Driftwork

To a friend engaged in a spiritual turn…. What seems to be at the core of your relation to religion is the belief that religion is potentially a regime of Truth, which is another way of understanding the different spin, the religious experience you refer to below. My assumption is that the turn marks the argument that it is an extension to Badiou’s four regimes of truth; Science, Art, Love and Politics. This does not require that we accept the individual truths that emerge from these regimes but merely that we should accept the idea that these regimes are ones from which Truth emerges. But if religion is a truth regime what would it’s truths be ? How would we separate them from religions ideologies ?

I can see how this would not prioritize one type of religious practice over another and that the generic notion of religion, justified by its claim to be a Truth regime, does become an area of special study. The specific type of study that is being advocating is grounded through your references to the spiritual godfathers, ( Gurdjieff, Aldous
Huxley, Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Mircea Eliade,Joseph Campell, Carl Jung, Carlos Castenenda, and Robert Anton Wilson )all of whom claim and are granted some special status to religious and spiritual knowledge, within the argument. Whilst I do have great sympathy with the idea that these regimes of Truth need to be studied, the question is what kind of study ?

Obviously I’m not suggesting that Badiou is correct in his construction just that the force of your argument suggests that the justification is founded on the belief of an underlying ‘Truth’, but rather I’m trying to speak into a set of discourses that are outside of my normal framework. The work of the spiritual godfathers suggests a very different understanding of how to study religion, more idealistic and involved than is understandable. This is a very different concept than that which emerges from the study of Indo-European myth (aka “comparative indo-european religious studies” Dumezil) as ideological concepts, of what in the 1930s would have been called “peoples” (a term which is thankfully almost meaningless now). Within this latter line of thought and study there is little or no difference between the monotheistic religions and the myths of Indra and Varuna, and perhaps because from the latter perspective the work of the spiritual godfathers would be just another area of ideological study.

” … ethnobiology, neoshamanism and altered consciousness in the way that Terence McKenna, Daniel Pinchbeck and many others have talked about this, lays out the way for a radical shift inculture and consciousness…"(eric 9th of march)

The philosopher and polymath Raymond Tallis has carried out a great of work both philosophical and practical in the issues of life, death and consciousness, recently he tired as a professor of geriatric medicine specialising in the hot topic of clinical neuroscience. In addition to the philosophy, medical work he has also published some fiction and poetry. He writes in a dense and difficult way, the text sometimes wilfully getting in the way of the argument he making, or it may simply be that his writing on the mind and body displays a breadth and style that is just a little to specifc. It’s his latest text The Kingdom of Infinite Space that seems to reflect on Eric’s new address of conciousness. Because Tallis seems to be following in the spirit of Spinoza when he begins to answer “what can the Head do ?” for Tallis is exploring the Head. Not the Brain, but that part of the body we call the head. This is not then a book about consciousness but something more biological and less human specific. There is a chapter on consciousness but it is just that a chapter. In this book by philosopher and medical/neuroscientist professional such things as MRI/brain scans and neuroscience are thankfully absent, after all when MRI scans are appearing on popular TV series as evidence of institutional racism it’s time the technology is treated with a little more cynicism. The books subject is the whole of the Head and how this relates to identity. In the introduction Tallis makes an interesting anti-brain-worship case and argues against the claims that consciousness emerges as a consequence from the firing of nuerons, of course they do yet as we all know “Selves require bodies as well as brains, material environments as well as bodies, and societies as well as material environments…” Which is why the brain and consciousness does not explain that much about being. As you might expect Tallis who has previously written on The Hand and in I AM on first person is still intent on exploring what the body can do, and is probably best thought of as the descendent of analytical philosophy writes on a number of related areas of the head hearing, blushing, ears, and enjoyably for me on eating; he disagrees with those who treat hunger and eating as fundamentally a biological drive but there is always he argues a social aspect to eating that evolutionary thinkers make secondary to the primary drive. Tallis uses the work of Levi-Strauss to mark the difference between the raw and the cooked which is to mark the difference between nature and culture, and for Tallis it seems that difference is always already there.