Burning Toward Transcendence--Kenneth Rose on Substack

Kenneth Rose
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Renewing the Spiritual Life After the Evaporation of Meaning. kenrose51.substack.com

  1. Recovering Being

    Jun 8

    Recovering Being

    A slightly edited version of this video is available on YouTube. If you liked this post, consider sharing it. If you haven’t already subscribed, you can here: More of my writing in written and spoken form is available on Amazon This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kenrose51.substack.com

    35 min

  2. Jun 7

    Being, Consciousness, and Bliss

    I recorded this episode a couple of weeks ago while sitting in the middle of a vast courtyard opening out from a cathedral in an old Roman city in western Germany near France and Luxembourg. It was a bright and gently warm Saturday evening. The technical quality is imperfect because I was surrounded by tourists, passersby, and townspeople enjoying the mild weather. There are gaps in the recording when I stopped recording because people began talking near me. The style is informal, unlike my written style, but this approach encourages creative sparks of intuition. Below is an edited version of this podcast episode. There may be still some imperfections in it, despite multiple readings, but that shows that it was not written by AI! It’s a luminous evening in Trier, and I’m sitting on a bench while gazing up at the Dom, or the Cathedral of St. Peter, which lies at the heart of this ancient Roman city in western Germany. The townspeople and tourists are passing the evening in the European manner of promenading through the streets, enjoying ice cream, heading to restaurants, or, sitting, like me, taking in the sunlight after a long winter. The massive Romanesque church rising above me evokes a delightful sense of uplift and exaltation, making my seat here a suitable setting for raising ontological and metaphysical issues. In this essay, I want to write about a number of concepts that are central to the Upaniṣads and Vedānta. I’m not writing as a scholar of the Upaniṣads, an Indologist, or an advocate of a Vedāntic school. Instead, I utilize concepts from the Vedāntic schools to express the contemplative and ontological contemplative vision that I have been articulating in my books. These concepts are old friends, and I have been working with them, meditating upon them, and contemplating their significance since I first began to read the Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad-gītā almost almost sixty years ago. They evoke contemplative, ontological, and mystical intuitions left untapped for me by Latin, Greek, and English terms. The word Brahman has far more resonance for me than the word being, although it is an evocative term in English. This contemplative ontology is based not on the exegesis of a specific philosophical tradition, either in India or in the West but on my own contemplative experience with these concepts. Not merely guided or shaped by reading the Upaniṣads and the study of Vedānta, it has been evoked by the ontological insights coded into their venerable teachings and narratives. We can subject Vedāntic concepts to conceptual analysis, which is a venerable academic approach. But if we approach them contemplatively with a disciplined and purified consciousness, they can evoke a vision of ultimate reality and its attributes. This is the gift of a contemplative metaphysics and a contemplative ontology, which I broached in my last book, Reviving Intellectual Intuition in Metaphysics (Bloomsbury, 2024) and which I plan to expand in a later book called The Generosity of Being. A classic Vedāntic definition of Brahman characterizes it as having the three cardinal features, or attributes, of sat, cit, and ānanda. (In more proper Sanskrit that is saccidānanda.) Although it’s a canonical expression in Vedānta, this formula first appears in the Tejobindu Upaniṣad instead of the earlier classical Upaniṣads. In a later essay, I’ll compare it with an older formulation of Brahman as satyam, jñānam, and anantam, which occurs in the classical Taittirīya Upaniṣad. (In the European Scholastic system, these universal attributes of whatever is or exists would be known as transcendentals.) Sat is being itself and indicates the real and the true. As sat, Brahman is the bedrock reality of whatever subsists or exists. As being itself, nothing subsists or exists outside of sat. Sat grounds and guarantees the truth of true statements and genuine experiences. Sat is Brahman, or being, expressing itself in the ontological hierarchy of physical existence, mental and subtle (prāṇic) experience, and the subsistent hypostases of the formal and ideal realm of the intellect. Cit is usually translated as “consciousness,” but this wan word captures little of the plenitude of experience that occurs in cit. Over the last century and a half starting with Brentano, Western philosophy has asserted that all consciousness is intentional—that every state of consciousness has an intentional object. This conception of consciousness is richer than bare awareness but it introduces an insuperable divide between a mental intention, or representation, and its object, whether internal or external to the mind. On this approach, consciousness is always divided into an intending subject and its mental objects. Consciousness is always about something that a subject intends or points toward mentally. To avoid this necessarily dualistic conception of consciousness, contemporary spiritualities that posit pure, undivided, objectless consciousness as ultimately real replace the word consciousness with awareness. Contrary to Brentano’s intentional consciousness and the rich contents of phenomenological elaborations of consciousness, awareness on this approach is what remains when everything has been eliminated from consciousness except the bare registration of uninflected awareness. But there is far more to consciousness than the mindful registration of events such as my sitting at this table and writing while being surrounded by people. The third term, ānanda, which usually translates as “bliss,” seems the easiest to translate, although there is far more to ānanda than this overused translation suggests. Ānanda is not just ordinary happiness; it’s complete and unsullied bliss. It is supreme happiness. I’ll have more to say about it later. As being itself, or absolute reality, Brahman is the fullness of reality. The Sanskrit word for the fullness of being is pūrṇam, which implies that nothing that subsists or exists stands apart from Brahman. That is the sat aspect or Brahman. The aspect of cit suggests that Brahman is not only the real, or the ontological foundation or bedrock, of what subsists and exists, it is also conscious. It’s aware. These nonduality of Brahman implies that wherever there is being, or sat, there is consciousness, or cit. Conversely, wherever there is consciousness, there is being. These are convertible terms. You can’t have the one without the other. The conception of saccidānanda not only suggests this coincidence of transcendental attributes in Brahman, it necessarily implies them as well. This is an example of a priori metaphysics, which Hume, were he still among us, would cast into the fire. Contrary to Hume, I contend that an a priori metaphysics is what we’re lacking. We’re unable to construct a grounding ontology that unifies the totality of knowledge, being, and existence without recourse to an a priori approach in metaphysics. An a priori metaphysics is not merely grounded in conceptual analysis, nor is it merely a logical operation. Instead, it charts, designates, and symbolizes the fundamental structure of being. Because being precedes and undergirds everything else, an a priori analysis of the concept of being deduces the necessary undergirding structure of whatever subsists ontologically and exists physically as their realizations. This view implies that logic is ontology and that ontology is logic, a view famously associated with Hegel. In a priori metaphysical thinking that has not been stunted by Kantian transcendentalism or by the linguistic turn, the analysis of an ontologically grounding concept like being is also an analysis of a way that being presents itself. Because being as such precedes, or grounds, whatever subsists or exists, it’s impossible to do ontology except as an a priori exercise of the intutive intellect. Ontology and metaphysics are not inductive sciences. They are not empirical. They uncover and articulate the categories that ground experience and that make empirical research possible. Now, to return to ānanda, Brahman’s third cardinal and transcendental attribute. As such ānanda is also convertible with being and consciousness. So, wherever there’s being, there’s not only consciousness, or awareness, there’s also bliss. Conversely, wherever there’s bliss, there’s also consciousness and being. Looked at from the standpoint of ānanda, it’s logical and not at all controversial to hold that, as in the case of sat and cit, wherever there’s bliss, there’s also consciousness and being. But here we hit a sticking point. One might object at this point that an a priori metaphysics that depends upon the analysis of the concept of being, or Brahman, as being constituted of saccidānanda, fails for two reasons. First, the claim that where there is being, there is consciousness fails because we’re not conscious when we sleep. Second, the claim that where there is being, there is bliss fails because no one is always blissful. We live in a world where there is much woe, suffering and misery existing alongside much beauty, truth, and goodness. There’s too much suffering and pain in the world for anyone to countenance an a priori claim that where there is being, there is also bliss. If I were approaching the meaning of saccidānanda from the standpoint of an empirical, or scientific, metaphysics, this would be the place where I would have to abandon that project. There are a number of ways of dealing with these objections. Buddhists claim over against Advaita Vedānta that consciousness is, like everything else, anitya, or impermanent. It comes and goes. When we fall into deep sleep, consciousness disappears. Some consciousness remains while we’re dreaming, but in deep sleep, we’re completely unconscious. The traditional retort of Advaita Vedānta is that when we wake up, we yawn, and happily exclaim, “I slept well and

    33 min

  3. May 10

    The Fullness of Being

    The question of why there is something rather than nothing is familiar in metaphysics. First asked by Leibniz, it was made more famous by Heidegger. More fundamental than the question of why there are beings rather than nothing is, in my view, the question of why there is being in the first place. Related is the question of why there are qualities, or qualia. So far, science hasn’t provided us with an answer to this latter question. As for being itself, it remains invisible to disciplines focused on beings rather than being. They measure the causes and effects of qualities, but why there are qualities and from where qualities come rank among the most intractable metaphysical questions. They rank with the question of why there is being in the first place and not just beings. Not only must we distinguish between beings and being, we must also inquire into what allows being to be? These questions will appear meaningless to some readers, but others will find them engrossing issues that appeal to the essence of ontology, metaphysics, and philosophy in their truest sense. Over the years, my ontological reflections have been formed fundamentally by the Vedāntic teachings in the Upaniṣads. Reflecting on these Hindu books has provided me with my clearest insights into being. My early upbringing in a traditional pre-Vatican II Catholic milieu in New York influenced me unconsciously as I imbibed aspects of Thomistic and Aristotelian philosophy. These were not communicated directly by my teachers or the parish priests but were implicit in the formation that I received in that traditional Catholic setting. My first conscious interaction with metaphysics came through reading, first as a teenager and then more seriously as I grew older, the Upaniṣads. The insights they afforded me were fortified through the practice of jñāna-yoga and bhakti-yoga, which draw upon Vedānta and the Upaniṣads. My intellectual awakening to the question of being happened while reading Étienne Gilson’s Being and Some Philosophers. I spent many months in the 1980s poring over this book and meditating over virtually every sentence. It took a couple of years before I sensed that I had grasped the import of Gilson’s critical views of essentialism. It took more years of rereading and reflection to comprehend the significance of the Thomist existentialism that he defended in the last chapters of the book. But understanding does not equal agreement, for the more I understood Gilson’s views, the less I agreed with him. That’s because I am congenitally a Platonist and not an Aristotelian. Those two words code contrary approaches to metaphysics. My early predilection for the Upaniṣads already predicts my penchant for a Platonic rather than an Aristotelian metaphysics. Despite my appreciation of Aristotelian defenses of universals against austere, deflationary ontologies, I see universals as subsisting whether or not there’s a physical world. Universals—along with qualia—don’t require instantiation in the physical universe because they subsist independently of it. On this central ontological issue, I depart from Aristotle and move decisively toward Plato, whom I find to be much closer than Aristotle to the the spirit of the Upaniṣads. This is the background for the issue that I want to talk about today. This isn’t the question of why there are beings, which is a mysterious issue, but rather the question of why there is being in the first place. To have any chance of answering that question, we first have to suggest an answer the question, “What is being?” Heidegger famously raised this question in Being and Time, but in an unsatisfactory way in my view. By temporalizing being, he reduced being to the status of a being. But being can’t be a being. It can’t be a something like numbers, essences, substances, or human beings because it is the ground of these various types of entities. Were it possible for being to become a being, a something, it would stand on the same level with other beings, or somethings, and would fall—which is impossible—from its status as being itself. A fundamental ontological truth is that being can’t be anything other than itself. This insight authorized Heidegger’s ontological difference and evoked Gilson’s relentless analysis of virtually every metaphysical school that he was familiar with as ultimately reducing being to beings. (In Advaita Vedānta this is the error of failing to perceive the difference between saguṇa-brahman and nirguṇa-brahman, which transforms Brahman into something less than itself.) Despite diversionary moves arising in deflationary, positivist, analytic, and scientific variants of metaphysics, the most fundamental questions in ontology and metaphysics are what being is and, crucially, why there is being. The clue that hints at answers to these questions is suggested by considering qualities, qualia. It’s a delightful spring morning at the Yoga Vidya ashram in northern Germany where I have been on retreat for the last four months. I am outside standing in the fresh spring grass gazing at a stand of flowering trees. When I consider the greenness of the leaves and the grass, I am not looking for a biological answer but rather for the source of the greenness of the leaves and the grass—for greenness itself. What is green? What is it to be green? Where does green come from? How is it that there’s a quality of greenness that suffuses these leaves, the grass on which I’m standing, the green shirt that I’m wearing, and the green lawn chair standing at my side. What is this quality of greenness? Related questions concern the other qualities that we experience in life. We might ask, “What is a virtue?” “What is goodness?” “What is honesty?” and “Where do virtues come from ontologically?” We can ask after the source of other qualities such as the devotion of religious people, the integrity of a reliable person, the feeling of friendship, the feeling of connectedness, the feeling of wanting to do something for others. We might ask after the source of melody, rhythm, language, cognition, and obligation. Besides these vexing issues concerning the source of qualities are questions about numbers and universals. When we analyze everyday experience, we see that it is pervaded with an ensemble of ethical, aesthetic, scientific, mathematical, and metaphysical qualities. None of these qualities can be excised from our experience through a monotonic physicalist understanding of life. We can’t easily and plausibly explain them away. Physicalist attempts to reduce them to something else inevitably fails. How do you reduce a virtue to a physical process? It’s just not possible. Attempts to explain away qualities as referring to or reliant on physical processes will fail for anyone with a classical formation, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Catholic, or Orthodox Christian because they fail to come to terms with the fundamental, existential, phenomenological, and ontological reality of qualities, which pervade our existence and make our lives meaningful. Inquiring into their source and persistently asking why they exist leads me into deep meditative reveries in which I become quiet and still. These reveries kindle philosophical, metaphysical, and ontological insight at their highest pitch. Philosophy at this contemplative level is not the analysis of words and arguments. It’s not a reductive program dissolving all phenomena into physical processes. These contemplations lead to the contemplation of being itself, or Brahman in Sanskrit. As I am using the term being, it is equivalent to the most fundamental standpoint, which is the ground from which everything else emerges. The word itself is not as important as being’s status as that which is always prior to whatever is or exists. When the word being is reduced to a mere abstraction, we can drop it and speak instead of whatever it is that is prior to this reduced concept of being. In Platonic metaphysics, which is not as much studied or as widely known as Aristotelian metaphysics, being is not the ultimate reality but is a product of the interaction of the One, or the Good, and the Dyad. Being on this view is subordinate to these hierarchically superior aspects of reality. Both Plato and Plotinus refer to the most superior or most prior dimension of reality as that which is “beyond being,” or hyperousios (ὑπερούσιος) in Greek. This is not a mere terminological distinction but a contemplative gesture toward the hyperousios, toward that which goes beyond being—or, in Sanskrit, nirguṇa (qualityless) Brahman. As a contemplative move, it’s like trying to view the back of your head with your eyes. It’s bending the mind back to its ground to see that from which it emerges. The insights kindled by this contemplative gesture yield an intimate familiarity with being as such rather than conceptual schemes and verbal doctrines. As we become inwardly still in contemplative reverie, the mind perceives its ontological ground through noēsis, which is its highest capability. This is the intuitive seeing, or cognition, of the intellect, understood in its pre-modern sense of nous in Greek, or buddhi in Sanskrit. The intuitive intellect perceives being as a continuous movement of deferral whereby whatever we say about being recoils back upon us. The Taittirīya Upaniṣad characterizes Brahman—or being—as that “from which words along with the mind return without attaining it” (yato vāco nivartante aprāpya manasā saha, यतो वाचो निवर्तन्ते अप्राप्य मनसा सह, 2.4.1, 2.9.1). This is not a counsel of despair or frustration but a contemplative guideline. In the falling back of language and the mind from being, we catch sidelong glances of what being is. These sidelong glances of being show it as continuously evading capture wit

    23 min

  4. Apr 29

    The Generosity of Being

    In this episode, I offer a short, off-the-cuff summary of the central theme of the ontology that I have developing to support my project of reviving intellectual intuition. Intellectual intuition is the main concern of my latest book, Reviving Intellectual Intuition: Contemplative Philosophies and Being (Bloomsbury, 2025). The fullest flowering of intellectual intuition happens when it’s directed upon Being itself. In this supreme contemplative act, what Heidegger mournfully named “the forgetfulness of Being” (Seinsvergessenheit) is overcome in a vision of Being as unlimited and infinitely endowed with potentials incessantly actualizing themselves. Being imposes virtually no limitations on or obstructions to whatever may arise from its infinite capacity. This is what I call “the generosity of Being,” which is also the title of a book that I am writing and plan on publishing after my current book project. The only limitation on what may arise is due to the character of Being itself as nondual and singular (advaita). Because Being is unbreakable, nothing negative and destructive can ultimately thrive. This impulse toward ontological oneness expresses itself on the human level as caring, concern, compassion, justice, and love. Although apparently weaker than their opposites, these attributes of Being cannot be vanquished because the indivisible oneness of Being is inviolable. Here is an edited transcript of the podcast The podcast is casual in tone, given that I hopped off my bike near a flowering field to record it. For a deeper dive, see my book on this topic—mentioned above and available through the Amazon link below. It’s a lovely spring morning here in northern Germany where I’m spending a few months at the Yoga Vidya ashram. It’s the kind of morning when you can’t stay inside, especially after so many weeks of gray and rainy weather. The beauty of a morning like this—the quietness, the coolness of the air, and the sound of chirping birds knowing that spring is here—makes up for all of those other days. It’s really a great morning to be outside, and it’s a shame to spend even a moment inside. I’m on my bike riding around in the hills around the ashram and admiring the beautiful farmland, the blooming flowers, and the golden fields of early spring plantings coming to maturity. Over the years, my most inspired moments often come when I’m outside. When I’m inside, I feel an enclosure wrapping around me like being in a city, a subway, or inside a car or plane for too many hours. Once I get outside and see the blossoms on the trees and the flowers that are poking up in the spring morning, I start to feel inspired. Many of the poems I’ve written in the last years came to me as inspirations while I was out walking. As I set out this morning on my bike, I thought about the affairs of the world right now and wondered why the values that many of us as spiritual people live by are only weakly reflected in the external world. Then I stopped to contemplate a vast field filled with the golden blossoms of Brassica napus, a common sight in Germany this time of year. I have watched this spring’s crop grow from small seedlings to plants as high as my chest over the last few weeks. Then a crow cawed and winged happily over the field. This reminded me of the central theme of my last book, Reviving Intellectual Intuition: Contemplative Philosophies and Being (Bloomsbury, 2025). In that book, I try to revive the conscious use of intellectual intuition for contemporary philosophy. It’s mostly unsung or denied, although it’s a cognitive faculty that we use constantly without realizing that we’re doing so. In contemporary Western philosophy, intellectual intuition can sound mysterious, even weird, but that speaks to the poverty and the impoverishment of such philosophies. Nourished for too long on desiccated physicalist ontologies, such philosophizing is unable to reflect on the cognitive instrument—intellectual intuition—without which we cannot know anything. When I speak about intuition in this context, I’m not merely referring to its everyday meanings of gut feelings and hunches. They’re part of intuition, of course, but, at a higher level, intuition is the cognitive tool through which we recognize a claim as true, valid, or correct. If I see that an argument is valid, it’s because intellectual intuition verifies that the conclusion logically follows from its premises. This is a common instance of intellectual intuition. When I sense the beauty of a field of golden blossoms and become illumined by its magnificence, my mind becomes still in admiration and awe. This is a higher exercise of intellectual intuition. In this inner stillness, I sense that the field and the sky spring from an ontological ground that eludes every attempt of the mind and language to capture it in a neat definition. This is the ultimate expression of intellectual intuition. In contemporary usage the word intellectual is often negatively contrasted as mere conceptualizing with words like spiritual or feeling. But the way I’m using intellectual goes back to the Latin intellectus, which is a translation of the Greek noēsis. These terms capture more fully what’s meant by intellectual intuition as an immediate apprehension of truth and Being, attended by a sense of sureness, certainty, and a sense of rightness. Alluded to but untreated at length in my last book is the claim that Being is generous, which is the theme of a book that I am now writing called The Generosity of Being. Naming Being as generous is a poetic metaphor warranted by the intellectual intuition that Being places no limits on the arising of phenomena. The generosity of Being is its non-obstructiveness, which places no roadblocks in the path of the actualization of the infinite array of potentials that is contained in Being’s fullness. As a verbal doctrine, the generosity of Being may appear dry and abstract, but the mystical contemplation of Being as Being overcomes what Heidegger eloquently but melancholically named the “forgetfulness of being” (Seinsvergessenheit). This forgetfulness pervades most of our everyday activity when people go about their business thinking about their cars, their relationships, their bank accounts, their pensions, their vacations, or, on a more existential level, how they’re going to make ends meet. This everyday thinking, so far removed from the intellectual intuition of being, is an innocent instance of the forgetfulness of being. Almost as innocent and also indicative of the forgetfulness of being is the acceptance without critical scrutiny of the constructed realms of artificial intelligence and technology that we’re all now completely encaged in. We get entangled in them when we fail to reflect on the character of Being as Being on which they are projected as if on a cinema screen. (I am, necessarily, using my phone to record this talk, using AI to generate a transcript, and using Substack to post it.) Less innocent and more banal is the forgetfulness of Being of people who believe that AI agents are conscious and now suggest that we may have to accord them legal rights as persons. It’s ironic that in a philosophical worldview that often denies consciousness to animals and deflates or denies our consciousness as human beings, there’s a sudden yearning to accord consciousness to AI agents. It’s like freezing your body for a thousand years in the hopes of attaining physical immortality. This banal outlook is a pure expression of Heidegger’s forgetfulness of being. The forgetfulness of being begins when the word being becomes a word without conceptual depth, lacking poetic energy and failing to grant us ontological zest. Metaphysical zest can only come when we begin consciously to evoke intellectual intuition, which, we all possess but rarely consciously use, as remarked long ago by Plotinus. The intellectual intuition of being is generally developed through meditation, the appreciation of nature, philosophical reflection on Being as Being, the practice of mystical theology in the Christian tradition, yogic meditation, Buddhist meditation, and other meditative practices. These exercises stimulate and awaken our awareness of the mystical capacity of intellectual intuition. Reflection on the ontological ground that allows a field of blossoming plants to explode in exuberant enthusiasm from Being suggests an answer to why there there’s so much negativity in the world. Because Being contains within itself infinite possibilities, it doesn’t exert forceful refusal over what can emerge from itself. That is the essence of freedom, which is the ontological ground of our own freedom. Whatever is potential in Being can become actual. Because Being doesn’t place ontological roadblocks on what may arise, it’s non-obstructive. This non-obstructiveness is the generosity of Being. Beautiful realities such as this spring morning emerge from Being, as do other less beautiful events, which raises the question of why Being doesn’t put the brakes on the emergence of negative events and things. To answer, I hold that there is one limit, or brake, on ontological generosity, which is a function of the unbreakable oneness (advaita) of Being. There aren’t two Beings. The oneness of Being explains why we often sense a drive towards harmony and unity. Expressions of the ontological principle of oneness on the human level include compassion, concern, care, and love. When we take care over our relationships and over the world, the nonduality of Being manifests itself directly through our actions. This expression of the oneness of Being in our actions is called dharma in Sanskrit. This ontologically grounded impulse toward nonduality evokes integrity in how we behave in our work and in our care for our families, our friends, and the wider communities of which we’re a part. Because, like Being, we’

    18 min

  5. Apr 15

    Advaita Vedānta and Mystical Theology

    In this podcast episode, I speak off the cuff and informally. It would take a few days to write an article on this topic and longer to refine it for an academic journal. But in my Substack posts and podcasts, I want to speak more freely than possible when speaking in a course on mysticism at a university. It’s more fun this way and allows me more freedom of thought and expression, albeit somewhat imprecisely at times. In this edited transcript of my talk, I have attempted to straighten out some of the tangents and imprecision of a spontaneous talk but without refining away its directness and spontaneity. Well, it’s afternoon now at the ashram and it’s a lovely sunny day in early April, which in northern Europe is a month when there can be sunshine and rain and occasionally even snow. So if you hear some sounds in the background, it’s because there are people playing with the frisbee and everyone’s really delighting and having some sun after a very long winter. I want to continue talking about the topic of Advaita Vedānta and religious experience. This is a significant issue for me, and I think for many others as well. I want to make some comparisons to clarify what I’m trying to uncover in these informal talks. As a person who taught comparative religion for many years at the university level and who has written books on this topic and researched in this field, I would assert that comparative religion is a liberative technique in the history of human consciousness. It’s not in fashion currently in academic religious studies, although academic religious studies, as opposed to theology, was largely shaped in its origins one hundred to two hundred years ago by the comparative religionists who discovered commonalities between different religious traditions. Back then, the comparative religionists weren’t clearly distinguished from the comparative theologians, and they often had an ulterior motive in looking for comparisons. They were motivated by theological concerns. But soon there came a new stream of scholars in this field who began to distinguish between comparative theology and comparative religion. The early significant figures in the field undertook a quest to discover commonalities between religious traditions, religious doctrines, and religious experiences in order to demonstrate the underlying unity of human consciousness across different cultural divides. One of the significant liberative insights that comes through the practice and the study of comparative religion is that religions change, doctrines change, and descriptions of experience change. Religious authorities, religious institutions, religious customs, and religious practices are diverse around the globe. Nevertheless, religions express a set of fundamental ideas, experiences, and teachings. This discovery unveils the spiritually liberative potential of comparative religion when considered as more than just an academic field. When we take a comprehensive and non-exclusivist approach to spirituality, it’s natural to become a comparative religionist. If one has fluency in more than one religious tradition, it’s natural and inevitable that one begins to see the similarities between them. If you study German and English, you can’t help but notice similarities. If you study Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, you also can’t help but notice similarities. It’s harder to discern similarities across different language families, but even there, the quest can be continued to find similarities. There are scholars and academics who see the search for commonalities as a type of essentializing that does violence to the particularities of different traditions. No doubt a facile comparative approach can generate ahistorical essential concepts that are out of touch with the realities that they express. But generalization is essential to thought. Every concept is itself a generalization. Whenever we use the word dog or tree, we are already engaged in generalizations because all concepts are generalizations. So we inevitably use essentializing concepts. We use them constantly in everyday speech. These reflections about comparatives studies are meant as prologue to an intriguing comparison that occurred to me earlier today when I was thinking about the last post that I recorded on Advaita Vedānta and mystical experience. In that podcast, I spoke about four different kinds of Advaita Vedānta that I have detected. (There are others besides the four that I mentioned. Recent scholarly studies of Advaita Vedānta deal comprehensively with traditional forms of Advaita Vedānta in India and the newer, highly erudite expressions of non-mystical Advaita Vedānta. But they don’t venture into discussing more popular forms of Advaita Vedānta, such as Neo-Advaita.) These four varieties of Advaita Vedānta can be illuminated by drawing upon a parallel from Catholic mystical theology. Catholic mystical theology is a subject that’s long fascinated me, and not for merely scholarly reasons. This fascination began in my personal spiritual quest, which was deeply shaped in my early years by an encounter with devotional Hinduism. After that, there was a deep encounter with evangelical Christianity. The bridge between those two worlds was the writings of Thomas Merton, who opened my mind to a wider spirituality. In learning to engage his writings, I was inevitably led towards other Catholic mystical theologians and the so-called manualists. The most significant of the manualists for me is a French mystical theologian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jesuit Augustin Poulain. His manual of mystical theology, The Graces of Interior Prayer, remains to this day a valuable source of knowledge about mystical experience and the ways in which it has been articulated or schematized in the Catholic mystical tradition. A decade ago, I wrote Yoga, Meditation and Mysticism, a book in which I delved deeply into Poulain’s taxonomy, or mystical map, which he structured on the basis of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross’s mystical writings. The detailed contemplative maps devised by the manualists in the Catholic tradition, a school of thought that extends from the 1700s to the early part of the twentieth century provide significant data for a comparative study of mysticism. After Vatican II, the manualist tradition seems to have slipped out of view in mainstream Catholicism, but among traditionalist Catholics and students of comparative mysticism, Poulain’s manual is still highly regarded. In Poulain’s highly articulated map of the spiritual life, there are two fundamental distinctions that have to be kept in mind. The first is the distinction between ascetical theology and mystical theology; the second is between acquired contemplation and infused contemplation. For those of you who are more familiar with Hinduism or Buddhism, this will likely be obscure language, but to put the shoe on the other foot, someone coming from the world of Catholic mystical theology would likely find the terminology that is used in Hinduism and Buddhism as equally obscure. The obscurity does evaporate, though, with familiarity. (On a side note I’ve noticed that here in the ashram in Germany where I have spent the last four months, most people are oriented towards Hinduism and to a lesser extent Buddhism. When I teach courses comparing the stages of samādhi in the Yogasūtra, the jhānas in the Buddhist Visuddhimagga, and the degrees of mystical contemplation in the Catholic mystical tradition, some ashramites react to my sudden breaking into what sounds like very traditional Catholic language as if I were speaking a language that they have never before encountered. Or perhaps they have, but their experiences with it have not been positive. It takes a little bit of getting people acclimated to these concepts before they feel at ease with them.) To say a few words about these two pairs of distinguishing terms, I’ll start with the fundamental division in Catholic mystical theology between ascetical theology and mystical theology. This fundamental division gave rise to two separate bodies of theological analysis in the Catholic mystical tradition. Ascetical theology is concerned, above all, with the penitential disciplinary practices that prepare one to go more deeply into the spiritual life. Mystical theology, on the other hand, is concerned with states of contemplative wisdom that are infused into the soul by God as an act of grace. The word mystical in the Catholic mystical tradition is thus a technical term with a precise meaning. Mystical contemplation is prayer that is infused into the soul by God through the Holy Spirit. It’s a gracious gift that cannot be procured by any activity on the part of the recipient. At best, one can only prepare oneself for the possible reception of mystical grace. In the Catholic mystical tradition, mystical theology is concerned with the graces that come gratuitously, or freely, from God, while ascetical theology is concerned with the practices of purification that dispose us and our awareness to the subtle state of consciousness that comes as close as one can come to mystical contemplation without actually producing the states of infused mystical prayer. On paper this sounds quite complex, and in early Christian mystical settings, these distinctions were not set out so clearly as they were later by Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and manualists such as Poulain, Adolphe Tanquerey, Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, and Giovanni Scaramelli. But from a phenomenological perspective this distinction is experienced as the difference between laborious ascetical prayer, which Teresa famously likened to drawing water from a well to water a garden, and the more easeful stages of mystical, contemplative prayer that she likened to using a water wheel to irrigate the garden or letting it be watered by a nearby river or rainfall. Th

    38 min
  6. Advaita Vedānta and Mystical Experience

    Apr 6

    Advaita Vedānta and Mystical Experience

    Prompted by a recent discussion with an advocate of a school of contemporary Advaita Vedānta that discounts mystical experience, I explore the positive and indispensable role that mystical experience plays in awakening to enlightenment. You can follow along with the transcript on the audio or you can read the slightly edited version of the transcript here: I’ve been staying for the last few months at an ashram in Germany. It’s a traditional place where the Hindu deities are honored in daily pujas and ceremonies. It’s possible to engage in spiritual practice from five in the morning until ten at night. There are aratis, satsangs, yoga classes, and traditional teachers of Vedanta from India. Globally known yoga teachers and Ayurveda physicians are also in attendance here. So it’s an extraordinary opportunity to be here and to revive and deepen my spiritual life. I’ve been writing, reading, and doing my seva here at the ashram. I’ve also been deeply meditating, practicing yoga, and experiencing a reunion with the Self. That’s exactly what one expects from time spent in an ashram, and that’s the experience that I’ve been having here. Just yesterday, I was listening to a teacher of Advaita Vedanta from India, who said something that set me to thinking about the different varieties of Advaita Vedanta that we can choose from currently. To put this quite simply, we might say that there is the traditional Advaita Vedanta that goes back to Shankara and is still taught and preserved in the four ashrams that Shankara founded in India. So this is a very traditional Advaita Vedanta. That’s one kind of Vedanta That’s a genuine tradition, but it would be difficult for someone like me to enter into it. I think that it would be better to have been born into the Hindu tradition to be able to fully access this tradition in terms of language, background, and culture. And then there’s a second kind of Advaita Vedanta that’s been popularized throughout the globe over the last century and a quarter by swamis who came to the West like Swami Vivekananda. They articulated a Vedanta that’s generally known as Integral Yoga. This term, Integral Yoga, was first introduced by Swami Sivananda to refer to his approach to Advaita Vedanta. This is an approach that is traceable back to Swami Vivekananda. Integral Yoga is a yoga tradition that integrates the four classical yogas that are often mentioned in introductions to Hinduism. These include Karma Yoga, which is the yoga of seva, of work, of activity, of offering the fruits of your actions to your favored deity, to your ishta-devata. And then, secondly, there is what’s commonly known as Raja Yoga and Hatha Yoga—they’re distinguishable; they’re not quite the same, so we can call them the yoga of the subtle body and the yoga of the physical body. Then there’s Bhakti Yoga, which is a very popular form of yoga. This is the yoga of devotion and of love for the Divine. It easily links up with devotional traditions in other religious traditions. It also speaks directly to our hearts as well as to our minds. Finally, there’s Jnana Yoga, which is the yoga of wisdom, the yoga of knowledge. This is what I want to talk about today, although it has become a difficult topic. The issue comes down to not only what is knowledge, what is jnana, but also how to attain it. From the standpoint of Upanishadic Advaita Vedanta, there’s nothing to attain because we are already the Self that we’re looking for. To put that in the memorable saying of a recent Neo-Advaita teacher, we can simply call off the search. There’s nothing to search for because we’re already found! We are the Self that we’ve been looking for. There’s nothing else to do. And everything else is merely a distraction from just being what we already are, which is pure, eternal, formless, infinite consciousness. This third kind of Advaita Vedanta, which is currently popular, is known as Neo-Advaita. There’s a fourth kind of Advaita Vedanta—as yet unnamed—which is becoming more influential, and there are many varieties and streams that enter into this view. The characteristic of this approach is that, like Neo-Advaita, it states the profound Advaitic Vedantic truth that we’re already enlightened. We never were not enlightened if we define enlightenment as being pure consciousness. Since there is only pure consciousness, it’s not possible to be anything other than pure consciousness. We simply have to recognize this truth, this teaching, for us to throw off the shackles of our blindness. You can try it yourself: Say to yourself, aham brahmasmi, or, in English, “I am pure consciousness.” Then be still for a moment. In that stillness, there may be a twinkle, a sensation, an awareness, or an insight that this is the truth: There is only consciousness. The teaching that really helped me with this early in my spiritual practice over fifty years ago was when my first guru said in his writings that you are not this body. That stunned me when I first read it, because I thought, if I’m not this body, what then am I? That led to the classic practice of atma-vichara, or self-inquiry, which is the inquiry or the investigation of one’s experience to see what in that experience is actually the truth. And of course, if you really grapple with the statement that you are not this body, that can lead—as it led in my case—to an almost furious search to find out, well, who then am I if I’m not this body? It’s an extraordinary thought at first for a pure physicalist or materialist. It’s an idea that’s laughable to them at the outset, but even they might be challenged if they really started to grapple with that teaching. If I’m not my body, who am I then? Am I my mind? But the mind constantly changes, and what is a mind in any case? I can touch my body but how do I touch my mind? How do I define a boundary around my mind? I can define the boundary around my body, at least from a common sense standpoint. But how do I define or how do I grapple with or how do I rope in my mind? You see how difficult that would be. It’s impossible because the mind isn’t a physical object. It’s subtle and it eludes any sort of definition. I can’t really find my mind. There is a classic story in Zen Buddhism about a disciple who comes to a Zen teacher and asks for their mind to be pacified. The Zen teacher replies, “Show me your mind, and I’ll pacify it.” There’s no way you can act upon that instruction. I’m not sure what it would even mean to say that I’m my mind rather than my physical body, although I do know that the mind can be both blissful and terrifying. Everything we experience, we only experience through the mind, which is an old insight. That’s not anything that you have to go to India to discover. Simple reflection upon our experience shows that we don’t have any direct encounter with the objects that we perceive except through our minds. And this is an idea that was also discovered by Idealist philosophers in the West. So, if I’m not my body and I’m not my mind, what’s left? Well, of course, if we are familiar with the Hatha Yoga teachings and the Tantric teachings of Hinduism, of India, of Buddhism, then we know that we have a subtle body, which is the prana body. We can perceive it through Hatha Yoga techniques and through deep meditation when we become aware of the subtle body. But that body also is changing, and it’s not something that I can physically define the way I can my physical body. It’s not always present in our awareness because we’re not always having deep, profound awakenings of Kundalini or the chakras. These are extraordinarily valuable experiences when we do have them because these profound experiences of the subtle realms reveal to us the presence of the devas in our completely flattened age in which physicalism and scientism have deprived us of our spiritual birthright and spiritual confidence. These experiences give us the knowledge that there are subtler and higher worlds than this one, and that we’re not merely trapped in the physical world as randomly evolved entities whose death spells the complete and absolute end of any form of experience. That’s why spiritual experiences are extremely valuable. They end, of course, and this is the point that one always hears from from the latter two kinds of Advaita Vedantists, both the Neo-Advaita Vedantists and also the fourth kind (I don’t have a name for it yet), who, unlike the Neo-Advaita teachers, at least accept spiritual experience. But they say that it only plays a purificatory role; that it’s only useful for bringing us to the place where we can recognize that we are eternal, formless consciousness, which is the liberative insight. Yet among these teachers there’s often a mocking of mystical experiences, a satirizing of them and of the people who have these experiences, who are sometimes depicted as somewhat sad and deluded because they supposedly think that these experiences are enlightenment itself. This argument holds that experiences can’t be enlightenment because, like all other experiences, they end. Like the pleasure of a good meal, the happy events of a family celebration, or the excitement of a vacation, they all end in the humdrum reality once again of everyday life. So, because enlightenment experiences also end, they shouldn’t be pursued, the argument is made, and, it continues, they’re to be seen ultimately as distractions. Some of these teachers mock or satirize the people who engage in these practices, even though they themselves may have engaged in them and had profound experiences. We might say that apart from those enlightenment experiences and practices, they may not have gotten to the point where they actually are. So a point that needs to be made here is that while it’s true that enlightenment experiences end, what they are an experience of does not e

    25 min
  7. The Mystical Quest 3a

    Feb 22

    The Mystical Quest 3a

    (Please excuse the email earlier today, which led to a dead end!) In this episode, I offer an overview of the mystical path as I conceive it, beginning with what I call Beginner’s Bliss. This is a phase at the beginning of the awakened life where we may experience periods of spiritual happiness and ecstasy, known as “sensible consolation” in Catholic mystical theology. Following Beginner’s Bliss is the Night of the Senses, which the first great experience of purgation. The beginning of this stage is marked by a sudden cessation of sensible consolations. The spiritual well runs dry, so to speak, leading the practitioner into the crucible of radical surrender to the divine. However, this transition eventually gives way to what St. Teresa of Avila called the Prayer of Quiet. Metaphorically, we can liken this subtle second awakening in the spiritual life to the first crocuses of spring poking through the winter snow. Here is an edited transcript of the video: Welcome to episode three in this series on my Substack, Burning Toward Transcendence. The title of this episode is “Fifteen Steps on the Spiritual Path.” For some people that sounds too formulaic, too rigid. The idea that there are multiple stages or steps on the spiritual path seems too abstract. They point out that the spiritual life is an individual and intimate experience, which can’t be reduced to a formula. Worse than reducing it to a formula, they continue, is to live it in accordance with a formula. When the spiritual life is practiced with dedication and seriousness, it grants us a personal sense of unity or oneness with a higher spiritual reality. This unique experience can’t be reduced to a formula. By outlining fifteen stages on the spiritual path, I don’t intend to force the spiritual life to fit within the contours of a conceptual scheme. If we get lost while driving, we can look at Google Maps to see where we are. But we wouldn’t think that the map is the road. The road’s outside, beyond the vehicle and the navigation system. We have to actually travel the road; the map can’t make the journey for us. A map is useful for orientation. It tells us where we are and how to get to our destination. It’s the same with spiritual maps. They’re useful for suggesting the steps on the itinerary that leads to divine union. We have so much spiritual information today that it’s easy to get confused or overwhelmed by the jumble of available spiritual teachings in multiple printed and digital sources. Everyone who has anything to say about the spiritual life has a YouTube channel or a Substack. And I’m one of them. To this mass of information and advice, we now have to include the potential that AI has for becoming a spiritual teacher along with everything else that its does for us. (After I’m done with this video, I’m going to ask Claude and Gemini a few questions to see what kind of gurus they would make!) With all of these resources at our disposal in an era lacking strong institutional structures offering meaningful spiritual guidance, we can easily lose our way. We may not even find the way. That’s why I want to talk about my experience with stages and steps on the spiritual path. As a helpful reminder, here is the list of the fifteen steps or stages. The titles evoke what for me were meaningful turning points in my own spiritual journey: Fifteen Stages on the Spiritual Path 1. Unawareness: Living in “the Real World.” 2. Awakening: Seeing the Path. 3. Renunciation: Stepping onto the Way. 4. Rapture: Beginner’s Bliss. 5. Spiritual Presumption: The Drug of Spiritual Pride. 6. Sensory Purgation: A Well Run Dry. 7. Spiritual Standstill: Was it Only a Dream? 8. Radical Surrender: No Conditions. 9. Mystical Illumination: An Awakening Presence. 10. Mystical Effectiveness: Spirit without Boundaries. 11. Mystical Carelessness: Drifting Away. 12. Mystical Purgation: The Death of the Sacred. 13. Mystical Death: The Fire of Nothingness. 14. Mystical Awakening: The Fragrance of Nonduality. 15. Mystical Union: Remaining in the Presence. The first stage, of unawareness, or living in “the Real World” is, as I pointed out in the last episode, not a stage on the path. Stage two is awakening, or seeing the path. Stage three is renunciation, or stepping onto the way. Number four is rapture, or beginner’s bliss. Number five is spiritual presumption, which is the drug of spiritual pride. Number six is, to use a more technical term coming out of the Catholic mystical tradition, sensory purgation, which I compare to a well that has gone dry. The seventh stage is spiritual standstill. This is the moment in the spiritual life when we suspect that it was an illusion, that it was fake, or that we had spiritual or emotional indigestion. Now we wonder if spiritual awakening was just a dream? Then comes the eighth stage, the step of radical surrender. This is a second major turning point in the life of a spiritual practitioner. Radical surrender occurs when we stop placing limits on the divine, God, truth, or Being. Instead of continuing to create the Divine in our own image or to use it to our advantage, we arrive at the first stage of spiritual maturity where we let what is ultimately most real be what it is and we conform ourselves to it rather than trying to conform it to ourselves. Stage nine is mystical illumination, when we become aware of a subtle inner presence. Stage ten is mystical effectiveness. Spiritually advanced mystics are often highly effective people. They’re not only people who run away and sit in a cave somewhere. At the eleventh stage, we experience mystical carelessness, or drifting away from the spiritual life. This is a difficult moment later on in the spiritual life when we become too accustomed to our status as illumined persons, and we become eligible for a new season of purgation. The twelfth stage is mystical purgation, also known as the Night of the Spirit in Catholic mystical theology. I name this major turning point in the spiritual “the death of the sacred.” This is a serious, even dangerous, moment in the spiritual life. “Mystical death” and “the fire of nothingness” sound extreme, and this degree of the spiritual life is known only to the most generous and courageous mystical seekers. Stage fourteen is mystical awakening. Well, haven’t we already had an awakening if we’re on the path? But this is an awakening at a much deeper level, where we detect the fragrance of nonduality. Nonduality is a word that’s become more popular, and not just in alternative spiritual circles or among those who practice the nonduality of Advaita Vedanta. It has begun to infiltrate other religious and spiritual traditions, particularly some versions of progressive or mystical Christian theology. Stage fifteen is mystical union, or remaining in the presence. That’s a quick overview of the fifteen stages, which I will now go through step by step, stage by stage. I want to give a general sense of the movement, of the flow, along the path. On the slide in the video, I code the fifteen stages with three colors. The first stage is coded in black, which signifies that it’s not actually a step on the path. I use purple and blue to indicate that the stages of the spiritual life can be reduced to two phases, which repeat continually like the seasons. Purple indicates seasons of purgation, purification, or cleansing. Blue refers to illumination. There is a continual interplay between the purificatory stages in the spiritual life and the illuminative stages. In the illuminative stages, coded here in blue, we gain a deeper sense, experience, knowledge, or insight into the fundamental spiritual reality of life. The purple stages refer to phases when we are bereft of illuminative experiences and insights. The purpose of these purgative stages is to prevent us from becoming addicted to pleasant spiritual sensations and experiences (or more problematically, of turning them into commodities or products that we can monetize). One cause of the return of purgation is subtle spiritual pride. This develops in people who have gained a reputation for being spiritual and who become subtly attached to this reputation, relish it secretly, and revel in thinking of themselves as spiritual guides, as illumined persons whose words are nectar to others who want to go deeper into the spiritual life. When we’re proficient in our work of profession, we also feel a sense of confidence, perhaps pride, so I don’t want to reject having pride and confidence in what we do. In the spiritual life, though, this can lead to presumption, carelessness, and the sad, unfortunate downfalls that we sometimes see among spiritual teachers and spiritual leaders. If we become aware that we are succumbing to spiritual pride, trusting in our own powers, and taking for granted our spiritual reputation, we should examine ourselves in light of the examples set by the most eminent saints. Then we should gently undertake the penitential work of gently and judiciously pruning this baggage from our souls. In the last few minutes of this talk, I want evoke a sense of how these fifteen stages might unfold. We first enter the path to divine union because of trauma, a sudden awakening, or in response to an intuition that we need to deepen what we’ve doing more by feel. At the beginning of the spiritual life, we’re often graced with extraordinary experiences, profound feelings of gratitude, deep insights, intutive understanding of scriptures and philosophical writings, and clarity about spiritual teachings that once were opaque to us. We may find ourselves able to speak ecstatically about our newfound path, and we may feel the need to convince everybody we know of its truth. If we had been intellectually unengaged before our awakening, we may now eagerly study ancient texts, read philosophy, and learn ancient languages so as to appreciate more deeply the relig

    24 min

  8. Feb 15

    The Mystical Quest 2

    In this video, I map my fifteen stages on the spiritual path on the three classic mystical phases of Purification, Illumination, and Union. I then reduce these three phases to the two phases of Purgation and Illumination. Before exploring each of the fifteen stages, which are posted below, I point out in the video that the first stage is not actually a stage on the spiritual path. It’s the standpoint of people who either don’t know about the spiritual path or who reject it as an illusion. After rejecting the belief that the so-called real world of frenetic activity is the actual real world, I indicate the three main ways that people transition from the stage of Unawareness to the stage of Awakening, which is the second stage in my itinerary. You’ll have to tune in to find out what these three ways are and how they relate to the two types of souls described by philosopher and psychologist William James. Note: The image above was generated by Notebook LLM. AI didn’t write this lecture but—as at a magazine’s art department—it produced a helpful illustration based on my ideas. Here is a updated and edited version of the transcript: I was playing with some AI tools last night, and I see that AI agent could produce this video for me. I could maybe look 40 years younger, have a different voice, and have all the content generated for me based upon my files, YouTube videos, university lectures, and the books I’ve written. They could generate something quite plausible, but I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to sit here and talk to the camera. I just want to talk to you the way I would if you were taking a course from me, or if we were sitting together in an ashram, a university or a monastery talking about the spiritual life. So, let’s take a look again at the fifteen stages of the spiritual spiritual path that I mentioned yesterday. Fifteen Stages on the Spiritual Path 1. Unawareness: Living in “the Real World.” 2. Awakening: Seeing the Path. 3. Renunciation: Stepping onto the Way. 4. Rapture: Beginner’s Bliss. 5. Spiritual Presumption: The Drug of Spiritual Pride. 6. Sensory Purgation: A Well Run Dry. 7. Spiritual Standstill: Was it Only a Dream? 8. Radical Surrender: No Conditions. 9. Mystical Illumination: An Awakening Presence. 10. Mystical Effectiveness: Spirit without Boundaries. 11. Mystical Carelessness: Drifting Away. 12. Mystical Purgation: The Death of the Sacred. 13. Mystical Death: The Fire of Nothingness. 14. Mystical Awakening: The Fragrance of Nonduality. 15. Mystical Union: Remaining in the Presence. With its fifteen stages, this appears to be a quite complicated map. We can simplify it by uncovering its underlying logic in light of the three stages of the spiritual path in traditional Catholic mystical theology and Neoplatonism that I mentioned last time. These include the stage of katharsis, or purgatio in Latin, which means “purification,” or “cleansing.” The second stage is illumination, or illuminatio in Latin and ellampsis in Greek. If you hear the English word lamp in ellampsis, that’s because lamp goes back to a Latin word lampas, which was taken directly from the Greek lampas (λαμπάς). The third stage is union, unio in Latin and henōsis in Greek, Henōsis carries the meaning of “unification.” The Greek word for the Supreme Ultimate Nondual Reality is to hen, or “the One. So henōsis means becoming one with what is ultimately Real. For even greater simplicity, I reduced these three stages to the two stages of purification and illumination. On this simpler approach, union can be seen as the perfection of illumination, which arises through purification. Purification is the process through which we move to final the final perfection of purification as union from everyday absorption in the so-called Real World, which many people take as ultimate reality. Attaining to union, or the standpoint of perfect enlightenment, occurs through intermittent periods of purification followed by seasons of illumination. The interplay of these two seasons of the spiritual life constitutes the rhythm of the spiritual life. In this and the next session, I want to run through the fifteen stages and relate them to the two phases of purification and illumination. The first stage in this itinerary is named, “Unawareness,” or living in so-called Real World. Actually this isn’t a stage in the spiritual life; it’s just ordinary life lived without orientation to spiritual values or truths. Excluding this first stage as a spiritual standpoint, we can say that there are only fourteen stages on the spiritual path. But even if it’s not a step on the spiritual path, it’s still an important stage because it’s the standpoint of many people who grew up without spiritual formation. So, for many people, it’s the jumping-off point into the spiritual life. I have lived in Germany for the last six years, and I’ve spent a lot time here over the almost three decades. Back in my early days here when I was starting to learn German, I often watched German TV movies to learn the language. These movies were pretty generic, with simple, predictable plots. Whenever they wanted to show that somebody was living a meaningful and authentic life and wasn’t passive and just letting life happen to them, they showed them as moving around quickly, traveling to this and that country, starting or ending relationships, having emotional outbursts, trying something adventurous like paragliding somewhere in South America. Their lives was full of incessant movement and action. For a lot of people, that’s their idea of being really alive and living in the real world as an external place providing constant stimulation. The more stimulations we have, and the more we’re able to creatively interact with them, to profit from them, and perhaps to monetize them, the more we’re living a real life in the real world. That’s the world that most of us have been educated to live in. That’s the world we’re supposed to take most seriously. But the point of the spiritual life is that that’s just not true. That world is an illusion. It’s not that the world itself is a total illusion because we can also unfold spiritually in the world and unfold as human beings. The world allows us to experience life’s deeper realities through literature, art, religion, philosophy, relationships with others, and selfless service. The world itself is not māyā in the popular sense of its being a pure and pointless illusion like faces that we might trace in passing clouds. What is māyā, what is illusion, is when we think that the actual real world is the contrived world of hectic activity in which we’re trying to profit and monetize our experiences to the full and to get through the so-called bucket list before we pass from the scene. Another false real world recently gripping much of humanity is AI-generated. Because of some projects I am working on, I was recently invited to participate in an intensive seven-day AI seminar to learn how to create AI agents to create videos, books, articles, answer emails, and run the tedious side of a business. The promise of AI is that it will free us from unglamorous work and free up a whole week out of each month. We can use the newly available freed-up time to go on exotic vacations, learn a new language, or, finally, hang glide on the Mediterranean coast. AI will allow us to live fuller lives while still being extremely productive! But we know how that works. For most people, if they have a regular job and if they can produce the same amount of work in four days that they used to do in five, well, that just means they’re going to start having an extra day of work squeezed into their usual work week. So instead of saving us time, AI is speeding everything up. We’re frenetically entering prompts into our AI agents and doubling the amount of illusion in our lives than was there before AI burst in us in late 2022. In accord with the mystical traditions of the world, I want to affirm neither of these scenarios depicts the real world. The real world, the true world, is within, and the external world that many take as the real world is actually a mere shadow of a higher and subtler dimension of reality. Perhaps hints of the radiance of that higher reality will shine through the words in this presentation as you encounter them meditatively. Unawareness, or living in the illusory real world, only becomes a station on the spiritual path when we first realize that we have to step away from that glittering mirage of false reality. Realizing that we have to step away from unconscious submersion on the artificial real worlds in which we have imprisoned ourselves is the first step on the spiritual path. This raises the question of how or why we would take this step. Because we have to see the spiritual path before we can step onto it, I call the second stage of my itinerary, “Awakening: Seeing the Path.” In order to awaken to the spiritual life, we have first discover that there’s a path that we can enter. This is probably the most difficult stage or transition point in whole itinerary because for many people, stepping out onto the path doesn’t occur unless one of two very different kinds of events occur. The first event is probably the most common. This is when some difficulty comes into our lives. Every life has difficulties, and we cannot escape from them. But perhaps something happens in your life that brings you to an inner breaking point, to hitting bottom, to the recognition that things are just not going the way you thought they should go. And you feel at a loss as to what to do next. Based on how they were raised some people might think of praying. Or if they don’t have familiarity with prayer, they might release an existential cry from the heart for help or guidance. It might be more mute and inarticulate than that. It might be a sense that I’v

    26 min
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Renewing the Spiritual Life After the Evaporation of Meaning. kenrose51.substack.com

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