Category: Cosmology

‘Definition of God’ – and it still leaves us with the job of living with each other through the unity of mystery

The nearest I have ever come across to a satisfactory definition of God is as follows;

God is a circle whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.

Anonymous, ‘The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers‘ (12thC)

Of course it isn’t really a definition – it’s more like a Zen Master’s ‘pointing’ – but what a pointing!

Of course I like it because it expresses my theological perspective and worldview – that of immanence plus transcendence i.e. panentheism.

Of course unless we lie through assertion or dupe through self-deception we don’t really, unequivocally, know. The best we can have is reasonably high degrees of certainty – and then preferably by combining several ways of knowing including sense observation, reason, intuition and the precedent of community precedents. We in truth live with mystery. As it says in the Koran ‘Man is my mystery and I am his‘.

“We are united by our doubts and divided by our convictions.” Sir Peter Ustinov

Recognition of ignorance is strength not weakness as Saint Augustine pointed out;

I am in a sorry state, for I do not know what I do not know!

Because we have unique histories we have unique worldviews. In fact it is the fact that at our centre we need faith to bridge the gap that exists between knowing and not knowing between finite humanity and that other defining characteristic of God – infinity.

As I suggested elsewhere excesses of certitude cut us off from truth and can lead to horrors of cruelty – the Nazis were certain that Jews, and Gypsies were sub-human.

“Certitude divides and diversity unifies…..We have to elevate religion above politics…..”

H.R.H. Prince El-Hassan Bin Talal of Jordan BBC Newsnight 9th Feb 2006

All desire to be united is as the drop that longs to come one with the ocean – the rub, and the joy, is that the duality through which we learn is the dynamic that exists between oneness on the one hand, via contemplative letting go of the ego, and l-one-ly separation on the other.

“The Self is an ocean without a shore”: Bill Viola, a perfect match of spirit and form?

THE ARGUMENT The past lives only in the present in that our consciousness is marked and shaped by those whose insights we come to re-realize – including those that come from the great spiritual teachers. Memories are like art and sacred writings that are simply marks made – but marks made that can transport us to our own high realization in inspired consciousness. Bill Viola is now re-presenting us through his mastery of one of newest of mediums, video, with access to that spiritual core at the heart of the great world wisdom traditions. Is this a perfect post-modernist match of spirit and form?

In my SunWALK model about ‘what it is to be human‘ and about ‘how can we spiritualize education without the exclusivity of sectarian religion‘ I was inspired by several quotations as well as by Seamus Heaney’s poem Personal Helicon.

Bill Viola from ‘Ocean Without a Shore‘ – click to see full size – Source artdaily

“One of the things the camera taught me was to see the world, the same world that my eye sees, in its metaphoric, symbolic state. This condition is, in fact, always present, latent in the world around us .”
– Bill Viola

I was interested to see news about Bill Viola’s recent work ‘Ocean Without a Shore’ (shown at Chiesa di San Gallo, Venice). Viola’s website cites the following two inspirations;

“The Self is an ocean without a shore. Gazing upon it has no
beginning or end, in this world and the next.”
Ibn al’Arabi (1165 – 1240)

From the Viola site we learn;

‘Ocean Without a Shore’ is about the presence of the dead in our lives. The three stone altars in the church of San Gallo become portals for the passage of the dead to and from our world. Presented as a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death, the video sequence documents a succession of individuals slowly approaching out of darkness and moving into the light. Each person must then breakthrough an invisible threshold of water and light in order to pass into the physical world. Once incarnate however, all beings realize that their presence is finite and so they must eventually turn away from material existence to return from where they came. The cycle repeats without end.

The work was inspired by a poem by the 20th century Senegalese poet and storyteller Birago Diop:

“ Hearing things more than beings,
listening to the voice of fire,
the voice of water.
Hearing in wind the weeping bushes,
sighs of our forefathers.

The dead are never gone:
they are in the shadows.
The dead are not in earth:
they’re in the rustling tree,
the groaning wood,
water that runs,
water that sleeps;
they’re in the hut, in the crowd,
the dead are not dead.

The dead are never gone,
they’re in the breast of a woman,
they’re in the crying of a child,
in the flaming torch.
The dead are not in the earth:
they’re in the dying fire,
the weeping grasses,
whimpering rocks,
they’re in the forest, they’re in the house,
the dead are not dead.”
(from David Melzter, ed. Death – An Anthology of Ancient Texts, Songs, Prayers and Stories (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984)

The Ibn al’Arabi quotations reminded me of my attempt to portray our state in visiting ‘the shoreline’ and encountering the unknowable Whole – in my Personal Myth and the four key qutations (SEE below)

The poetic sense of the dead speaking in the ‘dying fire, the weeping grasses’ etc is secondary for me to how they live on in the consciousness that we possess, because of them. Our spirits continue to live out their consciousness through ours.

FOUR KEY QUOTATIONS

The Ibn al’Arabi quotation also reminded me of the inspiration I got from four key quotations in relation to a sense of the Whole and to a panentheistic and Universalist perspective I hoped that they contributed to the leitmotif that made of the thesis parts, a whole;

Text 1)

“The larger the island of knowledge, the longer
the shoreline of mystery.” Unknown author

Text 2)

The search for reason ends at the shore of the known;
on the immense expanse beyond it
only the sense of the ineffable can glide.
It alone knows the route to that
which is remote from experience and understanding.
Neither is amphibious:
reason cannot go beyond the shore,
and the sense of the ineffable
is out of place where we measure, where we weigh…….

Citizens of two realms, we must all sustain dual allegiance:
we sense the ineffable in one realm;
we name and exploit reality in another.

Between the two we set up a system of references,
but can never fill the gap.
They are as far and as close to each other

As time and calendar, as violin and melody,
as life and what lies beyond the last breath.

The tangible phenomena we scrutinize with our reason,

The sacred and indemonstrable we overhear

with the sense of the ineffable.

Heschel A. J. (1971), Man is Not Alone, New York: Octagon Books p.8

Text 3)

Tao, the subtle reality of the universe

cannot be described.

That which can be described in words

is merely a conception of the mind.

Although names and descriptions have been applied to it,

the subtle reality is beyond the description.

One may use the word ‘Nothingness”

to describe the Origin of the universe,

and “Beingness”

to describe the Mother of the myriad things,

but Nothingness and Beingness are merely conceptions.

From the perspective of Nothingness,

one may perceive the expansion of the universe.

From the perspective of Beingness,

one may distinguish individual things.

Both are for the conceptual convenience of the mind.

Although different concepts can be applied,

Nothingness and Beingness

and other conceptual activity of the mind

all come from, the same indescribable subtle Originalness

The Way is the unfoldment of such subtle reality.

Having reached the subtlety of the universe,

one may see the ultimate subtlety,
the Gate of All Wonders.

Ni, Hua-Ching (1997), The Complete Works of Lao Tzu, Santa Monica, USA: Seven Star Communications – Tao The Ching (‘Chapter’ 1)

Text 4)

….set then yourselves towards His holy Court, on the shore of His mighty Ocean, so that the pearls of knowledge and wisdom, which God hath stored up within the shell of His radiant heart, may be revealed unto you….
(Baha’u’llah: Proclamation of Baha’u’llah, Pages: 8-9)

The past lives only in the present in that our consciousness is marked and shaped by those whose insights we come to re-realize – including those that come from the great spiritual teachers. Memories are like art and sacred writings that are simply marks made – but marks made that can transport us to our own high realization in inspired consciousness. Bill Viola is now re-presenting us through his mastery of one of newest of mediums, video, with access to that spiritual core at the heart of the great world wisdom traditions. Is this a perfect post-modernist match of spirit and form?

The mystic inner core of the great world wisdom traditions is incorrectly named as Perennial Philosophy

• There’s a reality beyond the material world:
• Which is uncreated.
• It pervades everything,
• but remains beyond the reach of human knowledge and understanding.
• You approach that reality by:
• Distinguishing ego from true self
• Understanding the nature of desire
• Becoming unattached
• Forgetting about preferences
• Not working for personal gain
• Letting go of thoughts
• Redirecting your attention
• Being devoted
• Being humble
• Invoking that reality
• Surrendering
• That reality approaches you through:
• Grace
• The teacher
• You’re transformed so that you embody that reality by:
• Dying and being reborn

Two views of the structure of Perennial Philosophy are HERE

Viola in our sea of uncertainty, and maelstrom of violence, is helping us re-connect.

Perhaps also Viola is showing us that video can do more fully what photographers – Minor White for example – have longed to do – to ‘en-form’ the spiritual?

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

Inspiring quotations for PhD thesis

Like heroes and heroines certain key sayings inspire us. Here I’m assembling the ones that have meant most to me.

As I re-find them I am putting the NEWEST at the top:

From my thesis;

The four texts that contributed to the leitmotif that, I hope, makes, of the thesis parts, a whole

Text 1)

“The larger the island of knowledge, the longer
the shoreline of mystery.” Unknown author

Text 2)

The search for reason ends at the shore of the known;
on the immense expanse beyond it
only the sense of the ineffable can glide.
It alone knows the route to that
which is remote from experience and understanding.
Neither is amphibious:
reason cannot go beyond the shore,
and the sense of the ineffable
is out of place where we measure, where we weigh…….

Citizens of two realms, we must all sustain dual allegiance:
we sense the ineffable in one realm;
we name and exploit reality in another.

Between the two we set up a system of references,
but can never fill the gap.
They are as far and as close to each other

As time and calendar, as violin and melody,
as life and what lies beyond the last breath.

The tangible phenomena we scrutinize with our reason,

The sacred and indemonstrable we overhear

with the sense of the ineffable.

Heschel A. J. (1971), Man is Not Alone, New York: Octagon Books p.8

Text 3)

Tao, the subtle reality of the universe

cannot be described.

That which can be described in words

is merely a conception of the mind.

Although names and descriptions have been applied to it,

the subtle reality is beyond the description.

One may use the word ‘Nothingness”

to describe the Origin of the universe,

and “Beingness”

to describe the Mother of the myriad things,

but Nothingness and Beingness are merely conceptions.

From the perspective of Nothingness,

one may perceive the expansion of the universe.

From the perspective of Beingness,

one may distinguish individual things.

Both are for the conceptual convenience of the mind.

Although different concepts can be applied,

Nothingness and Beingness

and other conceptual activity of the mind

all come from, the same indescribable subtle Originalness

The Way is the unfoldment of such subtle reality.

Having reached the subtlety of the universe,

one may see the ultimate subtlety,
the Gate of All Wonders.

Ni, Hua-Ching (1997), The Complete Works of Lao Tzu, Santa Monica, USA: Seven Star Communications – Tao The Ching (‘Chapter’ 1)

Text 4)

….set then yourselves towards His holy Court, on the shore of His mighty Ocean, so that the pearls of knowledge and wisdom, which God hath stored up within the shell of His radiant heart, may be revealed unto you….
(Baha’u’llah: Proclamation of Baha’u’llah, Pages: 8-9)

“The utterances of the heart — unlike those of the discriminating intellect — always relate to the whole.” (Jung)

Also from the thesis;

Introduction to Chapter 1 – an ‘overture’

By way of a short introduction I want to ‘sound’, as in an overture, certain ‘notes’, or themes or resonances. They are from writers, and a film-maker, whose statements have come to mean a great deal, in the struggle to search out my own story, and its meaning educationally.

Autobiography is a journey inward. St Augustine said:

Men go to gape at mountain peaks, at the boundless tides of the sea, the broad sweep of rivers, the encircling ocean and the motion of the stars; and yet they leave themselves unnoticed; they do not marvel at themselves.
St. Augustine, Confessions X2

Autobiography is not entirely a matter of re-collecting objective facts: it is re-creation as well as re-collection, but it is a seeking after a kind of truth; the truth of authentically being in oneself. Peter Abbs (1974 p. 7) calls autobiography: the search backwards into time to discover the evolution of the true self. It is, as such, about self-knowing, but something beyond the fripperies of the ego. Baha’u’llah, Founder of the Baha’i religion, in one of His own writings, cites a tradition from Islam: He hath known God who hath known himself. (Baha’u’llah: Gleanings, MARS database3 p.178).

For the theistically religious the more we come to know our true selves, the closer we come to the Divine within us, and vice versa. I make no claim, beyond a few faltering steps, but the ideas continue to inspire.

The ‘Thesis Poem’
I have chosen the following poem by Seamus Heaney (1996 p.14) as ‘the poem’ for the thesis because it shows beautifully how we resonate now, in relation to what we sensed and experienced as children. It also shows how, through metaphor, the objective connects with the subjective to thrill, to the very quick of our being.

About the poem, ‘Personal Helicon’ Pelligrino (2003 p.1) explains;

Mount Helicon is a mountain in Greece, that was, in classical mythology, sacred to Apollo and the Muses. From it flowed two fountains of poetic inspiration. Heaney is here presenting his own source of inspiration, the “dark drop” into personal and cultural memory, made present by the depths of the wells in his childhood. Now, as a man, he is too mature to scramble about on hands and knees, looking into the deep places of the earth, but he has his poetry – and, thank God, so do we.

Of course if Heaney was reading it we would have that wonderful voice, like an aromatic tree giving up the sap, and perfuming the air with all the good things from the soil.

Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney
for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Later I take up the issues of resonance, and of objective and subjective meaning combined in metaphor, and the power of the subjective in personal history, to continue to generate the new in the meaning-making we do. The darkness echoes, as we stare into the part darkness of the self, and its memories – we stare, each a big-eyed Narcissus.

The final ‘sounding’, or theme, in the Introduction to Chapter 1 concerns identity and the moment, which lives on, and in which the past continues to create. The piece is by Jorge Luis Borges4, who says:

Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made
up of a single moment – the moment in which a man finds
out, once and for all, who he is.

The one moment could conceivably be a choice – as in Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life where a group of 22 people are suspended between earth and heaven with a week to answer the important question: “What is the one memory that you choose to carry into the afterlife?” When each chooses his or her memory, this is all that will be remembered for eternity.

Professionally, the lesson, or pair of lessons, upon which this thesis is, in part, an extended reflection contains the one memory I would choose. Ideally it would be the whole of the two ‘story’ lessons.

If it was reduced just to seconds it would be the moment that one ‘deviant’ boy offered an explanation of the possible symbolic meaning of the two fishes that I had drawn on the blackboard. One fish was a line drawing, the other a similar shaped fish, but its shape was delineated via chalk shading (i.e. from ‘the outside’).

“Mr P I think one fish represents bounded imagination, and the other stands for unbounded imagination.”

His brilliantly insightful comment was the jewel in the crown of an outstanding lesson in which the class and I, so I felt, was as ‘one-mind’, intellectually sharp but attitudinally contemplative, in ‘cross-over’ from extreme left-brain and extreme right-brain engagement – and here he was, the boy always in trouble with various teachers, speaking my as yet unrealized thoughts, and riveting me to that moment.

It was the supreme moment, within the supreme experience in a life-time of teaching, and it was, as Jack Nicholson and the movie title say, ‘As good as it gets’.

One key quotation is missing from this section. It is; “The larger the island of knowledge,the longer the shoreline of mystery.” Anon. I now find that in a piece of his work Bill Viola was inspired by;

“The Self is an ocean without a shore. Gazing upon it has no
beginning or end, in this world and the next.”
Ibn al’Arabi (1165 – 1240)

The ocean and island metaphors, the limitless Self, the fathomless self, the moment and memories, ‘After Life’, self-knowledge and the impossibility of knowing the Self – all these and more are essential threads in my attempt too present in SunWALK a model of what it is to be positively and fully human as well as a model of how education can be intrinsically spiritualizing without the narrow sectarian religion.

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE


De-mystifying the mystical and deciding on your definition of ‘mystical’?

What’s your definition of mystical and mystical experience? The one I came up with is as follows;

‘The mystical is positive, ineffable, unitive, experience that enhances insight or knowing – in a spiritual or religious context.’ (My composite definition to use with Hick’s definition below)

This is a composite developed from a range of authorities I looked at. In addition to developing a definition that works for me I want to de-mystify the mystical. Many mystics are presented as rare creatures but I wanted to emphasize that mystical experience is part of everyday life – like philosophizing. There are neutral and even negative such experiences. The essential thing is the experience of being at one with the Whole and losing what Wilber and others call our ego-boundaries of self (ego).

Positive such experiences provide us with deeper insights into reality and the will to do good in the world. This may or may not be in a religious context.

Neutral or negative such experiences – I will leave it to you to decise which is which – include sex, drugs and rock and roll and such experiences as are available via flotation tanks. Music must surely be included.

What proof is there that such experience is part of normality? Perhaps there are clues in everyday language such as the phrase, “It took me out of myself?” or “I was transported…” (rather more 19thC).

I think that the ‘rarification’ of such people as mystics can be part of how a power elite has in the past exerted power over the common people. Fundamentalists are wary of mystics because they might have a view that’s different to the ‘party line’.

Apparently mystics flowered only for a short time in England.

Of course submitting your own experiences to reason and reasonableness helps create a balance.

My slightly adapted ‘John Hick’s definition’ of the mystical is helpful – the mystical is nothing more or less than direct religious experience’. It’s especially useful if combined with the Christian idea that you will ‘know them by their fruits’

The point is the mystical is subjective. We might be self-deceiving – so its a good idea to have some teachers whose ‘living of the life’ and creating of ‘good fruit’ qualifies them to be seen as authorities.

The bottom line is beliefs matter less that action – so why vilify or kill those whose only difference is that they might hold different beliefs?

Of course – but there’s a sting in the tail – there’s room in my world for fundamentalists, but there’s no room in their world for me. Hmm……..

Addendum

” Mystical experience…..does not seem to me to be anything other than first-hand religious experience as such. This is, however, the core of religion.

…the explanatory function of religion is secondary and derivative. Religion consists primarily in experiencing our life in its relation to the Transcendent and living on the basis of that experience….

…..in terms of Ninian Smart’s six-dimensional analysis – distinguishing the

ritual,

mythological,

doctrinal,

ethical,

social and

experiential dimensions of religion

– mysticism is a general name for religious experience together with part at least of the network of religious practices which support it.

…. Brother David (Steindl-Rast) defined mysticism as “experience of communion with the source of meaning“; and he stressed that all who worship, and indeed all who are conscious of the divine, are mystics. ….and Swami Prabuddhananda defined mysticism as ‘the realization of relationship between the individual soul and the infinite reality‘” P423

Hick, John, (1981) Mystical Experience as Cognition in Understanding Mysticism, ed. Richard Woods, London: The Athlone Press

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

Wilber, heart-knowing, head-knowing, and the 3 ‘voices’ through which we engage with reality

Heart-knowing, head-knowing, and the 3 ‘voices’ through which we engage with reality

The three intrapersonal ‘voices’ of human engagement, have previously been presented as Caring, Creativity and Criticality.

Our Caring, Creativity and Criticality ways of engaging are developed through internalizing the voices of parents and family and then all of the Humanities, the Arts and the Sciences experiences we have at school and in the wider society.

 

Corresponding to the three voices we have three ways of knowing:

1 the ‘social-others-centred’ way of knowing – in the case of Caring

2 the ‘subjective-creative-mystical’ way of knowing – in the case of Creativity and

3 the ‘objective-reasoning-scientific’ way of knowing – in the case of Criticality

So;

Caring, the ‘social-others-centred’ way of knowing = the internalized voice of the Humanities, and is about engaging with reality via the moral viewpoint

 

Creativity, the ‘subjective-creative-mystical’ way of knowing = the internalized voice of the Arts, and is about engaging with reality via the subjective viewpoint

 

Criticality the ‘objective-reasoning-scientific’ way of knowing = the internalized moral voice of the ‘Sciences’ and is about engaging with reality via the (supposed) objective viewpoint.

 

NB Criticality is wider that what is normally meant by the Sciences and scientific methods. It includes philosophy and such activities as Eng Lit criticism. Why? Because it is about reasoning and other ‘left-brain’ objective activities. The participant assumes the position of being objective and is learning or teaching about phenomena – s/he is not learning or teaching in the phenomena – a distinction that correlates with that between ‘knowing that’ (Paris is the capital of France) and ‘knowing how’ (being able to dance a response to a tragic event).

 

Heart-knowing and head-knowing, left-brain and right-brain

Heart-knowing, the ‘subjective-creative-mystical’, is seen as partly an innate, intuitive way of knowing and seems to relate to right-brain activities.

 

The ‘methods of the ‘objective-reasoning-scientific’’voice’ seem to relate to right-brain activities.

 

The third form, i.e. social knowing, is seen as deriving from the cultural interpersonal matrix of family and community relationships, internalized as the Caring seems to draw upon both sides of the brain (as do architects!).

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NB All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

 

 

 

 

Heart-rending testimony of an Afghan woman in Fazal Sheikh’s online book, ‘When Two Bulls Fight the Leg of the Calf is Broken’

afghan-woman.jpgBe sure to visit Fazal Sheikh’s on-line HERE

Take a look at the heart-rending testimony of an Afghan woman in ‘Fazal Sheikh’s online book When Two Bulls Fight the Leg of the Calf is Broken’.

Here is a short extract;

‘When our great Islamic revolution succeeded, we thought our day of deliverance had come. Finally we would be free and independent. Afghanistan was released. But once again women were treated as the goat in the game, pulled this way and that by one faction or another. Once again, on all sides, indiscriminate bombing and rocket-attacks, bullets and mines killed Afghan children in their mother’s wombs. We were forced to flee with bare feet and uncovered heads to escape the killing. Some of us fled to foreign countries and became refugees. It should not be forgotten that some of us were forced to flee to Moscow for our safety!

I shall never forget how so many of us spent frightened lonely nights waiting patiently in the front line for a single loaf of bread. How many of us were abducted by armed men from Mujahedin parties in the middle of the day in busy streets. How many of us were raped. How many of us threw themselves from buildings to keep their chastity. How many of us were taken from the scorching refugee camps in Jalalabad to become a commodity for men in neighboring countries. How many widows were forced to sell themselves to feed their families.

Those who have come to power, those with guns, continue to leer at us, to make fun of us, to take pleasure in harassing us. These men who think of themselves as the defenders of our faith, as our fathers and brothers sent to protect us, are the same ones who call us “Honey”. They say: “Don’t come out of your bottle, the flies might touch you.” The flies are the men that rush at you. Others tell us that we are “live wires that must be covered.” It is a pity they don’t recognize us as individuals, as fellow human beings. Over the loudspeakers they announce that years of holy war has simply been to cover Afghan women in Muslim dress.

That, dear brother, dear father and son, I am sure was not the purpose of the holy war……’

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Of course people need water and food but as Maslow pointed out long ago security is a comparably important need.

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NB All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

Perennial Philosophy or Primordial Tradition?: Huston Smith, Aldous Huxley and Ken Wilber – a view by James Baquet

James Baquet has a very interesting site – Take a look at Baquet’s site HERE It has a lot to say about Perennial Philosophy an the Primordial Tradition;

The modern popularity of the term can probably be attributed to the work of Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), who used the three words “The Perennial Philosophy” as the title of his erudite anthology of religious ideas. (See the Table of Contents here.) In defining the Perennial Philosophy in this book, Huxley doesn’t lay out the same four steps I described above; rather, he (fittingly) gives a more “esoteric” definition:

the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; [and] the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being (vii)

(I discuss this definition, and the following one, more thoroughly in my article “This World and That“, in the section subtitled “Two Definitions of the Perennial Philosophy.”)

Closer to my formulation, but still not identical with it, is the definition he gives in his Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (as translated by Prabhavananda and Isherwood):

At the core of the Perennial Philosophy we find four fundamental doctrines.

  • First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness–the world of things and animals and men and even gods–is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.
  • Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.
  • Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.
  • Fourth: man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.

(bullets added)

My four points are implicit in his, but I spell them out differently. As described here, they are quite similar, but Huxley’s 2 and 3 are reversed in comparison to mine.

Huston Smith

Huxley died (on the same day as JFK) in 1963. While he was still alive, another, younger, scholar was already making his mark on the “world religions” scene. Huston Smith, now in his late 80s (born 1919), has been both expounding and living the Perennial Philosophy for all of his adult life. (I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Smith speak in 1997, before I went to Japan; someday I’ll post my notes from that afternoon.)

Dr. Smith uses the term “The Primordial Tradition” to discuss what I have been calling the Perennial Philosophy. He believes that, since “perennial” means “at all times,” it neglects the “everywhere” aspect of this philosophy. You can read more about this in this interview. In a nutshell, Dr. Smith says that the Primordial Tradition is both timeless and spaceless as well, “because it was not only always, but everywhere”–echoing Vincent of Lerins. The universe, he says, “fits into the primordial tradition but does not exhaust it. There are reaches beyond the physical.” He says that science is doing a fine job of learning about “the physical reaches of reality,” but that we are in danger of losing sight of the “other regions of reality which continue to exist whether we attend to them or not”–in other words, the “something bigger.”

He also noted that in writing his book The Religions of Man (now published as The World’s Religions), which focuses on what is different in the individual religions, he “became more and more struck by recurrent themes which seemed to surface just time and again like echoes.” Later, in another book entitled Forgotten Truth, he explored these “common denominators that ran through them all.”

Forgotten Truth examines our place in the various levels of the world around us. The modern view, Dr. Smith says, reflects the primordial, in that humans are in the center between a “world above” and a “world below.” Look at this chart, from page 4:

Dr. Smith’s footnote points out these parallels:

2-views.jpg

Modern=Scientific=Secular

Primordial=Humanistic=Sacred

In the Modern/Scientific/Secular view, humans occupy the “Meso-world,” between the larger (in simple terms, “galactic”) world above and the smaller (“microscopic”) world below. The Modern hierarchy is based on both size and the strength of the binding forces; these are measures of Quantity.

Both of the Primordial models, on the other hand, look to measures of Quality: in the popular notion, happiness or “Euphoria” is highest at the Heavenly level, and lowest in Hell; we on Earth are in between. The more sophisticated, “Reflective” Primordial view sees Being as the source of this hierarchy: the Higher Planes participate in Being in greater amounts; the Lower, in lesser. Again, Euphoria and Being are measures of the Quality, not Quantity, of things, and this emphasis on quality unites the Popular and Reflective worldviews.

This kind of connective thinking, seeing that worldviews have changed but that they are still based on hierarchies of Things Above and Below, will be returned to in the discussion of Neo-Perennialism below. But I offer them here as evidence of Dr. Smith’s deep thinking about how the Elementary idea (in Campbell/Bastian’s term) of Hierarchy has manifested itself various times, and even in different forms to the popular and reflective minds of the same era.

Ken Wilber

Reluctantly leaving Dr. Smith for now, we turn to an even more contemporary thinker, Ken Wilber (born 1949). Best known for his Buddhist and psychological writings, Wilber is also a proponent of Perennial themes. In the heart-rending story of his wife Treya’s battle with cancer, Grace and Grit, Wilber presents a long interview on his “Seven Points of Timeless Wisdom,” conducted by Treya before her death. You can read the full interview here; I will present only the Seven Points themselves:

  1. Spirit exists
  2. Spirit is found within
  3. Most of us don’t realize this Spirit within
  4. There is a way out
  5. The way leads to direct experience of Spirit
  6. This experience marks the end of sin and suffering
  7. Social action and compassion result

Looking again at my Four Points, we see these parallels:

Neo-Perennialism Wilber
1. There is something bigger than us 1. Spirit* exists
2. Spirit is found within
2. We either are (West) or seem to be (East) separated from it 3. Most of us don’t realize this Spirit within
3. Through various means we can become reunited with it (or realize that we already are) 4. There is a way out
5. The way leads to direct experience of Spirit
4. Once the separation is overcome, we will lead larger, richer, fuller lives 6. This experience marks the end of sin and suffering
7. Social action and compassion result
*Wilber’s use of the word “spirit” leaps ahead and assigns a value to the “something bigger” in a way that my Point 1 does not. Needless to say, that this quality “is found within” is a further elaboration of something I am not yet willing to concede. This will become clearer in my discussion of Neo-Perennialism below.

Again, a reading of the full interview will give you a better idea of Wilber’s thinking.

So this Perennial Philosophy (despite its immense implications) is a fairly simply idea to grasp. It reflects humankind’s universal impulse toward union with something bigger, which has been exercised in myriad ways throughout human existence. With that, I conclude my comments on the Perennial Philosophy itself.

Take a look at a range of materials on Baquet’s site HERE

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NB All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

Story and Personal Myth in making our selves, and our education, whole

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My personal myth Island, Shoreline and Ocean –

a view of story in Personal Development and in Holistic Education

Introduction:

By way of an introduction here are a few succinct thoughts. Skip this if you want to go straight to my ‘personal myth’;

Myth operates in us – its part of being human – like philosophizing. Therefore we should make the most of it – in terms of the mythology we make, and that with which we choose to identify.

Story is central to our meaning-making and how we (choose) to make sense of the world and give account of our encounters and experiences.

Myth, as opposed to story generally, is about our deepest concerns and is characterized as narrative that gives account of the unknown and unknowable as well as some of the known. E.g. we die but we don’t know what, if anything, happens after that. Myth creates and is derived from beliefs.

Myth intrapersonally is the clothing we give to the psycho-spiritual dynamics of inner experience.

Myth interpersonally is the stories we tell each other to explain encounters with the (mainly) unknown and unknowable.

Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth is a must because it makes clear the relationship between myth and religion and world-views.

“Without myth, cult, ritual and ethical living, a sense of the sacred dies,” says Armstrong. Without the discipline of mythical thinking and practice, it was difficult for many to avoid despair. The dark epiphanies of the 20th century can be blamed on “the absence of a viable mythology” that could help us face the unspeakable. Guardian review by Tim Radford

A personal myth operates in us whether we choose to articulate it or not. It is closely allied to what one psychologist called ‘our personal script’ and the another (Kelly) called our set of ‘personal constructs’.

We can help in healing ourselves by articulating our personal myth in comparison and contrast to the group myths around us – or that exist as historical artifacts.

Restorying, (e.g.by writing different versions of) our personal myth can enable us to re-frame our personal experience and gain degrees of control and depths of energy that previously were denied us through locked-up pain.

Creating a personal myth can facilitate better self-understanding and there is potentially a powerful tool for teaching and learning.

My personal myth is here;

The ‘Island, Shoreline and Ocean’ personal Myth

The personal myth that follows was written as a ‘one-page’ way of expressing a) a sense of the relationship with the cosmos, the Whole, and b) of a range of the ideas in, and behind, SunWALK. Jane is part of me, perhaps the same Jane as in Jane’s Short Story in Chapter 1.

The personal myth is an attempt at re-storying one kind of knowing. A felt need to undertake a re-storying of knowing can lie in acknowledgement of the fact that we know, and need to know, and need to express that knowing, in more ways than the empirical-reasoning mode – hence Island, Shoreline, Ocean. To admit other ways of knowing, is to admit that in our wholeness we are more than our senses and our reasoning. It is also to admit that in our knowing we are surrounded by mystery, which we encounter. We in various ways give accounts of those encounters.

3:3 Island, Shoreline and Ocean

a personal myth concerning the nature of mystical experience & its relationship to consciousness, & to knowledge creation – as such it is an attempt to include as much as possible of what I learned during the eleven year journey of the thesis – in a ‘one page’ story

The sun always woke her. Every day Jane walked through her garden, inspecting this plant and that, analysing what needed to be done. The quest was never-ending. Sometimes she sat a while on an old tree stump in order to consider the tasks and challenges, trying to work out the feelings and puzzles of what didn’t seem quite right, what didn’t feel quite right. What she couldn’t physically arrange she sometimes tried to paint or write – she had an imaginary garden as well as a real one. Sometimes she looked at her neighbours’ gardens, wondering if that would give her inspiration, but she was always left with the feeling that her most important answers came from elsewhere.

Every day beneath the practical considerations she felt a longing. Having made her review of her garden Jane walked over the fields, across the two streams that eventually made their way down to the sea, and along the cliff, and down to the shoreline. At the shoreline she breathed in her sense of the infinity of the ocean, along with the ozone-heavy, sea-weedy, sea air.
Frequently she imagined the island’s shoreline around the island’s circumference. In her mind’s eye she saw each place being shaped in some different way by the ocean – which was sometimes gentle, and was sometimes awesome in its relentless might. Sometimes the feelings that filled her were so powerful that she was overcome. Sometimes the beauty of being in the presence of the ocean was so great that she felt that neither garden nor painting nor poetry would ever fully satisfy the deepest longing.

Often after such reverie she slipped into the sea.

The sea had so much salt that she just floated. And, when the temperature was right, in floating, eyes closed, she lost all sense of where she ended and where the surrounding sea began. There was no separate sea, no separate self – it was just ….. being. It was always that way, just being. At such times she felt both full and empty, both powerless and at that same time she felt herself to be the very ocean that insistently carved and re-carved the island shoreline.

Mostly at that point she just wanted to stay, to be just part of this place between land and sea, like a driftwood sculpture, ocean-polished, that had been thrown up after a long journey from some river bank, high up some vaguely-remembered river. The shoreline was exquisitely the best of places. But she always took that first step. A first step on the walk back to her garden. And with the walking the experience that was ineffable started to give up insights and possibilities to both refine the garden, and to extend it into some more of the island’s familiar, wilderness, space.

In the evenings she and her friends sat beneath the moon, in whichever was the most interesting of their gardens, at that particular time, and they discussed the issues that concerned them. They all, more or less, had similar such deep experiences as Jane. The ongoing conversation was what united them, along with their respect for how they clothed so differently, in imagination and form, the experiences that were ineffable.
C. from an unpublished doctoral thesis by Roger Prentice, Northumberland ver July 2003

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Karen Armstrong’s book A Short History of Myth is HERE NB Read the Customer Reviews which are excellent and ignore the Editorial Reviews which are carping, mean-spirited and self-serving!

Relevant book that looks interesting Restorying Our Lives: Personal Growth Through Autobiographical Reflection HERE

Island map SOURCE

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD. Summaries are HERE

Texts and Contexts and the Ultimate context – post-modernism and dinosaurs

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All postings, and pages, for this site are seen as texts as in ‘particulars’ or parts. But each post or page is as I will later point out in relation to an ‘ultimate’ context.

The parts or particulars are as in Wilber;

“To understand the whole it is necessary to understand the parts. To understand the parts, it is necessary to understand the whole. Such is the circle of understanding.

We move from part to whole and back again, and in that dance of comprehension, in that amazing circle of understanding we come alive to meaning, to value, and to vision: the very circle of understanding guides our way, weaving together the pieces, healing the fractures, mending the torn and fractured fragments, lighting the way ahead – this extraordinary movement from part to whole and back again, with healing the hallmark of every step, and grace the tender reward.” Eye of Spirit; an integral vision for a world gone slightly mad by Ken Wilber (1997) pub. Shambhala p.1.

Handling more and more challenging texts is one way to think of progress in education.

One aspect of post-modernism is the attention paid to con-texts. Literally con-text = what (meaning) comes with the text. A whole bunch of questions then become vital for examining the the text in one or more contexts. For example who wrote it or made it and for whom – and why, with what reward, what pressures etc.

One key variable then for the teacher is how s/he emphasizes (or de-emphasizes) contexts as s/he conducts discourse with the class.

I always felt that historical contexts were less important than how a text helps us right now- the group – in informing our selves more deeply concerning, ‘What it is to be positively and fully human’.

One source of novelty in post-modernist art is to re-contextualize objects – literally to give them a new framework. A friend got her first-class honours degree for – amongst other pieces of work – taking a reproduction of an old master and tucking under the arm of a central figure a baby dinosaur.

The most memorable teaching of my life was with a group 12-13 year olds when discussing the shortest story in the world, “When I woke up the dinosaur was still there.” All the drive and creativity was in construction of possible contexts as well as discussing whether or not it constitute a ‘story’ in any meaningful way. In due course I will post sections of the video of the ‘story lesson’.

Schools and teachers should provide experiences that help with developing a sense of the Whole and not just the ‘hell of relativity’ when the world is presented as just endless bits.

The ultimate context that we are all in, in reading all of the texts that come our way, is one of mystery, of not knowing. When we accept that we can enjoy both the concepts of separation and duality and the amazement of laying down the burden of self in an experience of unity- as in Heschel’s;

“The world presents itself in two ways to me. The world as a thing I own, the world as a mystery I face. What I own is a trifle, what I face is sublime. I am careful not to waste what I own; I must learn not to miss what I face. We manipulate what is available on the surface of the world; we must also stand in awe before the mystery of the world. We objectify Being but we also are present at Being in wonder, in radical amazement.” A. J Heschel

Peter Ustinov makes the point in a different way; “We are united by our doubts and divided by our convictions.”

Our encounters with the Whole are part of the personal story (history or her-story) that we make up to explain the cosmos. We should all write our ‘personal myth’ at some stage. As an example I will post mine separately.

In the light of the above comments I have added this to the front page of the site;

CONTEXTUAL QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

3 Questions and suggested answers that provide the context for all posts and pages on these sites

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Q 1) “What is it to be positively & fully human?” = the most important of all questions. My answers are in 2 and 3 below.

 

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Q 2) “What is it to function holistically?” My answer =

 

“To proceed in all particulars with a sense of the whole.”

 

Two quotations that are key to understanding. Firstly Jung’s,

 

“The utterances of the heart— unlike those of the discriminating intellect— always relate to the whole.”

 

Secondly Heschel’s;

 

“Concepts are delicious snacks with which we try to alleviate our amazement.”

 

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Q 3) How in one sentence does my PhD answer the question, “How should we educate to create a paradigm shift in education?”

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The SunWALK model of spiritualizing (or humanizing) pedagogy sees human education as:

 

the storied development of meaning, which is

constructed, and de-constructed,

physically, mentally and spiritually, through

Wise & Willing Action, via

Loving and Knowing – developed in

Community, through the

‘Dialectical Spiritualization’ of

Caring, Creativity & Criticality processes, all undertaken in the light of the

‘Sun’ of chosen higher-order values and beliefs, using

best available, appropriate content.

 

NB Please see these 3 questions, and suggested answers, as the context for all postings and pages on these sites.

sunwalk-logo.jpg

The diagram that pulls everything together

Summaries of SunWALK model are HERE

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The ‘Rules for being Human’, Perennial Philosophy and Universalism

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These ‘Life-Rules’ by Cherie Carter-Scott, from her book If Life is a Game, These are the Rules are becoming well-known and they seem to me to be are interesting in relation to a holistic perspective, and to the ideas of Perennial Philosophy and a mystical world-view.

When you were born, you didn’t come with an owner’s manual; these guidelines make life work better.

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it’s the only thing you are sure to keep for the rest of your life.

2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called “Life on Planet Earth”. Every person or incident is the Universal Teacher.

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of experimentation. “Failures” are as much a part of the process as “success.”

4. A lesson is repeated until learned. It is presented to you in various forms until you learn it — then you can go on to the next lesson.

5. If you don’t learn easy lessons, they get harder. External problems are a precise reflection of your internal state. When you clear inner obstructions, your outside world changes. Pain is how the universe gets your attention.

6. You will know you’ve learned a lesson when your actions change. Wisdom is practice. A little of something is better than a lot of nothing.

7. “There” is no better than “here”. When your “there” becomes a “here” you will simply obtain another “there” that again looks better than “here.”

8. Others are only mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another unless it reflects something you love or hate in yourself.

9. Your life is up to you. Life provides the canvas; you do the painting. Take charge of your life — or someone else will.

10. You always get what you want. Your subconscious rightfully determines what energies, experiences, and people you attract — therefore, the only foolproof way to know what you want is to see what you have. There are no victims, only students.

11. There is no right or wrong, but there are consequences. Moralizing doesn’t help. Judgments only hold the patterns in place. Just do your best.

12. Your answers lie inside you. Children need guidance from others; as we mature, we trust our hearts, where the Laws of Spirit are written. You know more than you have heard or read or been told. All you need to do is to look, listen, and trust.

13. You will forget all this.

14. You can remember any time you wish.

(From the book “If Life is a Game, These are the Rules” by Cherie Carter-Scott)

TASK:/LESSON

1 Take a look at Perennial Philosophy and the Golden Rule and compare and contrast them to Carter-Scott’s ‘Rules’.

2 Re-write these according to your beliefs and world-view.

3 Find out what Cherie Carter-Scott meant by reading her book.

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD. Summaries are HERE

The Golden Rule as one aspect of the world-view shared by most holistic educators

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The Golden Rule

Two aspects of the world-view shared by most holistic educators are Perennial Philosophy (see separate post) and the Golden Rule.

 

 

One measure of the challenge facing us is in the following. In looking for short definitions that might be useful I was struck by the fact that several (many?) Western encyclopedias actually refer to the Golden Rule as a Christian doctrine! Ethnocentricity rules! The point is also well pinned down in an interesting article from Arab News by Iman Kurdi

Below are some of the most interesting sites that present and explore the Golden Rule along with some suggestions for lessons and all ages.

 

http://www.jcu.edu/philosophy/gensler/goldrule.htm

http://www.goldenruleradical.org/

Home

 

SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR LESSONS/Discussion

1 In what sense is the Golden Rule the same as or different to acting justly?

2 Collect some examples, via interviews, of where the Golden Rule was applied with good effect?

3 Choose several of the problems that exist in the world and see how far you can a) analyze the problem and b) obtain inspiration for steps toward a solution.

poster.gifSource – for your poster Golden Rule info and much more

 

A TOUCH OF IRONY: The Wiki entry on the Golden Rule currently shows the price of democracy in that it is hung up in disputes! Re-named as the Ethic of Reciprocity – has it been hijacked or up-lifted by philosophers! I’m sure it will settle eventually – in the mean time there is a lot of good stuff alread on the site – including additional sources.

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NB All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

 

 

 

 

Gandhi, certainty and the ‘Healthy Doubt’ – as the basis for ‘federating’ common ground

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Whatever our religious background we tend to say something equivalent to, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’. This is an assertion of certainty. For some of us strength of certainty is an indicator of the quality of faith. Unfortunately, to take an extreme example, unconditioned certainty can lead to unspeakable horrors – the Nazis were certain that their killing of millions was a right and proper thing to do. So is a smidgen of doubt, the cousin of humility? And might it also be that such a conditioner of faith as a ‘healthy doubt’ hold us back from continuously negating ‘the other’.

I’m also suggesting that water-tight, hermetically-sealed certainty might put a break on an individual’s willingness to recognize the essential sameness in all of the world’s great faiths. Why can’t we be one? Well because we think our path up the mountain is the only right one – and because we are familiar and comfortable with it.

I can only think of three possible solutions. Firstly we all become Baha’is, Unitarians or or some form of Universalist worldview. Secondly we all wait to see which religion dominates and then hop on board (a time-honoured method but not out of Morality’s top drawer). Thirdly we take a leaf out of Ghandi’s book and expand our heart and consciousness so that we can revere our own tradition and the inner essence of all of the other great world religions.

Gandhi said;

I came to the conclusion long ago … that all religions were true and also that all had some error in them, and whilst I hold by my own, I should hold others as dear as Hinduism. So we can only pray, if we are Hindus, not that a Christian should become a Hindu … But our innermost prayer should be a Hindu should be a better Hindu, a Muslim a better Muslim, a Christian a better Christian. (Young India: January 19, 1928)

This is interesting because it suggests that we can have a universal heart that works from within the particular. Is that possible? Is it only possible for a few? Whether or not we go with Ghandi ‘s ‘particular-to-the-universal way we need to break through from narrow-mindedness and close-heartedness. To be able to cherish both the particular culture into which we were born and have a heart that embraces the inner light of all of the great world religions seems to me to make sense – just as federalism makes sense in say America or Germany.

There are some other of Ghandi’s thoughts that are relevant to the view expressed here;

  • God has no religion
  • My whole soul rebels against the idea that Hinduism and Islam represent two antagonistic cultures and doctrines. To assent to such a doctrine is for me a denial of God.
  • We must respect other religions, even as we respect our own. Mere tolerance thereof is not enough.
  • A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.
  • (When asked if he was a Hindu) Yes I am, I am also a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist, and a Jew.
  • “The sayings of Muhammed are a treasure of wisdom not only for Muslims but for all of mankind.”
  • The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives. Source WikiQuotes

If we can’t quite yet expand our consciousness to recognizing the inner oneness of all of the great faiths at least the Golden Rule (separate postings) is an ethic through which we can start to clear a meeting place within the forest of beliefs.

It is only beliefs that prevent the realization of our oneness. And it is only realization of oneness that will enable us to overcome our current ‘hardening of the hearteries’. That ‘hardening of the hearteries’ = beliefs so narrowed as to prevent us seeing ourselves reflected in the eyes of the ‘other’.

PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY – TWO VIEWS A) BY KEN WILBER AND B) BY DEB PLATT

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Even a cursory glance at the ideological and physical conflicts of today will indicate the desperate need for understanding that enables a ‘clearing in the forest’ of beliefs – one that will enable harmony in diversity.

.

On this site I argue that the deepest recognition has to lie in our humanity which we hold in common with all others – I am human, you are human, they are human – we all are human. However since religion exists in many and powerful manifestations the most important of all questions is, “In what ways is there a common light at the centre of of all of the great world religions?” The answer is presented in Perennial Philosophy. Perennial Philosophy is not a particularly good title – something like ‘core mystical reality’ or ‘the great chain of being’ are more accurate, albeit much clumsier titles.

In many ways the appeal to recognize sameness in others, harmony in diversity, is also a call to a kind of federalism. That is to say such a recognition will enable the people of the world to hold an allegiance to the whole as well as to the particular – much as most Americans or Germans hold an allegiance to their national government as well as to their state governments.

.

HERE IS HOW KEN WILBER SUMMARIZES THE SEVEN MAJOR POINTS OF THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, IN HIS BOOK GRACE AND GRIT:

1. Spirit exists.
2. Spirit is found within.
3. Most of us don’t realize this Spirit within, however, because we are living in a world of sin,
separation, and duality–that is, we are living in a fallen or illusory state.
4. There is a way out of this fallen state of sin and illusion, there is a Path to our liberation.
5. If we follow this path to its conclusion, the result is a Rebirth or Enlightenment, a direct experience
of Spirit within, a Supreme Liberation, which–
6 marks the end of sin and suffering, and
which
7 issues in social action of mercy and compassion on behalf of all sentient beings.

.

THIS IS HOW DEB PLATT PRESENTED HER LATE LAMENTED SITE ON WHICH SHE BROUGHT TOGETHER A VAST AND BEAUTIFUL SELECTION OF QUOTATIONS FROM WORLD RELIGIONS

.

If anyone knows what happened to her site please tell me. Her site was a truly great contribution toward religious understanding and its disappearance a great loss. Equally if you managed to copy her site before it was taken down please let me know (onesummit ATgmail.com replace AT with @).

This is the ‘universal’, mystic heart of all of the great wisdom traditions as Deb Platt presented it;

• There’s a reality beyond the material world:
• Which is uncreated.
• It pervades everything,
• but remains beyond the reach of human knowledge and understanding.
• You approach that reality by:
• Distinguishing ego from true self
• Understanding the nature of desire
• Becoming unattached
• Forgetting about preferences
• Not working for personal gain
• Letting go of thoughts
• Redirecting your attention
• Being devoted
• Being humble
• Invoking that reality
• Surrendering
• That reality approaches you through:
• Grace
• The teacher
• You’re transformed so that you embody that reality by:
• Dying and being reborn

Holistic Education doesn’t have allegiance to any one religion or philosophy, but Perennial Philosophy is very important for many and is the position of this site. It is motivated by recognition of the essential oneness of the great wisdom traditions

(SEE also Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy or Chap 2 of Jack Miller’s Educating for Wisdom & Compassion)

Clash of Two Cultures?

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In her interesting article All Roads Lead to India Kathleen Raine, on the Resurgence website, quotes the following;

CLASH OF TWO CULTURES

You live in time; we live in space.
You’re always on the move; we’re always at rest.
Religion is our first love; we revel in metaphysics. Science is your passion; you delight in physics.
You believe in freedom of speech; you strive for articulation. We believe in freedom of silence; we lapse into meditation.
Self- assertiveness is the key to your success; self-abnegation is the secret of our survival.
You’re urged every day to want more and more; we’re taught from the cradle to want less and less.
Joie de vivre is your ideal; conquest of desires is our goal.
In the sunset years of life you retire to enjoy the fruits of your labour; we renounce the world and prepare ourselves for the hereafter.
– Hari Dam

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LESSON TASKS: How far and it what ways is the contrasting useful? How far do we think the contrasts are true? What claims could be made to reverse the implied speaker for each statement? Is there a speed of globalisation that will inevitably prevent the good of an older culture from being taken forward? Is the work of ‘integral theory’ writers such as Ken Wilber vital to the need to keep hold of the best of the past – all of our pasts? How can we in education help popularize integral theory?

What does the art work above say about East and West? How would you present visually ‘East and West’?

Knowledge, Knowing and the Unknowable: Head, Heart and the Mystery of Our-selves

 

Ver 2. as at 4th Aug 2007

PREFACE

This was written as a summary of some of the discussions held during a recent course run with 9 wonderful young women and men. So first and foremost this is for Poppy, Ellie, Jono, Saha, Natalie, Paddy, Jody, Kenny – and Davey.

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This is what I feel/think I’ve learned so far;

WHAT’S WRONG?

Because of its lopsidedness and excessive specialization modern science, and thought generally, has got us into a mess. The mess is characterized by our consciousness and life being fragmented, mechanical and excessively materialistic. We need to create a new ‘post post-modernism’ that combines the positives from modernism, post-modernism and pre-modernism.

First of all we have to chose a starting point – because all of life is a circling matrix of connectedness.

THINKING AND FEELING AND BEING – AND BEING ‘MORE THEN’

I am – therefore I think. (Variation on Descartes’ starting point).

We are/You are – thereby I am. (Variation on a Swahili saying).

I am supported in my existence by all of the relationships in which I am embedded – including my ‘significant others’, and those I chose to lead me, and those with whom I chose to identify – so as to become like them or at least possess some of their qualities.

Our being is much more than our thinking, reason and logic – we are 51%, or more, feelings.

Unless our capacities for feeling are attenuated, blunted or simply under-developed.

We are known and knowable – but also exist at levels that are beyond the knowable.

That is we are, in the depths of our being, a mystery to our selves – and to each other.

Thinking is one way to engage with other/s, or the self – and with reality.

Thinking is what we do as part of being – sometimes it is more, and sometimes less, than the feeling/s we are also generating/experiencing. One or the other is in dominance at any one time.

Thinking and feeling are simply different forms of the single human spirit that flows through each of us – and apparently around that ‘space’ we call our inner world or interiority.

What would be a sensible name for the single flow of spirit that switches back and forth between ‘heart’ and ‘mind’? I suggest ‘heart-mind’. ‘Heart-mind’ actually has a long history in Chinese thought.

‘Heart-mind’ is preferable to ‘heart’ and ‘mind’ as some sort of separated ‘organs’.

Heart-mind is interiority – conscious thoughts and feelings, + re-callable memories + that which normally remains in the sub-conscious, such as painful memories.

HEART-MIND (THE ONENESS OF THINKING AND FEELING) AS THE 3 ‘I’, ‘WE’ AND ‘IT’ VOICES OR MODES OF ENGAGING WITH REALITY – AND OF CIOMMUNICATING WITH EACH OTHER

Thought and feeling however don’t account for the fact that we communicate with each other, at any one time, in one of three voices; ‘I’. ‘WE’ and ‘IT’ .

Sometimes our heart-mind/spirit switches into the I mode of artistic-subjective expression and engagement with reality.

Sometimes it switches into the WE mode of caring and other-focused action.

Sometimes it switches into the IT mode of scientific-objective investigation and engagement with reality.

We switch back and forth with great rapidity – unless we are in a meditative state or dreamless sleep. The other 2 voices are always ‘running in the background’.

THE ‘I’, ‘WE’ and ‘IT’ VOICES CORRESPOND TO CREATIVITY, CARING and CRITICALITY

I suggest that the term ‘thinking’ is better thought of as three separate ways in which we engage with reality, with each other – and our selves.

Thinking in the sense of Criticality (inc. philosophy, science maths, Eng. Lit, etc.) is one way for the human spirit to engage with reality. The other two are Caring and Creativity.

Caring focuses on moral truth as caring – action for the sake of others.

Creativity is concerned with subjective truth as a way to engage with reality – its voice says “This is how it has been for me, this is how it looks for me – standing in my ‘skin’.

Criticality focuses on objective truth – in which reasoning and logic are especially important.

Thought and feeling/s are two sides of a single coin – each transforms into the other moment by moment in the dynamics of the heart-mind. This is evident in simple introspection.

Heart-mind, is however socialized into the 3 I, WE and IT voices.

All 3 have cognitive and affective charges at any one time.

The I WE and IT voices are internalizations/socializations of parental voices, school and community voices.

The cultural ‘repositories’ that correspond to the I,WE and IT voices we call the Arts, Humanities & Sciences.

The moral voice is an internalization of early caring and experience – with conscience as the internalization of the parental voice.

There may be sensible connections to be made between left and right brain hemispheres and the UIT and I voices.

It seems sensible to connect the I voice and the mystical since both involve unitive experiences.

In dealing with the Critical IT way of engaging with reality we deal in concepts – but we might agree with Heschel who says “Concepts are delicious snacks with which we try to alleviate our amazement.”

CONCEPTS AS ‘DELICIOUS SNACKS’ – AND ‘AMAZEMENT’ AS THE UNITIVE STATE OF THE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE

Amazement is the state of union, the unitive state which in its elevated forms is the mystical.

The mystical needs to be recognized as a normal, every-day even, part of being human. It needs de-mystifying and de-rarefying. It is not the sole prerogative of the exceptional such as Joan of Arc or of those who unhelpfully hear voices.

The basic experience is embedded in every day language as when we say, “It took me out of my-self.”

In normal, conceptual, busy-busy life we have a strong sense of ego/self/me-me. But sometimes I forget my self – through a unitive experience.

As the gospel song says;

I’m gonna lay down my heavy load

Down by the riverside

Down by the riverside

I’m gonna lay down my heavy load

Down by the riverside

Gonna study war no more.

One reading of the ‘heavy load’ is the small self, the ego, the ego boundary that keeps us in the relative hell of separation and pain and suffering.

Contemplation or perhaps deeper meditation is what takes us to the unitive state.

But I don’t think permanent self-loss is the goal because the dynamic lies in going back and forth between the unitive and the duality that is most of everyday life.

In fact I believe that our knowing comes as a consequence of the dynamic that arises from going back and forth between the unitive and duality

LOGIC IS WHAT WE NEED WHEN WE RETURN FROM THE STATE OF AMAZEMENT/MYSTICAL UNION

Logic is a good servant but insufficient as an overall master explanation of what we are, or what amounts to truth.

For example logic can be used impeccably to support the view that God exists, and equally for the view that there is no God.

Logical constructions, like journeys, always start somewhere.

That ‘somewhere’ in our intellectual-spiritual journeys, and dialogue with each other, is always a set of assumptions and viewpoints.

DEVELOPING A NEW PARADIGM – AND REALIZING THAT THE INADEQUACIES OF THE OLD PARADIGM LIE IN ITS SET OF ASSUMPTIONS (BECAUSE THEY LARGELY LIE UNTESTED)

The assumptions, like a geographical position, always imply a world-view.

The assumptions are largely untested like the 9/10ths of the ice-berg that is below the surface.

The world-view can include a range of other assumptions including what it is to be human, what constitutes reality, what is good or bad etc.

The new paradigm that is struggling to be born is characterised by wholeness, flow and realizations of the spiritual nature of being human – the opposites of fragmentation, the mechanistic and the excessively materialistic. Above all it centres on realizing to a much deeper and higher forms answers to the most important of all questions; “What is it to be (fully and positively) human?”

REALIZING UNITY – PERSONALLY OR COLLECTIVELY – IS HELP BY THE GIFT OF WISE VOICES

Individually our happiness depends on our integration – of heart and head, of identity and purpose, of personal development and service to others. One key secret is realizing that mind and body and spirit are all one and the same – the singleness of the life-force, chi, the human spirit.

Collectively we also need deeper realization of unity – that unity is based on the existential reality of being human. Like millions of others I learned this from Shakespeare. Scots would add Robbie Burns.

Unity can not in the social political sphere be achieved through philosophy or theology, both of which depend on reason and logic. Why? Well as the ancient saying goes, ‘The longest journey in the world is from the human head to the human heart, but the shortest journey in the world is from the human heart to the human head.’

Unity can only be achieved via a commitment to the existential reality of being human. We are all human. We strive for a better life. We have loved ones and we all suffer grief and loss……………….

Our theology and philosophy are only games (of reason and logic) that we play – on the ‘foundation’ of incomplete certainty, not-knowing and mystery – and they must take second place to realizing our existential human oneness – and truth and beauty and goodness.- and above all justice as our over-riding interior ‘conditioner’ as well as the chief conditioner in the social and political realms.

Deep unity is realized through our existential sameness. The ‘healthy doubt’ is vital in matters of theology and philosophy. Doubting, just a modicum not a flood, is healthy when it functions as a cousin of tentativeness and humility. Absolute certainty is the condition of the fundamentalist – and the fascist and terrorist. Unity requires something other than closed minds and cold hearts. The co-existence of humility – but without a collapse into the hell of relativity, political correctness and effete values now displayed in so many Western countries. But our unity lies in the state of not-knowing, not in hard and water-tight (heart-tight?) convictions;

“We are united by our doubts and divided by our convictions.” Sir Peter Ustinov

Excesses of certitude cut us off from truth and can lead to horrors of cruelty – the Nazis were certain that Jews, and Gypsies were sub-human.

“Certitude divides and diversity unifies…..We have to elevate religion above politics…..”

H.R.H. Prince El-Hassan Bin Talal of Jordan BBC Newsnight 9th Feb 2006

I am because we are. I am ultimately in a state of not knowing. I see through a glass not darkly, but with imperfect vision – this being an inevitable consequence of being finite.

Speaking personally I can’t live fully up to the truth, beauty, goodness, justice and mystery that I’ve learned (about) so far. This means that I, like us all, need forgiveness; hearts embrace, minds take a stroll together before parting. I/we need for-give-ness as part of the love through which to gain the will to walk on!

Go well.

Roger

Dr Roger Prentice