Mapping Spirituality for the 21st Century

Mike King
January 2011

1. Introduction

The central question that this paper addresses is: what kind of taxonomical framework can be constructed for the study of spirituality in a pluralistic era? In the recognition of this spiritual pluralism two responses may emerge: one which denies the very validity of constructing any taxonomy at all, and the other which charges ahead with the nearest map to hand which appears to fit only because certain modalities of the spirit are excluded. The former permits nothing more than an endless unstructured inventory of the spiritual life, while the latter is nothing more than a half-hearted acknowledgment of the variety of spiritual impulse.

There is of course a wealth of existing taxonomies or maps of the spiritual life, with varying claims to be comprehensive. Such maps emerge from two broadly different camps however, the first being comparative religion (religious studies) and the second transpersonal theory (including integral theory). The first tends to construct classifications based on outward phenomena such as the canons of text and practice of the major and minor faith traditions, while the latter pursues what is essentially a spiritual psychology, a classification of inner impulse.

I propose that a truly comprehensive taxonomy of the spiritual life needs to reflect both the outer and the inner structures. The study of spirituality has to encompass both the accounts of practitioners of their inner spiritual states, and the spiritual and religious culture – or possible lack of it – which creates the context in which they have spiritual experiences and makes available linguistic forms for their expression. In other words a comprehensive model has to respond to the variety of personal spiritual impulse as set against the variety of either prevailing tradition or forms of modernity that deny the spiritual in the first place.

Each of the faith traditions has developed different languages of spiritual interiority, which appear at times incommensurable. How can Teresa of Avila’s seven ‘mansions of the interior castle’, with its language of devotion to ‘God’, map to the Buddha’s four-fold this and eight-fold that, where ‘God’ simply isn’t part of the language? This is where the transpersonal tradition supplies some leverage on the problem. Its essential insight is this: the inner spiritual world is a bit like a psychology. In the same way that a psychological profile of an individual can be built up, so can a spiritual profile. In the first instance the transpersonal tradition draws on Jung’s typology of archetypes and indeed some of Jung’s dichotomies map quite well onto the spiritual life, starting with head vs. heart and introvert vs. extrovert. The Buddha has a head-oriented spiritual impulse, Teresa of Avila a heart-oriented one. To find common ground with the Buddha in the West we could turn to Eckhart: they both praise detachment over love. Alternatively where do we find a Teresa in the East? Why in Kabir or Rumi. Rumi’s devotional spirituality has something essentially gregarious in it, whereas Richard Rolle, a fellow devotional mystic in an English setting is determinedly solitary. This isn’t exactly the introvert-extrovert axis, but we are not looking for an exact fit with the taxonomies of the psychological, just borrowing and adapting. 

In the following sections I now do two things. Firstly I discuss some existing spiritual maps in the light of the opening remarks above. Secondly a new model is proposed drawn from the material developed for my books: Secularism (2007) and Postsecularism (2009). 

2. Existing Spiritual Maps

The discipline of religious studies provides us with a comprehensive map of world religions over space and time, but that this isn’t quite what we are looking for – because it deals with the externals. For example Rumi, the 13th century Persian mystic, is located within an Islamic world with a Sufi inflection in a region still steeped in Buddhist sensibilities, all of which shows in his work. But to capture the interiority of the man and his spirituality a different kind of map is needed, even though Islam, Sufism, and Buddhism – and the imagery of the Persian poetic tradition – frame the expressive modes available to him.

In Secularism I looked briefly at three spiritual maps or schemes that at least partially provide what we are looking for. These were the maps respectively of New Age philosopher Ken Wilber, phenomenologist of religion Andrew Rawlinson, and Unitarian minister Peter Tufts Richardson. While Wilber went on to construct ‘theories of everything’ which placed spiritual maps within larger maps that enfold such things as science, arts and society, it is his earlier ‘two-arc’ model that is more typical of a dedicated spiritual map (Wilber 1980, 5). The first arc begins with the ‘pleroma’ – the undifferentiated state of infant consciousness – and ends in adult egoic consciousness. (Note that ‘pleroma’ is a gnostic term popularised by Jung.) The second arc moves through higher or transpersonal stages that I term variously as esoteric, occult or imaginal (Wilber uses slightly different language), up to the highest or unitive stage. The two arcs are drawn in such a way as to suggest that the highest unitive stage shares some quality with the original undifferentiated pleromic stage, thus nicely illustrating how Freud fell into the trap that Wilber terms the ‘pre-trans’ fallacy (Wilber 1995, 123). This model was no doubt a unique and ground-breaking contribution to our understanding of spirituality at the time, but, for various reasons it does not meet our requirement of comprehensivity. Most significantly, it is a developmental model which would claim universality for its unitive goal in the spiritual life, and a linear path through other forms of spirituality which place them as lower or less developed. What it does show us however is that spiritual maps at the very least do two different kinds of work: they can be developmental, in which case they are probably about the trajectory of a particular spiritual path – and in Wilber’s case it is more or less a Buddhist one – or they can be locatory, which seeks to find descriptors that identify common ground in paths from different traditions. 

Another developmental spiritual map might be Teresa of Avila’s ‘seven castles’, but her entire context and inner spiritual impulse is very different to Wilber’s. From this perspective it also becomes clear that many developmental spiritual maps have been created as teachings by a guru, spiritual advisor, or adept, in order to assist their pupils, and are located in specific historical traditions. These are valuable, but we are looking for spiritual maps which cross the boundaries of tradition and help us identify a universal inner spiritual geography. For example, it is clear that Wilber’s model describes a spirituality that might be common to Eckhart and Shankara – as Rudolf Otto suggested in the 1930s (Otto 1932) – and that a very different, more devotional spiritual sensibility is pursued for example by Rumi, Kabir, Richard Rolle and Teresa of Avila. Even then, it seems that all these examples share a unitive goal, which is emphatically not the goal of an esotericist like Rudolf Steiner, as he makes clear in his autobiography. Wilber’s model cannot distinguish between Rumi and Eckhart, omits the devotional altogether, and would insist that Steiner’s esotericism is merely a stage to a higher goal, all of which are serious failings.

Turning to our second spiritual map, that of Andrew Rawlinson (1997), we find just what was missing in Wilber: a non-developmental non-privileging scheme that cuts across the categories of religions and tradition, based on simple indices of spirituality. Rawlinson’s scheme is a quadrant model where the vertical axis represents a ‘hot-cold’ variable and the horizontal axis a ‘structured-unstructured’ variable. He carefully defines these two indices, and then locates various individuals and traditions on the graph with some useful outcomes. The hot-cold axis is to do with whether the goal, deity, spiritual agency and so on are external or internal to the aspirant. I like this because ‘hot’ is associated with devotion to a ‘god’ or ‘God’ or guru, while ‘cool’ is a good descriptor for, say, the Buddhist idea of ‘nirvana’ – meaning the snuffing out of ego-tendencies – or detachment. ‘Structured’ in this scheme means that there are steps from the starting point to the goal, while ‘unstructured’ means that they are one. Hence, for example, along the bottom of the diagram one can fill in different Buddhist schools that represent a spectrum from those espousing the ‘path of regular steps’ to those espousing sudden enlightenment. A modern teacher like Tony Parsons (classified a little misleadingly as a neo-Advaita teacher) would fall naturally in the bottom-left quadrant (cool unstructured), while any devotional mystic who insisted that grace was entirely in the will of ‘God’ would naturally be placed in the top-left quadrant (hot unstructured). However, while having only two axes makes for simplicity, I would suggest that the spiritual life requires a somewhat larger set of indices to create any comprehensive map. For example, what of Teresa’s seven mansions? Her location is clearly ‘hot’, but we now have a structured perception of the path, i.e. a path of stages, and it is as much for the aspirant to actively progress as it is for ‘God’ to give grace. This places her in the top-left, i.e. hot structured quadrant, which would also be the location of the entire occult or esoteric tradition. To characterise both Rudolf Steiner and Teresa of Avila, for example, as hot structured tells us something useful about them, but ignores the larger point that they are chalk and cheese of the spiritual life.

Rawlinson’s scheme shows us perhaps two things. Firstly, a variable space using carefully chosen spiritual indices is a good starting point as it allows for gradual variation and the combination of indices, and eliminates privileging of one region over another. Secondly, however, it cannot be comprehensive with just two indices.

Turning to our third model, that of Richardson, we find a map based on four variables or indices, which immediately creates a much bigger variable space. His scheme is an adaptation of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a personality type assessment tool, for the spiritual life (Richardson 1996). The MBTI in turn has its roots in Jungian archetypal psychology, and shows again that the kind of spiritual map we are groping for may have a good analogy in the field of psychology. Richardson’s Four Spiritualities model starts out with four polarities of personal impulse from the MBTI: Extraversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving. The fact that these map only crudely onto Rawlinson’s variables – if at all – suggest that the two models do different kinds of work. Returning to the idea that models can be either developmental or locatory, then we notice that Wilber’s is purely developmental; Richardson’s is purely locatory; and Rawlinson mixes up the two a little: his hot-cold axis is locatory, while his structured-unstructured axis, which locates different traditions, does so on the basis of the developmental model they adopt. Richardson’s scheme could in principal be the most accommodating, as its reliance on archetypes is non-privileging and has a comfortably large variable space, but its choice of variables do not quite deliver as sharp a tool as we need. For example, under Richardson’s scheme shamanism becomes a devotional system (Richardson 1996, 80), which is as clumsy a conflation as the Steiner-Teresa clumping that Rawlinson’s scheme requires.

3. The Two-Fold Model of Spiritual Difference

3.1 Introducing the Model

To some degree Wilber, Rawlinson, Richardson and I have pursued a similar question and method: by looking at as wide a range of phenomena as possible in the spiritual life we have attempted to construct as simple a scheme as possible to understand them. But any such taxonomical attempts are always framed by some initial taxonomy that the researcher brings to the phenomena, which in the last resort will reflect their own experience of the spiritual life. If the inner worlds of Steiner, Teresa, and Crow Dog (1996) (a Sioux shaman) are equally remote from one’s own experience of, for example, Buddhism or Methodism, then it takes a great leap of the imagination to enter those worlds. All I can do in putting forward my own scheme is to say that I have attempted those necessary leaps to the best of my capacity, and am always attempting to stretch that capacity. 

In the first instance it became clear to me that the postmodern debate of the 1970s-1980s over ‘perennial’ vs. ‘contextual’ had some truth on both sides: there are innate transcendent experiences beyond language, but at the same time tradition, culture and language frame at the very least their expression (indeed there was probably more agreement on this than the polarised debate suggested). Hence the two halves of my scheme are designed to reflect firstly the spectrum of innate personal spiritual impulses, and secondly the type of spiritual-religious context in which the individual finds themselves, and which could either legitimize or delegitimize their constellation of spiritual impulses and the expression of them. My scheme is locatory, rather than developmental, thus leaving aside the question of how the aspirant makes spiritual progress, and how that is assessed. It is however also a diagnostic and teaching tool – and I have used it as such in workshops – because it assists the aspirant, whatever their developmental level, to identify their personal constellation of spiritual impulse, particularly when one or more elements within that receive little validation from their cultural context.

My scheme is represented in its two halves in this diagram:

Historical Modalities of the Spirit	Personal Spiritual Impulse	

esoteric / transcendent

bhakti / jnani

via positiva / via negativa

solitary / social

Fig.1 The Two-Fold Model of Spiritual Difference

The first half of the diagram shows five modalities of the spirit, which have an approximately historical sequence, and could be interpreted as in some way developmental, though I am wary of that. Wavy lines are used to indicate that there are no fixed boundaries between them. The sequence starts with shamanism-animism and moves round in a clockwise direction, deliberately allowing the unitive-transcendent – which in one reading is the ‘highest’ form – to be contiguous with shamanism-animism – the earliest historical spiritual form. (This is to honour the large regions in the Far East where the transcendent religion of Buddhism cohabits or complements shamanic or other nature tradition.)  The second half of the diagram simply lists the four variables or indices that I have chosen to map out the personal spiritual impulse, or human spiritual interiority. 

There is not space here to fully explore the historical modalities of the spirit, but I do want to justify their importance to contemporary spirituality, much of which is pursued in an entirely secular or non-spiritual context. First of all, our understanding of spirituality draws heavily on exemplars through the ages, including relatively recent sages such as Jiddu Krishnamurti, born into a late-19th century Indian religious melting-pot and subsequently immersed into the Western esotericism of Theosophy, all of which is a century remote from us now. But without additional such figures further back in history like the Buddha, Shankara, Plotinus, St Augustine, Eckhart, Ficino, Blake, Ramakrishna or Sri Aurobindo – to make a galloping historical sweep – our understanding would be greatly impoverished. Secondly, ‘new’ religious movements often draw on historical modalities of the spirit, including Starhawk’s witchcraft, the ‘new’ shamanism, the neo-occult, the neo-Advaita, the Radical Orthodoxy (which rewinds Christianity back to about the period of Kant), the Traditionalists of Frithjof Schuon et al (which take an idea from Islam that Mohammed was the ‘seal’ or last of the prophets), and Hindu revivals of the last four hundred years which looked back to earlier religiosities. (Sometimes these movements are unashamedly revivalist in that they dismiss modernity, and sometimes they are radically modern in their adaptations.) Thirdly, an essential insight of the religious life is that human beings can be understood to recapitulate the universe and history within themselves (this is a Renaissance idea), so nothing of the past is truly lost or ever irrelevant. Fourthly, and most important perhaps: the spiritual life at some level deals with eternal verities. Such a ‘perennialist’ notion may have received a stringent critique from thinkers such as Jorge Ferrer (2002), but that is not to say that such critiques have totally won the day. For example while Thich Nath Hanh clearly believes that the Buddha’s ideas need updating for the 21st century, he retains much of the original system.

A few more words on my historical scheme are needed, though the longer exposition in Secularism fills out the gaps. Some readers may find the distinction between goddess polytheism and ‘warrior polytheism’ (my neologism) either unwarranted or insufficient in comparison to the more obvious distinction between polytheism in general and monotheism, for example. Put briefly, I found I needed the term because of the enormous rupture in religious thought caused by the introduction of patriarchy and its militarism after what appears to have been a fairly widespread and lengthy period of goddess religiosity associated with horticulture (as opposed to the previous hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the subsequent agricultural lifestyle with its first surplus productions). Another important point to note is that in the Asian world east of Iran (Persia) monotheism never arose: from the perspective of those cultures monotheism is an oddity associated with the West. Instead they developed religions such as Buddhism, Taoism and Shinto which I characterise as unitive or transcendent (Rawlinson’s ‘cool’ as opposed to ‘hot’) existing in an interesting spiritual synergy with animist-shamanic traditions.

All of this is not that radical compared to schemes derived from comparative religious studies. It is the second half of my model – when used alongside the historical side – which I think is an original contribution. It consists of four polarities:

1.	esoteric vs. transcendent
2.	bhakti vs. jnani (devotional vs. non-devotional)
3.	via positiva vs. via negativa (orientation to the manifest world)
4.	solitary vs. social.

In the two books Secularism and Postsecularism I was able to demonstrate at length how these distinctions themselves as well as the entire two-fold model provide tools sharp enough to not only radically locate world religious exemplars and faiths but also to provide an entirely new perspective on the Western tradition and why it gave rise to the secular mind. Here I can do no more than introduce the system.

I will start with brief descriptions of the four polarities. The first, esoteric vs. transcendent, cuts the vast phenomenology of the spiritual life into two hugely important halves. Put simply, the ‘esoteric’ category includes animism, shamanism, occultism, esotericism, and the imaginal, and is defined by the belief in and experience of a spirit world or non-material world of disembodied entities and forces. It is inflected by its location, whether in pre-scientific, proto-scientific or scientific cultures (the latter arising approximately with Galileo and Newton, and greatly moderated with the ‘new physics’ of the 20th century). This spiritual orientation or impulse (‘hot’ in Rawlinson’s scheme because it is externally oriented) experiences the physical world as a manifestation of the spirit world, or interpenetrated by the spirit world, or informed by it in some profound way, and seeks deeper contact with that world for a variety of reasons, even if, in its modern incarnation as the ‘imaginal’, it does not insist on the ontological status of that world as separate from the human mind. The transcendent, or unitive, on the other hand is indifferent to the existence of such a world – and may or may not give credence to it – but seeks something quite different: union with the whole, a state of non-duality, or a state of transcendence. The precise formula varies from tradition to tradition, but generally involves some or all of the following terms: the infinite, the eternal, the imperishable, the stainless, the unborn, or the unmanifest; and usually states the goal in terms such as union, liberation, freedom, moksha, nirvana, or enlightenment. In turn the esotericist finds little of interest in this vocabulary.

To illustrate this polarity I like to contrast Rudolf Steiner and Jiddu Krishnamurti, both spiritual teachers arising from a Theosophical background and fully aware of exemplars of both orientations. Steiner explicitly rejects the transcendent after reading the mystics because he finds in their rejection of the world of imagination – read ‘imaginal’ – that they live in a kind of darkness (Steiner 1986, 124). (We do not know exactly which mystics Steiner was referring to, but I would assume from the general habit of ‘reading the mystics’ in the late 19th century that they would include St John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Plotinus, and perhaps Eckhart, all of whom I label as unitive-transcendent in orientation.) Krishnamurti poses quite the opposite view: that ‘Imagination in any form destroys truth’ (Krishnamurti 1970, 114) and rejected all of his training with disembodied occult Masters and other staples of Theosophy for a highly pared-down spiritual philosophy of choiceless awareness. Other great teachers of the unitive-transcendent are clear that the seeking of occult powers or ‘siddhis’ is a distraction at best, or a slide into darkness at worst.

While we find exemplars of either persuasion clear about their opposition to the other path, we also find many exemplars or traditions where the two are intermingled. To give just one example, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali contain in the first half a supreme example of the unitive/transcendent, while in the second half all the known siddhis and the method of their attainment are detailed.

For the second of my key distinctions in the spiritual life I have adapted the Sanskrit terms bhakti and jnani, to mean respectively a devotional and non-devotional impulse. (Note that I have been corrected a number of times by those with a better grasp of Indian languages than myself that it should be bhakti and jnana, or bhakta and jnani, depending on noun or adjective usage, but I have chosen to continue with my incorrect adaptation as it is simpler for the Western reader.) The ‘devotional’ is easy enough to grasp even if it is foreign to modern sensibilities, implying as it does such things as emotionalism or servility. For example the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1990, 103) considered devotional religiosity fit only for the uneducated and women, and the modern world largely shares this ignorant attitude. ‘Non-devotional’ poses an even worse problem for those inculcated with secular values: does it mean atheist? Or what? In my system jnani is a spiritual impulse involving spiritual cognition, understanding, insight, awareness or wisdom. The term may have a linguistic connection with ‘gnosis’, but I chose not to use that term because of the historical freight it carries for the West. More simply bhakti is of the heart and jnani of the head, or in Jungian archetypal terms bhakti is ‘feeling’ and jnani is ‘thinking’. (I put those terms in quote marks to point out that such terms in a psychological context mean something subtly different to when they are used in a spiritual context.)

A few examples are in order. The Buddha and his entire legacy is jnani, while Catholicism in its heart is bhakti: Dione Fortune (1976, 5) noted that Catholicism is the bhakti yoga of the West. Teresa of Avila is bhakti; Meister Eckhart is jnani. This last pairing gives me a chance to introduce how the two-fold model works in practice: Teresa is a bhakti in a monotheist bhakti tradition, and while her life had its ups and downs she is now Saint Teresa. Eckhart was a jnani in a monotheist bhakti tradition, and was denounced in his lifetime as a heretic, and has never been canonised. Eckhart’s spiritual constellation was at odds with the prevailing historical modality, making him a heretic. Other such misalignments result in stilted or subversive use of the prevailing spiritual language, or in a profound instinct to hide one’s real meaning. Eckhart’s own writings show his orientation clearly: he praises detachment over love, claiming that in love the supplicant has to go to ‘God’, while in detachment you force ‘God’ to come to you, because you have adopted his principal characteristic. A bhakti could never say such a thing, and nor could Catholicism tolerate it. On the other hand Plotinus, clearly a jnani, lived at the tail end of Mediterranean religious pluralism (before Christianity created a religious monoculture) and was not so constrained by his context. (His works may have been known to Eckhart, and their writings have much in common even if Eckhart’s may have been quite independently originated.)

The third of my crucial distinctions requires the borrowing of terms from 19th century theology: the via positiva and the via negativa. These terms mean respectively an understanding of ‘God’ in positive terms – he is good, he is great, he is beautiful and so on – or in negative terms where anything attributed to him is necessarily false and misleading.  Both the Catholic theologian Matthew Fox and I have co-opted these terms for our spiritual maps, but we differ somewhat in our borrowings. I define the via positiva as a world-curious spiritual impulse and the via negativa as a world-renouncing spiritual impulse. Putting it another way, the person on the via positiva approaches transcendence through the progressive identification with more and more of the universe, starting with self, body, family and so on, while the person on the via negativa approaches transcendence through the progressive dis-identification with self, body, mind, feeling and so on. The person on the via positiva will find ‘God in everything’; be inclined to pantheism, or perhaps nature mysticism; and be open to the arts, science and social justice. The person on the via negativa will be inclined to withdrawal, inner contemplation, and be unexcited about art, science and society. I think this is broadly in line with what Fox proposes, but I disagree with him on one issue: he assumes that the via negativa is associated with negative emotions (Fox 1992, 32). I would suggest in contrast that the via negativa implies a quietening of all emotion, and that the negative emotions, as well as the positive ones are more likely to arise in the via positiva.

As the word ‘via’ suggests this distinction may be more to do with the path than the destination. While the Buddha and Eckhart appear to be intensely via negativa in their approach to the ‘world’, they both oversaw large religious communities. Alternatively, the joyously via positiva works of Thomas Traherne – he says at one point that he is ‘insatiable’ for the world – also suggest a supreme equanimity or detachment. In other words we look perhaps for where and how both the via positiva and the via negativa express themselves in a person’s or tradition’s life and orientation. 

Lastly, while less dramatic a spiritual polarity than the others, the distinction between the solitary and social spiritual impulse is important and often underplayed. This is partly a matter of spiritual temperament, and also partly perhaps a developmental issue. Many great spiritual teachers, including say the Buddha and Plotinus, spent their formative years in solitary – and sometimes anguished – searching, even if they found like-minded individuals to share some of the journey with. The breakthrough is often an entirely solitary event, but subsequently such individuals may become the centre of a substantial spiritual community or sangha, like the one set up by Pythagoras in Croton, by Plotinus in southern Italy, and by the Buddha in northern India. The aspirant may be fiercely solitary and perhaps stay that way all their life, even after any kind of spiritual breakthrough or esoteric insight, or may be determinedly social, entering a sangha as novitiate and staying to eventually take on the mantle of the Master. More likely we find that the social/solitary impulse takes a cyclical form, even over a single day, or perhaps over different periods in a year. The keenly argued-over rules of different monastic orders demonstrate how crucial the balance is between solitary prayer or meditation on the one hand, and social communion in ritual, work, play, and eating together on the other. Too much inward solitariness has been condemned at various times in traditions as far apart as Catholicism, in the Quietist heresy of the 17th century, and the autobiography of Zen Master Hakuin in the 18th century, in his protest against the ‘unborn’ Zennists, whom he insisted pursued little discipline, ate much rice, and produced ‘steaming loads of horse flop’ (Waddell 2001, 66) – quite an indictment! Amongst English hermits of the Middle Ages some busied themselves with useful tasks for the community such as bridge-building and maintenance, while others, such as Richard Rolle, were complete recluses and spurned any kind of work in the world.

3.2 Using the Model

The four polarities of my scheme may raise the objection that they represent dualistic thinking. There is a substantial tradition in Western thought which suggests that binary opposites like good/bad, male/female, us/them and so on have negative outcomes partly because they exclude the middle and partly because of the human tendency to privilege one of the pairing over the other. Despite this I defend the idea of binary opposites because they are a key tool of analytical thought, and we are after analytical tools here. But I do think that this system needs to be used carefully, avoiding the potential drawbacks just mentioned. Rawlinson’s model is helpful here, because his polarities are variables where only the exceptional data points will live on the extreme. None of my polarities are quite variables, yet neither are they quite either/or categories: I like the term ‘index’ as something in between. Neither can I graph them, because I am not able to draw a 4-dimensional space. Yet some continuous parameter space is what the system implies, because the middle is not excluded here. The spiritual life is extraordinarily rich, representing perhaps a combinatorial explosion that has never been fully explored. Hence we find individuals and traditions that include both esoteric and transcendent elements such as Patanjali and Neoplatonism for example; or that include both bhakti and jnani such as most major religions (because they become umbrella systems forced to include both paths of the heart and head); or that include both via positiva and via negativa such as in the examples above of the Buddha, Eckhart and Traherne; and finally that include both solitary and social. 

In the first instance however the distinctions do useful work when looking at individuals or traditions that tend to live on one extreme or another. The question of privileging one or the other is more difficult to resolve because of our prevailing culture, however. The occult may hold a lower status in popular thought because it is associated with charlatanry or romanticised in Buffy-style teen dramas, while the transcendent status of the Buddha – however much romanticised in another way – is held up as a lofty ideal. The via negativa, with its associations with renunciation, is inevitably dismissed in the modern world in favour of the via positiva. As we saw earlier, devotional-style spirituality is just as out of favour amongst educated peoples, and finally, the solitary pursuit of anything has little credibility in our human-human oriented world, despite the cult of the individual. (Actually the individual is only such if he or she proves it to the modern world through celebrity.) But my scheme is predicated, like archetypal psychology, on the basis that each of the eight poles here has equal value, dignity and spiritual purpose. They are not normative categories, but a way of mapping out personal spiritual impulse, just as in humanistic modernity homosexuality is seen as an innate and equal orientation rather than a deviant acquired characteristic.

But the real value of the polarities is when they are taken together.  Not all combinations seem to work, so for example I haven’t yet found an example of a person or tradition that genuinely combines bhakti with the esoteric, whereas jnani and the esoteric are regularly found together (hence Wilber’s confusion over the issue). It is also important to note that a jnani temperament is likely to be receptive to science, which is another reason why the jnani temperament is likely to find easier cultural expression in our scientific era than the bhakti one.  Here are just a few examples of how the polarities combine in individuals in my assessment:

The Buddha: 	transcendent, jnani, via negativa, solitary as regards inwardness, social in the sangha and ethics
Walt Whitman: 	transcendent, jnani, via positiva, solitary in his personal life, social as a democratic visionary
Rudolf Steiner: 	esoteric, jnani, via positiva, solitary in his access to the spirit world, social in his application of insights so gained
St John of the Cross: 	transcendent, bhakti, via negativa, mostly solitary
Rumi: 	transcendent, bhakti, via positiva, solitary in his devotional ecstasy, social in the order he founded

The polarities can also be used to distinguish between whole traditions such Buddhism and Catholicism. I like to use the following image: Buddhism as an essentially jnani tree around which the vine of bhakti grew and Catholicism as an essentially bhakti tree around which the vine of jnani grew. In both cases, as they became religions of empire, they had to become broader than their origins in order to accommodate a population with a mixture of religious impulses. Catholicism, at first reluctantly, but eventually in a fairly complete manner, adopted Aristotle as its ‘first philosopher’, allowing for the spiritual intellectualism of Greek thought – its jnani impulse – to balance the core devotional impulse which had its origins in St Paul and St Augustine. Buddhism, less reluctantly – because of the tolerant edicts of the emperor Asoka – accrued bhakti elements through the addition of various forms of puja or ritual. Because of this much greater flexibility Buddhism in fact absorbed a number of elements that would have been anathema to the Buddha (at least as we understand him from the Pali Canon), including a strong esoteric strand from various sources, including in Tibetan Buddhism the esotericisms of the Bon tradition.

Above all, what the two-fold model has allowed me to do is to show that the West has undergone a radical shift in the Reformation-Enlightenment period from a dominant religion that was bhakti via negativa to a sensibility that became jnani via positiva. We are still living with the ramifications of this radical shift, though there is no space here to dwell on the issue.

3.3 Expanding the Model

It is worth adding that I regard the two-fold model as a ‘baggy’ schemata, which can and should be adapted or expanded to the scholarly task in hand. For example, I have contemplated the role of the body in this, and the idea that the spiritual temperament seems to include a spiritual ‘centre of gravity’ in head, heart or hara (abdomen), which correspond to some degree with the Hindu tripartite distinction of jnani, bhakti and karma yogas, where the latter is the path of good works. For Gurdjieff, with his system of the ‘three-brained being’ – i.e. with three centres of gravity in head, heart, and body – the three paths became that of the monk (the devotional), that of the yogi (the jnani path) and that of the fakir, the one whose spiritual practice is physical (Ouspensky 1986, 97-104). The West doesn’t really have body-oriented spiritual practices, but from Iran eastward there are many deeply spiritual physical practices, some of which segue into the martial arts or dance. In so far as the two-fold model is useful in a diagnostic capacity, it may well be useful to add this tripartite distinction of spiritual centre of gravity, particularly as it allows into the discussion the question of the spiritual nature of the human body.

4. Conclusions

There has been an interesting progression within the academy from theology to religious studies and now from religious studies to the study of spirituality. Though the boundaries between these designations are fluid, the kind of taxonomies or maps required for each is different. I put the two-fold model of spiritual difference forward as an evolutionary step in the mapping of these disciplines. While it may not suit all the kinds of scholarship one would hope to see within studies in spirituality, I would hope that both my model and the critiques I have made of other maps suggest a method at least for creating such maps. Rather than ask ‘is the map true?’ I suggest we ask ‘what work does the map do?’ As I have pointed out, a map can be either developmental or locatory, or a mixture of both; and we must certainly ask of it: does it privilege one modality of the spirit over another? If so, the work it does will counter the pluralistic tenor of our age.

5. References

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