What is Spirit? An entry level set of definitions..

This post originally entitled 'Getting into the Spirit of Things' was written for (more vomited upon) a naturalistic pagan audience i.e. folk who deny the supernatural (www.caerabred.org) But even for these most skeptical of people, 'Spirit' can have meaning. A naturalistic spirituality is my 'default' option when all else is doubted (I don't seem to have a 'no-spirituality' option in my psyche)

A very long post about the meaning of 'Spirit' - possibly nonsense - that I splurted out some time ago, re edited many times and regurgitated here, for the purely selfish reason that I needed to get it out of my head.

Religious people see spirits everywhere. Spirit is what sprites, faery folk, magical beings of all kinds, angels and gods are allegedly made of/are by nature 'Spirit' beings: But whatever do they mean? - Spirit seems to be some kind of invisible, incorporeal and intangible stuff or force apparently. Religious people almost never define it or insist it is undefinable, even describeably indescribable. Naturalists have a problem with talking about Spirit. On the face of it, naturalists don't believe in spirit or spirits, though even atheists can apparently have a spirituality according to the precepts of Caer Abred.

As it happens i believe in Spirit, in everything, through everything, encompassing everything and so each particular thing has spirit too. The term covers a lot of ground. It is a handy term for the nature-mystic for discussing matters of personal contemplation and enjoyment. I'd venture even to try to define what it represents to me, using three key ideas - being, life and consciousness - which terms I hope even the most ardent anti-supernaturalist can find some connection with.

Firstly Spirit for me is 'being' or 'essence' or 'is-ness'. I am refering to the surprising and mysterious quality of anything, any-thing, as being something, here and now, rather than nothing. Being, in the philosphical sense, seems to imply we have something left when a concept has been analysed to almost nothing, stripped of all its particular qualities, before form and even substance come into it... not the phenomena we experience, something even philosophers elusive (blame the philosopher Immanuel Kant for he coined the idea) called the 'thing-in-itself'; Yet spirit understood as being is not just emptiness or an empty concept - paradoxically spirit signifies plenitude too. The indefinable, unique essence and special nature of something is above and above the sum of all its qualities and relations. The spirit of something, as well as the Being of something is perhaps then, its holistic quality ('more than the sum of its parts').

Pagans think nature is sacred, and when it comes to creating a pagan ethics some believe this means all living things and nature generally, should be allowed to enjoy and fulfill their existence with minimal threat or interference from mankind. If ethics is about the practical wisdom and steps needed to realise certain values (e.g liberty, happiness) then a pagan nature ethics starts with the premise that nature has 'inherent' value (in contrast an eco-belief/ethic that involves just the principle of 'sustainability' is not about inherent value but, if you think about it, really about human needs only).

What we mean by 'inherent' value is difficult to pinpoint, without eventually bringing the discussion back again to meanings that human's seem to want to project into nature. It might be easier to talk of aesthetic value and take the view that somehow this may be independent of our subjective judgement, and the human beholder; Certainly by the way language is used the notion of the 'spirit of something' seems to be indicative of its aesthetic quality - an ability to provoke a meaningful emotional response,

We look at anything out there in the world and our minds apply a whole set of personal meanings to the object particularly if it is something we fear or desire. So we really mean perhaps by the spirit of something, whatever significance that thing has for us personally, our 'feelings' and 'reaction' to a thing and our connection to it. And it is notable that we are more inclined to find 'spirits' present where there is some, strange, special or unusual feature of the environment and nature - rarely, on our culture do we react in this way to man-made, uniform or highly common place objects that we might pick up in the supermarket. Some objects and particularly parts of nature create suprise, awe and wonder in the human mind.

Which might lead us to think that any talk of 'spirit' is after all not about something 'out there' and inherent, but 'merely' about how our minds and emotions respond to the world and try to understand and relate to it, prior to rationalisation and analysis. Still I don't agree it is 'merely' our culturally conditioned perception that counts. I am you see, a little wedded still to there being 'inherent' value in nature, that is not just my projection upon nature of what I'd like to see there.

So under the category of Spirit as 'being', the idea can be further unpackaged as something's essence, holistic quality, inherent value and aescetic appeal.

Secondly, Spirit is for me about whatever evidences an object's life and by extension, an object's vitality/energy/power. Life involves at its most basic the ability to self-move (internally or externally) or processes and cycles within organic chemical structures, and particularly the ability of these structures to generate and regenerate from itself more life.

The Latin word 'animus' that is translated usually as 'spirit' provides us with our verbal classification of 'animate' and 'inanimate' objects. We don't usually have much problem identifying the living from the non-living, though we might have difficult pinpointing exactly what is 'lacking' or not present when life has ceased. A recently dead human body may look like a 'waxwork' copy compared to the animated living person we knew so well. . It is easy to see why our ancestors believed something had 'left' the body upon death, something literally vital, the animating principle or force.

The ancients/ ancestors variously imagined the spirit as vital principle, and something contained in the breath, in blood, or anatomically, having its place in the heart or in the head. Scientifically we look at the cells and see that non living things don't appear to be undergoing the same chemical reactions and processes and interactions with their environment, in particular multiplying and dividing . In some circumstances and viewed of course from the molecular, ultra fine viewpoint- such as found in the original primeval 'soup' - the distinction between living and non living things is very blurred. And so it seems eventually science wil show in detail how life arose from the 'inanimate'. The non naturalistic alternative is that life proccesses come from an external creative or generative source of life, because there is this eternal life enjoyed by the gods, somehow, somewhere..

A pagan and/or naturalist will really get a buzz from the vitality of nature, but in my case that extends beyond what is conventionally understood as animate, life forms ( like birds, and trees) to include the exciting natural 'inanimate' stuff such as waves on the sea, wind and thunder and lightning. Here I guess I am emotionally responding to what is basically the power/ energy /physical forces involved in the ocean and the atmosphere. Its a thrill if there is a slight danger of harm and the unexpected..there is probably some naturally selected instinctive reason for my fascination. Paying attention to stuff like that is brought a good survival strategy.

At the most fundamental level of existence we are all 'energy' and any change from nothing happening to something happening is due it seems to the transfers of energy within physical systems. These flows are the basis of living and non-living processes . And here I mean energy as described by physics not some imaginary force. So perhaps sometimes for 'spirit', we really do mean this kind of real physical 'energy', and in particular those non-linear (chaotic) patterns of energetic change found so much in nature. We don't see it of course, but there is a real sense in which we can all be described, in terms of the fundamental stuff out of which we are 'made', as simply 'patterns of energy'...poetically we are processes, unsolid objects, and in the scheme of things, we come to be and disappear, so I say poetically that we are 'ripples on the ocean of being ' or if you like, a complex of unusually persistent quantum fluctuations. And now modern science suggest that some beautiful pattern-states appear to be self-organising as well as naturally selected, with their 'great attractors' suggesting a strange kind of implicit order hidden behind the seemingly random... well, I just think that the more science advances, the stranger, the more counter-intuitive the vitality of the world appears. And then I just have to use the 'Spirit' word again.

So under the category of understanding 'Spirit' as life, this can be unpackaged further to suggest Spirit means vitality, biological activity, whatever distinguishes what is living from the dead, physical energy, and even the fundamental energy patterns of the universe.

Finally, spirit is a synonym for mind or consciousness as distinct from other bodily processes. Today this is often just a linguistic convention, while others hold to a strict dualism - i.e dualists believe mind/spirit and body/matter are distinct. Such dualism is very philosophicaly difficult to defend in the light of modern science and has unpleasant conceptual consequences and even ethical consequences because it may mean we devalue the physical in the natural world.

Naturalists don't believe consciousness exists without bodies, and generally they also think consciousness is confined to complex neural networks - brains. Naturalism's underlying materialistic philosophy rules out disembodied persons,life after death and probably, animism. However we don't fully understand even human consciousness, particular the subjective sense of 'I', and self awareness. No amount of scientific experimentation of a human brain will find the 'self'. We do have a very good idea about how mental function is tied to physical brain states though and drastically affected by drugs, lack of oxygen, illness and brain damage. Stimulation of the brain can result in (artificially created) conscious experiences. Certainly without a healthy brain, we can't have a fully functioning mind.

We cannot be sure though what physical conditions and level of complexity - higher animal, insect, tree?, ecosystem? - are needed for at least some form of 'self awareness'.We think we know that, trees for instance can't be self aware, but how do we test this?. Indeed how can we test any hypothesis about self awareness that does not rely on purely human expectations of what evidences consciousness, which is question begging. But why should consciousness necessarily be demonstrated only where there is a (human form of) logic, concepts and language?. But this may not be so for other creatures.... So the mystery of where in the evolutionary tree of life consciousness arises continues, and while we shouldn't 'argue from ignorance' and speculate, of course I do anyway in this way: what if consciousness may be not epiphenomenal but fundamental to the universe, along with, say energy, and space-time. Of course this is not something we can prove at all - at present.

A little aside here - one concept I don't really understand is how a fundmentally physical process - the creation of particles - is somehow related tp consciousness I am referring to how the measurement action of the observer is ' needed' to 'collapse the wave function' transforming the indefinite blur of energy governed by the uncertainty principle into definite particles and patterns of the macroscopic universe . The question remains persistent even in intellectual circles, while in New Age and Fluffy Bunny world, there any many garbled and pseudo scientific accounts of quantum physics that claim that the role of the observer - i.e. the role of consciousness - in quantum processes, also proves the world creating power of the mind. Usually, like me, they lack an understanding of the science. So I move swiftly on at this point.

I can at least say that I am conscious now from birth to death, but my mind is not quite my own. My everyday self is captive to something more basic. My self is driven here and there by unconscious forces, the primal instincts, desire and aversion, creating patterns of behaviour I can't shift out of. And oh, yes, I believe in the theory of Jungian archetypes, and symbols inherited from my culture and perhaps from some 'collective unconscious'. The archetypes are contentless, potentialities and repeating patterns until given a final shape in a given culture, and these actualised forms are found in all our great symbols, myths and embodied in our images/ideas about our gods. As gods our religion does poetic justice at least to the (subjective) power of archetypes - our relations with gods and archetypes can come to bless and curse us individually.

And I also wonder about spirit as consciousness when I sleep - perchance to dream. In between dreaming, there is deep sleep, and in case we are inclined to believe in a body independent self and imagine still that we have a permanent mind, then the mere fact we can daily be unconscious while the body continues surely demonstrates that the self 'comes and goes' with physical need. My consciousness when awake is like the ripples on an otherwise still pool. or the other metaphor, after William James, described the 'stream of consciousness or thought'; the metaphor implies something that is totally unstable, mutuable. It involves the arising and disappearing of myriad and successive images and concepts flickering on the 'screen' of the 'mind's eye'... (perhaps thats too many mixed metaphors). Anway the external 'observer' of the process turns out to be an illusion - perhaps. A whole religion, Buddhism, involves a fundamental analysis of our stream of consciousness and concludes there is 'no self', just the process. As the 'self' is never stable, it is never the same even from moment to moment. And where is it? Where in the head? It appears to be literally no-where, but my entire individual life that is my self, that I value so much, this ' has no scientific reference point, and the self is not so obviously rooted in either space or even time...

I analyse and I only find in my conscious mind a desire for happiness and a will to be, to create, to make a difference (whatever desire and will are at base I'm not sure - surges of neural transmitters/pulse?).The mind's content without which it seems to be an empty set, is turning on and off - dying - even more rapidly than our physical cells, yet we persist with de facto stability, rather than complete descent into incoherent mental madness - at least most of the time.

Most of all we tend to want to believe, that though the content of the mind is vapid, unstable,constantly flowing and changing, that some form of memory or at least our self awareness and identity might persist beyond one physical form and biological life. Any continued existence post mortem would have to be an extension of the process, the stream, if there is no permanent self - so if every mental-physical 'effect' must arise from the proceeding 'cause', can an effect extend to a new incarnation, a new body by some unknown transfer of what? Energy? Information? Formative Causation? Interestingly reincarnation is not really any kind of break or alternation in what is already going on in the mind of the living person, at least from the point of view of the stream of consciousness. The same propogating ripple of awareness, driven it seems by desire, creates our mental existence and somehow, subjectively speaking, a stable identity - so all that is required is some, obviously unknown force or process, to allow that stream of consciousness to move from one form of embodient to another. In fact no 'thing' has to transfer only for there to be a causal process, one mental life the 'effect' of a 'cause' in a previous mental existence. Though down through the ages a perhaps delusional wish and hope for an afterlife make us willing to accept any goobledegook, the scientifically supported notion that the consciousness is not a thing or substance, but the result of a dynamic process, had already been discovered by Buddhists over two thousand years ago.

Okay, so we have also looked at Spirit under the category of consciousness and found that the word 'Spirit' is most often used to describe human mind and self awareness, while we have no strong reason to rule out such mind extending to beings we would not normally imagine to be self aware; We do find that consciousness is brain dependent for manifestation of mental life, consciousness is not stable, and the process view of mind is compatible with one ancient religion's view of afterlife, and their notions of 'reincarnation'.

So are we now closer to some definitions for 'Spirit' that even a naturalist druid might appreciate? I think so....

Spirit is -
Being, Life, and Consciousness

and

unique quality
holistic
inherent value
awe and wonder inspiring
aesthetic affect
vitality
bio-physical energy
fundamental patterns of energy
dynamic thought stream process


This of couse is a minimalist account of Spirit, for the skeptical unbeliever. For mystics, lets just say it is the 'entry level'.....

Pretty Poly..

Recently, I took a diversion into polytheism. Yes, thats right, I began to think in terms of many Gods. I still believed in some absolute ground of being and unity, but thought divinty could have a plural manifestation. So i said 'one in essence and many in existence'.


The biggest obstacle to acceptance of polytheism - assuming we accept any God at all, which is of course itself hugely problematic - is the theist's insistence upon divine omnipotence. Eventually this obstacle was not such a problem for me, because I didn't believe the divine was omnipotent in the sense of 'able to do absolutely anything'. (I didn't believe this because it made the problem of evil insoluble) If we accept that God must be omnipotent however, there could only be one omnipotent being. But omnipotence can be qualified to not include the logical impossibility of one omnipotent thwarting another omnipotent being. Either my considering that in the case of any conflict omnipotent beings must reach a stalemate or perhaps we can imagine that omnipotent beings may not have contrary wills - as one might expect from beings which are also defined as 'perfectly good'.

The only polytheistic tradition in the West that is well documented with an extant and extensive authentic literary tradition, is that of Ancient Rome and Greece. Some of the images of the divine gods of the Classical period are 'vital', 'dynamic' and aesthetically pleasing. However much of the mythic material is hugely problematic for me - the Gods are capricious, unethical and involved in intrigue and love affairs. The myth can be of course be interpreted as allegory. Certainly the Classical Philosophers were embarassed by the myths about the gods and sort to read them in a way that reflected that philosophical concerns.

However in the last week, two more corrosive problems have troubled me. Firstly, the fact that the Classical Gods could be 'defeated' for 1000 years by the monotheists. Where did the Gods go? There may be an answer here, that the Gods turned their back and allowed ignorance because of impiety or because of a cycle of the ages reaching it's nadir.

Secondly, it is apparent that the Gods' characters are not static. The ideas about the God's natures change. New Gods are imported, old God's relegated in popular piety and the change reflected in myths of one generation of God's usurping an older generation. And the are more than one polytheistic pantheon we can worship. I realised that polytheism does not solve some of the cardinal problems of theism viz

* Why God's do not intervene, at least to protect their devotees.
* Why are God's 'silent' for centuries
* How do we deal with unpalatable and unpleasant characterisations of Gods found in myths and ancient stories
* How do we resolve/tolerate religious pluralism

The problem of multiple pantheons - each culture having its own gods in other words - did not seem to cause a problem for Roman religion. But treating Foreign Gods as aspects of one's own Gods, or as the same Gods by different names, or adding them on to the existing pantheon, actually begins to undermine the notion that the gods are independent, distinct beings. Hard Polytheism cannot account for multiple pantheons. It might think that practically the problem is avoided by toleration, however intellectually, this does not satisfy. The problem of religious pluralism is most easily solved by a 'soft polytheism' where the gods are really manifestations of a single deity or a God and Goddess.

Something else I found intrigueing was that in various polytheisms - Celtic, Greek, Indian and Taoist, there are notions of a 'Triad' of gods or at least a belief in the Threefold nature of the divine. Of course the Christian Trinity could be added to the list. However it is not at all apparent that all these very different religious cultures influenced each other directly. It is rather as if the Threefold nature of the divine is almost from some primitive ur-religion or archetypal, taking some peculiar character though in each culture.

I am moving quickly now to believing in one supreme ineffable deity, manfiest in threefold nature, the 'gods' are theophanies or the personification of divine attributes and actions. This God is not from any particular tradition, I would rather tap the archetypal notions.

Spirituality - my reasonings....

I can't believe based on 'faith alone' without 'reason'. A reasonless faith can believe anything. This can lead to complete confusion, and delusion, usually at the hands of preachers, clergy and gurus.

Nor do I find 'reason' alone adequate to account for my spiritual and holistic experience of the world and of myself. Reason appears to be a machine or tool of discernment but which needs to receive some kind of feedstock in order to create a 'world view'. A machine without something to work on, results in nothing.

It seems to me that our understanding of the world and science is the result of reason working upon the basic datum which is 'sensation' filtered through careful measurement and recording of observation. But cannot spirituality also involve a basic datum which is similarly worked upon by reason? Yes I think the basic datum upon which reason 'operates' in relation to spirituality is the 'mystical experience'. The mystical experience is 'intuitive'. And it is characterised as di-polar. The mystical experience is both an intuition of a fundamental 'unity' of all things, and also by a pluralistic numinous experience encountered in different parts and aspects of nature.
Reason focussing on 'unity' tends to deduce a monism or monotheism;
Reason focussing on the plurality of numinous experiences posits an animism or polytheism.
But then reason realises these either-or rationalisations fail to encompass the di-polar nature of mystical experience. One 'bridging' rationalisation of the mystical experience is 'pantheism'. The universe provides the unity and the plurality - it is one reality encompassing plurality.
However this rationalisation is wholly 'immanentist', and somehow also unsatisfactory. Why?
Because the mystic experience is not purely 'one-way'. It is not just an intuition, but also an emotional response and longing. The response and longing is a desire to go beyond finititude, a desire to 'transcend' the limited nature of our existence in time and space and physical bodies.
This is the desire for 'transcendence' and, I think, the 'other side of the coin' to the mystical experience. Now if pantheism is the rationalisation of both the intuition of unity and numinous plurality, then it seems to fail to provide a transcendent goal or fulfillment. But if the desire for transcendence exists so strongly co-joined with the mystical experience, does this not point to the fact that transcendence is really possible? I think so, and thus we cannot afford to 'lose' the transcendence neatly done away with by a pure pantheism.

But transcendence is a problem for many people of a 'rationalist' mind set. For trying to rationalise transcendence as a concept, the machine of rationalisation (to continue our earlier metaphor) can break down. Generally, for modern people, reasoning involves understanding the relationship between things in the universe, where again, the feedstock is sensation that has been processed via the 'filter' of the scientific method. Our everyday kind of rationalisation apparently cannot 'work upon' that which is not of the universe, though the possibility of transcendence is hinted at by purely abstract concepts, logic, axioms and universals and the possibility of idealism, which notions seem to inform and give an absolutely necessary metastructure to reason itself. A denial of the real existence of the purely abstract leads reason into a morass of relativism and soliphism. However an acceptance that abstract logic and axioms and universals are not always instantised in worldly examples but 'free-floating' is also at odds with all everyday experience.
Reason itself I think demands that there is a transcendent reality to 'ground' the abstract and idealistic notions suggested by the structure of reason. Having then 'discovered' the need for transcendence 'by the back door' as it were, reason immediately wants to be reductionist and now transcendence seems all important. We end up again equating the transcendent reality to the 'object' of the 'unity' intuition of the mystical experience. Clearly the numinous plurality is now left without a rationalisation if a purely immanent pantheism is unworkable. The answer for that conundrum superficially appears to be to identify the plurality with the transcendent, requiring after all, a transcendent polytheism. But oh, dear, we have we have again lost contact with the 'unity' intutition....and so it seems we can never find a rational framework for our spiritual life.

Ultimately we seem forced to either dispose of reason in our spirituality or doubt the mystical experience itself is veridical. I was close to this view only a few months ago.
But reason still suggests we have one possibility left: that we can have transcendence and an immanent grounding for the mystical experience of unity and numinous plurality. What is strange is that this possible rationalisation, or rational 'output' takes our di-polar mystical experience very seriously, also our transcendental longing, so that the solution was always speaking to us from the character of our mystical experience/longing, but not adopted rationally initially because it seems to be less parsimonious than a 'simpler' reductionism to 'unity' or 'plurality' with 'transcendence' or 'immanence' respectively. The rationalisation is that reality is itself 'di-polar' and so exactly consistent with the mystical experience itself, thus providing a system that avoids the logical problems and reductions to absurdity that result from any form of strict and pure monotheism, polytheism and pantheism. The rationalisation has a name: it a form of 'heno-theism' or 'pan-en-theism'.

So which is it, henotheism or pan-en-theism. They are not quite the same thing. For this rationalisation itself comes in 'two flavours' or 'emphases'. The rationalisation says there is an underlying and supreme 'unity' to reality that is 'divine' where any object of the mystical experience is understood as being properly labelled 'divine'. . But the mystical-divine quality also extends to every being 'to some degree. That there are two 'flavours' come from our subjective positions and prejudices I think, not because there are really two rationalisations we must choose between'. In pan-en-theism, the transcendent is all unity, and the numinous plurality is all immanent; the mystical-divine quality of the plurality is not so emphasised - the numinous is related to a panpsychism or animism and that the unity provides an ordering and a goal for the plurality. Henotheism allow that there is a plurality even in transcendence or at least ramps up and emphasises the 'divinity' within the immanence. The truth is probably some further synthesis of pan-en-theism and heno-theism, but for now we know that our conceptualisations are true to the mystical experience, transcendental longing and reason.

Presently I have chosen my preferred emphasis is Henotheism because it can ground a pagan type religiosity without recourse to association with the 'revealed' religions of the book. And once we have our rationalisation and conceptual framework we can then find we understand many ancient pagan existing religions and cultures. For humankind has long had henotheistic traditions though only as fringe spiritualities in recent centuries in the West ; For henotheism is exemplified by religious communities who believe in a supreme principle and ineffable unity self manifested as many individual gods. Henotheism is seen particularly in the Western Esoteric Tradition. Pan-en-theism is found in pure form only in a very modern form of Christian theology - process theology - but offers no tradition or living community outside of Christianity.
Thus I have come to my present position and the above essay I hope shows the 'route' by which it has been fully reasoned - I have also tried all the blind alleys discussed above and found - it seems - the 'solution' that was there all the time, if only I'd taken my mystical experience perhaps a little more at face value!

Henotheism anyone?

According to some folk the term 'Henotheism' refers to the exclusive worship of one god while accepting the existence of other gods. What then is the worship of many gods conceived of as the manifestations of Spirit, The One, or the All? A belief found in Hinduism, in Neo-Platonism and Hermeticism. Some suggest this view should also be called henotheism, and I would also use the word that way. Its always important to define terms of course.....
Now I like the word Henotheism - it is more impressive and academic sounding than the slightly mocking appellation of what some might think I believe in, namely, 'soft polytheism'. (and we all know that Hard Polytheists are hard, in the sense of tough minded, serious, and straight. They think they are the only 'proper' polytheists. Maybe so.

However my spirituality is currently (because everything is provisional) a variety of henotheism that can be characterised as somewhere between 'soft polytheism' where the One is the central focus and the gods 'mere' aspects or even illusory misconceptions of the devotees (the well worn story of the blindmen and the elephant ...) and a 'hard polytheism' where the gods are super powerful individuals with their own lives, distinct personalities, agendas. The problem for me with the latter belief system is that it does not appear to answer any deep philosphical questions about the nature of reality. To my mind, Hard Polytheism is simply declaring there is another class of beings, after animals, men and perhaps mere spirits. It is very difficult to see how the gods of hard polytheism can philosophically carry any high and sublime theology. For example, hard polytheism insists that the highest and greatest reality is not a unity but plurality. But a true multiplicity requires that we can 'count'. Therefore one being must be distinguishable from another being; and what is that distinction? - obviously I am here and not there because my nature has a boundary in terms of time and space. Multiple separate gods like multiple humans, and animals, implies limited beings - finititude. The infinite can contain and encompass multiplicity, but we cannot I think have multiple infinite or multiple omnipotents or omniscients.

But then my current viewpoint hovers between soft and hard polytheism, and the reason is that I don't consider the highest or supreme reality, The 'One' as something worshippable. It is there, but by nature it is the ineffable and unconceptualisable, not a being, but the ground of being or absolute being, the beingness, the is-ness, of every being. To our perception it is the 'unmanifest'. I might even consider it to be a pure potentiality while the cosmos is its actuality.

Sometimes though I admit that I may also imagine The One as if it is manifest and then I conceive of it as a kind of great shining spiritual sun from who's multiple rays and unfolding pleroma of light is the cosmos made.
What I am sure about is that The One is not a theos, a god at all; it is not even the most excellent or supreme of gods. It is not 'a being' and an entirely different category of reality to gods, indeed it is above and beyond categories really. The One is both transcendent and immanent. As immanent it is Spirit, which infinite is in all. Also it is Consciousness and encompasses all minds, it is the root principle of intellect and it is a knower, knowing and the knowledge of all simultaneously.

This means that the 'gods' or 'higher beings', as I also call them, actually manifest the Spirit as Spirit which flows from The One. The spiritual manifestation of The One is the gods, plural. They are not though 'aspects', even less 'pieces' or 'fragments' of the One, anymore or less than anything in nature is. Everything can be conceived as an aspect of the pleroma and outflowing of the One pantheistically.

The gods in my system have a nature that is being, living power and consciousnesses, functionally they are distinct ordering principles and metastructures of reality. As the manifestations of Spirit by which Spirit is seen 'in nature', they are windows upon and means of conceptualising the One as immanent in nature.

Metaphor helps as usual, and I think the following metaphors, though none of them entirely satisfactory, provide the least misunderstanding and aid us glimpsing the truth.
Metaphor #1 The absolute, The One or rather what streams or emanates eternally from the One can be likened to 'pure white light'. As such light is split by the prism into a spectrum or rainbow of colours (frequencies) and also the colours are then mixed and pixellated in nature, also in every hue and tone, so the 'gods' represent as the colours from the pure light before they are put into the picture of nature. The prism of this theology is the 'cosmos' itself, though sometimes I wonder if distinctions are made by the subjective mind. Curently i accept the objective nature of the distinctions - a real pluralism - so that the 'pure colours' - the gods - and the mixed colour picture - nature - are not an imposition of our normal consciousness or delusion (a belief found in Advaita Vedanta of course).
Metaphor #2 The One is like 'Sound' that has a number of 'notes' which are our 'gods'. And our pantheon of gods is a like 'scale' of such notes. The cosmos as a whole is a great symphony of music.
Metaphor #3 behind almost every written language is a system of signs or alphabet, which communicates in combination. The communicator is our One, the gods the system of 'signs' and the cosmos is the language, what is communicated.

Now I tend to move between thinking that the gods are wholly immanent in particular forces or parts of nature, rather as 'forms' have no reality except in the actual instances of things in this word, rather as the 'forms' of things exist always instantised as in Aristotle's system or something like the truly Platonic view of forms, that sees the gods as really 'transcendent' and 'out there' in some heavenly sphere.

Revelation

It seems to me that we cannot prove (or finally disprove) the existence of deity by reasoning from either pure logic or the natural world, while our mystical experience is unrealisable. Therefore we have no certain knowledge of any deity. At best we are left in a fog of agnosticism and uncertainty, while for many we should not believe in anything without adequate evidence, which dictum requires at least a practical atheism.

However the failure of reasoning and experience do not exhaust the truth claims of many religions. In particular there are a number of religions that claim to have been based on the deity's revelation to various people, in sundry times and divers manners. Christianity in particular insists that the deity has revealed itself and it is this 'revelation' that a person is called to believe in, not any reasoning or experience. The ultimate revelatory event for Christians is the person and life of Yeshua of Nazareth, called the Messiah or Christ. A belief or rejection of Christianity requires an assessment and decision about this revelation.

But how do we know a claimed revelation is 'true' and really from a 'deity' demonstrating that deity exists? On the face of it, we would have to reason about who is making the claim and their reliability and the general coherence and back story. But I am beginning to suspect that Christianity demands not a rational consideration and assent but that faith is a non rational, emotional or 'heart' response to the revelation. Either we are individually and emotionally driven to believe or not as the case might be. "Let those who have ears to hear"...indeed. I am therefore inclined to think that not everyone is able to believe by virtue of their mental disposition and that faith is a gift. But if this is so then we are not 'free' to choose to believe or not. There is plenty of biblical evidence that supports a theology that emphasises divine sovereignty - divine determinism, while this is contrary to most human notions of fairness and justice.

Spirit and Spirits

Almost every religion and spirituality, with some exceptions (e.g. Therevada Buddhism) requires a belief in spirit or spirits. A belief in spirit or spirits is in turn a belief in the existence of usually invisible minds that exist in a state that is separate or separable from brains and, usually, physical bodies. The individual spirit-minds may be named Gods, Angels, Demons, Devas, or Faery Folk or be embodied in natural objects e.g. trees or parts of the landscape.

It is easy to imagine how a belief in spirit and spirits came druing the development of human culture down the ages. Mankind, before the advent of modern science and technology did not understand the world and the forces of nature. Mankind now largely understands the unseen forces of energy, electro-magnetism, gravity, and biology that cause nature to work the way it does. Previously what science could not explain and did not have obvious physical form was understood as the result not of impersonal forces but willed events. Mankind's model was the human being who could effect the world, to some degree, at will. Some effects in nature were clearly beyond man's power e.g. a storm or plague to willl. But not beyond the power of beings greater than man, beings that came to be understood as 'gods'.

Yet a belief in spirits persists among religious believers, and those with animistic, ecclectic or esoteric spiritualities outside the main world religions. A belief in spirits is certainly fundamental to any belief in an afterlife that is part of most religious believes. Usually survival post mortem depends on a notion that each person has a 'spirit' that is not identified with their body, but instead usually identified with the person's mind. This spirit can exist in a disembodied state or at least can exist after the destruction of earthly body and brain. Allied to a belief that a spirit can be disembodied is the animistic notion that spirit or spirits can reside in all manner of creatures, objects, even parts of the landscape providing a form of consciousness without the structures normally associated with a brain.


But if spirit exists independently of physical bodies and brains, it is never explained what spirit 'is' . There are forms of matter and energy that are very strange, that are weakly interacting with the physical world and invisible. They have been shown to exist through research in physics and cosmology. However science has never demonstrated that such invisible (in the everyday sense) forms of matter or energy can create or constitute a mind. While believers would insist that as science is limited to detecting and measuring the physical world it is not surprising that the intruments of science cannot pick up on the existence of 'spirit'.

It is not of course beyond the bounds of possibility that minds could exist in forms other than exist in living creatures, in particular in humans. However most religions insist that the human mind is an example of spirit operating, but there is much scientific evidence that mind is dependent on a physical brain. Most modern scientists think the notion of spirit is a redundant hypothesis in that all natural and mental processes can be adequately explained and indeed much better explained in terms of their interaction with the environment without reference to spirit entities.

We must then explain why a belief in spirits persists when they offer no explanatory power and there is no accumulated, reliable physical evidence. The most likely reason is that we need a belief in spirit to indulge our desire for an afterlife. Admitting that spirit is impossible is admitting that we are limited to a physical and finite world.

I'm not back into work until Wednesday, then off again Thursday, and next week, I'm on holiday. Hurray. So its a nice time to catch up.

So who will win the election? It is looking like - on the strength of those notoriously unreliable opinion polls - that the Conservatives are going to be the largest party but there will be a hung Parliament. If the latter occurs I can't imagine the Liberals and the Tories will find enough common ground to form a coalition government. I expect therefore a Lib-Lab coalition but Gordon will not be in it. Since he never personally had a popular mandate in the first place to be P.M. having simply succeeded Blair through the support of Labour MPs, not any public test, then to lose this election will I think be too much of a blow. I just hope that the economy doesn't get the skids - because the money markets 'take fright' while the politicians come to agreement after lots of uncertainty and bickering in smoke free back rooms (smokey back rooms having been banned of course). I imagine those discussions are already going on, mediated by the Civil Service.

Whoever gets in will have to deal with the massive debt our government has incurred, albeit it seems this debt was necessarily incurred to dig us out of a worse hole. If we have to tackle this debt, then I'm afraid I think we should 'soak the rich' before we cut any existing services to the public.
Yes, of course there is waste in the public sector - I've seen it myself in various public sector jobs, in advising public sector workers and moreover my wifey is a civil servant who appreciates that tax payer's money is not infrequently wasted by government and unnecessary layers of management and bureacracy. There is at least a lot of deadwood management and -the Elephant in the room - the government pension schemes that the country has long been unable to afford. The unions won't like it, so I expect a great deal of industrial unreast over the next year or so. Still, many people have done well over the boom years, and its time to make the pips squeak a bit. To my mind, anyone earning at least three times average wage should contribute a lot more in tax. All those on average earnings or above will have to pay some extra tax, perhaps an extra penny or two on income tax. But the tax should be on income not more indirect taxation for the latter is not progressive: it seems obvious to me that VAT disproportionately affects the poor.

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On the 'Big Questions' debate programme on ITV1 this morning, the audience and invited worthies were discussing, amongst other things, whether animals have 'souls'. It was pointed out that many of the higher animals, particularly primates like Gorillas and Chimpanzees do appear to show emotions analagous to those of humans - such as a desire to care for others, and a sense of grief and mourning when a family member dies. The debate foundered on the very simple fact no one quite agreed what was meant by 'soul'. Does this mean self consciousness, mind or life principle? The Christians in the audience appeared to concede higher animals could have a sense of self, mind and naturally has a vitality, a life principle. The Christians did not want to accept that animals unlike humans have a 'divine spark' that allows for divine-human relationship or moral sense to choose between good and evil.
My take on this is 1) I don't know what soul 'means' or could mean if it something different to self consciousness, mind or life principle 2) there is clearly a continuum of mental state, with the boundaries between human sentience and animal sentience sometimes appearing quite blurred.
Indeed this is one more fact that rather supports a naturalistic rather than a religious view of reality. Christian theologicans in particular have great difficulty explaining apparent sentience, self hood and feeling for others - empathy or 'love' if you like - in animals if only humans are made in 'Gods Image'...also whatever that means.

I'd be willing to accept a religious schema there is a 'great chain of being' - a hierarchy of spiritual existence - and humans are closer to acheiving a higher or God consciousness than animals:
this makes sense to me. If evolution is given a spiritual teleology and seen as subtley guided, so creating an escalator that drives life to ever higher states of consciousness, upward from the primordial matter quickened by the divine energy, on a path of return to The One, then humans are further advanced, if they live up to their potential, than animals. The process would be a lot fairer on animals if there was inter-species reincarnation e.g. so a gorilla might hope to be re-born as a human so that its 'soul' can continue to develop further toward God. Of course the whole notion of resurrection and spiritually hierarchy is also twaddle to a naturalistically minded person. Okhams razor if applied would lead us to assume that humans and animals are equal in death yesL we all return to the dust of nature, never to live again.

It occurred to me that there is scope for a much more generous view inChristian theology, for doesn't biblical eschantology promise a new 'heaven and earth' is promised, and for all creation to be redeemed. Could this include Aunty Jess' beloved Cocker Spaniel, who might find himself playing ball with his resurrected owner with God in paradise? Perhaps even if animals were not included in a general resurrection then humans could choose to resurrect certain animals. Isn't all 'love' eternal and so wouldn't our eternal life be incomplete if we can't redeem all those relationships we most value? However it is these kinds of questions that start making the whole notion of 'heaven' either incoherent, greatly heretical or (if we deny animals, lets alone plants or nature any place in our eschantological feature) just plainly and horribly unappealing. But maybe...if Christians insist rabbits, fish, monkey and just anything else natural is shut out of heaven, then perhaps we can keep our pets in the other place.....


From Fundie Pastor Bob's handbook for raising a child in the way he should go...FAQ #234
When the children ask 'Wil our pet rabbit go to heaven?" what should a parent say?
Pastor Bob says " You should be honest and say 'No... Jesus has not redeemed and the rabbit will go.... to hell!"

HELL RABBITS.

..I like that