Metamodern oscillation is one of the most powerful tools that we have in the mystical and magical toolbox. It is a tool we use all the time without realizing it, but once we make it a more conscious act, it not only liberates us from the thoughts that hold us captive in our daily lives, but helps you to work toward our goals weaving around the obstacles that rise up in our path.
What is Oscillation?
True beauty and truthful beauty, as Whitehead points out, 'is a discovery and not a recapitulation.' We have lost beauty as a theological and educational category in the West to the extent that we have lost the dialectical birthing process, the artistic energy. For beauty is born and not made.
Matthew Fox, Original Blessing
Matthew Fox encourages us to move from the Dualistic views of Fall/Redemption theology where we focus on the either/or way of seeing the world, and move to a Dialectic view of Creation Spirituality where we focus on the both/and way of seeing. We need to understand that some things that seem contradictory at face view are simultaneously true. This is the way we create beauty.
Oscillation is the method of moving back and forth between two or more perspectives. For example, understanding that we can move between the either/or and the both/and points of view as a way of seeing more than one side of an issue to get a better view of the whole.
Belief in Christ alone and Universalism
For example, I am a Christian, and I believe with my whole heart that belief in Jesus Christ is required to enter the Kingdom of God, but I also believe that truth is like an underground river and religions are the many wells that tap the waters of this river to draw of life, power, and meaning in their own way. When I say Christianity is true does not mean that other religions are false, even though many Christians believe that is what it means.
Christianity is a framework like any other religion. When I am discussing or thinking about anything in a Christian context, I am invoking everything in that framework as a whole when I am discussing the part. So how does this prevent me from becoming a Christian that believes that everyone who is not a Christian is going to hell?
The idea that we must believe in Jesus rather than just follow him comes from Paul and the writer of the Gospel of John, not Jesus. Belief in Christ alone is required to be born again and take on the new life offered by the Christ to the world. The crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and Humanity is the cut in the vine necessary to graft Gentiles into the family of Abraham so we might also participate in the Chosen People status granted to his descendants. This chosen status does not make the children of Abraham and Sarah to only people who will thrive in the world to come. If you believe that you have to rejection the Covenant of Noah and the idea of the Righteous Gentile which permeates the Mosaic Law and the very testimony of Jesus in the Gospel of John:
I have other sheep, which are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will hear my voice. They will become one flock with one shepherd (John 10:16).
Jesus clearly tells his followers that it is Christ’s job to work with people outside the Christian Faith and not the work of his followers. Jesus saved everyone, but we need to focus on our own lives and not the lives of others.
Metamodernist Oscillation
Ontologically, metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern. One should be careful not to think of this oscillation as a balance however; rather, it is a pendulum swinging between 2, 3, 5, 10, innumerable poles.
Timotheus Vermeulen &Robin van den Akker, Notes on metamodernism
The problem that modern and postmodern interfaith movements have had is the lack of this sort of oscillation as a valid spiritual practice.
The Problem with Perennialism
The modernist answer to this problem is the colonizing and problematic idea of Perennialism, or the Perennial Philosophy promulgated by people like Aldous Huxley and Joseph Campbell.
The Perennial Philosophy is an original modernist framework that proclaims that all religions, spiritualities, and mystics were talking about the same things, they only used different words and images. It is a tempting illusion that all too often tells these traditions that what they really mean is—
Colonizing other faiths, religions, and practices to make them fit into our version of Perennial Philosophy is an act of violence and theft against the original people. They know what their stories and practices mean and don’t need a well-meaning Perennialist telling them what they actually means that lines up with the perennialist’s preexisting beliefs.
The Problem with Syncretism/Eclecticism
The post-modern version of this is version of Syncretism often called eclecticism. In this version eclecticism, the post-modern rejects the grand narratives of the modern and believe that they can cobble together a piece of lore here, a deity there, and a practice from somewhere else because who cares, it doesn’t really matter. There is no Truth so the post-modern can do what they want.
While this can turn into a form of cultural appropriation when these new age ideas are repackaged and sold, the biggest harm this causes is to the practitioner themself. In the absence of a framework, the post-modern eclectic alienates themself from the potential power and meaning that symbols and practices that collect could offer them.
Religion/Spirituality/Mysticism/Magic is a Language
Religions are like languages: all languages are of human origin; each language reflects and shapes the civilization that speaks it; all languages make meaning out of the raw facts of our existence; no language is true or false; there are things you can say in one language that you cannot say (or say as well) in another; the more languages you know, the more nuanced your understanding of life becomes; and as important as languages are, the final “language” of wisdom is silence.
Rami Shapiro, Holy Rascals, 24
Perennialism tells the speaker of a different religious language that they have to use the perennialist’s language. The eclectic tries to tell a story with words from a lot of different languages with out understanding the nuances of the terms and without a proper grammar to make sentences at all.
Oscillation as a Spiritual Practice
The difference between a post-modern eclectic or modern perennialist and a metamodernist oscillator is that we learn the spiritual languages that we study and construct sentences in those languages or once we have an understanding of the original language translate the words into our own.
You may have noticed that in my description of Creation’s Paths, I said that we will be discussing both Jewish Kabbalah and Western Esoteric Qabala. It is customary to spell that word differently to acknowledge the two divergent traditions that share a similar vocabulary. There is even a third spelling for the Cabala which denotes the Christian fork of this tradition which went off in yet a third direction. Within each of these paths there are even more branches and traditions. They are often not using the same words in the same ways. If I were to read Hayyim ben Joseph Vital outside of the tradition of Lurianic Kabbalah in which he wrote, I would misunderstand and misread what he wrote and not be able to evaluate his insights.
As a metamodernist oscillator we operate as multilingual practitioners who understand which language and grammar we are using at each moment and understand that if we want to discuss Shevirat haKeilim or Shattering of the Vessels from Lurianic Kabbalah in terms of the Esoteric Qabala, we have to translate the terms from one language to the other and are creating something new. While the idea has a particular lineage, it is no longer the exact same idea as it was before.
Oscillating between Mysticism and Magic
In the western esoteric tradition, mysticism is viewed as a passive path where the material and spiritual environment acts on the practitioner where as magic is an active path where the practitioner acts on the spiritual and material environment.
While this is not the paradigm I subscribe to, I follow the idea of the three rays that I will discuss more in future, this rubric helps us to understand the path itself better.
The spiritual path can be active or passive from moment to moment, The value in this dualistic binary is that it helps us to understand that we don’t always have to be the active agent in our work and ritual. Sometimes we are the one acted upon. Just as it is important for us to switch the religious language we speak, ensuring that the people we are talking to understand what we are saying, it is also important for us to realize that sometimes we have to use active voice and other times passive. This is how we recuperate and keep ourselves from burning out.
If you have any questions about oscillation, please feel free to ask. This idea is key to the work that will follow.