We
live in an age characterised by a soul-less understanding of both
science and spirituality, by soul-less commercial calculation and
exploitation, by soul-less philosophies and soul-less thinking, by a
soul-less medicine, and even — most disastrously — by supposedly
therapeutic or scientific ‘psychologies’ which fail to acknowledge
the nature and reality of the soul or psyche, identifying it instead
with the mind or brain, with patterns of behaviour or bodily
processes. The new age mantra of ‘mind, body and spirit’ notably
leaves out the word ‘soul’. The word has become emptied of meaning,
treated as a term incapable of any rigorous definition or referring
to something intangible and insubstantial, something whose very
existence cannot be ‘proved’. The time has come to correct this
situation. The essence of my philosophy is the articulation of a
rigorous and precise new science of the soul – a science that
transcends all previous religious understandings of the soul as some
sort of disembodied spirit contained within the boundaries of our
bodies.
The first and most important principle of this new science is that
the soul is nothing intangible or ‘suprasensuous’. Instead it has
its own tangible and sensual qualities. I call these soul qualities
‘qualia’. When we speak of someone’s ‘warmth of soul’, that is
nothing intangible or ‘suprasensuous’, but a quality we sense
tangibly. Soul science embraces a whole range of soul qualities or
qualia. These include soul light and soul warmth, soul
colours and soul shapes, soul sounds and soul tones. Using these
terms of course, begs the question of what constitutes ‘soul’ as
such. The answer offered by my new soul science is that the essence
of soul is quite simply awareness – and that awareness as
such has its own innate sensual qualities, qualities that we sense
and may appropriately describe as soul qualities or psychical
qualia. A light or dark ‘mood’, for example, is a quality of
awareness with a sensed and sensual character of light or
darkness. What I call ‘the qualia revolution’ is the revolutionary
new scientific understanding of all the sensory qualities that we
are aware of in the world around us — qualities such as
shape, colour, sound, light and darkness, warmth and coolness,
heaviness and lightness etc. What is revolutionary is the
understanding that these sensory qualities are the manifestation of
something quite different but no less tangible — sensual qualities
of awareness. What we call the ‘soul’ is made up of these
sensual qualities of awareness or qualia. Our sensory world,
on the other hand, is the sensory manifestation of these soul
qualities. A colour for example, is the sensory manifestation of a
particular colouration of awareness, just as a sound tone – for
example the tone of someone’s voice — is the sensory manifestation
of a particular mood or tonality of awareness. Similarly, a sensory
shape or pattern is the manifestation of a shape or pattern of
awareness.
This fundamental distinction between soul qualities and
sensory qualities is a scientific revolution. Why? Because our
current understanding of ‘science’ is based on the idea that it is
founded on the evidence of our senses – and that reality consists
only of sensory phenomena and sensory qualities. This is an absurd
and indeed contradictory understanding of ‘science’ for three main
reasons. One reason is that the type of science that has developed
out of it, far from being based on the evidence of the senses,
cannot in fact explain a single sensory quality of the world
we perceive around us – the redness of a rose for example. Instead
it reduces all sensory qualities such as colours to
quantities such as measurable wavelengths of light. The second
reason is that this understanding of science ignores what is most
tangible and meaningful to us in our everyday experience of the
world. That is not sensory qualities but soul qualities. When we
feel our souls touched by the colours of a sunset, it is these soul
qualities manifest in these colours that give meaning to our sensory
experience of them. This brings us to the third reason why the
concept of qualia or soul qualities is a scientific revolution.
Science is an attempt to make sense of the world. Within our
current understanding of science, ‘making sense’ of the world means
giving a rational account or explanation of it. But giving a
rational account of something through a scientific explanation does
not make that thing meaningful to us. That is why science can give
no answer to questions related to the ‘meaning of life’ and of our
everyday experience of the world. But the very idea that we need
science (or religion, or psychology) to ‘make sense’ of life implies
that meaning is something we cannot directly sense. That is
why the new science of soul qualities is so meaningful – for it is
based on the recognition that soul qualities, as sensual qualities
of awareness, are not only the basis of all sensory qualities we are
aware of. They are also the very essence of meaning or sense
- directly sensed. What gives
meaning to life are those directly sensed soul qualities that find
expression in sensory experiencing.
Modern science has no interest in the meaning of things. It is more
interested in abstract mathematical ‘quanta’ than in meaningful
qualities of soul manifest in nature and in human beings. To
persuade the scientist of today, or any individual whose thinking is
shaped by the modern scientific world view, that behind the sensory
world lies an invisible world of soul and soul qualities, is like
trying to persuade someone who has not learnt to read that behind
the words he sees on the page lies an invisible world of sense or
meaning. Then again, it is like trying to persuade someone who has
never recalled a dream that a dream world exists. You cannot. All
you can do is teach them to read or recall their dreams. Then they
will know for themselves. When it comes to the scientific reality of
soul, logical persuasion is as futile as blind faith. All one can do
is to teach people the methods by which they can discover this
reality of the soul for themselves – or rather acknowledge its
reality in their everyday experience.
Soul is in essence the pure awareness of sensory experiencing – not
just of the world but of our inwardly sensed body and even mind. For
even thoughts are things we sense within the awareness space of our
mind, and can be experienced as having subtle sensory shapes and
qualities (for example auditory qualities). If we attend to our
awareness of a sensory quality – whether a somatic sensation, the
different qualities of a sensory object, or a sensed thought or
feeling, then we begin to ensoul that sensory awareness. If
we attend to the unique tonality of a sensory quality — the
colour of an object for example — we begin to ensoul that awareness.
Through this ensoulment of the senses can come about a
sensualisation of the soul. Our awareness of the sensory quality
– whether a colour or sound — begins itself to take on the unique
tonality of the colour or sound. Then we no longer see or hear the
colour or sound just as sensory qualities. Instead we sense them as
the expression of an invisible ‘colour tone’ or ‘tone colour’ of
awareness. We feel this tone colour or colour tone within us
— and at the same time know it as the very inwardness of the
outwardly perceived colour or sound. Conversely, we recognise the
outwardly perceived sensory quality as the sensory manifestation of
this inwardly sensed soul quality – this intensely sensual
quality of our awareness itself.
The second most important principle of the new science of soul
qualities is that the soul itself is nothing bodiless. It is not a
disembodied ‘spirit’. For what we experience as our ‘body’ is simply
the felt boundary of our soul – a felt boundary of our awareness
distinguishing what we experience as ‘self’ from that which we
experience as ‘not-self’. The soul is nothing simply contained
within our own skins. Its only boundary is the felt boundary of our
awareness, which can expand beyond or contract within the boundary
of our ‘physical body’. This felt boundary has the character of an
interactive ‘field boundary’ or ‘interface’. It is not a boundary
that separates things in space. Instead, like a circle drawn on
paper That simultaneously distinguishes and unites two areas
or fields – the white area or field contained within the circle and
the field or area around the circle. What we call ‘soul’ is simply
awareness in its field character – like the white spaces or fields
within and around the circle. What we call ‘self’ is awareness in
its bounded character, like any white space bounded by a circle or
by circles within circles. Conversely, what we call ‘bodies’ are
those very field-boundaries of awareness as such – the circles, or
circles within circles — that both demarcate and unite an outer and
an inner space, an outer and an inner field of awareness.
What appears to us as someone else’s body is simply their own
field-boundary of awareness – not as they experience it from within,
but as we perceive it from without, as we perceive it in our own
outer field of awareness. If we represent our bodies as circles, the
body of the other is like another circle present in the space around
‘our’ circle. The two circles are not separated by this space. For
the space around our circle is just as much part of our ‘soul’ – our
awareness field – as the space within it. It is the outer spatial
field of our awareness. The other person’s body too, like a
circle has a spatial field around it. This is the outer field of
their awareness within which our body also appears as a bounded
entity, another circle. The illusion this generates is that the
space between the two bodies, like the space between two circles
drawn on a piece of paper, is empty space separating them. The
illusion arises from the fact that we do not acknowledge the obvious
— that both circles are just as much defined by their surrounding
field or space as by the space or field they surround. Unlike the
two circles however, both of which are drawn on the same piece of
paper, our bodies, do not exist ‘in’ a common space at all. We
perceive other bodies in our surrounding space, just as they
perceive our body in their surrounding space. These
surrounding spaces are essentially spatial fields of awareness –
theirs and ours. They are not pre-existing physical spaces but soul
spaces. We perceive each other’s bodies as bounded objects in the
space around us. We cannot perceive our own souls or those of others
in the same way we perceive bodies in space because what we call the
‘soul’ is essentially the very space of awareness within which
we perceive other beings as bounded entities or bodies – a soul
space which we falsely identify with an empty physical space
separating us from others.
‘Space’ and ‘time’, as the philosopher Kant recognised, are not
themselves sensory objects of perception. That does not mean they
are not real – for they are the very condition of perception of any
object whatsoever. The soul too, is indeed no object of sensory
perception that we can localise in space or in time.
But that does not mean it is not real. For it is the non-local
field of our spatio-temporal awareness. Such non-local
fields of awareness are the very condition of emergence of any
localised object of sensory perception for a localised subject of
perception. ‘Soul’ is the field character of our awareness. Soul
qualities are those field-qualities of awareness — qualities which,
like moods, lend a particular colouration and tonality to our
awareness of ourselves, other people and the world. Soul qualities
are not the private property or attributes of individual ‘souls’.
Rather the individual soul is a unique and in-divisible combination
of soul qualities. Nor are soul qualities merely qualities of the
human soul. Instead the qualities of the human soul are each an
expression of divine and trans-human soul qualities – qualities
which find expression in the entire outer world of the senses – in
nature and the cosmos — as well as in the inner world of the ‘self’.
Both our inwardly sensed self and our outwardly sensed world give
expression to soul qualities. So does our inwardly sensed world
– the world of our thoughts and feelings, mental images and dreams —
our inwardly sensed body. That inwardly sensed body is not just our
physical body as we sense it from within. Instead it is the fleshly
shape and substantiality of our awareness as such – it is our
awareness body or soul body. That soul body has an anatomy
very different from what we perceive, outwardly, as our physical
body. It is what allows us to feel heavy or light, tall or short,
big or small, fat or thin, substantial or insubstantial, in a way
that bears no relation to the measurable quantitative weight, size
or density of our physical body.
The qualities of our inwardly sensed self, like those of our
inwardly sensed body and of our outwardly sensed world are the
self-expressions, self-embodiments and self-manifestations of the
soul and its qualities. I say ‘the soul’ rather than ‘our soul’,
yours or mine, because the soul knows no boundaries of identity. All
that we experience alters our self-experience. Every experience ‘of’
the self affects the sense we have of ourselves – alters our felt
sense of self. The simple experience of being in different
situations, relating to different people or having different
feelings alters our sense of the self ‘having’ those feelings. Our
awareness of how we ‘are’ or ‘feel’ — of our experienced self — is
not that self. Only by attending to our awareness of all that
we experience – including not only our experienced world but
experienced body and self – do we free ourselves from limiting
identifications with different elements of our experience. Awareness
is ‘experiencing without an experiencer’ — not confined by
identification with a particular aspect of our experienced self or
world. Attention to what we experience is one thing. Attention to
our awareness of all that we are experiencing is another – it is
what Castaneda called “the second attention”. Through the second
attention both the soul (awareness) and self (identity) become free
to expand, being liberated from limiting identifications with
particular aspects of our experienced self or world whilst at the
same time allowing ever-new aspects to be experienced.
Awareness is both the soul dimension of experience and its sensual
dimension. For if we do not identify with a particular thought,
feeling, will-impulse or perception our experience of it takes on a
purely sensual character. We experience a thought as having a
specific sensual quality of depth or superficiality, a feeling as
having a specific sensual tone or texture, a will-impulse as having
a particular sensual intensity etc. We experience our awareness
itself as having its own qualities of shape and substantiality,
colour and tone, weight and density. Through so-called
‘transcendental’ awareness – the pure awareness of experiencing – we
do not leave the realm of the sensual. Instead we begin to
experience the innately sensual dimensions of awareness itself – we
enter the realm of soul. All true art arises from an ensoulment
of sensory experience, one that allows the artist to give expression
to the soul qualities manifest in our experience of nature and
bodyhood, self and world. All true religion is the ensoulment of
human relations, allowing human beings to recognise and ‘resonate’
with each other’s trans-human or divine soul qualities. Out of the
ensoulment of the senses comes a sensualisation of the
soul and with it a capacity to directly sense and resonate with
soul qualities. Out of the pure awareness of sensory experiencing
comes a richer, more sensual experience of awareness itself. All
true science is ‘soul-science’, the direct experiential
exploration of the infinite variety and groupings of soul qualities
that are embodied in human beings and made manifest in the cosmos.
It is ‘ cosmic qualia science’ in all its fields – from
soul-cosmology to soul-chemistry.
My work is therefore also the first attempt to create a
comprehensive conceptual, experiential and experimental science of
the soul since the work of the 19th century theosophists, the
evolution, out of theosophy, of Rudolf Steiner’s ‘spiritual
science’, and the attempt by Freud and his successors to develop and
refine ‘psychoanalysis’ as a science. Were this attempt to have
succeeded, we would have seen the rigorous and successful
application of psychoanalysis to a whole range of domains beyond the
analytic consulting room. We would have seen the successful
development of a psychoanalytically-based medicine and the use of
psychoanalysis to gain a deeper understanding of political events
and dramas as well as personal dreams. Instead the first and only
major application of psychoanalysis was its cynical exploitation by
the advertising industry. Attempts that were made to extend the
orbit of psychoanalysis to the domains of medicine, politics and
mass events came to nothing through lack of a proper philosophical
foundation. The vacuum left by this failure has in the meantime been
filled by soul-less cognitive-behaviourial psychologies and by
biological and genetic reductionism of the most superficial and
unscientific sort.
Freud’s first mistake was to reduce the innate sensuality of
the soul to its sexuality, understood as a set of instinctive,
biologically and evolutionarily determined drives. At the same time
he identified meaning with its expression in dream symbols or its
representation in words – focusing on symbolic sexual meanings in
particular. Identifying meaning as such with its symbols — with
indirectly signified sense — it was only natural for him
to regard as ‘unconscious’ the entire realm of directly sensed
significance. Resonance with the wordlessly sensed and sensually
experienced meaning of a patient’s words or dreams, gave way to
methods of ‘intepretation’ in which the sensed significance of a
word or symbol was reduced to its signified sense – the sense that
could be made of it in words or through association with other
symbols. Both psychonalysis and spiritual science sought and claimed
a type of scientific knowledge of the soul or psyche.
Freud’s second mistake, further accentuated by Jung, was to reduce
knowledge of the soul and its sensual qualities to knowledge of
symbols. Yet meaning or sense is not essentially a property of
symbols at all but rather intrinsic to sensual experiencing. It is
something directly felt before it is given form in words or images.
Rudolf Steiner’s mistake was to reduce knowledge of the soul to
knowledge of spiritual beings. Both mistakes are equally
disastrous. For any true ‘knowledge’ of the soul must begin with the
recognition that what we call soul is in essence itself a type of
knowing. ‘Soul’ is itself a direct knowing awareness,
entirely free of symbols and yet imbued, like music, with
intrinsically meaningful sensual qualities. This knowing awareness
is not the property of any beings, human or spiritual — for in
essence it is an awareness of those unbounded potentialities
of beings that are the source of all actual beings. The
ancient term for inner knowing was gnosis. My philosophy and
psychology is gnostic in the deepest possible sense, for it
understands soul as that knowing, sensual yet free of
symbols, that is the source of all beings. No true knowledge
of the spiritual world can arise as a type of science that is
‘entitative’ — that postulates as its starting point a set of actual
pre-existing energies, things or beings. True knowledge begins with
essential gnosis — the recognition that knowing
precedes being, and is the source from which all beings and
all realities arise. The soul is not what we know ‘about’ it, for it
is itself a condensed knowing that constitutes the core of our own
being. Our being is but the ever-changing way we express and embody
that knowing.
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