If I were to teach a general humanities course to college freshman I would anchor it around Louis Dupré’s two great historical meditations on the development of Western philosophy, religion and culture, “Passage to Modernity” and “The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Western Culture”. The usual academic surveys of Western culture, trying as they do to compress two plus millenia into a few hundred pages, are almost always futile efforts to force feed us an overwhelming and ultimately indigestible blend of facts subsumed under the standard (and unilluminating) conventions of historical scholarship. But Dupré—a Catholic philosopher of religion with a soul deep enough to write respectfully on the likes of Marx, Kierkegaard, and the Romantics—brings together an acute philosophical temperament, vast learning, and the instincts of a composer to takes the weight and measure of his themes deep in his psyche, not merely in the forebrain. I would have loved to have spent time in his classes at Yale where he taught for 25 years. Where was the Teaching Company when we really needed it?

His work is academically impeccable, but there is nothing of the musty scholar on academic retreat about him. Louis Dupré is a lucid, graceful writer who clearly picks his topics because of their cultural importance. What other Catholic philosopher has written appreciatively of Marx and then gone on to edit a, well, luminous anthology of Christian mysticism (“Light from Light”)? One feels his investment in what he writes, his desire to laminate and bring to the surface the themes that have done the most to awaken his own intuition. This why his books are such a service to his readers. They are intended to deliver us whole the rich insights and intelligence that the various subjects of his study produced for our benefit.

Accompanied by Eliot Hurwitz, I interviewed Louis Dupré on the Yale University campus in September, 2008. We both felt it was one of the best interviews DharmaCafé has done.

Human behavior is not working out all that well these days
for our planet. In fact, things can’t go on much longer this way.
Business as usual is over, and so is Francis Fukuyama with his
cavalier canceling of history. Either we recognize a vaster universe
or we fall out of civilization into chaos and strife without
end. While I don’t foresee international cooperation at the
governmental level with regard to impending climate change,
let alone global satori, I do think we have begun to quitclaim
a one-sided and myopic paradigm. The increasing ranges of adjunct
cruelty, violence, and the spreading banalities of evil are
perhaps not the most auspicious harbinger of good times ahead,
but it is worth considering that the membrane is hardening and
cracking before releasing its chrysalis. The grim stuff then is our
static, resistant part, the sinew that also gives life its structure
and presence within the planetary root.

Each dream to be dreamed, each Dreamtime to be lived out,
casts a nightmare and a shadow that makes it whole. Pure physics.
We emerge from each crisis transformed—the deeper the
crisis, the more profound the transformation. This is a big crisis
indeed, so we expect a comparable paradigm shift. We intuit
big gods and big winds, but instead we may encounter something
more subtle, something homeopathic and deep-acting.

In principle, we don’t have to be this rigidly stuck in a method
of being. Our downloads are all frangible and replaceable.
We are made of sub-atomic particles and psychic energy fields,
both of which are doing incredible, unacknowledged things all
the time, and, as whimsical and bourgeois as it sounds, we are
capable of pretty much anything. Blundering giants in our survival
patterns and civic activities, framers of disingenuous détentes,
we are composed at every other latency by nonlinear
forces and unbounded intelligence.
{pagebreak}
Barring asteroidal cataclysm or extraterrestrial visitation,
nothing explicit will happen on December 21,2012.This assignation
is not a train-schedule sort of thing whereby a machine-
object arrives on tracks or we see “ships the size of Manitoba
hovering over the Oval Office,” to cite a facetious rendition by
psychedelic explorer Terence McKenna. Instead, it is a seed moment,
a signal for a gap in meaning and consciousness, a threshold
that has been gathering for a long time.

The spirit Savitrie tells us: “The future that is coming in is
vast and well-designed. Cosmic forces are behind it. Nobody
will be abandoned to sheer chaos. This is about world renewal
on the greatest possible scale.”

Who wouldn’t second this motion! But I am not looking for
indications of renewal externally and historically. I am looking
for a gateway inside—inside consciousness, inside DNA potential,
inside the zodiac. My book is not about what is going to
happen (or not) on December 21, 2012 or January 1, 2013 but
a 2013 context for what is already happening and has been happening
since the emergence of our species, the advent of life on
Earth, and the creation of this universe—impossibly big venues
that cannot be queried but that mark abysses we must explore.

I am asking: What is loaded into us, what is inescapable because
it is intrinsic (come hell or high water), and what can
we expect our fortune and ordination to be, given the actual
capacities we have, the real obstacles we face, and the cards that
have already been drawn?

The Earth has been receiving transformative vibrations since
Atlantis and Lemuria and other unnamed prior worlds, or what
they stand for. From the pre-Cambrian to the Jurassic, through
the Stone and Industrial Ages into the Cybernetic Age—all
fancier Stone Ages—the microcosm has been germinating, as
it emerges from the hunt of the beast and the eternal moon to
the lighting of the Labyrinth and the City. One day, we expect
the Universal Peacekeepers, Serene Lamas, and Enlightened
Masters, which means the physics of love (Heart Chakra expansion),
the meta-biology of cell talk (Throat Chakra opening),
and a new politics of compassion and generosity (elevation into
the Buddhic Plane). This is a project launched incomprehensibly
long ago inside primordial bacterial cells and interpolated
into the tissues and organs of multicellular animals.

Though we are not anywhere near apotheosis yet, in subliminal
and unconscious ways human consciousness has been ripening
over a long midsummer night’s Dreamtime. For reasons that
transcend any culture or system of time, on Earth or any other
planet, the universe is working the infinitesimalized pulleys and
gears of a giant metaphysical clock. Enter the Mayan calendar.
{pagebreak}
class=* * *“center”
For all the fuss about it, the twenty-first of December, 2012,
is hardly an exact calibration. By scientific measurement, the
gun-sighting of the Earth’s solstice Sun to Galactic bull’s-eye
began in 1998 but because of the half-degree width of the Sun,
it takes thirty-six years for full passage, hence 2016 is the midpoint
when the Sun clears the Galactic Equator in 2034.

What exactly is supposed to be lining up? According to Geoff
Stray, the actual “Galactic Center is invisible due to interstellar
dust but has been pinpointed by radio telescopes. When [some]
people speak of the Galactic Center, they mean the bright central
or nuclear bulge; others mean the central part of that bulge
and others mean the radio-telescope-defined center. The ecliptic
(the path traveled by the Sun, Moon, and planets, which is the
plane of the solar system) crosses the Milky Way close to the
fattest, central part of the bulge, just below the dark rift, but the
size of the Sun is such that it would touch the dark rift.… [T]he
radio-telescope-defined center of the galaxy is just off the ecliptic,
and the Sun will be closest to that in 2219 AD. The Galactic
Alignment process described here involves the intersection of the
ecliptic with the Galactic Equator, or, alternately, the intersection
of the winter solstice meridian with the Galactic Equator.…”

Just as the experience of seasonal transition from winter to
spring to summer to fall is spread across days and weeks, so
are millennial cusps of Great Time periods spread over years
and decades. There are roughly twelve zodiacal “years” of 2150
Earth years each in a Great Year of 25,800 years, so precision
down to a matter of days is like trying to separate one millisecond
from another. Plus, the vingesimal acceleration factor built
into the Mayan 5120-year Long Count makes for an exponential
curve that goes right off the chart on any given day, as per
McKenna’s Timewave or Fractal of Time, breaking the illusory
linear structure and crashing over itself in a sequence of increasing
complexity and recursiveness until the past and future
come together—Mesolithic bog-dwellers and Babylonians and
Druids with biotech scientists and virtual-reality surfers. This is
Timewave Zero, at the pivot of all time.

It is worth turning again to McKenna for clarification. During
his 1998 talk in San Francisco, my friend David Ulansey
asked him a point-blank question. Knowing that I was writing
this introduction, David loaned me a DVD recording of the
legendary evening (the source as well of the long McKenna extract
above). I will abbreviate David’s query here in a form that
is still quite long:

“You have said that at a date in 2012 an event will take place
of tremendous or even infinite novelty. You also say that your
Timewave Zero and the Mayan calendar synchronistically point
to the same date. And you say at that time also an astronomical
event will take place, namely the conjunction of the winter
solstice with the Galactic Center, an event that only happens
roughly every 26,000 years. The last time that happened, our
ancestors were painting bison on the walls of caves. It’s a long,
long cycle that brings the winter solstice around the circle of
the zodiac every 26,000 years, and you say that this is going to
happen again in the year 2012.

“As you know, the Galactic Center is not on the ecliptic, is
not on the zodiac, but it is above it. So the Sun of the winter
solstice will never be in conjunction with the Galactic Center—
but an event which is linked with that, and I think far
more precise and significant, is the fact that, not in the year
2012, but right now as we sit here, the winter solstice is moving
into conjunction with the place where the Galactic Equator
crosses the zodiac. This is happening now, 1998 and 1999. So I
wonder why you look to the year 2012 and the imprecise conjunction
of the Galactic Center rather than the more precise
and remarkable return of the winter solstice to the Galactic
Equator where it was 25,800 years ago when the first bursts of
self-consciousness were occurring in our species.”
{pagebreak}
Terence’s response, almost a half hour long, is critical to any
understanding of 2012. Here is its crux:

“Your statement that the Galactic Center is now transiting
the solsticial node rather than in 2012—that is the only thing in
what you laid out that I would disagree with. Here’s why. When
we say ‘the Galactic Center,’ it turns out that, when you turn
the lights on that concept, it’s extremely slippery. The Galaxy is
not a basketball. It has a center of mass, which we can’t determine
from where we are because we’re out on one limb-edge
of it. It has a center of luminosity. It has a volumetric center. I
mean, how do you in fact even define what the Galaxy is? At its
outer edges it feathers out into extragalactic space.

“Now what we’re arguing over here is a difference of twelve
years if we accept that premise that we’re trying to locate a
point in time where this conjunction of the Galactic Center
and the heliacal rising of the solsticial Sun occurs . . . . This is a
deep subject, very interesting; it raises issues of bioastronomy,
archaeoastronomy, galactic dynamics—complex issues.

“The Gregorian calendar is off-keyed the Mayan by twelve
years, but on a scale of a thousand years, that’s a difference of
.12 percent, and on a scale of a billion years, what is being off by
twelve years? On a scale of a million years, what is being off by
twelve years? You see, we’re such ephemeral creatures in time.
We’re like mayflies who only live for seven days. Our temporal
window of perception is so extreme.…

“We are at the end. The point is that something—the galactic
mind, the intelligence of the species, the integrated Gaian
and Galactic entelechy—something is trying to deliver a message.
It is writ large, this message, in our largest systems of defining
and understanding time. We are at the end of a cosmic cycle.

“The point is: we are there. We. Are. There. We are in parking
orbit around the eschaton.…

“We are pregnant with this eschatological breakthrough.…”
class=* * *“center”
As we look inward from our residence and birthplace in the
Galaxy’s outer wheel toward the core, the cosmic womb where
new stars are being born, we see more luminosity and intuit
more intelligence, more knowledge, more yogic exercises, more
collective psychic output—absolutely incredible stuff that we
could use if we were able to access it, perhaps telepathically in
some as-yet-unknown cosmic language.

With no one quite knowing how it happened, ego-death became a kind of unquestioned highest value in the burgeoning counterculture.  It joined the gritty, basement realism of the existential “beat” movement with the exalted aura of sublimity emanating from the practicing mystics.  The “truth for truth’s sake” attitude toward life had already been epitomized in Western culture through the hallowed image of the questing poet-outcast, our quasi-religious archetype of the spiritual seeker. The beat poets were willing to nose around any precincts that might reveal and dissolve the contours of the overstuffed, power-driven ego now taking full possession of industrial society.  Nobody captured the angst and the motion of the venture better than Alan Ginsberg in his breathless poem of agony and ecstasy “Howl”.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry-headed dynamo in the machinery
of night . . .

The long-running underground river of the beat movement finally met its ocean in 1967 when the social revolution signified by the ‘summer of love’ accelerated its tempo and transformed its scope beyond what anyone had imagined. “Beat” now flowered as “hippie” and reached all the way into America’s suburban high schools and colleges.

Before long we saw the truly hip ranging college campuses and the burgeoning psychedelic ghettos carrying copies of Evans-Wentz’s translation of The Tibetan Book of The Dead.¹  For those who knew even a little about Tibet, the images suggested by the book and the legends surrounding it were of rugged mountains, cold, clear, fierce streams, scarce vegetation, and rocky, unpopulated plateaus.  The culminating event of ego-death seemed to require the most extreme of situations.  We contemplated desolate images of isolated graveyards strewn with the bones of the dying, encircled by vultures waiting to scavenge the remains of yet another heroic meditating soul who yielded his very body to this illusory world in a game exchange for the rewards of Nirvana.

Tibet was far away, however, and obviously very uncomfortable to visit, much less die in.  Nevertheless, no less a product of my times than anyone else, I was caught up in the motion.  I well remember the spring afternoon when I heard that my college had an opening in the Religious Studies Department. With the energetic naivete of youth propelling me, I found my way to the department chairman and excitedly encouraged him to go to India and hire an authentic yogi to help students like me through the death-rebirth process.  The department chairman was a typical academic existentialist thinker, a proponent of “the death of God” theology.  “I don’t think such an uncredentialed appointment would be likely,” he told me dryly.  I appreciated his wit but of course realized my cause was hopeless.  As I was leaving I noticed that he was digging his knuckles into his desk.

Soon I learned that cheaper help was available closer to home. The recently converted middle-class young like me were clearly as unenamored of the rude living and the trials of suffering endured by the beat subculture as we were daunted by the prospect of a long journey east.  It was natural to look for a quicker, more pleasurable route to liberated ecstasy.  A chance discovery at the Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland, duplicated without sanction by a few prodigious underground chemists, brought the great shortcut, LSD, into our hands.  What previously had cost oriental yogis years of preparation and discipline now seemed achievable in a matter of minutes.

To our progress-informed minds, the psychedelic trip was Western science’s solution to the wasteful effort of less inventive eras.  With a populace well prepared for innovation by modern advertising, it was no wonder that the drug’s messianic distribution through subcultural pathways was so rapid.  The artists, of course, tried it first, and soon acid was all over America’s streets.  And before long ego-death via LSD appeared in the lyrics of the most magical of the acid-rock bands, The Grateful Dead, whose “That’s It for the Other One” intoned “The other day they waited /the sky was dark and faded /And solemnly they stated /He has to die /You know he has to die.”  You had to be hopelessly square not to know they were talking about an LSD-induced ego-quenching.

This preparatory work made former Harvard professor Tim Leary’s plucky advertisement for the quick route to ego-release via LSD seem all the more attractive and convincing.  Timothy Leary and his friends Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert (later to become Baba Ram Das to America’s spiritual seekers) translated the venerable Tibetan manual into a more contemporary psychedelic lingo that cut out most of the cosmological “debris” and made the Shining Void seem as accessible as the local movies.  Why journey around the world when you can hop a chemically fueled rocket?  The more intelligent took the drug seriously and prepared for their voyages with care.

When all was said and done, it has to be admitted that the rewards were real.  Despite the genuine risk to one’s comfort and sanity, psychedelic drugs did provide a glimpse of existence that silenced the droning dogmas of scientific materialism.  People really did see spirits, feel energies, and enjoy visions and intuitions that definitely showed reality to be a whole lot bigger and more wondrous than the corporations, pundits, and professors were letting on.  A few of us even skated through or over our fear to a momentary glimpse of the pristine freedom of egolessness.  Everyone had their stories.  I certainly had mine.

In September of 1970 I was at my wit’s end, ensnared in a contradiction I couldn’t see my way through.  On the one had I was profoundly concerned with the creation of a just, peaceful, and loving world-order.  Mass starvations, massacres, racial prejudice, Vietnam, and the other atrocities of the post-World War II West seemed absurdly insane, and I, along with many of my generation, felt that we had to have the vision and the will to end the madness.  On the other hand, there was the constant allure of the spiritual, now being served by the accelerated introduction of esoteric oriental teachings into the West.  This inspired the happy suspicion that perhaps there was a great vision, one that would alter the very context of our conflicts so that they could be managed from a whole new perspective.

I was living at the time in Berkeley, California—just coming into its own as a crossroads of the new political and spiritual currents streaming through the United States.  Walking down Telegraph Avenue to the University of California campus I often passed through a gauntlet of radicals aggravatedly calling for my support of one or another cause.  But inscribed in bold letters on the awning of the street’s spiritual bookstore was the exalted admonition “All Hail the One Cosmic Mind”.  I was deeply torn by the apparent contradiction.  Politics or mysticism?  Justice or Awakening?  This world or the next?

So when a Berkeley friend brought home a container of mescaline fresh from the laboratory of a famed psychedelic alchemist, I decided it was time to get my answer.  Only hours later I was walking in the Berkeley hills, my being temporarily transformed by the drug-induced glories.  I had taken an unreasonably large dose, as if the amount itself would purity and concentrate the issues for me and draw an answer from the depths of being itself.  As I climbed the hill I watched the rolling patterns of the windblown grass.  Nature seemed a thin veil simultaneously revealing and concealing the rhythmic presence of divinity.  I felt my attention drawn to a locus of great power and light that was always somehow above and behind me.  I felt that I would be absorbed into that very Light, which was an original spiritual existence, but that if I did I would never speak my own truth again for the Light would then forever more require my complete discipleship.

I even physically withdrew from the ascending impulse, saying to myself that I wasn’t yet ready to make such a gesture.  I knew as I refused absorption in this Light that that refusal was a primal act of independent selfhood, that it was egoity itself.  Shortly thereafter, I came to another crossroads.  A suddenly arising edge of anxiety snowballed into an overwhelming, unstoppable fear that I was going—and indeed had gone—completely mad!  The fear moved much faster than my mind’s ability to assert control.  With no resorts, I spontaneously surrendered to the fear . . . and fell straight through it out the bottom of my presumed self!  In that moment of yielding, everything was lost and won as the groundless freedom of my very Self-hood showed itself.  I chuckled at the obviousness of my freedom, the nothingness of what I had moments before held most precious – me.

I sat down on the hillside and gazed at the San Francisco Bay.  I could have sat there for an eternity – time seemed to have stopped completely.  I did not think; thoughts arose.  Then, suddenly, in a moment, it became obvious that everything is a single mind or consciousness.  It was a superconscious intuition that could not have been more self-evident.  Then a friend came up to me and it was time to leave.

After that I knew that the first office of every life is the attainment of transcendental awakening.  However noble and just in itself, the human struggle for right and benign arrangements in this world must occur within the context of that spiritual endeavor and not merely precede it.  From there it was a search through the various spiritual resources available to me until I met my Teacher and Master, Avatar Adi Da Samraj.

What had occurred for me in the Berkeley hills, although not permanent ego-death, was at least the temporary intuition of egolessness.  Mine of course is certainly not a unique story.  Now, twenty seven years later, I think it’s fair to say that I and the rest of the psychedelic voyagers of my generation have kept our egos.  LSD, it seems, may have a message, but it is not a way. 

Many illusions popularly surround the whole matter of “ego-death”—our shortsighted and indulgent reliance upon psychedelic drugs being only one of them. Of course a consumer society would happily endorse a path that could be purchased and swallowed like any drugstore remedy.  But our real confusions went deeper.  They lay in the very attempt to pin the oriental notion of egolessness to the procrustean bed of our Western individualistic culture.

In Turning East, Harvard-based Christian theologian Harvey Cox gives an account of his academic and personal researches into the recent interest shown by Westerners in oriental religion.  He points to the fundamental confusion that Americans in particular have about key notions in the Eastern spiritual tradition.  Cox identifies “detachment” and “egolessness” as the two central tenets of all forms of Buddhism, and proceeds to explain how these were dramatically misinterpreted by a transient modern culture primed to adapt them to its own direction.

Americans already experience a kind of “detachment”, albeit very different from what the Buddhists have in mind.  Our detachment comes from our living in a mobile, throwaway civilization in which we are schooled by the media not to get too attached to anything – or anybody – because we will soon have to discard it (or him or her) when an improved model appears.  Our American form of detachment comes not from the spiritual insight that all things are moving toward nothingness, but from planned obsolescence, fashion changes, and the constant introduction of new products to replace the ones we have.  Our form of “detachment” is a kind of alienation that also infects relationships to persons, not just to things.  It is the result of a Kleenex, paper-plate and styrofoam cup way of life—itself the result of our economy’s unending need to sell new products^.2

Cox goes on to say that this confusion about detachment might not be too damaging, were it not combined with a far more fundamental misconception about egolessness itself.  Without any true understanding of what Buddhists mean by egolessness Westerners have created their own version of the concept, as Cox explains:

Western religion tends to accept the ego but teaches that love as a positive form of attachment can replace possessiveness and manipulation.  Eastern spirituality does not give love such a central place, but teaches that the ego is unreal, and that all forms of attachment lead to suffering.  The prism-distorted Western version of Buddhism combines loveless ego with psychological “detachment”. What comes out looks much like irresponsibility with a spiritual cover, a metaphysical license to avoid risky, demanding relationships, a mystical permit to skip from one person, bed, cause or program to another without ever taking the plunge.3

While Harvey Cox tends to settle for a rather Westernized understanding of what oriental cultures have understood as “Enlightenment”, he does have a clear instinct for the way Westerners bend Eastern spiritual exercises to the ego’s own ends.  Earlier in the book he observes that, in practice, the search for Eastern-style self-realization results in a mode of living that might be called “concentric”—i.e., focused upon a point within.  Avatar Adi Da Samraj has also addressed this disposition, which tends toward meditation on inward states combined with social withdrawal.  He observes that excessive concentration upon the internal “I” only reinforces ego-bondage and brings us no closer to the Divine Reality.

Many people . . . hope to Realize Liberation through dissociation.  But they must first be relieved from their imaginary disease.  In effect they must be cured of their alienation.  The signs of their alienation in daily life and in the relational context of their existence must disappear, and in their disappearing, intimacy with the Transcendental Condition will reappear and begin to show its signs in life and in the basic consciousness of existence.4

From this perspective all forms of introversion only extend and even compound the error that everyone is already making.  Our first responsibility is not to become quiet and inward but to understand the whole strategy of interior resort.  We transcend the mind by becoming the body.  In becoming the body simply we discover ourselves to be much larger than even the mind suspected.  This is not merely extroversion.  We also become quiet.

My experience in meditation in the spiritual company of Avatar Adi Da Samraj is that when my search for inner peace and quiet is released in real self-understanding, a magnificent sense of expansive well-being as the entire body is awakened.  To meditate truly is to be opened at the heart.  The sense of freedom, bliss, and power involved in this is completely opposite to that of the usual image of the “cooled-out” meditator, immune in his or her detachment from the play of life.  Real understanding and transcendental Realization are not philosophical.  They require participation of the whole body-being in a gradual psycho-physical transformation.

While it is true that the vision of ego-death propagated in the West through the popularization of Eastern literature is a distortion of the one conceived in the Orient, the conventional oriental notion of ego-transcendence has serious limitations, as well.  What is lacks is precisely the dimension to which we have just referred—a healthy and genuinely illumined acceptance of bodily life.  The great and authentic Realizers have almost all been Asians, to be sure, but they themselves exceeded their typically ascetical, other-worldly cultural milieu, which tends to equate egoic consciousness with bodily existence and to devalue manifest life as merely “samsara”, or “maya” (illusion). 

People play with the conception of ego-death as if it were an extension of egoic or mystical practices. The common idea is that ego-death is a matter of mortifying one’s flesh, doing without things one desires, even obliterating one’s existence. But these are notions of ego-death that the ego itself projects and consider in the midst of its own efforts to survive and to defend itself. the ego is not other than the mind. The ego is the mind—the ego is not contained within the mind. T he inner being, the subjective personality, the self-reference, “me,” “I,” is the ego. It is not by consoling one’s inner being with experiences (or states of mind) that one realizes Truth. Rather, it is by the transcendence of the mind, by the death of the mind, or by the overcoming of the false evaluation of the status of the mind, that the Truth is realized.

Overcoming the reaction to incarnate life is not to make bodily fulfillment in life a spiritual value, as we like to do in the West.  Rather, it is to understand that the Western cultural and religious emphasis upon incarnation and the opposite Eastern cultural and religious movement toward what we might call “excarnation” both express a more fundamental reaction to the mere fact of our mysterious embodiment.  The Enlightened man or woman enjoys what Avatar Adi Da Samraj calls “mindless embodiment”, in which the body and every other apparent object is seen to be nothing more than a modification of conscious light.  From that position we are free of the opposition of “for” and “against” (or yes and no) of West and East, and released into a free play with existence as the body only (which is mere Consciousness Itself) in which nothing remains to be accomplished or escaped.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj points out that instead of trying to suppress our incarnate life—as if mere existence were the error—we need to allow the native force of life to reach beyond its presumed limits and extend outward to infinity. His Teaching is about complete association or participation in life, not withdrawal.  It is for this reason he has characterized his own quality as one of “boundless extroversion”.

Such and uncompromising embrace of incarnate existence demands an outgoing or life-based practice.  This is exactly what we did not reckon with during the euphoric sixties when so many of us attempted to make off with merely the results or apparent rewards promised in the oriental teachings, without the hard work.  And yet it is understood in every traditional religious school that the unregenerate beginner must first be turned out of his self-reliant individualism (what used to be called “worldliness” ) to an actual encounter with and dependence upon the Living Divine.  By whatever name you call it, it is this Reality and not merely our own egocentric efforts that purifies and uplifts us.  This turnabout or conversion necessarily offends our willful self-possession and presumed self-sufficiency.  It is therefore very difficult to accomplish.  We are required to change our behavior in every precinct of our lives, since our chronic patterns are the daily script of our egoic program.

So, as real religious practitioners, we change our diet, study sacred scriptures, serve our Teacher and the temples he or she has established, pray or meditate, practice the appropriate sacraments, give money and other offerings to our school, accept disciplines of speech and dress, temper our usual commerce with ordinary entertainments and friends, accept direction from those more mature than ourselves and from the teachings whose authority we have come to trust, etc.  These disciplines are all designed to turn us from the habitual self-indulgence and self-display that constitutes daily life for nearly all men and women, to the acknowledgement of and homage to the great Reality we say we wish to know and love.

The breaking down of the psycho-physics of our ego by these very functional means is what true religion accomplishes.  It is a humble purification and rededication of our character that supplies the missing link necessary for us to make a genuine transition from our television upbringing to the profundity of the process that leads to ego-death.  Those who try to bypass this transitional step inevitably fail at spiritual life altogether.  For this reason Avatar Adi Da Samraj points out that before we can fully realize our inherent identity with God (ego-death) we must first realize our relationship to and dependence upon Divine Grace.  In his own language, before we can be “liberated” we must first be “saved”.  The alienated ego cannot take Heaven by storm.  Rather, it must acknowledge its own situation and first patiently serve the Divine until its alienation is replaced by Divine Communion. This preparatory work (which may take years to fulfill) has nothing to do with negating the basic force of the being.  It is the release of that force from limiting identification with the body-mind.  On this foundation, ego-death, expressed by Avatar Adi Da Samraj as “Ecstasy, or the Realization of Love” becomes a possibility.

The need for a total culture of practice is irreducible.  No one-shot experience or exclusive concentration in one or another kind of esoteric practice or “enlightenment weekend” can excuse us of the creative sacred ordeal requiring the commitment of our entire being.  The religious, spiritual, and meditative way of Truth or Eternal Life is a process of personal, moral, and higher psycho-physical sacrifice.  It is not a superficial and private remedial technique but a form of culture, a profound and total way of life.

      The message is this: You, as you know or may experience yourself, are not immortal, nor yet even fully human.  What you tend to be, and think, and live is exactly what must be overcome – through insight, change of action, and the fullest working out of the disposition of sacrifice.  Your reluctance to resort to the Divine and to the higher Agency of the Spiritual Master, neither of which is within you or even merely outside you, is a sign of the very dilemma from which you must be liberated.  Your moral and relational weakness or reactivity is the dominant fault that binds you to the illusion and torment that is yourself.  Your tendency toward confinement in inward and mental and physically self-possessed states is not at all reinforced by the truly spiritual Way.  The entire Way of Truth is immensely difficult and creative.  The entire Way is a Sacrifice.  The Way of Truth is the only matter of ultimate significance in the life of Man.  Let us yield our very bodies and minds into the Reality and Destiny that is both Spirit and Truth.

. . . [I]n our time and place, law persists in an ontological gap. . . .  [O]ur discourse and practices—our law-talk and what we do with that talk—routinely and pervasively presuppose commitments to (and often explicitly invoke)\ something like the law of classical account. Confronted with these apparent commitments, however, we profess not to believe any such thing. We are compelled to that profession, almost, because the law—the brooding omnipresence in the sky of [Olive Wendell] Holmes’ derision—does not square with either the everyday ontology or the scientific ontology that people in academic settings regard as axiomatic, at least for professional purposes. So our talk and practice make sense, if at all, only on assumptions that we feel compelled, or at least obligated, to disavow.

This complex observation, though entirely accurate, requires a bit of unpacking for the layperson.

As has been observed by the philosopher Charles Taylor, we live in a secular age. And the often unconscious scientific and logical presumptions which underlie virtually all of our various fields of human thought and our contemporary cultural institutions (of which “The Law” is perhaps the most consequential), reflect the scientific materialist logical positivism that has for at least three centuries now undergirded all of the secular realms of Western civilization. However, “The Law” that we have inherited from an earlier age is built upon a distinctly religious foundation that extends back more than two millennia to Greece, Rome, and Jerusalem. Professor Stephen Smith does not give us much history in his book—his is a lawyer’s book of argumentation, not an historian’s tome. To his great credit, Professor Smith knows that most laypeople (non-lawyers) will find both his subject and his argument rather abstract, so he manfully strives to lighten the load on us by establishing as conversational a tone as possible in his work. And, at this, he succeeds. Even so, at least a bit more history is essential because it is important for us to understand that the western system of jurisprudence is rooted in the two now long-intertwined sacred cultures which reside at the very origins of western civilization.

That is, our legal system hearkens back to Judaism and Christianity (our Anglo-American common law always having presumed to be rooted in Jewish and Christian values and truth) and in the philosophical meditations on law and culture which were undertaken by the Greeks, dating back to Plato and Aristotle. Having passed through the Stoic philosophers such as Cicero, the two strands joined in the medieval Greco-Judeo-Christian synthesis achieved and epitomized by St. Thomas Aquinas. These are the progenitors of what Professor Smith means by the “Traditional” or “Classical” account of “The Law”.

Referring to two of the great judges who advocated what Oliver Wendell Holmes scornfully derided as “a transcendental body of law outside of any particular state but obligatory within it”, Smith tells us:

Our own legal system descends from (or still is) a “common law” system—a “Case System,” as Karl Llewellyn put it—which centrally features judicial decisions as the materials that law students study and that lawyers and judges argue with and about. In the Classical view, however, these judicial decisions are not themselves “the law,” exactly, but rather are “evidence” of something that precedes and transcends them—which is “the Law.” And the intricacies of common law argumentation are calculated to get at that deeper or larger authority. In this vein, that great expositor of the common law, William Blackstone, explained that “the decisions of courts . . . are the evidence of what is common law.” A famous American case expressed what sounds like a similar view. [I]t will hardly be contended”, Justice Joseph Story wrote for the U.S. Supreme court in Swift v. Tyson, “That the decisions of courts constitute laws. They are, at most, only evidence of what the laws are, and are not, of themselves, the law.”

He goes on to explain:

Blackstone and Story were, after all, heirs of a worldview that assumed that God was real—more real than anything else, in fact, or “necessarily” real, rather than just contingently real—and had created the universe according to a providential plan. This view had important implications for the nature of law. Perhaps the most systematic working out of those implications had been performed centuries before by Blackstone, Story and Thomas Aquinas who maintained that enactments by human legislators (positive law) derives from the “eternal law,” which is the divinely ordained order governing the universe, and positive law gains its status as law [only] by virtue of participating in that order. “Since then, the eternal law is the plan of government and the Chief Governor,” Aquinas explained, “all the plans of government in the inferior governors must be derived from the eternal law.” And it followed that “every human law has just so much of the nature of law as it is derived from the law of nature.” Aquinas added that “if in any point [the human law] deflects from the law of nature, it is no longer law but a perversion of law.”

Here, as is the case throughout his book, Smith’s writing is both lucid and compelling, and his identification and description of what is wrong with the law in its the contemporary state (which is usually identified as “positive law”) is both philosophically sophisticated and practically precise.

However, describing the problem and detailing its current manifestations is only one-half of the task. What Professor Smith seems ultimately unable to do in Law’s Quandary (and what this reviewer thinks readers of his work have every right to expect) is to offer his own constructive solution to this quandary—one that is at least as accurate and as complex as his description of our legal system’s essential problem. In other words, where is the concrete, affirmative proposal as to where law ought to go from here to effectively resolve this problem? Stephen Smith is a respected legal scholar endowed with obvious intellectual gifts. But his glaring failure to so much as even try to present any proposed solution to such a profound and systemic flaw in our legal system—a flaw which he so clearly and accurately identifies—is deeply disappointing.

If Professors Smith’s reluctance to propose a way out of the law’s present philosophical dilemma stems from an inability to fully comprehend the source of this quandary, it is a weakness shared by most of his peers in the higher echelons of both modern legal scholarship and political philosophy. The source of this quandary is the fact that our western philosophical, political, and legal tradition has two categorically different worldviews struggling for both political and ethical ascendancy. Despite the many valiant attempts over the past century to do so, these two distinctly different worldviews cannot be successfully reconciled.

On one side, there is the majoritarian, strictly materialist/utilitarian philosophy and worldview championed by the likes of John Stuart Mill. This is what has come to be called “positive law”. Today it dominates America’s legal profession. On the other, there is the minority non-material/intuitionist worldview championed by those we might call transcendentalists or intuitionists. The schism between these two distinct worldviews is not new—nor is the difficulty that scholars, lawyers, and judges are experiencing in trying to resolve it. For example, as recently as 1972, John Rawls, the long-time and widely respected Chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Philosophy who is widely regarded as one of America’s greatest moral and political philosophers, did his best to address and resolve this conflict. He pointed out, in his well-known work entitled A Theory of Justice, the existence of, and the inherent incompatibility between, these two distinct schools of political and philosophical thought. (Rawls offered his A Theory of Justice in the field of philosophy, rather than in the field of law.) In that work, Professor Rawls recognized the fact that the essential principles animating each of these two distinctly different worldviews seem to take turns ascending into positions of prominence in the analysis and written rationales of various American legal decisions. This fact, he recognized, has created a certain tension (or, in Smith’s language, a quandary) at the very heat of our legal system. After correctly identifying this problem, Professor Rawls, like Professor Smith thirty years later, likewise failed to present a viable solution to it. Instead, he fell back upon a rather conventional attempt to the two viewpoints, an almost mathematical or mechanical solution that pleased no one.

The failure of philosophers and legal scholars as preeminent as John Rawls and Stephen Smith to make any meaningful headway in resolving this persistently observed quandary of contemporary law has, I believe, a common genesis. Its root is the failure of all of mere thinkers to have ever actually enjoyed the “Unitive Experience” that constitutes the experiential basis underlying the premises of adherents to the intuitionist school of justice. This specific “Unitive Experience”, which is designated by many different names, in many different cultures and traditions, is the actual source of the insight which underlies the unique and distinctive mode of ethical reasoning which has been historically adopted and employed by adherents to the intuitionist school of justice and constitutes the perspective from which experience adherents to this Intuitionist worldview formulate and enunciate their ethical premises.

Because Professors Smith and Rawls approach the ethical reasoning underlying the law—and the experience on which it is based— as intellectuals, they are confused and baffled about the interplay and opposition between the two competing worldviews and the normative, ethical conflicts to which they give rise. Nevertheless, we can resolve this conflict cum quandary only through ethical reasoning, rather than through the usual time-wasting parsing of judicial opinion. This is not to say that people who haven’t enjoyed the unitive experience are necessarily incapable of formulating a valid legal and political philosophy. Or even that those who have had such an experience will embrace legal and political views that reflect its depths. What I am saying is that for us to truly comprehend  and resolve the quandary that is presently afflicting contemporary law it is absolutely essential that we possess a deep appreciation and understanding of mystical experience because mystical or unitive experience is the real source of the normative principals behind the ethical reasoning of the intuitionist school—one of the two principal competitors for ascendency in this present conflict. And any adherent to one of the strictly materialist schools of political, philosophical or legal thought (utilitarian or otherwise) who is not fully aware of the reality of, and of the specific nature of unitive experience—and the relationship it bears to the quandary in which Anglo-American law now finds itself simply lacks the necessary intellectual tools needed to approach the task of repairing our western legal system.

Despite his lifelong and entirely praiseworthy effort to find a new philosophical foundation from which to address and resolve Western law’s quandary, Professor John Rawls was, in the end, unable to provide anything more compelling and satisfactory than the liberal, materialist solution. As a result of this failing, Professor Rawls recommended that–when confronted with the competing ethical demands of the two schools of thought seemingly perpetually at loggerheads in Western culture (the utilitarian and intuitionist Schools of Justice)–those who find themselves in charge of making community decisions should simply take a certain percentage of the material goods acquired by a given community’s entrepreneurial class from that class and give that it to the least well-off within that society. This is, in essence, a form of community-compelled, compulsory philanthropy on the part of the entrepreneurial class in a given society, pursuant to which process human satisfaction and the social order are to be guaranteed by the simple mechanical or mathematical device of re-distributing a certain percentage of strictly material goods.  It assumes that the highest foreseeable good our society can produce can be achieved simply by providing some ideal balance of simple material satisfaction between both ends of the class spectrum.

As an inveterate materialist, Professor Rawls’ proposal made no attempt to provide for any change whatever in the level of consciousness of any of the people at either end of the economic spectrum of his hypothetical community. Such a consideration, would, of course, be beyond the reach—indeed, some would say, even beyond the very understanding—of any strictly materialist philosophy. But a change in consciousness is what most essentially concerns members of the intuitionist school of justice.  In failing to take into consideration their conviction achieving a heightened or deepened consciousness resides at the very root of a viable value, Rawls was unable understand how the intuitionists arrived at, or navigated within, their unique mode of ethical reasoning. He thereby failed to appreciate or otherwise accommodate the demands that such a perspective compelled them to make upon society and upon our Western legal system.

By simply proposing to compel the provision to of some mechanistically-determined percentage of the strictly materialist goods and services possessed by the entrepreneurial class of a political community to “The Least Well-Off” of that community—without otherwise having the slightest understanding as to why the intuitionists were making this strange demand—Rawls found himself unable to significantly advance the debate. Because this perhaps poorly explained strange demand seemed to have so much historical support among certain influential members of Western civilization, Professor Rawls (and others) felt compelled to grant this set of strange demands some degree of recognition. But he could simply never explain why the adherents to this Intuitionist School of Justice believed these things.

What makes contemporary law’s philosophical quandary so seemingly intractable is undoubtedly the elusive nature of the Unitive Experience itself. It is, by definition, something that is very difficult to isolate out and study by the conventional (that is: scientific materialist) means, or even to easily understand when it is explained by others. In some traditions, this experience—or this state of Being thus experienced—is called “God.” Some traditions call it “Brahman” or “Nirvana” or “The Void”  Others describe it as an “Infinite and Eternal Undifferentiated Consciousness.” Others refuse, both as a matter of principal and as a matter of simply accuracy, to call “II” any “THING” at all, since, at base, “IT” has no “IT-ness” (that is: no NOUN-ness) whatsoever. “IT” is not a “Thing” among other “Things”, but their Source. Noting all of the different names, words, ideas and myths pointing to what he supposed to be an essentially universal human experience, Aldous Huxley (employing a term which was originally coined by Leibniz to refer to it)  identified the philosophy which is generated by this experience as “The Perennial Philosophy” .

Although the conventionally religious worldview has tended to personify ultimate cultural Authority as a vastly powerful, even immortal form of our own species of homo sapiens, adherents of the intuitionist school of justice resist this tendency to objectify and externalize the ultimate Reality as something separate from and superior to our own being and ultimate nature. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this key conceptual distinction. Both Professors Rawls and Smith seem completely ignorant of it. And because they logically enough choose to equate intuitionist spirituality with the naive religious concept of God as kind of big person in the sky, they cannot comprehend the underlying Source is of the intuitionist experience. As is the case with many scientific materialist logical positivists, Professor Rawls, having encountered something beyond his ability to see, touch, taste, smell, hear, weigh, measure or in some other way register it, simply excludes it from his account of Reality, and thus from his calculation of the nature of justice.

For all of his limitations, at least John Rawls tried to resolve the tension he found between these two different schools of thought, even though his proposed resolution was mechanistic. Stephen Smith never even gets that far. Rather, after only briefly (albeit accurately) delineating the quandary in which “The Law” finds itself in contemporary Western civilization, he instead spends must of the entire remainder of his book debunking, by various circuitous methods, each of the various potential solutions which have been put forward by others to solve this quandary. Among the various theses which he undertakes to disassemble (as though he were some artful Grand Santrape of the College de Pataphysique) are Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “Survival” Thesis; Morton Horwitz’s “Bad Faith/Idolatry” Thesis; John Searle’s Implied Platomic Thesis (and Charles Larmore’s Explicit Platonic Thesis), and the Neoclassical Explanation and Rationalization Thesis of Joseph Vining. Professor Smith, indeed, goes to great lengths to identify the reasons why each of these proposals should be rejected, in two such instances going so far as to point out how and why their authors did not believe in the very solution which they proposed!

In his closing chapter, Professor Smith reveals the state of mind in which he found himself after writing an entire book about the quandary at the heart of Western culture’s legal system without also offering a solution to it. Writing Law’s Quandary, he tells us, left him in a state of utter perplexity that gave rise to a state of increased humility that he hopes might possibly render him potentially more receptive to “other sources” and “other resources.” He speculates that such might lead to some “certain something” that might be more mysterious and more inspiring than whatever he was able to access while researching and writing his book. In other words, Smith appears to be engaging in what appears to be a prayerful quest to find the answer to this quandary. If so, in this he is not far from the truth.

One is hard-pressed to fault Professor Smith’s honesty and humility here. However, after wading through his entire book in search of a hoped-for solution to the quandary that he so accurately identifies at the propitious opening of his book—or, at the very least, for some good-faith effort on the part of Professor Smith at trying to identify such a solution—Professor Smith’s seeking of refuge in his cryptic reference to “other mysterious resources”, “other sources” or some kind of “certain something” (without otherwise attempting to come to grips with exactly what this “other resource” might possibly be—something that adherents of the intuitionist school of justice have all been willing to do) offers the reader very little solace or satisfaction. Unfortunately, Professor Smith does not follow through on these slight intimations.

Stephen Smith was presumably motivated to write his book by the same thirst for an answer to this quandary that likely propels at least some potential readers to pick up and read his book. But, in the end, all that he has to offer is his admission that that he has no idea whatsoever what the resolution to this quandary might be. At the end, he offers his little than the hope that some ill-defined source of inspiration might befall him in his now humbled state of mind.

If Professor Smith’s candor is both honest and admirable, it also begs the question: Did this book really need to be written at all?  And, if so, should this book have been written by Professor Stephen Smith, who, ultimately, does not advance us toward any viable solution to law’s pernicious quandary?  A scholarly explication of different problems that afflict us in the field of law might be a reasonable academic exercise. Such a service might well entitle one to teach “about” the law. But the provision of this service does not qualify one to teach “The Law” itself. Professor Smith himself seems to have some sensitivity to this issue. In the book’s last paragraph he writes, “Perplexity is not a resting place, to be sure, and it is uncomfortable (as some of us can attest) to have to be constantly choosing between speaking nonsense or just standing in silence.” It is difficult not to wonder how much better a book Professor Smith might have written had he learned how to allow that silence speak more loudly.

Attorney Daniel P. Sheehan, who trained at Harvard College, Harvard Law School and Harvard Divinity School, has investigated and litigated some of the most important lawsuits of our time, including The Pentagon Papers Case, The Karen Silkwood Case, The Three-Mile Island Case, and The American Sanctuary Movement Case. He is a pioneer in the extension of First Amendment freedoms to religious and spiritual organizations. Daniel was the Director of “The Strategic Initiative To Identify The New Paradigm” of President Mikhail Gorbachev’s State of The World Forum in San Francisco. He is currently undertaking a new global initiative that enable the entire human collective to cooperatively address the emergencies that now imperil all life on Earth.