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Social Spirituality

by Phil Campanile

Prescript / This paper is partly inspired by Scott and Helen Nearing. I can recall, specifically, walking from their garden plot into their library and having a sense of wonderment about their Project. Recognizing the juxtaposition between the stone and soil of the garden and their esoteric collection of books on diverse spiritualities, I started to conceive what going “back to the land” implied.

For me, spirituality would more befit a verb than a noun. It is a process - a constant dynamic of inward and outward relationships, a process of examination and then release. Perhaps one of the markers that sets spirituality apart from, say, inward reflection, is this constant crossing and re-crossing of the threshold between self and non-self (however one defines such an elusive and delusional term as “self”). That is, in my cosmology anyway, the individual spirit is both independent and dependent. It is dependent insofar as it is nourished through relationships with things exterior to it: Nature, friends, animals, politics, books, etc. But it is also independent: as Krishnamurti maintains, “Truth is a pathless land. . . . A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it.” Thus, the becoming of my individual freedom engenders the recognition that I am dependent on an ecology of relations.

It is this concept of a spiritual ecology that I wish to concentrate on here. That is, I wish to re-examine ecology as a spiritual realm in which we can contextualize political, social, and individual selves - to expand the concept of ecology to one that carries us over these thresholds

The word ecology is, of course, from biology, meaning the scientific study of the relationships between organisms and their environments. However, the word has spiraled outward to adopt definitions in a myriad of fields and often across fields, from cultural ecology, to political, sexual, and human ecology. The concept of ecology is often maintained in a base sense: there is a certain set of relationships at work. However, certain writers and scientists have recast the concept of ecology, furthering it to articulate more spiritual and more sociopolitical dimensions. I will briefly discuss one of these more esoteric but robust understandings of ecology, Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome. I will then just dabble in a few more thoughts regarding the ways in which the social and spiritual might be seen as continuous.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari, 20th century French post-structuralists, are interested in explorations and subversions instead of analytic logic and unified Truth, of which the concept of the rhizome is only part. They contend that the tree – the arboreal structure- is the dominant image of the world; in the image of the tree, the world is categorized by stratification and the illusion of unity. Basically, the complex of roots at the bottom is exploited to support the fruit at the top, which serves only to reproduce additional tree-like complexes, additional hierarchical structures. “Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of significance and subjectification, central automata like organized memories.” In opposition to the arboreal is the rhizomatic, which is characterized by the rhizome or fascicular (bundle) root. The rhizome root, like that of grass, is one that moves outward, not upward, in a decentralized fashion to multiply in the places that suit its growth – and some places that don’t.

“The rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton.” The principle characteristics of the rhizome include “connection,” heterogeneity,” “multiplicity,” and “rupture;” its movement is connected, it has neither beginning nor end. At question then, in the rhizome, is “a relation to sexuality, to the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural and artificial – all manner of ‘becomings.’” If all of these characteristics are, in fact, interconnected and in a process of becoming, then the resulting concept may be interpreted to be a complex ecology, always in motion, always in process. The rhizome – or, one interpretation of the rhizome – is as a representation of a spiritual ecology. The radical spirituality of this rhizomatic ecology is both in its infinity, and in its presence: in, what the authors note as Being and Becoming.

Deleuze and Guattari invigorate in ecology a sense of never ending space and time that is lost in many biological (or sociological) definitions. The vast entanglements that arise on account of the rhizome give rise to what, in What is Philosophy?, they call the “infinite symphonic plane of composition.” This symphony is created by relationships whose “territory does not merely isolate and join but opens onto cosmic forces that arise from within or come from outside, and renders their effect on the inhabitant perceptible.” Thus, for example, “the tick’s plane of composition is what supports the force of light, which can attract an insect to the end of a branch to a sufficient height, and the force of weight with which it lets itself fall onto the passing mammal – and between them nothing, an alarming void that can last for years if no mammals pass by.” Ecology is seen here as a territory, a space that both isolates, as in the individual, AND also opens to the flow of cosmic forces that find themselves situated in one’s psychology. Further, according to the excerpt, ecology is marked by imperceptible lengths of time, long or short. Each of these processes, then, finds its way to the individual, the “inhabitant.” And finally, “every territory, every habitat, joins up not only in its spatiotemporal but its qualitative planes or sections.” Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, ecology shows itself not only in time and space but in its relationships. Ecology is not a binary relationship; one cannot speak of any direct relationship between the bumblebee and the snapdragon with also mentioning the sweetness of the honey in this morning’s cup of tea.

This interrelationship between the environmental, social, and mental spheres of ecology is highlighted in Guattari’s Three Ecologies in a concept he coins ecosophy – an ecological philosophy. Biological concepts of ecology acknowledge the interdependence of all elements within an ecosystem. Similarly, within the movement of Guattari’s more comprehensive ecosophy, any distinctions separating the environmental, social, and individual, begin to show themselves as false; they disintegrate with the recognition that they were never there to start. Excited in these ideas is a momentum toward a more robust conception and actualization of the spiritual-social self, a self continually Becoming through its participation in spiritual, social, environmental, and political processes.

This radical connectedness, not unlike the connections made in Deep Ecological thinking, highlights certain social and spiritual positions. In fact, I believe that it goes some way in uniting the social and spiritual. Clearly, the distinction between the arboreal and rhizomatic structures is applicable to any sociopolitical analysis: the hierarchical and centralized arboreal structure is analogous to any state and bureaucratic structure while the rhizomatic remains a decentralized but overlapping autonomous anarchic structure (e.g. the Zapatista movement in Chiapas). The two are clearly not mutually exclusive, but, as the authors say, “We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. . . . Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes.”

Further, it seems clear that the symphonic plane of composition, which grows out of the rhizomatic connections extant in the universe, contains within it a definite sense of the spiritual that I previously outlined; that is, a plane of composition is an inward and outward movement situated in the individual and interconnected with the furthest galaxy, the smallest atom. It is that the social and spiritual are a continuum, without separation. What I see this concept of the rhizome doing is actively subverting the boundaries we have located culturally between the social self and the spiritual self (and whatever other kind of self).

* * *

I had one other thought that might deepen the discussion. In Bourdieu’s chapter on “Rethinking the State” in Practical Reason, he states “Submission to the established order is the product of the agreement between, on the one hand, the cognitive structures inscribed in bodies by both collective history and individual history and, on the other, the objective structures of the world to which these cognitive structures are applied.” So, submission to state and bureaucratic agency is a product of 1) the way in which cultural and individual history (internal processes) shape the mind and 2) the way in which the mind adapts to other environmental factors (external processes). If the aim then – as it is for me, as it was for Scott and Helen – is to resist submission to the State, one must lose his or her attachments to cultural and individual history and one must find infinite flexibility in the way in which s/he perceives the world.

In Buddhist terms, one must recognize the third Noble Truth, the truth of the cessation of suffering (as told by Strong in The Experience of Buddhism): “the destruction without remainder of this very thirst for further existence, which comes along with pleasure and passion, bringing passing enjoyment here and there. It is without passion. It is cessation, forsaking, abandoning, renunciation. This is the Noble Truth of the cessation of suffering.” It is how most define Yoga. According to Sri Aurobindo, “The common initial purpose of all Yoga is the liberation of the soul of man from its present natural ignorance and limitation. . . .” The state can be subverted by spiritual freedom, by freedom from that which is non-essential. Of course, one could argue that our entire economy on which the state is built is non-essential. But, importantly, beyond the freedom from the mundane lies ecology, interconnectedness, community.

The point of enlightenment for the Buddha was not under the banyan tree, but the point in time when he decided that, through his release of suffering, he would help others relieve their suffering. His inward spiritual quest became outward, social. Even Krishnamurti, champion of individual freedom, marks the communion found upon personal freedom: “Those who really desire to understand, who are looking to find that which is eternal, without beginning and without end, will walk together with a greater intensity, will be a danger to everything that is unessential, to unrealities, to shadows… Because of that real understanding there will be true friendship. Because of that true friendship, there will be real cooperation on the part of each one.” At some point individual liberation and community (and, of course, environmental awareness, which space prevented me from discussing here) are fully morphed into one another.

So, by adopting and expanding our notion of ecology as including the environmental, social, political, personal, etc., we may energize a socio-spiritual being with praxis. We may conceive of a spirituality and a politics that are mutually engaged in peace, equality, justice, and sympathy. I wish I had more room here to ground this somewhat strange discussion in specificities (e.g. for me, working in an urban farm last summer), but I hope to have achieved at least some acknowledgement that it is appropriate to be at once spiritual AND social, social AND spiritual. . .

Phillip Campanile is originally from Buffalo, New York. He has worked on urban agriculture projects in Buffalo and in Providence, Rhode Island, and is currently studying English and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon in Eugene. He can be contacted at philbelltower@riseup.net.

Table of Contents | The Good Life Center | Contact The Best We're Doing

The Best We're Doing : A Journal of The Good Life Center
Vol. 1 No.1 October 2005
Table of Contents GLC Home	Social Spirituality by Phil Campanile Prescript / This paper is partly inspired by Scott and Helen Nearing. I can recall, specifically, walking from their garden plot into their library and having a sense of wonderment about their Project. Recognizing the juxtaposition between the stone and soil of the garden and their esoteric collection of books on diverse spiritualities, I started to conceive what going “back to the land” implied. For me, spirituality would more befit a verb than a noun. It is a process - a constant dynamic of inward and outward relationships, a process of examination and then release. Perhaps one of the markers that sets spirituality apart from, say, inward reflection, is this constant crossing and re-crossing of the threshold between self and non-self (however one defines such an elusive and delusional term as “self”). That is, in my cosmology anyway, the individual spirit is both independent and dependent. It is dependent insofar as it is nourished through relationships with things exterior to it: Nature, friends, animals, politics, books, etc. But it is also independent: as Krishnamurti maintains, “Truth is a pathless land. . . . A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it.” Thus, the becoming of my individual freedom engenders the recognition that I am dependent on an ecology of relations. It is this concept of a spiritual ecology that I wish to concentrate on here. That is, I wish to re-examine ecology as a spiritual realm in which we can contextualize political, social, and individual selves - to expand the concept of ecology to one that carries us over these thresholds The word ecology is, of course, from biology, meaning the scientific study of the relationships between organisms and their environments. However, the word has spiraled outward to adopt definitions in a myriad of fields and often across fields, from cultural ecology, to political, sexual, and human ecology. The concept of ecology is often maintained in a base sense: there is a certain set of relationships at work. However, certain writers and scientists have recast the concept of ecology, furthering it to articulate more spiritual and more sociopolitical dimensions. I will briefly discuss one of these more esoteric but robust understandings of ecology, Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome. I will then just dabble in a few more thoughts regarding the ways in which the social and spiritual might be seen as continuous. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari, 20th century French post-structuralists, are interested in explorations and subversions instead of analytic logic and unified Truth, of which the concept of the rhizome is only part. They contend that the tree – the arboreal structure- is the dominant image of the world; in the image of the tree, the world is categorized by stratification and the illusion of unity. Basically, the complex of roots at the bottom is exploited to support the fruit at the top, which serves only to reproduce additional tree-like complexes, additional hierarchical structures. “Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of significance and subjectification, central automata like organized memories.” In opposition to the arboreal is the rhizomatic, which is characterized by the rhizome or fascicular (bundle) root. The rhizome root, like that of grass, is one that moves outward, not upward, in a decentralized fashion to multiply in the places that suit its growth – and some places that don’t. “The rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton.” The principle characteristics of the rhizome include “connection,” heterogeneity,” “multiplicity,” and “rupture;” its movement is connected, it has neither beginning nor end. At question then, in the rhizome, is “a relation to sexuality, to the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural and artificial – all manner of ‘becomings.’” If all of these characteristics are, in fact, interconnected and in a process of becoming, then the resulting concept may be interpreted to be a complex ecology, always in motion, always in process. The rhizome – or, one interpretation of the rhizome – is as a representation of a spiritual ecology. The radical spirituality of this rhizomatic ecology is both in its infinity, and in its presence: in, what the authors note as Being and Becoming. Deleuze and Guattari invigorate in ecology a sense of never ending space and time that is lost in many biological (or sociological) definitions. The vast entanglements that arise on account of the rhizome give rise to what, in What is Philosophy?, they call the “infinite symphonic plane of composition.” This symphony is created by relationships whose “territory does not merely isolate and join but opens onto cosmic forces that arise from within or come from outside, and renders their effect on the inhabitant perceptible.” Thus, for example, “the tick’s plane of composition is what supports the force of light, which can attract an insect to the end of a branch to a sufficient height, and the force of weight with which it lets itself fall onto the passing mammal – and between them nothing, an alarming void that can last for years if no mammals pass by.” Ecology is seen here as a territory, a space that both isolates, as in the individual, AND also opens to the flow of cosmic forces that find themselves situated in one’s psychology. Further, according to the excerpt, ecology is marked by imperceptible lengths of time, long or short. Each of these processes, then, finds its way to the individual, the “inhabitant.” And finally, “every territory, every habitat, joins up not only in its spatiotemporal but its qualitative planes or sections.” Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, ecology shows itself not only in time and space but in its relationships. Ecology is not a binary relationship; one cannot speak of any direct relationship between the bumblebee and the snapdragon with also mentioning the sweetness of the honey in this morning’s cup of tea. This interrelationship between the environmental, social, and mental spheres of ecology is highlighted in Guattari’s Three Ecologies in a concept he coins ecosophy – an ecological philosophy. Biological concepts of ecology acknowledge the interdependence of all elements within an ecosystem. Similarly, within the movement of Guattari’s more comprehensive ecosophy, any distinctions separating the environmental, social, and individual, begin to show themselves as false; they disintegrate with the recognition that they were never there to start. Excited in these ideas is a momentum toward a more robust conception and actualization of the spiritual-social self, a self continually Becoming through its participation in spiritual, social, environmental, and political processes. This radical connectedness, not unlike the connections made in Deep Ecological thinking, highlights certain social and spiritual positions. In fact, I believe that it goes some way in uniting the social and spiritual. Clearly, the distinction between the arboreal and rhizomatic structures is applicable to any sociopolitical analysis: the hierarchical and centralized arboreal structure is analogous to any state and bureaucratic structure while the rhizomatic remains a decentralized but overlapping autonomous anarchic structure (e.g. the Zapatista movement in Chiapas). The two are clearly not mutually exclusive, but, as the authors say, “We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. . . . Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes.” Further, it seems clear that the symphonic plane of composition, which grows out of the rhizomatic connections extant in the universe, contains within it a definite sense of the spiritual that I previously outlined; that is, a plane of composition is an inward and outward movement situated in the individual and interconnected with the furthest galaxy, the smallest atom. It is that the social and spiritual are a continuum, without separation. What I see this concept of the rhizome doing is actively subverting the boundaries we have located culturally between the social self and the spiritual self (and whatever other kind of self). * * * I had one other thought that might deepen the discussion. In Bourdieu’s chapter on “Rethinking the State” in Practical Reason, he states “Submission to the established order is the product of the agreement between, on the one hand, the cognitive structures inscribed in bodies by both collective history and individual history and, on the other, the objective structures of the world to which these cognitive structures are applied.” So, submission to state and bureaucratic agency is a product of 1) the way in which cultural and individual history (internal processes) shape the mind and 2) the way in which the mind adapts to other environmental factors (external processes). If the aim then – as it is for me, as it was for Scott and Helen – is to resist submission to the State, one must lose his or her attachments to cultural and individual history and one must find infinite flexibility in the way in which s/he perceives the world. In Buddhist terms, one must recognize the third Noble Truth, the truth of the cessation of suffering (as told by Strong in The Experience of Buddhism): “the destruction without remainder of this very thirst for further existence, which comes along with pleasure and passion, bringing passing enjoyment here and there. It is without passion. It is cessation, forsaking, abandoning, renunciation. This is the Noble Truth of the cessation of suffering.” It is how most define Yoga. According to Sri Aurobindo, “The common initial purpose of all Yoga is the liberation of the soul of man from its present natural ignorance and limitation. . . .” The state can be subverted by spiritual freedom, by freedom from that which is non-essential. Of course, one could argue that our entire economy on which the state is built is non-essential. But, importantly, beyond the freedom from the mundane lies ecology, interconnectedness, community. The point of enlightenment for the Buddha was not under the banyan tree, but the point in time when he decided that, through his release of suffering, he would help others relieve their suffering. His inward spiritual quest became outward, social. Even Krishnamurti, champion of individual freedom, marks the communion found upon personal freedom: “Those who really desire to understand, who are looking to find that which is eternal, without beginning and without end, will walk together with a greater intensity, will be a danger to everything that is unessential, to unrealities, to shadows… Because of that real understanding there will be true friendship. Because of that true friendship, there will be real cooperation on the part of each one.” At some point individual liberation and community (and, of course, environmental awareness, which space prevented me from discussing here) are fully morphed into one another. So, by adopting and expanding our notion of ecology as including the environmental, social, political, personal, etc., we may energize a socio-spiritual being with praxis. We may conceive of a spirituality and a politics that are mutually engaged in peace, equality, justice, and sympathy. I wish I had more room here to ground this somewhat strange discussion in specificities (e.g. for me, working in an urban farm last summer), but I hope to have achieved at least some acknowledgement that it is appropriate to be at once spiritual AND social, social AND spiritual. . . Phillip Campanile is originally from Buffalo, New York. He has worked on urban agriculture projects in Buffalo and in Providence, Rhode Island, and is currently studying English and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon in Eugene. He can be contacted at philbelltower@riseup.net. Table of Contents \| The Good Life Center \| Contact The Best We're Doing All material copyright The Good Life Center.