Immanence Without Transcendence?

Steven Norquist's Deal with the Devil

I meant to get into some of the following with Steven Norquist (allegedly enlightened author of Haunted Universe) by email, but he’s been a spotty correspondent at best, so I am posting it here (as well as at a Reddit thread Norquist started), as a summation of my thoughts on his work, and as this month’s free-for-all post.

(For unfamiliar readers, Norquist’s original 2003 essay: “WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT, NO, I MEAN REALLY, LIKE WHAT IS IT?”)

My qualms about Norquist’s work were first expressed in an email to him in Dec 2022, to which he didn’t reply. I then sent him a review of his book that was almost wholly positive, and to this he sent a grateful response. It’s too bad he didn’t address my concerns, however, since they have only grown for being untended. My unanswered questions were as follows:

Do you perceive any inherent problem in equating all of existence with materiality (consciousness with the universe)?

From a book about to be released (Big Mother: The Technological Body of Evil):

Scientism is when the scientific method is applied to everything but itself. It is science based on unconscious assumption or secret “faith” in the occult power of reductionism.

Evolutionary theory wants to basically do away with the need for a religious or a divine principle by saying that matter itself is self-evolving. Theologically, this is Satanism.

The same idea is expressed in the Lars von Triers movie, The House That Jack Built, in which the serial killer (an engineer who’s trying to become an architect) believes that matter has its own will, its own intelligence, and that things just happen according to that material will.

This is immanence without transcendence, and it is more or less in accord with the Satanic zeitgeist.

Does it not make more sense to say that the only thing that exists is being, and that everything within existence is an expression of that being, making the physical universe a kind of shadow or ghost of a greater existence...? The one & only thing we know after all is that we exist

(you are not reading this email)

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I have listened to Haunted Universe audio book (read by Norquist) hundreds of times now, and to his one online talk almost as many. Norquist has a compelling speaking voice, and his book is certainly a literary masterwork of some sort. (Though a lot of credit has to go to “the legendary” Thomas Ligotti, since the first version of the book—before Ligotti’s input—is something of a mess.) Norquist’s descriptions of what Jed McKenna (cult author of Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing) calls “abiding nondual awareness”—or no-self—have weight and substance and carry a lot of punch. Norquist is not a poseur or a pretender, and there’s no doubt in my mind that something happened to him, back in 2002.

Norquist states, “Anyone who has truly awakened knows it.” Yet he would be the first to admit that there are plenty of claimants out there who aren’t truly awakened; so the question as to what can happen to someone that seems (to them and to others) like awakening, but isn’t, remains unaddressed. The main flaw, as I see it, in Norquist’s descriptions of ultimate reality is his constant repetition of existence as a “mindless, soulless, machinelike movement of Matter.” (I don’t think Norquist has ever used the word Spirit in this context.)

At the same time, but oddly complementary, there is his relative disregard of the body, starting with his own. If all there is to existence-awareness (or consciousness-universe) is Matter, then what of the body and its internal processes? In the whole of Haunted Universe and his 90 minute talk, I can’t think of a single meaningful mention of the body besides one time, when he refers to how “the body knows” when we are getting close to awakening, and reacts with fear and revulsion. (He also describes feeling his body disappearing during his darkness meditation sessions, pre-awakening.)

Norquist’s enlightenment appears to be all head, and no body.

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As a counterpoint, I spent 14 years—between 2010 and 2023, including many live-in retreats—with a little-known enlightenment claimant, and was consistently impressed by their ability to observe, in real time, the subtlest physiological processes, both inner and outer, not only in their own body (hard to verify) but in myself and in others around him. As I have written about voluminously elsewhere, this person seemed to demonstrate a fully embodied enlightenment that is far, far harder to fake than the sort of conceptual “non-dual” verbiage that McKenna and Norquist offer a gritty, edgy version of (while dismissing it in other teachers).

So why is Haunted Universe so fundamentally—even literally—nihilistic, i.e., almost wholly consisting of negations? My feeling is it is because not only the soul but the body is the “main course” that gets swallowed up in Norquist’s faintly ghoulish vision of freedom-as-horror (or horror-as-freedom).

This isn’t to say that Norquist’s (and McKenna’s) spiritual nihilism doesn’t have its necessary place and function. It does. As I wrote in my review, Norquist’s philosophy of no-self, no-being, and no-soul, is an essential trial of fire for the mind and the ego-identity. It’s aversion therapy for the soul. But the only good reason to deny/negate the soul is so as to become aware of the soul, beyond concepts and beliefs.

If Norquist really believes he has no soul, then he’s on a perilous path and may be leading others into a similar sort of Lovecraftian limbo that he calls awakening (Steiner’s 8th sphere?). And there definitely is a kind of spiritual aloofness and invulnerability that seems to come with the package of “nondual, non-self” awareness, as both McKenna and Norquist embody it. Who wouldn’t want to look down on everyone and everything as unreal? Since they believe, not only that they don’t exist, but that you don’t either, the whole question of responsible, compassionate human relations ceases to be of any real concern. Nice vantage point!

(Example: in his one public talk, Norquist tells the story of how his mother read his book without his knowing it, and how it made her cry. Norquist attributes her tears to pride in her son, saying that she couldn’t possibly understand his book, that it wasn’t written for people like her, and that it “had no effect on [her]”!)

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The truth is that awakening to the ultimate reality of the soul—and therefore to all of the consequences of our actions and inactions, while living a soulless existence—is the opposite of aloof. It is like being a baby all over again. It is agonizingly exposing and vulnerable-making.

Contemplating our annihilation, our non-existence (not just after we die, but while we are alive) is a powerful thought experiment, and it certainly can get us closer to ultimate reality and to the soul (since it is true any number—individual identity—divided by infinity = zero). But to say “everything is delusion,” or “everything is bullshit,” or “everything is a lie”—as both McKenna and Norquist do—only works up to a point. It can’t be taken all the way, because sooner or later, the question arises, “Compared to what?” And if there is no answer, then all that leaves is nihilism.

(Similarly, to say, as Norquist does, “There is no meaning” in existence is ipso facto a meaningless statement, one that cancels itself out. Its purpose is as a Zen koan to stop thought, not as an actual, usable piece of knowledge-wisdom.)

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There are brief moments (mostly in the last chapter of HU) when Norquist describes his experience “beyond joy, or bliss” that approach something genuinely and profoundly meaningful, and these passages do suggest to me that he really is where he claims to be. But once again, if only the world of Matter, of physical objects, is real, what about the human body? Is that not also matter, and therefore equally real? So how or why does “the dreamer disappear”? Is the body not a “being,” even a kind of self, with or without mind-identity?

(Norquist seems to equate soul with ego or false identity.)

Statements like “There is no one who ever knew the Universe exists” (paraphrasing) are oxymoronic and risk sophomoric solipsism. Who’s making the statement? Even if the answer is “the Universe” (or the Dragon), then, at the very least, the Universe is perceiving itself.

If awareness is everything (a concept which I have no problem with), then awareness is still nothing without its focal point, its center, and its container, being the human body itself. And it is not just one center, either, but the primary instrument within the Creation for awareness-existence to know itself. The human body is the very “beingness” of universe-existence. It is the incarnation. Being IS ultimate reality. That is a self-evident truth.

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Norquist quotes Jesus, but he denies the resurrection of Christ. His Peter-like denial comes in the same breath as his praising Mel Gibson’s grisly and self-indulgent ode to torture, The Passion of the Christ (he calls it “beautiful”!). This seems like a microcosm of Norquist’s cosmic blind spot. Whether it is a willed blind spot or a feigned one, or somehow baked into his awakening and indicating its incompleteness, maybe even Norquist doesn’t know for sure. It is worth mentioning, however, that, while denying Christ’s resurrection and poo-pooing the reality of God and the soul, Norquist affirms the being-ness of Satan and the devil, or at least name-drops them. (He describes enlightenment as a “deal with the devil.”)

Norquist certainly talks up a storm, and I can’t deny that I am almost literally addicted to listening to his dulcet tones reading HU. That book has provided me with more bed-time pleasure than any other work in the created Universe (who’s haunted how?). But I am weaning myself off it because I suspect part of its allure is that it is acts as a sort of opium for the soul.

As a living embodiment of “the dragon of enlightenment,” (one who “lives as a liar”), I am not sure if Norquist lets anyone get close enough to find out if there is any fire behind the smoke screen. He even denies sentience to his own mother.

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Addendum. Regarding Jed McKenna: For me, his books are superb spiritual fiction, but much of the above can also be applied to them. There is an additional problem with McKenna, however, which is that we can’t check his claims by hearing his voice or watching him closely (or at all). His books read as novels, and suggest to me a literary stunt, an attempt by an unknown author to create a hipper version of Castaneda (without the sorcery) in which Carlos and Don Juan are merged into a single magical being. The problem (as with Castaneda’s books) begins when we choose to take them literally, as a record of reality. Was there ever really someone somewhere in mid-America who got people enlightened in two years by “spiritual autolysis”? Or is that whole idea the clever literary contrivance of someone who never actually attained the thing they are writing about? Which is more likely? (The “Jed McKenna” of the forum I have found to be singularly unimpressive.)

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Addendum 2:

A possibly trivial observation of something I have noticed that I find curious in Norquist’s online talk. For most of it, Norquist speaks in a carefully modulated fashion and doesn’t use the extremely common verbal tic “you know” at all. But there are several points during the talk when he uses “you know” repeatedly, sometimes as much as ten times in less than a minute. The recurrence of this verbal tic seems to occur whenever he is speaking about more personal or mundane matters (such as the printing of his book at Staples).

Now, I have done hundreds of podcasts over the past 15 years, and spoken to hundreds of different individuals, and I have never known anyone to only use this verbal tic some of the time—either they use it or they don’t (most people use it at least a little bit). Obviously, the regularity varies, but never to such an extreme degree as to alternate between ten or more minutes without using it at all, then using ten times in a single minute.

Although this may seem trivial, it’s the sort of thing you notice after dozens of times hearing the same audio. Could it suggest psychological fragmentation of some sort (i.e., different “alters”—something which is far more common than most people suppose, especially with seemingly “advanced” spiritual types); or that Norquist is performing an enlightened self and that he sometimes drops the part when straying into more personal stuff?  Or something else altogether?