Know Thyself 

The Western Spiritual Heritage

The insight mentioned above is no new-age thinking.
It is timeless and has been repeated again and again by some of the smartest and most influential minds of their time.
In all parts of the world.
Yet, we have seemingly forgotten.

Today, there is a suppression and neglect of many non-Western (Asian, African, indigenous) viewpoints and cosmologies that don’t comply with the current rationalist materialist worldview.
But the Western world has not only colonized many other parts of the world, infusing them with its capitalistic values and reductionist metaphysics, but it has also colonized its own weird and wild past.

The history of the West has been far weirder and more fascinating than we are made to believe.
The church has suppressed all alternative cosmologies and spiritual systems, and the enlightenment historians have ironed out and erased all seeming irrationalities of the past as embarrassments to their sober secular thinking.

What I never quite got is that the West was obviously never just about dry arguments and theory.

In antiquity, philosophy was mainly a way of life, quite often, it was spiritual, recognising the interconnectedness of things, and seeing the human being, the microcosm, as a mirror of the cosmos, the macrocosm.
Ironically, theoria itself meant “divine vision” in times of Plato.

Some striking examples:
Most Athenians were initiates at Eleusis, where up to 3000 people went through a 9-day ritual culminating in an experience of death and rebirth facilitated through a psychedelic sacrament (the kykeon). In fact, there have been countless initiatory rites like the Eleusinian Mysteries (existing for nearly 2000 years just outside of Athens), e.g. the Mithraia (rivalling Christianity for its first few centuries), or the Dionysian rites (Bacchanalia), existing all over the Mediterranean. That is, until Christianity stomped out the last ones in the 5th century AD.
There have also been oracles, caves, and temples for dream incubation, and magical traditions all over.

The Presocratics appear to have been wandering sages and shamans, more than anything resembling a modern philosopher. The Pythagoreans were a spiritual community with strict rules that cultivated a number-mysticism and weren’t particularly into calculus. The Stoics taught that we and the stars share a literal kinship, and that ethics follows from cosmology: live in accord with the larger whole because you are part of it.

Plato described the escape out of the cave as a path towards the light in which we come to realize the illusion of our everyday images and concepts, while many Neoplatonists spoke about their mystical union with the One and how the world emanates from said One.
Many schools of philosophy were concerned with what we today might call mystical insights, while engaging in catharsis (healing through emotional release) and practising ritual (e.g. Theurgy). Their goal was illumination or, in some cases, more simply, the good life, but all went beyond rational argument alone.
This ancient worldview was sustained by a continuous outflow of meaning coming from a participatory cosmology.

This is no wishful thinking, but the actual history available to anyone actually looking at the evidence without flinching out of fear of the seeming strangeness and irrationality of it all.
It’s only irrational and strange to our rationalist, materialist modern minds.

And that’s not it by any means.
We could add: Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Alchemy, monastic mysticism, cathedral geometry, Romantic nature mysticism, Theosophy, the Transcendentalist movement and many, many more.
Even modern scientists— like Whitehead’s process metaphysics, for instance—kept sneaking life back into matter. And then there’s the whole new paradigm movement and transpersonal psychology, which are shunned in academic circles and mainstream discussions (but that’s another topic).

So, it’s not that the West doesn’t have a spiritual lineage or history.
It’s only that it got suppressed and erased for fear of embarrassment.
Newton wrote as much on Alchemy as he did on physics, and Paracelsus, the inventor of pharmacology and famous doctor, was teaching “occult science” at university during the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, the infamous magician John Dee was the advisor to Elizabeth I, and Rudolph II, the king of Prague, was inviting alchemists from all over Europe to come to his court. 

History is indeed much, much weirder than we are made to believe.
Yet, it’s about time we uncover those beautiful, strange roots.

So, here’s the plan:

Let’s stop treating Western spiritual heritage like a porn magazine in the room of a 14-year-old, with secrecy, slight disgust, and a lot of neglect.
Let’s bring it into the light and use it to craft a shared story that makes it both sane and beautiful to talk about deep meaning, the connection to something larger than ourselves, the interconnectedness of things, and how our humanity includes our cosmic origin.

This is not nostalgia, it’s an inventory to work with.

We have a tradition and plenty to honor and draw from.
If we stop pretending our lineage is a museum and start treating it like a workshop, we find the tools to craft a new cosmology and story of what it means to be a human being in this cosmos. From this springs an inclusive ethics recognizing our mutual kinship.

My vision is to re-cover and re-member all those parts that have been forgotten and neglected in the modern (Western) world.
This includes understanding the limitations of the rational thinking mind and learning to expand its scope to something larger.

Evolutionary, we needed our separateness to survive, and it enabled us to have the experience we’re having. The next step of individual and collective evolution includes a vision in which we remember that we are parts of a larger whole.
Our separate selves will not be lost, instead, continuous individuation will be met with remembrance and integration.     
Compassion, trust, equanimity, and peace are some of the things that follow naturally.

“Where are we going, but always home?”
-Novalis