Clues to Ascent and Escape

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Annex 4 of Navigating Alternative Conceptual Realities: clues to the dynamics of enacting new paradigms through movement (2002)

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Summary

A presentation of any range of virtues may imply that they can best be understood in a sequence through to those of greater subtlety or challenge. This sequence may be associated with maturation. If presented as a table, a particular cell may be seen as an ultimate goal. In what follows this understanding of 'ascent' is considered as a pale reflection of one that becomes possible when any such set of virtues are seen as complementary prerequisites for any navigation into a new reality. In effect a three dimensional array, of which one dimension is 'up', is collapsed into a two dimensional array.

Bruce MacLennan, in a discussion of the process of human ascent [more] according to Dante, notes that in Plato's Symposium, the ascent to Beauty has three stages: (a) experiencing beauty in things; (b) experiencing beauty in souls; (c) experiencing the idea of Beauty itself. There is therefore a shift of focus, from (a) 'outside us' (extra nos), to (b) 'within us' (intra nos), to (c) 'above us' (supra nos): extraversion, introversion and supraversion. St. Augustine (354-430) adopted this basic scheme, but divided it into seven substages. However, Dante was following St. Bonaventura (1221-1274), who split each of Plato's stages in two, giving the six stages of ascent, which correspond to Dante's six guides (Virgil, Cato, Statius, Matilda, Beatrice, St. Bernard).

Other notions of 'ascent' or 'escape' are to be found in other spiritual traditions. As noted earlier, whilst the widely promulgated guidelines to virtues and vices may well be vital to what might be understood as attitude control and coordination, they can usefully be understood as prerequisites to any process of shifting attitude into subtler perceptions -- described metaphorically, and therefore inadequately, through such terms as 'ascent' or 'escape'. The distinction between attitude control and ascent for an individual may be compared with the complex set of techniques for successfully launching any vehicle so that it acquires the necessary 'escape velocity' to attain an orbit around the Earth, so escaping from the gravity well of the material world.

Launching a vehicle into space provides a rich store of metaphors to help avoid some of the dangers of getting lost in the spiritual terminology that endeavours to describe the journey of the soul to enlightenment (see Entering Alternative Realities -- Astronautics vs Noonautics: isomorphism between launching aerospace vehicles and launching vehicles of awareness). Whilst meaningful and relevant as an inspiration to many, such terminology also obscures for others the vital transformations in the understanding of the immediately obvious relationships of self to other, or of knower to known, during any such process of 'ascent'. It might even be said that spiritual traditions endeavour to lock people into their particular 'product' or 'brand' in the exclusive manner favoured by manufacturers of certain technologies.

Such special orientation of understanding by spiritual traditions in describing progress to 'holiness' detracts from recognition of the progessively more integrated understanding described by psychotherapists through terms such as the individuation process. In the first case the 'holiness' is framed in terms of a special understanding of spirituality, whereas in the second it derives from a more comprehensively integrated understanding of the reality of the world (as a 'whole') and of a subtler relation of the perceiver to it. The two are presumably not experientially distinct but religions have endeavoured to establish a monopoly on their understanding -- marginalizing insights that are not articulated through their particular terminologies. Schools of psychotherapy are similarly challenged.

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