PART THREE Flatland
14 Ascending and Descending
Q: We're going to look at the widespread loss of the spiritual in the West. What you call flatland.
K w: Yes, there is a very specific historical reason that we of the modern West tend to deny validity to all of the transpersonal stages that we just discussed. And attempted to demonstrate as clearly as possible the historical genesis of this rejection of the spiritual.
Q: Before we get to that, I wonder if you could give us the briefest possible summary of the overall discussion so far—a brief summary of the "big picture" up to this point.
KW : Okay. (But you can skip this section altogether if you hate summaries! Our narrative picks up immediately in the next section.)
K w: We started with Emptiness, creativity, holons. Or Spirit, creativity, holons. In other words, out of Emptiness, holons creatively emerge.
As they emerge, they evolve. This evolution, or Spirit-in-action, has certain features in common wherever it appears. These common
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features I have summarized as the twenty tenets, and we discussed a few of them. These are the patterns of manifestation.
For example, we saw that all holons have four capacities—agency and communion, self-transcendence and self-dissolution. Because of the self-transcending drive, new holons emerge. As they emerge, they emerge holarchically. They transcend and include. Cells transcend and include molecules, which transcend and include atoms, and so on.
Likewise, the self-transcending drive of the Kosmos produces hoIons of greater and greater depth. And we saw that the greater the depth of a holon, the greater its degree of consciousness, among other things.
But greater depth also means more things that can go wrong. Dogs get cancer, atoms don't. There is a dialectic of progress at every turn—hardly a sweetness-and-light affair!
Holons not only have an inside and outside, they also exist as individuals and as collectives. This means that every holon has four facets, which we called the four quadrants: intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social. These were indicated in figure 5-2.
So we followed the evolution of the four quadrants up to the human forms of those quadrants, at which point humans themselves begin to reflect on these quadrants, think about them, notice that they themselves are embedded in them. And in this attempt to gain knowledge about their own situation, humans generate various knowledge quests, quests for truth.
Since each of these four quadrants deals with a different aspect of holons, each of them has a different type of truth, a different validity claim. And humanity, through long and painful experimentation, slowly learned these validity tests—ways to ground knowledge in the realities of each quadrant. We saw these as truth, truthfulness, justness, and functional fit.
Since the two objective and exterior dimensions—the Right Hand quadrants—can both be described in objective it-language, we simplified the four quadrants to the Big Three: I, we, and it. Studied, for example, in self, morals, science. Or art (self and self-expression), ethics, and objectivity. The Beautiful, the Good, and the True. In the 24S
spiritual domains: Buddha, Sangha, Dharma—the ultimate I, ultimate We, and ultimate It.
And we could simplify the Big Three even further. The Left Hand dimensions (the I and the we) can only be accessed by introspection and interpretation, whereas the Right Hand delivers itself up to perception and empiricism—and those are the Left and Right Hand paths. That is, the Right Hand aspects are the exteriors of holons, and so they can be seen empirically. But the intentional and cultural— the Left Hand quadrants—involve interior depth that can only be accessed by interpretation. Interpretation means, in the broadest sense, empathic resonance from within, as opposed to objective staring from without. Surfaces can be seen, but depth must be interpreted. And those are the Right and Left Hand paths.
But those are all just ways to talk about these four facets of any holon. And the central point was, don't confuse these four quadrants. Simplify them, yes, but don't merely equate them, because these four quadrants, with their four different types of truth, are the basic facets of any holon, and reducing one to the others does not explain that quadrant but completely destroys it.
Therefore, as we followed the evolution of holons, we were very careful to follow not only the exteriors of those holons—atoms, molecules, cells, organ systems, Gaia, etc.; we also followed their correlative interiors—sensations, images, concepts, rules, right up to subtle and causal occasions. In short, we saw this interior evolution go from prepersonal to personal to transpersonal.
And we saw that this interior evolution involves ladder, climber, and view: the ladder or basic structures or nested holarchy of consciousness; the climber or the self with a fulcrum at every stage (a 1-2-3 process of fusion/differentiation/integration); and the changing worldviews (archaic, magic, mythic, rational, etc.), each of which produces a different self-identity, needs, and moral sense.
Thus, we saw self-identity, needs, and moral response go from physiocentric to biocentric to egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, the platform for all higher and truly spiritual developments. And we saw that an "accident" at any of these stages produced a pathology characteristic of the stage where the accident occurred (psychosis, borderline, neurosis, script, etc.).
And finally, we looked specifically at the four higher stages and fulcrums, the four transpersonal stages: the psychic, the subtle, the causal, and the nondual. We saw that each of these also has its own worldview and therefore its own type of mysticism, namely, nature mysticism, deity mysticism, formless mysticism, and nondual mysticism.
These higher stages are very rare, very elite, very difficult accomplishments. In the past, they were reached only by a small handful— the lone shaman, the yogi in the cave, the small sanghas and cloisters of the true seekers of wisdom. These deeper or higher states have never been anything near an average or collective mode of awareness. If we look at the evolution of the average mode, then we find something like figure 5-2, which stops at the centaur and vision-logic and a planetary federation with global or worldcentric morality—which is still an unrealized ideal for most.
If these higher or transpersonal stages emerge in our future collective evolution, then they will manifest in all four quadrants— intentiona*, behavioral, cultural, and social. And we are awaiting the possible forms of this future evolution, even if, individually, we pursue these higher states in our own case.
But the essential point is that at these higher or transpersona* stages, the Spirit that was present throughout the entire evolutionary process becomes increasingly conscious of its own condition. It has gone from subconscious to self-conscious to superconscious, unfolding more of itself and enfolding more of itself at every stage. Spirit slumbers in nature, begins to awaken in mind, and finally recognizes itself as Spirit in the transpersonal domains—but it is the same Spirit present throughout the entire sequence: the ground, path, and fruition of the whole display.
With Spirit's shocking Self-recognition, Forms continue to arise and evolve, but the secret is out: they are all Forms of Emptiness in the universe of One Taste, endlessly transparent and utterly Divine. There is no end limit, no foundation, no final resting place, only Emptiness and endless Grace. So the luminous Play carries on with insanely joyous regard, timeless gesture to timeless gesture, radiant in its wild release, ecstatic in its perfect abandon, endless fullness beyond
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endless fullness, this miraculously self-liberating Dance, and there is no one anywhere to watch it, or even sing its praises.
The Great Holarchy
Q: The widespread loss of the spiritual in the West. Why don't you set this up for us.
K w: Just for the moment, let's stick with the Upper Left quadrant, with the individual spectrum of consciousness—these nine or so basic levels of consciousness. If you look at figure 14-1, you will see what is essentially the same basic spectrum, the Great Holarchy of consciousness, as it appears in both Plotinus and Aurobindo. And please, for both of them, this holarchy is not actually a stepladder, but a series of nested and enfolded dimensions.
Now the really interesting point is that this Great Holarchy was, as Lovejoy put it, the dominant official philosophy for most of humankind, East and West, through the largest portion of its existence. In simplified forms we find a holarchy of earth, human, and sky (or heaven) even in the earliest foraging cultures. Chögyam Trungpa, for example, in his wonderful book Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, makes this point very convincingly. This basic holarchy
Absolute One (Godhead) Satchitananda/Supermind (Godhead)
Nous (Intuitive Mind) [subtle] Intuitive Mind/Overmind
Soul/World-SouI [psychic] Illumined World-Mind
Creative Reason [vision-logic] Higher-mind/Network-mind
Logical Faculty [formop] Logical mind
Concepts and Opinions Concrete mind [conop]
Images Lower mind [preop]
Pleasure/pain (emotions) Vital-emotional; impulse
Perception Perception
Sensation Sensation
Vegetative life function Vegetative
Matter Matter (physical)
PLOTINUS AUROBINDO
FIGURE 14-1. The Great Holarchy according to Plotinus and Aurobindo
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would later be elaborated into matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit (and in many cases that would be elaborated into even more subdivisions). But the point is that something like this Great Holarchy has been part of the cultural background of most humans for most of our history.
That is, right up until the Enlightenment in the West. With the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm, all of reality—including the Great Holarchy—was mapped in empirical and monological terms. This was a well„intentioned but deeply confused attempt to understand consciousness and morals and values and meaning by putting them under the microscope of the monological gaze.
And what do you know? The interior depths completely disappeared from view. They could not be found with the monological gaze, and so they were soon pronounced nonexistent or illusory or derivative or epiphenomenal—all polite words for "ain't really real." All I's and ail we's were reduced to mere its—atomistic or holistic, depending upon your prejudice—but all of which had only, at best, functional fit.
None of these interwoven its can be said to be better or deeper or higher or more valuable: just equally flat and endlessly faded surfaces scurrying about in objective systems, not one of which has the slightest clue as to value or depth or quality or goodness or beauty or worth.
Q: We have flatland.
Kw: We have flatland. We looked at this as good news, bad news. The good news of modernity was that the Big Three were differentiated—art, science, morals. The bad news was that they had not yet been integrated, and this allowed an explosive science to colonialize and dominate the I and the we domains.
Thus the downside of the Enlightenment was that it reduced all Left Hand dimensions to their Right Hand correlates, and it thought that a simple mapping of these empirical exteriors was all the knowledge that was worth knowing—the mirror of nature, the representation paradigm. This left out the mapmaker itself—the consciousness, the interiors, the Left Hand dimensions—and resulted in nothing but the flat and faded surfaces of a brutally monochrome world.
And so, following John Locke, "the teacher of the Enlightenment,"
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the great modern mapping game was afoot: map the entire Kosmos in empirical terms. And—this is what we'll talk about—a century or so into this game of converting the entire Kosmos into objective its, the Enlightenment agenda awoke one morning to find to its utter horror that it was living in a thoroughly disqualified universe—a universe absolutely bereft of value, meaning, consciousness, quality, worth. In mapping exterior correlates, it had gutted all interior depth, had eviscerated the interiors and laid them out to dry in the blazing sun of the monological gaze.
And so slowly, in an atmosphere of puzzled confusion, the bloodless corpse of the Enlightenment agenda was wheeled into the morgue—and the postmodern rebellion began. Postmodern, post-Enlightenment, post-empirical, post-whatever: something had gone profoundly, profoundly, wrong.
Q: The collapse of the Kosmos.
K w: Yes. The monological agenda had, in one sweeping action, completely collapsed the interior dimensions of being and consciousness and depth. it had, in other words, completely collapsed the Great Holarchy of consciousness. Whether prepersonal, personal, or transpersonal—you cannot find consciousness with the monological gaze. And so it must not exist. It must not be "really real."
And that is basica*ly why it is only with the modern West that we do not have access to the Great Holarchy.
This- Worldly versus Otherworldly
Q: The history of this collapse is fascinating. And your historical research seems to challenge several longstanding myths about the Western tradition, starting with Plato.
K W : if you look at figure 14-1, it might be obvious that there are, so to speak, two major directions you can move in this Great Holarchy: you can ascend from matter to spirit, or you can descend from spirit to matter. Upward is very transcendent, downward is very immanent. Ascending is very otherworldly, descending is very thisworldly.
Q: This is where you introduce "Ascending" and "Descending" spirituality.
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K W : Yes. And most people think of Plato as the Ascending or "otherworldly" philosopher, who saw this manifest world, this Earth and everything on it, as a pale shadow or copy of the eternal Forms of the other and real world.
Q: Ecophilosophers trace much of the West's "hatred" of this world to Plato.
K W : Yes, and those assumptions are quite incorrect. As Arthur Lovejoy points out, Plato actually describes two movements—what we are calling Ascent and Descent—and both of these movements are equally important in Plato.
The first movement, the Ascending movement, is a movement from the Many to the One, a movement where we see that behind the fleet* ing and shadowy forms of manifestation there is a single Source, a groundless Ground, the Absolute, and we rise to an understanding of this absolute Good.
Q: We "ascend" in that sense.
KW : Yes. But the other movement is equally important in Plato, namely, the movement whereby the One empties itself into ail creation, gives itself to all forms, so that all of creation itself is a perfect manifestation of Spirit. So this world, this very Earth, Plato called "a visible, sensible God."
Q: The "descent" of the One into the Many.
K w: Yes, exactly. Now it is indeed true that Plato gave the West most of its otherworldly philosophy. But, as Lovejoy is at pains to demonstrate, Plato also gave the West virtually all of the terms for its this-worldly exuberance and celebration, the celebration of the visible, sensible God. The entire manifest world was seen as a manifestation or embodiment of the Good, of the Absolute, and was to be celebrated as such! The greater the diversity in the world, the greater the spiritual Glory and Goodness.
And indeed, most of the this-worldly philosophies of the West have their origin in Plato. Listen to Lovejoy, because this is important: "The most notable—and the less noted—fact about Plato's historic influence is that he did not merely give to European otherworldliness its characteristic form and phraseology and dialectic, but that he also gave the characteristic form and phraseology and dialectic to precisely the contrary tendency—to a peculiarly exuberant kind of this-worldliness."
And, as Lovejoy concludes, both of these currents—Ascending and Descending, or otherworldly and this-worldly, or transcendent and immanent—were united and integrated in Plato. As Lovejoy puts it, "The two strands in Plato's thought are here fused." Ascending and Descending are united and integrated—and that is Plato's final stance, as it were.
Now what happened in subsequent history is that these two strands were brutally torn apart. There was a violent rupture between the advocates of mere Ascent and the advocates of mere Descent. These two currents, which in fact ought to be united and integrated, were catastrophically fractured into the Ascenders versus the Descenders, and the history of this warfare is part of what I try to trace. Q : With a view to their integration.
K w: Yes, definitely. Whitehead's famous comment—that the Western tradition is basically a series of footnotes to Plato—may be true, but the footnotes were fractured. People tended to take their favorite "half" of Plato—the otherworldly or the this-worldly—but rarely did they take the whole.
We do not have to settle for the fractured footnotes to Plato. The Ascending and Descending currents were united in Plato, and it is absolutely certain that they were united in Piotinus.
Q: But things begin to "fall apart" after Plotinus.
KW : In a sense, yes. It is generally agreed that Plotinus was fleshing out the essentials of Plato in a more comprehensive fashion. And in Plotinus we have the Great Holarchy of Being, as presented in figure 14-1, and we have the two basic movements in this nested holarchy, namely, Ascending and Descending, or what Plotinus calls Reflux and Efflux. Spirit constantly effluxes or empties itself into the world, so that the entire world and all its inhabitants are perfect manifestations of Spirit. And likewise the world constantly returns or refluxes to Spirit, so that this entire world is itself spiritual to the core—the visible, sensible God.
According to Plotinus, each senior dimension in the Great Holarchy transcends and includes its junior, so that each and every thing and event, without exception, is perfectly nested in Spirit, in the One, 252 I
which is therefore the seamless integration and union of Ascent and Descent, Reflux and Efflux, transcendence and immanence.
Q: You point out that this becomes very clear in Plotinus's attack on the Gnostics.
K w: Yes, that's right. Most of the Gnostics were mere Ascenders. Any form of Descent was, in fact, equated with evil. So the entire manifest world—this world—was thought to be illusory, shadowy, corrupted, sinful. Only by ascending to the One and shunning the Many could salvation be found.
If Plotinus—carrying the Platonic torch—were really otherworldly, you would expect him to join with the Gnostics and celebrate their merely Ascending agenda and attack all this-worldly endeavors. Instead, Plotinus began an absolutely devastating attack on the Gnostics, on these mere Ascenders, precisely because they couldn't balance the Ascending current with the equally important Descending current.
In other words, the Gnostics had found the causal One, but they didn't push through to the Nondual realization that the One and the Many are not-two, that Emptiness and Form are nondual, that thisworldly and otherworldly are One Taste, that the Ascending and Descending currents need to be integrated in the nondual Heart.
And so Plotinus tears into the Gnostics with an extraordinary and altogether convincing attack, and in some of the most beautiful spiritual prose ever written, reminds the Gnostics that this entire visible world is a manifestation of Spirit and is to be loved as Spirit. And if they, the Gnostics, really loved Spirit, as they proclaim, then they would love Spirit's children, whereas they merely despise them. In effect, Plotinus accuses the Gnostics of spiritual child abuse.
Q: You quote that attack in the book. I wonder if you would read it for us.
KW: Plotinus is speaking:
Do not suppose that a man becomes good by despising the world and all the beauties that are in it. They [the Gnostics] have no right to profess respect for the gods of the world above. When we love a person, we love all that belongs to him; we extend to the children the affection we feel for the parent. Now every Soul is a daughter of Spirit. How can this world be separated from the spiritual world? Those who despise what is so nearly akin to the spiritual world, prove that they know nothing of the spiritual world, except in name. . . .
Let it [any individual soull make itself worthy to contemplate the Great Soul by ridding itself, through quiet recollection, of deceit [untruthfulness] and of all that bewitches vulgar souls. For it let all be quiet; let all its environment be at peace. Let the earth be quiet and the sea and air, and the heaven itself waiting. Let it observe how the Soul flows in from all sides into the resting world, pours itself into it, penetrates it and illumines it. Even as the bright beams of the sun enlighten a dark cloud and give it a golden border, so the Soul when it enters into the body of the heaven gives it life and timeless beauty and awakens it from sleep. So the world, grounded in a timeless movement by the Soul which suffuses it with intelligence, becomes a living and blessed being. . . .
It [Soul/Spirit) gives itself to every point in this vast body, and vouchsafes its being to every part, great and small, though these parts are divided in space and manner of disposition, and though some are opposed to each other, others dependent on each other. But the Soul is not divided, nor does it split up in order to give life to each individual. All things live by the Soul in its entirety [i.e., ultimately there are no degrees, no levels, but simply pure Presence]; it is all present everywhere. The heaven, vast and various as it is, is one by the power of the Soul, and by it is this universe of ours Divine. The sun too is Divine, and so are the stars; and we ourselves, if we are worth anything, are so on account of the Soul. Be persuaded that by it thou can attain to God. And know that thou wilt not have to go far afield. .
Wisdom and Compassion
Q: So that rather clear*y shows the nondual orientation of Plotinus. And you relate this integration of Ascent and Descent to the union of wisdom and compassion.
K W : Yes, we see this in both East and West. The Path of Ascent from the Many to the One is the path of wisdom. Wisdom sees that behind all the multifarious forms and phenomena there lies the One,
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the Good, the unqualifiable Emptiness, against which all forms are seen to be illusory, fleeting, impermanent. Wisdom is the return of the Many to the One. In the East: Praina, or wisdom, sees that Form is Emptiness.
The Path of Descent, on the other hand, is the path of compassion. It sees that the One actually manifests as the Many, and so all forms are to be treated equally with kindness, compassion, mercy. Compassion or Goodness is, in fact, the very mechanism of manifestation itself. The One manifests as the Many through an infinite act of compassion and charity, and we embrace the Many with that same compassion and care. Compassion touches all manifestation with concern and gentle wonderment. In the East: Karuna, or compassion, sees that Emptiness is Form.
So we have: Wisdom sees that the Many is One, and Compassion sees that the One is the Many. Or in the East: Prajna sees that Form is Emptiness, Karuna sees that Emptiness is Form.
Q: Wisdom and Compassion—this is also Eros and Agape.
Kw: Yes, ascending Eros and descending Agape, transcendence and immanence, the love that reaches up and the love that reaches down. .
The central historical point in all of this is that with the great Nondual systems, from Plotinus in the West to Nagarjuna in the East, we see an emphasis on balancing and integrating these two movements. The Ascending or transcendental current of wisdom or Eros or prajna is to be balanced with the Descending or immanent current of compassion or Agape or karuna; and the union of these two, the union of the One and the Many, of Emptiness and Form, of Wisdom and Compassion—their union in the nondual Heart of One Taste is the source and goal and ground of genuine spirituality.
God and Goddess
Q: This is also God and the Goddess—as Eros and Agape, Wis. dom and Compassion, Ascent and Descent. . . .
K W : Yes, in a broad sense. If we ignore for the moment the more provincial and stage-specific notions of the horticultural Great Mother as a farming protectress, and the agrarian images of God the
Father as a Big Daddy in the Sky—these mythic images are not very useful for an overall picture—and if we look instead to the broad understanding of God and Goddess, then the balanced picture that emerges is something like this:
If we wish to think in such terms, then the Masculine Face of Spirit—or God—is preeminently Eros, the Ascending and transcendental current of the Kosmos, ever-striving to find greater wholeness and wider unions, to break the limits and reach for the sky, to rise to unending revelations of a greater Good and Glory, always rejecting the shallower in search of the deeper, rejecting the lower in search of the higher.
And the Feminine Face of Spirit—the Goddess—is preeminently Agape, or Compassion, the Descending and immanent and manifesting current of the Kosmos, the principle of embodiment, and bodily incarnation, and relationship, and relational and manifest embrace, touching each and every being with perfect and equal grace, rejecting nothing, embracing all. Where Eros strives for the Good of the One in transcendental wisdom, Agape embraces the Many with Goodness and immanent care.
Q: Which you tie in with Tantra.
Kw: Tantra, in the general sense, presents the ultimate Nondual reality as the sexual embrace of God and the Goddess, of Shiva and Shakti, of Emptiness and Form. Neither Ascent nor Descent is final, ultimate, or privileged, but rather, like the primordial yin and yang, they generate each other, depend upon each other, cannot exist with* out the other, and find their own true being by dying into the other, only to awaken together, joined in bliss, as the entire Kosmos, finding that eternity is wildly in love with the productions of time, the non„ dual Heart radiating as all creation, and blessing all creation, and singing this embrace for all eternity—an embrace that we are all asked to repeat in our own awareness, moment to moment, endlessly, miraculously, as the immediate presence of One Taste. This is exactly the Nondual vision, this union of Reflux and Efflux, God and the Goddess, Emptiness and Form, Wisdom and Compassion, Eros and Agape, Ascent and Descent—perfectly and blissfully united in One Taste, the radical sound of one hand clapping.
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Two Dfferent Gods
Q: And this is likewise the nondual integrative vision of Plotinus.
K w: Yes. But this union of Ascent and Descent would, in subsequent Western history, be viciously broken, with the otherworldly Ascenders and the this-worldly Descenders in constant and often violent conflict. And so attempt to trace this subsequent war, which has been the central and defining conflict in the Western mind.
Q : The war between the Ascenders and the Descenders.
K W : Yes. It's quite remarkable. Beginning with Augustine, and continuing right down to today, the Ascenders and the Descenders were in relentless and often brutal conflict, and this saddled the West with two completely incompatible Gods, as it were.
The God of the Ascenders was otherworldly to the core—my kingdom is not of this world. It was puritanical, usually monastic and ascetic, and it saw the body, the flesh, and especially sex, as archetypal sins. It sought always to flee the Many and find the One. It was purely transcendental, and was always pessimistic about finding happiness in this world. It shunned time in favor of eternity, and hid its face in shame from the shadows of this world.
The God of the Descenders counseled exactly the opposite. It fled from the One into the embrace of the Many. It was in love with the visible, sensible God, and sometimes Goddess. It was a God of pure embodiment, of pure immanence. It was fascinated with diversity, and found its glory in the celebration of this diversity. Not greater oneness, but greater variety was the goal of this God. It celebrated the senses, and the body, and sexuality, and earth. And delighted in a creation-centered spirituality that saw each sunrise, each moonrise, as the visible blessing of the Divine.
Q : You trace the history of this war between the two Gods.
K w' : Yes, that's right. In the West, during the millennium between Augustine and Copernicus, we see an almost exclusively Ascending ideal. Indeed, since this was an agrarian structure, there was a selection for male-biased spirituality, which consequently centered on Eros more than Agape, on Ascent more than Descent, on the One to the exclusion of, even hatred of, the Many.
And thus true salvation, true liberation, could not be found in this
body, on this earth, in this lifetime. It was otherworldly to the core. Flesh is sin and sex is sin and earth is sin and body is sin, no matter what lip service was given to creation itself. And so, of course, the root of sin was Eve in general—woman, body, flesh, nature, carnality: all of that becomes taboo in the deepest sense. Always, for the mere Ascenders, Descent is the Devil.
Q: in both the East and the West.
Kw: Definitely. There is a constant tendency in agrarian societies, wherever they appear, to let the Ascending current pronounce this world evil or illusory, and to condemn earth, body, senses, sexuality (and woman). There were exceptions, of course, but this is the constant tendency in all agrarian structures: otherworldly to the core, with my kingdom not of this world, and an intense desire to find a nirvana away from the world of samsara. You find this from early Judaism to virtually all forms of Gnosticism to early Buddhism and most forms of Christianity and Islam.
And this was indeed the case in the West especially from the time of Augustine to the time of Copernicus. An almost exclusively Ascending ideal dominated European consciousness for a thousand years. The Way Up was the counsel that the Church gave for her perfections and her virtues, and lay not your treasures upon this earth was the one sure way to salvation—which means, find nothing in or on this earth to be treasured.
Oh, there was plenty of lip service given to the Goodness of God's creation (Goodness = Agape, Compassion, Descent), but the bottom line was that you could not gain liberation or salvation on this earth, in this life, and therein lies the entire story. Life was okay, but things got really interesting once you died. Once, that is, you got off this earth. This earth was not a place where realization could be found; this earth was simply a runway for the real take-off.
Q: All of which soon changed.
K W : Yes, all of which changed, and changed dramatically, with the Renaissance and the rise of modernity, culminating in the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. And the simplest way to describe this entire period is that, at this point, the Ascenders were out, the Descenders were in.
And for mere Descenders, any form of Ascent is always despised.
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Ascent, in fact, becomes the new evil. Ascent is forever the Devil in the eyes of the Descended God.
So it is no surprise that from modernity forward, virtually any Asw cent, of any variety, became the new sin. The rise of modernity, the rejection of Ascent, and the embrace of a purely Descended world— these came into being together.
And here we are on the trail of the modern West's denial of the transpersonal dimensions. Here we start to see exactly the beginning of the dismissal, or rejection, or marginalization, of the genuinely spiritual and transpersonal. Here we start to see the glorification of flatland, the embrace of the Descended grid. The eclipse of any sort of transcendental wisdom—the eclipse of any sort of Ascent—cast a shadow over the entire face of modernity, a shadow that is the signature of our times.
The Descended Grid
Q: This flatland, this Descended grid, has marked the entire modern and postmodern condition.
K w: Yes. Salvation in the modern world—whether offered by politics, or science, or revivals of earth religion, or Marxism, or industrialization, or consumerism, or retribalism, or sexuality, or horticultural revivals, or scientific materialism, or earth goddess embrace, or ecophilosophies, you name it—salvation can be found only on this earth, only in the phenomena, only in manifestation, only in the world of Form, only in pure immanence, only in the Descended grid. There is no higher truth, no Ascending current, nothing transcendental whatsoever. In fact, anything "higher" or "transcendental" is now the Devil, is now the great enemy, is now the destroyer of the earthbound, sensory drenched God and Goddess. And all of modernity and postmodernity moves fundamentally and almost entirely within this Descended grid, the grid of flatland.
Q: So this is not integrating Ascent and Descent . . .
Kw: No, this is simply the dominance of the Descenders. They fervently follow their own equally fractured and dualistic and decimated God, their own broken Goddess, their own partial and limited and crippled spirit. It is a religion of great compassion, little wisdom.
Of much Goodness, but little Good. Of wonderful Form, and no Emptiness. Of glorifying the Many, and forgetting the One. It is all Agape, no Eros. It is all flatland.
Q: In the book, you introduce that idea with this sentence: "And whereas the Ascenders had dominated the scene up to the Renaissance, all it took was a decisive shift in consciousness to unleash the Descending Path, a Path which, bursting forth from its thousand-year confinement, exploded on the scene with a creative fury that would, in the span of a mere few centuries, remake the entire Western world—and in the process substitute, more or less permanently, one broken God for the other."
K w: Yes. For a thousand years we had the disaster of a merely Ascending ideal. And we are now in the grips of an equally insidious but merely Descended grid, the photographic negative of the basic Western nightmare.
And not just in "official" reality, but also in virtually every form of "counterculture" or "counterreality." The Descended grid is so entrenched, so unconscious, so background, so deeply ingrained, that even the "new paradigm" rebels move completely within its clutches. It infects equally orthodox and avant-garde, conventional and alternative, industrialist and ecologist.
Q: But the claim is made, by the ecophilosophers, that this purely immanent, descended Spirit, or Great Spirit, or earth Goddess—this creation-centered spirituality—alone will avert the ecological crisis.
Kw: Just the opposite. The purely Descended worldview is itself one of the prime contributors to the ecological crisis. The Descended grid is destroying Gaia, and the ecophilosophers are some of the prime promoters of that grid.
Q: That's exactly what I want to focus on next.
15 The Collapse of the Kosmos
Q: The modern and postmodern world moves within the Descended grid. So the obvious question is, why?
K w: The dialectic of progress took its first modern spill. Evolution hit a bump in the road and the whole car tilted on its side and began to skid down the road. The differentiation of the Big Three— consciousness, culture, and nature—began to careen into the dissociation of the Big Three, and their subsequent collapse into the Big One of flatland.
Evolution, of course, is a self-correcting agenda, and it is in the process of slowly righting itself. As in the stock market, there is an overall and unmistakable upward trend, but this doesn't stop violent short-term fluctuations, both up and down—periods of growth and periods of depression. And starting in the eighteenth century, aspects of the cultural stock market hit a great depression, the likes of which we have rarely seen, and are just now beginning to overcome.
Q: So this collapse is not a reductionism that you find in other cultures.
K w: That's basically correct; premodern cultures lack both the good news and the bad news of this differentiation, which confuses critics. Because other cultures did not differentiate the Big Three in
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the first place, they couldn't collapse and reduce them. The extraordinary advance of differentiating the Big Three allowed this extraordinary tragedy. The dignity of modernity began to slide into the disaster of modernity, and there, pretty much, is where the modern and postmodern world still rests: a fragmented lifeworld with self and morals and science at each other's throat, each struggling, not for integration, but domination, each trying to heal the fragmentation by denying reality to the other quadrants.
And so it came about that this great evolutionary leap forward brought its first great catastrophe, the dialectic of progress in its first modern form, blood all over the brand-new carpet.
The Dignity of Modernity
Q: So before we discuss this bad news, why don't you very quickly review the good news of modernity.
K w: It's important to emphasize, because the antimodernists focus on the bad news and tend to forget the good news altogether.
Neither magic nor mythic is postconventional. But with the shift to reason and worldcentric morality, we see the rise of the modern liberation movements: liberation of slaves, of women, of the untouchables. Not what is right for me or my tribe, or my race, or my mythology, or my religion, but what is fair and right and just for all humans, regardless of race, sex, caste, or creed.
And thus, in a mere hundred-year period, stretching roughly from 1788 to 1888, slavery was outlawed and eliminated from every rational*industrial society on earth. In both the preconventional/egocentric and the conventional/ethnocentric moral stance, slavery is perfectly acceptable, because equal dignity and worth are not extended to all humans, but merely to those of your tribe or your race or your chosen god. But from a postconventional stance, slavery is simply wrong, it is simply intolerable.
This was the first time ever in history that a general societal type had eliminated slavery! Some earlier societies happened not to have slavery, but, as Gerhard Lenski's massive evidence demonstrates, no general type of society was ever free of it, until rational-industrialization.
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And this was true East and West, North and South—white men and black men and yellow men and red men enslaved their fellow men and women, and thought nothing of it. Some societies, such as early foraging, had relatively less slavery, but even foragers were not free of it altogether—in fact, they invented it.
In this regard, one of the social nightmares in America is that this country was formed right during the great transition period from agrarian slavery to industrial no-slavery. The Constitution, in fact, is still a largely agrarian document—slavery is so taken for granted it isn't even mentioned, and women are not counted as citizens (and none of that even has to be explained in the document itself!). But as the center of cultural gravity continued to switch from mythic-agrarian to rational-industrial, slavery was eliminated across the board, although its scars are still with us.
Q: Women were also "freed," so to speak.
K w: Yes, for almost identical reasons, we would see the rise of feminism and the woman's movement on a culture-wide scale, generally dated, as we said, from Wollstonecraft in 1792, exactly the general beginning period of the numerous liberation movements.
This, too, was almost totally a product of rational-industrialization, and must be counted as one of modernity's many extraordinary achievements. Previously, where the Big Three weren't differentiated (where noosphere and biosphere were still indissociated), biological determinants, such as male physical strength, were often the dominant cultural determinants as well, because they weren't differentiated: male physical strength meant male cultural strength. If the mode of production did not demand much physical exertion—as in horticulture—then women lucked out, and the societies were relatively "equalitarian," although when push came to shove, women were always the shov-ee.
But with the differentiation of self and culture and nature (the differentiation of the Big Three), biological determinants became increasingly irrelevant. Biology was no longer destiny. Equal rights can never be achieved in the biosphere, where big fish eat little fish; but they can be achieved—or certainly aimed for—in the noosphere. And liberal feminism arose at this time in history, and not before this time, to announce this new and emergent truth—in the noosphere, women deserve equal rights—a truth centered in postconventional depth and worldcentric rationality.
Q: There was the whole movement of the democracies themselves. K w: Yes, essentially the same phenomenon. The mythological worldview, quite contrary to the wonderfulness ascribed to it by retro-Romantics, was in virtually all cases shot through with dominator hierarchies. The mythic god is the god of a particular peoples—it is sociocentric and ethnocentric, not postconventional and worldcentric. It is the god of all peoples only if all peoples bow before that particular god. It is therefore "worldcentric" only by forced conversion, and, if necessary, military conquest, as the great mythic-imperial Empires of the Aztecs and Incas and Romans and Khans and Ramses would make quite obvious. These dominator hierarchies generally have a single head: Pope or King or Cleopatra or Khan is on top, and stretching out beneath are various degrees of servitude and only servitude. And all of them conquered in the name of their mythic god or goddess, before whom all beings must bow.
The Age of Reason was therefore the Age of Revolution as well, revolution against mythic dominator hierarchies. This was a revolution not just in theory but in practice, in politics. One of the great themes of the Enlightenment was "No more myths!" because myths are precisely what divide and antagonize peoples, and set them against each other in ethnocentric ways, and inflict their cruelties on unbelievers in the name of a chosen god.
And so Voltaire's impassioned cry rang out across the continent: "Remember the cruelties!" Remember the cruelties inflicted on people in the name of the mythic god—remember the hundreds of thousands burned at the stake in order to save their souls; remember the Inquisition grotesquely inscribing its dogma on the flesh of the torture victim; remember the political inequalities inherent in mythic hierarchies; remember the brutality that in the name of compassion had crushed innumerable souls under its domineering march.
On the other hand, a postconventional moral stance extends equal opportunity to all peoples, regardless of race, sex, creed, belief, myth, or god. And again, although not everybody lives up to this postconventional or worldcentric ideal, it was indeed, beginning with modernity, firmly embedded in widespread social institutions that protected 2 64 1
its intent. Thousands and thousands of men and women fought and died for this democratic vision of worldcentric tolerance and universal pluralism, under the slogan, "I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
This, too, was radically novel, on any sort of large scale. The early Greek democracies had none of this universalism. Let us remember that in the Greek "democracies," one out of three people were slaves, and women and children virtually so; the agrarian base cannot support emancipation of slaves. The city of Athens, like all city-states, had its own particular mythic god or goddess. And so the indictment handed down by the city of Athens began, "Socrates is guilty of refusing to recognize the gods of the State." It ended with, "The penalty demanded is death."
When asked, as was customary, if Socrates could suggest an alternative punishment, he suggested free meals for life.
But Socrates chose reason over myth, and drank the hemlock. Fifteen hundred years later, the world caught up with him, only this time the polis forced the gods to drink the hemlock, and from the death of those gods arose the modern democracies.
The Disaster of Modernity
Q: And we have, as good news, suppose, the development of science itself.
K W : Yes, the differentiation of the Big Three allowed rationalempirical science to emerge unencumbered by blatant mythic dogmatisms. Empirical science—which means rationality tied to empirical observables through a hypothetico-deductive procedure—blossomed for the first time on any sort of culture-wide scale.
With empirical science there can be little quarrel, but with scientism . . . well, scientism is a different beast. And here we might as well start to look at the bad news, which was the failure to integrate the Big Three. Consciousness, morals, and science had indeed been freed from their magic and their mythic indissociation; each domain was set loose with its own power and its own truth and its own approach to the Kosmos, each of which had something equally important to say.
But by the end of the eighteenth century, the rapid, indeed extraordinary development of science began to throw the whole system off balance. The advances in the it-domain began to eclipse, and then actually deny, the values and truths of the I and the we domains. The Big Three began to collapse into the Big One: empirical science, and science alone, could pronounce on ultimate reality. Science, as we say, became scientism, which means it didn't just pursue its own truths, it aggressively denied that there were any other truths at all!
And thus, beginning especially, as said, in the eighteenth century, the Left Hand and interior dimensions were reduced to their Right Hand empirical correlates. Only objective its with simple location were "really real"! The entire interior dimensions—in ali holons, human and otherwise!—were completely gutted, and the ghost in the machine began its sad and lonely modern moan, a haunting cry made all the more plaintive in that it had not even the power to attract attention.
When only objective its with simple location are really real, then the mind itself is a tabula that was totally rasa, utterly blank until filled with pictures or representations of the only reality there was: objective and sensory nature. There is no real Spirit, there is no real mind, there is only empirical nature. No superconscious, no self-conscious, only subconscious processes scurrying endlessly, meaninglessly, in a vast system of interwoven its. The Great Holarchy utterly collapsed like a house of cards in an afternoon gust, and in its place we find only the web of nature with its simple location.
And thus, welcome to the modern, purely Descended world. All the truth that is fit to know is the truth of its, of mononature, of objective and empirical processes—and no Ascent of any variety is required. The Descended grid of flatland, the world of all proper troglodytes, hollow to the core.
Instrumental Rationality: A World of Its
Q: This seems to be the crux of the matter. How or why did science overrun the other domains?
K w: The extraordinary gains in empirical science—by Galileo,
Kepler, Newton, Harvey, Kelvin, Clausius, Carnot—were being
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matched by the massive transformations wrought by industrialization. Both of these were it-domain endeavors, and so they fed on each other in a vicious spiral, pushing all other concerns by the wayside. in other words, the it-domain had two very powerful forces on its side—the accomplishments of empirical science and the power of industrialization.
The techno-economic base of a society (the Lower Right quadrant) sets the concrete forms within which the culture moves and can move. The base doesn't determine the cultural superstructure in any sort of strong Marxist sense, but it does set various limits and possibilities (it's virtually impossible, for example, to outlaw slavery with an agrarian base, and equally impossible to vindicate women's rights).
Now the industrial base was a base of instrumental productivity. Of course, so was the bow and arrow, so was the hoe, so was the plow—but a steam engine? an internal combustion engine? In many ways the engine, the machine, was itself a simple evolution of productive capacity, stretching all the way back to the first rock used as a club or the first stick used as a spear. In that sense, there was nothing about industrialization that was a radical break with the past—men and women everywhere and at all times have tinkered with ways to secure their basic needs with instruments, with tools. But as the development of this quadrant became more and more complex, the sheer power of the machine, of the industrial base, brought instrumental productivity screaming to the fore.
Within the techno-economic base, a culture unfolds its possibilities. And within the industrial base, an altogether productive and technical and instrumental mentality unfolded, a mentality that, almost of necessity, put a premium on the it-domain.
Now many critics—most critics, actually—tend to see a great number of problems with industrialization. It is supposed to be the cause of a mechanistic worldview; the destruction of an organic culture; the cause of an analytic and fragmented world; the displacement of social cohesion; the cause of ecological catastrophe; the ruin of religious sensi bilities.
I don't think any of those are central. I think they are all completely derivative. Central is the pressure this productive base placed on consciousness to select for the it-domain. That is, the power of industrialization joined with the accomplishments of empirical science to select for a world where its alone are real. Everything else stems from that selection. All of those other problems stem from that problem.
The it-domain was growing like a cancer—a pathological hierarchy—invading and colonializing and dominating the I and the we domains. The moral decisions of the culture were rapidly being handed over to science and technical solutions. Science would solve everything. All problems in the I and the we domains were converted to technical problems in the it-domain. And thus science (theoretical and technical) would not only solve all problems, it would decide what was a problem in the first place—it would decide what was real and what was not.
Q: So the problem wasn't that the new science was analytic and divisive instead of holistic and systems-oriented.
K w: Absolutely not. The problem was that both atomistic science and holistic science were it-isms. Both contributed to the primary collapse. Atomistic its, holistic its—same basic nightmare.
Q: But we constantly hear, from the "new paradigm" folks, that we are living in a fractured world because the "old Newtonian" science was mechanistic, divisive, and atomistic, and these divisive concepts invaded society and caused its fragmentation; and that what is now required is for society to catch up with the new holistic sciences, from quantum physics to systems theory, and this will heal the divisions. And you're saying atomistic and holistic are both the culprit.
K w: Yes, that's right. When science pronounced its own mission to be the only real mission, it likewise pronounced the it-domain to be the only real domain. The empirical world of monological nature was the only real world. Humans were an inseparable part of this web of nature, and thus humans could also be known in an empirical, objective fashion. You want consciousness? Don't talk to me, just cut into the brain and look! The monological gaze.
The idea was that the brain is part of nature, nature alone is real, so consciousness can be found in an empirical study of the brain—this is a horrible reduction to monological surfaces.
Q: But the brain is a part of nature!
K w: Yes, the brain is a part of nature, but the mind is not part of the brain. The mind, or consciousness, is the interior dimension, the exterior correlate of which is the objective brain. The mind is an l, the brain is an it. So, as we discussed earlier, the brain, like anything else in empirical nature, can be known by the monological gaze, by empiric-analytic investigation, but the mind can only be known by introspection, communication, and interpretation. You can look at a brain, but you must talk to a mind, and that requires not just observan tion but interpretation.
So when all aspects of holons were reduced to the great monological web of empirical surfaces, then their interior dimensions were perfectly decimated. The interiors of plants and whales and wolves and chimps evaporate in the scorching blaze of the monological gaze. They are all just strands in the objective web—they have no lifeworld, they have no culture. And thus, if you reduce the Kosmos to the great web of empirical nature, you denature the interiors of nature as well. You only have empirical nature, monological nature, denatured nature, the hollow shell of the collapsed Kosmos: all I's and all we's reduced to interwoven its, reduced to the great web of simple location.
Of course, consciousness does not have simple location. It exists in levels of its own interior space that are know from within, accessed by interpretation, and shared in mutual understanding guided by sincerity. And since none of those have simple location, then if you attempt to get at the interior beast by simply mapping its empiricalobjective footprints, you will lose the very essence of the beast itself.
And then you will simply arrange your ontological holarchies based primarily on physical extension—orders of magnitude replace orders of significance, and so then the only "nests" you have are now based mostly on size: an atom is part of a bigger molecule is part of a bigger cell is part of a bigger organism is part of a bigger biosphere— and there is your holistic systems map.
At which point you have totally fallen into what Whitehead called the fallacy of simple location. Namely, if something can't be simply located in physical space, then it isn't "really real." You can locate Gaia, so it exists. You can locate cells, so they exist. You can locate the brain, so it exists. You can locate the biosphere, so it exists.
But you can't simply locate consciousness and values and meanings and morals in the same way. You can't point to them with your finger.
You can't see them or find them anywhere in the great web of sensory nature. They become rambling and ridiculed ghosts in the machine, pathetic illusions in the organic system. They are merely personal tastes and subjective fantasies. The interiors don't count in a disqualified universe, the universe you can put your finger on.
The irony, of course, is that the universe you can put your finger on is the meaningless universe. So although consciousness and value and meaning are intrinsic to the depth of the Kosmos, they cannot be found in the cosmos. That is, they inhere in the Left Hand dimensions of the Kosmos, not in the Right Hand surfaces. And thus, if you are intent on only allowing the sensory surfaces, then you scrub the Kosmos clean of value and consciousness and meaning and depth, guaranteed.
And so it came about that the Great Holarchy was abandoned, essentially for the first time in history, because you couldn't put your finger on it. The ghost in the machine was indeed a ghost, because it had just committed suicide.
The Fundamental Enlightenment Paradigm
Q : So is this why theorists like Foucault have so sharply attacked the "sciences of man" that arose in the eighteenth century?
KW : Yes, very much so. Foucault beautifully summarized this monological madness with a perfect phrase: men and women, he said, became "objects of information, never subjects in communication." That is, human beings, like all holons, were studied only in their empirical and objective dimensions, and thus were reduced to mere its in the great interwoven web, with no depth and no intentionality and no personhood to speak of. The brutal world of the lab technician, slabs of meat each and all.
And thus, correlative with the rise of scientism, you have the rise of the "sciences of man," sciences that reduced human beings solely to objects of information. Also called "dehumanized humanism." Q: Why did Foucault call that the "Age of Man"?
K W : Because "man" as an object of scientific investigation was "invented." Human beings became objects of monological rationality, something that had never happened before (because the Big Three
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had never been differentiated and then collapsed). In his own quirky way, Foucault would say that man had never existed before. Man was invented. And Foucault longed for "the end of man." So he concludes The Order of Things with the arresting metaphor, "One can certainly wager that man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. "
That's postmodernese for: the end of objectification. The end of this dehumanizing humanism, the end of "man," this mere objectification of the human person into monological surfaces. To reduce all subjects to objects in the great interlocking web—this is actually power parading as knowledge, this is the tyranny of the monological gaze, this is the irony of flatland rationality, and this was one of Foucault's main targets.
So if you look at the major theorists and critics of the rise of modernity—such as Hegel, Weber, Habermas, Taylor, Foucault—a surprisingly consistent picture emerges. They all tend to agree on certain basic features of modernity: a disengaged subject surveying a holistic it-world, with knowledge being simply the empirical and objective representation or mapping of this holistic world (the representation paradigm, the mirror of nature). The subjective and intersubjective domains were thus reduced to empirical studies—I and we were reduced to interwoven its—and thus humans became "objects of information, never subjects in communication." This reduction of the Big Three to the Big One produced the dehumanized humanism and the disqualified universe that still tends to dominate the modern and postmodern world.
The world and its inhabitants became "one-dimensional," as Marcuse put it. And welcome to the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm. The modern Descended grid.
No Spirit, No Mind, Only Nature
Q : So this is what you meant when you said that one broken God replaced the other.
K w: Yes, from an almost exclusively Ascending ideal, which had dominated Western consciousness for at least a thousand years, we get an almost exclusively Descended world, which has dominated modernity and postmodernity to this day. There is no translogical Spirit, and no dialogical mind; there is just monological nature. Surface nature, mononature, the world of sensory and material forms—this is the "God," this is the "Goddess," of the modern and postmodern world.
And as for this poor finite nature, this empirical nature, this mute and desolate landscape, which now alone was real: Some would call it Spirit, others would call it blind. Some would call it Goddess, others would call it brutish. Some would elevate it to ultimate glory, others would reduce it to lifeless matter. But always, always, always and only, this finite nature alone was real. Gone a genuine Spirit, and gone a genuine mind, and in their place, a monological nature and its functional fit, and what glories could be wrung from its solitary contemplation and its monological gaze.
The fractured, dualistic, Ascended world gave way to the equally fractured, dualistic, Descended world. And within that Descended grid, we moderns and postmoderns wander in puzzlement, cut off from Source, from Ground, and from Goal—waiting, or so we say, for the return of a lost and absconded God, whose rule we would nonetheless angrily deny; wailing for the return of a Goddess, whom we would not recognize even if She did; caught brutally between two dreams, one gone and never to be touched, one yet born, all bright and promise, so it seems, yet struggling in the agony of its birthing pains; and lost in the horrible in between, we fervently look to a finite world for infinite salvation, and live in the dusted ruins of that utter impossibility.
Irony: The Mood of Modernity
Q : Good news, bad news.
Kw: Yes, which gives modernity its unrelenting irony, its absolutely massive irony. The differentiation of the Big Three brought all of these enormous gains—in the liberation movements, in the democracies, in the knowledge quest—while at the same time it rather inadvertently allowed the fundamental collapse of the Kosmos into a flat and faded world of valueless exteriors and meaningless surfaces.
This is ironic. The rationality that had freed humanity was in the
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process of destroying it. Dehumanizing it, reducing it. And all of modernity and postmodernity circles in this orbit of irony. The postmodernists have even made irony their god, which is kind of funny. But irony means that the stated aim and the actual results are quite at variance—irony is a type of lying, so to speak, which allows a false self to ironically parade as the actual self.
And almost everything about modernity and postmodernity has an ironic flavor. This has been commented on by virtually every theorist looking at this period. Early Foucault, for example, is basically a study of the irony of the Enlightenment. Irony was so widespread— modernity was so ironic—that Kierkegaard even did his thesis on it ("The Concept of Irony"), and he decided that irony was the result, as he put it, of being caught between two worldviews, one dying and one struggling to be born, and those caught in the middle are drenched in irony.
We've already seen that a major irony of modernity was that it differentiated the Big Three, which brought an enormous increase in liberation and freedom, but which also allowed the collapse into a flat and meaningless world of surfaces—the increased freedom to be
Q : Very ironic.
K w: Don't you think? Modernity, precisely in its genuine advance and increase in depth, could be superficial and shallow in a way most other cultures couldn't even imagine. Kitsch and modernity came into being together. Even though rationality has more intrinsic depth— and therefore, more genuine Spirit—than magic or myth, nonetheless mythic fundamentalist religions would look at rational modernity and find nothing but shallowness—and in one sense, they would be right: the collapse of the Big Three to mere empirical nature was a flattening, a shallowness, a superficiality that no mythic believer would ever stoop to.
Collapsed modernity: trashy, kitschy, ironic. The most advanced, the most enlightened, the most progressive society ever—and it spends its time rummaging in the ontological basement, a trashed-out bag lady, looking for a lost god which it wouldn't accept even if it found it.
The very depth of modernity allowed it to deny depth altogether.
And so henceforth, in all of modernity and postmodernity, the main job of consciousness would be to strenuously and aggressively deny its own existence.
Q: So the modern world doesn't have Spirit, it has irony.
K w: Yes, exactly. Irony is the flavor of flatland, the mood of modernity, the bitter aftertaste of a world that cannot tell the truth about the substantive depth of the Kosmos, and so can only commit itself to saying one thing and meaning another—which is to say, a world that cannot commit itself to anything at all.
The Voice of the Industrial Grid
Q: Now you were saying that the modern ecological crisis is primarily the result of the Descended grid.
K w: Anybody can say they are thinking "globally," but very few can actually take a worldcentric or postconventional perspective. As we saw, to actually live from a worldcentric or universal perspective requires five or six major interior stages of transformation and transcendence.
But if the entire Left Hand is ignored and devalued—if we ignore interiors and just rivet our eyes on an objective "global" map of Gaia or systems nature—we will ignore the actual path of getting people to that global or worldcentric stance. We will have a goal with no path. And we will have a map that denies and condemns transcendence, which is the actual path itself!
And all of that ignoring, all of that ignorance, goes directly back to the subtle reductionism of the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm. We saw that rationality managed to differentiate the Big Three, but industrialization collapsed them into the Big One of mononature, of empirical nature with its simple location.
In other words, this world of mononature is in fact a purely industrial ontology. The very notion that "empirical nature alone is real" this is the modern Descended grid, and this grid is above all else the grid of industrial ontology. It is industrialization that holds flatland in place, that holds the objective world of simple location as the primary reality, that colonializes and dominates the interiors and reduces them
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to instrumental strands in the great web of observable surfaces. That "nature alone is real''—this is the voice of the industrial grid.
Q: Which is why you don't find this collapse in other cultures.
K W' : Correct. Nature was either predifferentiated and egocentric, as in magic; or nature was devalued in favor of a mythic other world, as in mythology. Or, in the case of a Plotinus or a Padmasambhava, nature is an expression of Spirit, an embodiment of Spirit—Spirit transcends and includes nature.
But never in history had a differentiated nature simply been equated with the ultimate reality! Never had translogical Spirit and dialogical mind been so rudely reduced to monological nature. But with the modern industrial ontology, nature is the ultimate reality, nature alone is real.
Q: So nature, in that sense, is a product of industrialization.
K W : Oh, definitely. As we were saying, that "nature alone is real' '—this is the haunting voice of the industrial grid.
And then, with reference to Spirit, you will do one of two things: deny Spirit altogether, or claim nature is Spirit. The Enlightenment philosophers did the former, the Romantic rebellion and back-to-nature movement did the latter. Both thoroughly within this Descended grid of mononature, this rampant industrial ontology.
Q: Plotinus was turning in his grave?
K W : One can only imagine. Let me repeat that for Plato or Plotinus—or Emerson or Eckhart or Lady Tsogyai—nature is an expression of Spirit. In fact, for Plotinus, both mind and nature are expressions of Spirit, and Spirit transcends and includes both mind and nature in an integral embrace of One Taste. Or likewise with Buddhism: the Dharmakaya of Spirit gives rise to the Sambhogakaya of mind which gives rise to the Nirmanakaya of body and form and nature.
But to acknowledge only the Nirmanakaya? Only nature? This is the collapse of the Kosmos into empirical flatland. This is the palpable effect of the industrial ontology that began to invade and colonialize and dominate the other domains—whereupon the only reality is nature.
Thus, only in the wake of Descended modernity could you have a Marx, a Feuerbach, a Comte. But likewise, only in the wake of modernity could you have the fully developed nature Romantics and ecophilosophers. They are all working the same side of the street, the same flatland, and finding their god, such as it is, in the Descended world of sensory nature, held secretly in place by the industrial grid.
Q: So this means that the Eco-Romantic movement is not a rebellion against industry but a product of industry.
K W : Yes, that's right. The belief that empirical nature is the ultimate reality—that is the industrial ontology. The Eco-Romantics reiected the industry but kept the ontology, and did so in the most loyal and royal fashion. In other words, they rejected the superficial problem while aggressively embracing the deeper disaster. They were secretly had by the industrial ontology and became one of its most loving advocates. Like a battered kidnap victim, they fell in love with their captors.
The religion of Gaia, the worship of nature, is simply one of the main forms of industrial religion, of industrial spirituality, and it perpetuates that industrial paradigm.
Q: But the magical-foraging structure, for example, worshipped nature.
K w: No, it didn't. It simply wasn't differentiated from nature. That's an entirely different structure. That magical nature was animistically alive with egocentric impulse and undifferentiated feelings. The nature that the modern Eco-Romantics adore is necessarily a differentiated nature. Modern Romantics do not actually think that the clouds move because the clouds are following them, and they do not think the volcano exploded because it is mad at them personally (unless they're severely regressed to borderline pathology).
No, the modern nature worshipped by the Eco-Romantics is a fully differentiated nature. And that nature is the supreme reality for them. In other words, they worship the nature that was disclosed by the differentiation of the Big Three. And they think that this nature is the only reality. That is, they have made a god out of the modern collapse of the Big Three to the Big One; they have made a god of monological nature. Mononature, and mononature alone, is real. It is their God, their Goddess.
And that collapse of the Big Three to the Big One, we were saying,
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was largely the result of industrialization. The collapse was held in place by the power of industrialization.
In other words, the nature worshipped by the Eco-Romantics is the flatland nature of industrialization. It is the same mononature. The worship of Gaia is a product, and an action, of industrialization, and this worship of Gaia perpetuates the empirical-industrial paradigm. It perpetuates the Big One. It perpetuates the collapse of the Kosmos. It perpetuates the modern Descended grid that locates reality solely or basically in mononature—the Right Hand surfaces alone are real, the world of simple location alone is real.
And this modern Descended grid is destroying Gaia, because it guts the interior dimensions where mutual accord and intersubjective wisdom can actually be found. The religion of Gaia is simply one of the ways the modern Descended grid reproduces itself. We might say, the cunning of the Descended grid. The modern Descended grid is destroying Gaia, and the religion of Gaia is simply one of its basic strategies.
Q: Now there's irony.
K w: Well, you know, modernity, irony.
The essential point is that Descended grid destroys each of the Big Three—destroys mind and culture and nature—because it perpetuates their dissociation, their lack of integration, so that the torn fragments continue to bleed to death. Not just Gaia or nature, but also consciousness and culture are all devastated by their fragmentation and reduction.
It follows—does it not?—that the ecocrisis is in large measure the result of the continued dissociation of the Big Three. We cannot align nature and culture and consciousness; we cannot align nature and morals and mind. We are altogether fragmented in this modernity gone slightly mad.
Yet it is the integration of the Big Three, and not the privileging of any one domain, that is our salvation, if such indeed exists. But as long as we continue to live within the Descended grid of flatland, then this integration is effectively prevented. The Eco-Romantic solution— back to nature!—is thus no solution at all, but merely the perpetuation of the Descended grid, the industrial grid. Q: They are definitely anti-transcendence!
Kw: Yes, since all mere Descenders believe that transcendence or Ascent of any form is evil, then they think transcendence destroys Gaia. They are extremely vocal about this. Transcendence ruins Gaia! Transcendence is the beginning of all evil!
This is the modern industrial grid speaking through their mouths. They are being had by the industrial ontology. They are puppets of the Descended disaster. They think transcendence is destroying Gaia, whereas transcendence is the only way fragments can be joined and integrated and thereby saved. They confuse transcendence and repression; they confuse differentiation and dissociation; they confuse dominator hierarchies with actualization hierarchies. No transcendence! Just get closer to nature—precisely the cause of the problem, not the cure.
It is in that Descended grid that the modern and postmodern world now moves—or flounders. This Descended grid determines our goals, our desires, our consumption, our salvation. It largely governs the mainstream culture as well as the counter-culture. The conformist and the avant garde equally sing its praises. It upholds the champions of modernity and equally tucks the haters of modernity into its unsuspected fold. It is fully behind the Ego assaults and equally embraces the Eco movements. It dashes to hell any Ascent at all, and whispers in the ear of each and all: I am here for you.
Modernity smashes its head against the iron bars of this Descended grid, and calls the spilled blood knowledge. It wails with the anguish of those self-inflicted wounds, and calls that anguish authenticity. It commits itself to a deadening embrace of this flattened grid, and calls that death grip passion. And it wishes, above all else, to prove its dedication to this merciless Descent, and calls that servitude salvation. The Descended grid has sunk its unrelenting claws into everything that moves.
And—for our last irony—those in whom the claws are sunk most deeply are made to sing its praises most loudly.
16 The Ego and the Eco
Q: The post-Enlightenment or postmodern rebellion. This began sometime between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century.
K W : Yes. The profound contradictions in the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm soon generated a series of world-shaking developments, pitting the positive gains of modernity against its ugly underbelly. The dignities of modernity clashed with the disasters of modernity, and we are all still living in the smoking ruins of that extraordinary battle. A battle we could call the Ego versus the Eco.
Ego versus Eco
Q: In the battle between the rational Enlightenment—which you simply refer to as "the Ego camps''—and nature Romanticism— which you call "the Eco camps''—for all their differences, you maintain that both of them were thoroughly caught in the modern Descended grid.
K w: Yes. Particularly under the onslaught of industrialization, the purely Descended worldview was crashing down with a vengeance. The great web of interwoven its settled over the modern and post-
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modern mind, and in that net we still live and move and think and
Small wonder, then, that what both the rational Enlightenment and nature Romanticism had in common was this purely industrial ontology as an ultimate reference point. It was no longer a case of integrating Ascent and Descent in the nondual Heart, it was a case of jettisoning Ascent altogether. Whatever their numerous differences, they were both perfectly united in their embrace of flatland, a world of simple location, a world you could put your finger on.
The difference is that where the Enlightenment approached the flat and Descended world with rational and industrious calculation, the Romantics approached it through feeling, sentiment, and emotion. In feelings, we could become one with flatland, one with nature, one with the world of form, and this "oneness" with the phenomenal world, with the Descended world, was thought to be salvation. The nature Romantics didn't want to control flatland, they wanted to become one with it.
The Flatland Twins
Q: Since both Ego and Eco are caught in flatland, why even bother with their squabbles?
K w: Because both of them maintained that they were overcoming the problems inherent in the dissociation of the Big Three, whereas both of them were actually contributing to the disaster.
So if we want to escape flatland, the one thing we don't want to do is fall into one or another of these camps. And the best way to avoid that entrapment is to trace their history—their case history, as it were. They're like some sort of evil twins locked in a dance of mutual destruction, each the enemy in the other's eyes, each promising world transformation, and yet each perfectly preventing it. This is, of course, ironic.
Q: So what was the difference between them? Because they sharply disagreed on many issues.
K w: Yes. Within the purely Descended grid, they moved in two diametrically opposed directions.
The rational Ego camp—the basic Enlightenment camp, from Des-
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cartes to Locke to Fichte—generally had a desire to control, calculate, even subdue the world of nature. The life in nature was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short—and at any rate, quite amoral—and so they understandably felt that the job of the rational Ego was to extricate itself from this brutish and amoral net. The job of the Ego was to disengage from the net of nature. Hence this rational Ego is often referred to as the disengaged self, the unencumbered self, the autonomous self, and so on.
The Eco-Romantic rebellion found this intolerable, primarily because it introduced a massive dualism or rift between the ego and the world of nature. The founders of the broad Eco-Romantic rebellion—in various ways, Rousseau, Herder, the Schlegels, Schiller, valis, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Whitman—wanted above all else to introduce what they felt was some measure of wholeness, harmony, union between self and world. And especially they wanted to see the self and nature united in a broad current of cosmic Life. Not a distancing representation, but a sympathetic insertion into this great web of nature, the ultimate reality toward which all actions and all knowledge must be geared. In short, they wanted oneness with themselves by finding a oneness with nature.
But note, it's the same nature. It's the same monological nature of the Ego camps, only now approached with an entirely different intent—not to control it or calculate it or dominate it, but rather to become one with it, and thus find "wholeness" in themselves as well. Q: They were both enthralled with the voice of nature.
K W : Yes. This is why Charles Taylor is able to demonstrate (in his massive Sources of the Self) that the Enlightenment and Romantic versions of nature were both based on the same modern conception of nature, namely, nature as a great interlocking order or system of empirical processes that is itself the ultimate or foundational reality. There is no longer Spirit as Spirit, and there is no longer mind as mind; there is now simply the voice of nature.
Q: So we have the Ego-Enlightenment on the one hand, and the Eco-Romantic rebellion on the other.
K w: In the most general sense, yes. With the collapse of the Kosmos, there emerged from the shattered debris these two crippled survivors. Whereupon there then commenced an extraordinary battle
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between these two camps, both thoroughly despising each other, both convinced they had the solutions to modernity's dissociations, and yet both thoroughly locked within the same Descended grid that was in fact the cause of the problem—and a grid that was never once seriously questioned.
The Ego's Truth
Q: So this war. . . .
K W : The problem was that both the Ego and the Eco camps had undeniable truths that they had latched onto—scraps of truth that had managed to survive the collapse of the Kosmos—and their respective truths were so important and so crucial that neither side would let go of them, understandably.
Q: Start with the important truths of the Ego camp.
KW : The reason that the Ego camps, particularly as they began to evolve away from empiricism and toward Kant and Fichte—the reaw son they wanted to "get out" of nature was primarily the fact that in sensory nature, there are no conscious moral values. This is not to say that nature is antimoral, but simply amoral, or lacking conscious moral decisions.
We saw that the human being is at first biocentric and egocentric, lost in its own impulses and incapable of taking the role of other. As egocentric gives way to sociocentric, the human being starts to treat others of its group with the same courtesy it extends to itself. And then with worldcentric morality, the human being attempts to treat all humans with equal dignity or at least equal opportunity. (And with further development into the World Soul, all sentient beings are extended this courtesy, even if they can't respond.)
The rational Ego camps, at their best, represented a postconventional and worldcentric morality, a universal pluralism, and, as we saw, this was part of the dignity of the democratization movements of the Enlightenment. And they were quite right to point out that worldcentric morality exists nowhere in the world of sensory nature.
Of course, there is plenty of altruism in nature, but only as an unconscious display of functional fit and genetic inclusion. A consciously worldcentric moral stance is found only in humans, and, as
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a matter of fact, this worldcentric stance is reached only by a relatively few number of highly developed humans (greater depth, less span).
To reach this higher and relatively rare stance of universal care, I must rise above my natural biocentric impulses (sex and survival), my egocentric wishes, and my ethnocentric proclivities—and stand instead as a relatively worldcentric locus of moral awareness that insists on universal compassion. And that freedom from shallower engagements is exhilarating, because it has plugged me into a higher or deeper or truer self.
I am, of course, summarizing Immanuel Kant. And this was part of the extraordinary and, indeed, exhilarating appeal of Kant. It is only by rising above my egocentric impulses, and my natural desires, and my conformist or ethnocentric perspectives—all of which Kant called "heteronomy''—it is only by rising above these shallower stances, only by taking a deeper or higher perspective, a worldcentric perspective, that I find my own highest aspirations and my own truest
It is only then that I become capable of universal care and universal compassion, which is a freedom from the shallowness of these lesser engagements. It is only by Ascending, only by transcending these lower orders, that I rise above these baser instincts and find a more universal and tolerant stance.
And for an entire age, Kant stood for moral freedom in worldcentric awareness, precisely by beginning to transcend the merely Descended world, the flatland world where only impulse and me-ness and mindlessness rule. And this indeed was the beginning of the major modern current of Ascent and transcendental awareness, which attempted to break out of the Descended grid of empirical nature, where conscious morals cannot be found.
Kant was outraged—or at any rate, rudely awakened from his dogmatic slumber—by Hume's perfectly mindless empiricism, and Kant responded with what many consider to be the finest and most sophisticated philosophy the West has ever produced. Whatever we decide about that, Kant's transcendental idealism was certainly impressive by any standards, and almost all modern transcendental currents, to the extent that they could be heard at all, would trace a large part of
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their heritage to Kant—Fichte, Schelling, Hölderlin, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bradley, Husserl, Heidegger. . . . Kant, we might say, was the first important modern to do noble and heroic battle with the trolls and troglodytes.
And so there was the Ego's enduring truth. Only in the transcendental currents of the Kosmos can we find a higher and wider stance that allows universal tolerance and compassion to flourish. Only with a higher Eros can a wider Agape even begin to function.
The Ego's Problem
Q: But you said the Ego camps, including Kant, had some severe limitations.
K W : Well, there's a very big problem in all this. Granted that everything Kant said is true enough; granted that this worldcentric moral stance is found nowhere in the categories that frame sensory nature, but only in practical or ethical mind; and granted that nature in that sense is something that must be transcended. But then how do you integrate mind and nature? How do you not only transcend but also include nature? What about this split between mind and nature? Because this split is also a split within my own being—my mind and my body are split as well. Mind is split from external nature and from internal nature. And what about that? Is the price of morality dissociation ?
And Kant had no final answer to this, although he attempted to heal the split between the knowledge of morals and the knowledge of nature via aesthetics. Note that he is trying to integrate the Big Three—aesthetics, morals, science—which are still flying apart, and Kant cannot pull them together, try as he might.
We saw that the great advance of modernity was to differentiate the Big Three, and this Kant does admirably—his three great critiques deal with science, ethics, and art. But we also saw that the great failure of modernity was its incapacity to integrate the Big Three, and in this failure Kant was no exception, as critics (such as Hegel) would soon aggressively point out.
So in the wake of Kant—that is, in the wake of modernity—we are faced with the massive conundrum: mind and morals and nature, and
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how could they ever be united? Not re-united!, because they were never united or integrated in the first place (because they had never been differentiated in the first place). This differentiation was utterly new, and so was the dissociation—and that was the blood all over the brand-new carpet.
Here was the nightmare of the industrial wasteland, a nightmare humanity had never before seen, a nightmare Kant spots and brilliantly works, but a nightmare he cannot awaken us from.
The Ego and Repression
Q: So apart from the Ego's truth, there was still this massive rift between mind and nature.
K w: Yes. And here we find the major, and I think very accurate, criticism of the Ego camps. Granted they introduced a measure of transcendence, but, as always, transcendence can simply go too far and become repression.
The rational Ego wanted to rise above nature and its own bodily impulses, so as to achieve a more universal compassion found nowhere in nature, but it often simply repressed these natural impulses instead: repressed its own biosphere; repressed its own life juices; repressed its own vital roots. The Ego tended to repress both external nature and internal nature (the id). And this repression, no doubt, would have something to do with the emergence of a Sigmund Freud, sent exactly at this time (and never before this time) to doctor the dissociations of modernity.
All of these dualisms understandably vexed the Romantics no end. The Ego seemed to be introducing splits and dualisms and dissociations everywhere, and the Romantics wanted above all else to find instead a wholeness and harmony and union.
The Ego was quite happy to continue mapping the world in an objective and monological fashion, which, of course, disenchanted the world in the process. The detached and disengaged Ego would simply map this world of empirical nature with representational knowledge. If the Ego disenchanted nature in the process, so much the better! It is precisely by disenchanting nature that the Ego frees
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itself! The disenchantment of the world—fine with me, said the Ego, fine with me.
But the Eco camps were absolutely alarmed, and pointed out that this disenchantment was fast becoming disembowelment. Repression, dissociation, desiccation. There is what the rational Ego has brought us! A disenchanted world. And the Eco camps arose directly in response to this wretched disenchantment, and they took it upon themselves to re-enchant the world.
The wild, fabulous, amazing and extraordinary attempt at reenchantment had finally begun.
The Re-enchantment of the World
Q: So the Eco camps began with a criticism of the rational Ego.
K w: Yes, basically. Most of the Romantic criticisms could be summarized as an extreme uneasiness with the Ego's repressive tendencies. The rational Ego—that great autonomous master of its universe—had in fact simply sealed out and ignored its prepersonal roots as well its transpersonal illuminations. It had cut off, or pretended to cut off, its subconscious juices as well as its superconscious inspirations. And so for all of its wonderful accomplishments, the autonomous Ego had nonetheless left massive roadkill everywhere on the highway to rational heaven.
And it was especially this repression that the Romantic rebellion would focus on.
Q : The criticism was true.
K w: Yes, there is much truth to that criticism, and this is where the Romantic camps attacked. They found this repressive split between morals and nature, or mind and nature, or mind and body— those are all the same split—they found this split to be intolerable. They understandably wanted wholeness and unity. So where Kant and Fichte would talk endlessly of the autonomy of the self from nature and nature's baser instincts, the Romantics would talk endlessly of uniting with nature in some sort of vital and expressive union, in some great unitary stream of Life and Love.
The desirability and necessity of healing this split between morals and nature—this was the great truth the Romantics came to an-
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nounce, and it is a truth that is as enduring in its own way as the Kantian notion of the necessity for transcendence.
Q: But something has to give.
K W : Yes, at this historical point we reach total gridlock, complete philosophical gridlock, an utter standoff between the Ego and the FÆO camps. How can you possibly reconcile these two positions? How can you reconcile the necessity to rise above nature with a necessity to become one with it?
This is still the crucial problem, isn't it? How can you reconcile Ego and Eco? This is still the critical dilemma in today's world, yes?
The Ego camp, we just saw, had no satisfactory answer. But the Eco-Romantic solution was notoriously just as unsatisfactory, by almost everybody's account, and their "solution" of the "one Life stream" was vigorously attacked by the Ego camps. How, the Ego camps asked, can you unite with nature, become one with nature, act only on nature's impulses, and yet still preserve the worldcentric and postconventional morality that we have all fought so hard to secure?
The Romantic response was lame in the extreme, and centered mostly on defining "nature" in two very different and utterly contradictory ways, and they simply switched back and forth between these two definitions as suited their purposes.
Back to Nature
Q: The Romantics had two different definitions of nature?
KW : Yes. First they maintained, in true Descended fashion, that nature is the one reality, the all-inclusive and all-embracing reality. This, of course, is the modern Descended grid, and the Romantics swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. And yet culture, they maintained, has grievously deviated from this nature, it has split from this nature, it has lost touch with the great life stream, it is ruining nature.
Q: The ecophilosophers still maintain that.
K w: Yes, but look at the two very different and contradictory definitions of nature hidden in that statement. First, nature is supposed to be the one single reality of which all organisms, including the human, are part. In this sense, nature is absolutely all-inclusive, nothing is outside of it. It is the ultimate and all-embracing reality.
But two, culture is supposed to have deviated from this nature. Culture has to some degree split itself from nature. Culture, in fact, is ruining nature. So now we have two natures: a nature that you can't deviate from, versus a nature that you can. And clearly they can't be the same thing. They sneaked in two natures.
So what is the relation of this Nature with a capital N that embraces everything, versus this nature that is different from culture because it is getting ruined by culture?
Q : The big Nature is supposed to include and unify culture and nature.
K w: Yes, and so again, what is the relation of Nature and nature? See, this was the whole problem.
The entire Romantic movement crashed and went up in flames over this internal contradiction. What the best of the Romantics were trying to say is that Nature with a big N is Spirit, because all-embracing Spirit does indeed transcend and include both culture and nature. And that is fine, that is true enough.
But because the Romantics were committed to the purely Descended grid, they simply identified Nature with nature. They identifed Spirit with sensory nature. And here they went up in smoke, a spectacularly narcissistic, egocentric, flamboyant explosion—because the closer you get to nature, the more egocentric you become. And in search of Nature, the Romantics headed back to nature, and disappeared into a black hole of their own selfhood, while claiming to speak for the ultimately Divine—divine egoism, it sadly turned out.
The Eco and Regression
Q: So the collapse of the Kosmos is the same as the collapse of Nature to nature. There is no Spirit, no mind, only nature.
K w: Yes, that's right. Now, if you are Ego and deny any sort of spiritual reality anyway, then fine, you'll simply map this empirical nature in a disengaged fashion, no problem. You are a happy, mindless, mapping fool.
But if you are tender-hearted, and if you are open to spiritual experiences—and yet you are still being secretly had by the industrial on* tology—then you will simply equate Spirit with nature. Your spiritual
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intuition is probably very genuine, but your interpretation occurs within the orbit of the industrial grid. The only reality there is— empirical nature—must therefore be the ultimate spiritual reality as well.
So even if you have a direct experience of the World Soul, or even the Nondual—pow!, it's interpreted as coming from nature. The industrial grid, operating preconsciously, beats you to the interpretation, and you are secretly caught in that flatland framework. You hug and kiss the dull and dreary shadows, dim and somber, bleak and boring, and call that shallowness your God, call that your Goddess. This, too, is the simple world of simple location, the world you can put your finger on, but a world you are now longing to become one with, and your God is now green.
And thus instead of moving forward in evolution to the emergence of a Nature or Spirit (or World Soul) that would indeed unify the differentiated mind and nature, you simply recommend "back to nature." Not forward to Nature, but back to nature.
Q: You point out that this regression is characteristic of most Romantic movements, down to today's ecophilosophers.
KW : In most cases, yes. And here is where this regressive move becomes so historically important, becomes an incredibly influential current in the modern and postmodern world:
If nature or the biosphere is the only fundamental reality—if it is actually "spirit' '—then, the Romantics announced, anything that moves away from nature must be killing spirit. Culture moves away from nature, and so culture must be killing spirit. So if mononature is the ultimately Real, then culture must be the original Crime.
And we are not simply talking about the fact that culture can go too far and repress nature; we are not talking about the fact that the mind can repress the body's impulses—granted all of that is true enough. The Romantic objection was much deeper and much stronger. Something about culture itself necessarily disrupted nature, and since nature is the sole spiritual reality, something about culture per se was antispiritual. Culture, in fact, was the original Crime against a primal Paradise of natural freedom and spiritual abundance.
This "spiritual insight" is the core of all Eco-Romantic movements, then and now. And yet this "insight" is not really spiritual in any profound sense; it is an interpretation framed entirely within the secret requirements of the industrial grid. It is simply one of the numerous hidden ways that the modern Descended grid defends itself against any transcendence, defends itself against any genuine spirituality. It is a defense mechanism of a worldview that wishes to maintain the outrageous lie that finite nature alone is real. And so it must present this nature as being Spirit, and it must present anything that deviates from nature as being the Devil.
And with this "insight" began the extremely influential movements of "back to nature," of "the noble savage," of a "Paradise Lost," of a primal Eden that had been disrupted and distorted by the horrible Crime of Culture.
To find a purer reality, a truer self, a more genuine feeling, and a fairer community, we must get back prior to the Crime of Culture and rediscover a historical past in which this Crime had not occurred. And once we find this Paradise Lost, we must, as a social agenda, make it the Promised Land by reverting to or incorporating the original, primal, pristine way of life into the modern world. And here begins the retro-Romantic slide.
Paradise Lost
Q : You trace this slide in a dozen different areas, from the original Romantics to the modern ecophilosophers.
K w: Yes, well, it's very easy to see how it got started. Modernity had managed to differentiate the Big Three for the first time in history—and this included differentiating mind and nature. But because modernity could not yet integrate them, the Big Three tended to drift into dissociation, and this the Romantics rightly reacted to with alarm. This reaction was completely understandable; quite noble, in fact.
Since this dissociation was so alarming, the Romantics did the obvious but naive thing—they thought the problem was the differentiation itself: we simply never should have differentiated the Big Three to begin with. Failing to see that differentiation is the necessary prelude to integration, the Romantic solution was to simply head back to those days prior to the differentiation. Not prior to the dissocia-
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tion, but prior to the differentiation itself! The only way to cure the problems of the oak is to go back to being an acorn!
And the only way to do that is to get back to the good ole days when culture and nature were undifferentiated, back to humanity's acornness, back prior to this horrible Crime that humanity had committed against nature. History was therefore imagined to be basically a series of horrifying errors that lead humanity further and further away from the original pristine state where mind and nature were "one," conveniently overlooking the fact that this original "pristine state" had none of the disasters of modernity precisely because it had none of the dignities either. For the Romantics, the oak was somehow a horrible violation of the acorn, and humanity's job was to rediscover and get back to its acornness.
Q: Whereas the real solution might be, what?
K W : We can probably all agree that typical or conventional culture is not often imbued with a great deal of genuine spirituality. But the remedy is to go post-conventional, not pre-conventional. The remedy is to go post-conventional in Spirit, not pre-conventional in nature. Spirit transcends and includes both culture and nature, and thus integrates and unifies both.
But if you recommend going back to the pre-conventional state, back to acornness, back to the original "pristine" state of nature, then you have not integrated the differentiations, you have simply destroyed them by regressing to a point before they emerged at all. You recommend magical indissociation or mythic immersion, hypocritically taking advantage of the dignities and freedoms of modernity while you endlessly whine about how rotten it all is.
This is not translogical Spirit; it is certainly not the dreaded dialogical culture; it is pure, simple, monological nature—which, by my sneaky dual definition, I have now proclaimed to be Spirit or Nature. will get away from the Crime of Culture. I will get back to Paradise Lost. I will find the noble savage in myself. I will discover the original Eden, when none of modernity's differentiations plagued me with the burden of distinguishing my ego from reality at large.
Away from the burdens of dialogue, away from the difficulties of interpretation, away from the demands of morals, I will find my true self in a monological gaze at a mute nature, which will thrill me alto-
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gether in its release from modernity. And I will then possess a damning indictment of modernity: I have found the Paradise Lost which will be the Promised Land, if only modernity will listen to me and get back to a mute and dumbfounded nature.
And in this regression from noosphere to biosphere, you are indeed released from the disasters of modernity, by releasing yourself from the dignity and the demands as well. You have cured the repression by regression.
Q: But you can have strong spiritual experiences in nature. This is very common. And I think that is what the nature Romantics meant by Spirit.
K w: Yes, indeed you can, but the source of these spiritual feelings is not nature itself. You might stare for hours at a sunset, and suddenly disappear into the World Soul, and feel yourself at one with all nature. This is well and good. But nature is not the source of this intuition. Worms and rats and foxes and weasels do not stare for hours at the sunset, and marvel at its beauty, and transcend themselves in that release—even though their senses are in many cases much sharper than ours, even though they see nature more clearly than we! No, nature is not the source of this Beauty; nature is its destination. The source is transcendental Spirit, of which nature is a radiant expression.
And thus when, in nature, you can relax your egoic grasping and stand as an opening or clearing in awareness—and nature is an inviting place to do so—then through that clearing might come pouring the power and the glory of the World Soul, and you are temporarily struck perfectly dead by the wonder and the beauty of it all—a beauty that takes your breath away, takes your self away, all at once—a beauty that bestows new splendor on the setting sun and renders nature insanely vivid in its display.
But if you are committed to interpreting this spiritual experience in a completely Descended pattern—if the industrial grid is having its way with you—then you will ascribe this Spirit to simple nature itself. You will mistake the effect for the cause. You will fail to see that you got to this World Soul intuition precisely by developing from sensorybiocentric to egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric to World Soul, each of which transcends and includes.
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Thus, struck by the beauty of the World Soul that you have mistakenly reduced to sensory nature, you will recommend—not that we go from nature to culture to Spirit—but that we simply get back to nature, even though the weasel sitting next to you doesn't seem to be seeing the same thing in nature that you are—wonder why that is?
And because you now think that the World Soul or Spirit is a simpie sensory impact—is nature itself—you will then start to think, not that culture is a necessary part of an evolution on its way to a conscious apprehension of Spirit as true Self, but rather that culture hides and distorts this mononature in which your "real self" supposedly resides. Culture is not on the way to the true Self, it is simply a crime against the "true self" of your biocentric feelings.
In short, you will start recommending, not that we move forward to fulcrum-7 and the Eco-Noetic Self, but that we move back to fulcrum-2 and the biocentric or ecocentric or ecological self.
So you will start to sing the fervent songs of yesterday, and wail at the travesty that is today, and lament the present tense in which you walk, and condemn it altogether, and weep at the thought of the horrible crime that your generation has perpetrated on the innocence of yesterday's wonders. You will rage against modernity, and root for the mindless world, and secretly gloat when natural disasters kill humans left and right, their anguished cries enrich your sensory soul, enjoying in your hidden heart the revenge of a pure and simple nature against the horrors of humanity: let viruses eat at the flesh and send blood spurting from every orifice, and isn't that just what humanity deserves?
In other words, you will be a retro-Romantic.
Q: You said this regression was converted into a critique of modernity.
K W : Yes, the real nightmare in this approach is that it misses altogether the actual cause of modernity's problems. The real problem was the dissociation of the Big Three and their collapse to the Big One of mononature—the industrial ontology. The Romantics spotted and rejected the nastiness of industry, but not the ontology of industry. They thus attacked the superficial problem while enthusiastically promoting the deeper problem, the real nightmare.
Because the startling fact is that ecological wisdom does not consist
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in how to live in accord with nature; it consists in how to get subjects to agree on how to live in accord with nature.
This wisdom is an intersubjective accord in the noosphere, not an immersion in the biosphere. No representation of the biosphere what* soever will produce this wisdom. It can be found on none of the maps of exterior surfaces and sensory marvels; it is a path of intersubjective accord based upon mutual understanding grounded in sincerity; it has it own developmental stages, with its own logic; it can be found nowhere in empirical nature.
But if preconventional biosphere is your Goddess, then you must get back closer to sensory nature in order to be saved. And since modernity differentiated this nature, you must get back prior to that differentiation. You must in all ways go premodern.
Q: The regressive slide.
K w: Yes. And thus, where the Ego camps were perpetuating what amounted to repression, the Eco camps were advocating what amounted to regression. Repression and regression were—and are— the twin engines of the flatland game, the twin machines of industrial ontology.
The Way Back Machine
Q: The Eco-Romantics were very specific about the lost glories of the past.
K w: Yes. Beginning in the eighteenth century, and continuing right down to today, you have the Eco-Romantics basically setting their Way Back machine to their favorite period where they felt that culture was the least differentiated from nature. The great search for Paradise Lost had begun.
Not the search for a timeless Spirit that we have alienated in this present moment by our contracting and grasping tendencies, but the search for a "spirit" that was fully present at some past time—some past historical or prehistorical period—but was then "killed" by the great Crime of Culture.
Q: The original Romantics were fond of Greece.
K w: Yes, for the early Romantics, such as Schiller, ancient Greece was by far the favorite stop on the Regress Express, because mind 2 94 |
and nature were supposed to be a "unity" (they were indeed undifferentiated to any great extent). And never mind that for precisely that reason one out of three Greeks were slaves, and women and children might as well have been. There were few disasters of modernity, it is true—and few of the dignities either.
Ancient Greece is now quite out of favor with the Romantics, mostly because, being agrarian, it was patriarchal. So the Romantics set their Way Back machine one stage further back, and they arrived at horticultural societies. These are now by far the favorite haunt of the ecofeminists. These societies, as we saw, were often matrifocal, ruled by the Great Mother.
And let us delicately ignore the central ritual of virtually all horticultural societies—the ritual human sacrifice, which was required, among other things, to ensure crop fertility. Let us likewise conveniently forget that, according to Lenski's massive data, an astonishing 44 percent of these societies engaged in frequent warfare and over 50 percent in intermittent warfare (so much for peace-loving Great Mother societies); that 61 percent had private property rights; that 14 percent had slavery; and 45 percent had bride price. These horticultural societies were anything but "pure and pristine," as the ecomasculinists themselves have aggressively pointed out.
Q : They prefer foraging.
K w: Yes, leave it up to the ecomasculinists ("deep ecologists") to push still one stage further back and arrive at foraging cultures as the "pure and pristine state." And, in fact, according the ecomasculinists, the ecofeminists' beloved horticulture is not truly close to nature in a pure way, because those societies depended upon farming, which is actually a rape of the land. Hunting and gathering, now that's pure and pristine.
And let us ignore the data that show that 10 percent of these societies had slavery, 37 percent had bride price, and 58 percent engaged in frequent or intermittent warfare. No, no, this must be the pure and pristine state—because there is no further back! This must be it! And so I will now ignore every single unpleasant thing about any of these societies, and they will be the noble savage, period.
Although logically, of course, the thing to do is push back to apes, because they have no slavery, bride price, war, and so on. I mean,
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why not get serious about this retrogression and really carry it to its conclusion: everything past the Big Bang was a Big Mistake. This is the logic you get locked into if you confuse differentiation and dissociation; you think every differentiation is a mistake—you think the oak is a crime against the acorn.
And so the search for the pure and pristine state would go, pushing further and further back—scraping more and more layers of depth off the Kosmos in search of a pristine state in which the Romantic insertion into nature could occur. You cure the repression by regression. You cure the disease by getting rid of the depth. By, that is, becoming more shallow.
The Great Battle of Modernity: Fichte versus Spinoza
Q: So this historical gridlock between the Ego camps and the Eco camps. The Ego wanted to subdue the Eco, the Eco wanted to get rid of the Ego.
K w: Yes. The gridlock was, do you transcend nature so as to find moral freedom and autonomy, or do you become one with nature so as to find unity and wholeness? Are you transcendental Ego or immanent Eco?
That is, pure Ascent or pure Descent?
This fundamental problem, this recalcitrant dualism! This twothousand-year-old battle between the Ascenders and the Descenders—the single battle that has most defined the entire Western tradition—has simply reappeared in its modern form as the battle between the Ego and the Eco.
And this millennia-old rivalry soon found its archetypal champions in Fichte and Spinoza.
Q : Very briefly.
K W : Very briefly: Fichte attempted to overcome the split between Ego and Eco by absolutizing the Ego, the path of Ascent. It was in the pure I, the pure transcendental Self, that liberation was to be found. And the more of the pure Ego, and the less of the Eco, then the better for everybody, said Fichte, as he bowed at the altar of the Ascending God.
The Eco-Romantics, of course, were headed in exactly the opposite 296 1
direction, under the gaze of exactly the other God. They would overcome this split between Ego and Eco by absolutizing the Eco, absolutizing the path of Descent. And thus the Eco camps would find their archetypal champion in an imaginatively interpreted Spinoza (they imagined that by Nature Spinoza meant nature—but never mind, he would do just fine!). Pure freedom thus resides in a total immersion in the Great System of nature, the pure Eco. The more of the Eco, and the less of the Ego, the better for everybody, said the Romantics, as they eagerly bowed at the earth-bound altar of the purely Descending God.
Q : So we have this standoff between Ego and Eco, Fichte and Spinoza.
K W : Yes, and this wasn't a minor side issue. This was exactly the end limit of the two-thousand-year-old battle at the heart of the West's attempt to awaken. And it was an agonizing problem because everybody vaguely intuited that they were both right. But how?
So the cry everywhere went up: We must integrate Fichte and Spinoza! Or Kant and Spinoza. Or Kant and Goethe. Variations on the same theme. This really was an obsession for an entire age, particularly toward the end of the eighteenth century.
Q : So who won?
K w: Well, it all came to the same thing: how can you transcend nature for moral freedom and yet become one with nature for wholeness? Autonomy versus wholeness. Which do you want? Freedom from nature, or freedom as nature? How can you possibly have both? How can you integrate Ascending and Descending? These fractured footnotes to Plato! Where is your salvation to be found? Where is your God to be located?
Q : In the midst of this battle came a person you are obviously quite fond of, and who perhaps solved the dilemma. In your book, you introduce this person by reading a letter from someone who tended the lectures. Mind if I read that letter? K W : Go ahead.
- 17 The Dominance of the Descenders
Q : "Schelling is lecturing to an amazing audience, but amidst so much noise and bustle, whistling, and knocking on the windows by those who cannot get in the door, in such an overcrowded lecture hall, that one is almost tempted to give up listening to him if this is to continue. During the first lectures it was almost a matter of risking one's life to hear him. However, have put my trust in Schelling and at the risk of my life I have the courage to hear him once more. It may very well blossom during the lectures, and if so one might gladly risk one's life—what would one not do to be able to hear Schelling?
"I am so happy to have heard Schelling's second lecture— indescribably. The embryonic child of thought leapt for joy within me when he mentioned the world 'actuality' in connection with the relation of philosophy to actuality. I remember almost every word he said after that. Here, perhaps, clarity can be achieved. This one word recalled all my philosophical pains and sufferings.—And so that she, too, might share my joy, how willingly I would return to her, how eagerly I would coax myself to believe that this is the right course— Oh, if only I could!—now I have put all my hope in Schelling. . .
K W : Yes, the letter is from Søren Kierkegaard, during Schelling's
Berlin lectures of 1841. Attending those lectures, beside Kierkegaard,
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were Jakob Burkhardt, Michael Bakunin, and Friedrich Engels, collaborator of Karl Marx.
Q : So can you summarize his central point, especially about integrating mind and nature?
K W : Schelling began by saying that, if it is true that the Enlightenment had succeeded in differentiating mind and nature (or the noosphere and the biosphere), it had also tended to forget the transcendental and unifying Ground of both, and thus it tended to dissociate mind and nature—the disaster of modernity.
This dissociation of mind and nature, Ego and Eco, with mind "mirroring" nature in scientific inquiry—what we saw as the representation paradigm—this dissociation was, of course, well under way. Representation had, Schelling pointed out, introduced a rift or cleavage between nature as external object and the reflecting self as subject—which also, he said, made humans objects to themselves— dehumanized humanism, as we earlier put it. And when representation is made an end in itself, it becomes "a spiritual malady," he said.
In this he was in agreement with the Romantics. In fact, Schelling was one of the principal founders of Romanticism, although he also moved quite beyond it, largely by refusing regression to nature. That is, Schelling realized that the dissociation could not be overcome by a retum to the immediacy of feeling, "to the childhood, as it were, of the human race." There was no going back to Eco-nature, and Schelling knew it.
Rather, he maintained, we have to go forward beyond reason in order to discover that mind and nature are both simply different movements of one absolute Spirit, a Spirit that manifests itself in its own successive stages of unfolding. As Schelling's colleague Hegel would soon put it, Spirit is not One apart from Many, but the very process of the One expressing itself through the Many—it is infinite activity expressing itself in the process of development itself—or, as we would now say, Spirit expresses itself in the entire process of evolution.
Evolution: The Great Holarchy Unfolds in Time
Q: So this developmental or evolutionary notion was not new with Darwin.
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K W : Far from it. The Great Chain theorists, beginning as early as Leibniz, began to realize that the Great Chain could best be underw stood as a holarchy that is not given all at once, but rather unfolds over enormous stretches of historical and geographical time—starting with matter, then the emergence of sensation in life forms, then perception, then impulse, then image, and so on.
And thus, about a century before Darwin, it was widely accepted in educated circles that the Great Chain had actually unfolded or developed over vast time. And—this was crucial—since the Great Chain contained no "gaps" or holes (because the plenitude of Spirit fills all empty spaces), the research agenda was to find any "missing links" in evolution.
Q: That's where the term actually came from?
K W : Yes, any missing links in the Chain. And so there began a massive search for the "missing links" between various species. And so widespread was this understanding, so common and so taken for granted, that even the notorious circus promoter P. T. Barnum could advertise that his museum contained "the Ornithorhincus, or the connecting link between the seal and the duck; two distinct species of flying fish, which undoubtedly connect the bird and the fish; the Mud Iguana, a connecting link between reptiles and fish—with other animals forming connecting links in the Great Chain of animated Nature." That's two decades before Darwin published Origin of Species! Q: That's hilarious.
K w: It's also fascinating. All of this looking for the missing links. It was behind the search for microorganisms, whose existence Leibniz had already deduced solely on the basis of the Great Chain— microorganisms simply had to be there to fill in certain apparent gaps in the Chain. It was behind the belief in life on other planets, which Giordano Bruno had deduced on the basis of the Great Chain. And the missing links between species—all of this was based, not initially on empirical or scientific evidence, but directly on the belief in the Great Chain.
Q : A Neoplatonic idea.
Kw: Yes, all of this, in one way or another, goes back to Plotinus. Spirit is so full and complete, he said, that when it empties itself into creation, it leaves no place untouched—it leaves no holes or gaps or missing links. And Plotinus's Great Holarchy is the way these links
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or levels connect and include and nest each other, all the way from matter to God.
Now, if you take that Great Holarchy, exactly as presented by Plot* inus (fig. 14-1), and if you realize that it unfolds in time—unfolds over vast stretches of time—then you basically have today's general understanding of the major stages of evolution. Evolution does indeed proceed from matter to sensation to perception to impulse to image to symbol, and so on.
Except, of course, we moderns, committed to a Descended grid, have no higher stages of evolution beyond reason, and we interpret the entire Great Chain in merely empirical and natural terms—which is precisely why we can't even begin to understand or explain the selftranscending drive of this evolution that has nonetheless become our modern god!
But the central point is that Plotinus temporalized equals evolution. And this was all worked out and widely accepted a century before Darwin. Schelling wrote the transcendental philosophy around 1800. We have P. T. Barnum's advertisement around 1840. Darwin published around 1860, decades after people were already going to museums to see the "missing links. "
What Darwin and Wallace contributed to this already-accepted no, tion was the theory, not of evolution, but of evolution by natural selection—which, it turns out, can't explain macroevolution at all! Which is why Wallace always maintained that natural selection itself was not the cause but the result of "Spirit's manner and mode of creation," and even Darwin was most reluctant to remove Spirit from the nature of evolution.
And so, if you had to pick two of the philosophers who, after Plato, had the broadest impact on the Western mind, they very well might be Plotinus and then Schelling. For this reason alone: Plotinus gave the Great Holarchy its fullest expression, and Schelling set the Great Holarchy afloat in developmental time, in evolution. And if there is one idea that dominates the modern and postmodern mind at large, it is evolution.
And we are at the point, historically, that it is beginning to be understood that the Great Holarchy evolved over time. And standing at that crucial watershed is Schelling.
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Evolution: Spirit-in-Action
Q: take it that for Schelling, development or evolution was still a spiritual movement.
K W : You can't understand it any other way, and Schelling knew it. Spirit is present at each and every stage of the evolutionary process, as the very process itself. As Hegel would soon put it, the Absolute is "the process of its own becoming; it becomes concrete or actual only by its development."
Q: in the book, there is a quote from Hegel that I should read: "That the history of the world, with all the changing scenes which its annals present, is this process of development and the realization of Spirit—only this insight can reconcile Spirit with the history of the world—that what has happened, and is happening every day, is not only not 'without God', but is essentially God's work."
K w: Yes, which is why Zen would say, "That which one can deviate from is not the true Tao."
Schelling's point is that nature is not the only reality, and mind is not the only reality. Spirit is the only reality. But in order to create the manifest world, Spirit must go out of itself, empty itself, into manifestation. Spirit descends into manifestation, but this manifestation is nevertheless Spirit itself, a form or expression of Spirit itself.
So Spirit first goes out of itself to produce nature, which is simply objective Spirit. At this point in evolution Spirit is still un-self-conscious. Thus the whole of nature Schelling refers to as slumbering Spirit. Nature is not a mere inert and instrumental backdrop for mind, as the Ego camps maintained. Rather, nature is a "self-organizing dynamic system" that is "the objective manifestation of Spirit"— precisely Plato's "visible, sensible God," but now set developmentally afloat.
So nature is most definitely not a static or deterministic machine. For Schelling, nature is "Godwin-the-making." The very processes of nature are spiritual processes—they are striving for spiritual awakening—because they are objective Spirit striving to actualize itself (Eros).
And so here Schelling is acknowledging the major contention of the Eco-Romantics—nature indeed is not a mechanical and doltish
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backdrop; nature is spiritual to the core. But slumbering Spirit, because Spirit has not yet become self-conscious, the Kosmos has not yet begun to consciously reflect on itself.
With the emergence of mind, Spirit becomes self-conscious, which, among other things, introduces conscious morals into the world, morals found nowhere in nature. And these morals represent an advance in consciousness over what can be found in slumbering nature. And here Schelling is acknowledging the rational-Ego camps and their undeniable contributions.
Spirit is starting to awaken to itself. Spirit seeks to know itself through symbols and concepts, and the result is that the universe begins to think about the universe—which produces the world of reason and, in particular, the world of conscious morals. Thus, says Schelling, where nature is objective Spirit, mind is subjective Spirit.
But unlike the Ego camps, Schelling is insisting that the Ego itself is simply one moment in the overall arc of Spirit's self-actualization. He refuses to stop with either the Eco or the Ego schools. Schelling is heading for the Nondual.
But he freely concedes that at this historical point—where mind and nature become differentiated—there does indeed appear to be a massive rift in the world, namely, between the reflecting mind and the reflected nature. But unlike the radical Ego camps, who want the mind to be supreme, and unlike the pure Eco camps, who want nature to be supreme, Schelling sees that both of them are necessary but partial moments on the way to a Spirit that will transcend and include them both, and thus awaken to its own supreme identity.
Q: So with modernity we are temporarily stuck with this battle between mind and nature, between Ego and Eco.
K W : Yes, this painful birth of modernity's acute self-consciousness is a necessary part of Spirit's awakening. We moderns must go through the fire. And no other period has had to face this fire on a collective scale. Going backward simply avoids the fire, it does not transform it.
So Schelling insists that instead of going back prior to this split, we rather must go forward beyond the Ego and beyond the Eco, both of which pretend to be "absolute." But these two "apparent absolutes," as he calls them, are synthesized in the third great movement of Spirit,
which is the transcendence of both nature and mind and thus their radical union.
Q: With Fichte and Spinoza in mind.
K w: Exactly. With the pure Ego and the pure Eco in mind. This nondual synthesis, according to Schelling, is also the identity of subject and object in one timeless act of self-knowledge, of Spirit directly knowing itself as Spirit, a direct mystical intuition, says Schelling, that is not mediated through any forms, whether those forms be the feelings of objective nature or the thoughts of subjective mind.
And here we have an unmistakable and profound glimpse of the formless and nondual groundless Ground, the pure Emptiness of One Taste. Schelling would often refer to the "indifference" and the "Abyss," precisely in the lineage of Eckhart and Boehme and Dionysius. "In the ultimate dark Abyss of the divine Being, the primal ground or Urgrund, there is no differentiation but only pure identity." What we have been calling the Supreme Identity.
Thus, for Schelling (and for his friend and student Hegel), Spirit goes out of itself to produce objective nature, awakens to itself in subjective mind, and then recovers itself in pure Nondual awareness, where subject and object are one pure immediacy that unifies both nature and mind in realized Spirit.
And so: Spirit knows itself objectively as nature; knows itself subjectively as mind; and knows itself absolutely as Spirit—the Source, the Summit, and the Eros of the entire sequence.
Glimmers of the Nondual
Q : These three broad movements can also be referred to as subconscious, self-conscious, and superconscious.
K w: Or prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal; or prerational, rational, and transrational; or biosphere, noosphere, and theosphere, not to put too fine a point on it.
Q: So how exactly does this vision integrate the gains of both the Ego and the Eco without just forcing them together?
K w: Schelling's key insight was that the Spirit that is realized in a conscious fashion in the supreme identity is in fact the Spirit that was present all along as the entire process of evolution itself. All of Spirit,
so to speak, is present at every stage, as the process of unfolding itself. But at each stage Spirit unfolds more of itself, realizes more of itself, and thus moves from slumber in nature to awakening in mind to final realization as Spirit itself. But the Spirit that is realized is the same Spirit that was present all along, as the entire process of its own awakening.
So, to answer your question specifically, Schelling could integrate Ego and Eco—Fichte and Spinoza, autonomy and wholeness— because, he pointed out, when you realize your supreme identity as Spirit, then you are autonomous in the fullest sense—because nothing is outside you—and therefore you are also whole or unified in the fullest sense—because nothing is outside you. Full autonomy and full wholeness are one and the same thing in the supreme identity.
So men and women don't have to sacrifice their own autonomy or will because their will ultimately aligns itself with the entire Kosmos. The entire Kosmos is something your deepest Self is doing, and you are that Kosmos in its entirety. Full autonomy, full wholeness.
This is a profound integration of Ego and Eco, of Ascent and Descent, of transcendence and immanence, of Spirit descending into even the lowest state and ascending back to itself, but with Spirit nonetheless fully present at each and every stage as the process of its own self-realization, a divine play of Spirit present in every single movement of the Kosmos, yet finding more and more of itself as its own Play proceeds, dancing fully and divine in every gesture of the universe, never really lost and never really found, but present from the start and all along, a wink and a nod from the radiant Abyss.
Always Already
Q: And what exactly separated this vision from the Eco-Romantic vision?
K w: The pure Romantics, then and now, would never admit that mind and Spirit transcend nature, because nothing transcends nature. There is only nature, and mind and Spirit are somehow the same as this nature, or the sum total of this nature, or strands in the web of this nature.
And so most of all, the Eco-Romantics could not understand that
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"that which you can deviate from is not the true Tao." The ecophilosophers keep telling us what we have deviated from, which shows that they are only aware of nature, not Nature. They have not understood the true Tao or Spirit.
According to the Idealists—and the Nondual sages everywhere— the extraordinary and altogether paradoxical secret is that the Final Release is always already accomplished. The "last step" is to step off the cycle of time altogether, and find the Timeless there from the start, ever-present from the very beginning and at every point along the way, with no deviations whatsoever.
"The Good," says Hegel, "the absolutely Good, is eternally accomplishing itself in the world; and the result is that it need not wait upon us, but is already in full actuality accomplished."
I have one last quote for you, from Findlay, one of Hegel's great mterpreters: "It is by the capacity to understand this that the true Hegelian is marked off from his often diligent and scholarly, but still profoundly misguided misinterpreter, who still yearns after the showy spectacular climax, the Absolute coming down . . . accompanied by a flock of doves, when a simple return to utter ordinariness is in place [cf. Zen's "ordinary mind"]. Finite existence in the here and now, with even limitation, is, Hegel teaches, when rightly regarded and accepted, identical with the infinite existence which is everywhere and always. To live on Main Street is, if one lives in the right spirit, to inhabit the Holy City."
As Plotinus knew and Nagarjuna taught: always and always, the other world is this world rightly seen. Every Form is Emptiness just as it is. The radical secret of the supreme identity is that there is only God. There is only the Kosmos of One Taste, always already fully present, always already perfectly accomplished, always already the sound of one hand clapping. And the very belief that we could deviate from this is itself the utter arrogance of the egoic delusion, the haunting mask of divine egoism gloating over the smoking ruins of its own contracting tendencies.
The Fading of the Vision
Q: The Idealist vision almost completely faded within a few decades.
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K w: Yes. The Descended grid ate Idealism alive and spat out Gaia-centric salvation, whether in the form of Marxism or ecocentrism or capitalism—the same grid, and the same wobbling between the only two choices available: control nature (Ego), become one with nature (Eco).
Q: So is it a matter of simply trying to bring back some form of Idealism?
Kw: Not really, because evolution moves on. We have a different techno-economic base now, and Idealism as it was proposed would not now functionally fit. There will be a new type of Idealism, we might say, but the coming Buddha will speak digital. Which I suppose is another conversation.
In any event we can't simply stop with Schelling or any of the Idealists. Granted that the summary gave of Spirit-in-action is valid—and believe it most definitely is—nevertheless, none of the Idealists really understood the four quadrants very well, and their grasp of the actual details and stages of the transpersonal domains was rather thin. I believe we can summarize these shortcomings in two simple points.
The first was a failure to develop any truly contemplative practices—that is, any true paradigms, any reproducible exemplars, any actual transpersonal practice. Put differently: no yoga, no meditative discipline, no experimental methodology to reproduce in consciousness the transpersonal insights and intuitions of its founders.
The great Idealist systems were thus mistaken for metaphysics, or more of the same ole "mere representation" philosophy that had no actual referent, and that Kant had thoroughly demolished. And because the Idealists lacked a transpersonal practice, this harsh criticism was in many ways true, alas. Idealism tended to degenerate into monological metaphysics, and so it rightly suffered the fate of all mere metaphysics—that is, of all systems that merely map the world and don't sufficiently provide interior technologies to change the mapmaker.
Q : So the first failure was that they had no yoga—no transpersonal practice to reproduce their insights.
Kw: That's right, no way to reproduce transpersonal awareness in a practicing community. No way to concretely disclose a deeper
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self (I or Buddha) in a deeper community (We or Sangha) expressing a deeper truth (It or Dharma). But yes, put simply, no yoga.
Q: And the second major failure?
K W : Although profound intuitions into the genuinely transpersonal domains were clearly some of the major, would say the major, driving forces behind the Idealist movement, these intuitions and insights were expressed almost totally in and through vision-logic, and this burdened Reason with a task it could never accomplish. Particularly with Hegel, the transpersonal and transrational Spirit becomes wholly identified with vision-logic or mature Reason, which condemns Reason to collapsing under a weight it could never carry.
"The Real is Rational and the Rational is Real''—and by "rational" Hegel means vision-logic. And this will never do. Vision-logic is simply Spirit as it appears at the centauric stage.
In 1796, Hegel wrote a poem for Hölderlin, which says in part: ' 'For thought cannot grasp the soul which forgetting itself plunges out of space and time into a presentiment of infinity, and now reawakens. Whoever wanted to speak of this to others, though he spoke with the tongues of angels, would feel the poverty of words."
Would that Hegel had remained in poverty. But Hegel decided that Reason could and should develop the tongues of angels.
This would have been fine, if Hegel also had more dependable practices for the developmental unfolding of the higher and transpersonal stages. Zen masters talk about Emptiness all the time! But they have a practice and a methodology—zazen, or meditation—which allows them to ground their intuitions in experiential, public, reproducible, fallibilist criteria. Zen is not metaphysics! It is not mere mapping!
The Idealists had none of this. Their insights, not easily reproducible, and thus not fallibilistic, were therefore dismissed as "mere metaphysics," and gone was a priceless opportunity that the West, no doubt, will have to attempt yet again if it is ever to be hospitable to the future descent of the World Soul.
Q : It's amazing the Idealists accomplished as much as they did.
K W : Isn't it? I keep thinking of this story: After World War Il, Jean-Paul Sartre visited Stalingrad, the site of the extraordinary battle that in many ways was the turning point of the war. At that site the
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Russians had put up an absolutely heroic defense; over three hundred thousand German soldiers died. After surveying the site, Sartre kept saying, "They were so amazing, they were so amazing." Sartre, of course, was very sympathetic with the communist cause, so somebody finally said, "You mean the Russians were so amazing?" "No, the Germans. That they got this far." keep thinking of that phrase when think of the Idealists. That they got this far.
The Dominance of the Descenders
Q: Yet they, too, were defeated. There is a famous phrase, that after Hegel everybody was saying "back to Kant!"
K W : Yes, which eventually meant: back to rationality and its grounding in the senses. In other words, back to mononature.
The collapse of Idealism left the Descenders virtually unchallenged as the holders and molders of modernity. After some extraordinary gains for the Left Hand dimensions in terms of consciousness and transpersonal Spirit, the Idealist current was, of course, snapped up by the industrial grid and converted, via Feuerbach and Marx, into a strongly materialistic and "naturalistic" conception. It's almost impossible to escape the modern Descended grid, and after absolutely heroic attempts by the Idealists, they were hounded out of town by the troglodytes.
And so Feuerbach, a student of Hegel, would soon announce that any sort of spirituality, any sort of Ascent, was simply a projection of men and women's human potentials onto an "other world" of wholly imaginative origin. And, according to Feuerbach, it is exactly this projection of human potential onto a "divine" sphere that cripples men and women and is the true cause of self-alienation.
He is, of course, ignorantly confusing the old mythic otherworldliness with higher and interior transpersonal potentials, but it is exactly this ignorance that allows him to embrace the Descended grid and maintain that nature alone is real.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were paying very close attention. "Apart from nature and human beings," Engels would write, "nothing exists; and the higher beings which our religious fantasy created
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are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence. The enthusiasm was general; we were all for the moment followers of Feuerbach."
And the entire modern and postmodern world is, in effect, the followers of Feuerbach.
The Internet
Q: But what about systems like the Internet, the computer network that now links over thirty million people in an information exchange? Is that merely Descended? Isn't that global? And doesn't that point the way to global consciousness?
K W : What good is it if Nazis have the Net? You see the problem? The Net is simply the exterior social structure—the Lower Right quadrant. But what goes through the Net—well, that involves interior consciousness and morals and values, and none of that is even vaguely addressed by those who simply maintain the Net is a global consciousness. This is flatland at its worst and most Descended and possibly most destructive.
The Net is simply part of the new techno-base (the Lower Right quadrant), and as such, it is itself neutral with regard to the consciousness that uses it. All Right Hand structures are neutral, valuefree. What computer technology (and the Information Age) means is that the techno-base can support a worldcentric perspectivism, a global consciousness, but does not in any way guarantee it. As we have seen, cognitive advances are necessary but not sufficient for moral advances, and the cognitive means usually run way ahead of the willingness to actually climb that ladder of expanding awareness. The Net offers the possibility, but does not guarantee it.
Which is why the Net itself won't do it, why the Net simply cannot be equated with global consciousness per se. What good is it if thirty million people at moral stage 1 have the means of extending their egocentric morality? What good is it if Nazis have the Net?
All of that is overlooked when people simply focus on the holistic net of simple location. You focus on the exterior grid and ignore the interiors that are running through that grid. The flatland idea is that the Internet is global, so the consciousness using it must be global. Not even close.
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And so once again, the flatland paradigm can't even spot the problem, let alone cure it.
Q: The problem being what, in this case?
K w: That the Net is simply an exterior social structure that does not, in itself, guarantee interior changes, let alone global consciousness. The Net is just a monological structure, through which various types of interiors can be projected. But the quality of those interiors is an entirely different issue, and that is not even addressed by the structure of the Net itself.
Here, for example, are two immediate problems that the Net has actually introduced: it is almost entirely male occupied; it fosters anarchic and egocentric male agency. The Net was built by males, for males, and it is occupied almost exclusively by males (Newsweek reports 95 percent of Net users are male). This great "information global consciousness" in fact threatens to reintroduce the most intense gender stratification since the agrarian structure. And the feminists are completely asleep at the wheel on this issue, preferring instead to argue such profound and timeless issues as whether pornography violates their civil rights or whether Congressmen should be imprisoned for pinching their butts. And meanwhile the biggest technological transformation in the history of the world has come and passed them by.
Most disturbing of all, a great number of the Infobahn males are digital predators—egocentric computer warriors that couldn't give a damn about intersubjective cooperation and mutual recognition. So much for global consciousness.
Most people, alas, are still at preconventional and conventional modes of awareness, egocentric and ethnocentric. And no systems map, and no Internet, will automatically change this. Neither a global holistic map, nor a global Internet, will in itself foster interior transformation, and often just the opposite, contributing to arrest or even regression. When worldcentric means are presented to less-thanworldcentric individuals, those means are simply used (and abused) to further the agenda of the less-than-worldcentric individual. The Nazis would have loved the Net.
The Religion Gaia
Q : But what about such problems as overpopulation, ozone depletion, and so on? Those are immediate threats to Gaia—to us all—and the Eco-Romantics do attack those head on.
K W : Gaia's main problems are not industrialization, ozone depletion, overpopulation, or resource depletion. Gaia's main problem is the lack of mutual understanding and mutual agreement in the noosphere about how to proceed with those problems. We cannot reign in industry if we cannot reach mutual understanding and mutual agreement based on a worldcentric moral perspective concerning the global commons. And we reach that worldcentric moral perspective through a difficult and laborious process of interior growth and transcendence. A global map won't do it. A systems map will not do it. An ecological map will not do it.
But the Descended grid rejects transcendence altogether. And therefore it despises Gaia's only source of genuine salvation. This hatred of transcendence is the cunning of the Descended grid. This is how the Descended grid perpetuates its love affair with flatland. This is how it perpetuates the colonialization of the I and the we by the empirical domain. This is how it hands modernity over to the lovers of sorrow and sadness, pity and pain, hidden in the shadows of their unrelenting shame. This is how it perpetuates the bitter fragmentation of the Good and the True and the Beautiful, and sets mind and culture and nature at fundamental odds, each not a trusted friend but a profound threat to the others, spiteful in regard, intent upon revenge.
And so of course the crude and obvious rational-Ego camps are contributing to the despoliation of Gaia, in their attempts to control and dominate nature. But it is the final irony of modernity that the religion of Gaia is also caught in the same Descended grid, and it is that grid that is the fundamental destructive force. The religion of Gaia has pledged allegiance to the grid that is killing Gaia.
And so the horrifying truth of the modern condition slowly dawns: The hatred of transcendence is the way the flatland grid reproduces itself in the consciousness of those it is destroying.
- 18 The Unpacking of God
Q: I want to conclude these discussions by focusing on three topics: how we interpret our spiritual intuitions; environmental ethics; and future world developments.
The Writing on the Wall
Q: First, you maintain that many people are indeed having intuitions of the beginning transpersonal stages, namely, intuitions of the Over-Soul or the World Soul or the Eco-Noetic Self. But many of these people are not interpreting these intuitions very well.
K w: These spiritual intuitions are often very true and very real, I believe, but these intuitions are interpreted—they are unpacked—in less than graceful ways. Many people have these spiritual intuitions, but they are thoroughly trapped in the modern Descended grid, with its massive dissociation between self, culture, and nature. The spiritual intuitions come crashing down into this dissociated grid, with less than happy results.
Q : For example?
K w: You might have an experience of Kosmic consciousness, or an intuition of the all-embracing World Soul, but you might interpret
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this solely in the terms of finding your Higher Self. You then think that if you find your Higher Self or higher consciousness, then all other problems will simply work themselves out wonderfully. You are doing the old Fichte move—the pure Self will solve everything—and you tend to ignore the behavioral and social and cultural components that are also absolutely mandatory for transformation. You tend to get caught up in a very narcissistic orientation—find your True Self, the world will take care of itself.
Or you might take the other extreme—you have this experience of Kosmic consciousness or the World Soul, you feel one with the world, and you then decide the world that you are one with is simply empirical nature, mononature. You are indeed sensing a oneness with the mountain, with the ocean, with all life. But caught in the modern grid, you will ignore the subjective and intersubjective space that allowed you to develop to the point where you could be one with the mountain, and so you will think that this "oneness" involves nature alone.
So you will decide that if we all can just become one with Gaia, one with the pure Eco, then all our major problems will be solved. You present your nice systems map of the world, and tell everybody that they must agree that we are all strands in the Great Web, disregarding the massive interior changes in consciousness that are necessary to even be able to grasp a systems view in the first place. You are doing the old Spinoza move: insertion into the great immanent system will save us all, overlooking the fact that you can become one with the great immanent system only by a laborious process of inner transcendence.
This modern dissociation is so firmly entrenched in the collective psyche that when a genuine spiritual intuition descends, it descends into the interpretive grid of this modern fragmentation. The original spiritual intuition carries a sense of wholeness, but if you interpret this intuition merely in terms of your favorite quadrant, then you try to reproduce the wholeness by making your favorite fragment cover all the bases.
Q: So the intuition can be genuine, but the interpretation can get fouled up.
Kw: Yes, that's the central point. As we said, surfaces can be seen, but all depth must be interpreted. And how we interpret depth is
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crucially important for the birth of that depth itself. Graceful and well-rounded interpretations of Spirit facilitate Spirit's further descent. Gracefully unpacking the intuition, interpreting the intuition, facilitates the emergence of that new spiritual depth.
On the other hand, ungraceful interpretations tend to prevent or abort further spiritual intuitions. Frail or shallow or fragmented interpretations derail the spiritual process. Usually this happens because the interpretations are drawn from only one quadrant—they do not equally honor and unpack all four quadrants, they do not honor and integrate the Big Three. And since Spirit manifests as all four quadrants—or simply the Big Three—then some aspect of Spirit gets denied or distorted or overemphasized, which sabotages Spirit's full expression and derails the spiritual process in its broader unfolding. We neglect the Good, or the True, or the Beautiful, and send Spirit crashing into the fragments of our self-contracting ways.
The Superman Self
Q: So both the Ego and the Eco are trapped in ungraceful interpretations.
K W : Very often, yes. On the Ego side, as we were saying, many individuals intuit the World Soul (or higher) and yet unpack that intuition, interpret that intuition, solely or merely in terms of the Higher Self, the inner Voice, archetypal psychology, Gnosticism, vipassana, the care of the Soul, interior Witnessing, the Universal Mind, pure Awareness, Enneagram patterns, transcendental Consciousness, or similar such Upper Left quadrant terms. And however true that aspect of the intuition is, this unpacking leaves out, or seriously diminishes, the "we" and the "it" dimensions. It fails to give a decent account of the types of community, social service, and cultural activity that are the intersubjective forms of Spirit. It ignores or neglects the changes in the techno-economic infrastructures and the social systems that are the objective forms of Spirit. It centers on the intentional, but ignores the behavioral and cultural and social—it ignores the other three quadrants, or at least relegates them to very inferior and secondary status.
The "Higher Self" camp is thus notoriously immune to social con-
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cerns. Everything that happens to one is said to be "one's own choice"—the hyperagentic Higher Self is responsible for everything that happens—this is the monological and totally disengaged Ego gone horribly amuck in omnipotent self-only fantasies. This simply represses the networks of rich social and cultural communions that are just as important as agency in constituting the manifestation of Spirit.
The idea seems to be that if I can just contact my Higher Self, then everything else will take care of itself. But this fails miserably to see that Spirit manifests always and simultaneously as all four quadrants of the Kosmos. Spirit, at any level, manifests as a self in a community with social and cultural foundations and objective correlates, and thus any Higher Self will inextricably involve a wider community existing in a deeper objective state of affairs. Contacting the Higher Self is not the end of all problems but the beginning of the immense and difficult new work to be done in all quadrants.
Q: But these approaches really do maintain that you create your own reality.
K w: You don't create your own reality; psychotics create their own reality. know, the point is that a genuinely spiritual Self does manifest its own reality. So here's an old story from Vedanta Hinduism.
A man goes to an enlightened sage and asks, of course, for the meaning of life. The sage gives a brief summary of the Vedanta view, namely, that this entire world is nothing but the supreme Brahman or Godhead, and further, your own witnessing awareness is one with Brahman. Your very Self is in a supreme identity with God. Since Brahman creates all, and since your highest Self is one with Brahman, then your highest Self creates all. So far, this definitely looks like New Age city.
Off goes the gentleman, convinced that he has understood the ultimate meaning of life, which is that his own deepest Self is actually God and creates all reality. On the way home, he decides to test this amazing notion. Heading right toward him is a man riding an elephant. The gentleman stands in the middle of the road, convinced that, if he's God, the elephant can't hurt him. The fellow riding the elephant keeps yelling, "Get out of the way! Get out of the way!"
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But the gentleman doesn't move—and gets perfectly flattened by the elephant.
Limping back to the sage, the gentleman explains that, since Brahman or God is everything, and since his Self is one with God, then the elephant should not have hurt him. "Oh, yes, everything is indeed God," said the sage, "so why didn't you listen when God told you to get out of the way?"
It is true that Spirit creates all reality, and to the extent you identify with Spirit, you do indeed find that you are within that creative activity. But that creative activity manifests in all four quadrants, not just in or from your own particular awareness. But if you interpret spiritual awareness merely as a Higher Self, then you will ignore God in the other quadrants—you will ignore the elephant, or think it isn't real, or isn't important—you will ignore the cultural and social and behavioral work that desperately needs to be done in those domains in order to fully express the Spirit that you are.
But ignoring all of that, sooner or later you will get flattened by some sort of elephant. You will get ill, or lose a job, or fail in a relationship—some sort of elephant will run you over—and you will feel massive guilt because if you were really in touch with your true Self, the elephant wouldn't be able to hurt you. When all it really means is, you weren't listening to God in all quadrants.
Q: These approaches maintain that the more you contact higher consciousness or Higher Self, the less you worry about the world.
K W : Yes, the Real Self is Superman! And Superman never worries! And conversely, if you are "worried" or "concerned" about the poverty or injustice or anguish of the world, then this shows that you haven't found the true Self.
And in fact, it is just the opposite: the more you contact the Higher Self, the more you worry about the world, as a component of your very Self, the Self of each and all. Emptiness is Form. Brahman is the World. To finally contact Brahman is to ultimately engage the World. If you really contact your Higher Self, one of the first things you will want to do is not ignore the elephant but feed the elephant. That is, work in all four quadrants to help manifest this realization, and treat each and every holon as a manifestation of the Divine.
With the supreme identity, you are established in radical Freedom,
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it is true, but that Freedom manifests as compassionate activity, as agonizing concern. The Form of Freedom is sorrow, unrelenting worry for those struggling to awaken. The Bodhisattva weeps daily; the tears stain the very fabric of the Kosmos in all directions. The Heart moves into those places where Spirit remains unheralded and unheard; the work is a passion, an agony; it is always fully accomplished, and thus never ending.
But if you keep interpreting Spirit as simply a higher or sacred Self—ignoring Spirit in the other quadrants—then that is going to abort further realization. It won't just hurt others, it will profoundly sabotage your own spiritual development. It will cut off further realizations of Spirit's all-pervading presence. You will just keep retreating into your interior awareness, until that well runs dry, and you end up despising the manifest world because it "detracts" from your "real" self.
On the other hand, a more graceful unpacking facilitates further and deeper intuitions, intuitions touching the I and the We and the It domains: not just how to realize the higher Self, but how to see it embraced in culture, embodied in nature, and embedded in social institutions.
Realized, embraced, embodied, embedded: a more graceful interw pretation covering all four quadrants, because Spirit itself manifests as all four quadrants. And this more graceful interpretation facilitates the birth of that Spirit which is demanding the interpretation. Graceful interpretation midwifes Spirit's birth, Spirit's descent. The more adequately I can interpret the intuition of Spirit, the more that Spirit can speak to me, the more the channels of communication are open, leading from communication to communion to union to identity—the supreme identity.
And Spirit's interpretation merely as a Higher Self is not very graceful, I don't think.
The WondedÜl Great- Web Gaia Self
Q: Whereas the other typical approach, the Eco approach, also tends to get caught in dissociated interpretations, but at the other extreme.
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K W: Yes, alas. There are many good souls who have a profound intuition of Spirit but unpack that intuition in merely "it" terms, describing Spirit as the sum total of all phenomena or processes interwoven together in a great unified system or net or web or implicate order or unified field—the Lower Right quadrant.
All of which is true enough, but all of which leaves out entirely the interior dimensions of "I" and "we" as disclosed in their own terms. This less-than-adequate interpretation is monological to the core, flatland through and through.
It is the old Spinoza move, the other pole—the Eco pole—of the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm, in the form of the Romantic rebellion. It thinks that the enemy is atomism and mechanism, and that the central problem is simply to be able to prove or demonstrate once and for all that the universe is a great and unified holistic System or Order or Web. It marshals a vast amount of scientific evidence, from physics to biology to systems theory—all monological!—and offers extensive arguments, all geared to objectively proving the holistic nature of the universe. It fails to see that if we take a bunch of egos with atomistic concepts and teach them that the universe is holistic, all we will actually get is a bunch of egos with holistic concepts.
Precisely because this monological approach, with its unskillful interpretation of an otherwise genuine intuition, ignores or neglects the "I" and the "we" dimensions, it doesn't understand very well the exact nature of the inner transformations and the stages of inner transcendence that are absolutely necessary in order to be able to find an identity that embraces the All in the first place. Talk about the All as much as we want, nothing fundamentally changes.
And nothing changes because the "proof" or the "new paradigm" or "great system" is still being put in monological it-language. And to the extent this approach talks about the interior dimensions at all, it instantly converts them into empirical observables in the great web—it instantly saddles them with the fallacy of simple location. It guts their interiors, their real depths, and displays them on the marble slab of simple location, and that location is always in the world of empirical nature, the realm of functional fit, the realm of monological systems, the realm of sensory surfaces. Deep ecology is span ecology, ecofeminism is ecosentimentalism. And this world of empirical na-
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ture, which is now called the Biosphere—with a capital B—is their God, their Goddess. Not Nature, but nature, is their great beloved.
Thus, however true the original intuition of Spirit is—and I do not doubt that it is true—it is not facilitated by these fragmented interpretations. Those interpretations, taken in and by themselves, block the transformative event. Those interpretations, driven originally by a true intuition of the very Divine, do not facilitate the further descent of that Divine. Those interpretations are unskillful to midwife the birth of Spirit.
Q: So they actually prevent further realizations.
Kw: If you keep interpreting your Kosmic consciousness experience as a oneness with mononature, you sabotage Spirit in the other quadrants. You keep pushing the flatland Gaia map. And you find that people might buy the map, but nothing really fundamental is changing. They aren't really transforming. All they do is become ideologues, and try to get other people to buy the map. They become pushers and pimps for flatland.
And they become very depressed, hollow-eyed souls, these flatland addicts. They say the reason they are so depressed is that Gaia is being destroyed—unaware of the hand they are playing in that downward spiral. Embracing the industrial ontology of simple location, they hug and kiss the spokes of the wheel that is grinding Gaia to her demise.
And this modern, Descended, industrial grid is simply having its way with the ecophilosophers—Goldsmith, Mander, Fox, Sessions, Diamond, Merchant, and company—alas, mouthpieces for the industrial ontology. And yet they are merely very recent examples of a three-hundred-year-old tradition of dissociation in the Western tradition. Working the Romantic side of the catastrophe, they of course recommend: we must all live in strict accord with nature, with the world of simple location, the brutal world of the monological gaze.
And, at its end limit, this approach, as we saw, fosters regression, both individual regression to biocentric and egocentric stances, and cultural regression to tribal or horticultural ideals. Reducing the Kosmos to flatland sensory nature, and then trying to become one with that nature in biocentric immersion, leads to profoundly regressive, preconventional, body-bound, narcissistic glorification. This was the entire lesson of the Romantic slide!—the closer you get to nature, the more egocentric you become. And it was the entire lesson of develop-
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ment as well: the less differentiated, the more narcissistic. This is not compassion, this is regression.
Q: You were saying that ecological wisdom doesn't consist in how to live in accord with nature, but how to get subjects to agree on how to live in accord with nature. in other words, how to integrate the Big Three.
K W : Yes. People are not born wanting to take care of Gaia. That noble state of global care is the product of a long and laborious and difficult process of growth and transcendence. But, like the multicults, the typical Eco-approaches condemn the actual path of transcendence that produced the noble state.
This then completely sabotages others getting to that state, and turns everybody loose to slide to their own lowest possibilities. This has already happened with the multicults, and with many Eco-approaches as well. Indeed, the multicults and ecotheorists have often joined hands to promote the retribalization of American culture.
Q: But the basic idea of the multicults is to honor individual differences.
K w: Yes, but that can only be done under the protection of the worldcentric stance of universal pluralism, which itself does not emerge until the postconventional stages (stages 5 and 6 and higher). And thus, without demanding and fostering ways for people to develop and evolve to these higher stages, we merely encourage them to act out their shallower engagements, and thus few people actually aspire to the worldcentric stance that alone allows the protection.
Instead, every sort of retribalization, fragmentation, preconventional, egocentric, and ethnocentric shallowness—all of those "diversities" are glorified as part of the decentered worldcentric stance, whereas they are exactly what prevent and sabotage that stance, and lead it by the hand into increasingly regressive engagements and the politics of narcissism, which, if it actually succeeds, will destroy the worldcentric stance that protected the pluralism in the first place. And this in turn will open the door to actual oppression, ethnocentric wars, imperialistic nightmares—we will lose all the liberation movements secured by the good news of the Enlightenment and its worldcentric tolerance.
You simply end up fostering a lack of growth, a lack of develop-
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ment, a lack of transcendence, a lack of evolution. You foster a culture of regression, a politics of narcissism. And this, you will happily tell yourself, has finally freed you from that horrible oppression known as modernity.
Beyond the Postmodern Mind
Q: Speaking of which, you realize that most of the world's great wisdom traditions are, in various ways, against modernity. Modernity is viewed as the great antireligious movement, the great movement of rational secularization, which "killed" God.
KW : Killed the mythic God, yes. But Spirit is in the overall process, not in any favored epoch or period or time or place. Reason has more depth than mythology, and thus actually represents a further unfolding of Spirit's own potentials. The very movement of modernity is a collective increase in Spirit's freedom, evidenced, among many other things, in the great liberation movements that define the very core of modernity.
So you might eulogize, for example, the glorious mythic-agrarian Empires, which were drenched in the blessings of your favorite mythic God, and you might worship that God as being the epitome of Freedom and Benevolence and Mercy. But you can do so only by ignoring that the temples and the monuments to that God, the great pyramids and stone cathedrals, were built on the broken backs of slaves, of women and children accorded the grace of animals; the great monuments to that mythic God or Goddess were inscribed on the tortured flesh of millions.
Spirit as great Freedom is one thing; Spirit actually manifested as political democracies, quite another. Reason frees the light trapped in mythology and sets it loose among the oppressed, which actually undoes their chains on earth, and not merely in some promised heaven.
All of this eulogizing of past epochs, and hatred of the present, mostly stems from confusing the average mode with the most advanced modes in those cultures. This approach simply compares the most advanced modes of past epochs with the most disastrous aspects of modernity, and gosh, guess what?
Q: Many of these traditional religious thinkers are constantly urg-
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ing us to go "beyond the postmodern mind." And they believe the great wisdom traditions can do that.
Kw: I certainly agree that the goal is to eventually transcend the postmodern mind. But before you can go beyond it, you have to get up to it. And most of these traditionalists, alas, don't seem to quite understand the essence of modernity and postmodernity, so I'm not so sure we can embrace their recommendations with confidence.
But this is just a typical example of what you were saying, which is that most of the great religious traditions are profoundly uneasy with modernity and postmodernity. Modernity, in various ways, is viewed as the Great Satan.
And my central point is that that idea is profoundly confused. I believe it is based on a series of palpable errors and extremely narrow interpretations. Most traditional religious thinkers simply have not clearly understood modernity, let alone postmodernity, so their recommendations about moving beyond them are like the Pope's recommendations for a satisfying sex life.
Q : Haven't understood modernity, how exactly?
Kw: Every great epoch of human evolution seems to have one absolutely central idea, an idea that totally dominates the entire epoch, and summarizes its entire approach to Spirit and Kosmos, and tells us something altogether profound. And each seems to build upon its predecessor. These ideas are so simple and so central, they can be put in a sentence.
Foraging: Spirit is interwoven with earthbody. Foraging cultures the world over sing this profound truth. The very earth is our blood and bones and marrow, and we are all sons and daughters of that earth—in which, and through which, Spirit flows freely.
Horticulture: But Spirit demands sacrifice. Sacrifice is the great theme running through all horticultural societies, and not just in the concrete form of actual ritual sacrifice, although we certainly see it there as well. But the central and pervading notion is that certain specific human steps must be taken to come into accord with Spirit. Ordinary or typical humanity has to get out of the way, so to speak— has to be sacrificed—in order for Spirit to shine forth more clearly. In other words, there are steps on the way to a more fully realized Spiritual awareness.
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Agrarian: These spiritual steps are in fact arrayed in a Great Chain of Being. The Great Chain is the central, dominant, inescapable theme of every mythic-agrarian society the world over, without exception. And since most of "civilized history" has been agrarian history, Lovejoy was quite right in stating that the Great Chain has been the dominant idea in most of civilized culture.
Modernity: The Great Chain unfolds in evolutionary time. In other words, evolution. The fact that Spirit was usually left out of the equation is simply the disaster of modernity, not the dignity nor the definition of modernity. Evolution is the one great background concept that hangs over every single modern movement; it is the God of modernity. And, in fact, this is a tremendously spiritual realization, because, whether or not it consciously identifies itself as spiritual, the fact is that it plugs humans into the Kosmos in an unbroken fashion, and further, points to the inescapable but frightening fact that humans are co-creators of their own evolution, their own history, their own worldspaces, because:
Postmodernity: Nothing is pregiven; the world is not just a perception but also an interpretation. That this leads many postmodernists into fits of aperspectival madness is not our concern. That nothing is pregiven is the great postmodern discovery, and it plugs humans into a plastic Kosmos of their own co-creation, Spirit become self-conscious in the most acute forms, on the way to its own superconscious shock.
Q: So those are the great defining ideas of each epoch. And your point about the antimodern religious thinkers . . .
Kw: Yes, is that they are thoroughly trapped in the agrarian worldview. They have not come to terms with the form of Spirit in either its modern or its postmodern modes. With eyes turned in shame from the wonders and dignities of modernity, they sing the songs of yesterday's marvels. Most traditional religious thinkers don't even think evolution has occurred!
They have not grasped Spirit in its manifestation as modernity; they have not seen that evolution is, as Wallace put it, the "manner and mode of Spirit's creation." They have not grasped the essence of modernity as the differentiation of the Big Three, and so they have missed the dignities of the modern liberation movements, of the aboli-
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tion of slavery, of the women's movement, of the liberal democracies, each of which sent Spirit singing through a new mode of freedom unheard of in their beloved mythic-agrarian dreams. They think that because modernity introduced its own unsurpassed disasters, evolution itself must be rejected, failing miserably to grasp the dialectic of progress.
And they have likewise not grasped Spirit in its manifestation as postmodernity. Nothing is pregiven. But, of course, to the agrarian mind, everything is simply and everlastingly pregiven, static, unyielding to the advances of time or the unfolding of development. The entire world is simply pregiven by the wondrous mythic God, and salvation depends upon totally accepting the form of that pregiven world—pregiven only to those prophets who, in hiding their promises from the validity claims, make a challenge to the pregiven order impossible. To disagree with the agrarian worldview, there is eternal sin. And never mind that that worldview is ethnocentric, racist, sexist, patriarchal, and militant, for it has been gloriously spoken by the pregiven God.
And so yes, to the extent the "religious authorities" are anchored in the agrarian worldview, they of course despise modernity, despise evolution, despise the process that is in fact working to undermine their own authority.
And yet their identification of Spirit with the static and pregiven agrarian worldview is exactly what prevents the modern and postmodern world from acknowledging Spirit. Modernity will never accept Spirit if Spirit means merely mythic-agrarian.
And so it is ironic in the extreme that these great spiritual authorities are actually some of the great forces sabotaging Spirit's modern and postmodern embrace. They are not, alas, beyond the postmodern mind, but beneath it. And in that rejection of Spirit's all-pervading presence, where indeed can the Son of Man lay his weary head?
World Transformation and the Culture Gap
Q: Do you think there is a major world transformation now in progress?
K W : Haltingly, jerkily, in fits and starts. We are seeing, and have
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been seeing since approximately World War Il, the slow shift from rational-industrial society to vision-logic informational society. This is not a spiritual New Age transformation—far from it—but it is quite profound nonetheless.
If for the moment we use the Lower Right quadrant as an indicator, there have been six or seven major transformations in human evolution—from foraging to horticultural to early agrarian to advanced agrarian to early industrial to late industrial to early informational. So we are right on the edge of one of the half-dozen or so major, profound, worldwide transformations in the formation of the human species. These are often simplified to three major transformations— farming, industry, information—so that today is the beginning of the "third wave."
But remember, we must, in my opinion, analyze this transformation in terms of all four quadrants (at least), or we'll miss the factors actually responsible for it. This transformation is being driven by a new techno-economic base (informational), but it also brings with it a new worldview, with a new mode of self and new intentional and behavioral patterns, set in a new cultural worldspace with new social institutions as anchors. And, as usual, specific individuals may, or may not, live up to these new possibilities.
Q: So go around the quadrants.
K w: A new center of sociocultural gravity is slowing emerging— the vision-logic information society, with an existential or aperspectival worldview (Lower Left), set in a techno-economic base of digital information transfer (Lower Right), and a centauric self (Upper Left) that must integrate its matter and body and mind—integrate the physiosphere and biosphere and noosphere—if its behavior (Upper Right) is to functionally fit in the new worldspace.
And this is a very tall order. Because the really crucial point is that a new transformation places a new and horrible burden on the world. It is hardly cause for undiluted celebration! Every new emergent and transformative development brings a new demand and a new responsibility: the higher must be integrated with the lower. Transcend and include. And the greater the depth of transcendence, the greater the burden of inclusion.
Q: That's a problem.
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Kw: That's a big problem. And the real nightmare is this: even with a new and higher worldspace available, every human being still has to start its own development at square 1. Everybody, without exception, starts at fulcrum-I, and has to grow and evolve through all the lower stages in order to reach the new and higher stage made available.
So even a person born into a grand and glorious and global visionlogic culture nevertheless begins development at the physiocentric, then biocentric, then egocentric levels, then moves to the sociocentric levels, then moves to the postconventional and worldcentric levels. There is no way to avoid or circumvent that general process. Even if you write a huge three-volume novel, you are still using the same letters of the alphabet you learned as a child, and you can't write the novel without the childhood acquisitions!
And the more vertical levels of growth there are in a culture, the more things there are that can go horribly wrong. As I was saying, the greater the depth of a society, the greater the burden placed on the education and transformation of its citizens. The greater the depth, the more things that can go massively, wretchedly, horribly wrong. The more levels, the more chances for the big lie (pathology). Our society can be sick in ways that the early foragers literally could not even imagine.
Q: So societies with greater depth face increasingly greater problems.
K w' : Yes, in all four quadrants! So where many people talk of the coming transformation and get all ecstatic and giddy at the thought, I tend to see another chance for a huge nightmare coming right at us. Q: I wonder if you could give a few examples.
K w: It is sometimes said that one of the major problems in Western societies is the gap between the rich and the poor. This is true. But that is a flatland way to look at it—merely quantified as a money gap. And as alarming as that exterior gap between individuals is, there is a more worrisome gap—an interior gap, a culture gap, a gap in consciousness, a gap in depth.
As a society's center of gravity puts on more and more weight—as more individuals move from egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric (or higher)—this places a huge burden on the society's need to 327
vertically integrate those individuals at different depths in their own development. And the greater the depth of a culture's center of gravity, the greater the demand and the burden of this vertical integration.
Thus, the "economic gap" between rich and poor is bad enough, but much more crucial—and much more hidden—is the culture gap, the "values gap," the "depth gap," which is the gap between the depth offered as a potential by the culture, and those who can actually unfold that depth in their own case.
As always, the new and higher center of gravity makes possible, but does not guarantee, the availability of the higher or deeper structures to its individual citizens. And as a society's center of gravity puts on more and more weight, there are more and more individuals who can be left behind, marginalized, excluded from their own intrinsic unfolding, disadvantaged in the cruelest way of all: in their own interior consciousness, value, and worth.
This creates an internal tension in the culture itself. This internal tension can be devastating. And the potential for this culture gap or consciousness gap becomes greater with every new cultural transformation. Ouch!
Q: That's similar to what you were saying about individual pathology as well.
Kw: Yes, the gap between the individual's main self or center of gravity and the "small selves" that remain dissociated and excluded. The internal tension, the internal civil war, drives the individual bonkers.
Just so with society and culture at large. The greater the cultural depth, then the greater the possibility of the culture gap, the gap between the average depth offered by the culture and those who can actually unfold to that depth. And this likewise creates an internal tension that can drive the culture bonkers.
Q: This is another reason cultures such as foraging had fewer internal problems.
KW: Yes.
Q: Any suggestions for solutions?
K w: Well, in a sense, the culture gap is not our real problem. The real problem is that we are not allowed to even think about the culture gap. And we are not allowed to think about the culture gap be-
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cause we live in flatland. In flatland, we do not recognize degrees of consciousness and depth and value and worth. Everybody simply has the same depth, namely, zero.
And since we recognize no depth in flatland, we can't even begin to recognize the depth gap, the culture gap, the consciousness gap, which will therefore continue to wreak havoc on developed and "civilized" countries, until this most crucial of all problems is first recognized, then framed in ways that allow us to begin to work with it.
Q: So before we can discuss the solutions, we have to at least recognize the problem.
K w: Yes, and everything in flatland conspires to prevent that recognition. This culture gap—this massive problem of vertical cultural integration—cannot be solved in flatland terms, because flatland denies the existence of the vertical dimension altogether, denies interior transformation and transcendence altogether.
Q : So how does this relate to the worldwide transformation now haltingly in progress?
K W : The hypothesis, remember, is that modernity differentiated the Big Three, and postmodernity must find a way to integrate them. If that integration doesn't occur, then the twenty tenets won't mesh, evolution won't purr, and some sort of massive and altogether unpleasant readjustment will very likely result.
And the point is, you cannot integrate the Big Three in flatland. In flatland, they remain dissociated at best, collapsed at worst. And no system that we are aware of has ever gone limping into the future with these types of massive internal dissociations. If these chaotic tensions do not lead to self-transcendence, they will lead to self-dissolution. Those are the two gruesome choices evolution has always offered at each vertical emergent.
And we are very close to seeing the culture gap lead to cultural collapse, precisely because flatland will not acknowledge the problem in the first place.
Environmental Ethics
Q: So do you think that the culture gap problem is more urgent than the environmental crisis?
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Kw: They're the same thing; they are exactly the same problem.
Egocentric and ethnocentric couldn't care less about the global commons—unless you scare them into seeing merely how it affects their own narcissistic existence—whereupon you have simply reinforced exactly the self-centric survival motives that are the cause of the problem in the first place. You just reinforce all of that with ecological scare tactics and ecofascism.
No, it is only at a global, postconventional, worldcentric stance that individuals can recognize the actual dimensions of the environmental crisis, and, more important, possess the moral vision and moral fortitude to proceed on a global basis. Obviously, then, a significant number of individuals must reach a postconventional and worldcentric level of development in order to be a significant force in global care.
In other words, it is only by effectively dealing with the culture gap that we can effectively deal with the ecological crisis—they're the same gap, the same problem.
Q: So both the culture gap and the environmental crisis are intimately correlated with flatland.
KW : Yes, the culture gap and the environmental crisis are two of the major problems bequeathed to us by flatland, by a worship of mononature. The religion of flatland denies degrees of vertical depth and interior transcendence which alone can bring humans into worldcentric and global agreement about how to proceed with protecting the biosphere and the global commons. The religion of Gaia is destroying Gaia, and this is yet another major impetus for breaking the hold of flatland in the coming transformation.
Q: In one of our earlier discussions, you briefly outlined an environmental ethics that would emerge if flatland were rejected. Perhaps we could go into that.
K w: Discussions of environmental ethics usually center on what is known as axiology, the theory of values. And there are four broad schools of environmental axiology.
The first is bioequality—all living holons have equal value. A worm and an ape have equal value. This is quite common with deep ecologists and some ecofeminists.
The second approach involves variations on animal rights—
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wherever there is any sort of rudimentary feelings in animals, we should extend certain basic rights to those animals. This school therefore attempts to draw an evolutionary line between those living forms that don't possess enough feelings to worry about—insects, for example—and those that do—such as mammals. Different theorists draw that line in different places, based on how far down one can reasonably assume that feelings or sensations exist. The lowest serious suggestion so far is shrimp and mollusks. (Of course, if you push it all the way down, this reverts to bioequality, and all living holons have equal rights.)
The third school is hierarchical or holarchical, and often based on Whitehead's philosophy (Birch and Cobb, for example). This approach sees evolution as a holarchical unfolding, with each more complex entity possessing more rights. Human beings are the most advanced and thus possess the most rights, but these rights do not include the right to instrumentally plunder other living entities, since they, too, possess certain basic but significant rights.
The fourth school involves the various stewardship approaches, where humans alone have rights, but those rights include the care and stewardship of the earth and its living inhabitants. Many conventional religious theorists take this approach as a way to anchor environmental care in a moral imperative (Max Oelschlaeger, for example).
My own particular approach to environmental ethics did not set out to synthesize those various schools, although I believe it ends up incorporating the basics of each of them.
Q: So those are four schools of value. Your approach is also based on different types of value.
K w: Yes. These are Ground value, intrinsic value, and extrinsic value. Briefly:
All holons have equal Ground value. That is, all holons, from atoms to apes, are perfect manifestations of Emptiness or Spirit, with no higher or lower, better or worse. Every holon, just as it is, is a perfect expression of Emptiness, a radiant gesture of the Divine. As a manifestation of the Absolute, all holons have equal Ground value. All Forms are equally Emptiness. And that's Ground value.
But every holon, besides being an expression of the absolute, is also
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a relative whole/part. It has its own relative wholeness, and its own relative partness.
As a whole, every holon has intrinsic value, or the value of its own particular wholeness, its own particular depth. And therefore the greater the wholeness—or the greater the depth—then the greater the intrinsic value. Intrinsic value means it has value in itself. Its very depth is valuable, because that depth enfolds aspects of the Kosmos into its own being. The more of the Kosmos that is enfolded into its own being—that is, the greater its depth—then the greater its intrinsic value. An ape contains cells and molecules and atoms, embraces them all in its own internal makeup—greater depth, greater wholeness, greater intrinsic value.
So even though an ape and an atom are both perfect expressions of Spirit (they both have equal Ground value), the ape has more depth, more wholeness, and therefore more intrinsic value. The atom also has intrinsic value, but relatively less. (Less value does not mean no value!) We also saw that the greater the depth of a holon, the greater its degree of consciousness, so it comes to much the same thing to say that the ape is more intrinsically valuable than the atom because it is more conscious.
But every holon is not only a whole, it is also a part. And as a part, it has value for others—it is part of a whole upon which other holons depend for their existence. So as a part, each holon has extrinsic value, instrumental value, value for other holons. The more it is a part, the more extrinsic value it has. An atom has more extrinsic value than an ape—destroy all apes, and not too much of the universe is affected; destroy all atoms, and everything but subatomic particles is destroyed—the atom has enormous extrinsic value, instrumental value, for other holons, because it is an instrumental part of so many other wholes.
Q: You also tie this in with rights and responsibilities.
K W : Yes. Rights and responsibilities are often used in the same breath, but without understanding why they are inseparably linked. But they are inherent aspects of the fact that every holon is a whole/ part.
As a whole, a holon has rights which express its relative autonomy. These rights are simply a description of the conditions that are neces332 I
sary to sustain its wholeness. If the rights aren't met, the wholeness dissolves into subholons. If the plant doesn't receive water, it dissolves. Rights express the conditions for the intrinsic value of a holon to exist, the conditions necessary to sustain its wholeness, sustain its agency, sustain its depth.
But further, each holon is also a part of some other whole(s), and as a part, it has responsibilities to the maintenance of that whole. Responsibilities are simply a description of the conditions that any holon must meet in order to be a part of the whole. If it doesn't meet those responsibilities, then it cannot sustain its functional fit with the whole, so it is ejected (or actually destroys the whole itself). If the responsibilities aren't met, then it ceases to be a part of the whole. Responsibilities express the conditions for the extrinsic value of a holon to exist, the conditions necessary to sustain its partness, sustain its communion, sustain its span. If any holon wants to be part of a whole, it has to meet certain responsibilities. Not, it would nice if it met these responsibilities; it must meet them or it won't sustain its communions, its cultural and functional fit.
Q: So agency and communion, intrinsic value and extrinsic value, rights and responsibilities, are twin aspects of every holon, because every holon is a whole/part.
Kw: Yes, in a nested holarchy of expanding complexity and depth. Because human beings have relatively more depth than, say, an amoeba, we have more rights—there are more conditions necessary to sustain the wholeness of a human—but we also have many more responsibilities, not only to our own human societies of which we are parts, but to all of the communities of which our own subholons are parts. We exist in networks of relationships with holons in the physiosphere and the biosphere and the noosphere, and our relatively greater rights absolutely demand relatively greater responsibilities in all of these dimensions. Failure to meet these responsibilities means a failure to meet the conditions under which our holons and subholons can exist in communion—which means our own self-destruction.
Again, it's not that it would nice if we met these responsibilities; it is a condition of existence. It is mandatory, or our communions will dissolve, and us with them. But, of course, we often seem to want to claim the rights without owning the responsibilities. We want to be a
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whole without being a part of anything! We want to do our own
Q: The culture of narcissism, you were saying.
K w: Yes, the culture of narcissism and regression and retribalization. We are in an orgy of seeking egoic rights with no responsibilities. Everybody wants to be a separate whole and demand rights for their own agency, but nobody wants to be a part and assume the responsibilities of the corresponding communions.
But, of course, you can't have one without the other. Our feeding frenzy of rights is simply a sign of fragmentation into increasingly egocentric "wholes" that refuse also to be parts of anything other than their own demands.
Q: Does either the Ego or the Eco approach overcome these problems?
K W : I don't think so. One of the great difficulties with the modern flatland paradigm—in both Ego and Eco versions—is that the notion of rights and responsibilities were both horribly collapsed, often beyond recognition.
Q: For example.
K w: In the Ego-Enlightenment version of flatland, we have: the disengaged and autonomous Ego assigns autonomy only to itself. That is, the rational Ego alone is a self-contained wholeness, and so the rational Ego alone has intrinsic value and therefore rights. All other holons are simply parts of the great interlocking order, so all other holons have merely part value, extrinsic value, instrumental value—and no rights at all. They are all instrumental to the Ego's designs. And so the disengaged Ego can do its own thing, and push the environment around any way it wants to, because everything else is now only instrumental to the Ego.
In the Eco-Romantic version, the great interlocking web is still the only basic reality, but it, and not the reflecting Ego, is now assigned autonomy value. Since the Great Web is the ultimate reality, then the Great Web alone has wholeness value or intrinsic value, and all other holons (human and otherwise) are now merely instrumental to its autopoietic maintenance. That is, all other holons are merely parts or strands in the Web, so they have merely extrinsic and instrumental value. In other words, ecofascism. The Great Web alone has rights,
and all other holons are ultimately subservient parts. And if you are speaking for the Great Web, then you get to tell us all what to do, because you alone are speaking for intrinsic value.
This ecofascism—a thoroughly flatland violence—gets further complicated because the Eco-Romantics, unlike the Ego camps, were at least in search of spiritual values and harmony. But, like every major movement of modernity and postmodernity, their spiritual intuitions were interpreted in purely flatland terms, unpacked in Descended terms.
So they immediately confused Ground value with intrinsic value, and arrived at the total confusion of "bioequality." That is, they confused Ground value (all holons have the same absolute value, which is true) with intrinsic value (all holons have the same relative value, which is false), and thus they arrived at "bioequality." In other words, no differences in intrinsic value between any holons—no difference in intrinsic value between a flea and a deer. This industrial ontology runs through most of the deep ecology approaches.
Q: So we want to honor all three values.
K W : Yes, I think we want an environmental ethics that honors all three types of value for each and every holon—Ground value, intrinsic value, and extrinsic value. We want our environmental ethics to honor all holons without exception as manifestations of Spirit—and also, at the same time, be able to make pragmatic distinctions about the differences in intrinsic worth, and realize that it is much better to kick a rock than an ape, much better to eat a carrot than a cow, much better to subsist on grains than on mammals.
In other words, our first pragmatic rule of thumb for environmental ethics is: in pursuit of our vital needs, consume or destroy as little depth as possible. Do the least amount of harm to consciousness as you possibly can. Destroy as little intrinsic worth as possible. Put in its positive form: protect and promote as much depth as possible.
But we can't stop with that imperative alone, because it covers only depth but not span; only agency and not communion; only wholes, and not parts. Rather, we want to protect and promote the greatest depth for the greatest span. Not just preserve the greatest depth— that's fascist and anthropocentric—and not just preserve the greatest
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span—that's totalitarian and ecofascist—but rather preserve the greatest depth for the greatest span.
The Basic Moral Intuition
Q: You call this the Basic Moral Intuition.
K w: Yes. The Basic Moral Intuition is "protect and promote the greatest depth for the greatest span." I believe that is the actual form of spiritual intuition, the actual structure of spiritual intuition.
In other words, when we intuit Spirit, we are actually intuiting Spirit as it appears in all four quadrants (because Spirit manifests as all four quadrants—or, in short, as and we and it). Thus, when I am intuiting Spirit clearly, I intuit its preciousness not only in myself, in my own depth, in my I-domain, but I equally intuit it in the domain of all other beings, who share Spirit with me (as their own depth). And thus I wish to protect and promote that Spirit, not just in me, but in all beings possessing that Spirit, and I am moved, if I intuit Spirit clearly, to implement this Spiritual unfolding in as many beings as possible: I intuit Spirit not only as I, and not only as We, but also as a drive to implement that realization as an Objective State of Affairs (It) in the world.
Thus, precisely because Spirit actually manifests as all four quadrants (or as I, we, and it), then Spiritual intuition, when clearly apprehended, is apprehended as a desire to extend the depth of I to the span of We as an objective state of affairs (It): Buddha, Sangha, Dharma. Thus, protect and promote the greatest depth for the greatest span.
I believe that is the Basic Moral Intuition given to all holons, human and otherwise; but the greater the depth of a holon, the more clearly it will intuit that Ground and the more fully it will unpack that Basic Moral Intuition, extending it to more and more other holons in the process.
Q: Depth across span.
Kw: Yes. The idea is that in attempting to promote the greatest depth for the greatest span, we must make pragmatic judgments about differences in intrinsic worth, about the degree of depth that we destroy in an attempt to meet our own vital needs—better to kill a carrot than a cow. Alan Watts hit it right on the head when someone asked him why he was a vegetarian. "Because cows scream louder than carrots."
But that must be carried across span as well, which totally prevents a dominator hierarchy. To give a stark example, if it came to killing a dozen apes or killing Al Capone, I'd kill Al. There's nothing sacrosanct about being a human holon. That in itself is meaningless. That in itself is truly anthropocentric in the worst possible sense.
Of course, it's a little more complicated than that, and I'd really have to refer you to the book, where this is discussed in detail. But perhaps you can get the general picture of holarchical ethics preserving not just depth, but depth across span, all set in a prior Ground value. Resting in Emptiness, promote the greatest depth for the greatest span. Such, believe, is the pattern of the tears shed by Bodhisattvas everywhere.
Good-bye to Flatland
Q: So in all of these cases—the problems with the culture gap, with vertical integration, with environmental ethics—they all hinge on a rejection of flatland.
K w: Definitely. We were talking about the possibility of a coming transformation, which in many ways is already in motion. But I don't believe this new transformation can harmoniously proceed without integrating the Big Three. The dissociation of the Big Three was the gaping wound left in our awareness by the failures of modernity, and the new postmodern transformation will have to integrate those fragments or it will not meet the demands of the twenty tenets—it will not transcend and include; it will not differentiate and integrate; it will not be able to evolve further; it will be a false start; evolution will erase it. We cannot build tomorrow on the bruises of yesterday.
Among numerous other things, this means a new form of society will have to evolve that integrates consciousness, culture, and nature, and thus finds room for art, morals, and science—for personal values, for collective wisdom, and for technical knowhow.
And there is no way to do this without breaking the stranglehold of flatland. Only by rejecting flatland can the Good and the True and
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the Beautiful be integrated. Only by rejecting flatland can we attune ourselves with Spirit's radiant expression in all its verdant domains. Only by rejecting flatland can we arrive at an authentic environmental ethics and a council of all beings, each gladly bowing to the perfected grace in all. Only by rejecting flatland can we come to terms with the devastating culture gap, and thus set individuals free to unfold their own deepest possibilities in a culture of encouragement. Only by rejecting flatland can the grip of mononature be broken, so that nature can actually be integrated and thus genuinely honored, instead of made into a false god that ironically contributes to its own virulent destruction. Only by rejecting flatland can we set the global commons free in communicative exchange that is decentered from egocentric and ethnocentric and nationalistic imperialism, racked with wars of race and blood and bounty. Only by rejecting flatland can we engage the real potentials of vision-logic, which aims precisely at integrating physiosphere and biosphere and noosphere in a radical display of its own intrinsic joy. Only by rejecting flatland can the techno-base of the Infobahn be made servant to communion rather than master of digital anarchy, and in this way the Net might actually announce the dawn of global convergence, not global fragmentation. Only by rejecting flatland can a World Federation or Family of Nations emerge in a holarchical convergence around the World Soul itself, committed to the vigorous protection of that workdcentric space, the very form of Spirit's modern voice, glorious in its compassionate embrace.
And thus—to return to specifically spiritual and transpersonal themes—only by rejecting flatland can those who are interested in spirituality begin to integrate the Ascending and Descending currents. in flatland you can only be an Ascender or a Descender. You either deny any existence to flatland altogether (the Ascenders), or you try to make it into God (the Descenders).
Q: So we really have come full circle here, right back to the archetypal battle at the heart of the Western tradition—the Ascenders versus the Descenders.
Kw: Yes. The purely Descended approaches absolutely despise the Ascending paths, and blame them for virtually all of humanity's and Gaia's problems. But not to worry, the loathing is mutual: the Ascenders maintain the Descenders are simply caught in self-dispersal and outward-bound ignorance, which is the real source of all humanity's turmoils.
The Ascenders and the Descenders, after two thousand years, still at each other's throat—each still claiming to be the Whole, each still accusing the other of Evil, each still perpetrating the same fractured insanity it despises in the other. The Ascenders and the Descenders— still crazy after all these years.
Q: The point is to integrate and balance the Ascending and Descending currents in the human being.
K w: Yes, the point is to bring these two currents into some sort of union and harmony, so that both wisdom and compassion can join hands in finding a Spirit that both transcends and includes this world, a Spirit eternally prior to this world and yet embracing this world and all its beings with infinite love and compassion, and care and concern, and the tenderest of mercies, and glory in the glance.
And however much the flurry of Descended religions help us to recognize and appreciate the visible, sensible God and Goddess, nonetheless, taken in and by themselves, they place an infinite burden on Gaia that poor finite Gaia cannot sustain. It might be sustainable growth, but it is unsustainable spirituality. And we desperately need both. The Ascending currents of the human being also have to be engaged, and activated, and cultivated, for it is only in being able to transcend our own limited and mortal egos that we can find that common Source and Ground of all sentient beings, a Source that bestows new splendor on the setting sun and radiates grace in each and every gesture.
Both the mere Ascenders and the mere Descenders, in tearing the Kosmos into their favorite fragments, are contributing to the brutality of this warfare, and they simply try to convert and coerce the other by sharing their diseases and waving their wounds. But it is in the union of the Ascending and the Descending that harmony is found, and not in any brutal war between the two. Only when both are united, we might say, can both be saved.
And there, hidden in the secret cave of the Heart, where God and the Goddess finally unite, where Emptiness embraces all Form as the lost and found Beloved, where Eternity joyously sings the praises of noble Time, where Shiva uncontrollably swoons for luminescent | 339
Shakti, where Ascending and Descending erotically embrace in the sound of one hand clapping—there forever in the universe of One Taste, the Kosmos recognizes its own true nature, self-seen in a tacit recognition that leaves not even a single souk to tell the amazing tale.
And remember? There in the Heart, where the couple finally unite, the entire game is undone, this nightmare of evolution, and you are exactly where you were prior to the beginning of the whole show. With a sudden shock of the utterly obvious, you recognize your own Original Face, the face you had prior to the Big Bang, the face of utter Emptiness that smiles as all creation and sings as the entire Kosmos— and it is all undone in that primal glance, and all that is left is the smile, and the reflection of the moon on a quiet pond, late on a crystal clear night.
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