Fifteen minutes about Spirituality

Preamble and disclaimer

To speak of spirituality in 15 minutes is a tremendous challenge. Not because the time allotted is short, on the contrary, because it is much too long. Had I been asked to speak of silence, any word I might have uttered would have defeated the purpose of my talk and contradicted its very subject. Speech can only illustrate what silence is not. So, to a large extent, the essence of spirituality is better accessible in silence than in noise, although, ultimately, it is accessible anywhere and through any channel.

The challenge of a 15 minutes talk about spirituality is therefore not to drift astray from the essence of spirituality into what would be its negation: sterile concepts and words. Ancient wisdom warns us clearly of this danger : "The Tao that is spoken is not the eternal Tao." A discourse about spirituality is not spirituality and, like a finger pointing to the moon, many may gaze at the discourse and miss the point.

What is spirituality ?

To me, spirituality is the unified space that opens when the mind stops creating artificial boundaries in the continuum of life. Any border, physical, or ideological, requires two armies to defend it. Every war is a fight between armies engaged to defend borders. On one side of ordinary consciousness also known as "reason", let's call it the "lower side", lays the chaotic field of animal impulses: exiting the narrow kingdom of reason through that side leads to the realm of psychosis. It is a regression from Cosmos to Chaos. On the other side of reason, let's call it the "higher side", the open fields of spirituality stretch ad infinitum. Entering the spiritual realm amounts, so to speak, to expand one's awareness beyond reason without loosing access to reason as a subset of spiritual awareness.

The French religious author, André Frossard, does not even use the word "spirituality" when he describes the trans-boundary experience I am referring to, he speaks of "mysticism" and on a scale of degrees he places mysticism at the top of a scale, followed by metaphysics (the attempt to establish the laws of spiritual experiences) then by physics. To him, spirituality is already a domain of concepts, synonymous of metaphysics. To illustrate the directness of the mystical experience, he compares the mystic to a barbarian entering a church who goes directly to the sacred vases in the tabernacle, unencumbered by ethics or customs or codes of behaviour.

The verses of T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets that best allude to what I refer to, when I speak of the trans-reason-ness of spirituality are in Burnt Norton:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from
nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been : but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

Spirituality, as I see it, is an experience that engages the whole being, absorbs it into the sacred and eventually returns it to the profane world. To use Martin Buber's terminology, Spirituality is the space where "I and Thou" encounters take place in the various spheres of our existence. Spirituality is not a thought (i.e. a projection on a screen called the mind) nor a way of thinking, it is an experience. Intuition is the doorway to such an experience while prayer and meditation are two attitudes that favour such an experience. Prayer is a Yang attitude, an inner movement "towards" the Sacred, meditation is a yin attitude, an inner movement of opening, an invitation of he Sacred..

The western world's fall from grace...

In the western world, the greatest trauma that has affected spirituality, as I see it, has probably been the work of Aristotle whose pragmatism had the effect of conceptually expelling the divine from the world we live in, whereas Plato's myth of the cavern left room for a view of the divine as the implicit light source behind the screen of our mental projections on the wall of the cavern. For one who follows an Aristotelian view of the world, spirituality tends to evoke an extraterrestrial, "disincarnate", immaterial field where man, the finite (and often despicable) creature, tries to establish some form of dialogue with a transcendental and external God. We know to what intellectual ravings and verbosity this approach led theologians such as Thomas Aquinas (with his Summa Theologica of which he fortunately had time to say that it was not worth a straw fire) and Augustine the supreme despiser of the flesh.

I suggest that the vandalism of the Crusades, the insane sadism of the inquisition, the callous plundering of the pre-columbian cultures by Christianity and even the rationalized horror of Auschwitz are to a large extent the rotten fruit of the Aristotelian, profane view of the world. "Got mit uns", lest we forget, was carved around the swastika on every buckle worn by the Waffen SS; Francis Bacon praised the rape of nature, and the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm has lead, through the industrial revolution, to the contemporary biocide (destruction of the biosphere) we either arrogantly partake to or passively witness as guilty bystanders: all these are the fruit of the Aristotelian shattering of an enchanted view of the world and the resulting desecration of matter. The dichotomy between the transcendence and the immanence of God (or Spirit or the Sacred, or the Source) has been and continues to be paid a very high price indeed.

Returning to the Garden

If we wish to use our minds to reflect on "spiritual experience", let us use them like good scientists and base our vision on experimentation, not on preconceived patterns or dogmas. Unless he be a deliberate deicide, would any man in his right mind dare murdering or doing any harm or violence, including on ideological grounds, to any creature in which he would recognize a temple and a manifestation of the Supreme Good or God?

Mystics of all Traditions have in common the experience of the One through the temporary or permanent abolition of the false-self or ego, that navigational software that has been called a "vital lie". The work at hand, for any serious enquirer of the spiritual field is therefore to "undress" and part from any egotistic stance before entering the Temple: when the "I" has been stripped, the experience takes place. In the words of Meister Eckhart: "God and Nature cannot leave anything empty... Understand this, waiting as long as you can is the best thing you can do... Therefore, wait and do not dismiss your emptiness. Know that as soon as he finds you ready, God infuses himself into you. Your task is to become ready, his is to infuse into you. Just as the sun cannot prevent itself from shining when the air is clear and pure! When nature is purified, God gives his grace." In short, one may say: when the student is ready, the master appears.
I believe that although it is safe, for reasons explained above, to start the spiritual enquiry from a postulate (if one is needed) in which the divine is both immanent and transcendant (Matthew Fox's panentheism) , when it comes to the mystical experience itself, that purely ideological distinction vanishes when the ego boundaries dissolve, since those boundaries are the only frontier between immanence and transcendence. Technically, the work is therefore one of psychological deflation and relativisation of the ego (transpersonal psychology) and, above all, one of experimentation with trans-ego consciousness through meditation and other techniques of "ecstasy" (from ex-stare: to stand outside of). Having experienced "life after ego", i.e. a form of life after death, the spiritual explorer may return to his psychological home like Copernic, Ticho Brae, Kepler and Galileo returned on planet Earth after their gazing into the cosmos, knowing that their earthy home is no longer the centre of the world although it belongs in a universe (from unus and versus: toward the One) whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

Historical vs Cosmic Christ

Finally, I would like to say a word about the Christian tradition and the dominant Aristotelian influence on the Catholic as on most Christian denominations. It is my deepest conviction that the Aristotelian ideological shift imprinted on the Church Canon and in some Dogmas by some of the Church Fathers is a betrayal of the very spirit of Christ who embodied immanence while witnessing transcendence. Many quotes from the Gospel would support that statement (I and my Father are One, John 10:30) The Church, under the direction of Aristotelian theologians has chosen to make Christ an alien with human features rather than a human fully awaken to his divine nature. For the Church, He came from over there and returned over there to come back once more in glory at the end of times, leaving us by our clocks and calendars, waiting. That is the Aristotelian Christ. Unfortunately for that perspective, what is true of mice is also true of men: when Christ is away, the mice will play.

The Platonic counterpart of this Aristotelian Christ is a Cosmic Christ, a principle embodied in every human being just like every plant, in Goethe's view, embodies a single plant principle (the cosmic plant).

Love thy neighbour as thyself cannot be the motto of one who has contempt for the slave or the gentile or the lower caste, or the other faith, contempt partly rooted in a contempt for the flesh and for life itself. Christianity is second to none in terms of genocides and spiritual as well as cultural plunder on the face of this earth, a blatant betrayal of its professed Master.

Final words

In conclusion, I believe that the experience of spirituality requires an ideological U-turn whereby man stops seeking and venerating "outside" what dwells "inside". Spirit can neither be hoarded nor stolen but waits to be found in the human heart and from there it can freely flow and shine when grace is freely received and given.

The lamp is not made to be kept hidden under a basket but to be put on a candelabrum so that it may shine upon all who enter the house.

D. Laguitton
Sutton 11/8/2001

Suggested readings: the works of Lao-Tse, Meister Eckhart, Matthew Fox
Suggested doings: holotropic breathwork, Vipassana meditation, sky gazing

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