spirituality – Becoming Human

The emergence of the spiritual

This merits a much longer piece, but I want to get the idea out there.

In Les Regles de l’Art, Pierre Bourdieu describes the emergence in the 19th century of a concept of autonomy in the sphere of cultural production, whereby progressively artists shook off the constraints of the need to conform to sanctioned norms and/or to communicate a “message”, in favor of “art for art’s sake”. To be an artist was to be someone whose duty of truth to him- or herself took absolute precedence over any other consideration.

This, I see, merely prefigured a wider emancipation of humanity which is still only at its early stages today, and not yet widely recognized as such.

The concern to live a good life has for a long time been the preserve of philosophers and theologians, figures who occupied a consecrated position within the hierarchy of social power. Even the artist’s freedom to create has not always meant a freedom in personal life, an ars vivendi (neither has the philosopher’s souci de soi).

As the social institutions of religion have collapsed in Western society, new religious movements have stepped in to occupy the space vacated. These movements have sometimes been of a mass nature, but also sometimes are little more than a clan. The easy availability of information in the internet age has also had a profound effect on these dynamics, rendering them both more ephemeral and more centripetal. But almost all of these new movements, to this day, seek to do exactly what religion has always sought to do, that is to respond to the human need for community by building social systems in which degree of initiation determines place in the hierarchy and ideas are turned into doctrines and dogmas, falsely dehistoricized to become foundational myths. However, in the modern world it is very hard to monopolize habitus and many forces militate against ever recreating the religious empires of the past.

The discipline of inquiry taught us by the philosophers potentially contains a grain of truth, but since Plato until modern times it is certainly thought of wrongly: as a search for what is “out there”, can be uncovered by reason and accordingly should guide our behavior. As I have argued before, this project in reality (the tyranny of reason) seeks only to control us in the service of a possibly (once) imperative social goal, but not one we have freely chosen or even, frequently, questioned.

Although most of us recognize that there is no “truth” in art, we are still highly conditioned to believe that there is truth in life; a meaning which is external, which some have found and which we can emulate by following in their footsteps.

In my opinion, our relationship to our spiritual forbears should be no different to the relationship of the artist to hers. Spiritual creation is a work of art, which may uncover something of the structure of the universe but which simultaneously embodies what Zola called “the particular language of a soul”, specific to time and place. It is a universality without universalism, and utterly contingent on this impossible paradox.

Is there evidence that this spiritual field, in Bourdieu’s sense, is emancipating itself from religion and coming into an autonomous state of being?

I have of course not done any historical study and it is very much my impression that almost no-one yet understands or espouses this understanding clearly, although there are clearly echoes of it already in systems both ancient and modern. Driven by economic factors, ego, habit or expectations, most spiritual teachers try to keep their disciples on the hook, and many aspire to found their own dynasties.

I say, spiritual truth can only be communicated as art, and the spiritual teacher must have the attitude of an artist and should be thought of in this way; indeed, the attitude of an artist is incumbent upon all of us, for we are all artists of our own life. There is no possible way that the student can emulate the teacher; the student can only express her own essence. As (even) Jesus said, unless the seed falls into the earth and dies, it cannot bring forth fruit.

It is very hard for those of us who seek truth to understand that it does not matter where we look for it; to understand that, in fact, “truth” is not a very good word. We all tend to think that if one person has truth, another does not; that is the nature of positivistic truth and we are accustomed to thinking it is also true of spiritual truth. But it is not. Spiritual truth, like artistic “truth”, is inborn, in our cells and in our consciousness; no-one can transmit it to us, all anyone can ever do is wake us up to it within ourselves, and to do this they are never more than instrumental. The environment around us most propitious to our spiritual awakening is not a problem we need to solve, it is much more an emanation of what is already inside.

We need to cease the search and become artists of our own lives, surrounding ourselves with and attracting other artists, certainly, but purely for the joy of sharing in their beauty.

Why I am not a Buddhist

For most people who have left behind theistic religion, there are only two widely understood alternative contemporary identifications, one being pagan/shamanic and the other Buddhist. Buddhist-derived thought is extremely influential in New Age spirituality, and many people in need of a comprehensible label will loosely describe themselves as Buddhist or Zen. These are rich traditions with many insights into the human condition, but in my opinion Buddhism also commits some ghastly errors to which many of its adherents remain blind.

As I have found an excellent summary of these errors here, I can summarize briefly. Many people loosely assume that by labelling themselves “Buddhist” they have chosen an appellation which does away with the dualist denigration of the body and earthly life which predominates in mainstream Christianity, Judaism and Islam. This is a profound misunderstanding, because Buddhism is closely aligned with other world religions in its promulgation of a belief system which promotes acceptance of the established order. Indeed, Buddhism owes a good part of its secular success to the fact that repressing it is entirely pointless.

Buddhism is a transcendentalist philosophy. This is epitomized in the core notion that desire is the root of suffering, and therefore desire needs to be overcome. Yes, you read that right: there is something wrong with man’s basic drive to achieve or accomplish anything at all. Absolutely everything is illusory; all that “works” is meditation, and a specific kind of meditation which is directed against our biological essence.

In my understanding, any true spiritual path is not transcendental, but restorative. What we are dealing with is not overcoming any inadequacy in our biological nature, but fundamental flaws in our social conditioning. We can trust who we are, and merely need to unlearn who we believe ourselves to be. This process comes completely from within and does not need any external goal to focus on, and certainly not the goal of elimination of desire. On the contrary, we very much need to cultivate desire, which is our life force. Desire, we can say, is the masculine aspect of love, and love is incomplete, indeed inconceivable, without it. This perspective I will continue to call non-duality; it is not Buddhism.

As a Buddhist you cannot live life, you can only renounce it. Sometimes in very subtle ways that may look like they affirm one or other aspect of human existence, but when you take a look under the cover, this is merely instrumental to a transcendent agenda. In a way, these aspects are not affirmed, but only admitted, because they are not important enough to reject, or because the war on biological nature also counts as a desire which undermines the attitude of strict passivity and acceptance. Even if it may be cognitively strained neither to struggle against a force nor its social counterforce.

In opting for a restorationist perspective, I am not of course arguing for a Flintstonian return to Eden. Such a call would be practically useless, but also spiritually flawed. I believe what we need to do to live a good life and heal our planet is to free our biological nature now, and that society is a transpersonal construct which is an inevitable and necessary part of our human existence, which can neither be abandoned nor simply refounded on a utopian (meaning inevitably dystopian) basis. It is clear to me that evolution continues through social institutions, even if it may take wrong paths. But it is also clear to me that nothing intrinsic to our biological nature is hostile to global welfare; on the contrary, it is precisely its repression which is at the root of all neurosis and cruelty. That is to say, society has not changed in ways which are simultaneously functional and to which our ancestral legacy renders us maladapted. This is because society merely reflects the attempt to achieve ancestral drive satisfaction under manufactured environmental conditions. This is all it does; and thus trying to inflect drives is inherently at odds with its purpose. Contemporary social reality is only one, path-dependent solution, and it lies well within the happiness production frontier. In other words, we can do very considerably better.

If there is no idea of revolution within a spiritual tradition, it is not human, and it is not fit for purpose. This social bias towards the status quo and the stigmatization of desire is what Bertold Brecht spoke of when he observed that “the rushing stream is called violent, but no-one so speaks of the riverbed which locks it in“. In fact, the embedded violence of social institutions is far greater than the observed violence of those who seek to break free of them. The centrality of embracing desire (Bejahung) also underpins Nietzsche’s philosophy, as for example when he wrote, in the Will to Power, that “if we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence… and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”

It is not that there is no transcendence; there is indeed transcendence but one cannot transcend that which one has not restored. In fact, it is the very restoration which is transcendence because, in that moment, the problem has ceased to be; the faculty is restored and reintegrated and the more complete woman or man is better equipped to find her or his way in the world. The idea of transcendence presupposes something which is lower and problematic; but there is no reason to believe that anything in the human biological constitution (any more than that of any other species) fits this description. I believe that the effort to transcend necessarily ties one into a dualistic samsara. Thus in fact that Buddhism cannot, by its very structure, solve the problem it has posited. Biological energy flows naturally in spiritual directions, but only if it is embraced in its totality, unselectively.

Let us be clear. Human beings are not unhappy solely because they have failed to resign themselves to the circumstances of their lives. They are also unhappy because social institutions frustrate the full expression of their biological nature. Somewhere, each of us has to come to terms with that part of this apparatus of repression which we can at a given moment not change. In this, there is an art, and Buddhist ideas can help us negotiate this path. They should not, for one moment, blind us or make us indifferent to all the horror embedded in our social institutions and all the suffering which they beget.

A new political paradigm?

Interviewed recently on BBC’s Newsnight program, Russell Brand has achieved a feat that had for so long been unseen it seemed to have become impossible: ignited the political imagination of a generation.

Growing up in Britain in the 1970’s, from a lower middle class background but happily spared the ravages of inner city social decay, I never felt myself drawn to the left. My political philosophy always has been, and I would say still is, a liberal one. When later I discovered the post-modern social liberalism of philosopher Richard Rorty in the 1990’s, I found him to be articulating the kind of political values I had always believed in. Philosophically this was a comfortable home. Politically, liberalism in the UK, and most other places, was of marginal relevance, caught in a squeeze between the self-interested conservatism of the empowered classes and the equally self-interested socialism of the struggling working class masses. Somehow, these two opposing political forces managed to run the country in alternation, with a good deal of unpleasant rivalry but without either of them going totally off the rails. The left knew its place and was seduced by power, the right had a tradition of social concern, albeit with a dose of condescension and paternalism. Marxists railed on the left wing of the Labour Party in the 1980’s, while Mrs Thatcher foisted an alien set of values on the party of the landed classes whose attitudes had become too archaic and whose appeal had become too limited to address mounting social unrest. Then Tony Blair introduced third-way socialism, in its origins an attempt constructively to engage with the economics of wealth creation which attracted many social liberals to its ranks. But Blair never won over the radical heart of his party, only its pragmatic head, and in hindsight his agenda seems naive, or at best inadequate.

I mistrusted the Left for the reasons most people did who grew up during the Cold War: the spectre of collectivism crushing human individuality and turning all of society into a grey, joyless, paranoid dystopia. This was not, of course, the progressive Left my parents knew. But the fear of nuclear annihilation hung heavily over my generation, and a political system that so elevated ideology over human community could never be my home. To this day, the soul and direction of the Left has seemed to me fatally compromised by its inner ideological struggles. Brand, who by background knows the social reality of the so-called working, increasingly however rather unemployed and economically marginalized, classes much better than I do, sums this up succinctly in his piece in the New Statesman, which is an angry, brilliantly poetic, iconoclastic yet supremely humanistic, epochal rant: the Right has always sought converts, while the Left has looked for traitors.

Brand’s passion for social justice is unquestionable, and at the same time he manages to nail what have always been my misgivings about the British Left. Paraphrasing what I see to be his key message, the Left has always remained in thrall to a system and a political class that embody values which have been taken by the British public to be quasi-constitutional, as the precondition of social stability, values which in fact, however, have never made a clean break from their feudal origins. There is no vision of a new humanity, of a new coexistence. Underlying this strange cohabitation, and it is excruciatingly obvious when it is pointed out, is not just the cult of production but the one unifying institution which bridges, or bridged, the Left-right divide: the church. Today though, it has lost its power to compel acquiescence in a supposedly divinely ordained political order which pretty well every thinking person realizes is no longer fit for purpose, and will not secure any continued human existence, never mind coexistence. There is a gaping hole, increasing angry impatience with the positivist social myth of progress we have been brought up on, and this crisis is not just spiritual and individual, but political and collective. Marxism has failed because it, too, exalted work and production over spirit and community (and fun).

Brand does the unthinkable: he marries the imperative of inner transformation known to us from the mystic core of all religions, but which has always had to seek shelter within and therefore accommodate itself to a hierarchical social order, with a call for radical social change. He seeks to refound the progressive left on essentially a completely novel spiritual basis. Unto Caesar will not be rendered that which is Caesar’s, because nothing is Caesar’s: all that is his is ours. This is truly a prophetic moment, a call for a spiritual democracy from a spiritual demos, a spirituality which itself is phenomenological, unmediated, unimposable, effervescent and evanescent, different in every moment but real, alive, because intrinsically, biologically, shared by every conscious human soul.

There is no doubt that Brand is right, that this is the direction we must take, and there is no doubt either that he is right that revolution is coming whether we like it or not, and the longer we unimaginatively hold on to stale repeat episodes of the old political sitcoms the more painful for everyone that change will be. The direction of change, though, is uncertain, in no way preordained. Contemporary spirituality, the preserve of fortunate middle classes, is far from yet ready for the task. Brand knows it. Those he grew up with have mostly no inkling of this dimension, no idea of this alternative. They are still living as slaves within an archaic paradigm. Or so, at least, I assume. Contemporary spirituality is an ethereal consumer good out of their financial reach and with almost no outreach to them. What they do see and read, if anything, is dumbed down and pious. The media and the marketing engine still have huge influence. Thus modern spirituality at best may inspire a new way of thought; it is, de facto, politically irrelevant. That is a major work ahead of us.

Neurofeedback

I have not yet any experience with it, so I may come back to this theme, but I have recently been looking into the potential of neurofeedback for spiritual development, in particular for training in meditation and self-hypnosis. Neurofeedback (NFB) consists in monitoring brain activity so that the individual can more easily learn how to influence his or her mental state. As such it is a subdomain of biofeedback, which covers the monitoring of various indices of bodily function (such as cardiac function, respiration, perspiration, muscle tensions etc). Biofeedback in turn, as regards its use by individuals at home, so in non-clinical settings, is a subfield of the growing trend towards what is now known as “quantified self“. Quantified self technologies allow for the capture of data regarding bodily functioning and condition with a view to harnessing the powerful goal-driven behavior of the human brain (well described by behavioral economist Dan Ariely).

In this context, I happened upon (to judge by the comments) a rather controversial post by Dr Christian Jarrett, a British psychologist, on Psychology Today (PT) website. Dr Jarrett writes that “Neurofeedback as a clinical tool definitely has a growing evidence base for a range of conditions. However, its use as a form of lifestyle therapy to achieve calm and enlightenment and good moods remains dubious.”

While I keep an open mind on NFB, I felt I needed to point out in the comments that the use of anything at all to achieve spiritual benefits “remains dubious“, if by “dubious” is meant “not empirically demonstrable”. This is intrinsic to spirituality…

Also, while one may perhaps regret, if it is the case, that some people who might otherwise take NFB seriously for demonstrable conditions do not do so because they perceive it as tainted with mystical associations, looked at from the side of those spending money on methods which might bring them spiritual development and not a solution to a specific underlying condition, NO such methods have demonstrable and indiscriminate efficacy. The choice of a method which at least has some scientific grounding to it, even if unproven, may be better than the choice of any of the many other methods which have none at all. If the author is right to dismiss the “spiritual” source of demand for NFB then essentially he is dismissing, it seems to me, spiritual inquiry itself. But then why be concerned with the futility of NFB for spiritual inquiry specifically, if spiritual inquiry itself is necessarily futile?

It seems to me, therefore, that the incorporation of NFB into spiritual training is at least as legitimate as any other practice in the domain of spiritual training. From the standpoint of a spiritual enquirer, Dr Jarrett’s article really does no more than state the obvious: caveat emptor. Unfortunately, much as I might like to, it is rare that I get to use scientific standards to guide choices of spiritual method. At best science may be suggestive. But spiritual inquiry is imperative and we are constrained to use the tools at hand in our choice of methods. Given this fact, NFB seems to me actually rather interesting.

I will post in the comments any reply I might get over on PT.

Street religion

cyberdog_and_grafitti_by_we_will_break-d31amhx — Nigel Harvey Photography. Source : http://we-will-break.deviantart.com/

London on a Saturday night is brimming with raw sexual energy. Party goers dress to impress – and to excite.

A couple of hours earlier I had been in the delightful energy of the alternative fashion scene in Camden Market, beating out ecstatic dance music and brimful of creativity (at this point, I have to link to Cyberdog and Sai Sai, I just love them too much!).

I’m not sure if the denizens of this milieu see themselves as a subculture or counterculture, I have no doubt that society (still) does, but I see them as in the very vanguard of culture, its vibrant, beating heart. They turn me on, excite me, leave me spellbound and dumbstruck at their artistic prowess. Where stuffy old conservatives see decadence and degeneration, I see the opposite… cadence, generation, life springing inexhaustibly from its source.

Leaving Camden market, I was on my way to a self-styled “Ecstatic Dance” event. There was live tribal-style dance music with drums and other instruments, accompanied by incantations to Gaia and helper spirits, all mixed up with yoga breathing and chakra meditations. The participants were dressed casually – read, in many cases, badly – and they interacted very little with each other. While the music was OK, it was nowhere near the ecstatic heights of what I had been listening to in a mere retail store a few hours before. And raw vegan food meant lots of sugar and plenty of chocolate.

I’m not knocking it. Well OK, I am, but the thing is this. One experience was creative and ecstatic, if maybe lacking in self-awareness. The other was derivative and stale, a veneer of spirituality on top of behavior with which everyone was comfortable. No remise en question. An attempt to recreate a tribal dance and shamanic healing “vibe”, but achieving at most only something of the form, very little of the substance.

In the world of spiritual practice there is nothing which is true or false, but there are some things which are authentic and alive and there are other things which are stultifying and dead. The two may resemble each other in form, but they differ wildly in spirit.

Spirituality, you see, is creative. It is an attempt first of all to imagine, and then to create, a more beautiful world. There are innumerable ways of doing that, but there are many more ways of failing to do so. The spiritual seeker is an artist. Copying someone else’s form of spirituality is nothing more than plagiarism. It will never put you in touch with yourself. That is what people who have no wish really to change are doing all over the world, day in day out, and it makes no difference if they do it in a traditional place of worship within an established religion, or in a community center hired for the occasion with an ad hoc crowd of revelers who found each other, as we did, on the internet. Of course, learning from a true master in any sphere of life may be a wise choice of apprenticeship. But this does not change that there is great art, and there are sad imitations.

Spirituality is out on the streets these days (perhaps it always was). It is the quality of all those who rebel against social conditioning, who strike out on their own or with a group of friends, who believe in themselves and dare to change the world, but never retreat from it. It goes as unnoticed by self-styled new agers as it does by the established church, yet it is way more authentic, way more life-affirming, than either. This post is my attempt to tell these kids (of all ages) that those who are really spiritual esteem them beyond measure. That if only they have the courage to stick with who they are, explore and, over time, deepen their youthful intuitions, they will make the world better for all of us. And while peaceful meditation in nature and solitary moments under the stars may be just as numinous, I wish more of us would cast aside stale, “ecstatic” asceticism and worship there, in the thick of life, at its source.

Oh, and I wish that they would start their parties just a wee bit earlier… 😉

God, sang Faithless, is a DJ. But not quite. In fact, it’s the DJ that is God.

The Aquarian Couple

In my last post, I wrote about the need to constitute relationships which are free of all forms of control and self-limitation. Only when we are open to life in its entirety are we aligned with our biological nature and our spiritual destiny.

As I’ve said before, this does not, however, mean that we need to embrace polyamory. It is important to recall a fundamental truth, namely that most social institutions are based on real human needs even whilst they are inimical to others. The demand for sexual exclusivity within marriage betrays a deeper, valid intuition as to the possible depth of a loving relationship. Many people are not willing to explore this depth, but by refusing to do so, they just as certainly set themselves on a path away from self-examination and transformation. Therefore I advocate radical commitment and radical openness. One must be willing to be burnt in the fires both of particularity and of generality – not pick and choose a la carte.

Our ancestral nature is tribal, but we are not going back to being hunter-gatherers in the jungle any time soon. For most people, pair bonding is the obvious solution to a biospiritual imperative. As I have previously argued, both the pleasures and the pain of this situation are there to teach us and to make us more aware.

Today’s spiritual couple is not just a neoprimitivist reincarnation, but is called upon to reinterpret our biological heritage to the needs of the present time. In my vision, the Aquarian couple is more deeply committed than any traditional couple, and at the same time more radically open than most polyamorists and almost all swingers and other persons in so-called “open marriages”. For this reason, whilst it is important to make clear that one stands outside the dominant social norm, these other terms are also inadequate. One is forced, really, to coin a term. I call this the Aquarian couple.

Aquarian relationships may come to an end, as everything eventually does, but they never fail, just as life is not a failure simply because it ends in death. On the spiritual path, we do not hold on to life but each day, each moment we die and are reborn. Similarly we do not hold on to our relationships, and they are new in each moment. I know many examples of this kind of couple and it is time that their stories are told and honored, as testimony to what is possible, satisfying and desirable in human relationships at the dawn of this new age.

Healing the body

In this post, I want to review two books with a common theme: Bruce Lipton’s 2005 The Biology of Belief and Lissa Rankin’s more recent Mind over Medicine.

Lipton, in his book, sets about demolishing what he himself admits is a straw man: the notion that genes determine disease and its progression. In his view, genes only provide a blueprint for building proteins, and it is the cellular receptor proteins on the membrane which drive gene expression in response to their environment. Few genes are self-expressing.

This hardly seems controversial. Nevertheless, the book is, even if it is not its main intent, a good and very readable laymen’s introduction to the molecular biology of the cell, and worth reading for that reason alone.

The “belief” in the title refers essentially to the ability of the brain to command, whether consciously or unconsciously, the production of neurotransmitters and other signalling proteins which then tell cells what to do. This view, as Lipton acknowledges, is based on the ideas of Candace Pert, whose work Molecules of Emotion I reviewed earlier. Interestingly, Lipton reports that this signalling intelligence was first developed in unicellular amoeba communities, where the signalling compounds are released into the environment and operate between distinct individuals. Multicellular organisms came only later, and took over this system of signalling to regulate the behavior of the community of cells which had now come to be permanently associated in a single individual. Thus cellular intelligence underpins the intelligence of more complex organisms.

Despite its expositional merits, however, Lipton’s book does not get us much closer to an understanding of the actual mechanisms behind the control of cell behavior. For the most part, he relies on somewhat forced analogies from quantum physics, the pertinence of which is far from established. Whilst he seems authoritative in matters of cell biology, what he says about quantum physics is frequently wrong and sometimes breathtakingly so. Essentially his main argument is the same one picked up on by Rankin, which may well be valid but is nevertheless lacking in detail, namely that the body’s self-healing mechanisms are activated by relaxation and disactivated by stress, i.e. by the activation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.

These self-healing mechanisms may be astonishing, and may depend to a significant degree on the variables the authors cite, but they remain quite mysterious in their details. One possibility one might have hoped Lipton would explore, but which he does not, is that there is a macro equivalent of the cellular apoptosis mechanism which leads entire organisms to self-destruct when signals in their environment communicate to them that they no longer play a role in the community. This may be a gross simplification but it would fit with Lipton’s overarching metaphor whereby the human body is, in many ways, merely the cell writ large.

Lipton also prefigures Rankin by taking to task the medical community for overuse of prescription medicines without a proper understanding of their systemic functioning. However he does not, and cannot, establish any principles to determine whether or not the use of pharmaceuticals is appropriate in individual instances and whether the other healing resources of the body have been sufficiently activated and explored. As such, the criticism, even if one may have sympathy for it, seems superficial.

If Lipton’s book is written from the perspective of a medical researcher, Rankin comes at the subject as a practising doctor disillusioned at the lack of holistic attention to health which characterizes the Western medical community. Failure to grasp the holistic nature of the body’s self-healing mechanisms means that many people get poor medical advice and care. Rankin is at her best campaigning for a much greater awareness on the part of medical caregivers of how healing actually takes place (though in this respect she seems to draw heavily on the admirable precedent of Bernie Siegel).

Much of Rankin’s argument centers on the unnoticed efficacy of placebos, a notion she draws from Lipton without, it seems to me, adequate attribution; indeed even some of the examples she cites already appear in The Biology of Belief. Rankin claims to have researched the placebo effect extensively, but at least sometimes she appears to permit misconception of the originality of her research. (A recent article in Scientific American is worth a look for anyone who doubts the strength of the placebo effect).

There are a number of important principles stressed in Rankin’s book which are often absent from other self-help guides directed towards recovering and maintaining health and which are welcome. Her insistence on finding meaning in life as a key contributing factor to wellness rings true, as does her defense of the power of affirmations given the need to override the negative messages which we are usually passing on to our bodies. She is also right in pointing to the value of community, although she passes lightly over important shortcomings of institutions like family and church the drawbacks of which may very well, in many instances, outweigh the benefits, and which are certainly some way short of the ideal. These institutions have quite likely been at the root of many of the health problems people experience. Moreover, even if community may be as important as diet and lifestyle, the recommendation to seek it out is difficult to operationalize if one does not have a healthy form of it to begin with. Rankin probably should also be commended for pointing to the importance of sexual life, but again, there is no clue in the pages of the book as to what might constitute a healthy configuration or even that this is a legitimate and important question to ask.

Unfortunately, for all its admirable qualities, Rankin’s book appears to take far too lightly the difficulty of modifying ones beliefs and actions in order to obtain better health outcomes, a mistake that Lipton avoids, since he is well aware that most of the body’s beliefs are encoded in subconscious scripts. The “diagnosis and prescription” part of the book is the least satisfying one, often asking the reader to answer in a few sentences what many seekers have needed decades to unearth and understand. In this sense, Rankin’s book looks like a typical US cultural artefact which uncritically endorses the errors of the positive thinking fraternity, discussed by me here.

This is disappointing, because Rankin is a much better self-publicist than Lipton and has acquired a significant new media voice which could have been used to promote deeper healing modalities than those she herself is able to offer. This unfortunately means she gives the impression of overextending herself where greater humility might have been in order, and accordingly coming across as superficial. Parts of her own “prescription” for herself read like an awkward list of endorsements of particular personalities, and there is no indication why they should be of value to someone else; they appear to be simply plucked from the air. Making a diagnosis of the factors in ones life which promote illness and writing a prescription to deal with them – even if one accepts this way of speaking – remains a major task and a daunting endeavor.

These criticisms aside, it is clear from both books that a major shift in social consciousness around health and healing is underway and increasingly forcing its way into the mainstream. For those who continue to place undue faith in the mechanistic and simplistic ideas which have hitherto underpinned Western allopathic medicine, either or both books will be very helpful antidotes. We may be still a long way off adequately describing how the body’s self-healing mechanisms work, but there seems no doubt at all that they make a key contribution to health outcomes and, if only for this reason, should be nurtured. In reality, of course, the quest for optimal health only dictates what the spiritual path anyway demands on other counts: a conscious uncovering of reality, and the courage to listen to what we already know.

Why eschewing religion is a prerequisite of spirituality

It is a glorious spring day in Brussels today, inviting to indulge a certain melancholy over the passage of time and the meaninglessness of existence.

In melancholy we sense, simultaneously, the beauty of both life and death; it may, if we let it, overwhelm us. But usually we are too frightened to let go.

This fear of being our mortal selves and clinging on to our misperception of separateness finds its origin in the survival instinct of animals. But although our biological nature impels us to seek to survive, it does not mandate fear when that survival is not threatened or simply because, ultimately, we all will die. Mortality anxiety takes root in a misformation of the ego.

Consciousness is not life without fear, but it is life without fear of fear. We know fear to be instinctive and survival to be a basic drive, but we also know that whether or not we survive, existence will go on. We know ourselves to be a tiny part of existence and this only now; and yet, if we are aware, a vital part, in a sense, however, which transcends vastly our self-identification.

Such awareness is the goal of spiritual practice; it is embodied spirituality. But our spiritual drive and our mortality anxiety are expertly captured and deviated by religion. Theistic religion promises an absurdity, namely the survival of the soul as a differentiated entity. In order to achieve this absurdity, devotees are ready to accept the most insane of sacrifices. Living is fully subordinate to an illusory survival. Even the Eastern doctrines of karma and reincarnation are not much different. Indeed they are possibly worse, since existence is seen as a chore which colossal efforts are required to escape.

Religion is not only the opium of the people; it is predatory on their enslavement and the sworn enemy of their emancipation. Today, take time to live, to experience one exquisite moment fully. The ecstatic character of life in which we partake is our birthright and the sole immensity there is.

Porn as meditation

In which I blast my blog into the outer reaches of cyberspace. Well, we’ll see. There is no intention to court controversy, but, as always, there are some things I just have to say.

Google these two words – porn and meditation – together, and what you’ll get is mostly links to pseudo-oriental “treatments” for (so-called) “porn addiction”. Although many people enjoy (so-called) porn, and sex-positive activists have generally embraced its production and consumption, at least within certain limits/genres, it seems that it has yet to make its way into the mainstream, or even any sidestream, of new spirituality. Continue reading “Porn as meditation”

A cultural critique of polyamory

As someone who has for a long time intellectually moved beyond inherited notions of monogamy, and who certainly subscribes to the sort of ethical precepts people who expound polyamory defend, I have often wondered why the notion itself is not one that appeals to me more.

Perhaps it starts with the word itself: the blend of Greek and Latin is itself disturbing. Why can’t it be “multiamory”? Or “poly-“…?

Well, poly-what? The inability to decide if it should be “polyeros” or “polyagape” together with the technical/commercial connotations of “multi”-anything no doubt explain this unhappy (not so) neologism. We think we know what “amor” is, and we very “nobly” want more of it in our lives.

But actually we do not know what “amor” is, no more than the ancients. We do not even know what “eros” is (and we are so far from understanding “agape” that it is no more than a hypothetical alien lifeform to most of us, inconveniently embedded in our superego). Continue reading “A cultural critique of polyamory”