How is an integrally intelligent being supposed to interact with lower spectrum cultures without becoming persecuted, and yet still communicating integral knowledge?
My response:
I like what’s already been said, especially Layman’s comment and Tom’s response which read: “We need to better articulate what it means to drop into their world view to fully convey understanding and to provide affirmation before we can expect them to be open to the possibilities. Often this takes a great deal of patience and timing.”
Firstly, let’s skip over the intellectual hornet’s nest that is roused by the phrase “lower spectrum cultures”. Another time.
I would add to Layman’s and Tom’s response that we need to embrace a methodological pluralism regarding even “integral” communication styles. Partly, I suspect, this is about differences between orangish-teal, greenish-teal, turquoise, and indigo integralists, etc., taking on different orientations. And of course it’s also about personality types, personal quirks, shadow issues, and so on.
For some of us, we will seek to model through example our inclusiveness and ability to think with nuance and balance and act with integrity, all the while refraining from explicitly discussing the “operating system” working in the background that helps to facilitate our way of communicating.
Others will take an approach with greater visibility and willingness to present the Integral worldview to a world, whether it’s ready for it or not, trusting that Spirit will sort it all out. They are the writers penning memoirs and novels and poetry and philosophy and other books for a public audience. They are the artists making integral art and music. They are the business people running Integral businesses and political activists running Integrally-informed think tanks. They are everyone who is willing to work a label of “integralist” or “evolutionary” or “metamodernist”, ever so lightly or boldly as befits their taste and sensibility.
Sometimes these approaches are at odds with each other, and not necessarily any “more integral” or “less integral” as a result.
I think the day is coming where “integral knowledge” will be embedded in works of art and literature and in public figures or organizations so prominent and influential that it’s going to change the game. Then we won’t get the blank stares anymore. But we’ll have a whole other set of challenges.
Personally I’ve worn a number of different communication hats at different points, and I can confidently suggest that it’s worth experimenting to find an approach that works for you. And don’t forget to listen and learn from every other person regardless of their station of life — they often have much to teach us as well.
I’ll close by quoting someone who’s said something similar as part of an elaborate theory of Integral Communication that’s worth taking a look at. T. Collins Logan wrote:
In a more general sense, integral communication celebrates the diversity of existence at the same time. It excites and absorbs the profound creative force of every heart, mind, body, soul, spirit, will and community. It invokes a neutral field of exchange where all concepts, emotions and experiences are relevant, but where no single meme or worldview dominates. This requires that we suspend our judgments and beliefs in the moment of listening; that we allow each contribution to exist by itself, without being prejudiced by its source, the language used, or even the perceived intent behind the language. To maintain a truly neutral disposition in our communication allows us to both receive and transmit on many frequencies at once. As a result, to communicate integrally is to accept, love and celebrate what is – in all its complexity, diversity and apparent contradiction – so that what could be is a natural synthesis of the greatest potential in all of us.
Although Logan’s definition won’t work for every Integralist at every station — there’s the rub with methodological pluralism — it’s a great start. The truth is, everyone deserves to be listened to fully and completely by someone, but not necessarily by us, in every context (not all perspectives are equal, and our time and attention are precious). Communication is just one aspect of our relationships and missions in life, and we have to weigh the opportunity costs of being a good communicator with being good at many other things.
Q&A with Joe on the Topic of “What is Enlightenment?”
A talk with Joe Perez on the topic of “Enlightenment” in a Question and Answer format.
Q: What’s your definition of Enlightenment?
Let me answer you literally just because I’m feeling ornery. Throw me a dictionary. Any definition will do that is in common use, in monasteries or divinity schools, among spiritual teachers or TV infomercials. All of these are ordinary and perfectly fine ways that people are talking about gaining knowledge and insight.
I’m not trying to be evasive or any more complicated than I need to be, but I don’t have personal, idiosyncratic definitions for terms that I then manipulate to manufacture the terms of a debate in my favor. When I write about a term such as “spirituality” and “enlightenment”, I consider my audience at the time, what they are likely to think of those words, and then write in a fashion that a large number of them will find meaningful.
When I don’t know who my audience is, as I often don’t when writing for this blog, I imagine the ways that persons with worldviews at all Nine Stations of Life in my Integral Konstructs are mostly likely, as a whole, to construe what I write. I don’t expect everyone to “get into the groove” with me, but I can usually find some sort of a communicative meeting point for everyone, or fail trying. In this way, it’s not necessary to define words in advance.
I find that practice to be unfortunately very common these days, and I don’t see the point. It can get quite manipulative. When people get to define enlightenment as they please, they very often say reasonable things about it because they have already fixed themselves into one Station of Life and without realizing it they have just announced their Kosmic Address and all but proclaimed that they aren’t going to try to reach anyone else who comes from another location. Anyone can sound reasonable if they get to define all the terms of their argument in a special way so that they always come out on top. These folks tend to imagine human discourse as if the world is made up of 7.6 billion people each with their own private dictionary somewhere “in their heads” that makes them right all the time if only other people would ask them to define the terms that they are using. That’s nonsense. Language doesn’t work like that.
Q: Do you consider yourself “enlightened”?
(Laughter)
You know, I wish that weren’t such a tricky question. The wisest answer is probably to just leave it alone. But there are a few things I can say in response.
I’ve had a series of partial awakenings in my life, each life-changing, each one that set my spiritual sojourn on a new path for a while at least, and they keep coming. I wrote about my early awakenings in Soulfully Gay. I’ve also written an autobiography that sketches my life story from birth to January 2018, but I don’t think I’ll publish it. I’m more inclined to use it as a reference for writing fiction, which would give me the literary satisfaction of telling the story with more dramatic flair.
Sometimes these experiences fundamentally changed my personality or self-concept, and sometimes they changed how my mind processes information or how I perceived spiritual, invisible realities, or how I wanted to show up in the world as a moral being. Self, cognition, perception, aesthetics, morality… there are so many ways that I’ve stepped up, and I’m still growing.
Maybe that’s all anyone ever really has, you know: partial awakenings. I don’t know of anyone who claims anything different these days, especially in the evolutionary or integral spiritual circles where everyone is pretty much aware of development and how tricky it is to make claims outside of particular coordinates — one’s own Kosmic Address.
Now since comparative religion and the psychology of religion are interests of mine, I’ve analyzed my experiences and compared them to the accounts of mystics who have reported “becoming more enlightened” or having “direct experience of God” and so forth, and some of them match really well and some of them don’t. Some of my experiences have been very unusual — I talk about this elsewhere and in my autobiography — and they’re just not mapped out anywhere, though I have found interesting parallels in the first-hand accounts of people who have used psychedelic drugs or who are brujos (like in the Carlos Castaneda novels). And then there’s the life stories of certain Muslim prophets, where I can find even more parallels.
The movement of spirit that I think of as my “exit of para-mind for meta-mind (maturation into the beginning of the Third Tier)” to use some Integral Spirituality jargon, was basically a falling away of psychic narcissism and an attachment to suffering that had subtly infused my “indigo period” (2010 to 2014). When that happened, I lost contact with my sources of spiritual and angelic support that had previously nourished me … eventually, I got some of that support back a couple years down the road, as an occasional assist to lift a heavy weight in my writing of Lingua-U, another unpublished book, but by then I had changed a lot.
Q: What do you mean by “falling away of psychic narcissism”? Is this “no-self” or “shunyataa”?
I don’t think so. Let’s start with “indigo” — the realm that Wilber calls para-mind (what I sometimes call X-Mind). I mean that at this time the organizing structure of my self-regard disintegrated because I had come to overcome much of the materialistic worldview. I saw the chain of cause and effect as involving mysterious and inexplicable phenomena that were steering my life and pursuits. Paranormal events and channeling of spirits and accurate divinations were ordinary, commonplace in my worldview — and they were common because my mental phenomena was no longer something merely “in my head”, but part of a permeable field in which other, unseen entities could (and did!) interact. This is the period when I engaged in certain occult practices to contact spirits … and formed relationships with two entities that I call angels. I didn’t have “no-self”; I had an expanded self. I also lost a certain degree of healthy, normal functioning (and that’s terrible!), but it was for a higher purpose: to grow into a larger field with a paranormal identity stabilized. It was frightening, but I survived the experience all right.
But “indigo” was not the start of a radically different worldview than what had come before in the previous decade or so (“teal”, “turquoise”). it was the payoff, in a manner of speaking. I had loosened the rigidity of my self-concept and worldview to the point where I was drawn, like a magnet, to a new point of synthesis. The yang of emptiness and the yin of creativity opened up into the yung of a cha (叉) opening to subtle energetic availability and so on, but it was all part of the same progression. The “psychological” turn of green opens to the “psychic” of indigo, but the latter is just a more interior and integrated form of the other. There’s still a lot of psychic narcissism.
My “indigo” period was exciting like a second adolescence, but it was also painful and dangerous, too. As I felt myself opened, I was flooded with grief and darkness. There were times when I believed myself to be communicating with a goddess, jinn, devils, demons, angels or with Allah or Jesus, but what I was feeling was a suffering and not-yet-redeemed divinity. I might even truthfully say: a tormented divinity. It was heart wrenching and it destroyed me. And so I had to let it all go. I had to give up everything I had ever done to tap into psychic or subtle energies. I just stopped and it felt like giving up God, giving up my spirituality, my evolution, my integralism, everything. It all had to go away.
And then I fully expected to regress, and perhaps I did in some respects, but life went on and eventually a new life impulse came to me. It was organized around everything that wasn’t me — especially around language and symbol and philosophy. It was no longer psychological or psychic, but these ways of organizing the life force were still present as undertones. The “third tier” began for me like so, a dropping away of the me in my spiritual journey, my relationship with angels/God, my work. It was no longer my work at that point. Apparently, the Mind itself wanted to become more lively and self-aware, and it began to use my hands and my voice and my output as one of its instruments.
Q: How does this relate to the Buddhist view of enlightenment or the nonduality of Advaita?
I think for a spiritual person to talk with a great deal of clarity and precision about their mystical experiences as a particular flavor of enlightenment, they should probably settle their worldview into one or two frameworks of the Great Traditions, so they can use nonduality-talk, or zen-talk, or Christian contemplative-talk, and so on, in a manner that is nuanced. If they do this, then they will also have the benefit of being able to check the accuracy of their self-awareness with a community of practitioners in a lineage who are adequate for the task. It’s obviously something easy to deceive one’s self about if you’re not getting quality feedback.
That said, I’ve walked a meandering path without the benefit of a rock solid community with which to check my self-understanding against the nuanced terminology of a specific lineage. I’ve been on a path of spontaneity and worldview artistry and metalinguistic map-making and prophetic calendary and mythopoesis and even a wild sort of world shamanism at times … and while I have been influenced by Buddhist writers and have an important place for Buddhist spiritual warrior teachings in my worldview, my traditions are Abrahamic and indigenous as well as the esoteric Confucianism of Yang Xiong and aspects of Wilberian and Jungian psychological theory; they have not usually conceptualized the human endeavor in terms of “enlightenment”, but in terms of “salvation” and “courage” and “nobility/virtue” and “hero’s journey”, as well as the sense that art and religion and philosophy are deeply intertwined and inseparable.
Since I haven’t had the benefit of a lineage teacher to tell me “yes” or “no” in my spiritual education, I’ve done a lot of work in the Integral Spirituality space where meta-maps of consciousness and formal assessments of level of ego-maturity by folks with doctorates and decades of professional experience have given me the “reality checks” that I’ve required.
So we’re having this conversation today about “enlightenment”, but it would be different if we were talking about whether my soul is saved, whether I am a hero of my own story, or if I feel myself in unity with my art. Those questions are no less poignant, though they are a bit easier perhaps because the question doesn’t presuppose a classical Buddhist or nonduality framework which can get problematic.
I meant to say, they’re problematic for me, and I’m not sure what to think about their usefulness for anybody else. I have difficulties fitting them completely into a Big Picture that fully resonates with me as truthful and a great way to talk about my life and worldview. For instance, I can’t truthfully say that I feel “One with God” when my most profound experiences have been being the yin to God’s yang and merging imperfectly and temporarily into a yung. So, I can’t rule out the possibility that “non-dual” refers to something outside my personal experience or to something I know by a different name — such as ternary consciousness. However, I think it may also turn out to be the case that these “nondual” philosophies are flawed and will need to be evolved to continue to be relevant.
For some of the spiritual gurus who are working these days, it comes down to the fact that their teachings presuppose worldview-making maps that “spiritually bypass” huge swaths of the subtle realm. This leads them to offer various erroneous teachings, including the fallacy that language is a hindrance, or at best a pointer, to ultimate reality, which they say is empty or a void. But in truth, the Logos or Word is a constitutive element of reality and is never really banished from awareness. Not in duration, in any event. Individual words can be banished, but the subtle structure of language which helps to constitute all of our lived experience can’t be. Language can become so subtle that it is no longer intelligible to the mind at ordinary or even superb functioning, but the mind can still enter into communicative union with the Word (or Sacred Words).
The more one listens to these nondualistic teachers of enlightenment, the more one wonders if we aren’t in need of another Wittgenstein to untangle the ways that perhaps language has befuddled them. Some of them think there is “no self” or that they are “a nobody”, but the ones that make the most sense to me speak of enlightenment as “more than personal” or “true self + personal perspective (i.e., unique Self)”. Unfortunately, language has made it virtually impossible to speak of these post-egoic realities in a way that feels natural and is easy to understand.
That’s why I think we need a revolution in language, starting with a new spiritually-informed metalanguage that includes definitions for new parts of speech (articles, affixes, pronouns, etc.) on many different stations of life from pre-personal to personal to integral to super-integral all the way up. I’ve reserved various metawords in Lingua-U that could serve this purpose, based on my cross-cultural research into the Sacred Words of the Great Traditions as well as ordinary speech, and if we ever built them into our worldviews, many of the philosophical problems that gave rise to “no self” and “non-duality” might just disappear.
A Response to Aleta S. on Resilience in Communities of Trust
I am one of those Integralists who longs for the arrival of a more substantial integral community, one based on Integral Spirituality and branching out into all aspects of our interconnected lives. I’m convinced that the green rejection of organized religion in favor of spirituality is a temporary phenomenon; that Integral calls us to both/and solutions that will eventually put spirituality and religion back together again.
I’m also slowly becoming convinced that the church walls that enclose the world religions today will eventually become too confining for second-tier individuals as they continue to evolve; that they will increasingly gravitate towards interfaith, interspiritual, and translineage approaches to spirit… and therefore could very well find themselves on the outside of the old faith structures by choice or excommunication. So it’s good to start thinking ahead to what possibilities exist for community when we start to look ahead to what may be coming.
In reply to “Is the ‘Integral movement’ basically about ‘individual attainment’?”, Aleta S. writes:
I collaborated with the late Rev. Tom Thresher at Integral Spiritual Nexus. Tom once said that “faith communities have an essential role to play in helping individuals develop the kind of interior resilience that they’re going to need in this world. This kind of resilience will allow them to participate deeply in communities of trust and caring. From that foundation they can go out and help make the changes in the world that are so essential… faith communities have something no other institution has. We own the great stories that give our lives meaning. We have society’s permission to change people at the level of their soul. And, perhaps most important, we have time to work with people to make the deep changes that are required by our world.”
While I was working to bring various faith communities together to work on the world problems, Tom cautioned me that I was wasting my time until people were able to change the interior individual quadrant. Perhaps we both suffered from a form of quadrant absolutism. Or we may have benefited from a coherent We space.
Does resilience come before communities of trust and caring or with such communities?
Great question. I don’t know the answer, though I’m passionately concerned that the Integral movement find out the answer for itself. As you know, I’ve had an interest in the topic of “Integral spiritual community” for several years now and have hoped that I would see something come into the world. I’m still watching and waiting, and writing and “righting the way” if it’s meant to come to pass.
For what it’s worth, there’s some imagery around the appearance of Sacred Words in The Kalendar that give food for thought to those whose imagination/intuition is ready. (The Kalendar is part of my Worldview Artistry, one which builds upon Lingua-U).
Three such words appear in the Season of Yin — which I associate with the second-tier of consciousness (green, teal, turquoise, and indigo): Sangha, Community, and Church. Let me tell fables about these Sacred Words and see if they resonate with you on some level. (Technically, these fables are called Ngoungong, or “new stories about the elemental energies of thought” or simply “meta-fables”).
Fable One: Sangha. Sangha appears at the start of the Season of Yin, at the very first Seat (the Seat of Basis at the Letter of Self-Sensing). The story told by the word Sangha is mainly that of a base for the self in its quest for enlightenment. The Sangha is at the “root” of the entire Season of Yin, so every aspect of the self’s enlightenment including its work in the world and its development of powers of the siddha are all connected and supported and reinforced from the Sangha.
Sangha is the yung to the yin of the Sacred and the Spirit at the Letter of Self-Sensing, so it is always already with us. As yung, it joins us to the yang of Safety, spiritual safety. It is one with the Svaadhiʃθaanə(self’s root) to six marks of subtlety. It doesn’t have to be established. It already exists.
Fable Two: Community. Community appears at the very middle of the Season of Yin, the Seat of Concern at the Letter of Constructing. Its story is that of the Container in which the Ethos (social soul) is taken up. The Turquoise Earth (turquoise) is the carrier that brings the Goose which lays The Golden Eggs (teal), and the Community is its essence. The Goose who lays the Golden Egg is nowhere in sight during the Month of the Green Forest; it appears in the following month, as the yin to the yung of God/Goddess and the yang of Advaita (Vedantic nonduality). The self is completely faded away in Community, but it is accepted through Agape. The Community is the carrier of the Culture and the hub of Communication at the Season of Yin, but it is also the Keeper of Occult knowledge, so don’t assume that all wisdom is transparent at this point in time.
Although it is common for people today to speak of “the Integral community” it is also common to hear other people deny the existence of any such thing. I think today it may be more accurate to say that the Integral movement has an Ethos (a social soul), but that soul is still rather incorporeal. The Ethos is at the cross-point between Green and Teal, but before a solid Community can emerge, the challenges suggested by several words must be faced and overcome: Shadow, Emptiness, Enlightenment, Enfolding, Upright, Goodness, Government, Advaita (Vedantic nonduality), Attentiveness, Gunas (a ternary model of subtle energy), God, and Guru (or Guardian). Perhaps when enough people come together who have a common understanding of terms such as these, and the emotional and spiritual capacity to bring complex responses to them into the world, we will finally have the preconditions of Community. If we fail to achieve that, well then, it’s (literally) Chaos.
Fable Three: Church. Church appears in the central part of the final chapter of the Season of Yin, at the Seat of Concern in the Letter of Challenge (the middle part of indigo). Its archetypal story is similar to that of King Arthur and the Holy Grail: an exceptional person, a group of committed disciples or acolytes (the Knights of the Round Table), and a quest for the Holy Grail (Chalice). The Church does not form without a need; it must first be presented with a Challenge, an Existential crisis or perhaps even the threat of Extinction for our species. It arises in response to the yang of the Ethos (social soul) and yin of Community as the yung of Church.
It works like a butter churn at a dairy farm: through cranking motions it converts cream into butter. The social soul and community are made thicker, richer, and more potent in their essence. But whereas a churn makes butter that is consumed, a Church makes… the Letter of Challenge itself. Well, in Lingua-U at least. The Church is self-reflexive (the /ch/ sound repeated at front and end). Therefore, the goal of Church is to Challenge those within it and those who are not a part of it. The Holy Grail is always beckoning, never finally confiscated.
Bonus Fable: There’s one more word that I haven’t told a fable about, and that’s Organization. This word waits until the final Throne — 27 out of 27 — in the Season of Yin before it appears. It is literally the yin to the yang of Order in the world at the Seat of Actualization at the Throne of Jazz/Order; it is adorned in the perfume of Jasmine and likes to dance to Jazz and get jacked. It is one with the subtle energy of the Organism to an astonishing 18 marks of subtlety. Its mode of knowing is a yung form of oracular knowing that enfolds both the yang of meta-systemic empiricism and the yin of cross-paradigmatic cognition. Its activity is governed by the yang of the OM/AUM (Shakti) of Yoga, the revelations of Oomoto of Shinto, and the Omphalos of Delphi, mediated through Jesus (who we may think of, for these purposes, with the English pronunciation of /jizəz/, indicative of the spirit of Generosity and Generativity that is yung to the yang of the Jeopardy of Existence, past the yin of Owiazka, the Polish word for Sacrificial Lamb, at the Seat of Structure of the Letter of Generativity. If the Season of Yin began with a repudiation of old forms of organized religion, the Season of Yin will end with the formation of new Organizations that are difficult for us to characterize at this time. Really, no one knows what they will look like.
So, such fables aside, I understand you are contemplating the nature of resilience and whether it comes before or after the arrival of spiritual community. I’m sorry that my answer veered so badly from your original question onto an unexpected detour! I’ve just got metalanguage on the mind this afternoon.
Upon reflection, I think each of these different sorts of things — sanghas, communities, churches, and organizations — nurture us differently and send us on different sorts of journeys, and so it could go either way.
or: The Time Has Come for a Rectification of Language with Sacred Truths
(Photo Credit: yhelfman/BigStock.com)
My teaching, if I may be so presumptuous as to call this conversation an exercise in education, is going to take time to unfold. Few are ready to hear; those who are ready don’t see the gestalt yet. I think I’ve got a picture of it.
I wonder if eventually some of the very earliest readers of this blog (like YOU) will look back some day with a deepened rootedness in the “language of the Real” and then re-read these blog posts and see that all along I was guiding you to it, to take in the Real, not through the meaning of what I said but in the life of the words.
Until then, there are moments when I wish I had an easier teaching. Like:
You are a precious snowflake.
God is love.
Just be present.
You are already enlightened.
My spirituality is kindness.
Or:
You are perfect just the way you are.
But there is blood on the snow, darkness in the mystery, cruelties that lead to a greater kindness, and you are perfect if you believe it so… and yet everything must change.
Realization is getting real, and human beings will do almost anything to avoid that, I fear.
If my tone is dark, blame the cosmos. This is the Week of the Swan in The Kalendar, my calendar infused with mythopoetic symbolism of the letter S. These dates are the home of Eve and the snake, evil and sacrifice, sadness amidst mere satisfaction, samsara’s ashes, sackings and snatchings, slavery and slaying, smallness and solitude… perhaps the soul does not confront a greater slog. It is as if evening has come suddenly at exactly 8:40 AM, and the world is engulfed in an uncertain darkness. Do you hear the sound of evil in the air?
In ancient China, the scholars who followed Confucius and read their classics spoke of times like these with uncanny prescience. They noted that periodically in the course of human events the ways that people speak lose touch with reality itself. Language grew overconfident or overbearing and nobody seemed to notice. People spoke like they knew what they were talking about, but their words betrayed the truth on their lips before they were even uttered. Language had become a trap for the soul, one that threatened the stability of the nature of everything. In such times, goodness itself was at risk of being toppled by evil.
What did they do in such perilous times?
The wisest among them called for a “rectification of language”. They wrote poetry and sang songs and composed pithy aphorisms that used language in ways that were more natural, more attuned to the rhythms of the cosmos. And their words sounded mighty peculiar to everyone around them who had grown accustomed to spite-filled, ossified, and putrid speech. They even sounded a little nonsensical because sense had become divorced from the senses.
We too live in a climate of lame and languishing language so that common speech is laced with the cyanide of cacophony for the spirit, no matter how well-intentioned or supposedly “spiritual” one may aspire to be.
The words are not easy to understand, but we can learn from the poetry of The Canon of Supreme Mystery. Yang Hsiung says:
When yellow is not yellow, The autumn routine goes back and forth. The virtue of the center is lost.
What does all this have to do with “Integral” spirituality, you might be wondering?
Simple. As we grow in consciousness, some of us will grow to the point of requiring to change the nature of our relationship to language itself. Those of us who do so may find themselves lost in the wilderness of strange notions, bizarre mysteries, the deeper they look.
Have you really listened to English lately? Here are just a few of its oddities.
Have you ever wondered if there were hidden patterns between the words we use and the symbols of the letters or numbers that represent them to us?
Have you seen a meme like this one in your social media feed and thought: that’s weird.
Good. Keep noticing the strangeness of the dream. These are silly examples, but perhaps they are deceptively silly.
Language can cast a spell on us. Will we be like the hero in The Adventures of Letter Man or will we be like the Letter Man’s archnemesis, the Spell Binder?
There is an alternative to being lost in the wilderness in a world where language has come unmoored from Truth, Beauty, and Goodness (as if we could wave a magic wand over those three words to shake off the sense of unease we feel in these days, but I suspect that they are not the most effective mantras for our problem).
There is another way. Wait until the book Lingua-U comes out.
Lingua-U can moor language in a metalanguage of Sacred Words that brings together the best insights into wisdom, truth, and human relations from all the Great Traditions, be they religious or secular. Taking a cue from Master Yang Xiong himself, we can borrow the symbols of his ancient masterpiece, The Canon of Supreme Mystery, and elevate them into a trans-religious spiritual technology for developing new insights into human nature by attending to the subtle energies of speech. In short, Lingua-U can become part of the “Integral toolbox”, a modality of individual and group practice for re-balancing the soul and social ethos through enhanced awareness of the subtle realm.
Will you choose a conscious relationship to language or simply slip into slumber? Do not go to sleep in the Week of the Swan. In a time such as this, sleep leads to sorrow; the greater the unconsciousness, the greater you will become sorry.
Something About Language Is Like a Rock, But Not a Rock
(Photo: Albus Dumbledore)
With every philosophical or spiritual system, we may ask: what are the magical presuppositions which it is implicitly invoking? This is not a common question, but it has surprising power to illuminate under-noticed aspects of our experience.
There are thousands of philosophy and theology and New Age spirituality books in hundreds of traditions coming out each year. Many new thinkers pouring new wine into old wineskins. The problem most of these thinkers haven’t wrestled with: what sort of old or new wizardry is this?
They have built a systemic way of thinking with magical bricks and mortar and never questioned the materials they are using. In other words, they have borrowed the magic of their dominant cultural ethos which has grown ossified and forgotten in its weirdness and spell-like nature over time.
And by saying that most thinkers haven’t taken the time to erect their own magical system, I’m not saying they ought to join a coven for practicing Magick! And as much as I enjoy the Harry Potter stories, I’m not talking about creating a fanciful world erected on the notion that if you say something in Latin impossible things will happen that would delight or frighten a child.
Let me put it this way. Most people haven’t created a beautiful and elementally-fortified linguistic and symbolic edifice in which they are instantiating their agenda, and it matters not one whit whether we are speaking of The Four Agreements of Miguel Ruiz or the Sources of the Self of Charles Taylor.
If you don’t get a handle of the magic your ideas are incorporating implicitly, then you can’t control the forces in which that magic resides. Sometimes these assumptions are amenable to careful observation by the acute mind: hidden structural worldviews, value memes, levels of consciousness, implicit “quadrant” biases (to use a term from Integral theory), and so on.
But some of the trickiest assumptions I know are those which only become evident when you become consciously aware of the biases of the linguistic and elemental and subtle energetic symbolism which constitutes the idea. To see through language itself, down to its most basic building blocks with sound, to the other side … wow, what a concept! That is real magic.
We could quote the words of Albus Dumbledore:
Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.
What he ought to have said is that the parts of words (not words themselves) are the most inexhaustible source of magic. Playing magically with words themselves, Latin or any other language, is like wading into the kiddie pool of wizardry; it’s playing with the elemental subtle energies comprising words that is like diving into the deep end of reality.
Philosophically, what is on the other side of language? There are basically three sorts of answers:
First, there is nothing, so enjoy the nothingness. We are forever embedded in linguistic constructs which we cannot escape so there’s no point in trying. Wisdom is discovering the emptiness of all concepts and symbols and entering into a “non-symbolic consciousness”.
Second, there is nothing, so play with and preserve all linguistic diversity. We are stuck with languages, incomplete and devoid of intrinsic sacred meanings as they are, but we can translate pretty well from one to another, and communicate well enough, so that is that.
Both of those answers have their merits, but they are missing the point. There is something beyond language that is like a rock, but not a rock (to steal a phrase from Master Yang Hsiung) It is the subtle energy of the Dao. It is the body of the Logos of the Creator. As Plotinus might have seen it, it is a series of emanations from the One. It is the Naadas of Sanskrit. It is the essential sound wisdom of the Koran and its literary descendants in Sufi mysticism.
Here there are obtuse realities inaccessible to introspection, observation, or even the study of conventional linguistics. Only a structural analysis of linguistic iconism in a cross-cultural perspective is able to produce anything like a sound description of the “magical” patterns of the sounds and letter-shapes that create our worlds of meaning.
At the same time, even a gifted phonosemantic researcher is not likely to identify all the patterns that are essential to getting to the other side of language unless she also marries her scholarship with insights from subtle energy research. With this help, you see that stepping off of language is not a plunge into an abyss; it’s skipping stones in a pond, the stones representing units of energy.
On the other side of language, as I have said, there is the territory of the subtle energies which are deployed for speech production and which are invoked in naming various nouns, verbs, modifiers, and other grammatical parts of speech. A very wide range of the sound symbolism in actual use today in the world’s most common languages – I’m guessing at least 80 percent – can be described using the symbols of Lingua-U, my forthcoming Konstruct.
The way I see it, any magical system worth its salt has got to attempt a project similar in scope to Lingua-U: strive to manipulate the artifacts of consciousness at the most elemental level possible, before a single word is formed, and before a single thought even arises. This is the layer of kinesthetic properties of phonemes, and fortunately this work has already been done in one way by the linguist Margaret Magnus and in another way by me.
Only when we understand that we are co-generating reality through the energy of our language can we transform reality at the roots. The transformation includes revisiting our spiritual and philosophical beliefs to discard stale language and refresh and engage with a new approach to Sacred Words that has been previously unexplored.
