There are two spirits animating us. One is the spirit of the ideal. And the other is the spirit of the fallen. The spirit of the ideal grips us and holds our attention. It is in the spirit of human development and self actualization. The spirit of the fallen slips in as the easy way out when the weight of missing the mark pulls us under. There are also two drives that push us. One could be called the life force, or libido. And another could be called the death force or death drive. In theology, they (the ideal and self-dissolution; libido and death drive) were referred to as God and the Devil. These two are opposites, in that one leads to development of the personality and the ego, and one leads to its destruction. In my personal journey, I grew up pretty conservative Christian. The soul was a real thing, and was a unified thing. It wasn't an amalgamation of parts like many psychologists now believe. The scientific endeavor cuts everything up into concepts and relates them, which is not how the mind operates in everyday life when the ego is the center of personality. There is a Quality to a soul. When I left Christianity, I was stuck with the problem of the soul. It had to operate in a world of cause and effect, and needed to be explained somehow. This is where I made friends with the Devil. I went into the underworld so to speak, to take apart my soul, and see what I was made of, relying on the conceptual mind. What I found was a lot of chaos. Self dissolution, and at the bottom, an intimate connection with the Universe and God. In the middle of hell, I found the key to heaven. The original intimacy we used to have with God. With Being. However, evolution isn't impartial. It takes sides. And as a part of this process, I had to leave this state of bliss in It, dissolved in God, and separate myself so I could stand apart in relationship to Him/Her. And so there are two directions of my spiritual growth. There is the path of waking up from separateness, and growing up into separateness. In Zen, this is referred to as not one and not two. It's a negation of both dualism and monism.
In the beginning was the Uroboros. Life beget itself. Being was one with itself, and it produced of itself. You see this in unconscious beings such as plants reproducing unconsciously. The tree species could be said to produce its young of itself. This is the original blissful state of oneness. We are homesick for this state, and we get glimpses of that lost paradise when we get experiences of Flow. When we lose ourselves in what we are doing, becoming what we are doing. This is the one hand clapping. However, as the consciousness and the ego developed out of unconscious existence, we began to look back upon ourselves and the world as separate beings. We left our mother nature. Going back to the mother, to find unity and non-self, is common in Eastern practice, and in the mystics of the Western traditions. This kind of spiritual practice emphasizes our lack of separateness from Being. Zen practice and many meditation strategies like mindfulness have the goal of bringing us back to the eternal present moment and to get back to the simple experience of being alive as we are. There is a dark side though. There is a tendency of the psyche to fall apart if it isn't motivated to grow and stand guard. A natural drive to stay unconscious is in us, and may fight knowledge because we want to repress things like sickness and death. These existential issues must be addressed to fully wake up from separateness. However, we didn't evolve to be one with nature. God kicked us out of the garden, and we were cursed. Now we have to work and suffer pain. We fell into history. And sacrifices for the future were made a necessity. Gone are the child like days of living off the land, or depending on our parents. We have to grow up. We have to work. If you don't all sorts of psychopathologies can develop.
In the beginning was the Word. We developed language, and the ability to give form to the chaotic world we lived in. Speech developed as a way to order symbols and concepts so we could slay the dragon of chaos. The proverbial snake, cat, bird, of our ancestors became the unknown itself. Now we do battle at every turn. We have given up the eternal present, for a conceptual future. It's necessary to develop as mature egos to function in time, with resources, and in our increasingly complex social environment. The spirit of the creator is animating us as we voluntarily worship the ideal future. When we orient ourselves properly, the world around us becomes a benevolent Father helping us mature and develop as separate egos with will and choice.
Tied in with this waking up and growing up, is the involuntary and the voluntary aspects of ourselves. Getting with the involuntary and trusting ourselves to the water of Being is a good way to wake up. Pushing ourselves in the voluntary to build a strong will is a good way of growing up. The difference between the two is the difference between the mystics and the orthodoxy. Between the man who feels himself one with God, and the one who sees the necessity for tradition and social institutions. The mystics have been in love with Mother Nature, while the proponents of social tradition seem to favour Father Culture.
The mystics, in love with Mother Nature, blur the distinction between themselves and the world. They are personified in an ecstasy of “I am that”. It's about merging the self with Being. This kind of person stresses the involuntary processes of his being, and his lack of free will. It is natural to be me, he says. Alan Watts was a proponent of Eastern mysticism. He educated many in the West in the ways of mysticism. He was a religious naturalist, and did not see any difference between our psyche's and the universe. Watt's would say things like, “you are as natural as a wave in the ocean”, and “enlightenment is when the wave realizes that it is the ocean”. There's something beautiful about this. It reminds us of our childhood and our place in the cosmos. To feel yourself as the ocean for the first time is a blissful experience. Every thought just happens, like you breathe. It just happens. And you can't stop it from happening. It goes on in you no matter what you do. So you might as well go with it. Many of our problems are existent because we go against the grain. This is a Taoist idea. The goal is to get with the Way. To be one with the Tao. The Tao is the unnamed unmoved mover that spins the wheel of the universe. And we are a part of that wheel. How beautiful just to feel, like in part, or just for a moment, that you are connected to everything that is. To not feel like a stranger, afraid, in a world it never made, but to be right at home in the exact moment, place, and state that you are in. Perfection in the is-ness of the now. There is perfection in the Great Mother, but there is also the danger of the Terrible Mother. The consuming nature that dissolves the ego. We need an ego to survive in our fallen state. We have to live in time, and we must interact socially with others. There is always the danger of dissolving back into the Terrible Mother of Being as if dying. Giving up the struggle to survive and to fall back on involuntary behaviour. Which is often less adaptive than voluntary rational ego infused existence.
The orthodoxy love tradition, and human development as distinct from the world. This is personified in the person who stands apart from nature and the world, and says, “I am not that”. This person lives more voluntarily and stresses his free will. I am at war with the world and my impulses, he says. I am separate and in relationship to other free agents. He relates to the world as Father Culture. The struggle to free himself from nature is paramount. This echoes with God giving dominion of the world to humankind. Whatever God is. God can be thought of the spirit of the Father. Of culture itself. We have gotten here on the backs of those who came before us, and we must stay on the straight and narrow road that is the only way to heaven. To conceptualize the highest good you can conceive of, and to align yourself with it, making sacrifices in the present for the ideal future. When you do this, God conspires for your good. This takes self sacrifice for an Other. Giving up yourself for something else. This something else isn't you, and is an abstract potential. We have no idea what we are capable of when we surrender ourselves to our highest conceptualized good. Also a part of the struggle of man against nature, is our ego's fight within its own psyche for a central place of order and relative control. There's a danger in allowing anything to happen that can happen, as the mystics would be inclined to do, even though it allows you to be one with God. God separated the one into two for a reason. Whether it be unfair or a curse, is up to you, but for the evolution of consciousness it seems necessary to stand apart from the object and to fight for your independence. To take responsibility and control for your domain. This is personified in the archetypal story of the dragon fight. A maturing ego must do battle with the dragon of the unknown, speak magic words to give order to it, and carve out some mapped territory where there once was darkness and danger. When you defeat a dragon, you kill a monster. The only way to defeat a monster is to become more dangerous than the monster yourself. As you may have guessed, this is where things can get too controlled. Man's search to dominate nature isn't all together working. Look at our environmental issues. Consider how we have gone to battle with ourselves in ways that cause us to dissociate from ourselves. We deny our unity as psyche's and have created an enemy in our own minds. We separated the Devil and God, and took sides. However, in every soul is the snake in the garden of Eden tempting us with knowledge of good and evil. We can never get out of the rat race that is our war of the ego. This is where the Great Father can become the Terrible Father. Culture can become rigid and un-inlightened. We need some of the mysticism in the East to balance out our Western dominion of nature and ourselves. There is an element of non-self and inter-being that we need to live in harmony with ourselves and nature. It's a bit of a paradox. We are not one. But we are not two. We are both voluntary and involuntary creatures, and we need a world view that encompasses both aspects of our being.
Overall, there are two spirits of living. There's the way of getting with nature and ourselves to the point of merging with the universe. And there's the path of worshiping the ideal and standing apart from nature as a human being who does battle with the unconscious (the unknown). There are the mystics and the orthodoxy. We need them both to be healthy. Mysticism seems to deal with existential issues like death and suffering by becoming what you are. God as everything. This is a way of waking up from separateness. The Orthodoxy deals with suffering by applying practical human relationship to the equation. God as the Father of culture. This is a way of growing up as egos and personalities in relationship to an ideal future. There are also dangers to becoming one with God. It is all too easy to sit down and give up on life dissolving as a psyche and dying. It is also a temptation for the ego driven person to try and dominate themselves and nature to get control. However, with an understanding of these two paths, waking up and growing up, hopefully we can be a little more aware of how we develop spiritually.