Spiritual Seeking and Spengler

In a sense, what I intend to do with this piece is to go back to the foundation of modern spirituality, especially the notion of spiritual seeking, which itself presupposes both some specific method or mode we commonly understand as ‘seeking’, that is, to seek, alongside the other, included, presupposed notion of a ‘seeker’. I want to look at seeking and the seeker in relation to both our contemporary situation and its place amidst larger Spenglerian cycles.

With this said, experience and history—have shown that people don’t update based on axioms, arguments, and/or data. In fact, it’s extremely difficult to surmise just what exactly it even is that changes people in any sense at all, and so, with that said, I have nothing to prove or argue. And, at most, this is simply a talk about the position the modern seeker finds himself or herself in, and little more.

What is it to seek?

It is apparent there is a thing called seeking. Where it arises from, that is, the drive to seek, is a question well beyond the scope of this talk. However, in practice, seeking results in various individuals and groups of people cohering around various sets of ideas they understand will give them something, take them somewhere, connect them to some elusive ‘more’ or ‘higher’ or ‘God’, or improve their lot in life in some sense. That’s about as broad as I can make it without upsetting people. Now, when I say take them somewhere, give them something, or improve their lot in some sense, I’m not necessarily referring to material goals. Though spiritual materialism is becoming an increasing reality, I think I can state with some certainty that spiritual seeking as it’s commonly understood centers around the inner life, and that what is being sought by the seeker is something that can help them make sense of things, the world, or their life in general, or even the cosmos, in relation to their internal life.

This definition itself presumes a foundation of the seeker that is commonly overlooked, that if there wasn’t something seekers (both individual and collective) understood—whether intuitively or empirically—as a problem, then there would be no seeking at all. Now, I don’t want to state that this is a problem in the normative, negative sense, like when your washing machine breaks or you lose your job, no. What I mean when I say problem is, I think, the felt sense of one of the following: Is this it?, Something is UP, Something is awry, Something just isn’t sitting quite right, or, most broadly, I really can’t put my finger on it, but the world FEELS to be much more than it SEEMS.

So it’s not just that seeking is as such, but its very reality presupposes something is up, not necessarily wrong—in fact, many seekers appear to become seekers because the material life is too comfortable or straightforward—but there is something to be solved. No one would seek if everything was fine, basically. Seeking exists in relation to a felt lack.

One question that often arises, especially for new seekers, is wondering why everyone isn’t seeking. Desiring to ask (or even yell in their faces) Why are you so content? Do you not want to know what it all means? One can kick around a multitude of reasons for this, many of them very complex and spiritually sophisticated, but the most pragmatic answer is…They’re just not interested. In much the same way, I am not interested in football or superhero movies, they’re not interested in analysing their dreams or summoning an entity. Each to their own.

Thus far, we’ve come to a fairly broad conclusion, then. There is this movement or process called seeking, which itself presupposes seekers, and the fact of its very movement presupposes something to be sought (itself presupposing some kind of lack, or at the very least, some notion that something, somewhere, can be solved in some sense by this process.) It is all fantastically vague, to be quite frank.

Now I can begin to form a key part of this piece, which is the question of who exactly this seeker is. Often, the case is such that the answer to this question is quickly (if not hastily) subsumed under the heading ‘psychology’. That is, the question is transformed into a question regarding the character or personality of the seeker in isolation from, well, everything else. Books, films, and even studies are quick to state that seekers are generally (though not exclusively): Nerdy, introverted, suffer from some form of low grade mental illness such as depression, possibly bullied, often isolated, have a preference for study and research, often have a creative streak, and struggle to fit in.

Now, when we look back at the question of Why doesn’t everyone seek? We could, if we so wished, project some form of correlation and/or causality onto this whole thing, a projection, however, that ends up much like the chicken and egg question. What came first, the seeking or the introversion? The isolation or the meditation? The struggle to fit in or the hexes? Here’s the thing: this isn’t linear, and in some cases it’s one way around, and in others, the other. However, generally speaking, this form of psychologizing (like most psychologizing) seeks only to do one thing: declare X as weird and therein, declare its opposite Y as normal. It is a question that modern psychology likes to avoid (because it really has no answer) as to the direction of its psychologizing, where the hell is this CBT taking me? And if such is the case that CBT (or whatever newfangled, watered down Skinner-box crap they’ve ‘developed’) is transforming me into someone who can sit in an office all day, then yeah, damn right I’m going so summon something instead. In short, the psychology angle is dull, but it needed a quick mention.

So, we can move away from the distinct mental angle of the seeker, really because that’s a case of individuality, and begin to look at a broader foundation, and finally draw in the work of Oswald Spengler.

~

So, I have now outlined what, albeit roughly, the seeker is in abstract. A human being is one who is seeking something more. This might appear to be a working definition of the seeker at its most reduced, however, it is actually this idea of seeking or a seeker in abstract I…seek to question.

The term seeking is a verb, and as such, one might think of the seeker as a noun that is a verbing. Or, a noun that believes itself to be outside the bounds of its nature, and is in fact a verb. The reality, like most things, is that the seeker is a mixture. If we are to take the prior definition of a seeker as given, there is inherent within its nature a certain sense—seemingly—of being above or beyond what is given—Not, I must emphasize, in the sense of superiority or elitism (though this often happens), but, quite aptly in the same manner as Spengler’s Decline of the West is above and beyond normative history—the seeker is the below of the Spenglerian perspective’s above.

In the sense that Spengler understood the Decline of the West as a ‘Copernican overturning’, which rejected linearity, Eurocentrism, and epochs. The seeker, too, in their seemingly acausal desire to seek (that, by societal standards, is almost entirely a net-negative in terms of ‘fitting in’), rejects linear progress, Scientific realism, and, it appears (and here’s where the problems start,) the culture of their day.

The first key issue, then, that I have with the abstract notion of the seeker is its presumed purity. Now, it might be the case that what I’m about to do is simply create another myth, let’s call it ‘The Myth of the Pure Seeker’, but the terms unto which seeking and the seeker are spoken of are those that appear to be without attachment. The seeker is he or she who is above or beyond (again, not in terms of elitism) the various cultures, currents, or even religions they seek between, becoming—and seen as—some form of ahistorical nomad, bouncing from point-to-point, taking what they find of use, and then moving on (or going up the ranks, etc.)

The point I would brashly make then is that there is—and never has been—such a thing as a pure seeker. Each seeker, despite their heightened perspective, is of their time, whether they like it or not. And, much to the dismay of many a seeker, each time, each phase, and most importantly, each culture, brings with it certain default, unconscious, or preformed traits and perspectives that are difficult, if not nigh impossible to shake off, or even see.

In a sentence, then, much to the regret and pain of so many, what I’m saying here is that, try as hard we might, we are modern. We are not just in this time, we are of it, and there is nothing we can do about that. We are quite literally of its form. Now, what does this exactly look like? Here we can turn more specifically to Spengler’s work.

One could mention the more transparent and workable traits for modern man, that are both widely apparent to us in everyday life (though floundering in their accepted legitimacy) and are noted by Spengler: Democratic values, money as our primary guiding spirit or Geist, the myth of progress, consumerism, individual cults of individualism, and the notion of freedom as definitionally freedom as aggrandizement, that is, freedom as understood as a freedom to add, buy, or consume.

One could then, quite easily, draw these traits into the current thread of seeker and sought, and by extension, view the logic of the seeker via each. We could, if we so wished, argue that as the values of each culture are As Above, So Below (that is, the are of the culture and of the men of that culture), we can then say that the act of seeking itself (speaking primarily of Western nations) has become democratic: The process of seeking is attended to with the idea that each and every religion, current, or spirituality is of equal worth to the next, and that any form of superiority—even in relation to a value such as getting enlightened or *realized—*is itself, culturally, defacto wrong.

We could extend the money as spirit to seeking, and argue that the infiltration of money as a quantifying unit into the reality of seeking (which is largely a qualitative act) therein reduces that act to the level of the quantified, whereby it misses the point entirely. We could note the absolute explosion of spiritual ‘cashing in’ that has become prevalent since the paperback boom of the 60s. These are things we could argue.

We could extend the myth of progress to the act of seeking, wherein one, if they so wished, could argue that the myth of progress itself is of modern man, and as such, the very process of seeking is largely mistaken with the notion of progress. Just one more retreat, just one more book, just one more guru, etc. When I have finally progressed to the top of the grading system and become grand-great-arch excelsior mega-magus of the divine right of the order of the triple blossoming golden sun, then I will be done. Unless…

Likewise, we could extend our inherent consumptive traits to the path of seeking, caught up in the idea that when I’ve finally read X amount of easily purchasable books, when I finally have Y type of wand, or have ‘completed’ Z course, then I will be where I need to be.

We could argue, as both Friedrich Nietzsche and Rudolf Steiner did that modern man has become a religion unto himself, and that all of the aforementioned modern claptrap, when reduced to the actions of an individual seeker is often nothing more than a walking cult of individuality, that has preened and cropped everything to fit the ego that it was already comfortable with.

We could do all this. I could do all this. But it’s easy, it’s cheap, and you are all worth so much more confusion and annoyance than that. And so, what, then, is perhaps the real issue? And, before I state this issue, I want to address the fact that it isn’t a singular issue, nor a coherent, boxed-off problem of its own; it is the end-of-the-road process of cultures, people, and things that are dying, it is, in abstract, recursivity. The end of the cycle sees the beginning of the next, and in doing so sees its own end, this is rarely a pleasant thing. To quote Spengler:

As soon as life is fatigued, as soon as a man is put into the artificial soil of great cities—which are intellectual worlds to themselves—and needs a theory in which to suitably present Life to himself— morale turns into a problem. (466)

the inward finishness of megalopolitan man…setting in from the year 2000 (463),

One doesn’t need a theory for walking, nor tasting a cup of coffee, or digging a hole, or many other things. The very notion of needing a theory, or of a known theory in general, points to the idea of being outside of something. Of course, this is false. One cannot be ‘outside’ of the organic Spenglerian culture they are born into, much in the same way one cannot be ‘outside’ of their family if they don’t happen to get on with them. What one can do, however—as per Spengler’s quote—is begin to develop theories, models, or maps of how to present Life to himself from within the very culture that he seeks to present to himself. This is a horrible recursive loop that doesn’t notice that the loop itself is the culture.

This is all getting a bit abstract and complex, so again, let me simplify.

If we take your average medieval peasant for instance, I don’t want to go so far as to say they weren’t aware of being part of and in history, but they weren’t waking up every day with the ability of historical and cultural cross-reference, stepping outside and stating ‘Ah, another lovely day as a medieval peasant!’. And so, this might seem very coy and almost like I’m playing a postmodern game, but one thing that needs to be addressed with regard Spengler’s theory of history is that we’re in the part of the cycle that has Spengler’s Decline of the West in it. Or, one of the key traits of this stage of history (this notion likely beginning, surprise surprise, with the industrial revolution) is the meta-level awareness of history itself.

This meta-level awareness isn’t solely part of our cycle, but seems to appear at the tail end of many others too, but here I am focused on our own.

We can call it meta-history, we can call is postmodernism, critique, critical theory, but I like to call it Recursivity. Any sufficiently advanced civilization eventually ends up in a loop of self-knowing. We know that we know that we know. We know who we are, we understand our place, as if history has burned itself out and we’re now simply cataloging the remaining years.

So, what’s our situation as modern man? Not only do we have the aforementioned (largely selective, choice-based values) as mentioned by Spengler such as democracy, money, progress, etc., but alongside this we have a distinctly unique—and likely to be very short-lived—hyper-selective technology called the internet at our fingertips as a means of selection. The average modern is not only literate (a historical rarity), but can sit down and, largely for free, gain access to (practically speaking) any historical spiritual, cultural, or philosophical tradition that has ever been recorded.

Yet, it is this, let’s call it ‘internet perspective’ itself that isn’t questioned. Because, again, what is overlooked is the form in light of the content. It is not the mass of content/data on the internet that is importance, but the medium itself, the very fact of being able to select from a variety of options is the very form of modern man. This freedom to choose is inherently a form of cultural comparison that renders myth as myth, story as story. Like being able to see the workings of history itself as opposed to partaking in it, this is the illusion we tell ourselves.

This is, by definition, what’s known as cynical reason: Cynical reason is no longer naïve, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it. (Zizek) - Or, cynical reason is when someone knows that they know, and from such a position believes themselves to be above or beyond that which they know. Isn’t this the case with us moderns? We are all so smart. We all just get it, don’t we? Historically speaking, modern man is so intellectually bloated that he’s just over it. The issue is, however, that this self-same cynical reason that lulls us into a false sense of self-security is a trait of this part of the cycle. Cynical reason isn’t some final breach from cyclic reality, but a lie internal to that reality itself.

And so, as frustrating as such a statement is, our understanding of being able to view history *from afar—*so to speak—is itself a function inherent to the phase of history we’re in. Likewise, again—As Above, So Below—it’s not the case that we happen to be a man or woman who has somehow found the means to be critical or meta, we quite literally are men and women of a culture that is such—this is not something we can escape, we are, in a sense, cyclic, flustered, and critical beings.

Again, we can turn to Spengler to see the difference of our current situation in historical terms, but time honing in on it in its most simple, abstract sense. That is, not what path are we following, but what is the shape of the path?

If we were to go back to Plato, we might speak of a seeker’s path as having a medium of Oneness, that is, in relation to the One, the ultimate and true unknowable Godhead and reality. It has an utterly singular unitary nature, says Iamblichus, and so I feel we can geometrically think of it as a point.

Further on from this is the form of seeking path that still has an overhang into our current day, and that is of the line. Where the seeker understands themselves as moving from point A to point B as some form of linear progress.

Further on from this, there is a more contemporaneous form of seeking path, which is that of the cycle, found in Ibn Khaldun, Giambattista Vico, Nietzsche, and of course, Spengler. A path that is akin to an aggrandizing ouroboros, forever building upon itself.

But now, with all that’s been said regarding contemporary man’s modern—or even postmodern—fate, what exactly does our critical, self-knowing, and arguably cynical path look like? That is, if once there was point, then line, then cycle, what is our shape? It would be motivic. That is, to quote Alexander Grothendieck, would be something like different thematic developments, each in its own ‘tempo’, ‘key’ and ‘mode’ (’major’ and ‘minor’), of the same ‘basic motif’. A shape that to try describe is simply…messy. It is fluxing, intertwined, disappearing, reappearing, and—possibly—sort of lost in itself.

As I said at the start, I don’t have anything to argue. That might have appeared like some arbitrary point, or some coy means to get out of having to defend my ideas. But, if it was such that I had something to argue, some *narrative…*some or other story or ideology to spin, I believe I would be a man out of time, and as I’m not, I don’t. One can take a very brief look around the world, the end of the cycle, and see that narratives and ideology (at least in their classic sense) no longer hold much weight. If one wants to argue for a certain story, they can critically find the means to do so. If they wish to argue for another, they also can find the means to do. Such is the state of the postmodern seeker.

A seeker caught within a narrative has a culturally organic telos from which to comport themselves. A seeker caught within the tale of a nation on its way up, or its way into battle, or its way into wealth, or its way into knowledge, has, both around them and within them, a telos of motivation. But what of a seeker within an ending cycle? Needless to say, that contemporary seeking is a hopeful act within a hopeless world (at least via common understanding). The modern seeker is, then, in a sense, culturally on their own more than ever before. And yet, in another sense, technologically and *intellectually—*that is, via books and media—they are less alone than ever before. The contemporary seeker is a complete contradiction, a vessel of narrative within a culture that is inherently without narrative.

To quote Deleuze, however, Nothing ever died of contradictions.