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August 1998

kamanews

A Phenomenology of the Implicate Order

Reading White’s The Alchemical Body brought to mind the strong connections between the Nath sampradaya and my phenomenological explorations of Western alchemy; (phenomenology taken as the science of experience.) I’ve begun to explore the phenomenal worlds of thought, and of sensation as analogs to the two-headed vessel of Indian alchemical lore and practice. The fiery heat for the transformation can be supplied by the fluids and psycho-mechanics of desire and lust. The path or throat between the vessels may lie as a tunnel beneath experience; just as Bohm’s implicate order lies ontically before and spatially beneath the explicate.

Adopt for the minute, after the general design Ken Wilber provides in The Atman Project, the shape of the Work as an arc. Trace the ontogenic (recapitulating the phylogenic?) development of the magickian up from the early ground of undifferentiated, oceanic body/thought experience of the womb and immediately post-natal bliss (the aeon of Bes?) up through the body/sensation focussed, group-mind tribe (the world of the goddess?) to the top of the arc. Here find the mature and reasoning adult "ego" where body/sensation and mind/thought are sharply differentiated. (Most of our species don’t make it even quite so far as the mature adult! The world of Osiris?) Beyond this rational adult, dive back into the body and into the existential Centaur phase (the solar twins?) Going beyond, experience what Wilber calls the subtle, and the causal realms (Maat ?)

The reintegration of the experience (pathos) of mind/thought with the experience of body/sensation, as it necessarily occurs in this dive back, distills the nectar of the gods for the enjoyment and transformation of the magickan. I’m finding that it is at this stage of reintegration that the importance of the formulae of reversal (the Tunnels of Set?) comes most into play.

Up from blissful oblivion, through tribal passion, my "mature" consciousness reveals the world as explicate order (á là Bohm) of the known and rationally comprehended consensual reality. As I move up along the arc, the body and sensation are first embraced by the tribe, and then are abandoned and isolated by my individual mind and my experience of thought. Over the top of the arc, through the angst (fear and trembling anyone?) of the Centaur, my body re-asserts itself as my own death. On into the subtle and causal realms I find that coincidence disappears, as synchronicities abound. Time makes a phenomenal shift. I listen to the wisdom of my body, and find it carries the direct experience of an implicate order.