TEN
MIND, SPIRIT, AND CREATIVE FIELDS
This book proposes a process which gives rise to our universe and everything in it instant by instant, wherein nothing that happens or conceivably can happen is other than process itself. “It” isn’t process that creates—“It” is creation. We cannot, in actuality, freeze or segment the process of creation (a verb signifying movement) and make of it some sort of nonmoving noun-thing that is fixed. Process is “itself ” simply a product of the movement, which “it” is—a rather tautological mirroring or strange loop. Thus again, as our wise man of a couple of millennia back said, the human has “no place to lay his head” as the animals have, since the human’s nature is of that Spirit-process itself, eternally fluid and moving, ever new and recreating itself.
To consider process as a thing-object-phenomena existing outside the creative process as something in itself, is, as Alfred North Whitehead pointed out, an “error of misplaced concreteness.” We tend to fall into this error repeatedly, referring to a product of thought as an objective thing-out-there. We take fluid events, movements, actions, or functions and treat them as static things or fixed-objective forms that we can then manipulate. Physicist-philosopher David Bohm echoed Whitehead’s concern, regularly pointing to the serious implications of reification—treating an abstraction of mind as substantive, final, and permanent.
In our further exploration of the potential of mind-fields—and even more so as we begin to consider “Spirit”—we must be aware of our inclination to slip into reification and misplaced concreteness, and to then judge events or ideas from these fixed criteria. At the same time, we need to recognize that belief, imagination, and mythological overlay—which can lock us into an inflexible mind-set of reifications—equally play a critical part in our evolution of mind. If we are alert, this interplay between reification and imagination will keep us on the horns of a number of healthy dilemmas.
Field Resonance in Time
Religions, adhered to and practiced by enough people over enough time, can become field-effects and to that extent valid from a functional, pragmatic standpoint, regardless of inner or logical coherence. Further, if such field produces according to its precepts, bringing effective change in behavior or thought or both, it is even more functionally valid. Applying historical-materialistic criteria as a final arbiter of “truth,” however, is shortsighted.
As the poet William Blake said, “Anything capable of being believed is an image of truth.” To Blake, as with that intuitive sage Jesus, “truth” was a pragmatic result, not mind-wandering abstractions. Field-effects, be they cosmological or ideological, can become active structures of knowledge and function as readily as any part of a mind-set, such as our sensory system’s response to environment. To live in Spirit and truth is to translate grace through one’s actions in gravity.
“If you would possess a virtue you must first assume it,” Shakespeare pointed out. Planting a seed of potential into the “field of mind,” even if a “let’s pretend” virtue only imagined, may attract additional precepts or concepts and expand the whole structure, all beneath our awareness. (“Much water runneth by the mill that the miller knoweth not of,” can be read as the good Bard’s metaphor of mind’s surface awareness floating atop the vast labyrinths of activity within body-brain-heart’s creative interactions.) Thus, we might well begin to “unconsciously” act out the originally imaged virtue, which indicates that what was imagined has grown until becoming a valid, working frame of reference. Producing products of mind-experience in keeping with the premise of its genesis, again indicates grace preceding gravity, or effect preceding its cause, recognized so clearly by poet Blake.
Modeling
Strange Loops in Time
Nearly every aspect of infant-child development hinges on such play-pretense of the adult models they imitate. The greater the freedom to play and the more real and tangible the adult models, the more complete and effective the final structures of knowledge-ability resulting in that child’s life. A virtual reality inserted at any point as a substitute derails the development.
Picking up a spool from Mother’s sewing kit, the child’s inner memory-imagination might create a powerful truck or automobile projected onto that spool, the child playing with its creation for hours. As Lev Vygotsky spoke of this, the child creates an inner world, which he projects onto his outer world, and plays in the imaginary world of his own creation—a synthesis of the inner and outer imagery. This gives a world over which the child has dominion. He has been God creating a world, and then is the adult in command of that world. Later, in its actual adult form, creating an internal image projected outwardly can concretize—make real in the physical world—creative constructions of the inner world, which might then be beheld, perhaps, as a great discovery awarded the Nobel Prize—again the cosmic play of creation.
Consider how a mythological overlay, as on a great figure of history, may overshadow the original figure overlaid. By the attraction that original figure holds to any related or resonant fields of action or potential, these related fields gather and add to the power and significance of that original figure and the field-effect it involved, the attraction to the growing overlay itself growing accordingly.
So the historical-evolutionary value of such mythological overlay is not so much to enhance the validity or ironclad “truth” of the original figure, as to give each current generation exposure to a significant “attractor-of-greatness” (as most overlaid historical figures are). Therein any attracted individual’s own latent greatness, finding resonance with that mythical figure, might also find a means for working out, expressing, or translating such hidden greatness itself within him. All this is an extension of the “model” being imperative to the needs of a creative imagination to jump-start a creative action within itself. Such event might then be found “out-there” in the world, making this a Divine Play in poet Blake’s sense. (And, again, giving the grounds for our Great Being’s “always becoming what we have need of him to be.”)
Such a dynamic is a vital part of the model imperative underlying child development. In order to be activated and take part in our reality-making, any inherent intelligence of ours (as detailed, for instance, by Howard Gardner)1 must be activated by the presence of a living model of that intelligence. Then this reciprocating model-capacity will tend to unfold, flower, and bear fruit in our life. The “model” is both stimulus and mirroring guide of development of that inherent capacity being activated, and through this reciprocal action the model is itself strengthened and expanded thereby.
Every child learning to speak enhances the language-field from which the model the child followed arose. This is another example of the strange-loop mirroring wherein a new creation loops back onto older ones to both stabilize and strengthen the new, which advances and further develops the old and provides a launch-point for further expansion-employments of the original potential (as with brain development, discussed in chapter 2). This evolutionary procedure is one I have long claimed on behalf of the mythical overlays on Jesus: the overlays far outweigh either the value of, or the credibility of, some near-hypothetical originating figure of some hypothetical “real concrete” or “true” history. All such “calendar history” of an original figure turns the entire movement of mind back into the past, replicating that past to some extent, and subtly shutting off any future-becoming it might hold for us, which is the real thrust of great beings in history. Thus, we stay locked into a destructive past with its vast injustices becoming ever-present to us. The immediate “now-presence” of that mythical figure in our inner life of mind is its value, one that needs no historical verification. Such verifications as attempted could only be another variant of mythical overlay at best.
This play of imagery between a nonphysical potential, such as one of Howard Gardner’s innate intelligences, and the concretizing of it through a living model’s physical demonstration, can initiate in the child a “mirroring” of the model and establishing such capacity in the child’s development.
Judith von Halle and Field Resonance
This brings us to Judith von Halle, whose personal history proves an enigma that makes for a stumbling block to ordinary logic. She received her doctorate in architecture in the United States and returned to her native Berlin to practice her craft. A follower of Rudolf Steiner, she would surely have developed a mind-set open to Steiner’s “higher worlds” (analogous to mind-fields as used in this book). Thus, she would be capable of opening to, grasping, and entering into those same phenomena.
These “higher worlds” are sometimes referred to as the “akashic field” in occult terminology, a hypothetical universal record of all events ever occurring. This subtle aggregate of all events and memories brought about by and in human experience is rather a “mirror of the universe of humankind” and all its happenings.
Such a plethora of field-effects, aggregating according to general resonance, can function selectively, manifesting as any intelligence or ability. The akashic field is ostensibly a “list” including everything, from nonsensical imaginative fabrication to atom bombs, lasers, or whatever. Such history does not consist only of facts and figures available to a logical temporal unfolding, but also of any resonances as constitute our brain, its “memories” and workings. What one finds in that field depends on the maneuvers of mind one employs to access it. We seek and we find—according to the procedures used in the seeking.
An akashic record might have no time-space correlates—nor need any—to simply “be there” in its subtle realm. Field-effects may or may not contain specific contents within any aggregation of that field, and no hard and fast conclusions concerning such hypothetical “field of all fields” can be made. For the materials or content such field may contain would likely form through our search itself. Our search may function as a seed of potential forming in that field. Or a search might be initiated and impelled by some form of resonant memory of an event lingering about in our mind, rather like an echo or reverberation. Recall here Paul MacLean’s proposal that the brain functions through resonance, not necessarily through facts or information in our ordinary encyclopedic sense.2
Judith von Halle may be an example of a field of information-knowledge-memory being enlivened and lived out in a person’s own history. Such an information-knowledge field, expanded, enriched, and elaborated on by its reciprocal interaction with a living, intelligent mind, can attract and incorporate other field-effects having resonance with it, the original event thus growing in validity and depth, and becoming ever more powerful and attractive. Gerald Edleman’s concept of memory as a re-membering, or gathering together of resonances from a variety of sources into a singular event, lends support to this perspective. Such event, even when logically coherent within its own frame, may or may not be valid in a larger context. Lived out and dwelt on, however, such a re-membering may attract to itself related events or resonances, which bring growth or expansion to the original, and is a way by which related potential can unfold. Every new relating resonance loops back onto the original possibility, expanding and enhancing its attractiveness and bringing such expansion so long as the re-membering remains active.
Von Halle’s experience (as she personally has detailed in an intriguing biographical history)3 tangled me in a labyrinth of associated phenomena, forcing me to abandon some of my pet prejudices and judgments. Judith presented an enigma so niggling to my mind-set I could not let it alone, nor fully cope with it.
The most notable feature and apparent inception of von Halle’s spiritual adventure was experiencing the stigmata—the sudden appearance on her body of the wounds received in the Crucifixion. This phenomenon itself has a long history in the West, generally among those of the Roman Catholic tradition. It runs from Francis of Assisi, considered the first known historical figure to experience the stigmata (and who may have thus introduced such a notion into that field-of-belief as an integral part of it), to the Catholic nun Therese Neumann, who died in 1962, whose experience was thoroughly examined and authenticated on every level—medical, scientific, and so on. The stigmata phenomenon traditionally appears on Good Friday, lasts the expected three days, leaving at Easter, mission accomplished. Therese Neumann experienced the stigmata at Eastertide all her life, and lived for many years without any food other than the single wafer given at daily Mass, a paper-thin wafer as near to nothing as can be made.
Von Halle’s wounds appeared spontaneously. They bled, as appropriate to tradition, but did not go away. Instead they were accompanied by an ongoing, vivid, full-sensory reenactment-incarnation of the entire Crucifixion event itself. Later this ongoing episode was apparently influenced by—and shaped within a frame of mind unique to and an enlargement-refinement of—Rudolf Steiner’s vast creative vision of the “Mystery of Golgotha.” And while the unfolding of Steiner’s cosmic drama within Judith’s own creative mind shows how mythical overlay can build and take on ever-greater potential for the mind’s creations, it proves a stumble to our acceptable academic or even occult patterns of conscious awareness.
Judith found herself not just witnessing, but equally living out the Crucifixion, both witness and victim, so to speak, rather reminding one of Wilder Penfield’s patients perceiving two reality-events simultaneously. Judith’s ongoing experiences took place, however, through a different modality of mind than most nonordinary phenomena. Robert Sardello suggests her mental capacity embraced an ethereal, perhaps a-causal realm of “clairvoyant consciousness,” giving Judith an immediate present-time experience of the Crucifixion drama. The proposal is that hers was not a memory recreating an original event, but a temporal shift of her sensory-system and mind-awareness into the time frame of the event itself. She was not just witnessing, but an integral part of that event as itself, in its own actual time-frame—a sensory warp-in-time, so to speak. This gave her a present-time presence in the whole drama. Once established in her, this clairvoyance took over and developed its own ongoing frame of reference with clarity and logical cohesion.
Here again, we have the power of a suggestion to become a nucleus of a resulting experience relating to the present moment—a memory-event of a past moment. Bear in mind that such akashic-record-frame events cluster according to resonance, not according to a logical time sequence or spatial proximity.*2
At any rate, Judith’s ongoing experience grew in scope and vastness, replicating in her (perhaps ethereal or “phantom”) body all the agonies originally experienced or imagined to have been experienced in Judith’s own visionary synthesis. More and more details came to her notice, her story growing in depth and power over time, as an event she witnessed and experienced. Further, her awareness apparently expanded over time to encompass more and more of the vast historic, theological, and intellectual ramifications involved in that event, cast within what may be a prime example of Blake’s “divine imagination.”
That this presence-experience of the Crucifixion did not leave Judith, but unfurled in her life day by day with ever-enlarged ramifications, is exemplary of the mind’s creative capacity. Writers will attest that the longer they live with, ponder, and conjecture on some character or story line they have created, the greater the dimensions their writing on the issue grow—the characters taking on ever-greater validity and realness to them, all but dictating their own destinies. To denigrate either psychic or spiritual experiences on behalf of ironclad, scientifically verifiable facts as the only “real” simply isolates the mind into its own cavern. The list of those who expand the human mind—von Halle, Bernadette Roberts, William Blake, Meister Eckhart, Goethe, on and on—has been and always will be endless. Such experience points up the dimensions of our creativity behind the scenes at all times, in all we do or experience.
Transcending Physical Constraints via Field-Effects
Of equally serious significance was von Halle’s body immediately rejecting any form of food on receiving the stigmata. In the ensuing years she has been unable to eat, her body rejecting food as though extremely allergic to it, the very idea of eating nauseous to her. Meanwhile her ever-expanding vision-sensing of the Crucifixion continues in an ongoing event engulfing her life, taking on ever-greater dimensions, all finding an orderly, logical premise within Rudolf Steiner’s intensely intellectual-creative framework. Steiner’s well-known frame of reference, studies, and vast writings have been discussed by countless students and followers for a century now, building a continually strengthened resonant field. Judith’s experience may well have had its genesis within that rich and ever-growing frame, but she no doubt moved beyond the boundaries of Steiner’s creation, and her own. The two may have given rise to each other in a strange loop—a richly creative-imaginative play of mind through which any participant in the original, including the very one crucified, may have found new voice and expression (again, “always becoming as we have need of . . .”).
That von Halle’s inability to tolerate food seems foundational to her continually expanding Crucifixion experience brings in another aspect of relative and resonant field-effects. In contrast with von Halle, Therese Neumann suspended all nourishment before she began to experience the stigmata. And hardly insignificant are the rich examples of fasting we have of the original mythical-historical figure of Jesus, perhaps a nucleus bringing all this about. In one episode Jesus reportedly had declined his comrades’ invitation to dine with them, saying that he had “food they knew not of.” Other accounts report his forty days in the wilderness without food, which in itself has copious symbolic meanings and perhaps indicates that such capacities are available to all of us, if unbeknownst and as yet undeveloped. The accounts of Jesus suggest that fasting and prayer can combine to make possible miracles or “interventions in the ontological constructs” (as Mircea Eliade spoke of such) of our world.
Although we have these potent accounts of Jesus fasting, including his forty-day marathon, the ontological significance of the capacity has long since been lost in the labyrinths of religious trappings devoted to proving Jesus’s divinity, rather than his role as an exemplary model of our human potential, in which we can find ever-greater freedom. Perhaps the seed of such ontological possibility has again been planted into our human psychic makeup, this time in the general cast of a semiscientific-occultic frame, and again as a pointer toward an evolutionary movement of mind beyond limitation and constraint, as we have been considering throughout this book.
In a similar vein, we should consider the experience of Michael Werner. A former university professor and currently CEO of a large chemical firm in Switzerland, Dr. Werner’s is a fully credible academic-scientific account of his own well-established life without food, through following a specific rigorous process.4 He initiated his process in 2001 with the “21-Day Fast,” a method pioneered in Australia and since practiced successfully around the world. This rather radical twenty-one-day procedure involves a complete and total fast from either food or liquid for the first seven days, followed by two additional weeks of no food, but small amounts of water with some fruit flavoring if desired.
Werner acknowledges that the early phases of the fast can be challenging, but claims that once he passed the twenty-one-day threshold it became easier, and he has since had no need to eat at all: “I feel healthier and more vital than ever. My powers of resistance and regeneration are stronger. I’m hardly ever ill any more. Psychologically, I feel stable and mentally enriched, have much better concentration and memory than I used to, and now only need five or six hours’ sleep, rather than the eight or nine I used to.”5
The originators of this process claim to have received the instructions for the fast through clairvoyant means, by which they contacted an intelligence from “the other side.” If the participant-candidate holds in mind that the “source on the other side” has promised to assist any candidate as needed, such help will be forthcoming. The needed nourishment from this psychic plane then forms and carries the threatened physical system through those first critical days and on to success. After twenty-one days the initiate can, if successful and holding to the end, either resume eating or elect never having to eat again.
There are two personal acquaintances of mine who, having gone through this process, represent both spectrums of success: one hasn’t eaten in ten years or so, is doing fine, loves the freedom achieved, and has no interest in resuming the natural cycles. The other acquaintance didn’t eat for eighteen months but got bored with it, missing his meals with friends and such, so eventually going back to eating. He had no adjustment problems, his body immediately assimilating food in proper fashion when called on to do so. Either way the participant goes, the event brings some degree of metanoia, or transformation of the mind. Thereafter, one simply looks on life from a different perspective than from the grim survival-orientation shaping us ordinarily.
The promised assistance from this phantom “other side” apparently has come through time and again, demonstrating an interaction or “crossover” between states of consciousness—physical, spiritual, psychic, clairvoyant, or whatever—even if such states cannot be fully articulated.*3 And this crossover of psychic and physical can itself be a serious breakthrough, giving us a new understanding of ourselves, should we pay attention.
Michael Werner provides us with a solidly reputable basis for the phenomenon of transcending scientifically defined physical constraints, yet people continue to ridicule even the mention of such possibilities. The reason for this ridicule and strong tendency to dismiss the phenomenon entirely is simple. As Susanne Langer said, our greatest fear is of “collapse into chaos should our ideation fail us.” That people are discovering that they can live without food or nourishment is a potent threat to all aspects of enculturation and its ancient ideations. As Judith von Halle points out, our entire modern world and mind-set would be undermined were we to fully acknowledge that our actual mind-brain-body system can be sustained through spiritually based action. Such understanding could blow our whole modern house of cards away, revealing knowledge of who and what we really are.
Crossovers and Spirit Infusion
“Crossovers” between our known physical-mental realm and the more subtle realm of mind-fields are, I would propose, fairly common. Many examples we have given here, from the Eureka moment to the phenomenon of the twenty-one-day fast, are of this order. In the case of the latter, the subtle realm can then support the physical, so to speak, in a crossover of energy and sustaining power. On the other hand, there is no “crossover” of Spirit and physical realms, no bridging the event-boundaries of two different realms as found with psychic and physical interplays. Spirit has no “realm” or event-boundary. Judith von Halle’s sudden body rejection of food was not a “psychic invasion” or takeover of the physical, or substitute of one biological action with another, but one of the many manifestations of Spirit’s infusion of von Halle’s whole being. Spirit’s infusion of a person is a different ball game from psychic seizure, channeling, crossovers, or intervention in ordinary causality.
Thus, there is a distinct, perhaps profound, difference between Werner’s success with the twenty-one-day process and the infusion of Spirit that von Halle underwent. Werner’s experience perhaps indicates a functional, working relation between the psychic and physical realms, whereas von Halle’s infusion was an equating of Spirit and von Halle’s whole being—Spirit, body, and mind. Sameness and resonant similarity are not equivalents. Regardless of all these distinctions, the cultural counterfeit under which we have labored these many millennia is not about to let some “mind-over-matter” or psychic-spiritual awareness take serious root. This conflict will go on within each of us simply because of the hind-brain/fore-brain activities still prevalent within most of our makeup.
Perhaps a larger frame of reference and identity for us could arise from a link of this Australian-based psychic-spiritual locus and Judith von Halle’s Steiner-based experience, so long as we remember the distinction between psychic-physical interplay and Spirit infusion. Bear in mind that Judith von Halle’s variation on this no-food theme took place some thirteen years later than the Australian procedure’s initiation, and simply happened to her with no intent of her own. And although the overall nature of the field-effect taking root and borne out in both experiences, along with the various descriptive names and resulting intellectual systems centering around this nucleus, are well within the boundaries of the general “Laski effect” previously described, a creative strange-loop effect is continually being demonstrated in each of these diverse forms.
While von Halle’s experience was almost surely influenced by the related studies, hypotheses, and theories of Rudolf Steiner’s long-pondered system—including what he termed the Mystery of Golgotha—a link with that very Golgotha event itself is apparent. Through resonant attraction, an actual temporal shift of physical-spatial sensing took place within Judith, for which phenomenon we have similar reports from other activities involving temporal-spatial displacements. In von Halle’s case, however, what began as resonant attraction eventually became the full infusion of Spirit.
The Field Resonance of Golgotha
In that same historical period of Jesus and Golgotha, public crucifixions as a means used by the Roman authorities to terrorize into submission a near-suicidal Jewish rebellion, had increased in number until, according to one perhaps exaggerated account, crucifixions lined both sides of the main thoroughfare to Jerusalem for miles.
No matter how exaggerated, an overall reign of terror loosed on those hundreds of victims could indeed have been seared into the whole historical psyche of the human and added to the power of the Jesus event in our species’ memory. (To get an idea of how such a field-effect forms, is kept alive, and can grow in power, go to the Holocaust Memorial in Boston and simply sit within close radius of it. I sat down near that memorial unaware of exactly what those great glass boxes were, and found myself slowly enveloped by an unaccountable level of grief that grew until it led to embarrassing tears. I felt that I wept for the whole history of mankind.) Consider how, in the field-effect brought into play in von Halle, such an enduring practice, with its own powerful feedback, can be experienced in endless ways.
A similar effect may arise from the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, the symbolic daily taking of the body and blood of that crucified figure into oneself. Repeated century after century for near two thousand years now, by untold numbers of believers, this observance in itself could well become a field-effect of great significance. Recall Darwin’s claim that any action repeated often and long enough will become habit, and potentially locked in genetically. Revitalized daily by untold numbers taking that sacrament (the word sacrament, akin to sacrifice, means making whole), the field involved in the event could thus, theoretically, be revitalized by each communicant unawares.
Stripped of its distortions, Jesus’s crucifixion-resurrection would also be a demonstration of a mind-self-personality’s ability to survive death, a full social awareness of which could bring to question humankind’s great stumble over its fear of death. Jesus’s example does not stand for the abolishment of physical death, which would upset the very ontological constructs of universal life with its vast capacities and wonders, but rather the abolishing of fear of death through recognizing the mind as an emergent process from the body, and not subject to the same fate. Thus, the distinction between the body and mind-emergent can dispel the fear of loss of body—fear being that most crippling of all constraints.
A Cautionary Note
The “akashic field” is reportedly made of a conglomerate of various other fields, as we have been surveying here. But the tendency of some people to treat such a storehouse as automatically a source of absolute truth is questionable. Almost any product of “channeling” is treated as truth because it comes from the numinous, inexplicable source it does. We should remember that any event from this field-of-all-fields must necessarily be translated, through those hundreds of billions of neurons in our brain-body, into our perceived awareness, then interpreted by each conceptual system. So this translation is always unique to and subject to serious colorations by the individual bringing the whole play into being. Memory, with its often vivid imagery, is never a one-for-one playback, but generally a haphazard or casual composite.
With this potential for self-deception and distortion in mind, we must nonetheless consider a further phenomenon that from one perspective is a “distortion,” but from another perspective is both creative and generative.
As a child (the last of eight siblings) I heard family stories covering the recollections of different family members concerning the two major floods we experienced in the small mountain town of Pineville, Kentucky, where I was born. I was two years old during the second flood, and my visual memories of that flood were (and are) vivid, since they concern scenes I had myself witnessed. Yet several scenes—every bit as vivid in my memory—proved to have occurred in the first flood, before I was born. Many of those vivid images from childhood were thus, clearly, pictures formed in my mind’s eye as family stories were related concerning events before I was born. Yet I recall them as my own, as they are indeed in my memory, which is all I have to go on.
Resonance between events may thus be an even stronger element than “facts.” Carol Gilligan, in her studies of early teenage girls, points out that “grandmother tales” have great value in giving a young person a sense of identity, continuity, belonging, and security. By whom, and where, and when could the factual reliability of those tales be established, and of what use would such establishment be? That such largely creative inventions could never be substantiated in no way diminishes the value of “grandmother tales” and the wide variety found therein.
There are surely collective memories (as Carl Jung might describe them) subject to the same haphazard assemblies, but which have no more guaranteed validity than my childhood ones. The branches from an ancient root may breed a constant variety of romantic-historical-mythical overlaid shoots, all of which would appear to their beholder as quite factual and substantial, since not of our making, but given as a grace.*4
My own teacher in India, for instance, following his tradition, accepted the power and sanctity of the Jesus story and all it stood for, particularly as symbolized by the crucifixion, but he emphatically denied that such a supreme yogi (as Jesus would have had to be according to yogic tradition) would suffer physical pain from his sacrifice. Yogis throughout history, he pointed out, have been able to anesthetize their body, partially or totally, and for long periods, if the need arose.
We might recall the fire-walkers of Sri Lanka, and in India I have witnessed some bizarre forms of yogic indifference to what would have ordinarily been severe pain and/or major physical damage (which damage, at least, never materialized). And we need to remember that the word “suffering” originally meant allowing, letting, being willing. It’s a bit of contortion to account for terms such as “suffer little children,” or even “women’s suffrage,” except through the original and wider application of suffering as willingness to allow or let. From this standpoint the notion of Jesus’ “suffering” to “vicariously bear our sins” and take on the mechanically reflective punishment we so obviously deserve, is seen for the silly, distorted, and rather cruel deception it involves. As though only by outdoing us in pain and anguish could he vicariously alleviate or absolve us of our stupidity and hardness of heart—this lies beyond even fairy-tale fantasy.
On the other hand, a real gem lies in that label hung on Jesus as the “suffering servant,” one who serves us by allowing—allowing the Spirit to move through him as we have need of him to be. This greatest of service, which involves simply allowing or letting, is not only one in which any of us can partake, but is the most active and powerful move through which we can open to and devote our life to our own and the planet’s common good.
Distinguishing Between Mind-Fields and Spirit
In my way of thinking about Spirit, spiritual fields are markedly different from religious fields, and even my use of the term “fields” to get into this subject of Spirit is misleading. There is, I wager, no such phenomenon as spiritual fields. There is only Spirit. Spirit is not a field, nor field-effect, nor does it manifest through fields or field-effects. Meditation may offer a possibility of opening to Spirit, but is generally undertaken by a person with a personal, if hidden, agenda; such an agenda inevitably influences the nature of the meditation and subtly blocks Spirit.
While there is no spiritual field, and Spirit is not subject to or part of any field (akashic or otherwise), Spirit does manifest in a myriad of constantly changing, shifting ways, according to the infinite phenomena through which, or as which, Spirit manifests. Spirit is not perceived as such, but is a resonance we must attend only as a possibility to be allowed—should it manifest. Only Spirit within us can perceive Spirit as “outside us.” Spirit is not reciprocal in any way. Spirit has no locus; it is universal, both within and without. We do not “enter into Spirit” in any fashion.
Spirit is not strengthened by our participation, reception, or response, nor is it in any way dependent on us. No religion or belief system can be built around Spirit. I cannot “practice spirit” until it becomes habitual. Spirit never stabilizes into a ready reference point, even though our constant and continual experience of it, should such occur. Spirit is the only phenomenon in our life that is truly a “river we can’t step into twice,” since the movement of Spirit is just that, a movement wherein truly “no man knows its comings and goings—it bloweth as it listeth.”
Further, Spirit may be the only toehold, or mind-hold, that the mind has for grasping—or at least getting some inkling of—that unknown we term the Vastness, into which Spirit seems to merge and from which Spirit seems to flow, a glimpse of which may come if we allow an openness to Spirit sufficient to sense its general course and direction. Even so, this results from our openness and our sensing, not Spirit’s. All of these observations, of course, are my own conjectures, certainly not Spirit’s, which may or may not have much to do with that to which the word Spirit refers.
Cultural Counterfeits
Notions of a “marriage between science and religion,” or worse, science and Spirit, thus making the religious or Spiritual response a “scientific” fact, is quite popular today (and rather a form of intellectual incest, since science is itself a most powerful form of the religion we invest in and invoke). But any scientific verification of Spirit is a hoax, although perhaps a comfortable one, of which there are legion. Spirit is neither an energy nor power available to analysis or instrumental detection. Our wise man of two millennia back observed that God was a Spirit, but he didn’t say Spirit was God. The first is a relationship embracing us all, the second is an equating with—which may be stretching the boundaries. That is, he clearly implied that we were of that Spirit and God, a product of—not necessarily identical to—its “process.”
Spirit has perhaps one manifestation (a word that isn’t necessarily appropriate, but the best I can do) that might be resonant with any of our sensory patterns or mind-sets, and so can be considered as perceived, after a fashion. That is Silence, as introduced by Robert Sardello. In this Silence there is nothing to be perceived, at least not in any ordinary way (here I capitalize Silence to distinguish it from simply an absence of noise). I would further point out that Silence is an intense involvement—perceived, one might say, as a precarious and delicate balance of mind—the intensity involved being, perhaps, a form of “soft will.”*5
In Zen archery, for instance, the master is “breathed by It,” the Spirit, and at that moment the (ninety-pound) master lightly holds the bow with limp muscles, and the powerful bow—which only the strongest of men can bend on their own—bends without the master’s muscles being involved at all, other than going through the appropriate motions. “It” bends the bow, perhaps as an extension of the master’s will, which seems almost an independent phenomenon.
The power within the hara can go either way, physical or heart-aligned, and there is no higher arbiter determining which direction is best, since “best” is an intellectual evaluation-judgment, not part of the hara equation (nor of Silence, or Spirit, which are of a nonphysical state falling outside both Hara and any terminology we come up with).
Opening to Spirit, Opening to Silence
George Fox, whose life brought about the Quaker Movement, opened to Spirit without a personal agenda—the only way in which Spirit can be opened to, or even approached. This openness indicates a “soft will” surrendered to the heart. In Fox’s case, through his soft will he opened to the heart while embracing a “hard will” able to follow the heart regardless of where that heart and its soft will led. A rare combination—George Foxes have not been overly plentiful in our history.
Robert Sardello describes his experience of Silence as it manifests in Spirit, or perhaps even as Spirit. Sardello’s account of Silence is a description of his experience of Silence, and never construed as a description of Silence itself (as though “it” might break “its” silence to tell us about itself!). This rules out conjecture and hypothesis and keeps us grounded in the experiential phenomenon itself, as opposed to intellectual, mind-wandering theories or romantic longing. As Bernadette Roberts insisted, we have only descriptions of our experience of God— which cannot be construed in any way as “God’s experience,” nor in any way as a definition of God.
This is not nit-picking semantics, and the same holds for Silence as for Spirit, which are almost surely the same. Sardello’s is a description of his own experience of Silence, which is of great value since it is a tangible and living guide we can follow. Sardello’s account lends, perhaps, to a phenomenology of Spirit, which one can really grasp only by having experienced that phenomenon in one’s own self. Sardello’s living account as an example gives substance to that phenomenon, making it available to us if we open to it and allow. Sardello’s remarkable little volume titled Silence subtly points the way by which we too might become aware of Silence, and so, perhaps, be open to Spirit. Even so, we don’t “invoke” Silence as a shaman invoking a spirit within his tradition, since this indicates such spirit is available through such invocation and tradition, throwing the issue back into the religious category. There can, however, be no case in which Silence is not present. Our awareness of that presence is another matter, not available as a casual pursuit or pastime.
Enter the Problem of God
Our discussion of matters seen and unseen, like the issue of self, touches on cosmology, ontology, and creation, and sooner or later tangles with the concept of God—an ancient abstraction of mind, which indicates, at best, a verb (not a noun), particularly to the extent God is considered as, or involved in, creation. Here we come to the mirroring of all mirroring, the “granddaddy” of all strange loops: Creator-and-that-created give rise to each other. Creation does not “exist” as some superior form of action or actor. “To exist” means “to be set apart from,” and this fluid verb-action of creation cannot be set apart from itself. There is nowhere to go. If there were such a “where” to go to, all we would find would be the same process—“itself ” all over again.
We can then use the verb creation, indicating action or movement. Creation is a “fixed” name we can agree on and refer to, such as God, but in this case the naming does not freeze the action or movement itself into a thing-object-entity molded by our nomenclature. And this is important: the name for some phenomenon enters into the overall neural fields organizing that phenomenon into a perceived event, which is why “speak the word and it appears” is true, at least in our mind’s eye of imagination.
While this book hasn’t overly dwelt on the “problem of God,” the issue hangs on the horizon at all times—by default. So to such a problematic issue we will turn, not with the illusion of solving the problem, but of opening to it without expectation and allowing what might then take place.