Abstract
The paper continues the model I began in a previous issue of Sophia. It is argued that the predominance of purely ascending or ‘top down’ forms of spirituality which stemmed largely from the axial period and have been carried forward into modern, transpersonal theories of evolutionary spirituality is a mistake and that there exists a lost or largely ignored form of spirituality—which I name somatic—which was the predominant domain of early Neolithic and Palaeolithic experience. Aspects of what I call somatic mystical experiences have certainly been acknowledged at times to a limited degree, though they have rarely been fully explored, and have usually been considered as basic to other kinds of mystical experience, rather than fully developed forms in their own right. This article offers a fuller exploration and places such states more accurately within a detailed developmental framework than has previously been the case. Other issues relating to the horizon model across the two papers are also expanded.
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Notes
In the terminology of the heart sutra, the ‘form’ component of reality can be subdivided into both luminous and somatic energies, and the mysticism of form is therefore either somatic or luminous, both of which contrast the mysticism of ‘emptiness,’ which I call etheric.
See below, and see note 4.
By opening up I mean working on the psycho-physical tension, sometimes known as the primal repression or as armouring, in order to reduce it and allow the deeper energic potentials to merge.
For further examples and insights about somatic mysticism in general see Nietzsche 1956, p. 22–23; Reich 1948, p. 282; Janaway 1995, p. 360; Grof 2000, p. 58; Narby 1995; Schopenhauer 1969, pp. 112–119; Collins 2004, p. 226. The work of Narby and Grof is particularly interesting as it suggests, like the Aurobindo passage above, that the soma may have its own intelligence. Attempts to expand on this are not easy; they are limited by definitions of what intelligence actually is, which make hypotheses exploring the possibility of such an intelligence difficult to formulate precisely and hence difficult to investigate. My own view is that ‘intelligence’—defined loosely as mental content—can be attributed to the natural world, and is ‘contained’ in it just as human intelligence is ‘contained in’ the human being. Therefore nature as a whole has an interior or ‘world soul’ as the human being has an interior of thought and feeling—see below on the world soul. These pockets of intelligence can be interacted with by gifted humans, of which the shaman was the classic example, and the resultant ethnophilosophical views of plant helpers, spirits in rocks, spirits in rivers, and many other sources of knowledge which the shaman was said to communicate with and utilise can be explained on this basis. I therefore reject the view of Piaget (e.g., 1929, pp. 92–96) that such beliefs can be wholly, or even usually, explained as ‘magical thinking.’ The existence of these pockets of mental energy within the somatic realm is due to the mixing of the energies of the different realms, which we shall explore shortly. It is also the case, I think, that as well as interaction between the mental realm (or the middle world of the shamanic cosmos) and the somatic realm (or underworld of the shamanic cosmos), there was also interaction between the luminous realm (higher realm of the shamanic cosmos) and both the mental and somatic. Thus most underworld journeys, like Eliade’s (1964) classic reports, are mixtures of lower middle and higher—or somatic mental and luminous—and not just of somatic and mental.
In the previous paper (Dale 2009) I briefly mentioned the top down / bottom up distinction, though I did not go in to detail. In note 17 (p. 288) I erroneously said ‘top up’ and ‘bottom down’ rather than ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’.
Ontogenetic means the development of the individual, phylogenetic the development of the species.
The somatic realm is also the home of various instinctual energies, which may have helped endow it with a demonic character in representations, and contributed to its persecution in axial philosophies which we discuss below; all of this helped hide the somatic realm and deterred its exploration both intellectually and experientially.
The characterisation of the Mahayanan Bodhisattva as anabhogacarya furnishes an example from the eastern traditions.
What they were fascinated by was in fact the emergence of mythos (mentality) out of logos (soma).
The primal repression is a psycho-physical stiffening which signals the end of infancy. For personal level psychologists like Freud (1958) the primal repression forms the ego by cutting out the instincts; for transpersonal level psychologists like Washburn (1995) it forms the ego by cutting off both the instincts and the dynamic ground of spiritual energy.
The figure 800,000 years is taken as an outside estimate from Hayden (2003, p. 93)
Kasmiri Saivism ‘holds that the world mind, as Will, is within the process of nature’ (Radhakrishnan 1952, p. 388) Even the European enlightenment thinker Schopenhauer’s (1969, p. 112–119) conception of will had more in common with body and instinctual reaction than with reflective self-consciousness. The suksma-sarira, or subtle body, is not actually described as a post-mental structure even in the detailed texts of axial traditions. The suksma-sarira is composed of three sheaths—the vijnanamayakosha, the manomayakosha and the pranamayakosha (Dasgupta 1932, p. 74). The pranamayakosha, which I call somatic, is therefore linked to the higher realms in these formulations, and the subtle body includes both luminous energies and somatic ones. As Dasgupta (1932, p. 76) sums up: ‘Hiranyagarbha (also called Suratma or prana) is the god who presides over all living beings.’ It is only the more general axial positions which simplistically and rigidly separate higher and lower, rather than presenting them as interlinked and mutually influential (see note 2). Unfortunately it is the simplistic and general conceptions which have become the standardised cornerstone of neo-axial evolutionary spirituality, leading to ladder like developmental models. These ladder-like models were ‘temporalised’ in the nineteenth century (Lovejoy 2001, pp. 242–288), and the entire cosmos was thus stretched out like a vast cone of increasing complexity and increasing capacity for mystical experience, and in the twentieth century the big bang theory was added as the starting point. The ontogenetic perspective of the horizon model involves both top down and bottom up, and consequently resembles the world tree structure of the shamanic traditions with upper and lower realms, rather than the chain of being. When stretched out it is open at both ends, not just one as a cone is. So the horizon model suggests a fundamentally different cosmic structure to the chain of being, and resurrects the world tree shape. In fact when stretched out and temporalised, the world tree actually becomes a circle, as its branches and roots can be shown to join when stretched out over astronomical timescales. Therefore following the Vedanta Sutra, and completing note 2, we can say that the circle of separation and time both begins and ends in the absolute unity and timelessness of non-duality; but the details of this must wait for a future paper.
My own view on the mysterious style of the rock art paintings is that they are often representations of enhanced sensory experiences of the physical world, which I have called ‘pan perception.’ Lewis-Williams (2002) argues that much of the rock art of the lower Palaeolithic is depictions of entheogen visions. We can conflate the two positions easily enough by saying that rock art is depictions of pan perception while using entheogens, which may or may not have also been available without them. My own view is that somatic experience gradually faded out as a ‘receding edge’ as the separate egoic state increasingly crystallised. The use of entheogens and other consciousness expansion techniques of the indigenous religions were attempts to fall back into this fading domain, and possibly by the beginning of the rock art era pan perception had already been shut out of ordinary experience, and entheogens or other consciousness expansion tools were necessary in order to perceive it. This framework is complicated by the fact that as well as the bottom down source realm or receding edge, the lower Palaeolithic also saw the emergence of the top down source realms or the leading edge of luminous mysticism, (all of which has helped camouflage the bottom up currents and—to my knowledge—delayed their entry as distinct components into our theoretical models until now).
The upward and downward movement can appear to happen at the same time. The movement is of course not really up and down—but just two different kinds of energy, one somatic the other luminous, and which are therefore quite capable of unfolding simultaneously.
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Postscript
In the time that has passed while this paper was under review, my opinion has changed slightly on one issue.
Where I have cited in the paper only the purposeful repression or purposeful dissolution of pre-axial traditions as the reason why this form of spirituality is now less prevalent in axial and post-axial societies, I now think that there are other reasons for this as well. The movement away from pre-axial currents in axial societies was simply a matter of the utility of the states, or even of taste. In a hunter gather society communication with nature, plant teachers, spirits, etc is useful because food supply is uncertain and this communication is held to aid hunting. In the full blown urban societies of the axial age the food supply was far more assured, and it was produced in these settings through complex agricultural technologies over which humans have far more control. For these reasons, the axials simply had less use for somatic mysticism. But what they did have use for was more complex metaphysics: their self-sufficiency created free time – whole days and weeks at a time for the higher classes – to sit around and ponder ultimate questions (an interest compounded by the birth and circulation of written philosophy). For this reason both luminous and etheric mysticism, whose images and representations address ultimate concerns – the Ishtadeva, the Self, Nu, Sat-chit-ananda, En Sof, Godhead, etc - all disclose themes relating to the ultimate existential and cosmic concerns of creation, causation and ontology, and contemplation of these things were now in vogue in the relative luxury environment of the axial world. The hunter gatherers may have had an interest in these things, but they would have had more of an interest in finding food on a daily basis – and in this endeavour somatic states were a help. (We might object that for most of the Mesolithic and Neolithic we have been at an agricultural level - but these pre-axial societies lacked writing, and you can’t develop very complex metaphysics without it. When writing appeared, we quickly start to get the Egyptian Nu (the etheric ground of being), Ishtadeva images, and early monotheism.) Mysticism reflects the utilities, the interests, and the fashions of society, and the tracks of the horizon model selected for cultivation by specific cultures are thus influenced.
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Dale, E.J. The Horizon Model Continued: Incorporating the Somatic Mysticism of Pre-history, and Some Further Theoretical Issues. SOPHIA 49, 393–406 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-010-0197-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-010-0197-1