CHAPTER FOURTEEN

FROM TRANSCENDENCE TO INTROCENDENCE: THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF POLITICAL REALITY AND -ESOTERIC CONSTRUCTIONS OF SALVATION

Andreas Dordel and Andrea Ullrich

The following contribution deals with a widespread modern notion of self-conception and its problems concerning the consciousness of politi- cal reality. The main thesis is, that the so-called secular modernity gen- erates as a refl ex secular-religious phenomena like ‘New Age’-Movement, Esotericism and a psychological boom of conceptions and methods of self-discovery. These notions became more and more widely spread and diffused in society and act as religious substitutes in the existential search of order. The common focus of these modes of self-assurance is the restitution of a ‘divine self’ as the way of salvation for the individual, as well as for mankind. The examples of modern esoterical systems like Aleister Crowley’s ‘Thelematism’, Rudolf Steiner’s ‘Anthroposophy’ and L. Ron Hubbard’s ‘Scientology’ on the one hand, and modern ‘Psychologies of Self’, represented by Carl Gustav Jung’s ‘analytical’, Abraham Maslow’s and Carl Rogers’ ‘humanistic’ and Ken Wilber’s ‘transpersonal Psychology’ on the other hand, demonstrate in compari- son not only a continuity within the history of religion by showing a transformation of itself within the process of secularization. Furthermore they show some elementary parallels in the axiomatic interpretation of existence, which describes the constitution of a ‘self-referential’ respec- tively ‘identical consciousness’. This mode of introspective self- awareness, where the transcendent ground of existence (nous, noetikon) is relocated or ‘immanentized’ in the introcendent world of the psyche, will be confronted and criticised in respect to its ethical and political consequences with the classical philosophical paradigm of noetic con- sciousness, which was exposed in its analytical political relevance by the political philosopher Eric Voegelin. 416 ANDREAS DORDEL AND ANDREA ULLRICH

1. THE PSYCHO-ESOTERIC MARKET OF SALVATION IN SECULAR MODERNITY AND ITS POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS

Contrary to the theory of secularization and its prognosis of an inevita- ble decline of religion in the modern world, it is becoming more and more obvious that modernization more often strengthens religion.1 One must admit that the techno-instrumental rationality of the modern world is quite not able to catch the existential human questions, which have been the main subjects of philosophy and religion since antiquity. Whereas religion ever had a broader infl uence and popularity of endow- ing life with meaning than philosophy, we nowadays can observe a more divers range of religious and pseudo-religious phenomena, e.g. New Religious Movements and world-views, Christian heretic and the mod- ern western adaptation of eastern religiosity. Beside the resurgence of traditional monotheistic religions in the modern western world and its reference to a transcendent reality, we can encounter an increase of new manifestations of religiosity with a focus on salvation in the immanent world. As the latter are mainly recognized as dangers for western democ- racies and culture in form of Political Religions, like e.g. National Socialism and radical Islamism, we can also perceive an increasing realm of superfi cial private religiosity and spirituality, as we can fi nd them in modern esotericism and in a vast expanding market of psychological life counselling, self-awareness and personality development culminating in the ideas of an ‘enlargement of consciousness’ and ‘spiritual growth’. In this so-called ‘psycho-market’, which had been established since the ‘psycho-boom’ of the ’60s and ’70s of the 20th century, we can fi nd a compound of psychological and spiritual-religious aspects respectively a syncretism of occult-esoteric world-views, together with elements of western depth-psychology as well with consciousness-changing tech- niques of Asian origin, e.g. Buddhist meditation and shamanistic tech- niques of ecstasy. Just to illustrate the relevance of this psycho- market, the approximated sales of popular-psychological and esoteric books, magazines, self-awareness courses, alternative therapies and treatments in Germany is among 10 to 18 Billion Euros a year. In the German book-trade the market share of esoteric books in the group of fact- and counsellor books was in 2005 by 13,4%, with an increase of 8,7% to

1 Cf. Peter Berger (ed.), The Desecularization of the World. Resurgent Religion and World Politics, Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1999.