Veils, Words & Values (3/5): competing needs

O My servants! Be as resigned and submissive as the earth, that from the soil of your being there may blossom the fragrant, the holy and multicolored hyacinths of My knowledge. Be ablaze as the fire, that ye may burn away the veils of heedlessness and set aglow, through the quickening energies of the love of God, the chilled and wayward heart. Be light and untrammeled as the breeze, that ye may obtain admittance into the precincts of My court, My inviolable Sanctuary.

Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá-u-lláh — CLII

Authenticity

When I was confronting my challenges in the 1992 diary entry I quoted in the first post of this sequence, I asked myself ‘How am I to break this vicious circle? Do I risk losing the social ties and work I value? That’s what scares and deters me, stands between me and myself.’

I went on to explore this more deeply:

.  . . . My background programmed me to believe that the cost of being ‘myself’ in the face of disapproval would be some kind of ‘death’ or absolute loss. But is this true? Is it too late to turn this round and refuse to be self-traitor any longer? Can I not find the means to reflect and write within my various roles? . . . To do so I must dare to introduce my differences into my relationships rather than sinking them beyond recovery in a swamp of self-deception.

That scares me. It will also be extremely hard work. There will be no comfortable easy rides. Confrontations, the idea of which shrivels me up inside, will be frequent. I will have to discover my true response in positions where that will be dangerous. I have so far attributed my survival and ‘success’ to my evasion of all such situations. My roles seem to require a dedication to the kind of facts with which the world typically stones to death the metaphors and myths poetry values and relies on.

It’s perhaps worth clarifying that at this point I really didn’t know about the language of the heart and its importance. All I seemed to know was that ‘My life and sanity seem to depend on my finding a workable and sustainable solution.’

I was gifted my Hearth Dream in 1993, triggered by the quotation at the head of this post, and it seems clear now that it started me on my long road out of this impasse. What I didn’t even begin to realise in 1993 was that this priceless source of innumerable insights almost certainly came from my literal heart, and not just ‘heart’ in some metaphorical sense. That clinching insight, as readers of this blog will know by now, came decades later.

There were various other complicating factors at work during this challenging period, above and beyond the role strain and conflicting values. My introversion had been a long-standing contributor to my stress, as previous posts have explored in more detail. What I was probably not factoring in was something that was only clearly explained in a recent book. Adam Robarts in his moving exploration of how he and his wife coped with the premature death of their son touches on a theme which resonated strongly with me and concerned ‘authenticity,’ something that seemed a core quality deeply embedded in his son, Haydn’s, being.

He quotes research published in Scientific American by Jennifer Beer:[1]

Beer notes, “Authentic people behave in line with their unique values and qualities even if those idiosyncrasies may conflict with social conventions or other external influences. For example, introverted people are being authentic when they are quiet at a dinner party even if social convention dictates that guests should generate conversation.” The distinctive twist, however, is that “a number of studies have shown that people’s feelings of authenticity are often shaped by something other than their loyalty to their unique qualities. Paradoxically, feelings of authenticity seem to be related to a kind of social conformity.” Specifically, she notes that such conformity is usually applied to a particular set of socially approved qualities, such as being extroverted, emotionally stable, conscientious, intellectual, and agreeable.

I have grappled since my teenage years with the issue of reconciling my introverted temperament with the need to operate effectively in the social world. I still remember my decision in my mid-teens to fake sociability in order to get on in the world.

The insights Robarts quotes helped me see how the confusion of extraversion with authenticity had made authenticity difficult for me as an introvert.

A relevant Socratic question might be how do I square the value I attach to connectedness with my deep desire for so much solitude? The acting on the latter leaves me feeling guilty while acting on the former creates frustration and drains energy. I am therefore rarely content.

Competing Needs

Grounded in my values, there are competing needs within me, for connection on the one hand and for solitude on the other. The problem is I feel authentic when alone, which can trigger a need to withdraw from company: when alone, though, I feel guilty for neglecting people who value my company, even though I often feel inauthentic when I’m with them.

There is apparently therefore no escaping my need for solitary time most days and usually I can scrape enough of that together. What I consistently fail to do most of the time with most people is to be true to my real self (not my ego but my heart). Part of the reason for this is my sense that who I really am in certain respects would not fit well with “present company” – I might easily upset or anger someone. I’m not so bothered about angering others because, for example, my views or tastes differ, but I hate upsetting or offending anyone.

I have not so far been able to find any way out of this cage. This contributes to a sense of distance from or loneliness with others that feeds my need for the quietness of solitude.

I wonder whether the distinction made by Eliot in his poem, Burnt Norton, which Lyndall Gordon discusses, is a clue:[2]

. . . the end of March, then, was [Hale’s]’s first opportunity to take in the [Eliot’s] detachment from human love. It was certain to shake her trust that this was ‘our’ poem.

Next to the line ‘darkness to purify the soul’, Eliot gives Hale a clue in ink: ‘The Ascent of Mt Carmel’. And next to the passage beginning ‘Descend lower’, he writes, again in ink, ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’. The 16^th century treatises by the Spanish monk St John of the Cross preached a solitary discipline: to divest oneself of natural human affections so as to arrive at the love of God.

His poem’s swing from human love does not deny the validity of the rose-garden moment [they had shared together]. The rationale is that the ‘way up’ in the rose-garden and the ‘way down’ of the saint coexist, as in the epigraph from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus: ‘The way up and the way down are the same’. These are alternative routes across the frontier of the timeless, and the poem does not lose sight of the route via natural love.

. . . So, for him to shun human love would have been more than expected; how could it not come as a shock and change her willing surrender to shame and disappointment? The first hint that he will turn away from pleasure comes in an otherwise intimate letter on 6 January when he writes that joy does not lie in the things of this world.

Basically, the theory goes that you can pierce the veils and access the timeless either upwards through connection with others or downwards through solitary introspection. Eliot ended up opting for the latter. I am torn between the two: the first seems an inescapable obligation, the latter an inexcusable indulgence. Pursuing either causes conflict and/or a sense of guilt.

My diary entries persistently track other aspects of this, for example, in an entry from Friday 17 June 2022:

Today I have experienced a crucially important epiphany. On the back of a fleeting comment I made recently that Iain McGilchrist, in his recent book ‘The Matter with Things’, was stating that art can serve as bridge between our consciousness and the ineffable aspects of reality, I came to see all too clearly a truth that I have been blind to all these years: art is not just a subordinate domain to science and religion – it is their equal. We need all three if we are to mobilise all parts of our brain to enable our minds to grasp almost any important and complex truth more completely in all its aspects. One of these domains is in itself not enough for most of us, at least.

This realisation almost immediately created the acronym S.T.A.R. in my mind — a peak experience, in its way; certainly a lightbulb moment. If I am to provide true C.A.R.E [my acronym for consultation, action, reflection and experience] I must resolutely follow my S.T.A.R. It’s only taken me 79 years to realise this. In fact, only to by taking CARE and following my STAR will I really be able to achieve anything remotely close to my life’s purpose.

Star and Care

This moved me onto to a critical question:

Have I really at last reached a proper understanding of what I should be doing with the rest of my life — a question that’s been bugging me for ages?

After years of sometimes invisible struggle, I clearly thought I was coming close to ripping off a few of the veils obscuring my inner vision.

This is such a revelation. I can’t quite capture all its many meanings. This not only explains my mysterious and compelling sense of quest, a desperate search for elusive meaning — something that has driven me ever since my wakeup call in the mid-70s. It also gives me a far better sense of where and how I should be focusing my energy and attention. . . .

I think a lot more energy than I was aware of was struggling to bring this crucial insight to the surface of my mind through miles of labyrinthine potholes and passageways. CARE is largely ‘How?’ and STAR is largely ‘Why?’ and ‘What?’

Of course, I had to bring my bête noire of reductionism into the mix:

Any form of reductionism or potentially toxic over-simplification is to be avoided at all costs in all three domains. A destructive ‘science’, ‘art’ or ‘religion’ is neither art, science nor religion. I think with this model, if I am immersing myself in any kind of genuine manifestation of any one of those three domains, there is no need to feel guilty, or slag myself off for betraying the other two and wasting my time.

I must keep all three in balance though.  Different people will privilege different domains at different times and in different places: what is critical is that destructive dogmatism and fanaticism be avoided at all costs and ideally everyone should be open to information and experiences from all three domains, or risk descending into illusion at best or dangerous delusion at worst. If I hear anyone disparaging any of these domains as pointless I’ll know not to trust a word they say.

For me a more difficult task than avoiding reductionism, is keeping the three domains in balance.

I know I am not a polymath, but I really do need to keep all three in balance. Choosing psychology swung me away from the arts but the fire-in-the-car-engine dream helped me redress that imbalance. My conversion to the Bahá’í Faith derailed the arts again in favour of religion. The Writings talk so much about the harmony of religion and science as paths towards the truth, that even though they praise the role of the arts in expressing spirituality I failed to see that there is more to the arts than that.

I think these insights might help me shed the burden of guilt that has dispirited me so long and prevented my enjoying and learning from literature, painting and song in the way I used to. Maybe I again got too close to the position Iain McGilchrist reminds us that Darwin found himself in:

He draws from Charles Darwin’s Autobiography which speaks of the great pleasure he derived as a young man from poetry, music and art, something now almost completely lost to him:[3]

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts . . . And if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through the use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

I am determined to do everything I can not to make that same mistake again.

. . . Basically, I think I have come to a firm realisation that my path entails using an exploration of the arts, social sciences and spirituality to help me enhance my understanding of reality and ease my own existential pain as well as lift the understanding and ease the pain of others.

Recent reading, which I will touch on in the next post, suggests I need to keep my focus on arts and sciences that explore spirituality in some way, however indirectly. My recent heart insights showed me that, as all three in their highest form are valuable paths towards what is ultimately the same truth, my sense of their being in conflict was a completely misplaced veil blocking my ability to jettison my disabling guilt about following any of them at the imagined expense of the others.

Also, I wrote that I had been ruminating so long on what I was interested in — science, art, consciousness, spirituality etc. — without really looking at how to enact that (except in my blog). That was not enough. I need to use every interaction, every solitary action, to authentically express my deepest self in as constructive a way as possible, regardless of the criticism, and possible contempt it might trigger.

I am trying to hold on to these words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, translated from the Arabic:

Let the loved ones of God, whether young or old, whether male or female, each according to his capabilities, bestir themselves and spare no efforts to acquire the various current branches of knowledge, both spiritual and secular, and of the arts.

More on all this next time.

Explained at this link

References

[1]. Nineteen – page 36.
[2]. The Hyacinth Girl – pages 227-229.
[3]. The Matter with Things – page 619.

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The Star of Truth (2/2): Why It Matters So Much

Given that I justified republishing the sequence on Mapping Consciousness by stating that art, as well as science and religion, has a role to play in understanding consciousness, it seemed only right to republish this short sequence which goes some way to explaining why I feel that to be the case.

Last time I explored a new realisation. On the back of a fleeting comment I made, in a recent conversation, that Iain McGilchrist, in his recent book The Matter with Things, was stating that art can serve as bridge between our consciousness and the ineffable aspects of reality, I came to see all too clearly a truth that I have been blind to all these years: art is not just a meaningful but subordinate domain to science and religion – it is of equal importance. We need all three if we are to mobilise all parts of our brain to enable our minds to grasp almost any important and complex truth more completely in all its aspects. One of these domains is in itself not enough for most of us, at least.

Now I need to try and pin why that insight is so important.

Why It Matters So Much to Me

Not everyone will jeopardise the balance I am about to describe by piling all the eggs of understanding into one basket, though there is an unhealthy drive in our culture towards specialization, as McGilchrist points out in The Matter with Things, and a contempt for what seems like a more superficial dilettante approach. While I have probably never gone to that extreme, I have had a tendency to let my enthusiasm for newly discovered lands carry me away for long periods of time.

For example, when I came to realise that my too exclusive focus on literature was motivated by what books taught me about people, and then shifted my attention to focusing on psychology, the same monochrome method induced me to neglect poetry as no longer relevant to my life. Novels, plays and films were acceptable as stories about people though I no longer trusted them to be reliable vehicles of truth. When, later still, psychology and psychotherapy triggered an interest in Buddhism because of its obvious deep understanding of the mind, rooted in centuries of meditation, the resulting blend of spirituality and psychology tended to even ease narrative forms of art out of focus.

Each time I got a dream reminder to recalibrate – first the Dancing Flames dream pointed me back towards poetry and diluted my obsession with psychology, then, after my decision to tread the Bahá’í path had to some degree reversed the correction, my Hearth dream not only reminded me about the value of art but also that of nature too. Both of these dreams are explored in some detail elsewhere on this blog.

Even so, in my conscious mind I still had this prejudicial sense that psychology and spirituality were somehow more trustworthy guides along the path towards truth than the arts, no matter how much (guilty) pleasure I derived especially from poems, songs and paintings.

Now, at last, I seem to have consciously realised that I must keep all three in balance.  Different people will privilege different domains at different times and in different places, as I have tried to illustrate in the three different diagrams fronted by different aspects of the STAR: what is critical is that discounting any of them reduces our ability to draw as close to the truth as we are able and desperately need to. Various forms of destructive dogmatism and fanaticism lurk in the shadows created by these discounts. When science disparages spirituality, for example, as I have explained many times on this blog, the mind gets reduced to the brain. When religion dismisses science we topple into fundamentalism. When either of them closes the door on the rich symbolism and metaphor of the arts, not only do they risk depriving themselves of the language by which their understanding can be more effectively conveyed, but they also impoverish their own ability to tune into aspects of the truths they are discovering. For this reason, not only are there three versions, each with a different domain at the front, but the colours of each domain are not primary colours, as that would suggest they do not overlap as much as they do.

Reductionisms

Such reductionisms must be avoided at all costs and ideally everyone should be open to and seek information and experiences from all three domains, or risk descending into illusion at best, or dangerous delusion at worst. If I hear anyone disparaging any of these domains as pointless, I’ll know not to trust a word they say. It is interesting to note here, as just one example, that metaphor, myth, symbolism, story and allegory, the tools of literature as an art form, are crucially important in Bahá’í and other religious scripture. Without parables where would the gospels be. Physics, confronted by its awareness of the role of consciousness, seems to be leading the sciences towards a more spiritual perspective and a felt need to use more metaphorical language.

Any form of reductionism or potentially toxic over-simplification is to be avoided at all costs in all three domains. The richness of artistic vehicles of understanding and communication can be a strong antidote. A reductionist ‘science’, a materialistic ‘art’ or fundamentalist ‘religion’ is neither art, science nor religion. I think with this model, if I am immersing myself in any kind of genuine manifestation of any one of those three domains, there is no need to feel guilty, or slag myself off for betraying the other two and wasting my time.

Imbalances

Because the Bahá’í Writings talk so much about the harmony of religion and science as paths towards the truth that, even though they praise the role of the arts in expressing spirituality, I failed to see that there is more to the arts than that. This is where my obtuse misunderstanding of the Bahá’í path in this respect did not quite get me to this new level of understanding, and has caused me to limp along more slowly in certain respects than I would have been able to do otherwise.

I think these insights might help me shed the burden of guilt that prevented me from spending more time enjoying and learning from literature, painting and song in the way I used to. Fortunately I haven’t got as close, as in my early days of my immersion in psychology, to the position McGilchrist reminds us that Darwin found himself in:

He draws from Charles Darwin’s Autobiography which speaks of the great pleasure he derived as a young man from poetry, music and art, something now almost completely lost to him (page 619):

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts . . . And if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through the use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

But still slightly too close for comfort.

Basically, I think I have come to a firm realisation that my path entails using an exploration of the arts, social sciences and spirituality, in an effectively balanced way, to help me enhance my understanding of reality and ease my own existential pain as well as lift the understanding and ease the pain of others. I think that has always been my unconscious priority, but my discounting of the arts tended to make my exploration of them feel like a stolen pleasure and reduce the efficacy of my search for deeper meanings both within experience and within the Bahá’í Writings.

Maybe the fact that ‘arts’ and ‘star’ are anagrams might make it easier for me to hold onto this insight now I’ve gained it. The cube below places sciences at the top because that is where our culture sees it as belonging, while religion has been sidelined. My hope is that this post will help redress that imbalance, and also bring the arts closer to the front in this dynamic.

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The Star of Truth (1/2): the light bulb moment

Given that I justified republishing the sequence on Mapping Consciousness by stating that art, as well as science and religion, has a role to play in understanding consciousness, it seemed only right to republish this short sequence which goes some way to explaining why I feel that to be the case.

Today I was planning to begin a sequence about Sylvia Plath as a follow up to my various recent reconsiderations and republished posts on the subject of creativity.

Two things have derailed that plan. One is that progress has been far slower on the Plath posts than I had anticipated. The subject is far more complex than I had initially thought. I’m hoping to be able to get that sequence off the ground the Monday after next instead.

Perhaps more significantly, in terms of setting a more complete context to help convey how important it is to gain a valid perspective on the role of the arts in shaping our experience of reality, in the middle of this month I experienced a crucial light-bulb moment. I’m still struggling to find a way of conveying this clearly. Anyway, here goes with my best attempt so far.

Preparatory Ruminations

For some time I’d been mulling over how best to clarify my priorities as the years are rolling by, and at some unpredictable point in the not-too-distant future I’ll be compelled to vacate the increasingly ramshackle caravan of bones and blood I’ve been travelling in for the last 79 years.

At the turn of the last century, seeking to hold in mind certain key characteristics of desirable collective action within the Bahá’í community, I created an acronym as a mnemonic: C.A.R.E. The initials stood for consultation, action, reflection and experience. As I’ve got older, and my capacity for travel and vigorous social engagement has declined, I’ve come to feel that I can’t sustainably lift my game to that level anymore.

The mnemonic needed revising.

Fairly recently I created a variation that seemed to work better for me now: consultation, altruism, reflection and expression.

I’d changed only two words — one for ‘A’ from ‘action’ to ‘altruism’, and ‘E’ from ‘experience’ to ‘expression,’ but that seemed to make the processes they suggest more manageable. I felt the replacement associations to be more inclusive and empowering, and don’t exclude some aspects of the older ones. Expression is a wider term than ‘action’ and does not exclude writing, one of my favourite habits. It also gets me off the hook of feeling guilty because I am not being enough of a practical activist. Altruism does more work as the letter ‘A’ than action did, and implies both compassion, action and interconnectedness.

The letter ‘C’ for me now probably also is more linked to creativity than consultation but doesn’t exclude it. There’s a lot more baggage attached to that letter for me though as the picture illustrates.

The new associations reinforce the word ‘care’ meaning action, feeling, concern and/or help etc.

Even so, I wasn’t quite sure I’d got the whole package sorted yet.

I was still working on how to operationalise this mnemonic, and struggling to get beyond too vague a sense of what it implied about how I should operate. I couldn’t escape the feeling that it only gave a general sense of how, and possibly what but not why. I was also progressing towards a realisation that staying calm and not getting triggered by frustrating experiences was also important, and that all forms of caring mattered  – none need to be seen as a distraction from my ‘Bahá’í work’ or my other duty-fuelled passion – ‘reading and writing.’ Even taking care over putting out the laundry on the washing line had its place!

The Light Bulb Moment

Then new insights came.

On the back of a fleeting comment I made, in a recent conversation, that Iain McGilchrist, in his recent book The Matter with Things, was stating that art can serve as bridge between our consciousness and the ineffable aspects of reality, I came to see all too clearly a truth that I have been blind to all these years: art is not just a meaningful but subordinate domain to science and religion – it is of equal importance. We need all three if we are to mobilise all parts of our brain to enable our minds to grasp almost any important and complex truth more completely in all its aspects. One of these domains is in itself not enough for most of us, at least.

Upon what was I basing my sense of McGilchrist’s perspective?

In The Matter with Things he makes statements such as,[1] ‘[t]he Beauty and power of art and of myth . . . enables us, just for a while, to contact aspects of reality that we recognise well, but cannot capture in words.’ He’s not arguing that words are completely useless. We would be lost without them, but ‘[t]he work of art exists precisely to get beyond representation, to presence, even if that presence is itself composed of words, as it is in poetry. . . . The work of art… is semi-transparent, translucent: we see it all right, and yet see through it to something beyond.’

Imagination, for him as for Coleridge in the past[2], (my emphasis) ‘far from deceiving us, is the only means whereby we experience reality: it is the place where individual creative consciousness meets the creative cosmos as a whole.’ It goes even further than that, as he explains in a quote from Geoffrey Bateson:[3] ‘mere purposive rationality, . . . unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life.’

Even though, in our age of mechanistic materialism, we disparage art and imagination as well as religion, we are still ‘never without a mythos of a kind. In the absence of the celebration of the timeless mythoi given us through art and religion, we do not avoid espousing myths of our own making, much impoverished though they must inevitably be: nowadays they are those of the Mindless Machine and the Selfish Gene.’

So where exactly does that take me, and why does it matter so much and gets me so excited?

The realisation of art’s equivalent importance almost immediately created the acronym S.T.A.R. in my mind — a peak experience, in its way, because of the uplift in spirits that it generated; certainly a light-bulb moment at the very least. If I am to provide true C.A.R.E., in the sense I have just explained, I must resolutely follow my S.T.A.R. It’s only taken me 79 years to realise this. In fact, only by taking CARE and following my STAR will I really be able to achieve anything remotely close to my life’s true purpose.

As soon as the insight came I tried to capture it in rapidly scribbled notes. I’ve used these as the basis for this post but I’m still not convinced I’ve done it justice.

Have I really at last reached a proper, deeper understanding of what I should be doing with the rest of my life and how and why I should be doing it — questions that have been bugging me for ages?

This is such a revelation. I can’t quite capture all its many meanings. This not only explains my mysterious and compelling sense of quest, a desperate drive to search for elusive meaning — something that has driven me ever since my wakeup call in the mid-70s at the encounter weekend described elsewhere on this blog. It also gives me a far better sense of where and how I should be focusing my energy and attention.

I think a lot more energy than I was aware of was struggling to bring this crucial insight to the surface of my mind through miles of labyrinthine potholes and passageways in my brain, which might account for why I felt so drained on the run in to the realization, and so energized since.

Next time I’ll have a stab at trying to explain why this all matters so much.

References:

[1]. Page 631.
[2]. Page 767.
[3]. Page 636.

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Science, Spirituality and Civilisation (2/4): Oneness of Religion and Science (b)

Religion and science are the two wings upon which man’s intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone! Should a man try to fly with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire of superstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá – Paris Talks – page 143)

In many ways, in Consciousness Unbound, the treatment of this theme is obviously in tune with my thinking and the fundamental Bahá’í belief in the harmony of religion and science.

The authors absolutely accept the evidence that torpedoes materialism. For example, Presti states:[1]

… if one is open and honest about the empirical data, it is clear that what has been and continues to be experienced by a great many individuals over vast expanses of time goes beyond the personal as conceived within our current biophysical model of reality.

There is a catch though, he feels, in terms of a wider acceptance of this position:[2]

. . . for most scientists interested in consciousness, work will continue to be accomplished solely via investigation of neural correlates, and in that lies what I view as a key obstruction in conceptualising the signs of consciousness more expansively.

William James. (For source of Image see link.)

A key thinker of the past is clear this won’t ever work. Presti brings William James’ perspective into the mix:[3]

To expand a science of mind, one must take seriously the occurrence of relevant empirically verifiable phenomena that do not fit within the standard accepted explanatory paradigm – the anomalies.

I love the phrase James created to capture the nature of the evidence scientism ignores:[4]

He referred to the unclassified, perhaps mystical, residuum as “wild facts”.

. . . more study of what James categorised as the wild facts is essential. . . . they are. . . paranormal only by virtue of their being beyond our capacity to explain within our current framework of biophysical science.

It will, however, be tricky to subject such phenomena to systematic examination:[5]

Here we must take what is given by nature, for [the essential ] emotionally evocative circumstances simply cannot be created in the laboratories or other well-controlled settings.

But if science does not find a way to incorporate the study of such phenomena into its methodology it will continue to fall far short of what should be its mission – the investigation of truth rather than the confirmation of delusion. Here’s James again:[6]

 “. . . our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest screens, there are potential forms of consciousness entirely different… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded” (James, 1902, page 388).

We will be looking at the screen or veil effect in more detail when I pick up on the dissociation metaphor in a later post.

It is certainly true that the evidence already gathered by research into the paranormal has, according to Presti, been consistently and unfairly dismissed:[7]

Parapsychological researchers may well be among the best experimentalists in human behavioural science “because they know that they must design more sophisticated, bias-proofed studies than scientists in other fields in order to be believed” (Leary, 2011, page 276). . . . Here is Jessica Utts (2016) in her presidential address to the American statistical association several years ago:

“The data in support of precognition and possibly other related phenomena are quite strong statistically, and would be widely accepted if they pertained to something more mundane. Yet, most scientists reject the possible reality of these abilities without ever looking at the data! . . . I have asked the debunkers if there is any amount of data that could convince them, and they generally have responded by saying, “probably not.” I ask them what original research they have read, and they mostly admit that they haven’t read any! Now there is a definition of pseudoscience – basing conclusions on belief, rather than data!”

None the less the nature of the evidence will probably remain inevitably and perhaps indefinitely problematic to a convinced materialist.

For example, with research on NDEs, attempts to provide an even more rigorous methodology may have failed, not because the NDEs were inauthentic but because the methods adopted were inappropriate to the task. A good example is the idea of placing targets close to the ceiling in the hope that experiencers would spot them. Consultations with a group of NDE experiencers flagged up the problem with this approach very clearly and, in my view, convincingly. Greyson described what happened:[8]

When I discussed [my] research findings at a conference attended by a large number of people who had had NDES, they were astounded at what they considered my naivete in carrying out this study. Why, they argued, would patients whose hearts had just stopped and who were being resuscitated – patients who were stunned by their unexpected separation from their bodies – go looking around the hospital room for a hidden image that has no relevance to them, but that some researcher had designated as the “target”?

This also resonates with what Julie Beischel writes in Leslie Kean’s Surviving Death about mediumship studies:[9]

The analogy I like to use is that a mediumship study in which the environment is not optimised for mediumship to happen is akin to placing a seed on a tabletop and then claiming the seed is a fraud when it doesn’t sprout.

Alexander and Newell are on essentially the same page:[10]

The elaborate process of setting up a scientific assessment of prayer in a controlled setting often strips much of the spiritual energy out of the endeavour.

No matter how important it is that we change our perspective, Presti provides reasons why this may remain a Bechers Brook for science for some time to come:[11]

If the material universe is enfolded with mind, this idea comes very close to home – as close as it possibly could: our consciousness. This is not a distant abstraction, like dark matter, dark energy, and Higgs bosons. The wild facts really matter on a very personal level. They threaten our worldview.…

In a current physicalist worldview, there is no place for a mind that really matters.

Also we need to remember James’s pragmatic sense that, while we may sometimes end up knowing the truth, we will never be able to absolutely prove it. As David Lamberth puts it:[12]

For James, then, there are falsification conditions for any given truth claim, but no absolute verification condition, regardless of how stable the truth claim may be as an experiential function. He writes in The Will to Believe that as an empiricist he believes that we can in fact attain truth, but not that we can know infallibly when we have.’

According to Marshall the consequences of this denial may be more far-reaching than most of us realise:[13]

Unfortunately, the exclusion of qualitative properties and the more advanced felt characteristics of mind – what it is like, for example, to know, understand, feel, imagine, desire, hope, and will – set up a causal and explanatory gap between conscious mind and the world.

Wishful thinking of this kind may seem to pay off:[14]

The hardest of the physicalisms is a kind of eliminativism that wishes away the mind-body problem by dismissing the awkward qualitative properties as nonexistent. No qualitative properties, no mind-body problem.

But the quantitative methods of physicalism make it qualia-blind:[15]

Felt colours, sounds, tastes do not come out of the equations used to model physical processes and so resist satisfactory integration into the program of quantitative science.

This neglect has serious consequences. Rather in the same way as Kripal describes the situation as the ‘materialist metaphysics of modernity’ being ‘our intellectual heart attack’,[16] Presti chooses a different metaphor with similar implications:[17]

There is something to be said for the idea that humanity is at present in the midst of a collective psychosis – a massive and disabling confusion over what is “real.”

But Presti, looking on the bright side, feels that[18] ‘A scientific revolution is nigh.’

This will inevitably rattle a more than a few cages:[19]

[I]nvestigation of who we are and how we relate to the rest of the universe can bring one into what is generally considered the territory of religion and, some maintain, outside the domain of science. This can be unsettling – to individuals in either camp.

Advocates of scientism, Presti hopes, may soon have to accept that their position is based on a problematic act of faith:[20]

Eccles stated that “we regard promissory materialism as a superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists… It has all the features of a messianic prophecy – the promise of a future freed of all problems . . .

If we were able to shake off this delusion the world might be a better place. Marshall asks some key questions about how we might decide on the value of a new paradigm:[21]

Does the theory offer explanatory insights into processes behind, say, psi and post-mortem survival? Are new lines of enquiry opened up by the theory, and what real-world usefulness might it have? Can it, for example, inspire us to live better lives and build better societies and formulate our long-term aspirations? . . . The importance of including mystical experience in the range of phenomena to be explained cannot be overstated, for there are clear connections between psi and mystical phenomena, and so an adequate theory should address both.

Kripal even makes a brief reference to a possible role for the heart, one of the rare mentions of this organ in this 500 page tome:[22]

Many of the Tantric traditions even locate the cardiac region of the human body as the esoteric door or portal through which this Consciousness beams in, more or less exactly as Federico Faggin describes his own awakening in chapter 8 in this volume.

A fitting place to bring to a pause this exploration of the as yet unaccepted harmony of religion and science is with Kripal’s record of his own experience:[23]

Gradually, over the course of the decades of meetings and interactions, I came to realise, with a growing sense of shock and liberating confusion, that many of the psi phenomena that I had been trying to ignore or dismiss as legends or pious exaggerations – as “miracle,” “folklore,” or, worse, “magic” – and separate from true or genuine religious experience should not in fact be separated and are quite real. They are real in the simple sense that they happen.

. . . I came to see that the data on the rogue phenomena are remarkably robust and more convincing, even if they, too, “do not behave” – that is, even if these phenomena in their most extreme and convincing forms cannot be replicated in a laboratory for some very good reasons… Rogue phenomena tend to manifest spontaneously in life-cycle moments of crisis, illness, trauma, danger, and death, none of which can be ethically reproduced or predicted in a controlled environment.

He even speculates that such experiences are intentionally thrusting themselves on our attention to force a change of perspective:[24]

On the most philosophical and speculative level, I came to see both these mystical experiences and these rogue paranormal phenomena as intentional signs of the fundamental inadequacy of the present Western worldview. I do not use the word ‘intentional’ lightly here.… They want us to look.… They want us to change reality.

I realise that even these compelling approaches may not be enough to convince a sceptic, but what I would at least hope is that sometime soon we’d reach a tipping point where enough thinkers would begin to explore what they don’t want to know, rather than keep dismissing evidence supporting it on the grounds that it could not possibly be true. That is not science.

Next time I’ll be taking a look at perennialism.

References:

[1]. Consciousness Unbound – page 326.
[2]. Op. Cit. – page 330.
[3]. Op. Cit. – page 335.
[4]. Op. Cit. – page 326)
[5]. Op. Cit. – -page 337.
[6]. Op. Cit. – -page 338.
[7]. Op cit. – page 339.
[8]. After – page 74.
[9]. Surviving Death – page 172.
[10]. Living in a Mindful Universe — page 262.
[11]. Consciousness Unbound – page 340.
[12]. William James and the Metaphysics of Experience – page 222.
[13]. Consciousness Unbound – page 410.
[14]. Op. cit.— pages 411-12.
[15]. Op. cit.— page 412.
[16]. Consciousness Unbound  — page 376.
[17]. Op. cit.— page 341.
[18]. Op. cit.— pages 351.
[19]. Op. cit.— page 351.
[20]. Op. cit.— pages 352-53.
[21]. Op. cit.— page 421.
[22]. Op. cit.— page 366.
[23]. Op. cit.— page 370.
[24]. Op. cit.— page 372.

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Science, Spirituality and Civilisation (1/4): Oneness of Religion and Science (a)

All Saints Church, Hereford

In the wake of my sequence on understanding the heart, I got steered onto a somewhat different track. Every month I meet up with a former psychology colleague and close friend for a coffee and deep conversation on topics close to both of our hearts.

The café we repair to is in All Saints church. We grab our drinks and nibbles and go up the curving stairs to a quieter, specially built part of the café, walk past a wooden risqué carving on the ceiling, which would be barely detectable at ground level, to sit, if possible, at the quiet far end on comfortable armchairs at a low table.

On a recent occasion, after I’d risked boring him to bits with my prolonged exploration of the heart theme, he shared with me a printed copy of the epilogue to Consciousness Unbound by Edward Kelly titled The Emerging Vision and Why It Matters, as downloaded from the Paradigm Explorer website, Kelly co-edited the book with Paul Marshall. A key quote, indicating the general direction of travel of this sequence reads:[1]

Our individual and collective human fates in these dangerous and difficult times – indeed, the fate of our precious planet and all of its passengers – may ultimately hinge on a wider recognition and more effective utilisation of the expanded states of being that are potentially available to us but largely ignored or even actively suppressed by our struggling post-modern civilisation with its warring tendencies toward self-aggrandising individualism and fundamentalist tribalism

As I had found the earlier book in what I came to realise is a sequence of three – Irreducible Mind – a compelling and illuminating read (see links for my blog sequence), there was no way I could resist getting hold of a copy as soon as humanly possible.

It took a few days for Waterstones to get hold of a copy for me, but, as soon as they did, I plunged right in. The reading experience, spread over several weeks, was a combination of pleasurable hope and unexpected disappointment, for reasons I am about to explore.

I’ll be going in some depth into three main themes: harmony of religion of science, the perennialism, and dissociation with a slight diversion into precognition. Before I do so, I just need to flag up two important ways in which I resonated to issues that are not the book’s main focus but were welcome side-alleys.

Heart

There is at least one faint echo of the heart theme in Faggin’s article. He describes a crucial wake up experience he had in these terms:[2]

I felt a powerful rush of energy-love emerge from my chest . . .

This feeling was clearly love, but a love so intense and so incredibly fulfilling that it surpassed any possible idea I had about what love is. Even more unbelievable was the fact that I was the source of this love. I perceived it as a broad beam of shimmering white light, alive and beatific, gushing for my heart with incredible strength.

Then suddenly that light exploded and filled the room and then expanded to embrace the entire universe with the same white brilliance. I knew then, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was the “substance” of which all that exists is made.

Inscape

In words which open with ones almost the same as those used by one of my favourite poets, R. S. Thomas, he adds:[3]

A little of the time, I began to realise that the truly important journey is the inner one…

I realised that I had almost always repressed my true feelings… I had convinced myself that I was strong, when all I did was estrange myself from my own heart by pretending that everything was fine.

. . . the inner world of meaning must also be an irreducible property of all that exists from the very beginning. Meaning and matter must be like the two faces of the same coin.

R. S. Thomas

Thomas has it this way:[4]

The best journey to make

is inward. It is the interior

that calls. Eliot heard it.

Wordsworth turned from the great hills

of the north to the precipice

of his own mind, and let himself

down for the poetry stranded

on the bare ledges.

Mental Health

Mental Health is another topic which the book occasionally addresses with strong resonance for me. Presti is quite scathing about our culture’s standard approach when he discusses the use of medications in mental health:[5]

. . there are compelling reductionist narratives underlying the understanding of these conditions and their associated clinical interventions.

. . . Something shared among all… non-Western medical traditions is that health and illness are viewed in a strong psychophysical manner. Mind is understood to very much influence bodily processes – there is no schism between body and mind.

. . . In the case of psychiatric medications, reliance on neurobiological research to reveal mechanisms of and interventions for mental distress has led to little progress in understanding mechanisms and designing better treatments. Furthermore, it has contributed to a pharmaceutical industry of design and marketing of medications to address mental distress based on poorly supported mechanistic narratives, with little to show for all this beyond billions of dollars in research expenditures (funded largely by taxpayers) and billions of dollars of corporate profits from the sale of pharmaceuticals to treat mental distress.

My hymn-sheet exactly.

Kripal describes a telling example to counteract this reductionist narrative:[6]

Further scholarship eventually challenged the Katzian position… on pure consciousness.

… [Rachel Peterson’s experience ] she tells the story of how her clinical depression was effectively addressed through an encounter with ultimate reality on psilocybin… The psilocybin did not just ease her of her clinical depression; it also cured her of her atheism. After all, she could not deny her own experience, and she had known, directly and immediately, “an abiding force that permeated all existence – something that felt conscious, vast, benevolent, eternal, peaceful, and furiously important.”

Materialistic Heart Attack

Kripal also expresses a related take on humanism:[7]

. . . this . . . materialism has been so destructive of the humanities, mostly by rendering the human literally non-existent, and certainly irrelevant in the technological world of objects and things.

… Most humanists, like most scientists, assume the same metaphysics. They assume some kind of physicalism or materialism.

. . . In the materialist or physicalist metaphysics, the humanities are the practices of something that is not real, studying other things that are not really real. The humanities are nothing studying nothing.

… The materialist metaphysics of modernity is our intellectual heart attack.

This brings me onto my first detailed focus: the need for us to recognise, as the Bahá’í Faith does explicitly, that there is a fundamental harmony between religion.

Even so, after finishing the book I was left feeling that I needed to do Consciousness Unbound justice but that it was also important, given my caveats, not to exaggerate its value, perhaps also because all the contributors are men.

This first section covers one of its most encouraging lines of argument.

Oneness of religion and Science

Hopefully their case compellingly suggests how the current conflict between science and spirituality can be transcended: they avoid the word ‘religion’ for reasons Kelly makes clear:[8]

We believe that the single most important task confronting all of modernity is that of meaningful reconciliation of science and spirituality.

. . . we believe that emerging developments within science itself are leading inexorably toward an enlarged conception of nature, one that can accommodate realities of a spiritual sort while rejecting rationally untenable “overbeliefs” of the sorts routinely targeted by critics of the world’s institutional religions.

This, in his view, requires that[9] ‘[b]oth science and religion . . . must evolve.’ For him this is a tricky path to tread in the book because ‘most of us are scientifically minded adults… sceptical of the currently dominant physicalist worldview but equally wary of uncritical embrace of any of the world’s major faiths with their often conflicting beliefs and decidedly mixed historical records.’ I’ll be dealing with these caveats about religion in more detail in a later post in this sequence

The rewards of succeeding are potentially immense:[10]

This synoptic vision seems to us to harbour tremendous practical implications… in terms of providing humanity, individually and collectively, with an ethos that is fundamentally life affirming and optimistic, profoundly ecumenical in character, and potentially capable of addressing the multitude of societal ills and threats to a planet that can be seen as flowing directly or indirectly from the currently dominant physicalism.

Basically, the properly recognised harmony between these two approaches to reality could lift our civilisation to a far higher level.

So, what does such an approach mean in practice?

There is so much to say on that, it will have to wait until next time.

References

[1]. Consciousness Unbound. – pages 286-87.
[2]. Op. cit. – pages 284-85
[3]. Op. cit. – page 286.
[4]. Groping from Collected Poems – page 328.
[5]. Consciousness Unbound – page 345-47.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 388.
[7]. Op. cit.— pages 374-76.
[8]. Op. cit.— page 2.
[9]. Op. cit.— page 3.
[10]. Op. cit. – page 8.

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‘The Marriage of Sense and Soul’ – a review (2/2): healing a disconnect

The Great Chain of Being

If we say religion is opposed to science, we lack knowledge of either true science or true religion, for both are founded upon the premises and conclusions of reason, and both must bear its test.

( ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Promulgation of Universal Peace –page 107)

Given my recently renewed struggle with modernism is seemed worth republishing this rather sooner than I had intended.

In the previous post I summarised Ken Wilber‘s take on modernism as expressed in his The Marriage of Sense & Soul. Basically he feels that, although we have gained much by splitting the medieval fusion of instrumental, moral and subjective thinking, we have drained much of our felt life of its meaning by adopting such a purely mechanical model of the world. Part of his search for a way to undo this damage involves revisiting what he feels we have lost.

The Great Chain of Being Broken

On page 61 he picks up the thread:

. . . all interiors were reduced to exteriors. All subjects were reduced to objects; all depth was reduced to surfaces; all I’s and WE’s were reduced to Its; all quality was reduced to quantity; levels of significance were reduced to levels of size; value was reduced to veneer; all translogical and dialogical was reduced to monological. Gone the eye of contemplation and gone the eye of the mind – only data from the eye of the flesh would be accorded primary reality, because only sensory data possessed simple location, here in the desolate world of monochrome flatland.

He goes on to contend that when science discovered that mind and consciousness were anchored in the natural organism i.e. the brain and not disembodied, the Great Chain of Being, the old world view, took a colossal hit from which it never recovered (page 62).

I need to digress one moment to unpack what he sees as an essential aspect of this Great Chain of Being:

In the natural order, earth (rock) is at the bottom of the chain: this element possesses only the attribute of existence. Each link succeeding upward contains the positive attributes of the previous link and adds (at least) one other. Rocks, as above, possess only existence; the next link up, plants, possess life and existence. Animals add not only motion, but appetite as well.

Man is both mortal flesh, as those below him, and also spirit as those above. In this dichotomy, the struggle between flesh and spirit becomes a moral one. The way of the spirit is higher, more noble; it brings one closer to God. The desires of the flesh move one away from God.

This should have a familiar ring to it for anyone with a spiritual view of the world. It certainly has for Bahá’ís. There are many quotations I could choose from to illustrate this but the passage below is particularly appropriate in the context of this discussion where science and spirit have come to seem at war:

If we look with a perceiving eye upon the world of creation, we find that all existing things may be classified as follows: First—Mineral—that is to say matter or substance appearing in various forms of composition. Second—Vegetable—possessing the virtues of the mineral plus the power of augmentation or growth, indicating a degree higher and more specialized than the mineral. Third—Animal—possessing the attributes of the mineral and vegetable plus the power of sense perception. Fourth—Human—the highest specialized organism of visible creation, embodying the qualities of the mineral, vegetable and animal plus an ideal endowment absolutely minus and absent in the lower kingdoms—the power of intellectual investigation into the mysteries of outer phenomena. The outcome of this intellectual endowment is science which is especially characteristic of man. This scientific power investigates and apprehends created objects and the laws surrounding them. It is the discoverer of the hidden and mysterious secrets of the material universe and is peculiar to man alone. The most noble and praiseworthy accomplishment of man therefore is scientific knowledge and attainment.

( ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Foundations of World Unity – page 48)

The irony, that a capacity, which Bahá’ís see as spiritual in origin, should have been harnessed to a process that has undermined our understanding of the spiritual, will not be lost on anyone reading this post. Wilber makes a subtle but important point on page 70:

Notice the difference between the interior of the individual – such as the mind – and the exterior of the individual – such as the brain. The mind is known by acquaintance; the brain, by objective description.

This contempt for our subjective experience as a source of legitimate data is something he feels we need to overcome. This forms the basis for his more balanced model of empiricism, one that he feels does not fall into the trap of privileging matter over mind.

‘Real’ Science and ‘Real’ Religion

Wilber concludes a complex review of what should constitute evidence and falsifiability by stating (page 169):

. . . it then becomes perfectly obvious that the real battle is not between science which is ‘real,’ and religion, which is ‘bogus,’ but rather between real science and religion, on the one hand, and bogus science and religion, on the other. Both real science and real religion follow the three strands of valid knowledge accumulation, while both bogus science (pseudo-science) and bogus religion (mythic and dogmatic) fail that test miserably. Thus, real science and real religion are actually allied against the bogus and the dogmatic and the nonverifiable and the nonfalsifiable in their respective spheres.

To arrive at this point he has covered ground that it would be impossible to reproduce completely here. I am offering only a selection of the barest bones of his argument. I am aware that this treatment may reduce the power of his case somewhat and can only suggest that, before dismissing it out of hand, anyone put off by my summary should read the original case in full as Wilber puts it. Also I have discussed on this blog Alvin Plantinga’s powerful exposition of a similar argument.

One of Wilber’s most basic points is that science is inconsistent if it claims that all its conclusions are based solely on external evidence.  He admits that science at its best does not claim this. On the contrary it acknowledges that interior processes such as mathematics play a huge part in the construction of its world view. However, it does a sleight of hand when it privileges the interior processes upon which it relies (e.g. mathematics) while ruling out of court those interior processes that it regards as suspicious (e.g. meditation). In Wilber’s view (pages 148-149), if you accept the one you must accept the other.

Give a Little

However, for true progress to be made, in his view, both sides need to give a little (pages 160-161):

We have asked science to do nothing more than expand from narrow empiricism (sensory experience only) to broad empiricism (direct experience in general), which it already does anyway with its own conceptual operations, from logic to mathematics.

But religion, too, must give a little. And in this case, religion must open its truth claims to direct verification – or rejection – by experiential evidence.

He builds further on this (page 169):

. . . . religion’s great, enduring, and unique strength, is that, at its core, it is a science of personal experience (using ‘science’ in the broad sense as direct experience, in any domain, that submits to the three strands of injunction, data, and falsifiability.

By injunction, he means ‘If you want to know, do this.’ This applies in equal measure to using a microscope correctly and to practising mindfulness skilfully. As I have argued elsewhere there are various pragmatic experiential exploration at the command of religions to explore their truths other than simply examining meditation, Wilber’s main focus, or similar purely individual experiences. For example, the Bahá’í Faith is a pragmatic religion – striving to learn how to walk the spiritual path with practical feet. The components of this process are described as study of guidance, consultation, action, reflection along with prayer and meditation on Scripture. This provides a set of interconnected steps to assess how effectively collective action is transforming our communities[1].

From this validation of personal experience Wilber reaches the encouraging conclusion (ibid.):

Thus, if science can surrender its narrow empiricism  . . . . ., and if religion can surrender its bogus mythic claims in favour of authentic spiritual experience (which its founders uniformly did anyway), then suddenly, very suddenly, science and religion begin to look more like fraternal twins than centuries-old enemies.

This he sees as a way of reintegrating what has been for so long so damagingly disconnected. As he puts it towards the end of his book (page 196):

. . . . the crucial point is that sensory-empirical science, although it cannot see into the higher and interior domains on their own terms, can nonetheless register their empirical correlates.

Footnote:

[1] There are those on what are probably the edges still of the scientific community who would already recognise this as a viable method of investigation, one that will enhance both understanding and practice. One example is the model of action research described by Peter Reason.

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