Notes on 'Spirituality'

"Implicit in the idea that spirituality concerns both understanding and being are the parallel notions of a doctrine (an account of Reality in both its absolute and relative 'dimensions') and a path (a spiritual method, provided by religious forms, whereby one might live in accordance with the Will of Heaven).  One of the myriad problems surrounding many contemporary attitudes to 'spirituality' is that the doctrine of an Ultimate Realtiy (by whatever name - the Absolute, God, Allah, Atman-Brahman, Nirvana/Sunyata, the Tao, Wakan-Tanka) and the elaboration of a spiritual method attuned to our relationship therewith, are left out of the picture altogether!  What we are offered instead is a notion of 'spirituality' as some kind of inner subjective state, a kind of 'warm fuzzy glow', sometimes harnassed to formulations such as 'the kingdom of Heaven is within you' - as if by these words Christ meant that the kingdom of Heaven is of a psychological order!  This is all of a piece with the notion that 'spirituality' is a private affair, and taht the spiritual life can be fashioned out of the subjective resources of the individual in question."

- Harry Oldmeadow, Notes on 'Spirituality'

Knowledge and the Sacred - Seyyed Hossein Nasr

 

Highly recommended: This lecture, Knowledge and the Sacred, was given upon request of Huston Smith when he taught at Hamline University in Minneapolis. Professor Nasr's lecture is based upon his book, Knowledge and the Sacred, which was a compilation of material from his Gifford Lectures.

  Part 1 - 48 minutes
  Part 2 - 40 minutes


Also:

The Heart is the Throne of the All-Merciful

From the 2001 Paths to the Heart Conference at the University of South Carolina.  Professor Nasr's key-note address touches upon the universal doctrine of the heart as the center of the human microcosm in all its levels, from the vital to the emotive to the intellectual and spiritual. It deals with methods of reaching the heart, primarily through prayer, drawing from the teachings of Islam, Christianity and other religions.


Part 1  - 33 minutes

Part 2 - 30 minutes

Eleven (False) New Age Principles

The points and counterpoints below are taken from Living Islam; the quotes are originally from the Left Traditionalist Charles Upton's The System Of Antichrist.  While I do have significant disagreements with Upton and with the Traditionalist school of thought generally, I have a great appreciation for their criticisms of modern spirituality, materialism, and psychologism.  I don't agree with all of Upton's counterpoints here; I'm re-posting them as part of an ongoing examination and discussion of the contemporary environment of spiritual narcissism and decay.

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1.) Universal evolution of consciousness toward greater love and compassion

"This is certainly false if applied to the human collectivity or the material universe. The receptivity of incarnate time-conditioned consciousness to Divine Reality waxes and wanes in a cyclical manner, and human receptivity to God on the collective level is now in a steep and irreversible decline."

"The truth here veiled is that the destiny of the individual soul on the spiritual path is to 'evolve' in the sense of 'unwinding what has been wound up', dissolving the hard kernel of egotism and self-will. This 'evolution' certainly includes the development of compassion, but (and here the principle is deceptive because incomplete) this 'evolution' also results in the development of true, objective knowledge."

2.) In the context of universal evolution of consciousness, we can be guided both by beings who are more 'evolved' than us, and by parts of ourselves which are themselves evolving.

"It is certainly true that some persons such as the Sufi guide Khidr (peace be upon him)... can in certain rare conditions sometimes be delegated by God to guide us, -as long as we, and they, understand that ultimately God is the only guide."

"But to believe that this rare possibility makes it unnecessary for us to connect ourselves to a revealed tradition, and place ourselves (God willing) under the guidance of a fully-empowered human representative of that tradition, presuming one is available, is false. And to believe that conscious, ongoing contact with a discarnate 'guide' is normal - for anyone but a sorcerer, that is, in communion with his familiar spirit - and that such contact is not an open door to demonic possession, is profoundly deluded."

"Furthermore, to say we can be guided by our 'higher self' which is also evolving, is false; to try to spiritually orient oneself to something which is still in the realm of becoming [such as our 'higher self'] is to reduce the meaning of 'spiritual orientation' to zero."

"If there is any meaning to the term 'higher self', it can only refer, not to the individual soul but to the level of Spirit (rûh) within us that Eckhart indicated when he said 'there is Something within the soul which is uncreated and uncreatable.' The atman (or Divine Self or rûh) does not guide us in the sense that we can hold a conversation with it."

"Psychic reflections of the rûh (Spirit), may certainly appear in dreams or visions. These reflections will be deceptive, ambiguous, or a vehicle of God's Grace, depending upon God's will for that person and his or her state."

3./4.) The earth is at a critical point in its development; we are witnessing a major shift in values, lifestyles, spiritual orientation, we are moving into greater spiritual maturity, the earth is to undergo a purification of values and social organization; there will be earth-changes such as earth quakes.

"It is true that the earth is at a critical point, but the shift in values, lifestyles, spiritual orientation and social organization is not toward greater spiritual maturity, but toward chaos and dissolution. It is true that there will be, and already are, earth changes, as were predicted by Jesus for the end of the age, and true that there will be a purification. But the purification will be apocalyptic, not progressive, and will represent the end of the present humanity. The 'new heaven and the new earth' will be for another humanity."

5.) Guides are now appearing to help us through this transition to an age of peace, new energies of higher frequency will cause minor disturbances in behavior.

"It is false that we are transitioning to a time of peace, unless it be a false and temporary peace; therefore the 'guides' who claim to be helping us through this transition are deceptive. Nor are the present disturbances in behavior minor, to say the least. It is true, in a sense, that we are encountering 'higher energies', but this is because our own level of integration is sinking to the point where the ever-present Grace of God can only be experienced, on the collective level, as wrath, since we are not receptive to it. The 'energy', or ontological level, of the parousia so far surpasses what the world can receive that it will shatter the world, making way for 'a new heaven and a new earth'. (parousia: wrath of God)"

6.) The human being is one part of a multi-dimensional soul or god-self, we are much more than we think we are.

"True and false. As Jesus said, 'ye are all gods, and sons of the Most High.' But he balanced this by saying, 'Why callest thou me good? None is good, save one, that is, God.'"

"It is true that humanity exists simultaneously in higher worlds than the material, namely the psychic and the Spiritual. But we do not simply ascend to these worlds, or enter them for the first time when we die, because the Great Chain of Being represents the 'ray' whereby God created us, and maintains us in existence, instant-by-instant. If we turn against these higher worlds, however - by giving our allegiance to our ego instead of God - then they will - become our Hell: the psyche, an anguished chaos; the Spirit within us, a cutting, blinding Light which forces us away from the radiant Center of Being."

"The central question is this: are these higher aspects of our being claimed by the ego, as if we were self-created, or are they seen as God's gift to us of our very being, which we cannot claim as our own even in material terms?"

"New Age believers like the idea that we exist simultaneously in higher worlds; what they have greater difficulty dealing with is that 'he who tries to preserve his life will lose it, but he who loses his life, for My sake, will find it'. This is because they want to claim these higher worlds for the ego; they teach that we can enter and 'explore' these worlds as a kind of leisure-time activity, by a simple, incremental expansion of our 'human potential', without piety, without sacrifice, without fear of God. Their doctrine is essentially Promethean; they choose to forget that 'twice born needs once dead.'"

7.) We create our own experience on all levels; there are no victims; we create our own suffering as a learning experience.

"It is false to say that we create our own experience if the 'we' in question is the individual psyche, because the psyche does not create itself, being wholly contingent on the Spirit of God, and because other individual psyches exist; the solipsism [i.e. obtaining knowledge only by own sense-perception] here implied is thus refuted both 'vertically'and 'horizontally'."

"There is a way, however, in which this is true, but only in a negative sense, since we certainly do create some of our own perceptual limitations. Rather than 'we create our own reality,' it would be better to say "we create our own illusions, which then become our 'reality'".

"Our view of the world is a learned pattern, determined both by culture and by personal experience, if not by a series of choices based on fear and desire."

"To say 'there are no victims' is true if by this we mean that everything, in the ultimate sense, is an act of God, and God is just, even the suffering of the innocent is justified from the point of view which sees cosmic existence itself, while in one sense necessary, as an imbalance in the face of the Absolute."

"In the words of Rabi`a, 'Your existence is a sin with which no other sin can be compared.' The idea that there are no victims is an interpretation of the law of karma (law of action and ongoing results of actions) - but if it is implied in this interpretation that charity toward the suffering is not incumbent upon us, since 'that's just their karma,' or that we can become liberated simply through creating illusions for ourselves and then seeing through them, then it is false.

"Karma (law of action and ongoing results of action) is not a self-exhausting system; without dharma, (which is) the operative truth which lifts one above the level of karmic cause-and-effect by positing the reality of self-transcendence, karma can never be 'lived out'; without the Mercy of God's Truth, freely given and freely accepted, along with its 'cross', illusion can never be dispelled. Damnation is the proof that not all suffering has the power to enlighten.

8.) Matter follows thought, our physical reality is created, and can be changed, by our beliefs.

"Matter follows God's thought, not ours; to imply otherwise, to say that we are co-creators in our own right, is false. It is true that our experience can be changed by changing our beliefs, but this change cannot be sovereign, or arbitrary."

"We can't simply believe whatever we want and think we're thereby controlling the world, because there really is an objective reality, both within us and outside us, something which is exactly the way it is no matter what we happen to believe."

"A change in belief can change our experience in two ways only: if we conform our beliefs to objective spiritual Truth, we will see the universe as it really is, as both contingent upon that Truth and a manifestation of it, (but) if our beliefs are determined by our ego, which interprets the world around it only on the basis of its own fears and desires, we will perceive and produce only chaos."

"It is true that if we all perfectly conformed our consciousness to objective spiritual Reality, the material world would dissolve and be transformed into Paradise. But this is the farthest thing from the idea that our beliefs create reality out of nothing, given that such perfect conformation - which, of course is impossible in practical terms - could not be a function of belief, which sees 'through a glass, darkly,' but only of true objective knowledge. As I pointed out above, the ego does not create; it only edits."

9.) Although our individual expression demonstrates much diversity, we are all ultimately one.

"True. The only question is, in what sense are we one? If this is meant horizontally, on the social level or in terms of sharing in the same subconscious motivations, then the best that can be said is that, for better or worse, we are related, or only 'relatively one'. Our true unity is vertical, (meaning) by virtue of atman or Divine Self within us; we are all creations, or symbolic manifestations, of the One Divine Self."

"By virtue of this atman (or Divine Self) we are, at the deepest level of our being, both unique and universal. The Self within us is pure, transpersonal, universal Being, without attributes; in another sense, It is even beyond Being. But since God is unique as well as universal, the Self is also the principle of our unique human integrity, according to which we are not simply humanity in the abstract, but actual human beings, commanded by God to be precisely ourselves, no greater, no less, and no other."

"And yet this uniqueness is also universal, since it is shared by all human beings, and in fact by all things. Self as the principle of uniqueness is not other than Self as the principle of pure Being, as when God, speaking to Moses in Exodus, names, Himself 'I Am That I Am' that is to say: My unique Essence is not other than My pure Being; it is My unique Essence to be pure Being. And what God can say of Himself, we can also say, virtually at least," of the Divine Self within us.

10.) That psyche and Spirit are identical.

"As I demonstrate in many places throughout this book, this principle is entirely false."

11.) That spirituality is a personal achievement, an exploit, a tour-deforce.

"As I demonstrate in many places throughout this book, this principle is entirely false."

A counterfeit is worse than a simple error...

"Dr Rama Coomaraswamy, in an article entitled 'The Desacralization of Hinduism for Western Consumption, lists nine New Age principles, which he takes from a book by Dr Catheryn Ridall, Ph.D., representing the essence of todays channeled spirit teaching. Above is a summary of them, in which I attempt to disentangle elements of spiritual truth from the matrix of error which is New Age doctrine."

"A counterfeit is worse than a simple error. These nine principles are full of errors which, however, are precisely designed to obfuscate specific metaphysical truths. And the effect of such counterfeits is that 'you are damned if you do and damned if you don't.' The Devil loves to employ counterfeits, because to accept them is to be led into error, while to reject them without exposing the counterfeit - that is, without bringing forth the true principle which the counterfeit was designed to hide - is to be, maneuvered into rejecting the truth that is being counterfeited. I'll attempt to deconstruct the above 'principles', expose the counterfeits they are made of, and present the traditional principles they veil."

From Living Islam

Related:

•  "...since you don't believe you are sick, there can be no cure."
• From Notes on "Spirituality"
• Seeking Ancient Wisdom in the New Age: New Age and NeoGnostic Commentaries on the Gospel of Thomas
• On Psychology, Cosmology and Morality

Tradition?

Tradition is abandoned, not because people are no longer capable of understanding its language, but because they do not wish to understand it, for this language is made to be understood till the end of the world; tradition is falsified by reducing it to flatness on the plea of making it more acceptable to "our time", as if one could - or should - accommodate truth to error.  Admittedly, a need to reply to new questions and new forms of ignorance can always arise.  One can and must explain the sacred doctrine, but not at the expense of that which gives it its reason for existing, that is to say, not at the expense of its truth and effectiveness.

- from No Activity Without Truth by Frithjof Schuon

From Notes on "Spirituality"

One of the myriad problems surrounding many contemporary attitudes to "spirituality" is that the doctrine of an Ultimate Reality (by whatever name - the Absolute, God, Allah, Atman-Brahman, Nirvana/Sunyata, the Tao, Wakan-Tanka) and the elaboration of a spiritual method attuned to our relationship therewith, are left out of the picture altogether!  What we are offered instead is a notion of "spirituality" as some kind of subjective inner state, a kind of "warm fuzzy glow", sometimes harnessed to formulations such as "the kingdom of Heaven is within you" - as if by these words Christ meant that the kingdom of Heaven is of a psychological order!  This is all of a piece with the notion that "spirituality" is a private affair, and that the spiritual life can be fashioned out of the subjective resources of the individual in question. Some of the factors which, over several centuries, have conspired to create a climate in which such ideas could take root include the rebellion against all authority, the cult of the individual, the humanistic prejudice that "man is the measure of all things", the triumph - even in the religious domain itself - of sentimentalism over intellectuality, the shibboleths of "egalitarianism" and "democracy", and the emergence of a rampant psychologism which usurps functions which properly belong to religion.  In recent times we have seen many attempts to assimilate spirituality into the domain of psychology, a move which fails to distinguish between the contingent plane of the psyche and the inviolate Self, or Spirit - this failure generating confusions of all kinds, on full display in "occultist", "New Age" and purportedly "Eastern" movements which lay claim to some kind of spirituality but which scorn traditional religious forms and practices."

- Notes on "Spirituality", Harry Oldmeadow

Intellect and Reason

If it is essential to distinguish between the realm of religion or traditional wisdom and that of experimental science, it is also essential to distinguish between the intellect, which is intuitive, and reason, which is discursive; reason is a limited faculty, whereas the intellect opens out upon the Universal and the Divine.  For metaphysical wisdom, reason only possesses a dialectical, not an enlightening, usefulness; reason is not capable of grasping in a concrete way that which lies beyond the world of forms, though reason is able to reach further than imagination.  All ratiocination condemns itself to ignorance the moment it claims to deal with the roots of our existence and of our spirit.

- from "No Activity Without Truth" by Frithjof Schuon

Facing Our Obsessive Patterns: The roots of the "seven deadly sins"

This article, from Pastor Theodore Notthingham, pinpoints one of the essential differences between Inner Christianity and modern Western Christianity.  What we know as the "7 deadly sins" weren't sins at all, but "distracting and afflictive thoughts" that undermine spiritual life.  The shift in perspectives is a symptom of the transition of Christianity from a school of transformation and liberation to a tool of the Empire:

This idea of the "seven deadly sins" is not original to the Catholic Church and is a reduction and distortion of the spiritual teaching that came before it and that has largely been lost to us.  In order to recover something of the original meaning, we must return to the fourth century and the middle-eastern lands where these teachings germinated.  It was the Greek monastic theologian Evagrius of Pontus who first drew up a list of eight human "passions": gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia (sloth), vainglory, and pride. For Evagrius, these passions represent an increasing fixation with the self, with pride as the most egregious of them. These passions are brought into play by thoughts or images which Evagrius does not name "sins" or "vices" but rather logismoi, meaning distracting or an afflictive thoughts.  These thoughts might be identified in our day as deeply ingrained obsessive patterns that are reinforced by habit.

These obsessive thoughts undermine the spiritual life and require recognition and resistance.  They are not seen as a moral failing calling for repentance. Evagrius held that spiritual progress depends on close observation of thoughts as they arise in the mind. Thoughts are symptoms, not sins. They buzz around in the mind looking for cracks in the heart – points of weakness and vulnerability. Their Greek name, pathi (pathology), suggests that a person is brought by them to a state of passivity and slavery. In fact, they overcome the will, so that the person victimized by his or her passions no longer has access to their free will.

Ancient writers give us a surprisingly contemporary psychotherapy of the human soul. Nilus the Ascetic writes that the stomach, by gluttony, becomes a sea impossible to fill – a good description of any passion. The objects which the passions look for cannot satisfy them because objects are finite and as such do not correspond to the unlimited thirst of the passions.

The full article is here

“The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive.”
― Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate

Psychology, Psycholigism, and Metaphysics

The muddling of the psychic realm of the subconscious with the mystical potentialities of the human soul and the infinite reaches of the Intellect has given birth to all manner of confusions. There is indeed a science which reveals the way in which the play of the psyche can communicate universal realities; this is one of the fields of traditional pneumatologies. But, and the proviso is crucial, such a science cannot flourish outside a properly-constituted metaphysic and cosmology." - Harry Oldmeadow

From "Man and Nature: Permanence Amidst Apparent Change""

"It is often forgotten that before man began to view his relation to nature only from the aspect of change and impermanence, he had become himself inwardly detached from the immutable principle of the Intellect, the nous, which along with revelation is the only factor that can act as the permanent and immutable axis for the machinations of human reason. With the weakening of gnostic elements in Christianity the rational faculty of Western man became gradually estranged from the twin sources of immutability, stability and permanence: namely, revelation and intellectual intuition. The result was on the one hand the nominalist trend, which destroyed philosophical certainty, and on the other this reduction of man to the purely human cut off from any transcendental elements, the man of Renaissance humanism." - Seyyed Hossein Nasr

full article here

Psychologism

"One of the most insidious and destructive illusions is the belief that depth psychology (or in other words psychoanalysis) has the slightest connection with spiritual life, whose teachings it persistently falsifies by confusing inferior elements with superior...The spirit escapes the hold of profane science in an absolute fashion. It is not the positive results of experimental science that one is out to deny (always assuming that they really are positive if a definite sense) but the absurd claim of science to cover everything possible, the whole of truth, the whole of the real; this quasi-religious claim to totality moreover proves the falseness of the point of departure. If one takes into account the very limited realm within which science moves, the least one can say is that nothing justifies the so-called scientific denials of the beyond and of the Absolute." - Frithjof Schuon

I thought that Gnostics didn't believe in dogma?

From the Alexandrian Gnostic Church FAQ:

Q: I thought that Gnostics didn't believe in dogma?

A: That depends on how you define "Gnosis," "Gnosticism," and "dogma." 

While our conception of the Divine Ground of Being is apophatic, meaning that ultimate reality cannot be described in words, it is also true that "truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images. The world will not receive truth in any other way." (Gospel of Philip).  Dogmas are a vehicle for Truth to be revealed.  It is when they are seen as ends to themselves, that dogmatism becomes a barrier to experience of the realities behind dogma.  Unfortunately, an often justified response to oppressive spiritual organizations has led many to "throw out the baby with the bath water," robbing individuals of the benefits of the rich and efficacious practices and a meaningful context for spiritual experience.

"Dogma" comes from Latin and means “philosophical tenet”, from the  Greek word δόγμα, meaning “opinion or tenet.”  In an ecclesiastical context, dogma includes the teachings and practices that shape a community's experience and practice.   Teachings about methods of meditation and prayer, the texts and rubrics of liturgical worship, the common language and images invoked - all of these make up the dogmas of a spiritual assembly.

There is a common tendency to posit "esoteric" or inner teachings as being somehow opposed to mere exoteric forms.  But there is no conflict between the two - the exoteric part of a spiritual tradition consists of the forms (cosmology, soteriology, ecclesiastical structure, ritual practice, etc.) and the esoteric part is the inner knowledge gained by applying those forms to the inner work of liberation.  To draw water from a well, you need a bucket - the exoteric forms are not opposed to the inner reality, they are a container to hold and transmit it.

Many contemporary seekers characterize "gnosis" as a general mystical experience, detached from specific historical or doctrinal context.  While we honor and respect all sincere seekers of spiritual truth, our understanding of Gnosis is drawn from the writings of the classical Gnostics, who defined Gnosis in very specific - dogmatic - terms.  The oft-quoted Excerpta Ex Theodoto describes Gnosis as "the gnosis of who we were, of what we have become; of where we were, of wherein we have been cast; of whereto we speed, of wherefrom we are redeemed; of what birth truly is, and of what rebirth truly is."

In other words, Gnosis isn't a vague mystical experience, it is a deeply personal apprehension of very specific spiritual truths.  Dogmas - spiritual practices, philosophical frameworks, and a shared mythos - provide a context to experience, explore, and share those truths.  For this reason, many Gnostic writings explicitly focus on expounding a very specific world view and body of teachings, such as found in The Gospel of Philip, The Hypostasis of the Archons (The Reality of the Rulers), The Authoritative Teaching, the Gospel of Truth, and others.