The key idea that makes spirituality understandable in a modern context went mostly undeveloped and unrecognized by the theosophists who first brought it out in the 19th century. The idea, perhaps an inevitable feature of any sophisticated metaphysical system fit for modern times, is that the transient, physical, or “actual” world our senses reveal to us, even though still conceived as pre-modern metaphysics had, as temporary and secondary to the eternal or “spiritual” domain behind our world—or behind any phenomenal world—was now also conceived as actually responsible for generating its structure, and in some paradoxical way as being “older” than it, or at least older than the structure of the spiritual worlds and beings most connected to our “physical” world.
Being a somewhat esoteric and seemingly counterintuitive idea, it is not surprising that 19th and early 20th century thinkers could not see the importance, or tease out the philosophical details, especially as Theosophy faded in its influence, even among the counterculture. Scholars frequently miss or dismiss the innovation, reducing it down to the mere addition of evolution to spiritual metaphysics, basically an opportunistic assimilation of the popular biological idea. But this merely conflates the generic idea of “spiritual evolution” with the more profound idea of spiritual change being dependent on material incarnations and events, which has always been a more or less cryptic component of esoteric doctrine, which itself arguably goes back deep into prehistory. To the ancient Chinese, for example, heaven and earth are equiprimordial, but the creative ideas of heaven are only seeds that gain form through the receptive womb of earth.
Of course, the important related idea, the skeptical perspective that human consciousness development has created the gods, is also older than modernity, and by the time of the European Enlightenment, it was well on its way to becoming part of the foundation for our mostly materialist and secular culture. To this day even most countercultural thinkers accept the idea in some fashion. Following Jung, the psychologized spiritualists of the liberally educated New Age scene, understandably trying to be modern and reasonable, have internalized the simplistic version of the idea, where all ideas and the thematic or archetypal structures that animate them, have a kind of reality and independence beyond the minds that produce them, but a reality that merely reproduces the habits and forms of our world or our minds, without much in the way of a convincing metaphysical structure, or a reason for any metaphysics at all.
This kind of platonic realism is easily reduced down to materialism, as it was eventually through Aristotle and his medieval followers, who eventually marginalized all platonic realism into a mystical counterculture. Certainly returning to some kind of platonic realism is an improvement over the materialism of modern thought, which naturally emerged from the defeat of medieval realists by nominalist philosophy, where the reality of ideas is merely nominal, that is, confined to the reality of the things to which they name.
But it still fails to break fully from modernity’s myopic literalism, its conflation of the material side of meaning with its spiritual sense. This literalism, however, has been somewhat eroded by the advances of postmodern thought, especially within the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the critical convergence of so many threads in the history of ideas that is his work, notably his landmark texts of the 1960’s: “Difference and Repetition” and “Logic of Sense”.
In these works the “involutionary” and evolutionary movements of modern spiritual philosophy are given a thoroughly formal and technical treatment as reciprocal movements, which preserve the platonic and spiritual heritage of western thought, and which place the source of this world in an involution and incarnation of eternal ideas, while also inverting the priority of this movement, or any proposed movement back along this descent, in a way compatible even with some versions of materialism. For though the movement from the eternal ideas to the actual world is vital, it is merely a “static” genesis, as opposed to the true “dynamic” genesis which lays down the structure of the eternal here in the actual worlds of material bodies and contexts.
Deleuze is able to clarify the paradox of there being an eternal sense prior to actualized worlds which is nonetheless always being produced and added to by those worlds, by making the eternal ideas pure variations or differences, not identities. The ideas are becomings which modify and connect everything from within, rather than ground everything in any static meaning. There is an aspect of the “sense” of things for Deleuze which is essentially impassive, unaffected by the changing relations of the material world, yet the structure of its relational meaning is always being modified and approached from within actual contexts.
From our point of view then, there is an eternal stability to sense in that there are pure variations that return again and again, unaffected by the new meanings and contexts they emerge within, yet they acquire new meanings and relations with every cycle, generating new differences, even new eternal ideas, as the eternal is never a transcendent realm for Deleuze, but rather the immanent relational sense connecting all worlds.
This sense maintains its eternal impassivity and continuity only as a returning rhythm of relational repetition through differential intensity. Only the different returns, but that which is able to differentiate and individuate will indeed return, will always return, as some aspect, at some level of intensity of the sense of everything.
