Book Review (2/2): ‘Self and Soul’ by Mark Edmundson – Shakespeare & Freud

Given that a recent post makes reference to the three ideals mentioned in the first post of this sequence, it seemed only appropriate to republish it. This second and final post of a two-parter.

Yesterday I gave a brief account of Mark Edmundson’s disillusioned dissection of our culture based mainly on his introduction. I promised to follow this up with a sampling of two other issues he takes up in his Quixotic attack on the windmills of materialism: the demolition work of Shakespeare and of Freud.

Shakespeare:

Edmundson warned me in his introduction of what I would find when we come to Shakespeare (page 10-11):

What is true is that Shakespeare helps change our sense of human life and human promise through an almost complete rejection of ideals. Like his contemporary, Cervantes, Shakespeare has only contempt for the heroic ideal. . . . . .

Shakespeare, as Arnold Hauser argues, is a poet of the dawning bourgeois age, who has little use for chivalry and the culture of heroic honour.

This was not a problem: the militarily heroic holds few attractions for me. However, as I discovered later Shakespeare, according to Edmundson, is not just attacking heroism, though that is a main target: he is (page 140) writing for

. . . . a class that has little use for deep religion, the religion of compassion. . . . . . And he writes for a class with no real use for high thought – though Shakespeare is from time to time tempted by the ideal of contemplation.’

He then analyses in detail plays including Titus Andronicus, Othello, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Troilus & Cressida that ruthlessly deconstruct the hero.

Interestingly, it is not just Cervantes who influenced Shakespeare away from ideals. Montaigne, it is possible to argue, as James Shapiro does in 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, was also an influence on Shakespeare (page 332), as perhaps he was on Freud as we will see, and an influence particularly relevant to Hamlet:

He had surely looked into Montaigne by the time he wrote Hamlet – intuitions of critics stretching back to the 1830s on this question should be trusted – but he didn’t need to paraphrase him or pillage essays for his ideas. . . . . . . There was more than enough scepticism and uncertainty to go round in England in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign . . .

What is more important, perhaps, is the influence of Montaigne on the development of the soliloquy (page 333):

Redefining the relationship between speaker and audience, the essay also suggested to Shakespeare an intimacy between speaker and hearer that no other form, not even the sonnet, offered – except, perhaps, the soliloquy.

This may help explain why the one exception which Edmundson detects to the reductive pattern he has identified, is Hamlet.

One of the reasons for this may be, as Shapiro suggests (ibid.), that:

Probably more than any other character in literature, Hamlet needs to talk; but there is nobody in whom he can confide.

Perhaps this is why Edmundson can find in him (page 174) ‘the free play of intellect’ he values so much. Hamlet can ‘think in quest of the Truth.’ And a truth that holds for everyone across time, not just pragmatically for the specific situation in some particular play.

It may therefore be no coincidence that this is my favourite play.

Edmundson argues that we feel that Shakespeare does not advocate any specific value system because the ones that live in his plays (page 12) ‘simply echo the anti-idealist values of his current audience and of the current world almost perfectly and, so, are nearly invisible.’

In the end, however, I do not accept his contention that Shakespeare does not value compassion, whatever we argue his audience might think and no matter that we can find evidence from his life that he fell short of that ideal in person. For instance, as a grain hoarder himself, his real life position on the 1607 food riots was rather different from the empathy for the rioters that comes across in Coriolanus.[1]

How, though, can the man that wrote,

The sense of death is most in apprehension;
And the poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.

(Measure for Measure Act 3, Scene 1, lines 76-79)

and

. . . . the snail, whose tender horns being hit,
Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,
And there, all smother’d up, in shade doth sit,
Long after fearing to creep forth again . . .

(Venus & Adonis lines 1033-36)

not understand and value compassion? And I am not equating this with the uncanny empathy that allows him to enter the shadowy mind of an Iago or an Edgar.

So, at this point, I am more or less convinced that he despised the heroic. I can accept that he might not have been strong on contemplation, though I do need to think more on that one. AD Nuttall would apparently not agree, given that he has written a whole book on Shakespeare, the Thinker and clearly feels that his truths are valid across time (page 22):

Shakespeare’s response is, precisely, intelligent rather than a mere cultural reflex. He thinks fundamentally, and this makes him a natural time traveller.

Even so, he may not be a million miles apart from Edmundson, as he also acknowledges that (page 12) ‘we do not know what Shakespeare thought about any major question, in the sense that we have no settled judgements of which we can be sure.’

I absolutely disagree though that he did not value compassion, while I do accept that, as a dramatist, he could have gone a long way to creating his vast range of convincing characters with high levels of cognitive empathy alone.

I am left, though, with a slightly uneasy feeling. Maybe there’s more to Edmundson’s case than I am happy to accept. This nagging doubt goes back as far as my reading of Anne Glynn-Jones’s book, Holding Up a Mirror: how civilisations decline. I am always a touch sceptical about confident claims to explain how complex entities such as civilisations operate, even though I keep getting drawn to reading them, as my posts on Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilisation testify. Glynn-Jones builds a case against Shakespeare on the basis of Pitirim Sorokin‘s social cycle theory. I would have found it easy to dismiss her case had I not felt that elements of Sorokin’s model made a great deal of sense to me as a Bahá’í.

The core of what she feels relates to Sorokin’s concept of the sensate society. He classified societies according to their ‘cultural mentality’, which can be ‘ideational’ (reality is spiritual), ‘sensate’ (reality is material), or ‘idealistic’ (a synthesis of the two). The relevance of those categories to the current issues is obvious.

She feels the Shakespeare is a dramatist of a sensate society. She quotes many examples of where Shakespeare can clearly be argued to be pandering to the basest sensation-seeking instincts of his audience. She quotes Tolstoy (pages 264-65):

Shakespeare exemplifies the view ‘that no definite religious view of life was necessary for works of art in general, and especially for drama; that for the purpose of the drama the representation of human passions and characters was quite sufficient. . . . . .

And he concludes, ‘The fundamental inner cause of Shakespeare’s fame is . . . . that his dramas . . . . corresponded to the irreligious and immoral frame of mind of the upper classes of his time.’

Because I felt that to be a distorted misreading of Shakespeare’s audience as a whole and a very selective reading of his work in its entirety, I dismissed this view of Shakespeare completely at the time, though I could also see what she meant.

I agree he side-steps directly addressing religion but feel this is because it would have been too dangerous – and almost certainly unprofitable of course as well. That does not prove that he did not have a transcendent sense of the value of all life, and I believe he was deeply aware of its interconnectedness.

I accept that he loathed the heroic. He was definitely no philosopher. But a deeply felt compassion, rather than a mercantile value system, is what for me has ensured that he lives on, and continues to attract audiences across the world. It’s just that he does not explicitly teach compassion: he demonstrates it, though, in almost every word that he writes.

And so the pendulum swings on. Enough of that for now.

Freud:

In his introduction Edmundson states (page 12) that ‘Freud takes the enmity with ideals implicit in Shakespeare’s work and renders it explicit.’ He argues (page 14) that ‘Freud stands in the tradition of Montaigne, affirming the belief that the life of sceptical, humane detachment is the best of possible lives.’

Freud, Edmundson claims, takes this to an altogether different level (page 165):

One of the main functions of Shakespeare’s great inheritor, Freud, is to redescribe the ideals of compassion and courage and the exercise of imagination as pathologies and forms of delusion. . . . . Freud makes the middle-class people who live by half measures feel much better, allowing them to understand that the virtues that intimidated them are forms of sickness and that normality – clear-eyed and stable – is the true achievement. What a reversal!

I have read almost no Freud in the original, so strong has been my distaste for his views[2] as they have reached me through secondary sources, many of them his admirers. However, I am aware that it is possible to share my suspicion of his value without seeing him as exactly the kind of reductionist Edmundson identifies.

Take Richard Webster for example in his book Why Freud Was Wrong, in its way as brilliant as Edmundson’s. In his introduction he outlines his case against Freud. After explaining his sense that psychoanalysis is to be valued, if at all, not because it is truly scientific and valid, but because it enshrines imagination, something which has been side-lined by modernist reductionism, he makes a second telling point (page 9):

There is another reason why the vitality of the psychoanalytic tradition should not be taken as confirmation of the validity of Freud’s theories. This is because a great deal of it is owed not to any intellectual factor but to Freud’s own remarkable and charismatic personality and to the heroic myth, which he spun around himself during his own lifetime.

This is intriguing in the light of Edmundson’s case that Freud was a debunker of the heroic, but is not incompatible with it. In fact, it suggests that Freud failed to analyse himself dispassionately.

Webster takes this a step further (ibid.):

Freud himself consciously identified with Moses, and the prophetic and messianic dimensions of his character have been noted again and again even by those who have written sympathetically about psychoanalysis.

So, not just a hero, then, but a quasi-religious figure in his own eyes. Even more intriguing. Webster even goes on to claim that Freud (page 10) ‘went on to use the aura and authority of scientific rationalism in order to create around himself a church whose doctrines sought to subvert the very rationalism they invoked.’

His final point on this thread is hugely ironic in the light of Edmundson’s claims that Freud demolished the cult of the heroic ideal (page 11):

If Freud has not been seen in this light it is perhaps because the very success which he has enjoyed by casting himself in the role of intellectual liberator has brought with it the kind of idealisations and projections to which all messiahs are subject.

Towards the end of his book, Webster draws another conclusion about where this has helped to take us, which resonates with my recent explorations of Shelley, and with Edmundson’s rants against the aridity of much current lyric poetry in Poetry Slam. He argues for redressing the current bias against imagination and states that (page 504-05):

. . . . [u]ntil we have done this it seems likely that we will remain in thrall to the dissociated intellectual culture which we inhabit today, where an austere and politically influential scientific and technological culture, devoid of human sympathy and understanding, exists side by side with a weak literary and artistic culture which, because it has unconsciously internalised the image of its own superfluity, is prepared both to the stand back from the political process and to concede to the natural sciences the exclusive right to explore reality systematically and to pronounce authoritatively upon it.

Returning in more detail to Edmundson’s attack upon Freud, he defines the main focus of psychoanalysis as being on one ideal in particular (page 232):

History (and Shakespeare) have dealt with the myth of courage; history (and the Enlightenment) have dealt with the myth of faith. Love is Freud’s primary antagonist among human ideals, and he attacks it from every plausible direction.

In terms of love’s great exemplars, including Jesus and the Buddha, Freud argues (page 237) that they are ‘asking too much of human beings.’

How can we love our fellow men? Freud asks. Our fellow men, in general, have at best a mild contempt for us; at worst, they nurse murderous rage. . . . . There is only Self. Soul is an illusion.

I have dealt already on this blog with Matthieu Ricard’s utterly convincing refutation of such debasing cynicism in his book Altruism, which demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt, and on the basis of a huge amount of systematically gathered data, that we are innately capable of developing high levels of altruism, fairness and compassion. My last sequence of posts revisited his brilliant book from a different angle.

Edmundson goes on to quote Karl Kraus (page 243): ‘Psychoanalysis… is the disease of which it purports to be the cure.’ He goes on to explain what he believes this means. Having listed various ways human beings can rescue themselves from meaninglessness, such as love, creativity, compassion, courage or idealistic thought, he rounds his cannon upon Freud’s benighted cul-de-sac (page 244):

… all these activities are out of the bounds. Embracing them, for Freud, causes only trouble.

It is possible that to deny human beings these primary satisfactions makes them sick. It causes a disease, it does not cure it. If you live life without courage, compassion, the true exercise of intellect and creation through love, then you will not feel very well. You may even get quite ill.

before he delivers the coup-de-grace:

Then, when the banishment of ideals has made you ill, Freud can show you, through psychoanalysis and through the ethical program of his thought, how to feel a little better than you do. Psychoanalysis helps the culture of Self create a disease. And this disease psychoanalysis will happily help cure.

He feels the legacy of this, for psychotherapy as a whole, is deeply damaging (page 245):

Therapy can have many values, but they will never be idealistic. All therapies are about learning to live with half a loaf.

He is probably selling psychotherapies such as Psychosynthesis short when he uses that dubious word ‘all.’ But his point is valid for mainstream approaches. Spirituality and idealism are seen by them as suspect.

I hope this all too brief helicopter review inspires you to buy the book and read it, and I hope you then enjoy it as much as I have. Life is a lot richer than our materialistic gurus would have us believe, thank goodness.

Footnote:

[1] This side of Shakespeare was revealed in research done by Dr Jayne Archer, a lecturer in medieval and renaissance literature at Aberystwyth University.

[2] I am aware, from January’s Guardian article by Oliver Burkeman, of the recent study which goes some way toward rehabilitating psychoanalysis as a treatment for depression.

He writes:

. . . . . [R]esearchers at London’s Tavistock clinic published results in October from the first rigorous NHS study of long-term psychoanalysis as a treatment for chronic depression. For the most severely depressed, it concluded, 18 months of analysis worked far better – and with much longer-lasting effects – than “treatment as usual” on the NHS, which included some CBT. Two years after the various treatments ended, 44% of analysis patients no longer met the criteria for major depression, compared to one-tenth of the others. Around the same time, the Swedish press reported a finding from government auditors there: that a multimillion pound scheme to reorient mental healthcare towards CBT had proved completely ineffective in meeting its goals.

So I need to clarify, perhaps, that it is Freud’s quasi-mythical beliefs such as the Oedipus Complex that repelled me as being too absurd to qualify as a universal truth. Other aspects of his thinking, taken over and used by other schools of therapy, have their place, such an projection and denial, as well as the acknowledgement that for some people it can be imperative that they understand their inscape deeply before they can move on, and that this can take years. Even so these are not universally applicable components of an effective therapy at all times. There is no one size fits all panacea – not psychoanalysis, not CBT.

I don’t think Burkeman would disagree with that as he concludes ‘. . . . . many scholars have been drawn to what has become known as the “dodo-bird verdict”: the idea, supported by some studies, that the specific kind of therapy makes little difference. (The name comes from the Dodo’s pronouncement in Alice in Wonderland: “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”) What seems to matter much more is the presence of a compassionate, dedicated therapist, and a patient committed to change; if one therapy is better than all others for all or even most problems, it has yet to be discovered.’

Stuck in memory from my first degree in psychology, there was an interesting piece of meta-analysis from 1979 that pulled together all the studies of the efficacy of psychotherapy that had included an advance measure of how credible clients found the therapy they were undertaking. When all other variables were controlled for, the strongest predictor of effectiveness was how much the client believed the therapy would work. Unfortunately I have not been able to track that down recently.

And for me, if it has no place for a spiritual dimension, such as can be found in Jungian analysis and Psychosynthesis, there is still a major defect in the approach.

 

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Mapping Consciousness (6/6): Is this a valid standard by which to evaluate a work of art?

. . . . the role of the fine arts in a divine civilization must be of a higher order than the mere giving of pleasure, for if such were their ultimate aim, how could they ‘result in advantage to man, . . . ensure his progress and elevate his rank.’

(Ludwig Tulman – Mirror of the Divine – pages 29-30)

Even though it’s barely a year since I last republished this sequence, its relevance to my sequence on Science, Spirituality and Civilisation is unmistakable. Art, as well as science and religion, has a role to play in understanding consciousness, so here it comes again!

A Test

As I explained earlier in this sequence, I’m not contending that mapping consciousness is the sole criterion for judging a work of art but it is a key one for my purposes as a student of consciousness, as the mind map above illustrates. I’ll unpack what the mind map is about later.

My ability to apply to ongoing experience what I have learned in theory was about to be tested. How clearly could I catch hold of and write down an experience under pressure?

The day I sat planning at some point to work on this post proved interesting. Two letters plopped through our letterbox. They looked like the ones I had been expecting, telling me when my next hospital appointments were.

I didn’t pick them up straightaway as I was keeping an eye on the pressure cooker as it built up a head of steam, ready to turn it down when the whistle hissed. No, I don’t mean my brain as it coped with all my deadlines. We were beginning to get the food ready for the celebration of the Bicentenary of the Birth of Bahá’u’lláh in two days time. The lentils apparently needed cooking well ahead of time.

Once pressure cooker duty was over, I dashed upstairs to tweak the slide presentation for the following day. I’d been enlisted to do the presentation at a friend’s celebration event. While the slide show notes were printing, I thought I’d better check the hospital letters out, not my favourite activity. The first one I opened was as I expected, an appointment for the ophthalmology department. I moved on to the second one. When I opened it I saw it was identical, same date, same time.

‘They’ve messed up,’ I groaned inwardly. ‘I was supposed to go for an MRI scan as well. I’d better give them a ring.’

I stapled the slide show notes together, picked up my iPhone and rang the number they had given me on the letter. A robot answered.

‘Thank you for calling the orthoptic department. We are currently dealing with a new electronic patient record system [I didn’t relish being seen as an electronic patient] and may be delayed in returning your call, [change of voice undermining the impression of caring that was to follow] but your call is important to us. Please leave your hospital number, the name of the patient, and a brief message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. Thank you.’

I responded after the beep, fortunately also remembering to give them my number as I wasn’t convinced they’d pick that up automatically. Most robots check whether they have absorbed your number correctly.

Rather than waste time waiting, I got my laptop and brought it downstairs to rehearse my presentation. I set up AppleTV and was just about to set my timer and start, when my phone rang.

‘Orthoptic Department. How can I help?’ She sounded pleasant and surprisingly unstressed.

‘The new system must be taking some of the pressure off,’ I thought.

I explained that not only had I got double vision but I was also now getting my letters twice as well. Well, no not really. I told her I’d got two identical letters when I’d expected one to be for an MRI scan.

She checked out what I meant and then explained that the letter I’d got was for my routine appointment. The other was an error on their part. I should also be getting a letter for the MRI scan, I clarifed, but they did not know anything about that. I added that after that I should get an appointment from a consultant about the scan. She couldn’t help with that either, even though he was in her department.

She agreed to put me through to discuss the MRI.

‘Radiology here. How can I help?’

‘Is that where you do MRI scans?’ I asked, not being sure whether they counted as radiology or something else.

‘Yes, it is.’

I began my explanation.

‘I’m sorry. I need your name and date of birth.’

‘Will my hospital number do?’

‘Yes. That’s fine.’

Once she knew who I was, I told her my problem and asked when I could expect my scan to be as were we hoping to be away some time in December.

‘It’ll take 6-8 weeks from the time they sent the request.’

‘So when might that be?’

‘It’ll probably be the week beginning 27 November.’

‘And when will the consultant see me to discuss it after that.’

‘I can’t say because he wouldn’t send out appointments normally until he receives the scan.’

‘So how long is the gap likely to be then?’

‘We don’t deal with that. You’d have to speak to his secretary.’

She couldn’t put me through so I rang Ophthalmology again and got the robot. I hung up and rang the hospital switchboard and they put me through straightaway. Must remember that next time.

I spoke to the same person as before. She explained that she didn’t really know. She was just the receptionist. His secretary was off till next week. She’d leave a note for her and if I could ring back then she might help.

I hung up and made a note in my diary to ring next week.

Before this all happened, I’d jotted down in the notebook I always carry: ‘It doesn’t matter whether I’m enjoying myself or not, as long as I’m squeezing every drop of meaning out of the lemon of the present moment.’ The phone calls to the hospital where a particularly sour experience, so my note was intriguingly prophetic. I had managed to stay calm, and even found the whole experience slightly amusing with its many examples of ‘I don’t know. That’s not my department. You need to talk to…’

At last I was able to settle down and rehearse the presentation before finally returning to my plan to draft this post.

The whole episode highlighted for me the need not only to slow down and keep calm, but also to sharpen my focus. Not that I will ever be able to write as well as Virginia Woolf, but without that combination of skills I doubt that anyone would ever be able to capture consciousness in words on paper, or even in speech.

A Valid Criterion?

So now we come back to the critical question. Is its skill in conveying consciousness a valid criterion by which to judge a work of art? As I indicated earlier, I’m not arguing it is the only one, nor even necessarily the best. What I have come to realise is that it is a key one for me.

I also need to clarify that capturing consciousness is not the same as conveying a world view or meaning system. So, you might argue that when Alice Neel is painting people that the art world usually ignores, just as I gather Cézanne also did, while the act of painting itself is sending a clear ideological message that these people matter, unless the portrait is more than a realistic rendering of the subject’s appearance we have not been capturing the artist’s consciousness. If any distortions of sensory experience merely serve to strengthen the message, these would be more like propaganda than maps of consciousness. Also the culture in which we are immersed, as well as our upbringing and individual life experiences, influence the meaning systems we adopt, or perhaps more accurately are induced into evolving.

Capturing consciousness is also a tad more demanding than simply conveying a state of mind or feeling, whether that be the artist’s own or their subject’s, something which music can also do perfectly well. That is something I value very much, but it’s not my focus right now.

Taking that into account, what am I expecting?

Woolf gives us a clue in her diaries ((page 259):

I see there are four? dimensions: all to be produced, in human life: and that leads to a far richer grouping and proportion. I mean: I; and the not I; and the outer and the inner – … (18.11.35):

I have quoted this already in an earlier post of this sequence. I also added the date on which she wrote it to emphasise that it was after the completion of both To the Lighthouse and The Waves, as if she sensed that her approach up to that point had been too inward looking. Her question mark after ‘four’ suggests she was entertaining the possibility of more dimensions.

The diagram maps what Woolf said very crudely. Most of To the Lighthouse and The Waves takes place in the top right hand quadrant. They are brave experiments. In places they work beautifully but are uneven and at times disappointing. She sensed that I suspect.

However, other novels she wrote take more account of the other quadrants except possibly the one on the bottom right, although there are places where she seems almost to be attempting to tune into the inscape of natural objects.

Clearly then it might be appropriate to judge a novel by how well it balances the three main quadrants, ie excepting the bottom right.

There is a catch here though. It all depends upon on what the prevailing culture defines as ‘outer.’ Is this to be confined only to the material realm? Mysticism is present in all cultures to some degree, though its legitimacy has been downgraded in the West. The critically endorsed novel has, with some rare exceptions such as John Cowper Powys and perhaps what is termed ‘magical realism,’ been seen as needing to focus on the world of the senses, the stream of consciousness and social interaction.

Is that enough?

Woolf expresses this whole dilemma with wry humour in To the Lighthouse (page 152):

The mystic, the visionary, walking the beach on a fine night, stirring a puddle, looking at a stone, asking themselves “What am I,” “What is this?” had suddenly an answer vouchsafed them: (they could not say what it was) so that they were warm in the frost and had comfort in the desert. But Mrs McNab continued to drink and gossip as before.

Should a work of art, could a work of art, express some kind of world consciousness, for example? Should mysticism be normalised and not be either excluded or presented as eccentric?

Given that I think expanding our consciousness is the key to enabling us to mend our world I am sceptical of any school of thought that would devalue and marginalise novels that attempt to treat outlying ways of thought and experience as of equal interest and legitimacy. It has already been demonstrated that the novel, in its present form, enhances empathy. It helps connect us in a more understanding way with the experiences of others very different from ourselves. Art in general is one of the most powerful means we have for lifting or debasing consciousness. It reaches more people in the West probably than religion does, especially if we include television, cinema, computer games etc.

I must add a word of warning here. Consciousness can be seen as expanding in all sorts of different ways.

Sometimes, though, I feel that just by pandering to our desire for exciting new experiences we might not be expanding our consciousness at all, but narrowing it rather.

Alex Danchev, in his biography of Cézanne, quotes an intriguing passage from Hyppolyte Taine (page 104):

In open country I would rather meet a sheep than a lion; behind the bars of a cage I would rather see a lion than a sheep. Art is exactly that sort of cage: by removing the terror, it preserves the interest. Hence, safely and painlessly, we may contemplate the glorious passions, the heartbreaks, the titanic struggles, all the sound and fury of human nature elevated by remorseless battles and unrestrained desires. . . . It takes us out of ourselves; we leave the commonplace in which we are mired by the weakness of our faculties and the timidity of their instincts.

I draw back instinctively from the elevation of the titanic, the fury, the remorseless and the unrestrained in human life. Exploring those aspects of our nature unbalanced by other more compassionate and humane considerations is potentially dangerous for reasons I have explored elsewhere. To express it as briefly as I can, it’s probably enough to say that I can’t shake off the influence of my formative years under the ominous shadow of the Second World War. I’m left with a powerful and indelible aversion to any warlike and violent kind of idealism, and any idolising of the heroic can seem far too close to that for comfort to me. Suzy Klein’s recent brilliant BBC series on Tunes for Tyrants: Music and Power explores what can happen when the arts are harnessed to violent ends in the name of some dictator’s idea of progress.

And where does this leave me?

I am at a point where I have decided that I need to explore consciousness more consistently, perhaps more consistently than I have ever explored anything else in my life. It blends psychology, literature, faith as well as personal experience, and therefore makes use of most of my lifetime interests. This object of interest would give them a coherence they have so far lacked. Instead of flitting between them as though they had little real or deep connection, I could use them all as lenses of different kinds to focus on the one thing that fascinates me most.

I have ended up with the completely revised diagram of my priorities at the head of this post, repeated just to the left above in smaller size. The blurring at the edges represents its unfinished nature. It seems to express an interesting challenge. It shows that I am on a quest, still, to understand consciousness. Does the diagram suggest the idea that consciousness is both the driving force and destination of this quest? It looks as though consciousness is seeking to understand itself, in my case at least: that makes it both the archer and the target. Mmmmm! Not sure where that leads!

What is clear is that my mnemonic of the 3Rs needs expanding. It has to include a fourth R: relating. In the diagram I have spelt out what the key components are of each important R.

Relating

This involves consultation (something I have dwelt on at length elsewhere). It also entails opening up to a sense of the real interconnectedness of all forms of life, not just humanity as a whole. It has to entail some form of action as well, which I have labelled service, by which I mean seeking to take care of others.

Reflecting

How well a group can consult, as I have explained elsewhere, depends upon how well the individuals within it can reflect. My recent delving into Goleman and Davidson’s excellent book The Science of Meditation suggests that there is more than one form of meditation that would help me develop my reflective processes more efficiently (page 264): mindfulness I have tried to practice (see links for some examples), focusing I do everyday, using Alláh-u-Abhá as my mantra, and loving kindness or compassionate meditation is something I need to tackle, as it relates very much to becoming more motivated to act. I have baulked at it so far because it relies, as far as I can tell, upon being able to visualise, something I am not good at.

They also describe another pattern, which I’ve not been aware of before (ibid.): ‘Deconstructive. As with insight practice, these methods use self-observation to pierce the nature of experience. They include “non-dual” approaches that shift into a mode where ordinary cognition no longer dominates.’

Reading & Writing

Readers of this blog, or even just this sequence of posts, will be aware of how I use writing and reading in my quest for understanding so I don’t think I need to bang on about that here.

The Science of Meditation deals with the idea that long-term meditation turns transient states of mind into more permanent traits of character. I have placed altruism in the central space as for me, having read Matthieu Ricard’s book on the subject, altruism is compassion turned to trait: it is a disposition not a passing feeling. I am hopeful that insight may similarly turn to wisdom, but as I am not sure of that as yet, I just called it insight.

I am already aware that the diagram inadequately accounts for such things as the exact relationship between the 4Rs, understanding and effective and useful action. It does not emphasise enough that my desire to understand consciousness better is not purely academic. It is also fuelled by a strong desire to put what I have come to understand to good use.

I am also aware that I failed to register in my discussion as a whole that there are distinctions to be made between capturing consciousness in art and other closely related scenarios, such as describing experience in terms of its remembered emotional impact (conveying a state of mind) or giving an account of what happened through the lens of one’s meaning system (evaluating an event). It is perhaps also possible to attempt to convey only the basic details of what happened with all subjective elements removed (a ‘factual’ account).

I can’t take this exploration any further than this right now but hope to come back to the topic again soon. I also said in an earlier post that I might delve more deeply into the soul, mind, imagination issue. However, this post has gone on long enough, I think, so that will have to wait for another time.

Rita and Hubert 1954 (scanned from Alice Neel: painter of modern life edited by Jeremy Lewison)

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Book Review (2/2): ‘Altruism’ by Matthieu Ricard – reaching a tipping point

O CHILDREN OF MEN! Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other. Ponder at all times in your hearts how ye were created. Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment may be made manifest. Such is My counsel to you, O concourse of light! Heed ye this counsel that ye may obtain the fruit of holiness from the tree of wondrous glory.

(Bahá’u’lláh – Arabic Hidden Words No. 68)

As I have just published a post whose focus was on how to lift our awareness to a higher level that will benefit not just ourselves but all life on earth, it seems a good time to republish this sequence.

The last post, after a brief review of the closing chapters of Ricard’s  excellent book Altruism, ended with the question of how we can ensure that enough of us will want to take effective steps to change things for the better before it is too late.

Something that should help is a growing awareness that growth cannot continue (page 658):

In the eyes of the politician Anders Wijkman and environmentalist Johann Rockström, there can be nothing more perverse than an economy that grows at the expense of the raw materials that allow it to exist: ‘The world’s population is growing. Consumption is growing. The only problem is that the earth is not growing.’ . . . .

In short, as the English-born American economist Kenneth Boulding said: ‘Those who believe that economic growth can go on forever are either mentally deranged or they are economists.’

Not all economists though fortunately.

There is, for example, a growing trend for economists to discard the treacherously misleading GDP as a good guide to whether we are doing all right or not. Because (page 660) ‘[i]t ignores social costs, environmental impacts and income inequality’ it is worse then useless: it is leads to toxic decision-making. Its fundamental insanity is revealed by its inclusion as positives what are in fact evidences of dysfunction (page 667):

If a country has more crime, pollution, war, and disease, GDP increases as a result of financial transactions relating to expenditure in prisons, policing, weapons, and healthcare. This increase enters the accounts as a positive indicator of a growing economy, even though it represents a decline in well-being.’

Case closed, it seems to me.

Bhutan: for source of image see link.

There are better indicators than GDP in the process of development. Perhaps the most startling, and long-standing, is the gross national happiness index used in Bhutan (pages 664-71). Inspired by this approach, a Chilean economist has developed a model based on six principles:

• The economy is to serve people and people are not to serve the economy;
• Development is about people and not about objects;
• Growth is not the same as development and development does not necessarily require a growth;
• No economy is possible without the ecosystem’s services;
• The economy is a subsystem of a larger and finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible;
• Under no circumstances whatsoever can economic process, or interest, take precedence over the reverence of life.

Bhutan in the meanwhile is flourishing.

We are back to the main question: ‘How do we develop a sufficiently powerful motivator to reach a tipping point where positives such as this come within reach on a larger scale?’

Ricard acknowledges that (page 679) ‘we must . . . not underestimate the importance of personal transformation.’ From there we must move to the wider society within which we live and, in Ricard’s view (page 681), learn to balance what Mintzberg calls the three-legged stool of a ‘public sector made up of political forces…, a private sector made up of economic forces…, and a plural sector of social forces embodied by robust civilian conveyances.’ It is in the development of the latter that the UK and America, who over-emphasise the private sector, and China, who places too much importance on the public sector, are seriously lacking.

There is yet another step to take.

We must move (page 682) from ‘community engagement to global responsibility.’ To do this it is necessary ‘to realise that all things are interdependent, and to assimilate that world view in such a way that it influences our every action.’ He sees altruism as the key to this transition.

In this long and enthralling book, Ricard has used reason brilliantly to advocate altruism as the solution to our personal and global problems. That in itself makes it an essential read for those of us engaged in understanding these issues more deeply.

He would be the first to agree, I hope, that an intellectual conviction in altruism is not going to be sufficient to motivate enough people to rise to the level of sacrifice required for long enough to achieve the necessary effect. He ends his book, it seems to me, rather in the same trap as Rifkin did. And I’m afraid I have the same response, despite my admiration and respect for the compelling case he marshals in the seven hundred pages it took him five years to write.

Rifkin, as I quoted before in the earlier sequence, acknowledges this deficit. He is aware of a void in the credibility of his position and has to locate motivating awe elsewhere than in the transcendent he refuses to acknowledge (page 170):

Empathic consciousness starts with awe. When we empathise with another, we are bearing witness to the strange incredible life force that is in us and that connects us with all other living beings. Empathy is, after all, the feeling of deep reverence we have for the nebulous term we call existence.

This basically material trigger may be a necessary condition for empathy to grow further in our increasingly global civilisation. Is it sufficient in itself though? Even if religion is not necessarily the enemy, and I believe it is not, do we need it?

The question is whether we agree that the way evolution has shaped the brain is also a sufficient condition to produce the necessary levels of self-mastery and altruism and spread them widely and deeply enough across humanity to preserve us in the longer term.

Rifkin clearly feels it’s the best hope we’ve got, even though one of his key witnesses wasn’t sure where empathy comes from (page 350):

Although the origins of man’s capacity for empathy was a mystery to Schopenhauer, the teleology was clear. By feeling another’s plight as if it were our own and by extending a hand to comfort and support them in their struggle to persevere and prosper, we recognise the unifying thread that connects each of us to the other and all of life on earth.

I realise that just as it is impossible for Rifkin, or Ricard as well perhaps by implication, conclusively to prove that any hope of empathic rescue from our current predicament must come from our material nature because that is all we have to draw on, I cannot conclusively prove to everyone’s satisfaction that:

(a) this could never be sufficient, and

(b) that is OK because we can draw upon transcendent powers.

None the less that is my view.

The Arc of Bahá’í Buildings on Mount Carmel

The Bahá’í position declares that it is necessary to draw upon both material and spiritual powers (Social Action):

An exploration of the nature of social action, undertaken from a Bahá’í perspective, must necessarily place it in the broad context of the advancement of civilization. That a global civilization which is both materially and spiritually prosperous represents the next stage of a millennia-long process of social evolution provides a conception of history that endows every instance of social action with a particular purpose: to foster true prosperity, with its spiritual and material dimensions, among the diverse inhabitants of the planet. A concept of vital relevance, then, is the imperative to achieve a dynamic coherence between the practical and spiritual requirements of life.

This same document unpacks the exact implications of that very clearly indeed:

When the material and spiritual dimensions of the life of a community are kept in mind and due attention is given to both scientific and spiritual knowledge, the tendency to reduce development to the mere consumption of goods and services and the naive use of technological packages is avoided. Scientific knowledge, to take but one simple example, helps the members of a community to analyse the physical and social implications of a given technological proposal—say, its environmental impact—and spiritual insight gives rise to moral imperatives that uphold social harmony and that ensure technology serves the common good. Together, these two sources of knowledge tap roots of motivation in individuals and communities, so essential in breaking free from the shelter of passivity, and enable them to uncover the traps of consumerism.

From a Bahá’í point of view, it is from the fusion of both material and spiritual powers that the necessary understanding and motivation derive.

While I accept that the capacity for a high degree of empathy is wired into our brains, I also strongly believe that a higher level again can be reached, with proportionately more leverage in terms of sustained action, if we also can internalise a sense of what the Quakers term ‘That of God’ which is in all of us. Then we will not only have a strong sense of our links to one another but we will also have the confidence to act against apparently overwhelming odds that comes from the knowledge that we human beings are not alone. Bahá’u’lláh says (Bahá’u’lláh, The Hidden Words, Arabic no. 13):

Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting.

Only when that divine connection has been achieved, it seems to me, will we be able to answer the challenge issued by the Universal House of Justice, the central body of the Bahá’í Faith, when the arc of buildings on Mount Carmel were completed. The following words were read at the opening ceremony:

. . . the time has come when each human being on earth must learn to accept responsibility for the welfare of the entire human family. Commitment to this revolutionising principle will increasingly empower individuals and Bahá’í institutions alike in awakening others to . . . the latent spiritual and moral capacities that can change this world into another world.

(Universal House of Justice: 24 May 2001 in Turning Point page 164)

The Bahá’í perspective shares Ricard’s awareness of the need to link the local through the national to the global (Social Action):

No matter how essential, a process of learning at the local level will remain limited in its effectiveness if it is not connected to a global process concerned with the material and spiritual prosperity of humanity as a whole. Structures are required, then, at all levels, from the local to the international, to facilitate learning about development.

And the international Bahá’í community offers, though admittedly at a very early stage of development, a model for how this might be done, and acknowledges at the same time that this will be the work of centuries and requires the whole-hearted involvement of all humanity and not just the Bahá’í community (Century of Light – page 94):

The immediate responsibility of establishing world government rests on the shoulders of the nation-states. What the Bahá’í community is called on to do, at this stage in humanity’s social and political evolution, is to contribute by every means in its power to the creation of conditions that will encourage and facilitate this enormously demanding undertaking.

Only when enough of us have such a sense of powerful support and shared humanity does it seem to me that we can reach that tipping point, when most of the world of humanity will be prepared and able to put their weight effectively against the wheel of redemptive change, and only then will disaster be averted. Pray God that moment will not come too late for us.

I am grateful to Ricard for having researched so diligently the evidence to support the absolute need for an altruistic response that can work at the individual, national and global levels. Without a world-wide commitment to such a model it will be impossible to address humanity’s challenges effectively.

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Book Review (1/2): ‘Altruism’ by Matthieu Ricard – Toward a Caring Economy

The fourth Taráz concerneth trustworthiness. Verily it is the door of security for all that dwell on earth and a token of glory on the part of the All-Merciful. He who partaketh thereof hath indeed partaken of the treasures of wealth and prosperity. Trustworthiness is the greatest portal leading unto the tranquillity and security of the people. In truth the stability of every affair hath depended and doth depend upon it. All the domains of power, of grandeur and of wealth are illumined by its light.

(Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh – page 38)

As I have just published a post whose focus was on how to lift our awareness to a higher level that will benefit not just ourselves but all life on earth, it seems a good time to republish this sequence.

In October I posted a sequence of three articles reviewing the thinking of two contrasting writers: Timothy Snyder, an historian with an interesting message about the Holocaust and World War II in his book The Black Earth, and Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk and neuroscientist with an impassioned and well-documented plea for altruism in his book of the same name.

I felt that the sequence of posts failed to do justice to the depth and extent of Ricard’s case and am therefore revisiting the final few chapters of his book in an attempt to put that right. It’s only fair to add that his book covers so much ground that all I can convey of his wealth of detail is a faint impression.

The System

Ricard radically questions the operational model of our acquisitive society. We are not homo economicus (page 564), ‘selfish agents’ out to promote ‘their own interests.’ We are potentially homo reciprocans with a desire to ‘cooperate’ and consider ‘the benefits to the community’ in what we do. He quotes Amartya Sen who wrote (page 565): ‘Taking universal selfishness as read may well be delusional, but to turn it into a standard for rationality is utterly absurd.’

He first quotes (page 566) Milton Friedman’s purblind declaration that any other policy for corporate officials than maximising the dividends of stockholders would ‘undermine the very foundations of our free society.’ The word ‘free’ there is of course doubly ironic: those who pay the true price of our society are anything but free. Then he follows up with Frans de Waal’s damning analysis: ‘Every advanced nation has had major business scandals [over the last 10 years] and in every case executives have managed to shake the foundations of our society precisely by following Friedman’s advice.’

He argues the evidence strongly suggests that the kind of regulation libertarians fear is conducive to economic growth (page 571). Their fantasy of a ‘free market economy,’ far from being stable, leads to global crashes. He quotes the research of Thomas Picketty, which demonstrates that, even in-between crashes, none of the wealth realised by the elite trickles down to the less well off (page 572). And the unkindest cut of all came with 2008 crisis: bankers walked off with bonuses while others, lower down this disgraceful pecking order, lost their homes and/or their jobs (page 573). It is not without significance that, between 1998 and 2008, the financial sector spent 5 billion dollars lobbying politicians in the States (page 574).

Having painted a dark picture of the way our system has worked up till now – and believe me I have only picked out a tiny number of his main points in this summary – he moves onto possible solutions.

First of all, using the address of the economics professor, Dennis Snower, to the Global Economics Symposium in 2012, he homes in on (page 578) our need to take proper account of two issues.

One is ‘collective/public goods:’ these include democratic freedoms, the state of the environment, and natural resources.

The other is ‘poverty in the midst of plenty.’

There are major obstacles to addressing this effectively and Ricard is not blind to them (page 580):

. . . . . in a world where politicians aim only to be elected or re-elected, where financial interest groups wield a disproportionate influence on policy makers, where the well-being of future generations is often ignored since their representatives do not have a seat at the negotiating table, where governments pursue national economic policies that are to the detriment of the global interest, decision-makers have barely any inclination to create institutions whose goal would be to encourage citizens to contribute to collective wealth, which would serve to eradicate poverty.

Snower contends, and Ricard agrees with him and so do I, that reason alone will never get us beyond this point (page 581):

. . . . no one has been able to show that reason alone, without the help of some prosocial motivation, is enough to persuade individuals to widen their sphere of responsibility to include all those who are affected by their actions.

We have been here before of course on this blog, in the consideration of Jeremy Rifkin’s solution to a similar dilemma. In his book The Empathic Civilisation, because he does not accept that there is a God of any kind and contends that theology is suspect, he chose what he calls ‘biosphere consciousness’ as the motivating factor (page 432):

A globalising world is creating a new cosmopolitan, one whose multiple identities and affiliations spend the planet. Cosmopolitans are the early advance party, if you will, of a fledgling biosphere consciousness. . . .

For not dissimilar reasons perhaps in terms of persuading his readers, and obviously because he is a Buddhist, in his book Ricard chooses to advocate altruism (ibid):

Combined with the voice of reason, the voice of care can fundamentally change our will to contribute to collective goods. Such ideas echo the Buddhist teachings on uniting wisdom and compassion: without wisdom, compassion can be blind without compassion, wisdom becomes sterile.

He goes on to argue for (page 583) an ‘economics of reciprocity,’ and quotes various examples, such as the Mondragon Corporation (pages 584-86) where ‘the members of the cooperative (on average 80%-85% of the total number of workers at each company) collectively own and manage the company.’ The best paid earn only six times more than the lowest paid compared to the 400 times more in some American companies. The founding of the company dates back to 1956, and it is still going strong.

Ricard also discusses the value of ‘socially responsible investing’ (SRI). He does not see such approaches as flawless, explaining (page 593) that some such investors, while avoiding tobacco and armaments, will still put our money into oil, gas or pharmaceuticals. He argues for developing this further (page 594) into ‘positive economy stock exchanges,’ and feels progress in this direction is being made by such ventures as the Social Stock Exchange in London, which finally opened in 2103.

The Individual

We live in an economy (page 606) which, to quote Victor Lebrow, ‘needs things consumed, burned, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate. Tim Kasser’s research has demonstrated that consumerism reduces life satisfaction and habitual materialists (page 607) lack compassion, are exploitative of others and often lack close friends.

A particularly interesting set of findings that Ricard quotes, given the importance attached to trustworthiness in the Bahá’í Faith, concerns Denmark, where levels of satisfaction with living conditions is high (page 611):

It is not one of the world’s wealthiest countries, but there is very little poverty and inequality. [The high level of reported satisfaction] can be explained, among other things, by the high level of trust that people feel towards each other, including toward strangers and institutions: people’s natural instinct is to think that a stranger is kind. This trust goes hand-in-hand with a very low level of corruption.

Ricard raises the issue of ‘altruism for the sake of future generations.’ If we accept the reality of climate change, as most of us now do, our behaviour will unarguably affect our descendants for the worse if we do not change it. However, there are interesting dynamics at work here, rather similar to the one I have explored already in terms of prejudice.

South African Miner (for source of image see link)

When I was studying psychology for the first time in the 1970s I came across the work of Thomas Pettigrew, which is still referred to even now. It illustrates nicely the exact nature of the problem Ricard says we are still facing in terms of responding to climate change.

To put one set of his findings very simply, whether you were a miner in segregated West Virginia or apartheid South Africa, the culture around you differed depending on whether you were above ground or below it. Below ground discrimination was potentially dangerous so the culture there frowned on it: above ground the culture was discriminatory. What was particularly interesting to me was that 20% of people discriminated all the time regardless of the culture and 20% refused to do so at all ever: 60% of people shifted from desegregation below ground to segregation above it (the percentages are approximate: the pattern is accurate).

Ricard quotes the research of Kurzban and Houser (page 631-32). They conclude from their research that:

20% of people are altruists who bear the fortunes of future generations in mind and are disposed to altering their ways of consumption to avoid destroying the environment. . . . . .

[However], around 60% of people follow prevailing trends and opinion leaders, something that highlights the power of the herd instinct in humans. These ‘followers’ are also ‘conditional cooperators:’ they are ready to contribute to the public good on the condition that everyone else does likewise.

The final 20% are not at all inclined to cooperate and want more than anything to take advantage of all the opportunities available to them. They are not opposed to other people’s happiness in principle, but it is not their business.

This clearly indicates that reaching the tipping point, where most people have widened out their unempathic tunnel vision to embrace the whole of humanity and future generations in a wide-angled embrace, is some way off still. He goes on to outline the many practical steps that lie within our reach, such as recycling more of our waste metals and moving to hydrogen powered cars. Enough of us have to want to bring those steps into reality before change will occur at a fast enough rate.

And that issue will be the focus of next Monday’s post.

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Book Review – ‘Living in a Mindful Universe’ (3/7): the need for co-ordinated action (a)

Given that the post on 13 November makes reference to Eben Alexander’s near-death-experience I thought it might be helpful to republish this sequence albeit slightly soon. 

Alexander and Newell are using words to describe the ineffable, so not everyone would sign up to every detail, but their basic sense of the transcendent is essential as a motivating perspective to give us the necessary level of sustained conviction to put aside our differences and undertake the challenging task of building a better world. It’s true that they have used their website to share valuable ways to help us raise our level of consciousness. Is that enough though?

This a truly important issue, and I feel it is one we may need to explore together at some length. I sense that this first attempt may already be too long!

As an introvert, part of me would like to believe I can just step back from the world and pursue my spiritual journey quietly, interacting with just a few like-minded souls. As I noted on my blog somewhere, when I was working with a Jungian therapist he jokingly shared his perception that on my grave would be carved the words, ‘He died with his options open,’ so reluctant was I at that point to commit to any cause or to join any movement.

I still do not vote, except in Bahá’í elections. The political and economic system is, in my view, broken. I’ve explored this at some length at various times on my blog (for example see link).

Culture of Contest

Our habitual acceptance of competition and profit as natural blinds us to the problematic nature of our culture. Our ‘culture of contest,’ to borrow Michael Karlberg’s evocative phrase, is a broken model that: (a) prevents the truth being discovered and justice reliably being achieved in court rooms where the whole point in most Western countries is for two opposing teams to wrangle until one wins, (b) thwarts equity as well as increasing inequality in the economic sphere, where the prize of increasing wealth goes to the most effective competitor rather than the most worthy one, and (c) obstructs wise decision-making in the political sphere because the main point is to defeat one’s opponents in elections and remain in power for as long as possible.

To use present day party politics and the economic model as the two most relevant examples, we can see first of all that a competitive model doesn’t do a lot to widen the moral imaginations of its participants in the political sphere. Karlberg presents the weaknesses of this system clearly:[1]

As Held points out:

“Parties may aim to realise a programme of ‘ideal’ political principles, but unless their activities are based on systematic strategies for achieving electoral success they will be doomed to insignificance. Accordingly, parties become transformed, above all else, into means for fighting and winning elections.”

. . . . Once political leadership and control is determined through these adversarial contests, processes of public decision-making are also structured in an adversarial manner.

. . . .Western-liberal apologists defend this competitive system of electioneering, debate, lobbying and so forth as the rational alternative to political violence and war. Based on this commonsense premise, we structure our political systems as nonviolent contests, even though most people recognise that these contests tend to favour more powerful social groups. . . . . [T]his premise embodies a false choice that arises when the concept of democracy is conflated with the concept of partisanship. . . . . [W]e lose sight of a third alternative – non-partisan democracy – that might be more desirable.

Recent events illustrate how competitive divides corrode relationships even within the same political party.

In terms of economics, Karlberg argues the same deficiencies appear in a different guise, and in fact we ignore the fundamental principle of moral restraint on markets cited by one of the founding father’s of economic thinking, Adam Smith:[2]

Since western-liberal societies have largely neglected Smith’s call for moral self regulation, yet accepted Smith’s warnings about state regulation, they have been left with a culture of virtually unrestrained market competition. Indeed, competition has become the pre-eminent value of a deeply materialistic age. And in the absence of external and internal market regulation, its culture of competition – or culture of contest – has led to widespread social conflict and ecologically degradation.

He goes on to describe these as the causes of (1) extremes of economic inequality, driven by the capitalist’s ‘attempt to extract the maximum surplus value from the labour force that is the primary source of their wealth,’ (2) rivalries between nations, and (3) a ‘relative absence of both external state regulation and internal moral regulation’ resulting in ‘unprecedented conflict between our own species and most other species on the planet.’

Interestingly, a more recent read was singing from a similar hymn sheet. Daniel Pick, in his book Brainwashed: a new history of thought control, picks up on an idea of Hannah Arendt’s:[3]

By politics she meant a process whereby a people, in their plurality, come together to engage with each peaceably, to look at real problems, debating trying to determine collectively what is needed; to consider matters in a properly inclusive and deliberative fashion.

He goes on to say, ‘[a] society, she suggested, needs to be engaged in a common conversation across all the differences.’

He summarises her position by saying, ‘In short, we need to struggle for the creation, or in some instances the restoration, of conditions that enable us better to engage with each other as people, with requisite information, and to think in company with others about our futures, to compare notes on harms and on remedies, with less role for money and the banishment of corrupt corporate lobbyists in that process . . .’

Sadly, opting out does not provide an effective response, but something else is needed as well if we are to effectively engage in this sort of demanding process.

Drawing on Spiritual Powers

The Bahá’í position declares that it is necessary to draw upon both material and spiritual powers (Social Action):

An exploration of the nature of social action, undertaken from a Bahá’í perspective, must necessarily place it in the broad context of the advancement of civilization. That a global civilization which is both materially and spiritually prosperous represents the next stage of a millennia-long process of social evolution provides a conception of history that endows every instance of social action with a particular purpose: to foster true prosperity, with its spiritual and material dimensions, among the diverse inhabitants of the planet. A concept of vital relevance, then, is the imperative to achieve a dynamic coherence between the practical and spiritual requirements of life.

This same document unpacks the exact implications of that very clearly indeed:

When the material and spiritual dimensions of the life of a community are kept in mind and due attention is given to both scientific and spiritual knowledge, the tendency to reduce development to the mere consumption of goods and services and the naive use of technological packages is avoided. Scientific knowledge, to take but one simple example, helps the members of a community to analyse the physical and social implications of a given technological proposal—say, its environmental impact—and spiritual insight gives rise to moral imperatives that uphold social harmony and that ensure technology serves the common good. Together, these two sources of knowledge tap roots of motivation in individuals and communities, so essential in breaking free from the shelter of passivity, and enable them to uncover the traps of consumerism.

From a Bahá’í point of view, it is from the fusion of both material and spiritual powers that the necessary understanding and motivation derive.

The Bahá’í perspective shares Matthieu Ricard’s awareness, expressed in his book Altruism, of the need to link the local through the national to the global (Social Action):

No matter how essential, a process of learning at the local level will remain limited in its effectiveness if it is not connected to a global process concerned with the material and spiritual prosperity of humanity as a whole. Structures are required, then, at all levels, from the local to the international, to facilitate learning about development.

Cultural Creatives

My sequence on what Ray and Andersen in their book The Cultural Creatives try to convey goes some way to explaining why. They discuss their sense of the exact nature of the cultural change we are all experiencing but from the point of view of the Cultural Creatives:[4]  

This group, who constitute 25% of the population of America (i.e. about 50 million people), feel we are in a period of transition. The authors call it the Between.

The Between is the time between worldviews, values and ways of life; a time between stories. The transition period, [John] Naisbitt concluded, “is a great and yeasty time, filled with opportunity.” But it is so, he added, only on two critical conditions: if we can “make uncertainty our friend,” and “if we can only get a clear sense, a clear conception, a clear vision of the road ahead.”

Ray and Anderson[5] are cautious and see this period as a ‘dangerous tipping point.’ They describe the position of Cultural Creatives[6] as seeing ‘an antique system that is noisily, chaotically shaking itself to pieces.’

This is not all negative:[7]

. . . this era is at least as much about cultural innovation as it is about decline and decay of established forms.

Ray and Anderson, in terms of interdependence, quote Mary Ford:[8]

You have to have a definition of self that’s bigger than [society’s] definitions, that’s grounded in how connected we all are to each other.

And this needs to lead to coordinated action, something which I feel plugs a hole in Alexander and Newell’s nonetheless impressive boat. The skilled marketing they do on their Sacred Acoustics site does not go far enough.

The how of mobilizing effective coordinated action is, of course, easier said than done, and we’ll be looking at that in more detail in the next post.

References:

[1]. Beyond the Culture of Contest – pages 44-46.

[2]. Op. cit. – page 38-42.

[3]. Brainwashed — pages 270-73.

[4]. Cultural Creatives – page 235.

[5]. Op. cit. – page 236.

[6]. Op. cit – page 40.

[7]. Op. cit. – page 33.

[8]. Op. cit. – page 21.

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Book Review – ‘Living in a Mindful Universe’ (2/7): the concept of the Universal Mind

Universal Mind

‘Abdu’l-Bahá

Given that the post on 13 November makes reference to Eben Alexander’s near-death-experience I thought it might be helpful to republish this sequence albeit slightly soon. 

The Bahá’í Writings refer to the ‘universal mind’ as when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá responds to a woman’s letter advising her ‘to forget this world of possession, become wholly heavenly, become embodied spirit and attain to universal mind. This arena is vast and unlimited . . . .’ Jung uses the term ‘collective unconscious’ and Yeats refers to the Anima Mundi.

Both Mishlove, my bridging text, and Alexander and Newell, my main focus, discuss what seems to be essentially the same concept at some length. In fact, Mishlove uses exactly the same expression as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:[1]

This higher law concerns consciousness, mind, or spirit in the universe – independent of the brain. Different cultures… all share a common thread, ‘the phenomenal worlds [including the brain] owe their existence to universal mind.’

He goes on to clarify that this idea is a core part of metaphysical idealism, something we’ll be coming back to soon.

The one thing any of us can be sure of is ‘I think, therefore I am.’ As Mishlove puts it:[2]

We each have direct knowledge of mind. Nothing is more immediate and intimate. We lack direct access to anything else but mind. . . . Max Planck . . . famously said: ‘I regard consciousness as a fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. Everything we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

In his search for what he regards is the most economical explanation of reality, satisfying the demands of Occam’s razor, he explains:

.  . . Idealism, the position the universe is essentially mindlike, satisfies the requirement in the metaphysical domain.

And goes on to conclude[3] ‘Metaphysical idealism is the most logically consistent position as it eliminates the problems of both materialism and dualism. . . .’ quoting Kastrup as defining metaphysical idealism to mean ‘reality is mindlike.’

Eben Alexander

There are other routes to the same conclusion, in the case of Alexander an experiential rather than purely philosophical one. He feels his NDE was an incontrovertible disproof of the sceptical dogma that there is no spiritual dimension to reality:[4]

What I’ve experienced – and what has been experienced by millions of other people who have had NDEs and other spiritually transformative experiences – is the black swan we didn’t know to look for.

He very much feels it points towards the conscious nature of the reality that surrounds us (my emphasis):[5]

During my coma journey, I experienced this same sense of oneness with the universe as a completely unified self-awareness of all that is – a truly mindful universe. Edgar’s intuition that science and spirituality greatly strengthen each other, that their natural synthesis is an inevitable aspect of human history, is one that I share deeply.

He evokes physics as doing the same:[6]

The physics community has only become more befuddled by recent experimental results suggesting that there is no objective external reality and that consciousness (the observer) is at the very core of all emergent reality.

What we experience is captured by the Vedic word maya, in his view,[7] which is not suggesting the world is ‘not real’ but what we experience of it is rather an ‘illusion’ or as I tend to express it, a ‘simulation’. It’s not what it seems. Reality therefore, for him,[8] is best explained by seeing it in the way Idealism does as ‘fundamentally a form of thought in which the human mind participates.’ Which brings him back to the physics again in order to emphasise our interconnectedness, also one of my mantra:[9]

In metaphysical idealism, as also in quantum physics, all of the universe is deeply interconnected: any separation of a part from the whole in our thinking leads to distortion and confusion.

It should be no surprise, then, to find where this now takes him, and me along with him:[10] ‘This view considers our conscious awareness to originate in the Collective Mind, which comprises all sentient consciousness throughout the universe.’ He goes even further to speculate that this might be part of the reason we have a universe at all:[11] the ‘grander evolution of consciousness is the reason the entire universe exists.’

Importance of the Heart to our Connectedness

Readers of this blog will be aware of just how important the idea of the heart is to my understanding of my own nature. On the one hand I wrestled after starting to tread the Bahá’í path, with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s explanation of the nature of the mind, but also on the other with Bahá’u’lláh’s use of the expression ‘understanding heart’, which He stressed in many places was the key to grasping what He was trying to convey in His Writings.

So, no one should be surprised that I resonated strongly when Alexander quotes Thomas Merton[12] as describing ‘centring prayer’ as a ‘return to the heart, finding one’s deepest centre, awakening the profound depths of our being.’ At the same time Alexander emphasises the crucial importance of connectedness:[13]

We are spiritual beings living in a spiritual universe. Fundamentally, this spirituality means we are all interconnected through the Collective Mind.

Moreover, the heart is central to a fuller realisation of this truth:[14]

Maintaining awareness of the heart and an appreciative state of mind while listening to another person often results in improved clarity and increased awareness of more nonverbal aspects of what is being communicated.

Reducing the Filter

Interestingly, and this was a new insight for me, Alexander links such heightened sensitivity paradoxically to a reduction in brain activity. For starters he writes:[15]

Like the flow state, lessening the information-processing of the brain might allow the filtering function to diminish, allowing me more complete contact with the Collective Mind across the veil and setting my awareness free.

Furthermore:[16]

When one accepts that the physical brain does not create mind but serves to allow in universal consciousness, “going within” is actually the means of “going out” to know more of the universe.

This resonates strongly for me with so many quotations from mystical perspectives. There are these lines from a poem of Ali, the Successor to Muhammad: ‘How dost thou reckon thyself only a puny form/When within thee the universe is folded?’ Bahá’u’lláh writes:[17] ‘Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting.’

Other Key Ideas

More resonances were to follow when Alexander closes in on ideas echoing disidentification and reflection, something I have explored many times on this blog:[18]

Once . . . . you realise there is a part of you that is separate from your thoughts – that is the key. It does not analyse, it’s simply observes. This is the first means to finding that larger part of you that exists beyond the physical world

The related idea of interconnectedness follows close on its heels:[19]

Rather than being separate individuals competing for resources, driven by the concerns of the ego, we are part of a larger whole, connected to each other in ways that bring meaning and purpose to our lives. . . .Our observed reality exists as the stage setting on which we learn ongoing lessons.

The idea of observed reality as a classroom maps onto the concept of the world as a womb of the soul in which we prepare ourselves for entry into next world beyond death.

He nails this exactly when he writes: ‘A useful approach is to consider our collective earthly existence as time spent in ’soul school.’

I laughed out loud when he torpedoed a key tenet of materialism in the plainest language possible:[20]  ‘No one gets out of here dead – there is ultimately no escape from the continuum of conscious awareness.’

Ultimately, he argues:[21]

. . . conscious awareness is the very same force at the core of all existence. Such oneness and dissolution of the sense of self, and complete identity with all of life and the source of all that is, is the pathway toward truth.

Love is the ground of being:[22]

Based on thousands of reported cases of those who have glimpsed more fully the workings of reality through NDEs and other mystical experiences, that informational substrate underlying our universe appears to be made of profound unconditional love.

We are all able to develop the capacity to connect, if we are prepared to make the effort:[23]

Truly, we all have the capacity to explore the vast well of consciousness that lies within and through us, and within and through the network of souls within which we are in a hidden but eternal pattern of connection.

Collective Responsibility

It is a journey we need to undertake together:[24]

We are all part of a vast and creative consciousness, and the evolution of all of consciousness throughout the cosmos is nothing more than the individual journey of sentient beings in coming to understand their own role in this co-creative endeavour.

We are, he feels, at a crucial tipping point:[25]

While my collective understanding is still evolving, I believe we are on the verge of the greatest revolution in human thought in all of recorded history, a true synthesis of science and spirituality.

From a Bahá’í point of view, this will not be a smooth and bland transition, as current events in the world powerfully illustrate. Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, wrote:[26]

A tempest, unprecedented in its violence, unpredictable in its course, catastrophic in its immediate effects, unimaginably glorious in its ultimate consequences, is at present sweeping the face of the earth. Its driving power is remorselessly gaining in range and momentum. Its cleansing force, however much undetected, is increasing with every passing day. Humanity, gripped in the clutches of its devastating power, is smitten by the evidences of its resistless fury. It can neither perceive its origin, nor probe its significance, nor discern its outcome. Bewildered, agonized and helpless, it watches this great and mighty wind of God invading the remotest and fairest regions of the earth, rocking its foundations, deranging its equilibrium, sundering its nations, disrupting the homes of its peoples, wasting its cities, driving into exile its kings, pulling down its bulwarks, uprooting its institutions, dimming its light, and harrowing up the souls of its inhabitants.

He compares this stage in the development of our civilisation to adolescence:[27]

The long ages of infancy and childhood, through which the human race had to pass, have receded into the background. Humanity is now experiencing the commotions invariably associated with the most turbulent stage of its evolution, the stage of adolescence, when the impetuosity of youth and its vehemence reach their climax, and must gradually be superseded by the calmness, the wisdom, and the maturity that characterize the stage of manhood.

A Motivating Force

To meet these challenges Matthieu Ricard argues that we must move[28] from ‘community engagement to global responsibility.’ To do this it is necessary ‘to realise that all things are interdependent, and to assimilate that world view in such a way that it influences our every action.’ He sees altruism as the key to this transition.

Jeremy Rifkin, as I quoted in the earlier sequence, acknowledges a possible deficit in the motivating forces of empathy that he is attempting to describe. He is aware of a potential void in the credibility of his position but has to locate motivating awe elsewhere than in the transcendent he refuses to acknowledge so chooses our connection nature and the planet instead:[29]

Empathic consciousness starts with awe. When we empathise with another, we are bearing witness to the strange incredible life force that is in us and that connects us with all other living beings. Empathy is, after all, the feeling of deep reverence we have for the nebulous term we call existence.

The Universal House of Justice brings in the transcendent when it states:[30]

Shoghi Effendi describes this process of world unification as the “Major Plan” of God, whose operation will continue, gathering force and momentum, until the human race has been united in a global society that has banished war and taken charge of its collective destiny. What the struggles of the twentieth century achieved was the fundamental change of direction the Divine purpose required. The change is irreversible. There is no way back to an earlier state of affairs, however greatly some elements of society may, from time to time, be tempted to seek one.

The essential motivating components potentially provided by the spiritual insights described by Alexander and Newell, powerful as they undoubtedly are, are, even so, simply not enough to move us past this tipping constructively. For this revolution to yield its most important fruits one more crucial thing needs to be added into the mix.

More on that next time.

References

[1]. Beyond the Brain:
the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death – page 14.

[2]. Op. cit. – page 82.

[3]. Op. cit. – page 83.

[4]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 84.

[5]. Op. cit. – page 110.

[6]. Op. cit. – page 135.

[7]. Op. cit. – page 160.

[8]. Op. cit. – page 178.

[9]. Op. cit. – page 181.

[10]. Op. cit. – page 186.

[11]. Op. cit. – page 207.

[12]. Op. cit. – page 260.

[13]. Op. cit. – page 289.

[14]. Op. cit. – page 320.

[15]. Op. cit. – page 333.

[16]. Op. cit. – page 426.

[17]. Arabic Hidden Words – 13.

[18]. Living in a Mindful Universe – pages 437-38.

[19]. Op. cit. – page 477.

[20]. Op. cit. – page 540.

[21]. Op. cit. – page 599.

[22]. Op. cit. – page 598.

[23]. Op. cit. – page 632.

[24]. Op. cit. – page 633.

[25]. Op. cit. – page 641.

[26]. Shoghi Effendi The Promised Day is Come (Wilmette: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1996) – page 1. 
Quoted by the Universal House of Justice in Century of Light – page 2.

[27]. Shoghi Effendi The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh, page 202. Quoted by the Universal House of Justice in Century of Light 
pages 50-51.

[28]. Altruism – page 682.

[29]. The Empathic Civilisation – page 170.

[30]. Century of Light – page 138.

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