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Habitude and “the spirituality thing”Chris Marsh, 8 June 2007
Habitude is the antithesis of materialism, and of the entire project of the orthodox scientific community as it engages in formulating and testing rational explanations for natural phenomena. This does not mean that some other thing which people might call ‘spirituality’ should take the place of materialism as the essence of everything. And the challenge to materialism is absolute; habitude excludes any dualistic combination of the material and the spiritual. This does not require that we dismiss as nonsense all the various phenomena, world views, and anecdotal experiences people associate with spirituality, the soul, religion, God, the numinous, or whatever. Spirituality – including religion etc. – matters to people, so it is an important area to explore, but to call spirituality a ‘thing’ signals that it is not to be regarded with awe and reverence. It is a set of phenomena like any other set of human experiences and observations. In this essay, the words ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’ are used interchangeably, sometimes one or the other according to context, but for the purpose of this exploration, they are the same thing.
The materialism, and associated ideas, experimental work and discourses, which habitude takes issue with occupies a period of time roughly coinciding with the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its arrival was protracted and uneven, but one can identify times and situations before that main period began, one of which is medieval Europe. Lewis Mumford describes the role of religion in that situation as follows:
There are two particular points of interest for habitude studies in this passage. One concerns the main justification or excuse given nowadays for respecting religion, which is that freedom of religious faith and practice is a fundamental human right, one of the rights due to everyone, to each individual. That is very different from the medieval situation, where faith and practice were, in a sense, imposed on people, not as individuals but as part of the community under the authority of the Church, and not by many seen as an imposition, rather as a fact of life. The second point relevant to habitude is that the kind of thing described here has a long history, and not only in Europe, and hence will have made a deep groove in the present past – a strong morphic field – with a resonance which accounts in part for its continuing appeal to and hold on people. Religion then gives back to the individual some of the sense of belonging to a community, and an identity as a member of his or her Church, denomination, Faith, religious brotherhood, or however the religious community is seen and felt by its members.
Interestingly, ‘religion’ comes from the Latin ‘religio’ which may derive from ‘re’ and the verb ‘ligo, ligare, ligavi’ to tie up or bandage, and figuratively to unite, and hence has the sense of tying back together or re-uniting a community. In our individualistic society today, religion in that sense, particularly as organised by a Church or other religious authority, is off-putting for some, which accounts for a preference for the word ‘spirituality’, and for the loose, informal groupings of people seeing spirituality in similar ways and terms. The dissociation of spirituality from religion allows spirituality to have a meaning which is not incompatible with materialism, a reference to awe and wonder at some aspect of the material world: the vastness of the universe, the variety and complexity of the natural world, and so on. There is an old saying: ‘You are nearer to God in a garden than anywhere else on Earth,’ which gets close to merging God with Nature, and religious experience with being part of the interconnectedness of life. Even an atheist, rejecting the power and authority of any Church, can use religion’s vocabulary, as Bertrand Russell does in ‘A Free Man’s Worship’ (http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/fmw.html):
Atheists today are often called, and refer to themselves as, Humanists, although that term was first used of the deeply religious Renaissance Christians, such as Petrarch, Erasmus and Thomas Moore, who made Man the main subject of their studies rather than God. The humanists of today see no reason why morals and ethics have to have a religious basis, on the grounds that good conduct is conducive to good society, and one must respect that. However, the scoffing at religious belief that radical atheists indulge in is offensive and not rational, given that there have been atheist regimes every bit as ruthless and cruel as the Inquisition, or any other Christian, Islamic, or pagan tyranny.
Given that habitude is not about discovering what is ‘true’ in a religious or any other sense, one can regard religious or anti-religious arguments as simply phenomena of human thought and behaviour. A similarly detached interest extends to the whole range of what may be called spiritual experience, and because these do not carry a load of theology, or histories of persecution and bloody struggle, they are much more fun.
Approaching a new or controversial philosophy playfully has a serious purpose, in that it can help to loosen up the fixed attitudes and unconscious mindset that uphold the dominant ideology. As Bergson pointed out, the language we use favours established ideas, so that anyone arguing for something else sounds weak and silly because they have to struggle to find suitable words and expressions, whereas someone arguing for accepted ideas sounds authoritative and natural. Expressions like ‘how it works’ and ‘to account for’ go unnoticed, despite their obvious associations with the mechanistic paradigm and a pecuniary system. So, if one is going to sound silly anyway, one can make a virtue of necessity and offer up what are going to seem the most ridiculous aspects of one’s new concept.
The ‘fun’ part of habitude results from being able to shrug off the prioritising that’s been part of the history of the mechanistic paradigm, whereby aspects of the world of experience and observation which lend themselves to being modelled using mathematics and logic are studied and ‘explained’ first, and subjective, complex, inconsistently variable or chaotic sets of phenomena are only gradually taken on, by applying or devising suitable kinds of mathematics. Habitude may have its own ‘easy to see’ and ‘more puzzling’ areas, but until the old paradigm is loosened in people’s minds, these will be difficult to accept. Phenomena which ‘work’ consistently, and thus lend themselves to objective study and the repeatable experiment, suit the mechanistic paradigm best. Phenomena which involve personal experience and memory may be expected to suit habitude rather well, and may suit habitude better than they do the mechanistic paradigm if they are anecdotal, unrepeatable, and inconsistent. One might expect the ‘presence of the past’ to seep past our dominant senses focussed on the ‘passing present’, to give rise to such as sightings of ghosts, and detecting of hauntings by other senses than sight; memories of past lives, including clustering of such memories around historic figures such as Napoleon or Cleopatra, even memories which do not agree with the historic record; oddities like the subject of a recent documentary whereby recipients of transplanted organs acquire personality traits and tastes from the donors. This fun aspect of habitude may be intriguing, but also makes it seem nonsensical and unworthy or incapable of serious study.
I have explained that habitude is a philosophical concept based on Sheldrake’s science, and Sheldrake’s science has been ridiculed by critics from the scientific establishment, as in the following example:
Looking at this example of Sheldrake-bashing, we have the following: ‘New Age’, ‘pseudoscience’, ‘only expert in the field [of “morphic fields”], since he invented it’, ‘mysticism’, ‘naively’, ‘magical’, ‘irrational’, ‘way of being open-minded’, ‘courting’ and ‘New (Dark) Age’.
Interestingly, whoever reported Rupp’s comment suggests that Sheldrake does not deny or reject his ‘New Age’ following, only its wilder mystical extremes. I attended the course at Schumacher College in 1991 with Sheldrake as lead tutor, and I would say that most of the students there were at least sympathetic to the New Age, and were not intellectuals: most had not read even one of his books. I think it is not unfair to say that such people are credulous, not just open-minded; but one can put a positive spin on this and say that they love new ideas which challenge conventional thinking.
As for the term ‘pseudoscience’, this is a neologism whose only purpose is to make someone’s sneering seem authoritative. The dictionary definition: ‘a pretended or spurious science; a collection of beliefs mistakenly regarded as based on scientific method’, does not fit Sheldrake’s science, given his impressive academic credentials and his scrupulous experimental procedures. To call his work pseudoscience is meaningless and unwarranted mockery. The dictionary definition, of course, contains a societal genuflexion towards science and its method which Sheldrake himself shares in, and I do not; this is where he and I part company.
Rupp declaring that Sheldrake invented the field of morphic fields suggests she has not read his books or his web site, because Sheldrake has been careful to acknowledge, and indeed gain credibility from, the scientists and philosophers whose ideas he was building on.
Having to some extent exonerated Sheldrake from this piece of typical criticism, I intend now to embrace some of the pejorative terms and see what habitude as a philosophy, rather than a science, might make of them. I shall start with ‘mysticism’ because that links nicely to my ‘spirituality thing’.
I was brought up atheist. As a child I was told that religion is nonsense and religious believers stupid, and I was barred from participating in any activities associated with the local Church, including Girl Guides and the Youth Club. It was not until I was nearly forty that I took any interest in religion, and then only academically, having opted for an Open University course entitled ‘Culture and Belief In Europe, 1450-1600’, which provided the basics in theology, which was useful for later courses in history, literature and philosophy. From the ‘Culture and Belief’ course, I gathered that, for Christianity anyway, there were three forms of religious belief and practice. There was the kind Mumford describes in the passage above, which was imposed and controlled by the Church hierarchy, where practice involved communal ritual, and there was iconic and story-telling imagery, and people were not meant to question, or even understand, the truth of it all. Then the Reformation brought in private Bible studies, a more personal relationship with God, with practice still involving Church attendance but the congregation was meant to follow and understand the service and the sermon. The third kind of religion is mystical, which means it includes practices designed to bring the believer closer to God or to ‘enlightenment’. To put this another way, the practices bring about altered states of consciousness, from which strange thoughts and sensations arise, which the believer interprets according to the religious framework. The Quaker meeting for worship is an example of such practice. Originating in the seventeenth century, it was once seen as heretical and its practitioners persecuted, but all that happens is that members sit in silence until the meeting is ‘gathered’, after which, from time to time, someone will feel moved to share his or her ‘ministry’.
I have actually experienced Quaker meetings where the gathering ‘magic’ has happened, and I have felt my heart pounding with the compulsion to stand and speak. Becoming a Friend for several years was part of a phase in my life when I was exploring ‘the spirituality thing’, when I also tried rather more weird and wacky stuff, such as ‘Rebirthing’, ‘Enlightenment Intensives’ and ‘Mind Clearing’. The Society of Friends was the nearest I got to organised religion, and even in the Quakers I was firmly on the fringes, in a group called the Quaker Universalists, where you didn’t have to pretend to be a Christian. I emerged from that phase still an atheist, since neither religion nor spirituality ever really took. What I was left with though, was quite a collection of memories of having what are called spiritual, mystical or religious experiences; experiences, I should say, much more powerful than the kind Maslow called ‘peak experiences’, those thrilling highs when all feels right with the world, although I’ve had those too – and deserve them, I think, in compensation for awful lows, either from depression or from my disabling ‘death dread’.
This has become rather too personal for my preference, since I want to promote my ideas but not put myself forward. But for some people, personal experiences and feelings have more authority than intellectual explorations, and I do want to say, ‘yes, I know what you mean’ – and then get back to considering how that stuff relates to the ideas, in particular to the concept of habitude. With the foregoing, I may have alienated the atheists and humanists, as well as those who are interested in and open-minded about spiritual experience, but never mind, perhaps I can tempt both back, if only by showing how intriguing is this new way of thinking about everything.
Because habitude challenges the prevailing paradigm, ideology and use of language, it is necessary to include regular recaps on what habitude says, so here is another:
The universe being memory stuff means that its past forms are ever present, but we do not see and know that with our dominant senses of sight and hearing, which seem to be focused on ‘now’ as it travels through time. I say ‘seem to be’ because this may be the result of mindset, something we tell ourselves is so, and not inevitable. We can become aware of ‘the presence of the past’ by means of other senses, the senses we call variously ‘feelings’, ‘sensations’, ‘awareness’ or ‘knowing’. Returning again to the Mumford quote about the drama of medieval culture involving the Church, the power of that drama, re-enacted by so many people over centuries, is palpable. Entering a cathedral, or a Saxon or Norman church, one can feel an atmosphere which I am sure is more than the massive form of the architecture or the chilly stone and musty smell – but I don’t insist; one either knows that kind of thing or one does not, or one feels it but denies or ‘explains’ it. Everything mysterious or mystical can either be explained away or attributed to some yet-to-be discovered explanation.
A friend I have been corresponding with about these ideas sent me a little ‘self help’ book: not my kind of thing usually, but she thought I would be interested in the author’s idea of the ‘energy field’ of a living creature, and it does indeed seem relevant:
On the back cover of Feeling Safe, William Bloom is introduced as ‘ Britain’s leading holistic teacher’. Bloom, and the many alternative teachers, therapists, counsellors, life coaches and so on, share a mission to help people feel better about themselves and others, and this is usually well meaning, worthwhile and useful. There are charlatans, of course, and a downside, even of the good ones, is that the pupils or clients can become dependent, even addicted, to looking after themselves and being looked after in this kind of way. More seriously for the present discussion, the kinds of theory on which such teaching and therapy is based is dubious: much more deserving of the term ‘pseudoscience’ than Sheldrake’s work.
Introducing a new philosophy, or a new science, is plagued with difficulties, and it is tempting to latch onto others’ ideas if they seem to resemble one’s own; in this case Bloom’s ‘energy fields’ which are described in some of the same terms as Sheldrake describes his ‘morphic fields’. But energy fields is just one of the notions Bloom employs. He also talks a lot about body chemicals, especially endorphins. He talks modern science and Eastern medicine, and a lot of what cynics might call ‘cod psychology’. It is as if he trawls around shop windows, markets and reclamation yards to pick up whatever impressive or intriguing material he can use in his collage of theory. That may seem overly dismissive, and perhaps Bloom and others have respectable scholarly credentials, but it would muddy the waters to associate habitude with that kind of stuff.
I said at the start of this essay that habitude is monistic: it postulates one substance taking many forms, forms of the same kind, in that they all consist of memory and habit in the present past. Habitude excludes material-spiritual dualism, except as a way of thinking with a history. The collections of ideas Bloom draws on exist: groups of people think and have thought in those ways, and they are manifested by influential morphic fields, which is why they are appealing.
What is there left to say about habitude and ‘the spirituality thing’? For Bloom and others spirituality is the great good. This is what Bloom says on the FAQs page of his web site (http://www.williambloom.com/faq.php):
Bloom’s definition of ‘spirituality’ is not dissimilar to Russell’s usage of religious terms in ‘A Free Man’s Worship’. Used in this way ‘spirituality’ is a metaphor, and no less powerful for that. It is a truism to say that language matters and is powerful; we would not be human without language, and written language has always had a special potency. Consider the sentence from St John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ (John 1:1) This echoes the insistent phrase: ‘And God said’, in Genesis. God needs to be a person in order to utter the words that make the world and us, so Bloom’s rejection of that idea seems to indicate that he wants to make God a metaphor too, in deference to modern usage. (The more I consider Bloom’s project the better I understand what Sheldrake said in our Dialogues about keeping spirituality separate from science.)
God needs to exist, and to be a person uttering words and using reason, to create a world which works mathematically and deterministically. Without the Mind of God and the Word of God there cannot be a mechanistic universe. So if one is convinced that there cannot be such a God, one has to look for a radically different ground and set of processes to make sense of the world we experience. Habitude provides such a ground and processes.
Before leaving Bloom and his useful but intellectually annoying book, there is an interesting section on ‘Asking for Help’. A personal God is the obvious ‘person’ to ask for help when in dire need; even an atheist will say, ‘Oh, God!’ when in trouble, so strong is the cultural and linguistic habit of appealing to God. But Bloom does not mention God in this section until the very end in the summary, where the final point is ‘Ask the great flow of life, God and the angels for help.’ Instead he offers the reader ‘infinite reservoirs of positive energy in the cosmos,’ (Bloom, p.111) and other supernatural beings:
Again, some of this looks to be on the same lines as habitude, and it might have been tempting to say, ‘Look!, this successful and much admired holistic teacher is saying what I’m saying.’ But he isn’t, because his project is different. Bloom’s project is helping people feel better about themselves, using whatever material he can find to make positive thinking out of. My project with habitude, and from long before I adopted that term, is to show how people think – paradoxically mainly unthinkingly – along destructive lines, destructive of the planet we inhabit and have overwhelmed, destructive of rooted community and culture, and ultimately destructive of individual wellbeing. Bloom’s work is about enhancing individual wellbeing by helping people cope with society as it is. Many of his anecdotes involve business situations, and the roles and circumstances of modern life, without challenging that framework. Habitude goes deeper, and if the challenges it initially makes were taken up, the wellbeing which could be brought about would be deeper too.
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