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For the yogi, the identification of all the embedments, and particularly his/her
own selfhood embodied at the fourth embedment, with the cosmos con-
ceived as universal consciousness, is expressed by the mantra Tat Tvam Asi:
“That You Are.” These are the last three words of a quotation from one of the
Ancient Vedic scriptures, the Chhandogya Upanishad, expressing the cosmic
identification:
That subtle essence
which is the Self of this entire world,
That is the Real,
That is the Self,
That You Are.
Rather than trying to sum up this section, it might be useful to come at the
topic from a different angle. Beer, of course, identified the spiritual aspect of
his life with the tantric tradition, but it strikes me that his fusion of cybernet-
ics and spirituality also places him in a somewhat more specific lineage which,
as far as I know, has no accepted name. In modernity, matter and spirit are as-
signed to separate realms, though their relations can be contested, as recent
arguments about intelligent design show: should we give credit for the bio-
logical world to God the Creator, as indicated in the Christian Bible,
or
to the
workings of evolution on base matter, as described by modern biology? What
interests me about Beer's work is that it refused to fall on either side of this
dichotomy—we have seen that his science, specifically his cybernetics, and
his understanding of the spiritual were continuous with one another—flowed
into, structured, and informed each other in all sorts of ways. This is what I
meant by referring to the earthy quality of his spirituality: his tantrism and his
mundane cybernetics were one. Once more one could remark that ontology
makes a difference, here in the realm of the spiritual.
67
But my concluding
point is that Beer was not alone in this nondualist space.
I cannot trace out anything like an adequate history of the lineage of the
scientific-spiritual space in which I want to situate Beer, and I know of no
scholarly treatments, but, in my own thinking at least, all roads lead to Wil-
liam James—in this instance to his
Varieties of Religious Experience
, as an
empirical but nonsceptical inquiry into spiritual phenomena. James's dis-
cussion of the “anaesthetic revelation”—transcendental experience brought
on by drugs and alcohol—is a canonical exploration of technologies of the
nonmodern self, Aldous Huxley
avant la lettre
. Huxley himself lurked in the
margins of chapters 3 and 5 above, pursuing a biochemical understanding
