TCGA:
The Cardio-Gnostic Archive
This page will feature writings and other forms of media exploring related topics.
…
A Scholarly Writing Sample from 2018:
Language and the Logos:
In the Context of Spiritual Attunement and Healing,
By James-Maxwell Milne
I. Introduction of Terms and Tasks
“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.”
-Gospel of John (Lattimore, 1996)
This biological, psychological, and spiritual event – the emergence of human language – has inspired and perplexed mystics, philosophers, and scientists throughout the ages. Language and words apparently wield, both consciously and unconsciously, a magical and persuasive power over our bodies, mind, and being. This essay explores the inscrutable concept of the Logos; and the idea that, through spiritual activity and education, one can become released from the deadlocks of human language into a relationship with the Logos, as a transcendent form of mystical understanding, a type of language beyond language or thinking beyond thinking.
A special attention will be given to the philosophical or phenomenological qualities of human language, rhetoric, and logic against the theological counterpoint of the Logos, as a metaphysical activity or intelligence that both constrains and transcends the boundaries of the human. As one might surmise, the subject matter elaborated above is an infinitely complex and endlessly daunting intellectual task, as infinite as language itself. So, for a conceptual blueprint, this essay will approach the release from language into the Logos in regards to spiritual healing by setting forth a three-stage cycle of movement or evolution. These cycles will be metonymically organized into three stages so as to mirror the shamanic activity of dismemberment: (i) pathos in the body or soul; (ii) dismembering of the soul-body by spirit; (iii) remembering the soul-body into a new state of consciousness and well-being (Harner, 2013). For this task, the terms of Arthur Versluis, a prominent scholar of Western Esotericism, will be useful to introduce and define three interrelated polarities that will be helpful to the linguistic-philosophic tasks of this paper: magic versus mysticism; cosmological gnosis versus metaphysical gnosis; the path of via positiva versus that of via negativa. As elaborated in Versluis’s book Magic and Mysticism, this primal and essential dyad can be defined as follows:
Magic has to with to do with power over others or over nature; often, the magician seeks to command. Mysticism, on the other hand, has to do with the surrender and transcendence of self and of power; the mystic’s primary interest is not in worldly command but in realization of the divine. (Versluis, 2007)
He goes on to explain how the many practices and traditions within this spectrum can be understood as “magico-mystical” or “mystico-magical”, implying that the former represents an “escape of the soul from this world into the spiritual universe” whereas the latter involves “the induction…even the compulsion of the divine powers within the material world” (2007). Although reality is always more complex, in reduction, magic implies influence and transformation through will-powered action whereas mysticism implies ecstatic, passive reception and transformation of perception, a state of consciousness that attunes toward a higher unity to the divine (Versluis, 2007). This antipode also harkens back to the rhetorical debate concerning the spectrum of sorcery versus shamanism, where the former indicates the use of spiritual power or magic or for selfish, non-compassionate purposes and the latter uses spiritual power only for the purposes of healing and compassionate understanding/knowing (Harner, 2013). Therefore, I would define both the shamanic and spiritual sensibilities as magico-mystical healing, in that they only seek to create change in external reality in the service of regeneration, and through not the use of one’s own life-force or will-power but through the invocation of transcended-compassionate spirits (for the shamanic) or the realignment toward the One God or the Logos or the Holy Spirit (for the spiritual).
However, the shamanic is usually categorized as closer to the magical and metaphysical gnosis toward the mystical, partly because the shamanic tends more toward the spiritual aspect of matter or cosmos whereas metaphysical gnosis tends more toward the divine and the acosmic. These distinctions have traces in the literature and practices of each. In order to further understand this distinction, the spectrum of cosmological (physical) gnosis versus metaphysical (meta-cosmological) gnosis should be reintroduced:
On the one hand, we have the current of cosmological gnosis to which belongs not only magic, but also alchemy, astrology, the various “mancies” like geomancy or chiromancy, and all other forms of secret or semisecret knowledge of the cosmos. And on the other hand we have the current of metaphysical gnosis, the most lucid form of which is the negative mysticism of Dionysius the Areopagite or Meister Eckhart. (Versluis, 2007)
Expanding upon the definitions of Versluis, shamanic gnosis tends toward the magical-cosmological whereas metaphysical gnosis tends toward the mystical-metaphysical. Within shamanic gnosis, gnosis is defined by the retrieval of knowledge as information, in that it tends toward an affirmative understanding difference and distinction through the experience of the journey or exomatosis, often associated with the knowledge given through inner eye experiences in altered states, whereas metaphysical gnosis tends toward a type of knowledge or gnosis of oneness, where all experience, information, and distinction is obliterated under the one power of God or Spirit. In this way, shamanic healing involves distilling the spiritual through a natural language to be apprehended by the ascent of the mind or inner eye-ear-body, etc., whereas spiritual healing invokes the Logos, an entity or intelligence the descends from a higher or inner domain, to bestow feelings of peace or love or oneness, a knowledge of the heart, an unknowing that surpasses human understanding, category, and thought (Versluis, 2007).
At the linguistic-symbolic level, the path of via positiva versus via negativa can further define the phenomenology of this spectrum: as Versluis terms, “the via positiva, or the path of symbols, and the via negativa, or the path of negation or absolute transcendence” (2007). Here, I would codify shamanic gnosis as a via positiva path that aims to experience positive mystical content or information through the domain of the third eye, or a mediated experience of the spiritual unconscious as inherent to dreams or visions, whereas metaphysical gnosis tends toward the absolute negation of human information or experience or language or symbols by cutting away through all experience to enter into or experience God or Christ consciousness, or Samadhi, or the grace and presence of transcendent oneness, often associated with the domain of the heart or crown.
To elaborate further within this mystical progression, and to move toward understanding the original task of this line of thought – the release from human language into a relationship with the Logos – we will harken back to the shamanic event of dismemberment, which shamans and shamanic practitioners often describe as a spontaneous experience that bestows ecstasy, union and the restoration of health or the feeling of lightness. As the anthropologist and shamanic practitioners, Michael Harner, describes, “lurid accounts in the anthropological literature told of shaman who described how their bodies had been torn apart, chopped up and eaten, or otherwise commonly dismembered, and then reassembled” (Harner, 2013). As Harner elaborates that early scholars and anthropologists from the West, after hearing accounts from shamans across the world about dismemberments, thought them to be lying or psychotic. However, these experiences were completely painless and initiated “an ecstatic sense of merging with ‘everything’ and oneness with the universe” (2013). In the shamanic literature, animal spirits, shamanic guides, or cosmological entities like stars or black holes usually perform these dismemberments. Harner recounts a representative description of dismemberment from a Siberian novice shaman that covers the threefold progression of (i) pathos in the body; (ii) journey and dismemberment; (iii) remembering and regeneration. As Harner writes, “A Samoyed shaman was very ill and expected to die. Almost unconscious, he made a spontaneous journey to the Lower World, where was led on by two spirit animal helpers, Mouse and Ermine” (2013). As the story goes, the shaman is led through the desert toward a distant mountain by animal spirits. The three-day journey, in non-ordinary time, capitulates upon finding an opening in the ground where the journeyer meets a naked blacksmith with a bellows working a cauldron “as big as the Earth.” The blacksmith caught the shaman with tongues, cut his body into bits and began to boil his body-soul parts in the waters of the cauldron. After three years of non-ordinary time, where the shaman experienced an afterlife-like bardo state, the spirit gathered his bones from a river and began to reassemble them and regenerate his flesh. Upon being remembered and returning back to ordinary reality, the shaman remarked that the blacksmith changed his eyes “so that he could see shamanically, and fixed his ears so that he could understand the language of plants” (Harner, 2013). Thus, after the experience of dismemberment, a newly remembered body and spiritual reconfiguration bestow shamanic practitioners with an advantageous, non-ordinary form of seeing and communicating.
As we move through this procession (pathos in the body; dismemberment; remembering and union) we will invoke examples from the shamanic gnosis as well as metaphysical gnosis, with the latter emphasizing the aspect of the release from human language and mediation into the deconstruction or dissembling (dismemberment) of language as ideology, an then into the spiritual activity and mediation of, and union with, the Logos. Again, the line of thought will also set forth a pendular movement from the cosmological to the metaphysical, in order to encompass the full spectrum of the cataphatic (via positiva) and the apophatic (via negativa).
II. Pathology in the Cosmic Body: the Machinations of Culture
“The life was the light of mankind; and the light shines forth in the darkness, and the darkness did not understand it.”
-Gospel of John (Lattimore, 1996)
Far from heaven or Eden, we are born into a world imperfect. There is life, and experience, but there are also disease of the body, pathos, and disorder of the mind, strife in the social, inequality in the economic, and a constant rift and friction between our nature and culture. Language has become humankind’s most pervasive and powerful way to mediate reality and navigate the collision of the mysterious and universal forces that beget suffering at all levels. In a sense, language has become a pharmakon, poison and medicine, a bio-cultural tool for adaption and problem solving as well as a super-system that has precipitated our fall into the horrors of pathology, ideology, terror, and rhetorical violence.
At the biological level, there exists an endless debate about the biological nature of human language: whether or not it is genetically innate and neurologically instinctual or a mysterious confluence of natural and cultural forces. In his well-known book, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Steven Pinker rigorously argues his thesis that language “is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains.” He goes on to explain,
I prefer the admittedly quant term “instinct.” It conveys the idea that people know how to talk in more or less the same sense that spiders know how to spin webs. Web-spinning was not invented by some unsung spider genius… Rather, spiders spin webs because they have spider brains, which give them the urge and competence to succeed. (Pinker, 2007)
As we approach the spiritual subject of ‘elementals’, we will explore how this correlation between human language and spider-web spinning might be more (spiritually) real than metaphorical. Still, the fierce debate continues on how human’s miraculous and unbounded tool for phonologization and symbolization could have arisen from nature. In The Unfolding of Language, Guy Deutscher writes that although that the genome is structured as a type of code-writing, and although linguists of the ‘innatist’ school like Noam Chomsky have argued strongly for biologically pre-wired ‘universal grammar’ into the brain’s of babies, that still “no one actually knows what exactly is hard-wired in the brain, and so no one really knows just how much of language is an instinct” (2005). He goes on to explain that although the human brain obviously does have an apparently innate capacity for language; however, “it does not reveal whether the specifics of grammar are already coded in the genes, or whether all that is innate is a very general ground-plan of cognition” (Deutscher, 2005). This debate echoes the question of how metaphysical ideas, like consciousness and the apparent ‘subject’ of the grammatical, can relate or spring forth from so-called ‘objective’ entities like the brain or genome. Furthermore, this notion of the logic of grammar, which is fundamental to language and communication in all species, is also fundamental to our task of investigating the nature of Logos, as it sets forth the primordial split between subject and object, between conscious observer and the observed, between dreamer and the dreamed, between the metaphysical and the physical, initiating the primal difference and (veil of) separation that gives rise to cosmological experience, insofar as our brain-mind is an organ generated to register differences (blue vs. red, hot vs. cold, etc.). Thus, language could be articulated as fractal mirroring of this primordial, structural split between the conscience or hypostatic intelligence of God (the ineffable One of the metaphysical Logos) and consciousness of cosmos (the multitude of phenomenological form and movement as mediated through experience), a split that is in some way embedded or re-encoded into our brains and biology through grammatical language.
In his well-known work, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, the historian Yuval Noah Harari writes a chapter aptly named “The Tree of Knowledge” about the role and development of language in the evolutionary unfolding of the human. He discussed the origin of our ‘Cognitive Revolution’ as the “Tree of Knowledge mutation” that occurred within the DNA of Sapiens as opposed to Neanderthals and other primal variations of the human, about 70,000 to 30,000 years ago as the fossil records show the emergence of vocal cords geared for complex phonology as well as the archeological record evincing tools and the symbolic-thought implicit to cave paintings (Harari, 2015). He elaborates that it was not the first language, as animals communicate, and not the first vocal language, as animals have sounds and calls for “Careful! A lion!” (2015). Therefore, he offers three reasons that make modern human language powerfully adaptive and unique: (i) infinite flexibility, (ii) cooperation and ‘gossip theory’, and (iii) the capacity for fiction, myth, and metaphysical language (2015). With the emergence of the brain structures that gave birth to human grammar, we were able to infinitely combine words, humans moved from “Careful! A lion!” to a modern human who can say “this morning, near the bend in the river, she saw a lion tracking a herd of bison” (2015). Or that with gossip theory, “Reliable information about who could be trusted meant that small bands could expand into larger bands, and Sapiens could develop tighter and more sophisticated types of cooperation” (2015). And with the capacity for mythic or metaphysical narrative, humans could say, “The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe” (2015).
Then, in a fascinating turn of thought, Harari sets forth an analysis of the “Legend of the Peugeot Lion” (2015), discussing how mythic or fictive and metaphysical language ‘gave birth’ to gods, spirits, and other entities that affect, constrain, and determine human interaction and survival as they work upon the collective imagination. He describes how the company began in the 19th century as a small family business in a French village 200 miles away from the Stradel Cave, which features some of the oldest artifacts of mankind’s ability to think symbolically through cave art. The family started a business making cars and motorcycles adorned with the logo of a lion standing upright like a human. In 2008, the company employed 200,000 people worldwide who are not related to the original family and most of whom are complete strangers to each other (2015). He questions the reader, “In what sense can we say that Peugeot SA (the company’s official name) really exists?… Peugeot is a figment of our collective imagination. Lawyers call this a ‘legal fiction’. It can’t be pointed at; it is not a physical object. But it exists as a legal entity” (2015). He goes on to elaborate the Catholic Church as a prototypical metaphysical entity that uses language and rhetoric to hold power, and that survives individual humans, attributing this unique nuance in human culture to the capacity for metaphysical thought and language, giving birth to ‘legal fictions’ and ‘social constructs’ (2015). Harari demonstrates how this ‘fictive’ or metaphysical-ideological aspect of human language has developed to a point in which it contains the power to totally subsume, via the power of institutional-ideological mediation, almost every aspect of the natural or even supernatural. As he continues with his analysis of capitalism and the free-market-based systems of virtual monetization, constituting a form society and economy that is gradually bestowing more and more power to corporations or ‘LLCs’ than it is to individual humans, he concludes, “Capitalism is the most successful religion of all time" (Harari, 2015).
Now, as we have moved from the biological to the social aspects of language, we will investigate how these conditions, both the nature of virtualized capitalism as an ideology and the way in which modern society allows non-physical concepts or entities to subsume the entities of nature, have given rise to a psychiatric system that does not treat pathologies in their physical or metaphysical particularities but has instead subsumed them into a market-game driven by pharmaceutical protocols, codifying the behavior of humans into human-invented metaphysical categories under the guise of diagnosing a physical illness. In his introduction to the book Violence, the Lacanian psychoanalyst and philosopher Slavoj Zizek writes,
First, there is “symbolic” violence embodied in language and its forms, what Heidegger would call ‘our house of being’…there is a more fundamental form of violence still that pertains to language as such, to its imposition of a certain universe of meaning. Second, there is what I call “systemic” violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems. (Zizek, 2008)
Especially in the West, mainstream medical and psychiatric approach towards diagnosing illness and mental illness has been determined by completely nomothetic, non-physical terminologies. Indeed, not even yet touching upon the spiritual, philosophical, phenomenological, and existentialist interventions, which perhaps initiate a more holistic-dynamic approach toward language and apparent pathology, are castigated by the super-structural, socio-economic, and ideological machinations mentioned above. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, is often credited by history to propose that physical or psychological symptoms and pathos have their origins in a more mysterious unconscious locality. However, Freud attempted to couch his psychology in the physical sciences by offering a, more or less, pansexual interpretation of the unconscious. Yet, he still depended upon metaphysical or non-physical concepts like the id, ego, and superego to fortify his conception of the psyche (Zizek, 2008). One of his famous intellectual descendants, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, offered a more complete ‘release from language’ in his own philosophic-therapeutic theories. In fact, moving away in part from the sexual interpretation of unconscious, he postulated, with his imaginary-symbolic-real triad, that the ‘unconscious is structured like a language’, that “words became the very stuff of symptoms, the fabric of the life and torment of human beings” (Leader, 2010). The identity of a child is overdetermined by a confluence of linguistic, social, and cultural networks and metaphysical webs: “Even before a child is born, the parents have talked about him or her, chosen a name, mapped out his or her future. The world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child’s existence” (2010). He went so far as to interpret the symptoms of illnesses as an irrational, hidden language to be deciphered by an analyst, comparing the unconscious to “an infernal translating machine, it turns words into symptoms, it inscribes signifiers into the flesh or turns them into tormenting thoughts or compulsions. A symptom may be literally a word trapped in the body” (2010).
Psychoanalysts like Lacan and Zizek write philosophically rigorous works to evince how the complex webs of linguistic, social, and cultural language overdetermine our modern symptoms and discontents. They describe how ideological forces, denaturalized and deracinated from our original task as biological organisms attempting to survive and thrive in the ecological environment in which we were born, transform language from a biologically imprinted tool for adaption into a form of rhetorical logos (here, logos in the rhetorical sense simple means logic verbally used for a specific purpose), and then into an apparent pathology, thus completing the pharmacological cycle from a medicine to a poison (Leith, 2012).
Still, psychiatrists do not approach language and thought-patterns in a holistic or dynamic way, and instead add to this over-webbed, culturally accumulated mode of language gone haywire. In her article The Illusions of Psychiatry, Marcia Angell writes of a psychiatrist named Daniel Carlat who is starting to question the basic protocols and foundations of his profession. He calls the protocols a matching exercise that provides “the illusion that we (Psychiatrists) understand our when all we are doing is assigning them labels.” As Angell paraphrases,
Often patients meet criteria for more than one diagnosis, because there is overlap in symptoms. For example, difficulty in concentrating is a criterion for more than one disorder. One of Carlat’s patients ended up with seven separate diagnoses… A typical patient, he says, might be taking Celexa for depression, Ativan for anxiety, Ambien for insomnia, Provigil for fatigue (a side of effect of Celexa), and Viagra for impotence (another side effect of Celexa). (Angell, 2011)
Just as corporations like Peugeot are ‘legal fictions’ that have more power than the human, animal, and natural subjects affected by such entities, in the case of psychiatry, the nomothetic diagnosis of human symptoms, both mental and physical, are codified into and reproduced within the commoditized systems of medicine and Western pharmacology (Harari, 2015). The humans, whose symptoms are driven by linguistically and socio-economically determined forces, are deprived of cognitive access to these forces and provided an even more insidious excess of metaphysical categorization and physical chemicals to confound their already agitated natural and spiritual homeostasis. Thus, cultural and physical excess is prescribed to counteract cultural and physical excess. Lacan was prescient when he wrote, “A prodigious analogy exists between sewage and culture. Culture is no longer a privilege. The whole world is more than covered in it. Culture clots on you. Because we are cooped up in the great shell of waste that comes from the same place, we make vague efforts to give it a form” (Lacan, 2008).
In recourse back to the movement from human language into Logos, we have moved from the biological to the socio-economic, from the natural to the cultural, in our attempt to understand how the metaphysical or non-physical accretions of human language have contributed to pathology in a general, philosophical scope. Now we shall transition and change the tune from poison back toward medicine, from apparent illness toward a hypothetical cure, and from the materialist and philosophical viewpoints toward language back toward the shamanic and spiritual elaboration of gnosis and of the Logos.
III. The Dismemberment of the Human: the Transcendence of Language and Form
“It is the spirit that makes life, the flesh is no help.”
-Gospel of John (Lattimore, 1996)
We will introduce the levels of dismemberment: the shamanic language of non-ordinary reality versus the activity of transcending human language and thought itself by bringing one’s consciousness straight to the source. The former defamiliarizes and deconstructs our normal, Western ‘human’ approach to language through the via positiva, that is, through a form of dynamic positive phenomenal-mystical content whereas the former enters into a post-linguistic transcendent state through an absolute negation of language as well as all forms of sensation and perception that separate the practitioners from God, oneness, absolute being, etc.
In the first part, we considered how mainstream biology and linguistics theorize how the emergence of language in early mankind spawned the evolutionary rise of the homo sapiens. However, the question poses the quintessential chicken and the egg problem, meaning that, in our early evolutionary history, there may have occurred a deeper biological event, an expansion in our human consciousness, which set forth mutations in our cognitive capacity that gave rise to language. In his book Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, the biological Terrence Mckenna writes the following:
The action of hallucinogens present in common plants enhanced our information-processing activity, or environmental sensitivity, and thus contributed to the sudden expansion of the human brain size. At a later stage in this same process, hallucinogens acted as catalysts in the development of imagination, fueling the creation of internal stratagems and hopes that may well have synergized the emergence of language and religion. (Mckenna, 1992)
Here, language becomes less the cause and more of the effect of a deeper movement and expansion of consciousness. Upon entering into the shamanic work, whether it is naturally and spontaneously or through the auspices of plant medicines, there is a sense of beginning to communicate in a type of reality that transcends ordinary, linguistically-mediated, human communication. In his The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, the anthropologist Jeremy Narby describes exactly such a phenomenon after taking Ayahuasca for the first time:
These enormous snakes are there, my eyes are closed and I see a spectacular world of brilliant lights, and in the idle of these hazy thoughts, the snakes start talking to me without words. They explain that I am just a human being. I feel my mind crack, and in the fissures, I see the bottomless arrogance of my presuppositions. (Narby, 1998)
After emerging from the state, he attempts to define the strange mixture of arrogance and self-pity that he was experiencing, summarizing it as: “poor little human being who has lost his language and feels sorry for himself” (7). This notion and theme of losing one’s language at the ingress to a higher phenomenal reality, and the subsequent cracking of the ego that comes therefrom, invokes precisely what I call the cosmological logos: the activity of spiritual dismemberment into a radically altered state of consciousness defined by extraordinary forms of communication and mystical perception.
As we introduced previously with the work of Harari, Lacan, and Zizek, we are born into a culture that is infinitely attempting to impose external desires and meaning upon our nature through the guise of language and its ideological accretions. Thus, at the ordinary level, in human culture there exists a universal web of meaning and action that is constantly at play within the world of language and information, bestowing upon language its status as a powerful form of low magic, attempting to influence or persuade or constrain nearly every aspect of our daily life as well as many of the deeper aspects of our being. In Sam Leith’s book about rhetoric, Words like Loaded Pistols, he uses the concept of rhetoric to highlight this ubiquitous and magical power inherent to the word: “To think about rhetoric is to think about something central to the foundation of our politics, to the DNA of our culture, and to the basic working of the human mind…Language happens because human beings are desire machines, and what knits desire and language is rhetoric” (Leith, 2012).
Harkening back to the polarity of magic versus mysticism that we introduced early with the work of Arthur Versluis, magic attempts to actively exert our own desire or intent upon the working of external reality where mysticism refers to a passive change in perception or awareness that opens up an attunement to higher or transcendent states or powers (2007). Upon entering into non-ordinary ways of seeing, hearing, and knowing, the so-called mystic, shaman or healer can actually begin to work with and perceive these accretions of energies as desire-thought-forms as elementals (Markides, 1998). In his book about the renowned Greek healer, Stylianos Atteshlis, who is often referred to as Daskalos, the sociologist Kyriacos Markides offers many cases about the spiritual existence of both elementals and the Logos (1998). After telling a story of invoking the “Christ Logos” to calm sea waves so that one of his friends could experience safe waters for an important boat trip, Daskolos proceeds to talk about two different forms of elementals: “those that are produced subconsciously, which he calls ‘desire-thoughts’ and those consciously-constructed and called elementals of ‘thoughts-desires’ (1998). He goes on to explain that the unconsciously created ‘desires-thoughts’ make up the normal psychic-spiritual air of the world we live in, and that work to impose their energetic structures upon our waking reality:
“Elementals of desires-thoughts are characteristic of ordinary people who lack an understanding of the nature of thought and desire. Consequently they often fall prey to the very elementals they themselves create…Our present personalities, Daskolos went on, and the circumstances within which we live, are the sum total of the elementals we have constructed ever since our descent into the three-dimensional world and the beginning of our cycles of incarnation. Elementals are built with the very substance with which personality and the universes in general are built…with etheric matter of the noetic, psychic, and gross material worlds. (1998)
He continues to explain how most of the physical and mental illnesses and agitations are created and experienced through this inter-dimensional nature of thought formation, which can be viewed in non-ordinary states of mystical perception or attunement. He describes how, upon our entrance to the physical world, our physical, psychic, and spiritual bodies are constantly generating, intercepting and regenerating thought forms that stem from our conscious and unconscious desires, and that enter into a sort of psychic state of creative generation, to interpolate the formations of our desires and phantasms into reality (1998). Also, these elementals can be known or mystically perceived as a visual language or other (via positiva) forms of mediation, and can be understood as informational-energetic clusters of psychic formation. To ordinary perception, they are taken in and ‘absorbed’ unconsciously, and they take can the form of an apparent neurosis or mental illness, or perhaps transduce into physical illness (1998). This transduction of external informational (symbolically or linguistically mediated content) echoes the idea of Jacques Lacan that the language of external culture takes hold in the body and marks a trace of where the smooth resonating of physical health or homeostasis is disturbed, i.e.: “A symptom may literally be word trapped in the body” (Leader, 2010).
However, in the shamanic or mystical perception of non-ordinary reality, we enter into a form of time-space where our thoughts, which are usually mediated by human language in our waking life, take on a much more dynamic energetic-informational life and form. Those working within the shamanic or other mystical paradigms enter into altered forms of perception that can cognitively access the sources of illness and disturbance. When experiencing dismemberments in non-ordinary reality, it is precisely these elementals and energies and low-frequencies that are being released or cleansed from the psychic body, allowing the practitioner to feel more light and whole upon arriving back into their ordinary bodies (Harner, 2013). As Harner writes, “the dismemberment experience is much more than the simple replacement of body parts, for the ‘remembering’ of organs, including the brain and heart, is also an awakening from ego-centered preoccupations with one’s own personal history in ordinary reality and remembering and reconnecting with a very ancient and sacred memory” (2013). We enter a world full of energies and desiring-machines attempting to take control, consciously or unconsciously, over our life and horizon of consciousness, but this condition can be overcome through a mystical connection to transcendent states and higher intelligences that are hypothetically compassionate and predisposed towards healing and regeneration. In the context of dismembering, both in the context of shamanic (cosmological) gnosis and spiritual (metaphysical) gnosis, this connection to a higher, sacred locality is fundamental.
As the healer, Daskalos, describes in Magus of Strovolos, these states of attunement and altered frequency become incredibly intense and can harness impressive physical force: “The energy generated is too much for a weak body…To be able to call on the Logos and not get burned, you have to reach a certain level of spiritual development” (1998). With his explication of this “Christ Logos”, Daskalos explains mystics and healers use the power of consciously crafted “thoughts-desires” as a form of initiating healing, in that thought-desires receive their power from a higher domain and are less clotted with the machinations of desire. This was what enabled him to invoke the “Christ Logos” to gently calm the waves of the Mediterranean (1998). Again, within the cosmological gnosis of shamanism or the mystical perception of Daskalos, all of the work is accomplished and perceived through the via positiva methods of non-ordinary hearing or seeing. On the other hand, the via negativa, also known as the apophatic, or metaphysical gnosis (Versluis 2007). This sensibility reaches its most popular and pervasive manifestation in the literature and meditation practices of Buddhism, which reaches beyond all desire and thought and culturally-linguistically mediated ego construct toward Nirvana, the Samadhi state, characterized by a pure, inexpressible, transcendent oneness or union with the source of all being, usually defined as a form of emptiness or kenosis (2007).
In the intellectual history of the West, however, the most well-known progenitor and innovator of negative theology was the 5th-century monk named Pseudo-Dionysius, who wrote,
Indeed the inscrutable One is out of the reach of every rational process. Nor can any words come up to the inexpressible Good, this One, this Source of all unity, this supra-existent Being. Mind beyond mind, word beyond speech, it is gathered up by no discourse, by no intuition, by no name”. (Pseudo-Dionysus, 1987)
This linguistic and psychic activity of pure negation, of moving past all naming, all sensing and ratiocination, is the starting and ending point of metaphysical gnosis, as a form of knowing that transcends knowledge itself: as all our forms of sensing and knowing are mediated by phenomena, then phenomena and thought itself divides us from the supernatural unity inherent to the nature of God (1987). Where Pseudo-Dionysus sets forth this activity of negation to describe the godhead as a transcendent authority beyond all symbolization, the famous philosopher of religion, Soren Keirkegaard, articulated such negation in a way that echoes the Eastern sensibility, applying this negation to his own consciousness or soul, as part of the contingent origination that connects his own being or soul to the cosmic descent of the divine: “To put me in this whole you imagine is to negate me. Who am I? I am an intensity of feeling in relation with beings, and particularly with the Divine Being, who excites my desire, my knowledge. I want to be in a kind of self-destroying contact with God, the Absolute Other” (Wahl, 1945). This concept takes a more succinct form in Kierkegaard’s famous but mysteriously sourced saying, “If you label me, you negate me” (1945). Taking this negative theological impulse to its logical conclusion, Kierkegaard simply proposes that God and transcendent reality must be more than mere words in the mundane sense. He thus implies that the essential reality of both our own existential nature and that of the supernatural are more defined by an inscrutable presence as opposed to a linguistically encoded system. Thus, to achieve an aspect of enlightenment or sensibility of truth, humans must attempt to directly perceive reality and being and ‘dismember’ themselves from the codes and elementals of external culture in order to transcend them, in order to eventually remember their spiritual nature before returning and re-becoming a member of society. Also, the metaphor of cosmic dismemberment finds an interesting resonance with the current physical descriptions of black holes and their apparent ability to store holographic encrypted information upon the surface of the event horizon, thus, perhaps functioning as massive storage systems of ‘dismembered’ cosmological memory (Seife, 2007).
IV. The Remembering of the One: Logos in the Context of Healing
“The spirit of truth, which the world cannot accept, because it does not see it or know it; but you know it, because it stays with you and is in you.”
- Gospel of John (Lattimore, 1996)
As we transition from the contemplative or internally-mediated activity of dismemberment towards methods and events of spiritual healing, the recount of miraculous healing events in Phillip K. Dick’s Exegesis will provide another insight into the constitutive nature of the Logos. After receiving a salvic message from a beam of pink light on February 3rd, 1974, about the medical severity of his child’s hernia. The popular author underwent a series of non-ordinary remembrances and extraordinary experiences (Dick, 2011). In one excerpt, he recounts an inquiry into the mind or ratiocination of God:
I thought a thought and then an infinite regression of theses and countertheses came into being. God said, 'Here I am, here is infinity.' I thought another explanation; again an infinite series of thoughts split off in a dialectical antithetical interaction. God said, 'Here is infinity; here I am.' I thought, then, an infinite number of explanations, in succession, that explained 2-3-74; each single one of them yielded up an infinite progression of flipflops, of thesis and antithesis, forever. Each time, God said 'Here is infinity. Here, then, I am.' I tried for an infinite number of times; each time and infinite regress was set off and each time God said, 'Infinity. Hence I am here.' Then he said, 'Every thought leads to infinity, does it not? Find one that doesn’t.' I tried forever. All led to an infinitude of regress, of the dialectic, of thesis, antithesis and new synthesis. Each time, God said 'Here is infinity; here am I. Try again.' I tried forever. Always it ended with God saying, 'Infinity and myself, I am here. (2011)
Here the Logos reads as a state of infinite intelligence and dialectical movement, as a supernatural hypostasis that guarantees, through the generative interrelation of creator and creation, the phenomenal knot between the constituents of all thought that brings forth the ingredients needed for linguistic communication; mainly, the constituents of grammar: subject and object, action and being, thesis and antithesis. Language and words act as intermediary between the phenomena of subject and object and movement, that which mediates between the invisible and visible, observer and observed, dreamer and dreamed. We are presented with Logos as a hypostatic union, an always-already present emanation of spiritual completion, a fulfillment of the infinite intelligence that finite beings or minds can only echo as limited symbols or words. In his the Divine Names, Pseudo-Dionysus explains a similar expansion of consciousness as invocative of the Logos:
God is praised as “Logos” (word) by the sacred scriptures not only as the leader of word, mind, and wisdom, but because he also initially carries within his own unity the causes of all things and because he penetrates all things, reaching, as scripture says, to the very end of all things. But the title is used especially because the divine Logos is simpler than any simplicity and, in its utter transcendence, is independent of everything. This Word is simple total truth. (Pseudo-Dionysus, 1987)
Paradoxically, the intelligence of the Logos is at once utterly transcendent yet also a simplicity. Theoretically, the spiritual healer or mystic attunes, resonate, or alters consciousness in order to become a conduit of this indescribable and irreducible force of spiritual-linguistic intelligence and knowing, and yet somehow bestows this to the populace with grace and simplicity (Dick, 2011). This notion of simplicity marks a stark contrast between metaphysical Logos (via negativa) and the cosmological: the metaphysical can be embodied and transmitted simply for the purposes of the passive reception of healing, whereas the via positiva strives toward full phenomenal cognition, experience, and understanding of the cosmological conditions and spiritual entities that set forth sickness and healing.
Indeed, at the level of practice, shamans are often known for speaking in tongues to communicate with spirits or for explaining complicated visions and particularities while providing their service. Within the movement towards monotheism and the metaphysical, a simplicity and practicality of language becomes emphasized. As the apostle Paul writes on spiritual language in the first letter to the Corinthians, “Pursue love, aspire to thing spiritual…For one who speaks with tongues speaks not to men but to God, since no one understands him, and he talks mysteries by the Spirit; but one who prophesies to men speaks edification and exhortation and consolation” (Lattimore, 1996). He goes on to indicate that spiritual knowledge, as expressed through ordinary language, must be brought back to the normal confines of everyday life, saying he “would rather say five words rationally and so communicate with an other, than ten thousand words with speaking in tongues” (1996). This passage expresses an inherent responsibility in spiritual development and activity to speak to people in a manner that is comprehensible and effective, instead of merely speaking to God or spirits in altered states of consciousness and ecstasy.
Now, to offer a more specific counterpoint, an example of a metaphysical healing sensibility as opposed to one mediated by cognitive phenomena, we shall examine the perspective towards language explored by the well-known spiritual healer and teacher Joel S. Goldsmith in his Art of Spiritual Healing. He articulates, “Disease is man-created, and only through man’s developed spiritual consciousness will it be eradicated” (Goldsmith, 1992). At the core of his teaching is the cognitive and relational activity between language and the mystical states of being needed in order to cultivate healing:
As a rule, disease is spoken of not as disease but as a claim. For example, consumption, cancer, or paralysis is referred to as a claim, a belief, or an appearance…As long as you dealing with a cancer, consumption, a tumor, paralysis, a cold, or influenza, you are at an impasse…When however, through illumined consciousness you come to see that it doesn't exist as disease, but that it exists only as mirage, or illusion, then you have the first step in healing. (Goldsmith, 1992)
He articulates how categorical and diagnostic language constitutes a form of low magic, the hypnosis of the world, feeding the illusions of a disease so as to impose and re-impose itself upon psychic and physical reality. This collective hypnosis denotes a chamber of collective elemental generation and regeneration, castigating our waking life into an amnesia that hinders the achievement of transcendent states of awareness or union; or, in other words, the hypnosis of the world acts as a barrier to the simplicity and beauty of direct perception. This hypnosis can be disturbed or disrupted by interventions that unravel our unconscious metaphysical webs into a higher emanation of understanding. In such methods, events and acts of mystical recollection and regeneration undermine and destabilize our natural approach to language as an informational-energetic nexus or form of mediation (Goldsmith, 1992). The healer must constantly evaporate or sublime the heavy resonance of low-magical elementals through the invocation of this high-vibrational, transcendent category and transmits this knowledge and experience to the receiver. In other words, language, symbol, and phenomena must not be castigated as pure imagination or mere illusion, but must be constantly interpreted and overcome and ‘dismembered’, as a sort vanishing activity of mediation or communication, a mystical activity that, through egoic disappearance, enters into communication with the intelligence of the supernatural other that is also inner. Indeed, Goldsmith’s passive, mystical subordination to a higher power is the definitive quality of metaphysical gnosis and the invocation of metaphysical Logos. As Goldsmith hears (through his inner ear) after one of his prayers to initiate healing, “Man is not a healer” (1992).
The healer, mystic, or practitioner cultivates a non-ordinary state, where the baseline, human orientation towards language reorganizes under a higher unity or force that could be described as the Logos, where the informational-energetic (elemental) heaviness is sublimated and restructured, and the healer then experiences a distillation of consciousness that inducts a further-distilled, further-emancipated relation towards language, consciousness, and experiential (physical) reality. So, to rearticulate this purely metaphysical gnosis, God as the Logos remains a theoretical hypostasis, a pure and foundational presence. The work of the healer becomes the work of alignment and attunement through language and consciousness; the removal of self and mind in order to surrender and to receive. The healer does not heal with his or her own power but attunes to a higher frequency of emanation, to transcend the ordinary nexus of word and world, of language and reality. The activity of the Logos becomes the expansion of one’s horizon of experience into a hypostatic union with spirit: to penetrate and mend the apparently tripartite connection between spirit-mind-matter, experienced as a phenomenal split (subject-verb-object) that constrains the grammar of our human languages. As we reorganize ourselves with the ordinary grammar of our language and ‘dismember’ ourselves from the often violent machinations of our culture, we must then remember the body and restructure the self as a vessel for spirit, to rejoin the journey towards making the world a proper home for life, creation, and cosmological well-being.
References:
Angell, M. (2011, August 18). 'The Illusions of Psychiatry': An Exchange. The New York Review of Books.
Deutscher, G. (2005). The Unfolding of Language: The Evolution of Mankind’s Greatest Invention. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books.
Dick, P. K. (2011). The Exegesis of Phillip K. Dick. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Dionusius, the Areopagite. (1987). Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. New York, NY: Paulist Press.
Goldsmith, J. S. (1992). The Art of Spiritual Healing. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
Harner, M. (2013). CAVE AND COSMOS: Shamanic encounters with another reality. Berkley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Harari, Y. N. (2015). SAPIENS: A brief history of humankind. New York, NY: HaperCollins Books.
Lacan, J. (2008). My Teaching. London: Verso.
Lattimore, R. (1996). The New Testament. New York, NY: North Point Press.
Leader, D. (2010). Introducing Lacan. London: Icon Books.
Leith, S. (2012). Words like loaded pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama. New York, NY: Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
Markides, K. C. (1998). The magus of Strovolos: The extraordinary world of a spiritual healer. London: Arkana.
McKenna, T. K. (1992). Food of the gods: The search for the original tree of knowledge: A radical history of plants, drugs and human evolution. New York, NY: Bantum Books.
Narby, J. (1998). The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. New York, NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.
Pinker, S. (2007). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
Seife, C. (2007). Decoding the universe: How the new science of information is explaining everything in the cosmos, from our brains to black holes. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
Wahl, J. (1945, September 30). Existentialism: A Preface. The New Republic.
https://newrepublic.com/article/76994/existentialism-preface
Versluis, A. (2007). Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esotericism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Žižek, S. (2008). Violence: Six sideways reflections. New York, NY: Picador Books.