ownership, inheritance and inequality

A potentially uncomfortable quote (from 1907) for your contemplation.

The overbearing attitude of the rich and the noble, the unnecessary sufferings of the poor, the over-production of criminals, and suchlike social phenomena, arise from the imperfection of our present social organisation, which is based upon the doctrine of absolute private ownership. People are allowed to amass wealth unlimitedly for their own use and to bequeath it to successors who do not deserve it in any way. And they do not pay regard to the injuries this system may incur upon the general welfare of the community to which they belong, and upon other members individually. The rich might have slaughtered economically, and thus politically and morally, millions of their brethren before they could reach places of social eminence they now occupy and enjoy to its fullest extent. They might have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of victims on the altar of Mammon in order to carry out their vast scheme of self-aggrandisement. And, what is worse, the wealth thus accumulated by an individual is allowed by the law to be handed down to his descendants, who are in a sense the parasitic members of the community. They are privileged to live upon the sweat and blood of others, who know not where to lay their heads, and who are daily succumbing to the heavy burden, not of their free choice, but forced upon them by society.

Let us here closely see into the facts. There is one portion of society that does almost nothing towards the promotion of the general welfare, and there is another portion that, besides carrying the burden not its own, is heroically struggling for bare existence…

— D. T. Suzuki, “Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism”, 1907

auspicious rainbow

In this blog’s burgeoning tradition of discussing unexplained phenomena, I thought it would be interesting to mention an ‘auspicious rainbow’ which is reported to have appeared at Namdroling Monastery in India on the 23rd of May 2009.

Here’s a video of the event. I’ll write some background and context below, and then some observations about the video.

 

 

Context and background information:

Reports are quite common in Tibetan Buddhist literature of ‘auspicious rainbows’ and other remarkable events coinciding with the deaths or funeral ceremonies of Tibetan masters. These include numerous spherical ‘pearls’ which are sometimes discovered in their cremated remains. (In the same Namdroling temple, in the same period, the wax of butter lamps was found to have coagulated spontaneously into ‘petal shapes’: video here.) These phenomena are usually interpreted as signs that the deceased individual had a high degree of spiritual realisation. But they’re almost always reported second-hand. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that such an event has been captured on video.

Penor Rinpoche is reported to have died on March 27, and the video reports that the rainbow appeared on May 23, which it says is the 49th day of the prayer ceremony following Rinpoche’s death (or parinirvana). 49 days is the traditional length of the ‘bardo’ — the intermediate state between death and rebirth (it’s possible, of course, that Your Mileage May Vary). But there are 57 days, not 49, from March 27 to May 23. So there is an apparent discrepancy in dates. Either there is a mistake in the video’s reporting, or the ceremony was delayed by 8 days for some reason, or the rainbow didn’t appear on the ‘magical’ 49th day — not that it particularly matters, necessarily. But I have inquired with another blogger to try to discover.

 

What do we have here?

Well, it’s a video, which seems to show a fully circular rainbow, and a fair amount of people, including monks, trying to photograph said rainbow.

What’s interesting about it? Here are a few observations:

• Most rainbows start and stop at the horizon. Fully circular rainbows are sometimes seen from the air, but never from the ground. Yet this rainbow is totally circular, seen from the ground, and does not start or stop at the horizon.
• It also appears ‘in front’ of every other object in the video, whether these are people very close to the camera, trees far away from the camera, or the wall of the temple. Ordinary rainbows appearing as arcs in the sky may be obstructed by objects like tall buildings, mountains, and so on, but this one does not seem to be obstructed.
• Despite the rainbow’s ‘right here’ appearance, the monks in the video are pointing their cameras away from the viewer. Assuming they are trying to photograph the rainbow, this seems to suggest that, to them, the rainbow appears also to be ‘right here’, but in a different place from where it appears to the viewer. Yet the rainbow is also not a totally subjective hallucination — it was captured on video, and you and I can see it as a result. It seems to be just as real as Nelson Mandela or the Eiffel Tower.

In the immortal (?) words of the Cheshire cat: curiouser and curiouser.

Hypotheses and comments welcome, as always.

prayers at the moronic abyss (a rant)

Warning: this blog post has a long first line. That was not it. It could cause eye strain, or you might lose concentration while reading it. If you are susceptible to either of these conditions, please do not take offence that I have written a long first line. Especially, please do not sue me for neglecting to consider those who may be eye- or concentration-impaired. Consult your local lawyer.

Obligatory self-referential humour aside, I wish I had a resellable Michael Jackson album for every time the lamentably litigious and uppity attitude pervading the UK’s public services had made me laugh or sigh or think of something loud and bloody, involving facebrick walls and rifle regiments, that could be done to the grossly-unable-to-think-for-themselves, and the aftermath photographed and framed for posterity and the moral guidance of future generations.

This article (bbc.co.uk) was the latest to evoke these thoughts, along with the growing suspicion that the good people of the world are sinking into a Great Moronic Abyss of Infantile Thought, whence they might never emerge if it means foregoing the insipid paraphernalia of a nanny state. Obviously, it is my duty to arrest this sinking.

NHS trusts have taken a hard line in recent years on doctors and nurses who take the horrendous step of Mentioning Religion. After Nurse Caroline Petrie offered to pray for a patient, she was summarily suspended. (Cue rifle regiment.) Later, she was reinstated. (Rifle regiment, stand down.) Doctors have now asked the British Medical Association whether they may offer to pray for their patients or discuss spiritual issues with them.

Kicker line: “[The Department of Health's Guidance Warning] said that discussing religion could be interpreted as an attempt to convert which could be construed as a form of harassment.”

Hell, yes. The bloody Christians are rampant, I’m telling you. Just the other day I was strolling around the Elephant and Castle when I was attacked without provocation by a septuagenarian nun brandishing hard-cardboard leaflets proclaiming some charity sale. Those things have sharp edges — she could have cut me. I had to fight for my life. I succeeded in wrestling her skeletal frame to the ground, but it occurred to me that it would be only seconds before she caused me untold mental anguish by asking if I’d accepted Jesus. Thank goodness I’d remembered my Pepper Spray. I escaped and ran straight home, where I broke down and wept in the foetal position until sleep overcame me. The moral of the story is you’ve got to be damned careful out there. You never know when someone might harass you by discussing religion or inquiring about your spiritual beliefs. Damned nuns. Get them out of our healthcare systems.

Here ends the sermon.

No, wait, it’s not quite over.

“Christianity is being seen as something that is unhelpful.”

(Naturally, here, religion = Christianity (= rubbish = unhelpful = harassment = lawsuits = policies = rifle regiments).)

Anyway, take it as a given that your hypothetical future author, age 88, post cardiac-arrest with about 7 weeks to live, would deeply appreciate a sincere discussion about life, death, the universe and everything (read: spiritual issues) as he draws ever closer to the profoundly signifant event of his death. If a nonreligious NHS regards death only as something to be postponed and is unable to provide this, he would quite like a chat with a religiously inclined doctor, or whoever is available.

Hopefully it won’t come to that, but if it does and some compassionate soul is inclined to offer to pray for me, I’d really rather they didn’t hesitate for fear of losing their job. And if, at that time, I am a rabid atheist and think Christians are the deluded scum of the earth, hopefully I’ll still have enough sense to reply to their harmless offer, compassionately, in the negative.

scientific research into verified memories of past lives

I’m just going to go ahead and post this (PDF, 73Kb) here, so you can read it. Please read it?

Many thanks.

Now, if one was to be

• premature,
• belligerent, and
• a boytjie

one might tentatively suggest a rugby analogy, along the lines of which, unless it gets disallowed on a technicality after a slow-motion replay, the paper does rather resemble a try under the posts of the materialists.

Is it, in fact, a seven-pointer? Is it only a three-pointer? Was there a forward pass? Or is it an epic win?

passing sensations

Passing sensations like the ground beneath my feet. I drop into the present, involuntarily slipping through the shifting web of thought and into my footsteps, the sound of birds, the cold air, passing sensations and no need, no need to make any effort. Things coming and going very peacefully. I stop and gaze up a street where the colours of the trees and the sky make a picture; other pedestrians don’t stop, it’s not really done and I feel (I ought to walk on, I’m behaving strangely) an impulse to walk on which passes like a cloud and I continue to gaze. The street is bronzed in setting sunlight.

I could call it “stepping off the chessboard mind.”

Stopping to ask “what is reality?” and one might realise one had been caught in a web of imaginary things, like waking up from a bad dream, losing the vague sense of nausea….

So much space.

philosophy of mind: optional essay question

“Some philosophers claim that neuroscientists and behaviorists indirectly observe mental events by directly observing brain functions and behavior that are related to the mind. If that were true, on the basis of their physical observations, they should be able to tell what the mental events are that they are indirectly observing, without relying on first-person reports of subjective experiences. But they can do nothing of the kind. Without such reports based on the direct experience of the mind, they wouldn’t even know that mental events occur, let alone know what they are or what they are about. This fact undermines the widespread and virtually unchallenged notion that mental events are emergent properties of configurations of neurons, similar to the way a wide range of physical properties emerge from other, more basic physical processes.”

  —   Mind in the Balance by Alan Wallace (Chapter 10 – PDF, 308KB)

Discuss.

father thomas keating on contemplative christianity

Transcript:

Please remember that since the Vatican II, Roman Catholic Communion, at least, took a 180 degree turn. And it recognised [explicitly and formally that the] Holy Spirit is at work in other religions. Hence, some of their rituals, without designating into which ones and getting into the details, also lead to salvation. And this is a fundamental truth that hasn’t filtered down too far – it certainly hasn’t gotten into the pews, and I’m not so sure how far it has gotten down the various corridors of the Vatican. But this is what the Fathers of the Church, and the most authoritative formal teaching of our times, have said.

It’s so wonderful that we can forgive them that it took 1900 years to get there. But now that they’re there, all the doors and windows are basically unlocked, if not opened. And there breathes through the world a new movement of divine love, that we can feel and pick up, and further and foster and become a part of. And it’s that tide of the true knowledge of God and of ourselves that is gradually inching its way into the consciousness of humanity. And if we don’t destroy ourselves sometime during this century – a high possibility, of course, humanly speaking – then the human family may begin to be transformed. And this transformation of course involves moving through the spiritual evolution of the human family that we’ve negotiated in our childhood, more or less – poorly, I would suspect – and which is now available to a vaster group of the population.

There are 2 billion Christians in the world. If they only got this message, it could change the world.

And that’s our job, it seems to me, as Christians, is to embody the teaching of Jesus in its contemplative dimension. Contemplative dimension is the only thing that can make sense out of Christianity. It’s not monotheism that will save us, it’s the Trinitarian relationships, and the vision of ultimate reality as unconditional love. This is what can raise the downward-leaning movement of human evolution, or the regressive tendencies that have plagued us for thousands of years.

calming the waters

towards a reconciliation of religious people with scientific atheists
with a massive debt of gratitude to Alan Watts, specifically for his book
The Supreme Identity: Oriental Metaphysic and the Christian Religion.

Introduction

The battle between scientific atheists and religious people – henceforth to be known as the God Wars – is fraught with misunderstanding on both sides. Not only do the proponents of each position usually misunderstand the position of the other, being inclined to read only the most affirming literature of their own camp and review only the least intelligent literature from the other, but they often misunderstand their own as well. This is as true of scientific atheists as it is of religious people, although in the case of the religious it is arguably more tragic. The result of this mutual misunderstanding is an image of ignorant armies clashing by night, and since both armies are emotionally partial to their own position (as well as sometimes possessing a merely partial understanding of it) there seems very little hope for consensus or resolution.

As a scientific and religious atheist, I sympathise with each position while remaining emotionally unattached to either. My understanding of each side is incomplete and imperfect, especially regarding Christianity, but sufficient to afford me the understanding that the conflict between them – at least insofar as it concerns metaphysics and religious belief – is mostly wrong-headed. (In the political sphere, however, the argument has practical relevance, and here it is all the more important that religious people understand the logic of metaphysic as distinct from the metaphor of religion, and temper their evangelism accordingly.)

How do the parties to the conflict err? Religious apologists err mostly by confusion, when they conflate their religious metaphors with a metaphysic whose nuances they do not understand, quote scripture by way of argument, evangelise with dogma before compassion, or wade into the impossible territory of proving God’s existence with logic. Scientific atheists err mostly by inflation, when they admit no strict theoretical limits to science, fail to recognise the faiths inherent in a scientific world-view, or deny the possibility of knowledge beyond the rational and the empirical. These are the main respects in which, I feel, those who cleave to a position must increase their own understanding of that position as well as the ‘opposing’ one.

And both science and religion tend towards a kind of fundamentalism. Modern-day ‘followers of science’ tend to give it some of the characteristics of a creed, and it is probably unnecessary to elucidate the ways in which religious dogma assumes absolute rather than relative truth for some of its own followers.

My main motivation for writing this is the distress and frustration I feel in witnessing the angst, anger and confusion felt by participants in this conflict, especially since I believe the conflict is largely unnecessary. I hope to engage with all parties to this conflict in an intelligent and critical conversation that will at least partially assuage their mutual dissatisfaction.

Framing the Conflict

The largest questions in the battle between atheists and the religious include: whether God exists or not; the value of religion to humanity; the political relationship between church and state; and the debate between evolutionists and their religious opponents, the latter an apparently unnecessary debate which seems undying despite having been effectively concluded long ago: evolution happens.

I don’t intend to address these questions by turn, which would merely add my voice to the clamour and go no way towards quieting it. What I intend is a broad philosophical exploration of science, metaphysic and religion. Hopefully I will be able to explain some insights on topical questions at opportune moments along the way, and later I might be able to address specific unresolved questions from both sides in the God Wars.

I have said that when scientific atheists err it is usually by inflation, by which I mean they believe science can do more than it actually can. In my view, errant scientific atheists in the God wars either admit no strict theoretical limits to science, or fail to recognise the faiths inherent in a scientific world-view, or deny the possibility of knowledge beyond the rational and the empirical. These failures lead them to overestimate the capacity of science to answer all questions, resulting in an overzealous flying of the scientific flag and a corresponding attitude of intolerance and dismissal to alternative models of explanation.

This attitude is recognised by many as analogous to the arrogance and intolerance of religious fundamentalism. That some religious people are hopelessly dogmatic needs no elaboration. But the intolerance of the religious fundamentalist and the arrogance of the scientific fundamentalist are in many ways counterparts. The scientist, however, suggests that his apparent arrogance is actually a confidence justified by a wealth of scientific evidence. Scientific evidence is based on methodical observation and repeated testing, and compared to it the unobservable and scientifically untestable ‘hypotheses’ of religion are flimsy indeed. The common religious man is affronted by this, the scientist remains incredulous, and the confused argument continues apace.

The factors allowing this debate to continue are at least twofold. The first factor is the privacy of religious experience. In gathering empirical, objective knowledge, science is limited to third-person, repeatable observations. Religious experience (or, to be precise, the metaphysical realisation that is later codified in terms of religious experience) is first-person and unrepeatable, and therefore permanently inaccessible to science – except insofar as it can be represented by analogy as neuronal firings. This process is akin to reading a Wordsworth poem on your computer in the form of the 1s and 0s in the hard drive; the bits themselves neither constitute nor represent the poem, let alone convey the intensity of its meaning. But since intensity of meaning – experience per se – cannot be quantified, observed and tested, it does not constitute empirical evidence and is scientifically invalid. (In fact, scientists feel compelled to explain mind as an epiphenomenon, or less, of matter, but experience the same pitfalls as those who try to explain matter as an epiphenomenon of mind.) The scientist and the religious person feel at loggerheads, but actually their views are perpendicular. Like two vehicles proceeding at right angles, they could continue peacefully on their respective courses, but their ignorance – or their need to perpetuate their views – causes them to clash.

The second factor perpetuating the clash is a specific and entirely forgiveable ignorance that concerns the necessary exegesis in metaphorical terms – which is the creation of religion – out of the ineffable experience of metaphysical realisation. This is generally more problematic for the Western mind, so I’ll deal with it in its own sub-heading.

There may be other factors contributing to the God Wars’ longevity, but these are the main ones I can think of: that science is compelled either to deny ‘religious experience’ or reduce it to an observable analogue that is rightly unacceptable to the religious; and that religious metaphor is routinely taken for the truth itself rather than understood correctly as a metaphor for the infinite.

Metaphysicalstyle

The metaphysical realisation of the infinite is the true beginning (as in the origin) and the true end (as in the goal) of all religion. The beatific visions of the saints, the realisations of mystics and of ordinary people are experiences of the ineffable infinite which religion, or any other system, can describe only by metaphor. The second ignorance that allows the God Wars such egregious longevity is the tendency of religious people as well as scientists to confuse religious metaphors with the ineffable truth – the infinite – to which they point.

Now the Western mind, whether religious or not, is uneasy with talk of the infinite. We are accustomed to gradual, rational exposition and are reluctant to accept ‘immediate certainties’ or ponder the truly metaphysical. Especially when this is declared from the start to be paradoxical to language and inaccessible to thought except by metaphor, it is easier to dismiss such territory as mere nonsense and return to the study of charmed quarks. But this is precisely the territory one must explore if one is serious about life, or if one wishes to engage with religion in a sincere way, regardless of whether one’s intentions for this engagement are that it should be sympathetic or hostile.

There is no place from which to begin to understand the infinite except the infinite itself. This may be inconvenient, but one cannot work up to the subject by easy stages. Almost all writings about the infinite plunge straight into the heart of their topic without preface, apology or introduction (and this unanimity might be surprising to some sceptics whose understanding of religion has been more or less superficial) but all do so by metaphor, whether personification as “the Lord” or abstraction as “OM” or “the Tao”:

“In the heart of all things, of whatever there is in the universe, dwells the Lord. He alone is the reality. Wherefore, renouncing vain appearances, rejoice in him.”
- Isha Upanishad

“The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be defined is not the unchanging name.”
- Tao Te Ching

“OM. This eternal Word: what was, what is and what shall be, and what beyond is in eternity. All is OM.”
- Mandukya Upanishad

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”
- St John, I

In the infinite we are dealing with something that has no beginning and no end, and to explore it there is no finite point of reference from which to begin. We must therefore begin with the infinite itself, and try to understand as clearly as possible what the word means. Almost invariably our imagination tries to grasp the infinite in terms of a boundless expansion of space or an indefinite duration of time. In spatial terms, it is perhaps that which expands outwards forever or contracts inwards forever. In temporal terms it is an unending time series or perhaps an “ever-diminishing point of time called the moment” (Alan Watts, The Supreme Identity: Oriental Metaphysic and the Christian Religion, 1950). In terms of consciousness it is an indefinably vast mass of sentiency; in terms of power a potential so vast as to make the explosion of every atom in the universe mere firecrackers.

“But expand, prolong, magnify and multiply as we may, we are not one fraction nearer to the true infinite than when we began, for the terms of time and space [or anything else] are not applicable to the infinite” (Watts). One million to the power of one million is no closer to strict infinity than one. So instead of trying to multiply our way to infinity, we might denote the infinite by outlining it in the limitations of space and time, as the sizeless, the spaceless or the timeless. We could say that the infinite exists in its entirety at every point of space. “Or, to put it in another way, from the standpoint of the infinite every point of space is absolutely here, for there is not a different infinite in every place. In yet another way, we can say that there is no space or distance between the whole infinite and anything at all” (Watts). Or, in terms of time, that from the standpoint of the infinite, every moment of time, past, present and future, is absolutely now. As the infinite must always be described paradoxically, a not altogether terrible description is that the infinite is that circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

That there is no finite point from which to explore or work up to the infinite, the scientist and the philosopher regard as a hopeless position, for to adopt the existence of the infinite, or God, as one’s major premise contradicts the rules of logic. But there is no alternative, for “as the reality of light cannot be proved or described in terms of visible shape, the reality of the infinite cannot be proved in terms of the finite. … Logic… may travel backwards in time from effect to cause, effect to cause, but as long as it stays in time it cannot touch the eternal… The most that can be said is that finite contingencies suggest the infinite; in no sense can they be said to prove it.” (Watts)

By way of encouragement to the logician, a parallel to this situation is available in ordinary experience. All knowledge must begin with oneself; it must assume a knower as base of knowledge. But no objective proof of the knower’s existence will ever be forthcoming, for the knower can never be the subject of its own knowledge, so its existence can never be objectively proved. Objective knowledge suggests a knower as the finite suggests the infinite; neither proves what it suggests. Nor can the infinite be described in terms of anything finite, as the knower cannot be described by anything known. Neither long nor short, white nor black, hot nor cold – the knower transcends all the objects of its knowledge as the infinite transcends the finite. “But as the infinite is the ground of the finite, the knower is the ground of knowledge; apart from the knower, or at least the knowing process, nothing whatsoever would exist from the standpoint of knowledge.” (Watts)

The philosopher’s intuitive knowledge of a knower may not be objective nor proven, but it is something much better. Objective knowledge is mediate and relative, but subjective experience is immediate; the knower is as absolute and certain as anything in the realm of science or philosophy. In the same way, for metaphysic the infinite is the certain and irreducible ground of everything finite and is known immediately as distinct from objectively. Since both proof and doubt can refer only to objective things, the infinite is accessible to neither. As ultimate Reality, there is no external standpoint from which to doubt it or to prove it.

One may well respond: “We have intuitive experience of our own knower-ness and are prepared to call it immediate and irreducible, but we have no such experience of the ultimate Reality. How can we accept it as our starting point?” The answer is that, in principle, the knower and Reality are the same, all knowledge being partial participation in infinite knowledge – a metaphor that does not reduce the infinite to only meta-knowledge or ‘cosmic consciousness’, but merely follows from the fact that since it manifests limited knowledge, the infinite contains the possibility of all knowledge, infinite knowledge. As the infinite, Reality ‘generates’ reality by limiting itself in apparently multiple finitudes. (And the interconnectedness of these finitudes points, similarly, without proving anything, to an underlying or transcending order.)

It is possible to go extraordinarily deep into this topic but now, with heartfelt thanks to Alan Watts (and obeisances to his publishers) I would like to leave aside the idea of the infinite. I have merely set before you the impossibility of proving or disproving it, but even describing it is like trying to describe a mirror in terms of the colours and shapes it reflects, yet as the mirror is the indispensable source of the images it reflects, the infinite is the indispensable ground of being and knowledge.

So, with relevance to the God Wars: if God is understood to mean the infinite, God is beyond proof or falsification. Firstly, then, for goodness’ sake stop arguing about whether God exists. To regard the existence of the infinite, or of God, as being of the same order as the existence of anything else you can think (such as a flying spaghetti monster or a pink teapot orbiting Mars) is to miss the point. God is not posited in this way to begin with.

Secondly, I have a message for religious fundamentalists.

God is Your Metaphor

Religion is knowledge of the infinite in terms of analogy. Whereas the metaphysical realisation is immediate, subjective and direct, “the religious mode of knowledge is mediate, objective and analogical, and does not claim to be anything else.” (Watts) Correctly understood, Christian theology is a well developed doctrine that in no way contradicts itself or a non-dual metaphysic of the infinite. Only a superficial understanding of Christian theology (one which does not understand it as a metaphor for the infinite but as an absolutely literal doctrine – and just as many if not more Christians err in this regard as do religious sceptics) could regard it as logically untenable or naïve. Such a view is the valid conclusion of an invalid method employed by an investigator lacking one crucial piece of the puzzle, like the congenitally blind man who knows sunlight only by its warmth or someone who insists on evaluating apples by their physical dimensions and not by their taste.

Despite the ineffability of the infinite, it is necessary to develop religion. One cannot hang around in metaphysical la-la land and say nothing whatsoever about the infinite if one’s goal is to realise it. It is necessary to generate a knowledge of the infinite in terms of what is accessible to mankind: reason, feeling and sense. One must employ an image for the infinite. And there are three kinds of image (this borrowed, once again, from Alan Watts):

• Rational images or ideas: forms seen in the mind’s eye (which is the strict meaning of “idea”). “Metaphysical doctrines are not ideas in this sense, for the mind is incapable of forming any image of the eternal… The mind can conceive the eternal as everlasting time, but this is analogy pure and simple.” (Watts) Everlasting time and indefinite duration are not ideas of eternity, because time and duration are relative concepts of temporality, whereas to the eternal all moments are present – the strictly eternal is ‘timeless’. The mind can only think about the truly eternal negatively, so it must employ ideas.

• Feeling images or values. “In order to relate the infinite to man’s feeling nature, it must be clothed in some emotionally moving analogy.” (Watts) A ‘non-idea’ like the Eternal or the Absolute lacks the feeling value that attaches to ideas like God, the Divine Love, or the Everlasting Father.

• Sense images or sacraments. “For the original apostles, Christ Himself would have come… under this category, being the Eternal Word made flesh. To Christians of later times the Incarnate Word is sensed indirectly in the sacraments.” (Watts)

Thus religion incarnates or projects the ultimate reality in creed, in code (values) and in cult, so as to be meaningful and effective for the whole of mankind’s nature.

Why does Christianity not speak of the metaphysic of the infinite? And why should Christians not be outraged at this apparent reduction of their faith to a kind of second-rate metaphor for something completely nonsensical? The answer is that the purpose of Christianity is salvation, which is analogous to but, relatively speaking, distinct from metaphysical realisation (although the path of some Christian saints or mystics may very well involve both) and we live in the realm of the relative.

“Now the Church, as such, is not concerned with metaphysic. The nature of the Church is sacramental. That is to say, it is a concrete and positive form of creed, code and cult, which has its own proper function of representing the spiritual by analogy, and in physical terms. Thus it is quite beyond the design and nature of the church to employ the negative speech of metaphysical doctrine, or to deal in any way with immediate as distinct from mediate and analogical knowledge.” (Watts)

Christianity is concerned with the person as a temporal being; metaphysic is concerned with man as an eternal being. In the same way that the infinite is not opposed to the finite but finds its perfect expression therein, there is no conflict between metaphysic and the Church but the latter expresses the former, and each is perfected by the other.

Dionysius the Areopagite, a sixth-century Syrian monk, “distinguished between the kataphatic and apophatic means of knowing God, which are equivalent to the religious and the metaphysical. Kataphasis is the description of God in terms of created nature… Apophasis is the negative description, the subject of [Dionysius's] Mystical Theology, whose final chapter might have been taken bodily from the Upanishads or Shankara.” (Watts)

“Going yet higher, we say that [God] is neither a soul, nor a mind, nor an object of knowledge… neither is he reason, nor thought, nor is he utterable or knowable; neither is he number, order, greatness, littleness, equality, inequality, likeness, nor unlikeness; neither does he stand or move, nor is he quiescent; neither has he power, nor is power, nor light; neither does he live, nor is life; neither is he being, nor everlastingness, nor time… nor wisdom, nor one, nor oneness, nor divinity, nor goodness… nor any other thing known to us or any other creature” (Theologica Mystica, V., a chapter entitled “That he partakes not of intelligible things who is pre-eminently their maker”)

The Mandukya Upanishad, mentioned by Watts, elucidates:

“The infinite consciousness is not that which is conscious of the subjective, nor that which is conscious of the objective, nor that which is conscious of both, nor that which is simple consciousness, nor that which is a mass all sentiency, nor that which is all darkness. It is unseen, transcendent, unapprehensible, uninferable, unthinkable, indescribable, the sole essence of the consciousness of Self, the negative of all illusion.”

Now, briefly, regarding the attributes of God, it should be easily understood that the Christian God is omniscient and omnipotent because (in the crudest language of the least realised person, your author) the infinite ‘contains’ all viewpoints and all possibilities. It is everywhere and does everything. God is understood as Creator because all finite and temporary being has its ground in the infinite. And so forth.

I think I have devoted enough copy to the task of ‘explaining religion’ and I hope I have not failed too dismally in that task. Actually I am more or less unqualified to do this, so I hope I haven’t merely created more confusion. At the very least, I hope it has given some superficially anti-religious viewpoints pause to consider that their enemy may be deeper and, perhaps, more credible than they had imagined, if not less inscrutable.

By way of further specification, it is obvious that many religious people are also entirely dogmatic and impervious to reason as well as experience. People are fragile and fallible; brainwashing is alive and well in religion as elsewhere, and dogmatic indoctrination is an extremely dangerous trend, especially when a church aspires to statehood or dogma subverts reason to political ends. In some senses, then, the God Wars must rightly continue. But contrary to many scientific atheists’ beliefs, religion does not necessitate brainwashing, and God is not only for suckers.

On to Science

I’ve said that scientific atheists err mostly by inflation, when they admit no strict theoretical limits to science, fail to recognise the faiths inherent in a scientific world-view, or deny the possibility of knowledge beyond the rational and the empirical. So the question to ask is what parts of reality are off-limits to science.

As a disclaimer I can only hope is unnecessary, I want to state briefly that although I think followers of science sometimes overreach themselves, I am not antipathetic to science. I thrilled to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker before being massively disappointed by The God Delusion, where he overreached himself and let his tone change from that of a masterly and companionable guide exploring the fascinating intricacies of biology to a shrill and disdainful preacher from the pulpit of an ill-considered dogmatism. Science has produced wonderful benefits for humankind, along with some terrible dangers, and the validity and efficacy of its methods, within its field, is not to be denied. But its field is limited nonetheless.

I’ve pointed out that the scientific method can only deal with third-person observable phenomena, so it cannot directly investigate experience as such. Science can also not deal with the once-off incident, or the ‘miracle’, because its method relies upon repeatable experiments. The question of Christ’s resurrection, for instance, as a once-off event, is not accessible to scientific investigation. The most a scientist can do is furnish opinions, never evidence, and even then his opinions would not come in his capacity as a scientist but as a philosopher. In fact the resurrection would not even have been a question for science if there had been scientists at Golgotha, for they would not have been able to repeat the experiment.

A Christian would be ill-advised to put too much stock in this point, because as historical dogma the question of the resurrection is, of course, just as inaccessible to him as it is to the scientist. The Christian believes it on faith; the scientific atheist disbelieves it on faith. The point nevertheless remains that science as a creed (and in the eyes of many of its followers it does tend to be a creed) ‘averages out’ the world into a kind of consensus reality. Science must ignore, deny or explain away unrepeatable phenomena, but it remains a great arrogance for a school that deals only with the necessarily commonplace or repeatable to suggest that very rare phenomena do not occur or are impossible.

What Life Is For

“Although the phrase ’scientific truth’ has for our age almost the same ring of ultimate authority as the phrase ‘Catholic truth’ had for the past, the honest and strict scientist is the last person to claim such authority. As a human being, every scientist is a philosopher; but he is not a philosopher as a scientist. As a scientist he is vividly aware of the limitations of his branch of knowledge. He knows that science is the measurement, description and classification of natural processes; it is the study of how things behave. It cannot tell what things are, nor why they behave. It describes life in operation, but it does not presume to say what life is for.” (Watts)

To clarify from quotation and analogy: the first way in which science’s field is limited is that it explains physical causality from empirical data gathered by repeatable experiment. It does not deal with the teleological (the purpose-oriented) and has no view towards ultimate meaning – except insofar as it might aim to create a theory of everything. The question of life’s meaning is meaningless to a scientist as a scientist. A scientist may explain how humans are made up and how they operate, in vivid detail, but cannot suggest what mankind ought to do. Science has no access to the “why” of life.

Science is therefore strictly amoral, having nothing useful to say about human values or ethics, because it is not equipped to do so. The scientist as human being is obliged to look elsewhere for a sense of the good – but struggles to find it. It is not forthcoming even from philosophy, whose abstractions and liberalism have all but relegated it to the university’s cobwebbed attics, where its most unifying characteristic is a profound disunity of thought.

Consider a nonreligious morality. “If morality consists in doing good to one’s fellow man, it is clear that morality exists for man rather than man for morality, and the problem of what man himself is for is still undecided. If I live simply in order to serve my brother, what is my brother going to do with the service I give him? Serve me? Does the race exist just to serve itself, and if so to what shall it serve itself? To food and clothes for all, to information, medication and harmless amusements? Mere morality as the unifying principle brings us back dangerously close to the biological ideal of the greatest good of the greatest number. Of itself, it offers no real reason for the respect of minorities because it rests on no doctrine as to the true nature of the human person. Its motives for mutual goodwill are purely sentimental, having no deeper origin than fellow-feeling and pity on the positive side, and, on the negative side, that ingrained sense of guilt sometimes called the ‘New England’ or ‘Nonconformist’ conscience.” (Watts)

On the other hand, Christian religions “have a real doctrine of the meaning of human life, namely that man’s true end is union with God in the contemplation of the Beatific Vision. Of all ideas as to the ultimate destiny of man this alone, quite apart from any question of its truth, gives us a real end, a point beyond which the question of further purpose cannot be asked, because the enjoyment of God is an infinite good.” (Watts, extensively)

In the absence of a final or true end, morality contains only contingencies and sentiment. A purely biological understanding of man’s nature, which is the paradigm of science, results in the understanding of man as merely animal, morality as mere social contract, and leaves nothing moral to be said against contravening the contract if one can evade punishment. Apart from mere sentiment, we find no basis for the idea that man should not be treated as an animal.

In radical contrast, religion provides an ultimate end and an infinite good. The various religions naturally speak in different ways, but their answers are identical in effect. Christianity posits the contemplation of God as an infinite good and man’s ultimate end, and from the preceding discussion of the infinite and its ‘relationship to’ the finite, one may get a sense of the credibility of this valuation – what human would not enjoy the experience of union with the ultimate essence of all things? Buddhism shies away from absolutes, presenting a framework of suffering and wellbeing and working on the assumption that it is better to be well than to suffer. Nevertheless, setting (very radical) metaphysical differences aside, enlightenment and nirvana in Buddhism are analogous to the direct contemplation of God in Christianity and, if it were possible to shed the respective metaphorical skins, each would be seen to be identical with the realisation of the metaphysical infinite.

They Don’t Know What is What

There is another limitation of science: it does not explain the what.

“In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison.” (Einstein and Infield, The Evolution of Physics) (emphasis mine)

Or, somewhat more succinctly, in the words of Sir Arthur Eddington describing the mystery of the electron: “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.” This might equally well describe the current scientist’s attitude towards the Higgs Boson, for instance, although the present case might require a greater sense of perplexity. This proper and necessary humility regarding science’s role in the world is sometimes hard to detect in contemporary scientific atheists in the God Wars. Perhaps they feel so affronted by religion’s political prevalence that they consider humility an impractical possibility, which would be entirely understandable.

To clarify this point, science explains phenomena as causes and results. It may analyse the constituents of an atom, for example, and then again the constituents of an electron, and then those of a quark, but in doing this it explains constituents of phenomena, not the essence or the nature of phenomena. Moreover, it never will.

Arguably the great hope of science is a theory of everything, an elegant theory that will completely describe every known phenomenon. This might explain the “what” and, if we are really liberal with our imagination, might go some way towards a “why” of reality. But there are important philosophical problems with the possibility of a theory of everything.

One such is Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, an analogy of which (according to Stanley Jaki and Stephen Hawking) suggests very strongly that no finite number of principles can ever completely describe reality. Without getting into the complexities, which are many and much too mathematical for my limited intelligence, if Gödel’s incompleteness theorem applies to scientific theories – as it seems to – then science as we know it will never produce a consistent and complete theory of everything.

There is another problem that runs more pervasively in the domain of scientific knowledge and is also relevant to religion and metaphysic: conceptual dualism.

Over and Against

Dualism is “a state of two parts” and because it is so familiar to the Western mind it is very difficult to point it out – it is like trying to see something that is too close to one’s eye to be seen. The reason for the familiarity is that dualism arises from conceptual thought, and we have been identified with conceptual thoughts for almost our entire lives. Nevertheless, it’s worth a try.

The most fundamental dualism is a subject/object dualism. For instance, in the case “I see the cup”, “I” am the subject on this side and “the cup” is the object on its side. There are two parts. Subject/object dualism is inherent to the scientific method to date, which operates on the principle of “an experiment” on that side and “an observer” on this side. Over the last several decades, science has become familiar with the pitfalls of this idea due to discoveries in quantum mechanics, which have crystallised the ‘entangled’ nature of the observer and the observed.

Dualism is radically flawed, because, in reality, no single phenomenon is fundamentally separate, existing from its own side. There is no basic, ultimate or fundamental separation between the observer and the observed – if they were fundamentally separate, there could be no relationship or interaction between them. To think of them as separate is therefore mistaken, despite appearances of phenomenal multiplicity. That dualism is logically untenable is not a new idea to Western philosophy, although the implications of this have not permeated Western society. Although the world may appear in duality, or multiplicity, logically that can only be a false appearance.

Now, conceptual analyses are always dualistic, because every concept ‘cordons off’ its referent from the rest of reality and views it as separate. (For instance, to have a concept of a cup, you must first designate “cup” as distinct from “not-cup”.) Because conceptual analyses are always dualistic, they are always mistaken, because nothing exists in the way that it should exist in order for a conceptual analysis to be complete.

The implication for science is this: as long as inquiry remains conceptual, and therefore dualistic, it can never obtain to a true and complete knowledge or representation of reality. And it is hard to see how science can cease to operate conceptually.

However, it is false to say that because language and science cannot do it, it is impossible. Religion – or, more properly, metaphysic – is better equipped than science to answer questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Unfortunately, because the infinite is indescribable and metaphysical realisation is private, metaphysic cannot give a truly satisfactory answer to anyone ‘else’. Religion is not there to be analysed, but practised.

“No-one can tell you what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.”
-  Morpheus

The Faiths of Science

Among my list of ways in which scientific atheists err was the impression that they do not acknowledge the faiths inherent in a scientific worldview. It seems to me that the very idea of scientific knowledge (as opposed to scientific instrumentalism) rests on some assumptions about the world, and that if any of them are false then scientific knowledge is empty of truth. These assumptions include, but may not be limited to, beliefs that

• phenomena are real,
• that they have intrinsic properties that can be measured,
• and that science can achieve a true description of reality (as distinct from a mythological description of reality) using mathematics or language.

Even if one of these principles were to be false, it would still be the case that that X-rays reveal broken bones, that aerofoils cause lift and that nuclear explosions destroy cities. Science would still have instrumental value, which is arguably what really matters – but it would be stripped of truth value.

It is possible to delve very deeply into these philosophical questions, and (I may be wrong, but) it seems that they are by no means concluded. Until they are concluded in favour of science, the religious person defending his or her beliefs from a scientific atheist may point to the questionable truth value of science and suggest that scientific atheists overreach themselves in talking as scientists about truth or the nature of reality.

The argument from conceptual dualism, above, seems to challenge the assumption, which is necessary for science to have truth value, that language can achieve a complete description of reality. There is at least one more argument that challenges the truth-value of language, from Nietzsche in his On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense. It is difficult to decide which paragraph or series of paragraphs to quote from that astonishing essay, but this line suffice:

“It is this way with all of us concerning language; we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things – metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”

Nietzsche illustrates the process of abstraction, the creation of metaphors, in a sequence: from the nerve stimulus to an image, from an image to a sound (a word) and from a word to a concept, which, he says “simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases – which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things.”

This is a massive and fundamental critique of the truth value of language and is by no means aimed at science in particular, but its relevance for the truth value of science, since science is based on language, is obvious.

Enough is Enough

Now my fingers are tired. I hope that I’ve illustrated the ways in which both parties to the God Wars make some unfortunate mistakes, and that the realisation of these might lead to an overall decline in hostilities. I hope that the body of this essay has provided its readers with some useful food for thought, and that perhaps the taste is richer and subtler than might at first have been suspected.

My tone may have resembled that of a religious apologist. I do perceive a value in religion that seems to be missed by scientific atheists as well as by some religious people. These latter I would, if pushed, call politically or dogmatically religious rather than integrally religious – they emphasise dogma and faith to the exclusion or ignorance of the realisation or experience to which the dogma points and faith leads. By the same token, were it not such an undesirable label for them, I would call some scientific atheists religious in an integral sense notwithstanding their refusal to admit any articles of faith. I would mean it as a compliment.

In brief conclusion, I have tried to show that religious people and scientific atheists do not need to fight – unless it is over a matter of genuine practical import, like the coalescence of church and state. Where they fight over other matters, it is usually because they misunderstand each other’s position or have only a coarse understanding of their own. Each school can learn a great deal from the other, and many followers of both actually do.

A brief summary of the values universal to all religions would include compassion, humility, wisdom, patience and love. The view remains widespread that religions are hateful and dangerous; that the harm religion has wrought through ‘religious’ wars and superstition exceeds the good brought about by people who have dedicated their lives to the selfless service of others in the name of their religion; and that humankind would be better off if religion was eradicated. The latter view is especially naïve, but any of these views are understandable only from a perspective that conflates the religious with the political (as many religious people continue to do). The motivations for war are greed and fear; ‘religious’ wars are given a specious cloak of religiosity by the rulers who instigate them, so that they appear righteous to the people who actually do the fighting. In this way religion, like any other doctrine, may be used for evil – but that is not a fault inherent to religion. Fundamentalism of any kind will always be dangerous, and dogma will never be a valid substitute for reason.

That patience is among the virtues of all religions makes religious people’s inflamed participation in the God Wars all the more frustrating. The response of a truly religious person would be patient, humble, compassionate and loving, or at least written with the effort or aspiration to be so.

My personal and tentative working thesis at present is that religions (and, in fact, words in general) are like fingers pointing at the moon. There are many fingers, but only one moon. It is important for religious people to notice that other fingers also point in the same direction. And it is crucial, for anyone, not to be so attached to the finger that one never looks at the moon.

drug legalisation, otherness and the shadow

Here’s a post whose type is new for me. It’s a chat I had with a friend recently, whose name has been changed to conceal his/her (a ha!) identity.

For context, my tagline at the time read:

challenge UN drug prohibitionists:
http://daretoact.net/

and this is the conversation, related verbatim from its start until the point where it left the topic of drugs in society (and went on to other interesting topics, like the ’spiritual feeling’, Sehnsucht and Buddhism).

————–

Oscar: eish legalised drugs would be so boring, all that would remain would be a shoddy one dimensional chemical effect
me: you think the thrill of rebellion is an integral part of the experience?
Oscar: undoubtedly
its a case of cultural artifact versus test tube
vinyl versus mp3
me: I definitely take your point, but I think the component of the experience that’s attributable to rebellion is smaller than you think it is… perhaps it varies between drugs? and also between individuals… a psychedelic like LSD or shrooms will produce ‘transcendenta’ or ’spiritual’ (for want of better terms) experiences regardless of the rebellion element, I think
whereas weed definitely has rebellion culture attached to it
Oscar: certainly and those transcendental experiences are mostly legally available often in a more potent form than the illegal equivalent
people take acid because it refers to the counter culture
me: ok sure
I don’t understand what do you mean by a transcendental experience that’s legally available in a more potent form than the illegal equivalent… can you give an example?
Oscar: salvia
for one
me: okay
definitely more potent than LSD?
definitively, I mean
Oscar: a mere quirky blip on the psychedelic landscape compared to lsd
yet infinitely more incapacitating
me: ok, but I’m struggling to understand how the salvia/LSD potency issue relates to legalisation
if LSD was legal… so what, compared to salvia?
Oscar: what do we achieve by legalising drugs?
government gets to tax crackheads
me: they can be regulated and taxed, the markup of the drugs (which is mostly inflated by the difficulties of supplying an illegal substance) decreases hugely, it becomes less profitable to produce, less wars and violence over production and distribution, less dogma and more balanced information about drugs…
less stigma too
Oscar: i don’t think we’re lacking in info on drugs
me: I think we’re lacking accurate info, there’s a lot of propaganda and vested interests in the War on Drugs, the foolishness of “Just Say No”, etc. there’s definitely lots of ignorance
my parents were immensely ignorant about psychedelics until I explained a lot about them… (that was intense, but whatever)… the institutional view of drugs-as-basically-dangerous-and-harmful is widespread
and my mom is a medical drug specialist
Oscar: those are knee-jerk opinions based on the social otherness of being high, not a product of poorly documented chemical effects
me: interesting
Oscar: although perhaps in your parents case, obviously i don’t know your parents or the context which formed their opinions, but maybe info was less readily available in those times
my dad has smoked weed regularly since he was in his teens
he is fairly clued up on its effects
but not from a well educated nor affluent background
your folks are doctors are they not?
surely they understand what drugs do?
me: Is the sense of social otherness (which you see as a cause of prejudice and ignorance?) not reinforced by the illegal status of drugs? drugs are seen as pariahs… coming to those questions now
yeah my folks are doctors, they’re clued about about the chemical reactions of drugs, literally how they work
but they had no idea that LSD wasn’t physically addictive, that MDMA and LSD were used effectively in therapy, or other more “social” facts about drugs
so they saw both of those as basically harmful with no value, which I think is a very unfortunate mistaken opinion, and one that could be combatted with a climate of balance… which would be easier if drugs weren’t suppressed and a scary, underground phenomenon
Oscar: hmm I’m not sure if the legality of drug taking is really a big enough factor at all levels of society, certainly not for example, for the people living on the poverty line who make a living out of growing them.. I think social otherness, be it related to drugs, religion or any other culture is an offshoot of the social mores of a given society. The law is always going to be a little bit secondary to those norms and the culture that perpetuates them
complex issue i guess
me: indeed
Oscar: but getting back to where we started, personally the stuff I enjoyed about taking drugs was definitely the effects, and almost as importantly, the way this illuminated the brittle social fabric all around me
threw it into stark relief
the reality that people cling to on a daily basis is a by and large a delicate construct easily shattered
me: totally
Oscar: perhaps on the grand scale legalisation may be a good thing, but I don’t think that is a given
the impetus to say prohibition is wrong is one thing
the framework to legalise – getting that right – is far more difficult
the netherlands is one country with a unique bunch of open minded people
what works there would be a disaster elsewhere
me: quite probable
just to address something you mentioned: the producers on the poverty line… economically speaking, if drugs were legal, people could still make a living out of growing them. The cost of production (= what the growers are paid) is tiny; the price consumers pay is huge. The markup happens with the distributors who are adding hardly any real value. They generate most of their costs sidestepping the law, resulting in lots of violence. And it’s the middlemen, the violence, and the huge markup that would be greatly reduced, not the income to the producers themselves.
(would be reduced through legalisation, i mean)
anyway, The Economist this week (or last?) deals with this debate in its usual style
haven’t read it myself though
Oscar: ok, yes, there are certainly bad people controlling that middle ground
not only in black markets, but in most institutionalised international markets too
me: for shiz
I wonder what potential catastrophes you foresee if the Netherlands’ drug policy was applied to the USA, say… and what would cause those catastrophes
Oscar: i think this issue at it’s essence for me, is that drugs are about a sense of otherness
one that will not gel with the status quo or accepted modes of behaviour
that’s my perspective anyhow
other people get a different kick out of them
me: is that sense of otherness a good thing? would it be regrettable if it was diminished following legalisation?
Oscar: i think its good.. its necessary, to get outside of yourself every now and again, see things from the other side, keeps things in perspective
me: agreeed
Oscar: i have a song that epitomises this sentiment
hang on a sec..
me: irie
Oscar: mr jung has this to say http://psikoloji.fisek.com.tr/jung/shadow.htm
me: I wonder… tis an interesting point, but I’d love to see it elaborated so that the value of otherness is clearer. Then it would be interesting to explore whether the values of otherness would disappear if otherness itself disappeared, or whether something else might be able to fulfil its function… and THEN, you have to balance the value of the otherness that might be lost with drug legalisation against the cost of violence and misinformation that is associated with continued drug illegality
thanks
am a fan of mr jung as you probably know
Oscar: nope
….
me: haha, a positively demonic dynamism [this a quote from the Jung page above - ed.]
I like it
scary shit, because I’m only superficially and slightly aware of black and dense dark aspects of myself
Oscar: haha
me: mostly I seem to be a child of sweetness and light
Oscar: you need more illegal drugs
me: hahahaha
Oscar: legal ones only illuminate the wee fairy demons with their poxy 20 watt bulbs
me: that’s interesting, I’ve only had one or two ‘dark’ trips and that was only due to taking moldy old shrooms
Oscar: Once in a while, once in a while
You got to burn your lips, keep your feelings alive
Once in a while, once in a while
You got to burn down your house, keep your dreaming alive
http://www.last.fm/music/The+Kills/_/The+Good+Ones
me: LSD and shrooms mostly showed me things like flowers glowing with an inner light, the shimmering vibrations of beingness, the almost viscous interconnectedness of people (at trance parties) and things like this… I did also encounter some things that felt archetypal or quite powerful urges I hadn’t been consciously aware of before, and I did find them a bit scary so shied away from them… but that was rare
maybe I didn’t take a high enough dose
Oscar: sounds fun
me: have your trips on illegal drugs showed you a shadow side? certainly you seem less bound by a desire to be approved of or seen as moral in a puritanical way that many others — very personal question of course
“than”, I mean, not “that”
Oscar: thats the thing, my whole lifestyle was pretty dark when I was taking a lot of drugs. drugs just take the world you’re already in and pump up the volume to 12
me: yes, I’d agree
Oscar: that’s what i was looking for at the time
a lifetime of suburban social torpor moved me to poke at the fabric a bit
me: roger that
I’m thinking of publishing this chat on my blog, because it’s been super interesting. I could replace your name with another one, if you like? or, if you are averse, I won’t at all. just a thought at the moment

————–

Most interesting! I hope you agree.

interbeing and the importance of positive art

Suggesting to artists what they should produce is a risky business. But I’m going to make a case for something. The basic principle is this: art shapes collective consciousness; collective consciousness shapes the world. Raising our consciousness (by which I mean expanding, deepening and clarifying our awareness and working with our mental frames) allows us to act with greater wisdom, so our actions shape the world for the better. Therefore, I argue, we need artists who commit to raising their own consciousness and commit to producing conscious, positive art to help raise the collective consciousness, to help humanity at large to transcend the psychological patterns of fear and anxiety that shape the world for the worse.

I’m aware that I’m using phrases like “transcend,” “collective,” and “raising consciousness,” which are unfamiliar and problematic to many people, so I’ll clarify what I mean. I’m not talking about anything like a “communal mind.” The collective consciousness is merely the sum of individual consciousnesses. Transcendence, as I use the term here, is the process of becoming aware of a psychological pattern so that one is no longer identified with it, no longer caught inside it, but still feeling it, so one can work constructively and creatively with it. And raising consciousness is the practice of developing one’s awareness, or mindfulness, which allows one (among other things) to transcend psychological behaviour patterns.

On with the show.

art influences consciousness

I hope my artist friends will forgive me for expressing this simple, functional truth: when artists or writers have a feeling, their art or their writing lets them express that feeling and share it with others. A skilled writer who has an experience of fear can share it by writing about it in such a way that someone else will experience that feeling. A painter can do the same. In fact, we can do more: we can exaggerate or embellish the experience to create a heightened emotional experience for the audience. This makes for more exciting art.

If an artwork becomes popular, many people see it and many people experience the feeling the artist conveys. An artwork that originally conveyed a feeling to a single individual now conveys that feeling to many individuals. If a popular artwork expresses fear, many people experience that fear. A collective experience of fear is created, associated with that artwork. So artworks influence not only individual consciousnesses; they influence the collective consciousness.

collective consciousness influences the world

While artworks influence collective consciousness, collective consciousness influences the world. This occurs in large part due to governments, social groups, and public and large private institutions acting on the perceptions of collective consciousness.

As an example, the terrorist attack of September 11^th 2001 created a huge amount of fear, anxiety and anger in the collective consciousness of the USA, which quickly spread to countries with close cultural proximity to it, like the UK. Among the most ubiquitous results of the new collective affect were extremely stringent security checks at airports and almost absurd restrictions on the contents of hand luggage.

The consciousness of a security officer no longer interacts with ordinary human beings travelling on an aircraft; he now interacts with potential terrorists. Even fellow passengers begin to view each other in this way, and innocent Muslims are thrown off airplanes. In this way, the feelings of fear and anxiety that arise in a collective consciousness eventually manifest in the environment. Then they become entrenched in a society.

the world influences art

As a writer going through the security check at Heathrow, I am asked to take off my shoes and my belt. Intentionally wide awake so as to observe this experience as thoroughly as possible, I notice I’m intimidated by the bright lights, the blank walls and the curt, only-just-courteous manner of the security guards. I also note how I feel, and I’m inclined to write a piece that expresses it: anxiety, isolation, fear, absurdity, and later sorrow.

And I might. It would be a natural expression of my feelings; perhaps this piece is such an artwork. But I’m talking about the function of art here, so my point is that the experience of an environment created by fear is a fearful experience. The art that results from that experience expresses and, crucially, reproduces that fear.

It is only when consciousness is raised to a level that can observe the fear, rather than one that can only participate and be fearful, that the paradigm of fear can be transcended. Then, the resulting art need not express and simultaneously perpetuate its cause in a blind feedback loop. Then the collective consciousness can be consciously changed, and changed for the better.

the need for positive art

Artists routinely observe the content of the collective consciousness. It is their ecology. Collective consciousness is the environment in which they work, it is the environment their work affects and the environment in which their work is judged. They see its negative and destructive contents as well as its positive contents, and express all of these clearly, precisely and gracefully.

And their artworks are powerfully affecting, creating novel feelings and intellectual experiences in their audience, sometimes resulting in widespread social movements, but always producing some effect in the collective consciousness. Despite this, it is rare that the effect of an artwork on the consciousness of its audience is evaluated and considered in an estimation of the value of the artwork.

That should change.

As an artist’s environment is nothing less than the consciousness of his or her audience, artists might admit that they have a great responsibility. As a conscious and important voice in the collective consciousness, an artist expressing the world can choose to create a message of despair or a message of hope, one of anger or one of compassion. And their choice will influence the world.

That is why the world needs artists to take a new cognisance of their place in the collective consciousness, to be aware of their power to shape that consciousness and, through it, the world itself. And as artists are undoubtedly affected by the world, on a very pragmatic level artists need to be committed to raising their own consciousnesses, to enlarge and deepen the scope and the message of their art.

We need artworks that might raise the consciousness of their audience, and that of the world at large. When that happens, we will be able to see and begin to transcend the fear and anxiety of our destructive collective psychology. But until that happens, we may be helplessly bound within it.