Adam in red, Peter normal text:
Dear Adam,
There are many pages on your site I would like to respond in depth to. But I must perforce be as brief as I can. I fear I do not have much time or strength left, and my death process is not been an easy one, not least because it doesn’t seem to even register with others. Hence my new piece for academia.edu on ‘Dying and Time’, and the Diary I have written on living with my illness.
So perhaps I will try to limit myself to gathering a series of shorter missives than my last one written in two sessions. I paid too heavy a price for attempting that.
Re. spiritual practices. I have not drawn one single practice or any of the Yogas in my Manual mine from any teacher or teaching, except perhaps Graf von Durkheim on Hara and also important terms from Gendlin. But what I did even with their teaching is unique. Indeed I recall giving a years-long American teacher of a school Hara his first, most powerful and most unforgettable experience of it!
I myself have never ‘wanted’ to write a book, even though I have written over 40, and published 25, but indeed I DECIDED, not wished, to write a book when I was 18. My role model at the time was Das Kapital, for its sheer cogency.
At the risk of sounding very arrogant, I do regard The New Yoga as a significant advance upon Aurobindo, though I have a deep respect for him.
Partly for this reason however, I regret deeply, however, us not having had the chance to meet earlier and for me to co-embody my New Yogas with you.
Re. your book Prologue:
As the gulf between all that we are aware of or ‘see’ in the Castanedian sense grows, the more important is not even to attempt to share all of which we are Aware. Your most supremely eloquent and lyrical prologue shows that you truly ‘see’ a lot, and that your awareness of context is uniquely and exceptionally broad and encompassing. And yet…no text or utterance can ever hope to give full expression to its context and co-texts of emergence.
My own texts do not even attempt this. For in my view of the role of a Speaker/Teacher as a writer is a quite different one. It is to bridge the gulf with those of far lesser awareness by couching any new and deeper awareness in terms of vocabularies, languages and symbols they are already familiar with and working a clear, concise and accessible deconstruction and creative transformation on and of those terms.
More on the dialectic of text and contextual awareness. In my search for analogies I thought of the relation of adult to child or therapist to client. If a therapist has an insight born of decades of experience that he feels it important to share with the client as an ‘intervention’ that will have powerful illocutionary force, he would not dream of first circum-locuting this illocutionary utterance with, say, an hour-long discourse on its broader knowledge base and the much larger context of occurrence of the insight as an event in his awareness.
Similarly an adult speaking to a child cannot expect to convey to the latter to be familiar with or appreciate the life world of adults.
The role of the Speaker-Teacher as I see it then, following Seth, is to make effective ‘interventions’ the most highly specific of social cultural, sub-cultural, textual and, above all, immediate relational and bipersonal contexts. As regards the much larger contexts within which these interventions take shape he must often and for the most part remain silent. Otherwise they lose their illocutionary impact in the particular contexts and milieu and for the particular individual or individuals they are intended for. Hence the first rule of the occult initiates or ‘mustai’ – to ‘keep silence’ on matters upon which it is pointless to speak, except paradoxically to those already gifted with an awareness that would make what is said uncontroversial – as for me, is everything you write in your prologue, even though, as I say, I was extremely impressed by its elegance and eloquence of expression.
My writing is gross and crude in comparison, but it is also not intended as great ‘literature’ in the literary sense. And yet literary genre is a big question if one wishes to use writing to make timely and targeted interventions of the sort intended to elevate the awareness and intellect of those for whom one’s writing is intended. So in this sense, I suppose, I agree with your Professor: writing should be intended FOR a specific audience, even of only one, i.e. for their BENEFIT – and not just to attract a readership by “pandering to their tastes”.
It has always been interesting for me to find that the right people FIND my work without the least attempt at promoting it, even to a specific readership.
I have often received a lifetime of thanks for it from ‘ordinary’ individuals who know nothing of Philosophy, let alone of its larger philosophical, cultural or spiritual contexts of emergence and its meaning or place therein.
As for closer encounters with my readers, those who have crossed continents to meet me, they have not been disappointed by the experiences I have imparted to them, not by teaching about ‘higher beings’, ‘higher intelligences’ but by visibly and tangibly becoming and bodying them.
Did not Deleuze also speak of ‘becoming Other’, just as Steiner spoke of the stage of Intuition as one in which one BECOMES the spiritual beings one encountered previously only in the stage and ream of Imagination?
I myself was gifted early on, and as briefly described in my Memoir, with a knowing of my prime purpose from my ‘Entity’ before and for this life. I also became and bodied my Entity, Seth style, in one of my first pair meditations with Karin. I still value and appreciate her colour portrait of it, or rather on one of its many faces and names.
You too can get to Be, at least for times, the beings that live through you – and that are also “beings that mean”.
Meaning, which you write of is also a verb, and one that has the very Castanedian meaning of INTENDING a specific other or others. Just as, as Seth reminds us, we cannot love all people equally, nor can we address or ‘mean’ or intend them or for an abstraction of humanity (as always betrayed by words like ‘we’ or ‘our’).
The uniqueness of my New Yoga ‘methods’ lies in methods of achieving ‘union with higher consciousness’ relationally, one to one, and not through “ascetic withdrawal”. If these methods fall by the wayside in this reality, it will only be because – as Seth writes of other methods that never ‘caught on’ in their time and so were forgotten – because people had no inkling at all, in advance of being taught them, of the extraordinary intensities and depths of experiencing they could bring – and so lacked the motivation to even delve into them. And yet all my methods and means of pair meditation simply bring down to earth ways in which souls can and do communicate and interpenetrate each other directly in the afterlife, there where countless ‘siddhis’, known and still unknown or even undreamt of, form part of the very texture of existence and Interbeing.
A simple but important psychoanalytic foundation for Interbeing is what Donald Winnicott called “the capacity to be alone in the presence of another”, indeed to feel one’s innermost or core self more strongly in co-presence with that other.
I still hold firm in general to the Buberian understanding that the locus of change and revolution is neither the individual nor society as a whole but rather the immediate one individual to another – these being the “units of relation” within (Buber) which make up all larger groupings of individuals. Hence my now well-nigh ancient essay entitled ‘Relational Revolution’, and my very first provisional ‘motto’ of The New Yoga: “Meditate the Other”.
As regards ‘universal truths’, contra ‘postmodernism’, I do believe they exist and that they are really very simple truths in essence. It is only their expression that is in need of constant refinement, or just clearer and simpler formulation, as well as freedom from old or new distortions. We need no systems theoretics to rediscover or replace them.
On dialectics: ” ‘Opposites’ are but inseparable sides of a singular boundary state.” (Michael Kosok). It is only the attempt to turn them into separate and not merely distinct elements or sides that gives rise to either a dynamic of contradictory opposites, a yearning for a harmonious unity or oneness free of internal distinction or differentiation, or else a need to conceive a relation of separable elements systemically. See ‘Revolution vs the Myth of Identity and Consistency’. See www.thenewdialectics.org
“There are many pages on your site I would like to respond in depth to. But I must perforce be as brief as I can. I fear I do not have much time or strength left, and my death process is not been an easy one, not least because it doesn’t seem to even register with others. Hence my new piece for academia.edu on ‘Dying and Time’, and the Diary I have written on living with my illness.”
It registers to me. I have been trying to balance my own tendency to fly off in several directions of inquiry, and my awareness that time and priorities are pressing us in this exchange. Academia told me of your new piece and I read a bit. It looks like another interesting report that I will have to take a closer look at when I get the chance.
“So perhaps I will try to limit myself to gathering a series of shorter missives than my last one written in two sessions. I paid too heavy a price for attempting that.”
I am sorry if I have provoked you a little. I really resonate with everything you write, even if I may subject it to somewhat contrasting perspectives. I think we have slightly different reasons for writing as you note below.
“Re. spiritual practices. I have not drawn one single practice or any of the Yogas in my Manual mine from any teacher or teaching, except perhaps Graf von Durkheim on Hara and also important terms from Gendlin. But what I did even with their teaching is unique. Indeed I recall giving a years-long American teacher of a school Hara his first, most powerful and most unforgettable experience of it!”
I wish things were different and I could have gotten to experience some of your presence in person, but I have never been much for teachers myself (or wanted to be one). I tend to learn better by rubbing up against the limits of things and people. That took some rather tumultuous forms in my youth, as I explained, but nowadays I just tend to be in the right place and time to take a part with people in their transitions.
“I myself have never ‘wanted’ to write a book, even though I have written over 40, and published 25, but indeed I DECIDED, not wished, to write a book when I was 18. My role model at the time was Das Kapital, for its sheer cogency.”
Well you are more self-assured than I have been. But my want was more of a vision of what I was destined to do and a feeling of what I had to do to become the person I truly am.
“At the risk of sounding very arrogant, I do regard The New Yoga as a significant advance upon Aurobindo, though I have a deep respect for him.”
You definitely fill in some gaps. He was focused on higher ranges of transformation and was not too interested in teaching people as you are. He expressed disdain for the idea that he had any important teaching, preferring to see his role as primarily working on invisible levels. It is the “event” of his life that was important. This is something I was expressing in that prologue, something that Deleuze also takes to a radical level, even going as far as saying that conversation is pointless, that it “always comes too early, or too late”. In my prologue (written almost a decade ago), I advocate conversation, but frame it more in the way they are discussing, as an event that has as its end something beyond communication, the encounter between and the creation of new possibilities.
“Partly for this reason however, I regret deeply, however, us not having had the chance to meet earlier and for me to co-embody my New Yogas with you.”
I may not have been an obedient student, but I would have shown you respect and most likely benefited greatly from your experience and embodied wisdom. On the other hand, getting to talk with you now at this crucial moment in your transformation is quite a rare privilege that I will never forget.
“Re. your book Prologue:
As the gulf between all that we are aware of or ‘see’ in the Castanedian sense grows, the more important is not even to attempt to share all of which we are Aware. Your most supremely eloquent and lyrical prologue shows that you truly ‘see’ a lot, and that your awareness of context is uniquely and exceptionally broad and encompassing. And yet…no text or utterance can ever hope to give full expression to its context and co-texts of emergence.
My own texts do not even attempt this. For in my view of the role of a Speaker/Teacher as a writer is a quite different one. It is to bridge the gulf with those of far lesser awareness by couching any new and deeper awareness in terms of vocabularies, languages and symbols they are already familiar with and working a clear, concise and accessible deconstruction and creative transformation on and of those terms. “
That is certainly a helpful service. I have always sensed a lot more wisdom behind your writings than what was coming through your texts, but I could see quite clearly the audience you were speaking to and why you were holding back. That is why my attitude towards your texts has been interesting to me, for while I could sense that I was not on your level of experience and wisdom, I also never felt like I was on the level of your audience. Not that there was or is not plenty for me to learn from your writing. But the feeling I get is usually one of seeing how a similar mind is doing something and comparing how I might approach a similar problem in thought and expression.
“More on the dialectic of text and contextual awareness. In my search for analogies I thought of the relation of adult to child or therapist to client. If a therapist has an insight born of decades of experience that he feels it important to share with the client as an ‘intervention’ that will have powerful illocutionary force, he would not dream of first circum-locuting this illocutionary utterance with, say, an hour-long discourse on its broader knowledge base and the much larger context of occurrence of the insight as an event in his awareness. “
This is true. I certainly don’t write for people too far from my awareness level, and often feel more motivated to explain the spiritual truths that seem like common sense to the child-like minds of many New Age or spiritual people, to the intellectuals that have lost touch with what should be obvious but has been obfuscated by cliched culture production.
Similarly an adult speaking to a child cannot expect to convey to the latter to be familiar with or appreciate the life world of adults.
The role of the Speaker-Teacher as I see it then, following Seth, is to make effective ‘interventions’ the most highly specific of social cultural, sub-cultural, textual and, above all, immediate relational and bipersonal contexts. As regards the much larger contexts within which these interventions take shape he must often and for the most part remain silent. Otherwise they lose their illocutionary impact in the particular contexts and milieu and for the particular individual or individuals they are intended for. Hence the first rule of the occult initiates or ‘mustai’ – to ‘keep silence’ on matters upon which it is pointless to speak, except paradoxically to those already gifted with an awareness that would make what is said uncontroversial – as for me, is everything you write in your prologue, even though, as I say, I was extremely impressed by its elegance and eloquence of expression.
“My writing is gross and crude in comparison, but it is also not intended as great ‘literature’ in the literary sense. And yet literary genre is a big question if one wishes to use writing to make timely and targeted interventions of the sort intended to elevate the awareness and intellect of those for whom one’s writing is intended. So in this sense, I suppose, I agree with your Professor: writing should be intended FOR a specific audience, even of only one, i.e. for their BENEFIT – and not just to attract a readership by “pandering to their tastes”.
It has always been interesting for me to find that the right people FIND my work without the least attempt at promoting it, even to a specific readership.
I have often received a lifetime of thanks for it from ‘ordinary’ individuals who know nothing of Philosophy, let alone of its larger philosophical, cultural or spiritual contexts of emergence and its meaning or place therein.
As for closer encounters with my readers, those who have crossed continents to meet me, they have not been disappointed by the experiences I have imparted to them, not by teaching about ‘higher beings’, ‘higher intelligences’ but by visibly and tangibly becoming and bodying them.”
You are certainly a unique event Peter, and one that will go on in many forms, both through your writing and your impact on people, as well as your future adventures and what they will make possible for the rest of us.
“Did not Deleuze also speak of ‘becoming Other’, just as Steiner spoke of the stage of Intuition as one in which one BECOMES the spiritual beings one encountered previously only in the stage and ream of Imagination? “
That’s the idea.
“I myself was gifted early on, and as briefly described in my Memoir, with a knowing of my prime purpose from my ‘Entity’ before and for this life. I also became and bodied my Entity, Seth style, in one of my first pair meditations with Karin. I still value and appreciate her colour portrait of it, or rather on one of its many faces and names.
You too can get to Be, at least for times, the beings that live through you – and that are also “beings that mean”.
Meaning, which you write of is also a verb, and one that has the very Castanedian meaning of INTENDING a specific other or others. Just as, as Seth reminds us, we cannot love all people equally, nor can we address or ‘mean’ or intend them or for an abstraction of humanity (as always betrayed by words like ‘we’ or ‘our’).
The uniqueness of my New Yoga ‘methods’ lies in methods of achieving ‘union with higher consciousness’ relationally, one to one, and not through “ascetic withdrawal”. If these methods fall by the wayside in this reality, it will only be because – as Seth writes of other methods that never ‘caught on’ in their time and so were forgotten – because people had no inkling at all, in advance of being taught them, of the extraordinary intensities and depths of experiencing they could bring – and so lacked the motivation to even delve into them. And yet all my methods and means of pair meditation simply bring down to earth ways in which souls can and do communicate and interpenetrate each other directly in the afterlife, there where countless ‘siddhis’, known and still unknown or even undreamt of, form part of the very texture of existence and Interbeing. “
I see that. I am glad you have teased out and developed these practices. I have done similar experiments myself but have less of a taste for formalization and prescriptive methods. But I like learning about them to give to other people that have a taste or need for them. I have a feeling I will be using your work more in the future as I come more formally into a teacher role. I have been counseling people for a long time, but haven’t much cared for the formal practice of it. I respect your methods too much which require a level of embodiment that I am only now coming into.
“A simple but important psychoanalytic foundation for Interbeing is what Donald Winnicott called “the capacity to be alone in the presence of another”, indeed to feel one’s innermost or core self more strongly in co-presence with that other.”
Something I was trying to express in my last email: it has been a very conscious challenge in my life that I am finally succeeding at. God it has been a long struggle.
“On dialectics: ” ‘Opposites’ are but inseparable sides of a singular boundary state.” (Michael Kosok). It is only the attempt to turn them into separate and not merely distinct elements or sides that gives rise to either a dynamic of contradictory opposites, a yearning for a harmonious unity or oneness free of internal distinction or differentiation, or else a need to conceive a relation of separable elements systemically. See ‘Revolution vs the Myth of Identity and Consistency’. See www.thenewdialectics.org“
I like that quote. Deleuze would agree. His problem with dialectics is more with making it a method than negating the truths that it illuminates. He just wants to get at the multiplicities that get incarnated in dialectic or organismic boundaries. Not negate the boundaries, but find the distinct but obscure structure of the heterogenous continuity of intensities which gets obfuscated by the “clear but confused” territorialized and coded boundaries that frame dialectical problems within the negation and contradiction inherent in identity. I think your work does something similar as it converges on not just a fundamental abstraction of indeterminate being, nor even of pre-subjective and pre-intentional awareness, but on the soul-moods and feeling tones that connect the qualities of subject and objects with what Deleuze would consider pre-qualitative intensities.
I think your work points to an interesting interzone between phenomenology and his transcendental empiricism. For intensities can be discovered as pre-qualitative processes incarnating in diverse qualitative phenomenon by thought, I think soul awareness can experience those intensities as qualities of awareness beyond any normal “sensual quality”, though still as a kind of sense as both you and Deleuze would admit. Steiner as well, for he might discuss this as the meeting zone between the sensual-soul and the intellectual-soul but illuminated by the clairvoyance of spiritual awareness awakened in the heart, Aurobindo’s psychic being. I still see you as on similar territory as these guys, especially Heidegger and Merlou-Ponty, both of which Deleuze considered as beyond phenomenology, and certainly beyond the mono-centered operations of traditional hegelian dialectics.
