Although D.H. Lawrence is known as a very physical writer — to put it mildly — he was also spiritual in his finer moments. Look at this passage from Chapter 15 of Women in Love:

“Whatever life might be, it could not take away death, the inhuman transcendent death. Oh, let us ask no question of it, what it is or is not. To know is human, and in death we do not know, we are not human. And the joy of this compensates for all the bitterness of knowledge and the sordidness of our humanity. In death we shall not be human, and we shall not know. The promise of this is our heritage, we look forward like heirs to their majority.”

Take away the novelist’s sentiment and there are some interesting points made here.

For example, “the inhuman transcendent death” recognizes that while consciousness persists at death, our human traits do not. We transcend ourselves at death.

Lawrence realizes that our humanity is the least of us : “the bitterness of knowledge and the sordidness of our humanity”. We know he often celebrated “the sordidness of humanity”, but here, using a different mouthpiece, he raises his game considerably.

In fact, those who reach out most to the concreteness of life, are often touched by the spiritual. It’s as if in glorifying the world they pass through the thin veil that separates us from the ineffable.

“In death we shall not be human, and we shall not know.” This passage echoes the 14th-century English spiritual text, The Cloud of Unknowing in which the aspirant meets the transcendent “and it is unlike anything we could possibly imagine here on Earth”.

“The promise of this is our heritage, we look forward like heirs to their majority.” Not everyone does, of course, but a touch of poetic licence is well earned.

Novelists often get closer to the meaning of things than scientists and philosophers. Here we see that most physical of men demonstrating a profound knowledge of “the other side”.

Quotation taken from Hemingway Serial.

Syntagma’s new network magazine, 21st-century Phi, has just been launched and, while Spiritual Nirvana is not included in this one, we will be in the next, LifeTimes, covering lifestyles and celebrities.

Phi is a letter of the Greek alphabet that’s used by science to describe the mathematical formula behind a spiral form that occurs over and over in nature. The spiral of a conch shell is phi.

Phi also has mystical connotations, if only because of the mystery of its appearance time and again in nature. Clearly, it shows a background intelligence at work, a “mind” far beyond the human one.

We’ll be discussing these matters in more depth in the coming weeks.

Halloween, which falls today, October 31, is all things to all men. Celebrated as a time when the veil between the spiritual and the earthly realms can be lifted.

It is enacted in many parts of the Western world, often as a jokey event, most commonly in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Ireland.

The term Halloween, and its older spelling Hallowe’en, is shortened from All-Hallows-Eve, as it is the evening before “All Hallows’ Day” (also known as “All Saints’ Day”).

In some places, Halloween is more often associated with the occult. Many European cultural traditions hold that Halloween is one of the liminal times of the year when the spiritual world can make contact with the physical and when magic is most potent.

It coincides with the Celtic festival of Samhain when the veil between the spiritual and the earthly realms could be lifted. Once it was a floating festival with the actual date depending on astronomical variations. It’s said to be a good time for facing up to whatever you are afraid of.

We sometimes republish Andrew Cohen’s weekly email quotes here, especially when they strike a particular chord. This week’s certainly does. It develops Andrew’s ideas of “evolutionary enlightenment”, the notion that the whole of the manifest world is a straining for greater consciousness on the part of the unmanifest.

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Reaching for the Unattainable
The traditional, premodern notion of enlightenment was all about coming to an end, a final state of perfection or a complete attainment. But when we redefine enlightenment in an evolutionary context, there is no longer an end–development is constant. Of course, the unmanifest ground of all being, which is the foundation of traditional enlightenment, is inherently full and perfect as it is and will never change or develop. But in evolutionary enlightenment, we awaken not only to that unmanifest ground but also to the evolutionary impulse that is driving the manifest, evolving universe. And that impulse is only interested in higher and higher development. That is its nature. So if our goal is to become a living expression of that impulse, which is what evolutionary enlightenment is all about, we as evolving individuals would have to become very interested in the notion of perpetual development, and let go of any emotional or philosophical investment in the idea of attaining perfection any time soon.

As evolving human beings, we are inherently imperfect and we’re not capable of reaching perfection, because we are in a constant state of development. But the path to evolutionary enlightenment is paradoxical, because I have found that the most appropriate posture for consistent higher development is one of ceaselessly reaching for perfection while knowing full well that we’ll never be able to achieve it. Only reaching toward that which is absolute–ever striving to attain the unattainable–puts the self in a position to consistently evolve. And it’s a lot to ask of any human being, because our nature is to seek comfort, security, and rest. But when we reach that point in our own spiritual journey where our attention is no longer primarily focused on our own comfort and security or even on our own enlightenment, but has become dedicated to the evolution of consciousness itself, we will find the courage to bear the creative tension of ceaselessly extending ourselves toward the unattainable.

Andrew Cohen