Lovers of Sophia

Home > Other > Lovers of Sophia > Page 27
Lovers of Sophia Page 27

by Jason Reza Jorjani


  something like a fish out of water.30 The basic metaphysical position

  of Shaktism demolishes the distinction between three realms or,

  rather, col apses them into the spectrality of the ‘intermediate’ one.

  As the Vajrayana Buddhists put it, there is no Nirvana distinct

  from Samsara and so every samsaric condition conceptualized

  as intermediate between Samsara and Nirvana – from the highest

  heavens to the bleakest hel s – is marked by the same inessentiality.31

  Adharma (chaos, immortality) only leads you to hell if you sow karma without recognizing that all dharmas (natures, paths) are empty of any inherent essence and that the hero’s liberation may take

  place anywhere, under any existential condition.32 There is naught

  but intermediacy in life, and what the mind hopes to grasp in terms

  of matter or escape to in terms of (relative) formlessness is nothing

  but the greater or lesser stability of one or another degree of the life force’s concrescence. Despite the widely held Western view that, as

  29 Ibid., 48.

  30 Ibid., 38.

  31 Ibid., 32.

  32 Ibid., 58.

  212

  jason reza jorjani

  compared to modern European materialism, the spectral is more

  at home in the East, the spectrality of existence or – if you prefer, the finitude of being – has always haunted orthodox Indian thought

  as what is neither Being nor Nothingness and what has never yet

  been but may become so through creative activity: the simulacrum

  without an original; maya as Shakti. Such is the radical Tantra of a serpentine feminine energy that both poisons the human condition

  and is the cure to it. It is She who possesses one with a vital force

  that carries one above the gods. As the Tantric texts put it, this

  daimonical y inspiring creative force is bound to supersede the gods to whom She gives birth:

  Shakti is the root of every finite existence… She is the mother

  of all the gods. She supports them and one day they will be

  reabsorbed into her… It is by Thy [Shakti’s] power only that

  Brahma creates, Vishnu maintains, and, at the end of things,

  Shiva destroys the universe. Powerless are they for this but by Thy

  help. Therefore it is that Thou alone are the Creator, Maintainer,

  and Destroyer of the world.33

  This is a radical y empirical, ruthlessly pragmatic view of life. In the vast expanse of Indian mysticism and religious thought, it has never

  been the view of anything but an extreme minority of dangerous

  rogues. The mainstream of even the more liberal and lenient Hindu

  and Buddhist sects have equated this antinomian gnosis with an

  asuric or “titanic” view of life.34 When I use the Western terms

  “empirical” and “pragmatic” one should not think of the empiricism

  of Hume or of the common sense of so many 18th century European

  and American gentlemen. I mean these terms as William James did.

  In Tantra sadhana or “practice” takes precedence over theory.35 The Greek word theoria shares a common root with theater and involves assuming the position of a spectator with respect to the cosmos.

  33 Ibid., 21.

  34 Ibid., 75.

  35 Ibid., 11.

  213

  lovers of sophia

  Much of Western science, even when its content is materialist, has

  understood itself in these idealist terms. The form of Western science has been predominately idealist in its self-image and understanding

  of the primacy of theory.

  Of course, in actual fact scientists are practitioners and

  elaborating theoretical frameworks is real y a kind of practical work.

  The English word id ea shares a root with the Sanskrit Veda, namely vid – which we also find in vid eo and e vid ence.36 In a sense, the Vedas are texts of a theoretical nature produced by visionary intellection.

  Within the worldview where atman must wake up to the fact that he is real y Brahman by liberating himself from this il usory world –

  including his embodied existence – practice, which not incidental y shares an Indo-European root with Prakriti, can only be conceived negatively, in terms of self-destructive acts of erasure.37 How, then, could Yoga work?

  The fundamental incoherence of this cannot be exorcised by

  means of any mystical mumbo-jumbo concerning the ineffable and

  paradoxical character of the sacred path. Those who recognize that

  the ultimate reality is Power ( Shakti) or the will to a power never positively possessed also understand that life is praxis. Theoria is only about life, and its worth – not its objective ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’

  – lies in what it empowers one to accomplish. The siddhis or

  superpowers are, literal y, “accomplishments.” There is no one and

  nothing above or beyond those who have refined their embodiment

  to one or another degree of subtlety and enhanced their capacities as

  compared to those lacking in the superhuman desire for exploratory

  evolution without a predetermined end. This means seeing dark

  ignorance ( avidya) and the passionate unconscious as a necessary limiting condition that sheathes the sword of Wisdom.38

  Insight is lightning. The radical y empirical and ruthlessly

  pragmatic attitude towards life is precisely the opposite of being

  sensible. It is the very uncommon sense of the hero ( vira) who 36 Ibid., 10–11.

  37 Ibid., 19.

  38 Ibid., 29, 41–42, 45.

  214

  jason reza jorjani

  braves danger and risks damnation, to test head on every claim that

  something is “impossible.” Its history is a saga of accomplishing the

  Impossible. “Wisdom is a woman,” said Nietzsche, “and she always

  only loves a warrior.” This could just as well be an aphorism from the Tantric Way of the Thunderbolt Scepter ( Vajrayana). God is dead, we have killed him, and only the dance of the sky-clad Vajra Yogini can rouse us to a life greater than that of gods. “One must still have chaos inside, in order to give birth to a dancing star.”39

  39 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), 342.

  215

  PARANORMAL PHENOMENOLOGY

  In his book UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities, Dr.

  John Alexander uses the term “phenomenology” to refer

  to paranormal manifestations in general.1 There have been

  objections to this usage on the part of persons trained

  in academic philosophy, where the term “phenomenology” has a

  clearly defined meaning and refers to a particular school of thought

  that begins with George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and continues

  through such figures as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Yet two of these phenomenologists, Hegel

  and Merleau-Ponty, wrote fairly extensively on the paranormal.

  Moreover, their having done so is not at all incidental to the basic

  character of the phenomenological method. The latter involves

  a bracketing of specific theoretical knowledge and a suspension

  of commitment to potential y conflicting frameworks for the

  acquisition of such knowledge. This is done not only with a view

  to understanding the cultural-historical construction of such

  frameworks, but with the aim of delineating basic structures of

  our experience, perception, and understanding that are more

  fundamental and stable than any particular scientific theories or

  their broader p
aradigmatic structures.

  Consequently, Colonel Alexander’s use of the term

  “phenomenology” is apt insofar as he insists on engaging with

  the data of UFOs, or perhaps more accurately, Unidentified

  1 John B. Alexander, UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities (New York: St.

  Martin’s Press, 2011).

  216

  jason reza jorjani

  Aerial Phenomena, without being prejudiced by any unexamined

  assumptions, for example the materialist assumption that these

  ‘phenomena’ are objects rather than, say, psychic or psychokinetic

  manifestations of some kind.2 This adoption of the discourse

  of “phenomenology” should be generalized within the field of

  exploratory scientific research on the paranormal, but in a way that

  explicitly acknowledges, appropriates, and furthers the insights of

  thinkers such as Hegel and Merleau-Ponty. To this end, I intend to

  examine the most significant point of contention between Hegel and

  Merleau-Ponty on the question of the implications of paranormal

  phenomena for the enterprise of scientific exploration in general.

  Hegel’s repeated affirmation of the veracity of psychic phenomena

  and his sketch of a paranormal phenomenology takes place in §

  379, § 393, §§ 405-406 of his Philosophy of Mind, together with their Züsatze or addenda. The Züsatze to §406 of the Philosophy of Mind is shockingly revealing. There, Hegel claims that: “the occurrence of

  very marvelous premonitions and visions of this kind which have

  actual y come to pass can certainly not be denied.”3 He also says, of

  paranormal phenomena more general y: “Whatever charlatanism

  there may be in accounts of such happenings, some of the cases

  mentioned seem worthy of credence…”4 Hegel discusses numerous

  types of psychic phenomena in the Züsatze, giving examples from what he takes to be credible case histories of them.

  The basic thesis of Hegel’s treatment of psychic phenomena can

  be found in §379 and §§405-406 of the Philosophy of Mind, without even considering their Züsatze. In §379 Hegel notes that we have an experiential sense of the unity of our mind, and yet in our desire to

  comprehend that unity we are tempted – for example, in neurology –

  to analyze the mind in such a way as to break it up into an aggregate

  of independent forces and active faculties. These tendencies, at odds

  with one another, ultimately culminate in apparent contradictions

  2 Ibid, 227–230.

  3 A.V. Miller and N.J. Findlay, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 113.

  4 Ibid., 108.

  217

  lovers of sophia

  such as the antithesis between the freedom of psychical agency

  and the determinism of the presumed corporeal substrate of mind.

  Hegel believes that in “modern times” psychic phenomena have

  provided us with an especial y “lively and visible confirmation of the underlying unity of soul, and of the power of its ‘ideality’”.5

  However, he goes on to add that while these phenomena are

  “facts”, it remains the case that “the rigid distinctions of practical common sense are struck with confusion” in the face of them. In

  §405 psychokinetic maternal impressions on the fetus, as well as

  telepathy between persons close to one another, are mentioned

  as examples of the “magic tie”.6 In §406 Hegel once again refers

  to phenomena such as clairvoyance,7 telepathy,8 and other forms

  of extrasensory perception9 as factual, and he elaborates on the inability of the practical intellect to accept them as such.10

  The reason that the practical intellect cannot comprehend these

  phenomena is that they violate the chains of mediate causality and

  thus cannot be conceived in terms of what Hegel cal s “the laws and

  relations of the intellect”.11 We will not be able to understand psychic phenomena “so long as we assume the absolute spatial and material

  externality of one part of being to another.”12 The philosophical

  significance of these phenomena is that they are phenomenological

  evidence for the lack of any fundamental ontological “distinctions

  between subjective and objective” or “between intelligent personality

  and objective world”; they show us that we need to give up the

  assumption of “personalities, independent one of another and of the

  objective world which is their content.”13

  5 Ibid., 4.

  6 Ibid., 94-95.

  7 Ibid., 103.

  8 Ibid., 104.

  9 Ibid., 105.

  10 Ibid., 101.

  11 Ibid., 105.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Ibid.

  218

  jason reza jorjani

  This does not mean that we should give up these distinctions

  for practical purposes, only that we should not conceive of them

  as ontological y grounded. Hegel believes that exceptional y strong

  psychic ability is a “morbid” or “degraded” state that threatens

  the freedom and responsibility of the individuated intellect.14 The

  garbled information attained by means of it, which is so often “at

  the mercy of every private contingency of feeling and fancy” as well

  as to “foreign suggestions”, is certainly no substitute for rational y ascertainable general truths.15 Nevertheless, denial of the existence of paranormal phenomena, and of their ontological significance, is

  unscientific (in the broad sense of “Science” as Wissenschaft) and such a denial clearly indicates that Absolute Knowing has not been

  attained.

  Before phenomenology can guide the sciences into Science, into

  Absolute Knowing, these “phenomena, so complex in their nature

  and so very different one from another, would have first of all to be

  brought under their general points of view.”16 This would seem to play a significant role in Science’s being able to overcome, and not simply dodge, the last of the three slave ideologies, namely the Unhappy

  Consciousness of Religion. Hegel claims that the “miraculous cures

  said to have been effected in various epochs by priests” that fill the

  “old chronicles” and “which are not to be too hastily charged with

  error and falsehood” are actual y cases of psychic phenomena that

  can be understood in their ontological significance rather than

  marveled at in blind faith.17

  In other words, Hegel’s overarching view of the paranormal is

  that, although these phenomena are evidence for a pre-rational

  and primordial dimension of experience, they can and should be

  surmounted and circumscribed by scientific thinking. In fact, such a

  development of human reason will take the ground out from under

  religious doctrines that are legitimated, above al , by holy terror

  14 Ibid., 102-103.

  15 Ibid., 103-104.

  16 Ibid., 101.

  17 Ibid., 111; 117.

  219

  lovers of sophia

  in the face of paranormal phenomena. But if the roots of rational

  thought extend deep down into the occulted soil of an essential y

  irrational Nature, and of an intuitive power capable of engaging

  it pre-rational y, then why would we see the edifice of scientific

  rationality as anything more than a construct consisting of useful

  abstractions rather than abstract but objective truths?

&
nbsp; Maurice Merleau-Ponty takes just such a view when he examines

  the structure and function of Science against the background

  of what cannot be comprehended by its rationality. Like Hegel,

  Merleau-Ponty sees paranormal phenomena as a clue to recognizing

  the superficial and reciprocal y reinforced distinction between the

  objective and the subjective, but unlike Hegel, he is more consistent

  in following this insight through to the conclusion that the structures of scientific thought and practice are basical y totemic.

  In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty sees the scientist assuming the position of a spectator above all things, so that taken

  together these things grasped as objects turn the world into a Great

  Object – what I would call an atlas of the world.18 For example, when different real world astronomical perspectives of those who

  observe the starry heavens are rendered commensurate with one

  another it is not in terms of a universal world but as the function of a methodology grounded in the assumption of the position of the

  great spectator.19

  Whereas for a while this methodology seems to effect

  breakthroughs that allow us to observe both microphysical and

  astronomical realms closed to our immediate perception, as Physics

  advances on these dimensions it is forced to confront the limit of

  its assumed objectivity by admitting the interdependence of the

  praxis of the observer and the observed phenomena. Insofar as

  the physicist attempts, on the basis of a philosophical ontology of

  materialism, to explain away these empirical discoveries by treating

  as objective realities quantum ‘entities’ that well up from the flux

  18 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 15.

  19 Ibid., 15–16.

  220

  jason reza jorjani

  of nature for milliards of a second and that are dependent for their

  manifestation on careful y controlled conditions of observation, the

  physicist is translating these intangible and elusive phenomena into

  localizable classical entities just of a much smaller scale and in terms of a much shorter interval of time.20

  This projective transformation real y entails assuming the aspect

  of a giant or Promethean titan with respect to the microphysical

  world.21 Similarly, when, as in the case of Einstein’s theory of relativity, the presumed possibility of the integration of the perspectives of

 

‹ Prev