I have friends who would say they are Qabalists or at least Thelemites, who would deny not only deny the possibility of any kind of Supreme Being, but also the possibility of life after physical death. There are others who find it improbable that there could be realms of consciousness, or even a conventional old Freudian or Jungian unconscious, that precedes and/or predetermines, conscious thought.
Somewhere on this blog there is a wrangling sequence of comments about a post where I suggested that unconscious or pre-conscious elements determine what we so fondly call rationality, or our power of reasoning. The individual whose rationality I questioned launched a sharp counter-attack, based (I thought) entirely on his own assumptions about what could be included in such a discussion, and what could not. He did better than I did in that department, and I left the discussion alone, to his accompanying scorn about my intellectual dishonesty. Yet I found myself utterly unimpressed by his arguments, just as I was impressed by the force and vigour of his prose. He lied, in my terms, with great eloquence, while I expressed what I felt and still believe to be true with excessive timidity.
The militantly atheistic mystic or gnostic is a 20th Century phenomenon. Amongst the Thelemic community, Crowley is often quoted selectively to support this position (“There is no God, so stop your grovelling and get proudly rational”), while his equal plethora of statements about transcendence, spiritual ecstasy and ineffable things is back-burnered. Like Jesus, Mohammed or Plato, Crowley can be used to support almost any philosophical position.
Exactly what makes any one individual balk at going beyond Point X is a hard point to generalise. In technical Qabalistic terms, we can say that the Nephesh (animal soul, instinctual self) can be enormously threatened by the realm of eternal verities. As we progress through life and grow further into the realm of the rational ego-self, the Ruach, this can, paradoxically, become more intense, not less, because the immensity of the Neshamah, the Supernal Soul, starts to be felt more in the background of consciousness. Somewhat like Freud’s notion of the Super-Ego, it seems to be a vast, non-rational and overbearing presence, and it does carry all sorts of echoes of the sterner or shadow side of our own parents. Reason itself, at this stage, tries to block the increasing flow of intimations about the Undiscovered Country, the Illimitable Region, the Ground of Being or whatever term fits.
Mystical illumination, therefore, is going to be the outcome of a human failure. Anyone who holds otherwise is either well advanced into enlightenment and has different notions of what it means to fail, or is dabbling with New Age shallowness and anodyne pseudo-metaphysics. The Thelemic über-text, the Book of the Law, says simply “There is success,” but that is a statement made from a supra-rational viewpoint, not a mundane one. Or, as the late Israel Regardie once put it, “Magicians never have any money.” What is the hierarchy of denials in all this? Could we say that the first is the denial of anything remotely definable as divine or supernal, followed by no non-mortal part of the psyche, the non-existence of a spirit realm, and so on? I doubt that anything near as facile can be compiled. It’s probably always a very individual list.
A number of times in my life, it has been borne in upon me by various experiences that my means of appreciating experience itself is arbitrary and subject to societal conventions. I don’t hold with a God-of-Mount-Sinai style deity, nor a Saviour in whom I can believe to attain forgiveness and immortal life, but I do accept that the vastness of creation is not simply matter being knocked around by mega-bucketloads of quanta of energy. Nor do I see consciousness as a by-product of the physiology of my neurons.
I also hold this all-ness has an immeasurable consciousness that links intimately with individual human consciousnesses, while admitting I have no theory of how this is so, or any idea of how to prove this to myself, let alone to anyone else. I don’t think the personal self I present here as Skeptical Theurgist will survive the demise of my associated physical body, but I care less than I once did about that. I dread being old and decrepit, or dying in pain, but the idea of actual death strikes me as not in the least frightening. My Nephesh-self certainly finds the idea terrifying, but what we might call my key point of reference considers the whole business hugely overrated.
But depending how I feel on a given day, this sense of a transpersonal level to existence might still exclude definitive faith in the existence of: angels, ghosts, elementals or spirits; a specific racial or planetary consciousness; telepathic contact with extra-terrestrials; the white Lodge or some other gathering of superhumans who guide our affairs; and a whole laundry list of normally invisible things. I’m not different at all to Dawkins in this, I just observe different markers, even if I accept evolution as a fact, and natural selection as at least one key mechanism of it. The only point where he and I might come unglued is in the notion of going beyond ‘rational’ analysis of it all. Reasoned argument is a good but fallible tool, and there are others we need to employ that take us past its checkpoints and assertions to primacy. Dawkins himself (and others who share his views) so often seems stumped or frustrated by this idea, but that’s why he gets no sympathetic hearing from religious believers.
The late Renaissance saw various thinkers (Giordano Bruno, John Dee, Robert Fludd) trying to come up with theories of everything and ways to have access to all conceivable categories of knowledge. Physicists today still dream of a Theory of Everything. But any such theory, if it is at all honestly compiled, eventually comes, trembling, to the portal beyond which there is always another unknown, another improbability, another counter-argument to our finest and most delicate logic.