I listened to a radio interview with magickian Alan Moore, and my heart sank when he said: ‘I have never in my life seen an objective truth’ [1]. And it sank further when I encountered similar sentiments in a book by the writer and professor of religious studies, Jeffrey Kripal.
I loved Kripal’s most recent book, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred [2], which is an exploration of rhetorical strategies in the work of key writers on the paranormal. The book perhaps heralds a shift in the academic orthodoxy away from postmodernist theory towards subjective experience. Here’s what Kripal says on his website:
I think the ways… [paranormal] phenomena offend or subvert our usual dualistic epistemologies (subjective/objective, mind/matter, meaning/causality, and so on) represent one possible future of critical theory… I have come to see that the deep resonances, even identities, between eroticism and mysticism that I tracked in my early work are refigured in the deep resonances, even identities, between matter and mind that I am now tracking in the history and study of the paranormal… It’s all one reality, which is fundamentally nondual. [3]
In Authors of the Impossible Kripal shows how the great writers on the paranormal, although publicly they might pretend otherwise, were often writing from experience. They wrote because something incomprehensible had happened to them, and the ideas and strategies they developed for writing about it were not only a formulation for coming to terms with the incomprehensible, they were that coming to terms. Yet Kripal by a whisker (it seems to me) steps back from asserting that paranormal and spiritual experiences constitute any kind of objective truth. His interest is primarily hermeneutical; he examines the self-contained world of words and meanings created by his authors, with an intentional lack of concession toward any supposed referent of those words and meanings.
Maybe Kripal’s latest book is indeed a positive sign of change within academia, but his earlier work – the work he mentioned on the relationship between eroticism and mysticism – confronts us with some more nakedly postmodern assumptions. Perhaps he is in a process of wrestling free from these.
Books by Jeffrey Kripal. Click to preview his works on Google Books.
Evelyn Underhill, author of that hoary classic Mysticism (1911), is the subject of one of the chapters from Kripal’s earlier book, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism [4]. Kripal takes Underhill to task for her assertion that only mystics can write about mysticism; that only experience counts in this field; and that the experience of the mystic is direct, self-sufficient and universally recognisable.
Kripal chides:
In the end, what Underhill cannot see is that even the most orthodox of mystics are not reporting on some independent objective experience but interpreting a highly subjective state that may or may not be engaging a noumenal ground, and all this with categories that not only describe the experience after the fact but help shape and form and guide the event within the experience itself. Experience itself is interpretation. [5]
Kripal’s view is that because the language of mysticism is erotic (all that talk of ‘divine union’, ‘surrender to the Absolute’, etc.) then the basis of mysticism is the body. What the mystic writes is therefore an interpretive gloss upon a bodily, erotic experience.
Even though he appends a slightly mitigating footnote, I can’t let pass that ‘experience is interpretation.’ It’s a classic postmodernist tenet, but to hold this view surely perpetuates a sin of which postmodernists like to believe themselves innocent.
Some mystical experiences are not states, but are the understanding of what presents as an experience of no state at all. When I first stumbled into this realm what struck me most was the paradoxical, impossible form that the experience took. What rises during these moments is something experienced not as a thought, not as a feeling, nor as a concept, nor as a sensation. Except there it is all the same, leaving us bewilderedly wondering how we can possibly be experiencing such a thing.
This is my description of my mystical experience. If there’s not enough ‘erotic’ language in it, then let me oblige by saying how it totally fucked my mind!
‘Experience is interpretation’ allows for differing interpretations, but it doesn’t admit that experience itself might take on different forms, from person to person. Kripal’s view allows for differing views creating different experiences, but ultimately this suggests there is only one kind of experience – the kind that arises from holding a view. It’s the same old glaring flaw that haunts the whole postmodern enterprise: the assertion there is no absolute truth, asserted absolutely.
What the mystic describes is more postmodern than the postmodernist: it is the idea that the structure of experience itself varies from one person to the next. So, to someone like me, who has sat on a cushion meditating for hours on end, there can appear something that fits no mental or sensory categories. Because ‘zero’ assumes the same value on whatever scale we choose to measure it, by this means what is seen assumes objectivity. Whereas to someone like Alan Moore, who has perhaps devoted more of his time to developing his prodigious talents, the view is different: ‘I have never in my life seen an objective truth.’
Neurological imaging studies that show structural differences in the brains of long-term meditators (increased cortical thickness, for example [6]) perhaps argue for this possibility of variations in the structure of experience, beyond the far less radical differentiations between interpretations of an assumed single form of human experience. Mystics are therefore a group for whom experience itself – not just their interpretation of it – is different.
Spot the difference: a baseline brain, versus a meditator's brain.
Indeed, ‘experience is interpretation’ itself implies a particular structure of experience, for if experience is genuinely an interpretation then there is no ‘direct’ experience; instead, there is mediation, an interpretive activity, which renders the interpretation to or for something. The nature of experience, in this view, is divided between the interpretation, the interpretive activity, and that to which the interpretation appears to be an experience. ‘Experience is interpretation’ is actually not saying anything very new or clever at all, but merely consolidating what was already the consensus view, that experience is what assumes a particular form for a separate, individual self.
The postmodernist who holds these views has perhaps looked deeply enough to observe how what we call experience is made and not ‘given’. ‘I have never in my life seen an objective truth,’ they might conclude. Or they might decide to look even harder, because where can they situate for whose benefit it is supposed the interpretive activity takes place, if not within experience also? And if the self or ego is in our experience (for otherwise, how would we experience it?) then isn’t it too a product of the interpretive activity?
Once it becomes apparent that there is no one for whom the interpretation takes place, then it follows that what we call experience is not and never could be mediated by and for anything. Yet this is not the consensus view of experience at all, but something else. It is indeed the direct knowing of the mystic, where experience recognises self or ego as just another aspect of itself – self as just another content of experience, rather than something separate that apprehends or creates that content.
This is not a ‘state’. This is not even an experience. It is instead a restructuring of experience, wherein the illusion of an interpretative activity by or for someone has been seen through. Because the interpretive activity has now been seen for what it is, this is direct knowing, clear seeing. But until it is seen for oneself, it cannot be known. ‘Only mystics can write about mysticism,’ as Underhill said. This would be false if theirs were only an interpretation of experience, but instead it is an altogether different kind of experience.
Bernini’s St. Teresa, in the basilica of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Is that her 'mystical experience' face?
It might be said that, back in the day, mystics perhaps over-eulogised their experience. They used terms that were bodily and erotic in order to do so, but there’s no necessity to do that. It’s a vocabulary that is better than many others, but the aesthetic of mysticism is free to change. Mystics are human beings, and human beings love sex, so if sex flavours their expression more than – say – cybernetics, then no wonder. But that does not mean that mysticism arises from sex. What it might mean is that the first step in transcending the consensus view that ‘experience is interpretation’, which entails an isolated, separate self, is an inclination towards the erotic. But that’s not where mysticism ends. It aims instead toward a radical restructuring of experience, not simply a leaning toward certain kinds of experience.
The good news is that this restructuring is available to everyone who takes the trouble to cultivate it. To entirely misappropriate and misquote Karl Marx: ‘The postmodernists have only interpreted experience in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Hopefully Kripal is already onto this, and the rest of the academic establishment that he currently stands against will one day soon follow suit.
References
[1] ‘Expanding Mind’, Progressive Radio Network (14th July, 2011). Moore makes the comment at approximately 8’49″ into the recording.
[2] Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2010).
[3] From the FAQ section of Kripal’s website, hosted by Rice University, Texas.
[4] Jeffrey J. Kripal, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2001).
[5] Ibid., p. 66.
[6] Sara W. Lazar, et al., ‘Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness’, Neuroreport, 16 (17): 1893–1897 (2005 November 28).
Here’s a thought: Maybe the erotic source of mysticism is simply Muladhara acting up?
Cybernetic expression of mysticism: I’ve been reading one of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker books again, and there’s an android mystic in there. He’s 37 times as old as the universe due to several time-travel accidents where he got left behind; he’s made up entirely of spare parts, and in the end he finds God’s final message to his creation.
“Restructuring of experience” is a bit ambiguous, because it could imply just the kind of selective re-decoration you’re trying to talk away from. “It’s not a spectator sport” was my favourite for a while, but it still implies participants. This stuff isn’t easy to express. The Buddha elegantly avoided all this by teaching technique only and refusing to engage in this kind of debate – only now people are worshipping the techniques, so it didn’t work that well, either.
Cheers,
Florian
Great post (:
I would just side-note that some so-called “post-structuralists” like Deleuze & Guattari are not postmodernists by a far shot (“Interpretation is a modern form of believing”, Deleuze decries), and they have written extensively about the zero, the limits, the virtual (you would call “immaterial”), the non-dual (they call it absolute limit) and it’s relation with the Real (opposing Lacan who posits the Real as lacking, they operate univocally (monistically) with an all-encompassing non-dual real).
It doesn’t means they’re englightened, of course. In my view, they just did the right “mathematics”.
@Florian: Yes, indeed! You use one metaphor to fix something, but it immediately breaks something somewhere else… (There must be a programming analogy in that somewhere…)
@PP: Many thanks for this. Duly noted! I have to be careful not to conflate the term ‘postmodernism’ with ‘all that pointless crap I was forced to read at university and still feel very bitter about’. Unfortunately, I think I’m very likely to fail in that regard…
“We always imagine the Real as something face on. We think of ourselves always as facing the Real. Well, there is no face-to-face. There is no objectivity. Nor any subjectivity either: a twofold illusion.
“Since consciousness is an integral part of the world and the world is an integral part of consciousness, I think it and it thinks me.”
-Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
When the subjective is also illusory I become much more comfortable with there being no ‘real’ objective. It is in that territory that things arise together.
I agree with PP about Deleuze and Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus has a lot of theory that seems very appropriate.
@ultralaz3r: Well, yes, the postmodern schtick can look very non-dual, but that quotation from JB just doesn’t feel right to me… I’m sorry, but it just reeks of ideas rather than experience…
For starters, the remark about consciousness ‘thinking’ is odd, as if to be conscious is to think, and to think is to be conscious… Yet the mystical realisation of consciousness is surely that it has nothing to do with anything – neither the thinker nor the thoughts nor thinking…
Secondly, the mystical experience is the experience of the way things are – reality, in other words… But JB’s work was all about the unattainability of the real… Yet presumably he regarded ‘the unattainability of the real’ as a reality, in which case – what was so fucking ‘unattainable’ about the real?
Thirdly, if there is no experience of the objective or absolute, then indeed there are only our thoughts about them; they can be envisaged only as concepts, and all we can do is repeatedly re-conceptualise them, over and over, in the kind of interpretative game I tried to highlight in the article.
The mystical position, however, is quite clearly that the absolute is a reality and can be experienced. Although the postmodernists sound very non-dual, this is only at the level of ideas. They arrive at this conceptual non-duality by deconstructing an idea of the real. But the mystical project is entirely different: the mystic arrives at non-duality by experiencing it as a reality.
The postmodernist is saying, ‘There is no reality because of non-duality.’ Whereas the mystic is saying, ‘Reality is non-dual.’
I agree with you, Duncan, regarding the postmoderns – they got tiring and their limits turned clear to me very fast! second year on college or so – and yout critique may also apply to Baudrillard, whom I must admit having not read.
Still, I must insist that with D&G it’s totally another matter. Firstly because, as I said, they refuse to think the real as lack – their real is pure affirmation, pure production, pure potence (virtuality) and actualization (emergence, and may be understood also as emanation) – their real is what happens, without an essence (anicca) and beyond any duality (but also, producing duality). They’re off to think “Impersonal individuations”, non-dual processes (becomings) on the borders of chaos, complexity and order, where mind and language and bodies (‘karmic’, causal phenomena) ‘singularize’ themselves immanently, like raindrops falling in patterns or waves arising on an ocean. And they also look at how reactivity, “strata”, arises from these patterns… as a “folding” effect of activity the subject comes only as a ‘ghost’ effect, on a later stage of “emanation”.
(emanation not from some content-essence, but from pure potence, a ‘pregnant void’ I would say).
I speak from theory, of course. My vipassana is still crawling. But I have good intuition for those things (;
Where I say
“And they also look at how reactivity, “strata”, arises from these patterns… as a “folding” effect of activity the subject comes only as a ‘ghost’ effect, on a later stage of “emanation”.”
I meant that
“And they also look at how reactivity, “strata”, arises from these patterns… reactivity understooad as a “folding” or “doubling” effect of activity; the subject (who is pure reacivity, “stickness”) comes only as a ‘ghost’ effect afterwards, on a later stage of “emanation”.
@Duncan
I agree it does reek of ideas. Ideas are strange things however, and may be experienced in that I am not completely sure where ideas come from, what they are, or what thinking is. (I can have experiences of what these things are, but afterwards I still am unsure…it isn’t sustainable)
Not to say that I believe JB has experienced non-duality, and he certainly doesn’t formulate it well. I however was just pleased that in his most recent writing it hasn’t stopped at the objective as illusory, and has moved onto as well to the subjective.
But I suppose I see his work as thought experiments, not entirely rigorous, but what is the point of rigorous work anyways? I don’t think he’s attempting to find the path of the mystic, but an explanation for some of the apparatuses of the world. I admit that insurrection has always been an interest of mine, and in this regard he relates a bit to Agamben or Tiqqun in my cosmos.
I think the point is missed entirely when we try to look to “post-modern” writers for explanations of reality. I’ve only ever seen assemblages and patterns. Even more-so I’ve seen amusements.
Question: the experience of non-duality afterwards—isn’t is only relevant in how it presently presents itself? Doesn’t it collapse afterwards back into concept? Or perhaps collapsing, and billowing, collapsing and billowing?
I have no experience…I don’t think
@Duncan, again.
First off: disregard my question of my last post. It answered itself clearly.
I suppose one thing I was trying to say is that when I hear: “there is no objective truth,” I immediately start thinking that people are referring to the apparatus.
Agamben: “I will call an apparatus,” he writes, “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”
I believe what JB is more getting at (these days) is that the idea of an illusory subjective it so uncomfortable that we are compensating by clinging to it firmly (there is no objective truth). When he says “the real”, it seems like he is more talking about that as an apparatus. JB’s realm is more the political:
“In the shadow of reality, of this causal and rational simulation model, the exchange of the world becomes possible, since it is defined by objective laws.”
“It is not a matter of resisting alienation, but of resisting the very status of subject”.
It seems to me that these things speak directly of Alan Moore’s comment; the situation many people are in. I guess my whole point of posting was to say: hey, the postmodernists are way off, but some of the post-structuralists have interesting correlations to the language and conceptions of the mystical path. So does some anarchist theory, oddly.
‘The mystical position, however, is quite clearly that the absolute is a reality and can be experienced.’
I agree entirely. Ditto with ‘Reality is non-dual.’
@PiedP: It does sound interesting. But reading most postmodernist writers is such a pain in the arse. I remember wading through Lacan, and suddenly waking up to how disgracefully low the ideas to words ratio actually was!
@Ultralaz3r: The wacky thing about non-duality is that (past a certain point, which Daniel Ingram calls ‘third path’) it doesn’t recede back into an idea. Instead it permeates experience, becoming more and more apparent, yet remaining constantly fresh, until it dominates the whole, real-time experience of reality. That’s what makes it so extraordinary, and also accounts for why the mystics make such a voluble fuss about it. It’s unlike anything, because it isn’t any thing. In the face of it, I’m dumbstruck. From this position, I simply find it impossible to appreciate any longer the postmodern project of attempting to contextualise truth. We’re all of us absolutely swimming in the stuff already, forever soaking wet with it…
In the absence of contextualized truth, how do you feel art addresses, and can express, non-duality?
@Duncan
It does seem worth the fuss. I appreciate your wording and explanation of it.
@PP & Duncan
The real thing about D&G is that sometimes it reads like poetry (and other times like theory).
@ultralaz3r
yeah, that’s what got me interested on the first reading! I didn’t understand anything, but it made a good, wild, sometimes eloquent reading. I feel they ‘suffer’ from the opposite problem compared with the pomo’s: overabundance of ideas per page. =D
Hello,
I just found your blog for the first time.
I’m listening to Alan Moore, and I’m not sure that he would agree entirely with your analysis of his beliefs…He doesn’t say there *are* no objective truths, he merely says he hasn’t seen them. It sounds to me like he’s more on the Kant phenomenon noumenon distinction (in addition he makes references to those Kantian notions in Promethea). I think he’s merely talking about epistemology, not ontology.
@Eric: Hi Eric! Yes, that’s my understanding of Moore too. I was just trying to make the point that if he hasn’t seen it, then he just needs to look harder!
I’m not a big fan of the Kantian distinction, which of course compounds this view that we are separated from direct knowledge of things. But I do like Rudolf Steiner’s deconstruction of Kant. He pointed out that if our sense organs are limited in what they can perceive, then so to is our perception of our sense organs as limited. In other words (much like the postmodernists) the Kantian distinction is invalidated by its own grounds. It’s not a reliable guide to the way things are. I love Alan Moore’s work, but what it seems to me is great about it is its content, not its uniqueness when compared with the assumptions of much of contemporary western occultism.
Duncan, good reply. I’m going to disagree again – not so much in so far as I think you’re necessarily wrong, but I’d like to elaborate a bit more about what I think Moore might believe (and I just like the discussion tbh).
I think it’s possible that Moore might not believe that absolute knowledge is impossible, just that it might be impossible to know that you are correct. In my mind, that’s true doubt, it’s not the kind of doubt that asserts doubt as absolute, but [i]true[/i] doubt, the kind that says, “maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t”.
Alternately, I also think it’s possible that Moore has suggested a unique alternative to much of [i]contemporary[/i] western philosophical thought. Sometimes I read Moore to be suggesting that subjective truths [i]are[/i] objective truths. Of course that’s a statement that needs elaboration.
Frequently, when people talk of subjective truths, it occurs within an atheistic framework. I think Moore has deep faith in the Kabbalistic notion of God (which again, is based upon my reading of Promethea, which seems to me to be a story set to his personal beliefs). In Kabbalah, the Tree of Life which represents the external universe, is mirrored in every individual, represented by Adam Kadmon. In that sense, the objective divine and the subjective divine congregate. Again, in the story of Promethea, it seems to me that every level of God has objective and subjective notions mixed – even in Kether, the highest point, the main characters wonder if they’ve really been God all along, but it’s clear that the point is not meant exclusively towards them, but to all.
To add, I did think the article was great, but I’m just one of those annoying people that only comments on the stuff they disagree with!
Hi Eric,
So, what’s it all good for? Kabbalistic notions of God, mirrored representations of external universes, objectively divine perfect men mixed with subjective notions and so on? Or for that matter, postmodernist thought, or any fashionable fad in philosophy, or mysticism, religion & spirituality, the Dharma, modern science, or Magick? What is *true* doubt good for – what do you want to doubt (and what about that little word *true* in “true doubt”)? Why play with all these intricate notions at all?
Just to pass the time? Till when?
Here’s what I think: it’s all a trap. Granted, it’s a beautiful, bejewelled, endlessly fascinating, wonderful trap. It really *is* a representation of the trapped state, a masterful, artistic rendering of the very mechanism that’s keeping itself bound up. And since it is such a good representation of the trap, it can be studied for the properties of the trap, hence the persistent belief that studying or engaging with these things can be somehow liberating, which is kind of true, in fact, but this belief, being a half-truth or a half-understood one, is actually yet another contingency measure built into in the workings of the trap itself. Which is not bad or anything, just another layer to dismantle if getting out of the trap is of any priority.
Cheers,
Florian
@Harris: My opinion would be that there’s nothing special about non-duality as a subject for art. Art depends on conventions, so it’s the same old problem that artists always face when trying to break new ground: how to arrive at a convention for representing the unconventional. My favourite example of a convention for the unconventional, by the way, is the halo. The halo is a way of representing the saint or holy person’s experience of non-duality, which has now become so familiar and overdone that most people no longer connect with its meaning. In fact, it’s easy to regard the halo as itself something visible, as a representation of a physical object! But that would be silly…
@Eric: I’m the same… commenting on the things I disagree with – which was my reason for singling out that one sentence by Alan Moore, from what was a very substantial and fascinating interview!
I’m with Florian on this one, in that I value praxis more than representation. My feeling is that Moore’s approach to magick is the use of art (and tradition) to turn subjective truths into a reality – which is still pretty much the standard chaos magick schtick… But I think magick taken further is actually far more like religion than art, in that it leads to experience of the absolute. (By ‘taken further’ I mean that we apply the same methods and tools to the self that the magician generally applies to perception of reality in general.) As Florian points out, it’s not our representations or ideas that can reveal God (or whatever you prefer to call ‘It’) so much as also seeing past the trap that they simultaneously pose.
Doubt is interesting, but ‘true doubt’ doesn’t have any bearing on the experience of the absolute. It’s senseless to doubt it. And this is where things get very dangerous, because this can sound like the most obnoxious fundamentalism, but consider this: to doubt something, it has to have representation; there has to be a ‘that’ which we can turn our doubt upon. But the absolute is beyond representation; it doesn’t enter into our experience ‘as’ anything. We can have a good old doubt of it, if we want to, but where the absolute is concerned, doubt has this strange quality of failing to stick. Doubt misses the point, because the salient issue is how on earth we can be having this awareness of something that has no representation for us to get a handle upon it in the first place?! The answer would seem to be that we and It must be (somehow) the same… So to doubt it, that would be like doubting whether one was oneself…
All good fun!
@Florian
I think that’s a really wonderful summation and justification of Eastern mystic thought. From that standpoint I don’t disagree with any of it at all – in fact it’s not that I disagreed with the original post, I just thought his perception of Alan Moore was a bit off.
Incidentally, the truth in true doubt is the kind of truth that refers back to the definition of doubt. I could have used ‘doubt as limited to the strict denotation without using reason to enhance its applicability’ as a synonym…but :S
Anyways, back on topic. The thing that I disagree with, is that Moore is approaching this from a Western mystic perspective – so I don’t know that your post is quite applicable. For instance, in the ending of Promethea **(spoiler by the way)**, mankind goes through the apocalypse. But the apocalypse is merely allowing ones mind to come into contact with the divine. There is an individual who doesn’t go through the apocalypse per se, and all he sees is a bunch of people running around, losing their minds. From their perspectives, angels and demons are running loose upon the earth, and all manner of things are happening. Which one is true? It’s clear that Moore believes neither is true, it’s a matter of perspective. It’s true that God exists in mind, but it’s not something that *must* be seen, it’s not objectively necessary, but you can open your mind up to it. That is what Moore believes, and I instantly knew where he was coming from when he said what he did on the radio show. Someone who hasn’t read that work, and who doesn’t know that it’s a summation of his beliefs might not understand his perspective, and that’s totally understandable.
@Duncan
I think we might be getting somewhere. I don’t know that Moore would disagree with you on that post actually. I should have read both replies to me before commenting, but I didn’t, so here it is…
Again, in Promethea (this is getting annoying, isn’t it?), I think it’s clear that Moore thinks there is an objective absolute truth, but that it doesn’t necessitate someones experience of it. I think when Moore hears objective truth, he hears ‘an experience that is shared by everyone, something everyone can agree on’, and he clearly thinks *those* do not exist, as evidenced by my post to Florian. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t very real experiences to be had, it’s just that they might not be objective in the sense that everyone’s mind can/will experience that. And objectivity can be a funky thing to define sometimes. If I type in google, ‘define: objectivity’, I get:
judgment based on observable phenomena and uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices.
That does seem to preclude the kinds of things that Moore is talking about – but that doesn’t mean that those states are just made up, or any less real, it’s just that observable phenomena might be different among different people.
Shoot I wish I could edit:
I think Moore incorporates Eastern mysticism into his work, but there’s a lot to it. Some of the levels of the Tree of Life are clearly inspired by Eastern mystic notions, but imagination is clearly a fundamental function for him.
*Just to put a disclaimer, any time I say that he *is* a certain way, I recognize it’s my opinion and don’t have a direct line into his brain.
Have either of you read Promethea? If you’re a fan of some of his other stuff and you’re into hermetics, you should.
Yeah, Promethea rocks, both as an aesthetic object and as a teaching on (at least theoretical) hermetism. It threw me into studying the qabalah, and that lead me to the Baptist’s head, and they presented myself to vipassana and pragmatic dharma… (: for with I’m grateful with them all.
I think Moore’s understanding of “immateria” is spot on, very close to Duncan’s use of the concept: “immaterial beings”. What happens in the end is very much like mass englightenment, conceptualized as a personal, intimate encounter with the Mother archetype – Binah! – with subtle insinuations of anatta.
@Florian
Wow!
Thanks, man. Wise as ever. (:
@Eric, @PiedP: I have a shameful confession to make… I really struggle with graphic novels, and only managed Vols. I & II of ‘Promethea’. (I did a little better with Morrison’s ‘The Invisibles’, but couldn’t finish that either.) Some people just don’t get on with certain forms of art, and unfortunately it’s graphic novels that often leave me wondering what the hell I’m missing… But I kind of admire Moore for choosing to excel at a form that sits outside the mainstream… Your descriptions of the climax of Promethea sound really interesting… Maybe I should get the last volume, and see if I’m able to work backwards?
What got me to the experiences I’ve written about was very much the western notion of ‘The Great Work’, achieved by attaining ‘The Knowledge and Communication of the Holy Guardian Angel’. And my map was very much the Tree of Life. I worked my way up it step by step, apparently recognising each stage. It was just a freaky coincidence that at the same time I discovered the work of Daniel Ingram, started practising Buddhist vipassana meditation, and realised I could use this as an actual engine for hauling myself across the Abyss and up the tree.
This bastardized mixture of East and West has led me to the perhaps inevitable conclusion that Eastern and Western traditions point at the same goals and truths. But there *is* a difference of emphasis, which, Eric, you seemed to address in your use of the term ‘imagination’, which you noted was ‘fundamental’ to Moore, but perhaps is not so characteristic of the Eastern paths.
I’d agree with that, and I’d agree also on the fundamental importance of this ‘imagination’. I think the difference between East and West is that the Western path puts imagination first. The Eastern path insists more on discipline and on a more passive observation. By ‘imagination’ I would understand ‘playing with reality’ (through media, for instance), ‘altering experience’, exploring ‘freaky stuff’. In other words, ‘magick’. The Eastern paths are full of warnings about being distracted by magick: you must master your meditation first, and only then can you start mucking around with ‘special powers’. The Western path, on the other hand, sets off full-tilt at magick. This is a gross generalisation, of course, and doesn’t account for the full richness of eastern traditions, but my general impression has been East = slow but steady; West = fast but volatile.
From where I’m looking at the moment, the truth I see is objective and is the same for everyone that sees it. However, our experience of truth is not that truth itself, so the experience may vary, and so too may the understanding that we derive from it. ‘What’s so objective about that, then?’ I hear you cry. Well, it’s objective or absolute in the sense that what is experienced or understood is clearly something beyond experience or understanding, and includes the direct recognition that our experience or understanding of it is not the truth that is revealed by it. (‘Neti neti’, the apophatic – and all that.)
A truth so inclusive that it includes the negation of itself is therefore objective. (Or that’s how I’d describe it, from where I am currently – which may well change one day!) But that’s what I don’t see in Moore (and other contemporary magickians) where nothing is true unless it is made so – through belief, or, as Eric says, ‘It’s true that God exists in mind, but it’s not something that *must* be seen, it’s not objectively necessary, but you can open your mind up to it.’ My view is that God is so inclusive, It also includes not-God (i.e. us). God cannot be avoided!
In my view, the guy who misses out on the apocalypse doesn’t do so because he fails to do anything, or not do anything, but because he fails to perceive what’s already *really* happening. In a universe where there is absolute truth, the apocalypse is happening every single moment. In a universe where we have to make, find or discover truth, then it’s a one-off event.
So – yes, to imagination; but imagination ‘makes’ rather than observes what’s actually there (vipassana), which is the way we see through imagination also and include it in what really is. And that’s something else I don’t find in Moore (or other magickians) – there’s the images, the map, but where’s the engine for propelling us through the territory described by the imagination and out the other side? Where does he tell us in ‘Promethea’, step by step, how actually to get our sorry arses across the Abyss? What should we actually do starting right now? (Magickians such as Crowley and Evola do provide an instruction book, however.)
I accept that after my shameful confession I’m not qualified to comment on Promethea (past vols. I & II) – so these comments are based only on the ideas offered in Eric’s account!
This is slightly tangential, but on my mind and relating to Duncan’s east/west, slow/volatile discussion in the previous comment. I met a guy who teaches in an eastern tradition that includes esoteric practices – in fact they are quite important to the path. However, he rarely mentions these, and presents his group as a welcoming, peaceful meditation group. He only teaches the esoteric stuff to select students who enter priesthood training.
I asked him one day why he never talks about the esoteric side of things. After all, there are these deities on the altar, and some of the chanting done before the meditation sessions invokes and addresses them (in foreign languages). He said, simply, it attracts the wrong crowd.
Also participating in the conversation was a another guy from another eastern esoteric tradition, but one which openly emphasizes the deity work. He said “yep, sure does. you should see the broken, desperate, messed-up folks who drag themselves into our group. it’s a brutal path, but if you can survive it, it works.”
Yeah. Moore read at least some Crowley, and he may or may not have read or understood (by practicing) the engine. On the limit, Promethea explain sufficiently of Qabbalah to allow an inventive but otherwise ignorant person regarding magick to sketch a ritual similar to ‘rising on the planes’. I remember Alan mentioning something about Rising on the planes possibly engaing on the englightenment proccess with dedicated pratice… On ‘Three Steps to Heaven’. I don’t know the theory behind the statement, nor had the actual experience,
It’s sad, anyway, to see no mention of an actual engine on Promethea. It’s such an wonderful comic.
Duncan, it gets better on the second half – when there’s tantric sex and tarot and Sophie begins climbing the Tree of Life. (:
It’s all pretty mythical. Inspiring. Teaches you qabbalah stuff with such skill that you hardly forgets. Promethea eventually reaches me emotionally, too (tough not during the beginning).