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Body as spirit I. Introduction to 'spirituality' in embodiment
Beliefs and experiences we categorize as 'spiritual' are
often quite inarticulate, and they are culturally extremely diverse. They
are however very dear to the people who hold them, and they have had, and
continue to have, extraordinary cultural and political influence. What are
some of the things we mean when we talk about 'spirituality'? What is the
relation of 'spiritual' experience and 'spiritual' belief? Why are beliefs
of this sort so diverse and so passionately defended? Can recent changes
in our understanding of bodies help us to understand 'the spiritual' without
soul-body or spirit-body dualism? What are the body's resources for 'spiritual'
exploration?
So the world gets on step by step towards brave clearness
and honesty - George Eliot Letters III 227
- For what's left of my religion
- I lift my voice and pray:
- May the lights in the Land of Plenty
- Shine on the truth someday
- - Leonard Cohen Ten New Songs
It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic
out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena
and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that
consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end.
Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic
phenomena - only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and,
occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic. - Susan
Blackmore
- Do not imagine that the spiritual life requires only
abandon; it demands the highest kind of intelligence, also, the clearest
powers of discrimination and judgment. (forgot
who)
- Body as spirit I. Introduction to 'spirituality' in
embodiment - sketch outline:
- A. Intentions for the minicourse
- B. Methodologies and assumptions for clarity about
the ineffable
- C. The S word naturalized: bodily resources for ultimate
value
It's a fly-over of a huge territory.
Discussion of religion/spirituality is an enterprise that
takes us to the heart of both the intuitive strengths and the hallucinatory
weaknesses of human cognition.
Seen globally an extraordinary stew of beliefs, massively
at odds with each other, and so fraught with anxiety that murder is regularly
committed in their name.
The range from fundamentalist religions to the vaguest
of New Age ideas
Worst of human craziness mixed up with the most intelligent
of human intuition, the sweetest of human innocence mixed up with the most
cynical exploitation, fraud and hocus pocus.
Why I'm doing this minicourse I've said Embodiment
Studies is being invented from the ground up, through the contributions
and preoccupations of students. 'Spirituality' came up a lot this semester.
And in politics the question is very current: the phenomenon of fundamentalist
belief needs to be understood much better than it is.
A. Intentions for the minicourse
1. to go to the heart of
objections to an embodiment hypothesis
Putting my head in the lion's mouth - it is the realm where
body has historically been most derogated and where there are still the
strongest objections.
For those who are wedded to a two-world view, you will
feel objections and protests boiling up at some points in this introduction,
but I'd ask you as an exercise to look carefully at exactly where
they come up I will try to be clear about assumptions so that it will
easier to spot just exactly where you differ from the framework offered
here.
2. to demonstrate a method
for restructuring a previously dualistic field as integral
A case study in revising dualism - techniques that can
be applied to any sort of dualized conceptualization mind/heart, organism/habitat,
etc.
A case study in revising the humanities/sciences split
which has been so dangerous to both can we be really radically interdisciplinary?
A case study in conceptual clarification and complex discernment
what critical thinking might mean in an area of studies that has high
personal charge.
A demonstration of outlining, explicit listing of methodolgies
and assumptions, various ways to get to the heart of one's interest in something.
3. to demonstrate ways of
preserving and enhancing life value without credulousness
Keep the value, give up the credulity.
Introduce ways of thinking about the S word so it is more
clear that soul/spirit qualities are in no way devalued when the body is
more valued.
B. Methodologies and assumptions
for clarity about the ineffable
1. Methodologies:
a. conceptual clarification
Conceptual analysis of terms like 'soul,' 'spirit,' 'sacred,'
'divine,' 'spirituality,' 'religion'
i. define?
not much commonly shared meaning
like most abstract terms, a whole matrix of meanings rather
than linguistic effects pegged to a commonly perceived object
often an indefinable emotional matrix
maybe a personal core meaning, but in public discourse
compliance with other people's meanings
ii. ground the term
contact the feel of a term and its images
Somatics: notice what those words evoke in one's body
- what body feeling attaches to the words? What is your immediate physical
feel for the words 'soul,' 'spirit', 'spiritual,' 'the sacred'?
Is there an image, something you imagine?
iii. look for contrasts
Traditionally: secularity mundanity materiality
materialism survival mind - 'the physical plane' rationality
science
In conservative contexts the contrast is with "secular
humanism of reason and technological innovation."
vi. look for paradigm instances
In Olive Shreiner's story the moment she looks in the
mirror and says goodbye to herself - the moment of seeing the universe
- the moment getting on my knees thanking for Tom - moments touching the
core with Rob - moments seeing the pollen rise outside the lake house -
the whole enterprise of the work with the Book - the northeast wind and
the medecine wheel - the whole enterprise of Being About - the herb garden
at its best - moment of seeing myself in the dressing room mirror in the
dark red kimono - moments putting myself on the line with someone, the
quaking
vii. fan out into aspects
Aspects and functions that can be included when we talk
about 'spirituality'
- affiliation and social control: politics, economics,
group identity, ethical rules
interrelated social aspects and functions:
economic activity meditation
cushion sales
affiliation, belonging, group identity
cultural tourism - aspect
of current search
ethical rules for social order,
well-being of the group as opposed to the individual commandments
dietary observances sexual mutilation
politics power struggle
- male priest class class, gender or class hegemony
- valued and privileged experiences, feelings
Interrelated feeling aspects - 'mysticism' privileged
experiences thought to be especially significant - sense of life value,
meaning or significance, 'ultimate concerns'
"Authentic spirituality involves an emotional
response, what I will call the spiritual response, which can include
feelings of significance, unity, awe, joy, acceptance, and consolation
celebration and reconciliation, feelings of connection, significance, serenity,
acceptance ."
"temporarily drawn out of the mundane into the realization
of life's deeper significance, and this realization generates emotional
effects."
feelings related to early love and its freedoms and
terrors devotion - gratitude and dependency anxiety and propitiation.
feelings of sublimity, mystery, awe, in the presence
of the ineffable, unexplained
Liking to feel sublimity, mystery "The great mystery
has brought us here."
mortality - feelings of vulnerability (and elaboration
of defenses around) of creatures who know they will die. Sense of life
as a journey, having a beginning and an ending and advenures that are consequential.
feelings of oneness with something larger than oneself
projects of self modification toward an ideal of some
kind - ethics as rules for good being eg "You learn how to keep
your heart open in hell," Ram Dass
Ideas about self-transcendence, non-ego, ie counters to
ideas of what we are based on roles and relationships. Struggle, self-contradiction,
"dual nature" contrasts of ego and Self, personality and
soul, etc.
experience with and interest in state change
For many the S word seems to have to do with making efforts
to improve oneself, taking oneself as a task often discussed in terms
of 'consciousness' taking wilful control of conscious states - interest
in state change (this one can be a result of drug use). Sense of quality
of being, quality of state.
If there is a quintessence of esoterism, it's maybe this.
Often includes an interest in 'consciousness' as such
"placed the exploration of consciousness at the center of their
spirituality."
practices to evoke these
"Spiritual practice" - "Technologies
of the Sacred" practices for state change - dance, singing,
chant, meditation, rituals and ceremonies drugs, austerities
etc.
ideology explanation, framework, interpretation
Ideological aspects - framework of belief, interpretation,
theory includes explanation of intuited realities, nonnormal experiences,
creation often takes the form of stories.
" ... a cognitive context, a set of beliefs
about oneself and the world which can both inspire the [emotional] spiritual
response and provide an interpretation of it. Our ideas about what ultimately
exists, who we fundamentally are, and our place in the greater scheme of
things form the cognitive context for spirituality." Thomas Clark
" ...ideas about objects of veneration, of deeper
realities to be encountered: God, Earth, Nature, Emptiness, angels, devils,
ancestors, previous incarnations, the Force."
" ... the spiritual response is interpreted in the
light of our basic beliefs; namely, it is taken to reflect the ultimate
truth of our situation as we conceive it. The cognitive context of spirituality
and the spiritual response are therefore linked tightly in reciprocal evocation
and validation."
Kinds of belief:
- explanations about death
- explanations of the origin of the world and people
- explanations of events unexplained by current science
- explanations about the purpose of life and creation
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c. other methodological commitments specifically in
relation to belief
i. Occam's razor
A philosophical principle that recommends choosing the
simpler explanation.
ii. cognitive coherence
Look for explanatory hypotheses that maximize interconnections
within the various areas we are interested in, and that don't conflict
with each other.
iii. distinction between experience and explanation
What are the simplicities of the experiences we
are talking about here?
Quite apart from these experiences are the frameworks
and metaphors by which we attempt to explain the experiences.
If you have talked to certain kinds of crazy people you
will know what I mean when I say they are very theoretical. They are lost
in speculation about abstractions: trying, trying, to make it all make
sense. When I read religious texts and metaphysical or psychological theory
I often think of these people.
For instance a man on Art Bell who was saying he was born
into a family of Satan worshippers who tortured him into giving up his
soul, so it could be replaced by the family demon. The purpose of the transaction
was to gain wealth and power in this world. (His people were churchgoers.)
When he was 17 he was institutionalized and in that institution saw what
he understood as soul theft people from one day to another made tractable
and robotic and sent home. In what he experienced as out of body travels
he was shown a crystal city on the moon, which is the depot harvested souls
are shipped through.
This man seemed to be actually more or less sane but he
was trying to make up a metaphysics that would account for his experience.
iv. exact phenomenology describe experience closely
rather than sloppily
Phenomenology: description of experience as such.
Was it Gurjieff who said that we observe with a good faculty
and explain with a poor one?
Be as observant and accurate as possible in describing
unusual experience, and then leave it unexplained rather than adopting
a questionable explanation.
v. revise language
watch for dualistic formulations For instance talking about "the relation of body and soul"
implies that they are different things.
translate texts into your own understanding rather
than taking them on as whole systems only tenuously anchored to anything
you know
Something that occurred to me after reading Eastern philosophy/psychology
for some years was that, given transmission stages, cross-cultural uncertainties
and translation problems, these texts might be mystified descriptions of
facts and states that are actually quite familiar and down-to-earth, not
metaphysical esoterica as they seem. Reading them as if this is so is quite
rewarding. Since I have learned and thought more about how to understand
bodies and nervous systems, and materiality in general, this possibility
seems always more likely. Most Eastern and Western 'spiritual' texts were
written prior to the existence of neuroscience.
But this suggestion goes for science texts too biology/neuroscience
as they are still being written have not revised their own implicit dualism.
Learning neuroscience well enough to read it non-dualistically and non-reductionistically
is an enormous undertaking, but it's one of the tasks of the moment.
vi. give honest attention to possible sources of and
motives for explanatory belief
Jung suggests that religious belief is wired into human
beings. Is it?
Some personal/cultural motives and sources for 'spiritual'
beliefs:
experienced presence of the nonconscious self -
various kinds of intuition of the invisible, immaterial:
amnion, body energies, electromagnetic fields
death denial, the tragic, suffering, mortality - "Your
soul is that part of you that is immortal."
Death-denial is one of the sources of cultural denigration
of the body, and with it nature, women and the mother. It is also one of
the deep sources of dualist confusion in religious psychologies, which
keep sidestepping what makes sense whenever it implies final physical death.
How does it feel, and what is different for us intellectually,
when we are not requiring our philosophy to support a hope in an afterlife?
love denial - early love, prenatal intuitions, merging,
"vertical desire"
Fantasy projection - thwarted early love, suppression
of desire and pleasure, access to early love states through imagined beloveds.
desire for protection, security, power
dream, hallucination, unexplained experience of disembodiment
or action at a distance
reflexivity - desire to take ourselves rather than
outside things as a project
experienced effectiveness of methods and prescriptions
unrecognized intuitions of nonverbal and preverbal
memory traces, including prebirth
etc.
vii. look at metaphor,
displaced structures of intuition
A captivation by symbolic or displaced knowledge not recognized
as such.
Learn to spot structures of human intuition and reasons
for them. Archetypes. Da Free John: spiritual language as intuitive somatic
perception of structure within the body.
viii. account for rejected beliefs, don't simply reject
them try to discover why such a belief has been plausible or desirable
Need to account for the forms belief takes.
Dualist intuitions that there are two orders of reality
aren't nothing where do they come from? - examine sources of persuasion
- the old distinctions sometimes meant something real that we can understand
more clearly. Try to understand the belief as such.
2. Embodiment assumptions
a. one world assumption
embodiment assumption nondualist metaphysics - EVERYTHING is
part of our one, physical world there is nothing aside from or apart
from or of a different nature than the world
The embodiment hypothesis: one world hypothesis: god is
the universe itself, no externalness.
A fertile hypothesis: imagine that the powers and pleasures
imagined to be otherworldly are actually this world's.
A materialism that is demystifying but not reductive
bringing heaven to earth not segregating the concrete from the ineffable.
There exists no personal soul or spirit, no supernatural
God or creator, no purpose that can be attached to existence, no ultimate
meaning to life, and no special first-person way of knowing that puts the
individual in direct contact with a deeper reality. From the traditional
perspective, all this seems a crushing blow to our existential hopes, a
catastrophic leveling of the transcendental ambition to escape from the
mundane into the exalted and eternal. Tom Clark
b. everything psychological
feeling, 'mind', 'soul', 'spirit' - is physical structure of some
kind
This premise is that psychological functions and characteristics
ARE, and can be understood in terms of, bodily structure. Relevant bodily
structure includes but is not limited to neural structure. It also is not
necessarily limited to what can be seen, since it can include electrical
or other sorts of subtle fields around the visible body.
c. immanent rather than
transcendent creation - the universe is self-creating, and humans, like
other organisms, have evolved as self-creating beings within that self-creating
cosmos
Definition: immanence versus transcendence:
Philosophies that think of divinity, or the standards
for morality, or particular value, as internal to or part of the physical
universe, are said to believe these things are immanent in the physical
universe. Pantheism would be an example. Philosophies such as Christianity
or Judaism that think of divinity or moral standards or particular value
as located in something or some being exterior to the natural or physical
world are said to believe in transcendence.
Dualist psychologies have brought notions of transcendence
into their understanding of what a person is, in a way that parallels dualist
beliefs about the cosmos as a whole. Bodies are thought to belong to the
physical world, and spirit or soul is thought to transcend materiality
the way the father god is thought to be outside his creation.
Dualist philosophies are invariably hierarchized. That
is, their dichotomous terms are not valued equally. Dualist philosophies
in general seem to denigrate the body along with many other things they
dichotomize similarly: the perceptible world, sensory perception, feeling,
women in general and the mother in particular.
d. science is far from
finished, but further discoveries will need to be compatible with most
of the science we already have
What science means: corpus, methology, coherence, causal
leverage.
Science does need to be ammended: the rationalistic mind-set
is often itself a result of trauma.
So this assumption says, don't make current science the
arbiter, but maintain the scientific attitude of investigation, patient
questioning which submits to falsification, and look for hypotheses that
are compatible with knowledge established within science.
e. knowledge is liberating
not destructive
This assumption says, explore the body's capacities, feel
losses, deal with traumatized structure.
Truth is liberating. We can stand hard truths, even thrive
on them, because when we are in accord with the way things are, we function
better.
C. The S word naturalized:
bodily resources for ultimate value
Summary: trying for an approach that's grounded, exploratory,
experiential, and at the same time open to bliss.
Naturalizing these concepts isn't necessarily reducing
them. Though it frustrates certain wishes and implies that certain cherished
beliefs are illusory, it also reframes them in a way that gives us another
and less ineffable source of value.
there is something in me,
which I think is shared by many: a hope that "when all is said and
done, human beings will be found to be something more than 'a vast assembly
of nerve cells and their associated molecules.'" (student packet)
Shared by many, yes, but if an (extremely complex) organization
of cells is capable of writing Shakespeare's plays and Mozart's music, why
should we want to be MORE than that? It is a question of raising our estimation
of cells rather than of lowering our estimation of humans.
Your concern might be that this embodiment approach, which
is a form of materialism, might have the effect of diminishing wonder. My
own sense is that the opposite can be true: instead of diminishing delight
in what has been thought of as spirit, it can massively enlarge delight
in the possibilities of material being, which I believe includes all that
has been meant by spirit and more.
Embodiment studies is an emphasis on understanding human
life as the life of a physical body.
List of 'spiritual' values taken from a paragraph by
Andrew Harvey:
Radiance and vulnerability of love, inner and outer simplicity,
radical and all-embracing egalitarianism, freedom, tenderness, bravery,
healing ecstatic potency, play, honor, laughter, equanimity, stillness,
awe, passion, compassion, justice a wonderful list of qualities that
demonstrate spiritedness in oneself and promote spiritedness in others.
At the moment when the patriarchy was beginning its
long, dark triumph in the form of the Roman Empire, Christ revealed and
enacted a way of being completely subversive to all of its beliefs and 'truths.'
To a world obsessed by power, he offered a vision of the radiance of powerlessness
and the powerful vulnerability of love; to a culture riddled with authoritarianism,
false pomp and greed he gave a vision of the holiness of inner and outer
poverty and a critique of the vanity and horror of all forms of worldly
achievement so scalding that most of his own followers have contrived every
means imaginable to ignore it. To a society arranged at every level into
oppressive hierarchies - secular, religious, racial, and political - he
presented in his own life, a vision of a radical and all-embracing egalitarianism
designed to end forever those dogmas and institutions that keep women enslaved,
the poor starving, and the rich rotting in a prison of selfish luxury. In
his own life, he showed what the new life this path would open up to everyone
who risked its rigors would be like - how free and tender and brave and
charged with healing ecstatic power."
Mathew Fox: "What values or virtues do we desire to
develop and to put forward and to share?"
- 1. work on the human heart
- 2. revalue everything
- 3. see that we are a part of the whole
- 4. rebalance gender: men get in touch with their mothering
powers, women tap into their fatherly anger
- 4. recover from the harm done by religions
- 5. be creative
- 6. re-value work by establishing it within a sense of
the whole
- 7. synthesize traditions
Body as locus of these 'spiritual' values
a. the nonconscious body
Throughout the history of humanity it has been said
that the self we know - the individual ego - is a very limited form of
identity. this derived sense of identity is always under threat, and our
attempts to maintain it are responsible for much of our "self-centered"
behaviour.
Behind this identity is a deeper identity, what is
often called the "true self".
When we discover this deeper sense of self we are freed
from many of the fears that plague us unnecessarily. We discover a greater
inner peace, an inner security that does not depend upon events or circumstances
in the world around. As a result we become less self-centered, less needy
of the other's approval or recognition, less needy of collecting possessions
and social status, and become happier, healthier and more loving people.
In many spiritual teachings this is called "self-liberation".
- And now read these paragraphs as talking about the nonconscious
body rather than something outside and different from body.
b. subtle aspects of body
including the subtle senses
c. recovered early love
and grounded presence
Early love - People put their dearest sweetest youngest
most fragile most hopeful most frightened most-connected and most-disconnected
feelings into the S word phenomena.
If there are core values that 'spiritual' beliefs defend
and that 'science' does not, it may be because science has been practiced
by people still largely dissociated from feeling their own bodies.
d. the Work ethical/therapeutic/structural
processing toward integral function an ethics of good being
Ethics is about doing right;
art is about doing well; therapy is about doing to mend;
spirituality is about doing to be in contact with ultimate realness
and value.
These four things can be seen to be essentially the
same thing.
What has value in these four ways? Hypothesis: wholeness
of contact, wholeness of response.
e. the cosmos as a realm
for love and comprehension
Cosmos is from a Greek word
meaning "the whole'
-What if the "ground of being" is the self-creating
cosmos itself?
It gives us work to do, engagement, curiosity being
with the world as an active other.
We are in a time with the most extraordinary opportunities
for clarification, revision and synthesis.
I think nonreligious society has in the last several centuries
contributed more to spiritual values than churches have; scientific cosmology
(including physics, biology, cognitive science) and the anti-authoritarian
vision of a self-creating universe in which life evolves toward complexity
and awareness are exquisitely beautiful.
Isn't it a matter of being willing to learn from the scientists
rather than "taking something back" from them? What if we said,
cosmology is for everyone, and so we must open our borders to be able to
go where it is: a second ecumenism of 'spirituality' and secular investigation,
in order to vivify our sense of value.
f. art
Reread The mask of Apollo
last night. "I closed the shutters, and threw myself on the tumbled
bed. The room smelled of melon-rind and wine and sweat." Opened it
to that. Athens in the 4th century BC. Divinity of art and dedication,
philosophy teaching humans to notice carefully and have honor. The gods
are human possibilities. Why don't I mind the Greek gods? Because they
aren't taken earnestly, they are temperamental loyalties. They're art in
life, they're ways of feeling and celebrating human life. (The mask
of Apollo Mary Renault 1966)
Should we judge the value of a cultural form of spirituality
by the art it produces? Can we extrapolate from our best art to a spirituality?
Lee Bontecou, Gordon Smith. Service to a value that isn't ego-defense,
devotion to the world and human cognitive possibilities. Works in art and
science are temples that aren't called that dedicated to a lineage
of human discovery and dedication.
Mystics are the radicals of religion, but they still cast
their experience in religious terms. What if we said, "the ultimate
challenge is to study the great artists, for they have always been the
ones who show us how to grow our souls and give us permission to enlarge
our sense of ourselves and the cosmos."
What is interesting is that the realms most feared by
religious enclaves have been science and art, and these are precisely the
realms that devote themselves to undoing denial and being real with the
world - science through patient principled hypothesis-testing over centuries,
and great art through committed, often-excruciating sacrifice of unconsciousness
for the sake of true perception.
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