Above All, Perspicacity

Four-level practice for the fourth turning.

Really, above all, love.

Countless near-death revelations attest to an “other side” that is saturated with love, where love is the standout criteria by which human life is evaluated. Many mystics assert the same. In his stylized memoir The Bridge Across Forever, Richard Bach receives the message — a thunderbolt out of the blue — in a convertible parked curbside, in 1970s L.A. In the synoptic gospels, Jesus says the two most important commandments are to love God and love your neighbor. And John tells us that Jesus’ mission occurred, as an ultimate offering, because “God so loves the world.”

So above all, love, I’d say. But I don’t think you can fully separate love from wisdom. Love without wisdom can be dissipative and consumptive. In the Theosophical tradition, love and wisdom are joined together on the same “ray” of existence — one of seven definitive energies running through the universe — as Love-Wisdom. And here, latter-day Theosophist Raghavan Iyer makes the case the love is so inherent to the fabric of all Being that the increasingly keen perception of reality is indistinguishable from an increasingly profound saturation in love. I think this point is really worth thinking about.

Above all, love. But above all, wisdom, too. And for the sake of wisdom above all, perspicacity. Clear-seeing. “Ortho-antilipsi” over orthodoxy. (With love.)

And if so, I think it’s important to consider that perspicacity really fully occurs when it’s developing at four levels simultaneously: personal, interpersonal, systemic, and cosmic. To see clearly, you have to look within. You have to clearly engage with others. You have to gain a deeper understanding of systems — from the behavior of organizations up through the behavior of macro-level events. And you have to, I believe, connect with a sentient mystery.

The point feels particularly worth making because, in America at least, during the next four years — the second term of a horse-in-the-hospital president (h/t John Mulaney) — there’s likely to be a lot of conversation about institutional and political reform. The first place many people are going to go, it seems to me, is to complain about MAGA, as though there’s some way to vote it off the island. The second place many people are going to go, I suspect, is to recur to rehearsed, but somewhat poorly interrogated American ideological tropes. And the third place many people are going to go is to talk about policy.

But it seems clear to me that anything that is being called a crisis — the climate crisis; the consumption crisis; the culture war; the democracy crisis; whatever you want to call the myriad fires, large and small, that will result from the Trump administration — are all the result of deeper psychic, spiritual phenomena at many scales of detail. To find agency, I think we must engage at many scales of detail — doing personal, interpersonal, systemic, and cosmic work. It seems to me that all useful endeavor harkens to these four levels, and that a cursory job with of any one of them weakens any effort at any level.

At the nonzero risk of mansplaining, for the rest of this piece, I’m thinking aloud about concrete practices at each level. When I say “you,” I mean me, also. (And I vacillated between writing in first and second person.)

Personal: Vipassana and psychotherapy

How are you wild? How are you tame? How are you natural? How are you shackled? What do you want and why?

What do you tend to see? What do you tend to miss? How are you loving toward yourself? How are you loving toward others? How can you be a little much, and in what ways are you thoughtful about it? Can you see your feeling of not having enough? How do you handle that feeling? Can you see your feeling of not being enough? How do you handle that?

Do you see the difference between the image-making faculty of the mind and reality?

Vipassana is the process of observing without judgment. It’s a term that underlies a few things mentioned here. But as a practice, it’s good to engage in self-observing meditation. And it’s also good to engage in some kind of psychotherapeutic, self-analytic process. You don’t have to pay for it. There are all kinds of spaces where you can have supportive, self-analytic conversation for free now. Ancient Vedic and Buddhist approaches to individual practice, combined with the growing wisdom of the psychotherapeutic tradition are, together, powerful guides, I feel.

Interpersonal: Mutuality practice

While looking within, can you take charitable, pro-active interest in other people? The organization/movement Waking Down in Mutuality has a very simple but effective mutuality practice. A group decides how long they’re going to meet. Then you count the number of people present and divide the time evenly among the people. Everybody gets that amount of time to talk about whatever they want about their own experience of reality. Everybody else listens without comment. For the listeners, the goal is to observe someone in the process of awakening. For the speaker, the goal is to inhabit their own experience while they are in the process of awakening.

I really love this practice, because it drives home that even the most mundane experiences in day-to-day life are expressions within the exquisite ground of Being. Not everything is desirable, but everything is in a way sacred. Developing the practice of listening to others intentionally can really help one connect with the fact that, by definition, everything is woven into the cosmic.

Systemic: Academia

There are many ways to frame the intellectual world. But I’d highlight academia in particular because academia, like the Church, is a big institutional structure that gets knocked around a lot. After college, I deliberately steered clear of academic institutions for many years because of my prejudices about them, but I’ve come around to the feeling that like the disparagement of the Church, a lot of the critique of academica is strawmanning or otherwise unfair. At root, academia is the gathering for the pursuit of truth through dialogue, especially mindful of reason — and in my more recent experience it seems to me that it remains just that.

I think it’s important to operate within a narrative that the two basic evolutions beyond medieval thinking — modernity and postmodernity — have each inadvertently been accompanied by a kind of scourge. Modernity came with the strong pressure that we could only treat as real that which could be quantified. And postmodern relativism came with a sort of frowzy agnosticism that, at its extreme, verges not only spinelessness but on the insistence that frowzy agnosticism verging on spinelessness is the only truly ethical stance possible.

And then, let’s put academia in another category. Academia is the attempt to understand reality through a keen rational conversation — which can detect and evolve beyond the pitfalls of previous attempts. The term “metamodernism” is increasingly used, for instance — so far, mainly as a gathering space for folks who recognize the premodern-to-modern-to-postmodern problem.

It’s extremely hard to understand systems, and my feeling is that we grossly overestimate the extent to which any systemic picture in our heads actually resembles anything that’s really going on. But it also seems clear to me that the best way to connect with systems is through academia.

I think it would be great for many forms of continuing education — i.e., many forms of classes — to be considered an essential part of adulthood. One way or another, it’s valuable to get involved in the “church” of rationality somehow, and the great conversation it spurs. An institutional conversation.

Cosmic: Prayer

To me, one of the standout features of the Judeo-Christian tradition the long argument that the ground of reality has a personal aspect, and that, through this personal aspect the ground is intently engaged in the lives of human beings. It seems to me that the very idea that the cosmos is saturated with love only truly coheres when one seeks what could be called a personal relationship with God.

I don’t mean to be chauvinistic about this; there are personal realizations of divinity in other traditions. Krishna’s revelation to Arjuna of his ultimate form in The Bhagavad Gita, for instance, is more subtle and explicit in its ways than anything that quite appears in the Bible, I feel. But in whichever tradition one finds it, I think the basic idea that God is parent — abba, father; immah, mother — is an invaluable one, and the idea that we can approach the ground of reality with the vulnerability of a little child, to be received with the open love of an ultimate parent, is an essential component of wholeness, I feel. To view the process of prayer not as an inspection of an inert landscape, but a dialogue with an ultimate Personage, is similarly essential.

So, pray. Not just as an act of expression. But as an act of dialogue.

Cosmic: Contemplation

I suppose contemplation is just another aspect of vipassana: to not only consider one’s own interior anatomy without judgment, but to reflect on the existence of all things without judgment. It’s really important, I think, to see that our mental maps overlay reality with forms of our own design, and that these can tile over the nuance of reality itself. Taking time for uninflected contemplation connects you with a purer apprehension of reality. It’s not to abandon the mental activity altogether; it’s to put it in its proper place. Contemplation allows reality to penetrate us, to speak to us. It changes what we see, and it changes what we are.

As the world increasingly wakes to the metacrisis, it’s easy to predict that hard times are going to get harder. In Christian terms, a period of trial is a period of the cross, and Thomas à Kempis perhaps most explicitly framed this as an experience of purification. Hardship can be a crucible, and some of the effect is just achieved through our surrendering to it, and letting something larger than us work in us.

But when we try to be deliberate, I think it can’t be underestimated how necessary it is to be holistically deliberate. We’re seeking what John Vervaeke has called the “optimal grip” on reality, and I think it must be stressed that that optimal grip requires multiple scales of approach.

Activism without individual self-analysis is self-defeating; interpersonal priorities are inevitably inflected with larger group and system dynamics — even cosmic dynamics. Et cetera. Engaging in the process at four levels — and engaging with others who are doing the same, is a direction of the richest potential. It’s this way that the vibrant fabric of a new world emerges, I feel. And I think it shouldn’t be underestimated how often it’s valuable to recur to the four levels, explicitly, in any personal or group practice.

Above all, perspicacity. At four levels.

And then, above all, love.