This isn’t an easy book to review. Parts of it strike a strong chord with me. It deals with the central dilemma of human life : how do we awake from the nightmare of history? But it is easy to get lost in it’s jungle of abstract concepts. “The function of virtual actualization is to take over the de-actualized and reversed elements and forces, released from the event’s actualization, in order to virtualize and actualize them on the plane of immanence.” Does this mean something? Or is it just a gobbledegook word salad? I have to give the author the benefit of the doubt. When I do feel that I know what he is saying it is often something deeply insightful and important. Sometimes you have to have had an experience in order to know what the words someone else uses to point to it are referring to. The subject here is really altered states of consciousness. So I’m willing to believe that the abstract concepts he introduces us to in the book and the framework within which he places them could come to take on a practical value if I were to have more experience of the processes of spiritual death and rebirth he’s talking about. As it is my experience of the collapse of dogmatic beliefs and of becoming through creative activity enable me to identify strongly with what he has to say when he uses more concrete examples.
Part of my problem grappling with the book may be my desire for Ben-Aharon to be talking about things I can believe in. Is he talking about us forming literal ethereal bodies or is this a metaphor for placing emphasis on our ability to experience ourselves as a part of the process of life which extends well beyond our physical body? I have to just take what I can from the book. I may be wrong about that other world not existing, but there’s no sense being gullible. As it is I view the spiritual simply as the realm of relationship as apprehended by human emotions. If I experience relationship with another person in a way which makes me feel something, then that is a spiritual experience. If I get a sense of wonder when I look at the stars at night then that is an experience of relationship to the universe itself. I just don’t see the spiritual as something which has an existence independent of the body.
How can we find hope in our profoundly dysfunctional social world? Our way of life is placing ever greater pressure on our ecological support systems. At a time when personal responsibility and cooperation for the common good are most needed, we are becoming ever more polarised and prone to blaming others. You don’t have to be religious to feel that this is the end of days.
To the degree that I can find hope, I find it in the overlap of big ideas, especially where those ideas seem to be carving out a deeper riverbed into which otherwise divergent streams may flow.
“Rudolph Steiner predicted that the new Christ Event would penetrate and transform all earthly and cosmic matter, life, consciousness and evolution.” So says the blurb on the back of this book. And Ben-Aharon begins his book with a quote from Jesus : “For the Son of Man in his day will be like the lightning which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other.” Luke 17:24. But this is not a religious book, at least in any conventional sense. It’s references to religious texts are brief and used on the basis of their ability to give a useful way to conceive of something demonstrably real.
The Christian gospels predict a time of great crisis when an apocalyptic event (the revelation of previously hidden knowledge) would, after at first throwing the world into great tribulation, usher in the “Kingdom of Heaven”, i.e. a new way of being for the human race in which the old conflicts and hierarchies would disappear. The mighty would fall, the meek would inherit the earth, and we would all be united by love, all emotional suffering washed away.
I’m not a religious person. I don’t believe in the supernatural. But just such a metamorphosis seems both possible and necessary to me. We certainly have tremendous potential which we see in our technological advances, so why would it be impossible that we would find a way to heal the wounds which make us so dysfunctional socially?
The essence of the first chapter ‘The Event in Science’ is that the old reductionist mechanistic approach to science, and especially evolution, has been found insufficient and that a systems view which acknowledges that everything exists as part of a field of complex interrelationships opens up awareness of the development of matter and life as a creative process. I’ve read similar material before (Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, which I read recently, is cited with regard to changes in our concept of cognition.) On the one hand, I found this chapter easier to understand, because so much of it is less abstract than what comes later, but, on the other hand, I don’t have enough knowledge of science to assess whether any conclusions it draws are too bold for the supporting evidence.
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| Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon |
The second chapter ‘The Event in History’ presents perhaps the most useful concept in the book, that of “the reversal”. Why, when we took the great ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood and attempted to use them as the basis for revolutionary social transformation, did we end up reversing them into their opposites? In Communism the ideal expressed in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov - “All of us are guilty for everything and before everybody, and I am more than the others.” - was reversed to become : “All of you are guilty for everything and for everybody and I am more innocent than all the others.” In Naziism the ideals of Goethe - “spiritual-moral sacrifice of the lower ‘ego’ in order to become the higher ‘Self’” was reversed so that the higher self was sacrificed to preserve the lower. In both cases the result was a descent into mass slaughter.
For some it may be controversial that Capitalism as it has played out is seen by Ben-Aharon as the third great reversal. “As masters of the world by destination and capacity, first the British Empire, and now the American, could and should have used their given power and fantastic creative physical abilities, to create affluence for humanity as a whole... George Bataille…says that the problem of the world economy, ruled by the US, is what you do with 'excess' of economic prosperity as such. Production as a goal in itself can only become as social disease, a real social cancer, because it will not annihilate itself through free giving, leading to monstrous accumulations, untold riches and power in the hands of very few, and also to necessary cycles that will destroy this excess.” I’m no expert on economics, but in thinking about this it occurred to me that the supermarket is perhaps a useful example of the pros and cons of free market Capitalism as it currently manifests in the world. The supermarket gives us access to a wide choice of consumer products at relatively inexpensive prices, but a high proportion of the food on offer ends up being thrown out. Apparently, in the U.S. a third of all food produced is thrown away. And yet there are people who don’t have enough to eat. This reversal may not have been as immediately disastrous as Communism and Naziism/Fascism (though bloody wars are sometimes fought to protect market interests and the selling of weapons to dictators is part of that market), but we don’t know how sustainable it is. We need it to work better or we need something which will work better.
Ben-Aharon identifies transhumanism - the idea that we can use technology to make ourselves immortal - as another reversal which is on the horizon. Mystics have always had “intimations of immorality” through the temporary surrender of their ego in the face of the whole of which we are a part. To seek immortality of the ego by uploading yourself onto a computer (even if such a thing were possible) represents the ultimate rejection of the impermanence which is our soul, our participation in an ever-changing universe. As Ben-Aharon points out, this is “infinite egotism” and would have devastating social consequences.
So how do we reverse the reversal? Only through opening to “a new form and level of consciousness and being.” It has to come from autonomous individuals who can perceive potentials and act to bring them about in the social world. This is the opposite of a universalising system. Rather it is the individual who is universalised in the process of creation and actualisation of potential.
This leads to the chapters on philosophy and art. Ben-Aharon sees developments in modern philosophy, specifically postmodernism, as opening the way for this new way of thinking and sees art as the arena in which we explore spiritual transformations of being. This is where things get complicated. It probably doesn’t help that I’m not well-informed about post-modern philosophy.
I have heard Jordan Peterson rail against post-modern philosophy, in a way which made me curious to find out more. Sometimes denial lies behind anger, so one shouldn’t take vociferous condemnation at face value without more closely examining what is being condemned. On the other hand, post-modern philosophy is a big topic to explore and, so far, I haven’t found the time to do more than watch a couple of YouTube videos. But what I find fascinating is that Ben-Aharon sees the tools of post-modern philosophy, from people like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, as crucial to the fulfilment of the promises of the Judea-Christian religions. We need techniques to break free of the old dualities and dogmas and open up the possibility to see things in a new light. Perhaps it could be seen, not as a denial that truth exists, as some critics claim, but a strategy for opening the space necessary for the holistic truth to arrive. Like Field of Dreams - “Build it and he will come.” For Ben-Aharon the aim is not to destroy Western civilisation but to arrive at a realisation of “…the other in me as the primal, unconditional responsibility for the earth and all her children.” A point at which we can reverse the Cain mindset and finally say : “Yes, I will become my brother’s keeper!”
How can we reconcile this view of Foucault, Derrida, et al, as layers of the foundation for the “Kingdom of Heaven” with the social phenomena to which their ideas seem to have given rise - the dogmatic, repressive and judgemental political philosophy we refer to as “political correctness” and the narcissistic egotism which often goes with it. Peterson isn’t wrong in his criticism of this trend, but can we blame it on the philosophers? Isn’t this another case of reversal? What is presented as a path for the individual will become its opposite if we universalise it, if we try to force it onto the world. To try to overthrow the hierarchies of our own mind in order to set free our consciousness and our imagination is not at all the same thing as going to war against the social hierarchies around us and trying to overthrow them.
