No tags yet.
The split between the spirit and the flesh is a subtle fallacy which has had fundamental and dire consequences in the development of Western Culture from the beginnings of Semitic culture. Bodily consciousness and spiritual awareness are essentially one, and this is the ontological base for realizing the oneness of God.
The Big Lie and the Great Truth
Contents
The Big Lie
1. Identity Unrooted
The Semitic Tradition
2. Man vs Nature
Western History
3. Sex vs Spirit
Eroticism and Spiritual Potential
The Great Truth: All is One
The Body as the Temple
1. The Innate Wisdom of Body Awareness as the Source of Gnosis
The Garden into the Kingdom
Chi: The Innate Wisdom of Body Awareness as the Source of Gnosis in East Asian Religious Practice
2. The Method of Tantric Yoga
Working with the Chakras
3. A Scenario of the Tantric Integration Process
The Importance of the Root Chakra
The Pattern of Breathing and Visualization
The Systematic Transformation of the Chakras into Gnosis
The Peace of the Great Truth
The Big Lie and The Great Truth
The Big Lie: Flesh vs Spirit (body vs mind)
The flesh lusts after the spirit and the spirit lusts after the flesh.
St Paul
What St Paul says in this famous quotation is at once the problem and the suggestion of a solution.
The problem is that in the Semitic tradition the spirit and the flesh have been so construed, seen as fundamentally separated, that each is incomplete without the other. Falsely separated, they "lust" after each other. This lie produces the fundamental angst of Western consciousness.
1. Identity Unrooted
We understand that birth is an original trauma of separation from the Mother. Healing this trauma at our source is the stuff of religion and makes pilgrims out of all humans. Yet we come into a consciousness, which, though undifferentiated, is one. Subsequent experience of the freedom of the mind and the limitations of the body, however, leads to a fundamental human tendency to differentiate them.
This universal tendency takes on a special character in the West. The original separation comes out of Semitic culture. As the New Testament is based in the Old Testament, so Christian culture is based in Semitic culture.
We have learned from the feminists that the cultures descended from Semitic culture have been male dominated. Much is to be seen by starting with the earliest experience of the male infant in that culture.
Consciousness enters with conception, it grows as one in the mother. At birth that consciousness is full unitary potential, one, body and mind undifferentiated. Then in a moment of primal, original, and unimaginable pain something at the most essential core, something bodily, secret, intimate and close to the center of ones unitary being is severed. A chorus of adult voices chant their approbation. This event, possibly the first memory, at once severs the (internal and intrinsic) primordial connection to nature, true power, and simultaneously seals the connection to the (external and extrinsic) authoritative God. It sets the ground for an identity traumatically alienated from its roots and stressed in a lifetime of trying to regain union.
This is circumcision, a fundamental Semitic event happening at the beginning of life to each male child from the time of Abraham as a sign of his covenant with God, and followed ever since by all males in the traditions descended from the patriarch.
I am not saying that circumcision causes Western Culture, but that it reflects a certain archetypal quality of the Western psyche, which has always been male dominated. This ritual act and the thinking behind it sets up Western culture in a characteristic way. There are of course many "gentile" Christians who are not circumcised, yet they still live in a culture grounded in the original Abrahamic identity uprooted in this way from its primordial nature. These are the men who have shaped Western Culture.
This ritual act grossly establishes something very fundamental: you were made wrong! This raises all sorts of weird ambiguities that remain largely in the shadows. For instance, if God is perfect and good, why did He make me this way? Why does His perfect work have to be mutilated in order that I might be put right? His perfection thus made terribly wrong, must I then spend the rest of my life trying to attain union with Him? Is it not this wound, passed from generation to generation, that establishes and continually confirms Original Sin in the first place? How can the child in his innocence deal with these questions, particularly in a culture of adults that never address them? Does this not imprint upon him forever what he will experience for the rest of his life as guilt and anxiety?
With this miasma of primal questions relegated to the shadows and never addressed, the covenant with the Semitic God is sealed. But before the fundamental agreement is secured, the man-child is violently and irrevocably separated from what is given.
Let us be clear, this covenant between man and God is based on a primordial, traumatic separation which is self-inflicted.
L
2. Man vs Nature
The human is a psycho-physical being. Dividing the physical off from the psyche sets up a contradiction in reality.
What is actually happening here is that the mind has rejected the primal body with all of its awareness and connection to primordial being. In the last hundred years this has been clarified as the nature of psychological pathology; first by Freud as the repression of the id, or the itness of the body/psyche, and then by Jung as the formation of the "shadow". What is rejected forms itself into sabotage. The rejected being turns negative and becomes the antagonist. The body and its energies, and by extension, nature itself, become the enemy of the spirit/mind. The control of this enemy and its persecution becomes the main challenge of life and the function of Western religion.
Separating mind off from body violates the primordial unity and creates a state of chronic internal division and anxiety. This is the Fall.
Western History
Judaism created this split, cemented in the consciousness of each new generation by circumcision, thus producing a fundamental angst and guilt. Then Jesus Christ appeared to show that only foundational love could heal this angst. Some early Christians followed his inspiration and found a way to renew the primordial unity through gnosis.
A description and a full discussion of gnosis is to be found in the long essay, The Heart of the Matter. In the present essay, we will consider gnosis as the understanding which is a return to the primordial unity of spirit and body.
Gnosis is returning understanding to the original given state of awareness, the Garden. When the primordial unity is rendered conscious through gnosis, it becomes the true Kingdom. This is the nature of true power. However, gnosis does not wield power, nor does it control. It unifies and empowers: it does not divide and conquer.
When Christianity was brought under the hierarchical structure of Rome and became the Catholic Church, the deeper unifying truths realized through gnosis were co-opted into external authoritarian fact, which furthers the Semitic tradition of setting the spirit against the body, thus creating a fundamentally anxious existence riddled with guilt. The Kingdom became exiled to the afterlife, and the anxiety fed into the resolve in this life to exert control over one's body and behave oneself. When Christianity became the State Religion, it got relegated to the Roman power structure which attempts to legislate and regulate behavior in a fundamentally anxious existence based on a self-generated and perpetuating split. It is like the man who sets fire to houses and then provides a service for putting house fires out, which becomes a very lucrative business.
Thus in the Hebraic and Christian traditions, the split of flesh and spirit became foundational to the development of the Western concept of human nature in which mind and spirit are at war with nature, derisively labeled "flesh". This is a usurpation of Christ by the anti-Christ of power lust.
In this war of spirit and flesh, domination becomes the central theme. The spirit MUST dominate the flesh or else all is lost. Among the myriad reasons that Western Culture has come to dominate the world, this is perhaps the metareason. Since men identify women with fleshly lust, they must be dominated and held in place. When this was added to Greed, the formula became deadly. Since the indigenous cultures of the world have not been indoctrinated with the Christian truth of spirit over flesh, they must be destroyed, enslaved or at the very least clothed in modesty. By the way, while we are imposing upon them our Christian truth, the resources of their lands can make us very rich. Since Nature is the source of flesh, it too must be controlled and enslaved. Science can dominate nature, and technology can exploit all this planetary resource.
Where has all of this led us?
The most powerful impulse in Western religious history to reconstrue this narrative of spirit vs flesh and to reground the Kingdom in the Garden, was led by St Francis, who sought to heal the breach by reestablishing a simple, holy relationship to nature, which he believed to be the truth of God. Though he came to be revered with great sentimentality, he did not succeed in his dream of "rebuilding the church". In fact the church dealt with his simple tendency to reform the relationship to nature with characteristic cunning: it assimilated the Franciscan Order into itself and built grand temples adorned in gold to honor Francis.
With this holy project thus incorporated into the power of the Church, the way was clear for the domination of the world, starting with the invasion of the Southern Hemisphere by sword and cross.
The Enlightenment furthered the project to lift Western man out of the experience of nature, by promoting the practice of observing nature and manipulating it, creating science and technology which dreamed of creating the Kingdom on Earth.
Yet it did not satisfy the human heart. In the Romantic period great sentiment to return to nature took hold. Romantics longed to reunite with heart and soul and the givens of nature. One star of British Romanticism, poet and theologian William Blake, succinctly diagnosed the Big Lie and identified the basis of the Great Truth. In 1793 in the opening declaration of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake stated this thesis in concise terms. “All Bibles or sacred codes have been the cause of the following Errors: 1. That Man has two real existing principles viz: a body and a soul. 2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, and that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul. 3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. But the following Contraries to these are True: 4. Man has no body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in these days. 5. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. 6. Energy is Eternal Delight”
In the late nineteenth century the forces of nature came to be seen as a kind of godless force, the Will of nature and instinct. Darwin demonstrated this in external nature, and Freud demonstrated it in internal nature. This Will, raised to a kind of religion by Nietzsche, was glorified in two traumatic world wars that profoundly exhausted all efforts to realize the enlightenment dream of applied science as the savior of civilization and resulted in the annihilation of all essential value. The victors led the world into unparalleled development, which began to overwhelm nature on a planetary scale.
The longing for an authentic relationship to nature exploded into the sixties, which ushered in a dream of realignment with nature, through sexuality, through the equality of all humans before nature, in the growing ecological movements, and through a diaspora of Western youth into the spirituality of Asia and indigenous cultures still integrated by their sacred relationship to nature.
As for the Enlightenment dream of dominating nature through science and technology, it has turned into a nightmare. Western man, fueled by his antagonism against nature, and in marked contrast to most other traditions which honored nature, set out upon a conquest and exploitation of the earth that has resulted in a destruction of the environment that now threatens the very existence of the human species.
3. Sex vs Spirit
One of many consequences of this complex, producing anxiety on the most intimate level, is the mishandling of vital or sexual energy in the Christian tradition. The stance of the church towards sexual expression outside of marriage is "Just say no". Like its modern cousin in drug policy, this strategy exerts control but doesn't work. It never has. The priest and the prostitute are in business together. The priest creates the guilt, which foments temptation and hunger, which the prostitute satisfies, which creates more guilt, which the priest then forgives with the admonition to not sin again….
The one situation in which the breach of body and spirit may be authentically healed is the marriage bed, in the case where the chemistry is right. Here the ecstasy of sexuality may ascend through the heart of love into the bliss of sacred union. This experience of the primordial union is regarded as a great blessing in the Semitic tradition and has caused romantic love to be raised in the West to the status of true fulfillment, up there with salvation. As the culture has become more and more secularized, romantic love has been raised to a universal cult, now the obsession of pop culture the world over. While the split of body and spirit remains deep in western culture, every loud speaker in the world proclaims its only antidote in rhythmic and lyrical paeans to romantic love, celebrated obsessively as the only true value in life. However, this is a blessing vouchsafed to a few. Fewer still are those married who find their way to sustain this kind of union for a lifetime of sexual/spiritual satisfaction on the part of both partners. Very few indeed. And the others? The other 95%? Well, just say no.
As the sexual scandals of the church become more and more appalling, it becomes increasingly clear that the "just say no" policy of the church towards sexual energy, is demonically dysfunctional, indeed malignant. In words the Pope used to describe homosexuality, this handling of vital energy is "intrinsically disordered".
The Western attitude towards sex culminated in the repressiveness of the Victorian period, which, as Freud and Jung showed, sets man against himself, thus creating a deep pathology. Sexual repression continued however up until the early Sixties, when the suppression exploded into the sexual revolution with its own attendant obsessions and painful excesses.
Eroticism and Spiritual Potential
In fact, hidden in the Christian story has been an underlying theme that the height and genuineness of spiritual experience was inversely related to the capacity for depth of erotic experience. Original Christians, those true to themselves rather than to the traditions, often understand this. Some of the greatest Christians were very experienced in sex, reputedly Mary Magdalene, who was the first to realize the risen Christ, and Saint Augustine, who was the first to frame Christianity in the context of the great Platonic tradition. Christians like to believe that when these spiritual giants became Christians they gave it all up. However they may have reformed and repudiated it subsequently, their prior sexual experience and understanding was still part of their total experience and make up. Another perspective would be that the depth of their sexuality was the basis for the originality and heights of their spiritual insight. This alternative possibility is now corroborated by an entirely different form of information, which comes from a growing comprehension of the great spiritual and religious traditions outside of the West.
Gnosis does not support a stand against the body, but reaches back into the intelligence of consciousness that is prior to a split between body and spirit. This it does by realigning primal bodily awareness with mind. This union is the basis of true spirit, which alone is capable of receiving the fullness of gnosis.