Showing posts with label Existentialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Existentialism. Show all posts

Thursday 22 June 2017

A Very Personal Conclusion About Recent Events

Position Reserved, at various times, has been an outlet for exploring a variety of cultural and political issues of interest to me as well as a means of putting my case and the facts in controversial areas where the mainstream media have failed to 'get it right'. I am, with perhaps just very rare future interventions 'for the record', reducing activity, not only because of pressure of work but also because I may have run out of things to say in public. This posting says most of what I have left to say until the world changes again: then my opinions may have to change in response. From now on, you are likely to get only very rare personal ruminations as the mood takes me, maybe odd discussions of obscure academic papers that don't fit with my Goodreads account or anywhere else and, of course, statements of fact if some malign media half-wit decides to have another go at me.

There are three great lessons learned from several years of writing these posts.

First, that search for some special meaning in the world is pretty futile. The world is as it is. It should be understood just as it is. This is not simply a matter of having a prejudice towards science but having an essential scepticism towards all human narratives. The questions have always to be - who invented the narrative and for what purpose and who is using the narrative and why as well as whether a narrative is true. Truth is a sticky issue. Many facts are not recoverable. All facts are interpretable. A moderate scepticism about all stories we tell ourselves, while understanding that narratives are still necessary for society to function, is the way forward.

The end game is thus detachment but with a degree of compassion for peoples' need to tell stories and a decision somewhere along the line to construct a workable but flexible story for oneself that best accords with the facts of one's condition in life. In my case, my narrative is rather workaday. Having exhausted most evenues surrounding the magical and the spiritual and the ideological, I am really perfectly happy just to go with the flow now and maintain an ethic of civilised survival. My core values are what they always were - a mish-mash of existentialism, libertarianism and basic compassion for the weakest and most troubled.

Second, the melange of social narratives criss-crossing our culture and competing with each other have now gone beyond a joke. It is easy to condemn the dreamers and ideologues as stupid but even the most formally intelligent seem to have extended their psychological flaws and preferences into complex systems and structures that seek to bend reality to their will. There is nothing more deviantly sinister than the human ego that denies that it is an ego. Again, detachment and a determination to stand one's ground with one's own story, while being questioning about its own validity against the facts, is easily the best stance. Social existence is a brutal struggle within a framework of accepted conventions and order and it should be seen as such. It cannot be otherwise and those looking for reason and perfection are doomed to disappointment.  Two areas of recent life brought this into focus.

The Exaro experience, whether good or bad in the sum, demonstrated the degree to which power manipulates narrative. The conduct of the mainstream media in this matter made me understand, without condoning, the resistance of populists to the claim that their propagandistic fake news was actually any worse than the constant devious manipulation of the MSM. It often struck me that the MSM's real gripe with Trump was that he was exposing their monopoly of falsehoods by simply making what they do subtly be done more crassly.

Fortunately the internet permits the individual to challenge the MSM on the record (which is what I have done on several occasions) knowing that, while the exercise is rather futile, the bulk of MSM coverage is equally transient and distrusted by anyone with half a brain. At least there are now many voices telling half-truths and porkie pies rather than just a few with presumed authority - that is progress of a sort since the detached observer can now compare far more narratives and then use their judgment to come up with some rough approximation of reality.Admittedly, most apparently highly educated people seem to have a problem with their judging faculty but, hey (as Tony Blair used to say), you can't have everything.

The second area of interest was and remains transhumanism which I intend to remain involved with, albeit in my classically detached way. This is a school of thought of considerable importance in translating the coming technological revolution into sets of questions that need asking and which still pass most politicians by. This community has produced creative ideas around the application of innovation like cryptocurrencies and technologies like automation. It has promoted ideas that are now being looked at by policy-makers such as Universal Basic Income. It has also created, however, some insanely apocalyptic thinking about existential risk and a quasi-religious narrative that can make practical men like me cringe with embarrassment.

And why? Because too many of the enthusiastic nerds and engineers involved still read too much science fiction and find themselves driven by their own extrapolations and weak understanding of 'really existing humans' rather by any understanding of social and political reality. Still, although the hysteria surrounding these communities and their often shambolic organisation is a bit depressing at times, nevertheless, these are the people throwing up all the ideas now about the possibilities for humanity, ideas that correct our stupid belief in certainties. Square the flaccid complacent folk culture of the establishment with the trans-human lunacies and you might yet get to see a pathway to understanding future probabilities.

Finally, there is politics. Oh my God, politics! This has become the art of posturing one's story as if your powerlessness mattered, at least as far as most social media discourse is concerned. Most people simply do not understand the nature of power and how to use it. They cannot accept that simply having strong opinions is too often just posturing that expresses psychological anxieties or is a primitive demand for respect in the ape-like world of social competition yet moves the world not one jot forward. We all have opinions but few of us truly understand where power actually lies, when and where we can make some small difference and how acquiring more power by its very nature shapes us into the victims of our own wielding of it if we are not aware of what is happening to us. We all need to make positive decisions on how to use the little power that we have effectively and with full understanding of probable consequences.

I have come to the view that politics must be treated either as a cynical game played by moral inadequates (which is not to my taste) or be considered as an expression of core sentiments and values, beyond conventional morality, where one chooses rationally to see through the expression of our prejudices according to the power that one actually has. There are people out there who we should not want to have any power because of their intrinsic irrationalities and cruelties. Representative national democracy still strikes me as the best means of keeping these wolves off our backs even if our representatives are deeply flawed and not always the sharpest tools in the box.

Most people's values are rarely thought about, contradictory and situational but they do make up who we are and democracy squares millions of confused world views into something broadly consensual. Reforming the machinery of it all (as liberal nerds want to do) is less important than reforming the informations flows and education that enable people to make better judgments in their own interest and according to their own values. Even sociopaths have rights in this respect if only to balance out those dangerous radical empaths who think so much of themselves. To cut the posturing, I certainly put the economic and personal survival of myself and my immediate family first and anyone who doesn't do the same is already probably someone who needs to be kept an eye on.

Beyond that, I have a hierarchy of values which include the general sanctity of life (a Catholic upbringing), a loathing of bullying and sympathy for the underdog, a gut patriotism for soil though not blood, a distaste for people who break promises without clear explanation, a distaste for the use of secrecy to gain advantage and a prejudice against all forms of abstract universalism. There is also a belief in the benefit of pragmatic non-ideological flexibility that permits opinions and actions to change easily with new information. Part of that pragmatism is that you cannot take on the burdens of the world ... concern should start with the self and work outwards through concentric circles lest one become the sort of humanitarian Napoleon who destroys the world in order to save it. Much liberal universalism strikes me as being derived from immaturity and anxiety in weakly formed selves who are unable to build an independent existence outside the group-think of the ideologically like-minded.

I also seem to have been surrounded, through Brexit and recent political events, by many people who have taken what values they have out of their mental box but then constructed rigid systems from them that seem not only completely out of kilter with the facts but drives them to believe that things could be as they never can be. This is the idiotic politics of naive idealism, wide-eyed hope that almost always presages great cruelties and incompetencies. It is compounded by the hysteria of the media whose interpretative and analytical skills are barely existent in the drive to tell stories thoroughly detached from reality. Reading the FT on Brexit is watching a sort of cultural oozalum bird in full flight. Watching the BBC is like watching a rather confused old dear try to deal with the i-phone someone gave them for Christmas. Reading the Daily Mail is like being cornered by a perpectually snarling mad dog.

Over the last few years, I have decided that I don't really like people who don't have clear values (I have no problem with people whose core values are not mine) and who cover up their feelings with ideology and pretence. I have removed them quietly and without rancour from my social circle as intrinsically rather stupid and boring. Those who cover their class interest or personal interest with a coating of emotional idealism, whether it be their stake in the NGO industry or their interest in cheap labour to keep their fluffy businesses going, are perhaps the ones who most exhibit 'mauvaise faux'. Unfashionably, I still have an admiration for people who can put personal material interest second to personal values and I always prefer the ruthless materialist who knows that he is a ruthless materialist to the self-deluding clown who pretends they are not.

My own ideological positions are simple, pragmatic and contingent - for Brexit, for an intelligent democratic socialism (which, in my opinion, is only possible under conditions where sovereign democratic nation states can be abstracted from regulatory empires) and then for strong national defence directed at peace. War should be the ruthless defence of the homeland and never more. But even these are flexible positions. Brexit is a necessity for example but I see no reason why it should require a primitive and inflexible nationalism. I would go with the Corbyn-McDonnell approach if I trusted the Labour Party more, while I see no inflexible nationalism in the Johnson-Gove position. In other words, once Brexit is decided (as it has been), there is every reason to go with the flow of national consensus (which actually there is, despite the whining of Remoaners and the posturing of the Populists) and then and only then engage in struggle over whether it is to be a Brexit for Labour or a Brexit for Capital. The behaviour of Remainers is now a national embarrassment.

The same apples to democratic socialism. My heart is very much with Corbyn and McDonnell and I find myself cheering much of their speeches but then I look at the detail and sometimes blanch. The aspirations are great - they are mostly my aspirations - but then I look at my own experience in international affairs and the market and I see that the populist promises currently under offer, combined with the failed ideological liberalism of the still dominant soft Left of the Party, create reasons for serious concern. Will we see a twentieth century welfarism, shorn of warfarism, that still fails to understand the massive import of the coming technological revolution, fails to lead it and misses the boat just as Globalisation 2.0 takes hold as a mix of anarcho-capitalism, strong nation states and decaying authoritarian empires? Quite possibly.

At the moment, I see little more than platitudes reminsicent of Harold Wilson's 'white heat' and a weak sub-Marxist understanding of power. At the time of writing, I feel disinclined to renew my Party Membership in September. It would be better to become, once again, truly independent and observe with my customary detachment, employing what tiny power I have very carefully in the direction of understanding and managing Globalisation 2.0 rather than granting it to a mass party of semi-educated enthusiasts whose programme seems doomed to disappoint. Once Brexit is done, one might reconsider one's position.

However, all in all, I know what I want. I want a smooth Brexit broadly along the current Government's lines. Accordingly and logically, I want a stable Tory minority Government until that is completed precisely because the PLP and Labour activist membership cannot be trusted on the issue. This does not seem compatible with Labour Party membership for the next two years or so. And then, two or three years on, I want to see a strong and stable, radicalised and intelligent Labour Party come to power with a working majority of 50 or so to implement a programme of democratic socialism better than the one we saw in the catch-all 'package of measures' Manifesto of a few weeks ago. Brexit first, a credible democratic socialism second, Globalisation 2.0 third. 


Sunday 13 March 2016

Modern Mythologies and the Social

Joseph Campbell in his Occidental Mythology wrote that
"In the long view of the history of mankind, four essential functions of mythology can be discerned. The first and most distinctive – vitalizing all – is that of eliciting and supporting a sense of awe before the mystery of being. ... The second function of mythology is to render a cosmology, an image of the universe that will support and be supported by this sense of awe before the mystery of the presence and the presence of a mystery. ... A third function of mythology is to support the current social order, to integrate the individual organically with his group ... The fourth function of mythology is to initiate the individual into the order of realities of his own psyche, guiding him toward his own spiritual enrichment and realization."
The unknowability of Being, the invention of meaning around this core of unknowability, the maintenance of social order and personal individuation are 'mythologised' in integral societies. Conservatives pine for this. They think we were both better and happier when these functions were integrated despite the probability that each whole system was inevitably built on invention. There was a disconnect between the actual nature of material reality, society and the individual in their relation to Reality (or Being) as soon as anyone began to think about what was going on. Deep thought does not work well for serious traditionalists. Mythical societies were static societies, not necessarily, despite the claims of the ideologies making use of myths, very ordered or mentally healthy. Trying to construct a myth to restore total order - to the material world, society and the person in an integrated way - may be the dream state of the conservative and it may be true that our species clings to irrational pseudo-order out of fear and anxiety but it is not necessarily true that the species needs to cling to anything that extensive at all.

In our contemporary world, the, four functions have separated out and then fragmented within themselves. It may be that the fragmentation within the functions is the problem rather than the disconnect between the functions. It may be that the disconnection of function is, in fact, a healthy state of affairs and that it is the fragmentation within each function that makes us 'unhealthy'. The attempt, by conservatives and the religious, to integrate forcibly the four functions misses this essential point - that we can live well enough by seeing each function as having a separate purpose but still yearn to have each function function well which it cannot do if it is not coherent in itself.

The contemporary world has an opportunity to accept this situation instead of fighting it. Our mythology of awe is now either simple existentialism or the choice by individuals from a smorgasbord of 'faith-based' choices that can be insulated from the other functions if we wish - New Age beliefs if we insist, Our cosmology can be that of science - the most coherent mythology now on offer even if some may choose incoherent ones existentially - even as, in our heart of hearts, we know that this, at its furthest reaches when it leaves the world of technology and demonstration, has its faith-based aspects. Our current mythology of social order is most in disarray because atomised individuals now know that they cannot easily trust to the competence let alone benignity of their priestly and warrior castes (if ever they could) while the mythology of the person, the narrative that helps construct our individuality, might be talked up by psychotherapists but is, in fact, simply the story we tell ourselves to navigate a society that is fluid and unnerving. 

It is possible to create a myth of non-meaning, trust blindly in science and construct a personal mythology that permits the first two and live well. The problem child in Campbell's short litany is the lack of a viable myth of the social since it is not easy to live well if society is unstable or works against individuation (as most conservative spiritual, religious and social mythologies work against it for many people). In a world that permits the possibility of existentialism (alongside faith-based essentialism), science and psychotherapy and free choice, it is the social that has become problematic. It is the failure of the social to reconstruct itself without God, with Science and yet respectful of 'human rights' that is the crisis of our time. The social does not need the mythologies in the other three areas to be in accord with its own necessary mythology any more than any of those other mythologies require any of the others to function effectively. The revolutions provided by the Enlightenment, Nietzsche and Freud (discredited though he is in detail) provided, eventually, a new coherence but the opportunities provided by Marx were squandered by the Marxists, leaving little behind.

So, this is the next stage - having established that there are things we cannot know and which must be faced with pagan equanimity, that there is no God but only Science as our Faith and that we are captains of our own souls until we die, we now need to establish some kind of social order that requires no deities, can make use of science and technology and respects autonomous individuals but yet has its own independent mythology that can hold it together for the next stage in human development. A mythological 'faith' in the good society is the last of the four corner stones to be put in place before we can move forward as a species. After the current time of troubles, our species will probably construct this new myth once ideological liberalism has gone the way of communism and fascism ... but not before.

Wednesday 30 December 2015

The Eysenck Personality Test and Self-Criticism

My version of a New Year's Resolution is a bit of 'quiet time' and some self-reflection for the re-calibration of the 'self' for the year ahead (unlike post-modern philosophers, I have a very firm sense of the Self and feel sad for those who do not). I usually try and find some tool, something outside myself, to trigger reflection and then note down what I think I discover. It is part of an on-going process - like Petrarch's construction of himself as a living work of art carried through by time to its natural end.

About a quarter of a century ago, I did the Eysenck Personality Test which, without taking it over-seriously, was quite useful in defining onself against what it is to be a 'normal' (aka socialised and habituated) human being, albeit with adjustments to account for its mild American bias. I found the results again this week and recognised the continuities in my character and some minor differences. Out of curiosity, I searched the internet and found an adaptation of it which covered 32 basic attributes of personality under five categories (introversion/extraversion, emotional stability, mastery/sympathy, sexuality and social and political attitudes). I did the test (which took about forty minutes) and recorded the results.

Basically whatever I was twenty-five years ago is pretty well what I am today but with more maturity so there were no surprises there. The analysis struck me as fair and I was painfully honest in my answers (as you should be if you try it). However, this was not a test of who one is but of who one is in relation to the rest of the species so what interested me was my deviance from the norm rather than who I was (since I know who I am and there were no major surprises).

What is it that makes me (or you) significantly different from normality (within which there is still a fair range of personality differences) and so often misaligned with the social (for the record, a position where I am more than happy to be found)? What does this tell us about our 'adjustment to society' and what about our perceptions of the maladjusted nature of society to what it could be rather than what we are? So, this test is best regarded as just a statement of difference that tells us where we are within our species, where we are as 'rebels' whether on the cusp of normality or actually 'abnormal'.

In my case' abnormality' applied to 14 out of 32 attributes (of which six were 'on the cusp' and so possibly within the bounds of 'normality). Five (the full list) were related to social and political attitudes. In other words, a chunk of my 'abnormality' is socio-political (which will be fairly obvious to regular readers of this blog) and I am around 30-40% 'abnormal' to some extent. I am more than relaxed about this. I am interested only in the insights of the test into one's position in the world and why one acts as one does.

The non-socio-political abnormalities are pretty easy to summarise: A risk-averse (meaning physical risk), cautious (in terms of action), highly responsible and undogmatic (though with a few fixed ideas that I shall never shake off) personality with high self esteem and virtually no sense of guilt. My attitudes to risk, my cautiousness and my level of dogmatism are 'on the cusp' so the key difference markers are self esteem, responsibility and lack of guilt - all very existentialist! This implies that most people I deal with are going to be less responsible (which may explain my disappointed distrust of others) and suffer from less self-esteem and have more overhang of guilt (which explains my frustration with people's inability to get a grip of their lives). This may also explain my almost crusading zeal to help others realise that they are better than they have often been labelled by family and society and that they almost certainly have no reason for the vile vestiges of Judaeo-Christian or familial or sexual guilt in their lives. I would arrogantly like to pull my fellows into my territory so that the 'normal' could be changed to one of a higher self esteem and 'joy' in the complexity of existence, something our culture seems actively to discourage.

The socio-political differences arise from this possibly foolish mission. My different take on the world seems to derive from an aspiration for a better world that is probably not possible given 'the crooked timber of humanity'. In this area, I am foolish and not wise but it is who I am. I am highly sexually and socially permissive which does not mean I am myself anything more than a rather dull vanilla person when it comes to sex and social behaviour (I am, in fact, very dull nowadays). I am strongly committed to a broadly libertarian position on individuals in society and the choices they make. Indeed, my attitudes are classically anarcho-socialist to the extent that I am on the edge of (possibly the foolish part) denying the necessity for aspects of the social order required precisely because normality contains a majority of people with lower self-esteem and problems with guilt of some kind (and who are likely to be more dogmatic, more neurotic [in terms of guilt] and less responsible).

It could reasonably be argued that a society built on dogmatism, short term self interest and neurosis can only be managed with an element of the whip and the jackboot and, to be self-critical, I am probably far too soft on this score, expecting more of our species than may be possible. I add to this foolish belief in the possibility of a better world (which I cannot shake off) a set of progressive attitudes that seem stronger in me than in the 'norm' - anti-racism and, to a lesser extent, pacifism included. Like the pacifism, my 'socialism' is 'on the cusp' so the personality 'abnormality' really lies in my radical libertarianism. This explains my love/hate relationship with the British Left which strikes me as more riddled with authoritarian prescription than I am comfortable with and yet still the better hope for a better world if only 'normality' could be shifted a degree or two towards an emotionally stronger and more intellectually flexible electorate (and activist base). The modern Leftist activist is almost the epitome of dogmatic neuroticism.

However, this belief in a better world is not a belief that can be seen as more than a sentimental prejudice since I score very highly on scepticism - that is a belief in my own logic, observation and intelligence gathering rather than the claims of authority or others (basically, I do not trust the 'normal' very much). My analytical side sees the world and knows it for what it is - hence my outbursts of clinical rationalism that appear to sound a classically conservative note about the human condition. I know my core belief in a better world is absurd but I am true, in this respect, to my only remaining 'faith' - that of existentialist choice, if necessary for an absurd proposition such as this one. I also distrust the State (though consider it necessary) in particular because it is run by 'normal' people for 'normal' people and normal people, as we have seen, tend to lack self esteem, be neurotic (in terms of guilt feelings) and be dogmatic. Ergo, the State is likely to react to these aspects of normality - playing on peoples weaknesses and neuroses in order to manage them better yet without any aspiration to lift them out of their situation in order to create something better. I have little respect for authority for the same reason - authority is generally not logical and based on evidence but is based on dogma and the neuroses of the authoritarian.

So that is the 2015 self-criticism over with. I quite like me and I hope everyone else gets to like themselves too but I know I am a little out of kilter with the way my species organises itself socially and politically. It is bigger and more powerful than I am. My radical libertarianism might be regarded as a defensive manouevre, maintaining my small bit of territory against the encroaching empire of authoritarian neurotics. Conservative pessimism and social progressivism are the thesis and antithesis whose internal contradictions require a new synthesis.

Saturday 22 August 2015

So Who Is The Author of Position Reserved?

[It occurred to the Author that regular readers had no frame of reference for the personality behind the postings. This is a slightly edited version of the Facebook Profile I use and may act as a sort of reference point.]

Existentialist, Anti-Trancendentalist Mysterian Supermaterialist and Politically Non-Euclidean with Chaotic, Possibilian, (cautiously) Trans-Humanist, Gothick, Nietzschean, Antinomian, Discordian/Erisian, Zen & Tantric Tendencies. Believer in Wu Wei and Wyrd and not much else. Looks on the species as work-in-progress likely to take another 30,000 years to become basically secure and so decent.

Politically into personal liberty (all things being equal, especially in cognitive and sexual matters), anti-bureaucratism (above all, that of the European Union which is the 'monstre sacre de nos jours'), good order mixed with compassion and common sense (the 'way of the decent copper'), sustainability for future generations and maintenance of the natural environment (which is not to be confused with any support for the Greens who are as mad as hatters or professional environmentalism which is little more than a job-creating racket), the primacy of the young over the old who usually are responsible for screwing things up in the first place, national self-determination (though never ethnicist which means that Israel worries me), against German-led Europeanism (as opposed to liking Europeans) and American-led Atlanticism (as opposed to liking Americans even though I go into hiding when they 'get God'), secularism (big time! anyone who believes in fairies and is in politics is a threat to me and mine), evidence-based policymaking, respect for difference (it is the outliers who ensure the progress and survival of the species), kindness to people who believe in fairies except in politics, anti-feminist, anti-identity politics (you are a person not an hysterical attribute) and anti-Frankfort School ideology which precisely means that I support the rights of women to make their own choices and that I support socio-economic and political equality, above all against the matriarchal top-down busybodies of the Academy.

All in all, a classic pre-1970s rational, pragmatic liberal socialist who still believes in the democratic nation state (not that the UK is really one any more) - very much an endangered species amidst the hysterics, posturers, hypocritical moralists, opportunists and downright liars of modern media-driven democracy. Not currently party-affiliated: the Labour Party is so appallingly decadent that the Tories now look relatively competent. How did that happen? Oh, and past contributor to Tribune, The Chartist and Lobster and founder of www.exaronews.com over which I have no editorial control or influence whatsoever.
 

Instinctively polyamorous like most men if they were honest but married to a remarkably interesting woman with two very bright and likable kids ... I really like women a lot and my sympathies are wholly with Emma Goldman on 'feminism'. I do not like sport or engines. I rather like fashion and art.

However, my aversion to ideology, identity politics (which has destroyed and fragmented the intelligent distributionist Left) and post-Frankfort School idiocy suggests that if you are a dim-witted femi-nazi who denies men their fulfilment as anything other than pale imitations of themselves, an ethnicist or traditionalist or a happy-clappy rights liberal or activist, you might be a helluva lot happier not entering into my circle..

Philosophy

My philosophy in life is existentialist (as if regular readers had not guessed). Life is a path that leads to death and no other end. There is no point in believing that you will be pulled from the pit by some great God. You climb out yourself.

The only meanings are those you make for yourself. But, actually, life is good, very good, if you feel the fear and make it work for you. I am passionately anti-anti-natalist and all philosophies of death and the death instinct. I prefer Catholicism for all its evils and mistakes to a Buddhism which negates.

Sometimes, things will go very wrong but these can be good times in retrospect, though you may regret that you had to learn the hard way.

But no regrets is part of the rule-book. Just live with it and move on ...

Philosophers who are admired include Heraclitus, Socrates, Kierkegaard (without the God bit), Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein and Foucault. I respect Wilhelm Reich and Jack Parsons not for their thought but for their good will. I find the philosophers of the Far Right challenging, fascinating and instructive - their critiques of contemporary liberalism resonate even though I oppose them. There are dangers in these thinkers and they require contesting with respect.

Philosophers who are despised include Plato, anyone deluded enough to think that meaning subsists outside ourselves, Hegel and all Hegelians (though with a sneaking respect for Marx's use of Hegel to create a dynamic political movement which, though it went wrong, still gave hope to the hopeless and still has things to say today) and guilt-ridden post-Nazi 'liberals' like followers of Kojeve and Habermas. Zizek drives me up the wall - did he and others not see that Tsipras was engaged in a doomed enterprise. I have no time for German Idealism more generally, analytics who dance on the head of a pin or who invent elaborate ethics in order to avoid personal despair or ensure tenure. My current bug bear is the fashion for extreme scientific speculation which is taken too seriously - it is an enjoyable stopping off place between real philosophy and science fiction.

Matters of the Spirit

I was never interested in the idea of some ghostly spirit, internal or external, animating us and then merging with some abstract Great Beyond. The mind is materially embedded in the body and the mind-body in society and all is fundamentally matter. We are emergent from matter but we cannot say we understand precisely what we mean by matter in this context. Functionalist materialism is simply an interpretation of materialism and there may be more here yet to be uncovered - or never recoverable.

There remain great mysteries in the functioning of society, about the nature of ourselves and about the workings of minds which may as well be regarded magically as undiscovered, and possibly undiscoverable, science.  If there have to be gods, then I choose Dionysos and Aphrodite, Odin and Freyja ...

But you cannot escape the drag of matter, of others or of your own carcase. A Luciferian rebellion, in the end, makes it all worthwhile because it asserts the working of your own deeper matter against the matter worked on you by the laws of physics and by the burden of social organisation. The imagination, a creative irrationality, is what makes us able to move beyond being mere walking stones, shuttled around by blind necessity and previous chance.

If I could rebel against matter I would but I cannot, so, instead, I reserve the right to rebel against social convention and the dead weight of history to free the mind-body for new experiences and pleasures, for individual psychological transcendence (not to be confused with claims about the universal) and for the benefit of those I love.

God certainly need not be involved. Past texts, especially those 'revealed' in the Iron Age, are useless. As are all socially constructed abstracts ... I very much prefer the realist Foucault to the delusional Habermas.

Politics

I used to be involved in politics a great deal. I wasted much of my life and time on the 'official' Left. It achieved little and all I learnt was that the few will always command the agenda of the many, not because they are strong but because we, the many, are weak. Recent events surrounding Jeremy Corbyn's candidature for leadership has exposed to the gaze of all what I learned in the struggles of the 1990s - the main Party of the British Left is deeply dysfunctional, staffed by second and third rate minds with no strategy beyond the 'next election'. The British Labour Party is little more than the defensive manouevre of conservative special interest groups terrified by the onward march of history. I may join it again if Corbyn wins even though his politics are not mine (though I know and respect the person)

On the other hand, anarchism tends to the naive, riddled with the naturalistic fallacy, deviant forms of religion and hidden communitarian terrors. One sinks back into a soft sort of left-libertarianism, a social liberalism or libertarian socialism created out of justifiable pessimism tempered by good will. I would prefer even Baathist order to the killing fields created by enthusiastic and naive armchair liberal outrage, at least when push comes to shove on taking the AK47 out of the broom cupboard.

I have certainly come to dislike the self-regarding political class and the lies of the 'international community' (aka professional fixers) but equally those who afford them loyalty out of an ignorant tribalism, corporatist cowardice or a refusal to think about the nature of power and how the power of the few depends on the willing servitude of the many at home and their disregard abroad ... evil lies so often in obeying orders provided by those same second rate people who naturally rise to the top of political institutions.

The foot soldiers of domestic left-wing politics have been continually digging while in a hole. Solidarity, once it has served its initial purpose, tends to become slavery. The networks of people determined to collaborate to get the cattle trucks from place to place without asking about the destination, combined with the awful truths of social psychological experimentation by our elites, suggested to me that evil was well embedded in the human species by its very socialisation strategies long before we were born.

And so I am a peculiar form of pessimist of the anarcho-Left, owing more to Rabelais, De Sade (the philosopher), Nietzsche (again), Paine, Shelley, William Morris and the incomparable Oscar Wilde than the current degenerate crew of rascals serving special interests, overseas and domestic, who have passed by the moniker of 'New Labour' and who owe more to Lloyd George than Keir Hardie.

These became mere statist war-mongers who have run the economy into the ground for the sake of power, and whose supporters are a rump of dangerous post-Marxist ideologues. In the end, they rise like scum to the surface to get their well-paid jobs in an international system that they created. In that context, it is billionaire wealth creators who deploy capital well to create jobs and build economies that impress me more than the Atlanticist and European clowns who do the opposite. The real talent is at the front end of capitalism nowadays and the leaders of the people should be ashamed of themselves for letting this happen.

The problem may be with Parliamentary Democracy itself, with the prerogatives of the Crown, with the dominance of Party and with institutional special interests that stand in the way of the people's own ability to develop their capabilities in collaboration with others. The way that the priestly class of public intellectuals and third-rate journalists dictates the terms of politics in the Atlantic system and the way modern graduates lap up the nonsense is a lot of the problem ... closed cosmopolitan (a classic contradiction) elites believing their own lies about the nature of the world and existence.

I stand against the bureaucratic State, the Crown as State (though I quite like the Windsors out of sentiment), foreign wars, federalism of all types, the corporate mentality (while appreciating the innovations supplied by genuinely free Jeffersonian markets and even intelligent State infrastructural investment), managerialism as cult, neuroscientific manipulation and tenured technocracy.

Science, technology and innovation are mostly very very good indeed but have to be kept out of the hands of the fruits and the nuts. The market and the State do inspire great works of progress as well as great evils.


Malatesta,Tucker, Rocker, Kollontai, the Kronstadt Mutineers, Zapata, Makhno and, of course, Goldman all had a point and the naive Jack Parsons makes that point likeable: freedom and personal autonomy within a society of free individuals is our highest aspiration ... but I would still trust a weak democratic State over any number of self-righteous activist enthusiasts who weedle their way into the bureaucratic corporatism of social democracy under self-righteous liberal cover.

Sunday 2 August 2015

Further Ruminations on East and West, Science and Religion ...

There is a difficulty for anyone seeking to engage with the 'Wisdom of the East'. If you think you are just a creature, ultimately, of matter subject to physical and biological laws, out of which your awareness of your self and the world has emerged, then you are going to be dismissed as wrong-headed by most (though not all) of those who look to the East as fount of 'wisdom'. Yet there is no necessary non-materialistic cause that would make the various transformative experiences that Eastern (and, for that matter, shamanic) techniques can offer anything other than experiences based on some (if not fully understood) physical or biological process.

The problem on the other side is that, whenever a scientist uncovers a bit of the alleged 'God gene' or works out what self-generated DMT actually does to the brain, he tends to crow that this means that all 'spiritual' thought can be reduced to his terms as a number-crunching rule maker. This sets up an interesting problem for modern man. One tradition is dismissive of the ability to 'become' through guided and learned technique: indeed, is a little frightened by its apparent irrationality. The other tradition insists on putting spirit or magic where none may be. Although we may smile at Dion Fortune today, there may have been merit in her insistence that occult matters were thoroughly scientific even if we demur when she suggests that it is a a science lost when an imagined continent disappeared.

Liberal intellectuals often spend inordinate amounts of time castigating irrational belief without investigating its social and personal functionality - to the extent that one suspects that they are behaving no less like gay-bashing closet homosexuals in the Southern Baptist pastorhood in their prejudice. Do they really so fear their own unconscious? They certainly do not have a fully formed and adequate answer to the claims of the 'spiritual'. What are they so obviously scared of?

You usually get some reference to the rise of the Nazi Party at some stage in the discussion of irrationalism which only goes to show that the average liberal intellectual has a highly superficial command of history, neuroscience and religion all at the same time - no mean achievement! Yet, and we return to Dion Fortune again, in her 'The Winged Bull' she provides a dynamic view of the berserker nature of the 'racial consciousness' in a hero who is by no means a bad man, rather a sturdy, decent and protective, an older type who worked for a society at a certain point of time (and helped defeat Kaiser and Fuhrer alike). Simply to throw this type out of the door of history means that we turn the undoubted evil that stalked Europe in the 1930s and 1940s into an over-simplified travesty of what it felt to be a man or a woman in a particular time or place.

Meanwhile, the 'spiritual' types rarely help their case (with some noble liberal exceptions) when they pontificate as gurus, looking with disdain on the poor saps who have not seen what they think they have seen themselves.  A third way might be to accept the reality of monism and materialism without throwing the baby out with the bath water. The laws of the universe exist alright. They are just science that is not yet understood when they appear to be spiritual or magical and actually 'do something' in the world. The problem for positivists is that some things not understood are actually there and may be the basis of techniques (a technology were we to be so clever) with positive benefits for many people.

We can throw away both the simplistic materialism that refuses to see future possibility and the determination of adepts to make their experiences a little bit more meaningful than they really are. The scientific approach to the spiritual (which is really the way we perceive the world in order to create meaning) and a 'spiritualisation' of science (which means humanising existence into forms that can mean something to people) seem to be the way ahead for a healthy humanity. A personal existentialism and a scientific humanism can leave space for the 'mysterium' without recourse to God, spirit or universalities that are not possible.

The third side of the triangle underpinning the modern mentality, set between scientific observation and the subjective experience required to create meaning, is probably the the existential capability to create fresh meanings out of what is 'given out' as the world over time. Both science and 'spirit' appear to like to fix things as immutable (this is not strictly true of good scientists and good mystics but is certainly true of those who claim to follow them). Both have laws or commandments called 'models' or dogma, urgent statements of how things are. The scientific models seem to do better under scrutiny than the religious ones. But the world in general and society in particular, let alone each and every individual, are in a constant process of Heraclitean transformation which either we command or we are commanded by. There are points where even science can tell us only what is impossible and not what might be possible within the constraints of the impossible.

So what might block a creative process of adaptive responsiveness to change? What might limit us as a species at the very moment in our history when we are sensing that we might be displaced by our own creation in artificial intelligence and have once again a hunger for the stars that will not easily be sated if we rely on biological entities, fish out of watery planets. Probably the block will lie in the extremities that stand just outside each side of the triangle: excessive positivism ('rigidity'), excessive essentialism ('gloom') and a propensity to change and shift for the sake of the matter rather than in accordance with one's own true will or unconscious ('the mind of the butterfly') .

Respect the nature of the given world, accept that it is partially but not entirely malleable to will and know your own will - those seem to be three reasonable responses to existence. All three are difficult but not impossible to handle. All three are subject to our having a critical stance to the sum of available knowledge. Dawkins, Biblical Fundamentalists and Robert Anton Wilson may all be necessary exemplars of unnecessary extremism in thought in this context - useful cases that show us where not to go.

The life well lived probably has more to do with a moderate respect for science and received 'normality' (which always emerged for a reason with its own history), with a selfhood that is fully aware that things change constantly and with the idea that we must control our own adaptation than it does with taking stands that merely show that we have no idea who we really are.

Do we really need to have our identities dictated from outside? In this context, the techniques of the East and the knowledge of the West are just tools for self-calibration and for social calibration under conditions of permanent flux. Eastern technique as an end in itself results in a sterile withdrawal from social existence. Western technique as an end in itself results in personal sterility. The flow of one to the other and back again, finely calibrated within oneself and between oneself and others, is both an art and a science.

There is no necessity for the concept of the divine nor of reincarnation nor of the 'eternal return' - these metaphors may be useful to kick-start thought but they become dessicating when they are believed to be true. Liberation starts with the elimination of the divine and placing science in our hands as a tool for our own purposes. Experts and priests are good on means (assuming they are tried and tested). They are very bad on ends. Only we can know our own ends.

Saturday 13 June 2015

The Contribution of the Eastern Religions

This posting is by way of a footnote within a series of philosophical notes (covering spirituality, issues of personal identity, ontology and free will). The question has been raised in discussion elsewhere whether the influence of the Eastern religions, central to the creation or elucidation of the 'existentialist cast of mind', was any better than those religions that personalised God in promoting the ‘death instinct’ (the abnegation of our own matter-consciousness) at the expense of the affirmation of life.

My interest here is only in the Vedantic-Buddhist tradition. Nothing that is said is intended to detract from the pragmatic use-value of the tradition for persons and societies now or in the past or to make claims about its (or indeed Judaeo-Christian or Islamic) ‘truth-value’. The issue of the ‘truth’ of a religion has already been covered and is considered by us to be meaningless but often useful. For something to be useful to us does not require it to be true in any absolute sense.

Too much can be made of the East/West dichotomy. After all, in the Indian tradition, there is a Supreme God in Brahma. Some traditions within South Asian culture make this Godhead personal even if the Buddhist strain then spins off into another dimension altogether. The point is that, in the continuum from the Jewish God through Brahma to Nirvana, despite the differences that made Pope John Paul II write so negatively of the influence of Buddhist thinking on the West, all have in common the submission of ourselves to a construction of meaning out of Raw Existence that represents a cast of mind which, whether filled with Christian hope or Buddhist withdrawal, places responsibility for being what one is firmly within a shared vision of Existence that is ultimately social and not truly individual.

I appreciate that this is not what appears to be the case in Buddhism but Buddhist abnegation is embedded in tradition and tradition is, by definition, social and not individual. In this posting, I want to pinpoint two things that we must avoid in dealing with the influence of the East (in this greater context) and explore what we can learn more positively from that influence.

The first thing to avoid is the narrative of decline. In this narrative, once a commonplace in the West but superseded by an equally naive belief in progress, we have lived through successive ages in a cycle of existence that represents decline from a Golden Age. We are now, it would seem, in the Kali Yuga or final Iron Age and can merely await the final cataclysm after which, we are told to hope, humanity will return to a Golden Age (which, of course, is actually perfectly meaningless to you and me because we certainly will not live to see it unless we believe in reincarnation). The literature on apocalypse and hope is wide and includes the radical Christian apocalyptic strain that would see not merely the fall from the Garden of Eden as one book end to the narrative but the end to the age of sinfulness in an apocalypse as the other. To some radical American evangelical groups, the ‘saved’ would be translated directly to Heaven and the rest would wallow in death, pain and suffering.

Although Nietzsche adopted the myth of the eternal return for metaphysical purposes, we have suggested elsewhere that the only metaphor that captures the most credible idea of a really existing God in the creation of our world (as opposed to all other possible worlds in space-time) is that of Its ‘deliberate’ suicide (the nearest we get to a Fall) into undifferentiated matter and ‘potential-for-consciousness’ from which small sparks of matter-consciousness (ourselves) emerge after billions of years of things and processes bumping and grinding into each other in a rather wasteful but nevertheless counter-entropic way until we (and probably other intelligences) come into existence.  This is not to say that there was a conscious intelligence that kick-started the chaos from which order arises or that such an alleged intelligence has any meaning for us but only that, whatever metaphor we use, the conclusion is not one of decline and entropy alone but of increasing complexity causing intelligence and consciousness, albeit in a wasteful way with many dead-ends, and emerging in counterpoint to material entropy.

Whatever narrative might emerge to feed the social order and to allay the despair of societies with limited resources, relying on false hope to get us through the day or to sustain the power of some over others, the best narrative that fits the facts of the matter is a progressive one. This is one of the very slowly increasing intelligence and awareness of individuals (not excluding aliens on faraway planets). The conditions of the best today are significant improvements in terms of the sophistication of matter-consciousness, compared with the state of matter-consciousness (our humanity) in the past. Getting depressed about our cruelty and stupidity as Ardrey's 'risen apes' misses the point that, apes though we may be, we have actually risen considerably in the last 10,000 years or so.

This 'rising' is not the same as increasing ‘happiness’. Happiness can exist just in not being aware of not being happy - much as a well-fed animal might live in the present. The Buddhist might reinterpret this as that tranquillity that removes all the future causes of unhappiness, including those transient states of pleasure that consciousness will remember with regret or become anxious about in expectation or desire. The alleged happiness of the animal (unconscious of threat until it is eaten or dies alone shivering of fever or old age in a pile of leaves) is what underlies the myth of the Garden of Eden and the Golden Age. It is both false (insofar as animals shift themselves under the influence of primal drives from contentment to hunger and fear of depredation much as we do) and the core of that cast of mind that turns away from life – abnegation again.

The determination not to face the pain of existence and the emotions that accompany existence is what underpins faith and its constructions, a way of thought that also has as its purpose, the building up of a workable society in which pain is a given and emotions must be mastered.  There is nothing wrong with this as ‘magic’ in the sense of spells designed to hold oneself and society together but its later sophistication at the hands of philosophers and intellectuals should not be exaggerated. Religion is always built on the sand of fear and anxiety (with a leavening dash of mystic ekstasis for some).

This leads us to consider the second ‘insight’ of the East that the Golden Age is an age of ‘piety’ and of adherence to standards of law, duty and truth (the concept of ‘dharma’). The religious cultures of the West have a similar belief in divinely sanctioned right order and for similar reasons. At this point, we must not be deflected into Marxist or similar radical critiques of religion as a tool that is being used to maintain the social power of the few over the many. Such critics seem to imply that the process of submission is deliberate but the revolutionaries, from Robespierre to the personality cults of the heirs of Stalin, inevitably find that they need some religion-substitute to maintain themselves in power. The response is instinctive.

The habit of submission is intrinsic to humanity. It has been so for most people for most of human history and the obligation has probably been worn lightly and often cynically – true believers in ideas are generally a minority of humanity under normal conditions. As we see in a modern free culture, left to ourselves we tend to believe collectively in many impossible things at the same time and as individuals some of us are quite capable of shifting belief with our conditions of life. Belief is a social phenomenon and is not often a gnosis from contemplation – even if it is the latter, the result can only be communicated within given cultural language so that mystics with similar experiences can develop Judaeo-Christian or Islamic or Buddhist or Shamanistic narratives in communicating what is essentially the same human phenomenon. Such diversity argues against truth.

The religious impulse is thus towards a conservative assessment of progress (that we are in decline) and to the solidification and elaboration of tradition is part of the fear of life that we have noted elsewhere. It is not bad intrinsically but it is not ‘true’ even if these sclerotic systems are best not over-turned (as the Communists demonstrated) lightly. If the idea of the ‘kali yuga’ is best left to natural miserabilists (of which there are many) and the idea of ‘dharma’ (and their Western cognates) is best left to fearful conservatives, then what (other than the proven psychotherapeutic effects of belief) can we best learn from the East if we want to abandon the negative attitude to life.

How can we experience, without illusion, our natural will as a process constantly moving forward socially and individually until brain decay sets in or until material resources run out? How can we negotiate claims that, without narcissism, are greater than those of the society in which an individual is embedded? The existentialist cast of mind is not anti-social or optimistic (since the first is asking to be crushed and the second to have no basis in the facts of existence) but it is still individualist, radical, liberal and an affirmation of life and will against pessimism. Its social conservatism is more apparent than real – a scepticism of new forms of belief that may move us along a notch as social consciousness but which will contain all the hallmarks of traditional systems in another form. No better examples could be chosen than Marxism-Leninism in all its variants or the localised tribal religions of radical nationalism.

What religions of the East in particular can teach us is refinement of psychological method. If we strip away the dead languages and forms of religions that should have no meaning unless lived ‘in situ’, the religions of the East have not been turned to stone by the institutionalisation and excessive systematisation of belief systems under an imposed authority (Christianity) or a social model that is defensive (Judaism) or offensive (Islam) enough to suppress the possibility of an Eastern-style psychology of mind management in the face of Existence.

Although there are techniques within the West that mimic Eastern traditions, it is the East, precisely because faith has been detached from power in terms of dogma (as opposed to ritual), that has preserved either the spark of life affirmation (Tantra) or the skills required to master mind (Tantric/Shamanistic Buddhism). Understanding Eastern ideology is a guide to the underlying principles in an Eastern thinking that is not existentialist by any means (it is always wrong, almost certainly imperialist, to ‘read back’ our concerns into traditionalist cultures).

The Tantric tradition in its relationship to Shiva (the destroyer) rather than Brahma (the creator) perhaps represents a recognition of what transpired after the ‘suicide of God’ to create creative chaos, in a way that makes creative transgression the formation of consciousness, just as survival within evolution requires innovation that might be as likely to be more brutal in predation as it is faster in evading predation. Brahma is not worshipped in general in India because, once creation was created, His work was done. This might be read as a dualistic acceptance of matter in decline (the pessimistic approach referred to above) or as a monistic ‘suicide’ or withdrawal as I have postulated.

Shiva represents the meeting of opposites. He contains within himself that very attribute of beyond good and evil that is central to existential ethics and to Tantra alike. Without destruction there can be no creation. The psychological truth behind this is that, in an impermanent and confusing world where we certainly do not have access to full information (more so today than in a relatively stable traditionalist society), our adaptation to existence on our terms requires the constant recalibrating of ourselves against not only other people and society but our own inherited habits and values. For example, I might be born and live a Calvinist but what happens when my conditions of existence are completely at odds with that faith? I can only go deeper into mal-adaptation and adopt a strategy of trying to bend the world to my inner need for fixity and certainty.

This, in turn, forces me to go outwards and oppress others into conformity or develop a stance of withdrawal from the world – both norms of Western and Eastern responses to change respectively. Or I can adapt my Calvinism to reality (reform) or, alternatively, ‘transgress’, even ‘break down’, in order to find new values that accord better with my nature, an admittedly painful process that might shatter other relationships because, instead of oppressing them into my world view, I am demanding that they do not oppress me into theirs.

Equally to the point, Shiva is Lord of the Dance. Dance is a process and not a thing. You cannot pick up a dance as a thing. You can only perform it or watch it. So it is with mental process. The mind is not a succession of things in the mind but a process of thought and feeling. Shiva is quintessentially the representation of the reality left behind after Brahma did his ‘thing’, his single act. Shiva is constant fluctuation and change. The Buddhist response to this fact of fluctuation and change is to try and find non-change in detachment. Most other religions try to deal with this crisis of change by fixing things in space and time through fixed rituals and dogma.

The Liberal Enlightenment is not much better in this respect – the American Constitution is a religious document, an attempt to fix political existence in political space-time. It is an argument against all written constitutions that they are essentially sclerotic in the very long run. They are religious acts. The association of Shiva with dance and fertility is also not accidental because the central source of discomfort to many people is the libido, not just sexual energy but the life force that underpins the creative and disturbing use of emotion as a tool of self development alongside or even in preference to calculation and reason.

Nor is it just a matter of procreation, the conditions of which institutionalised religions have always sought to control in some way. The sheer energetic pleasure of sexuality has been automatically relegated to the category of transgression because its libidinous energy is, alongside outbursts of violence, regarded as most dangerous to Dharma in East and West. Sexuality thus becomes repressed or ritualised. Even the modern Western penchant for neo-Tantra and fetish is no more than a liberation that is being fought on the enemy’s terms by which transgression becomes ritualised in homage to religion.

Far from being true liberation, the ‘namaste brigade’, expressing sexuality in ill-understood Sanskrit and out of traditional context, and the far more earthy and authentic native fetishists are engaged in a simulacrum of liberation designed to ghetto their desires so that the outside world will not feel threatened. They are still products of fear for all their ‘liberation’. Almost any Eastern concept of value, such as the metaphor of Shiva, needs to be re-translated into the real and actual culture of the West. The dance of more value than the temple dance to most Westerners might, in fact, by the tango – which, in its matching of erotic movement with a high discipline that is without direct sexual intent, is almost the perfect metaphor for the tamed libido. It is not, despite its origins, however, transgressive.

Alongside Shiva, we have the concept of the Great Goddess (Mahadevi) who is the feminine principle writ large. One fine principle of the East from which we could learn is the reaffirmation that men and women are, well, different because the matter part of the matter-consciousness is different regardless of social forms and conditions. Radical feminism in the West often misses the point because in its correct demand for social, economic and political equality, it attempts to turn both men and women into what they cannot be – types of consciousnesses detached from their material base. The Shiva-Mahadevi relationship expresses an erotic truth about the male-female relationship that need have no connection with the proces of dealing with the social, political and economic inequalities in the world of Dharma.

The specific energy of women (shakti) is for women to write about and define and not me but the association of Mahadevi with fertility is not some simplistic association with motherhood but a more complex sharing of feminine mastery of process (as opposed to the rationalism of things). Mahadevi is consort of Shiva, both equal principles expressed, in Tantric thought, by the power of the sexual act between them. In a later age, this can be translated to relations between any two people so that homosexuality and then more than two people as in the dance of polyamory are included but the essence of the dynamic is not procreation but creation – and not of things (necessarily a child, as Catholic intellectuals might prefer) but of processes that transform. This is not just bonking but being. The point is that Shiva is powerless without shakti – the thing is meaningless unless turned into process by a process (consciousness) working on thing-ness(matter).

We are this interrelationship of process and thing. There is perhaps no greater individual working of this than the sexual act where matter merges into pure mental process that, under the right conditions, without any concern for Dharma or what is proscribed by others, can transform the structures of the mind into new ways of thinking.  Such thinking is transgressive only to the degree that Dharma makes such acts transgressive but the art in this is to know that social definitions of transgression are of no consequence if the transgression is responsibly conducted in terms of equality of effects (between persons) and with a true, not feared understanding of consequences.

If the East gives us the creative mentality of Tantra (albeit that this needs to be removed from the Sanskrit and brought into English and de-fetishized), it also brings us ‘technique’. Thoughtful sexual congress is, of course, a technique but the merging of shamanistic and tantric elements into Tibetan Buddhism offer a range of explorations that do not depend on the visions of reality or the belief in reincarnation (Bardo) of Tibetan theocrats. Nor are we wholly dependent on Tibet for their further development – shamanistic techniques are part of the human armoury from Finland to the Amazon and from the back areas of Australasia to the reservations of the crushed American Indians.

If formal religion and the demands of Dharma have a victim, that victim is the a-moral mysticisms of the shaman even if shamans turn up in many guises hidden away in the interstices of all but the most oppressed and totalitarian of societies.  In our free liberal society, shamanic thinking is re-emerging amongst academics, urban rebels and the troubled middle classes even if neo-shamanism with its eco-political dimensions is liable to go the way of neo-Tantra and become a pale pink, tamed and convenient shadow of its real, earthy and often very dark original.

The merging of Tantric Buddhism and shamanism (almost certainly as a political compromise in the highlands of Tibet) has created a certain blind romantic regard in the fluffy liberal West for what was, essentially, an inefficient and oppressive theocracy not much better than late medieval Catholicism. Similarly, whether Kashmiri Shaivism or Tibetan Buddhism, the whole master-pupil relationship is fraught with implicit traditionalist oppression in which a young mind is not taught to explore freely and even (initially) chaotically under guidance but has their brains bent into a traditionalist order that may have no connection to their true will or needs.

The very idea of a master granting ‘permission’ to do anything is absurd even if, like the placebo effect, in Western medicine, the command and control and secrecy aspects of the system may have a role in its success. These are not paths for the free-born Westerner for any length of time and merely dabbling in a tradition is probably next to useless. However, the application of effort, even for misguided reasons, under conditions where the peasants toiled to keep a lot of idle monks in rice who had little to do but think, has resulted in an experimental laboratory of enormous sophistication for technique. This provides an opportunity for study in what these techniques can do for Western man, stripped of the religious overlay and the implicit ‘death instinct’ of Buddhism.

The West has taken up meditation with considerable beneficial effects. There is more work to be done in understanding the relationship between sound and mental states (mantras) and visualisation and ritual as transformative for some personality types (including the use of mandalas). Body movements (such as mudras) and breath control add body to perception as tools in the armoury of changing mental states to order.  Whether we want to attain the control of our autonomic system of some adepts is another matter – the question ‘why?’ is the greatest contribution of Western culture to humanity – but investigation into what amounts to control of perception in order to change mind states strikes this writer as containing the seeds of change for our ability to take command of our lives in the context of a world where we are constructed by the perceptions of others.

The detachment of Tibetan Buddhism has been criticised as an abnegation of life by me here and elsewhere but detachment (perhaps better understood in a Japanese Zen context) is a tool to the same degree as Tantric sexual transgression. There is no reason in principle why the same mind cannot make use, as tools, of both possible states of being – shamanic ecstasy and detachment at separate times and even at the same time. The height of human attainment might be those rare states in which one observes one’s own ecstasy or can be ecstatic within one’s own detachment.

In this context, the visualisation techniques in relation to Bardo may be of immense importance since they are really a sophisticated version of the shamanic journey into the underworld. The adept (in a manner not to be undertaken by amateurs) goes through a form of ‘death in the mind’ and comes alive by working back through the levels of mind until full perception is re-attained. This is analogous to the more chaotic and often lengthy process by which the ‘triggered’ existentialist recreates themselves out of the shattered remnants of old values (a minor key ‘transvaluation of values’).

The existentialist might argue that the discipline and ordering system of the Buddhist might remove from the process the value of the pain, suffering and shock of the admittedly mentally risky existentialist path. The risk is the art. The association of a ‘teacher’ or ‘psychotherapist’ may get in the way of a final resolution even if it stops some vulnerable people from topping themselves or going clinically insane. What speaks most strongly for the Tibetan way of seeing is that it pre-supposes the value of every moment of existence. It shares with the existentialist model an acute awareness of death not as something to be feared but as something that defines life.

The existentialist mind, without solace of reincarnation, merely turns this back on itself to intensify the existence of life including its engagement with the social and with the acceptance and enjoyment of the transient pleasures of life - as part of that high valuation of each moment of existence. Both traditions also understand the importance of impermanence which brings us back to a mentality that sees the world in terms of processes rather than things.

If you see the world as a collection of ‘things’, you are soon aware of entropy whereas a Heraclitean world of processes means impermanence and instability but it also means an awareness of positive changeas possibility and as actuality, a form of progression (at least in mental terms) as each mind state is succeeded by another that exists only because of the previous mind state. The Buddhist, of course, is seeking to pacify these mind states in order to achieve the tranquillity and calm that will ensure safe passage through the key days of reincarnation (Bardo) but the existentialist will be seeking to excite these mind states in order to create himself or herself.  Assuming no senile brain decay, the last state before death is one of no regret - the final state of a work of art that either leaves some legacy in the minds of others (signs and symbols) or things in the world or is simply a private viewing of the greatest work of art we will ever see - our own self.

Saturday 14 March 2015

Experimental Approaches to Contemporary Gnosis


Contemporary 'new spirituality' presents us with a number of problems: it employs patently false narratives in closed communities; it presumes to have access to a world beyond the more sophisticated materialism of contemporary science (or it appropriates a fake 'quantum' version of materialism); and it holds to a primitive essentialism in a time of existentialist insights.

Keeping Hold of the Esoteric Baby

But there is a danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water in rejecting simplistic belief in universal consciousness, demanding a cogent materialist explanation for everything under conditions where the material world is imperfectly understood and failing to understand the social and individual function of this no-thing called spirituality.

The very term 'spirituality' is slippery and rightfully presented by the analytical philosophers as virtually meaningless. What we are talking about is 'belief that gives meaning', an inward state that need have no connection with any objective reality but which can be constructed as 'shared' in order for it to be built into the edifice of a practice, a cult or a religion.

How can we recapture 'belief that has meaning' as a legitimate aspiration in a post-modern culture but in a way that still takes account of science and stops scientific materialists from claiming that they know far more than they do. They may know that Creationism is foolish but they do not know 'for a fact' that many other things that others believe that they know are decisively and provenly false.

The plethora of new religions provides a pathway of possibilities once we have removed the bad history in most of their mythic narratives, once we have stood back from the anthropological and sociological aspects of cultish-ness and once we have critiqued guides and leaders who are often half-educated at worst and naive at best. But what is then left?

What is left is, first, a series of techniques for accessing the very material but untestable or definable elements of the mind that amount to what most people mean by spirit or soul and, second, a competing set of analogical narratives for describing what is otherwise not describable, certainly not in positivistic scientific terms.

We might see a gnostic mentality (rather than gnostic dogma) as useful in being able to tap into the language of such mythic and artistic narratives. The primary narrative is one of spiritual alchemy to ensure that we, and not society or our pasts, are in control not only of our conscious minds but of a great deal of our unconscious (aka spiritual) minds as well.

Many of these techniques might conceivably be derived from the further reaches of the New Age Movements and from Neo-Paganism but they are much more likely to derive from a dynamic and critical appreciation of the occult and esoteric movements, shorn of its mumbo-jumbo and seen as sets of practice defined as successful by its material effects or transformative illusions.

New Age Insights

Let us get the New Age and New Pagan communities out of the way. Much of theosophy may be arrant nonsense but there are, no doubt, great insights in Krishnamurti's rebellion and in Ouspensky as interpreter of Gurdjieff - two men who took flawed models and used them as the basis for further thought.

There may be important value to be acquired in the 'technologies' of Steiner and Subud but also in the whole school of positive thinking and 'placebo effects', of 'attunement', of aura and colour effects, of an attitude of mind towards personal development and even, with caution as to its actual use, the insights of NLP.

The Emissaries of Light and the Template Network may actually have discovered techniques that deserve further investigation and a great deal could be learned from Raelian sexual and social philosophies (if you can detach them from their mildly demented but amusing and harmless foundation myth). So let's put these on the list for critical investigation.

Neo-Pagan Insights

Neo-Paganism can teach a sense of place as placebo and the creation of imaginative mythic narratives (such as the Matter of Britain) that permit the creative construction of art, literature, sacred places, and the revitalisation of local myth, folklore and the 'faery' tale. Such a place may be a City or suburb or garden or corner of a room as much as a field.

It can also inspire us to the logic of sustainability without requiring the absurd reification of Nature into some benign essence which it is not - let alone the meaningless New Age version that builds a brutal cold Goddess out of Gaia, the planet. The divine feminine may even be interpreted a divisive invention to buttress ego-problems in a flawed society so let's throw that one out of the window.

The planet is certainly a system that we should understand but it adapts blind to our existence and is no divinity. Nature is de facto cruel and wasteful. Sustainability has to be functionally related to what it is to be human amongst other humans, a personal and social as well as formally environmental sustainability.

Finally, there is shamanic technique - inauthentic perhaps against surviving indigenous traditions but recoverable in urban settings or linked perhaps to place and past without racialist or ethnicist overtones. When the British adopt Voodoo, they adopt this technique as their own.

We might then 'play' with Raymond Buckland's Seax-Wica, with Robert Cochrane or with Heathenry but we should set our hearts against accepting forgeries and false histories which merely repeat the Christian tradition of propagandistic lying and re-interpretation of history to 'win souls'. We can be better than this.

Occult Insights

And what of the Occult and Esoteric? There is ancient mining to be done in the Kaballah and in the Tarot as psychic ordering mechanisms, without any necessity for the Gematria (which strikes me as a somewhat autistic technique but one which may add value to some).

There is certainly no further benefit to be had in mystic lineages and traditions, in hidden masters or in ancient pre-Husserlian dogma. The esoteric also gives access to sex magick, possibly over-rated as a tool but, nevertheless, one that taps directly into who we are and how we relate to others. Perhaps an honest sexual magic that is more sophisticated, shorn of fetishistic ritual and reconstructed as a mutually guided vitalism, might be more useful to most of us than our current culture of ‘naughtiness’ and fear.

Without falling into the trap of traditionalism, a core knowledge of neo-Platonic, Judaeo-Christian, Egyptian, Persian, Sufi, Hindu, Chinese and other East Asian traditions does not require that we accept their essentialisms but merely that we understand our own existentialism better through the prism of the choices of the past.

The study of correspondences, of sympathetic magic, of visualised ritual (arguably, the best sexual magical ritual of all) and of transgression within a self-constructed ethical framework is not irrationalism but hyper-rationalism if the study is directed at questioning not merely the reality of the phenomena with an open mind but the meaning of the experience of the reality as reality.

Within the occult tradition, Thelema is a religion of sorts with insights if fundamentally flawed as a counter-intuitive derivative of Christianity, over-elaborated by the successors to Crowley, especially the retrograde Typhonian and subsequent 'dark' traditions. 'Love is the Law' begs the question of what Love is but it is a sound starting point that is glossed on the right hand by the Wiccan 'an harm no-one'. What is not required is some wise inner circle speaking as if the masses were scum. What is required is an egalitarian and libertarian (as captured by Jack Parsons) approach that brooks no formal or restrictive religious structures.

There is practical psychology hidden away in this territory as well. The early Dion Fortune was reacting to a fundamental issue for most of us in mentalising responses to bullying. She also offers a bridge to that sense of place (Britishness in her case) in neo-paganism that we discussed earlier.

There are the insights of Chaos Magick (Carroll, Hine, Anton Wilson, Spare, even the eclectic acquisition of Dick and Lovecraft) which offer ultimate opportunities to detach ourselves from belief in order to test technique scientically before returning to belief when we are ready.

And, finally, there is the Left Hand Path of Vama Marga Tantra as tool for personal empowerment. Transgression and aggression, even violence, are active forces in the world and we must command them, lest they command us.

Conclusion

We have here quite a menu of techniques that do not need us to believe in the absurd and can enable anyone to find the meaning that will mean most to them. I have not even started to address the world of the hyper-real - meaning derived from films, fantasy novels and comic books. There is certainly no need to fall into the error of the desert religions in requiring some divine entity or that of the East (in assuming a mythic universal consciousness) or descending into a countervailing nihilism.

The technique as technique is a path way to more than simple New Age personal development and fluffy well meaning or untenable mythic narratives amongst small cults or a perpetual adolescent belief in actual dark demons. It is the pathway to personal choice about how to construct oneself out of the raw material of oneself - the most advanced type of materialism.

Personal development techniques and a critical review of past traditions, a sense of place and a commitment to a new definition of sustainability and an active exploration of transgressive and irrational operations within an existentialist ethic may construct more meaning that works for us than all the loss of self into some predetermined religious framework.

In short, we do not need religion at all. We do not even need to be hung up on spirituality. All we need to do is take command of that bit of ourselves for which science has no current explanation and make it work for us.

Friday 27 February 2015

Kundalini Thinking

Some believe that there is an unconscious and instinctive, indeed libidinal, force that can be felt as a physical phenomenon. Others deny its existence. Those who say it exists win the argument for the simple reason that, if they feel it, then it is there as a reality for themselves. If it is a reality in the context of their own perception, then, unless they are outright liars, even if it cannot be measured scientifically, it exists - end of story.

A mental state does not require general social approval to exist. It merely has to be experienced as real. A delusion is a real mental state but it is a delusion in the context of social and not individual reality and so not a delusion about its own state of delusion-ness. We may go on to apply all sorts of metaphor to such a felt libidinal force. We may develop vitalist theories or call it a serpent power or a goddess or use lots of sanskrit gobbledygook. We may try to make it more than it is by giving it value and romance - but at the end of the day, it is simply what it is: a sense of experienced reality that is real to the person experiencing it and different from mundane 'normal' existence in the world.

This force may, of course, not be experienced identically in every person who experiences it (as we write there is a furore on the internet over whether a dress is blue and black or white and gold which is really a furore over human perception in the face of the variable outputs of our electronic world) but there are some common denominators in the descriptions of such forces (once we get past the spiritual guff) that suggest that people who have this sense, whether intrinsic to their nature or intermittently experienced, are all experiencing the same phenomenon.

There is no issue with saying that the experience might be bio-chemical nor that the experience has such meaning to a person that this meaning might force a person to engage in some sort of struggle with others, indeed with society, to be permitted to engage with his or her own experience as good and worthwhile. It might be this that forces us to have to face the 'reality' of Islamist gnosis. Experience of, and existence with, this force is a defining issue in human freedom because the spiritual guff may well be nothing more than a pragmatic attempt to 'justify' (when no justification should be necessary) something that is difficult to communicate and is not a universal phenomenon in a social context. The issue is not the normalisation of people but the harm done to others by abnormalised experience - which would brings us back to statue-smashing Islamists.

For historical and cultural reasons related to the pragmatic exercise of power and the discomfort and anxiety of the those who cannot comprehend this force, or perhaps to relieve the anxiety of those who experience this force but are not given a language for it that is positive, the force’s own existence and value may be denied but only as once it might have been denied that the earth could be round. It may be that the person who feels this force is faced with such resentment and incomprehension from those who do not feel it that they are obliged to create a mythology and religious or cultic context rather than be able simply to say what should be said - 'this is what I am and you just have to live with it'.

Perhaps organized religion was and is the revenge of those who feel this force on the uncomprehending only, in one of many paradoxes that will we see in this Note, to see this revenge appropriated by pragmatists who thereby exerted their revenge on the revengers in turn! The lack of a language of assertion in the modern world for those who feel this energy means that the force-full are always placed on the defensive. This defensiveness extends to their very natures, in the round, as people different to the pragmatic mainstream. They constantly have to justify their difference!

A barrier is equally set up for 'intermittent' experiencers who learn to experience their difference in shame or silence instead of discussing their moments of difference openly or being permitted to create some personal meaning out of it, while those who live in a permanent state of relationship with this force are obliged to become not merely silent but secretive - or cloak themselves in that cultic nonsense we have already noted.

Perhaps much of the essentialist nonsense surrounding spirit that seems to have led to the absurd institutions of organised religion come down to little more than this - that non-sense has been a necessary defensive weapon for those who feel this libidinous force in an uncomprehending society. They are obliged to re-cast that which is not permitted in order to be open and then turn it into something false but socially acceptable. Of two main strategies for coping, our culture may have chosen the wrong one in the past because of resource constraints and the need to maintain social order but our social order may now no longer require communitarian falsehoods.

There is the opportunity to replace a strategy of silences and displacements with a new strategy of assertiveness and for the stripping away of all those accretions that force those who have a sense of their internal biochemical power to give absurd meanings to a surprisingly simple phenomenon. Social authoritarians remain rather frightened of this force because it is creative and innovative but it is also centred on a gnostic relationship to itself as not only desire is but as all other forms of high emotion and constructed meaning are so centred. High emotion and intense meaning are frightening to many people. The co-existence of non-reason with reason causes anxiety.

For social authoritarians, an inner force that cannot be reasoned into ‘normality’ must be repressed and contained. In the worst case, it becomes redrafted as 'sin' or even into particular 'sins' such as Lust which may then be rationally contained in a numbering system (the '7 Deadly Sins', for example). Nor is this force to be assumed to be simply sexual (the sexual may have a higher or lower place in its expression in particular individuals). The force is a general force that is not easily explained in conventional language. It may also have very different expressions in different people - the 'desire' that exists within it is also a form of yearning or love that need not at all be focused on, say, orgasm at all.

The force may equally well be focused simply on a state of being, one that has had accreted to it terms like 'spiritual' but whose terms are far too limited by such language, language designed merely (as I suggested above) to contain, channel and socialise something infinitely more complex that, in itself, needs no myth of universal consciousness or divinity. The ancient Indians would have seen this force as sleeping, dormant, a potential in the human condition. I am not so sure. Their analysis is based on a determination to see human beings as operating within some universal type or essence of human nature.

It is far more likely that it is present or not present to different degrees of intensity, possibly even circumstantial in its form to environmental conditions, in different persons, often at different times of their lives. This lack of essence to the force is why it presents such a difficulty to men and women who demand fixed essences instead of accepting existence as Heraclitean flux. It is why it is not merely contentious but a subject of anxiety, horror, social control and re-invention.

Whatever this thing is, it presents two immediate problems – how do I describe it to myself in order to manage it and how do I explain it to the world? Both exercises require that it be expressed linguistically or in terms of some ritual which, in itself, starts to remove a person from the actual experience. The degree to which this ‘force’ is shared is the degree to which it becomes exponentially attenuated so that the intense connection between individual persons (‘love’ included) becomes revised into a weak spirituality that ultimately leads to the psychic onanism of universalism and the covering of the experience with cultural layers and language that bend the experience into tribal or, again, cultic paths.

To some extent, it might be useful to create a theory of the force – in the Indian tradition, there are introspective models that lead to concepts of energy channels (nadis), subtle energy (prana) and essential elements (bindu) within a subtle body. Something similar takes place in the Chinese Taoist and Western alchemical traditions. But it is important to see these descriptions as allegorical and not as necessary truths. They exist to manage, control and communicate but not to ‘live’. The practitioner who believes in these forms has taken a step away from the truth.

Hindu, Chinese and Western language of the force should really be seen not as truths in themselves but as different technologies of 'spiritual' exploitation to which many other technologies of the past and the future might be added – including, possibly, a monist materialist scientific one as the science of mind and body progresses. The descriptions of the schools all taken together are mistakenly read as referring to some ‘perennial philosophy’ where the underlying reality is assumed to be of some universal quality where consciousness is to be set against matter. This is absurd because it mistakes the effect for the cause.

Instead, we have to think of the sensation of 'spirit' as an intrinsic quality of some forms of matter, arising naturally under certain conditions of evolution, where ‘spiritual technologies’ merely represent pre-scientific methods of dealing (through experience) with something that scence should theoretically (though possibly never actually) resolve through its methods of investigating the material plane, the only plane that ‘matters’ for descriptive purposes. This presents us with another paradox because the language that best describes what is going on is a phenomenological language, a description of experience in which cultural and personal metaphor, even poetry or visual symbolism in the form of art, best describes what is to be scientifically explained.

A scientific explanation may thus lie not in the description of things in mathematical terms but in the refinement of shared artistic representations that accumulate to become a paradoxically 'scientific' description of the phenomenon, one that has to be ‘felt’ as true because the artistic description in its right context (looked at with apollonian detachment) becomes the intellectual ‘last man standing’ - based on ‘praxis’, the doing of things that elicit or make use of the force. There is an existent Hindu technology (not the only technology) of systematically raising, containing, directing and using the force that is sensed as a physical sensation of movement from base through spine and upwards. This is Kundalini yoga.

The point today, though, is that such techniques should be looked at afresh primarily as technologies and not permit obfuscation with strange Sanskrit words and unscientific explanations that require the experience to represent more reality than it can take. We have covered this at length in our Tantra series but both these technologies and drugs should be able to recreate high-level experiences of a delusory nature that have effects on persons that are highly fulfilling and life-changing without demanding belief in God, gods or universal consciousness.

A further paradox must be that the delusion of universality becomes an apparent reality, not the ostensible reality of the vision (the absurdities of universal consciousness or reincarnation), but the felt reality of dramatic changes in personality, mind and the relationship between mind and body and then between mind, body and social reality. Some Indian sages will be usefully clear that the energy of which we speak is just the natural energy of the self but they then go on to make the unproven and unprovable assertion that this self is somehow dissipated as universal and is to be found in every being at the same time. This may help us to love rocks, spiders and frogs but it is a distraction.

Instead of seeing our experience of the universal as an attribute of an integral self to be mastered and understood, the Hindu sage somewhat foolishly takes the attribute for the whole and then dissipates the self into all sorts of creative invention. The ultimate absurdity becomes planet-worship, where rock displaces mind. This is not merely the general-universal but universals that then become re-personalised as God or turned into a nothingness (Nirvana) that is supposed to be higher than Man and still have meaning as a No-Thing in which he is to be merged in the future rather than contended with as 'Le Neant' in the present.

Humanity is unlikely to be free of its own delusions until it can face the awful fact (to many of its number) that its experiences are entirely contingent on the material structures of the brain in the body. This is not cause for gloom but for joy because it states that the person, though destined (at this point in history) for death, is his own invention and is not merely the fluff on the back-side of eternity.

Above all, this is an opportunity to recapture the various mythologies about the inner force and make them work as technologies rather than as eternal belief systems. By yet another paradox, this may 'save' the religious impulse by permitting many systems to co-exist as technologies without going through knots trying to find some perennial common denominator at the philosophical level.

To believe for the purpose of transformation in, say, Freyja or Shakti, is a wholly legitimate method of personal transformation, so long as the practitioner fully understands that, existentially, he is engaged in a technology in which the goddess both exists (as means) and does not exist (as ultimate reality) at the same time. The end of the technology is very similar to that of the ancient sages – a ‘gnosis’ or self-realisation that has been falsely connected to the idea of God or to an external wisdom. To think that some 'divine' external force transforms us is to diminish the power of one's own intrinsic resources.

Wisdom is connected to a self-knowledge that need have no connection with the universal except that it is an illusory experience shared biologically with some others of one’s own species, without any necessary specific connection to what it appears to be. The genius of self-knowledge lies not in knowing the other (impossible) or knowing the universal (illusion) but in knowing that the knowing of the other or of the universal is an illusion but one that is embraced as transforming.

Again we are into a paradox because the transformation into a state of understanding that all universalisms and all other-knowing is illusory – which may cause a passage through the ‘dark night of the soul’ – is ultimately so liberating that this knowledge of our lack of knowledge permits a much healthier relationship with others and with society. It is this state that the sages will refer to as an ‘awakening of inner knowledge’ or ‘pure joy, pure knowledge and pure love’ but is here taken to the next stage existentially, one where one observes objectively the illusion of this knowledge so that it can become the 'highest' form of knowledge – the knowledge that the illusion lies not in the Self but in the projection of Self into the universal.

From this perspective, a key figure in our understanding (though the existentialist perspective in this paper is different) is Jung who linked the process of Kundalini yoga with individuation. Another such figure is Wilhelm Reich who identified the ‘drives’ involved with more perspicacity than he has been given credit for – a failure created by his many other errors of judgement. Jung put it succinctly (in relation to the Eastern exploration of these issues): “… the concept of Kundalini has for us, only one use, that is, to describe our own experiences with the unconscious”. We only differ from Jung in our view of that unconscious as being possibly far more materially based than perhaps he considered likely.

The issue raised here is thus only whether individuation must be illusion-full (essentialist) or illusion-less (existentialist). We are discomfited in the West by the value placed on being ‘without illusions’ in spiritual matters but a position that is filled with illusion (whether generated by meditation or Ayahuasca) is not, in value terms, any better or worse than one that is without illusions (existential) or perhaps is one of having the illusion that one is without illusions.

There is a point where we cannot know anything but merely are forced to make choices (even if less than conscious choices) of the level of illusion we find acceptable. It is merely the contention of this Posting that full individuation probably requires that we go beyond the comfort zone of the illusion of having gone beyond material illusion into high essentialism (the construction of pragmatic but false meaning) and re-engage with our materialism as 'no-meaning' other than the meaning we create out of our material being (existentialism).

There is, however, no obligation on us to do so and no moral superiority in moving beyond the ‘spiritual’ back into the material. It is simply a choice for full individuation – an individuation that might well be in danger of detaching oneself entirely from the social (as pre-eminent value system) and into a state that might almost be considered intellectually post-human. This would simply be, then, a matter of choice ... the embracing of Existence, including the felt forces of Existence, without illusions because Life is in itself sufficient to justify the ways of Man to Man.