An analysis of Method through Process Theology
The word ‘method’ is etymologically derived from the Latin methodus or ‘way of teaching or going’, from the Greek methodos or ‘scientific inquiry, method of inquiry, investigation’. Also in the Greek, meta meant ‘in pursuit or quest of’ thus methodos originally as a ‘pursuit, a following after’. In the 1580s ‘method’ meant a way of doing anything of orderly regulatory conduct with a view to the attainment of an end. By 1680 it had evolved to meaning a system or complete set of rules for attaining an end. For Whitehead, all natural events are dictated by some subjective-aim held by a conscious or unconscious being. A method in object-oriented programming (OOP) is a procedure (set of actions) associated with a message (containing data which is represented as properties of an object, whereas behaviors are methods) and an object. An object consists of state data and behavior; these compose an interface, which specifies how the object may be utilized by any of its various consumers. A method is a behavior of an object parametrized by a consumer. Methods in OOP also provide the interface that other classes (classifications of properties) use to access and modify the properties of an object; this is known as encapsulation. Encapsulation and overriding are the two primary distinguishing features between methods and procedure calls. A simple plain definition of method gets us back to the point, a process for attaining an object such as:
A systematic procedure, technique, or mode of inquiry employed by a proper to a particular discipline or art
A systematic plan followed in presenting material for instruction (the lecture method)
A way, or process of or for doing something
A body of skills or techniques
As Process Theology is concerned and for analysis here, a method is experienced phenomenologically in four main stages of development according to esoteric spiritual literature:
Novice Stage: complete ignorance of the method (oh the pleasure)
Student Stage: caught in the pursuit of learning the method (convinced of one way)
Teacher Stage: caught in the pursuit of teaching the method (convinced of one way)
Guru Stage: embodiment of the method, freedom from it to seek out other methods
A guru according to Ram Dass is a cooked goose. It is someone who is the method thus does not have to think about it any longer, their life becomes the living embodiment of the method itself. The teacher then is someone caught in the ‘Golden Chain of Righteousness’. That is the last gate into the inner temple. Righteousness, or the feeling of being right is the last obstacle to speak of on the path to freedom. Ram Dass speaks of a pitfall on the spiritual path (no worries, once started there is no falling off the path for it is all spiritual work), one of these problems of spiritual work to speak of then is that of becoming a ‘Good Yogi’ or a ‘Good Teacher’. That is, to know all the right rituals and be able to perform them flawlessly, making an utmost righteous and Good character of spirit but your spirit is not free. This is what is referred to as the ‘Golden Chain’ and is a classic trap involving a desire to be free, but a realization occurs when you truly become free: you lose an ability for your anger and righteousness to be so interesting! We secretly deep down, or maybe we can call it our shadow side, craves the feeling of being right, of being able to feel self-righteous about a cause or subject. That is, when you are in a feeling of righteousness or caught in the Golden Chain you are in a certain psychological position to hold others in contempt or treat them with scorn, with a great reason to, maybe even the example par excellence to be self-righteous in the first place. But to lose this psychological position, to lose this self-righteous fuel is to become free and lose the Golden chain – thus this feeling of righteousness and anger must be ‘thrown back into the pot’ in order to become truly free on the spiritual path. This all to say that you would feel much more comfortable as a spirit to be free of any righteousness or anger held, but the trappings of the Golden chain deceive us.
When the Buddha described how long we’ve been on the spiritual journey, he said imagine an image: a mountain that is six miles long, six miles wide, and six miles high and every 100 years a bird flies over the mountain with a silk scarf in its beak and runs the scarf over the the mountain once over this 100 year time period. The Buddha says in the length of time it would take for this bird to use the silk scarf to wear away the mountain, that is how long we have been on the spiritual journey. That is the length of time we have been struggling on the spiritual path.
A method is a useful tool but issues arise when you try to utilize your desire to rush the process. This is partly where the nature of false problems originates, in our hasty decision making. Especially for Western minds, we crave the goodie as quick as possible with our fast food and our competitive service economy in general as we rush to fight to commodify ourselves. In this habit or tendency of mind that causes Western minds to perform a type of modification onto Eastern practices that would not be done in the East itself. In its haste, Western mind does a kind of violence to a concept known as ‘Lineage’ that is very important in any conception of a notion of method or methodology. Lineage is a concept we can utilize as giving duration to a method, that is to say, to think of methodology as a kind of process possessing a duration which we will refer to as Lineage to distinguish it from other durations. This process of lineage is unique for each person is developed as a kind of intimate love-affair with the method itself:
Dilettante State: where one first goes into a method as a kind of Dilettante and here one gets into its methodology in a more or less fanatic way; this is the state of development where the student stage and the teacher stage form a symbiotic relationship
Guru State: one comes out the other end of this Dilettante State being able to now ‘wear’ the method, that is embodying the methodology without necessarily being conscious of it (older fish turns to the young fish and asks, “how’s the water?” the younger fish says, “what the hell is water?”); the state of development of the guru state where freedom is
The Guru Development becomes a place you obtain through the process of methodology experienced in space and time where one is now a unique carrier of a ‘Lineage’. This Guru wears the method, or honors the method, or uses the method, without being attached to it because the attachment is in the Lineage as opposed to the Method itself – the attachment is with the experience of duration with the method (the Real), not the method which serves now as a mere representation of said experience with the method in real space and time. This is to carry the Lineage because you no longer need the method, thus you let go of it and are free to pursue other methods, whilst bringing in your unique lineage into new endeavors. In this way, attachment to a Lineage is not negative nor can it be undone. Pandora’s box opens and there is no re-closing it. This is Bergon’s conception of memory, or Debord’s Irreversible Time that is a side effect of Historical Time – man made recorded history (event oriented), a history that has always existed as a real part of Natural history but this is separate from the wholistic myth making Cyclical Time. That is a conception of memory on a cultural level that can be comparable similarly on the individual level, in terms of what exactly is chosen to retain and forget (modify) from the source.
The problem with ‘Lineage’ is when the Western mind decides how much to incorporate a method from the East in the sense of how much modification would occur (for comfort, ease of use, or hasty rushing all causing error). This issue became very prevalent in the initial pouring in of ‘Eastern Wisdom’ into America in the later half of the 20th century – in their error they missed a key factor, you cannot modify Eastern practices derived from Eastern Wisdom from outside them, you must modify it from within. And to modify an Eastern practice from the inside requires a great skill discussed by Carl Jung in his foreword to I Ching. It takes a kind of trick of the mind in the West to be able to properly think about Eastern concepts due to inherent habits, to properly tune into their style of thinking. If we are not careful we fall prey to the Dunning Kruger effect, or more easily understood by a popular Alan Watts’ quip, “you’ll eat the menu at the restaurant instead of eating the food”. The Buddha says when he points at the moon, do not mistake his finger for the moon – well not only does human nature cause a distortion of this naturally, Western culture as a whole muddies the conception even more. The map is not the territory and the method is not a real representation of real life, however something does not have to be real to be useful. To know something is not real, but to treat it as if it were and perform actions that engage with a belief in the ‘fetish’ being real is the definition of Fetishistic Disavow (and what gives the world that ‘real’ feeling).
Carl Jung calls Richard Wilhelm a ‘Gnostic Intermediary’ in his foreword to I Ching, he says Richard Wilhelm is a crucial point of understanding the Eastern methods through a Western lens by the practice he offered with his translation. What Wilhelm did was to incorporate the ‘Chinese Being’ into his blood and cells so that he would, or could, dream that way. When learning a new language, a curious phenomenon occurs where you may have a dream in that language in which you do not translate the words to your original language but leave them in the foreign tongue thus carving out a place in your brain for fundamental symbolic recognition. Richard Wilhelm first became-Eastern, that is to say, departed from the mindset and axioms of Western mind (theories of causality, scientific method, etc.); and transitioned into a mindset consisting of axioms in Eastern mindset to more fully grasp the practices. It is here that he developed from Eastern Wisdom a methodology or practice, learned its very insides as deeply as could be done in his given circumstance, and then brought it back to the West for us Western minds to apprehend. The curious detail about Gnostic Intermediaries is the ability to do this, to go deep into the axioms of a system and adopt them in such a way to view it through the lens. With this understanding, there may be certain notions that will not be immediately transferable to the West, requiring some sort of inner transformation to be more fully developed for maximum Western mind apprehension.
A big issue in the West, and in Western mind, is the notion of ‘my way is the only way’. This is a position held from a certain perceived psychological gap that is seen far too often in a competitive capitalist environment. I would argue that it is the mechanism behind hazing, it is a feeling of scorn possessed by an individual of negative emotion in the possibility of an event in which someone could learn something easier than they did. This creates a kind of gap where a feeling of ‘unfairness’ might emerge, a stubbornness of self-righteousness arises where anger becomes palpable in the work-environment. “Enough questions, just do it like I said to”, thinking might be actively discouraged as it gets in the way of the ‘proper thinking’ as propagated by this emerging power dynamic between person a, the student, and person b, the teacher.
There is a story of God and Satan walking down the street, they see this brilliantly shiny object sitting on the ground. God reaches down, picks it up and declares, “Ah this is truth” – to which Satan replies, “Ah yes, here give it to me; I will organize it!”.
There are many ways to reach the top of the mountain, if the goal is to get to the top then one should seek a path that is more apt to their unique karmic predicament. That can be achieved through the letting go of any intellectual control you may think you need to create – and the embracing of your own creative intuition that is at the heart of your spiritual being. That is to keep your ‘spiritual heart’ as open as possible such that it can receive the flux of the moment to un-mediatedly decide from the most optimal position possible. For it is through a disruption of this direct experience, from your spiritual being (elan vital) to the object of focus, through a type of muddying of the picture that can interrupt any intelligibility. This is the issue with ego and its curse of attempting to control situations through intellect, the curse from the Fall of Man. We left our animal immanence behind: Bataille describes this in two ways:
Nonhuman Animal: immanent to its environment; no use of methods or tools that create a type of subject/object ontology that come in between the animal and the environment
Human Animal: human in this context is defined as a being that through mediation of tools (methods), encounter themselves as subjects distinct from their environment; the human being treats its environment (and all beings that constitute it) as objects for its focus, thus animal immanence gives rise to a world of apparent transcendent objectivity through this application of tools applied to the environment (nature)
In this way, humans animate ‘objects’ with their methods (tools) and extend their subjectivity onto objects. This is done to extend their subjectivity to being itself to the lost continuity of immanence, for Bataille. Management of any spiritual practice, then, should recognize that excess management of the system (religion, state, political, corporate, etc.) should controllably and systematically purge any immanence found in its system such that the system itself does not collapse back into the immanence into its environment. Thus a company becomes a subject utilizing tools such that they stay alive, in spiritual terms these tools or methods are productions of the sacred. Bataille gives us a kind of Base Materialism here, a vision of excess, he calls it – where a radical materialism emerges, we take Marxist Dialectical Materialism and Modern scientific materialism and turn it up to its extreme. This is to use Ancient Gnosticism in its conceptual three categories:
Physical Reality: as actual reality, that which is in flux and always becoming. To the ancient Gnostics physical reality, or matter, was evil and dark as it was demiurgic
Spiritual Reality: as virtual possibility, this is the universe or as Augustine conceived of Plato’s forms as the mind of God. This is the world of forms and immutability of Being, the illuminating light of the Good keeps us warm here in the space of true knowledge
Other Reality: that which is outside of logic, outside of being and becoming, outside of physical and spiritual realities as we can speak of them. This is base materialism’s conception of the unspeakable, that which is un-utterable as anything utterable would have been done so already in the previous realities. That which exists outside of instrumental reason according to Marcuse
“But since blood, birth, and titles of nobility have lost their ideological force, the taste of signifying transcendence has fallen to the material signs – to pieces of furniture, objects, jewelry, and works of art of every time.” Baudrillard
For Freud in Totem and Taboo, the King is both the Totem, or the representation of power and a Taboo, or a member of the living dead. This is the relationship set by a priestly class of the sacred and profane:
Totem is the Sacred: representation of power
Taboo is the Profane: member of the living dead
What we are in now is a period of Totem and Taboo, of the Sacred and Profane – Freud used with Marx and Marcuse to give us a world as the system of objects, and thus we consume its signs. That is, a consumption of symbolism and signs must be analyzed to make any sort of sense out of the predicament of modernity. The Ontology of Marxism is that the material relations, while abstract, constitute the concrete reality of the things (objects). Marcuse, in One-Dimensional-Man, describes Instrumental Reason as a notion of ‘Enlightenment Reason’ derived from the Kantian, “dare to use your own reason”. This Instrumental Reason, however Marcuse claims, is not a comprehensive reason at all and it is mostly a scientific reason. Under further Marcus-ian analysis we find that this so-called ‘scientific reason’ is actually a game of debunked/debunking religion in disguise (the old game of the god of gaps as Neil de Grasse would say). It is a technology-fueled subjective aim that would make Orwell’s 1984 happy, for it leaves a huge vacuum in the symbolic-sign realm – a vacuum consisting of the space once occupied by the Catholic church, for instance, that fell out of fashion from the Enlightenment and is being slowly clawed back, seemingly by modern science. What we are given nowadays in the social are pre-packaged methods, or ways of thinking about reality in forms of simulacra: Marx’s Alienation; Weber’s/Kafka’s Rationalization; Rick Roderick’s Banalization. In this mass media of modernity, objects or images of symbolic value are then copied, recopied, and further banalized so the connection to any semblance of reality is lost. This is precisely the issue those early adopters of Eastern Wisdom faced when they integrated it in America and its culture. Modern science would deem issues brought up about the self unimportant such as: Existentialism’s anxiety, dread despair; Phenomenology’s study of the observer (that which quantum mechanics cannot account for), and Descartes conception of the cogito (that Heidegger wishes to analyze). I’m reminded of Freud when arriving to America made this statement as he turned to his student Carl Jung:
“They do not realize we’re bringing them the plague” Freud
Audrey points out in this beautiful formulation of the problem plaguing America:
“America as the great libidinized signifier is adverse to psychoanalysis because with psychoanalysis you’re no longer mandated to enjoy. America on the other hand is entirely defined by a culture of enjoyment.” Audrey 2
Even Freudian psychoanalysis had to be modified for America, as seen by Anna Freud’s modifications to it. Why is it that methodologies being imported into America must be adjusted? There is a web or framework of analysis that we have been born into in the West, and that we adopt as possessing a Western mind. This is the philosophical creed of “Know thyself”, it is to engage in the process of learning the assumptions and consequences of the predicament you have been born into in space and time, in a culture. The famous Rick Roderick helps us understand what a mess we are in with his proclamation:
“After Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, you don’t know if you’ve got a good reason for believing something or if you’ve simply got a bad symptom.” Rick Roderick, Siege of Self Series
This priestly class, that which delineates totem and taboo and creates Debord’s Cyclical Time through a holistic mythos combination through logos (the trick of separation), shows us the power that they possess. Nietzsche’s lessons on slave morality should help guide us in the pitfalls of the spiritual path we have seen engaged by the Western Priestly Class – not to get into the plethora of examples of behavioral misconduct propagated by contemporary religious institutions. The tools of these masters give the Nomad a stronger perspective for analysis on this developing situation of Religion in the Modern World, these so-called Priests should be embarrassed. We can learn from this though, especially in the history of the Zen monks coming over to America. These Zen-monks were acolytes of ascetic practices, primarily celibate, and again were carrying a Lineage of the methods respective to their unique subjective-relative histories, were not prepared for Western culture. Western culture at the time of these Zen monks arrivals, in the middle of the 1900s, showed us what an embodiment of a certain method (Zen Buddhism) brought into contact with a foreign culture to it (American culture) pervaded the Zen monks. They fell suspect to many behavioral misconduct actions, caught lawsuits in America, and even to this day the most prestigious of Zen institutions, like the Catholic church, has incriminating evidence embedded in it. What are we to do when presented with a fact like this? We can use it for education purposes: these Zen monks coming over to America were not gurus, they were teachers – while they indeed did embody their respective lineages they were still too caught up in their methods. Ram Dass says that a guru is a ‘cooked goose’, whereas a teacher is not, the important difference being for instance when a guru does not care if he is in a cave or a classroom when he is being a guru; a teacher would prefer a classroom settings for many reasons that their methodologies could attest to. A teacher points the way, whereas the guru is the way; a very different quality is at work here. What a guru does is mirror for you where you are not – the lake reflects the image of the swan but as soon as the swan is gone, so is the image of it; the lake however reflects only an image of the swan but not the real swan itself.
In the Western mind, we confuse the idea of a guru and that is how we received the Zen monks. In the West, we took the Eastern conception of guru and modified it for our own comfort and in our own ways – to the end of giving ourselves a good father. Apparently that is what the Western mind desires the most when given a so-called mirror to look at itself, it projects the desire for a father figure onto the ‘image’ of the guru (Western conception of guru) in a psycho-dynamic sense. A situation occurs where Western minded individuals then get confused and we then want a guru to do something to us, when in fact what happens is that the guru just is (like a tree or river). In the Eastern notion, the guru just presents himself and the Eastern subject is then to observe what arises from their own karmic-predispositions in the situation and do work on themselves (by using the guru as a mirror for their own ends). The guru is viewed as a presence that allows you to perform this sort of self-knowledge learning act, or process of development – a presence in time and space such that does not catch you anywhere but enables you to instead ‘catch yourself’. In a Western environment, this gets transmuted into a bastardized form that Ram Dass calls ‘becoming a connoisseur of clay feet’ where Western mind then thinks what is needed is to find the most pure guru, the one with the least cringe/bad takes or with the least gossip about them. This allows the Western mind a judgmental space (through a comedic sort of slave morality) in which they analyze whether they can afford to ‘take on’ a teacher/guru depending on how impure they deemed the teacher/guru. They would then look for impurities in a guru to protect themselves because they misunderstood the concept of surrender – Western mind believes that you must surrender to a person rather than to the truth itself, this kind of phrasing of the problem instantly becomes banalized in Western minds.
“God, Guru, and Self are one in the same thing.” Eastern Proverb
In the proper Eastern notion, you are truly surrendering to the truth, not a person. One surrenders to a higher truth or higher wisdom they find reflected back at them through the presence of the guru. Unfortunately for Western minds, we engage in a cult of personality worship often, possibly due to some mechanism deeply lodged in our modern philosophical western framework’s axiomatic assumptions. From this we can surmise a kind of formula to delineate cult or religion: a cult is that which worships a person, a religion is that which worships an idea (ideology, etc.). In the Methodist Protestant tradition, this allots a curious phenomenon in which they circulate out the pastor every five years (and include women) so cults of personality do not form and the proper worship of the Word is performed. The concept of surrender is a very unpleasant one for Western minds, although you might not think that from our Judeo-Christian appearance of honoring sacrifice (Binding of Isaac). “I accept your surrender”, the showing of the neck in vulnerability, these are kind of bad words or bad notions to Western minds – although it is the place of great learning value.
Ram Dass has much to teach us here about methods and methodologies implemented in the West, and can be used as a great luminary historical example of a kind of foreign philosophical system being brought in and integrated into our western philosophical system. Ram Dass of course is formerly known as Dr. Richard Alpert, the eminent Psychoanalysis professor of Harvard after being kicked out and went East comes back and tells us of some great pitfalls for us to be aware of in the 21st century. It is in this process of development that he gains much insight into how to stabilize methods to be able to incorporate them into one’s life and not leave it as mere words – but actual action.
“We are to practice virtue, not possess it.” Meister Eckhart
Zizek has a joke: on Saturday Jewish believers meet in a synagogue and each of them says something. First, a big famous Jewish Rabbi says, ‘oh my God, I am nobody! I am not worthy of your attention!’. Then, a rich Jewish Merchant in response says, ‘oh my God, I am also nobody. Do not even consider me, I am not worthy of your attention’. Finally, a poor Jewish believer says in response to the first two, ‘God, I am almost a nobody!’ to join in on the fun. The rich Merchant then kicks the famous Rabbi and says, 'who is this guy that he thinks he can also say that he is a nobody?!’. Zizek says when someone is doing something like this, disparaging their person or identity as a role in society, because what it really is is some sort of claim for a secret privilege. Lacan would call this surplus enjoyment and might be how we could differentiate our Western identities. The point here is that Western mind has a funny kind of tendency or habit when we conceive of sacrifice or surrender, we do so competitively. For example, when Zen was imported into America, Western minds tend to collect Zen rituals as a kind of achievement, ‘look how many I know’ as if, again, you could possess knowledge or virtue in this way, ‘I want to get that goodie’.
“The highest virtue is not virtue, therefore really is a virtue; but the inferior virtue cannot let go of being virtuous, therefore is not a virtue.” Lao Tzu
The highest virtue is not conscious of being itself a virtue; the lowest virtue however is conscious of itself being a virtue, a kind of self-consciousness. Alan Watts would call breathing an example of the highest virtue as breathing is what keeps us alive yet we do not congratulate ourselves on breathing. Not only must we distinguish between lowest and highest virtue, but as Western minds, we must make sure to practice (through proper methodology understanding) virtue instead of possessing it. For Western minds, it is very easy and always a temptation to possess virtue, wear it on your sleeve to show others just how pure you are – a desire to show others your power or what you have learned, almost like the desire of a criminal craving to go back to the crime scene or tell someone of their deed for how much sweeter it becomes. To possess virtue however would keep you holding on to something, Let go or be dragged, you would find yourself on the last rung of the Golden Chain unable to proceed to freedom of becoming-guru. You cannot become-guru possessing virtue, you must let it go through practice or the art of praxis. This is tough for Western mind to truly understand the ramifications due to our desire of Self-Righteousness, no worries many get hung up on this rung in the spiritual path, but we must use our intuition to re-open our heart and re-introduce movement back into the process (as Nietzsche would say in pursuit of the Nietzschean child).
Western minds, when presented with supernatural phenomena or become aware that they might have supernatural ability – to whatever legitimacy of them either possessing it or not, we can speak of the behavior in history of how Western mind typically can react due to habits. After performing Eastern rituals of spiritual purification, in the Eastern Wisdom literature it says to not get stuck in the trance state that come after spiritual purification – such as Buddhism says you will go in these trance states and possibly experience omniscience, omnipresence, but it says to not get caught up in it (like a guru, be a mirror) and go on. That is to say, to whatever states an individual experiences, they should not get stuck on it and allow the next state to come in when the time comes, this is the proper mode for nomads. For Western minds, it is too tasty to let go; however, again the Golden Chain of Self-Righteousness strikes again with these trance states. Western minds do not wish to leave the trance state due to its appearance of some ‘power’ or possession of ‘powers’. These would be powers describable in some libidinal energy sense, or desire-production psychic energy. Western mind, after recognizing or becoming self-conscious of power, whether perceived or real, tends to bring its ego into the awareness of the gaining-of-power. The ego-element in this process (Becoming-Free, spiritual path) when it senses this power increase likes to interpret this power as ‘my power’ and can tend towards a ‘Messianic Journey’. It is very painful because of how it is treated in the West, in the East their priestly class have institutions and mechanisms to aid when those feel the pains of the spiritual path. Again, Western mind tends towards a ‘Messianic Phenomena’ directly after its spiritual purification and perceived possession of some sort of ‘virtue’ power or libidinal power increase (Spinoza joy or increase in conatus). This tendency towards Messianic influence is of course related to our Judeo-Christian values embedded deep within our culture, representing the messianic role of Jesus and his sacrifice. Western minds tend to get lost on this plane, again proving more so an insistence to go this way with the utmost of care.
In India and other Eastern cultures, there is a concept called ‘God-Intoxicants’ where everyone knows if someone ‘flipped’ and starts to proclaim they are God they automatically think, ‘ah, there is a God-Intoxicant we must take care of them at a temple’. In the West, we do not have a comparable support system, that of a transformative loss of metaphysical ground (of being), and the consequential states of psyche that accompany it through its process of change. There is a careful balance to be maintained with spiritual practice, and if you are not stable in your ‘transformative experience’ your faith flickers – and that is precisely when fanaticism breeds strongly.
“The mosquitoes of fanaticism breed in flickering faith environments.” Ram Dass
“When the way rules, coach horses fertilize the field. When the way is lost, war horses breed in the parks.” Tao Te Ching
When you meet a spiritual master in any tradition: Zen, Hindu, Sufi, Buddhist, Native American, you instantly recognize they are a ‘Real One’. They typically aren’t sitting around saying, ‘you are not following MY way so you are lesser’ decrying those around them as not a One; but curiously all of their disciples underneath them usually do (student/teacher stage). The spiritual student/teacher and spiritual master are related in terms of stages in the process of development of the Lineage with the method. The thing about a method is, that for a method to work it has to trap you. In the sense of you have to go through the Dilettante (student/teacher stage) to get to the guru, BUT if you try to Dilettante your way through and act as if the Dilettante is the guru you are absolutely free to do so. No one is stopping you but again, you will end up trapped by the method (endlessly stuck in the cyclical student/teacher false dichotomy) rather than letting go and becoming free of the method thus progressing into your unique lineage with the method itself. For example, you have to become a meditator to learn the methods of meditation, but if you end up a Meditator (teacher/student of meditation) then you are lost – or stuck in the methods of meditation. This is where Alan Watts famously asks, why do you want to meditate? Do you wish to learn methods of meditation so that you can become-free, or reduce your suffering? Or do you wish to learn methods of meditation so you can ‘teach’ meditation, or worst use it as some sort of sign-economy ‘show-boating’ where you proudly go around wielding the title Meditator (cue Seinfeld joke, not that there's anything wrong with that). Many people end up as just Meditators, where they utter things such as: ‘I’ve meditated for forty-two years’ they say as they look at you with an earnest, albeit intense thousand-yard kind of stare. This is the example par excellence of showing a being trapped in the ‘Golden Chain of Self Righteousness’, they got caught again in the method.
A method must trap you; and then finally if it works it self-destructs. And you come through the other end and thus free of method. Dante and Virgil must go deep down into Hell to escape the Inferno, much like Hegel says Alienation is not something you fight against or go around but is something you go through. Once you come through your method, you come to a realization that all methods, especially spiritual, lead to the same kind of free space and time. A free space and time, where you can look for other methods to become trapped in all over again (cyclical-time) but with the memory or lineage of successfully memorized previous methods (irreversible-time). The way Western minds approach the spiritual path always is tipped towards a more Self-Righteous tendency due to our Judeo-Christian roots, thus we must work a little harder to overcome these spiritual pitfalls.
One way to overcome these spiritual pitfalls is to of course find a guru, that does not have to be a person, a proper guru, a teacher, a student, or even a proper full fleshed out method. Nomads steal ‘learns’ anywhere we can get them to build out the full method to go through. In this proper understanding of the conception of guru (does not have to be a person) Ram Dass helps us in a certain way to pick the right kind of guru for the job – a certain quality to look for. Look for a guru that has a rascal-type nature, he says, a guru that possesses an element of rascalian-ness, that is a kind of trickster behavior found in Loki and Thor in Norse Mythology, but also we find within Zizek with his provocative jokes. We will flesh out the search of guru more in later essays but a few more things, in this search of guru we find ourselves, as Western minds, to engage in a type of judgmental behavior that would make the book of Daniel sad (as Daniel in Hebrew means only God can judge me). Yet of course Nietzsche and Zizek points us to a curious ‘hidden power’ engaged within Judeo-Christian habits of mind, one in which we use to gain a semblance of psychological ground to engage in scornful (resentful) judgment of gurus/teachers and even students from the position of the novice stage. That is, as an individual who knows nothing of a given subject to turn to each entity in that subject (student, teacher, guru) and proclaim them all unworthy of their time, energy, space, and consideration – wow can that be some delicious gossipy goodie-ness us Western minds can slurp right up in conceptual glory. Some gurus differ in this way that they do not fear their Dilettantes getting lost along the way and aim for pure truth, where degrees of lesser shades will be more protected with their methods. This is the curious delineation of esoteric methodology and exoteric methodology, that which is aimed for the masses and that which is aimed for the few.
The curious consequence we find in this matter, is if you find a guru there will be no way for you to tell if they are ‘hung-up’ on something themself (therefore maybe a lesser teacher) or an exquisite teacher (guru). This is the predicament we find in guru searching that gets hilariously analyzed through the lens of Tantric gurus (that is not Tantric of Californians, again another improper importing of Eastern concepts into the West, Tantra does not just mean sex). A Tantric guru is known for being confusing in the sense of one famous (infamous?) Tantric guru owns something like 92 rolls royces, how do we know he is doing this to teach us something or simply likes owning 92 rolls royces (capitalist style?). This is an example of an issue we find when guru searching within the nature of the search itself, not even to add to the mix the problems when analyzing it through the Western mind’s axioms themselves (improper definitions being used).
The key point here is you cannot know if the guru is this or that, and it does not matter to the Nomad, because you are not learning the method from them in the sense of a person-worship (cult of personality style), their person actually has no bearing whatsoever if you do it properly because it should have nothing to do with them (as a guru) and solely all to do with setting yourself free (Western minds cue cringe, deprogram my comrades). For methods and gurus, to Nomads, are mere signposts, objects, rhizomes, pointings to freedom and Nomads will use them by any means necessary: stealing, hacking, organizing, and so on, to get free. That is, Nomads only know that if they want to be free, you use any kind of guru/method/dilettante/novice, no matter the level of knowledge or possession of a body (rhizomatic), and use them as hard as you can so that you can be set free or gain your freedom. The guru/method’s karmic problems, are their karmic problems – and have nothing to do with you and your own karmic problems (work on yourself, you cannot force others to do anything; the nomadic creed). This is the secret we will illustrate more in another process theology installment of ‘search for the guru’.
Nomadic Notes (Prophecies and Futures):
There are metaphysical problems we are facing in modernity that are not properly framed. Bergson calls them false problems of nonexistence or badly stated. We are emerging from a sort of philosophical metaphysical dark age due to the epoch of logical positivism and its lingering spirit, but due to this we have lots of metaphysical work to do. We can look to the East for guidance if we do so properly – one example is a general flow or current in Buddhism is found between the two schools: Mahayana and Theravada. Theravada in one way can be described as a going inward (spiritual), whereas Mahayana would be complementary described as going outward (political). In this day and age we need a combination of both to find some semblance of unity such that we can properly state our questions (inward spiritual work), and then perform the requisite actions (outward political work) knowing our political work is praxis towards theory. It is in this way we aim to use Process Theology in this pursuit of a more fleshed out metaphysical framework for which to aim this lens, in the same way Hesiod might have looked at what had became of Ancient Greece during the Ancient Dark Ages (after the collapse of the Bronze Age) and learn to look beyond it for answers. That is, the Dark Ages tell us much about our present, but so does the Golden Ages. This publication aims to leave no stone unturned in our subjective-aim in our metaphysical curiosity.
“The student learned by daily increment the way gained by daily loss.” Ram Dass
“The scholar gains every day but the Taoist loses every day.” Lao Tzu
Sources
Audrey 2, The Cumming Insurrection Part 2: Confronting Analysis,
Ram Dass, Be Here Now Podcast Ep 34/35/36 Promises and Pitfalls
Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud
The Accursed Share Volume 1, Georges Bataille
Mahayanan all the way! Some theravadan schools are sexist af, female monks tend to have more rules to have to follow, and the relationship between bhikkus and bhikkinis has an emphasis on stuff like not being in the same room together - I'm not saying this goes for all theravadan schools! But has just been an unfortunate experience of my own, especially as a trans enby buddhist -
This was a fantastic entry, I love these styles of notes, Science was a banger and this is a strong follow up and contender, I think a few of us will be responding to Audrey2's latest entry for some time!