Return to the Source

.... I'm back ...

I know that I have not been posting very much this year, and that perhaps some of you have wondered what happened to me.

Over the first half of this year my own thinking has developed. Not my philosophical thinking. Rather, my thinking about what I can offer you, not only on this platform but more broadly.

Over that time, a new project has emerged. I am very excited about it and I hope to share it with you all soon.

But for now, let me try to explain.

The Chasm

If you have been a subscriber for a while, you will know that I aim to take deep academic study in philosophy, theology and spirituality and to make it accessible. My goal here on Provocations has been to do the deep dive for you, into the source materials for different traditions, and then to write something that aims to be easy to understand with some measure of practical application.

In that process I have started to see the problem I am trying to solve more clearly. Yes, on the one hand, it is helpful to interpret these traditions for people to make it easier for them.

But that doesn’t put the reader directly in touch with the traditions themselves. I’ve started to think about how great it would be to make that possible.

One of the reasons that would be great has to do with a huge gap, a chasm really, that I see in the world of spiritual seekers.

On the one side of this chasm is the high wall of academically-oriented philosophy and theology. On the other side is the equally high wall of experientially-motivated spirituality. The intellectually-minded people often scoff at the spiritual people as “wu-wu,” as lacking depth and seriousness. The spiritual people dismiss the intellectuals with equal ease as theoretical and abstract, without any sense of practical benefits for the everyday person.

The Bridge

I think it is important to bridge this gap, and I hope that I can be offer something to help.

There are many ways, no doubt, to bridge the gap. But there is one that I think is extremely important, perhaps the most important of all. And that has to do with access to the original texts in a language that you can understand, with some help on how to read and interpret them. And for that to be easy, community-building, and fun.

Let me explain a little bit more about the gap from the traditions that I am most familiar with: Tantrism, Nietzschean philosophy, and Christian theology.

Tantra is probably the most extreme example of it. For people that want to ground their spiritual practice in the roots of this tradition, there is a massive shortage of resources. This is due, in large part, to the basic unavailability of the Tantric textual traditions in edited and translated editions. And even if you can get your hands on a properly curated and translated text, its contents are likely to be esoteric and obscure.

Work is being done by a significant number of scholars around the world, including in India, to recover these texts, to establish authoritative manuscripts, and then to translate them and make them available in a variety of ways. People like Christopher Wallis, Alexis Sanderson, and the late Mark Dyczkowski have all made enormous contributions in this space.

And yet, despite all of this work, the texts remain elusive to an English speaking audience. They come to us in bits and pieces, in academic articles and partial translations, often drowned out by academic apparatus, with large volumes of notes and interpretive material. The bottom line: it is still extremely difficult to get to the sources of Tantric spirituality.

This is true, but less extreme, in other areas. Nietzsche is a good example. It is easy to get hold of his canonical works. It is also easy to run off with them in all kinds of weird and wonderful directions. The academic mocks at the ‘angry young man’ phenomenon, those philosophically-minded young people who are drawn to Nietzsche’s bombast. In turn, those young people mock the professors for being the incarnation of everything Nietzsche hated about academic philosophy.

And I hardly need to mention the Christian faith. There is an awful lot of white-washing of the foundation texts of Christianity. Most people in secular society would like to think of the Christian faith as essentially the same as all the others, and bearing essentially the same message: love everyone and be kind. This gets a little awkward when you actually read the foundation texts of Christianity, and you find that it does not regard itself that way, and quite explicitly so.

Back to Source

In the Protestant revolution in Europe, the Latin phrase ad fontes became something of a catch-cry. It meant ‘back to the sources,’ and it was an encouragement for people to not just believe the priests but to go back to the foundation texts of Christianity, the Bible, for themselves.

This is the spirit of my new project. I want to bring together philosophical theology, linguistics and philology from my intellectual life, and teh affordances of artificial intelligence from my professional life.

I do this with one main goal: to bring you closer to the source for whatever spiritual tradition speaks to you the most. And, in doing this, hopefully we can create a community of people, each on their own journey into the depths and back to the sources.

Stay tuned good people. I will let you know more about this project over the coming weeks. And, what’s more, think I will need your help to bring it to life.

But for now, I will simply give you its name:

Neil