Beyond Religion

by William Irwin Thompson. Lindisfarne Books 2013, 89 pages

One of the guilty pleasures of reading Owen Barfield is to delight in the arch manner in which he disposes of unexamined or pretentious ideas. For instance, in commenting upon the assumptions of many nineteenth century historians of myth, Barfield observes:

"The remoter ancestors of Homer, we are given to understand, observing that it was darker in Winter than in Summer, immediately decided there must be some ‘cause’ for this ‘phenomenon,’ and had no difficulty in tossing off the ‘theory’ of, say, Demeter and Persephone, to account for it. A good name for this kind of banality -- the fruit, as it is, of ‘projecting post-logical thoughts back into a pre-logical age -- would perhaps be Logomorphism." (1)

Further on, in speaking of philosophers and historians who equate all thinking with judging, and limit “ideas” to the products of judging, he writes:

"It is perhaps hardly necessary to add that ‘Realism’, in the sense of an hypostatization of such ideas, must be merely one step further into the realm of unreality. For it is a step into the realm of shadows of shadows. Such hypostatization is today commonly attributed to, e.g., Plato, and that not only by amateurs in philosophy, but even by those who have made it their principal task to interpret him to others, and who, following Kant, regard it as a matter of course that they know what the author of Timaeus meant better than he did himself. Thus, it may be remarked… that logomorphism is always to be suspected in the writing of modern commentators, etc., upon ancient philosophy or literature…. So ubiquitous is the Königsberg ghost that it is, in my opinion, wise to assume every modern writer on every subject to be guilty of Logomorphism, unless he has actually produced some evidence of his innocence." (2)

Barfield’s lifelong interest was the evolution of consciousness, and in the passages quoted above, besides having a great deal of fun, he acknowledges the difficulty inherent in speaking of (let alone apprehending) an older form of consciousness out of the understandings and the vocabulary of a contemporary one.

The difficulty is formidable, but not insuperable. The reality of the evolution of consciousness is a critical historical insight. We should not “pass over it in silence.” But to talk about it, we need a sensitivity to the changing nature of language, the creative truth of metaphor and the power of mythopoeia, and a strengthened capacity for imagination. And sometimes we just have to coin new words.

The evolution of consciousness is also a principal theme of William Irwin Thompson’s 'Beyond Religion: The Cultural Evolution of the Sense of the Sacred from Shamanism to Religion to Post-Religious Spirituality.' Thompson, who has read both Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield extensively, and admires them, nonetheless follows the outline of the evolution of consciousness depicted by Jean Gebser in The Ever Present Origin, which identifies the successive historical stages of consciousness as archaic, magical mythical, mental/rational, and integral.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to map Gebser’s system onto either Steiner’s or Barfield’s. “Origin,” for Gebser, is not an exclusively temporal concept, and means something more like an always present divine or spiritual reality, not unlike the Greek word “arche.” The “archaic” structure, and the “magical” structure, appear to be similar to the condition of “original participation” posited by Barfield. Gebser’s “mythic” structure is likely related to Steiner’s third post-Atlantean epoch, or “sentient Soul” age and the mental/rational structure, which Gebser locates as beginning in pre-Homeric times, nonetheless appears related to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, or “Intellectual Soul” age, as well as to what Barfield calls “alpha-thinking” (with its shadow side “idolatry”). Gebser’s “integral structure,” reintegrating the previous four structures and “concretizing the spiritual,” is “irrupting” into the mental/rational structure now. It strongly suggests the Consciousness Soul’s mission of developing the Spirit Self.

Thompson’s particular focus in this book is not so much past forms of consciousness as what he understands to be the present transition from the mental/rational structure to the integral structure. Thompson’s language dilemma is thus greater than that alluded to by Barfield, because he is attempting to describe, out of the words and thoughts of the early twentyfirst century, a form of consciousness that has not yet fully manifested itself. But, declining to lapse into the vatic silence of a Wittgenstein, Thompson chooses to work with mythopeia, imagination (Thompson is a poet), and an arsenal of neologisms in order to call up a picture of the “integral” future for his readers.

Gebser’s admonition that when an emerging structure of consciousness becomes efficient, the current structure becomes deficient, is fundamental to Thompson’s approach. The “deficiencies” of religion and its predecessors, as Thompson sees them, mean sclerosis, decay, and even reversion to evil. Thus, when religion first made its appearance in the mental/rational structure of consciousness, the previous structure of shamanism descended into sorcery, black magic, and human sacrifice. Similarly, as religion is being replaced by post-religious spirituality, we see not only the rampant child abuse, conspicuous wealth, and entrenched hierarchy in the Catholic Church, but a more general dislocation in all organized religions. Fear of what is emerging prompts a scurrying to the comforts of the past, manifesting in (an often violent) fundamentalism. Because he understands fundamentalism in a universal sense to be a degradation of metaphor into code, Thompson sees the linear reductionism of socio-biologists and eliminativists like Richard Dawkins and Patricia Churchland as its secular subspecies, and a prime example of the sclerosis and decay of the creative endeavors that characterized the flourishing of science at the height of the mental/rationalist structure of consciousness. Thompson’s perception of Jerry Falwell and Richard Dawkins as two sides of the same coin is illuminating.

'Beyond Religion' is a compilation of six essays that Thompson originally published in the web literary magazine, Wild River Review. This stitching together may account for its somewhat disjointed presentation. (3) The first chapter focuses upon child abuse in the Catholic Church, and suggests that the recent scandals are a direct result of a fear and hatred of women, made institutionally permanent during the papacy of Pius IX in the mid-nineteenth century—again, a mental/rationalist structure deficiency come to the fore in the face of emerging spirituality. But Thompson places it in a larger context:

"Once Isis and Osiris was the religion of a Magnus annus in the zodiacal precession of the equinox, then it was Jesus and Mary for the age of Pisces. Now in this new millennium we are experiencing the cultural evolution from religion to a personal spirituality in which the unique mind learns how to immerse itself in the Universal Mind through a process of meditation: no churches, mosques, or temples needed."

The remaining chapters treat the development from shamanism to religion to post-religious spirituality, and preview Thompson’s vision of a society of “integral consciousness,” which he believes will consist of a “fellowship of inspirited minds” rather than a hierarchy of leaders and followers. Thompson sees adumbrations of this new spirituality in the “initiatic consort” relationship that obtained between Sri Aurobindo and Mirra Alfassa (the Mother) in the ashram in Auroville. Neither one, Thompson says, tried to be a guru or a charismatic leader, but both wished to be realized as a divinized couple. Tantric practices engender Illumination through what he terms the “etheric body” with its elevation of kundalini; Enlightenment, on the other hand, involves higher and more subtle bodies, what Aurobindo called the “Descent of the Supramental,” or the “wisdom heart of universal compassion.” Thompson devotes a considerable part of his text to his imagination, derived from Aurobindo and the Mother, of the development from tantric yoga to integral yoga and the changing sexual and spiritual relationship it will entail.

Thompson’s “Conclusion” is dedicated to his projection of what the new “planetary culture” of the integral structure of consciousness may look like. It presents an imagination of a new space, a new time, a new sexuality, a new ecology, and a new relationship between machines and human beings, entailing nanotechnology, higher dimensionality, and symbiotic consciousness with both elemental realms and celestial intelligences. Everyone will find this imagination challenging; many will find it impenetrable.

Readers will have to judge for themselves the extent to which Thompson’s understanding of the evolution of consciousness coincides with and departs from those of Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield. While Thompson perpetuates at times the familiar Darwinian sketch of an exclusively upward evolution of hominids, his (and Gebser’s) understanding that the evolution of consciousness continually incorporates the latent aspects of previous stages is similar to Rudolf Steiner’s exposition of the recapitulation of old planetary stages of consciousness in the epochs of the post-Atlantean age, and his sense of a fundamental purposiveness of evolution in the hoped for return, in a higher key, to “origin,” is fundamental to anthroposophy. Thompson is not an anthroposophist, but a thinker in deep sympathy with its principles, and one bold enough to try to concretize, out of his imaginative understanding of evolving consciousness, the kinds of futures to which we may be exposed and from which we may have to choose.

1 Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, (Wesleyan University Press 1973), p. 90.

2 Id., at 196.

3 A comprehensive background to Thomson’s ideas and assumptions in this book may be found in Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996).