Postsecularism: Celebrating Spiritual Difference

Mike King

What does ‘Postsecular’ mean, what does ‘spiritual difference’ mean, and why should we celebrate it? These are questions that I normally explore in a strictly academic setting. Here I have a chance to write from a more intuitive space, while still exploring the importance of the scholarly approach. The great revolutions of thought in the 17th and 18th century European Enlightenment created a scientific worldview within which the spiritual has become marginalised, yet at the same time an enormous leap forward was made in the way we share ideas together. We now overemphasise scientific ‘proof’ – to the detriment of the aesthetic, emotional and spiritual – but nevertheless we have developed dramatically new ways of coming to agreement about things. Some are cynical about this and about democracy in general, but I am not, neither am I cynical about the role of the University in creating communities of understanding. In the seventeenth century, just prior to the emergence of modern science, to be a ‘freethinker’ could mean exile, prison, torture or death, yet paradoxically ‘professors’ (those who ranted about religion at every street corner) could make the most bizarre and unsupported claims. The University now offers a space where all received wisdom can be questioned, yet at the same time discounting any claims for which no evidence can be put forward or consensus found.

Let me give some examples to illustrate the idea of how we share ideas today, including those of spiritual difference. I sometimes claim – in the pub or any other non-academic context – that I am the world’s greatest lover, that I was the Buddha’s wife’s serving maid, and that I am enlightened. I also claim – this time in the academic context – that we can usefully identify major modalities of the spirit through a quasi-historical scheme that includes four major divisions: shamanic, polytheistic, monotheistic and transcendent. The former set of claims are insupportable, while the latter can be set out as propositions dependent on recent scholarship in religious studies, anthropology and archaeology. 

My first claim – that I am the world’s greatest lover – is nothing to do with sex, but to do with one of the key spiritual differences as I see it: between what I call the via positiva and the via negativa. The Buddha and many (but by no means all) early Christian mystics understood the spiritual journey as a disengagement with the world: in theistic language, to know ‘God’ was only possible by denying ‘His’ creation. This can be referred to as the via negativa, while its opposite, the via positiva, refers to the spiritual path which is fully engaged with and celebrates the manifest world(s). Shamanism is a via positiva for example, and so are the teachings of that much neglected spiritual Master, Walt Whitman. I first came across these ideas as a disciple of the controversial guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who also introduced me to the concept of the three ‘M’s: Music, Mathematics and Meditation. For Rajneesh, music stood for all the arts, mathematics for all the sciences, and meditation for the whole of spirituality. Since I encountered him 25 years ago, I have pursued all three equally, gaining four degrees from British Universities spanning these disciplines, and exhibiting my digital artworks around the world. But why my claim of being the world’s greatest lover? Because I rarely find – apart from Whitman – anyone who is so committed to the via positiva in the spiritual life as I am. However, such a claim is totally unsupportable: I would have to meet and evaluate the lives of all 6.2 billion people on the planet. What is supportable in an academic context is the argument for the via positiva / via negativa distinction in the first place. It has a historical place in theology, a debate within religious studies, is informed by anthropology, and could be open to research using the survey methods of the social sciences.

My second claim, that I was the Buddha’s wife’s serving maid, is to do with reincarnation. In the West this idea was commonplace up to about the 4th century, when Christian dogma forced it underground: Plato and all the mystery schools believed in it however. A claim to remember past lives is again unsupportable, or nearly so. In fact there has been good scholarly research into the topic, and there are case studies of individuals having access to knowledge later proved correct, but which they could not possibly have known by any other means. However, personal memories of any kind are always private; a problem that relates to the technical issue in philosophy of solipsism, the theory that self is all that can be known to exist. This issue can take one through the writings of Bishop Berkeley, Leibnitz’s Monadology, Kant’s denial of the ‘thing in itself,’ and hence into large swathes of Western philosophy. For me however, the private felt reality of this memory is of an intense grief: even as I write, the dreadful wrong that Siddhartha Gautama inflicted on his beautiful wife Yashodara remains a livid wound in my psyche. (It has taken me 2,500 years to properly forgive him for it.)

The last claim, that I am enlightened, is one I tend to slip into a conversation now and again. One is supposed to make a big song and dance about it, but then I have a very English side to me which avoids overstatement. But is such a claim supportable? Paul Heelas, in his excellent book The New Age (Blackwell, 1996), uses such claims as an example of how the academic discipline of religious studies has negotiated its way through the university context. He suggests that religious studies cannot arbitrate between claims of enlightenment, but can investigate the lives of the individuals, their religious contexts, and their reception. From my own perspective, particularly taking into account questions of solipsism, I am convinced that claims of enlightenment are unsupportable, even through neuroscience. So when Heelas suggests that evidence of financial abuse would be evidence against the claim of enlightenment, I can’t agree. Even so, the University context demands an undogmatic stance, and hence I am willing to be persuaded otherwise.

What my three claims do add up to however – and only supportable from my own perspective I am afraid – is an intense motivation and background to explore different spiritual paths. Rajneesh encouraged this, but the real Master of spiritual difference was the great 19th century Hindu sage, Ramakrishna. I share with him – again I need to stress that this is an unsupportable claim on my side – the quality of mind called ‘enlightenment;’ but I bring also a long memory of past lives and an intense passion for the via positiva. Ramakrishna had a gift, that I recognise in myself, of curiosity about all the spiritual paths, and he most memorably explored a key spiritual polarity: between the devotional and non-devotional, known in the Hindu context as bhakti and jnani respectively. (See an excellent new book on this by Paul Hourihan, Ramakrishna and Christ: the Supermystics, Vedantic Shores Press, 2002.) The bhakti or devotional spiritual path is all about love, not the everyday human love, but what the Greeks called ‘agape,’ a divine love. Devotional mystics are found in Christian, Muslim, and Hindu contexts, and Ramakrishna represents not just one of the best developed, but also one of the best documented. Within this material we find an extraordinary interest in spiritual paths that are not in the first instance his own, for example the non-devotional or jnani path. This is the path of wisdom, of the head rather than heart: the Buddha, Plotinus and Meister Eckhart being great exemplars.

I work with two more key distinctions in the spiritual life: between the esoteric and the transcendent, and between the social and the solitary, seeing all of these distinctions as a matter of personal impulse. The three monotheisms of the West, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, while having developed within them a set of profound and beautiful spiritualities, have tended to resist the idea of spiritual pluralism. It is much harder to build a spiritual community – or sangha as it is known in the Buddhist tradition – without a common spiritual path and goal, but the West has unfortunately sometimes gone too far in prioritising community over the difference of personal spiritual impulse. Hence monotheistic religion in the West has denied spiritual difference. The secular world has of course lost interest, while I believe that the New Age is reluctant to draw distinctions within the spiritual life, perhaps because of the anxiety that it can be divisive.

This brings me at last to the idea of the Postsecular. I have been collecting evidence across seven fields of human endeavour that there is a renewed openness to spirituality. These fields include: science (mainly the ‘new’ physics), consciousness studies, transpersonal psychology, postmodernism (tucked away in its corners!), the arts, ecology and the New Age. Individually each field may not have much impact on the mainstream, but taken collectively the picture is nothing less than a revolution of thought. The term Postsecular also implies an interest in examining the nature and origins of the secular mind. For me the Postsecular avoids the extremes of dogmatic religion, the aridity of the secular mind, and also the potential drawback of the New Age: a lack of critical debate. With all of this in mind I have set up a Centre for Postsecular Studies at my institution (London Metropolitan University), which carries out research and supports Doctoral students in the area of spirituality and cultural production. More than that, I am interested in the idea of a scholarly community as ‘sangha’ – i.e. as a spiritual community. We now have the potential for something new: a community which both pursues scholarly distinctions and celebrates spiritual difference.

Dr Mike King is Reader in Computer Art and Animation at London Metropolitan University. He is a Director of the Centre for Postsecular Studies, a Director of the Scientific and Medical Network, and on the Steering Group of the University for Spirit Forum. 

www.jnani.org/postsecular