The Ecstatic Self: A Fourth Tier of Consciousness

 

It's called philosophical anthropology, the effort to construct a unified description of human nature, and I've already wrestled with Max Scheler's scheme. One of Scheler's traditional but counter-intuitive elements (given modern connotations of the word soul) is his using the term (Seele in German) for the life-sustaining impulse in animals, an instinctual core that is one of three tiers of normal human experience. But his scheme omits a fourth tier that is the goal of mystics. I'll describe the four tiers from the bottom up.

Body. This is about my experience of being flesh, not about the body seen by others or weighed by a bathroom scale. It's about everything that would be missing from my awareness if I were a brain in a vat or a spirit in a cloud. It includes the five senses and more, a range of inputs including pain, tension, flushing, itching, bloating, friction, warmth, cold, movement, depression, anger, fear, and elation--all facts of the flesh sensed by the conscious mind. The facts of the body are like weather. I can climb out of a snowdrift, but I can't avoid feeling cold if I'm naked in one. The body, in a given situation, is autonomous. If a wound causes a lethal drop in my blood pressure, I will die. There's very little my mind can do about facts of body but try to ignore them. Finally, input of the body is not directed toward particular objects, though its senses provide the images of objects. Its language is not desire, but fact: pleasure or pain, energy or its lack.

Soul (Psyche). This is my animal intelligence, a bundle of life-optimizing drives that evolved in interaction with my environment, my version of the survival kit of the species. Like the facts of body, it happens in my person but isn't personal. My love for my wife is personal, but my attraction to women isn't. It's a fact that I discovered at puberty and share with most other men. Much of the time, except for a chatter of words in my head, I operate on a level much like my dog, especially in dreams, fine meals, sudden danger, good sex, and quiet walks in the woods. The language of soul is the image--not just sight, but also as scent, sound, or pain or any cluster coalesced into an object. The soul constructs objects of desire or aversion from bundles of sensation. Desires are autonomous. Just as I can't help feeling cold in a snowdrift, I can't resist falling in love or enjoying blues music. Or explain either one. I experience soul as spontaneous relationships to sensory images, real or imagined.

Spirit (Person). This is the self-conscious executive function. Free will is a paradox, but, if it exists, here it is. Words, not images, speak to the spirit, which is capable of prioritizing--capable, when hungry soul desires a Twinkie, of reading a nutritional label and abstaining. It's worth noting that my spirit is more likely to succeed in resisting Twinkie-temptation if it enlists the cooperation of soul by speaking its language--imagining weight gain or a sugar slump. Spirit makes laws and obeys them, sometimes even dying for an idea. Spirit creates morality, civilization, science, industry, war, and art, as well as of personal integrity. I'm not responsible for the impulses of my soul, but I am responsible for not acting out impulses toward crime and betrayal. Spirit, by whatever name, is the rational, conscious part usually seen as the highest in Western culture.

Self (The One). This state is often externalized and called God or postponed till the afterlife, but centuries of mystics have declared that it can be experienced in the flesh. If the language of body is fact, the language of soul image, and the language of spirit idea, then the language of the Self is silence. Body, soul, and spirit are all dualistic: they deal with multiplicities of contingent objects that cannot ultimately satisfy. They produce or address objects in the flow of time, but the Self is said to exist outside time, an eternal ecstasy (derived from Greek "standing outside)." The Self, like the body, is impersonal and without desire. It is a unitary state of satisfaction that, unlike body and soul, is fully conscious even if impossible to describe. Indeed, the Self is sometimes called pure Consciousness.

Self isn't a synthesis of other faculties, as spirit is, but it is a destination achieved by leaving them behind. To quote the Katha Upanishad, "The man who has learned that the Self is separate from the body, the senses, and the mind . . . has found the source and dwelling place of all felicity" (p. 7). The Taittirya Upanishad expresses this transcendent felicity in a series of multipliers climbing through the tiered worlds of Hindu cosmology. The angels are a hundred times happier than the happiest young man, ancestors in paradise are a hundred times happier than the angels, and so forth, multiplying a hundredfold at each of nine tiers until the happiness of "the seer to whom the Self has been revealed and who is without craving" is a million trillions times greater (p. 62). Experiencing the One is the goal of all human existence. 

Many centuries later in The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th-century English Christian describes the path to immersion in God as negating, first, imagistic desire and then reason: "cleansing your feelings of all worldly, fleshly and natural pleasures and your intellect of everything that can be known according to its own form" (p. 2). This includes leaving behind even theological and devotional concepts and entering into a void utter darkness, leaving behind all images and earthly understandings (pp. 93-96) until all sense of separate existence is forgotten (p. 37).

Dropping back a few centuries to North Africa and a beatific vision from Augustine's Autobiography, he describes his consciousness rising through "the soul's inward faculty, to which the bodily senses report outward things--and this belongs even to the capacities of the beasts"--and then, upward through the reasoning power that deals with things of the senses, which are changeable, "abstracting itself from the contradictory throng of phantasms" and, after coming to know the unchangeable, finally arriving in a flash "at that which is," a vision of the invisible (7.17). Though Augustine's philosophical anthropology is dualistic, his account of the ascent to God clearly describes the soul-spirit-Self strata.

Nine centuries later in Germany, Henry Suso, another saint of the Catholic Church, charts a similar path in his maxims "for the guidance of an exterior man into his interior." The total negation of the imagistic soul is the first stage: "Keep thy senses closed to every image which may present itself." Evil results for pursuing objects of desire, "the craving for some thing which may satisfy him." For Suso, satisfaction is found only in "the inmost depths of the divine nature," and, although reason can be an ally in resisting the lure of the imagistic senses, spirit ultimately becomes an impediment, and "good intention often impedes true union." (pp. 234-240). The goal is to lose the lower-case self, the person, in union with the Self. The highest reward, the state of the most blessed in heaven but approached on earth, is to be "blended up" and "become the very same that God is" (p. 49).

I could extend and expand examples for hundreds of pages from all major religious traditions--in fact, Aldous Huxley does this in The Perennial Philosophy (1945), a guided tour of world mysticism illustrated with lengthy quotations. But, before I leave transcendent ecstasy dangling out on a long pole, I feel obliged to see if it can be reeled in. The transpersonal experience of the Self has been phenomenologically validated by a chorus of witnesses through the centuries, which is to say that many people have had such experiences. This is seldom questioned. The nagging question is an ontological or metaphysical one: what is really causing these experiences, and what do they demonstrate in the real world?

Cristof Koch notes in the June 2020 Scientific American that, "as a scientist, I operate under the hypothesis that all our thoughts, memories, precepts, and experiences are ineluctable consequences of the natural causal powers of our brain" (p. 73). In his article "Tales of the Dying Brain," Koch acknowledges the power and regular occurrence of near-death experiences and explains them as anoxia in the brain, similar to the effects of hallucinogenic drugs. 

          More relevant to my subject, Koch notes that in the moment before some episodes of epilepsy--known as Dostoyevsky's seizures because the Russian author described them--a patient feels depersonalized ecstasy, "overflowing with unbounded joy and and rapture, ecstatic devotion and completest life." Not only does this sound like a mystical experience, but Dostoyevsky's narrator says he would give his whole life for it. But this is a disease process, and neurosurgeons have produced it by stimulating the brain cortex with electrodes (Koch 75). Science hypothesizes that all four of our conscious tiers--including the reasoning one and the one experiencing God--are epiphenomena of electrical currents in gray meat. (But then, of course, so is science, at least our awareness of it.)

Koch promises electric head trips, and I wonder if billionaires will soon be hiring surgeons to plant electrodes in their brains to deliver mystical ecstasy at the push of a button. But, like dropping acid, the result probably wouldn't be a shortcut around years of meditating on Eternal Being--more like a path to burnout and addiction, a wholly different experience. 

  References 

Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Albert C. Outler. Revised by Mark Vessey. Barnes and Noble, 2007.

The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works. Translated by A. C. Spearing. Penguin, 2001.

Koch, Christof. "Tales of the Dying Brain." Scientific American, June 2020, pp. 71-75.

Suso, Henry. Blessed Henry Suso Collection. Aeterna Press, 2016.

Huxley, Aldous. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper, 1945.

The Upanishads: The Wisdom of the Hindu Mystics. Translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester. Signet, 2002.

White, John R. "Max Scheler's Tripartite Anthropology," in Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 75:255-266, 2001. White explains concepts in Scheler's Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics (1913-1916), translated by M. Frings and R. Funk, 1973. This is applied to Jungian analysis in White's, "Toward a Phenomenology of Participation Mystique and a Reformulation of Jungian Philosophical Anthropology" in Shared Realities: Participation Mystique and Beyond, edited by Mark Winborn, Fisher King Press, 2014.