5. “TAT TWAM ASI”, “THAT IS YOU”

Note from the translator: This is what I came across in a blog “Reality check: the existentialist Colin Wilson and consciousness theory in the 21st century” by Geoff Ward while translating this chapter (September 24, 2019) : “What [Colin] Wilson was searching for all his life as a philosopher was the means by which, through an elevated consciousness, we could meet our deep-seated, primeval need for transcendence without the use of drugs or other stimulants or the aid of religious institutions, and how we could assist what he saw as an evolutionary momentum towards this goal. Ever since his first book The Outsider (1956), he was sure that humanity was on the point of an evolutionary leap to a higher phase. Integral to this was the ultimate question that lay behind the ‘Outsiders’: how can humans extend their range of consciousness?” Is this question not exactly what is answered in this essay?

Another quote: “Once, in an interview (‘Life after death’, 2003, under the Interviews section at Colin Wilson World), Wilson told me: ‘Our purpose in the world is eventually to enable spirit to conquer matter, to get into matter to such an extent that there is no longer any matter.’” This is an indication to the next planetary phase of the earth, the New Jerusalem, where the physical no longer exists and the “bottom is the etheric.

Also relevant to what is developed here: “I [Geoff Ward] was prompted finally to write this essay after reading three new books by post-materialist authors: The Idea of the World: A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality (2019) by the philosopher-scientist Bernardo Kastrup in whose work I find much that is complementary to Wilson’s; Digital Consciousness: A Transformative Vision (2018) by Jim Elvidge; and An End to Upside-Down Thinking: Dispelling the myth that the brain produces consciousness and the implications for everyday life (2018) by Mark Gober, all of which I would recommend to the reader.”

I left an, as yet unanswered, comment with a link to this translation in progress saying, “You’ll find many of the questions that Colin Wilson raises answered in the essay “What is Meditation? — A Basic Examination of the Spiritual Scientific Expansion of Consciousness” by the anthroposophist/philosopher and poet Herbert Witzenmann (1905–1988) that I am in the process of translating from the German.”

This essay might also be interesting to those concerned with the eminent danger posed to human consciousness and thereby to the whole human race by the steadily encroaching phenomenon of transhumanism, because the author Herbert Witzenmann, in advancing the great Platonic tradition of the medieval scholar Alanus ab Insulis with his work “Anticlaudianus or the Books of the Heavenly Creation of the New Man” (as the subtitle reads of the German translation by Wilhelm Rath), succeeds in exactly formulating a viable consciousness theory of the sort that Colin Wilson sought but not quite managed to find.

 

If we give in all seriousness the proper weight to what introspection tells us, then we become aware that through our ability to think we are connected to all world phenomena, to the whole of reality. Thinking is after all the unifying bond permeating all world-being – and is only interrupted in the moment of origin of our cognition. For in the latter, the formative and cohesive power only becomes active when we generate it through our own activity. In our cognition we participate in weaving the bond that unifies all beings, here this bond is woven together in us and here we cooperate in interweaving it in the things. This signifies, however, that we as thinking, spiritual beings are connected with our destiny through ideational co-creation, thus not only in an enduring way. For the world phenomena and world events are our destiny. In the slings and arrows of our destiny, we face ourselves as its co-creating contributor.

            We are, however, connected with world phenomena, which are our destiny, in a twofold manner. This emerges from the foregoing.

            By looking at one of these modes of connections, we can become aware of the fact that we (consciously or subconsciously) participate in everything that comes into being, the construction of all forms through the unification of the cosmogenic with our own cognitive spirit. We thereby gain a universal mode of existence, an affinity with all beings. For through the co-production of the spiritual formative powers that are active in all existence, through the active reconnection of the spiritual bond that is torn from our organism without our individual activity (thus as a result of a constitutional subjective process), we are (because of our participation in a process that overlaps subject and object) part of the whole world. For nowhere does this bond in virtue of its self-contained infinity and adaptability to all beings leave an open space. We, therefore, have through our thinking co-formation of world phenomena a total existence in the universe – indeed not in full consciousness of its immeasurable content and scope (since we always realize only parts of the totality), but in a more or less subconscious, yet through clear knowledge justifiable existential feeling. “Tat twam asi”, “That Is You”, this Brahmanic formula expresses the latter with regard to the world. And it is this connectedness with world phenomena that we become aware of by observing our cognitive co-creation.

            We must, however, in our context also consider the other mode of connection. For, as has resulted from the foregoing, our power of realization is not only united with the emergence of world phenomena but also with the dying away of the spirit therein. This dying away is the individualization of the concepts, the spiritual formative powers of the world. Through our activity of thinking we participate in the processes of dying away and of coming about. In this context we must focus our attention on a factual matter of the greatest significance. The dying away of the spirit in world phenomena, the individualization of the universals, remains connected with the universalized percepts. Nowhere does the dying spirit appear as something detached from the perceptual-material. A dead spirit does not exist, only its dying away in world phenomena, there exist only dying metamorphoses of the immortal spirit. Also there where we observe decomposition, decay and putrefaction, it is not the spirit decomposing and decaying. What decomposes and decays is rather that which the spirit previously formed and maintained, from which it now retreats leaving its dissolving remains behind. It may be that anti-spiritual powers nestle in the decaying matter, but the cosmogenic spirit does not partake in the decay. It does not know death detached from the reviving formative process. Proper to the spirit is only the passing away connected with the coming about and its detachment from its previous formative work. For, when a form is dissolved, nothing is present anymore in the remaining, previously formed perceptible components of the structural power and therefore no longer attainable to human cognition either. To be sure, the remains that appear at every form of decomposition again assume the level of form, yet the latter is no longer suitable to the original structural fabric, but to the one appearing anew in each case. In so far as this is the case, it has also to do here with formative processes, in which the states of becoming and dying away are intertwined,  which can be concurred with in cognition as well as followed by introspection becoming attentive to it – a creation gently flaring up from the consumption.

            Even though it was previously stated that there exists no dead spirit, it is now, however, necessary to consider a highly significant exception for which this is not true. The place (in an exaggerated sense of the word) where this exception takes place is the human being. It is only in the human being that this unique exception of the dead spirit, detached from its formative reality, is manifested. For from the foregoing it has emerged that the paralyzed, congealed, no longer mobile concepts can be manifested in a dead representational form in human consciousness. This is of the greatest significance, because of the fact that this is connected with the origin of our independent individuality. Through the observation of our spiritual formative power that shapes reality within our consciousness, we have an actualistic consciousness, the emergence of which we attribute to ourselves. Through this actualistic consciousness, we are connected to the universals and through the latter to the general evolution of the world, with the powers shaping destiny, but only as co-creators of their work. In so far as we are co-creators, we are not self-formators, designers of our destiny. This co-creation of our destiny is synonymous with our cognitive co-creating share of reality. Through the fact, however, that individualized thought-forms can manifest in our consciousness arises the basic condition of our wholly fulfilled independence. For the individualized concepts, the representations, are in two respects detached from the general context – and this detachment is in relation to their original transformable class type a process of dying away. The representations no longer possess, on the one hand, the mobility of the general concepts by virtue of which they belong to the self-enclosed organism of the spiritual world in which they merge into a unity. They are, on the other hand, also drawn out of the formative process of reality, in which they led their formative activity to the world phenomena permeated by them. As the originator of these processes, the human being develops the ability to produce psychic-spiritual figments that are detached from the context of the purely spiritual (ideational) world as well as from the formative process of the sensible world of appearances. This ability is the power to form representations that are not connected (apart from their own proper psychic existence) to any reality, which the human being can first concretize through his action. He can therefore develop visionary-conceptual imagination through which he can imbue the world with new impulses that without him would not come about. It is immediately evident that the human being thereby enters into a relationship with the world, which includes the possibility of constructive creative power as well as the other possibility of a most dangerous false path. The human being thereby enters also into a relationship with himself.

            In order to gain a sufficient understanding of what hereby occurs, it is, to begin with necessary to take a look at the different types of actuation, through which the human being (without preliminary self-observation as yet subconsciously) works on gaining his independence. The human being develops self-independence by grasping the general concepts, for he hereby brings his personal thinking will to bear in contrast to the influence of his bodily organization as well as within the spiritual world. He develops self-independence, furthermore, in the co-creating construction of world phenomena through the cognitive unification of percept and concept, because he enacts something that without him cannot come about, and in which he thus manifests, asserts himself. The advantage gained from these processes of acquiring independence, however, is largely lost to him, because he activates them in most cases subconsciously. It is only in the introspection of his cognitive behavior that he becomes fully conscious of them and that they unfold their full activity within his soul life. This transforming influence is everywhere fully active where the human being with his representations, mental images intervenes in transforming his environment. For here he is fully aware of his own activity and its origin in his own being (albeit not yet of its ideational interwovenness). This is the case with all inventions with regard to a previously unknown state of reality. For the inventor pries himself away from customary views and reveals what was previously hidden. For the inventor himself, the accompanying change in consciousness is unmistakable. It can with regard to great inventions be epochal and change the state of consciousness of humanity. This is true e.g. for the new representations about our planetary system that go back to Copernicus. Not only our astronomical worldview but also the existential consciousness of humanity has hereby undergone a decisive change towards gaining self-independence. The transformative intervention in our environment, which we continually execute with greater or less success, is however as the daily toll for our journey through life not only the indispensable tribute to the conditions of our existence, but also the permanently gaining of self-independence  - the full significance, of which we are indeed at first not inclined to honor. It is notwithstanding obvious that, through our creative ability to transform the world based on our own representations, we give ourselves a spiritual content, which originates from our own creative power. This is the continually and therefore with priority active source of our self-independence. For our psychic-spiritual condition the results of our actions are less important than the strengthening of our creative power, which is independent of success and which increases while being exercised. Yet for the world, it is important that, by turning ourselves into self-independent beings, we can contribute to its advancement – and that with all the more creative power, the more we change ourselves.  

            The human being is, therefore, not only the co-formator of his destiny by cognitively co-formatting reality as destiny coming his way. He is also the acting self-formator of his destiny, in as much he imparts new impulses to the latter and by adding a new destiny out of himself to what comes his way. He is capable of imparting these impulses by virtue of his power of independence, to the increase of which the destiny coming his way is constantly appealing, and the significance of which however he only gauges through the destiny proceeding from him, thus through his faculty of individualization to the extent of its proliferation.

            Yet while become aware of this, we are also becoming conscious of the great severity overshadowing our power of independence. For we attain the latter, after all, only because the spirit dies in us. We approach this fact with the proper appraisal only when we become aware of the fact that the spirit is the all-pervasive primal vitality – that the phenomena of life we observe in and around us are only derivative forms of appearance of the great stream of life, the formative power of the idea that creates and maintains the world. 

            The seriousness that permeates us while becoming aware of this process of dying away can, however, also fulfill us with hope. For the dying away of the spirit can be transformed into a resurrection, in the course of which we can resurrect ourselves out of the dead world of our representations. Of this we can be sure when through the growth of our individual independence we let creative new things enter the course of world events for the true progress of humanity.

            It is indeed clear that this self-formatting share of the human being in his destiny also causes a changed relationship of the general destiny forming powers with respect to him.