largemaxa - Tumblr blog

[largemaxa]

Spirituality, Psychology, and Healing

Religion and spirituality have long shared a border with psychology. But where should the border be now? In the premodern past, there was no domain of scientific psychology, and all of the knowledge we would now see as psychological was contained in various other fields—religion chief among them. But issues and problems that were once seen as religious in nature are now seen as belonging to the domain of psychology. Chief among them is the problem of suffering, one of the most persistent and thorny problems facing human existence. Religion used to claim to be the premier field for the solution to human suffering, with its ultimate solution being the turn to God. In the modern era, human suffering is seen as a problem that is amenable to the techniques of science and technology, like other problems facing technology; since the problem is located in the sufferer's interior experience, as opposed to being a physical problem amenable to engineering, the problem is seen as falling within the domain of psychology. One answer for the sufferer in modern times is to go to psychotherapy, where their problems are brought to a trained psychologist, who analyzes and empathizes with the patient to help them reach a state of well-being; the drug-based approach of the psychiatrist is another avenue for a solution.

There is no doubt that the methods of the therapist and psychiatrist have been effective in treating a large amount of human suffering. But does that mean that the religious or spiritual approach has no place? Religion and spirituality offer psychological techniques, some of which overlap with those that might be prescribed by a therapist. But there are aspects of the religious or spiritual approach that go beyond the scope of scientific psychology. Scientific psychology is proscribed from offering a holistic worldview to a sufferer. Religion and spirituality offer some sort of overarching cosmic account within which the sufferer's problems have a meaning and an eventual purpose. That worldview can support healing practices, such as faith or rituals, that seem meaningless and pointless within the neutral worldview of scientific psychology.

Scientific psychology is thus able to tolerate religion and spirituality as adjunct practices for its own project of healing, but is unable to view them as domains with their own autonomous logic and purpose. But the purpose of spirituality is not only to heal. Spirituality in part may aim to heal the being if there are emotional wounds that prevent it from progressing towards God, but a good part of spirituality is about going beyond the normal experience, not healing to an undamaged state. While it is acknowledged that seeking healing or relief from suffering is a legitimate reason to approach God, it is not the only reason, and is indeed not the most characteristic reason for one to seek God. By partially ceding the problem of suffering to psychology proper, then, spirituality may actually come closer to its characteristic approach. The essence of spirituality is the quest for God and the inner spirit, and not healing; healing is an ancillary benefit.

[largemaxa]

The Epistemology of Tech Support

For the past several years I've made my living in technical support. While this profession is often maligned, it is crucially necessary. Moreover, it provides a unique window into applied epistemology. Epistemology is the field of philosophy that inquires into the nature of knowledge. Tech support provides a very pure example of the problems facing the human mind in its quest for knowledge at the individual and social levels.

A user contacts tech support because something has gone wrong with their software and they hope that tech support will be able to remedy their problem. The mission of a tech support organization is therefore to organize knowledge of the software and deploy it to be able to solve user problems. Their first point of contact in the tech support organization is the tier 1 support agent. To be able to solve a variety of problems at a high enough rate that an insurmountable backlog doesn't pile up for the organization, the agent must be able to solve a reasonable amount of problems without burdening the organization's experts. This requires a thorough knowledge of theoretical functioning of the software, but also a great deal of practical knowledge—the knowledge needed to produce certain effects, like knowing how to process credit card payments correctly in a system. This type of knowledge can often be found in documentation, which is a formalized way of writing down how a software system is expected to function, and is endorsed by the organization for public usage.

In addition, there is also a certain amount of folk knowledge needed as well. Folk knowledge is a term from anthropology describing bodies of knowledge that belong to particular tribe of people without being mediated by institutional or formal structures. In this case the tribe is the tribe of tech support agents who, while they are technically part of the same institution, constantly communicate their solutions back and forth with each other through informal channels and build up shared bases of knowledge in greater depth than any other users of the product. Examples of folk knowledge in tech support are things like knowing that a setting needs to be set a certain way, even though it is not specified in the public facing documentation.

Empirical inquiry is also needed to expand the boundaries of what is known directly. When the outcome of an operation in the software is not known—or when the observed outcome is different than the desired or expected outcome—empirical testing is needed to verify the ground truth behavior of the software. In this mode of inquiry, the agent tries to experiment to reproduce behavior consistently and find the conditions that are required for a given outcome. Sometimes the problem cannot be reproduced—when testing, the standard method may work works without error. Other times, the directions the user gives directly result in the same error being thrown. Whatever the outcome, in this mode of knowing the tech support agent must confront the behavior of the software system—a microcosm of nature—directly rather than relying only on the codified abstractions of book knowledge. The tier 1 agent uses all the knowledge at their disposal, including formal knowledge, folk knowledge, and empirical knowledge, to diagnose and treat the problem presented to them.

The problem of social epistemology already comes into play for the tier 1 agent, since so much of their knowledge comes through transmission from peers and those higher in the hierarchy. But the specific issue of organizational epistemology comes when the tier 1 agent is not able to solve the problem with their own knowledge. In this case they must rely on tier 2 (or higher tiers, lumped in with tier 2 here) of tech support. The existence of tier 2 reveals that the tech support organization is a bureaucracy—it is a hierarchical organization staffed by experts who are the authoritative voices on the product; further, the tiers of support must interact with each other through formal protocols.

To receive assistance from tier 1, the agent must ask a precise question, provide the customer's problem in writing, state the software configuration as well as all the troubleshooting steps that were already performed. In other words, the tier 1 agent must reduce their previous work on the case, which was more than likely a sprawling and ad hoc communication with the live customer into a rational, legible question that is easily understood. It is key that tier 2 receives communications that fit this format because of the large number of issues they must deal with; the purpose of the bureaucratic process is to maximize the effectiveness of the scarce resource of their expertise. Tier 2 serves as the authoritative expert on the software product. They must determine whether a given issue has a solution, has no solution, or must be sent to the software development team to solve. For the development team to look at an issue, usually a reproduced version of the problem is required so that they can do the tests necessary to isolate the actual problem in the code. Tier 2 must try to create this reproduced version to send to them.

A great many problems in software can be solved by tech support. There is knowledge contained between documentation and the heads of experts which can turn a painful situation on the user's end into a perfectly working solution in very little time. But not all problems can be solved; the trickiest problems may not admit any solution. This is similar to how in medicine, sometimes the doctor runs out of options and there is nothing that can be done but let the patient die; expertise does not guarantee answers to every single problem. But as a general rule, we organize our social systems to make the best use of expert knowledge to solve as many problems as can be solved. We experiment and try to find steps through which issues and solutions can be consistently reproduced; we communicate our knowledge to each other orally and informally, or through formalized documentation; we store knowledge in writing and in the heads of experts. These are key epistemological building blocks that we see clearly illustrated in the field of tech support.

[largemaxa]

Integral Spirituality and the Renunciation of Desire

Desire is a major factor in the current state of human existence. We are beset by desires of all kinds daily: desire for a bigger house, desire for a romantic partner, desire for a million types of goods and services. Marketers have figured out how to manipulate desire at scale, and they are vilified for their tactics; but it is our own susceptibility to desire that is the real cause of their effectiveness. But while human life is currently unimaginable without desire, spiritual teachers have warned us about desire for centuries. The Buddha taught that desire was the route to suffering. Medieval Christianity taught the vanity of desire for things of this world. More recently, integral spiritual philosopher Sri Aurobindo has also held that desire must be conquered in order to achieve spiritual perfection.

Is it possible that the spiritualists who admonished humans for desiring be wrong? Couldn't their viewpoint that be symptomatic of an ascetic and world denying attitude towards spirituality that is made obsolete by a world-affirming integral spirituality? It is true that older forms of spirituality which tended to asceticism, the rejection of desire was a consequence of an ascetic viewpoint. What is less obvious is that even in a world-affirming integral spirituality, desire must be renounced as well. However, with a clearer understanding of what desire is, we can see that renouncing desire doesn't have to mean the end of participation, and even delight, in the world.

A first place to start is in understanding what exactly is meant by "desire" in the spiritual context; confusion over the injunction to renounce desire is often confounded by the issue of semantics. Desire in the spiritual sense is not just a preference for an outcome; it is a craving of the life force in a particular direction. In Sri Aurobindo's spiritual psychology, man is made up of the mind, the vital or life-force, the body, and the soul. The life-force is the source in us of energy, drive, enthusiasm, and passion, positive qualities which no life, spiritual or mundane, can do without. But along with its positive qualities come its capacity for craving, suffering, aggressiveness, selfishness, and so on. Desire is the craving in the life force for objects or circumstances other than those available in the present moment. Desire can be identified by the presence of attachment or agitation in the vital over the possibility of having or not having the object or circumstance in question. We perhaps need a more refined vocabulary to be able to discuss the difference between this sense of desire as craving of the life force from the other possible meaning of "preference for an outcome". For the spiritual seeker, desire must be conquered, whereas preference for various outcomes is legitimate—just as God himself does not create out of desire, but does have preferred outcomes.  

Even with this distinction, there are those who still hold out for a role of desire in the spiritual life. One argument holds that desire is "natural"—that humans are naturally desire oriented beings, and to go against this is to go against nature. This argument cannot hold because all of Yoga is the attempt to transcend the natural state of human life for something closer to God. Another concern is political. In our society, there are groups or classes of people that have been shamed for their desires previously and insist that they now be allowed to desire freely. This is a valid consideration. Indeed, large classes of people whose desire has been regulated for political reasons should indeed have their right to desire in line with nature be affirmed. But the question under consideration here is not political, but spiritual. The spiritual admonition to renounce desire does not apply to large classes of people, but rather to the small and self-selected group that is made up of integral spiritual seekers. Though they will be conditioned by the same forces that operate in the world, it is imperative that they rise above them.  

Indeed, the question of desire is completely different when considering spiritual seekers as opposed to the manifested world in general. In fact, desire is essential in the lower aspect of the manifestation to bring about God's will: desire is required to get the species to procreate to sustain itself, sustain the economy, and secure the needed results in presidential elections; the ideal outcome is not for desire to simply drop away from the human race. The question is for the role of desire in the lives of spiritual seekers and in the higher manifestation, and the answer is that desire must be renounced.

But if desire is required in the lower manifestation, what will drive the manifestation when desire is no longer a factor? Some have theorized that after desire is gone, there is no need for the manifestation at all anymore, and when everyone conquers desire, all souls will simply depart and the world will pass away. But that is not the theory of integral spirituality, at least in Sri Aurobindo's conception. Sri Aurobindo holds that the manifestation was created with the purpose of manifesting God. And the paths God takes along the way are meant to best bring about that end. There is in some sense a preference God expresses to manifest the higher spiritual values—Satchidananda, or existence, consciousness, and bliss—over nothing at all. But we cannot say that this preference is desire in the sense of a perverted movement of the life force. This fundamental will of God to manifest carries down to the smaller decisions we face in our lives. Some possibilities in our consciousness are colored by desire; other possibilities allow God to manifest in his purity. The manifestation of God does not even necessarily exclude of things like a nice house (as an expression of beauty) or a romantic partner (an expression of complementary energies). These things are admissible for the integral spiritual seeker only when they are a pure manifestation of spiritual energies, but not when they are held as cravings of the life force. Naturally, it requires great sincerity to be able to determine what is the will of God to manifest and what possibilities are tinged with lower human desire; perhaps this is why the older ascetic spiritual paths found it easier to simply renounce the manifestation of God altogether than trying to isolate desire and renounce it alone.

On the path to renounce desire we must not get caught in the old trap of confusing spiritual necessity with morality; we must get rid of the idea of moral fault in desire. There is nothing "wrong" with desire. Desire is a natural part of the human experience. When we attempt to transcend desire in Yoga, we attempt to fulfill a higher law for a higher purpose. If the aim of a given person is not Yoga—and this is the case for the vast majority of humans—there is nothing wrong with their desire. They must simply learn to manage it using the enlightened mental will—not everything will be possible to attain, but some things will be possible. God works through these various possibilities and desires to attain his larger purpose.

It is only when an individual seeks to do Yoga that the renunciation of desire becomes an issue. But even for the spiritual seeker, what is so bad about desire? There is first of all the fact that desire leads away from peace and towards suffering. But the more substantial reason why desire is a problem for the aspiring Yogi is that it separates the seeker from God. This is often more clear in others than in oneself. If a person has a concerted desire for a car, a house, a romantic partner, that is that much energy that is siphoned away from surrender to God. They desirer becomes lost in the lower world and turned away from the higher world. The energy spent on desire cannot be recovered; it is channeled away into the lower part of the manifestation where it can only recur and recur in new forms. To attain oneness with God, it is necessary to master these turbid motions of the life force through will, surrender, or any other method that works. This is one of the most difficult parts of the spiritual path. But one secret of the spiritual path that once we are on the other side of the desires, rewards of the spirit that are far more preferable, beautiful, and blissful open up.

[largemaxa]

Being Grateful

Gratitude did not come naturally to me. I experienced periods of unhappiness in my life, and often did not feel that anything that came to me was a particular gift that I should feel grateful for. And even if I did feel glad about some circumstance in my life, who was I supposed to feel grateful towards? Gratitude was usually presented to me in terms of a guilt trip—that I should feel grateful either because there were others who had less than me, or alternatively that I should feel grateful obsequiously to the person who was claiming that they gave me something.

Having since experienced true gratitude, I can now see that guilt and shame are not the most helpful supports for gratitude. Those who give with a jealous heart, expecting to be showered with praise in return, distort their gift and cannot expect an unsullied gratitude in return. Similarly, shame isn't a helpful support for gratitude. It is true that seeing those who have less can be a powerful spur for feeling gratitude in your own life; however, this recognition has to come about organically, not through having that fact forced upon you. For those who have had their experiences of gratitude tainted by guilt and shame, the best path forward is to let gratitude come easily and naturally where it shows up in life.

Our experiences with gratitude on the human level are helpful for understanding true spiritual gratitude. In reality, it is God who has given us everything, and therefore he is the one we should ultimately feel grateful towards; but the human experience of gratitude is the starting point for understanding this. When another person gives you a gift you love, it is easy to feel appreciative of the gift and their thought and effort that went into obtaining it. It is possible to feel towards everything in our lives—the good things and even the bad things.

It may not feel easy to feel grateful at times. When it's not actively difficult, it may seem like there is no particular reason to be grateful for anything—after all, the world is as it is with or without our gratitude. But again, the human example serves us well. Someone who does not feel gratitude for a gift they received is seen to be ungrateful, or entitled; these are not positive qualities. We don't want to be marked with these qualities ourselves. So it is with the spiritual gifts we've been given; it is not good for us not to be grateful; if we are not grateful, we risk a display of spiritual ingratitude.

We are thus warned off the possibility of ingratitude, even as we have been advised not to be shamed into gratitude. So how are we to start, knowing that gratitude is good but not when it is shamed or forced? The easiest place to start is with what you genuinely feel gratitude for. You can start with the most positive things in your life. There is no point trying to feel grateful for those things which genuinely feel like burdens; it would be perverse to try to do that. But the secret is that once you can feel grateful for the things you naturally feel grateful for, you begin to see why you could feel grateful for those things which were more difficult—the painful experiences, the uninteresting experiences, the challenging experiences. For everything in life offers its wisdom to the one who seeks to know it.

The vibration of gratitude changes us. There are those who will advise you to be grateful because it increases your ability to receive things. This is true at a certain level, as vibrations perpetuate themselves—if you are appreciative of the things in your life, then more will come that there is to appreciate. But that is not the real reason to be grateful from the point of view of the spiritual life. For the spiritual seeker, gratitude is good because it brings us closer to God. God is the ultimate source of all that we feel grateful for. When we are grateful to Him we draw nearer to him, as the giver, the gift, and the recipient are seen and appreciated for what they are. In the human case, when we are ungrateful, the giver of the gift sees that we don't appreciate the gift, which brings a distance between the giver and the recipient. Ingratitude is therefore a distance from God; and gratitude is seen to be a form of devotion.  

[largemaxa]

Getting Past Politics

The political situation in America seems to saturate public life; it can seem hard to unplug from politics when every aspect of life seems to be politicized and discussed constantly in mass media and social situations alike. However, it is essential that the spiritual seeker learns to keep a healthy relationship, if not a complete distance, from politics. This is because politics in its current form deals mostly with man's lower nature, whereas spirituality is the attempt to transcend the lower nature for the higher nature. Without this healthy balance, we become dominated by the need to know who is winning, who is losing, and whether "our side" will come out on top; and we get caught in the negative energy generated by the political process as seen on cable news or in acrimonious debates with other citizens. We risk getting caught in the turbulent phenomena of the lower world and losing our hold on the higher spiritual reality.

But politics is reluctant to let go of its hold on the seeker, as it claims to be all encompassing, demanding our engagement and energy. The slogan from the 1960s, the personal is political, pointed out how the seemingly neutral structures of daily life are actually microcosms of political structures, with the implication that there is no safe refuge from political structures in simply going about one's regular life. In society, having the right political opinions is seen to be important to being a decent person; a person with the wrong views is suspected of being unsavory and thus worthy of marginalization. There is a tremendous urgency that people on all sides of the spectrum place on politics, and every development seems to be the crucial one separating utopia from dystopia.

In this climate, the first step towards a healthy balance is seeing politics for what it is. Politics is the way that humans come together to resolve disputes, allocate resources, solve collective problems, manage social systems—in short, to govern society. While these functions are essential, it is important to recognize some truths about the nature of politics. First, even where politics claims to be about principles, it is fundamentally driven by material interests. While this critique is often leveled from a leftist perspective, it is not the case that centrist and conservative politics are driven by material interests while leftist politics are pure; in fact, leftist politics are driven by material interests as well. We see an open admission of this in the notion of "popularism" that has surfaced—which is the idea that the Democratic party can both move left and win more by doing what is popular with voters, which inevitably means attending to their material interests. Material interests are essential to human life and need to be respected. However, for the spiritual seeker they are ultimately secondary, and it is not helpful to be overly preoccupied with them. Second, the entire mechanism of politics in the present age works through the ego to drive its results—through the manipulation of emotions like resentment and desire at scale, or the appeal to self-interest, or by casting the political situation as the manichaean battle of good and evil. This is as true of one's favored side as it is of the opposite side. While again this is essential for the maintenance of the world in the current conditions, the goal of the spiritual path is to go past all such dualities and obscurations to reach the Divine, so it is imperative to avoid being caught by this machinery.

It is true that in a certain lens of analysis, there is no escaping politics and political structures because they condition all the structures of our life. But this isn't the healthiest or even most accurate framing to use as a spiritual seeker; as a spiritual seeker we see that even more fundamental than political structures is the Divine, his manifestations, and his conditions. Rather than believing that everything is a fundamentally political development, we can see that everything has a fundamentally spiritual basis. From a spiritual perspective, it is the ego that is the fundamental psychological fact that conditions the relations of man; if politics seems pervasive, it is because the ego is pervasive.

But how, then, are we to engage with the specifically political dimension of life? One approach is to cut off engagement with politics altogether. This is very difficult in our current society, but it can be done. This would involve choosing not to pay attention to politics on the news, and bowing out of political discussions with your associates. No matter how much one might be badgered, the line "I'm not political" is still respected. While this approach is possible in a secluded spiritual atmosphere such as an ashram—indeed, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram insisted on upholding a ban on politics at the Ashram as one of their three fundamental rules—it is difficult to practice in a democratic society such as the one we have today.

A more suitable practice in a society like ours may be to continue participating in social norms around politics, first, without getting overly invested in it, and second, while constantly performing introspection so as to overcome the ego in this engagement. This can mean paying attention to political developments, participating in political engagement such as by voting, and even having discussions with others about politics. If there is a political action that has a positive and concrete goal, it is fine to participate in it. But this must be done with a calm and steady heart, not one that is agitated into a frenzy by mass-media. And self-inquiry around politics should be conducted regularly. Are you taking sides on an issue by demonizing another group of people? Are you allowing your resentments and desires to color your political opinions? Are you arguing about a political issue because you want to prove yourself right to an acquaintance or colleague? If we start to inquire into our motives, we find that political questions we previously found to be essential turn out to be manifestations of some underlying psychological factor, which we can then release, heal, or clear.

As these egoic facets drop off, we develop a clearer view as to what is really going on in politics. In fact, it is the spiritual seeker who is often most able to see through to the real truth of political matters. The seeker who moves past their own cherished thoughts and seeks the Divine truth will see in any political debate two sides that are each caught in their own mental formations about what is right and what is wrong; by working through their own desires and resentments, the seeker comes to see how the political positions of others are colored by these factors. This is not to say that there is a moral equivalence between each side. Nor is it to say that the Lord has no favorites; the Lord has a favored side that he supports, just as Krishna had special political designs in the Gita which required Arjuna to win. But the Divine recognizes that the side that is chosen to win is limited and imperfect as well, and is chosen because it is the vessel through which a larger Divine purpose works—a purpose which has no sides.

[largemaxa]

Winning, Losing, and the Ego

The ego is the chief obstacle in the way of spiritual realization. It is what separates us from the Divine or our true nature. But it can be surprisingly difficult to understand what exactly the ego is. Sri Aurobindo defines it as "a self-limitation of consciousness by a willed ignorance of the rest of its play and its exclusive absorption in one form" (The Life Divine 63). In other words, it is a psychological principle of separation from the rest of existence that is manifested throughout our being. This is the most cogent definition, the one that most clearly defines the nature and scope of the ego with respect to the other terms of existence we find in metaphysical philosophy. But the risk of using such an abstract definition is that it can be difficult to apply it in the context of our mundane experience. Where do we actually observe this "self-limitation" in our daily routines? The meditative traditions propose one way to go beyond the limitations of the ego. But the ego is present in our lives all the time, even beyond the meditation couch. How are we to to find it and rout it out?

The most foolproof method of working with the ego, if there can be said to be one, is to follow the guidance of the realized guru who deeply understands the psychological makeup of the disciple and can guide him or her through the difficult passage. In fact, identifying the operations of the ego is extremely difficult. The difficulty of dealing with the ego is that any psychological movement can be a manifestation of the ego, but it could also be a manifestation of the true Divine individuality that lies past the ego. Even an apparent defect of the outer nature like messiness, which would seem like something that must be transcended in a state of order, can in some cases be an expression of a Divine principle; but it requires exceptional intuition to be able to sort this possibility out from the more common explanation that it is an egoistic attachment to tamas. In the absence of the realized guru who can make these determinations, the individual is left with their own discrimination; eventually they may be united with the guidance of the soul or with the intuitive planes above the mind which can help them along the way. In the meantime, there are any number of heuristic principles that guide us along the way. Selflessness is, in general, preferable to selfishness; love is to be preferred to hatred; and so on. Heuristics can be helpful, but their generality can make it difficult to know how to apply them precisely.

The power of the heuristic schema of "winning versus losing" for identifying the operation of the ego lies in its rich structure and clarity. Once we recognize that we are in its grip, it is exceptionally clear how to apply the terms, interpret the situation, and work towards dismantling an instance of the ego's operation. The principle of this schema is that the ego is attached to winning in any situation it finds itself in. The terms of the schema are our ego, a game-like situation, the adversarial psychological entity competing with us, and our psychological reaction. These game-like situations involve other psychological entities which are generally other people, but in the case of a deadly animal or a faceless corporation, we may project human psychologies onto them. A game-like situation is a circumscribed situation that is carved out from life where there is a notion of "winning" or "losing" some prize or end-condition. And the reaction is the perturbed psychological state that we encounter when we realize we want to win the game, or realize that we are losing and don't like it.

It is frequently the reaction we have to a situation that alerts us to the fact that we are in a game-like situation, sometimes even against our own wishes. And the reaction is even able to point out the ego as an entity itself, which is what makes this schema so instructive. Once the game is seen, we see that the ego is the player who has cut itself off from the rest of existence and is purely absorbed in its petty victory or defeat. One of the most frequent and recognizable instances of this phenomenon is when we are on the road and another car cuts us off or overtakes us. We feel irritation or indignation and plot and stew in it, and wonder how we can overtake the other car in turn, or at least keep up a healthy speed to show that we are not "really" defeated. At the level of our higher self-concept we may think that we have gone beyond such petty occurrences; we may feel that such reactions are worthy of a child, or even a lower state of civilization. And yet we continue to have the reactions regardless of what our conscious mind tells us we should feel about them.

Here, it is the perturbed reaction we have to losing that reveals the game that was already carved out; it is an infantile game, but a game nonetheless: the game of who will be the car who is in the lead. And by the fact that we are attached to winning we identify the entity that wants to win as the ego. Once this pattern is recognized, we see it everywhere: trying to stay on top of an email chain at work; dealing with the customer service representative we are on the phone with; trying to return a defective product at the grocery store; establishing the good name of our reputation at a dinner with friends of friends we don't yet know; and the simple example of the debate, where we are determined to prove our point of view against the adversary whose opposing view in the heat of the moment seems a threat to all that is decent in the world.

How are we to transcend this state? Knowledge of the games around us is a first step, and just having this knowledge can go a long way towards extricating ourselves from their traps. But simple awareness is ultimately not enough, because the nature of the game has a long history in the psyche, and the irrational drives that stabilize it are not so easily plucked out. Being aware of the triggered complex is one stage of growing past the game. Having an attitude of quietude towards the triggered response is the next stage; in this state, the burning desire to win or the rage at the thought of losing is quieted to a simmer, though it does continue boiling quietly in some part of our consciousness. Another level of growing past the reaction is to feel the vibration gone from our consciousness altogether; the simmering pot in the back room is taken off and we don't feel the reaction inside us at all.

It would seem that this is the final level, but of course it is not. Sri Aurobindo has described how vibrations that are rejected in one part of the nature can go down to a lower level of being such as the subconscious and come back later (Letters on Yoga IV 604). Inevitably when dealing with the game situation the next time, the feelings of wanting to dominate will come back, when we meet the stubborn friend, get on the phone with customer support, and so on. We must remain vigilant and do the best we can to defuse the triggered response, knowing that the true victory may take many attempts. The best case is that we are able to transform our reaction enough that the game opens up into a new, win-win possibility; or if not that, then at least the game may conclude in a way that leaves us feeling more at peace, without raging feelings of victory or defeat.

It would seem that surmounting these reactions is tantamount to leaving the field of play altogether. But life beyond the reactions of win-lose games is the not the same as the experience of being off the field of play, but is rather a psychological space with more possibilities. It is important to note that there can still be conflict in this condition. And it is important to be able to bear these conflicts and see them through to the end, as there are still important aims to be sought out. On the road, we still need to coordinate so that everyone can get to the lane they want to, and some people will get positions farther ahead than others. Debates will continue, as the dialectical process of finding truth will require it, and there will be wins and losses. We may still by stonewalled on the customer support line or at the grocery store. The field of life is a field of conflict, and in asserting our highest truth and highest potentialities there will be be conflicts that need to be worked out. The way to tell a true conflict from a mere win-loss game is when we can identify the higher purpose that the conflict serves and that we must work out through our actions. But it is possible to undertake these conflicts in a psychological state of equality, where our reactions to each gain or setback are not constantly perturbed by the status of the game the mind carves out and attempts to win. In this state, the Divine Force flows through us; this force sometimes flows freely, and sometimes is obstructed, but we trust that it eventually finds its way to the outcomes that it seeks to accomplish.

This principle of win-loss games and the ego can be used to give a reading of the great scripture of engagement with life, the Bhagavad Gita. Contemplating the conflict that he has to go through, Arjuna shrinks from the battle that he is tasked with by his dharma. But Lord Krishna reminds him that he must continue and fight in order for the processes of the world to continue to unfold. Arjuna recognizes that entering the game of battle in an untransformed consciousness cannot lead to a positive outcome; he would only be winning or losing in the terms of the ego. But attempting to avoid the game altogether is still an egoic reaction; in reality, because the processes of the world continue on as they always do, there is no real possibility of leaving the field of battle. Arjuna must engage with the battle with a consciousness undertakes action while transcending the dualities of winning and losing. So it is in our own lives; we cannot avoid the demanding and often conflictual nature of the situations our life presents to it. But we can leave behind the win-lose reactions of the ego and engage with life from a higher poise—and we must, if we are to develop to the higher spiritual consciousness that is possible for us.

Works Cited

Sri Aurobindo. The Life Divine. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 2005.

Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga IV. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 2014.

[largemaxa]

The Continued Need for Faith

Luther felt that there was no longer any true religion to be found amidst the decadence of the Catholic Church; he proclaimed that in his view, religion had no need of the structures of the Catholic Church that came between man and God. However, his faith was not founded on thin air: he founded it on the Bible, which he took to be the glorious revelation of God. No doubt he perceived the reality of the Bible's existence, its accessibility to man's mind and aspiration, as enough of a self-evident revelation that it didn't need defense and therefore was a solid enough basis for his faith.

But his critique of the Church opened the doorway for further critiques. In protesting that the Church was an unnecessary structure getting in the way of man's relationship with God, he prefigured the argument that the Bible itself could be seen as an unnecessary structure, either because man's relationship to God needed no textual prop, or because there was no God for man to relate to. When modern biblical scholarship showed that the Bible was made up of a collection of texts authored by humans within the literary conventions of their time and put together deliberately for a spiritual-political purpose of establishing a canon, some lost faith in the idea of the Bible as self-evident revelation. And if their faith was based on the Bible, they then either lost faith altogether, becoming atheists or agnostics, or otherwise found a faith that did not rely on either the Church or the Bible, which meant that it bore little resemblance to Christianity as it had been understood.

Having long since integrated the perception that the Bible is not self-evidently the direct revelation of God, the modern mind sees no need for faith at all. The watchword of the modern mind is science, and the meaning of science is direct observation rather than taking things on faith, that is to say, without direct experience of them. This attitude affects spirituality as well. Where spirituality is still practiced in the modern era—as opposed to completely discounted by a materialist worldview—it is taken for granted that the experiential method is necessary. According to this line of thinking, the difference between the modern spiritual search and the premodern spiritual search is that the modern spiritual search has no need of dogma (which faith is conflated with) and proceeds by experience alone.

One problem with this attitude is apparent to anyone who has tried to walk the path of experiential spirituality. The issue is that the experiences on which the modernist seeker tries to base his spiritual conclusions—the great experiences of oneness with God, peace, enlightenment—often take decades of experience to establish. The method of founding one's spiritual convictions on direct experience is hardly as simple as, say, going to another country to gain "experience" of it. One can argue that this long incubation period is not unlike the incubation period needed to gestate a scientist during their apprenticeship; empirical scientific knowledge is accessible to everyone, but still requires 5 or 10 or 15 years before its secrets make themselves known. But the scientist doesn't need "faith" to keep going because of the hegemony of scientific knowledge; there is no serious doubt about the scientific illumination, and the person who falters along the way does so because of psychological exhaustion and not a lack of belief in scientific knowledge.

The spiritual seeker, on the other hand, still needs something to keep them going during the long process of the spiritual search, where affirmation and encouragement are in short supply and experiences can be meager; hence the continued utility of faith, even in this modern age. Faith doesn't have to be without evidence: it just needs to be rooted in the highest intuition or conception that one has access to. Luther genuinely perceived the Bible as a revelation, and this gave him the faith that he needed for his own spiritual path. But if we no longer have faith in the Bible, if it no longer seems like a self-evident revelation to us, that doesn't mean we have to give up on faith altogether; it just means that we may need a source of faith besides the Bible. This can come from within us or from outside; it may be founded in another book, an idea, the community of seekers, or an intuitive knowledge or feeling that we hang onto in times of doubt.

The faith that we find is the faith that we are on the right path; that God or the Spirit is real; that one is continuing to be guided. Faith provides the encouragement, consolation, and comfort that one needs to continue down an arduous and difficult path. 

Doubt is a fundamental movement of the modern mind, and its critiques can go farther than critiques of institutions and books; critique and doubt can go to the very root of rationality and self-experience altogether. In the face of critique and doubt about our perceptions, the nature of our world, and our spiritual path, we may even find that faith is more fundamental than knowledge itself.

[largemaxa]

Integral Monism

A foundational idea for any spiritual worldview is that "all is one". This idea is as powerful of a general heuristic for the spiritual life as it is misleading in its simplicity if applied incorrectly in other domains. For how far afield can we be taken if we apply this idea indiscriminately? It certainly does not mean that there is no distinction between the objects we see in our normal field of experience as a pragmatic matter. It has been cited as the impetus for the romantic idea that we should go back to Nature, but there is no real hope for dissolving the boundaries between our modern industrial lifestyle and a life in the jungle. It has been made into a political slogan, but even if it is true at a very general level it still lacks the power to effect itself amongst the very real conflicts of human nature.

The most robust way of understanding this idea is with the Indian conception of Brahman. In this view, the manifested world is made up of a single indivisible energy; and there is an still an infinite existence beyond this manifestation which is also at one with it. This indivisible energy is Brahman and its nature is Satchitananda—existence, consciousness, and bliss. And yet, despite the positive assertions we can make about Brahman, we must also say that it is "neti, neti"—not this, not that. All of the descriptions I gave are schematics that mislead by their status as mental ideas. We mistake the description for the actuality of it, and fail to understand what the words are pointing to. Every interpretation at the level of the mind falls short of its reality.

Brahman can be known, however. In the chapter of The Life Divine "The Methods of Vedantic Knowledge", Sri Aurobindo argues that the method of knowing Brahman is through "knowledge by identity". Knowledge by identity is the same mode of knowledge that gives us our own psychological experience: I know that I am who I am, a person with a name and sensory experience, as opposed to another person entirely, through knowledge by identity. So can we through meditation or other psychospiritual techniques come to know that our consciousness is one with this infinite energy of Brahman. And a powerful argument comes out of this experience: the experience of the unity with Brahman can be so powerful and convincing that it seems to be more real and significant than that of the world. From this, it appears that the regular world is an illusion and only the status of unity with Brahman is real. This is the argument of illusionism—a philosophy that has had adherents from antiquity to the present day.

But as Sri Aurobindo notes, the real conclusion of monism would not separate the world and Brahman into two separate spheres and declare that one is illusion and one is reality; an integral monism would affirm the reality of the manifestation as well, and hold that the regular world is not separate from the Brahman (Sri Aurobindo 35). Both are reality; neither is illusion. This means that the normal reality we are familiar with cannot be dismissed as an illusion or impediment in the way of seeking God; it has to be accepted, affirmed, and perfected in any integral view.

Works Cited

Sri Aurobindo. The Life Divine. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 2005.

[largemaxa]

Commentary on “This is now” by Diane Seuss

Poem:

“This is now” from Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open by Diane Seuss

i had a bright aquamarine blouse i called my power shirt.

if you were far enough north the light had a yellow-green hue.

suffering was thin.                                                     5 buttered saltines and cocoa. two marshmallows

were enough. the black phone had a cord curly as a pig's tail. you could only stray

so far. three choices for pizza toppings. emerald green shampoo             10

through which a pearl would sink slowly, and breck, thin and gold,

princess elixir. my boyfriend's skin was the color of skim milk. when the rock star

died you were sad but you didn't throw up.              15 if you teased it enough

your hair would rise like jesus in his meringue dress.

things blew up, but not all the time. when one person died it made a huge sound                           20

like a piano lid slamming. war was blue if you watched it at night with the lights off.

Commentary:

Diane Seuss' "This is now" is an ironic lament about the past from the perspective of the present. The speaker looks back on a past that appears more wholesome, simple, and even beautiful than the present, by implicit contrast. But the ending reveals that the past is always more complicated than any simplifying emotion makes it out to be.

At the start of the poem we hear about the speaker's "aquamarine/blouse" which she calls her "power shirt". Aquamarine represents the speaker's youthful enthusiasm while also appearing dated. (Even though the vagaries of fashion mean that aquamarine might be "back in" at some point, the rest of the poem makes it clear that it looks back to the mid-late 20th century.) Perhaps the present of the speaker has faded to a duller brown or grey, with none of the power and enthusiasm that youth once offered.

In line 3 we see that "if you were far enough north the light/had a yellow-green hue." The distorting lens of memory affects the speaker's perceptions of the natural environment itself. "yellow-green" might also refer to the specter of nuclear radiation that weighed on the mind of citizens during the Cold War. At this far north latitude, or high altitude, "suffering was thin." Just like the body reacts differently to the air at different altitudes, so might emotional experience seem different to memory looking at the past; suffering itself might seem thin and insubstantial as compared to the thickness and fullness that present day suffering seems to have. (This echoes Emily Dickinson's famous poem on grief, #660 "'Tis good — the looking back on Grief —" where the speaker notes that "though the Woe you have Today/Be larger", the earlier suffering was suffering as well.)

The "thin" suffering was perhaps easily covered up by the abundance of inexpensive pleasures, like buttered saltines and hot cocoa. In those days, "two marshmallows//were enough." One can imagine the extravagant and unsatisfied appetites of the present self compared to the past self's reasonable desire for just two sticky-sweet marshmallows. The poem jumps from the image of the two white marshmallows to the black phone, which takes on the appearance of a marshmallow-like lump of plastic, despite the fact that this lump contains the relatively advanced technology needed to transmit voices over long distances. The speaker is nostalgic for the way the limit of the phone's cord meant that "you could only stray//so far."  To the speaker, the ability of contemporary people to travel freely with cordless telephones is a sign of decadence, the possibility of a potentially infinite diversion from the true life; this is a luddite attitude that admits the technology of the past as "natural" (the phone having a cord like a "pig's tail") while present technology appears infernal, despite the fact that they are both instances of technology.

As with technology, so does the past seem more simple and natural with regard to "pizza toppings", where there are only three available. To have more choices, as in the modern world, means that one's burdens and dilemmas multiply; the small number of toppings in the past is not felt as a restriction but rather as a more wholesome state. This wholesomeness is not incompatible with luxury, however: in a richly imagistic several lines 10-13, the poem evokes emerald, pearl, and gold, all referring to images that the marketing industry presented to the world in order to sell its hair products. ("breck" refers to a brand of shampoo with ads featuring models with gorgeously golden hair, so powerful and luxurious that the speaker dubs it "princess elixir".) The marketing world once drew on those images to associate their products with the mystery and power of precious metals; in the same way, the speaker now dwells on the products to get access to that same mystery and power, which shows that the real power is in the power of symbols and symbolic transfer. The same powers are likely lost to the present of the speaker; there is no gemlike power in our hair care products; perhaps even our advertising wizards have fewer wizardly powers than in the past.

The images jumps from the superficies of hair to that of her boyfriend's skin on line 13-14. He isn't coated by opulent creams and powders, but rather has the appearance of "skim milk", calling up wholesome images of dairy farms and cereal breakfasts. The twinned "sk" sounds of skin/skim on these lines serve to transfer the milkiness more powerfully onto that skin. The juxtaposition of the "rock star" in the next image on line 14, coming after the wholesome boyfriend, downplays the rock star's larger-than-life qualities. The speaker's attitude is more down-to-earth as well: after the death of the rock star "you were sad but you didn't throw up", says line 15, meaning that people at that time had an innocent relationship towards rock stars, without extreme and unhealthy emotional attachments; and the rock stars, too, seem more innocent, as no mention is given of any of the possibly grisly or scandalous reasons for the rock star's death. That isn't to say that there are no larger-than-life figures, though. The following image depicts "jesus in his meringue dress", comparing the rise of the speaker's properly tousled hair to Jesus' legendary resurrection. The "meringue dress" perhaps refers to the white robes that Jesus is sometimes depicted in; but the outrageous and electric quality of the hair, the dress, and the previous image of the rock star combine to make the image connote the exciting image of a rock star rising on an elevated platform.

By the end of the poem, we start to see awareness on the part of the writer, if not the speaker, that the past was more complicated than the speaker's nostalgia makes it out to be. On line 19, the speaker says "things blew up, but not all the time." The speaker here is acknowledging that there was misfortune and even disaster, but she minimizes it by saying that it didn't happen all the time. And the past may have valued life more as well, as death of each individual person was significant, making a "huge sound//like a piano lid slamming."

But it is the final image that shows most explicitly that the speaker's naivete is clouding her view of the past in relation to the present. In line 21-22 we see that "war was blue/if you watched it at night with the lights off. " The "blue" the poem refers to could be the blue screen of the evening news, providing an image of how abstract war is for the speaker; war, for her, is not something that was concretely taking place. The speaker reveals that she didn't know the full extent of the evil that was happening in the past, and thus that she is not qualified to judge the difference of the situation of the past and the present; even if war is more visible now, is no longer the same blue abstraction, that doesn't mean that the past wasn't filled with its own problems. The writer, as opposed to the speaker, is fully aware of the irony involved in the speaker's naivete, and uses it to make a complex point about how nostalgia obscures our vision.

[largemaxa]

Commentary on “Written by Himself” by Gregory Pardlo

Poem:

“Written by Himself” from Digest by Gregory Pardlo

I was born in minutes in a roadside kitchen a skillet whispering my name. I was born to rainwater and lye; I was born across the river where I was borrowed with clothespins, a harrow tooth, broadsides sewn in my shoes. I returned, though it please you, through no fault of my own, pockets filled with coffee grounds and eggshells. I was born still and superstitious; I bore an unexpected burden. I gave birth, I gave blessing, I gave rise to suspicion. I was born abandoned outdoors in the heat-shaped air, air drifting like spirits and old windows. I was born a fraction and a cipher and a ledger entry; I was an index of first lines when I was born. I was born waist-deep stubborn in the water crying                          ain't I a woman and a brother I was born to this hall of mirrors, this horror story I was born with a prologue of references, pursued by mosquitoes and thieves, I was born passing off the problem of the twentieth century: I was born. I read minds before I could read fishes and loaves; I walked a piece of the way alone before I was born.

Commentary:

The very title of "Written by Himself" by Gregory Pardlo indicates that it will be an investigation into the nature of the self; it is not written by the speaker as "me" or by a name given in the third person, but by "Himself", an agent with a relationship to the self that is almost identity, but not quite. The investigates the many forces that condition the self, which are by definition beyond the self's choice or desire. The poem uses the device called anaphora, or repetition, repeating the phrase "I was born" to enumerate these forces. The birth of the self indicated by this phrase is not a chronological point in time but the point at which it comes into being from amongst the conditioning forces; in particular, the entity who is speaking is not referring to infancy per se. In addition to the exact anaphoric repetitions, there are also similar phrases, such as "I gave" and "I bore" which develop in other directions, which indicate the tangents and developments of the conditioning forces.

In the first line, the speaker says that he was born "in minutes in a roadside kitchen a skillet/whispering my name." The primary factor around any person's birth is their nuclear family and its circumstances. A family just giving birth to a child has much going on; their attention may be on the immediacies and exigencies of life, meaning that the situation of birth may be simultaneously casual and urgent as in a "roadside kitchen". Even the child's name might be suggested by the whisper of a hot pan, something that is seems to lack the requisite formality and attention but utterly fits the broader situation. The "rainwater and lye" on line 2 suggests the difficult situations that the family may be facing.

The element of identity beyond the nuclear family enters on line 3 where the speaker states that he was "born across the river". Pardlo is an African-American man, and while it doesn't say explicitly that the speaker is, it's not a far leap to suppose that being born on the other side of the river, and coming back with such downscale circumstances as being  "borrowed with clothespins" and carrying "coffee grounds and eggshells" could allude to the second class status that African-Americans still face due to racism and inequality. The speaker also comes with "broadsides sewn in my shoes", which could indicate on one hand the gift for song and art that African-Americans have displayed; but another meaning of "broadsides", indicating the cannons on one side of a ship, could also indicate the aggression that someone who has been wronged might have towards the initial aggressor. But there are hints of resolution in the split between the races, since the speaker comes back "though/it please you, through no fault of my own"; also the speaker's pockets are filled with two food waste items, one dark, coffee grounds, and one light, eggshells.

After dealing with the familial and societal levels of conditioning, on line 8 the poem focuses in on the level of the individual. The individual may have such idiosyncratic psychological qualities as being "still and superstitious"; bearing an "unexpected burden" is something that happens to all of us, and must be faced alone. But the individual in dealing with his troubles and burdens is only a step away from the deification of the individual; line 9 deals with the mythological, as the speaker "gave birth", perhaps in the manner of the Virgin Mary, "gave blessing" as Jesus did, and "gave rise to suspicion", as both Jesus and an African-American venturing into the wrong neighborhood might, unfairly. The religious prophet as well as the second-class citizen might face being born "abandoned outdoors in the heat-shaped air" (10), left to the elements, without the protective forces of society fully on their side.

At a climactic juncture in the poem, the speaker juxtaposes two diametrically opposed views of the self. On one hand, it is a "fraction and a cipher and a ledger entry" as in line 12, a cog in the machinery of society or the state; and on the other hand as in line 13 it is an "index of first lines", the fount of all possibilities of beauty and self expression. In the next 6 lines the poem addresses the conditions of the world that the self is born into which invariably shape the self. The lack of periods further intensifies the portrait. It is a world where civil rights issues still occur and one must declare "ain't I a woman and a brother" (15); a world of confusions as in a "hall of mirrors" and even evils as in a "horror story" (16); a world where the condition of the self can only come by understanding the "prologue of references" that is history (17). There are problems big and small, both "mosquitoes and thieves", as well as the great existential quandaries of the "problem of the twentieth century". Line 19 ends with the simple statement "I was born", which can be said without further elaboration now that the poem has catalogued everything that must be said to fully understand that statement.

There is a final turn on line 20, where the speaker switches modes from explanation to a more intimate psychological disclosure. He says that he could "read minds before I could read fishes and loaves", meaning that the intellectual understanding of these forces came before the understanding of the problems of life and how to deal with them, the so called "bread-and-butter" issues, or here bread-and-fish issues. Once again there is an allusion to the religious figure Jesus, who famously fed a crowd with nothing more than a few fish and loaves of bread. Here, the ambiguity as to whether this speaker is a normal human or a religious figure is as clear as ever; but perhaps it doesn't matter, as the great religions insist that every man has both earthly and divine potentials within himself. In either case, whether relating to the reader as a prophet or as an everyman, the final line 21 acknowledges that there is a share of difficulty that all must surmount in order to fashion a self; one must walk "piece of the way alone" before being born as a fully realized self.

[largemaxa]

Commentary on “Swimming” by Carl Phillips

Poem:

“Swimming” from Wild is the Wind by Carl Phillips

Some nights, I rise from the latest excuse for Why not stay awhile, usually that hour when the coyotes roam the streets as if they've always owned the place and had come back inspecting now for damage. But what hasn't been damaged? History        5 here means a history of storms rushing the trees for so long, their bowed shapes seem a kind of star– worth trusting, I mean, as in how the helmsman, steering home, knows what star to lean on. Do people, anymore, even say helmsman? Everything           10 in waves, or at least wave-like, as when another's suffering, being greater, displaces our own, or I understand it should, which is meant to be different, I'm sure of it, from that pleasure Lucretius speaks of, in witnessing from land                      15 a ship foundering at sea, though more and more it all seems related. I love the nights here. I love the jetty's black ghost-finger, how it calms the harbor, how the fog hanging stranded just above the water is fog, finally, not the left-behind               20 parts of those questions from which I half wish I could school my mind, desperate cargo, to keep a little distance. An old map from when this place was first settled shows monsters everywhere, once the shore gives out–it can still               25 feel like that: I dive in, and they rise like faithfulness itself, watery pallbearers heading seaward, and I the raft they steady. It seems there's no turning back.

Commentary:

"Swimming" is a poem saturated but not dominated by the night. The night here is a multivalent figure for the speaker's emotional landscape. In time, the speaker has progressed from experiencing his engagement with the night primarily in terms of confronting the doubts and distresses that are part of any human life to being able to engage more simply and directly with the sensations and emotions the night brings. Near the end there is a suggestion that the speaker may be able to simply see things just as they are, and not only as a projection of his turbulent emotions: "how the fog hanging stranded just/above the water is fog, finally, not the left-behind/parts of those questions..."

The late hour of the night is made palpable for the reader at the beginning of the poem with the indication that speaker is reflecting on "that hour when/the coyotes roam the streets as if they've always/owned the place and had come back inspecting now/for damage." The hour is so late that the normal structures of human civilization have broken down, and the coyotes are able to run free; they represent the untamed psychic forces that lie beyond the organized structures of the ego. The coyotes come "as if they've always/owned the place", meaning that they don't own it in actuality, and its only the wild time of the night that lets them act this way.

On line 5, the poem asks "But what hasn't been damaged?"—by the wild coyotes, or perhaps even by the more civilized processes that take place during the day in the normal human world. The position of the word "History" at the end of line 5 suggests a tentative answer as to what has not been damaged. In fact we see that the forces that shape history, the "storms rushing the trees/for so long" that must appear to be damaging in a local view, eventually create beautiful weathered "bowed shapes" can be trusted in the same way the helmsman trusts the star. This is a history of the psyche, which is shaped by trials into a deep wisdom that the speaker can encounter. But the speaker goes on to ask "Do/people, anymore, even say helmsman?" raising the possibility that this knowledge of the trusted natural forces of the psyche could be lost. Only in his nighttime reflections beyond the usual structures of the day does the speaker get access to their wisdom and power.

Thought in this poem comes in waves, and the speaker's next reflection is that he thinks about how everything in this landscape is "in waves, or at least wave-like", and launches into an extended metaphor comparing the ocean's waves to waves of suffering in two figures. The first one discusses the situation "when another's/suffering, being greater, displaces our own", while the second discusses the pleasure that comes from "witnessing from land/a ship foundering at sea". Call the first one the empathetic response and the second a masochistic one: in one of Phillips' signature syntactic complications he acknowledges that the two responses are "meant to be/different", but that "more and more/it all seems related". To an Epicurean like the poet Lucretius, perhaps the pleasure of the wave-like play of emotion takes precedence over the proper attitude we are dutifully supposed to feel. The speaker seems comfortable with his not-knowing, with the connections he finds in his reflections.

The complexities of emotion and morality give way to simple, straightforward statement in line 17, with "I love the nights here". Auditorally, the phase "nights here" turns into "ghost-finger" on line 18, a mysterious way of describing the jetty. The "fog hanging stranded" on line 19 continues to permute with these sounds, and the mystery of the fog takes on some of the mystery of the night. The speaker starts to explore the question of whether the surroundings could be seen for themselves instead of as an allegory for an emotional landscape, playing with the idea that the fog could be just "fog, finally". But the intricate image he compares the fog to seems so much more compelling that the reader feels certain that the speaker still sees the fog this way, at least to some extent:

how the fog hanging stranded just above the water is fog, finally, not the left-behind       parts of those questions from which I half wish I could school my mind, desperate cargo, to keep a little distance.

Perhaps the speaker once felt the fog served that role and he has gotten over it, or perhaps he still wrestles with it now; he has almost certainly seen the fog at some point as so many "left-behind/parts of those questions".

It is certain, too, that there has been change in the speaker's experience, perhaps even growth. The penultimate image starting on line 23 is of an "old map". This map stands for the speaker's old way of seeing things, where there were "monsters/everywhere, once the shore gives out". The speaker has transitioned to a new way of seeing and feeling, since then, but "it can still/feel like that". When it does, the monsters feel like "watery pallbearers" and the speaker himself is a "raft they steady". The monsters function as the star once did for the helmsman, guiding the speaker when there is nothing else to guide him. Even though he still perceives monsters, there is a curiosity and aliveness that the speaker radiates when uttering those lines—a curiosity that was likely not there in the days of the old fear-drawn map. The speaker has grown into a psychological space where he can interact with the night's emotional landscape with curiosity and love even amidst the difficulty and complexity that still lies there.

[largemaxa]

Dharma and Social Constructions

The world is in the grip of a set of waves of social change that we term the "culture war": individuals and groups disagree about the way that society should function in areas from treatment of minorities to economic inequality to gun rights. A frequently invoked idea in many these debates is the concept of "social construction" imported from academia. This is the idea that behaviors or forms of knowledge, rather than being based on empirical reality, are constructed by society. For example, consider the behavior of men and women. The social constructionist theory says that there is no behavior that is essentially male or female; rather, society organizes approved ways of acting for men and women and expects them to conform. One side of culture war belligerents draws the conclusion that if someone does not want to conform to those approved ways of acting, they should not have to, because there is no inherent basis for those rules besides arbitrary social convention. The other side usually responds that societally given arrangements are "natural", and are not arbitrary. Since science is the most prestigious method of justification in society today, this conservative tendency often looks to root answers in biology in order to be able to show that the established way of doing things really is "natural".

The concept of dharma can help to shed light on this issue. Dharma is the essential law of being of any given thing—animal or mineral, human or nonhuman. Dharma is often interpreted as pertaining specifically to societally prescribed responsibilities, or duties. But the law of nature that is dharma does not simply consist of the duties that someone must fulfill. To view dharma in terms of duties is a degenerate interpretation that reduces an entire way of living to a series of obligations; acts such as breathing and dancing are part of the dharma of a human just as his or her job responsibilities. The nature of dharma can perhaps be seen most clearly during times when dharma changes such as in major societal transformations where existing dharmas fray and people search for new ideas and ways of life. For example, during the hippie era, millions of young people felt that the previous way of life of 1950's America, commonly understood as staid and repressed, were no longer working for them and looked for a new dharma, finding new ways of being in their attitudes towards work, conscription, sexuality, music, and fashion. (Their search was preceded by the beatniks who searched for new ways of being in jazz, poetry, and Zen in the heart of the 1950's themselves.) A clear contrast can then be seen in the dharma of the 1950's and the hippie dharma.

It is tempting to say that dharmas are simply socially constructed and have no empirical reality. But this misses the key principle that the socially constructed prescription is not the same as dharma itself, even if they often line up; in the final analysis, dharma can only be known by the individual. That is, society may tell the individual how they are expected to behave, but only the individual knows whether that is the true dharma which applies to them. If a given pattern of living is so outworn that it appears to the individual as an arbitrary social construction that gives no joy, then it should, in fact, be replaced; this is what happened when the hippies rejected the 1950's lifestyle. But if the societal prescriptions still retain life and vitality, they should and will be accepted. Social constructionists note that identities are enacted through "performances"—maleness or femaleness, for example, are effects that are produced by a person acting in a masculine or feminine way. From the point of dharma, however, the question is whether performing the performance is stimulating to the soul; if it is not, it is time to find a new performance, wherever that may come from.

By adopting the perspective of dharma, the need to root the justification for behaviors in some anterior essence, such as biology, is seen as unnecessary. The problem with the drive to root behaviors in nature is that nature, too, can and will be able to be changed as science progresses. From the perspective of dharma, what matters is the soul's consent to the pattern of thought, behavior, and even physical nature that it is presented with.

A problem comes in because refusing to cooperate with established dharmas is interpreted as adharma, which can be seen as sinfulness or the absence of virtue. A charge of adharma often occurs when an individual makes a choice that they feel aligns with their personal dharma while it conflicts with others' view as to that individual's dharma. There is no objective criterion that dictates who is right in this situation, the individual or society—there are only precedents and principles which may be used to provide a guide to judgment, but reasonable judgments ultimately still may differ. This is why the Gita says that it is better to perish following your own dharma than to succeed while following another's dharma. There is ultimately no way to prove that you are following the right dharma to anyone else, and you may have to accept the consequence that you are judged as committing adharma, which can bring significant negative consequences.

This leads to the possibility of the unfortunate situation where individuals who follow their own individual guiding light are punished by society for following disapproved ideas. This can and does happen, as society is inherently more conservative than the individual and is only able to make general allowances for the most typical behavior. But there is a mechanism for making this situation somewhat less brutal, which is that is that society is able to update its ideas. If a certain number of individuals are viewed as committing adharma for the same reason, it is possible for society to look at them, reassess, and realize that in fact they are following a valid dharmic movement. This change may not be easy or peaceful and may even require conflict, but it is a pattern that is seen many times in history. An example is the recognition of homosexuality as a valid pattern of life, at least in the most progressive societies. Homosexuality was once regarded as an adharmic state, but thanks to the work of organizers and changing societal attitudes, it was recognized that it is in fact a natural condition. In this way the collective societal idea of dharma was updated, and it became possible for homosexuals to follow their nature in a socially approved way. Here, we see that social constructions can be responsive to change and update themselves according to new conditions just as individuals do.

In light of the concept of dharma, we can reassess what it means to be progressive or conservative without demanding either the overthrow or arbitrary preservation of all socially constructed standards. The true function of a progressive prescription is to point out that a given dharma has become outmoded and is in need of repair or replacement—even if there is no time-tested replacement for it yet. The true function of a conservative prescription is to point out that a given dharma needs to be preserved because still reflects the nature of things and needs to be respected—even if its value is not rationally understood. Together, the progressive and conservative negotiate their way around the true dharma, which is found at the point where the individual soul makes its choice to be itself.

[largemaxa]

The Divine Work

The world was created as an outflow of God's energies. The purpose of the world is to work through the innumerable potentialities contained within God's infinite expanse and bring out that which most fully expresses the Divine. The physical world is not the only part of the manifestation; there are other, subtler planes of existence that are just as filled with activity as this plane is. But the solidity of the physical world means that planets with fixed orbits and canyons that slowly erode rivers can be created here. Physical matter allows us to create skyscrapers that stand and don't collapse. It allows for stable human bodies that can have sensations and acquire durable knowledge.

God works in the world to bring about his purpose. That means that everything we see in the world is part of God's plan—governments, human relationships, the natural environment. These are all are parts of God's plan; everything here is an expression of God. What does it mean for something to be an expression of God? Everything is a portion or an aspect of God; everything serves some function of God. For example, the military expresses God's capacity for power and protection. God is powerful enough to defend that which is worthy of being defended. Factories express God's capacity for production and abundance. God is endlessly generative, producing everything that is necessary to meet the needs of the world. The world of fashion expresses God's concern with beauty and appearance and the changes that come with time.

The challenge of the world is that all of these different aspects need to be harmonized. Thus these "expressions" can also be seen as "forces" that God is working out to meet his purposes. Sometimes these forces are large and even terrifying. For example, each country can be seen to be working out a force of God. The entire economy can be seen to be the force of God in action, with each person using their capacities to increase the store of possibilities in the world. But conflicts between these forces—between governments or economic interests—can be huge and terrifying for the individual humans caught between them. Only in the widest possible view do they make sense as expressions of God.

But in our normal perception, the world is just what it is: a rock is a rock, a table is a table, and a chair is a chair. The objects of the mundane world do not appear to be charged with any particular glory or signature of their maker. Generally, the world and its objects appear mundane: there are paper clips, small mammals, glue guns, asteroids seen from telescopes, and so on. None of them inherently telegraphs the fact that they are created by God. It's usually only in moments of extreme grandeur or beauty—such as when faced by a natural landscape or emotional passion like the love of a family member—that we can conceive of God. But God is here, working, nonetheless. Of all the things that God could create, why would he choose to create something so ordinary? It could only be that the Lord created the world because of a secret that could only be revealed through its creation.

Just what is this hidden perfection, this secret yet grand purpose that God is working to in the world? It is not possible for anyone to claim absolute or detailed knowledge of what will happen in this world; as the last few years have shown, we have little ability to know what will happen even a year or two from now. But one way of understanding it is an expression of the Divine Perfection on Earth, a perfect world created in physical matter. In the world, at a human level, this at the minimum would be a world of peace and harmony, where the issues of poverty and suffering are alleviated. The beings within this world would be perfect themselves with perfect knowledge, perfection in beauty, harmony, and expression, dwelling in a state of bliss.

But in truth, the actual contents of this world are far beyond our ability to imagine. We don't know what specifically what the content of that perfect world might consist of. For example, in our current state most of our actions are taken with the intent of solving some problem; what would goals look like in a world where the same problems that motivated our actions cease to exist?

Rather than dwell too exactly on what that endpoint is, it's much better to simply focus on the task at hand, which is to do our own spiritual practice, which is the most effective way of helping the Divine Will come about. This focus on individual practice isn't just for the sake of pragmatism: it's also because our specific visions are likely to be too mundane. When asked to provide visions of the future, our most imaginative minds have come up with the visions of science fiction, which history has shown is not a way to get accurate predictions about the future. For one who knows and loves God, the hints and intuitions we receive about the future state show us something that in its grandeur goes far beyond the efficient logistical provision of food, adequate roads and sewers, or even the most glorious architecture that has yet been seen. We don't know exactly what the future will look like, but based on the glimmers that we do see and feel, we trust that God will not disappoint.

[largemaxa]

Getting on the Spiritual Path

Our affluent, technologically advanced society offers more options to more people than were available at any other time in history (—at least before the restrictions of the covid-19 pandemic). We have been able to travel to worldwide to both cities and rainforests, have exotic cuisines delivered to our door, experience the novel sensations of jumping out of airplanes and diving underneath the sea, access the best movies and music from across the centuries at a click of a button from digital archives, and experience the thrill of creating unprecedented new technologies to revolutionize communications, logistics, and defense. With all these choices, why would we take the trouble to concern ourselves with a distant, hypothetical, and immaterial possibility like the spiritual path to God?

Our most advanced knowledge and science cannot say anything definitive about God, perhaps no more than was already written in dusty books millennia ago. This science, with its bombs, data centers, and transportation systems, wields all of its power without the need for any appeal to an omniscient being or supernatural agency. Prometheus needed to steal fire from the Gods, but we unlock the gate to technological power ourselves; though we may need to navigate the obstacle course of advanced science and mathematics to get to it, there are no supernatural guardians at the threshold.

In the face of all these manifold possibilities, what could possibly interest us in God? We are no longer compelled by social pressure to show up at churches or other places of worship or participate in organized religion in any way. The secular world does not reinforce the spiritual path at all either—newspapers, television shows, and celebrities usually don't prompt us to turn inward, and it's a curiosity when they do. Only if we feel the call of the spirit will the fruits of the spirit come to us. But what does it take to have this call for the spirit? Is it only the lucky few who feel a need that only God can fill?

The Initial Opening

In truth, not everyone will feel this call. Even those who nominally practice a religion or hold a vague spiritual belief system will not necessarily feel a deep call to seek for and know God. And there are different ways of making sense of this fact—the Calvinists believed that all those who are meant to be found and saved by God are decided in advance, with no role for individual volition; another explanation is found in theories about reincarnation where people spend multiple lifetimes chasing lower, more purely human desires and only in later rebirths do they turn to the spirit. There is no need to consider any explanations here, though the reader may note that the act of reading this essay probably already indicates at least some interest in spiritual matters. Anyone who gets this far and decides to investigate the spiritual path further has made a deliberate choice. So we'll just concern ourselves with the question of what exactly it is that makes someone turn to God and how they do so.

For better or worse, one of the major ways that people are drawn into the spiritual life is through misfortune. In times of misfortune, our external means fail, and our internal means—the way we see the world, our methods of coping—fail as well. During trials and ordeals, those who had never thought about praying to a higher being may find themselves entertaining the possibility of a loving God, a source of infinite compassion who would hear and heal their anguish; those who had believed in God but took his support for granted may find themselves deliberately seeking him out where they hadn't before, wanting refuge. When everything is taken away in the outer life, they may find that God is the only real source of hope, solace, salvation, and stability. God is the great consoler, and this method of finding the call of God does make sense.

Misfortune is not the only route that leads people to God. There is also a positive way—perhaps an individual may not feel that anything is "wrong" with their life, but they have an opening or experience that makes them feel that some greater, vaster, grander possibility opens up than anything they have previously known in normal life—a new intensity of happiness or bliss, a sense of a light or presence. This could be the result of an inspiring concert, seeing the beauty of a national park, or just a deep feeling of connectedness with the world. In truth, these sorts of experiences are miniature spiritual experiences and the right one at the right time can expand our worldview and lead us to the spiritual path.

Then there is also the path of philosophical or existential questioning. For most people engaged with the practicalities of the struggles of life, this does not come up. But for a curious and penetrating mind—one who really questions and wonders—there are not many satisfactory answers to questions like "how did we come to be here having this earthly experience?" and "what is the real purpose of this life?" Why is it that we really need to have the job, the relationship—what is the real significance in the end? Beyond the mere fact of social proof, consensus, and convention, are there any intellectually and psychologically satisfying answers to these questions? The field of philosophy attempts to provide principled answers to these questions—and spiritual philosophy in particular provides its own set of answers that supports the spiritual path. Though spirituality is not the only answer to questioning, nor is it proven by any special airtight logic, the path of questioning can still frequently lead to the spiritual path.

But not everyone who undergoes trials and misfortunes feels the need to open up to God—after all, everyone goes through trials in the course of human life, and many atheists feel that their atheism suits them perfectly well to see them through it. By the same token, everyone has peak experiences and not everyone needs to turn to God. And the path of philosophical questioning could lead us to more mental philosophizing, nihilism, or even a recoil from philosophy and a focus on a simple, rational healthy life—it need not lead inevitably to spirituality. All of these situations may provide initial conditions and circumstances, but none of them are absolutely causally decisive. What is ultimately decisive is the call of the soul, and this can happen within any sorts of circumstances at all, be they apparently positive or negative.

In the face of this call, the powers, pleasures, and distractions of the modern world are not enough. But those of us drawn to spiritual seeking in the modern world are actually not the first people to feel this way: the circumstances of life have left many before us asking questions and yearning as well. There has been no absolutely convincing rational argument found that will suffice to answer this yearning or questioning. If we look at the case like a lawyer, casting around for evidence in favor or against, it's debatable whether there will be an absolute affirmation of God; the structures of logic and thought are not sufficient to prove this on their own.

It is not through the reason, whether pure or applied, that the entry point to the spiritual path can be found. In fact, the only way that the spiritual path will open to you is if there is some sort of opening in one's consciousness—some experience or intuition that tells you that the claims of a higher spiritual reality might really be possible. We won't find the true spiritual vision unless we yearn for it, unless we feel it as a deep need of our being. There are material and emotional rewards that come from life: success, relationships, even a feeling of contributing to serving others; these are not enough for someone who has felt the call of their soul. But while the call of the soul may alter our relationship to some of the world's structures, the call of the soul usually still needs to be met by the world in certain key ways that give the soul the context needed to walk the spiritual path.

The Context of the Spiritual Path

When we enter the spiritual path, we do not do so in a vacuum. We set out on the spiritual path from a determinate place in our lives: the particularities of a life in a certain country on a certain place on the earth, at a time when we are involved with certain relationships, when we are at a certain point in our schooling or career; moreover, these lives are contained within an entire history stretching back from our own life to encompass the history of our culture, the cultures around it, the culture that came before it, stretching all the way back to the entire story of humanity. That means that there is a history and way of understanding that is already known to us before we deliberately enter the spiritual path. And this history will affect how we enter the path.

No matter how modern our thinking, we are led to the question of God at least in part because we have come in contact with a truth that has been passed down from before. In our society we are already embedded in a stream of religious discourse: we have always known that there is a being called God, or at least a hypothesis of such a being, and have known that other people speak about such a being and even take steps to pursue him. We know that it's a possible aim for people to pursue, regardless if we believed in the truth of that aim. It doesn't matter how prominently the message is disseminated throughout society or whether we ourselves believed it when we first heard it—the important and relevant part is that the mind is aware that there is some such thing as wisdom or truth of God and the possibility of finding it. This sets up a latent field of possibility in our mind, and when we ourselves have an opening into the possibility and the desire of spirituality through whatever set of circumstances perturb our stasis, we are able to tap into this stream of knowledge that has already been left for us.

One of the things that this field of knowledge lets us do is enable us to classify our initial spiritual thoughts and experiences as having to do with this domain of human knowledge. Without the preexisting framework of spiritual knowledge, it would be difficult to relate our specific experiences at the time of the spiritual opening to even the idea of spiritual knowledge at all. The experiences that occur at the time of the spiritual opening are usually non-ordinary when compared to the events of normal life: there may be unfamiliar thoughts, feelings, and even unusual sensations like visions, lights, or unusual sensations in the body. But when contextualized and structured by preexisting spiritual discourse, these unexpected individual psychological experiences can be connected back to the larger stream of human experience.

The person who turns to God while going through a difficult experience does not invent the concept of a benevolent omnipotent being from whole cloth. Rather, they have heard about God as a possibility in their past, and perhaps are counseled by a friend who has faith that God will hear their prayers. Similarly, the person who turns to spiritual seeking after a peak experience with nature or art knows that others have spoken of the connection between these experiences and the Divine. Without this knowledge to concretely connect their experience to the spiritual quest, it would stay known mostly as a positive experience with nature and not go beyond that. And then, of course, there many people whose first knowledge of the Divine comes from doctrines of organized religion explicitly handed down from the time of early childhood.

Especially when we are starting out on the spiritual path, it is impossible to separate what we personally know about God from what has been said of God; this remains true for a long time until we have more definitive firsthand experience. Even if we do not believe—or even trust—those who have passed their word onto us, the thoughts and experiences they have left in writing and indirectly through the influences on existing human communities already frame the discourse. For most, it will be hard to stake out a new position among the debates of the theists, the mystics, and the nonbelievers stretching back through millennia. Even the great religious reformers, such as Jesus, Buddha, and Luther, had doctrines that were deeply shaped by the doctrines that came before them.

This is not to say that we are bound to the knowledge of the past without the possibility of exceeding it; rather, I simply mean to emphasize the positive function that the knowledge of the past inevitably plays in the spiritual transition. Early in our spiritual quest, we may have a certain indication, an intuition, a perception of voice or a light. How do we know that it means anything? We know because we have access to spiritual discourse that tells us that these are signs of God—we've heard before that people have been visited by similar experiences, or we hear about a popular book that discusses them. If it was not for the access to spiritual discourse, we might never know to interpret our inner experiences in a spiritual way at all. Perhaps we'd see them as psychological quirks and hassles; perhaps we'd even view them as totally meaningless sensations. Even the experience of God himself pointing us towards the right path could be disregarded; many rational and scientific people may be inclined to dismiss this as a hallucination.

Structurally, getting on the spiritual path can be seen as navigating a juncture between worlds, where some opening experience joins us to the world of spiritual experience. And once we are in the world of spiritual experience, we are inextricably bound up with the history of man's spiritual search for our basic concepts and orientation. This does not mean that we are restricted to only the knowledge and experiences that have come before. But it does mean that that knowledge structures the way we think about the spiritual path. When we enter the spiritual path, we need to figure out how to interpret our own experience in the context of the testimony and knowledge left from the past along with all the other possibilities seen around us—cultural attitudes, philosophical ideas, trends, activities and occupations. It's impossible to disregard this past even if we tried, because our very concepts come from the past. But this past gives us the starting point and context of our possibilities on the spiritual path, rather than serving to simply delimit our horizon.

[largemaxa]

Devotion Without Religion

Devotion to God has been at the figurative heart of man's religious and spiritual quest for millennia. Saints and texts alike have spoken of man's love for God, God's love for man, and the ecstasy that comes from realizing that love within oneself. But we live in a rational and secular age, and the path of devotion has been de-emphasized. When we admit to having spiritual urges at all, we often speak of the search for peace, with its main route being through meditation. When the emotions are engaged in the spiritual search, they are directed towards aims like self-actualization and healing. Actual devotion—the practice of love, worship, and prayer—is viewed as misguided at best, and dangerous at worst.

It is not at all clear how to reconcile the path of devotion with the independent spiritual path. This is because the way of devotion is associated with the worst aspects of religion, such as irrationalism and fanaticism. The argument goes that only a force like religious devotion is able to lead otherwise intelligent people to embrace the irrational aspects of religion, such as beliefs that contradict mainstream science, or partisanship that rejects or persecutes those who hold differing religious opinions. Therefore, for the modern reformer of spiritual seeking, devotion with its irrational emotional intensity is the force that must be excised when we go to recover what is good about spirituality.

But it's unfair to blame religious devotion for all the problems that the emotions bring to man. On one hand, emotional attachments can lead to fanaticism even without a religious component, as we see in the case of nationalist passion. And on the other hand, as we learn more about man's psychology, we see increasingly that emotional attachments are a key factor that keeps human life and society running. In his treatise The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama points to research that shows that man was always involved in social and political groupings held together by emotional ties and was never in a solitary state of nature. Modern psychology emphasizes the fact that human relationships are essential for mental health. Even in the hard-nosed field of business management, ever since the publication of In Search of Excellence by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, it has been acknowledged that emotional factors like pride in one's work and the joy of serving the customer, as opposed to the rational pursuit of wealth alone, are crucial for success in business.

Therefore, we can't rule out the engagement of the emotions in spirituality solely on the basis of the negative aspects of religion. And while it may seem easier to leave the emotions to the adjacent fields of mental health or business success coaching, the essential connection between engaging the emotions and the search for the Divine cannot be neglected indefinitely. Most people would never be able to undertake an endeavor as difficult as the search for the Divine, not even on the austere path of formless meditation, without a strong emotional connection to the path. And once we admit the possibility of engaging the emotions, we must also admit that deepening that emotional connection to God is one of the most accessible and powerful paths to God.

Devotion to Forms, Abstract and Concrete

The contemporary understanding of God does not allow us to easily see how to do this. Because of the aversion to the religious approach to God, which is caricatured as propitiating a stern old man in the sky, the contemporary tendencies are to either view God as a pure abstraction, a powerful deity but one who is ultimately unknowable in a human way, or otherwise to deny that there is a God in the sense of a conscious being, imagining only an abstract energy. If those two conceptions of God exhausted the reality of God, that still wouldn't necessarily mean that the path of devotion is impossible—after all, such abstractions as a flag, nation, or business organization are all able to command sustained emotional commitment and sacrifice. But it remains true that devotion to tangible forms is a powerful practice—the practice which gives religious devotion its power and which makes the modern spiritual reformer wary.

One interesting thing to note is that just because we find the approach of devotion to concrete forms problematic doesn't make those forms of God any less real. The modern reformer takes God to be an abstract energy because it would be distasteful to worship God in the specific form of Krishna or Christ; but if God really does take the form of Krishna or Christ, the opinions of the modern reformer wouldn't matter. Of course, the modern reformer would hold that there is no specific evidence for God having the form of Krishna or Christ either. Still, if we are open to the idea of devotion at all, we must hold out the possibility of the validity of the recognized forms of God; after all, any argument that discounts the God of specific religious forms could easily be modified to discount the formless and abstract God as well.

But whether we admit traditional forms of God or only abstract forms, the problem for those on the independent spiritual path remains as to how we are to pursue a path of devotion that avoids the trap of the religious approach of exclusivity, irrationalism, and fanaticism. It's hard to see what the options are, but if we are clear eyed we can see that there are only so many possibilities. One is to preserve the old gods of the religions, but to try our best not to get stuck in the religious traps. This approach would acknowledge that there is an unknowable mystique around the forms of God that have been handed down, and that it is not possibly to synthetically come up with a new form or abstraction which can command the same reverence or devotion. In this approach, the heart would be devoted to Christ or Krishna without participating in the other social and institutional structures of organized religion. The danger of this option is that it will slide too far to the faults of the old religious mentality. After all, if the revered forms of God are worth preserving because of their irreplaceable essence, why shouldn't the associated religious practices and social forms be viewed as similarly meritorious? It may not be clear how to extract devotion to these forms of God from concrete religious practice.

A second approach would be to channel devotion to human gurus. There are obvious problems are here as well, and they may even seem to be worse than the problems with the previous option. Namely, this option could lead to personality cults, which are regarded as the worse and more extreme than even religious institutions. If an individual human is loved and regarded as God, they may feel as though they are granted absolute power, which no human being should have. Further, it is not clear whether anyone currently existing on earth is worthy of being placed in this position. What makes this opportunity worth considering, though, is that the human guru provides a target for the devotional impulse that is tangible without relying only on the classical forms of the religions. And in an ideal world, there might be enough spiritual masters and gurus that would make this a legitimate outlet for the devotional impulses of the spiritual seekers.

A third approach would be to reserve the devotional impulse for the forms and institutions of human life as they are: the family, the nation, various secular and religious institutions. This approach would powerfully ground spiritual seeking in the structures of everyday life. The problem with this approach is that even though the human affections can work effectively through these human organizations, it is not clear if the highest form of religious devotion could flow through these mundane channels. A fourth option would be not to try to send the religious devotional impulse towards any forms or structures at all, and instead to focus on revering the abstract forms of God instead. This approach would seem to at least avoid the problems of the earlier methods in principle, though in practice one may wonder if the human heart could really love an abstraction. The modern reformer or critic may hold that any effectiveness of the concrete forms for devotion is still too big of a risk, and that man will have to learn to love the abstract. But it must be noted that even movements with aniconic policies or tendencies have had trouble with fanaticism.

It may seem like there are no good options for how to safely direct the devotional impulse: either there is the option of a cold abstraction that doesn't inspire devotion, or otherwise the problems that come with emotional attachments to people, forms, or institutions that are not fit to bear the pressure of being loved as God. But there is a subtle shift of framing we can use to open another option. In options one through four, we assumed that we were disconnected from God and needed to find the right way to connect with him; if we didn't find it, we might be disconnected forever. In this way of thinking, the old religions may have had a channel through their various forms, and if we can't use their channel as it was initially set up, we could lose access to God completely.

But we don't need to make that assumption. We can assume instead that we already have a relationship with God, and from there assume that we will be guided to the right devotional channels when the time is right. This is a fifth, all-encompassing option that gives us not a simple answer for how we should direct our devotional impulse but rather a way of living that will dynamically channel our devotion. The specific devotional forms may be different at different times; and they may include some of the options from above that may seem "dangerous" for their proximity to religious methods, such as the use of older religious forms of God, devotion to human spiritual teachers or institutions, or the sanctification of human relationships like the family, romantic love, or friendship. But as long as we keep in mind that our relationship with God is prior to any given form of him that we are devoted to, we will be relatively safe as we negotiate the shifting tendencies of devotional spiritual practice.

A Devotional Relationship to God

The possibility of a devotional practice in the contemporary era requires that we have a relationship with God that is prior to any specific form of God, and use that as a basis for devotional relationship to various forms of God. But what is this relationship with God? This may seem like an impossible query. How can a human have a relationship with God, the creator of the entire universe? We are used to relationships with our fellow humans; these relationships are characterized by mutual support, or antagonism, or indifference. Assuming God is a real being, we have a relationship with Him, just as we have relationships with our fellow humans on Earth; if it doesn't seem like we have a relationship with Him, that just means that our relationship is characterized by ignorance, or perhaps worse, indifference, just as so many of our relationships with humans are.  

The first step to improving this relationship is to acknowledge that God exists and try to be more open to Him. The first step in improving a human relationship is to listen more, to be more attentive; so it is with God. We do this by being quiet and listening for what God has to say to us. But what if God says nothing? In that case, we might feel that our relationship with Him is characterized by abandonment—as with a child whose father or mother has left. In an adult relationship with God, though, there can be no question of abandonment; we must realize that the issue is not with us or with God but with the limits of our human finitude, our ability to hear. So if God seems quiet, we must trust and wait for His voice to be heard more clearly, whether that takes a day, or a week, or even many years. A relationship with God must take into account the type of being that God is, which means understanding God as a being that works on timescales that are vaster than ours are; we cannot be upset if he doesn't immediately answer us as we might expect a human relationship partner to return our texts and calls on the same day. The relationship with God is not a relationship between humans but rather a relationship between a human and the all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving creator of the universe. We must trust his timing, and we must trust that the circumstances he arranges for us are the best ones for us to be in.

We must be present in our relationship with God just as we stay present in a relationship with a human, being open and listening and staying connected; only then does the possibility of insight and trust open up. We don't need to start with trust—we simply need to start with staying connected. As we communicate and listen, the forms that we need to interact with God will be suggested, whether these are human relationships in our life that are symbols of the Divine, or are ancient forms of the Divine that have been revered through the ages and find a renewed relevance for us, or are the beloved forms of spiritual teachers that come into our lives. By following the path that opens up, we find the forms that are needed to practice the path of devotion. Even in this modern era that has identified the problems with religion without providing a replacement, if we trust the spiritual path that unfolds, the heart will still be able to fulfill its desire for the Love of the Divine.

[largemaxa]

Spiritual Progress

The modern period of our history has been characterized by the idea of progress. Exponents of the idea of progress, such as Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, note that science is able to cure ever more diseases, the economic benefits of prosperity are distributed amongst a greater fraction of the population, and the world grows increasingly more peaceful, and argue that this means that our society has discovered the key to human flourishing in the idea of progress. There are others who would hold that progress is a "myth"—an idea that structures our interpretations but does not correspond in any absolute sense to reality. There are increasing concerns that the Western idea of progress was true for Western society through the twentieth century but may no longer hold: real advances in science and technology could be stagnating behind superficial innovations, and the economy may have reached a dead end underneath propped-up stock prices. Further, it is always possible that whatever progress occurred took place for reasons that we don't fully understand, and could end as quickly as it began.

Beyond this debate about the secular concept of progress, there is a more solid foundation available for progress that does not depend on our economy or machines or anything external to ourselves. That is the idea of spiritual progress. In the frame of spiritual progress, we focus on those things which move our spirit forward along the march towards God. That may overlap with the secular meaning of progress at times—after all, the progress of science and technology has been a wonderful example of the progress of God. But spiritual progress doesn't need to coincide with secular or material ideas of progress, as it is ultimately an inner criterion. 

But if spiritual progress does not align with the usual scientific and economic ideas of progress, how are we to know where to look for it? The clearest way to understand spiritual progress is to understand its opposite. The opposite of spiritual progress is spiritual stagnation—the attitude that does not care about improvement or getting better and is content to leave things as they are without any expenditure of energy or effort. Spiritual progress in whatever direction requires determined and passionate effort. But this cannot be haphazardly applied energy, in the manner of a person who goes on a whirlwind effort of hasty work that doesn't truly accomplish anything. Progress is attained through energy directed through intelligent effort. (In the terminology of Indian spiritual philosophy, we would say that the opposite of progress is tamas, the quality of laziness and sloth, while progress is attained by sattva, the balanced intelligence, guiding rajas, or forceful energy.)

With this clarification, we can see why the idea of progress is characteristically modern. The ideal of progress has been prominent in the modern period where the mind has been free to try to improve life—in contrast to the ages where life was governed by religious superstition and aristocratic privilege as in the Middle Ages. In such periods, there is no possibility of the mind improving the state of life because its attempts are shot down by the rigid prevailing orthodoxies and social structures.

At the same time, the essence of spiritual progress is not quite the same as the modern secular idea of progress because of the role of the mind. In a spiritual view, the mind is a high faculty, but it is not the highest possible guide; higher and more valuable than the mind's ideas are the purely spiritual faculties like the soul's guidance and the spiritual intuition. In the secular concept of progress, the mind identifies the directions that progress should take and then carries out the necessary experiments; in the concept of spiritual progress, it is the soul or spiritual intuition that determines the necessary direction of the progress, and the mind comes into play more as an executive force carrying out the direction. This is because the mind cannot judge what is the true direction for progress; it can make its calculations about the relative tradeoffs of, say, health, prosperity, effectiveness, and so on, but cannot come to a definitive answer. The soul and spiritual intuition are able to directly perceive the true values and order them, and thereby provide an assured basis for directing progress.

However, the results of the soul's attempts at spiritual progress may not be as outwardly impressive as the mind's attempts because the soul may attempt to progress in infinitely many directions, not all of which are equally apparent to the mind. The conquest of a psychological deficiency like anger is a valid direction of spiritual progress, but may not seem as impressive as the launch of a rocket; however, it is only the soul that is able to properly judge which has the most truly progressive value between the two things. In addition to the conquest of psychological deficiencies, any skill is an opportunity for progress given the right attitude; activities such as fishing, programming, pottery, business management, and caregiving all become avenues for spiritual progress through gaining skill and perfecting oneself when they are undertaken with the proper spiritual attitude. For a spiritual progressive endeavor, it is important to link the truly spiritual motive for progress to the activity so that it is the soul in charge of the progress. The soul seeks for light, love, and God in the progress, as opposed to the lower ego motive, which seeks for personal reward and self-aggrandizement.

If spiritual progress can be along any possible direction, how should one decide how to move forward? One way is to follow the trend of one's own nature. Each person's nature has the seeds of future development and progress already latent: a person's natural or developed skills, talents, and interests provide the seeds of further growth. The difficulty is to make sure that one is not being spiritually stagnant by settling for one's limitations. That's why a second method is to try progress along the lines of one's weaknesses. The earlier mentioned example of addressing psychological defects is in line with this method. A last method is to look not at the self but at humanity's efforts at progress as a whole and try to collaborate with them. By paying attention, one can determine trends in humanity's progressive efforts, and by trying to align with them, one will naturally progress along with the other people on that path. For example, information technology still has vast potential for making changes in our world, and individuals interested in spiritual progress can use this opportunity to collaborate with others in business and research efforts to help humanity make progress while progressing on their individual level as well. The danger with this method is, of course, following the herd too much; this method should not be used if the cost is sacrificing too much of one's individuality.

One difficulty on the path of spiritual progress is that progress can be difficult to measure. Ultimately, unlike the world of science and technology, spiritual progress cannot have a system of precise measurement. But this doesn't mean that spiritual progress is a notion that belongs to an earlier age where religious superstition ruled and man didn't have objective ways of assessing and measuring things. Spiritual progress equally requires the freedom and zest for improvement that came about in the modern age. Further, what the modern age has given us is the name and ideal of progress itself that lets us identify spiritual progress and other kinds of progress. As such, spiritual progress is equally a product of the modern age. In this light, one of the most valuable things that science and technology have given adherents of spiritual progress is a set of intuitions about what progress looks like; seeing the launch of a rocket or the whirring of a large data center will make it hard to forget what real progress is, and will serve as an inspiration and guide on our own paths of spiritual progress.  

[largemaxa]

Spiritual Groups

Spiritual practice on the independent spiritual path is one of the activities that has the potential to be most individual in its pursuit. This is because of an axiom of spiritual practice that runs contrary the usual human social tendency: the soul is one with God, and this has absolute importance, as opposed to the social bonds that make up the rest of life, which have only relative importance. However, even if the soul communes privately with God, or even if human contact has been cut to a minimum in a monastic setting, so long as the soul is alive on Earth, it is also in touch with Nature, the outside world. And while one is in touch with the outside world, it is best to try to arrange one's circumstances so as to be most favorable to one's spiritual quest. If there is a suitable ashram or monastery that meets the ideological requirements and life situation of the seeker, and is well suited to their personality, then they should feel lucky to be able to pursue that avenue. But most seekers in this world, especially at this time when traditional institutions are being questioned and are having their societal and material bases of support tested, do not have this opportunity. That doesn't mean that the seeker has to do without the possibility of a supportive structure for the spiritual path, however. There is also the opportunity to have spiritual growth by finding a suitable spiritual group of independent spiritual practitioners. Ultimately there is no way to escape the fact that the individual must approach God alone on the spiritual path, but spiritual groups allow for fellowship, support, and faster advance. 

A spiritual group brings together like-minded seekers in a way that supports their development. There are a few main components that make up the spiritual group. First, there must be a collection of individual seekers. These seekers could find each other via a bulletin board announcement, through an online organizing platform like meetup.com, by congregating around a the writings of an author that are disseminated in books or on the internet, or even by forming subgroup or splinter group from a larger organization; any way that human organizations form could be a viable method of bringing together a specifically spiritual organization. Most readers of this article will find that some of the work has been done already, as there are countless spiritual groups already formed and waiting for members. But if a suitable group does not yet exist, you can try to create one yourself. The group also need an activity to do together at regular intervals, as humans need structures through which they can interact to be productive and comfortable. Common activities include participating in a spiritual practice like hatha yoga or meditation, discussion sessions about spiritual topics or principles, and recreational activities like hiking. 

The benefits of a spiritual group come from the mutual energetic interchange of members. Though individual spiritual practice is important, it can be stabilized and accelerated by interacting with others in a spiritual setting. As one negative benefit, group interactions provide the opportunity for members to check their egos. Interactions with others inevitably show us where we fall short by feeling irritation, jealousy, anger, superiority, inferiority, or any number of other psychological defects. In the group, these defects come up in a safe, spiritual setting that is somewhat removed from the world, providing an opportunity to deactivate and change the pattern more easily than in a setting that is harsh, competitive, or does not allow for spiritual understanding such as the normal work or family environments. On the positive side, the group setting allows opportunities for knowledge sharing, encouragement, and emotional bonding. This mutual feeling can raise to as high of a level as the individuals are willing to experience—even to that state of oneness which goes by the name of "love". This is a loaded term in our culture, and it can be safer to think in terms that are less charged, like "fraternity" or "solidarity". But one should not be blind to the fact that the sense of solidarity felt by fellow spiritual seekers can indeed go so far as to merit the stronger term "love".

The other benefit of a spiritual group is the enhanced operation of the phenomenon of "projection". Because of the complexity of our being, it can be hard to identify our own strengths, weaknesses, emotions, or characteristics. For instance, one may wonder if the anger one is feeling is really one's own or is rather anger felt sympathetically on behalf of a family member; or one may wonder if one is really conscientious or only behaves that way because of the imposition of school teachers during childhood. It can be easier to identify traits and behaviors when we see them in others. In a spiritual group, there are many projections happening simultaneously, as each member contains a projections of all other members. This means that each utterance or interaction between people serves as a spiritual lesson for all the other members; the effect of each interaction is amplified so that it becomes much more powerful than it would otherwise be. The sum total of the effects of the interactions on all the projections that are present make it so that every interaction is a sort of spiritual revelation. 

The benefits listed above could happen in principle in any human group, such as a school, bowling club, or corporation. But they are characteristically more powerful in a true spiritual group. This is because it is only in the spiritual group that many people are focusing together on their spiritual advancement; other organizations serve other aims that are not purely spiritual, so it is those aims and not the spiritual aim that is advanced in all the members. This is why it is important not just to accept just any group that forms. To create a true spiritual group, one must actively seek out spiritual harmony to forge a unified group marching in the same direction towards God, rather than just an ad-hoc collection of participants with many different aims. This can involve decisions like cutting out members who are disharmonious with the group's energy or are not fully in line with the group's principles. While this is difficult, the positive effects on group harmony will bear out the fact that this is ultimately for the best for the budding group.

Spiritual group work, like any type of spiritual work, tends in the direction of purity; as the group progresses, the group as well as its members will burn away all that holds them back from God. At the highest level of purity one ultimately sees one's own soul and its qualities as one with the souls of the other group members and their qualities. We see how all the soul qualities of the group are present in us, and we also see and experience the spiritual difference of the soul qualities between all the members. In a true harmonious spiritual group, we see the very principle of the manifestation of the cosmos borne out: the group is one as God is one, but it has infinitely many refractions which are seen in the individual members.