The Nearness of Grace
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THE NEARNESS OF GRACE A PERSONAL SCIENCE OF SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION Arnold J. Mandell Table of Contents Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………… 3 Chapter 1: In Search of the Miraculous .…………………………………. 4 Chapter 2: Doesn’t Everybody ……………………………………………. 22 Chapter 3: Transformations Of Energies ……………………………. 42 Chapter 4: Sensual In-Between Entropies ………………………………. 64 Chapter 5: Some Entheogenic Entropies …………..……………………. 87 Chapter 6: Pentecostal Phase Transitions ………………………………. 122 Chapter 7: Amphetamine Roll-Up And Splitting .………….……………. 144 Chapter 8: Faith And Rationality …………………………………………. 168 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the Fetzer Institute for their support of this work. Particular thanks are due their imaginative program officer, Dr. Paul Gailey, who shared my vision and hope that these somewhat disparate themes could be blended into a meaningful whole. Time and the reading by others will tell whether this idea was realized. The Fetzer Foundation has facilitated exploration into blends of science and spirituality, particularly in the context of personal meaning. They also have a history of supporting serious work in this era’s most powerful and rigorous exercise in holism as represented by the mathematical and applied mathematical fields of modern dynamical systems theory. Fetzer’s very special environment and years of dedication have encouraged the variety of personal meanings within science to emerge and be recognized as legitimate and important parts of the research enterprise. It would be difficult to imagine a more propitious context for this effort. The book is dedicated to my constitutionally curious and clear-headed young daughter Buna, and to my intellectual and creative companion, Dr. Karen Selz, whose deep and lovely mind and spiritual consciousness helped create much this book. 3 CHAPTER 1: IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS I have been led into many laboratories by more than a half-century of persistent, driven searching for a biophysics of mind and personal spirituality that might yield some understanding of healing transformation. The motive force may have been genetic. My father said that we were descended from several generations of Jewish mystics, few of them able to attain the status of a salaried rabbi or cantor. These ecstatic men lived lives of peripatetic eccentricity, visiting and stirring congregations with provocative insights and uncomfortably personal inquiry, but only for a little while. Often they were asked to leave the synagogue, and sometimes even pushed out of their Eastern European Jewish townships, called shtetels. My father’s generation was the first in our family without one of these out-of- work Hebraic scholars. He lived as a businessman-musician, who, in the early mornings, studied Talmudic commentaries. He taught me that most interpretations of the book by the rational, physician, lawyer, philosopher, Moses Maimonides, called Guide for the Perplexed, erroneously assumed that man cannot understand God’s nature. He took issue with the opinion that the union of a person’s intellect and Spirit with God was not possible as long as a person was living. My father disagreed with Ibn Tibbon, Maimonides’ best-known early translator and interpreter who relegated the cognitive, analytical, physical and alchemical transformational 4 sciences to the earthly, not spiritual realm. My father espoused the work of the 13th Century proponent of a school of Jewish ecstatic mysticism, Abraham Abulafia, who taught that the human mind, if transformed into a “state of active intellect,” could become one with Spirit. This position is obvious in Abilafia’s interpretation of the Guide and in his Commentary on the Secrets. He believed that the Spirit could realize the Kingdom of God in rational yet mystical experience, in a state excited with ideas and images. The active intellect consciousness captures deep knowledge of both the “upper” and “lower” realms of “reality,” spontaneously and directly. He said that without spiritual transformation, this kind of knowing is not possible. Abulafia’s lesson was that the mundane intellect of man has the potential for metamorphosis into another kind of mind through a spiritualization of thought. This occurs in a series of developmental stages that begin with exercises of the intellect and imagination and culminate in what he called prophetic emanations. The exercises leading to this transformation are to be strongly willed and practiced regularly. This work results in ascension to an ecstatic state accompanied by greater intuitive powers, which Abulafia called “prophesy.” Ibn Adret, the Chief Rabbi of Spain at the end of the Thirteenth Century, banished Abulafia from that country, a century before the Spanish Inquisition ousted all Jews. Readying myself for the practice of Kabbala, a 13th Century tradition of esoteric and mystical interpretations of the Scriptures, I learned the secret meanings of each of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Much like the Platonic view of mathematics, that mathematics existed before the physical 5 universe, these symbols and their equivalences were believed to be eternal in the transcendental realm. One of the rare written accounts of this oral tradition is in the thirteenth-century Hebrew Book of Splendor, called the Zohar, which describes the Hebrew alphabet as the heavenly code of the cosmos. I learned the Hebrew unspeakable name for God in its four letters, the Tegragrammaton, yod-hei-vav-hei. The repeated letter hei, being fifth in the Hebrew alphabet, also represents the number five. In the Kabbalistic tradition, hei implicates the functional five-part partition of the human inner self or soul. The five parts are: nefesh, instinctual drives; ruach, mood, affect and emotions; neshamah, cognitive activities of the mind; chayah, efforts to understand and attain transcendence; yechidah, experiencing the world as a cosmic unity. Later in life as a psychoanalytical neuroscientist with a computational preoccupation, binary partitions divided the thoughtful, forewarning forebrain from the automatic and stereotyped hind brain; the signal analyzing thalamocortical from the emotional and impulsive brain stem-limbic systems; the symbolically logical left from the intuitively geometric right hemispheres. We divide the neurotransmitter moods of dopamine aggression from the transcendentally erotic serotonin and the organized dynamical states of periodicity and quasi (multi)periodicity from the real world complexity of chaos. I practiced the comfort of dividing an unknown whole into two or more unknowable parts. My fears of death emerged around sleep-time at age four, when the implications of my father’s malignant melanoma and the surgical loss of his left eye became clear. Death could be near. It was there as I fell asleep. It was not until age 6 ten when the Jewish guru and Hebraic tutor of my childhood, Rabbi Isadore Kliegfeld, could smile when I told him about my recent loss of nighttime panics with repeated Hebrew letter meditation. He said that I had been graced with personal evidence that these powerful symbols could call forth the transformational powers of God. The Rabbi said that I had been given a blessing, a nachas. Maybe the excitement of panic is not that far from the ground for the transcendence of an activated mind. It was the same tenth summer, in a hot back bedroom behind a closed door, first by accidental touch and then by more systematic chaffing, that I evoked a pleasurably urgent and yawning feeling that began in the lower part of my abdomen and back. The thought-emptying fullness resolved in the spasms of my first memorable orgasm. It was followed by an hour or so of inexplicable sadness. I had been struggling to understand my father’s well warn copy of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and wondered if I had been visited by one of the altered states James described. Was this what he meant by a transformative experience? A few months later, a similar late night meditation produced physical evidence, a thick, sticky, salty sweet stuff that by morning stuck my sheets together. Later that year, in my father’s library, I found a translation of the 1500 BCE Egyptian Book of the Dead. It contained a creation myth of two Gods in which “rubbing with my fist, my heart came into my mouth and I spat forth Shu and Tefnut.” Psalm 23, read rather regularly in Sunday school, began to make me wonder about the meanings of “…rod and staff that comforts…”, and what was meant by “…my cup runneth over.” 7 Among the ten regions of the Zohar, connecting the inner world of man to the upper world, is the tree of ten sefirot, the Tree of Life, in which Yesod, the phallus, occupies a central place. Now we know that G-spot stimulation of the para-urethral glands in the female and male can result in augmented spurts as well as cups that runneth over. A similar disappearance of time and loss of self-awareness overtook me while doing the theorem and proof work of high school geometry. Axioms and the rule-bound processes of deduction created unobvious journeys from that which was given to that which could be found. Rocking back and forth in a desk chair for hours, chewing on fingernails, cuticles and pencil ends, time evaporated in a self-less state of work-a-day well-being. Sri Aurobindo’s commentaries on the Bhagadvad Gita described this state as one of the rewards of karma yoga practice. Abulafia’s Kabbalistic School emphasized the importance of hitbodedut, detachment and seclusion in concentrated thought, as a technique