Paradox & Spiritual Leadership (PART THREE)

"The image of God has a shadow."

Dear reader,

Over the next few weeks I will be sharing the remaining parts to a work I authored for Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by Cadell Lastand O.G. Rose, recently published by Philosophy Portal Books. You can find a link to the paper copy of the texthere.Many excellent writers contributed to this work including Last, Rose,Alex Ebert, Layman Pascal,Samuel Barnes, Andrew Sweeny, Daniel Fraga, Carl Hayden Smithand several others.

You can read Part 1 here. And Part 2 here.

III - Unfolding Paradox

The image of God has a shadow.¹

C.G. Jung

Spirituality is private (inward forming as an affective process), while religion is public (outward forming as community order). They co-relate with a trans-membranic ecology:² a plurality of life-death processes which constitute a multi-dimensional relational field. In these words I interchange ecology with lifeworld.

Spirituality is realised in the beating heart of self, that most private place which knows no other language but that of its singular affirmation: the beat which only it can beat. If it is fundamentally private then it cannot be known by others second-hand: they must know it for themselves, directly, as an interior, 1st person reality distinct, or barred, to 2nd or 3rd person knowing.³

Thus, spiritual leadership, as invoking a 2nd person relation, is nevertheless a transmission born of interior process, and can therefore only indirectly inform the conditions of another's interior process. And it does so by virtue of influence onto the channel or field of shared participation (the 2nd person relation).⁴ This 2nd person relation is also conditioned by 3rd person dynamics of coordination and formation,⁵ which effectively emanates a hermeneutical (interpretive) map as incumbent canon,⁶ enforced by gatekeepers consciously and less consciously.⁷ To deepen this point, the conditioning overton is also constituted by our prisms of perception as such, a full accounting for which ought in my view incorporate subtle, broad, and deep stories of—for example—biology and anthropology, metaphysics and archetype, psychology and psychoanalysis, as well as mythology and theology.⁸ That is, what we can ‘perceive together’ as a kind of mutual participation—the 2nd person field—is also influenced by factors of 3rd person social conditioning, incentive, power, symbol, and perhaps more fundamental affective constituents of the 2nd person field itself.⁹

The core virtue of a cultivated spiritual leadership is to influence the conditions and affordances of another’s field of perception, without controlling their justification system or dominating the void (gap, or lack, as channel) through which their voice as expression becomes in the relational field.¹⁰ One-as-leader can participate in and thereby influence the frequency of another’s vibration—whether, for example, by playing a music that dynamically addresses the 3rd person conditioning,¹¹ or breathing through a new pulse of presence in the 2nd person field. But one cannot captain another’s vessel or broach beyond the looking glass of another’s soul to know by immanent touch the total context for their discernment on the Way (the immanence of participation in their life-death processes). Such is the inherent irreducibility of nature as ecology as lifeworld and the unicity of our being involved.

There are many ways to characterise the modes of influence-unto-channel associated with spiritual leadership. For instance: as sacred mirror; pattern interrupter; co-participant dancer in the great weave of masculine - feminine polarity; or more philosophically put: as participant influence in the catalytic turn, or leap, of transcendence made immanent, by virtue of modulation of channel / field / ecology as lifeworld, which reveals a before and beyond of religious stasis—the conjuring of a kind of clearing, in which breath not absolutely conditioned by the social order may come to voice. In other words, the reanimation of mystery—that which is always transcendent (beyond the trance)—by virtue of encounter and mode of orientation with a more vital participation in the here and now.¹²

“Spirit is the life that cuts itself into life.”¹³

Nietzsche

The deep paradoxes of spiritual leadership reside in the relation between the absolute privacy of subjective orientation, and the influencing energy subjects necessarily participate in (and with) during encounter on the way. By the same line of logic: encounter with others graduates the necessity of an outward-forming as religious common unity of process, to the degree there is conscious or less conscious return to shared interaction in commons as lifeworld.

Leadership is particularly needed in the context of religion, where the protocols for reliable rhythm as normative stasis conducive to social relations and treatment of the perceived commons in a given movement, or epoch, is hard won¹⁴ and a matter of care-full, courageous enculturation.¹⁵ Religious leadership can share story and teach ritual and organise protocol and erect symbolic hierarchy as memory of ostensibly adaptive relation between self, other, and lifeworld. And critically, its doings are—in principle, eventually—available to mutual perception and contested consensus as objects or iconographies.

But to re-emphasise: spiritual leadership is distinct from religious leadership. Yes, they are inseparably linked in the whole of praxis as relation between the many and the one. But spiritual leadership does not take others as objects to cohere in a particular model of formation.¹⁶ It rather addresses subjects in a liminal channel, with a mode of address that encourages and encares discernment on the Way. Discernment on the Way is broadly comprised by the dynamics of attraction and repulsion in the context of self-orientation,¹⁷ each of which are vital for the coherent being of ecology, but not necessarily conducive, when authentically realised, to the present specifics of religious formation as orthodoxy of canon or justification. Spiritual leadership is in one sense a responsiveness to the relational context which makes possible a clearing for the (re)weaving of religious structure, but as the mode of spirit, it lacks any apriori absolute obligation to the dictatorial formations of a particular religion.

Of course, there is a tension as paradox here in the notion of a living spirit which consists in a relational process that bears forth from something at all which has been overcome (or transcended)—as child does with parent. Thus in part the vessel of spiritual process, even undergoing the peak of mystical encounter as awe, is always already conformed in considerable part by the formations of its begetting world context of religious interpretation.¹⁸ In other words, there is ‘a something’ to be overcome which remains a relevant condition that we cannot bypass flippantly, even as we come to know—by touch if not yet map—a terrain which is other than, or greater than, the previous perceptual matrix.¹⁹

What does it mean to become if we are always already? This is an inquiry which the spiritual leader must face, and they must do so in consideration of the necessity of religious leadership as upholder of orthodoxy as well as reformation, without bypassing the life-death reality of the change process that is being in the here and now: immanence, interaction, influence by virtue of the time toned process which transmutes form, as caterpillar to butterfly, absent conscious apprehension of such matured notions as spirituality and religion. From this angle, both choice and fate are aspects of a loving transformative process which is before and beyond each. And it is this process which makes possible the coherence of spiritual and religious orientation at all. It is this process which realises the possibility for life-death change itself to progressively animate a coherence between knower and known.

“And we gazed at one another and looked out at the green meadow, over which the cool evening was spreading, and wept together. But then Life was dearer to me than all my Wisdom had ever been.”²⁰

Nietzsche

END PART THREE

---

You can read part four here.

Discernment on the Way,

1. (Jung 2009, 230)

2. Another speculative way to name this notion of ecology is with some combination of terms like ‘immanent’ and ‘liminal’. Where I say ‘membranics’ I may just as well say ‘membrane’, but ‘membranics’ as a term I believe to be coined by Alexander Bard and voiced on many podcasts, seems more fitting to reference the plurality of membranes participating in change processes.

3.  ‘Every soul is a world of its own;’ (Nietzsche 2003, 234)

4. ‘I am a railing beside the stream: he who can grasp me, let him grasp me! I am not, however, your crutch.’ (Nietzsche 2003, 67)

5. One instance of which is ritual, though also included here are notions like infrastructure and social status relations.

6. Elsewhere in these aphorisms I refer to ‘justification systems’ as articulated by Gregg Henriques as exemplary of (one of) the factors which condition the domain of influence I am looking to reference here. (Henriques 2022)

7. I am also happy to say ‘unconsciously.’

8. Disentangling the particular conditionings such factors bear on the domains of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person is not fully within the scope of these words, though it ought not be entirely omitted from them either. I mention these broad domains of study mostly to present relevant angles of approach in consideration of the complexities that constitute our prisms of our perceptions as such. Domains of analysis like sociology and political-economy are relevant also; the list is not exhaustive. Additionally, I would recommend to readers the recent work by Cadell Last, editor of this anthology, Systems & Subjects, which explores a basis for relation to associated tensions here. (Last 2023)

9. This domain will often find reference in language of ecology and lifeworld, characterised by life-death process.

10. “My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth into the light!” (Nietzsche 2003, 233). “who sees the abyss, but sees it with pride.” (Nietzsche 2003, 298)

11. This work could be more complete with a comparative integration of the Lacanian triadic structure of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary orders, and archetypes as influenced by Jung and in some tension with Freud. I can only be more obscure than I would like here and recognise this work in process. 

12. Another way to look at this is through the prism of transformative interaction, real relationship, and dialogue, which I see as core praxis for real embodied philosophy today.

13. (Nietzsche 2003, 331). He also makes the comment ‘spirit is the life that itself strikes into life’ in (Nietzsche 2003, 127).

14.  ‘And the spirit – what is it to the body? The herald, companion, and echo of its battles and victories.’ (Nietzsche 2003, 101).

15.  I speak in aspirational terms here, noting of course that religious ordering has often met chaos with all manner of brutality.

16. ‘Become what you are!’ (Nietzsche 2003, 252)

17.  In unpublished writings and publicly in podcasts I have spoken about modes of orientation in terms of two categories of orientation, confrontation and surrender, each of two types, connoted with +/- symbols that convey a positive or negative orientation of the primary mode. It is speculative language developed in effort to communicate about the manner by which distinct processual occasions relate, in a broader context of attraction and repulsion, in processes that a philosopher like Whitehead might call ‘concrescences.’ I appreciate that such light speak on a notion as this may not be helpful in the context of this paper. But so it is: hyperlinks to the future!

18.  This relates to an aspect of the third compressed paradox in aphorism II.

19. By perceptual matrix I mean a perceptual-identity set: the contents of perception and the perceptual prism, as a kind of identity which illuminates that set. For readers beginning and intermediate in their journey of relating to awe and mysticism in the context of religion and spirituality, I recommend the writings of William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (James 1961).

20.  (Nietzsche 2003, 243)

REFERENCES FROM THIS PART:

Henriques, Gregg. 2022. A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. N.p.: Springer International Publishing.

James, William. 1961. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Edited by William James. N.p.: Collier Books.

Jung, Carl G. 2009. The Red Book: Liber Novus. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. Translated by John Peck, Sonu Shamdasani, and Mark Kyburz. N.p.: WW Norton.

Last, Cadell. 2023. Systems & Subjects: Thinking The Foundations of Science and Philosophy. N.p.: Philosophy Portal Books.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2003. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. London: Penguin Books.

Whitehead, Alfred N. 1978. Process and reality : an essay in cosmology. Edited by David R. Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. N.p.: Free Press.