Honourable companions,
I begin with a story: ten years ago I sat against a cedar tree that grew from the edge of a limestone cliff overlooking the Grand River. It was my habit at the time to go to that tree because it was a good place to read books undisturbed, for I was still a schoolboy then. The wind shaking the autumn leaves and the rocks at the shallow river bottom produced a sound that washed over me. I kept to my books, but at some point I put down the books and listened to the river, flowing over the rocks. And then I listened to the wind in the trees. I enjoyed the life around me. When I returned home in the evening, I had left my books behind.
The journal that I kept at the time cites that day in Autumn as the day that I became interested in spirituality. Much life has happened to me in the ten years since that time. My education has continued, of course, for now I am no longer a schoolboy but a grown young adult. I cite that afternoon in Autumn because it is the first spiritual experience that I can fully recall in my life. On that day, I encountered the spirit in nature.
In paganism, and especially Wicca, there is a debate on whether spirit is transcendent or immanent. The simple explanation of this division is this: transendence is the view that spiritual realities are above, seperate, and beyond normal realities. Immanence is the view that spiritual realities exist within, and are inseperable from, normal realities. This letter speaks from the view that spirit is an is an immanent, inner, presence. It is immanent for the embodied world that surrounds us as well as
our own personal being. Embodied life generates its own spirituality through a process of emergence, and that is what makes embodied life so wonderful. I offer an argument for immanence as the nature of spirit here: Spirit is essentially immanent because it can be experienced. Spirit is knowable, and understandable, and we can communicate our personal knowing of it. If the nature of spirit was transcendant, it would be outside the range of sight and knowledge, and there would be no experience to communicate, but this is not the case. The origin of spirit is not beyond the world, and so the embodied world itself is the origin. There is no division between embodied being and spiritual being. The world is the womb of birth from which emerges the spirit. So it is that I tell you, good and learned friends, that the Goddess is the world, and the world is all that exists, and nothing less.
Understanding Spirit as Mystery
An immanent spirit is not an object in the usual (analytic) sense. It cannot be said of such a spirit that is "here" and not "there", it cannot be said of an encounter with such a spirit that what is presented to the seeker has anything to do with a particular tree, a specific rock, or even the seeker alone. Spirit reaches beyond particulars; and this is why, I think, its ontology mistaken for transcendant. When the presentation of the world to the seeker reaches the level that cannot be located in any specific place nor likewise located in time, its location must be spoken of as mysterious. A better word to connote what I mean, then, is "mystery".
The word "mystery" means something hidden, invisible, incomprehensible, or beyond human understanding. It comes from a greek word meaning "to close the eyes or lips". Although I assert that spirit is not beyond understanding, I still assert that mystery is the right concept with which to understand spirit. Spirit is not known in the same way that we know embodied things, because it is not a "thing". Spirit appeals to more than just the senses to be known. Yet Mystery is rooted in lived experience and not in intellectual exercise. It is not a categorical abstraction (which is a class of objects grouped together by shared properties), because one could locate the abstraction in the mind of the thinker. One does not meet "animal" when in the woods; one does not meet the intellectual group in which we assemble the squirrels and coyotes and deer and crows that we meet in the woods. You can meet a Mystery, but not a category; one thinks about categories, but mysteries are actually outside the mind, in
a strange way which I will shortly explain. We can know an abstraction a priori, but we cannot know a mystery in quite the same way. Moreover, one could supposedly locate a categorical abstraction in the thinker who contemplates it, and if so, we cannot
say that it has an indetermined place and time, which is how I am characterising Mystery.
So, what is a mystery? I begin the explanation by offering an analogy. It is like a person under a veil: we can see the veil but not the person within it. We can see that the folds of the veil are shaped like the person. Thus, we can see the person without looking at her, and touch her without feeling her. Yet we intuitively know that there is a person behind the veil because the person is affecting the shape and movement of the veil. The veil is the world, and the person behind it is all of the animating principles of function operating on the world. Mysteries are the immanent principles of animation which, by working on the embodied world, produce a change, a renewal, a birth, a death, and every new event and new state of being that could be created at all. Hence, mysteries are encountered in events and not in things. When we meet with a mystery, we don't know what it is, we don't know where it is. We know only that it is. The new event borne of the joining of a mystery with the embodied world is the Sacred Marriage, and it is the Great Rite that the witches dramatise with their bodies, or with the chalice and the blade. Wise indeed were the occult-minded artists who depicted our ancient Goddess with a veil! She is the unlocated yet discernable presence, the mystery, the spirit, immanent within the world. It is the walker we know though we see only her footprints in the sand, the stamp that we know though we see only the impression in the wax, the force that marks the world with its presence and yet does not really exist in extended space, and hence it is shadowy, empty, mysterious, and spiritual. Such is the mystery.
Mysteries, being unlocateable in place, extend through all place and so are everywhere, and immanent. Being unsituated in time they extend through all time and so are eternal, and unchanging. Being everywhere, it can be experienced anywhere; being eternal, it can be experienced at any time. "Nature loves to hide", says Heraclitus*, and perhaps he was alluding to the unlocateable, animating principles of nature that are hidden just beyond the usual reach of sense-perception. But he also reminds us that "the lord whose Oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign", as if to say that the hiddenness of nature (or, that aspect of nature which Apollo stood for) is not a deliberate obfuscation but a feature of its being, and is perfectly comprehensible to someone who knows how to read the signs.
The immanent presence of Mysteries within all things is one basis for the connectivity of all living beings, and all environmental phenomena. It is the foundation of shared ontology above and beyond the simple claim that all bodies are energy from the same quantum field, or composed of the same sub-atomic particles. The purely physical case for connectivity is that all living beings rely upon the same source material for sustinence; we all breathe the same air, we all require water, we all rely on the
same sun as a source of heat energy (except insofar as we build surrogate "suns", like fires or electric radiators), we all are borne from other living beings, and we all consume organic matter for food. Living beings are, for each other, a source of sustinence, for we are parents (as life sustains other life as a natural function of being alive), and we are fodder (as life sustains other life by death). Nonorganic factors like air, heat, water, and minerals also sustain life in the same way. The life-
world is a world of connectivity, but even as a feature of the life-world, connectivity itself is an emergent mystery.
Experiencing the spirit
When we meet with a thing (really a non-thing) that is eternal and immanent, we experience it spiritually; we have a spiritual experience. The immanent and eternal mystery, which is the central feature of the spiritual experience, is not known by the light pillar of intellectual contemplation (which renders this very letter somewhat ironic, does it not?) and not known by the dark pillar of sense-perception. It is known not by these ways of knowing but by parting the veil between the pillars; it is known by direct living encounter. This is what the Brahmin of India mean when they say they pierce the veil of Maya; it is what the Druids mean when they say they part the mist of Manannan. But to part the veil does not mean to slay whatever creature lives
there, it means to confront it, to see it, listen to it, to touch it. The Druid looks to a Yew tree, and in seeing through the mist of Manannan she sees not a Yew tree but sees an universal animating principle in the Yew tree; she looks to the Yew tree
and sees death (which is what the Yew tree symbolises for them). She looks to the birch tree and sees not a birch tree but sees Birth. She looks through the presentation of sense perception to see the mystery within. She looks through the world to find the world within the world. "Parting the mist of Manannan" is different from ordinary sense-perception because it reaches for a level of principle, but it is different from intellectual reasoning, which is the usual cognitive tool for reaching abstractions, because the knowledge is about something genuinely in the world and not just a construction of the mind; also, the abstractions are of categories not principles. One could say, "parting the mist of Manannan" involves using one's senses and not one's reason to make abstractions.
In paganism we regard the spiritual experience as real, and not as illusory or abstract. Some might deny the reality of spiritual experiences on the grounds that the objects experienced are not real. "It is all in your mind", a skeptic might say. "It
is not God that you saw, but a crust of bread, a piece of cheese, an undigested bit of beef."* I respond thiswise: If I think that the spiritual experience is outside of me, I am misled. A spirit is not a "thing", nor does the experience of spirit have
any "object" in the strict analytical sense, as I argued earlier.
To use the word "God" for the thing encountered in spiritual experiences is misleading. In my culture and with this language, the word connotes a transcendent omnipotent intelligence, who is interested in the moral condition of the world, which is not at all what I mean. The spiritual experience is not predicated on any moral issue. Neither is there any selection on the part of the spiritual entity itself as to who will encounter it and who will not. The mysteries are always there, no matter who is encountering them, and so an encounter with a mystery can happen to the most beatific and saintly among us as well as to the most vile. The experience itself does not determine its own moral interpretation. This is because there is no "entity"; there is
no object-- and that is what makes it spiritual.
A spiritual experience is what happens when a person encounters a mystery. The moral interpretation of a spiritual experience comes from the seeker; for me, ten years ago, in the woods by the river, I interpreted the experience as beautiful and right.
I was listening to the sound of leaves shaking and river water flowing, but for some reason the sound became not mere noise but meaningful communication. The spiritual experience is in the communication. Had anyone been with me that autumn afternoon, the
wind would have rattled the trees and the river water would have run its course. As it was, no one was with me, and the wind rattled the trees and the river water ran its course. Today, as I write this at my table much distant from the white limestone
cliffs of the Gorge, the wind is rattling the trees and the river water is running its course. The material thing that I encountered on that afternoon is still there and it was there before I was born and it will still be there when I die. The mystery is still there too. A mystery entails more than trees and rivers, for that is entailed in any experience of sense-perception that a subject might have who visits that spot. The experience of Mystery emerges from these conditions. Yet there would have been no spiritual experience had there been no wind, no trees, no river, and no rocks. The mystery, then, is contingent upon material conditions as its sub-stratum. Or, to put it more holisticly, the mystery is presented by the embodied world which is its
sub-stratum. The substratum underdetermines, or sets the limits and range of possible interpretation, without specifically defining, the emergent experience. Without the underdetermining presence of the embodied world as substratum there is no experience. Matter is, after all, the "mother-stuff" out of which things are formed.
The other condition for a spiritual experience is, naturally enough, the presence of a seeker. Without the receptive seeker processing the sense-perception into meaningful intelligence, there is no experience. I stipulate "receptive" because the subject must be ready for the experience. Readiness is meant not in the sense of preparedness, for many is the epiphany that takes us by surprise. Readiness is the capacity to experience. Without the capacity to experience, perception would be composed of coloured shapes moving in space, and not trees, rocks, rivers, nor wind; there would be only sounds of varying pitch and volume, and not speech, or music. Insofar as the seeker is a part of the self-same world that presents spiritual experiences to her, she too underdetermines the experience.
Out of the material conditions present in the world and the readiness of the seeker emerges the spiritual experience. The leap of emergence from sense-perception and material world to fully realised spiritual experience occurs because something about the combined receptivity of the subject, and the material conditions extant at the time, reach beyond a level that can be analysed soley in terms of the embodied world and the seeker, by themselves or in combination. Consider a Druid who takes up the bell-
branch. Air shakes against itself in a wave-shaped pattern, which resonates in the ear. Where is there any room for sound in shaking waves of air? The answer, of course, is none, for sound is not in the shaking waves of air. From shaking waves of air emerges a transmission, a communication, a presentation, of something beyond the matter in itself, taken in by the receptive seeker, and becoming sound. This is basic emergentism theory, which should be familliar to philosophers who investigate the mind.
What is different about spiritual experiences from ordinary experiences is that the receptive subject organises the presentation into more than knowledge about the world immediatly surrounding the subject. The presentation is organised into knowledge about universal principles, or mysteries, that enable and animate the world immediatly surrounding the subject.
Another thing that is interesting about Mysteries, or animating principles of function that emerge from the world, is that they seem to be independant of seekers. The spiritual experience is in the person, but the Mystery is in the world, whether someone is looking out for the mystery or not. But, insofar as the seeker participates in the world that presents the mystery, she too underdetermines the mystery, she too is influenced by the mystery, she too is the house of mystery that as a mystic she enters. Insofar as the mysteries are immanent everywhere, they are also immanent in the seeker. An entire constellation of mysteries is the subject. So it is that the external environment is not the exclusive condition for the spiritual experience, though it can and certainly does function as a condition. The environment is not the exclusive presentation, though it functions as a presenter. The only absolutly necessary material condition is the seeker herself, within whom can be found any mystery that can
be found anywhere at all.
It is still possible to practice spirit flight, and give offerings of wine and apples and the like to local spirits, and maintain the view that these spiritual beings and experience do not transcend the self, nor the world, but are immanent mysteries, which emerge from an inner birthplace of being. When the universality of the spirit is realised, the sense of self and identity extends beyond the body to include the local environment, and continues to extend onwards in ever-widening spirals of inclusiveness to enclose the whole star-filled universe. Then, can one genuinely say, "I am a wave of the sea".*
Cathbad
Writing from the Grove,
and in the season of Beltaine, of the year 1999
*Heraclitus: Pre-socratic Greek philosopher. Quotes of his thoughts come from "A Presocratics Reader" trans. Richard McKirahan, Jr., ed. Patricia Curd (Hackett Publishing Company, Cambridge, 1996.)
* "Not God but a crust of bread..." An allusion to A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
* "I am a wave of the sea" Song of Amergin, an ancient Irish Druid.
