Reclaiming the intelligence of subjectivity

Photo: Lorna Sim

We live in times of virulent tribalism. Everything is about sides, signing up to an ideology and finding “community” amongst “like-minded” people. This is supported by the narrative about humans being “social animals” and that not belonging is abnormal. We are suspicious of people who choose to stand alone, or who seem to express sentiments that are nuanced, and who do not sign up to any side.

We also have narratives that claim to have authority about Reality— they tell us the nature of Reality, even the nature of our bodies, consciousness, and identity. I hear from people I teach how they feel they are not even experts about their own selves. They feel that they cannot even experience themselves without an external narrative.

The ancient spiritual inquiry was a space of leaving the known. People went away for ritual ceremonies at critical life stages which marked a return to one’s intimate and personal unfolding. The intimacy of one’s own sensations, including the most primal ones like fear, desire, and the energy of ferocity, were invoked in ritual practices. It’s no accident that many of these practices were creative and artistic modalities including dance, singing and painting.

In Indian ritual dance, the unit of dance is called Karana. Karana denotes “making” or bringing into form. It is akin to artisans who create works of art with their bodies through processes that need to overcome the threshold of friction. For example, when we smelt metal to make it into a weapon, the smelting is how we meet the friction of bringing matter into a form. Ancient weapons were also works of art, forged by artisans as beauteous expressions of ferocity. This is not extolling war, but simply that anything brought into form can become an act of beauteous transformation. And this is congruent with the coming into form of our own bodies and the forms of Nature all around us—all forms are beauteous expressions of creativity.

Creativity is the intelligence of the personal or subjective space. Today we think subjectivity is an uninformed space, a stance devoid of knowledge, and therefore of intelligence. If we do not consume the tonnes of knowledge that are fed to us on a moment-by-moment basis, we are in danger of disappearing into the nothingness of not belonging to an ideology. Even spiritual inquiry has become about community.

I am often asked by people in my classes about “satsang” or those who come together (sang) for sat (truth). This principle has long implied that a group of people invoking “truth” together is necessary. Of course, satsang may be supportive because spiritual inquiries can often be very lonely spaces. However, I wonder at what we have made of community in spiritual spaces. I see that the social factors of a spiritual community function very much like other tribes. There seems to be implicit or explicit ideologies to which people must sign up so they can all agree on “truth.”

Isn’t this how knowledge functions? Isn’t Reality based on agreed truths?

This is where spiritual inquiry is something other than our usual knowledge systems. In spirituality we inquire into the nature of our subjectivity, deeper than any of the narratives we assume to function pragmatically in our daily lives. Truth here is the experience of subjectivity, what in dance philosophy was called “anubhava” or direct perception. It is perception unfiltered by narratives, including narratives about the meaning of Reality. Truth here is a movement, as was the implication in the source of the word “sat” which is Truth than is always unfolding in each moment.

Our essence is this unfolding movement of Reality. It is not a word or a thought. Therefore, consciousness was invoked as the great waters, that state of being which is ever fluid and ever in motion. This Truth is only apprehended in languages and traditions that were revealed as those which can hold the multi-dimensional experience and bring it into expression. Artistic and creative practices were important in these traditions because expression or bringing into form is how this insight or revelation becomes part of our bodies and of the body of the world.

Subjectivity here is a complex intelligence of intimacy, creativity, and universality. Indeed, the proposal in these kinds of traditions is that true universality emerges when we can inhabit spaces of plurality. This is of course quite different to how we conceive of community as spaces of like-mindedness which exclude those who are different from us. Subjectivity itself is revealed as a space of multi-dimensional plurality. When we taste our “sat”, our own bodies and sensations are domains of plurality. This plurality is an intelligence that is expansive, energising, and wondrous. It is what fires what is the creative intelligence in these rituals.

The role of ritual creativity is to express our “sat” as an offering to our bodies. Inherent in that offering is the offering to the body of the world. Here subjectivity is not an introspective and inward focused separation. Rather it is the expression of universal intimacy in its infinitude of possibilities.

Spiritual inquiry may not be about tribes and communities. It is also not about loneliness and withdrawal. It is about honouring the intimate self and bringing all of that self, without brutality and judgement, into beauteous expressions as artisans. Beauty, enjoyment, and pleasure are vital to inquiry, and artistic practices held these experiences to allow us to perceive all of Reality as divine.

When we source our daily lives and our participation in the narratives that seek to curate and explain Reality through this underpinning of subjective intelligence, everything takes on a radically different place. We find our voice and body amid the clamour of ideologies, and we find the creative ways to take a position that comes from our depths.

As some people in my classes say, we have new eyes with which we see Reality where we do not have to create a meaning for Reality, but we become part of its meaningful waters.