Spiritually-Engaged Knowledge

The Attentive Heart

Jennifer Crawford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351898515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In a supposedly 'global age, ' which not everyone accepts, the late Dr Jennifer Crawford has brought together a range of disciplines in her creation of a unified, sensitive 'way of knowing' for the global era. Drawing upon her academic and lived experience in philosophy, environmental science, social work and feminism, together with a deep spiritual commitment, Jennifer Crawford has deftly woven together complex ideas in her reconceptualisation of global justice. Spiritually-Engaged Knowledge: The Attentive Heart is framed within the author's troubling encounters in India recounted in the Prologue and Epilogue. These transformative experiences inspired her multi-disciplinary exploration of justice, which took her beyond the boundaries of Western epistemology. Locating the global, the author defines what it is to be a member of a global community in which cross-cultural encounters bring forth the possibility of new genre of knowledge. Crawford situates her argument within contemporary philiosohpical contexts, drawing upon postmodern discourse, globalisation theory and the realisation of shared horizon for all human knowledge, which offers up a potential for 'knowing globally'. Crawford takes the reader through feminist theory, the ethic of care, the craft of 'othering', surrender to the 'other' and to our relationship with the earth which, she argues, can be reconfigured into an ethically-based way of knowing. Drawing on a range of belief systems, including Australian Aboriginal spirituality, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, metaphysics and Western philosophy, Crawford rebuilds an inclusive, compassionate, redefinition of care for the new millennium, which she calls spiritually-engaged knowledge.

PART 1
Part I: Locating The Global

1
Chapter 1 Understanding in a Global Era

Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument

About it and about; but evermore

Came out by the same door as in I went

Omar Khayyam¹

My meetings with the yogi and the woman on the bridge were not unusual in themselves. They are examples of cross-cultural meetings that occur more and more frequently in our world. These encounters with those perceived as ‘global others’ occur in the contemporary era with an intensity and frequency that make our time unique. The process of globalisation that characterises the present era – the mass movements of peoples (through migration, labour exchange and tourism) and the inter-penetration of cultures and markets unceasingly confronts us with alterity and with opportunities to meet with the Other. It is my contention that the global encounters to which we are being called, are bringing forth a new genre of knowledge. This book is an exploration of that genre, which emerges from the particularity of my own interactions with the woman on the bridge and the yogi with the fan, and reaches towards the universality of the global domain.

It is appropriate perhaps to be writing of a new genre of knowledge at a time when, on the one hand the technocrats tell us that the entire sum of human knowledge doubles every few years,² while on the other hand intellectuals inform us that the postmodern critique has called all knowledge into question. The contradiction between these two statements points to the crisis of knowledge occurring within the contemporary Western episteme. The extraordinary accumulation of knowledge to which the technocrats refer is largely due to the revolution in information technology. It reflects a rapid growth in information, which has left its recipients overwhelmed and bewildered, unable to direct this flood of facts in a way that impacts positively on the contemporary global crises.

But what kind of knowledge is needed in our globalising context? If not more facts, then what is it that we need to know in order to respond to the present crises? I propose that the kind of knowledge which we need is in fact emerging in the global context, but it is a way of knowing that is so different from our present understanding of knowledge that it is not at first easily recognised. As we have become more acutely aware of the ways in which our knowing is a socio-linguistic construction, a play of signifiers within a system of representation, the term knowledge has increasingly been placed in inverted commas. The genre of knowledge that I seek to identify here must therefore be thought of as ‘knowledge’, or perhaps, knowledge – knowledge under erasure. Heidegger employed this practice of erasure in his attempts to go beyond Being.³ Just as Being for Heidegger was not a negative denial, but a pointing towards something more immediate and originary, so the knowledge I seek to identify involves a way of knowing, a kind of awareness, that because of its immediacy is overlooked.⁴ Whilst knowledge may alert us to the dilemmas of signification, it does not offer an accurate representation of the way of knowing which I seek to define here. Ultimately erasure only replaces one inaccurate signifier – knowledge – with another – knowledge. What is really at stake is not a change of signifier, but a reframing of our modem Western understanding of what it means to know.

Rather than employ the strategy of erasure (and create a word-processing nightmare!), I have chosen instead to qualify the word ‘knowledge’ with the description ‘spiritually-engaged’, which to some degree situates this way of knowing within the Western tradition. In the following chapters I argued that this genre of knowledge exceeds the reach of the rational, conceptual discursivity that we have, in the modem Western episteme, come to refer to as ‘knowledge’. By contrast spiritually-engaged knowledge is concerned with a nondual mode of awareness that, since it collapses the subject/object duality inherent in all modem ‘knowing’, cannot really be said to ‘know’ anything in the modem understanding of the word. It is not therefore a ‘genre of knowledge’, in the sense of another particular pattern of signification that can be identified within the dualistic structure of modem knowing. Rather it is a kind of knowledge that stands outside the modem understanding of knowledge. This way of knowing has been recessive rather than absent from the Western tradition, where it is more readily identified within the domain of religion or spirituality than philosophy. It has certainly been present in other cultural traditions of knowledge, particularly those which have not suffered from the modem split between philosophy and religion.

Spiritually-engaged knowledge not only reframes our understanding of what it means to know, but it brings about a total reorientation of the ground of identification of the knowing subject. Such a claim might be considered audacious and it must certainly be approached with care. As I understand it now, it was this kind of spiritually-engaged knowledge that the yogi offered me, though I could not accept it at the time. When something unrecognisable enters our world for the first time we cannot always grasp it. We may eventually approach it via a conversational method that compares and contrasts it with that which is already known and named in our world, until at last it is integrated into our world view. When that which is proffered comes from another tradition of knowledge, this process of integration involves both anamnesis and translation. The former task of anamnesis is concerned with rediscovering, within one’s own knowledge tradition, the recessive strands that resemble the new knowledge that is being offered. The latter task of translation involves finding ways of expressing this newly acquired knowledge in the idiom of one’s own culture. A similar technique is adopted in the following chapters as this emerging genre of knowledge is investigated.

The fields chosen for exploration can be broadly delineated by the terms ‘globalisation’, ‘postmodernism’, ‘environmentalism’, ‘feminism’, ‘psychology’ and ‘spirituality’. Not only did each of these seem relevant to my meetings with the woman and the yogi, but each articulates to a greater or lesser degree a submerged aspect of modernity. Elements within each of these fields, I suggest, offer more or less coherent glimpses of the (re-)emerging knowledge referred to as ‘spiritually-engaged’. If the contemporary socio-political context of this (re-)emerging knowledge is defined by globalisation, its theoretical context, at least in the West, is defined by postmodernity. The remainder of this chapter introduces the genre of knowledge which I want to identify, and the next chapter explores the interdependent global and postmodern contexts that are facilitating its (re)-emergence.

Global Conversations

Extrapolating from the past, Samuel Huntington (1997) in a well-known essay suggested that the global future was likely to be characterised by a ‘clash of civilizations’ in which civilisational blocs, rather than nation states, would be the main players in a continuing saga of conflict and domination. Whilst this certainly maps one possible global future, there are aspects of both the globalisation process, and of postmodernity, which suggest other alternatives. In contrast to Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ other more optimistic commentators (Nandy, 1983, 1987a,b; Kavolis, 1991; Blaney and Inayatullah, 1994) have proffered the alternative of a ‘conversation of cultures’ which offers a path between incommensurability and conflict on the one hand, and global hegemony and homogeneity on the other. It also offers the possibility that the Western episteme might recognise and acquire, through contact with other cultural traditions, the knowledge needed both to avert its own current crisis of knowledge and to participate effectively in the solution of the contemporary global crises.

Although the global context creates many opportunities for exchange with others of the global domain, most of these meetings do not result in conversation. The historical record bears witness to the way encounters between the West⁵ and other civilisations have been largely determined by an attitude of superiority which, in the socio-political arena, has translated into conquest, colonisation or conversion, but not conversation. In the colonial era, for example, female infanticide was one of a number of cultural practices used as a means of constructing the superiority of the British over the Indians in order to justify the imposition of Britain’s ‘civilising influence’. Mani (1990:35) ironically sums up the colonial subterfuge as: ‘we came, we saw, we were horrified, and we intervened’. Female infanticide was identified as one of those practices that, dutifully assuming the ‘White Man’s Burden’, the British needed to eradicate.⁶ The ‘necessity’ to intervene in the ‘dreadful practices’ of female infanticide, sati and child marriage, provided legitimisation for the ‘civilising mission’ of British administrators, missionaries and the British public alike.

Missionary activity also played an important role in the colonial enterprise. The superiority of Western religious and theological discourse was assumed and the world of the yogis, fakirs and rishis was dismissed as a chimera, a variant of the Indian rope trick from which the unwitting populace needed ‘saving’. It was several centuries before the philosophical discourses and meditative praxes which constructed that world would be ‘taken seriously’ by the West. There is no doubt that the various schools of Indian philosophy differed greatly from the Western analytical tradition, but this difference was interpreted as inferiority, an interpretation that was essential to maintain the momentum of ‘converting the heathen’ and ‘expanding the empire’. Early this century, in language that today seems more associated with humour than hubris, the historian La Vallée Poussin (1917:110-112),⁷ referring to Indian philosophy, wrote of ‘Indian “philosophumena” concocted by ascetics… men exhausted by a severe diet and often stupefied by the practice of ecstasy’.⁸

Today evangelical missionary activity in the Third World has been curtailed, but contemporary interpretations of female infanticide can still be used to legitimise ‘development’ or ‘aid’ programs that inexorably extend the reach of the global market. Verhelst (1990:86-8) warns of the dangers of ‘development pornography’, those tragic images of the Third World that are used, not only to construct a picture of the harsh reality of poverty, but also to rationalise intervention into Third World economies in ways which maintain, rather than rupture, global patterns of power and privilege. Economic intervention generally implies cultural intervention and in situations of inequitable power relations, cultural intervention often implies cultural destruction (Verhelst 1990:84).

A conversational rather than conflictual model of the future offers the possibility of a multicultural globalism. All models are subversive one way or another,⁹ and Blaney and Inayatullah (1994) consciously develop their model of ‘conversation’ as a way of countering the dominant view of both past and future as narratives of conflict. Much has already been written about dialogue and the possibility of a dialogic future.¹⁰ It is not my intention to adopt an adversarial stance towards this dialogic approach, nor to split hairs over the difference between ‘dialogue’ and ‘conversation’, although such a distinction can be made.¹¹ What is being explored here is an aspect that has been underemphasised in dialogic approaches. It is concerned with a praxis, or a kind of knowledge, that must be present if a meeting is to evolve into conversation rather than conflict. This praxis is identified as spiritually-engaged knowledge.

Blaney and Inayatullah (1994) relate the possibility of conversation to a spectrum of otherness, a range of different self/other constructions, some of which enable us to meet the other in ways that facilitate conversation, some of which so inhibit conversation that the outcome is conflict. How must the other be encountered in order to enter into conversation? In the following chapters I try to answer this question, suggesting that the genre of knowledge needed represents a submerged way of knowing within the modem episteme. Unlike the dominant form of modem knowledge, this way of knowing exceeds both rationality and discursivity. Since it is concerned with the relation between self and other this knowledge is ethically based, but since it involves re-negotiating the self/other boundary it is also transformative, concerned with re-presenting both self and other.

In conversation the other becomes more than a mirror passively reflecting us to ourselves. The process of conversation involves finding and engaging, not only with the external other, but also with the other within oneself. In this way the other – both internal and external – becomes an ally in a process of critical self and cultural reflection (Blaney and Inayatullah, 1994:31). Within both the personal and the cultural frames of reference, conversation encourages each participant to deepen their understanding of their own distinctiveness by engaging, from their unique position, with the distinctiveness of the other (Kavolis, 1991:130). On the personal level we discover the other within, while on the civilisation level we are drawn into a ‘process of “mutual criticism” that allows each civilisation to rediscover and reinvigorate its own vision, including the recovery of lost or submerged knowledges’ (Blaney and Inayatullah, 1994:41).

In the contemporary global context where the hegemony of Western modernity is being challenged, conversations between submerged Western knowledges and strands of other cultural traditions have the potential to create alliances by establishing ‘a “common horizon” for thought and action’ (Blaney and Inayatullah, 1994:37). By way of example, Nandy (1983:49;51) offers Gandhi’s capacity, during the Indian struggle for independence, to draw together recessive elements of Christianity with elements of Hinduism and Buddhism in a successful common horizon for ethical, non-violent action. By engaging these apparently disparate discourses in conversation, Gandhi reframed the struggle for independence within ethical and spiritual horizons that could be translated as effectively into the idiom of the British colonisers, or of the Hindu masses.¹²

This work attempts to draw together elements of the secular Western discourses of globalisation, postmodernism (particularly postmodern ethics), psychology, feminism, and environmentalism, with spirituality. In so doing I seek to express in Western idiom a more universal genre of knowledge, which might offer a common horizon for ethical action within the contemporary global domain. My earlier drafts were syncretic, based on the desire to somehow amalgamate the discourses of feminism, environmentalism, and alternative development in order to weave a new conceptual metanarrative in response to the woman on the bridge. Karen Warren has called this metanarrative that arises from the interconnections between all systems of oppression ‘transformative feminism’ (Warren, 1987:18-20), and in some ways my project here might have come under that banner, for my concern with the woman on the bridge certainly pointed to an interconnected system of oppressions that operated both locally and globally.

But it was my conversation with the yogi that in the end proved more transformative, and which demanded inclusion. That conversation pointed beyond analyses of domination and oppression, and beyond the material needs of the woman on the bridge, however urgent. It demanded that all traces of superiority be dropped, moral or otherwise, and a process of mutual critique be entered by acknowledging that the universe of Indian culture may contain some corrective, some knowledge that the secular Western episteme badly needs.

And so spirituality became a participant in the...