Thomas Lavin, a Zurich-trained Jungian analyst, holds PhD’s in clinical psychology and theology. He was chief clinical psychologist for the US Army in Europe, where he was in charge of drug and alcohol addiction programs. He is a founding member of the C G Jung Institute in Chicago. His private practice is in Wilmette, Illinois, and he consults internationally on typology, spirituality and addictions.

Addiction is not a simple thing. We can have positive addictions and negative addictions, but in the process of addiction we are giving over our freedom. We are making choices. So to the idea of, “Well, it’s a disease, it’s not my fault”, I say no. It is my fault. I’m making choices. I can choose to move from one addiction to another addiction. I can be free. Freedom is relative, but as long as I’m human I can still say yes to the creative spirit within myself.

To be addicted comes from the Latin word addicere, to give my voice over to. Someone who is addicted has no voice. Linda Leonard wrote a wonderful book called Witness to the Fire: Creativity and The Veil of Addiction in which she talks about the word “addiction”: What does it mean? Where does it come from? Ad means to or toward. Dicere means to speak. I give my voice to or toward some person, place, thing, or even a process. Process addictions are rigid attitudinal ways of approaching the world.

Addiction need not be limited to alcohol or drugs. I can give myself over—hand over my voice—to anything. In fact, the original meaning of “addictus” was spiritual, in the sense of someone dedicated to the gods, one whose voice was given over to the Divine (e.g. AA’s third step). Thus, inherent in the meaning of addiction is the sense of dedication, or bearing witness to creative energies. Among the Romans, addiction also signified the making over of goods to another by a legal sale. A slave was even known as an addictus, someone who had no voice, who was a slave to a master. Addiction is the act of giving oneself over to something as one’s master.

In this century, people like Carol Gilligan have discovered how important it is for women and men to come to voice, to get their voice back. The process of sobriety is a process of getting my voice back, of finding my voice, awakening my voice, so that I can respond to the presence of the Divine, wherever I find her, him, or it. It is a dedication—a rededication—in a pristine sense.

I can be addicted negatively; I can be addicted positively. We have to understand that addiction is Janus-headed. Almost everything psychological has two faces or sides to it. In our dreams, we regard snakes as something terrible, but then what do we see on the healing wand of Asclepius, what do we see in the caduceus? Snakes. A symbol also of the resurrected Christ in the catacombs of Rome, the snake sheds its skin, representing rebirth.

Not only symbols but also diseases that happen in our lives are Janus-headed. Addiction is terrible, it’s true, but addiction can be transformed. How can the addict get her or his voice back, so that they can respond when they’re called? My hypothesis, having worked for 30 some years with alcoholics and addicts, is that within every addiction there is a vocation, a calling. Addiction is not the end of the line. Someone is addicted. Until I come to voice, I can’t respond. Like Samuel in the night, how do I respond if I don’t have a voice? Samuel went to his guru and said, “I think I hear my name called.” And he’s told by the Prophet Eli, “Say ‘Here I am.’” Saying yes is part of dealing with addiction. The spiritual part of addiction—getting my spirit back, getting my voice back—is to be able to say yes to all of life. No one, no thing, is excluded, precluded, left out. In dealing with addiction, we have to see it as one side. It might be a sad story, maybe generations of sad stories, but we can’t talk about addiction, whether positive or negative, without pain, because people who get their spirit back have to deal with the pain of staying with their own creative spirit.

Anyone who follows her or his creative spirit has to leave the collective, leave the mediocrity of the collective. It’s Eliade’s myth of the eternal return: you leave the collective, you go out into your own desert and have your own religious experience, and then you come back to the collective with something. Each and every addict, each and every alcoholic has something to give to the community. Anyone coming from alcoholic or addicted homes has something to give back to the community. We may not know it yet or, even if we know it, maybe we haven’t come to voice yet, to ask the questions: Where am I a slave? Where have I given up my voice? Where am I mute to the life-force of Creation?

We can lose our spirits in different ways. Very often the models that are given of addiction are male. This is a problem in our culture, because the female addict is left out and not given a paradigm. Apropos of this, an article in AA Grapevine, February 19, 1996, was given the title “No Secondhand Gods”. The writer says:

I came into Alcoholics Anonymous beaten down by gin and depression, barely clinging to a thin and unhappy belief in God, and trying desperately to talk myself back into my childhood faith. It wasn’t working. I was an ex-nun whose faith had fallen apart in the convent, partly because the order’s strict policy on alcohol prevented me for the first sustained period in my adult life from drinking away troublesome doubts and questions. The first thing people in AA told me about spirituality stopped me cold. They told me if I wanted to live, I needed an honest relationship with an honestly envisioned higher power. Ill fitting secondhand gods need not apply.

I found this both liberating and terrifying. Terrifying, because I’d been taught to hang on under my religion like grim death, whether I felt honest doing it or not. Liberating, once I discovered I was genuinely more afraid of drinking again than I was of going to hell for disbelief. The ensuing years were an incredible revelation. My sponsor has an interest in comparative religion, and some of her books introduced me to a marvelous new faith, one that made me exclaim, “So that’s what I’ve been all my life.” I became a practitioner, and eventually a clergywoman of this faith, and it has given me the sort of relationship with my deeper power that I could have only dreamt of.

Nevertheless I have a solid granite derrière on the subject of keeping religion per se out of AA. So I’ve never gone to meetings and tried to preach my religion to anyone. I’ve seen the damage that that can do to groups, the confusion and pain it can cause to newcomers. But I do try to be honest about my deeper power. It isn’t easy. You see, I envision that power as female, and I call her “Goddess”, not “God”, and in some AA meetings you’d think I’d thrown a stink bomb into the circle every time I refer to my deeper power in this way. I was careful where I began saying it. For the most part my home group didn’t mind the new phrasing, so I tried it out at another meeting where I heard various people’s powers referred to as God, Allah, the Tao, the Great Maybe, and Eddy. All had gotten reasonable respect, even Eddy. So I was totally unprepared for the roar of derisive laughter that greeted me when I spoke one evening of the Goddess as I understand her. I was thunderstruck. Tears came to my eyes. I nearly died trying to find a power I could believe in, I told them. I would never laugh at yours. Please don’t laugh at mine. I tried it again at other meetings.

At about the third of the meetings, I got either ridicule, or after the meeting, conversion pitches. I wondered if it was just my area that was unusually closed to the idea, until I began to hear stories from other women of my faith on the Internet. All confirmed my impression that female deity language is the one kind that routinely elicits laughter or hostility at AA meetings. For a while, I tried dancing around the issue with terms like “Creator” and the “Divine”. I didn’t wear my religion symbol around my neck at meetings, even though some Christians and Jews often wore theirs. Eventually, I stopped dancing. That’s one tango not required of the more mainstream believers in our ranks. And I truly don’t understand why it should be required of anyone.

I’ve watched for years now as this problem has driven desperately ill newcomers away from the program. They’ve had to fight the prevailing society so hard for a faith that fits, and it is so hard for them to face being laughed at or scorned for it in what is supposed to be a place of safety when they’re barely out of detox. Please, next time you’re tempted to have a contemptuous, and audible, reaction to somebody else’s deity, think. If it’s what’s keeping her alive, do you really want to knock it down?

Openness to spirit means openness to all forms of spirit. There are many stories of coming to voice, stories of getting one’s spirit back. Our stories are different. Both introverts and extraverts can be drunks and addicts, but we do it in different ways. A subtle but important part of understanding the dry drunk is understanding psychic energy. When we’re in a dry drunk, if we’re extraverts we think we’re introverts. And if we’re introverted, we think we can be the life of the party and tell jokes and do things just like extraverts do. It’s strange but true. Some introverted people, when using mind-altering chemicals, will often extravert, extremely inadequately but extravert nevertheless.

Now 100 introverts don’t make one extravert. I was at a party once in Chicago with a group of Jungian analysts, all introverted. It was Jung’s birthday, June 6, and nobody knew what the hell to do. One person started singing “Happy Birthday, CG”, and I thought: Here I am with all these introverts, I can’t stand it, but that’s how things are. In the same way, people who are introverted, and who are with extraverts, look at them and say, “Will anyone in this room ever sit down and shut-up?” Introverts bug the hell out of extraverts, extraverts bug the hell out of introverts (and of course they marry one another!). There are stories of people who become addicted by going up, by going higher. There are some who become addicted by going down deeper. The extravert has to come back down to the ground, and the introvert has to come up to becoming normal. Both wind up in the same place, but the path, the journey, is different. Treatment programs often ignore typology. We tend to typologically tyrannize people in treatment. You hear stories of people saying, “I got sober, but I wasn’t authenticated. Because they wanted to make me a goddamn extravert or introvert.”

I have this wonderful patient who’s a PhD in theology, and she comes into my consultation room once a week, and she sits down, and I look at her and say, “How do you feel?” And she says, “Damn you.” If I asked her what she thought about Luke’s Gospel, she knows. She thinks very well. That’s why I ask her every week, “How do you feel?” “Sonofabitch. Let me think about it,” she says. “Let me think about it”!

We need to understand that there are different paths to losing our spirit and that there are different paths by which the spirit returns. This is as subtle as understanding that someone has a preference for a deeper power. Jung says extraverts are basically people who flee the center, centrum fugere, are centrifugally energized. Some people get addicted and get intoxicated in order to flee the core, to get away, to get high, to get above it. But you don’t need to drink to get high. You don’t need substances to get high. You don’t need to go shopping to get high. There are other ways of fleeing the wasteland, or the fact that your life is so banal. Other people get high so that they can go underneath the surface and find solace in the center they know they won’t find at home, so they drink in a solitary way, seeking the center, centrum petere. They are centripetally energized. We have to teach these people in treatment, in our homes, wherever we find them, that they don’t need substances to go deeply within. This is why it’s important for us to look at the typology of addiction.

Extraverts can get high without mind-altering chemicals, and they don’t have to become introverts in the process, doomed to a life of staying at home reading books. Introverts need not be condemned to an endless round of AA meetings with people they otherwise wouldn’t talk to. There’s a tremendous difference, and we need a fingertip feeling for the subtleties of introversion and extroversion in the healing process.

The Grimm fairytale, “Spirit in the Bottle”, gives us many insights into the relationship between addiction and spirit.

Once upon a time, according to the Brothers Grimm, there was a poor woodcutter who had only one son. He saved up a little money, and he sent the son to the university. After a semester or two, the son had to come back, because like many of us he ran out of money while studying. He came home to his father and said, “Father, I’ll help you. I’ll go out with you and chop wood.” But the father said, “With those hands you’re going to chop wood? And besides we don’t have an ax.” The son pleaded, “I want to do something. I just can’t sit here. Let’s borrow our neighbor’s ax.” And indeed they were able to do that, and duly set out.

After about four hours of chopping, the father said, “Let’s sit down, have our bread and water, and rest. It’ll go twice as well for us afterwards.” The son said, “Father I’m not tired. I’d like to take a little walk in the woods and look for bird’s nests.” “Don’t be a fool,” retorts the father, “Afterwards you’ll be too tired, and you won’t be able to chop wood.”

The son goes off anyway, looking for birds. Nearing a big oak tree, he hears a sound, a voice screaming, “Let me out, Let me out!” The student looks down at the base of the tree, and there is a bottle, and in the bottle he sees a little man, jumping up and down, screaming, “Let me out! Let me out!” The student pulls the cork, and out comes this little man, who then, like a genie, gets bigger and bigger and bigger, until he’s as big as the oak tree itself. The genie looks down, and says to the student, “Now I’m going to have to break your neck. That will be your reward.” “You should’ve told me that before,” said the student, “I’d have left you in the bottle. But I’ll keep my head on my shoulders all the same. You’ll have a to consult a few more people before I let you tamper with my neck.” The genie says, “I am the mighty spirit Mercurius. I have been shut up for centuries, and when I’m freed it’s my duty to break the neck of the person that frees me.” “Not so fast,” says the student. “First I need to know it was really you in the bottle.” The spirit thinks, fin and goes back in the bottle. The student then puts the cork back on and recaptures Mercurius.

The spirit says, “I’ll be good, let me out.” But the student says, “Uh-uh, sorry, you had your chance.” “No, honestly, I’ll be good, please let me out. I’ll make it worth your while. You’ll have all the riches you want.” “I don’t know,” says the student.

Then he thought about it: he had outsmarted the spirit the first time, so maybe he could outsmart him again. And he said to himself, I’ll take a chance. Maybe he’ll keep his word and, besides, he can’t hurt me. So he pulled the cork, and the spirit came out as he had the first time. He stretched and spread until he was as big as a giant. He handed the student a piece of cloth, very much like a poultice, and said, “This is your reward. With one end, if you rub anything that is broken or wounded it will be healed. And if you rub steel or iron with the other end, it will turn to silver.” “I’ll have to try that,” said the student. He went over to a tree, gnashed the tree with his ax, rubbed the poultice on it, and the tree was healed. He wiped the ax off, and the ax instantly turned to silver. He thanked the genie, and said, “Thank you for the reward. Now we can part.” The spirit said “Thank you for setting me free.” The student went back to his father.

Cutting the story short a bit, the father berates the son and says he’s a blockhead. But the son tells his father the story, and thereafter the student takes care of his parents, who never again want for anything. With the rest of his money, he returns to the university and goes on studying. And seeing that he was able to heal all kinds of wounds with his poultice, he became the most famous doctor in the whole world. He who almost had his spirit strangled out of him, he who was wounded by negative Mercurius, becomes the wounded-healer. Woundedness becomes the foundation for healing.

The idea of venturing forth, “opening up the bottle”, getting in touch with the dangerous spirit that could strangle the life out of you and outsmarting it, outwitting it, is fundamental to staying sober. The daily journey to sobriety must be a risk, an adventure. I remember being at a physicians’ AA group where there was a new physician present, and in the discussion afterwards, this doctor said, “I don’t get it, did someone just say alcohol was cunning, baffling, and powerful? That doesn’t sound like ethyl alcohol to me. I mean, you’re personifying a chemical.” And we all said, “Harry, you’re getting warmer.”

It’s hard to believe—Alcohol: cunning, baffling, powerful? Nietzsche wrote that Christianity has dragged Eros through the mud. I think Christianity has also dragged the virtue of cunning through the mud. We have to be cunning, wise as serpents, like the student with the genie, if we’re to remain sober. We have to be tricksters to stay sober, and if we’re working with people in treatment, we have to be artful dodgers to help them stay sober. There isn’t a damn thing wrong with being a trickster. The question is, who does the trickster energy serve—the drunk/addict or the healer?

It’s the question of the Grail King—who does the grail serve? To be able to go back after you’ve almost lost your life, after you’ve almost been strangled to death, to be able to go back and open the bottle again, to deal with the spirit in another form, and make that which was your downfall bring new life and new meaning to your life and the life of those around you—sounds like a paradox, one of many paradoxes in understanding the multidimensional aspect of spirit and its role in addiction. As human beings we cannot live without breath, and we cannot live without spirit either. In the Grimms’s tale, told in the middle of the last century at the beginning of the process of the industrialization of Europe, there was a loss of spirit. And who comes out? Old Mercurius, Mercury, Hermes, the god of transformations. Is there a goddess of transformations?

Linda Leonard, in Witness to the Fire, recounts the ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna. Inanna was the goddess of heaven and earth, whose sister Ereshkigal was Queen of the Underworld. Ereshkigal’s husband died, and Inanna decided to go down into the Underworld to offer sympathy to her dark sister. She’s met by a gatekeeper, who tells her that she can’t go down into the Underworld, just because she wants to, and now she has to pay the price. There are seven levels in the Underworld, and Inanna is stripped naked, piece by piece, at each of the seven levels—stripped of her crown, stripped of her jewelry, stripped of everything that gave her identity as a queen, until she is naked. Inanna was then judged, and Ereshkigal, staring at her with eyes of death, hung her corpse on a peg until it became a piece of rotting meat.

When Inanna did not return after three days, her aides sought help from the father gods. But most of the father gods were angry that Inana had craved the power of the underworld, and they refused to help her: “She who goes into the dark city stays there.” Only Enki, Lord of the Waters, responded. From the dirt under his fingernails, he created two small asexual creatures who slipped into the Underworld unnoticed and grieved with Ereshkigal, who was moaning with the cries of a woman about to give birth. Ereshkigal was grateful for the empathy and gave them Inanna’s corpse, which they revived with food and the water of life given to them by Enki.

Inanna was told that no one ascends from the Underworld unmarked. Demons from the Underworld clung to her sides, and she was required to send back a substitute to take her place. Refusing to send her faithful feminine aide, she chose instead her husband, Dumuzi, who had been feasting instead of mourning for her. Dumuzi tried to escape the demons but they found him and beat him and stripped him naked and finally took him to the Underworld. The myth ends when Dumuzi’s sister Geshtinanna agrees to share his fate, each spending half the year in the Underworld and the other half above with the living.

In our patriarchal culture, the need, especially for women, to act out our shadow side is often denied. A 12-year-old girl, for example, whose hormones were beginning to kick in, comes downstairs in a bad mood one morning, and her mother says, “Uh, uh, no way. Go back upstairs now and come back down as Suzy Sunshine, or Daddy will be mad.” So down she comes as Suzy Sunshine until she winds up in the hospital with all sorts of psychological problems as a teenager. Such is the price she’ll pay for refusing the call to the underworld. That hospitalized teenager became the famous healer, Dr Christiane Northrup.

All of us in our culture have to go down into our darkness, into our own underworld. For some of us, that’s going to be through alcohol and drugs. We’re going to be bad little boys and bad little girls. And how long do we stay down there? Maybe until we’re stripped naked of our identity. And then the water of life, the life force, will bring us back up to the surface, sadder but wiser.

There are all sorts of books coming out now in Jungian psychology, about “meeting the shadow”, “romancing the shadow”, “dealing with darkness”, “uncursing the darkness”, and so on. People are catching on that individuation is not a Pollyanna trip—it’s not all lightness and archetypal warmth and light. It’s also dealing with the darkness and the cold. So is the journey into sobriety and discovery.

Some of us are going to journey too high. We’re going to get the hell out of Iowa and join the Army and see the world and get to drink like “my father the minister” won’t let me. And then we’ll wind up somewhere like the heroin ward that I directed, in a US Army hospital in Germany, where in the 1970s I had 85 beds for 125 people who were coming down from bad heroin trips. A day never went by that there wasn’t heroin in the ward. It was a locked ward. There were bars on the windows. Two people had the key. But there was always heroin in the ward. Of course, we know that “addicts have no willpower”. No willpower? Then how the hell do you get heroin into a locked ward on the fifth floor where everything is behind bars? These people were truly cunning, baffling, and powerful.

Addiction is a detour on the journey but also a mission—and a driven mission—nevertheless. If we don’t see the spiritual aspects of this disease of addiction, we’re missing it. Jung’s idea of “spiritus contra spiritum” was, if you can help a person to understand the context of their addiction as really a search for the divine in whatever image or form, then you’ve gone about half way in terms of helping a person take what’s available within herself or himself to transform the disease and themselves.

Addiction is a diamond. What needs to be done is to find a new setting for it. As Jung says about spirit: “Do we know, for all of our familiarity with the verbal concept, what spirit really is? Are we sure that when we use this word we all mean the same thing? Is not the word spirit a most perplexing, ambiguous term? The same verbal sign spirit is used for an inexpressible transcendental idea of all-embracing significance, the spirit of the time, for instance. In a more commonplace sense, it’s synonymous with mind. Be of the same spirit: that means mind. Second, it may connote courage, liveliness, or wit, or it may mean a ghost. It can also represent an unconscious complex that causes spiritualistic phenomena, like table-turning or automatic writing. In a metaphorical sense it may refer to the dominant attitude in a particular social group, the spirit that prevails there. Finally, in a material sense, as spirits of wine, spirits of ammonia, spirituous liquors in general, (and this is not just a bad joke) it’s part of the venerable heritage of our language.”

So spirit can mean mind, spirit can mean divine force, spirit can mean ethyl alcohol or spirits of something, and it can mean spiritualistic. Jung says, when I utter the word spirit—no matter how accurately I may define the meaning I intend to convey—the aura of its other meanings cannot be wholly excluded. When we talk about spirit we’re talking about all of these realities.

My hypothesis, my experience—personal as well as professional—is that we are experiencing the subtle return of the spirit in our culture, in our treatment rooms, in our hospitals. Hopefully, we’ll have the courage to let go of what we have to let go of, and welcome this new manifestation of the spirit in our time and in our persons with a whole heart.

Leonard George, Phd, is a psychologist and writer. His published works include Crimes of Perception: An Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics and Alternative Realities: The Paranormal, the Mystic and the Transcendent in Human Experience.

My serious interest in Neo-platonism began shortly after starting work as a clinical psychologist in a hospital burn unit. In this setting I was exposed to horrible mutilations of the human form, and to pain that is difficult to conceive. My deep response to this onslaught of mortal reminders was paradoxical — I became more and more sensitized to the beauty of things around me. And the Beauty twinkled. It drew my attention beneath the beautiful surfaces, into beautiful depths that led to a place of utter simplicity and stillness and silence. Feeling my own rootedness in that stillness — what I believe Plotinus and Iamblichus called the One — is what sustains me in my challenging work with survivors of severe physical and emotional traumas.

Incident at Gadara

The town of Gadara was a welcome stop for ancient travelers. Located a few miles southeast of the Sea of Galilee, it was renowned throughout the Roman Empire for its soothing hot springs. Sometime in the first years of the fourth century AD, the philosopher Iamblichus paid a visit to Gadara, along with a group of his students. One day, according to Iamblichus’ biographer Eunapius, an amazing scene unfolded. The sage’s devotees had been urging him for some time to show his divine power by performing a miraculous feat.

Iamblichus had always declined. But for some reason, on this day and in this place, he chose to acquiesce. Sitting down by a hot pool known as the spring of Eros, he plunged his hand beneath the roiling surface — and pulled a young boy out of the water. The child was radiant, with blond hair and fair complexion. Iamblichus then walked over to the next pool, called the Spring of Anteros. Again he reached into the depths, and retrieved another boy. This one was dark of hair and skin, but no less radiant. The children of the springs clung to him “as though he were genuinely their father.” Shortly, Iamblichus led them back to their respective pools where they swam out of sight beneath the bubbles. The philosopher continued his stroll with a retinue of astonished followers.

What are we to make of this? Eunapius obtained his account third-hand from a student of one of Iamblichus’ devotees. The biography hints that some of Iamblichus’ disciples were rather literal-minded, so we might suspect that the Gadara episode originated as a story of symbols, a teaching tale rather than a news report. And indeed, the figure of Iamblichus in the story portrays the sacred ideal taught by the sage himself.

Dreaming of a Pagan Reformation

But before we explore this ideal, and the means he offered to progress toward it, some background on this myth-shrouded character is in order. Who was Iamblichus? Details of his life are sketchy. We know he was born into a wealthy family in Chalcis in the roman province of Syria around 240. His direct ancestors were the priest-kings of the city of Emesa. He keenly felt his roots — contrary to the day’s fashion, he refused to adopt a Greek or Latin name (“Iamblichus” derives from the Syriac ya-mliku, “the god rules”). He spent most of his life in the vicinity of the Orontes valley. With its headwaters in the Lebanese highlands, meandering through a verdant swathe of western Syria and emptying into the Mediterranean Sea near Antioch, the Orontes River had been a conduit of influences between Greece and the East for many centuries. Iamblichus’ background readied him for his main life-task — crafting a synthesis of the pagan world’s deepest spiritual insights.

He lived a luxurious but simple life, tended by slaves and enjoying his suburban properties. Unfettered by material want, he could devote his life to searching for the highest truths using the best means available. Iamblichus studied under the famed Neoplatonist Porphyry, likely in Rome, but came to believe that his own discernment surpassed that of his teacher. The Syrian sage founded a school in Apamea, a columned town by the Orontes. This site was already esteemed in cultured circles as the hometown of Numenius, a great philosopher of the second century AD.

Iamblichus died around 325. His lifetime has been called an “age of anxiety.” It had become obvious that the shared sentiments binding the Empire together were fraying. Like the papacy a millennium later, the institution of imperial rule fractured into camps that often fought each other, softening the empire’s defenses against the attacks of restless neighbors. In his youth, Iamblichus saw Persian troops storm through Chalcis and pillage northern Syria. Other trends pointed to a deeper malaise. The leading thinkers viewed the sacrifices, prayers, and myths of traditional religion as naive and stale. Commoners for their part found the intricate philosophizing of the intellectuals remote and irrelevant. And even in popular devotion there were disturbing signs. The ancient network of oracles was falling silent one by one, like wells that dry up when their aquifer is exhausted. In his old age, Iamblichus witnessed the unthinkable. Emperor Constantine turned away from the pagan path to embrace the god of a fringe cult called Christianity. Iamblichus was troubled by the pallor of the pagan spirit. But he thought it could be nursed back to health. Iamblichus dreamed of a pagan Reformation.

His remedy for the pagan malaise was a return to the roots of antique wisdom: the most venerable spiritual practices, especially those of the eldest societies (Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria); the fountainheads of classical thought (Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle); and the major mystical movements and texts of later antiquity (the Mystery cults, the Hermetic writings, and a visionary book known as the Chaldean Oracles). Could these strands be woven into an integrated world view profound enough to hearten the philosophers, majestic enough to awe and comfort simpler folk? This was the challenge Iamblichus set for himself.

When considering the teachings of Iamblichus, we must always keep his goal in mind. He wasn’t interested in speculation or argument for their own sake. He believed that many of his philosophical forebears had lost their way in deserts of arid theorizing rather than pursuing contact with ultimate realities. Iamblichus’ ideas about the nature of world, self and spirit aren’t factual descriptions or logical points, but tools to alter awareness. We can’t judge their worth by rational or empirical means, but only by “trying them on” and assessing their impact on our consciousness and our lives.

The Erotic Cosmos

First, let’s review the stage on which our spiritual life is played out, according to the Apamean. We live, Iamblichus taught, in an immense and mostly invisible universe. The kaleidoscope of perceptions, thoughts, feelings, images and impulses that crowd the mind only skims reality’s surface. From unfathomable depths, the things we experience emerge in a perpetual upwelling of creation. Just as constantly, these forms melt back into the unseen domain. This appearance and dissolution is a flow, a circulation or current, encompassing the visible and the hidden.

The ultimate source of the current is a being of sheer simplicity. Iamblichus followed Neoplatonic convention in calling it ‘the One.’ But even this term misleads, as ‘the One’ is beyond anything countable. This mystical entity is not apart from all that flows from it and to it, but contains and unites the whole turbulent cosmos within its perfect stillness.

There are no lines between the colors in a rainbow. But we need to parse the rainbow to describe it: “Red / orange / yellow / green.” So also with the circuit of existence, seamless and endless. Iamblichus divided creation’s cascade from the One to the sense-world into levels. At each step away from the One there is more diversity and less unity. In our own realm diversity rules, and the unity of all is evident only in subtle ways.

Iamblichus described reality’s first forms as they bloom from the One in Pythagorean terms — as Numbers. From the One, there comes Two. The Two generates the Many. These Numbers aren’t the familiar counters used in practical transactions and measurements, but divine presences. Their patterns resonate across succeeding levels, giving rise to the regularities of the sense-realm.

For instance, the imprint of the Two can be detected throughout our world. Inspired by Plato, Iamblichus affirmed that everything is composed of dualities — light and dark, cold and hot, left and right, odd and even — knit together into the myriad objects we see around us. But everything in the cosmos yearns for its origin, the place where the opposites fuse. All longings in life, unmasked, are this. Iamblichus called this universal passion Eros. The One loves the Many, and the Many the One, impelling the cosmic flow. Every duality is Eros split in two, and the struggle of opposites that makes up our lives is the hide-and-seek of the halves of desire, the Lover and the Beloved — or as Plato put it, Eros and Anteros.

Iamblichus not only parsed reality’s rainbow. He personified each color. A spectrum of spiritual beings ranges between the One and the Manyworld of the sense — deities, archangels and angels, archons, daimones, heroes, and ourselves. The daimones are the spirits closely intertwined with our daily lives, lurking just beneath the veneer of the mind and the physical world. Daimones personify the natural energies that comprise our environment, and the character features that sway our fate. Before engaging the higher beings we have to establish mature relations with our daimones.

The most fulfilling relationships — with people, daimones, or divinities — are based on the ability to love (the mark of the One) while keeping our own distinctness (the signature of the Two). This is Eros’ flow, the play of the One and the Two. And we relate most intensely with other persons. Iamblichean personifying isn’t a simple-minded projection of human traits onto non-human things, but a psychological device helping us to relate fully — that is, Erotically — with the forces of creation.

The Double Identity

This vast unity — the entire cosmic cascade — is our home. And, more mysteriously, it is our identity. Who am I? Iamblichus taught that there are two valid answers. From the angle of ordinary awareness, I am a being with a body and an inner life or soul, sharing a world of other bodies and souls. I am an individual, limited in knowledge and power. And I am mortal. This finite identity is who I am. But it isn’t all that I am. From the standpoint of cosmic Eros, this individual life blends into the life of daimones, gods, archetypal Numbers, and the One. My immersion in the universe is so thorough that my “self” is in some sense the totality.

We live a double life, and a paradoxical one. The paradox in Iamblichus’ picture of the self is that both identities — finite and endless, dying and deathless — are utterly real. Neither is just a mirage or derivative of the other. I am both part and Whole. And to be completely present, we must be mindful of both identities, without either one eclipsing the other.

This is no easy task. Plato wrote that merely existing as a physical being scrambles the soul. We’re seduced by the vivid minutiae of our material life. Irresistibly we become confused and overidentified with them, mesmerized by the affairs of the small self. The sweet, faint note of the One is drowned by the clatter of everyday sensation and thought.

As a first step toward relaxing these attachments, Iamblichus’ students pondered lessons about the miseries of embodiment, such as Plato’s statement that “the body is a tomb.” But Iamblichus carefully balanced this seeming distaste for matter with teachings that praised the sanctity of the body. The coarsest thing is included in the highest good, the One. We are embodied beings. There is no use pining for escape to nonmaterial worlds. From Aristotle our Syrian sage learned that the soul is not other than the body. But from Plato he understood that the soul is more than the body.

Iamblichus compared the growth of divine self-awareness to the blossoming of a lotus. And like a flower it benefits from proper cultivation. Reading and thinking about higher truths — the usual pastime of philosophers — is helpful, like fertile mud. But on its own this activity is spiritually ineffective, because it remains on the plane of ordinary consciousness. Iamblichus insisted that spiritual flowering can only be powered from beyond the boundaries of personal identity. We must open ourselves to influences from outside, as a lotus to light. And again a paradox: these “external” influences remind us that from the Erotic vantage they aren’t “outside” us at all.

Rites of Self-Remembrance

We are to befriend the daimones and link with gods and rouse our unitive identity. But we won’t succeed by relying on our normal kinds of thought and effort. The sage emphasized that we can only approach Truth on its terms, not ours. How then do we proceed? Iamblichus taught that the hallowed repertoire of pagan spiritual practices held potent means of stirring awareness. These methods work because they aren’t inventions of the limited mind, but come from the side of divinity. He took a word from the Chaldean Oracles to denote these means of divine self-remembrance: theurgy. This term means ‘divine activity.’ Iamblichus contrasted theurgy with theology, or ‘divine words’ — talking about the Erotic cosmos isn’t the same as living it.

The Greek philosopher Thales said, “all things are full of gods.” The universe is stocked with objects that point to the mystery of the One. Our souls too harbor such reminders, in the form of images. Iamblichus’ favorite word for these numinous cues was synthemata, a Greek term that literally means “tokens” or “signals.” Synthemata are witnesses of the gods’ presence. They act as mirrors in which the soul’s sacred element can view its own divinity. Iamblichus prescribed the rites and meditations of pagan religion as means of guiding the soul’s attention to the synthemata around and within it.

The details of Iamblichus’ theurgical ceremonies are lost. But we know that he offered an array of disciplines to match the states of the soul. Many souls are so fixed on material things that they can only work with synthemata made of matter, and aspire to contact only the most material kind of gods. They performed rituals with certain stones, animals, plants, and other natural objects that revered lore associated with deities. For such people, life feels like a punishment, and the material theurgies eased their pain by calming their daimones.

More mature souls who had achieved some mindfulness of the One could include more refined synthemata in their theurgies. Because sounds are invisible and mental images are inaudible, the sage taught that they are tokens of divinities a step removed from the sensory realm. Theurgical chants and visualized symbols could arouse synthemata in the soul connected with them. Souls of this quality regard life’s travails as chances for purification.

Rarely is a soul so advanced that it can work with the subtlest synthemata of all, Iamblichus admitted. His surviving writings say little about the highest type of theurgy. Gregory Shaw, the preeminent Iamblichus scholar, believes that this summit of pagan practice was the contemplation of sacred geometric shapes and ratios. These mathematical synthemata joined the soul with the realm of archetypal Numbers, near the One itself.

To the most developed souls, the world seems neither punishment nor purgation, but a single exalted synthema. Every object within this grand vision appears clearly as a ripple on the ocean of Eros, a wave of yearning for the deep Source it will shortly return to. The self-concept of the advanced theurgist is also transfigured. Thoughts, emotions, and personality persist, but now are suffused with the feeling that these phenomena, no less than outer things, are shapings of the One. Every action is theurgy, and an expression of love, because Eros is Love. It is also a creative act. The gods whose ‘divine activities’ theurgists emulated are the channels of the One’s world-making. Through theurgy, we come to know that we are co-creators of the universe.

Philosophical Shamanism

What would it have been like to perform the theurgies of Iamblichus’ school? visions were common during the rites. Iamblichus described the types of transcendent beings that might appear to the theurgist, and a mysterious light — a glimmering of the current of creation itself. A sound like the wind was also reported, coming from every direction at once. These signs were taken to mean that the ceremony had contacted the sacred realms. they also point to a shift in the performer’s consciousness. And this is not surprising. Many components of theurgy had been known to trigger altered states of awareness since the Old Stone Age. Concentrating on a holy object, rhythmic singing, visualization — all of these techniques can loosen the hold of the ordinary world and the everyday self, and permit the mind to slip beneath the surface.

The stereotypic ancient philosopher is a toga-clad gentleman, calmly pondering the meaning of life. This image seems as far removed as can be from the howling, prancing shaman of primeval hunting cultures. The theurgist was both — a philosophical shaman who wielded every instrument, logical, mystical, or material, to prove the secrets of existence.

Iamblichus, like the shamans of old, taught that the soul is housed not just by the physical body, but also by an invisible and immortal frame. This ’spirit-body’ is made of the same stuff as the stars. The spirit-body can only be sensed through the imagination — indeed, it is the imagination. But it is obscured by the froth of discursive thinking. Breath meditations swept and cleansed the mind, bringing the imaginal body into clarity. The visions and celestial sounds invoked in theurgies were perceived with the spirit-body’s organs. And it is in this vehicle of imagination that the soul meets the gods.

Iamblichus saw himself as the preserver of paganism’s highest values and fullest insights. But he wasn’t uncritical of many common beliefs of his time. Then as now, people tried to divine the future by dreams, astrology, and numerology. Iamblichus thought that the only thing worth divining is the true nature of self and cosmos as manifestations of the One. Chasing after worldly secrets for their own sake was for infant souls. He was just as harsh in his judgment of egotistical magicians. Grasping at personal power through magic is a sad caricature of the theurgic quest, which is also a pursuit of power — the potency of universal creation itself. But the theurgist’s aim isn’t to gain this might for self-aggrandizement. When the personal soul is harmonized with cosmic Eros, the soul’s endowments serve the whole. Our sage also cast a cold eye on seekers of erotic experiences such as trances and ecstasies. Iamblichus pointed out that not every altered state is spiritually opportune. The ecstasies that occurred in theurgy weren’t treasured in themselves, but only as means to alert the soul to the One’s presence.

Personal knowledge, power, thrills — these weren’t what Iamblichus’ pagan Reformation was supposed to be about. He urged his disciples to model their lives on that of Pythagoras. The Apamean believed that Pythagoras had reached the peak of wisdom and compassion, not by rejecting his human existence but by doubling his sense of self to include the One and its infinite creativity. Pythagoras had matched his double identity with a double awareness. He became a living synthema of the One.

And in Eunapius’ tale, Iamblichus himself represents this attainment. Asked for a sign, he reaches beneath reality’s swirling surface (the springs), touches the dual currents (bright Eros and dark Anteros) of cosmic passion, and unites them in his own embodied life as their “genuine father.” He is a symbol of the Many, the Two, and the One. This, not some literal magic trick, was the miracle shown at Gadara.

Loss and Legacy

We all know today that Iamblichus’ pagan Reformation failed, washed away in the rising tide of Christianity and the shipwreck of Empire. But for a time a different outcome beckoned. His renewal of ancient wisdom freshened hope in the sagging pagan spirit. He was recognized as a genius within his lifetime, hailed as the “benefactor of the “entire world” and dubbed Theios Iamblichos — divine Iamblichus. Julian, the last non-Christian emperor, campaigned to revive the pagan faith along theurgical lines. According to historian Stephan Gersh, Iamblichus’ vision was “the dominant philosophy of antiquity in its most elaborate and developed form.” Every notable pagan thinker from Iamblichus’ age until the last light was snuffed at the Athenian Academy in 529 saw the world in his terms.

But the rebirth of paganism was not to be. Even among thoughtful pagans, Iamblichus’ ideas were almost immediately misunderstood. His cherished theurgical rites with their lofty goal of enlightenment fell into the very sort of magic and mystery-mongering that he condemned. Although he explicitly dismissed the use of statues for divination, theurgists became known as experts in the practice. Theurgist ceremonies were enacted as late as the eleventh century in Byzantium, but by then the ideals of the Apamean sage were long dead.

Iamblichus could have been a pagan Luther. But his timing was terrible. In the year of his death, Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea, which gave birth to Christian orthodoxy. Christianity’s strength grew through political maneuvering, escalating violence against its religious competitors, and luck. By century’s end, paganism was withering in the Church’s looming shadow.

But Iamblichus left a hidden legacy. in the sixth century, a Syrian Christian wrote several philosophical works. He pretended that his books had actually been authored by a minor New Testament figure named Dionysius the Areopagite. This “Pseudo-Dionysius” combined Christianity with the system of Iamblichus. The writer recast the invisible hierarchy personifying the circulation of Eros as nine angelic choirs. He applied Iamblichus’ arguments for the frailty of human thought and the value of theurgic rites to the need for Christian faith and the eucharist. And instead of viewing the entire universe as a synthema of divinity, he shrunk this notion to embrace only the Church. Pseudo-Dionysius’ writings were crucial in moulding the Christian world view in both East and West, were they were translated into Latin by the Irish theologian Erigena. Ironically, the pagan sage who tried to revive the religion of his past ended up creating much of the religion of his future via his anonymous Christian interpreter.

Iamblichus eventually did play a role in a revival of pagan though. Eleven centuries after his death, a copy of his major surviving work came into the hands of Marsilio Ficino, the Neoplatonist philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. Ficino translated it into Latin, giving it the title it is known by today — De Mysteriis, or On the Mysteries. The Renaissance fascination with ancient spirituality was fueled in part by Ficino’s enthusiasm for Iamblichus.

Does this nearly-forgotten sage have anything to teach us today? In some ways, Iamblichus’ time was like ours. Old values and certainties were under fire, and civilization’s survival seemed doubtful. In this ominous setting, Iamblichus outlined the soul’s condition in terms that many of us can recognize: scrambled, unable to feel clearly its connectedness with the Whole, often bearing life as an anxious trial. Our spiritual search yields many examples of the egocentric sidetracks the seer warned against. Modern seekers talk about Soul and Imagination, two of Iamblichus’ main concerns. This is due largely to the writings of James Hillman and Thomas Moore, who acknowledge their debt to the antique and Renaissance Neoplatonists. It may be time to reconsider the views of the ancient soul-master himself.

Perhaps it’s good that we no longer know the details of his theurgic ceremonies. Otherwise, we might be tempted to mimic behaviors taken out of a context that has passed forever. But from the fragments of Iamblichus’ works that have come down to us, we can recreate the theurgic attitude. And we can “try it on.”

The theurgist knows that the sensory world isn’t an illusion. But neither is it everything. Its rippling surface veils a vast, animate energy flooding from inconceivable depths. The mathematical patterning of this flood, discovered by Pythagoras, is the basis of modern science. The inner world isn’t what it seems either. Below the flotsam of thought and fantasy the immortal Imagination dwells, seeing and hearing and swimming in creation’s stream. We don’t need to flee to another world, or another time, or another identity. There’s no exit anyway. We can find our own ways to glimpse the One in the mirrors of Nature, songs, images, and symmetries. By nurturing our soul’s double awareness, we too can feel at home in this wondrous realm between Eros and Anteros. Walt Whitman saw the same vision as Iamblichus, a vision that can also be ours, of an all-embracing Being nearer than our breath:

I am the poet of reality
I say the earth is not an echo
Nor man an apparition;
But that all the things seen are real,
The witness and albic dawning of things equally real…

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This article originally appeared in Lapis Issue 13.

Robert McDermott, PhD, was president and is currently professor of philosophy and religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He was formerly professor and chair of the department of philosophy at Baruch College, CUNY. His publications include Radhakrishnan, The Essential Aurobindo, and The Essential Steiner.

This essay is a revised version of a section of an essay entitled “My Transpersonal Worldview,” written for a forthcoming volume called The Collected Works of Ken Wilber.

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I am often accused by my East Coast friends of having “gone Californian,” and by my San Francisco Bay Area friends of being still “very East Coast.” Neither characterization is intended as a compliment. Reference points for New York academic life tend to be the canonical tradition from Socrates to Godimer whereas comparable reference points for the Bay Area transpersonal community tend to be Asian spiritual teachers; meditation techniques; goddess, shamanic and Jungian symbols; astrological archetypes and Enneagram points. When I appear to my East Coast friends as too Californian, it is because of my delight in the varieties of spirit manifest in transpersonal psychologists and artists, in the eighty dharma centers in the Bay Area, sacred medicine researchers, teachers of biography, eco-feminists, multi-traditional mystics, organizational experts, and astrologers. Anthroposophy is not ordinarily listed in such a catalogue, and there are excellent reasons why it should not be, as well as reasons why it should be — hence this essay.

For my transpersonal colleagues I am too much an Anthroposophist and for my Anthroposophical colleagues I appear too involved in Hinduism, Buddhism, and The New Paradigm. My Anthroposophy is very “East Coast,” and perhaps necessarily so. My version of Anthroposophy includes Krishna and Buddha, but also tends to include references to the European Christian tradition. Anthroposophy has Japanese and Israeli adherents, but non-western and non-Christian voices are not yet as audible as Anthroposophical teachers who look and sound Christian. Furthermore, anyone who accepts Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual-scientific research accepts a Christo-centric view of history and evolution of consciousness. Such a view can, and perhaps will, offer an alternative perspective to Christianity, but it is difficult to imagine a Christo-centric view of the history of the earth and humanity which does not closely resemble and overlap with the view of Christ offered, however imperfectly, by Christianity.

This essay is an attempt to explain why I admit to holding both sides of the polarities introduced above. In this essay I recommend the complementarity of East Coast and West Coast thinking as well as Anthroposophical and transpersonal world views. I am grateful for my fifty years in heady New York and for the past ten years in the transpersonal community of the San Francisco Bay Area. This essay issues from my primary commitment to the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner and from my secondary commitment to the varieties of transpersonal dharma and practice. The sociological difference of East and West Coast is interesting to observe for its subtle influence but the deeper topic is the spiritual paradigm represented by Anthroposophical and transpersonal teachings and practices.

While it would be misleading to say that Anthroposophy embodies East Coast and transpersonal embodies Bay Area sensibilities, the turn of the twentieth century European origin of Anthroposophy and the Asian and pagan origin of the transpersonal worldview continue to affect all who touch one or the other. For ten years I have been trying to integrate the best features of the transpersonal experience, worldview, and practices with Anthroposophy and to introduce Anthroposophical thinking and practice into the transpersonal community. My spiritual home, however, for the past twenty-five years, and no doubt longer in both directions, has been and will be Anthroposophy.

As my Anthroposophical and transpersonal worldviews overlap substantially but not entirely, this essay aims to express a transpersonal Anthroposophy and almost equally an Anthroposophical transpersonalism. As with all comparisons, it is the differences that get disproportionate attention. I will also indicate the strength of the Jewish and Christian elements in East Coast thinking, and the corresponding emphasis in the transpersonal community on a light-paradigm Buddhism — or, negatively, away from Jewish and Christian monotheism, creationism, and messianism. Entirely consistent with my Anthroposophical worldview, my thinking has been and no doubt will remain Mahayanist and incarnational. I attend to the Krishna of the Bhagavadgita, not only of the Mahabharata; to Buddha of the Mahayana tradition, not only Gotama of the Theravada tradition; and to Christ of the John-Logos tradition, not only Jesus of the western humanist tradition.

As it has been the aim of my dharma for approximately thirty years to transform my personal life in the light of the Mahayana and the transpersonal, I sought the guidance, first, of Sri Aurobindo, whom I have long considered the foremost spiritual teacher of modern India. Without revising that assessment, I turned for guidance to Rudolf Steiner, whom I consider the foremost spiritual guide of the West — and perhaps of this historical period. It seems to me that Steiner has given a more comprehensive spiritual teaching than anyone else of the last several centuries. I have been working both at deepening my Anthroposophical work as such, and also at creating relationships between my Anthroposophical discipline and the spiritual work of diverse individuals and groups, many of whom are transpersonalists.

The transpersonal movement is based on a panoply of non-ordinary experiences, including those derived from psychotropics and psychedelics, meditation, shamanic practices, intuition, rituals, spiritual journeys, artistic activities, and organizational transformation — a truly radical empiricism and one deepened by traditions of practice. The entire transpersonal movement has issued primarily from psychology, the most transpersonally advanced western discipline from the 1960’s to the present. The transpersonal movement in turn continues to influence psychology and allied disciplines on behalf of a conception of psyche as profound and proactive. Not properly an ‘ism’ or a community, ‘transpersonal’ is an adjective prefixed to a loose confederacy of ideas, ideals, critiques and practices, as well as cultural (and more typically counter-cultural) mores.

I would propose as a working definition that the term transpersonal refers to a group of worldviews and practices which aim to foster soul transformative experience as well as to deepen and expand awareness of psychic and spiritual realities. It should be added to this definition that the realities which we in the third millennium West consider extraordinary would be perceived as perfectly ordinary in earlier cultures and in cultures at the present time not yet overwhelmed by the modern western paradigm. In recent decades, experiences that were kept out of mainstream cultural and intellectual life have been increasingly recognized as worthy of attention. As positivism and materialism tighten their grip on the intellectual life of the West, so do an increasing number of individuals and communities affirm the interior life. As darkness spreads, individual lights do shine, and need to shine, ever brighter.

In principle, there is no part of Anthroposophy that should be considered incompatible with the ideas and experiences that characterize the transpersonal movement. The degree to which Steiner’s account of the evolution of consciousness is consonant with Ken Wilber’s theory and application of the pre/trans fallacy is one of many areas of agreement between Anthroposophy and the foundational ideas espoused by the most prominent members of the transpersonal community. There are also, however, five important respects in which my commitment to Anthroposophy leads me to make assertions which are not generally included in the worldview most typically associated with transpersonal thinkers:

1. The supersensible reality of Anthroposophy and Anthroposophia;

2. The ontological reality of higher beings;

3. The evolution of the earth and humanity as a framework for epistemology, culture and spiritual discipline;

4. The centrality of Christ — in cooperation with Buddha and other spiritual beings in service of humanity and the earth;

5. A positive regard for historical religions.

First, as “transpersonal” modifies a group of thinkers with a shared worldview and set of experiences, “Anthroposophical” modifies the teachings, practices, and contributions of Rudolf Steiner and everyone who works out of his dharma. But “Anthroposophical” is also a modifier of a spiritual being whom Steiner refers to as Anthroposophia — human wisdom, in divine feminine form. In addition to designating a body of ideas and the method of intuitive thinking which ideally access such ideas, Anthroposophy refers to a spiritual influence of particular beings and events in the spiritual world, particularly Christ, Buddha, the Archangel Michael, Christian Rosenkreutz, and Anthroposophia. Throughout the last week of December, 1923, Steiner created a mystery school, with esoteric and exoteric components, continuous with the western Rosicrucian esoteric tradition, in service of these beings.

Anthroposophy is also linked properly and comprehensively to the karmic biography of Rudolf Steiner, an initiate whose teachings and spiritual mission are right for this time. Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) was a European initiate who brought a modem scientific method to the study of spiritual realities. Science commanded his attention and respect, but he also taught methods by which to break through its perceived boundaries to a direct knowledge of spirit. Steiner exemplified and taught a way of thinking which is capable of accessing spiritual reality and serves as an antidote to the restrictions on thinking placed so effectively by modern Western epistemology. Steiner’s method fully integrates feeling and willing, activity and receptivity. The esoteric research that Steiner conducted in later life led to many practical initiatives such as biodynamic farming and Waldorf education. His epistemology, as theory and practice, provides the necessary foundation to all of his work on behalf of spiritual and cultural renewal. The Anthroposophical Society that Steiner founded is a modern mystery school continuous with the mystery centers of Egypt and Greece, but using western scientific sensibility and open to all who seek knowledge of higher worlds.

Secondly, my Anthroposophical worldview affirms a full hierarchy and pantheon of real, distinctive, and collaborative spiritual beings, including Krishna, Buddha and Christ, angels and archangels, the tempters Lucifer and Ahriman, and the great spiritual leaders of humanity. Steiner’s accounts of these beings and their influence provide us an opportunity to approach, to contemplate, and to make relationships with higher beings. Such specificity, however, can lead to inflated claims of familiarity. Religious fundamentalists have a tendency to regard their images of such beings as the beings themselves, thereby falling into idolatry, a sin warned against in the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, and the Qu’ran. A similar opportunity and temptation attends our relationships to spiritual leaders of humanity — e.g., Abraham and Moses; John the Evangelist and Mary the Mother; Sankara, Ramanuja, and Sri Ramakrishna; Shantidev and Dogen; Augustine and Aquinas; Dante and St. Francis, as well as Rudolf Steiner. While the personalities and achievements of these figures offer unlimited opportunity for intellectual speculation, it is their essential karmic mission and significance that is efficacious for our spiritual striving.

The task of knowing the essential spiritual work of contemporary spiritual teachers is even more challenging because it is so difficult to penetrate to the spiritual realities of human beings who are familiar in ordinary ways. Among the spiritual leaders of global import in the twentieth century, I would include Sri Aurobindo, M.K. Gandhi, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Rudolf Steiner. Close behind these I would mention Black Elk, Swami Yogananda, Sri Ramana Maharshi, J. Krishnamurti, Simone Weil, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Buber, C.G. Jung, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Bede Griffiths, Thich Nhat Hahn, and Ram Dass. I mention these names in the hope that such exemplars of the divine-human dialogue will give credibility and encouragement to our seeking and striving. The divine continues to reveal and manifest in myriad ways, and none so helpfully as in the lives of our contemporaries. The study of these figures and their esoteric-spiritual tasks is part of the discernment of karma.

For each of these, and others, I want to know the innermost core of their spiritual life, of their connection to the spiritual world, immanently and transcendentally considered. To meet such figures in their spiritual import is to engage in real, as opposed to nominal, knowing. It is to know the objective reality rather than the mere name, the surface, the conventional signification. Steiner’s esoteric epistemology is both a monism and a realism: a monism in that he defines reality as spirit, and matter as an expression of spirit; a realism in that spirit manifests a vast plurality of real beings and spiritual realities. These beings are all knowable, but only by effort. Steiner observes the medieval theological concept of adequatio: the level of knowing must meet the level of the object to be known. As Goethe observed, light created the eye just as spiritual light created the spiritual eye. To know the spiritual reality of beings past or present, physical and discarnate, requires spiritual — or realist, not nominalist — knowing.

Although it would be difficult, and rather to the side of the purpose of this essay, to generalize on the degree to which leading transpersonalist works can be said to be nominalist, I do believe that transpersonal thinkers partake of this nominalism more than I would want to do. Contemporary thought generally, and perhaps particularly psychological thought, regards as constructs of psyche precisely the spiritual ideals, events and individuals that I regard as spiritual facts, as realities that are mediated by, but also transcend, psyche. Among the many kinds of beings to which I ascribe ontological reality — not infrequently to the dismay of readers and colleagues — are angels and bodhisattvas; ideals such as Love, Truth, and Freedom; the etheric bodies of planets, animals, and human beings; and the Christ surrounding the Earth.

Names such as Krishna, Buddha, and Christ — and others, such as Brahman and Divine Mother — designate single beings, and experiences of them result in quite different descriptions of their characteristics and activities. These higher spiritual beings are experienced by human beings in a wide variety of valid transpersonal ways. By their relative vastness and relative perfection, these beings are closer to the singular divine source than any personal life, human community, or earthly existent. Because accounts of higher beings, including those given by Rudolf Steiner, are mediated by the limitations of human capacities, they are inevitably partial and inadequate.

I see the trans-personal and the trans-sensory as accessible and knowable by human effort and grace. The essential task of our time is to establish a noetic relationship between the immanent and transcendent, the supersensible and sensory. If artists, instead of psychologists, had initiated and articulated the transpersonal movement, its impact would have been more focused on the development of positive capacities and less on therapy. Steiner worked extensively with the arts because he considered art to be the most effective way of establishing a relationship between the supersensory and the world of the senses.

An ideal approach to the supersensible seems to me to include, in addition to artistic activity (including speaking and writing), highly individual experiences such as those celebrated in James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, and community experiences such as those celebrated in the religious philosophy of Josiah Royce. Just as an individual person is necessarily part of many communities, and is unintelligible apart from them, higher spiritual beings whom I and others aspire to know have their being as part of supersensible communities.

Third, it makes a decisive difference for one’s worldview if one adopts a perennialist or evolutionary framework for the interpretation not only of the past, present, and future, and equally of one’s spiritual discipline. I accept in broad outline the evolutionism of Steiner, including particularly the significance of Christ in the evolution of the earth and humanity. This framework might be the most important divide between Anthroposophy and virtually all transpersonal perspectives. In Steiner’s view, truths, such as those of the great religious traditions, are not permanently true, and certainly not true in the same ways, as one historical epoch succeeds another. The truth, meaning, and effectiveness of ideas, as well as beings, including higher beings, are all decisively affected by their evolving contexts.

Steiner’s account of the evolution of consciousness is not a simple modern Western view of progress, such that later is better; it is a double process. As human consciousness has expanded and deepened with respect to knowledge, complexity, and inventiveness, and continues to do so, it will continue, proportionately and appropriately, to lose the intimacy and directness of its relationship to the divine. In Steiner’s double evolutionary process, earlier consciousness (shamanic, for example) means closer to spiritual realities and later consciousness (particularly modern Western) means more alienated, individualized, and materialistic. This problem of modern Western alienated consciousness, however, provides the opportunity for humanity to share freely and deliberately in the creation of spiritual-sensory relationships.

As humanity lost its spiritual home and innate capacities (which Owen Barfield refers to as original participation), it also gained capacities. In the course of several millennia of human development, humanity experienced greater independence from the divine and thereby realized correspondingly greater opportunities for deliberate relationships between the human and divine. Steiner considered the twentieth century to be a time of exceptional spiritual darkness — and thereby an exceptional opportunity for the development of human wisdom and human will. To meet this challenge, Steiner bequeathed a host of spiritual insights and practices under the heading of Anthroposophy or spiritual science.

Steiner’s account of the evolution of consciousness does not commit what Ken Wilber refers to as the pre/trans fallacy — i.e., it does not reduce or prefer the pre-personal to the trans-personal (by whatever terms). Steiner essentially holds that even though the present might be terrible and the past might appear to be ideal, earlier modes of consciousness should nevertheless not be confused with, nor preferred to, contemporary modes of consciousness. Similarly, higher modes of consciousness, though perhaps painful or terrifying, should nevertheless neither be reduced to nor sacrificed in favor of lower modes of consciousness.

Steiner developed and recommended as a spiritual exercise a discipline, which he called symptomatology, for the study of the characteristics of each age, event, and biography under review. Steiner’s advice concerning the karma of consciousness is analogous to Krishna’s advice to Arjuna — namely, that despite the pain of Arjuna’s duty as a warrior in the line of battle, it was nevertheless right for him to do his own caste duty, however poorly, than to do well the duty of another caste. So too, it is better to face the task of this age, which Steiner takes to be the cultivation of free and loving thinking, than to revert to the consciousness of a previous age.

Fourth, I see the Christ as the central event in the evolution of consciousness. I am convinced that Steiner’s rendering of the evolution of consciousness will need to be very significantly extended so as to include, for their respective contributions, shamanic and indigenous consciousness, east Asian thought, and the vast research generated by a half century of anthropology, but I am not inclined to reduce or revise Steiner’s account of the role of Christ in cosmic and human history which he refers to as the Mystery of Golgotha. The transpersonal movement, by contrast, seems as focused on the spiritual teachings of Asia as the Theosophists of the past century and a quarter. The transpersonal movement has exhibited a natural preference for Buddhism, and particularly for forms of Buddhism with a light paradigmatic commitment.

The life of Jesus seems to me to have been an instrument similar to that of Gotama. After approximately fifteen years with little or no conscious relationship to the reality of Christ, I began to absorb the voluminous and unique teachings on Christ to be found in the writings and lectures of Rudolf Steiner. As a result of these works, supplemented by the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton, and Bede Griffiths, I now view with gratitude the union of Jesus and Christ for three years that made possible a redemptive sacrifice on behalf of the evolution of human, and particularly Western, consciousness. If I do not fully accept the fundamental premise of Buddhism (particularly the first of the four noble truths — that all existence is dukkha) it is at least partly because the “good news” of the Incarnation described in the New Testament, and particularly its double message of vulnerability and forgiveness, keeps breaking in.

I consider my personal life to be intensely important not, as I ordinarily think, because it is mine, but, as I know transpersonally, because it expresses, however dimly, the reality of Logos — Christ, Buddha, Krishna, and Tao. I am relatively more awake to the reality and transformative power of Logos-Christ in history and enveloping the earth, and of Buddha, the preeminent source of wisdom and compassion prior to Christ, and less awake to other spiritual beings, such as Tao and Brahman, and beings to be contacted in shamanic journeys. As a result of study and meditative reflection, I can say that Buddha and Christ are real to me, but far less vivid for me than I would want them to be. Such beings are more real for me than they presumably are for those who subscribe to a standard modem or postmodern paradigm, but less real for me than they are for those whom William James referred to as “the experts” — converts, mystics, saints, Gnostics, sages, and initiates.

Fifth, just as transpersonal thinkers and teachers are currently attempting to revision psychology, so might they attempt to revision religious traditions as we know them. To do so, transpersonal thinkers who often sound dismissive of religious traditions might heed Huston Smith (whose exposition of religious traditions seems to me unsurpassed in our time) in seeing in these traditions what he refers to as the “traction of history.” Now and in the future, religious traditions — including particularly Asian traditions about which transpersonalists tend to be reactively uncritical — must die not to their rich diversity, sources, or institutions, but to their penchant for atavism, misogyny, and intolerance. Let pragmatism and pluralism help religious traditions replace anachronistic and dogmatic prescriptions in favor of tolerance needed both by adherents of religious traditions and by those who might be adherents if religious communities more faithfully exhibited their espoused ideals.

The first of many positive consequences of this change would be the general acceptance of the yogas that Krishna taught in the Bhagavadgita: spiritual thinking, selfless action, worship, and meditation. A second consequence would be the general acceptance of the dharma of Buddha and his followers. The life of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, made luminous by suffering, and his teachings made efficacious by compassion, might then serve as evidence that spirit manifests itself for all humankind. A third such consequence would be the general acknowledgment that the Christ (Logos), through Its incarnation in Jesus, as depicted in the New Testament and witnessed currently by a third of the human community, decisively brought and continues to bring redemptive grace into human consciousness and into the earth.

Religious traditions can trivialize and distort by dogma and idolatry, but they can also sustain the mysterious relationship between the spiritual and the human. In my view, the spiritual has broken through with particular force and depth in at least these instances — but in many others as well: the revelation of YHWH as “I AM” to Moses; the revelation of the yogas by Krishna to Arjuna recounted in the Bhagavadgita; the way of overcoming suffering by Buddha; the life and teachings of Christ from his baptism through His resurrection and the descent of the Spirit; the reality of the Avalokiteshvara (the bodhisattva of compassion) in the life of Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth incarnation of the Dalai Lama.

It is an essential component of my Anthroposophy (as well as a karmically significant part of biography) that I find deep exoteric and esoteric truths in life and reality of Christ, some of which have been saved and others distorted by Christianity. I hold that as human beings we are born of the Ground of Being (traditionally called the Father), die and resurrect through the Logos, and are drawn to the future by the Spirit. I am convinced that the “persons” of the Trinity should no longer be understood in gender terms and that the divine feminine is emerging in our time from a deeply spiritual, ontologically real source.

Because I need help in my effort to experience, understand and express the reality of Christ and other higher beings who work in harmony with Christ on behalf of humanity and the earth, I practice some of Steiner’s many recommendations — such as meditation, working with mantras, esoteric reading, and regular invocation of the dead — helpful for developing a noetic relationship with the spiritual in the universe. I supplement my Anthroposophical practice by participation in the Christian sacramental life made possible by Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Experience of the Christian sacraments, particularly when deepened by scholarship, can be profoundly revelatory of a positive relationship between the sensory and the supersensory realms.