The gymnosophist and the lonely ape

I've been working on my next book on meditation, consciousness, and criticality. I've been reading widely in cybernetics, chaos theory, and criticality - Norbert Wiener, Per Bak, and W. Ross Ashby.

I'd like this book to be free of the kind of errors and distortions typical of someone who hasn't studied the mathematics seriously enough to handle the terms responsibly. I'd like to plausibly discuss the implications in terms of meditation and spiritual development. We need a revised theory of "consciousness", else we get lost in rechristened abstractions handed to us by the far ancient past: prana, qi, dao, jhana were originally borrowed abstractions. At the time, metaphors were drawn from whatever imparted authority: divination, cosmology, sacrificial ritual, and ancestor worship. The Rig Veda is the ideal place to study this process, as vocabulary drawn from a sacrifice performed for victorious warriors and worried kings is gradually woven into a priestly cosmology supporting the necessity and power of this ritual, only to be gradually transformed and adopted by the rogue sadhu, the lone holy man who rivals the old priest and seeks his empowerment in new signs, namely in asceticism and vigil. He is a "gymnosophist", he wears little or no clothes, he abandons his home and family and the best chances of social success, he wanders and seeks teachings, he gains in independence of mind and attitude. Along the way he finds it expedient to borrow and steal the old vocabulary, putting exciting new twists on each term, while absorbing the language of his fellow ascetics and sometimes inventing his own: this is the process by which a new era supplants the old and yet seems to be its fruition and meaning. We may know we're doing it, but still we must: we need to convince ourselves more than anyone, that we're not fools. How does one do this? By communicating our experience successfully: only when another head nods along, do we really become convinced we're not lying. Therefore what choice do we have, but to beg-borrow-and-steal the best vocabulary we can find, to create a minimally plausible theory for the sake of our anxious over-the-shoulder-looking-back, for the sake of the lonely ape who is quietly and perpetually terrified by the solitude of modernity and the way our spiritual development only seems to deepen this threat. "Why this way? When so few seem to be headed here?" That lonely ape is there for a reason: because his fears were so often correct - that wandering off into the wilderness for the sake of some crazy dream, some moonlit vision of a gifted but shifted mad primate, too often resulted in the genetic endgame. Your ancestors are the apes that feared the wilderness more than they hated the bickering tribe: that we find it so difficult to think and act independently shouldn't surprise us - the boldest ancestors likely disappeared over the horizon long ago, and it was your grandfather who stayed behind, full of regret and a secret ill-wishing to that freedom. He would rather bicker than learn about himself. He would rather be bored than face a brave new world.

And so spiritual life is an uphill battle - if it's not, you're in a cult. And the cult, precisely as ersatz tribe, is what gives birth to the religion, which is what's responsible for catapulting us into the frontier of spiritual life - I would not be here if it weren't for the insanity of evangelical middle-American Christianity, which shaped my inner life from the earliest possible age into a twisted labyrinth. I have been blessed with the old-fashioned Christian conscience, the kind Kierkegaard and Pascal had, the truly brutal one, the one that never lets up, the one that seeks blood in all things, the kind of medieval European dramaturgy that almost no one understands anymore, the kind that had almost as much to do with pagan Europe and its oaths as it did with Israel and the rages of Yahweh. It's this kind of religious training that I find missing in the younger students raised by agnostics and atheists: they don't know how to steer with dread, nor anger, and thus not with yearning either. They only want out: they know what they don't want, but haven't learned to project a fate ahead of themselves with good conscience - perhaps meaning they're less easily fooled by personal hope, but that's a dire problem in the young. A general lack of faith in anything tangible and present haunts 21st century youth, and makes them more susceptible to precisely those collective religious delusions from which European culture just spent so much effort to extricate itself - a new global religion is coming, I can feel it. It's almost as though the Renaissance to late modernity will have been merely a breath midswim: it requires religious torture to craft the kind of soul capable of doing without religious certainty. And if we're not careful, one of us crazy gymnosophists is likely to end up canonicalized, snuck in the backdoor like Heraklitus was, right into the heart of the Gospel: one day they'll appropriate our appropriated scientific vocabulary for their own new testament, and words like "algorithm" and "intelligence" and "statespace" will be mumbled over a crowd of cowering peasants.