Introduction: Where Angels Fear
The primary theme of the present work is the social and cultural effect of systematic suppression and supersession of non-secular experience by secular thought. The following pages argue that the above process that has been going on in the name of human advancement has resulted in a profound schism in the social plane. For the non-secular is the dialectical opposite of the secular and they can legitimately exist only by reference to one another. Yet, while that might seem trivially true, the notions that have eclipsed this truth and driven the former underground are uncritically accepted as some of the foundational postulates of modernity. Hence, we have the following question before us: How does one study this onesidedness, this “Absence”? Even more, how does one study an Absence that has been in the making for almost 2000 years? For secularity, as the term will be developed here, is, before anything else, a systematic and profound absence—a slow invisibilization of an entire domain of collective human experience.1 The creation of a polarity and a public stance by which the domain of inward and non-empirical experience is excluded as whimsical, unnecessary, or incredible, especially in its relevance and relation to public reason, will be regarded here as a willed Absence.2 The “inward” has been mistaken for the personal and therefore not examined
1 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Ballantine Books, 1969).
2 Different from secularity, the word “secularism” refers to the separation of Church and State, its historical progression in different societies, and in some cases such as in India, a public even-handedness toward all religions.
© The Author(s) 2017
K. Roy, Limits of the Secular, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48698-7_1
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seriously. The present book claims that the making of this absence has had devastating consequences for humanity, as well as for those who cohabit this planet alongside humans. To refer only to the scientific or technological spirit for social decision, for example, without a corresponding or dialectical regard for other ways of relating to the world, is to create a unipolar or monocular world that is always on the verge of breakdown. Some might object to this as an extreme viewpoint, but it is not difficult to show that even as the transcendental spirit as a beacon for collective ethics has been eschewed, secular reason has not been very successful at independently generating new matrix for ethical action. In an interview with Eduardo Mendieta, Jurgen Habermas, the celebrated Left-wing German philosopher, has said:
Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct heir of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.3
But even while this lends substance to the present argument, today the world draws upon the ethic merely discursively; there is no serious ontological attempt to engage and directly relate to the source events in terms of ethical or aesthetic practice. Secular modernity’s human relations have come to be mediated by the exchange relation, which has become the great substitute displacing the “ethic of justice” and the “ethic of love” mentioned by Habermas. It is not surprising therefore that a great deal came to be staked on this absence, as the very emergence and eventual hegemony of homo economicus or “economic man” was contingent on this absence. It will be partly the task of this book to show that a vital part of the being of the human—the inner as distinct from the outer—was submerged in order to indemnify this new understanding.4 The repression of
3 Jurgen Habermas, Time of Transitions (London: Polity Press, 2006) 150f.
4 Unlike Max Weber, who showed how the conditions of possibility of Western Capitalism emerged from the secularization of Christianity, my task here is to explore the peculiarity of a society devoid of the non-secular.
the “inward” processes and the eventual banishment of a timeless part of human experience from the content and intercourse of public societal relations bring about the peculiar phenomenon called secularity.
At its broadest, secularity can be characterized as the methodical exclusion from the social imaginary of a realm outside the boundaries and productions of rational thought. In other words, for the secular order, the sole legitimate tool for making sense of the world publicly is empirical reason. Experiences and sensibilities outside of the rational discourse are confined to the private domain, their understandings made inconsequential for the deliberations of public import. I will argue here that this is a form of blindness to the ontological being and becoming of the human, since the birth of cultures, in the sense of the emergence of the key source events of, say, the Judeo-Christian, the Islamic, the Buddhist, the Egyptian, the Hindu, and so on, has been entirely outside the productions of rational thought, although later explicated and elaborated on by reason. That is to say the founding experiences of cultures were religious and transcendental, inward revelations of a completely different order than the mental, complete in themselves. The developments in rational thought cannot be, and must not be, divorced from the source, no matter how independent they might appear today. It is ruinous to do so. One might even argue therefore that it would be reasonable to expect societies to collectively commit part of their psychological and physical resources to the conscious, active exploration of the circumstances and roots of their genesis. Unfortunately, the opposite has happened, and as societies have drifted from their roots, modernity has engaged less and less directly with this part of cultural and aesthetic experience, even as it has drawn from it intellectually, and often unconsciously.5 The consequence has been that the roots of many secular concepts that actually lay in another dimension of human experience have become distorted and obscured.
It does not matter very much here for our purposes how we think of the exact nature of the “inner” or the “outside” of thought-consciousness even if such a comprehensive definition were possible. The fact is that the varieties of experiences that testify to a trans-empirical Outside are too numerous in history to enumerate. What matters is to raise the question of its subterranean presence in the cultural memory and inquire into its relevance for continued social existence. At various points in the
5 I am not referring here to rituals and outer observances of which there are plenty, but to the source events of cultures such as the life and death of the Christ.
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book I have referred to the non-empirical as trans-secular, transcendental, religio-psychic, cosmic, supra-rational, sacred, mystical, transpersonal, and so on, aware that these terms are not fully equivalent. However, I have done so in recognition of the fact that the specific form of the Outside must be left to the reader’s imagination since sub-cultures have different and unique alignment with the macrocosm, and that uniqueness locally determines the shape of the Outside in collective consciousness and individual experience. Instead, the task I have set for myself in this book is to work out the limits of secular thought and to remind ourselves in multiple ways that cultural memory of transcendence, no matter how submerged, and its conserved social effects cannot be simply wished away.
My claim is that no matter where a society may be located on the curve of secular ideology, the limits of the secular ideology are important for all to consider. To societies that pride themselves on being fully secularized, which also means in part the removal of any serious examination of religious thought in public education, a reconsideration might reveal an associated lack of existential fullness. For those not so secularized, it will serve as a warning not to simplistically embrace the reductive worldview or even the pious policy of so-called religious tolerance. A much more active consideration is needed. There is great peril for all when we take a truncated view of ourselves, societies, and cultures and regard it as the whole. When the part regards itself as the whole, it is bound to make fatal mistakes in its appraisal of its relations with others and with the macrocosm.
Let us, for a moment, look at the necessity of the “Outside” from the angle of reason itself. One of the fundamental laws framed by human reason is the law of causality. Simply put, the law says that every effect has a cause, and an effect cannot precede its cause. In other words, generally speaking, to every perceived effect one can assign (or at least speculate about) a source of its arising. An immediate difficulty arises when we come to consciousness itself. What is the cause of thought, and wherefrom does it arise? No amount of research on artificial intelligence or cognitive theories is able to penetrate the surface of this mystery, and philosophers in the West have tended to avoid the question of consciousness.6 Since, by the law of causality, thought (effect) cannot precede its cause, the thinker can never know what gives rise to it. Yet we do experience thoughts and so it
6 Here the reference is to the form of thought-consciousness and not to its content. The content can be analyzed such as in psychoanalysis, but the form itself eludes our grasp, and therefore its sub-structure.
must have a cause. Hence, by the dint of its own logic, consciousness must admit to an Outside, a beyond of thought as “cause” to which thought itself can have no access.
The usual celebration of thought does not allow us to posit this problem in any meaningful way and it remains confined to the formal intellectual domain as an unresolved issue. But I want to suggest that this is a central issue not to be banished to a formal domain or entrusted to the scientists and experts but be part of the social discourse in multiple areas—in education, psychology, economics, and politics—reminding us at all times the ontological boundaries of rationality and thought-consciousness. Only then the Outside will begin to have a broader significance and a different kind of search widely be seen as relevant. My task as set out in this book is to bring back into the reckoning and acknowledge a side of human life and personality that has been increasingly submerged and ignored, resulting in what one might call an impoverished reality.
This book is not about secularism, which concerns the various developments in and the growth of secular formations, or the spread of secular ideology across societies over time. The book is also not about intercultural comparison. Hence, I do not use the term secularism; instead I settle on the term secularity to capture and analyze a state of things that has deliberately turned its back on the collective cultural memory of transcendence, inner experience, and supra-sensory sensibilities. Therefore, while secularism is a historical process, secularity is a state of being; the former is a diachronic lens, whereas the latter is a synchronic one. In order to understand the limits of the secular and to propose a public dialogue concerning the possibility of an ontological Outside, I interpolate diverse sources, testimonies, and experiences. From these accounts and interpolations I am persuaded to conclude that the West-driven attempt to impose a uniform secular social order, meaning a deliberate distancing from the non-secular spirit, on the whole world is (a) an elitist attempt to eliminate non-governable experiences; (b) a root cause of the contradictions of modernity as well as of religious fundamentalism; and (c) the producer of a false and perverse view of individuality and its relation to the collective. I would go so far as to argue that the ecological crisis of unimaginable proportions facing the world today is a direct result of ignoring the non-secular and the limits it poses, and instead depending solely on the technological aspect to make sense of the world.7
7 See Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man (London: Unwin, 1990).
The principal argument therefore in the book is as follows: the global construct of secular reason that refuses positive engagement with the transsecular ends up projecting a partial and fragmented reality as the whole in accordance with ruling worldly interests and the dominant epistemic. This partial reality is an ongoing construct of empirical rationality that systematically excludes from public life any reference to religious sensibilities which are seen as unsophisticated, interfering with material flourishing, and inimical to homogenized secular values. In contrast, the argument here goes like this: the non-secular dimension of human experience cannot be simply cast off or privatized. The attempt to obliterate it gives rise to a dangerously distorted and one-sided view of the world, leading to positions and social arrangements that are unsustainable. In addition, exiling transcendental values from the public sphere or banishing them altogether as anachronism creates a vacuum that is eventually filled by fundamentalism and extremism. Here too elite interests are served since the threat of extremism consolidates power and raises visibility of the rulers, even as the main victims of fundamentalism tend to be ordinary and peripheral people.
Of course there is no easy answer as to how to include the value and logic of the non-secular in public life. But we do have the precise instance of Gandhi who refused to separate transcendental values from political action. Gandhi wanted the right kind of religious values, not institutionalized religion, to ethically guide and limit political action. At the same time, he used political action to undermine canonical forms of religion that were oppressive and exploitative. It is difficult to find in world history a more astute co-deployment of the secular and the non-secular that is aimed at liberation for all. Gandhi returned again and again to the core teachings of major religions, and not to their organized or canonical forms, in order to find praxis. Gandhi believed that if religion was concerned merely with private belief and did not have any bearing on the conduct of collective life, it would be a sheer misapprehension of religiosity. Similarly, if politics was a Machiavellian struggle for power free of religious ethics, it could not possibly bring about well-being and livability for all.
More than argument, the book is concerned with praxis. Conventional usage of the term praxis indicates transformation in thought in the process of action.8 It is largely an epistemological reconsideration. Here I have shifted focus to the body-being and its ontological possibilities, paying
8 This is the Marxian idea of praxis.
close attention to the corpus sensorium that is otherwise carefully ignored in secular modernity (other than for the purpose of amusement). On the contrary, representational or abstract thinking is highly valued in modernity because it is formal, generalizable, predictable, and controllable. But experience, which is diverse and divergent, is devalued due to its apparent ad hoc nature. Consequently, transcendental experience, which is uncontrollable, is impossibly diverse, and may bring about changes in the bodybeing in unpredictable ways, is highly suspect. Besides, it is its non-market quality and non-standard nature that modernity is unprepared to deal with.
Hence, from the angle of this new kind of psycho-physical praxis and its possibilities toward breaching the apparent bland monotone of immutable reality, I have leaned heavily on Gandhi’s practice of “swaraj ” or self-rule which requires a serious inquiry into our subjectivities. The latter, I have argued, is not simply to be seen as a moral or an ethical gesture, but an important shift in the “center of gravity” of the human from the head (thought) to the heart (senses), a shift that makes it possible to inquire into the transpersonal and the transcendental seriously. This shift pushes the constellation or the composite called the individual against its selfand society-imposed limits. Such an effort makes possible the construction of new constellations at the edges of being, as the brief ethnographic accounts included here demonstrate. I have suggested that logical thinking in general tends to be indifferent toward the ontological, and is dismissive of inward experience in particular. Reversing the position through corporeal praxis shocks the constellation into a new frame of attention. Since my major purpose here is also to create a threshold for looking into elements of a (variously) transcendent reality, and which I claim to be part of varied human heritage, I have reached out geographically to diverse traditions and experiences in order to envision the same. The focus is on the peripheral, rather than the canonical or the dogmatic forms of tradition. Thus, there is a peripheral Christianity around the actual teachings of the Christ, besides the mainstream canonical form led by the Church. Historically, the latter has been an adversary of the former. Similarly there is a divergence between mainstream Islam and Sufism, just as there is between orthodox Buddhism and its Tibetan counterpart. I look for elements of transcendental praxis in the noncanonical forms. There is of course an infinite variety of transcendental experience besides the above, which we are not able to discuss here, and which is probably one of the major limitations of the book. Some who
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have gone over parts of the manuscript have complained that I have left out what are arguably the major forms (such as Vipassana in Buddhist practice) to focus only on peripheral approaches. This is a deliberate part of the strategy of the book because I try to build theory based on the experiences and practices of common folk. The early chapters of the book are a preparation for, and anticipate, the multi-pronged praxis in the later chapters.
As indicated above, the praxis is ontological rather than epistemic. The contrast between the epistemic and the ontological approach can be grasped by comparing my method here with that of Ashis Nandy, one of the most insightful commentators on modern India: “A humane society can only be built or sustained on the basis of open politics. And both in South Asia demand the defiance of the ruling categories of our times. These categories have allowed the concept of secularism to hegemonize the idea of tolerance, so that anyone who is not secular becomes definitionally intolerant.”9 This is a sound description of the problem. However, in this commentary on the secular trajectory in India, Nandy maintains the epistemic opposition: tolerant/intolerant, which is perfectly relevant to the mode of his analysis, which, in his own words, is psychology of the political. The praxis envisaged here nevertheless moves in a different direction and seeks to assess the formal content of thought by dialectically relating it to an ontological Outside. Tolerance is still a matter for the mind, whereas transformation is a matter of the heart consisting of concrete practices. But what transformation are we talking about? The bringing together of the secular and the non-secular results in bringing together the two halves of the human experience and must therefore be the essence of repair in the schism mentioned at the beginning. The human-to-human and humanto-world relations are then guided not by either competition for turf or tolerant acceptance, but by a dialectic between the secular and the nonsecular spirit.10 Both epistemic and the ontological are necessary parts of this transformative relation that takes us beyond divided consciousness.
One more thing I want to suggest is that in the absence of embodied practice, thought (the instrument of rational consciousness), with its fears and conflicts, lives in endless oppositions. The body or corporeal
9 Ashis Nandy, “An Anti-Secularist Manifesto.” India International Centre Quarterly. Vol. 22. No. 1 (1995), 64.
10 I have by no means rejected the secular position; the requirement is that of an adequate dialectical relation.
practice, in contrast, does not depend upon these ruling categories which are imposed upon it by thought. I recognize that this is a far riskier proposition and may invite the charge that I am attempting to revert to the days of mysticism and the occult. To that I can only reply that the body is a mystery, having many layers and zones of unknown possibilities (the layer we inhabit is only a small part), and these have to be tapped for an authentic change in the direction of societal relations. There is little acknowledgment of this because modernity has mainly a colonial relation with the body, using it for pleasure or as a medium of continuity. But as Nietzsche saw so clearly, the body is the true repository of the mystery of existence, in comparison to which thought is merely epiphenomenal, ephemeral.11 Body is prior to rational consciousness, and not the other way around, and therefore must be made integral to transformative practice.
Geographically the book is not tied to the cultural experiences of any particular community or ethnic group notwithstanding a few anthropological accounts of non-secular experience located in a non-modern community. While it is true that the ideology of secularism—the progressive freeing of public spaces and discourses from faith bound norms and attitudes—has affected different societies differently, both qualitatively as well as in degree, it is also true that the overarching goal set by the hegemonic world order is the same for all, and each is bound by similar yardsticks within the reward system of that world order. Therefore, I have chosen to focus on the phenomenological and socio-psychological consequences and assumptions of the secular mandate in general in order to understand its limits, notwithstanding its specific performances in diverse settings. And since secularity, or the suppression of the transcendental, is in large part the evolutionary child of organized Christianity, and thus of the Empire, it is not surprising that a great deal of attention in the book has been given to Christendom and its various cultural effects, especially in the erstwhile Imperium. The teachings of the Christ as in the Beatitudes are at all times kept distinct from the institutionalized version of Christianity.
In writing a book like this, one is always walking a very thin line, a “razor’s edge” as it were, since thought/intellect is being challenged to open itself to something that is outside reason, seemingly an absurd proposition. But the even bigger challenge a book like this faces is to impassively persuade an intellectual audience to examine the very substance through which s/he thinks and thereby to experience herself/himself differently.
11 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (London: Dover Publications, 2003).
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The flat monotone of endless representation and its vicissitudes is one way to experience oneself, but there may be more intense and viable modes of experiencing that are not mere spiritual mumbo jumbo nor “New-Age” individualism but ontological realignment. Ontologically sound, collective rootedness in the cosmos is possible through the fullness of a “theandric” alignment with the world at large that can also accommodate the scientific spirit. Some readers may be already persuaded that such living is possible because they either have been privy to certain experiences or simply have thought things through for themselves. For them the book offers ways and means of stabilizing those sensibilities and widening them out toward the collective life and a different politics that takes into account the aesthetic dimension.
The task, as I have said in the book, is to create a bridge consciousness that moves easily between the inside and the outside of thought, and hence moves equally easily between the so-called individual and the collective. It is from the perch of bridge consciousness that we begin to understand the tragic failure of the project of modernity that had cast the secular and the trans-secular in opposition. We cannot separate ourselves from that failure, and yet we can make amends for it by making an immense effort toward comprehending and possibly transcending the limits of the secular. The move from living exclusively by mental representation and its by-products—a legacy of the eighteenth century—to a search for authentic being-experience is not an easy one and is to be accomplished carefully in stages. This book can only be a pointer in that direction.
Modernity as used in the book is more than just a historical era. It refers to a certain way of visualizing and relating to the world. In this sense there has been a modernity in every age. The Indian epics “the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, for instance, take into account the modern consciousness in the form of the personality types represented by some demons (danavas, daityas, rakshasas and asuras).”12 These may even be usefully thought of as Jungian archetypes given the widespread allusion to their overweening traits throughout cultural memory. A persistent characteristic integral to these types, for example, is their search for absolute power and dominance over the elements and over other beings. And this
12 Ashis Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 122.
leads them to seek and acquire great technological mastery.13 This mirrors the modern consciousness which “hierarchizes the relationship between human beings and nature and between those who possess technology and those who do not.”14
Next, let me say a few things about the major influences in the book, on whose prodigious insights my own understanding has grown. I have begun by referring to Adorno’s Negative Dialectics for an important reason. Other than the fact that there are few critiques of modernity as deep, broad, and penetrating as Adorno (and Horkheimer), it seems to me that the critical tradition has been widely appropriated in a selective and partial manner, leaving the more acute discernments that demand a sustained microsocial praxis for realization. Let me clarify this point. For Adorno, “society and culture form a historical totality, such that the pursuit of freedom in society is inseparable from the pursuit of enlightenment in culture.”15 But, arguably, and unfortunately, much greater attention has been given to the question of “freedom in society” than to “enlightenment in culture.” This is because in the name of fighting superstition or romanticism, modernity “promotes a form of hard materialism which negates even the idea of future freedom from material bondage which was Marx’s dream. Such materialism becomes an end in itself…and defines large parts of critical consciousness as irrational, romantic irrelevancies.”16 But enlightenment in culture cannot be the sole prerogative of objectivity or objectivism.
Then what do we mean by “enlightenment in culture”? Adorno writes that cultural criticism must result in “determinate negations,” pointing up specific contradictions between what thought claims and what it actually delivers. Elsewhere Adorno states that there is always in reality an excess that escapes the grasp of thought. When one puts the two together the inescapable conclusion is that there is an irreducible gap between the projections of thought and its achievements (other than in the domain of techne). My view is that cultural studies and other cultural criticisms have focused on the expressions of thought in culture rather than on this
13 In the Ramayana, Ravana, the great rakshasa (demon), is shown as a supreme technicist and a master of warfare.
14 Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias, 136.
15 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. (New York: Continuum, 1973) xvi.
16 Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias, 136.
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ever-present ontological gap.17 The transcendental or the outside of thought is a reminder of this gap. I suggest that enlightenment in culture must, before anything else, take into cognizance this hiatus and self-consciously make it pedagogical. In other words, notwithstanding its specific form, cultural enlightenment is the recognition of the congenital shortcoming of thought and the working out of its consequences in terms of social action. If we fail to do this, we remain trapped in the hegemonic patterns of thought and remain entombed in crass materialism, repeating wars of the past.
But there is something more. For all the power, range, and brilliance of his analysis, Adorno fails to realize that ultimately there is no change in the substance of thought, and hence no psychological transformation as a result of negative dialectics. In other words, thought remains qualitatively static despite its apparent internal dynamism, going round and round in circles, while in the meantime the misery and pain in the world remain undiminished. Adorno fails to fully play out the consequences of his own discovery, the discovery being that there is always an excess over and beyond thought that escapes thinking. The dialectic must be with this excess if the unthought of is to be realized. The excess is the Outside of thought to which a bridge must be constructed. It is perhaps true that prima facie Adorno’s own framework does not allow access to this excess, or for bridging efforts to be envisaged. Coming from a materialist position, such a turn would perhaps have been too incongruous. Nevertheless, an important opportunity is missed for constructing a materialist nonsecularity that, while it might have transgressed the consistency of the framework, might have laid the ground for taking forward the project of negative dialectics. In the absence of that move, negative dialectics remains a useful starting point, but not sufficient in itself as an emancipatory project.
The present book attempts to address this gap, moving from the critical platform to an ontological praxis. Not limited by the constraints of the materialist position, the book takes recourse to depth psychology, radical theosophy, as well as esoteric practices in order to understand the ontological excess that escapes thought. Once the trail of an Outside is picked up, it is followed through to its logical consequences, notwithstanding the
17 The idea of “différance” in Jacque Derrida and in some post-modernists is linguistic rather than ontological.
variegated terrain through which one is forced to follow it.18 For example, possessive individualism is a major cultural feature of modern mass society. The deconstructive understanding of this peculiarity has been accomplished by taking recourse to several domains of understanding.
Depth psychology is one such domain, and I will next focus on psychiatrist R. D. Laing and his influence on my learning. Laing is famous for his iconoclastic approach to psychiatry. In his writings and practice, Laing challenged the ruling categories of his field including normality, insanity, and individuality, insisting that all descriptors actually refer not just to the individual but to the individual in relation to society or the individual in relation to other individuals. Thus, the modernist understanding of the discrete individual was a deeply problematic one since no one could experience themselves in isolation. But even more, anyone with transpersonal experiences beyond the so-called individual ran into much greater problems: “Our civilization represses not only ‘the instincts’, not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. Among one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows.”19 Rarely has an intellectual in the professions so openly and so matter-of-factly acknowledged the possibility of transcendental experience, and what is more, integrated it into his work. Both, “the risk of being destroyed by others” and “betraying what one knows,” are terribly bleak but real prospects in this case. Within secular modernity, claims to transcendental experience invite incredulity or suspicions of insanity and zealotry.
Besides, where the cultural memory of the transcendent has not entirely disappeared, secularism at best acknowledges the theoretical possibility of transcendence but dismisses any actual claim to it. It is a rare society that allows the meaning and content of transcendental experience to be deliberated upon as part of ethical or collective reason. Alongside, one must note the irony that in heterogeneous societies such as India, the secularized middle classes who have for some time now moved away from traditional faith often maintain the possibility of transcendence in
18 The tracing of the Outside has to be done through different and discontinuous domains as it is glimpsed through shifting and peripheral lenses. No particular dominant view or school is taken as determinative.
19 R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (New York: Penguin books, 1965), 12. Emphasis mine. This aspect of Laing’s work is crucial here because it implicitly deconstructs the secular subject of modernity while at the same time consciously admits the prospect of an Outside.
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their “god-men,” crediting them with peculiar powers and lavishing them with ill-gotten wealth. Within this power dynamic, there is little room for the native experience of transcendence or the sacred apocrypha to be taken seriously in terms of the conduct of public life. Instead, mirroring the West, the tendency is to pathologize any situation that defies secular logic.20
The second thing is the prospect of betraying what one knows as Laing puts it. Sociality enforces conformity, attempting to reduce all experience to the lowest denominator, imposing upon it an economistic equality. Within the pressure of such reductionist economy, a human being either must carefully hide what s/he knows and experiences above and beyond the common social understandings, or must recant and trivialize it. Only such betrayal will preserve her/his place in society, or else s/he will be deemed incoherent. But this “betrayal” has terrible consequences for the person as well as for the society. For, apart from all else, the modernist split between the personal and the social is itself part of that betrayal; it is a form of cultivated blindness which refuses to consider the path to the collective through individual conscience. Important changes in social thinking and practice often come from critical non-cooperation with ruling categories, practices, apprehensions, and modes of being, which is conscience. And transcendental experience has been a major source of the inspiration and strength for such non-cooperation. Betrayal of transcendental experience closes the door on one of the most important sources of combined personal and social transformation.
On that note I will turn to Carl Gustav Jung whose name is particularly associated with depth psychology. Here we have another instance of supreme intellectual courage and the audacity to live, think, experience, and write differently in the age of conformity. Jung never betrayed the psychic and transcendental experiences that nourished as well as troubled him from a young age, something that led many of his contemporaries in the field, including his teacher Sigmund Freud, to shun him later. In 1937, Jung wrote: “every creed is originally based on the one hand upon the experience of the numinosum and on the other hand upon pistis, that is to say, trust or loyalty, faith and confidence in a certain experience of a numinous nature and in the change of consciousness that ensues…We might say, then, that the term “religion” designates the attitude peculiar
20 See Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983)
to a consciousness which has been changed by the experience of the numinosum.”21 And in 1955, he wrote: “In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted….”22 This is an astonishing counter-modernist talk coming from a leading intellectual of the twentieth century. Jung erects before us both an ontology and a teleology alien to the prevailing materialist and political culture of the West. The meaning of life as a publicly debated concept, a topic which secular modernity avoids strenuously, is spoken about in a direct manner. Secular modernity replaces “meaning” by the notion of individual freedom, which is variously interpreted as choice, opportunity, human rights, self-expression, and so forth. Jung sweeps aside modernity’s attempts to codify the being of the human in terms of the utilitarian and marketized values of Western capitalism and adjustment to the modern thought-machine. Instead, he refers to a radical Outside of human thought, the experience of the “numinosum” as that which alone gives meaning to existence. At no point does he devalue ordinary material existence but laments the loss of connection with a deeper psychic reality that is the natural other side of being of the human.
Jung wrote from the authority and direct experience of the numinosum, or cosmic dimension, which is transpersonal, and over which human thought has no control. It is this trans-individual energy that connects us to the cosmos, and to which every being is intrinsically connected, that lends incontestable meaning to our lives individually and collectively. The sudden transformation that is the essence of the transcendental has been known to every culture from antiquity. But its slow perversion and obliteration from cultural memory has been a pre-condition of modernity. Our great fortune is to find remnants of the pre-modern such as in Jung who bears physical testimony to the transcendental root of all culture. This book’s attempt to create a bridge consciousness that is simultaneously aware of both dimensions, the “inside” of thought and its “outside,” finds in Jung a supreme resource that sets us in motion toward that objective. It is from Jung’s work that I have learned that human consciousness, as distinct from instinct and as externalized thought, is a relatively recent
21 C. G. Jung, cited in, Edward F. Edinger et al., The New God-image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters concerning the Evolution of the Western God-image (New York: Chiron publications, 1996), 40.
22 C. G. Jung, cited in, Ann Belford Ulanov, Spirit in Jung (New York: Daimon Verlag, 2005), 167.
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phenomenon; his work with pre-modern peoples points definitely toward that conclusion. Being a recent development therefore, objectivized thought is also unstable. This understanding throws light on the behavior of modern consciousness and its capriciousness. It also reveals the reason for its peculiar arrogance and triumphalism. The lesson this book draws from the above finding is that the progression of thought from incipience to a more mature form necessarily involves discovering for itself its own ontological limits. When thought acknowledges its intrinsic limits, it becomes humble and thus opens itself to the possibility of the Outside.
Part of the task of this book therefore is to help discover the limits and boundaries of thought-consciousness. In the social imaginary of modernity, thought appears as infinite, its possibilities limitless. In actuality, the expansion of thought occurs more along the physical lines of the expansion of gas, with its ontological properties (and therefore its ultimate social effects) conserved. This means, as I have observed later, that relations repeat themselves ad infinitum in new ways, promising new things, but actually transmogrifying previous patterns—old forms of exploitation turn into newer and more subtle forms of oppression, older prejudices morph into new phobias, primeval superstitions are replaced by modern totems, old anxieties show themselves as contemporary neuroses, and ancient hierarchies become sophisticated levels of command and governance. But globally, the quantum of suffering remains constant.23
One of the most brilliant commentators of this transmogrification is Ivan Illich.24 He possessed the historical knowledge as well as the skill of the social scientist that could slice through the modernist subterfuge at any level. In Tools for Conviviality, Illich wrote: “Overprogramming can transform the world into a treatment ward in which people are constantly taught, socialized, normalized, tested, and reformed. Centralization and packaging of institutionally produced values can polarize society into irreversible structural despotism. In each or several of these dimensions a tool
23 Some are apt to argue that discoveries such as modern medicine have brought down misery in general. In actuality, this is highly debatable. For example, Ivan Illich has convincingly shown that medical response today, to a large extent, is necessarily directed at controlling disease categories brought about by social developments within modernity itself such as cancer, heart ailments, and diabetes. Even more damning is the reality of “iatrogenic” or doctor-and-medication-caused diseases that have become rampant. See Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (New York: Pantheon, 1976).
24 In Illich, one can find the personalization of the transpersonal and the operation of what I have called bridge consciousness.
can threaten survival by making it unfeasible for most people to relate themselves in action to one of the great dimensions of their environment.”25 More than at any other time in history, life today comes in pre-determined and pre-packaged form, with the only participation required of the citizen being in making the “right choice” of package. Choosing replaces active participation in societal processes and not the partaking of meaningful solutions relevant to the context. Less and less are people able to actively “relate themselves” in any substantive manner to the vital dimensions of their environment, and less and less are they being educated to do so. And what is the upshot of this? Human experience is devalued; only largescale institutionalized solutions are recognized, and are promulgated by experts. The devaluation of experience is the general negative process within which the subtle mobility of the psyche is lost, leaving the human exposed to the State, and the caprice of the market.
Illich taught me the true implication of the sentence that he wrote so portentously: “The world does not contain any information.” At one level the implication is fairly obvious. Information/knowledge has no prior objective existence; it is produced in the organism when it interacts with its environment. But it also implies that when the information/knowledge is taken out of the organism(s) and amassed in a systematic manner, it no longer has anything to do with the lived-in-ness of the organically produced knowledge. As it grows and is refined and further accumulated without the original embodied limits, its potential for doing harm far outstrips its potential for doing good. The Absence that is secularity is filled by information/knowledge with a central tendency toward formalization and homogenization. Illich, like Gandhi, fought endlessly for peripherality, rejecting the formidable institutionalization of knowledge in the name of progress and scientific advancement. He urged us to trust our innate, non-corporatized, non-homogenized lived experiences and deepen them to find solutions to our problems rather than depend on vast bureaucratic processes that denude our capacities and ruin the imagination. The limits of the secular are thus epistemically grasped through the proper understanding of experience. Ontologically, lived experience imposes organic limits on the claims of knowledge as well as on the urge to compete destructively for “secular rituals” that consist in endless consumption of knowledge, materials, cultural artifacts, and apparatuses that may or may not have any relevance to the particular lived context. The aesthetic
25 Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 49. INTRODUCTION:
and ethic of the transcendental can help maintain the balance through a productive engagement with the uncertain stream of transpersonal experiences that travel through the individual and collective psyche.
But Illich’s insights into the present epoch go even deeper than this. His surgical deconstruction of modernity, on the way to the possibility of liberation from the peculiar blindness that has developed within secularity, parts the curtain for us. He takes us to the cultural roots of modernity following the thread of his own constitution as a subject of the West. It is in these hidden subterranean chambers we find the traces of experiences that have been pushed out of conscious cultural memory: “I want to explore with you a phenomenon that I consider constitutive of the West, of that West which has shaped me, body and soul, flesh and blood. This central reality of the West is marvelously expressed in the old Latin phrase: Corruptio optimi quae est pessima—the historical progression in which God’s Incarnation is turned topsy-turvy, inside out. I want to speak of the mysterious darkness that envelops our world, the demonic night paradoxically resulting from the world’s equally mysterious vocation to glory. My subject is a mystery of faith, a mystery whose depth of evil could not have come to be without the greatness of the truth revealed to us.”26 The phrase in Latin means “the corruption of the best is the worst.” Here it is an oblique reference to the institutionalization of the Good and the consequent evil that proceeds from it.
Great good is simultaneously accompanied by the possibility of great evil. The Incarnation (and possibly its equivalent in other cultures such as the Avatara among the Hindus or the Prophet among the Muslims) brings about a tremendous responsibility. It is like the release of floodwaters that can flow into the right channels or be destructive; the release of unprecedented power in the socius can go either way. The task is to seize the Good and find the Light as directed, or things start to go badly immediately thereafter, since the released energy is channeled into institutionalized forms and rituals. The cultural roots of modernity lie in the failure to carry forward the transcendental project of the Good turning instead to the seeking and consolidation of worldly powers. In due course, this conversion to material powers takes on different manifestations—technology, secular knowledge, control on nature, managerial society, and so on—each a perversion of the Truth and the purpose of the original Good,
26 Ivan Illich and David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2005), 24.
and hence their incalculably wretched and irreversible effect on the environment. Illich implies that the confusion and precariousness in which humanity finds itself today are the progressive result of such perversion. What the managers of modernity have persuaded the public to accept as the “ascent of man” is, in actuality, seen from the perspective of Illich, nothing other than a steady decline in the being of the human and the increasingly warped relationship of what remains of the human with the environment.
The present crises facing the world including environmental degradation can be traced to the historically produced confounding of the real meaning of the transcendental phenomenon and its onus.27 The deontology of human existence begins there. The sublime event is not to be confused with idle belief or the piety of thought. It is instead a direct challenge to act and be transformed or to go down the drain of history. Illich was not refusing to engage with the actual conditions of modernity and turning away instead to an impossible condition from the past. In fact, in different places, Illich works out in different dimensions how change can be brought about in the present society even with its entrenched path dependencies. Rather, he was simply reordering the priorities before humankind, demanding that we recognize the limitations of the secular view of life and understand the genealogical truth of its emergence.
Few have understood the limits of the secular as well as Gandhi did. Although he described himself as secular with respect to institutionalized religion, Gandhi accepted the religious challenge of transformation for himself as well as for the polity. In fact, his entire program of swaraj was a non-secular transformative project that synthesized the real implications of the religious traditions of India. Gandhi was not to be conned by the superficial flow of change brought about by industrial and managerial culture that masqueraded itself as progress. He stood like a rock made up of a “pluri-centric derivative” of core religious teachings, around which flowed powerful currents of liberal humanist thought of the twentieth century that could not move him. From Gandhi I learned that immanent critique can rediscover the bed-rock of substance for the collective; in fact, it can redefine the very meaning of the collective, even when that substance has been obscured by centuries of obfuscation. I learned that anyone can learn
27 I do not think any reasonable person would dispute the claim that modern industrial civilization has had disastrous effect on the environment, both physical and psychological. There is a deluge of writing on the subject today, but early books like Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher are pathbreakers.
to see this if they worked past the vested interest society had developed in its non-visibility.
Consequently, the book’s trajectory acquires precious direction from Gandhi’s approach and his resistance against the basic elements which held together secular modernity. “These elements were (1) the image of politics as a non-synergic game in which each person’s gain is another person’s loss; (2) the idea that the normal politics of self-interest, if properly managed, contributes to the social good and to humane social arrangements; and (3) the separation of normal politics from the search for selfrealization.”28 The politics and economics of self-interest, the bases of liberal society, are in the final analysis delusional since both are but a partial response to reality. The uneasy formation of a collective through contractual means and market relations is in reality no collective at all. What is actually obtained is a genteel form of omnus contra omni (each one against all), and a general acceptance of controlled aggression.
Specifically, several pages in the book in the sections relating to praxis are devoted to Gandhi’s staunch avowal of bodily labor as a mode of reducing social hierarchy. Secular logic attempts to reason its way to an abstract equality, whereas Gandhian labor is a concrete practice of equality. Distinct, and miles from Adorno’s suspicion of the ontological (a typically Enlightenment attitude), Gandhi embraced the body as a vital locus of discovering a new link with the cosmos and the collective. Instinctively moving away from the logic of modernity that asserts the supersession of physical labor by machinery, Gandhi argued that humans do not produce anything, they convert. “This only means a transformation of natural energy. Try as we might, the balance is always nil.”29 In other words, in converting natural energy into higher and higher output, we do not necessarily improve on the real state of affairs. To imagine otherwise is to delude ourselves and deny the conservation principle of the cosmos.
So, what then is the purpose of activity? The purpose lies in the activity itself and not outside of it. It is a self-limiting activity, producing organic limits to the possibility of exploitation and misappropriation: “God never creates more than what is strictly needed for the moment, with the result that if anyone appropriates more than he really needs, he reduces his neighbor to destitution. The starvation of people in several parts of the
28 Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias, 145.
29 M. K Gandhi, Ashram Observance in Action, trans. Valji Govindji Desai (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing house, 2011), 36.
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