Paradox and Spiritual Leadership (PART FOUR)
"Nobody can give guidance, light, to another. Only you yourself. The light cannot be given to you. You have to stand tremendously alone."
Dear reader,
This is the penultimate part to a work I authored for Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by Cadell Last and O.G. Rose, recently published by Philosophy Portal Books. You can find a link to the paper copy of the text here. Many excellent writers contributed to this work including Last, Rose, Alex Ebert, Layman Pascal, Samuel Barnes, Andrew Sweeny, Daniel Fraga, Carl Hayden Smith and several others.
Here you can read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. The final section will follow next week. If the section below is particularly hard to follow, then I do recommend beginning with Part 1, if you haven’t already.
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IV - More On Paradox
Core to the paradoxes in relation here is something like the vital tension of two as a relating one. The beating heart as a relational, telic pulse: a structure that affords a dynamism, and a dynamism that affords the making of structure. As a triad, I see the beating heart in terms of ecology (lifeworld), the dynamism in terms of spirit, and the structure or stasis in terms of religion.1
From this perspective, spiritual leadership influences the vibrational field in the mode of dynamism, whereas religious leadership influences the field in the mode of stasis. It is quite straightforward to see how and why these modes both inter-afford as well as, at times, threaten some disruption or strangulation on the other. Too much dynamism will destabilise an overly static structure, like a bridge that is built without ‘give’ to sway to and fro. Too much stasis risks a comparatively chaotic revolution as life teems from the shadow to breathe again. It is of course ironic—in that tragic all too human way—that spiritual dynamism as re-sourced relation with mystery, or whole-making beyond the previous coherence limitations of a given perceptual prism, is both anathema to religious order and at the same time its redeemer.
What I mean by dynamism2 is a kind of whole-making energy, an intimation of a relation with and desire for becoming ‘greater than’ in the sense of ‘other than’, infused by valuation—a need to choose in accord with the perception that there is potential of profound, inexorable relation to the valuation-as-affirmation of creative life-death process. In a sense we are speaking here about a certain pull of freedom to become more fully what one could-be-and-is. That we are not just oarsmen of fate; that we participate in orienting our way; that the ordering structure and function of religion as ark, if it decay to the point of rigid tyranny as denier of the transcendent potential of life, ought be re-infused, re-membered as a whole more capable of stewarding souls in relation with ecology.
And so in this sense spirit redeems, for it is that first touch of novelty in relation with living reality; it is that orientation toward thriving and beyond violation. But it is also a kind of irrepressibility, a dynamism that overcomes, and in its tendency to wildfire may paradoxically come to miss-perceive the nature of things as they are, in their own process. It can draw the trauma and chaos and tyranny and self-perpetuating pain of the world through an always-too-narrow frame as immanent context (even if it is, on occasion, a wider, more vital one). Spirit can inflate the conduiting vessel too far beyond its station in life-death relating context, which has a rhythm—many interwoven rhythms—each with a dignity and inherent integrity to their always-already context for discernment on the Way. It is the task of spiritual leadership, a cultivated relation with spirit and its capacity for vision and valuation, to meet the ecology of silence and voice well, and remember its primary mode as metabolization of that which enters its own self-context, which means it must, inexorably, become as a lover of religion too.
Stasis, on the other hand, is comparatively easier to name for its function as regards religion. It is more visible, for one, and its influence less alien. Religion as the latin ‘religare’ and ‘religio’, in the sense of ‘to re-bind’ with some colour of ‘reverence for’ and ‘observance of’ rule set or rites, seems in its highest to make possible modes of education, enculturation and stewardship of the parts which comprise its order. And a particular order may for a time be of vital capacity in its relating with the waves of ecology and the potential of spirit, as well as, of course, other religions.
Religious leadership may build houses in honour of the cultivation of spi(ritual)ity, and rituals for reconnecting therein to the meaning of being as it broaches the ‘greater than’ or ‘beyond’: intimations of a whole-making which situates humanity in a deep context of belonging in the cosmos—even in service to ‘the meaning of the earth’, to quote a Zarathustrian line.3 But in so building—in ‘ritualising’ spirit, turning it into custom—whether as affordance of ecstasis, awe, or even in ostensibly more vanilla forms of interpersonal sexual or non-sexual social organisation, it creates repeatable conditions for selves to go beyond, or transcend the containers of those very practises themselves, which can destabilise aspects of its own stasis and hierarchy. An alternative is for religion to neuter the ‘ritual’ in order to maintain its ordering structure, and rigidify and radicalise the identity structure of its members: disgracing the nature of spirit as that capacity and necessity for humankind to relate with the beyond, as well as to breathe in the here and now. A tyrannising compensation in this manner sows a barrenness into the soil of its own renewal, as spirit will eventually seek a break with lineage in order to re-make a dynamic of meaningful relation in the lifeworld. It moves toward sharing space, rather than mere holding (though holding is necessary in its time.)
In light of this, it is no clever remark that stasis which affords a sufficient expression of dynamism, and dynamism which affords a sufficient vitalisation of stasis, is characteristic of the process which might be aspired to in terms of loving transformation, or at a different level of conception, conscious sustainable evolution.4 In other words, I believe there is a reciprocal relation between spirituality and religion that is our being in the lifeworld. Each are important, each can be more or less loving in treatment of the lifeworld, and as with the case in any relationship, ill or well treatment of self and the other is within the remit of each—while the relationship itself, the ecology as such, changes regardless.
I like to sit like grass and red poppies on shattered churches.
Nietzsche5
You shall love your children’s land: let this love be your new nobility.
Nietzsche6
IV. 2
Spiritual leadership is the orientation of influence from the mode of dynamism through a subjective vessel—addressing the field, experiencing: “is the fruit of this table well metabolisable?” And “can the waste be processed in a manner conducive to the reaffirmation of form?” It is an influential kind of consumption, excretion, libido, love, creative activity; even in its time a kind of sacred violence. It is ripeness for the moment, it is almost too full. We could even say it dances with and between lack and excess,7 such that even falls are incorporated into flow as a meaningful, pregnant silence: the embodiment of transformation as influencing orientation of participation.
In Sterquiliniis Invenitur
Translation: ‘In filth it will be found’ ‘It is found in manure’Alchemical dictum
The substance that harbours the divine secret is everywhere, including the human body. It can be had for the asking and can be found anywhere, even in the most loathsome filth.
C.G. Jung8
There is wisdom in the fact that much in the world smells ill: disgust itself creates wings and water-divining powers!
Nietzsche9
Spiritual leadership appreciates beauty and doesn’t shirk tasting the ugly. It metabolises well and thereby knows filth. It looks into the shadow of the God-image, and this re-vitalised relation with the lifeworld may thus inform subsequent religious orientation to formation as re-formation (to the degree it is not suppressed or avoided). In this way, it can re-source the seeds of a creative-ordering intelligence no matter the apparent context of disorder. From chaos to creativity, from disorder to order, as the instagram memes go.
From another angle: spiritual leadership entails no followers,10 but informs the capacity for religious leadership to gain a following conducive to the making, or remembering, or re-binding of context that revitalises, or re-attunes, to the ebb and flow of vital life-death patterning of lifeworld, as well as to the further becoming of spirituality and spiritual leadership (because there is a new formation to move beyond, and which itself will decay.)
To cut into things and offer a too limited analogy: we build tables and eat at them, but the food does not come from the table. In this analogy, it comes from the world garden. Religion as table (a social ordering structure for the regulation of energy exchange process) is the relation between garden and gardener, lifeworld and spirit. And while the gardener does influence the garden, the garden itself breathes its own: it doesn’t follow the gardener. Indeed, the gardener’s vision must be shaped as much by what can actually grow in a particular context as it is by the abstracted wants a meal at the table, or vision thereof, might inspire.
Nobody can give guidance, light, to another. Only you yourself. The light cannot be given to you. You have to stand tremendously alone. And that is what is frightening for the old and the young. Because if you belong to anything, ‘follow’ anybody, you are already entering into corruption. If you understand that very deeply, with tears in your eyes… you understand? There is no guru, no teacher, no disciple.
Krishnamurti11
END PART FOUR
You can read part five here.
Discernment on the Way,
(Nietzsche 2003, 243)
I would like to note the thinking of Alex Ebert as an important voice in contemplation about the relations between the static and the dynamic. I believe the work in this paper would be aided by in dialogue with Ebert’s thinking on FreQ theory and relations between stasis and dynamism (Ebert 2022).
“May your spirit and your virtue serve the meaning of the earth, my brothers: and may the value of all things be fixed anew by you.” Here Nietzsche addresses an orientation for the mode of spiritual leadership which ought graduate, in the view I put forward in this work, to a religious leadership, where the ‘meaning of the earth’ is the always already of life-death ecologic process (Nietzsche 2003, 102).
Conscious sustainable evolution is a phrase (in fact itself a triad) also expressed with unique depth and clarity in the work of Landry, though the terms of course do seem to have a longer lineage of use.
(Nietzsche 2003, 245)
(Nietzsche 2003, 221)
In writing these words I am reminded of the foresight and insight shared by Cadell Last, and additionally by Alex Ebert and O.G. Rose, in the Philosophy of Lack dialogic series, the third of which is titled ‘Excess’.
(Jung 2014)
(Nietzsche 2003, 222)
This statement seems almost absurd as formulated here. One might immediately object: “No! Spiritual leadership precisely entails followers!” Indeed, this is one of the core paradoxes motivating these words. Yes, spiritual leadership catalyses a kind of ‘first’ or apparent ‘origin’ as a kind of way which can be followed. But I am not dispelling the notion of ‘following’, I am rather incorporating its essence in the context of religious leadership. Spiritual leadership, as I mean it in this work, must catalyse authorship in a deeper sense: it supports the cultivation of another’s self-participating orientation as itself a form of leadership constitutive of discernment on the Way. Following as mere mimicry alone will never of itself eventuate the cultivation of true authorship of soul.
(Public Question & Answer 1 23 July 1980)
REFERENCES FROM THIS PART:
Ebert, Alex. 2022. “The Sublation of Mathematics.” In Enter The Alien: Thinking As 21st Century Hegel, edited by Cadell Last and Daniel Garner, 211-249. N.p.: Philosophy Portal Books.
Jung, C. G. 2014. Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 12: Psychology and Alchemy. Edited by R. F. Hull and Gerhard Adler. Translated by R. F. Hull and Gerhard Adler. N.p.: Princeton University Press.
Landry, Forrest. 2009. An Immanent Metaphysics. N.p.: Forrest Landry.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2003. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. London: Penguin Books.
Public Question & Answer 1. 23 July 1980. Featuring Jiddu Krishnamurti. Saanen, Switzerland: n.p.