The Only True Happiness Pill: PED (not PEZ)

No, you can't get true happiness from this...

PEZ may immediately gratify an appetite for something sweet, but little else. Ultimately, we can only find true happiness from PED. PED stands for Pervasive, Enduring, and Deep, and it's these qualities that can only come about by aligning ourselves with activities that satiate our more significant desires. When the effects of our activities move us beyond the self, that is said to be pervasive; when the effects of our activities are lasting, that is said to be enduring; and when we use our higher faculties to engage in particular activities, that is said to bring in depth.

Earlier this year I read Part 2 of Robert Spitzer's quartet, and now I am embarking on Part 1: Finding True Happiness. I suppose my approach is non-linear in the way Truth is non-linear. You have to go where the heart sings sometimes, so this book felt right in the moment. 

Spitzer's desire model resonates with me, in that, we all have desires, but not all desires are equal. My desire to watch the Walking Dead is not the same as my desire to spend time with good friends which is not the same as my desire to get closer to Divinity. Spitzer categorizes these into four levels:

• Instinctual desires (level 1)
• Ego-comparative desires (level 2)
• Contributive desires (level 3)
• Transcendental-spiritual desires (level 4)

While there may be hierarchical approach to these desires and their ability to make us more PED happy, it should be noted that pursuit of a higher level should not preclude the lower level (can you say spiritual bypassing?). Nor should a higher level be conflated with a lower level (can you say spiritual pride?).

So while we don't want to negate the first three levels, there is something significant about level 4 that most folks never consider. “Level Four happiness arises out of three dimensions of God’s interior call: (1) our five transcendental desires for perfect and unconditional truth, love, goodness, beauty, and being (home), (2) our awareness of the numinous and the sacred, and (3) an interior relationship with a transcendent personal Being, which is so fundamental that ignoring it can lead to cosmic emptiness, alienation, loneliness, and guilt.”

And it's this cosmic dread that creates these existential crises in those of us that fortunate enough to have them. Think of it as God's way of provoking us to search for our true purpose, instead of settling for the finite and conditional things in life. 

Sartre, Camus, and the rest of the existential gang were on to something, but they didn't take it far enough. Instead of pushing against our existential crisis with egoic defiance, we can receptively meet it with a surrender to something more PED-like. This calls us beyond the personal to the post-personal, which is still us and so much more.

Spitzer again: “If we take the evidence of human transcendentality seriously, we will see the inadequacies of the first three kinds of happiness, for they can never ultimately satisfy us. Without the fourth kind of happiness, we will underlive our lives, undervalue ourselves and others, and underestimate our full destiny and call.”

Not that we all need a cosmic kick in the arse, but I suppose my stubborn mind did. And I needed several repeatable lessons too. Now, there's the question as to we enter more deeply into the transcendent domain and integrate PED happiness into one's life. Spitzer gets into the need for a spiritual community, contemplation, philosophical and theological inquiry, and service to others. But it all starts with a leap of faith. 

“This choice means acting on the call we have received, which can be done by participating in a church community, seeking a deep understanding of spiritual wisdom and God’s self-revelation, entering into a life of prayer, trying to live according to God’s goodness, and helping others to see their true dignity and destiny. When we act on our choice to enter into a life of transcendence, God will invite us to experience Him in ever deeper ways. He will also provide grace, guidance, protection, and inspiration on our journey with Him so that we will be able to reach our most pervasive, enduring, and deep purpose in life, reach new depths of authentic empathy and love, constructively contend with suffering, help others to cope with suffering, and at the end of our lives leave a legacy of transcendent, eternal, and loving goodness. (Spitzer)”

Well said. Now that's a wrap for 2016. Merry Christmas everyone!

Who Turned Down the Entropy?

For those of you that got through high school physics may know something about of our fundamental, physical laws. Without these laws, we'd be screwed big time! So thank God they're in place. But let's not get into who made the laws just yet.

There is one law that would seem to work against us: the dreaded second law of thermodynamics. It says that entropy (or disorder) always increases over time in an isolated system. And that all physical systems will eventually become completely run down and incapable of physical activity. Yet, the cosmos doesn't seem run down at all and has done a pretty good job countering all that entropy. I mean, we've got sexy galaxies, some cool planets, and even lots of crazy life on this one! So the caveat may be that our cosmos is not an isolated system after all. And if it isn't closed, is there something guiding from behind the scenes to create order?

Sir Fred Hoyle once remarked, “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with the chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”

But we don't want shun all questions to the answer of God just yet. That would be rude to our skeptical readers. It seems to me there is still an interesting, rational theory that can explain order in the cosmos. 

Kevin Kelly, who leans towards secular explanations, came up with a clever term for this decreasing entropy: exotropy. He says, “The multibillion-year rise of exotropy—as it flings up stable molecules, solar systems, a planetary atmosphere, life, mind, and the technium—can be restated as the slow accumulation of ordered information. Or rather, the slow ordering of accumulated information.”

So information may be where it's at (along with those turtles all the way down). For many years we believed the material universe to be made of matter and energy. And now some scientists are willing to concede that information may be behind it all. I suppose this is one way to get esoteric, without losing your academic credentials.

By its very nature, the informational dimension of any thriving system is going to be dynamic and unpredictable. It is also how systems change and grow: including physical, biological, and economic ones, etc. In other words, entropy creates something new, but requires exotropy to integrate all the new information in the system. 

George Gilder says, “All information is surprise; only surprise qualifies as information. This is the fundamental axiom of information theory. Information is the change between what we knew before the transmission and what we know after it.”

If we take this from the macrocosm down to the microcosm, this “surprise” depends exclusively on human agency because creativity comes from people, not from systems, who are part of systems. It is indicated by the idea of something new that defies prediction because that only works in closed systems. If a system is closed, it cannot experience the “surprise,” that infusion of new information that contributes to its survival and growth.

This is how creativity can create value through individuals willing to take risks investing their capital, prowess, and labor. Through this effort, new information is brought into light that others can't see or do. Gilder notes that this can fail when it violates a key principle of information theory: “It subordinates a higher and more complex level of activity — the creation of value — to a lower level, its measurement and exchange.”

This is the beauty of creativity via human agency, in that like the flow of information within a cable line, we can hone in on a signal from all the noise. Yet, our creative endeavors also require a stabilizing, grounding force, like the cable line itself. As Gilder notes, in our civilization this includes “moral codes, constitutional restraints, personal disciplines, educational integrity, predictable laws, reliable courts, stable money, trustworthy finance, strong families, dependable defense, and police powers.” 

And so a key principle of information theory is that “it takes a low-entropy carrier to bear high-entropy creations.”

So dude, who did turn down the entropy?...

If You've Got the Freedom, I've Got the Truth

I've been thinking about the convergence of freedom and Truth lately, and how one without the other just doesn't work. If you don't have freedom, then you can't choose to discover and align with Truth, and if you don't have Truth, then your freedom is just baseless chaos. 

I mean when people say it's a free country, what does that really mean? Some would say pretty much anything except yelling fire in a theater (which will definitely show you what chaos looks like pretty quickly). 

The Founding Fathers professed freedom, but it seemed to me it was always a means for some ends. In other words, we created a country that offered freedom from tyranny, but that wasn't the whole point. I do recall something about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness too. And liberty is essentially ordered freedom. 

As Bob said, “Like any other form of freedom, it cannot merely be "freedom from." If it isn't simultaneously freedom for, then it is worthless. It equates to nihilism, or freedom to be absurd (which is no freedom at all).”

So in a world of too many choices, freedom alone has little value. We can only give a free life significance when we align with Truth. And that alignment will always require a commitment of some sort. Think of the deep satisfaction a couple has when they have been married for many years, and can reflect on all their trials and tribulations together through the commitment they made to each other. If each of them were free to do what they wanted, the results certainly would not be the same. 

So in the bigger picture, we are all on a metaphysical adventure that our deeper nature yearns to align with. Some may deny this or marginalize it, but it's right in front of our noses. Yet, in our feeling-inspired culture, most would find this as stifling: you mean I can't do what I feel like doing? 

The irony is commitment to Truth gives you more freedom because you’re no longer distracted by the things in life that are unimportant and frivolous. It hones your attention and focus, directing you toward what is most effective at making you healthy and happy. Commitment to Truth also makes decision-making easier and removes any fear of missing out; knowing that what you already have is good enough, why would you ever stress about chasing more? And it allows you to focus intently on what's important and achieve a greater degree of life satisfaction than you otherwise would.

The paradox of choice is less is more, but we just need to affirm that the more is what we want. And what is the more? Possible answers: (a) fame, fortune, and your own YouTube channel; (b) salvation, liberation, evolution and love; or (c) frozen yogurt.

Onion Peels

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” — G.K. Chesterton

Some of us love maps. Sometimes it's a guy thing, because I suppose it feeds our desire to explore. Or maybe we are just not relational enough to ask for good direction. But a decent map can lay out the gist of a heroic journey to get some where we are not.

I am not designed to be a Shackleton, exploring stormy, unknown seas, or an Elon Musk, who is ready to fly off to Mars. I am more an explorer of the interiors. That doesn't mean I've always been good at it. I've gone off the path too many times to count (which is always part of the ultimate path). But the intention never leaves. I am steadfast, so a good map hopefully can only help.

Consider all the map-makers I've been attracted to: Ken Wilber, Daniel P. Brown, A.H. Almaas, the Tibetans. These folks recognize the territory is primary, but if there's a map to address it, I'm sure they would say theirs is the best. My latest favorite map comes from Ric Weinman, who I recently came across in an interview on BatGap. His book takes on the path to awakening, unveiling all the layers of the self (which I liken to onion peeling, and I do love my peels). 

There are some nice tidbits in the book. Let's see what I highlighted...

From an awakening perspective, life is simply the opportunity for the Source of All to experience its own potentiality. [Thank God for that! We need to be liberated toward a telos.]

Awakening does not fulfill the self but rather deletes it from the picture. [Yes, but something remains which is the True Self.]

People live in their heads because the ego uses its mental story about itself as a support for its existence. They also live in their heads as a defense against feeling overwhelmed by their emotions and to defend against the experience of simply being open to life as it is. [Tell me about it! I always thought I wasn't that emotional, but the truth was I used my ruminations to run away from them.]

Yet the general rule is that the more of you that disappears, the more your partner will like it. [See the irony here. Unless your relationship is based on ego-dependency.]

I once heard Wayne Liquorman (an awake teacher) say that awakening was like the relief of taking a pebble out of an old, well-worn shoe. The problem is we all think we’re going to get a new pair of shoes. [Mistakenly so, we often think awakening will make us a new me.]

So, freedom has nothing in it that the ego desires. What the ego wants is transcendence and expansion into a higher state of security and power. That’s why the idea of ascension is so popular. [Ascension is just the expansion of a self that is still a self.]

Yet I have noticed one very consistent initial response to Basic Awakening: the experience simply has nothing to do with whatever was expected. [Yup, best to look into the unknown.]

The awareness that you lost your awakeness is actually the awakeness itself making itself known. [Just remembering is awakening.]

The Map can only describe the levels of awakening, not the degree to which it has been incorporated into one’s life. Someone who has not awakened deeply but is more fully living from their awakening may seem more awake than the person who has gone deeper but allowed it to move more into the background. [I love this excerpt. It made me think of all the people I've come across who have higher attainments, but are still arseholes. It all comes down to intention.]

If you can find where laughter comes from you will find Divinity. [Another quote I love! Humor releases us to Source.]

So, you do have free will, but the person you experience yourself to be doesn’t. [Yup. We're not that free if it's all that conditioning that is reacting.]

Fixating harder on something that is known won’t open the door to the unknown. [Another great quote!]

Here’s an extra little trick: think of the source of the mind as existing in the heart. [Ahh, the cave of the Heart. Makes me smile.]

Consciousness has the quality of emptiness. If you think of light as having a quality of fullness and the shadows it creates as having a quality of emptiness, then this aligns with awareness and consciousness: awareness has a quality of fullness, and consciousness, the ‘shadow’ of awareness, feels empty. [I like this distinction between consciousness and awareness.]

You might think that losing the sense of the personal would make you more emotionally cold and impersonal. It turns out this isn’t true. In general, the deeper your awakening goes, the more ‘real’ you become, the more you become what you really are. So you become more open, more present, more heartful. You will have more detachment as well, but the detachment created from the awakening will have no walls— it is open space. [Some Buddhists get mixed up in this detachment, where they are not truly available. It's just a state of repose and not true awakening.]

Because we want to hold onto our awakening, there will be a tendency to turn our awake space into an image that we can then hold in consciousness. In addition, we want to be that awake space, so we will identify with that image. That turns what you are into an image in consciousness. Be on the alert for this, and remember that whenever you become something, you have moved into illusion. Only in being nothing does the everything you are reveal itself, and it reveals itself to no one. [A good reminder!]

My only guidance for learning to live from this level of awakening is to distinguish what you are from what you keep becoming and what you experience. Then keep dropping into what you are. [A pith instruction we can always use.]

Overall, Ric's book was a delightful read. I don't know why some teachers resonate more than others with me, but I always appreciate a fresh perspective to the path!

Popping Bubbles

This past week, Saturday Night Live had a quite funny, yet poignant mock advertisement for The Bubble...

After a wild and crazy election season, I know we are all taking inventory of our political fragmentation. I was not as surprised that Trump won the election as many of my peers, but I was surprised as to how surprised they were that he did win.

Several years ago I read Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 to better understand the shifting patterns in American working/upper class culture. It was not as obvious to me at the time, as I assumed like everyone else that the general working class was always slanted toward more traditional Democratic values (the one exception being the Reagan years where there was a slight counter shift). But in respects to Murray's work, which compared the two communities of Belmont, MA and Fishtown, PA, there is a different story as to an increasing divergence that begun to emerge for several decades between the college-educated elite living in the super-zips (a la bubble) from those with little education, eking out a meager living in more rural areas. Much of this points to economic shifts, but Murray highlights more the cultural underpinnings that created this mess.

One Amazon reviewer says, “in 1960 Fishtown was a very Catholic neighborhood in which the men worked, the women stayed home, and the kids went to Catholic school. My ex-wife was one of them. What they considered to be social problems were excess drinking, quite a bit of it, fistfights and a bit of philandering. Young people, however, knew what was expected of them. They got married, before or after becoming pregnant, and provided families for kids. It was a moral expectation that was generally observed. People had responsibilities and took them seriously. They did not accept welfare, they answered the call when they were drafted, and they participated in church and civic organizations. Fishtown in 2010 is a very different place. People simply don't feel an obligation to either work or get married. There are many never married people, and many out of wedlock children. A lot of the guys are just bums - don't work, don't want to work, don't want to get married, and waste their time watching television. An inordinately large number have figured how to game the system by qualifying for Social Security disability. Their attitude is that work is for chumps. Quite a few of them have drinking and drug problems, but Murray does not consider these disabilities to be nearly as important as the lack of any of the four foundations in their lives. No more religion, no social connections with the community, either no marriage or an unsatisfactory marriage, and no vocation.”

Yet in Belmont, the picture is quite different. “Murray claims that the state of affairs in Belmont is much better. People work hard, get married, stay married, are resolutely and obsessively concerned with their children, and are involved in community. More than that, counter-intuitively, they are more involved in church than are the people remaining in Fishtown. They may not believe the dogmas, but they understand the social value of belonging. What has changed in Belmont is the conviction that the set of virtues they practice really ought to be preached. Belmont now believes totally in moral relativism. If somebody else doesn't want to remain married to his kids' mother, doesn't want to work, or spends all of his money on drink and drugs and all of his time watching TV, they're not going to be judgmental. That's somebody else's life.”

Murray sums it up best when he says, “the hollow elite is as dysfunctional in its way as the new lower class is in its way. Personally and as families, its members are successful. But they have abdicated their responsibility to set and promulgate standards. The most powerful and successful members of their class increasingly trade on the perks of their privileged positions without regard to the seemliness of that behavior. The members of the new upper class are active politically, but when it comes to using their positions to help sustain the republic in day-to-day life, they are AWOL.” 

Where once there was a time when people of any class admired the upper classes in America, now there is little to admire as having an ideology of non-judgmentalism does little to help a working class with a decaying moral and social fabric. Such frustration could only lead to the desire for a outside statesman with strong convictions that could rattle the current system to its core.

Moreover, the new upper class non-judgmental stance is not without its hypocrisy, as there is a contempt the bleeds from the top-down. Locked into their value-laden bubble, they can't even relate to working class America anymore. Murray showcases this through a quiz in his book... 

1. Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American neighborhood in which the majority of your fifty nearest neighbors probably did not have college degrees?  
2. Did you grow up in a family in which the chief breadwinner was not in a managerial job or a high-prestige profession?
3. Have you ever walked on a factory floor?
4. Have you ever held a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?
5. Have you ever had a close friend who was an evangelical Christian?
6. Do you now have a close friend with whom you have strong and wide-ranging political disagreements?
7. Have you ever had a close friend who could seldom get better than Cs in high school even if he or she tried hard?
8. During the last month, have you voluntarily hung out with people who were smoking cigarettes?
9. During the last five years, have you gone fishing?
10. How many times in the last year have you eaten at one of the following restaurant chains? (Applebee’s, Waffle House, Denny’s, IHOP, Chili’s, Outback Steakhouse, Ruby Tuesday, T.G.I. Friday’s, Ponderosa Steakhouse)
11. In secondary school, did you letter in anything?
12. Have you ever participated in a parade not involving global warming, a war protest, or gay rights?
13. Since leaving school, have you ever worn a uniform?
14. Have you ever ridden on a long-distance bus (e.g., Greyhound,Trailways) or hitchhiked for a trip of fifty miles or more?
15. Have you ever watched an Oprah, Dr. Phil, or Judge Judy show all the way through?

So I was able to answer yes most of these only because I grew in a working class town in southern Maine. However, in my current living situation, I would have failed this miserably. And I never cared to fish and I never wore a uniform. C'est la vie, in a bubble.

Hamilton and Elitism

I finally finished the terrific Hamilton biography by Ron Chernow. Since this book inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda and I may never get to see his Broadway musical, I have to get what I can from this delightful read.

So when I read a long biography like this, there are just a couple big takeaways I can absorb beyond some fun facts and dates (which I will eventually forget in most cases). So a theme that came to me as I was reading was this notion of elitism. Why Alexander Hamilton and elitism? From the following excerpt it would seem Hamilton held a somewhat pessimistic view on the citizenry and our fledgling nation. Chernow says, 

“The intellectual spoilsport among the founding fathers, Hamilton never believed in the perfectibility of human nature and regularly violated what became the first commandment of American politics: thou shalt always be optimistic when addressing the electorate. He shrank from the campaign rhetoric that flattered Americans as the most wonderful, enlightened people on earth and denied that they had anything to learn from European societies. He was incapable of the resolutely uplifting themes that were to become mandatory in American politics. The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.”

Human nature being what it is, Hamilton did not get lost in rose colored glasses. He understood we have two natures, and as such, he valued the need to cultivate the rarity of excellence rather than take it for granted as a given. After all, that's why we fought for freedom from the Redcoats, as freedom is fundamental to our nature and necessary for exceptionalism to flourish. But Hamilton also knew this would not come without industriousness, perseverance, and sacrifice.
   
Hamilton, a poor immigrant from Saint Croix, rose to prominence based on own merit. Ironically, he “was villainized in American history textbooks as an apologist of privilege and wealth,” when he was a fervent abolitionist unlike many of the slaveholding populists that occupied the presidency those first several decades of our nation's birth. Chernow states, “It was no coincidence that the allegedly aristocratic and reactionary Federalists contained the overwhelming majority of active abolitionists of the period. Elitists they might be, but they were an open, fluid elite, based on merit and money, not on birth and breeding— the antithesis of the southern plantation system.”

Hamilton lived a mostly dignified (as well as sometimes flawed) existence through his duel with Burr that abruptly brought his life to an end. Taking his life as a whole, he exemplified an excellence that gave elitism a respectful aspiration. 

So what can learn about Hamilton's notion of elitism that we have seem to have lost today? The elitism that Hamilton espoused is not the same elitism that antagonizes today's alt-right. While some of the outrage toward institutional cronyism does have merit, it does not negate the fact that some established experts do bring an excellence to their craft. After all, an elite is simply someone is better at doing the sorts of things within their respective peer category. They are not just better, but deservedly better, and should be respected as such. Hamilton, often labelled a monarchist by his adversaries, did acknowledge the need for elitism in government. This is also one of the reasons the founding fathers set up our governmental structure as a republic (representative democracy) over being a pure democracy. The latter would have brought on too much risk that the rule of majority could overtake the rights of the minority. Having representative elected officials would mitigate governing by mob rule. 

On the other side, the left has been guilty of marginalizing accomplished elitism by giving short shrift to liberty over equality. Equality, emphasized as outcome and not opportunity, can oppress success for the sake of a strict egalitarianism. In the end, this brings down the best in order to raise the "oppressed." The cost to culture is immense, as this creates its own form of state totalitarianism that stifles creativity and innovation. Moreover, institutions that emphasize equality will do little to allow those in power to be held accountable. Ultimately, that undermines any of the benefits brought to bear by elitism and creates a culture where mediocrity prevails.

Both sides of the political divide could learn from Hamilton's pride in true elitism, sans contempt from above and envy from below, so the desire to strive for and support excellence can bring about the best in a nation.

Speaking of a talented elite...

I Vote for God

“Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs that properly concern them.” — Paul Valery

There is not much I can add to this election season, except for more fodder for the burnout. I have become more adept at avoiding the noise in order to hone in on the signal. My question as to where I want to focus my attention is: will it matter in 10 years? I have probably seen hundreds of newscasts and clickbait stories over the years that have completely left the memory banks and had no lasting impact other making the monkey mind more manic at times. While I have books that I still point to from a decade ago that mean something to me and have left an imprint in my soul. Sure, I can’t remember much detail from some of those reads, but that’s why we highlight the high points.

I suppose politics does matter to a point; but it is always downstream from culture; and that is downstream from metaphysics (which shapes our values and virtues); which is ultimately downstream from Divinity. So that’s why I am going with the flow of this election season, and will only endorse what matters. I do not believe a Clinton or a Trump will matter in the greater scheme of things, even if I do have my unenthusiastic leanings. 

Most people, myself included, can be reductive with their thinking as to how we solve worldly problems. We can’t even agree on the problems: where one side views ISIS as the greatest threat, the other side sees it as climate change. Truthfully, our secular solutions won’t solve our spiritual problems, and I think most of our problems are of a spiritual nature. This doesn’t mean I am not interested in how the world works (I am very interested in that!), but I am not very interested in how it should work. Who am I to say what would be best? Sure, I have some preferences and principles. But I realize that there is danger in concretizing either. Preferences are my own subjective whims. And my principles are an aid to my reasoning, but not a replacement for it. My principles can guide my thinking, but once I believe that they must be rigidly applied in any context without further thought to all circumstances, then all I have done is transformed any redeeming wisdom I may have into an ideology. And most political discourse these days is ideology mixed in with some dog-fighting.

So, what essentially would I like to see happen beyond what policy could offer? A spiritual revival with mystical/metaphysical rigor would be a good start. It seems we have lost the desire for a relationship with the Divine, and therefore man has to do all the heavy lifting himself. But mass culture doesn’t even take responsibility for the lifting these days, but now relies on the state to do it. And once the state screws it up, we then look to the next leader to steer the ship. The currents continue to flow, but we resist hoping to arrive at some utopian end state that will never be. 

As Bob said, “the trouble is, no one looks at things from a cosmic perspective, so trivial things appear huge while massive objects are rendered invisible.” What will it take to render the invisible visible? I’m not sure, but I’d vote for it.

The Dissociation of Knowing and Being

I really enjoy the interviews at Buddha at the Gas Pump by many random spiritual/non-dual teachers. But I do take one issue with what I've observed there, and through my exposure to some of the spiritual communities I have engaged with: realizationism.

As I've come to understand it, realizationism is another reductive phenomena that happens with esoteric seekers. They privilege subjective experience at the expense of Truth. But I've always wondered why would the idea of being itself and knowing something be mutually exclusive?

Yes, you can't read your way to God. I was told this once on the subway as an evangelical believer was looking over my shoulder at the metaphysical book I was reading. My response should have been, “but maybe God can write himself to me.” So while I agree that thinking with the ordinary mind can be an obstacle to true nature, it can also be in service of it.

I recall Ken Wilber wrote about this phenomena in Integral Spirituality...

“Notice individuals who have been practicing one path for a decade or more, and you will often see a gradual closing of their minds, a narrowing of their interests, as they go deeper into spiritual state experiences but don't have an integral Framework to complement their plunge into Emptiness, or Ayin, or Godhead, or Holy Spirit. The result is that they become closed off to more and more parts of the world, which can actually lead to a regression to amber [mythic stage of development] or fundamentalism or absolutism. They become both deep mystics and narrow fundamentalists at the same time.”

Deep and narrow isn't always bad. The Sufi ad-Darqāwī said, “like a man who tries to find water by digging a little here and a little there and who will die of thirst; whereas a man who digs deep in one spot, trusting in the Lord and relying on Him, will find water; he will drink and give others to drink.” But I think Ken's point is that God permeates every part of our being, and to privilege any aspect of the self is a house divided against itself. 

Western Buddhists are often most guilty of taking non-conceptualism too far. Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche agrees and says, 

“Buddhism states that our normal views inhibit us and chain us to the limited condition of samsara, whereas the correct view can lead us to our ultimate spiritual destination. We should not conclude from this—although modern Western Buddhists often do—that meditation is all about getting rid of views, or that all views will hinder us from attaining our spiritual goal. This assumption is based on the legitimate premise that Buddhist teachings emphatically identify the need to develop a nonconceptual wisdom mind in order to attain liberation and enlightenment. However, many people mistakenly think that this implies that we do not need to believe in anything [nobody tells me what to do] and that all forms of conceptuality must be dispensed with right from the beginning. It is only incorrect views that we need to overcome. The correct and noble view is to be cultivated with great diligence.”

So while some Buddhists confuse no concepts with no intellect, I do believe this is also due to the fact the Buddhism is soteriological (a system for liberation). As such the emphasis in western circles is more psycho-spiritual than metaphysical. So most people coming to Buddhism are looking for happiness over Truth. Where we can recover a more complete picture of deeper inquiry is in some Greco-Roman and Christian circles by reintroducing the concept of nous. I'm currently reading A.H. Almaas' terrific book Inner Journey Home where he states, 

“Here, instead of ordinary knowledge obscuring our basic knowledge, the nous uses it to reveal and unfold the infinite potentials of basic knowledge. The essential nous can also operate in conjunction with reason and logic, applied to spiritual experience in all its dimensions and subtlety. The essential nous is one of the natural secrets of the wisdom teachings; it was mentioned and discussed a great deal, but most contemporary investigators miss it for they do not understand it. They cannot understand it because they are subject to the dissociation of knowing and being. We can mention one more thing about the functioning of the nous: it can combine with ordinary thinking to the extent that thinking becomes the flow of essence and its aspects, in a stream that scintillates with insight and understanding. Thinking becomes objective thinking, intentional, truly rational, steady, focused, and to the point. It is the operation of true nature in the process of discerning wisdom.”

I realize (without realizationism) that some serve Divinity better with their hearts and hands than with their minds. We are not all meant to be metaphysicians or theologians. And yet, understanding the context to any path can only enhance it, for it gives us deeper meaning, purpose, and significance to some of the most pertinent questions to life and existence. So let's think about that, along with our no-thinking. 

A Loveless Story

I don't write as much about music as I'd like, but there was a period in my life when it meant almost everything to me. (Sadly, internet culture may have changed this by turning music into a highly accessible commodity.) Before I began on my adult spiritual/metaphysical quest, music was my scared experience. Sure, there was the adolescent awakening to sex, drugs (not so much), and rock n' roll, but I was also drawn to music than transcended my shallow states to bring me somewhere higher (even if it just touched some Romantic notions I had around life).

Being a product of early-1980's music, I got interested in the post-punk and new wave movements that started to permeate mainstream radio during that time. There weren't any interesting college radio stations in southern Maine back then, but every so often something cool would emerge on the airwaves. For instance, take the minor hit of the Flock of Seagulls' Space Age Love Song...

I remember being swept up by the ethereal chords and melody that revolved around the song. The lyrics were stark, but this allowed plenty of room for interpretation. Sometimes less is more, and the music itself dominated the experience allowing me to be taken away in reverie to something that felt beautiful and real.

I began to write this post because I ran across Pitchfork's 50 Best Shoegaze Albums of all Time. Shoegaze is a form of music that captured me in the 1990's, as it further elaborated the ethereal sounds that I fell in love with through a song like Space Age Love Song. As wikipedia states, shoegaze “is a subgenre of indie rock, alternative rock, or neo-psychedelia that emerged in the United Kingdom in the late 1980s and reached peak popularity in the early 1990s. The style is typified by the blurring of component musical parts—typically significant guitar distortion, feedback, and obscured vocals—into indistinguishable mixture of sound.” But what that definition doesn't get at is all that distortion, feedback, and obscurity often created something angelic. It was like a new form of Church music landing in secular, indie world. 

The album that came in Pitchfork's #1 position is no surprise to anyone. My Bloody Valentine's Loveless still stands as one of my favorite albums of all time. When I first heard it, it was literally a spiritual experience for me. Let's see what Pitchfork has to say... 

Loveless is a guided meditation on love and its absence that conjures an emotional reality instead of merely depicting one. At the album’s core is a succession of super-sweet melodies filtered through the softly psychedelic subjectivity of a mind engulfed by thirst. Shields’ bent notes are that introspection made sonic, their familiar guitar sounds so dramatically distorted, you might start to suspect that it’s your ears twisting them. The glide guitar on opening track “Only Shallow” contains the same creeping violence as the onset of passion; “Loomer,” which comes next, speeds into the childhood origins of longing.

The album isn’t just romantic, though. It’s also Romantic in the 19th century sense, a work so grand that it connects us to the limitless universe and reminds us how small we are as individuals within it. Coleridge and Turner used nature to access the infinite, but the internal landscape Shields locates is just as expansive. The radical inclusiveness of these songs even evades the specificity of gender by mixing Shields’ and Belinda Butcher’s vocals into androgynous foam on soaring monuments to the lover's gaze like “When You Sleep.” Just audible beneath the halo of fuzz that surrounds “Sometimes” are lyrics that express a frustration we’ve all felt: “I don’t know how you could not love me now.” Loveless is the defining statement of shoegaze because it discovered, in layered guitar sounds and submerged singing, a language that serenely overwhelms as it distills the universal human experience.  

Yup. What more can I say, except post a couple songs that delight me...

Well, actually I did have something to say. Back in 2007, I read the 33 1/3 book about making the Loveless record and left a review on Amazon. Here's what bombastic Ted had to say back then...

Brilliant overview of my favorite album of all time. So despite my bias toward MBV's effort, my intent was to read this book with an eye toward disinterested formalism. And the result for me was quite pleasing. McGonigal gave several perspectives that overrided some long standing myths, and maybe gave us a couple new ones to ponder. Bottom line, he gets it. He gets the fact that this CD goes beyond the overused ethereal descriptors, and touches the listener in a deep spiritual way. It's not about lyrics, melody, production, sounds...it's about the whole. The poignant philosopher Schopenhauer stated that great art will always dissolve the subject from the object, and he always placed music on top of the hierarchy of art forms. Loveless always had that experience for me, so when I read McGonigal's book I was happy to see that he never swayed from his lofty view, yet remained grounded as well. After all, the process of making great art is never quite as lofty as the outcome. We learn of the painstaking process Shields and others went through to make something that always seemed to be on the brink of demise. McGonigal made this struggle an enjoyable read, and he has given us a perfect literary companion to one of the most perfect musical experiences.

Okay, not my best review and the book was probably more mediocre than I led on back then. Another mediocre thing was seeing My Bloody Valentine live in 2013. I left halfway during the show. It was too loud and musically a let down. Sometimes the mystique should remain a mystery.

The Maladies of Evolutionary Spirituality Part 2: Does God Evolve?

In a continuing discussion around the principles behind Evolutionary Enlightenment, we now look into the nature of God and whether or not He evolves along with creation. Now, some would ask why does this matter? I always go back to the Hermetic first principle: “as above, so below.” Hence, metaphysics do matter, as what we believe God to be will always influence how we live everyday life in relationship to Him. Atheists may argue differently, but by denying God they have to create a new one which has its own metaphysical principles that guides their lives. As Etienne Gilson famously observed: metaphysics will always bury its undertakers.

A couple Process philosophers who gravitated toward an evolutionary framework of the Divine were Alfred North Whitehead and his student Charles Hartshorne. In attempt to create a lineage for his teachings, AC used these thought leaders, along with Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin and other Integral thinkers, to add credibility to Evolutionary Enlightenment.  

And most of these Process thinkers did enrich the classical theistic notion of God as omniscient, omnipotent, and static by considering Creative Evolution. The idea here being that the God is transcendent and immanent, and the immanent evolves (a.k.a. Panentheism). If you add into the mix that the transcendent is impersonal, which AC did coming from an Advaita path, and that Becoming should take precedence over Being because it's all Process, then you've got the latest and greatest in evolutionary spirituality. Yet, while culturally relevant and somewhat sexy, one has to question if such a metaphysical notion is logically consistent and internally coherent. It would seem to me that all those cracks that led to fall of AC's community could possibly go beyond AC himself, and be coming from the fact that the teachings themselves are also problematic. But how so?

First, In the case of permanence and flux, if you come down on either side, you are going to privilege a side to God in an unhealthy way. It would be like approaching the Trinity by saying the any of the three Persons of God is higher than the other. When there is no Father in the absence of the Son, and no Son in absence of the Holy Spirit, and vice versa. This is complementarity that can not be compartmentalized. By giving Becoming more credence than Being, AC was able to make God whatever he wanted Him to be according to the flux in culture and science. But what if science got it wrong, or culture is heading in bad place? Is God wrong then? No, but AC sure was. As Chesterton quipped, “How is the evolutionist to know which Beyond is the better; unless he accepts from the past and present some standard of the best?” In AC's case, it came down to his vision which was also co-opted by his egoic fallibilities.

Next, a God seen as Process will always be seen as contextual, relational, and impersonal. And there is some Truth to that. But what about the absolute, individualistic, and Personal side to God? Can we truly worship an impersonal God? I would argue most likely not. Love is relational, and in that regard, our relationship to Him is very Personal. And while there may be an impersonal dimension to God, there is most likely a Personal one too (look at it as two sides of a coin). So by making his God an impersonal process, AC became the flawed devotional vessel for his followers. While this what the guru model represents, it is incomplete if done outside of the context of something higher to worship in relationship. Robert Neville claimed that Process theism, based on Whitehead's doctrines, is “incoherent, superfluous, and descriptive of an alleged reality that would not be worthy of worship even if it existed.” So if you can't worship that God, then AC is all you got.

Moreover, AC was always weak in his metaphysical skills. He could not distinguish between the power of ontological self-creation; in that God creates man and nature; while man has cosmological self-creation, or self-determination. The freedom for us consist of determining our own character relative to the determinate character we bring to decision, but not creating our own determinateness (which can only be done by God). In essence, we are fractals of God that are given freedom to express our idiom. We can worship and align with the Creator both transcendent of us and creatively present in us. But we are not Him. And if we reduce God to a cohort of ours, then we have no sacred Absolutes to measure ourselves against. 

In one respect, AC was right that we influence God, but we can not change Him. As W. Norris Clarke said, “God in his eternal NOW is cognitively and actively present to all that goes on in our changing world, his intentional consciousness with respect to us is eternally contingently different because of what he and we do, but not changing — a distinction constantly missed by Process thinkers such as Whitehead and Hartshorne. “Different” means “could have been otherwise”; “changing” means “now one way, later another” — two quite different concepts. God can rejoice eternally, but contingently, in free responses we make to the gifts and inspirations he has already freely given us — which are all limited participations in his own infinite goodness and power, never rising higher than the original source. For God to rejoice in his own freely given, but eternally decided participations is not to change.” Again, this is metaphysically crucial as God remains a mystery above and beyond man to be worshiped in relationship beyond the collective, the holon, and the guru.

Next, by placing any scientific theory (like evolution) as an integral part of theology exposes it to the risk of collapse should the theory prove to be false or is replaced by another theory. Even if valid, AC did not even understand that evolution is not a straight arrow, but comes about in fits and starts and often needs stability prior to another leap in complexity. By pressing on his students to constantly evolve (because the Process demands its), it places too much emphasis on the strive to grasp in place of the allowance for receptivity. Grace has its place, and it may not always require one to evolve. 

Lastly, what if it's not about all this increasing complexification of Process, but more a unification of the Personal? We know from systems theory, the cosmos is a deep movement from simplification to complexity. But this “assertion of the increasing 'complexification' through mind necessarily implies its unification around a personal center, for mind is not just an undefined something or other; where it exists in its own specific nature, it subsists as individuality, as person (Ratzinger).” Therefore, this “implies that the cosmos is moving toward a unification in the personal,” and “confirms once again the infinite precedence of the individual over the universal.... The world is in motion toward unity in the person.” AC made it all about the sake for the whole, when the whole draws its meaning from the Personal. As such, in AC's world, the Personal is lost to a mere idea when “person always takes precedence over the mere idea (Ratzinger).”

Peter Kreeft says, “God is infinite love, and what is infinite does not increase. This would only assume His Love is not complete. It through His love that we create with God, which changes our relationship to Him but does not change God... But how can there be a relationship between the changing and unchanging. Much like there is with the unchanging sun and changing world. There is also a changing relationship between unchanging moral principles and changing applications of them to changing situations.” While the relationship to the Divine changes, it may not be in the way envisioned by AC or any other utopian notions we can come up with immanently. God's telos is more mysterious than that, and the emphasis should always be on Unity in Person over the mere ideas around the Progress of Process. Otherwise, we may end up selling our souls short of our True Potential.

The Maladies of Evolutionary Spirituality Part 1: Does Culture Evolve?

In world of human fallibility, spiritual teachers often fall from grace. And some come back for a second act. One such teacher, let's call him AC, is attempting to recreate himself in the postmodern spiritual marketplace. Yes, I was influenced by him at one time (some of which was very positive), but after his fall I had to reexamine my notions around him and his teachings. And there are legitimate concerns around his character which has the internet abuzz. But right now, I want to tackle his metaphysics: Evolutionary Enlightenment.

First, it's important to note that Evolutionary Enlightenment came out of an Advaita path that informed AC initially. From there it was seen as augmentation to a path that denied world and soul, and to some extent even God. For many former non-dualists, it seemed the AC was bringing something new into the world: reconciling the one with the many (all of which are evolving with purpose).

Nevertheless, many aspects of a postmodern evolutionary spirituality are not new at all. The notion of a person spiritually evolving goes back to the days of Orthodox Christianity. The Church did not use the word evolution, but it was understood that there were levels to sanctification. They were seen as purification, illumination, and then deification. Other paths also have levels to an individual's spiritual evolution, whether it be attainments of Bhumis in Buddhism or Patanjali's Yoga Sutra's in Hinduism.

(It should be noted that we have many lines of development that can evolve in time, however, we are focused on the spiritual here since that is core to a spiritual teaching. Certainly, I can become more emotionally intelligent, cognitively intelligent, and kinesthetic without being spiritually orientated. And some who are spiritually evolved, can be lacking in all these areas. Human beings are complex.)

When Darwin's theory began to make a cultural impact, it was then seen that material evolution has been happening all along all the way back to the big bang. While the theory of material evolution still predominates in science, it still has challenges with some of the punctuated leaps that can not be easily explained. Nevertheless, it made sense for religion to absorb a more credible theory than Bible doctrine that said God created the world 6,000 years ago. (David Bentley Hart mentions that even in Biblical terms, “creation is seen not as a one-shot, once-and-for-all event at the beginning, but as an ongoing process throughout cosmic history, God working with nature from his eternal Now outside of time.”)

The area where things go off the rails for Evolutionary Enlightenment, is not that person and material world evolve, but now it's seen that culture evolves and more importantly, God evolves. Hence, all contradictions in Reality gets reconciled in one working principle-belief: the progress of process.

So let's first take a look at culture. Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature makes a significant point (with lots of evidence) that we have become more civilized (or less prone to warfare). So while this may be true, does it demonstrate that human nature has truly evolved or has civilization just kept it in check? You can also look at Gebser's work (which heavily influenced Ken Wilber) that there are cultural stages to evolution. Gebser was not overly firm on his structures, and certainly didn't have the evidence to back it up, but I often wonder if he was trying to fit certain cultural patterns into a model that he already preferably intuited? Personally, I have a hard time defending postmodern culture as a higher stage of development with all the secularization and relativism it has wrought. While some claim that civil and environmental rights came from this era, it could also be said the seeds of these principles were already in place in high modern culture. And taking some virtues too far to the extreme, like tolerance (which permeates our pluralistic postmodern culture), can eventually negate the benefits of it. 

One anonymous poster from a message board made the interesting point that, “We're not evolving in time or in history. The Omega is pulling us upward and it appears that we are progressing in a forward direction... In fact, right now, we are regressing as far as the spiral of history goes. "Surgical" drone strikes are about as barbarous a method of warfare as I can imagine. No rattles on that flying serpent. Normally I don't feel too sorry for backward, bloodthirsty jihadis who happen to be in the vicinity when a missile lands, but I would have a hard time arguing that it was a noble or heroic business. Are we really a better people than my grandfather's generation? Sure they had fist fights for entertainment, and we prefer football, but there sure is a lot of senseless violence. Not to mention stupidity -- Rap music? All those people on "reality" television? We are a lot more vulgar than we used to be.”

When Ratzinger was asked why hasn't religion brought fruits to culture, he said, “I think that we must say first that salvation, the salvation coming from God, is not quantitative, hence, not the sum of an addition. In technical discoveries there is a growth that may proceed by fits and starts but is nonetheless somehow continuous. The purely quantitative is measurable, and one can ascertain whether there is now more or less. A quantifiable progress in mans goodness, however, is impossible, because every man is new and because in a certain respect history begins anew with every man. It is very important to learn this distinction. The goodness of man, to put it like that, is not quantifiable. We therefore cannot assume that a Christianity that in the year zero begins as a mustard seed ought to be a huge tree at the end and that everyone ought, to be able to see how much better things have gotten century by century. There can be collapses and repeated ruptures, because redemption is always entrusted to the freedom of man, and God will never annul this freedom.”

While I agree that technological developments in medicine and lifestyle have made our lives more comfortable and lasting, have we used this benefit to look into the significance of life more deeply or do we just celebrate that we have more of it?  The question will always come back to what we mean by progress? Ratzinger mentions goodness, and goodness needs to be measured against something Absolute, or it becomes progress for the sake of progress.

It would seem when we look at history, there have been periods of advancement in man. But to pin it down to one period is tricky, as there are always countervailing forces in every period of culture. Some believe progress is not a positive concept, as progress can also be seen as a progression away, a distancing and withdrawal from something pure and perfect in origin (see the Fall). I am not sure I completely agree with that, as I don't necessarily believe in a Golden Age that we can point to. Some would say traditional man is higher, and some would say modern man. I would say it depends on the day you ask me. But I don't feel it is this day.

So while Evolutionary Enlightenment posits we are culturally evolving and it is up to those of us on the "leading edge" to cultivate that further, and if even true to some extent, this also can be a point of contention from a certain perspective. As Bob notes, “the entire concept of Evolutionary Enlightenment is misguided, misinformed and mistaken. [And] it's worse than that. If the evolutionary paradigm is correct, it means that people of the past were just the means to arrive at us, and hence less than fully human. This is a monstrous doctrine, for it dehumanizes anyone short of... AC? Please. On the positive side, it implies that AC is just a stage on the way to something better, so we can ignore him.”

So by saying we are more evolved we may be dehumanizing our progenitors. And “how do you feel about being a mere stepping stone to future humans who will dismiss your ideas as mythic and irrational postmodernism? The point is, the human station is a mirror of the absolute, and that any human, at any time, may access it. To suggest that AC, or Ken Wilber, or Deepak Chopra, or Tony Robbins, or Oprah Winfrey are somehow "higher" than Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas, Meister Eckhart, or Denys -- and that's just in the West -- is absurd.  You can't tell truth by a calendar” (Godwin).

Lastly, if our ideas around cultural evolution were to be seen as the raison d'être of the cosmos, and then privileged over the cultures that are geared more towards homeostasis, would this undermine something very fruitful in the world? Healing and agape should be foundational and antecedent to eros, however, in Evolutionary Enlightenment it will always be seen as secondary since process and cultural progress takes center stage.

So maybe progress should not be seen as some culturally defined vision and evolving metric in time, but a motion toward unity in Person (in terms of growth in wholeness; including aspects of love, truth, virtue, beauty, creativity, and sanctity). In Part 2 of this blog post, I look into the notion of whether or not God evolves? And what this means as a metaphysical foundation.