnt at the foot of the Pog at a spot commemorated today by a small stone obelisk. Inquisition records relate that, as this was happening, three Cathars slipped away via secret route with 'the Treasure of the Cathars' to make contact with other cells in Italy and France. Speculation is rife with what that 'Treasure' was, from the Holy Grail to possible sacred texts to, quite simply, money with which the Cathar movement could continue. But to all intents and purposes, the movement was dead. One final siege occured a decade later at Queribus, but this was an isolated remnant. The main Cathar leadership had been killed at Montsegur. Some ragtag survivors continued to operate into the 14th Century in villages like Montaillou, but eventually they were tracked down and killed by the Inquisition. The last remaining Cathar leader is said to have sealed himself up in the Lombrives Cave with a hundred or so followers to escape the Pope's soldiers, never to emerge. Stories tell of how when 'le Bon Roi' King Henry 4th of France came to the throne and brought in his edict of Religious Tolerance, thus bringing to an end centuries of Catholic/Protestant conflict, he reopened the Cave and had the Cathar remains given a proper burial. If it were true it would not be surprising. After all, Henry was a member of the Comtes de Foix, the famous aristocratic dynasty which had fought to defend the Cathars and counted members in their bloodline.

But that was in the 17th Century. By the 14th Century the Cathars were finished. Other heresies would spring up over the next few centuries but the Pure Ones would rise no more.

THE ENIGMA OF THE CATHARS: PART FOUR

2008-09-01T09:14:00.000-07:00

"Neither pray I for for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us... And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them, that they may be one, as even we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one..." Gospel of John

It was this vision of the Parfait as receptacle for the Holy Spirit that is thought to be the origin of the Mystery of the Holy Grail. Aside from the wild speculations of Dan Brown, Baigent and Lincoln, the theory goes that the Legend of the Holy Grail as passed down through the Troubadours and Minnesingers (eg Chretien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach) was a coded version of the Cathar doctrine of the transfiguration of the Self by the Holy Spirit sent by God through Christ. Thus the Grail, far from being a physical object (or even Mary Magdelene!) was us - all humanity - equally able to be transformed and reconnected to our Angelic Selves. In saying 'equally', this was literally true, as the Cathars made their particular idea of Redemption available to all regardless of gender, race or class. Focussing more on the Soul than the Body, they took the notion of Reincarnation to its logical conclusion. If one could be born as a nobleman in one life and a milkmaid in another, how could anyone possibly discriminate against anyone on such grounds? In this they were, once again, in accord with New Testament teaching. As Paul says:

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Jesus Christ."

This egalitarian approach was, as can be imagined, fairly anathema to the Church and the Feudal Authorities who depended upon people knowing their place. There is a famous story about a disputation taking place between a group of Cathar Parfaits and delegates of the Church at which Esclarmonde de Foix, a Parfaite from one of the most powerful Languedoc noble families, got up to speak. Used to being allowed to preach as a Cathar, she was shocked to be shouted at by one of the Catholic delegates who insisted that, as a woman she should sit down and shut up. Catharism's appeal to those areas of society which tended to be downtrodden and rejected by the Church - women, the poor - was one of its great strengths for the population of the region. The fact that women could play an equal role to the men set it apart from the institutional misogyny of the Church. Once again, the Cathars appeared to be connecting more closely with the ideals of Christ than the Priesthood and the Pope.

Another thing which infuriated the Church was the Cathar refusal to acknowledge any of their Feast Days or Sacraments, which they denounced as blatant corruptions of Christ's teachings. They rejected the the rite of Holy Communion, or rather the notion of transubstantiaton on the grounds that, firstly, Christ was not Material and thus the Host and Wine could not possibly become flesh and blood and, secondly, that there was something obscene about Christ's body passing through the digestive system of humans. Once again the Cathars understood the words of Christ about the need to drink of his blood and eat of his flesh symbolically. Always issues of Matter became Spirit for them. In their version of the Lord's Prayer, rather than asking for Daily Bread they asked for the 'Cosubstantive Bread', or Spiritual Bread (in fact closer to the meaning of the original Aramaic). In keeping with their anti-materialism, they offered their sacraments and absolutions from Sin without demanding money and never took tithes. This was equally frustrating to the Church, whose economic survival depended upon it.

Cathar sacraments were always held in natural places - in forests, caves, fields or by rivers. The only times they held services in buildings was, as mentioned before, in the homes of Croyants. Never once did they build a Church or Chapel of any kind, believing, like Paul, that God 'dwelleth not in temples made with hands'. Again as anti-materialists building monuments to God was anathema to them. Even the famous 'Cathar Castles' were not constructed by them, rather they were chosen as defensive positions and fortified by Cathar-sympathising families such as the Comtes de Foix. Herein lies a mystery. For a movement which purportedly despised Matter and viewed the natural world as the creation of Satan, the Cathars seemed to operate in perfect harmony with it. Forests, rivers, caves and fields are strange places to chose for worship for nature-hating people. Some commentators have drawn comparison between this practise of the Cathars and their Pagan predecessors the Druids who also held services in such places. Similarly in India such locations are regarded as ideal places in which to meditate and communicate with the Deity. It is believed that the Cathar Initiates, as they underwent the process of training to become Parfaits through the Holy Spirit were prepared through a long process in the cave networks in the Pyrenees mountains near Tarascon. Key complexes such as the Lombrives are said to have housed whole communities of Cathar Parfaits and served as the final hiding place of refugees fleeing the Inquisition. Haunting caverns such as those known as the Cathedral (so-called because it is equal in size to Notre Dame in Paris) and the beautiful Bethlehem Cave where the process of 'Perfection' was completed testify to the role of these natural hollows in Cathar Initiations and Rituals. And yet Church records insist that the Cathars viewed Nature as irredeemably corrupt and of the Devil. Clearly there is a contradiction here that needs further exploration.

Cathar popularity hit its peak in the early 13th Century, when it first drew the attention of the Church. To begin with, Pope Innocent sought to combat the growing heresy peacefully and by reasonable means. Church dignitaries were sent to preach against the Parfaits and disputations were held. Whole town populations would turn out to witness these debates. It was rather like a sort of theological football match. Records show that on almost every occasion the Church would lose before a word was spoken. As soon as the Dignitaries would turn up with their lavish robes, entourage and train of carriages and retainers, the crowds would look at the Parfaits with their simple clothes, ragged shoes and look of poverty and immediately the moral victory went to the heretics. Even the Catholic icon St Bernard of Clairvaux could not make any headway with them. Indeed, he came away from his encounters with them acknowledging that they 'could not be more Christian'. The legendary St Dominic, then just starting on his religious career, spent several years preaching in the Languedoc to no avail, finally unleashing a torrent of anger at the apostate southern French and fully supporting the Crusades that were to come. Indeed he and his Order were to become the chief architects of the Inquisition. The Cathars were too popular and the Church too corrupt in the region for peaceful means to make any headway. Then in 1208 Cathar sympathisers murdered a representative of the Pope. The reaction was swift and direct. A Crusade was ordered against the Cathars and the Languedoc nobility that tolerated them. An army lead by Simon de Montfort was launched against southern France and the fate of the Cathars was sealed...

THE ENIGMA OF THE CATHARS: PART THREE

2008-08-30T16:08:00.000-07:00

"God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in the darkness, we lie, and do not the truth: but if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from sin." - First Epistle of John

For the Cathars, Jesus Christ was made up of pure Spirit and had no material form. As an emissary from the True God he could contain no element of the corrupt Creation of Satan and thus only had the appearance of a physical form. This wholly spiritual Christ was utterly incomprehensible to the Church, for whom the notion of Christ's Resurrection in the flesh was the whole essence of the Christian message. Since Tertullian's insistence that physical Resurrection was what was taught in the Gospels and the Epistles, the idea that our material forms would reemerge in Judgement Day had been a central plank of Catholic Theology. Indeed, the physical humanity of Christ coupled with his Divine Nature was a key element in what his Mission on Earth meant to Christians from Rome to Constantinople. It still is today. For the Cathars, however, this was a deception propagated by the Devil as part of his desire to destroy our awareness of our Christ-like Nature. As the Son, Jesus was sent by God to show us the way to return to the Light Realms of pure Spirit. As human mortality was a result of Satan's Creation, the Son of God could not be confined by the taint of Matter. As John's Gospel says:

“God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth”

This vision of a purely spiritual Christ drew accusations of Docetism from the Church and was derided as meaning that Christ was no more than a phantom. But in fact the implications of this view of the Cathars are rather more interesting. Firstly, by identifying Christ as a spiritual being, they were able to release him from his historical aspect, something which has fixated the Church for millenia. Thus Christ ceased to be confined by Space and Time but became a Universal Being , present beyond those boundaries. Thus in contrast to much of Church theology outside a few Mystics, the Cathars believed in Christ in his Cosmic aspect as opposed to a person who lived and died in 1st Century Judea. Secondly, by describing Christ in this way the Cathars were making a profound point about the nature of Divine Humanity - that in essence Christ was an image of our Angelic Nature ie that in reality we were all Christs, or potentially Christs, just as the Gnostic Gospel of Philip says. Christ's preeminance as the Son, an expression of God, set him above us all but his appearance and his Path presented the possibility of us all regaining our Angelic Nature in Light. Thus the Crucifixion was not the focus of the Gospel Story for the Cathars, rather the entire span of Christ's life as described therein - Birth, Baptism, Transfiguration, Glorification, Crucifixion, Death, Resurrection, Ascension and ultimate return to the Father. Thus Eternal Life in Jesus Christ was interpreted as release from the cycle of Reincarnation and reunion with God:

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but be given everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved."

It was this hostility to the Crucifixion as the iconic event in Christ's life that was especially abhorrent to the Church as it involved open preaching on behalf of the Cathars against the Cross as a symbol of the Son. As pretty much everyone knows, the Cross has been the central sacred image for Christians before and after the Cathars, embodying the ultimate sacrifice Christ underwent to save humanity from Sin. For the Cathars, though, it was a symbol of suffering, torture and pain and thus a slander upon Christ. One Parfait is recorded as saying that a man should smash a Crucifix 'as a father would smash the gallows upon which his son was hanged'. As a piece of Matter, it was doubly part of Satan's realm and worship of it was particularly idolatrous. Understandably, the Church viewed such polemic as deeply sacreligious and accused the Cathars of all manner of desecration of sacred sites.

So Christ's story was an embodiment of the Way. By following him, by walking in his footsteps, humanity could be transformed as he was transformed. The key part of this process for the Cathars, was the action of the Holy Spirit, released into this world by Christ and passed down to the Parfaits by an unbroken chain of links from the Apostles. It was here, in the transformative agency of the Holy Spirit conveyed through the laying on of hands in the ritual known as the Consolamentum, that the heart of Cathar spirituality lay. It was also where its fundamentally different focus to the Church appeared. For where Catholicism laid the ultimate importance upon the Cruficixion, Catharism looked towards the Holy Spirit as the key. Christ had shown the way, but his legacy was the Holy Spirit, a gift or 'charism' given to the human race to enable it to realise its Divine Humanity. What Christ had told the Apostles at the Last Supper was still true for the Cathars. The Holy Spirit was the ultimate expression of God's love for mankind:

“And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you”

This was their purpose - to spread the power of the Holy Spirit among all humanity, restoring them to their Angelic State as Christ had done. Once the Parfait had been inducted into the elite, he or she (for the Cathars recognised the equal value of women in the Divine Mystery) would go among the Croyants, ministering to them, and wherever else, spreading the Cathar faith. In keeping with their claim of Apostolic Succession and belief in the minutiae of Christ's instructions, they travelled as the Apostles are described as doing in the Gospels - in twos with nothing more the bare necessities on their back: a copy of the Bible, a few provisions etc. To avoid sexual temptation they always travelled with a companion of the same sex, a practise which drew accusations of homosexuality from their enemies. Also as described in the Gospels, they relied on the hospitality of the Croyants for their accomodation. Cathar families vied to house wandering Parfaits, viewing as a great honour. In return, the Parfaits would hold services in their homes and tend to the sick if it was so needed. Where someone was dying, the Consolamentum would be carried out, the belief being that the purification of the Holy Spirit at the hour of death would enable the Soul of the dead to return in an incarnation one step closer to Perfection. Again, all these practises - the mendicant lifestyle, the focus upon the state of the Soul at death before reincarnation etc - show parallels with those of the Buddhists and Hindus of the East...

Fascinatingly, this Cathar return to the Apostolic ideal helped lead to the founding of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders in the Church. For faced with the humbleness and poverty of the Parfaits, the riches and finery of the Church served only to demonstrate how far the it had fallen from the Christian ideal. It was St Dominic who told the then Pope that, were the Cathars to be defeated spiritually, they had to be faced on their own terms. Hence the Mendicant Order of St Dominic was founded and the appearance of Francis of Assisi in Rome was viewed kindly. Legend has it that the Pope was about to declare Francis a heretic when a prophetic dream made him change his mind. Realising that Francis' vision represented an important return to the purity of Christ's ideals, he decided to allow him to found his own Order. Ironically, as the Dominican-led Inquisition set in to combat the Cathars, it was the Franciscans who often lead the opposition. Indeed, after the demise of the Cathar faith, it is believed that a lot of Parfaits joined the ranks of the Poor Brothers as the one way they could remain true to their beliefs...

THE ENIGMA OF THE CATHARS: PART TWO

2008-08-29T16:54:00.001-07:00

"Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." - First Epistle of John

To understand Cathar spirituality, it is first necessary to understand the structure of the movement. Like some of the spiritualities that came before them, such as the Manicheans and the Valentinian Christians, theirs was a two-tiered faith. Cathars were made up of the ordinary Believers who made up the majority (Credentes in Latin, Croyants in French) and the elite/priesthood, known as the Perfects (Perfectae or Parfaits). Again, these too were names given them by their enemies, who distinguished between ordinary Believers (ones for whom there was still hope) and 'Perfect Heretics' (ie ones who had gone the whole hog). The Inner Mysteries of Catharism were kept by the Parfaits who adhered to the strictest form of the faith, the austerities of which the Croyants were not expected to follow. 'Perfection' was for select souls only, specifically those who had undergone a cycle of seven or nine special incarnations (depending upon which Cathar one spoke to) which lead to the state of particular spiritual purity which meant they were ready to receive the Holy Spirit, a condition which required the state of rigour and self-denial associated with the 'Pure Ones'. This self-denial involved an austere regime of fasting, strict vegetarianism and total sexual abstinence, not for reasons of self-punishment, but because it was the only way in which the body could remain pure enough to house the transfiguring Holy Spirit which made them 'like as to one of the angels':

"Know ye not that ye are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwelleth within you?"

This notion of reincarnation, that the Soul needed to undergo a sequence of lives in order to achieve 'the Kingdom of Heaven', connects the Cathars not only to the earliest Christian Gnostics but the Buddhists and Hindus of the East. In fact, perhaps closest to the ethic of the Parfaits would be the rare Jain sect of India, whose extremely pure lifestyle involves similar practises ascribed to the Cathar elite. Quite naturally, such notions of reincarnation would have been completely alien to the cosmology of the Middle Ages, however familiar it may now seem to us. One can well imagine the incredulity and bafflement of the Inquisitors faced with such doctrines:

"Denying also the Resurrection of the flesh, they invented some unheard of notions, saying, that our souls are those of angelic spirits who, being cast down from heaven by the apostacy of pride, left their glorified bodies in the air; and that these souls themselves, after successively inhabiting seven terrene bodies, of one sort or another, having at length fulfilled their penance, return to those deserted bodies."

The Cathars are often described as being Gnostics and also Dualists. While not entirely false, these terms are misleading as they would not have understood or recognised either. By Gnostics, commentators mean that they believed in a fundamental conflict between a True God which was purely spiritual and beyond Time and Space and a Demiurge, or Lesser God who governed the Material World and sought to entrap humanity within his domain. Dualism is another term for this conflict, being composed of a battle between two cosmic forces. In this instance, the True God vs the Demiurge.

This analysis is not completely wrong as we shall see, but the reality of Cathar spirituality was probably more subtle. What is certain is that they believed in the Kingdom 'not of this world' and the need to be wary of and resist the Rex Mundi, or "Prince of this world" spoken of by Christ in John's Gospel:

"My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight... but now is my kingdom not from hence."

For the Cathars, the True God of the New Testament was a God of Light and Love of pure Spirit who dwelt in the eternal Light Realms. Each human Soul was born of that Light Realm and made up of that Light. At the moment of Satan's rebellion against God, shards of this Light fell with Satan to this universe, each shard being an Angel which had been persuaded to fall from God's bosom in the process. In order to entrap these Angel Souls with him, Satan created this world of Matter, cloaking their Light in 'tunics of flesh' (ie mortal dress) so as to make them forget their rightful existence on High. In order to make this forgetfulness total, Satan offered Divine Humanity the lure of temporal power and the pleasures of lust and physical sensation. Thus the Fallen Angels, unaware of their true nature, were formed into Princes and Subjects so that they could lord over one another and were offered the temptations of riches, power and sensual delight. At the same time, Satan made sure that life was an agony for most so as to get his revenge. Thus the afflictions of this world - disease, old age, death, violence - resulted from the Devil's defective Creation. Angelic Humanity were therefore doomed to continue to incarnate time and time again into this world, eternally deceived subjects of the Rex Mundi who promised everything but delivered nothing, unmindful of the Light Realms from which they came. While this might seem very bleak, it should be remembered that by ascribing the presence of Evil and suffering in the world to the Devil, the Cathars held to no doctrine of Original Sin. The human race was not responsible for the darkness in the world thanks to the Sin of Adam. Thus there was no terrible primordial crime to expiate, no guilt we were lumbered with at birth. The Devil was the culprit and his chief weapon was Ignorance - Ignorance of our true nature as Children of God, of Angels thanks to the corrupting influence of Matter and the Flesh. Hence the use of the term Gnosis by modern commentators, for it was through Gnosis - or 'Knowledge' - of the True God that the Demiurge Satan could be defeated and a return to the Light Realms be acheived. This was where Christ came in - Christ and, through his agency, the Holy Spirit...

THE ENIGMA OF THE CATHARS: PART ONE

2008-08-28T13:57:00.000-07:00

"...you must realize that when you are before the Church of God you are before the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, as the Scriptures teach. For Christ said in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew: 'Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in my name there I am in the midst of them' " - Parfait Ceremony

"God is light and in him is no darkness at all." - First Epistle of John

The Cathars were the first, the largest and the most important of the great Medieval Heresies to challenge the Church. They were also the first to be put down with the utmost brutality; Rome launching a series of Crusades against them, each one progressively more savage, even by the standards of the Middle Ages. By the time the Inquisition had been set up to find and root them out, the fate of the Cathars was written on the wall. By the 14th Century all had been burnt, forced to convert or put to the sword, but not before they had turned the wheel of Western Spirituality in a profound way, the after effects of which are still being felt now.

So who were this mysterious sect? And why were they such an enormous threat to the Catholic Church? Pacifists, they had no army or military might to speak of. If they had weapons of any kind they were words and actions. Cathar denunciations of the corruption of Rome were such that they attracted the ire of the authorities quite quickly. Were it not for the fact that they were also enormously popular in some regions, particularly in the Languedoc region of what is now southern France (in those days it was a nation of its own), these denunciations might have gone unnoticed. But the problem for the Cathars was that they were too successful, which meant they were bound to get into trouble. In whole areas of the Languedoc Cathar followers constituted the primary expression of Christianity in the area. And when the Pope eventually did launch his Crusade against them, it was the ordinary people and nobility that came out to defend them. Heretics they may be, but they were also countryfolk and counted members of some of the most important aristocratic families of Toulouse, Foix and the Tranceval as part of their community.

The Cathars have been a personal obsession for me for about two years, when I spent a fortnight in the mountains, hills and towns where they lived, flourished, flared briefly and then died at the hands of the Church. Since then, every few months they crash back into my life, revealing another layer of information and meaning to what they were. Sometimes a book will grab my attention in a second-hand bookshop somewhere, or a chance conversation with a friend will reveal a similar passion for them. Each time some new mystery is revealed or another unravelled. Seven hundred years after they were extinguished the Cathars are very much back in the modern Consciousness. As Medieval Christian Gnostics, different esoteric and New Age movements from Rudolf Steiner and the Lectorium Rosicrucianum to the Kryon Organisation have become interested in them. In popular fiction, Dan Brown and Kate Mosse have both co-opted them into their Grail-orientated literary puzzle novels. As a ready-made tragic story of a pure spirituality being crushed under the jackboot of the Church, they have become icons of integrity and purity in a world which would destroy such things. This is not all that surprising, for even in their day commentators were horrified at the sheer brutality with which these holy men and women were hunted down like wolves and killed.

'Cathar' has been interpreted as meaning 'Pure One' after the Greek Katharoi, a word linked to Katharsis, or 'Purification'. It was not a name the Cathars used for themselves but one given them by their persecutors. Of the other term given them: 'Albigensians', Cathar has, nevertheless, stuck. Somehow the sound of the word as well as its connotations with Purity perfectly typifies who and what they were. Ironically, its believed that its actual origin is from the so-called 'Kiss of the Cat (Chat)', an obscene ritual the Cathars were accused of indulging in involving kissing the anus of the Devil in the form of a cat. Happily, this piece of grotesquerie has been forgotten in favour of the meaning of 'the Pure Ones'. The Cathars themselves referred to themselves as 'Good Christians', 'Good Men and Women' and sometimes 'Friends of God'. Although they are recorded as circulating as early as the 11th Century, it was in the 13th that their numbers suddenly rocketed, posing such a serious threat to the Church. No-one knows how this sudden upsurge in support happened, but pretty soon major Cathar movements were erupting in eastern Spain across Aragon and Catalonia, northern France, Rhineland Germany (interestingly, centres of later heresies such as the Beguines, Beghards and Brethren of the Free Spirits) and northern Italy. In the East, there was a sister Church which sprang up in what is now Bosnia known as the Bogomils (also 'Friends of God'). This parallel movement which shared common ideas with the Cathars and had important links ran with into similar problems with the Byzantine Church. But where the Cathars were destroyed, the Bogomils held out and eventually came to terms with Constantinople. The Cathars were wiped out by Rome, but in areas of Bosnia Bogomilism became the established Church, on occasions participating with the Byzantines on ambassadorial missions.

So what did the Cathars believe and why did they get into trouble with the Church? The difficulty with answering this is that we simply don't know, or we cannot know for sure, the reason being that the majority of records we have are those kept by the Inquisition, an organisation not famed for its impartiality and desire to deal fairly with your average heretic. Where the information given by Cathar followers was not given under torture it was hardly likely to be written down in a way which was designed to treat sympathetically non-Catholic spirituality. As much of Cathar doctrine was highly esoteric in nature and therefore incomprehensible to the average Priest (they believed, for instance, in 'Glorified Angel Bodies' and cycles of Reincarnation, of which more later) it was often recorded in as ridiculous and derisory a way as possible, liberally peppered with slander, often sexual in nature, and livid denunciations. Add that to the fact that, until the latter part of the 19th an early 20th Century predominantly Catholic France frowned on any exploration of Cathar history and that even today they remain massively controversial, sifting fact from fiction is extremely difficult. Fortunately, modern scholarship has unearthed a lot in the last century or so, particularly in the post-War period, and, with our present familiarity with other forms of Gnosticism and ideas thought only to be the preserve of the East (such as reincarnation), everything is becoming that little bit clearer... In all the haze of speculation, slander, romanticisation and sheer invention, though, one thing is often forgotten: the Cathars were Christians. Christians of a different stamp to any form of Christianity we may be familiar with now, but Christians nonetheless, inspired by the Gospels (especially John's) and the New Testament and believing in a God which was a God of Light and a God of Love...

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not.."

But it was what this inspiration was and how they interpreted it which makes the Cathars so interesting...