Speaking of the Numinous: the meaning of meaning

By Andrew Lohrey

A science of meaning and spirit. How are we to speak about the Numinous, the transcendent and immanent reality that informs all life? Andrew Lohrey argues that the Numinous is meaning, which is an entirely new area of study. The territory of meaning is omnipresent, alive, intelligent and spiritual. This mental and spiritual force is the most subtle yet fundamental energy source in the universe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Lohrey
• Release date: Oct 10, 2010
• ISBN: 9781458004529

Andrew Lohrey

Andrew Lohrey has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Technology, Sydney. Over the past twenty- five years he has worked as a publisher, writer and applied linguist. Before that he was a member of the Tasmanian Parliament during which time he served as a cabinet minister and Speaker of the House. Andrew Lohrey meditates daily and is a long-term devotee of the south Indian mystic known as Amma. He edited the book by Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy and was the author of The Meaning of Consciousness, and Speaking of the Numinous: the meaning of meaning. Andrew now lives in Tasmania with his wife Amanda.

Book preview

Introduction

Speaking of the Numinous is a discourse on the principal laws and conditions of meaning. I will come to these laws shortly but first a few words about the term numinous. The word numinous is most often used to describe the power and presence of a divinity and it is commonly supposed to have been popularized by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his influential book, The Idea of the Holy (1923). For Otto the numinous experience is an ‘otherness’ which has two aspects: the tendency to invoke fear and trembling and the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel.

Leading twentieth century writers such as Carl Jung, C. S. Lewis and Aldoux Huxley adopted and elaborated on Otto’s concept of the numinous experience in their own work. In general the term was and still is used to describe an awe-inspired experience of wonder which may be felt in certain meaningful circumstances. The religious use of numinous traces this sense of awe-inspired wonder to the presence of a divinity; to a supernatural God, al Lah, Brahman, Buddha mind, and so on.

The connection of awe and wonder to a supernatural divinity has been criticized by leading atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. ¹ They claim that awe-inspired wonder is a natural aspect of the human condition and is not related to any supernatural dimension. According to them any account of the supernatural must necessarily be a fiction. My approach differs from both traditional religious ideas of the numinous as well as from the atheist position. The approach in this book is postsecular in that it accepts and agrees with the reality of an impersonal transcendent presence but finds evidence of that reality in non-theological practices and methods that are often used in secular science and technology.

This work does not therefore proceed by arguing for any religious institution or dogma, nor does it rely on scriptural interpretation or sectarian religious discourses. It relies instead upon an evidence-based approach. In both these senses it can be described as postsecular, if we take secular to mean worldly, rational and non-religious. This postsecular approach seeks to explain the spiritual transcendence of a Numinous reality which continually and permanently touches everyone, blessed as well as unblessed.

In Speaking of the Numinous I refer to the reality of the Numinous in terms of laws of meaning. In this respect the Numinous and meaning are coterminous in that both ‘meaning’ and ‘Numinous’ refer to the same reality. By the Numinous (with a capital ‘N’) I mean a universal transcendent spirit that also informs and is immanent in every aspect of our lives. This universal spiritual presence is best described through certain laws of meaning. These laws cross all boundaries and that includes the traditional boundaries between secular science and sectarian religion. The laws of meaning thus refer to the internal structure as well as the outward manifestations of the Numinous. I suggest that this open and all-embracing approach to the Numinous reflects the essentially non-sectarian nature of the postsecular. ²

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This postsecular view of the Numinous had its origins in a childhood that had little or no religious training but was full of spiritual inspiration. I grew up in a small farming community in the mountains of north-eastern Tasmania. Almost everyone in this community was related for they were the descendants of several large families that had emigrated from Germany in the 1850s. The community was, and still is, unimaginatively called ‘Germantown.’ My ancestors brought with them a commitment to the Lutheran Church and a dislike of Catholics. As it turned out there were too few of them to sustain a Lutheran pastor so gradually they joined the Anglican Church.

Over the years this religious commitment weakened, even though a small wooden church was built on our farm in an effort to sustain it. This was an ecumenical building used by many denominations. One month we would have the Anglicans, the next month the Presbyterians, then the Catholics, and so on. My lasting impression of this kind of religious instruction was of the enjoyment we had after church when everyone relaxed and came back to our house for afternoon tea. Those cold afternoons in front of an open fire with hot tea, cakes and scones, where everyone talked about common problems, seemed infinitely more appealing to me than the slight embarrassment I felt at singing badly in a cold church up the road.

My great, great grandfather, Henry died in 1868, only fourteen years after he had travelled to the other side of the world. On his headstone is written: ‘Heaven is my Fatherland, Heaven is my home.’ ³ In my childhood such deeply religious sentiments as these were never discussed. They had long been replaced by the philosophy of the small dairy farmer, which is the credo of hard physical work. My immediate family had little time for religion or a church that increasingly seemed disconnected from us. We were always too busy trying to scratch a living from the land. In the second half of the twentieth century we had become, like many Australians, ‘post-religious.’

Yet I also grew up within a geography of hope. ⁴ This was the influence of the physical environment that affected the way we lived, felt and thought. Each day was shaped by the ever changing colors, hues, moods and temperature of this geography. It was a cultural landscape as much as a physical one and it exerted a daily influence on family members in determining what we did and where we went. The wind, temperature and weather created our patterns of daily work on the farm. Each morning we clambered out of bed certain that life would continue to sprout from the soil and confident that the climate and seasons would nurture us. Within the daily routine of this childhood I began to sense that the landscape had a life of its own, a living cosmology that went beyond the cows, the pigs, the horses and family members.

The sense that we were farming within a larger cosmic farm was helped by the view from our farm. It sat on a mountain that looked out over the world and on a clear day we could see fifty miles in a one hundred and eighty degree arc. The largeness of the view helped to expand me. The sunrises that came over the edge of the world fifty miles out to sea and the sunsets that painted the sky over the mountains behind us took my breath away. And so it was, at some level below social interaction and language, I came to accept that the landscape was a living presence that gave meaning to our toil. This living landscape was my spiritual instructor.

In hindsight I see that this instruction planted the seeds for later thinking about meaning; for the recognition that life extends beyond our skins; that communion is prior to expression; and that interconnection is the nature of everything. These childhood impressions of the landscape were never explicitly articulated by me or anyone that I knew. They came gradually and implicitly as a natural part of my childhood and their messages were always about interconnection.

It is difficult if not impossible for those of us steeped in a culture based on the Enlightenment and subjected on a daily basis to the discourses of science, technology and capitalism to respond fully to spiritual and religious issues in the same manner as our ancestors did. They lived in a pre-modern, slow-moving conservative world that was mainly agrarian. I live in a technological world almost wholly imbued with the scientific spirit, a world which has a tendency to see truth primarily as factual, historical and empirical. This is the postmodern era; a time after two world wars; a time after the dry intellectualism of modernism, the reductionism of psychoanalysis, and the revolutions of sex, race and gender politics. This is a globalized, corporate world of instant communication, worldwide pollution and ever developing medical science. This is a time that David Tacey can call ‘post-religious’ in his book that proclaims a spiritual revolution. ⁵

The postsecular spirit of these times does not seem to sit well with pre-modern sentiments or ancient orthodox religious discourses. A sense of these cultural changes and the need to respond to them was acknowledged in the August 2000 Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders, sponsored by the United Nations. This Summit expressed a concern for a new language of spirit. In this statement, world spiritual and religious leaders were simply saying that because the culture has changed, the vocabulary that represents spirit also needs to change. I share such sentiments.

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The discourse I have found to be least sectarian and therefore most useful in describing the Numinous is the language of meaning. I would argue that in this language there is a greater explanatory power than in the conventional religious or even psychological discourses (of faith, purpose, mind and consciousness). In addition, my interest in meaning reflects my own training. I began writing this book over forty years ago. At the time I was interested in studying consciousness, a life-long preoccupation. In my twenties I was a psychological counsellor. I read widely in the area but was unsatisfied with the narrow biology-based approach of most clinical psychology. Later I studied applied linguistics, semiotics, semantics and the philosophy of language. Through these subjects I was gradually introduced to the terrain of meaning.

This introduction began subtly. At first, meaning was something I took for granted, like breathing. Then gradually it began to occur to me that here was a territory that could be described and mapped. Increasingly I began to see myself as a cartographer of meaning’s many paths, but a cartographer of meaning is not like other map-makers. This is because the territory of meaning does not lie flat like a piece of coast line, nor does it behave like a physical event in a four dimensional continuum. It is both broader and yet closer at hand. I began to realize that the presence of this territory was the terrain of my mind, of my life and spirit. In other words, meaning was the energetic domain of my being.

Over the years I have come to realize that the presence of being cannot be satisfactorily described by the famous phrase: cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) and neither is it well served by: sentio ergo sum, (I feel, therefore I am). Both intellect and feeling are prominent features of being but they are not the whole story. The domain of being is also represented obliquely by the tautology: sum ergo sum – I am, therefore I am. While the ‘therefore I am’ does not appear to add much to the initial ‘I am,’ it does at least suggest the essential nature of being which is found in an experience of presence. It is the experience of presence that I suggest is the essence of all meaning.

By approaching being as meaning we can speak about it in two ways. We can refer to it as the ultimate sine qua non; as a universal and divine quintessence; as the meaning of Meaning. This sense is denoted by the use of a capital ‘M.’ (This is also the sense in which I speak of the Numinous, with a capital ‘N.’) In the second sense we can speak of it as the meaning of everything other than Meaning. This secondary sense is signified by the idea of ‘process’ and is denoted by the use of a lower case ‘m.’ In forthcoming chapters I hope to make clear this distinction between the capital ‘M’ Meaning and the small ‘m’ meaning which is made by individuals through their actions and with the use of signs. While these two uses are distinct they are interconnected and indeed integrated, for the conditions and laws of Meaning run through both the meaning made by individuals as well as the Meaning that is always ever-present in the universe.

This understanding of being as meaning is different from the conventional linguistic view of meaning which refers to it as that which is made by individuals when using signs, that is, when expressing themselves through some form of communication. This limited linguistic view does not take account of the meaning of Meaning, which is the essential nature of Meaning per se and which is also the source of an individual’s capacity to make meaning. I have also come to realize that Meaning can be studied through meditative reflection as well as by speaking about it. The medium of a book is more suited to the latter mode. Hence, even though the Numinous is a non-visible presence that cannot be pierced by weapons or burned by fire, ⁶ it can be spoken about and studied through a detailed analysis of the laws of Meaning.

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There are five assumptions which underpin the subject matter of this book. These five assumptions represent the fundamentals of Meaning. As such they constitute five laws. A law of Meaning expresses the conditions that hold for all and every situation. There are five laws of Meaning and in this Introduction I outline four of them. The following remarks may seem to the reader to be dense at times; however, these are important orientation comments that point to the infinite scope of Meaning.

The first law of Meaning arises from an idea implied by the very notion of a law and that is the idea of the absolute. A law cannot be a law if it is not absolute. The first law of Meaning is absolute interconnection. Absolute interconnection means that there is no outside of Meaning; its all-encompassing scope and interconnections are universal, absolute and infinite. A major consequence of absolute interconnection is that there are no separations in the universe. For example, there is no separation between objects and subjects or mind and matter and hence the presence of this cosmic, transparent, fundamental ocean is logically everywhere: omnipresent. This means that everything is integrated and also that nothing exists outside of Meaning, that is, nothing is born, created, spoken of, measured or located in a space or a time that is outside the precincts of this singular all-embracing Numinous dimension. ⁷ The visible universe is therefore integrated, undivided and holistic in the manner that the theoretical physicists David Bohm and Basil Hiley refer to in their book, The Undivided Universe. ⁸

The second law deals with the shape of the Numinous and follows on from the omnipresence of the first law. Meaning’s all-encompassing interconnections are circular, hence the idea of a Numinous singularity or One-ness. One-ness is a concept that implies circularity. Meaning’s interconnections are circular in two respects. Firstly, they are circular in ways that are outside our deliberations and control. Examples of this are the biological organizing process of self-replication and self-organization. Another example is the inherent circularity of discourse, which is the tendency of language to refer back to itself. The second kind of circular exchange of Meaning involves deliberate self-referencing when, for example, we are involved in self-reflective thinking.

One of the key consequences of the circularity of Meaning is that any sequence of movements has a built-in circular order. That order begins with implicit meaning and then unfolds to become actual, visible explicit meaning. The final step in this circular order is the enfolding of visible, explicit meaning back into implicit meaning. Everything in the universe has this circular order of birth, development and death.

A second important consequence of the circularity of Meaning is that any linear sequences will always represent a small picture within a larger context, a context which always refers back to the details of the sequence. This circular relationship can be represented by the model of a gestalt. A gestalt always has two exchange elements. These are: a set of specific, explicit details, objects or parts that are always immersed in and given coherence and order by a broader implicit context. Another way of saying the same thing is to describe any visible object as that part of the event which is seen. The major part of the event which is not seen represents the implicit ordering that creates the object. The circularity of the second law of Meaning means there is no such thing as an individual object or set of objects existing on their own without an ordering context. For example, there is no such thing as a separate and solo mind.

The third law of Meaning concerns the idea of causality. Meaning’s laws write themselves; hence they are self-sustaining, self-creating and self-organizing and can therefore be called uncaused causes. ⁹ Ralph Waldo Emerson proposed the same kind of causality for his Laws of the Soul. In the text of his 1838 Divinity School Address Emerson wrote that, ‘these laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance.’ Emerson went on to say that the Laws of the Soul make man ‘Providence to himself.’ This insightful phrase reflects both the universal scope as well as the circular nature of Meaning for it points to the manner in which our minds are interconnected with, and integrated into, the singular presence of the Numinous One.

Currently there are four fundamental physical forces known to science. These are called gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear strong force and nuclear weak force. These four fundamental forces are said to account for the physical structures of the universe. Yet science has neglected the quintessential presence of the Numinous and therefore, of Meaning. The four forces identified by science stand as only partial explanations of the universe. This book argues the case that the quintessential force of the Numinous operates prior to these four physical forces and is therefore the source and causal force that orders and structures every particle and point in the universe.

From the perspective of Meaning, the physical world is not composed of separate objects that affect each other through material causes. In Emerson’s words, the physical world is the product of ‘one will, of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever opposes that will, is everywhere balked and baffled, because things are made so, and not otherwise.’ In these words Emerson describes the self-caused nature of the Providence within. From this position he is able to say that, ‘good is positive. Evil is privative, not absolute.’ The only absolute is the Numinous One. As a self-sustaining and self-caused absolute the Numinous is by definition omnipotent.

The fourth law of Meaning relates to mind and intelligence. Exchanges of meaning always convey some intelligence and therefore they are characterized as a mental state or a state of mind. ¹⁰ Because Meaning is omnipresent this state of mind (call it awareness or consciousness) is everywhere present. Hence the Numinous represents the ever-present presence of a cosmic mind or consciousness. The first law of Meaning concerns absolute interconnection and therefore in terms of mind there must be only one interconnected, holistic field of consciousness. In other words, there is only one mind in the entire universe.

The conventional view of mind is that there are many small, separate individual, solo minds. According to the laws of Meaning there cannot be separate and solo minds. These laws mandate that there is only one integrated singular consciousness in the universe. This is the cosmic singularity of the Numinous One in which we all participate individually and collectively. This book argues that the singularity of cosmic consciousness can be discovered in the scientist’s Zero-point field and in addition, as the energetic presence below the surface of the everyday mundane mind of each individual.

The fourth law of Meaning tells us that this absolute and singular domain of intelligence is the source of all individual intelligence. Its scope is therefore omniscient: all knowing. These four laws of Meaning: omnipresence, circularity, omnipotence and omniscience are often considered to be the principal attributes of a divinity. The scope of these four laws of Meaning therefore embraces those experiences of mystical presence that we associate with a sense of divinity as well as all the more mundane meanings we make in our everyday lives. The presence of the Numinous therefore involves both the mystical as well as the mundane.

In Chapter 5 the fifth law of Meaning is discussed. Unlike these first four laws which relate to the meaning of Meaning, the fifth law is concerned with how we think. The fifth law sets a standard or a criterion by which we can aim at in our thinking. This standard can be called sane thinking or sanity. Finally, as these five laws are fundamental they imply that knowing these laws is a knowing from which everything else can be known. In other words, these laws of the Numinous represent the organizational structures of mind, life and society as well as the physical world.

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The view of this book assumes that each day we swim in this transparent ocean of Meaning, doing our laps, treading water or just moving with the flow. Each individual mind is thus an inclusive and participating feature of this all-pervasive, all-knowing, all-powerful cosmic consciousness. An image that reflects to some degree the circular relationship we have with the Numinous is the hologram. A hologram is a three-dimensional image which has been imprinted onto a photographic plate. When a laser beam illuminates the plate it reveals the three-dimensional image, almost identical to the original object. When a small region of the plate is cut off and is illuminated again by a laser beam, what we see is not a piece of an image, but the whole of the image. This is extraordinary. It means that the whole of the three-dimensional image has been recorded in every part of the plate.

The whole is therefore replicated in every point on the plate while at the same time every point has contributed to the creation of the whole image. This connecting symmetry—of part-to-whole and whole-to-part—gives the hologram its undivided interconnectedness or wholeness. The Numinous One has the same kind of holographic wholeness as the hologram. From this view, individual minds represent various points on the external fabric of cosmic consciousness. In other words, each individual represents a small prism through which the larger (whole) cosmos shines. Individual minds thereby represent local flashpoints in the divine ferment. In this holographic sense, each of us contributes to the consciousness of the whole universe, while at the same time the whole of the divine cosmos is reflected in and through each of us.

Understanding our holographic relationship to the absolute is generally considered to be a spiritual undertaking, one in which the individual self should be emptied into a transcendent formlessness. The word ‘kenosis’ is often used to describe this kind of undertaking. Yet there is also a more practical, everyday reward for understanding this interrelationship of part-to-whole and whole-to-part. This kind of knowledge avoids the trap of ego inflation where we assume or act as if, ‘I am God.’ How can a part be the same as the whole? Yet in addition, such an understanding also inhibits us from saying ‘I have a solo mind that is separate from the absolute.’ A part of the picture (no matter how small) can never be separated out from the whole image.

A holographic understanding of being enables us to appreciate the value, difference and integrity of each individual’s mind, and to appreciate how this diversity is vitally necessary to make up the whole fabric of a cosmic multiplicity. Such a view is also essential in cultural and environmental situations for when cultural and ecological diversity is devalued health and wellbeing is reduced. Similarly, when religious or scientific intolerance begins to exclude differences of opinion there is social sickness rather than a healthy holographic diversity that forms a coherently attuned community.

Understanding our holographic relationship to the absolute is a scientific undertaking. For example, the symmetry of the hologram (of part-to-whole and whole-to-part) signifies the possibility of harmony through balance and equilibrium. It also indicates that the whole of the cosmos can only be known if that knowledge is based upon a participatory and integrated perspective where interconnections are valued and where separations and the idea of isolated entities are rejected. In addition, with this holographic view there are no ‘outer’ forms or separate universes as everything is contained within the singular consciousness of the Numinous.

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Our relationship to the Numinous is therefore connected and integrated, but how to describe this relationship? The theoretical physicist, David Bohm was inclined to believe there was a structure to our participation in the world. He concluded that no sharp division could be drawn between the individual, the collective and the cosmic dimensions. ¹¹ For me these three states (individual, collective and cosmic) represent a skeleton outline to the underlying structure of our relationship to the Numinous.

This kind of outline is not new for it was foreshadowed by the Franciscan Seraphic Doctor, Bonaventure (1221–1274). Bonaventure wrote about his relationship to God in terms of these dimensions, only he called them the uncreated Word, the incarnate Word and the inspired Word. As my training has been secular and in the Humanities I have been inclined to change the words and expand these dimensions to four. I have called them, in the order suggested by Bonaventure’s model: Host, body, culture and symbol. The term I will use in this book for the divine context of the Numinous is ‘Host.’ I have tended to refrain from using the word ‘God’ or ‘Word’ because I wanted to move beyond religious discourses to a more open, postsecular and spiritual understanding. The Host represents the impersonal context of Meaning, which hosts and supports every incarnate form.

Our holographic relationship to the Host is therefore not a two valued either/or one, but a four-valued set of interconnections. Comprehending this relationship means understanding the distinctions as well as the integration of the four contexts of being: Host, body, culture and symbol. These four contexts are simultaneously involved in every action we take as well as in the question of who we are. For example, this four-valued interconnected framework of being is not sympathetic to the common idea that each of us has a local, separate bounded solo identity. Rather, in terms of these four contexts we have minds that are a composite superposition. ‘Superposition’ is a term used in quantum physics to indicate when an object can be in two or more states, places or realities at the same time. Who we are involves a superposition that incorporates these four contexts of mind which operate simultaneously together so that we are never contained in any one state, place or reality at any given time.

The superposition of these four contexts means that our mind as well as our sense of self is always, in a sense, multi-layered. These layers involve the symbolic expressions we use, the cultural habits we have grown up with and fall back on in behavior as well as the pre-reflective consciousness of the body’s activities and movement. Underpinning these three secondary and relative levels of being is the primary and divine context of the Host which holds and supports every thought and sensation within its interconnected, all-pervasive cosmic fabric. Who we are therefore is never a separate, static or solo identity but, rather, a multi-layered superposition involving the absolute and the relative of these four contexts.

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Speaking of the Numinous is in two sections. The first section is entitled The Contexts of Self and it introduces the reader to the various concepts of Meaning along with its connection to energy and matter. As the superposition of self is discussed in some detail the four contextual levels of Host, body, culture and symbol unfold. The nature of these four levels is unravelled through their micro conditions of implicit and explicit meaning. These conditions reflect what David Bohm calls the implicate and explicate orders and I will argue here that these two orders and conditions of Meaning provide the integrated structure of the four contextual levels of self. The multi-layered model of these four contexts also provides a model for the fifth law of Meaning.

Section Two is subtitled The Evolution of Consciousness. It is concerned with the manner in which, through iteration, the two general conditions of Meaning (implicit and explicit) create the four modes by which we think. These four distinct modes of thought I have called: love, desire, intellect and empathy. These four modes of thought endow individuals with the potential for the four stages of their development and maturation as well as the four stages in the overall historical evolution of human consciousness. These four modes of thinking also create a wide variety of world views and interpretations. Two of these modes tend to separate and divide us from one another. This is the case for the modes of desire and reason. In contrast, the modes of love and empathy connect and join us together as families and communities.

The evolution of consciousness is discussed in the last chapter (14). It draws on Owen Barfield’s work on the evolution of consciousness and I have applied his concepts to the conditions of Meaning. In applying the structure of Meaning to Barfield’s thesis on the evolution of consciousness I believe I have theorized a more developed framework for that concept. This is a framework that links learning to maturation and to the four modes of thought, and further links these with several evolutionary periods in human history.

Section One:

The Contexts of Self

1 – In the Beginning

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Wonderland the King advises the White Rabbit ‘to begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop!’ This is