Sacred Science

* Book: John Heron, Sacred Science: Person-centred Inquiry into the Spiritual and the Subtle PCCS Books, 1998, ISBN 1 898059 21 7, 156x234, pp 288, £18 paperback.

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Description

From the publisher:

"This cutting-edge book breaks new ground in transpersonal psychology. It argues for a people-based, person-centred religion which holds that spiritual authority is within each individual, and that spiritual initiation is a path of lived inquiry, for which all traditional systems are a secondary resource.

Topics covered include:

• The emergence of a self-generating spiritual culture of independent pathfinders.
• An affirmation of the person as a real spiritual presence on the crest of divine becoming.
• The nature of long-term lived inquiry, and of short-term co-operative inquiry, into the spiritual and the subtle.
• A radical account of what happens when inner spiritual authority is projected outward on to traditions, texts and teachers, with an expose of the authoritarianism in spiritual traditions.
• A critique of the gender-laden theory of a perennial philosophy.
• A practical, working model of internal spiritual authority, to dialogue with the reader’s working model.
• An exploration of the issues involved in do-it-yourself subtle (psychical) research.
• A provisional new dipolar map of the spiritual and the subtle, and a critique of other maps.
• A new classification of methods of inner transformation, and a critique of a traditional Buddhist approach.
• Reports of eleven short-term co-operative inquiries into the spiritual and the subtle, showing how the method works.
• A presentation of a participatory worldview, with the paradigm of participatory inquiry and a sketch of a dipolar theology of embodiment.

Sacred Science will be of interest to all those who believe in the emergence of the self-determining human spirit within the field of religious belief and practice. It is written for the general reader, yet specialists in transpersonal studies will find that it addresses critical issues at a sophisticated level."

Contents

Part 1:

• Perspectives of lived inquiry
• Introduction and background
• Spiritual inquiry and projected authority
• Spiritual inquiry and the authority within
• Issues in subtle inquiry
• The challenge of cartography
• A dipolar map of the spiritual and the subtle
• Methods for the second form of spiritual transformation

Part 2:

• Co-operative inquiry reports
• Procedures
• Reports, adequacy and viability
• Spatio-temporal extensions
• Impressions of the other reality
• The bliss nature and transtemporal regression
• Knacks in entering altered states
• Charismatic expression
• Transpersonal activities in everyday life
• Transpersonal inquiry within a self-generating culture
• Ritual and interpersonal process
• Empowerment in everyday life and group life
• Co-creating
• Coming into being
• Epilogue to Part 2

Part 3:

• A participatory worldview
• Participatory research
• Participatory theology and cosmology
• References
• Index

Review

Summary of reading notes by Michel Bauwens, 2003:

"- This book is a summary of a “cooperative inquiry” process into spirituality.

John Heron distinguishes three categories of the subtle:

• The realm of the recently deceased (also known

as the realm of spiritualism)

• The realm of purported guides and advanced

beings which come through in channeling

• Exalted ‘presences’ in the ‘high subtle’, which

participate in ritual and change process

He says we have to take it seriously, by

   - Not dismissing it (scientific approach)
   - Not subjectivize it (psychologizing it)
   - Not ignore it (as in Zen and Buddhism)
   - Not demonize it (as in Christianity)

Heron distinguishes the transcendent world of form, from the immanent lifeworld of process, and the ‘present’ in between, linking both.

For subtle inquiry, it is important that researchers enter the state, by entertaining the possibility of its occurrence through ‘imagistic training’.

Jean Houston in her account of sacred psychology stresses the importance of imagistic thinking, of the training of the creative imagination, as a necessary condition for entering the subtle realms of the ‘mundus imaginalis’.

Discussing Wilber, he stresses that he represents a ‘monopolar practice’, focused on ascent and dissociative meditation to the higher stages; it does not feature ‘descent’ into the immanent dynamic processes (“shekinah”). Heron stresses the horizontality of the latter process, contrasting it to the verticality of Wilber. For example, Heron sees ‘conscious intentional parenting’ as a valid spiritual practice.

To Heron, saying that the self is illusory and has to disappear/merge with the whole, is a dangerous form of spiritual inflation. Top-down emanationist philosophers such as those like Wilber or Plotinus, do not take into account ‘creation’, since that is only seen as a return to the One. Against this vision, Heron posits "unpredictable divine becoming".

Heron writes that ancient spiritual accounts are not trustworthy, because:

   - 1) They are rife (and unaware of) with authoritarianism, patriarchy and the denigration of women
   - 2) deny the body and repress emotion
   - 3) have no commitment to a mastery of the phenomenal world in terms of science, politics and ethics

John Heron then starts describing his dipolar map of consciousness. Dipolar, because, starting from "immediate present awareness", it can either turn to four transcendent states (height, form, and beyond), and four immanent states of process within (depth).

The "fulcrum of immediate present experience" exists when I attend to the intrinsic nature of my 'being-in-the-world', n a relational, participatory, subjective-objective reality, when there is no gap between me as subject and what is around as object.

Heron compares it to:

   - the I-Thou communion of persons (Buber)
   - unitive ecstasy in extralinguistic immediacy of perception (Jean Wahl)
   - pre-objective consciousness-nature union (Merleau-Ponty)
   - pre-conceptual spontaneous sensorial engagement with phenomena (David Abram)
   - sahay samadhi (Raman Maharshi)
   - tzu-jan, wu-wei (Taoism)
   - jen (Confucianism)

It is important that Heron's map is about action which combines both immanent and transcendent.

More information

Order Sacred Science from: PCCS Books, Llangarron, Ross-on-Wye, HR9 6PT, UK. Tel: +44 1989 77 07 07. Fax: +44 1989 77 07 00. Email: contact@pccs-books.co.uk Cost: £18 per book. Buy online at [2] Also available online from Amazon