I have used the works of Professor William A. Tiller and Rupert Sheldrake, as discussed in the essays Spiritual Realism Parts I and II, to form the foundational insights grounding a formulation of the Core Philosophy of Spiritual Realism. However, I have also integrated insights from many different aspects of my eclectic philosophical and spiritual background.
A Note on Sources
To produce this presentation of the Core Philosophy of Spiritual Realism, I have drawn on a dozen distinct different sources. In reading what I have written, it may be helpful to know what they are. They include:
- The Psychoenergetic/Intention Science of Professor William A. Tiller.
- The Morphic Theory of Rupert Sheldrake.
- The Process Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.
- The teleological theory of evolution presented by Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man.
- The spiritual teachings of Ramona Maharshi.
- The Fourth Way of G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky.
- The teachings of Builders of the Adytum, a branch of Rosicrucianism.
- A Vision by William Butler Yeats.
- The Journey of Souls by Michael Newton.
- Journeys Out of the Body by Robert A. Monroe.
- The Psychosynthesis psychology of Roberto Assagioli.
- The approach to Vision Meditation of Robert Nadeau and my own deepest vision meditations.
So, let’s get started.
Science and Phenomenology
Rene Descartes raised his mind up from the River of Minds that constitutes human thought and formulated the distinction between thinking substance (the mind) and extended substance (matter), with God as guarantor of their connections, such that the mind can come to truthful knowledge of matter.
As the River of Minds flowed on, two great branches of thought (and action) emerged from Descartes distinction. Science and the scientific method developed as the way to learn about and come to explain and understand the world of matter and Phenomenology emerged with the project of learning about and coming to understand the world of the mind and the phenomena of our experience.
Both branches produced very interesting and, on occasion, profound insights, but each branch has suffered from a flaw.
For Science, the flaw is clearest in relation to “the Big Problem.” The scientific method uses consciousness but cannot explain consciousness, because we cannot observe consciousness except for our own and we cannot get a valid explanation of consciousness by explaining how the brain functions.
As the branch of Science flowed on, it came to manifest a deeply held prejudice against philosophy, particularly metaphysics and ethics. However, Science’s unwillingness to address philosophy directly has led to its adoption of un-explored, overly simplistic, and inadequate philosophical/metaphysical assumptions (i.e., the materialist assumption that the Universe is [like] a machine or a computer that somehow makes itself).2
For Phenomenology, the flaw manifests most directly in relation to the failure of most of the Phenomenologists to reach into the deeper aspects of human experience. With a few exceptions, they have stayed pretty much focused on exploring the interaction between their language and their physical senses, largely leaving out of their formulations their spiritual senses and the hard work needed to develop an integrated self that can direct experience, thought, and action.
The Eastern spiritual disciplines have gone much further than Phenomenology in exploring our experience. Mindfulness meditation has shown us that we need to work to develop a coherent consciousness that does not jump around from association to association but rather focuses on what we want it to. Vision meditation, out-of-the-body experiences, and near-death experiences have shown us that our consciousness exists beyond our bodies and that, out there (or perhaps we should say, in there) beyond material existence, there is a Spiritual Realm where our consciousness comes from and returns to.
Need for a New Synthesis
I believe that the time has come for Science and Phenomenology to return to the River of Minds and give birth to a new philosophical synthesis that flows off in a new direction, embracing consciousness as a characteristic of all aspects of the Universe, both inside of us and outside of us, and basing its principles on the full range of human experience. Such a philosophy should be able to show us how to understand the problems we face right now and help guide our actions so that we grow up as a species and build a way of life that produces health and wellbeing for humanity and for the Earth.
As discussed in Spiritual Realism Part I, the Psychoenergetic/Intention Science of Professor William A. Tiller provides us with a place to begin by offering an explicit formulation of the existence of a Spiritual Realm, moving at speeds faster-than-the-speed-of-light, a material realm, operating at speeds slower-than and the speed of light, with a mental interface between the two realms.
The trans-physical Spiritual Realm has many different vibrational bands differentiated by vibrating at different rates with different resonances making it the realm of Plato’s Forms and Carl Jung’s Archetypes as well as the realm of the Angels, the Archangels, and the God of the great Western Religions.3
So, starting off from this understanding, how should we formulate what I have come to call a Philosophy of Spiritual Realism that is emerging to establish a new point of departure, a new paradigm?
Changing the Paradigm
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argues that normal Science moves in a relatively smooth fashion, integrating new knowledge into preexisting theories, which operate within particular world views.
However, periodically, there are scientific revolutions when the whole world view or, as he puts it, ‘the paradigm’ changes. Moving from a geocentric to a heliocentric solar system and from Newtonian to relativistic physics are two such examples of paradigm shifts.
To take a run at formulating the new paradigm at the heart of this emerging Philosophy of Spiritual Realism, I am going to begin by presenting my understanding of Philosophy.
Engaging Philosophy
Philosophy deals with basic assumptions about ourselves and the world we live in: how we choose them; how we organize them; and how we use them to guide ourselves and interact with others. This means that philosophy really is the right discipline for choosing, evaluating, and modifying paradigms.
Traditionally, philosophy has three main branches:
- Ontology, which focuses on the nature of being and the types of existence.
- Epistemology, which delves into what constitutes knowledge and how to know and test knowledge.
- Axiology, which considers values, morality, and how to act.
Both the philosophy of Science and the philosophy of Phenomenology are epistemologically deterministic. That is, they both prioritize Epistemology over Ontology and Axiology. The Scientists analyze what they observe using their external senses and instruments in objectively replicable contexts (experiments). The Phenomenologists observe and analyze their lived interior experience.
Unfortunately, as I have indicated above, both the philosophy of Science and the philosophy of Phenomenology have inadequate Epistemologies. The Epistemology of Science can’t deal with consciousness at all and the Epistemology of Phenomenology doesn’t typically deal with the type of consciousness emerging from our spiritual experiences that we receive through our spiritual senses.
(However, we should note that the Phenomenological philosophy of Georg W. F. Hegel, while, apparently, not based on his spiritual experience, actually draws on the Hermetic tradition and does a pretty remarkable job of providing an explication of spiritual reality.)
A Philosophy of Spiritual Realism
It’s not wrong to start with experience just as the Scientists and Phenomenologists do. It makes sense because what we humans know most immediately and intimately is our experience. However, the Yogis and the Buddhists and the Taoists and the Sufis and the Christian Mystics and the Rosicrucians have all showed us ways into deeper levels of experience than either the Scientists or the Phenomenologists practice.
We can go deeper, below our sensing of the world outside us and our thinking (our inner voice talking to us). We can experience our breathing, our kinesthetic awareness, our emotions, our energy awareness, our visualizations, our visions, and even our out-of-the-body experiences (for those of us who have those). We can remember and anticipate across each of these types of experience. And we can go deeper still and connect with that which is doing the experiencing and the remembering and the anticipating and the acting.
So, let’s sketch the core principles of an Epistemology, an Ontology, and an Axiology of Spiritual Realism that is grounded in and makes sense of these deeper levels of experience.
An Epistemology of Spiritual Realism
Let’s begin our Epistemology of Spiritual Realism by categorizing the 5 different types of experience and the five different domains within which we do our experiencing and our acting:
- We experience and act in the Physical World inside us and outside of us utilizing our physical senses (kinesthetic awareness, vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch).
- We experience and act in the Emotional World utilizing our feelings (fear/courage, anger/empathy, happiness/sadness, and emotional love).
- We experience and act in the Symbolic World with our thinking mind that functions through language with words, symbols, and visualizations. We structure the symbolic world both rationally and artistically.
- We experience and act in the Spiritual World utilizing our spiritual senses (energy awareness –the Ki energy of martial artists and the Chi energy of Acupuncture; inner seeing; inner hearing; extra-sensory perception; out-of-the-body sensing, near-death experiences, etc.).
- And we do this experiencing and acting, including the particular kind of experiencing that is remembering and anticipating, through a process that is trans-sensual, i.e., that is beyond both our physical and our spiritual senses.
A central question for the Philosophy of Spiritual Realism is: who is it that does the experiencing and acting? We know that it happens but we are unable to turn our experiencing and acting back on that which does it, so how do we gain insight into the source of our experiencing and our acting?
The short answer is that it is our Souls, coming from a Divine World, who incarnate to acquire physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual vehicles, and, through them, do the experiencing and acting. The fuller answer emerges as we proceed with explicating the Core Philosophy of Spiritual Realism.
An Ontology of Spiritual Realism
So, then, what can we formulate as the basic principles of an Ontology of Spiritual Realism, of the world(s) that are what we encounter through these five modalities?
Everyone pretty much agrees that the physical world vibrates at speeds at or slower than the speed of light and, as we approach the speed of light, the density of matter approaches infinity. According to the insight of Professor Tiller, as we cross the speed-of-light boundary, we leave the world of matter (and the realm of the physical senses and physical action) behind and enter the world of spiritual substance (and the realm of the spiritual senses and spiritual action) vibrating at speeds faster than the speed of light.
The Creator: As vibrations speed up in the Spiritual World, we transcend the world of physical matter and entropy and ascend through the world of spiritual substance and syntropy. Ultimately we reach what is essentially, from our perspective, perfect order or the Creator or the Absolute or the Divine or however we care to characterize the Ultimate. There we reach a boundary analogous to the speed-of-light boundary between the Physical and the Spiritual Realms. When we cross this boundary, we move beyond the realm of spiritual substance and enter the realm of the Creator and Divine World.
From the Divine Realm, everything in the Physical Realm and the Spiritual Realm is experienced at once. The Creator is, thereby, omniscient and omnipresent, manifesting infinite resonance. The mystical traditions I am familiar with call this infinite resonance love, complete and total love.
This Ontology of Spiritual Realism tracks pretty closely with the three aspects of Taoist philosophy – the Yin realm is the Physical World; the Yang realm is the Spiritual World; and the Divine World is the all-pervasive, all-integrating, all-guiding Tao.
Before the beginning, our Creator existed as the ultimate singularity manifesting solely in the Divine Realm as pure creativity and pure potentiality.
Are there other Creators? Perhaps, but speculating about the answer to that question is beyond the scope of this version of Spiritual Realism.
Analogous to the singularity that preceded the Big Bang at the inception of our physical Universe, our Creator contained all the possibilities for all types of spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical manifestation, bound together with an overpowering resonance that brooked no vibrational diversity. Put another way, this resonance was ultimate love, but this love had no object of its affection.7
The First Creations: In response to this situation, the Creator took the first action by creating a space within itself and then forming Creations to populate this space. The Creator did this, in part, so that it would be able to reveal itself to itself by manifesting aspects of its potentiality and experiencing those aspects of itself and acting on those aspects of itself. But, also, the Creator did this because that’s what Creators do. They create.
Love, as the essence of the Creator, formed the central guiding principle for this process of Creation – love of the Creator for itself and for its works. The first Creations, which were the first manifestations of the Spiritual Realm, were like great works of art with different guiding principles, guiding aesthetics.
After these initial Creations, the Creator created subsequent Creations exploring many different guiding principles as different kinds of great works of art and appreciated them as great mirrors reflecting back to the Creator different aspects of Itself that it loved. Some of these new Creations included Sub-Creators – lesser but still great whole manifestations of the Creator’s creativity – within them.
The Manifestation of Freedom: After a while, the Creator sought to surprise Itself by creating a whole new kind of Creation – with a deeper kind of love – that had freedom built into it. To undertake this new direction, the Creator engaged the Sub-Creators – Gods and Goddesses if you will – within one of its Creations to manifest Universes out of the stuff of that Creation.
This new type of Creation was formed as a Spiritual Dimension – vibrating at speeds faster-than-the-speed-of-light but slower-than-the-infinite-speed-of-the-divine – that included manifested Universes with Material Dimensions, vibrating at speeds slower-than-the-speed-of-light, which is the point at which the time of one moment after another comes into being.
Freedom manifests when the vibrations slow down (across the speed-of-light boundary) to the point that the moment-by-moment time we experience in our Physical Universe emerges. To slow down enough to allow for moment-by-moment temporal existence, a Universe has to be quite far from the core of the Creator so that the Creator’s resonance lessens to the point that freedom becomes possible.
Thus, Spiritual Realism offers a “Panentheist” Ontology, in which the Creator is greater than the Universe and includes and interpenetrates the Universe within itself. In this sense, Spiritual Realism embraces Karl Christian Friedrich Krause’s conception of Panentheism, combining the transcendence of the Creator from Theism with the immanence of the Creator from pantheism.
The Ontology of Spiritual Realism also tracks pretty closely to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.
The Creation of Souls: The new Realm of Freedom – these Material Universes – intrigued the Creator so much that It undertook a third kind of Creation, creating Souls – Atoms of Itself, Sparks of the Creator – that It sent into the Universes, the Realms of Freedom, to learn the lessons of Freedom and, ultimately, to work as allies of the Creator to bring the Universes in question to full glorious manifestation, in part through the free creative acts of these Souls.
Each Soul, including each of us, is a manifestation of the Creator in microcosm. Our Souls do not experience themselves directly. Rather, like the Creator Itself, our Souls experience themselves indirectly by using our physical senses and our physical bodies to experience and act within the Physical Dimension and by using our spiritual senses and our spiritual bodies to experience and act within the Spiritual Dimension and then by experiencing the results of those actions.
An Axiology of Spiritual Realism
Keeping this Ontology of Spiritual Realism in mind, we can now turn to Axiology. When our Souls incarnate, acquire bodies, and take on material existence, our Souls enter the realm of moment-after-moment time. In this Physical Realm, the plenum of the faster-than-the-speed-of-light Spiritual Realm fragments into the succession of moments of time. Each moment becomes a moment of choice, a moment in which freedom can be exercised. So let’s examine how this freedom works, because this is at the heart of our Axiology of how we guide our actions.
Our Souls experience and act in these moments along the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical levels to manifest one string of present moments among of a vast range of alternative presents. Our moment-by-moment temporal existence is surrounded by a cloud of possibilities. Each moment, our Souls manifest one set of possibilities from this cloud of alternatives.
There are some analogies here with the Science of Quantum Mechanics, which describes quanta existing as a range of possibilities that only manifest as one particular reality when they are observed.
In a present moment, our Souls take in a set of explicit relationships from the four dimensions (spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical), keeping all the other relationships implicit, and then our Souls act to bring these explicit relationships it has embraced into some sort of coherence, a gestalt if you will, and then that moment passes into the relatively fixed succession of such moments that constitute our past.
This perspective closely tracks Alfred North Whitehead’s Process Philosophy with its Actual Entities/Actual Occasions. (See my essay on Alfred North Whitehead for a discussion of Actual Entities.)
Incarnation and the Rhythm of Waking and Sleeping: To gain access to the Physical Realm, our Souls have to incarnate into physical embryos that grow into bodies, which are eventually born and grow as physical people.
However, our Souls can only survive their relative separation from the Creator for relatively short periods of time. They need to return to communion with the Creator frequently, so every night our bodies go to sleep and our Souls wake up and pass through the Spiritual Domain in dreaming and wind up being reabsorbed into Divine Domain of the Creator in dreamless sleep. Then our souls pass through the same process in reverse from the Divine Domain back through the Spiritual Domain in dreaming again to go to sleep as our bodies and wake up to a next adventure of freedom in the Physical Domain.
The Great Mystics make this journey to absorption in the One, the Creator, without going to sleep.
The Education of Our Souls: In our waking lives, our Souls undertake a process of education. We begin by learning how to operate within our physical vehicles. As children, we go through the process of learning how to move our bodies, how to see and hear, how to stand up and walk, how to talk, how to interact with our families, and how to interact with other children.
Then, once we are able to operate our physical vehicles, we have to learn about the Physical World we live in and about our society and about our history. We do this by developing our thinking minds interacting with the Symbolic World that humanity has created.
As we evolve, we can come to expand our consciousness to include kinesthetic and emotional awareness and awareness of our spiritual senses. This can prepare us for the next step of recognizing that it is our Souls that are doing the experiencing and reflecting and acting through our physical and spiritual bodies, enabling us to establish the coupled state described by Professor Tiller and do a much better job of manifesting the possible futures that we want.
With enough practice, our Souls can come to be able to reach through the boundary between sleep and wakefulness and wake up while our bodies are also awake, thereby becoming our Higher Selves experiencing and acting within our Physical World, our Emotional World, our Symbolic World, and our Spiritual World. In this way, our Souls/Higher Selves come to learn and grow and develop, thereby forming a mirror through which we can come to connect with and understand ourselves more and more deeply.
The Mission of Our Souls: The Creator sent out our Souls with the mission of learning and growing in the slowed down Physical Realm to get to the place where our Souls could wake up while our bodies are awake to form our Higher Selves and, from that perspective, to constitute healthy psychologies that integrate our Physical, Emotional, Mental, and Spiritual Realities and produce the ways of life that are best for us. Accomplishing this is the First Imperative of the Axiology of Spiritual Realism.
Once we have constituted our Higher Selves, we can more on to the Second Imperative of the Axiology of Spiritual Realism, helping to bring to fruition different aspects of the best vision of the Creator for our situation here on Earth. To accomplish this, the Creator sent out Souls in teams to incarnate together and find each other and form living teams to join together and work together to accomplish what is needed for our Earth, to evolve and accomplish the Creator’s vision of the best manifestation for our Earth.
However, the Creator also sent us into incarnation not only to help the Creator accomplish its objectives for the Earth, but also to learn how to be Creators in our own rights and how to join together with the other Souls in our teams and co-create the next phases of evolution for our Earth. That is the Third Imperative of the Axiology of Spiritual Realism.
In this way, we learn how to be Co-Creators so that when, ultimately, we return to the Creator for good, we will be able to help accomplish amazing new Creations in which the Creator joins with Its returned Souls who are now also Co-Creators to undertake a new wave of Creation undertaken by a collaboration of Co-Creators.
Taken together, these Three Imperatives constitute the core Axiology of Spiritual Realism.
In my next essay, Spiritual Realism Part IV: The Core Philosophy 2, I will present my understanding of how the Epistemology, Ontology, and Axiology of Spiritual Realism work together to produce a next level of elaboration and guidance.
