| | That paradigm is a perfectly reasonable one and has its own internal consistency and logic. It seems as fine a one as many.
I should add that very early on I got influenced by the writings of Ken Wilber, who, while not anything resembling an ultimate authority or perfect intellect, did make some points that made good sense to me at the time and still do.
This is from his Wilber One phase, his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness. In it, he made the point that humans have a range of paradigms to draw from and routinely draw from many of them simultaneously, each having some different resonance with some different part of our being, each tapping into some capacity within us, and each seemingly being somewhat or even totally contradictory in some way to the others.
As you read my descriptions, the apparent hierarchy is obvious. The problem is that our brains have structures that resonate with all of those levels to various degrees, and our own personal manifestation of this spectrum will vary depending upon circumstances and conditioning, so if we don't have some basic awareness brought to each level, some comfort navigating in each one, then we will encounter situations in which we have inadequate personal understanding and fluency with the way our own humanity can manifest, leading to increased shadow sides and difficulties.
Paraphrasing and grossly simplifying that somewhat complex work and filtering it through about 25 years of thinking about it, we have the following:
The way we think about reality happens on a spectrum of paradigms and modes of perception, being really almost meta-paradigms, large baskets in which we can consider how we view the world. They vary by the degree of integration or division within them. Each also has its obvious shadow sides and can combine with the others to produce very complex effects.
Basically, at one end of the spectrum, and originating out of early childhood, we have the Magic and Mythic levels, in which the world is split variously into either God and his retinue, meaning angels, perhaps fairies etc., and then in the middle is us, and below us is the Devil and his retinue, meaning devils, demons, trolls, and whatever else, or, the more simplified and somewhat more integrated version, which condenses some of the cast into their essential elements, that being just God, Us and the Devil. Some basic version of this paradigm is very commonly found across cultures and is actually probably the dominant culture right now in the US, if statistics about politics and the like are any indication. It explains a lot of our foreign policy and that of the world. It is the Light fighting the Darkness, or, in the more fractured and complex form, The Powers of Good and the Powers of Evil. As there is a church on about every corner where I live, to not understand this worldview somewhat and how it plays out in peoples' hearts and minds would be to miss much about understanding the human experience.
Rising above that we have the Egoic level, that of the internalized super-parent of the Super-Ego, the Ego, and the primal drives of the Id. It is all very Freudian. The seemingly external factors have integrated somewhat and become semi-internalized but are still seemingly separate entities at some level. It is the world that most people live in most of the time: they have obligations, they have desires, they have rules, the have the desire to break those rules, and they struggle to work all that out. We seem caught in the middle of powerful forces that we must somehow tame and work with. Most of what people who go on retreat are dealing with is this Egoic level, they have the schedule but their back hurts, they know they are supposed to be practicing but they really want to space out. It is where most people struggle most of the hours of the day. The boss wants more work, we want more play, and so it goes.
Above that we have the Existential, in which there is just slightly more integration and along slightly different lines, and which part integrated which way I will leave open to debate, but basically we now have as the primary operating principle or division the Mind and the Body, or the Mind and the entirety of the Physical. This is the level in which the intellect rules supreme. Thought is the ultimate arbiter of reality. Cold, hard logic rules the day. It is the Existential Hot Seat, the black beret in a café with a stiff cup of espresso and a dog-eared copy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness, the Scientist's Lab.
Meaninglessness takes on new meaning, Non-existence attains to new Reality, and the apparent paradoxes of quantum mechanics can become the basis of a whole personal philosophy. It is at once exceedingly powerful, sharp like a pit of razors, able to slice and dice reality across the continuum of the Arbitrary Nature of the Sign, and use that to justify basically any repressed and poorly sublimated shadow urges and reasoning that the lower structures of the Egoic and the Magic and Mythic have subtly bubbled up from the depths, but in new Hyper-rationalized, and oh-so-airtight form. It is the paradigm that allowed the Third Reich to allow the killing of millions of innocent people in the name of Efficiency and Purity, the world-view that produced brilliant scientists that created the Atom Bomb, and, on its own, is capable of frightening and also amazing things.
Beyond that we have that of the Yogi or Centaur, in which the Mind and Body have become integrated and the primary split is between us, the Unified Brain-Body, and the World. This is the level of Vision Logic, of Meta-Logic, of Heart-Mind. It is the level on which much of what we have been discussing here operates. It is at once the level of true placebo-based cures and also the level of the most flighty aspects of the New Age. It can have a certain More-Integrated-Than-Thou narcissism. It also allows for a deeper heart-based reasoning that helps us understand Why perhaps an Atom Bomb is problematic beyond just the level that we don't want one pointed at Us and do want one pointed at Them. It is the level of deeper ethics, secular humanism, and the like.
Beyond that we have the level he called the Sage. Gone is the duality of Heart-Mind and World, and now the paradigm is more integrated. The primary split is between the Ultimate and the Relative. This is the level of Deep Ecology, Gaia-based philosophies, real concern for the problems caused by National Pride and the Tribalism that humans are so prone to at so many levels. It is a level of deep paradigmatic and perceptual integration. It is a level that comes from a deep appreciation of Interdependence, a direct experience of Causality and its ripples through the world. Combined with the Existential, it can come up with things like what Einstein was onto, and I believe his appreciation of it was part of his genius.
Beyond that we have the level he called the Saint. In this one, the split between the Ultimate and the Relative is gone. It is what is hinted at by God in All Things when combined with the paradigm of the Mythic, or Buddha Nature when combined with the same paradigm. It is the true This is It. It is clearly in some ways the most desirable of the paradigms to have perceived and understood well, except that it is so totally generic, so totally found in all of it, so totally the same regardless of what is happening, as it is all Ultimate, that it lacks the basis to form a more coherent philosophy beyond that, and requires the more work-a-day and practical paradigms to help it congeal to a more workable paradigm.
In my own practice, I initially recognized that value of appreciating the whole spectrum, but for me the answer clearly lay at the top, that of the Sage and Saint, and so I put the full power of my Existential force at the time into that quest, the quest to perceptually align my waking, walking-aroud life with what Newtonian Physics and Particle Physics pointed to: that all was truly mechanical, all was truly just causal, truly and totally Empty of any separate entity. After some years of hard work, I succeeded.
That work being done, there is clearly much more to totally figure out, with "totally" obviously being an absurd goal, more of a direction, a vector to extend, or really a set of vectors, and those vectors relate to the other bands of the spectrum, which I consider really important to have a deep, experiential fluency in, to bring the Light of Awareness to.
Along the way, I did notice a lot that might generally fall into the category of the Yogic or Centaur stage, and I think that is where much that was useful really came from. It can be deeply healing to really get that.
Finally, when I felt I had my trip more together, I started back down, down into the basement of the lower structures of myself, and that trip is still ongoing and not easy. In fact, I consider it to have been way easier to have gone up than to go down, and by down I mean into the realms that the Existential totally loathes and dispises, those of the Mythic and Magic, as has been playing out here.
If one is primarily living in the Existential band and giving that a supremacy over the others, then all of this stuff is going to seem totally like the ravings of a madman, a fool, a dupe, an adult child, one living in fantasy-land. I totally understand that paradigm, as I have lived there for most of my life and it is still in some ways my refuge when things get tough. It may be a good refuge for you also, and you perhaps recognize that at some level, and more power to you. It is not perfect, but it is very functional in some ways and a lot of mileage can come out of the Existential as long as you don't look at it too closely, as if you do, it will reveal the problems that cause it to fail, as happened to me when I went plunging into the deep logical insanity that modern physics appears to be viewed from that paradigm, and that lead me out to the other things.
However, I have found that, while for many things the Existential has a lot of value, there are lots of things I have found it doesn't do well and lots of shadow sides that it creates, as somewhere deep down on our being, the heart does respond to the messages, paradigms, and stories of the Mythic and the Magic, as any trip to a play or movie theater, any visit to a church, any fantasy novel, any night on the news will reveal, and the deep and profound popularity of these things shows us that this way of being is powerful, very, very powerful, and shapes much of what the higher structures of the brain do and create, even if those higher structures try to pretend that this is not what is going on, that they have truly escaped from all of that childish nonsense, all of that magickal bullshit, all of those damn fairies.
But they haven't, and I actually believe they can't.
Thus, to step out of the comfort of the hard logic of the Existential is something that I do both very unwillingly, as it does seem totally insane and childish from that point of view, but also with great excitement on the other hand, as that stuff, those levels, really do resonate, really do call, really do make some deep and extremely powerful emotional sense to this human, and to fail to recognize that is to be walking around in total denial, I have found, and to fail to make time to understand what is down there, or out there, if one wants to get more fractured about it, more angels and demons and fairies and ghosts about it, is to be bitten and burned by things that one can try to hyper-rationalize away, but they are still operating regardless.
I prefer to see what they are. I prefer to go there. I prefer to really try to understand those aspects of myself and this very human world we are in, a world where those paradigms run rampant with little wisdom, little light shed on them.
The Existentialists, by totally rejecting those world views, sit in a Mythical Ivory Tower and watch in dismay as those paradigms cause staggering good and also staggering destruction, a world they consider basically insane, not realizing that they have to begin to embrace some of that insanity to even talk with all those crazy people running around and to really understand why they are doing it. Consider the number of very intellectually sharp people whose lack of understanding of their own Id totally derailed their lives. I don't want to be one of those people.
Thus, if you want to really work with something, you have to understand it. I choose to try to understand it, and aspects of it are really fun. Other aspects are clearly dangerously crazy. I put faith in the other bands of the spectrum that I spent so many years developing to help keep those in check and allow that deep exploration of stuff that is really freaky from most points of view, but not from its point of view, and to really understand it, you have to step to some degree into that paradigm and see what happens. From its point of view it has its own logic, its own emotional sense, and its own real power, and I hope that by understanding it that my understanding of myself and my world will be more complete, more universally fluent, more integrated, more workable, less shadow-filled, and more fully awakened.
That paradigm articulated so nicely by the Naturalists in the post above is a very sane, very workable take by the Yogi/Centaur and Existential levels on the Magic and Mythic. It likely will make for a relatively balance, logically much more palatable version of spirituality for many who resonate on those bands and are comfortable there. Does it likely have all the power and deep emotive glory of the straight-up Magic and Mythic? Obviously not. Would rituals performed using that paradigm at once feel much more safe and also feel vastly less deep? I think so.
Can we truly get down into the fantasy-land stuff and really get it if we are only dipping our toe into that water with most of our body clutching desperately to the Existential Guard Rail? I don't think so, but then that is not everyone's goal, and that is just fine, as that goal is not an easy one to pursue, and I don't find it easy most of the time either, and take swims there and then scramble back up on the shore. I have no desire to live there, but I do like the ability to go there when that aspect of things arises and then come back, and it has helped me understand aspect of myself that I don't think I otherwise would have.
This is the Existential, Psychological take on the thing, crafted to make sense on that band, at that level. Were I talking with, say, a Christian Mystic, I would say it totally differently.
Anyway, hopefully this framework will allow some more nuanced discussion of this topic and give you a better sense of how I think about these things, where I am coming from paradigmatically, what my goals are, and why I find this stuff compelling and useful. |