A Meta-Narrative of Spiritual Awakening
(excerpts from Christopher Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind).
The metanarrative of spiritual awakening must be broadened. Transpersonal thinkers must extend their analysis beyond individual persons and begin to address the larger systems that persons are part of. We must learn to think in terms of the encompassing patterns that emerge in transpersonal experience itself. We must find our way to a new vocabulary that allows us to describe the dynamic of spiritual awakening from the perspective of the unified reality that is awakening, while note losing sight of the individual. To address the issue of karma and the species-mind is, I hope, one step in this process.
Karma is the generic name given to the conditioning of our mind-stream, and I propose that we distinguish between the temporal and spatial aspects of this conditioning. For this purpose, let us think of ourselves as existing at the intersection of time and space, conditioned by forces that reach us through both these dimensions. Thought completely integrated in reality, they can be isolated conceptually in order to articulate more precisely our inner experience. Thus I will speak of the temporal and spatial vectors of our mind, by which I mean the temporal and spatial conditioning of our mindstream. "Mindstream" is itself a metaphor that reflects a bias toward the temporal vector, for the term emphasizes movement in time. The term "mindfield" might be a more suitable metaphor for the spatial vector as it suggests omnidirectional spatial extension.
I believe that most transpersonally informed persons today are reasonably familiar with the workings of the temporal vector of mind. Because of the growing acceptance of Eastern thought, many of us have grown accustomed to thinking of ourselves as life forms that exist across enormous tracts of time. Indeed, what most people mean by "karma" is precisely the conditioning that reaches us through the vector of time.
But there is a second mode of karmic conditioning that reaches us not through time but through space. To see it we need to look not "vertically" through time, but "horizontally" through space, at life as it is spread out around us. As we turn in this direction, we begin to recognize that our minds are part of an extended web or field of consciousness composed of all the beings who are simultaneously sharing this present moment. Less recognized than temporal karma, the karmic conditioning that reaches us through this spatial vector is just as real and just as important to understanding the human condition.
Another way to make the distinction between temporal and spatial karma is to say that the concept of the soul that often accompanies reincarnation theory, especially in popular thought, heals the fragmentation created by time but perpetuates the fragmentation created by space. With the concept of rebirth [or persistence of the soul] our sense of identity is enormously expanded in time, with our egoic identity yielding to an encompassing soul-identity that integrates all our incarnations. If we stop here, however, we will not have escaped the conditioning of spacetime. We will simply have taken the experience of spatial discreteness into transpersonal theory and created the myth of the individual soul, a temporally extended but spatially constricted reality. We will still be caught in the astral mirror that is simply reflecting back to us the spatial dualism of physical existence.
The Temporal Vector:
Whatever position we take toward future lives, as we open to the temporal depth of our being, we cannot help but become more sensitive to the paradoxical both/and quality of our present condition. We are both our present incarnation and, in a less obvious but just as real sense, we are also the former lives that have given this life its shape and content. We are who our body and personal history tell us we are, and yet we are also more, because the significance of this body and its history only comes into view when we place it in the larger context of our extended existence. Our sense of identity thus stretches to include both these aspects of our being. our present form emerges out of the karmic momentum of our mindstream, which defines the challenges our life was designed to embody and which will receive our efforts when we are finished with this life.
Because of the both/and nature of our being, dialogue is the fundamental rhythm of our inner life. The more conscious we become of our historical depth, the more we begin to recognize that there is a subtle inner dialogue constantly taking place within us. This dialogue is the breathing in and breathing out of soul, a continuous trafficking between our present awareness and the historical depth of our being.
The more keenly we discern the depth of history behind our every thought, the more paradoxical becomes our immediate condition. Our distant past impinges continuously on our present. The less conscious we are of its influence, the more it tends to structure our awareness automatically. Conversely, the more conscious we are of it, the more a sense of dialogue replaces linear conditioning, opening the way to the exercise of greater freedom in the present. Dialogue encourages communication, differentiation, integration, and greater freedom of choice. Attending carefully to our stream of consciousness sets in motion a process that slowly frees us from blindly repeating the patterns of the past.
In general, then, learning to live consciously in a reincarnating universe involves opening to a multitiered sense of identity that develops into a temporally expanded sense of self. The words "I" and "my" begin to take on an expanded temporal reference as we stretch language to describe the multiple levels found to be operating within our moment to moment experience. Careful distinctions between the present personality and the temporally encompassing soul-identity allow us to articulate inner processes so subtle as to usually escape detection. All the while our sense of identity is becoming increasingly porous. It does not become mushy or lose its shape, but rather is experienced as a transparent reality in continuous exchange with a larger field of awareness created by previous life experiences. As our sensitivity to this exchange increases, our basic sense of identity shifts, becoming progressively deeper. While the danger of ego-inflation is always present, the ego claiming more and more experiences as its own, this is transpersonal pathology pure and simple. When contract with one's deeper path is healthily integrated, the ego is deflated, not inflated, because things that we had initially thought of as being "me" are now recognized as being merely a karmic inheritance. As with inherited money, it would be foolish to mistake our inherited traits as personal accomplishments, however much we are entitled to enjoy them. Rather than grow larger, our sense of self becomes "lighter."
In this way, reincarnation deepens our sense of identity by shattering the temporal boundaries of the self, and yet there is a distinct narrowness to this self. In this model, one's karmic lineage is the trajectory of a single entity moving in and out of time. If there were a dozen people in a room, there would be twelve distinct lineages present, perhaps intersecting at different points in history but always representing the evolutionary development of twelve separate beings. The concept of rebirth opens us to our historical depth, but to the extent that the reincarnating soul remains a solitary individual, it remains inevitably a small thing. However hoary with age the soul may be, it is a cell devoid of a larger organ.
The Spatial Vector:
Thus we make the transition to the spatial vector, but this transition has not been easy for me personally to make. The habits of atomistic thinking were so deeply ingrained in me that when I first tried to describe the spatial vector of karma, I found it difficult even to say the words. It kept feeling as though I were speaking either heresy or sheer confusion. As we let go and experientially open to the spatial breadth of our being, a breadth that includes everything that we see around us, it feels like we are shattering out last piece of privacy. It is one thing to open to time which we can't see, but another thing entirely to open to the full complexity of space which we can see. At least the concepts of reincarnation and personal karma allow us the privacy of individual progress. If we open to the whole of humanity, it initially seems that we will lose ourselves entirely in the developmental currents of our species.
And yet something like this surrender is demanded by the collective experiences that regularly emerge in [non-ordinary] states. Long before it is extinguished in Causal Oneness, the ontologically separate self is challenged by being repeatedly immersed in many permutations of collective awareness … . What needs to be emphasized here is that these collective or transpatial experiences are not simply temporary states but rather are profound encounters with the being one always is. These glimpses awaken us to the larger being we are at this and every moment. After the shock wears off that contact with such collective fields or awareness is possible, the greater shock settles in as we realize that this contract is taking place continuously beneath our conscious awareness. The interlaced quality of our existence may move in and out of our attention, but it never ceases for a moment to be our functioning reality.
We can begin our exploration of the spatial dimension of karma by expanding the earlier picture of the temporal vector. Now the vertical line of time is intersected by the horizontal line of space. The dots of our past and future lives are now complemented by dots representing other members of our species, sharing the present moment (and by extension other life forms as well). The lines of causal influence that enter our present awareness through time are now complemented by lines of influence that reach us through space, from the human species as a whole and from specific subgroups to which we are particularly connected. When one's present awareness is penetrated deeply in [non-ordinary] states, both these vectors of influence eventually come into view and are seen to contribute to our moment-to-moment awareness. Similarly, by reversing these arrows, we can represent the continuous flow of the karmic effects of our individual decision-making back into these fields.
The same both/and quality that we saw operating in the temporal vector of mind also characterizes the spatial vector. The same dialectic, the same intimate and subtle dialogue between our present consciousness and a deeper subjective ground emerges. now, however, the dialogue is taking place not between the individual and his or her former lives but between the individual and the species. The expansion of one's sense of identity beyond egoic time into deep time repeats itself in the expansion of one's sense of identity beyond egoic space into deep space of the species-mind. As we come to recognize the subtle patterns of interaction constantly taking place between ourselves and our kind, our sense of self again becomes more porous, but in a different direction. Our individuality does not become mushy, but rather transparent to the vast and subtle field of the species-[body]-mind, and what lies beyond the species [body]-mind. And of course, this does not stop with our species, but extends to include the entire cosmological life process and all the life forms it has birthed.
It is not just experiencing the species-mind from many different angles that forces one to redraw the boundaries of one's identity, but experiencing the detail of one's placement in that mind and the precise and subtle ways that one's individual life reflects this larger field. The conventional exposition of karma emphasizes individual agency exercised over time. It stresses the fact that our present form emerges causally our of our deep past and that we alone are responsible for our condition. By emphasizing the temporal vector and individual agency, however, this account leaves out of the picture and equally important facet of karma, namely, that our individual choices take place within and reflect the general condition of the species-mind as well.
Our choices derive from and feed back into not only our individual soul's evolutionary trajectory, but the evolutionary trajectory of our species via Shedrake's principle of formative causation. The evolution of the individual is part and parcel of the evolution of the group and cannot be meaningfully isolated from it. Though we can appreciate the pastoral intent of spiritual traditions that emphasize individual responsibility and the refining fo individual capacity over time, we must also recognize the imbalance created by any presentation of cause and effect that diminishes the lateral web of causal relationships that weave all of us into an integrated whole. A more rounded discussion of karma will seek to remove this imbalance by emphasizing the intimate participation of the species in the life of the individual, and the individual in the life of the species.
The karmic challenges we face and the blessings we inherit can be described from within both the temporal and spatial frames of reference, for these two perspectives are complementary. If described within the temporal frame of reference, the story of karma is one in which the individual inherits and advances the derivatives of choices made in his or her previous lifetimes. If described within the spatial frame of reference, however, the story becomes the story of the individual inheriting and advancing the derivatives of his or her species' previous choices. Viewed from this perspective, the individual appears to be a distillation of collective karmic currents. this is not an either/or choice, for both these perspectives are true. The collective norms of the group become the karmic context of our individual decision-making. The species-mind is the matrix within which our individualized agendas unfold. As karmic cause and effect crystallize in our lives, therefore, it can be as seen as being both individual and collective, as simultaneously reflecting both the temporal and spatial dimensions of mind. Similarly, our responses to our karmic challenges generate an energy which flows into both vectors, echoing through time and space, affecting both our individual future and the future of our species.
