SPIRITUALITY FROM A MALE PERSPECTIVE
by Jan Van de Wetering

Growing up between two cultures that were at war with each other was for me an extremely confusing experience. Even though we lived in Holland during WW II, German was spoken at home. My father was Dutch, an atheist who believed that Hitler was the saviour of Europe. My German mother on the contrary was quite spiritually inclined and she deeply mistrusted the Nazis. During this whole period nameless dread and anger filled the air. My Dutch relatives talked about the Germans as if they were monsters, those same Germans that I knew as my aunts and uncles and experienced as warm, caring and generous people. So, at the age of 7 or 8, when I should have been bonding to my culture, I knew all about cultural relativity, and felt like a stranger in a strange land in my native country. If only all those adults could agree on something that made sense. My distress at the unreason around me kept mounting until, at age 14, I decided, off hand, what I was going to do with the rest of my life; I was going to discover the Truth.
It took 23 years of searching until a satisfying answer finally found me in the form of a series of mystical experiences. The answer to my question:"What is Truth" was not an answer at all, it was an internal experience that permanently and profoundly shaped my perception of reality. In the mystical reality the very question :"What is Truth" was, as a matter of fact, meaningless.
In that reality, the intellect and language, which are built on foundations of separation, comparison, space and time, are virtually useless, because the reality perceived is an eternal and infinite seamless unity of all that is. The seamless unity is probably the most difficult aspect of the experience to describe. You are everything and everything is you, except there is not really any you nor any everything... No wonder mystics are dismissed by many as fuzzy thinkers. The other two aspects might seem a little more comprehensible, or so it appeared to me. Eternity was experienced not as an infinite amount of time, but as no time at all. It was an eternal now, a relaxed sort of waiting without anticipation .
Infinity was being at the same time as large as the universe and yet as small as a grain of sand on a beach, an analogy that also describes how I felt as an individual.
I had my first mystical experience on my way down from Burnaby mountain near Vancouver. I was returning home from my third year studies in biology at SFU. A few months earlier, on my way up, I had asked myself what I had learned during my studies since I obviously had not learned much about life. Nine times out of ten when I studied an organism, it was dead. After some reflection I decided that what I had learned most of all , was how to think like a biologist,` and to think like a biologist was to be totally immersed in philosophical materialism. For the sake of my studies I was quite eager to keep on thinking that way. So here I was, a mystical materialist, a paradoxical state, yet one that felt quite appropriate in spite of the fact that the mystical reality and the materialistic one are quite incompatible.
One of the first lectures I attended when beginning my biology studies was on why ESP is impossible. Using telepathy as a model, the argument went as follows . When I have a thought, my brain puts out a few millivolts of energy. The strength of any kind of radiation diminishes with the square of the distance, hence it does not take much of a distance for there to be no signal left that can be received. How the man filled a whole hour of lecture with so simple an argument, I don't remember, but I do recall that I felt very uneasy listening to it. Three years later, after my mystical experience, I had no more problems with it at all and would have cheerfully given the lecture myself. By then it had become clear that the problem lay in the fact that the lecturer had not demonstrated the argument he had set out to prove. Just because something does not fit into our paradigm does not mean that it does not exist, it simply shows that our paradigm leaves something to be desired. What makes this difficult to live with is that when one wholeheartedly believes in a paradigm (in the case of materialism that belief even has a name, it is called scientism) everything that does not fit that paradigm is either filtered out of our awareness or, when that fails, is denied or reasoned away or in any other way made to disappear: a paradigm must be logically consistent for most people.
One of the strong tendencies in civilisation is to search for the one paradigm that will account for all of reality, a kind of Unified Field Theory. The mystical experience provides a strong antidote for that compulsion. One is confronted by a reality that far transcends human reason and logic. It makes one aware of the fact that any mental model of the universe is only that, a model. These models have about the same relationship to reality that a plastic scale model of an aircraft carrier has to the real thing. It looks about the same from a certain perspective but comes nowhere near representing the total enormous complexity of what it models.
That does not however limit the usefulness of models. Although I do not believe that philosophical materialism provides an accurate picture of how our universe operates, it has served science well and is perfectly adequate for most of my needs. I should add that I consider science the greatest achievement of the human mind.
Still, materialism has severe limits. For instance, it cannot contain psychic phenomena. These phenomena are however a logical necessity in the mystical paradigm. If we are all a part of this seamless unity, the "Ground of Being" as I call it, than we should be able to share each others thoughts. Since there is no space in that reality, it should not make any difference how far apart we are when we do so and timelessness requires that it should not matter whether I receive those thoughts from the past, the present or the future. In my experience all those variables hold true.
Being in the mystical consciousness is not very practical on a long term basis. One tends to be somewhat distracted. Crossing a busy street for instance becomes rather problematical. What I would suggest instead is to cultivate the ability to move back and forth between paradigms depending on the needs of the moment. (I first came across this idea in a book by L. Leshan appropriately entitled "Alternate realities".) In the mystical state I am not only at one with everything, I am unable to perceive any evil, and whatever happens is appropriate. These perceptions of reality that are most dysfunctional when crossing a busy street are very appropriate for engaging in psychic healing. Let us add that these two realities, or paradigms, are not the only ones available to our experience.
There are for instance more aggressive paradigms that also work when doing psychic healing. I recently attended a workshop given by a healer from New Zealand who introduced us to a specific scenario that had become a paradigm unto itself. He demonstrated it simply by miming an epic struggle with the negative energy in his patients. He would scrape together the negativity with the edge of his hands, then scoop it up and dump it in the corner of the room, or yank at knots, which after a long physical struggle he would finally manage to pull out of the patients body. He claimed he could teach this to anybody in 3 hours and proceeded to do just that. The paradigm he used was easy to understand through watching him act it out graphically, and just as easy to learn through mimicking his performance.
There are an infinite number of paradigms that work in some way or other and I think "work" is the operative word here. We all know fairly well how materialism works. Aided by cause and effect thinking we decide how to manipulate physical matter to achieve our ends. By contrast, in the mystical reality we can mentally affect the physical world directly with our minds. In these processes, the kind of images and metaphors and story lines we use to describe to ourselves what we perceive do matter. I was once asked by someone who was a very effective psychic healer, why he would acquire the physical symptoms of his patients and become ravenously hungry as well as so depleted of energy after working on someone that he had to throw himself on his front lawn to recharge himself from the grass there. It was, from his description, easy to see what he was doing wrong. In the paradigm he was using when he healed, he would identify with the patient and see himself as the source of the healing energy he directed toward them. All he had to do instead, to correct the situation, was to think of himself as a conduit for universal energy which he could then channel into the patient (a process taught to any beginner in the Reiki healing tradition for instance). His healing energy then would in future be inexhaustible.
This overview of paradigms and their uses leads me into spirituality, which I would define as follows:
"Spirituality is the skill of entering different paradigms at will, to move from one to the other as required by circumstances, to transcend them all and to move into a larger reality of which they form a part"
For this purpose many techniques have evolved over the millennia, from meditation, guided imagery and the use of drugs to dancing, drumming, chanting, whirling around and other forms of ritual. Many of these techniques produce altered states of consciousness in which the universe and our relationship to it may be perceived differently from our normal waking consciousness. But why bother?
As Muktananda states in his book "Meditate", "everything we do, we do for the sake of happiness" ; we engage in spiritual pursuits for the same reason. Spirituality allows us to function more fully, to use more of our potential in our daily life. After my mystical experience all sorts of new behaviours started to arise.
I often felt a need to dance to digest my experiences, or to go into yoga like positions to tone the body and I developed a very much heightened sense of humour. For many months I went through my mind very much like cleaning up an attic. I would look at all the ideas, questions and conundrums I had accumulated over the years, consider them and throw them out as nonsense or retain them as useful.
Most of those urges faded after a while. But to this day I have retained a desire to heal people by laying on my hands whenever they hurt.(In the meantime I have acquired a certificate from my Reiki master as proof that I can do it, "Render unto Caesar"....you know.)
One thing I did very much enjoy was to go into ecstasy. Every night after work, as soon as I left the office, I would enter into a state in which everything I saw was imbued with an almost painful beauty. I would wander through the city in this state of ecstasy for a couple of hours, snap out of it and go home for dinner. After a week of this I was so exhausted that I could barely get out of bed. There obviously was a downside to this pleasure.
In his book "The Natural Mind" , Andrew Weil points out that it is natural for us to want to enter altered states of consciousness and that we do not need drugs to do so. Once we have experienced a particular condition or state, all we do need, in my experience, is a precise memory of exactly what it feels like to be in that state to be able to reenter it at a later date. Years after my first ecstasy experience, I related it to a friend who was a NLP trainer. He asked me to describe exactly what it had felt like. When I told him about the scratchy/ticklish feeling in my third eye, he touched me quickly on my forehead; as I mentioned the feelings of pressure at the bottom of my breastbone he anchored that that feeling by touching me there. He than diverted my attention and quickly tapped me on both places at the same time, I instantly snapped into ecstasy, to immediately snap out of it again. What I had neglected to tell him was that the last time I had entered that state, triggered this time by sensations of water on my skin, I was with a friend who became terrified because she was convinced I had an epileptic fit. At that point I vowed never to enter that state in front of another person again. Our spiritual experiences are just as embodied as other experiences. Our bodies remember and can be our teachers. Learning new ways is much easier in a group, not only because ones internal processes are validated by others, but also because entrainment (that is, a shared resonance with the experiences of other persons near by) makes them much easier to perceive.
Spiritually-skilled people are no more free from greed and one-upmanship than anyone else; if anything, a lot of them are worse. Spirituality lends itself to absurd economic and political manipulations. It is easy to make spiritual matters sound serious, unique, difficult or holy, thereby putting unnecessary barriers in the seeker's path. Yet we know that the best attitude for spiritual growth is one of playfulness, a sense of exploration and what I would describe as a willingness to feel uninhibited about faking it. The most important skill to cultivate is an awareness of our own internal processes. This skill is explicitly stressed by a wide number of very distinct traditions (from Buddhism to Alaskan Indian traditions to 'Kung Bushmen, among others). To observe, in the present, without judgment or rationalisations what is happening inside us as far as physical feelings, interaction of body and emotions, thought processes etc. are concerned., is a key to spiritual endeavors. A look at what such great teachers as Gurdjyeff and Krishnamurti taught confirms this.
Even though spirituality, as such, transcends gender, we have to recognize that its concrete expressions are intertwined with gender: Self-awareness implies full awareness of one's body, as does the expansion of one's sensorium. Sexuality permeates our modes of relating to the world and to others. In particular, spirituality cannot avoid being modified by the differences in reproductive strategies between the sexes.
In our quest to sort out the gender differences from a spiritual perspective, two main variables to be examined are biology and socialisation or acculturation.
Acculturation appears to be, by far, the most powerful force acting on our behaviour, but I would defy anyone to be present at a natural childbirth with its aftermath of mother-child bonding and maintain that our biology has no effect at all..
The step from a hunter-gatherer tribal way of life to an agrarian-civilized existence is a profound one in many ways; it certainly affects our spirituality. In tribal societies spirituality is not centralized, codified and formalized into religion. Spirituality remains very much an individual and interpersonal affair. The tribal community values self-sufficiency over conformity, and spiritual development implies there, as it still does for us, accepting one's uniqueness and one's whole self. Spirituality is then put in the service of the community, in the form of shamanic practices for instance.
St. Thomas put the mores of our civilised society in perspective when he came to the conclusion that spirituality was for the soul only, an endeavor in which mind and body had no place. In such a context, women are barred from a leading role, both because they cannot deny their biological nature, and because they constantly remind us of how much our biology affects us. From a woman's point of view, this rediscovery, most obvious in the whole mothering cycle, can be quite forceful. As a friend, who had just become the mother of twins recently remarked :"I would have never thought I could kill someone, but now, if anyone were to hurt my baby, I am not so sure." One important aspect of the child bearing and rearing cycle is the female necessity to adapt to changes. Or as an old Athapascan women once said to my wife :"Women can be reborn every month; every blood, every moon, they can change. Poor men don't have that. They're stuck with themselves. To change, they have to really try hard. Men change hard way". To reclaim our spirituality, we have to reclaim our individuality all the way to our bodies and to the rhythms of change.
In reviewing what I had learned from my mystical experience.I always ended at the same place. Even though we are much more than a creature, creaturehood or more precisely incarnation as a human being in a "spacetime" universe is what it is all about. I do not for a moment agree with St. Thomas that spirituality is for the soul only, the body-mind is the scene of action.
Spirituality is not given to us to avoid or escape space-time but on the contrary to function more fully in it. Space-time, like any game, has limiting rules that make an internally consistent set of behaviours possible. It, like any form of play, allows us to explore new behaviours. What the rules of space-time allow us to explore, precisely because they require space and time, are such things as growth and evolution or, as these things express themselves in man, intent and choice.
I sat in the grey, dingy drafting office of a large consulting firm, waiting to be laid off for the first time in my life. I was 25. It seemed at the time the ultimate rejection to a young man from Holland where one had a job for life. Over the years the world had become more and more grey, the technicolor daydreams of childhood had been left behind somewhere along the way, all my thoughts were now in words only. While waiting, I idly wondered what the world would look like if I could once again see its true colour. Suddenly the room was filled with a riot of luminous colours. Objects appeared as if translucent, lit up from inside by a gentle light. I was enthralled and for ever after have never seen the world as grey again. I do often forget just how beautiful it can be, but then all I have to do is to pay attention to it again in a nonjudgemental, receptive way.
That incident I consider the first breakthrough on my spiritual journey. It also is to me the perfect example of what our enculturation does to us. It teaches us how to stop paying attention to our body and senses, takes the intellect, which is only one of many tools for apprehending the world and elevates it to the position of being the only important one.
Many techniques have been evolved to get in touch with the body and expand our use of the sensorium. Those in themselves promote the nonrational use of the mind. Jean Houston teaches a large variety in her workshops and in books such as "Listening to the Body" "Mindgames" and "The Possible Human". If you want to learn about trance states and the sense of timelessness, Robert Monroe's audio tapes are unique, and L.G. Fehmi's "Open Focus" exercises can easily be adapted to have you experience the seamless unity of the mystical experience. I would emphasize these techniques especially for men because, unlike the women, we are not naturally endowed with a physiology that regularly confronts us with an opportunity for change.
Our manhood also predisposes us to flexibility in social situations, exploratory behaviour, and a predilection for adventure, all attributes that can help us on our journey and which played an important role in my own search. My own quest has included joining many different groups and communities, trying all sorts of different techniques and lifestyles and exploring different paradigms. Aggressiveness plays a role at the beginning of our maturation. Still, I was never able to appreciate the books of Castanada. A spirituality based on aggressiveness and power, the spiritual warrior model, arrived a bit late on the scene for me. Personally I am much more attracted to a spirituality of exploration as described by Serge Kahili King.
Reflecting on the new behaviours after the mystical experience and the spiritual technologies accumulated by our culture as mentioned earlier, it soon becomes obvious that they are physiological-sensorial in nature. Our gender has an effect on how we approach spirituality, but it is not, in itself, of overriding importance. It is not a norm but a tool. Gender really only becomes an issue as we relate to each other with all we are. One of its most powerful manifestations is falling in love. Spirituality is about our relationship to all that comprises our universe, it is about learning to fall in love with that universe.