Introduction
This chapter explores aspects and experiences of academic writing using a liminal lens. Liminality involves a threshold (Latin, limen), a boundary, something which needs to be passed or stepped over. While this can apply to the transition to becoming a member of the academy, there are other thresholds which can be crossed. In this chapter, I document my doctoral journey as a rite of passage in which I explored the boundaries or thresholds encountered when researching the esoteric, cosmic and supersensory in an academic context.
My doctorate (Boland 2019) was concerned with the process of writing small pieces of music for young children through a compositional process that involved meditation. It took its departure from lectures by Rudolf Steiner on music, and music for young children. Steiner said that, in the interval of the fifth,1 “we reach the boundary of the human and the cosmic, where the cosmic resounds into the sphere of the human and the human, consumed with longing, yearns to rush forth into the Cosmos” (1906/1986, p. 220). This short, cryptic sentence identifies an interspace between the earthly and the cosmic which this musical interval occupies; working with and in this interspace became the subject and location of my study. I explored it musically through meditation to see if it contained ideas that I could work with and use to compose pieces of music. In doing this, I began of necessity to work with ideas of thresholds, experiencing and then documenting them, choosing to challenge rather than conform to academic norms, setting off towards other horizons.
Turner (1969/2017) notes that “artists tend to be liminal and marginal people, ‘edgemen’” (p. 128). As one of these edgemen, I came to occupy and work in uncommon territory, part earthly, part cosmic, a Zwischenraum which I termed a zone of ‘interbeing’, taking the term from Deleuze and Guattari’s A thousand plateaus (1987/2013, p. 26)—essentially a marginal position straddling two different experiences. The purpose of the current chapter is not to focus on these experiences or on the musical aspect of my work, which can be read in my doctorate, but solely on the engaging with and documenting of meditative processes in this area of interbeing in an academic setting. In so doing, I demonstrate what academic writing can encompass and how it can be shaped to accommodate liminal experiences, spaces which offer much to researchers. I identify three threshold crossings on the journey.
The Age of the Cosmic
Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2013) state, “If there is a modern age, it is of course the age of the cosmic,” that the present-day is a time of “Cosmos philosophy” (p. 398). As I sought to investigate the cosmic as well as the terrestrial, to “harness […] forces of a different order … the immaterial, nonformal” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987/2013, p. 398), I needed a way of researching which offered both structure and rigour, at the same time as flexibility and above all sensitivity. Placing the starting point of my investigation at “the boundary of the human and the cosmic” (Steiner 1906/1986, p. 220) positioned the study some distance from conventional academic inquiry.
I was aware when I began that a study of this kind puts the researcher on a potential collision course with academic research conventions. Some in the academy have a troubled relationship with notions of spirituality, ‘the cosmic’ and the esoteric (Shahjahan 2005; Spiller and Wolfgramm 2015; Zajonc 2009); the use of first-person experience as research data has been questioned because of the impossibility of conducting double-blind tests in the field of meditation and of the lack of consensus of how to best study the role of first-person inquiry (Davidson and Kaszniak 2016). This criticism has as its central premise that, for any approach to be accepted, it needs to be able to comply with Western scientific norms—essentially a Procrustean model claiming status as sole arbiter of what can form ‘knowledge,’ what Foucault terms the “hierarchical order of power associated with science” (1980, p. 85). Accepting this hierarchical order of power would not allow me the scope to investigate what I wanted to, so I needed to find ways to write which were acceptable both academically and esoterically.
The invisible distinctions are established through radical lines that divide social reality into two realms, the realm of “this side of the line” and the realm of “the other side of the line.” The division is such that “the other side of the line” vanishes as reality becomes nonexistent, and is indeed produced as nonexistent. (de Sousa Santos 2007)
The status of knowledges on either side of the abyss is unequal. Their power relationships are imbalanced, influenced strongly by centuries of colonisation and conquest (Connell 2013). Western traditions other than scientific (in my instance, Western esotericism) are similarly positioned. Furthermore, there is little traffic over the abyss; it is seldom bridged.
This account confirmed my experience of the academy, academic writing and academic discussion (with praiseworthy exceptions). The conventions to which I was meant to conform as an emerging academic did not easily allow for what I wanted to do or how I wanted to be. My research, in fact the way I thought and experienced life, was problematic. I was faced with the task of using the conventions of one side of the abyss (academic writing) as the way to describe the other (lived experience in meditation).
We should seek a theory of knowledge that is not only capacious enough to include scientific knowing of material existence, but is also adequate to the immaterial experiences associated with contemplative inquiry. Only such a philosophy can act as a foundation and guide for us as we seek to extend our knowledge to include the soul-spiritual dimensions of the world. (Zajonc 2009, p. 209)
This led me to choose first-person research as a methodology, what Zajonc calls ‘contemplative inquiry,’ and meditation as the method, documenting lived experiences in contemplation, in non-ordinary or extended states of consciousness. Zajonc (2009) acknowledges the importance of this and states that, “The potential value of contemplative experience—not only for the meditant, but also for society—requires that we take meditative experiences seriously” (p. 43). I aimed to explore “the cognitive link between the spiritual dimension of the … self and the spiritual dimension of the universe” (McDermott 2012, p. 57). Documenting this involved crossing a number of liminal boundaries.
First Threshold |the Academic as Parrhesiastes
With a way of researching and theoretical structure mapped out, it became clear that I was facing the technical decision of how to write, as what I wanted to say was not easily expressed in words. I was writing small pieces of music for young children—what I had set out to do—but this did not begin to document the depths of what I thought, felt and experienced during the process. Avoiding this depth led to a period of academic and compositional paralysis as I faced a step I needed yet refused to take. The reason for me balking at it was that it meant facing up to and crossing a threshold I had never considered stepping over—documenting then deprivatising my meditative life.
Initially I found a half-way point to this private–public hesitation. I found what I termed to myself a ‘confessor’ to whom I could talk openly about things which I had not necessarily ever put into words before. This confessor was an ever-longer Word document I kept on my Desktop and into which I poured my thoughts, questions, concerns, ideas, frustrations and, importantly, experiences. It remained private.
The catalyst which took me beyond this particular threshold was reading Foucault. In his later works, he talks at length about subjectivity and truth in Graeco-Roman philosophy. He gives three different forms of the Greek word parrhesia.2 There is parrhesia or ‘truth telling,’ parrhesiazomai, the act of parrhesia, and parrhesiastes as the person who expresses parrhesia. Foucault saw the academic as a parrhesiastes—a ‘speaker of truth’ (Flynn 1994; Foucault 1980/2016, 1983; Hunt 2013). It requires a degree of risk on the part of the truth teller (Pickup 2016): risk of rejection, of ridicule, of patronage, of exclusion, of loss of status. I could imagine all of these in speaking of my experiences to the academy. A form of reverse threshold crossing—a gesture of rebuffal.
Why parrhesia became a formative principle in my writing was the requirement for the academic to be open and frank when speaking about experiences, outcomes and processes within me which occurred during the research process. As Foucault says, “No one forces him to speak; but he feels that it is his duty to do so” (1983, p. 6).
“In parrhesia, the speaker is supposed to give a complete and exact account of what he has in mind so that the audience is able to comprehend exactly what the speaker thinks” (Foucault 1983, p. 2). This speaks to the intimate relationship of the parrhesiastes to what it is they have to say; “Parrhesia is opening the heart” (Foucault 1981–2/2005, p. 137). It makes the subject a locus through whom “the truth can appear and act as a real force” (Foucault 1980/2016, p. 37). I understood it as a requirement to speak this truth to myself as well as to others.
The decision to be outspoken, to reveal aspects of my inner experience about which I had never spoken, was not straightforward nor one which I took lightly. At the same time, I fully agreed with Zajonc when he acknowledges the importance of inner enquiry within the academy and states that the “potential value of contemplative experience—not only for the meditant, but also for society—requires that we take meditative experiences seriously” (2009, p. 43). In this spirit, I chose some passages from the long journal I had been keeping and emailed them to my supervisors, so beginning a parrhesiastic journey.
Second Threshold|Describing the Indescribable
Ultimately, there were two kinds of entry in the journal. The first included everyday thoughts, wonderings, questions, hunches, contradictions. The second was, for me, more weighty, intriguing and significant. These are entries in which I tried to capture in words experiences gained while meditating, experiences from the far side of the abyss. I would like to say that this process became easier the more I did it, but I fear I would be deluding myself.
The challenge I faced was having to find words for experiences or impressions which were, essentially, unsuited to everyday vocabulary (Platvoet and Molendijk 1999). Our language, which is well adapted to describe what we perceive with our everyday senses, is poorly suited to describe what can arise in meditation as images (Sam 2007/2020).
The difficulty of finding terminology for supersensible events is discussed by Steiner among others. “To describe these experiences is not easy. Our languages were designed for the material world and contain words that only approximate things not belonging to this world. Nevertheless … we must use words to describe the higher worlds” (Steiner 1904/1994, p. 164). “You really have to invent new words to express what the soul experiences” (Steiner 1922/2003, p. 57). The same issue is acknowledged by authors researching the phenomenology of near-death experiences, including Fox (2003) and Melo (2016). Cassol et al. (2018) comment that respondents, in trying to relay their experiences, “highlighted the indescribable aspect of the place (i.e., they showed difficulties in finding words)” (p. 8).
This has to do with the fact that it is only on the physical plane that we can use concepts. … Yet, what can be clearly and necessarily linked together through concepts on the physical plane immediately changes as soon as we enter the neighboring supersensible world. Thus we see that two worlds interpenetrate; one of them can be grasped with concepts and the other one cannot, but can only be perceived. (1916/1988, p. 21)
As a way to respond to this dilemma, he suggests, “We can gradually allow ordinary thinking, applicable only on the physical plane, to turn into thinking about the spiritual world, and then into pictorial thinking, which develops under the influence of the spiritual world” (1916/1988, p. 146). “[T]he things in the spiritual world are so different from those of the physical world … you must really identify yourself with all the images there. You must dive into them, must become one with them” (Steiner 1914/2008, p. 22).
I did not find diving into the images which arise in meditation difficult. The difficulty was in then clothing them in words. The putting into words of experiences for which there are no words was, every single time, painful. Painful is too mild a word. It was a feeling of reaching in and ripping delicate soul experiences from their natural home and brutalising them into everyday terminology. I had a feeling of taking what I could call ‘soul butterflies’, delicate soul experiences, transient, fleeting, delicate, and using the pin of my intellect to skewer them to the wooden board of prose. What was living, colour-rich, numinous—liminal in fact—was killed for me in finding words to describe it. This happened time after time. The pain I felt did not go away as, in putting into words what I had experienced, I killed part of the experience for myself.
These experiences then formed my strongest, and quite unexpected, reaction to working within the conventions of academic writing and indeed within the framework of academic research. In conforming (and wanting to conform) to academic expectations, I experienced the self-violence of transferring experiences of one kind into the language of another.
Writing this, part of me wonders why I persisted down this route. Ultimately it was because I had resolved to tell what was for me a truth—the truth of what happens when one explores the realm of music from a spiritual perspective. There were other truths beyond this however, which I now recognise. There was a resolve to say, this is how it is to be a border crosser, an edgeman, repeatedly occupying a liminal zone, striving to bring back the experiences of one side of the threshold to the other. This is how it is to experience the world in non-standard ways, to experience things not commonly spoken of and this is how I experience and theorise them as an academic. I persisted because of the near invisibility in academic literature of such border crossings in everyday language and because I have a firm conviction that bridges over this apparent divide need to be made repeatedly within the academy. I had the hope that my voice could add perspectives which might otherwise not be available.
This situation changed too as the study went on. I became more practised and learned how to straddle this divide and experience both sides at once so to speak. At first I rejected this as somehow ‘not doing it right’. However, I realised that in waiting till after a meditation to write down my impressions, I was missing huge amounts of detail which I could still ‘see’ but which I was not able to put into words—it seemed too far away. And so I began to try to experience both ‘sides’ at once and found that I could do it to a degree. After that, documenting things became swifter, though not less strenuous.
Through experience, I have come to realise that it is the transferring of experiences over this threshold, from what I would call the spiritual world to the everyday, which can be so difficult. The stronger the experience, the greater the difficulty, and the most so if they are things I have never tried to put into words before. The strongest example I had of this was when I resolved to tell one of my supervisors why I had included a certain image as the final page of my thesis. Almost as soon as I started speaking, I became overwhelmed by the task of translating experiences and images into spoken words. Re-experiencing it took me to one side of the abyss, while finding words and expressing them to the person in front of me put me on the other. Occupying two places at once was more than I could withstand. I hope I am now wiser and do not attempt this without preparing myself inwardly—at least in public.
Interlude
What most fundamentally characterizes abyssal thinking is thus the impossibility of the co-presence of the two sides of the line. To the extent that it prevails, this side of the line only prevails by exhausting the field of relevant reality. Beyond it, there is only nonexistence, invisibility, non-dialectical absence. (de Sousa Santos 2007)
In its stead, he promotes a ‘constellation’ or ‘ecology of knowledges’. These positions represent understandings of different cultural and epistemological worlds using a range of theoretic models. They have often been in existence for far longer than Western scientific thinking has been dominant. The process of European colonisation has colonised more than overseas territories; it has marginalised, denied, threatened and even extinguished these other knowledges (Connell 2013; Frazier 2017).
It was the idea of a constellation of knowledges which provided to me the greatest support and help in working out how to approach the research and writing challenge I faced. Working with the esoteric in music, I read many authors widely distributed over time, cultures and geography. Many I had been aware of for decades, but re-reading brought new understandings and, above all, new connections to light. In essence, I realised I was reading accounts of individuals trying to do the same as I was attempting: to put what is essentially indescribable into words.
I cannot say who influenced me the most or whom I found the greatest support. I would group them into five rough categories: of the Classicists, Plato appeared head and shoulders above anyone else; the work of the twelfth century Iranian Sufi mystic Suhrawardī was the unanticipated find of my doctorate—in his work I found a companion and guide; Indian musicologists Banerjee, Chatterjee, Biswas and Saraswati allowed me to link my experiences directly to Indian philosophy and musicology; and of composers I would include Stockhausen, Messiaen and Cage as significant for me, in their seeking to explore and document their own crossing of musical thresholds in diverse ways. Lastly, I have to thank Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault for giving me a theoretical structure within which I could move freely.
But it is in fact no easy matter, but very difficult for people to believe that there is a faculty in the mind of each of us which these studies purify and rekindle after it has been ruined and blinded by other pursuits, though it is more worth preserving than any eye, since it is the only organ by which we perceive the truth. (Plato, 380 BCE/2007, pp. 274–275, Book VII, 527d–e)
It appears that de Sousa Santos’s notion of abyssal knowledges has been around a long time.
Third Threshold|Losses and Gains
[W]hen we begin to have a first inkling of the supersensible, we are tempted to talk about it. But this only impedes our development. Until we have gained a certain degree of clarity in these matters, the less we say about them, the better. … [T]alking about our experiences always somewhat hardens the [faculties] we are developing. (Steiner 1904/1994, p. 117)
Taking on the notion of parrhesia and opening up about aspects of my inner life goes strongly against this advice.
In undertaking the often-difficult process of putting supersensible experiences into words, I had the impression that I was experiencing the hardening process Steiner describes above. This was a chastening thought and one I had to work through. The more clearly I cognised what I was experiencing and could locate it in a stream of similar experience, the more careful I had to be to support my meditative practice especially strongly. It was a fine line to tread and involved backing off several times for weeks or months to create the inner calm which is needed for meditative work and which academic enquiry disturbs.
With this came a growing sense of the importance of expanding academic borders regarding investigating music and writing music from a numinous perspective, a liberating feeling of ‘truth telling’—essentially the satisfaction of being able to tell others how I experience life—and challenging the boundaries, not conforming to the norms laid down by others but following my own lights.
I believe I passed this third threshold when I came to speak face to face with others about my work, and not just put it in writing. This highlighted an immense (for me) vulnerability; in speaking, I lay my soul bare to the listener in real-time; I communicate with them through my tone of voice and gestures as well as in words. Their reactions and feedback (silent as well as voiced) are immediate and affect me directly in ways which someone reading something I have written can never do. I have to say that in the fora I have done this—in my viva, with individuals (including my supervisors whom I cannot thank enough), and to colleagues at a research event—the openness and interest shown by many have been humbling. Nonetheless, it was a definite threshold to cross.
Conclusion
The longest journey
Is the journey inwards.
Of him who has chosen his destiny,
Who has started upon his quest
For the source of his being.
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. (Turner 1969/2017, p. 95)
I can easily recognise myself as one of Turner’s ‘threshold people’ and have frequently been (made) aware that I am something of an academic anomaly, slipping through the network of classifications. While I was usually comfortable enough with that, a sense of separation remained which, I have to admit, I resented at times. The process I have tried to document here has carried me through and beyond this separation. I have gained an expanded sense of what academic writing can encompass and how it can be shaped to accommodate trans-abyssal experiences. It has led me to appreciate liminal spaces as ones which offer much to researchers. Liminal work is found in the crevices, in the spaces between and around other work. It neither acknowledges nor respects boundaries and extends beyond the accepted into unknown and perhaps unknowable territory. It works with the invisible and intangible, and is to be sensed at the borders of consciousness. I apply it here to music and meditation but it can involve all those who move between epistemes, all those informed by Sousa Santos’s abyssal knowledges.
I began this study aware that I worked with two kinds of experience: the sensory and the supersensory. They were both experienced by me as subject, but came from different places. I thought of them to myself as separate, as separate aspects of myself. I worked extensively with the image of the abyss and the divide between the material world and what I would call the spiritual—a duality. We hold this duality within our bodily organisation. Yet to gain a full picture of the world and ourselves as subjects we somehow need to change seeing these two realms as separate and opposed and work from a monist outlook “uniting what is spiritual with what is material”, advocating “descend[ing] into the depths of our own being” (Steiner 1894/1995, p. 26).
The feeling I voiced above of being carried through and beyond feeling this separation is perhaps the truly liminal experience I need to identify here. It is not a further threshold; it is a culmination or maybe a consequence of the other three. I no longer experience the sensory and the supersensory as separate sides to my existence; they are joined at every moment. After working with what I called interbeing for several years, I turned again to Deleuze and Guattari to the notion of the plane of immanence (1991/1994), “infinitely folded up infinity” (p. 39). It contains all things which have been and have not been, past, present and future. The plane of immanence must, by definition, contain both sides of the abyss. It must remove any notion of the abyss, any duality, anything binary, as no separation is possible. It is all contained within the infinite fractialisation of the plane of immanence.
Deleuze and Guattari go on to speak of “a sort of groping experimentation … [using] methods which are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable” (p. 41). These “belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess” (p. 41). I am uncertain how many of these five I represent, but certainly an interest in the ‘not very respectable, rational, or reasonable’ practice of meditation which can lead to esoteric experience. The extract continues to say that representatives of these groups then “head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and … return with bloodshot eyes, yet these are the eyes of the mind” (p. 41, italics added).
For me this phrase carries within it infinite scope for exploration. Reading the sentence as an esotericist, it meshes effortlessly with experiences and understanding of engagement with the numinous, the spiritual world, and speaks clearly to Deleuze and Guattari’s statement, “of course, [this] is the age of the cosmic” (1987/2013, p. 398). From where I now stand, I am left wondering if my writing represents anything of this process of ‘groping experimentation’, a ‘heading for the horizon’ on the plane of immanence. If so, I think it is important that others take up the challenge to document their inner journeys so we can compare multiple accounts of those who “return with bloodshot eyes … the eyes of the mind” (Deleuze and Guattari 1991/1994, p. 41), to hear what their eyes have seen.