The Cosmic Spirit: Awakenings at the Heart of All Religions, the Earth, and the Multiverse

THE COSMIC SPIRIT

Awakenings at the Heart of All Religions, the Earth, and the Multiverse

Roland Faber

THE COSMIC SPIRIT

Awakenings at the Heart of All Religions, the Earth, and the Multiverse

Copyright ©

2021

Roland Faber. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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Cascade Books

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paperback isbn: 978-1-7252-6069-6

hardcover isbn: 978-1-7252-6065-8

ebook isbn: 978-1-7252-6070-2

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Faber, Roland,

1960

–, author.

Title: The cosmic spirit : awakenings at the heart of all religions, the earth, and the multiverse / Roland Faber.

Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books,

2021

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers:

isbn 978-1-7252-6069-6 (

paperback

) | isbn 978-1-7252-6065-8 (

hardcover

) | isbn 978-1-7252-6070-2 (

ebook

)

Subjects: LCSH: Cosmology. | Spirituality. | Religion. | Religions—Relations. | History—Religious aspects.

Classification:

BL48 .F20 2021 (

print

) | BL48 .F20 (

ebook

)

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

March 10, 2021

Table of Contents

Title Page

Why You Should Read This Book

What Is in a Title?

Preamble: We Are All Poets of the Spirit

Theosis

Nine Paths

Differentiation

Meditation I: Nothing; but Light

Chapter 1: The Small Flame in Everything

Space

Fire

Heart

Epilogue: Suffering

Meditation II: The Inner Fire

Chapter 2: Crossing the Infinite Sea

Ocean

Horizon

Mariner

Epilogue and Meditation III: Dying Sea, Dying Spirit

Meditation IV: The Raft; Vanishing

Chapter 3: A Finger in the River

Flow

XAΩS

Meditation V: Mind the Flow

Passage

Epilogue: Manaus

Meditation VI: Let There Be Life

Chapter 4: Falling from the Tree

Life

Knowledge

Garden/Forest/Wilderness

Epilogue: The Throne of God

Meditation VII: Becoming Wood

Meditation VIII: Becoming Life

Meditation IX: Becoming Worlds

Chapter 5: The Show from Backstage

Meditation X: Prospero’s Magic

Prologue: Theatre

L’Orfeo

Moses und Aron

Akhnaten

Meditation XI: The Sun, All in All

Epilogue: Epiphany

Meditation XII: Koan

Chapter 6: Fata Morgana

Desert

Meditation XIII: Monad, Nomad

Mirage

Epilogue and Meditation XIV: Vibration

Chapter 7: The Mountaineer

Numen

Ascent/Descent

Summit

Meditation XV: Mirrors

Chapter 8: Staring at Stars

Heavens

Interstellar

Light

Epilogue: Immolation

Meditation XVI: The Stellar Blanket

Chapter 9: The Life of Other Days

Prologue: Matrix

Polyphilia/Multiverse

Meditation XVII: Other Lives

Awakening—Detachment—Compassion—Peace

Meditation XVIII: One/All No/Self

Love/God

Epilogue: Extinction

Meditation XIX: The Placeless

Epilogue

Bibliography

The Cosmic Spirit

I am a single Self all Nature fills.

Immeasurable, unmoved the Witness sits:

He is the silence brooding on her hills,

The circling motion of her cosmic mights.

I have broken the limits of embodied mind

And am no more the figure of a soul.

The burning galaxies are in me outlined;

The universe is my stupendous whole.

My life is the life of village and continent,

I am earth’s agony and her throbs of bliss;

I share all creatures’ sorrow and content

And feel the passage of every stab and kiss.

Impassive, I bear each act and thought and mood;

Time traverses my hushed infinitude.

—Sri Aurobindo

Why You Should Read This Book

Are we more than stardust? Is the appearance of the fragile Earth in the vast universe more than an accident? Does the capacity of the cosmos to produce immense manifolds of shapes of energy and light, of forms of life and the reflections of the mind, beings able to enjoy and question their existence and that of the multiverse in which they seem to be thrown, have any meaning beyond the moments in which they witness these wonders and suffer their own passing? Are we not only children of the stars, but of a Spirit that pervades the dust, rejuvenates life, and embraces the ever-evolving universe—a Spirit in which the All shapes the bewildering manifold of heavenly bodies, our globe, and our lives as our home? Is there a cosmic Spirit that wants us to awaken to a consciousness of universal meaning and sacred purpose, of freedom of diversity and mutual friendship with all beings, of deep insight into the divine nature of existence and to the hope for a future in which a universe will communicate in peace?

This book answers these questions with a spirituality of the numinous in our relation to the elements of the earth in the matrix of the multiverse by taking you on a journey through nine paths and nineteen meditations of awakening. Not bound by any religion, but in deep appreciation of the religious and spiritual heritage of human encounters with the divine depth of existence in our Selves and in nature, they invite you to become co-travelers by engaging the most profound embodiments of the intangible Spirit by which it facilitates its own materialization in the cosmos and our spiritualization of the cosmos—a process by which we become participants in the realization of the ultimate meaning of our Selves, the living earth, and the unending multiverse. Use—says this Spirit—the stardust that you are to become a spirit-faring species in an eternal journey of the cosmos to realize its ultimate motive of existence—the attraction of love!

Spirit manifests in cosmic becoming, but is not of it. In the wheel of births and deaths, Spirit is the birthless and deathless. The cosmos itself is a spiritual reality, inexhaustible by its merely material or energetic or informational states. In the mutual foldings of the cosmic Spirit and the spiritual cosmos, the nine paths of awakening of this book will present you with a spiritual landscape of human religiosity as means for communicating our common earthly and cosmic existence, expressing itself in the realities of space and time, interiority and exteriority, mind and matter, soul and body, life and love, mystical experiences and cosmological understandings. They want to take you into the interior of becoming-divine and the exterior of becoming-cosmic, becoming Spirit and becoming cosmos. They want to document and facilitate spiritual awakening in the recognition of the transreligious poetic patterns by which the spirit seekers in their passageways through the heart of the material and symbolic embodiments in which the cosmic Spirit expresses itself—such as the ocean, the rivers, the mountains, the stars—and by which we become travelers of oceans and rivers, mountaineers and star-farers—may find life unborn and deathless.

Throughout the nine paths of spiritual awakening to cosmic depth in appreciation of our fragile life on Earth, a philosophy of the Spirit addresses questions of religious multiplicity und spiritual unity; divisions in theistic and non-theistic accesses and answers to God and ultimate Reality; the deficiencies of spiritual materialism and naturalism; the becoming and meaning of diverse forms of pantheism, panentheism, and trans-pantheism; implications in the contact between scientific and philosophical cosmology as well as their religious counterparts; current research on the historical roots of Abrahamic monotheism and its interaction with the non-theistic complements of Daoic and Dharmic nature; the difference of monism and dualism from a dipolar and non-dual understanding of God and ultimate Reality; the implications of pre-axial, axial, and post-axial religious identities in conversation with postmodern philosophical thought; diverse philosophical constructions of the process of cosmic impermanence in the search for the unconstructed and undeconstructable Reality in its midst and as its origin; multiverse theories and ecological spirituality; and many multireligious themes around spiritual cosmology and cosmic spirituality. Yet beyond any romantic simplification of the spiritual blindness to the reality of suffering, perishing, and violence permeating all of these themes, awakening to the cosmic Spirit can only claim to release or exhibit spiritual authority if it also leads into, instead of hiding, the questioning of its own ambivalence in all cosmic realities, from exploding star-matter to life as food and gross inhumanity. In the end, cosmic spirituality must ask the question of you, the reader, pondering on its matters, whether you see the light in the darkness and can feel your spiritual home in the immense interstellar expanse of space and time.

What Is in a Title?

There is really no good reason why a book should be named The Cosmic Spirit, except that there is really no better title for what this book wants to propose. I will explore the implications of its meaning within the current spiritual landscape in the preamble. Here, I want to foreshadow the following text with a disclaimer: there are many things that I don’t mean to invoke with this title, and there are many potential connotations it may trigger in anyone’s mind or on diverse backgrounds of experience, knowledge and patterns of spiritual interest and search that are problematic. Nevertheless, important reasons have hindered me to avoid the confusions that the title may signal.

The term cosmic Spirit has undergone many metamorphoses. It appears in very diverse areas of thought and commerce. It is the name given to a figure of a virtual playworld, a code for the experience with certain entheogenic drugs, and, in the plural, a euphemism for alcoholic spirits. It appears as a title of various pieces of music and art but also as the theme of a tarot deck, and it can represent astrological considerations. It is used as an apostrophe to characterize certain artists, writers or musicians, lacking any other form of expressing the overwhelming grandness of their mind and intentions as well as the impact of or universal desires enshrined in their work. In religious connections, it functions as a synonym for the ultimate object of desire of diverse forms of theistic or non-theistic spirituality; or it signals biblical or alternative non-western forms of personal, impersonal, or transpersonal encounters with God. It may stand for the essence of the universe as well as for the essence of its becoming.

Although relatively few books are titled Cosmic Spirit, they exist. And if it is not a book title, we may find it heading chapters or presenting us with one of the central concepts propagated by such books. Without appealing to any details of the general direction and suggestive implications they want to convey, we can still say that such books direct our attention toward a higher kind of consciousness at the heart of our existence—a consciousness that expands far beyond our ego-limitations and even any sense of Self to the vastness and depth of the universe as a whole, to that by which it is supposed to be held together: some kind of cosmic consciousness, be it ours or that of the cosmos or some divine reality. It is our close companion but cannot be reached without a change of perspective. In some religious contexts, it has become synonymous with cosmic or universal Christ- and Krishna-consciousness. In related contexts, it may stand for the Spirit of God or of Life, or it may refer to a specific way of life of a community that follows a certain religious or spiritual path.

When cosmic Spirit is evoked in religious literatures, it often represents an evolutionary view of a deep reality that must be reached through certain forms of training or by levels of mystical ascension, or it may be accessed by maps and plans of certain steps one must take in order to obtain its experience. In certain spiritual corners, it becomes a means of selling some kind of twelve-step program or the like by which, one is promised, one may attain spiritual peace or meaning in life. Alternatively, it can be connected to similar notions or associated meanings extracted from sacred literatures, scriptures of the religions of the world or the oral traditions of primordial religions and their current representations, mostly in order to build a case for alternatives to organized religion. It can stand for a new religiosity that is ecologically sensitive and planetary in scope. It may have feminist connotations or indicate windows into the recovery of lost dimensions of human existence as well as future reconfigurations of human life, consciousness and existence on Earth and in the cosmos. Or it may intend to devise cosmic religion as a natural development of, or alternative to, the checkered past of dogmatic religious interests and the small-minded religious imaginations regarding the world as a whole.

I am not inclined to argue against any of these incarnations of the meaning of the term cosmic Spirit. They are just not exactly what this title and concept means in this book. My use of the term does not imply that a development of religiosity or spirituality beyond past instantiations of religions necessarily needs to overcome the religious diversity of the past and present—either in the form of departures from nature (natural religion) and humanity (revelation religion), transforming itself or being transformed into cosmic dimensions (universal wisdom religion), or in the form of oppositions to organized religions, indicating free spirituality. On the contrary, the impulse and desire for a movement of transcending might just be about the awakening of the heart of these religions and spiritualities. Further, the search for the cosmic Spirit, here, is likewise not about adding experience to doctrine, or exchanging theory with practice, or reconnecting our humanity with the world around and beyond humanity—as the ancient religious patterns might already have been closer to these transcending universals and ecological integrities despite the distortions of the later memory of humanity. While I value the undiscovered, suppressed, or lost dimensions of religiosity that the cosmic Spirit can evoke or remember, in my understanding, it is more about an affirmation of these ancient patterns and forms as limited elements of the vast multiplicity in which the Spirit of life addresses itself in its cosmic dimension. Even if these worn perspectives may seem to be limited ways of addressing religiosity (that is, the value of any form of religious consciousness, theory, practice, or character), it is precisely such liminality (bounded, but in excess of meaning) that makes a certain path valuable. The cosmic character of the spirit of any limited religious expressions releases its depth and breadth in its inherent transgressions of meaning, thereby intersecting and interacting with the diversity of such self-transcending processes. So, widening our horizon rather than that of the ancient paths to a global view of their interaction means becoming aware of the inherent spiritual character of the very multiplicity of these mutually diversified but related religiosities.

What I mean to say with the combination of cosmos and Spirit is but an insight that is, presumably, as old as religious consciousness itself: that consciousness and reality resonate. Cosmic and spiritual consciousness are mirrors of one another. In fact, as far back as we can recover ancient religious and mystical literatures, even in their most mythological and symbolically distorted forms, we find a correlation between spiritual stations and cosmic states to be an essential feature of religiosity. While the old astrological stratification of spheres of planets maps cosmic reality onto spiritual states, so many spiritual traditions relate their experiences of spiritual, mystical, divine, or alternate realities to either a mirage of the mind or a mirror of higher realities that are invisible but powerful, that pervade and transcend physical reality, and that even create reality for some mysterious reason. Moreover, the diversity of heavenly realms in many religious traditions have been interpreted as cosmic and symbolic realities, that is, as cosmic manifestations of spiritual realities and as states immanent (only) to the human mind. While, for instance, Buddhist traditions variously interpret ultimate reality (nirvana) as both objective state and as subjective experience (and the fixation on either to be nothing but samsaric imagination), Bahá’í scriptures, conversely, affirm both perspectives as necessarily transgressing into one another.

Spirit, then, is a cosmic reality—the immanent reality of the cosmos beyond its becoming and perishing. Spirit manifests in cosmic becoming, but is not of it. In the wheel of births and deaths, Spirit is the birthless and deathless. The cosmos itself is a spiritual reality, inexhaustible by its merely material or energetic or informational states. While for the skeptic this may all be a figment or an expression of our consciousness, it may also be that reality through which the world becomes a cosmos of harmonizations of multiplicities of realities of which our consciousness is only one element. It is in a landscape of such vibrations, oscillations, and mirrorings that the mutual foldings of spiritual and cosmic realities render the cosmic Spirit interchangeable with a spiritual Cosmos. Their mirroring appears to become present precisely at the points at which religious intuitions become meaningful, new religions appear, old religions become inspired again, and at which our understanding of the cosmic reality that we live in opens a window into the essential implication of our spirit to populate it. It is in this sense that I will pursue modes of awakening in this cosmic Spirit to a spiritual landscape of human religiosity as means of communicating our common cosmic existence, expressing itself in the resonances between macro- and micro-realities, interiority and exteriority, mind and matter, becoming and being, space-time and everlastingness.

The epigraph to this book, from a poem by the Indian sage Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950), captures some of these themes and dimensions of the interference of the Spirit and the cosmos in a way that does not simplify it to either a mere limitless and unproblematic harmony—without acknowledging dissonances as part of any interesting and realistic harmonization—or some merely vague hope for such a harmonization projected onto the painfully missing simplicity of the perceived nature of the cosmos in and from which we live and find our suffering, and to which we die. Although, in Hindu fashion, the poem preferences a universal unity of the cosmos that, simultaneously, pervades it as it embraces its limitations, that is, the brahman-atman unity that transcends any limited entity of a merely private and often possessive nature, it also resembles the detached and disinterested-compassionate dharmakāya of Buddhist philosophy and experience.

I am still struck by the pervasive character of a spiritual presence of this embracing and pervading unity of detachment-compassion in Sri Aurobindo’s poem that, rather than just being a witness or a register, feels much more like a transforming power. Not the kind of power that we might project onto it—that of desire, interest, agenda, self-aggrandizement, or even atavistic self-affirmation through selflessness and service—but rather a power that reveals something that the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), a contemporary of Sri Aurobindo, has poetically described as brooding presence. Interpreting a poem of William Wordsworth (d. 1850) in his book Science and the Modern World (1925), Whitehead speaks of Nature as the aesthetic process of birthing, bringing forth, as the matrix of generation, even being Creativity itself—the ultimate principle in Whitehead’s philosophy. But that which senses and lives the birthing process—the Self of this becoming at the heart of its (Nature’s) self-transformation—is the Spirit of the transformation of the cosmos.

This Spirit is the Spirit of the earth and the cosmos, indicating a spirituality of Mother Earth in the matrix of the multiverse. This Spirit creates by brooding, by sensing its birthing process. It is a power of letting be and of attraction to become. It also perceives what it releases. Its listening silence speaks without syllable and sound. It is the spirited vibration that receives all words/worlds and that recycles their value in infinite living variations and connections. Endlessly playing the chords of cosmic multiplicity in its own space, the cosmic Spirit emanates and receives the vast cosmic expanse through an open mouth. The cosmic Spirit is not a mere mystery that is accessible only to mystics (from the Greek muein, with closed mouth) but a polyphilic Spirit who loves, breathes and lives the manifold that it births, senses, receives and creatively transforms.

And, in concordance with Sri Aurobindo’s evolutionary expectation of the ultimate Spirit to involve itself in the progression of the universe, the Spirit that breathes in us and the cosmos, that broods, births and drives the cosmic becoming, is that reality in us and everything that is both birthless and deathless. As such, it is the sign of the ultimate value of cosmic becoming beyond itself, but also the impulse to value cosmic becoming itself. The cosmic Spirit names the motive power of the process of the spiritualization of the cosmos in which the cosmos both becomes from the birthless and, in the process, becomes deathless itself.

Preamble: We Are All Poets of the Spirit

God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. He does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.

—A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality

At that hour will the Mystic Herald, bearing the joyful tidings of the Spirit, shine forth from the City of God resplendent as the morn, and, through the trumpet-blast of knowledge, will awaken the heart, the soul, and the spirit from the slumber of heedlessness.

—Bahá’u’lláh, Kitab-i-Iqan

Theosis

We all live our lives, if we are lucky, without asking, Why? If we are lucky—but what kind of luck is this? Is it the luck of being born into a family that can afford to feed itself? Is it the luck of a having been born at a given time or place in this world we did not invent? Would I like to be born in, say, the 1400s CE in Europe amid the bubonic plague sweeping through the lands and killing up to two-thirds of the population? Or would I like to live during the Spanish conquests of the New World, witnessing the slaughter of up to 90 percent of the indigenous populations there? Certainly not! But why are people born at these times? Why? The question of luck and fate always arises in times when we are robbed of just living our life in peace.

We seem to experience the gravity of the meaning of life when its very spirit seems to have gone missing. Yet that is not the entire truth. We also experience the spirit of life when we consciously avoid just to live our lives. When we, instead, begin to wonder: Why are we here—here, in time and space, on this continent, at this time, on this earth, in this cosmos? When we are not content with things just as they are, we begin to ask for the very spirit of it all. Whenever we are not just doing what we do, we become aware of a spirit, or its absence, that makes what we do or feel or think meaningful. We become, then and there, right then and there, not only aware of the spirit of life or its lack. Rather, such situations impress on us something essentially human. We become spirit-faring. By transformative experiences of fullness or lack, pain or joy, injustice or liberation, contingency or eternity, we become the poets of our spirit of life.

Let me first say what I don’t mean. I don’t mean to say that we create this spirit. It is not that we experience meaning as our creation, at least not exclusively. We find ourselves—if we are lucky—already in a world that conveys to us by its very existence a profile of meanings (or the painful recognition of their lack) when we become conscious of it. But we feel that we, in being born into a world—into its contingent situatedness—are not its creators, but actors in a play that is always already on its way of working itself out. Nor, at least deep down, would we accuse our parents of being the creators of our part in this play. They would, if you asked them, admit that they too have just appeared on that stage, seemingly from nowhere, becoming participants in a scene by a mysterious reason other than their parents. We are here, no reason given, no reason found.

The questions whence and why are smoothed over by our consciousness, rounded, closed, foreclosed. Like our continuous field of eyesight, we normally don’t see or miss the blind spot. The blind spot of whence and why is squeezed out by the seamlessness of our consciousness. Neither did we create this consciousness or manufacture its well temperate roundedness. But we know of its createdness. Especially if we begin to ask why, we are bound to encounter the spirit of this contingent life. Then, we become liberated to become poets of this spirit.

Let me give you an example of what I mean by poet here. Imagine that you read a poem: You recognize it as a poem if suddenly all the words, the intersection and clash of their images, the restlessness and strangeness of their symbolic interaction—all that becomes significant in new ways, in ways far beyond the materials used and the meanings translated. Unlike a set of instructions for building a piece of furniture, unlike a report in a newspaper, unlike even the page of a novel, now every word and its position in the text, on the paper, the form it takes, the sound and rhythm it reveals when we recite it, the contour it releases when its polysemic images confront each other—all that and more we may feel to be a gift of placement. This serendipitous togetherness in the poetic composition may urge us to ask deeper questions, such as, Is this all coincidence or destiny? It is with such questions that we not only become aware of a text as a poem but also, in a true sense, become its poets. No one else can replace the way the poem becomes a poem for our feeling and in our mind. Not that we create the poem, if we are not its author. And even if so: Did we really create it or was it felt by, and fall into, our awareness? In the poet lives the poem, but it arises, appears. We become poets as much through the poem as the poem becomes a poem through us as poets.

The poet does not create, the philosopher once said, but saves the world in a poem—so the epigraph of this preamble. In the poet’s vision, the world comes together in its very spirit. In this sense, we are poets of our spirit.

Yet the spirit of life is not our spirit. We do not possess this spirit. It always arises as a gift, in between things, because of their excess or lack of aesthetic appeal or existential meaning. This appeal or meaning does not gather by a willful act, but neither is it a mere passive given. It comes like a thief in the night (Matthew 24:43; 1 Thessalonians 5:2; Revelation 16:15), without warning, always unexpected, and in ways unanticipated—if we let it compose itself. We suddenly become poets when our life’s becoming converges as a poem. Yet we become its poets only by sensing its convergent spirit. Not by manipulating it, nor even by steering it willfully, but rather by mediating and meditating on the gift of its spirit. Only in this sense are we poets of our lives, do we become a poem of the Spirit. In the experiences of our lives, the Spirit arises as the event of their meaningful togetherness.

The passages from the New Testament invoking the poetic image of the thief in the night indicate something else, too: that this experience may not just be one of unexpected appearance, even suddenness, but of some kind of a shock. It is inherent in this experience of the spirit of our lives that it may happen when we are sorely and acutely missing its meaning, when we are thrown into the low strata of animal existence, when the bare bones come out. When the spirit seems to be missing like in the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the field of bones, without flesh, awaiting some kind of divine action, we sense, we hope, we awaken to the desire for a revivification. Indeed, this image of a field of bare bones awaiting awakening has become one of the original poetic renderings for the spiritual figure of resurrection, collectively as a people or individually from a life in the shadows, on the border of death, or even after death (Ezekiel 37). What the dead bones are hoped to be clothed with is not just flesh but spirit, meaning, life. The spirit of our lives is always the spirit of life, a life that is given as (a gift of) the power that overcomes death, figuratively or literally, collectively or individually, in this life or beyond its confines. As the Gospel of John so decisively states: It is only the Spirit that bestows life; and the one without Spirit is without life, whether living or dead (John 3:6; 6:66).

We all are seekers of the spirit. We are a spirit-faring species. This seems to be a steep statement. Why? How can I claim that? Because when we receive the gift or shock of the spirit of our lives, as indicated in the epigraph of Bahá’u’lláh (1817–92), the prophet-founder of the Bahá’í religion, it is with our sudden awakening to the wonder or lack, the wondrous or dreading contingency, of meaning in our lives that we become spirit-seekers. We begin feeling alive or dead, seeking life or more life. We want to gain or regain meaning, or we seek to understand its wonder or disappearance. We may wonder how we could ever have lived just so, without consciously experiencing its wonder. Or we may wonder how we could have ever missed to be thankful for the wonder of our life as long as it was in our possession, and we did not really feel this to be a big deal until we found it missing. We may, indeed, become weary of our life if it does not release more than a sigh for a vivacity either beyond the one that vanished because of a loss of love, friendship, a lover or friend, or beyond the very life we already lived because of its thrownness into stern times, among war, hunger, and homelessness or creeping meaninglessness.

We all are seekers of the Spirit—whether we want it or not—because we are always already out of luck. Not that we cannot be lucky, possibly, for a moment in time, to live our lives without the shock of the spirit; but the luck that this luckiness indicates is not really great. It is either the luck of the unaware or it will always become the luck of the sedated. This luck is the anesthesia of the ones who have not yet experienced the roughness of life or who have become numb to it because of the hardship it brought. This luck is in no way more satisfactory than the lack of luck one dreads when it has gone. Such luck is rather unlucky, because it cannot find a spirit in life. It has either lost it, lost the opportunity to find it or not been given the opportunity to seek it. If we have not become a question ourselves, we will not set out on the quest for, and the encounter of, the spirit in, of, and for our lives. Yet as long as we have not become spiritual, in this sense, we waste our lives either for ourselves or for others: for ourselves, because we have not become aware of our Self yet; for others, because we waste others’ lives that we leave untouched, ignoring them or impacting them only like lifeless objects.

The Spirit of life impacts by touch. Seeking life, seeking the Spirit of life, is seeking to touch and be touched by all life, whether ours, others’ or that of this world: of the beauty of nature, of the relief of the thirst or the release of the imprisoned—much like Jesus wanted us to seek the Spirit of Life, of resurrection, of a new life, of offering life to others, in our touch of the excluded (Matthew 25).

Seeking the Sprit in everything is seeking its inner life, vibrating with the Spirit—like two instruments that are close enough to pick up each other’s vibration. It is like becoming a body of resonance that synchronizes with a world fine-tuned in the cosmic Spirit of life. In the Spirit of life, we become spiritual beings. Not that we ever were without it—life or Spirit. We always were spiritual beings, even before we noticed it. Nothing is without it.

The Spirit hovers like an eagle, effortless and still in the wind of our Self, or moves like the wind over the waters of our inner being, churning up vivid patterns of foam and contours where surface and depth meet like the waves of the ocean and the air into which they pierce their forms. This is the cosmic Spirit in the image of the initiation of creation as it appears in the book of Genesis (1:2): the mysterious ruah Elohim, the divine Spirit that is just there, placeless, before the act of creation, before light and darkness part, and land and water retreat to their own realms. Is it (like) a wind, a bird, a power, a presence? Maybe pure potential or creativity? Is it personal or more? Is it singular or plural, a relation or a web, maybe?

The cosmic Spirit of life is, well, cosmic, universal. It is not owned by any religion. Its reality appears in all religions—for instance, as the dynamic and creative presence of God in the Hebrew Scriptures; as the Spirit of pure life in the New Testament; as the Great Spirit of indigenous American tribes; as brahman, the essence of Reality in Hinduism. All of these religions mean the vivid Spirit inherent in all existence and in us. It is in this recognition that the cosmic Spirit stretches us to be released beyond any splintering differences and limiting boundaries. In the excess of the cosmic Spirit, we should measure its gift of life only by the intensity by which we give ourselves to others.

The cosmic Spirit is not a spiritual reality. It is that by which there is spiritual reality, that is, a reality that awakens to the vividness of life and its unbounded meaning. We become spiritual reality in the Spirit. In seeking the Spirit, we become what we are—spirit seekers, poets of our life on a world and in a cosmos that is moved by the process of becoming spiritualized.

If we say we are spiritual, but not religious, we miss the point here. With the deep empiricist (relationality) and pluralist philosopher William James (d. 1910) in his book A Pluralistic Universe (1908), we should be intent to see the opposition between spirituality and religiosity as an aberration imposed by materialist reductionism and secularist concessions to its spirit rather than an empirical insight. It is in the cosmic Spirit that we are spiritual; but it is the religions that remind us of the empirical accessibility of the Spirit: that the cosmic Spirit cannot be possessed either by religions or beyond their limitations. Since no religion possesses the Spirit (as does none of its deniers), their fine differences should not be a means for conflict, which often was and still is the case, but a warning: In the Spirit, there is freedom; in the Spirit, all are only possessed by the Spirit if they are empty like a reed or a flute for the wind, the tone that the melody of it—Spirit, life—creates in them. Yet the Spirit only appears in the manifold of all the melodies it poetically instills as a gift, and differently so in all of them, including the pleroma of religious paths.

The spiritual is not a reality different from the material. Rather, the Spirit rises in its and our passages through matter. Matter is not in a dualistic opposition to anything other than that which avoids or negates the spiritual. But even then, the Spirit that is negated is the one Reality on the basis of which such a negation is granted. What is more, the Spirit of life seeks the dead, to vivify them. The patience of the Spirit is the power of persistence. Maybe continuity and constancy are the characteristics of eternity; but, then, eternity may be the characteristic of the patience of the Spirit, offering space and time for seeking it out, inviting to a life of adventure, momentum, and activity. The Spirit of life never reaches (for) a final resting place. It always seeks revivification, overcoming any grave. That, here and now, may be resurrection, the coming to life in the Spirit of life.

Matter is spiritual; materia is the birth that the mater gives to life. It is the Mother Earth and the cosmic Matrix of becoming-Spirit. It is nothing fixed, as we might think if we were (still) limited by old categorizations imagining matter in terms of inert things or particles, operating like billiard balls in a universe of collisions. Rather, as newer physics has recognized, we live in a universe of touch, between forces, energetic potentials, and forms of fields that coalesce, that relate, that communicate, that mutually influence one another, become, or move into each other. We live in a universe where things are clouds of activities and potentials, of events and processes, of energies in exchange of characteristics. Everything moves, relates, is present in one another in dynamic ways. The spiritual connotations of this universe are endless, of course. But the one important connotation, at this point, is this: the cosmic Spirit indicates the vividness of these movements and exchanges, of these mutual ways of being immanent to one another beyond any abstract characterization in isolation, be it that of matter and mind, form and content, or activity and potentiality.

The ancient and venerable philosophers and sages of diverse spiritual and religious traditions, whether in the east or the west, knew that. The Stoics rendered pneuma a refined spirit-substance; brahman could be understood as the most rarified material of existence (Chandogya Upanishad 6.13); and for Aristotle (d. 322 BCE), materia is nothing but a sphere of potentials for activation. This is not a bad image for the reality of the Spirit: the field of a multiplicity of infinite potentials of activation; the attractor of all potentials to be realized according to beauty or goodness; and the infinite movement that seeks such realization. Matter, here, appears as the spiritual milieu seeking its multifarious realizations of touch, beauty, and mutuality. The first spirit seeker is the Spirit! It is the Spirit that sighs in us (Romans 8:25–27). Spirit is the true movement at the heart of, the urge for, and the desire to actualize love within the elementary matters of life.

As the Spirit is the seeker in us for infinite actualization of spiritual potentials, so is God the first poet of the Spirit of life—or that is what I, with A. N. Whitehead, will name God. While we might be the poets of our life’s spirit—dispossessed by its gift—it is a gift only in the saving view of the Poet. Why? Because it is only God, or that is God, who or that can save everything to life, who or that is the Spirit of life, who or that becomes God in all that becomes, who or that realizes the spiritual potentials of their lives, and who or that becomes alive in them. This is the God who or that becomes all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28). Did you ever ask yourself, What does all in all mean? To be all in all things does not seem to leave any space for anything else besides this reality. What besides God is everything, then, if it indicates the all in which nothing else is but God? We could call this pantheism, a becoming-God of everything, or a partaking in God’s nature (2 Peter 1:3–4). But we should rather talk about spiritual seeking as becoming that which we already are: spiritual potentials for the realization of divine Life. It may be an infinite process of becoming, but it is a becoming-God. The ancient ones have called it theosis.

There is too much in this little word theosis to be excited about. Yet, at least, it should be pointed out that it is not only a profound Christian notion, venerated by its Eastern traditions throughout the centuries. It is meant to indicate the highest aim of human existence as such, independent of specific religious connotations. It is also imminently connected to another term used here, namely, the poet. Indeed, theosis is a short version of this term: theopoiesis. It announces that we are God in the making. However, this becoming-God is not signaling our hubris—like the one suggested to Eve by the snake in the garden of Eden (Genesis 2–3)—but the self-gift of God the Poet in which the giver becomes the gift and the gift becomes the giver.

Like the mystics of medieval times, such as Meister Eckhart (d. 1328) and Nicolas of Cusa (d. 1464), this becoming-God suggests unio mystica, the mystical union in which God expresses Godself (the Self of God) as all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28). Alternatively, as Islamic mystical language suggests, in this spiritual state nothing remains in this union but the Face of God (Qur’an 2:115). The theopoetics of this becoming-God is the poetics of the spirit seeker: becoming a spiritually awake being in the Spirit. Let the Spirit seek in us the very realization of the infinite potentials that indicate divinity in humanity and humanity in divinity. Spirit is not opposed to matter, but the incarnation of matter in the spirit—yes, I mean that: not the realization of the spirit in matter, but the realization of matter in the spirit, of the awakening of spiritual potentials toward their actualizations, of the poetics of humanity in divinity, of becoming-human in the Spirit.

While the Spirit is formless or pluriform, allowing for many forms of realization and actualization of its potentials and powers, its poetic force adopts modes of imagination that can be meaningfully differentiated in their materializations. I will lead you through nine such materializing forms of imagination or poetic matters of the Spirit self-realizing itself (its Self) as you become the imaginal poet of the spirit of your life. One can understand them as paradigms. In the meaning of Plato, who introduced us to this concept, this term indicates a perfect potential, a heavenly image that gathers all of its potential actualizations together like folds in one poetic imagination (Republic, 592b). In religious terms, this translates into a manifest image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15), that is, a poetic materialization of the Spirit seeking its realization in us. They are not imaginative, but rather, in their profoundest appearance that constitutes these poetic matters as potential or powers of the actualization of the Spirit, they are imaginal in the sense of the subtle realms of mystical experience, as explored in the work of Henry Corbin (d. 1978) on Shi‘i and Sufi sources.

While the potentials of realization are infinite in their modes but also in their combination, such paradigmatic images or clouds of imagination can release the different types of spirit seekers to variegated resources within and outside of religions for their awakening to the awareness and realization of purpose and meaning in their lives. These paradigm-clouds allow for spiritual patterns to arise that are sufficiently different from one another so as to resonate with diverse materializations of the Spirit or with different potentializations of life-matters in which the cosmic Spirit may indicate its presence in our lives. They each actualize different poetics of spiritual awakening.

These image-clouds are poetic in the sense that they save the matter of spirituality—again referencing the epigraph of this preamble. They are material in the sense indicated above: concrete, embodied images of the invisible infinity; and they are materializations in the sense of being lived through by merely living in this world. They are spiritual due to their aesthetic immediacy of imagination—that is their poetic nature. These poetic forces are taken from different immediate bodily encounters with the world before education takes them away and exchanges them for abstractions: concrete encounters with the world of nature and aesthetic, of sense experiences and primordial mental operations before any reflections.

These image-patterns lead us back into profound vibrations of inclusiveness, of the primordial includedness of our bodies in a world of elements and temperatures, evoking explorations in haptic, visual, auditive, and olfactory sensations, of moods and temperaments in such encounters, of activities and feelings before mind takes over. Yet these experiences don’t become poetic through the exclusion of mind and reflection, language and communication, abstraction and construction, either, but rather by seeking, through mental processes, the release of the primordial potentials of these embodied life-forms and -forces to concrete actualizations. It is this potentialization that makes such imaginations universal paradigms of the spiritual.

Nine Paths

The book consists of nine paradigmatic and poetic paths of seeking the cosmic Spirit of life. Alternatively, these paths of potentialization of life highlight patterns that traverse spiritual landscapes without fixed boundaries. Couched in their valleys and hills, we can trace various passages meandering through some of the most elementary forms of the matters of our life—luminating them in the light of the cosmic Spirit that rises in them and releases us as vortices of their conjugation in the evolution of the cosmos, this earth and humanity. Alternatively, we may say that these paths are the clouds of images representing nine modes of passage spirit-farers may want to recover as potentials that they have already encountered, inherent vibrations of life to be vivified, or inert folds of potential life to be unfolded.

Postmodern writers on religion, such as Luce Irigaray (b. 1930) and Ellen Armour (b. 1959), have indicated that we might, at a time of feminist, racial, and postcolonial intersectionality as well as global consciousness and ecological integrity, dare an important shift in our spiritual perspective by moving away from abstract concepts and doctrines, upholding limited religious identity, and, instead, find spiritual satisfaction and nourishment in the elements of existence, such as water and air, fire and earth, that are fundamentally shared with all beings. Yet, since ancient times—in the west and the east—these elements were not simply physical appearances of our human-size mesocosmic world, but, contrary to the materialist assumption, the intangible reality of which the material is a symbol—and as such they are not constituents (ingredients) of material reality, but their spiritual universals.

Indeed, as such these elemental forms of nature appear in virtually all religions and are used in many spiritual traditions, physically and symbolically, as means of action and of imagination and as sensible envelopes of the divine born from the spiritual earth. In these elemental encounters, the most primordial expressions of the sacred character and perception of the numinous power of the cosmos and the earth dawned on primal and indigenous consciousness and ways of living, and it still reminds us that these universal experiences of the Spirit have always been a companion in the human encounters with the mystery of existence, divinity and Reality. In fact, to the extent that this spiritual encounter with our common material existence actually makes us human, in the first place, it may well be precisely the elemental engagement with the numinous divine or spiritual Reality that awakens us to the avoidance of religious striving. We all share this treasure by means of which deep spiritual conversation between many traditions, religious or not, have been and can be facilitated. By invoking their all-pervasive, constitutive, and healing presence, we may consciously begin to understand that we, that is, all of humanity and all other beings we touch through these elements, are—as another feminist and poststructuralist religious thinker, Catherine Keller (b. 1953), remarks in her Process and Difference (2002)—united on our only common ground, this earth, and its diversified but interrelated Spirit. The impression that the whole planet Earth (with all of the enabling cosmic constellations that gave birth to her and sustain her, such as the heavily bodies, the physical forces, evolution, life, mind, and so on) is the minimal undivided unity or smallest entity of meaningful existence—quasi the atom of meaning in the cosmos—was not invented by the sensibilities of eco-theories such as the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock (b. 1919) and Lynn Margulis (b. 1938), but reflects our most ancient human spiritual knowledge and experience.

In this sense, the following nine paths or patterns or modes or forms or clouds of images may be understood as a kind of transreligious impulse for awakenings of our existence from the slumber of heedlessness to a spirituality of the numinous at the sensible heart of all religions and non-religious sensibilities to the sacred—not only of the natural integration of humanity in the rhythms of nature, but of the Spirit as an expression of an ecological integrity that transcends all boundaries while imminently remaining essential to all of these traditions. So, now, these are the nine transreligious poetic patterns that spirit seekers, in their passageways through the heart of material existence in which the cosmic Spirit expresses itself, may employ, concurrently or successively, actively or reflectively, in the search for life unborn and deathless.

The Small Flame in Everything draws us into the realm of the small and large. As a matter of magnitudes, we realize that the Spirit is not only in everything, but everything is in the Spirit, placed in it as its all-embracing space. It is the encounter of the heart of things, of that which matters when everything else is said and done. It evokes the images of life as fire, of life under fire, of the burning sentiment of life, the ineradicable thirst for life, and what this means for seeking the Spirit in all things, small and large, important and negligible, found and lost, picked up and thrown away. The Spirit of the All makes its appearance in the minute, the minor, the excluded, the undiscovered, the small voice. Here, the irreplaceable voice of God’s Self, the vox ipsissima divina, manifests through the heart of our Self in the form of a vibration between hearts, in modes of truths that cannot be expressed except in the language of the heart. The spirit seeker who follows this path will want to become minor to become everything. This path stands for a theopoetic emptying—as is suggested by the invoked images and gestures of the self-emptying Reality (sunyata) in Mahayana Buddhism, but also by the christological hymn in St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians (2:6–11), one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of the texts of the New Testament.

Crossing the Infinite Sea employs the image of an ocean cruise. Danger, adventure, and trust meld to create the image of an extraordinary reality, of a situation of high alert, of the perpetual renewal of orientation and purpose. One can be lost in the open spaces of the sea, drowned by its violent upheavals, miss one’s port of exit, disappear in its endlessness, but also find peace in its calm waters and the infinite horizon that offer us places to linger. The ocean has a presence like nothing else and a depth with an impenetrable life of its own; it hides monsters and treasures. It may be traveled but cannot be drunk. Why are we crossing it? How do we stay alive? Not whether, but when does its own vivacity become too much to bear? The spirit seeker who travels this path will be in awe of the primordial, grand and inconceivable otherness of Reality and its Spirit, a Life so alien and yet so familiar that it reminds us of the sensation and multifold powers of the ocean waters, of their salty strangeness, of their transcendent depth and width, of their patience in carrying us and their seeming indifference swallowing us. Like the Leviathan of old (Job 41), no one has created this ocean (Genesis 1:2). A poetics of chaos can only lend the power of chaos to healing by persuading it to calm down long enough for the spirit-farer to find a harbor (Jonah 1:12; Mark 4:31–45).

A Finger in the River references the moment when we encountered moving waters, their flow, and the urge to touch them. A river of life streams by, presenting life to an embedding landscape, while a dry river indicates death to the whole land. By touching the river, we create a change of flow. Flow upon flow! We cannot cross it without being changed, moved away, transported downward, dislocated. Yet we cannot avoid crossing it, either, if we don’t want it to be the end of the world. And we know it is not. Bathing in it, eating of its fish, using it as means of transport and release, seeking its origin and end, waiting for its yearly flood, in fear or anticipation—all that and more binds us into the rhythms of nature and imprints on us an image of life and transcending movement. Sit at the river and follow its flow! Movement and stillness at once; flat and deep places; eddies and rapids; waterfalls and meanders—all that may indicate to the spirit seeker a path of crossing boundaries, of the permanence of flux, of constant change, of the unity of opposites in the face of impermanence. As with Ecclesiastes (1:9) there is nothing new under the sun, except that the sun comes up every day to grant us a new day; so, here, nothing stays the same, but no change is permanent either.

Falling from the Tree evokes an image of childhood: climbing a tree; but maybe also: falling from a tree. Why do we climb trees (some of us, at least)? It is higher up; we must trust the tree to hold us in its arms; we hide in the crown among the leaves. All that—and: the tree is in all spiritual traditions a symbol of life. The Tree of Life (Genesis 2:9). The Tree in Heaven. The Wishing Tree. The World Tree. The Sacred Tree. The Qur’anic sadrat al-muntaha, the Tree of the utmost boundary beyond which only God resides (Qur’an 53:10–18). Trees have their own language, the language of the spirit-wind, of the leaves in the wind. They have their own mysterious life, as forest, the rain forest or cloud forest, as jungle or the redwood forest. They can be beautiful ornaments in gardens and unexpectedly resistant inhabitants of a wilderness. Ancient forests, groomed gardens, and the inhospitable wilderness harbor the most extraordinary and oldest living beings on Earth, thousands of years of age. But it is also a tree that reminds us of the fall, the insight into good and evil, the ability to be morally responsible (Genesis 2–3). And we should not forget that humans come from trees. We have fallen from trees, walking on two legs instead. We abandoned trees as haven in order to live under trees and from their breath. In many cultures, trees house spirits, wisdom and fate. The spirit seeker who treads the path of the tree will be aware of the other life we depend on. With the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (d. 1965) we may encounter a Thou—a companion that speaks not through leaves of books but in leaves of trees, and not in words and sentences but in the rhythms and songs of birds; it tells not the story of our little sorrows, but the story of the evolution that brought us about.

The Show from Backstage will, for once, depart from the images, and imaginations, of nature. Instead, it thrusts us into the poetics of art, of imitation, of drama and tragedy, of culture and the mirroring of humanity to itself. It is a strange place to be in or around: the stage, the