Toward a Culture of the Self: The Union of Philosophy and Spirituality

‘We are now gods, but for the wisdom.’ With this remark Eric Weinstein has captured the present state of humanity. We have attained tremendous mastery over nature and society, but remain dismally lacking in self- mastery. The sheer disequilibrium between our power and our wisdom now defines the existential threat that looms over our immediate future. With this observation, however, we also obtain our most pressing challenge: to curb the excesses of our power through the cultivation of an equal measure of wisdom. The only question that matters now is this: will we prove capable of redirecting the titanic powers we have wrested from nature away from the aggravation of division, conflict and war and toward the birth of a unified humanity worthy of the gift of the Earth? No ideology, no government, no revolution can bequeath to us the unification we need. But -following an ancient idea- we might discover the source of unity at the very heart of our humanity. This is what the old world called wisdom: a living communion with the Source that spills over into the actuality of living community. Perhaps it is in this ancient idea that we find the seeds of a liveable and hopeful future.

One of the most fruitful ways to make the pursuit of wisdom a living experience is to adopt an approach to personal transformation that is known as the ‘self-realisation’ paradigm. The idea of self-realisation is well known among students of Eastern spirituality, but is as much at home in the later works of Carl Jung, in the Human Potential Movement, the Gurdjieff work or Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory. In its essence, the self- realisation paradigm teaches that the human being possesses an innate potential for spiritual evolution that mostly remains unrealised due to our immersion in systems of self-alienation. Freeing ourselves from our adherence to such systems allows us to reconnect to our innate potential to live in greater freedom, truth and joy. The conceptualisation of this idea as well as the pragmatics of it have varied widely with its formulations within different cultural and historical settings. The persistent recurrence of the core teaching across generations, however, indicates its universal appeal and lasting relevance.

I myself draw great inspiration from the study of a variety of approaches to self-realisation as they occur in what Henry Corbin called the ‘Sophianic traditions.’ These include such schools as Mahayana and tantric Buddhism, Shaivism, Sufism, Gnosticism and the Hermetica. It is my believe that these Sophianic traditions provide us with an authentic understanding of the meaning of ‘wisdom.’ Wisdom, here, is not conceived of just as a human property, but primarily as a divine attribute in which the human can participate. In other words, wisdom is conceived of as an intrinsic quality of Being itself, also understood as primordial awareness or pure consciousness. It is through adopting the proper comportment toward Being that we as individuals can learn to participate in the creative intelligence of the Source. What is required for this is to undergo a conversion to our selves, in such a way that reveals to us the immanence of the Absolute at the heart of our humanity. In short, it is to ‘know thyself’; the philosophical move par excellence.

Modern Western philosophy can help us to apply the often obscure teachings of other times and cultures to the present and to our particular predicament. My filiation here lies with the tradition that runs from Spinoza, through Nietzsche, and Heidegger, to Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben. Here philosophy hasn’t ceased to be a radical practice of freedom and the search for immanence, affirmation and the transmutation of the very idea of the human. Importantly, these thinkers help us to diagnose the root causes of our existential predicament and to courageously embody alternative ways of life.

A central motive in my coaching approach is the notion of the ‘culture of the self,’ as developed by Michel Foucault. This term simultaneously indicates the particular practices of self-cultivation undertaken by the individual and the resultant social impact of the gathering of such individual practitioners into communities or ‘cultures.’ The culture of the self thus implies an ethical concern with selfhood and the way in which we constitute ourselves as creative participants in the collective totality of which we are integral elements. As such, the culture of the self can form an effective remedy to the culture of narcissism and ‘ego-hood’ that is threatening the social integrity of our culture today.

As demonstrated in Foucault’s later work, in ancient Greek and Roman schools the culture of the self consisted in an integral approach to life that wedded philosophical inquiry to spiritual practice. In fact, the quintessential philosophical injunction to ‘know thyself’ was traditionally never separated from the spiritual concern with a ‘care for the self.’ Our cultural history, however, bears witness to a division of philosophy and spirituality into separate domains that share little to nothing in common. As a consequence both elements suffer impoverishment; philosophy becoming calcified into intellectual professionalism, while spirituality devolves into a variety of shared escape-fantasies. The net result of this split is the collective condition that is now being called the ‘meaning crisis’ (by John Vervaeke and others) and which translates into myriad forms of existential and social alienation.

The terms ‘philosophy’ and ‘spirituality’ are used today in a wide variety of senses. The way I have come to understand these terms has come from a search for an integral practice that actualises both conceptual and non-conceptual forms of cognition. Accordingly, I understand philosophy to be, essentially, ideational training, and spirituality as noetic training. The integral harmony of ideation and noesis is the ideal guiding the process of self-realisation.

Philosophy as ideational training

‘Ideation’ is simply the process of forming ideas and concepts. As such it is basically an ongoing act of creation and the training in ideation means developing a mastery of this creative process. To put it differently, ideational training means turning thought into a tool; a tool that can support our growth and evolution instead of undermining it.

Per default, our thinking is turned outward; it is an ongoing attempt to model reality so as to help us navigate the world safely and successfully. But thought possesses a reality of itself, which it is worth investigating in order to find out what exactly it is that we call thinking. As thinkers we have the capacity to turn thought around on itself, thereby becoming self-reflective. This turn-about is the beginning of philosophy proper and the prerequisite to start disciplining our ideational activity.

What is the aim of this training? To answer this question we must explore what would constitute the perfection of thought. We often fail to notice to what extent out ideation is involved in the constitution of the lived quality of our experience. Thinking, in other words, is not merely a second-order reflection on experience, it is one of its constitutive elements. Becoming subtly acquainted with progressively deeper layers of our ideation allows us to become familiar with the profound ways in which we actively shape ourselves (and make ourselves happy or unhappy, whole or divided), based on the modes of thought we intentionally or unintentionally choose to manifest. Thought, in other words, can be engaged as an ontological modulator, a tool enabling us to regulate our mode of being.

Ideational training begins with the practice of non-interventional observation of our private flow of thought, which will inform us of the manner in which our thinking actively produces states of being characterised by lack, division, and strife. Bringing the inner machinery of misery fully to consciousness prepares us to start actualising alternate modes of ideation, modes that are conducive to the production of modes of being that begin to approximate states of human perfection, such as super-abundance, wholeness, and joy. Perfect thought, therefore, is the mode of ideation that facilitates the self-perfection of the human being.

At this point, philosophy starts to realign itself naturally with the concerns of spirituality proper, which is the realisation of wisdom. Philosophy, the ‘love of wisdom,’ is the recalibration of our entire system of values toward the possibility of self-perfection. Spirituality is the work we do on ourselves aimed at the realisation of self-perfection, which is called wisdom. It is because philosophy has forfeited its intimacy with spirituality that it has relinquished its relation to wisdom. Wisdom can never be mere knowledge or intellectual understanding. It is the full-spectrum embodiment of the highest felicities the human being is capable of. Ideation must be aligned to this purpose, but it remains inadequate in itself to attain it. Because wisdom remains always beyond mere thought, the perfection of ideation means to train thought to become self- transcending.

Spirituality as auto-noetic perception

The term ‘spirituality’ can mean nothing if we are unable to provide a novel sense to the much abused notion of ‘spirit.’ I am of the conviction that this sense can be provided by returning to the core meaning of the Latin spiritus and its Greek cognates, pneuma and nous. The latter two terms were central to gnostic and hermetic philosophy respectively, where they had the connotation of pure consciousness or primordial awareness, which is present in the human being, but also calls us to transcendence. In this sense the notion bears striking similarities to understandings of consciousness in Buddhist and Hindu philosophies. Beyond any religious or mythological connotations, we may thus conceive of spirituality as a training in pure noesis; that is, as the immediate and first-hand exploration of the nature of consciousness.

We often associate what are called ‘spiritual traditions’ with particular doctrinal contents. But it is not doctrines that make a tradition spiritual. I suggest, to the contrary, that we re-engage with such traditions not as doctrines but as technologies. What we stand to learn from these schools are experimental protocols for achieving the effective self-disclosure of the nature of consciousness. It is only by moving through and beyond the ostensible ‘belief systems’ that form the external codes of particular traditions, that we may tap into the originary noetic experiences that lie at their foundations. What such noetic experience seems to universally disclose, is a radical potential for freedom and joy at the core of each individual: the sublime element in the human being that is variously called pure consciousness, primordial awareness, Nous, pneuma, the Atman, Purusha, tathagatagarbha, etc. In this light, the idea of spirituality sheds its pernicious ambivalence and becomes of central anthropological interest.

The disclosure of noetic dimensions of which we are rightfully capable as conscious beings is not without its perils. Not the least of these is the tendency to absolutise private experiences as rigid, universal truth. Here, philosophical training becomes of crucial expedience. Previously, ideational training led to the self- transcendence of thought, enabling our transition into noesis. Now we return from noesis back into ideation, but here understood as a dialectical, dia-logical (therefore also communal), explication of non-conceptual states of consciousness. It is in fact through noesis that we achieve a transfiguration of thought, where our ideas and concepts are no longer items on a representational grid, but become fully explicative entities displaying the inexhaustible self-presentation of Being.

The fruition of noetic training is the stabilisation of a state of direct self-knowing, or what I call auto-noetic perception. It is a state in which the nature of consciousness does not have to be represented or conceptualised, but where we rest immediately in and as pure awareness. This state of immediacy allows us to actualise the inherent qualities of pure awareness and is variously explicated in different traditions as moksha, liberation, or enlightenment. I prefer to call it ease. As exemplified by the sages of the wisdom traditions, this realisation gives birth to a deep affirmation of our existence as the spontaneous self-manifestation of Being. When we naturally let life flow from and return to its source we make ourselves capable of enjoying the pure effulgence of Being as such. Negativity is destroyed at its root and the re-integration of the individual within the living totality of the Absolute becomes a real possibility. This is the ‘restoration’ sought after by ancient gnostics and what Carl Jung theorised under the rubric ‘individuation’. The core teaching of all theosophy is realised here, namely that the human mind, turned back upon itself, comes to recognise itself as primordial awareness. The direct self-perception of mind, therefore, is also the fulfilment of the philosophical journey to self-knowledge.