Quality, Mysticism and Action in the World
John Beasley
In this essay, I seek to explore the
difficult terrain of quality, of the good. I will examine the novels of Robert
M. Pirsig; also a brief formulation of modern mysticism, 'All Else is Bondage',
by Wei Wu Wei, who is Irish/English despite his nom de plume; thirdly, the
impressive body of writings by Ken Wilber, who seeks to integrate all human
knowledge including the realm of spirit; fourthly, the experience of scientist
and academic John Wren-Lewis who had mysticism thrust upon him after a near
death experience, and finally the work of a modern mystic and teacher, Hameed
Ali, who has integrated traditional Sufi insights with modern psychological
understanding and techniques. Each brings a distinctive approach and
perspective to the field.
Talking About Quality
Let us begin by looking at quality, and
how we might talk about quality.
For Pirsig, quality is regarded as fundamental while indefinable. Yet his
Metaphysics of Quality is an attempt to define quality, as he concedes in Ch 5
of 'Lila'. "Quality cannot be defined. Yet here he was about to define
it." If by definition we mean a verbal package that wraps up every aspect
of the term in advance of experience, then quality cannot be so defined; but
then, neither can something so simple as a tree. But language is not just about
definition. Any communication involves quite a lot of 'reading between the
lines', the root meaning of the word 'intelligence', and quite often a didactic
attention to terms defeats the aim of communication, and focuses instead upon
the qualities of the 'finger' which is pointing to the 'moon' of enlightenment.
Let us agree to use language more loosely, recognising its limitations,
certainly, but allowing the 'Aha' of recognition when it arises.
Any metaphysics is constructed in
language, and as Edward Pols reminds us, "the corruption of language
consists in our substituting it for the real." In 'Radical Realism', Pols
explores the question of "How can we get out from under the net of
language", the issue that the rise of structuralism and post-structuralism
has made central during the past century. He attacks the view that language is
so peculiar that any attempt to explore the relationship between language and
reality is doomed to failure, though he acknowledges it is difficult to
express. He challenges the extreme views which find language to be constructed
from unknowable stimuli as an attack on the ontic level of the person, and
shows that all argument derives its authority from that ontic level. This fits
quite comfortably with Pirsig's view of quality as fundamental, since quality
can only be experienced by individuals, as he acknowledges. (Lila Ch 13)
Pirsig has a bleak view of the potential
for real contact between people, though. "All these different patterns of
people's lives passing through each other without any contact at all."
(Lila Ch 17) But language would fail if it were not for the shared experiences
of individuals in which it is embedded. The fit does not have to be perfect.
Your concept of a tree will be different to mine, if we were to explore them at
enough depth, but it is not necessary that they be identical for communication
to occur. This is the trap that Pirsig falls into, in his belief that
metaphysics is about definition. We can argue and debate and communicate
without defining, and as a novelist Pirsig knows that well. But consistent with
his ranking of the intellectual as the highest level of static quality, he
places reason in a privileged position, as a lynch pin of academic debate. And
let us be clear, Pirsig wants his ideas to be taken seriously by academia,
partly because he believes in his skills in rhetoric, and partly because as an
outsider, as a person who has been defined as 'insane', he craves recognition
by those on the inside, the inhabitants of the Church of Reason.
Pirsig and Mysticism
I find it
interesting that Pirsig is often taken to be a mystic, as Antony McWatt,
for example, explicitly argues in his response to an earlier essay of mine.
Pirsig claims to have avoided the 'easy escape' of that path, and to me it
appears that he represents a modern metaphysics responsive to mystic insight,
but knowing about truth, rather than experiencing the truth that comes from
immersion in a transformational praxis. He is perhaps, a 'mystic manque',
someone who is attracted to the mystic view, while not yet 'enlightened' (if
indeed enlightenment exists). Hameed Ali (who writes under the pen name of A.H.
Almaas) says, "a central thread in the field of Western philosophical
thought concerns epistemological questions regarding the experience of the
self. This body of thought has penetrated the naive assumptions of conventional
thought regarding the nature of self and the world, and brought profound
appreciation of the difference between mental constructs and more fundamental
reality. However, this tradition does not focus on actual methods of
transforming the experience of the self." ('The Point of Existence', p
178)
This seems to me to apply particularly
well to Pirsig. The subject/object metaphysics that Pirsig so loathes is an
assumption of the nature of self and the world, and Pirsig has indeed produced
a more profound appreciation of the nature of fundamental reality in his
exploration of quality. Yet his book is a product of the Church of Reason, as
he refers to the academic world in 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance',
and while pointing to a mystic depth in reality, he actually offers a rather
unweildy and unworkable rule based ethics using the four levels of static
quality that he explores in 'Lila'. A true mystic wouldn't bother, as Pirsig
acknowledges in his discussion in Ch 5 of 'Lila'. For the mystic, ethics is not
an issue; rather, a clear and close relationship to truth provides an integral
ethics, in which actions are not debated, or chosen, but lived.
All of which comes back to a rather
fundamental point. Mysticism is not a belief. That is, mysticism cannot be
grasped by intellect. Certainly it is possible to discuss mysticism, to analyse
and dissect it in words, but as Ken Wilber points out, words will never be a
path to understanding without a transformational practice, or at the very
least, a transformational experience such as John Wren-Lewis met with in his
near death experience in Asia. (His fascinating article, 'The Dazzling Dark',
is available on the internet.) Krishnamurti felt the weight of this
observation, when, after decades of teaching, he conceded that probably not one
person had been enlightened through listening to him.
Pirsig's Place in Philosophy
Pirsig belongs to a broader group of
metaphysicians who posit that value is foundational to understanding. This
includes much writing that is phrased in theological terms, but in which God is
understood to represent the 'Good', as well as formulations couched in terms of
depth, and here I would include Paul Tillich and Ken Wilber, where in Wilber's
words "The greater the depth, the greater the value". ('Sex, Ecology,
Spirituality' p 518) Wilber would
protest that this is not metaphysics, though I fail to see how such a statement
can be anything else.
Other philosophers point to qualities
other than goodness as fundamental. Nietzsche points to will, courage and
vitality as the core issues. Sartre points to the courage to accept and will
what is given in our experience, without evasion and 'bad faith'. Much
post-modern philosophy undercuts traditional value statements by exploring the
language in which they are cast, until often nothing substantive remains, and
the whole exercise is assumed to be about the use or abuse of power.
'Scientism' assumes a 'reality' out there, which can be seen and measured, and
clarified through experimentation, where values are excluded; and it denies any
reality to the interior realm where value must reside. This is, of course, only
a cursory sampling of other approaches aimed at indicating something of the
territory we are entering.
Pirsig's attempt at a metaphysics is a
response to a number of issues. Originally, if his account in 'Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance' is taken at face value, it arose in the context of
teaching writing, where the value dimension was being overlooked in favour of
technique and analysis. From there he expanded it to grapple with the dominant
scientific worldview, with its incapacity to deal with value issues. And in
'Lila', so he tells us, it was his reading of supposedly value-free
anthropology that led him to assert that Quality and value were the same thing.
"Value was a term they had to use, but under Boas' science value does not
really exist". (Lila Ch 5) He saw his task as "to first find some
solid ground upon which such a (new anthropological theoretic) structure can be
constructed. It was this conclusion that placed him right in the middle of the
field of philosophy known as metaphysics ... a collection of the most general
statements of a hierarchical structure of thought." (Lila Ch 5) His
opponents he saw as the logical positivists who dominated science and
anthropology, and the mystics, who "share a common belief that the
fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things
up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided." (Lila Ch 5)
Pirsig actually welcomed the hostility of
both camps towards metaphysics, arguing that it could therefore become the
bridge between the two. But immediately he concedes that since he had already
argued that "Quality doesn't have to be defined ... this means that a
'Metaphysics of Quality' is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical
absurdity." (Lila Ch 5) His answer to this is to suggest that while
writing a metaphysics might appear to the mystic a degenerate activity,
"avoidance of degeneracy is a degeneracy of another sort", the sort
fanatics are made of, just as "Objections to pollution are a form of
pollution". (Lila Ch 5) This ad hominen argument (which implies mystics
who deplore degeneracy are themselves degenerate) is a rhetorical flourish, and
should alert us that this is where Pirsig is most vulnerable. He has identified
the weaknesses in his enterprise, while papering over the cracks with a crass
generalization. Do only fanatics object to pollution? Is degeneracy made
wholesome by noting how common it is? As Pirsig himself has noted,
"metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand page
menu and no food." (Lila Ch 5)
Traditional Mysticism
In exploring the world-view of the mystic,
of which there are many variations, I will use Wei Wu Wei's formulation in 'All
Else is Bondage' as a brief and rather clear formulation that seems to pull
together many of the strands of Eastern mysticism in a way accessible to
western thought, though the author would insist that what can be thought it is
not what he is pointing to. Indeed, I accept this point, but as his small
volume is presented as something of an 'intermediate stage' to 'an entirely
modern presentation of oriental or perennial metaphysics' for the 'pilgrim
struggling to understand', it suits our purpose well. (Quotes from the Foreward
to 'All Else is Bondage') For I assume that a metaphysics is fundamentally a
'struggling to understand', and however tenuous an activity this may be, it is
one that continues to fascinate and engage human beings across history and
cultures, and is the motive for this essay.
Now I must plunge in bravely where Pirsig
feared to go, and address what I see as the territory where a metaphysics of
'quality' and a mystic understanding of the world contend. Pirsig described (in
ZMM) how he walked out of Benares Hindu University after ten years there, and
in his words "gave up", over an issue that I also find a problem in
the mystic attitude to the world. This is the issue of how mysticism destroys
morality, at least in the conventional
sense of the word. Wei Wu Wei deals
with this issue, in quite specific language.
When we look at a mystic 'metaphysics' we
engage in something of a contradiction in terms, since the core understanding
of the mystic seems to be that existence itself is a fantasy, "and in the
absence of the phantasy of living there is the bliss of 'nirvana' or awakened
life." (Wei Wu Wei p 47) However, Wu Wei allows a place for knowledge,
where he says "All the teaching of all the Masters ... consists in
attempts by means of knowledge, practices and manoeuvres to free the
pseudo-individual from the chains of volition, for when that is abandoned no
bondage remains." (p 48) And in his introduction he asserts that
"there is nothing mysterious about this matter" ("escaping the
dungeon of individuality"). "The apparent mystery ... is just
obnubilation, an inability to perceive the obvious owing to a conditioned
reflex which causes us persistently to look in the wrong direction!" I
fear he would regard metaphysics as part of this 'wrong direction', but this
essay uses the language of knowledge and metaphysics, in spite of Wu Wei's
insistence that "the understanding required is not conceptual and
therefore is not knowledge." (Foreward, 'All Else is Bondage')
"Who is there to create a cause? Who
is there to suffer an effect? ... There is neither a causal nor an effectual
entity." (All Else is Bondage p xi) The mystic objects to the
objectification of subjects, but does not deny the reality of the subjects as
subjects. "Bondage is ... the illusory identification of Subject with its
object." (All Else is Bondage, p 27) But the world in which morality
exists is only a construct, and morality itself must be seen as part of that
construct. "The apparent universe is a dream-structure in-formed by Subject,
and therefore can be nothing but I-subject. For that reason nothing that
happens therein can touch or reach the subject which it is." (p 38)
"Being ... is not ceasing to objectivise - for that is the functional
aspect of subject - but ceasing to objectivise oneself, and thereby ceasing to
regard one's objects as independant entities." (p 40) And these objects
include the others who form the basis of any morality. They are merely
phenomena in a dream. "'Others', therefore, are nothing but our objects; as
we know them they are not entities in their own right, and they only appear to
be such each as dreamer of his own dream, that is subjectively." (p43)
All morality assumes that I can choose my
actions. The significance of the debate as to the possibility of free will is
precisely that if I have no ability to choose, then morality, in the sense of
being responsible for my actions toward others, collapses. "Without
'intentions'", says Wu Wei, "We just act." (p 46) The absence of
volitional action does not mean we cease to act, but action becomes
spontaneous, "the so-called 'non-action' of the Sage." (p 47)
"The I-notion which has intention is itself ... a reflex. Its performance
as inaugurator of pretended acts of volition is a phantasy, and it is precisely
this phantasy which constitutes suffering." (p 47) So to the mystic, all
volition is a myth, and a bondage, and "everything is as-it-is and as it
must be. For it is 'intention' that is responsible for dualistic conception and
the ensuing comparison of interdependant counterparts, seen as opposites, one
of which is 'good' and the other 'bad'." (p 49) Here we see the core terms
of any morality linked directly to the myth of volition and intention. If we
cannot choose, if volition is a myth, then we can do neither good nor bad, and
morality collapses as part of the suffering inherent in dualism.
But the mystic somewhat paradoxically
asserts that such a living in the moment, without volition, constitutes a state
of high moral virtue. "Envy, hatred and malice will be no more, vengeance
will no longer seem desirable, we shall be invulnerable, and we know why ...
there is no one to hurt any 'us'. Love and hatred are replaced by universal
benediction, manifested as kindliness and good nature towards the world around
us which we now recognise as ourself." (p 55) Yet Wu Wei acknowledges that
"the Sages did not consistently conform to any pattern of saintliness,
their phenomenal manifestations were on occasion quite ungodly ... Sai Baba was
often violent". (p 55) He concludes, "Our notions concerning the
behaviour of sages are only concepts; and anyhow they are not to be copied. We
have only to live noumenally ... being as-we-are. This is the only
'practice'." (p 56)
Myth, Mysticism and Morality
In the myth of the Garden of Eden, man
resides with God in the garden in a state of naive innocence. Once Adam and Eve
enjoy the forbidden fruit, however, they become aware of themselves as
separated beings - moral beings. This loss of innocence is symbolised by the
experience of shame which causes them to seek to cover their nakedness. They
learn how to lie, and to blame others for their wrongdoings. And so according
to the myth, they no longer can live in harmony in the garden, but must labour
to find their food in a hard world where they will also find death. And each
person born into this world repeats in their own history something of this
'fall', as each innocent child learns to become a separate individual, a self,
who enters into moral relations with other selves, experiencing shame and
guilt, and realising that death will be his or her ultimate and unavoidable
fate.
While mainstream Christianity has focussed
on the fallen and sinful state of man, there have always been currents of
Christian thought, sometimes tolerated, sometimes attacked as heresy, which
have emphasised the essential goodness of creation, and man's true nature as
that which existed prior to the fall. This Johannine tradition informed Celtic
spirituality, and was powerfully expressed within the Christian Mystic
tradition. While often accused of being pantheistic, it more properly was an
expression of panentheism, where God's goodness was not irretrievably lost, but
could be discerned in his creation. From this perspective, the healing of the
state of separation from God was to be achieved, not so much through
contrition, repentence and adherence to a revealed moral code, but by
recovering the lost innocence of childhood through recontacting the divine in
the world, including in our own selves. To the mystic, God was to be sought
within, and at the highest levels, God and self were found to be 'not two'.
In the Buddhist myth, the Buddha as a
young prince is protected from suffering and death. But the day comes when he
encounters the sick and dying, and shocked, he leaves his kingdom to seek a way
to escape suffering. In his wanderings he explores the wisdom available to him,
but is always unsatisfied, until eventually he sits under the Bodhi tree
determined to find enlightenment. While the nature of his experience is still
debated, he comes to a realisation that ends his search, and proclaims a new
middle way of tolerance and compassion.
The Buddhist tradition has many branches,
and in China and later in Japan there developed a particularly powerful understanding
of the enlightenment experienced by the Buddha, known as Zen. Through various
disciplines, notably meditation of various kinds, the egoic self is challenged
and the boundaries between self and other, subject and object, that were
developed in childhood as a part of normal human development are
re-examined. The Zen ideal is to
"attain a state of pure awareness of things, without judging them."
(Aubrey Menen, The New Mystics, p 229) Menen claims that in modern terms this
is a valuation of the cerebellum, that part of the brain that controls
instinctive action, and a condemnation of the cortex, where thinking arises.
The end result is not tranquil. "The Zen master laughs, shouts, has fits
of irrational anger and generally behaves (as they say) like a happy
madman." (Op cit) "But in its origin, Zen was simplistic, no belief
more so. In the words of Lin-chi (died 867): 'There is no place in Buddhism for
using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Relieve your bowels, pass
water, put on your clothes and eat your food. When you're tired, go and lie
down. Ignorant people may laugh at me, but the wise will understand'."
(p230)
Both the Christian and the Buddhist myths
point to a lost 'essential goodness', represented by the garden of Eden in one
myth, the prince who does not know suffering in the other. Both have spawned
traditions in which this lost goodness is able to be reclaimed, and this mystic
path inevitably focusses upon pure awareness experienced in the moment, leading
to the dissolution of the boundaries
between self and others, subject and object.
It seems to me that all moral virtues
collapse in the mystic world-view into the one aspect of immediacy.
Unreflective living-in-the-moment becomes the only good, and all other values
simply emerge from that state of being. Is not this what is meant by 'bliss'?
The questions that arise for me, despite my attraction to the elegant
simplicity of this view, are twofold. Firstly, is immediacy a moral cop-out, an
evasion of moral experience, a refusal to take others seriously? And more
fundamentally, if the phenomenal world is indeed a fantasy, a dream, how is it
that its hold on us is so strong that so few achieve liberation? Might it not
be the case that the avoidance of suffering by living in the moment is the
ultimate self-ishness, an abdication of responsibilities thrust upon us by
life, and thus the ultimate in 'bad-faith'? This equates with John Wren-Lewis's
assessment of mysticism prior to his near death experience, which was "I
saw mysticism as a neurotic escape into fantasy, due to a failure of nerve in
the creative struggle." (The Dazzling Dark, p2)
Is Mysticism Moral Evasion?
This question is one of value. If value
has only one dimension, immediacy, then mysticism is supported. But mystics
appear to take other values quite seriously. We normally assume that when
values contend, some form of reconciliation of conflicting values must
emerge through choice, which implies
intention and volition. Or to put it more subtly, might not the emergence of
intention and volition be a response to the emergence in human experience of
the ability to comprehend more than one value, with the result being the
emergence of choice? John Wren-Lewis offers a particularly interesting insight,
since, as he says "I had God consciousness thrust upon me in 1983, my
sixtieth year, without working for it, desiring it, or even believing in it,
and this has understandably given me a somewhat unusual perspective on the
whole matter." ('The Dazzling Dark, p2) He describes his experience thus:
"I've been liberated from what William Blake called obsession with
'futurity', which, until it happened, I used to consider a psychological
impossibility. And to my continual astonishment, for ten years now this
liberation has made the conduct of practical life more rather than less
efficient, precisely because time consciousness isn't overshadowed by 'anxious
thought for the morrow'." (p 3)
If we take what Wren-Lewis says as
significant, then immediacy is indeed critical, yet does not preclude value
choices. Having spoken personally with Wren-Lewis, and having a more than
passing interest in his previous attitude to religion, since he was to a
considerable extent the instigator for the Bishop of Woolwich writing 'Honest
to God', a remarkable book that got me thinking as a teenager, I take what he
has to say as very significant indeed. Indeed, his pessimistic assessment of
the potential for 'strenuous spiritual practice' to lead to what he calls 'God
consciousness' convinced me for some time of the futility of seeking any path
to 'enlightenment'. Krishnamurti, too, always claimed that there was no way to
progress towards 'enlightenment', for such progress was a process in time, and
it is just such processes that 'enlightenment' precludes. "The very idea
of a spiritual path is necessarily self defeating". (The Dazzling Dark, p
7) I use the term 'enlightenment' as a convenient shorthand for a different way
of being, and this is indeed something Wren-Lewis amply confirms. As just one
example, he had always been extremely sensitive to pain. He says "I
discovered how all kinds of 'negative' human experiences became marvels of
creation when experienced by the Dazzling Dark ... Pain becomes ... simply an
interesting sensation ... The Buddha's distinction between pain and suffering,
which I used to think was equivocation, is now a common experience for
me." (Op cit, p 5)
If future outcomes are not explored
through 'anxious thought', the implication is that choice emerges from some
other level, the 'wisdom of the organism' being one contender, though the
phrase, while felicitous, is hardly explanatory. The implications for
traditional morality are staggering, since it is indeed the emergence of
'anxious thought' which students of ethology such as Lyall Watson, in 'Dark
Nature', suggests leads to moral judgement. "By its very nature, a complex
society creates calculating beings - ones who recognize the consequences of
their own behavior, who predict the response of others, and who measure the net
profit and loss in everything that happens." (p 75)
In traditional moral terms, it appears
that the concept of duty is minimised or even abolished for the mystic, since
it has a clear time orientation built into it. Wei Wu Wei's denigration of
intention and volition seems to fit quite comfortably with Wren-Lewis's
experience.
Critics of mysticism have been quick to
point to anomalies in the behaviour of the 'enlightened' that suggest that even
in the most liberated, pockets of egoic behaviour persist. This includes
Krishnamurti's unwillingness to deal honestly with the man who acted as his
secretary, and with whose wife he had a long term affair. Some observers of the
Zen scene in the United States have been scathing in their critique of sexual
and financial exploitation by supposed 'masters', who in some cases also
displayed racist or homophobic or other behaviour offensive to modern liberal
sensitivities.
All this suggests that 'enlightenment'
cannot be equated with moral virtue, as it is commonly understood. Yet as Wei
Wu Wei claimed, in his words quoted earlier, " Love and hatred are
replaced by universal benediction, manifested as kindliness and good nature
towards the world around us which we now recognise as ourself." For the
present, this must be left as a paradox. It seems that mysticism assumes an
integral morality, in that moral issues are resolved in the immediate
'non-action' of the sage. Wilber asserts that "'choiceless awareness'
means that both judging and no judging are allowed to arise, appropriate to
circumstances." (The Eye of Spirit, p 277) He adopts Chogyam Trungpa
Rinpoche's discrimination between 'compassion' and 'idiot compassion'.
"This is perhaps the hardest lesson to learn in politically correct
America, where idiot compassion - the abdication of discriminating wisdom and
the loss of moral fiber to voice it - is too often equated with
spirituality." (Op Cit )
While mysticism can appear amoral, it can
also expose the ambiguities of much social morality, where neediness, for
example, masquerades as love. Mysticism does not exclude a strong moral
polemic, as in the poetry of William Blake; indeed, there are many examples of
polemic in the mystic tradition. What differs in the moral behaviour of the
mystic is the lack of volition or intention in his action, since neither the
past nor the future are dominating present awareness, which is therefore
responsive to the circumstances of the present.
Is Liberation Achievable?
Many observers of mysticism are
pessimistic about the ability of various forms of transformational practice to
achieve the sort of transformation that John Wren-Lewis had thrust upon him. As
we saw above, both Krishnamurti and John Wren-Lewis deny the possibility of a
'spiritual path', since such a path implies a focus on futurity. Others have
pointed to the very low success rate, so far as can be judged, achieved by
popular transformational practices such as Zen. Wren-Lewis claims that when he
sought spiritual advice regarding his new state, "no one I consulted,
either in person or through books, had a clue".(p 6) Not that he denies
the reality of a "common 'deep structure' of experience underlying the
widely different cultural expressions of mystics in all traditions." (p6)
But he points to a number of accounts which suggest that enlightenment has been
an act of grace for the recipient, rather than a reward for effort on their
part.
"Even disciplines designed to prize
attention away from doing are simply another form of doing",(p 7) observes
Wren-Lewis, who turns to his experience as a scientist for a partial suggestion
of how such a Catch 22 might be overcome. "The right kind of lateral
thinking can often bring liberation ... provided the Catch 22 is faced in its
full starkness, without evasions in the form of metaphysical speculations
beyond experience."(p 8) His main advice to spiritual seekers is "to
experiment with any practice or idea that seems interesting - which is what the
Buddha urged a long time ago ... novelty is apparently the name of the time game."(p
9) Or as Krishnamurti said, "Truth is a pathless land".
I will turn to the thought of two living
Americans to extend the hints that Wren-Lewis offers, and explore the
possibility that a transformational path is not a contradiction in terms. They
are Hameed Ali, the founder of the Diamond Approach, and Ken Wilber, considered
by many as the best theorist of human reality, including spirituality, that has
emerged.
Hameed Ali came to the United States to do
a doctorate in science, and soon became more interested in personal
development, studying with Claudio Naranjo, from whom he learnt about the
enneagram, and combining his traditional roots in Sufi mysticism with modern
psychology, notably object relations theory, Kohut's self theory, and studies
of child development, such as by Margaret Mahler. Ali has developed the Diamond
Approach to personal development, and in numerous books has explored the
importance of essence, those qualities which vitalise the human infant, and are
encountered throughout life but usually ignored or trivialised.
Ali utilises both traditional meditation
techniques and modern therpeutic techniques to assist students to become more
aware and sensitive to their essential qualities. Almost inevitably the process
begins as a striving for something missing, a search for the holy grail that
will bring liberation. But as students begin to experience their essential
natures, it is possible for the efforting that accompanies the initial search
to be replaced by a process of inquiry, in which the truth of experience
becomes valued for its own sake. The process is in an important sense a via
negativa, an undoing of childhood conditioning, in which the pain and terror of
childhood experiences that shaped our developing egos are re-encountered and
faced, and the blinkers on our experience that such trauma created are removed.
Ultimately the mystic sense of oneness with the world, and the ability to view
everything as 'not two', can emerge from the enquiry process, supported by the
developing essential states. What Ali calls 'universal love', or 'cosmic
consciousness', "is a unification of all aspects of essence ... all the
essential aspects must be free, and available without blockage." (The
Freedom to Be, p 173)
In contrast to many other mystic schools,
Ali is open to a broad spectrum of experience. He acknowledges that often
therapy will be needed before spiritual development can proceed, and individual
work with students can involve considerable therapeutic content. He remains
refreshingly candid about the reality of 'enlightenment', claiming no
perfection for himself. He acknowledges the value of the self, which was a
necessary construct in infancy, and in this regard his understanding is similar
to that of Ken Wilber. The self, Wilber seems to argue, is a stage in human
development, necessary at the time, but able to be transcended by a mystic
transformation which remains involved with the world, not denying it or
minimising it, "a Higher Self with a wider Community of all beings."
(Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, p 516)
Ali suggests that the path towards
enlightenment hinges upon the development of the essential self, through
activites such as meditation, focussed inquiry, personal therapy, the support
of a teacher, and the intensification of experience that comes from working in
a group. Once such a development has occurred, a deeper stage of transformation
becomes possible, in what seems to resemble an experience of the 'dark night of
the soul', where the full horror of loss of self is experienced, and faced,
alone. In Ali's words, you have to let go of everything you have ever loved,
parents, partners, pets; but also "your feelings, your mind, your ideas.
You are in love with all of these. Letting go of them will feel like a great loss,
even a death. It is not you who dies. What dies is everyone else. In the
experience of ego death, you don't feel you are dying; you feel everybody else
is dead. You feel you're all alone, totally alone." (The Freedom to Be, p
169)
Pirsig argues that only what has quality
can conceivably be sensed by the organism. In such a state it is indeed
possible "to just act". But the evolution of culture, and language,
fundamentally changes that world. Now the three forms of good; art, morals and
science, are discriminated, and the individual who has choice emerges,
painfully, from organismic bliss. In Wilber's terms, the world is no longer
embraced only from the inner experience of the individual. The individual has
become an agent in a society, where he or she calculates the benefits or
otherwise of potential actions. And the individual is now part of an objective
world, where the understanding of cause and effect can allow calculated action
for the hope of future gain. Time and space have emerged with potent effect.
The world has expanded to allow subjectivity, objectivity and intersubjectivity
to co-exist.
From an evolutionary perspective it is
easy to see how such a development can assist with survival. The aware and
proactive individual is certainly going to avoid potential dangers to which the
organism, immersed in its immediacy, is oblivious. Indeed, evolution appears to
have preempted this advance with the more rigid development of the instincts, a
form of learning which is hard-wired into the organism. Instincts develop over many generations, as
helpful behaviours are selected in the evolving population; but culture offers
the potential for learning to be gained within one generation, and passed on
through education to the next. Yet this has been a mixed blessing, for the
price of such flexibility is individual doubt, uncertainty, and the emptiness
and meaninglessness that characterise our age. Add to this the loss of
immediacy, which is replaced with habitual mental fantasy, and the desire for a
simpler and less threatening life is understandable.
Pirsig is only one of many writers who
point to the alienation and loneliness that plagues modern society. Yet he
offers nothing substantial as a remedy, seeming to believe that suffering is
the inevitable price of quality. "Those species that don't suffer don't
survive. Suffering is the negative
face of the Quality that drives the whole process." (Lila Ch 29) Ken
Wilber points to a transformational praxis as essential in moving into the
higher stages of personal development, where spirit is discerned. Wilber has
taken the position that what happens as a person grows and develops is
sufficiently obvious that we may construct a conceptual map to chart this
development, and that this requires no metaphysics. His holarchical model
asserts that at any level of the holarchy, there is a sense of completion or
fulfilment, as the new level of evolution integrates as a whole what was
previously irreconcilable, yet this also co-exists with an incompleteness as a
part, that is only resolvable as the transition is made to a new and yet higher
level. He also argues that a higher level both includes and transcends the
lower level, and shows there is a progressive unfolding of Spirit as movement
up the holarchy occurs. While Wilber seeks to base his model upon evidence, his
argument assumes that the only valid critique of the evidence is by those who
have themselves taken the trouble to explore the realm they debate.
Wilber takes community and the moral
relations between people very seriously indeed. Where the mystic seems to avoid
moral issues by escaping the world of subjects and objects altogether, and
Pirsig builds an uneasy compromise balancing Dynamic Quality, which might well
be the 'bliss' of the mystic, with his static levels, which he applies with as
much logical consistency as he can muster, Wilber takes seriously the
subjective, objective and intersubjective worlds revealed in experience, and
suggests that the reconciliation of subject and object is dealt with as higher
levels of integration are achieved, though they are incapable of resolution at
the intellectual level only. Hence for Wilber a transformational path is an
essential element of any high level developmental praxis.
In some endnotes to his big book, 'Sex,
Ecology, Spirituality', Wilber talks about the BMI, the basic moral intuition,
which he plans to write about in a future volume. The BMI is a human intuition,
hence relates to "patterns of higher quality". He postulates that all
humans intuit a moral imperative, "Protect and promote the greatest depth
for the greatest span". (SES p 613) This formula applies at each level of
human development, but since each level is open to different inputs, the
outcomes differ significantly, depending upon the level of the person involved.
So at the egocentric level, for example, where only the self is of real
interest, we get the typical warrior ethic. At the sociocentric level, where
depth is also acknowledged to exist in others, but only those in my group, we end
up with the typical duty ethic. At the worldcentric rational level, depth
extends to all human beings, and span includes the whole human race. (At this
level the BMI is often stated as 'Promote the greatest happiness of the
greatest numbers', which ignores different types of happiness, or levels of
depth of happiness, so this level is unable to handle questions about whether
it is better to be an unhappy Socrates or a contented pig.) "In the
transpersonal domains, the BMI unfolds as Buddha (I), Dharma (It), and Sangha
(We), and the ultimate Sangha is the community of all sentient beings as
such." (SES p 614)
Wilber says "I believe we all intuit
Spirit to one degree or another, and thus we all possess the Basic Moral
Intuition; but we unfold that intuition only at our present level of
development." (SES p 614) Wilber further argues that any intuition of
Spirit manifests in at least three domains, the subjective (I), the
intersubjective (We) and the objective (it).
What Wilber is arging is that it is not enough to intuit the
preciousness of spirit in myself, but also to value the spirit as it unfolds in
others, and to implement this spiritual unfolding in as many beings as
possible, that is in the objective world. Some mystic groups have developed
quite complex structures to do just this. The 'Sarmoun Darq' or 'Collectors of
Honey' collected human knowledge at times when knowledge was dissipating, and
stored it for future times when it could be used again. (A.H. Almaas, Elements
of the Real in Man, p243) This knowledge is not just information, though, which
can be stored in books, but it is the
fostering of essence, developing the essential nature of individuals in a
supportive community. Hameed Ali is developing just such a nurturing community
today.
Wilber is at pains to point out that how
we implement the BMI depends on our social involvement, and can only be worked
out "in open communication, free of domination", through discussion
and decision. This seems to leave unresolved the very real issue of how such
high level cooperative endeavour can be made to work in societies where
inevitably the majority of people are operating at quite low levels of moral
understanding, and hence are more interested in serving self interest or
narrowly defined group interests. Mystics such as the Sarmoun Darq, or Hameed
Ali, are unselfconsciously elitist, in that they do not pretend that democracy
provides any answers. The mystic truth is democratic in that it is open to all,
but the path to such truth must be nurtured by those already enlightened. A
single bee makes very little honey.
So is liberation achievable? Wilber says
yes, and urges those seeking spiritual development to take up a
transformational praxis such as meditation, since in his view the beginning
stages of any spiritual development are not significantly different to those of
any human discipline. You start at the beginning, learn from those with
knowledge, test your learning against the combined wisdom of the group, and in
time reach a level where the discipline required to achieve mastery can be
transcended.
Hameed Ali suggests that once the process
of inquiry becomes fixed upon the exploration of truth for its own sake, that
those facets of the egoic self that are uniquely restricting each individual's
spiritual development will surely emerge, and can be dealt with so that in
Wren-Lewis's words quoted above, " the Catch 22 is faced in its full
starkness, without evasions in the form of metaphysical speculations beyond
experience". A profound attention to what is, rather than our thoughts
about what is, underlie both therapeutic change and spiritual growth, it seems.
Nonetheless, the assumption that spiritual
progres is a discipline like any other is perhaps too optimistic. It may be
indeed the case that each individual will have a unique path to spiritual
unfoldment, and no 'authority' can deduce this in advance. John Wren-Lewis
offers some words of warning that are perhaps worth heeding. "Beware of
philosophies that put spiritual concerns into a framework of growth or
evolution, which I believe are the great modern idols." (The Dazzling
Dark, p 8) This seems to me the perfect response to Pirsig's Metaphysics of
Quality, which Pirsig himself depicts as a thirty thousand page menu with no
food. Pirsig has no answers to the deep loneliness which I see as the hidden
subtext of 'Lila'. Quotes abound, but the end of Chapter 22 of Lila captures
the flavour well. "They were living in some kind of movie projected by
this intellectual, electromechanical machine that had been created for their
happiness, saying PARADISE > PARADISE > PARADISE but which had
inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of life itself - and from
each other."
I will give to Wren-Lewis the final word
on how quality, mysticism and action in the world might be reconciled. "A
truly mystical paradigm has to be post-evolutionary, a paradigm of lila, divine
play for its own sake, where any purposes along the line of time, great or
small, are subordinate to the divine satisfaction that is always present in
each eternal instant."