3 Spirit Problem Workbook (The Second Lighthouse, 2023)

Opening Statement

I came to believe that there were three fundamental functions of infinity or eternity, all of which are trans-psychological, or if their entry is in the psyche, their end takes us elsewhere. I saw that the purpose of the traditions I have typified as belonging to Law, Void, and Creation had the simple purpose of teaching us that these functions are in fact infinite. The purpose of all the practices and beliefs of Law was to develop the understanding that conscience is infinite; of Void that consciousness is infinite; of Creation that imagination is infinite.

When I considered this I often wondered that the great spiritual teachers did not teach this and I am puzzled. Certainly I do not believe myself to be a greater authority than Confucius or Michelangelo or the Buddha. So either they saw it and they saw through it, or it wasn’t for them to see.

This wouldn’t be concerning if the great teachers of every variety of verity had an accord, but it seems instead that they bored like oil miners into the depths of their own infinity, without much concern about alternate infinites. This is not to say there may not be similarities and a peace at the end, but one wonders why the masters didn’t say “and this isn’t all of the truth, go to that fellow if you like his angle” if they knew that it was not. And ultimately on the road to our own precise relationship with spirit we will find that, rather than these practices and teachings creating simple harmonies, they often conflict: crashing with the counterforce of tides in a tremendous storm, or like in sleep when one dream blinks out of existence to be supplanted by another.

And ultimately, I suppose, what I contend is this. Any person who has experienced, firsthand and fully, the truth at the center of each of these practices, who has been kissed by Law and conscience, Void and consciousness, Creation and imagination—will forever recognize that the history of spirituality has been schizoid despite its best beauty. That person will then be confronted with the three spirit problem, or how to find what the process or pattern is of these three forms constantly in motion.

The three spirit problem brings a great deal of agony and destroys a practitioner’s spiritual innocence. That is the purpose of this self-help book.

THE WORK OF THE WORKBOOK

Flow within each section:

Practice, practicing no-practice, realization
Practicing no-practice, realization, practice
Realization, practice, practicing no-practice

Mental tools that create reality:

Faith (“higher power” creation)
Memento Mori (what is most important creation)
Existential Choice (Radical freedom creation, free will creation (creation of a gap between self and all personal history))

3 Practices:

Volunteering/”selfless” community participation
Meditation
Art/Creative practice

Notebook Sections (found in workbook):

Checking in on progress/goals, virtues, gratefulness, etc.
“Carl Rogers” self-diary dialogue,” mindfulness, retrospective emotion tracking.
Dream journal, pages to draw dreams on, fantasy notebook.

Possible Themes/Subjects:

Virtues, philosophy/meaning-building, selfless love, routine, moral-social obligation, practice/discipline, relation to conflict: to side with one principle
Imperfection/brokenness of world, personality fixation & freedom of essence, importance of going into desert (leaving structures, rules, and supports behind), importance of doing nothing/learning nothing, relation to conflict: to compromise
Seizing desire, belief that anything is possible, the infinite imagination, sexuality, letting yourself go crazy & abandoning stability, there is no method, confronting anxiety of authentic, non-replicable creation more important than practicing, your daemon/fate, laughter/absurdity, relation to conflict: to have both sides/have it all

The Motion of Spirit (The Three Phases)

Let me begin in the way of motion, by announcing what’s been most novel and poignant to my soul lately: not all gold in life is spiritual. It’s difficult to chart the exact meaning of that, but let it suffice to say that sometimes we tend towards what is eternal, perfect, and unaffectable, and other times we want mcdonalds and sex.

I begin this essay on modes of spirit with that proviso, so that it may be clear that what I will purport to be the three major and valid orders of spirituality, I do not also take to be the three modes of living well, or living with gusto, or living at all.

I believe it was Richard St. Victor who wrote “Watch the motions of earthly creatures to understand how the mind functions. To understand the spirit, study the birds.” It is characteristic of anyone entering into, or caught in the tide of a spiritual epiphany, that they describe it as instant transformation, transportative motion. I would build this interpretation a wide frame: all of our problems and psychic maladies have the one meaning of “stuckness” (it was no accident that Dante imagined hell’s lowest layer as a frozen lake), and all healing begins in spirit and the wafting movement of its wings.

To some significant and insane extent a person must say goodbye to their old instinct to control pain, pleasure, and the world. Arguably this is why, and precisely when, life gains meaning as a process. For as soon as a person has lived two lives in one; has died and been remade; then the vice-grip of identity relaxes forever in an open palm. The purpose of this essay is to hypothesize a predictable, seasonal cycle of three spiritual phases. Somehow neurotics and those who have not entered the world of spirit can never lucidly perceive the notion of spiritual seasons. They remain stuck or frozen or fixated in some node of the cycle, refusing to let the year move on, like a farmer who insists on planting tomatoes all year.

What I believe is truly novel in my approach to the field of spirituality is to include, front and center, these three major phases, tones, archetypes to how spirituality is approached. Art is not given dubious credit as a moral device or aid to non-duality. Meditation is not primarily considered a support for benevolent action or a loosener for creativity, though it may certainly be those things. Virtuous morality is not considered a boon towards escaping the wheel of karma, nor a means of acquiring artistic diligence.

Another novelty is the focus on process. These three phases are considered to be regularly cycling occurrences. You are not, for example, an “INTJ”, but a person confronted with autonomously shifting internal demands and themes, very much like the outer seasons.

These three major portions of spirit are given their due validity. Noting them, like dividing anything abstractly, helps us to crisply see the total field where before we daydreamed a blur. Naturally not all traditions or figures will precisely fit the gesture of each phase, but their comprehensiveness may startle you, the longer you dwell on them. The result, hopefully, will be the willingness to move on.

Unfortunately, as much as I’ve poured over and adored the prophecy of these phases, at the end I confess it appears the most I can offer is a simple description of what happens; I have experimented, like a fool in a cap, with trying to move the great wheel forward, living in accordance with the next phase; but all that brought was anxious sorrow. It seems we can gain comfort, and perspective, from the calculation of the stars, but their course is not for us to muck with and alter. The real wisdom becomes the willingness to live where we are in time. Staying with the exact day of the calendar is damningly the quickest way to reach the new year. It is important to realize that these cycles of Law and Void and Creation really are beyond us in a metaphysically external sense. We’ve got to check the weather to dress for each day. It does us no good to say “winter is cold, summer is warm, and fall is inbetween” for then we line ourselves up to be miserable right through many charmingly warm winter days and cool summer ones. And it does us less good to say “I know spring is next in the lineup, perhaps if I wear a sundress and a gardening hat I can make winter stop sooner.” Or as recovery knowledge has it:“God moves much slower than us.”

Despite the general futility, one decent way of utilizing this knowledge may be to see our life as Three Tasks. These are meta-meanings to living, none of which can quite conquer or colonize the others. We can see these tasks demarked in the “ethic” section above: to pursue Goodness, Awakening, and Revelation. For some mysterious reason which we won’t attempt to wrestle down here, these urges rarely synthesize all at once in an individual, and the rare instances when they do go by the name of grace.

But in the world of entrapment we get locked into these particular ethics and then they get a stranglehold on us. We become so sure that helping others is what life is about that we forget how to accept the suffering of our friends simply as a truth and not a wound to bandage, or we get so preoccupied with the groundbreaking aspects of our guitar technique that we lose sight of whether our music will ever be enjoyed by a real person. In those moments of frozen patterns, we might draw back, shoot into space, and observe the map again. Law, Void, Creation. Goodness, Awakening, Revelation.

A deep logic has embedded itself in this cycle, like the knowledge bundled in an acorn. More magic than we might think happens just at that moment when we turn from our preferred rut of an ethic, and staring over and up at the other great tasks, feel the pain of how stale or snakish or downright repressed we’ve been. Very commonly issues of therapy or guidance come down to just such a resistance to a seasonal shift, an incredible blindness to some major third, or two thirds of what life is about.

Once a seeker has given up each idol and adopted the next with heartfelt devotion, only to have it ruined and to come back to the first, it may be said that ideological innocence leaves them. They have seen, more or less, the complete circuit of wisdom. No one will come along and tell them something wiser or new. The real task looms then, of depth rather than truth, or a river rather than a rock.

-Law-

-1:3 Clever talk and a pretentious manner are seldom found in the good.

-1:6 A man’s duty is to behave well…to be cautious in giving promises and punctual in keeping them, to have kindly feelings towards everyone, but seek friendship with the good. If, when all that is done, he has energy to spare, then let him study the arts.

-I have passed whole days without food for the sake of my meditation, and in this there was no real use. It would have been better to have studied something in particular.

The first phase of spirit is named Law, because, under its sway, the sense is clearest that a heavenly or divine order exists, that there is right and wrong, that a god or force can be petitioned or caused (as with Karma) to lend outside aid, and a code exists for action.

One important truth of Law that gets little glowing review in most contemporary spiritual texts is the theory of divine dualism, or the theory that God and the heavenly forces are separate from us; possible to be in relation to but not to be. This theory seems to offend people because, as it goes, dualism cuts us off from the divine, and denies the true oneness of everything. Judgment from on high and perfectionism seems to enter and poison the picture. Now, as I’ll argue in the course of this chapter, this is due to the fact that most contemporary spiritual texts have a distinct preference or frozenness in the second spiritual phase of Void, with a distinct second preference for Creation, and almost no love left over for Law. Because it’s a sore spot, let’s take a bit of time to talk about it.

The matter revolves around: is it or is it not a part of our experience that we have a conscious ego that is distinct from what is beyond? The point here is that it doesn’t matter if you prefer to think of God as a force within you or a force outside you—that force is beyond your conscious control and self. It is flying outside and you are staying in. I mean to say this is an accurate, valid, and numinous experience (exactly as numinous as finding that divinity and you are one) and that attempts to deny this come, ironically, from an egoic attachment to some pet theory about unity. The late mystic-songwriter Leonard Cohen wrote this clever line: “Now the name has no number / Not even the one”. Non-dualism really has a warm love affair with dualism, for in the final count they are not distinct sums.

SELF DYNAMIC: Ego Reaching Out

In law, the ego reaches out, hoping that help will come in from without, that order will transfer from the outside in. From the stance of self, the self asks to be aided, possessed, transformed by what it sees as holy and beyond it. This can be felt in the earnest petitions of prayer. “Let me do thy will.” “Please give me the strength.” “Please send a sign.” “Let me do the right thing.” “Please move through me.” These are thoroughly opening, surrendering statements, as opposed to the caricatures of prayer often pilloried for their self-reinforcing, selfish motivations. The heart of prayer is the self offering up the self. Sometimes it is accepted and the vessel numinously filled. Sometimes not.

INNER STANCE: Submission

In Law we feel truly humble. We believe there are forces greater than us, figures and rules to guide us. Naturally the attitude we take is one of submission. We get to enter into the role of the good boy or good girl. We’re here to learn, and we don’t want to muck it up with our own confused opinions.

OUTER STANCE: Worship

PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTION: Superego

ETHIC: bad vs. good

ENTRY BLOCK: vices/pride

TRIGGER: spiritual confusion

ARCHETYPES: Philosopher/Saint/Sage

Systems/Traditions: Modernism, The written word (generally), Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), Confucianism, 12 Step Programs, Virtue Ethics, Moralism, Law Ethics

Works/Persons: The Analects, The philosophy of Herbert Fingarette, The philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, The philosophy of Mencius

-Void-

Self Dynamic: relaxing/dissolving the ego-divinity boundary

Inner Stance:

Outer Stance:

Psychological Function:

Ethic:

Entry Block:

Trigger:

Archetypes:

Systems/Traditions: Taoism, Buddhism, the works of Thomas Moore, Ecclesiastes, Song (generally)

Works/Persons: The paintings of Rembrandt, The songs of Leonard Cohen, The paintings of Van Gogh

-Creation-

Self Dynamic: divinity reaching in (like in Michelangelo’s Creation)