Theology

"While no one would want to discount the significance of experiential phenomena in the spiritual life, if these are seen as the defining features then spirituality seems to lose its theological voice. It becomes seen as a particularly powerful expression of human subjectivity. The analysis of spirituality in terms of that subjectivity washes out the theological implications of the subject's transformation – the trace of the divine other vanishes behind one or another aspect of human self-consciousness." (McIntosh, M. Mystical Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 9.)

After bravely renouncing theology for the direct experience of God one is promptly reminded that that particular renunciation is not a surrender to the absolute but rather a surrender to the tyranny of subjectivism. In the subjective realm one struggles to find criteria for evaluating the reality of the subjective experience. In my case, I collapse into the mush of the new age predicament, the apparent surrender of judgment in the name of universalist inclusivity. "Apparent" surrender of judgment that is in actuality a willful blindness, a refusal to recognize judgment so as to appear un-judgmental – a cousin of the post-modernist dilemma of an absolute denial of absolutes, a judgment that judgment is impossible . One is left without the capacity to evaluate the transformative potential of experience, because that can only be recognized when the experience is firmly located (interpreted) in a theological matrix.

So retaking Karuna Reiki with Carlos and Ana today I realize that I'm thoroughly theological, just as they are thoroughly theological – no matter how hard they try to pretend otherwise. The crux for me seems to come down to the New Thought idea that we create our own reality (mistakenly based on the eastern philosophy of levels of reality having a causal relationship: mental-etheric-emotional-energetic-physical. Here, the mental is confused in the western New Thought mind with the individual mind giving rise to the magical idea that somehow or other just by changing my mind about something I can change the physical world. In more sophisticated New Thoughtiness, a collective mental level is recognized, but it's a collectivity derived from the multiplicity of individuals. In Eastern thinking the mental level is the level of the deity not of the individual human being – a unitive level giving rise to the world of multiplicity). It comes down to 'do we cause God or does God cause us?' That's a theological question – and it's answer leads to quite different spiritualities.

Renunciation of theology is renunciation of real spiritual transformation – it's abandonment to the flux of experience, rather than to the rigors of transformation. This is not to say that one must give primacy to rationality or to theology, it simply means that one must situate one's experience somewhere if one is not to be lost.