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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Irreducible Mind – a review (1/3): how psychology lost the plot

. . . . the mind is the power of the human spirit. Spirit is the lamp; mind is the light which shines from the lamp. Spirit is the tree, and the mind is the fruit. Mind is the perfection of the spirit, and is its essential quality, as the sun’s rays are the essential necessity of the sun.

(Selected Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: page 316-317)

Even though it’s barely a year since I last republished this sequence, it’s relevance to my sequence on Science, Spirituality and Civilisation is unmistakable, so here it comes again!

I began studying psychology in 1976, long before I became a Bahá’í, and completed my clinical training in July 1982, at least four months before I met even a mention of the Faith in the following November.

Never once in my entire experience of being taught psychology did I ever hear of Frederick William Henry Myers. The closest encounter I ever had of this kind was with William James. He was mentioned in asides with a dismissive and grudging kind of respect. The implication was that he was an amazing thinker for his time but nowadays very much old hat. I gave him a quick glance and moved on.

Looking back now I realise I was robbed.

FWH Myers (1843-1901)

When I decided to become a Bahá’í at the beginning of December that same year, after a lightening conversion, my friends thought I was nuts, and when I met the quote from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá which you’ll find at the top of this post, I was thunderstruck. It ran completely counter to all I had been taught and all I had found in any psychology I had ever read. I really struggled to integrate that insight into my world-view.

The context included ideas such as Manifestations of God (symbolised by the stars in the picture at the head of the post), a spiritual realm (represented by the left hand line), and a link between that spiritual realm and our material one (the line that joins the left hand to the right hand line). If accepting the idea of God was a huge challenge for a former atheist, taking on board the concept of a soul was an even bigger one. At least the Bahá’í concept of God was definitely not the one I most certainly did not and could never believe in: it still seems such an unwarranted gift for beings like us to have an immortal soul though, considering how badly we behave most of the time. It took me four years at least of hard study and deep reflection to even begin to get my head around this stuff. (The poem I posted on 21 March, after this post was written, gives a sense of where I was starting from.)

It is plain to me now though how this situation came about. Kelly and Kelly capture it neatly and clearly in the introduction to their brave, thorough and well-researched book, Irreducible Mind (pages xvii-xviii):

[William] James’s person-centered and synoptic approach was soon largely abandoned . . . in favour of a much narrower conception of scientific psychology. Deeply rooted in earlier 19th-century thought, this approach advocated deliberate emulation of the presuppositions and methods – and thus, it was hoped, the stunning success – of the “hard” sciences especially physics. . . . Psychology was no longer to be the science of mental life, as James had defined it. Rather it was to be the science of behaviour, “a purely objective experimental branch of natural science”. It should “never use the terms consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspectively verifiable, imagery, and the like.”

And, sadly, in some senses nothing much has changed. Psychology is still, for the most part, pursuing the Holy Grail of a complete materialistic explanation for every aspect of consciousness and the working of the mind. It’s obviously all in the brain, isn’t it (page xx)?

The empirical connection between mind and brain seems to most observers to be growing ever tighter and more detailed as our scientific understanding of the brain advances. In light of the successes already in hand, it may not seem unreasonable to assume as a working hypothesis that this process can continue indefinitely without encountering any insuperable obstacles, and that properties of minds will ultimately be fully explained by those brains. For most contemporary scientists, however, this useful working hypothesis has become something more like an established fact, or even an unquestionable axiom.

This is a dogma and as such can only be protected by ignoring or discounting as invalid all evidence that points in a different direction. Edward Kelly argues for a different approach in his introduction, believing as the co-authors demonstrate in this massive tome that there is a wealth of evidence to undermine this a priori belief (page xxii):

First and perhaps foremost is an attitude of humility in relation to the present state of scientific knowledge. . . . Second, we emphasise that science consists at bottom of certain attitudes and procedures, rather than any fixed set of beliefs. The most basic attitude is that facts have primacy over theories and that belief should therefore always remain modifiable in response to the empirical data.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

He quotes Francis Bacon (ibid.):

“The world is not to be narrowed till it will go into the understanding . . . but the understanding is to be expanded and opened till it can take in the image of the world as it is in fact.”

The Kellys try and practice what they preach, as their book demonstrates (page xxv):

Our own empiricism is thus thorough-going and radical, in the sense that we are willing to look at all relevant facts and not just those that seem compatible, actually or potentially, with current mainstream theory. Indeed, if anything it is precisely those observations that seem to conflict with current theory that should command the most urgent attention.

Their first chapter, to which I may return in a later post, takes a critical look at the current mainstream position. I want to start instead with their second chapter that looks in detail at the work of Myers. I want to do justice to a deep and creative thinker whom I was induced to neglect during my formal training, much to the detriment of my practice for a significant number of years.

I am plucking a quote from the middle of Emily Kelly’s chapter on Myers’s approach (page 76) because the last sentence cuts to the core of the challenge constituted by his position and the evidence that mainstream ‘scientists’ ignore:

This notion of something within us being conscious, even though it is not accessible to our ordinary awareness, is an exceedingly difficult one for most of us to accept, since it is so at variance with our usual assumption that the self of which we are aware comprises the totality of what we are as conscious mental beings. Nevertheless, it is essential to keep in mind Myers’s new and enlarged conception of consciousness if one is to understand his theory of human personality as something far more extensive than our waking self.

And perhaps it needs to be said in advance, in order to soften the shock for some readers, that he is not just talking about the kind of unconscious processes we all accept as definite, such as those which keep our hearts beating, or as probable, such as the projection of past experiences onto the present. He takes seriously not just what lies underneath our minds so to speak, the stuff that many dreams are made of, but also what soars above them, such as mystical states.

Emily Kelly’s preamble:

Before we look in more detail at what his exact position was in the next post, it might be useful to quote from Emily Kelly’s preamble. She puts her finger on the most significant loss incurred when psychology went pseudo-scientific (page 50):

All elements of the universe are not only inextricably related, but they all function according to the same basic, deterministic principles of cause-and-effect and are all, in the final analysis, of the same basic essence or nature. . . . The attempt to transform psychology into a science, however, raised some unique problems. The phenomena of psychology are unlike those of any of the physical sciences in that they are, above all else, mental. (Ibid.)

The pioneers of this approach were far too sure of themselves (page 54):

. . . . For many in the first generation of scientific psychology, the thoroughgoing unilateral dependence of mind on brain was “a practical certainty.”

The basic issue had been resolved (page 58):

. . . . For [T.H.]Huxley as for many other 19^th-century scientists, the exact nature of the dependence of psychical processes on physical ones with an open – though unresolvable – question; the general dependence of mind on matter was a resolved – and thus closed – question. (page 58)

I almost winced when I read her pointed explanation of how psychology had traded in the mind to buy itself a place among the sciences (page 59):

Scientists instrumental in the development of 19^th-century psychology thus in general had chosen to conceptualise science primarily not as a method with which to confront basic questions posed by contradictory aspects of human experience, but as a doctrine to which psychology, if it is to be a science, must conform. (page 59)

Lotus/I-Ching (From this Website)

She paves the way for a key component of Myers’s approach in her quote from Mill (page 62):

John Stuart Mill had been the leader and exemplar of mid 19^th– century liberal thinkers who believed that the cause of knowledge is best served, not by partisans, but by “those who take something from both sides of the great controversies, and make out that neither extreme is right, nor wholly wrong.” (page 62)

In the tomorrow’s post we’ll be taking a closer look at Myers’s approach.

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Book Review (8/8): Do we need a transcendent focus? (b) – ‘The Empathic Civilisation’

Reflecting Evil

These [perfect] mirrors are the Messengers of God Who tell the story of Divinity, just as the material mirror reflects the light and disc of the outer sun in the skies. In this way the image and effulgence of the Sun of Reality appear in the mirrors of the Manifestations of God. This is what Jesus Christ meant when He declared, “the father is in the son,” the purpose being that the reality of that eternal Sun had become reflected in its glory in Christ Himself. It does not signify that the Sun of Reality had descended from its place in heaven or that its essential being had effected an entrance into the mirror . . . .

Promulgation of Universal Peace – page 173

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.

We have discovered how far Rifkin’s case against religion seems largely to be based on his dislike of Christian teachings, especially concerning the existence of Satan, the Fall of man,  and the resultant denigration of the body. He is aware that other religious teachings do not fall into what would be for him the same trap.

For example, he feels that the Gnostic gospels were more empowering and benign (page 238) and finds close parallels ‘between Jesus’s teachings as expressed in the Gospel of Saint Thomas and Hindu and Buddhist teachings at the time.’

He develops this theme (page 239):

. . . the Gnostics viewed Jesus as a human being who had achieved enlightenment. There is no talk of him performing miracles or referring to himself as the son of God or any recollection of Jesus dying for the sins of a fallen humanity.

Then he states his case (page 240):

For the Gnostics, ignorance of one’s true self, not sin, is the underlying cause of human suffering. Therefore, the key to unlocking the divine in each person is self-knowledge through introspection.

And he has a view of Jesus to match (page 241):

The critical question is whether enlightenment comes from fully participating in the world around us in all of its vulnerability and corporeality or by withdrawing to an inner world removed from the vulnerability of corporeal existence. The historical Jesus was fully engaged in the world.

He acknowledges the positive impact of Christianity (page 246):

The Christian empathic surge lasted a mere three centuries; but in that time it made an incredible mark on history. By A.D. 250 the number of Christians in Rome alone had grown to fifty thousand people.

Goethe, Kant and Schopenhauer

He, in the same way as many others, dates from the time of the Enlightenment the demise of religion as an effective force in society. He locates a key figure as embodying an inspiring post-Enlightenment empathic spirit – secularised empathy, if you like: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (page 307):

If one were to have to choose a single individual who most embodied a cosmopolitan view of the world and a universal empathic sensibility, Goethe would be an easy pick.

His subsequent commentary explains exactly the nature of Goethe’s appeal for Rifkin. He fuses empathy with biosphere concern (page 308):

Goethe felt that the purpose of living was to enrich life and that man is endowed with a special appreciation of life – a heightened consciousness – so that he might steward all that is alive. . . . Breathing nature in and out was the way one takes in nature and remains connected to the larger whole.

It is here that the roots of Rifkin’s model of empathy and biosphere consciousness becomes most explicit (page 309):

With Goethe, we see the secularisation of the empathic impulse, embedded in the embodied experience and that includes not only human society but all of nature. His empathic view is truly universal in scope.

His critique of Kant remains firm. He condemns his take on the Golden Rule (page 347):

Left behind is any heartfelt connection to another’s plight as if it were one’s own; the desire to comfort them because of a felt understanding of one’s common humanity.

He prefers Arthur Schopenhauer (page 348):

Schopenhauer argues that the moral code that accompanies theological consciousness is purely prescriptive. If human nature is “fallen,” as the Abrahamic religions suggest, then there is no moral basis within an individual’s being that would predispose him to do the morally right thing. God’s commandments, therefore, are a prescriptive device telling human beings that this is the way they “ought” to behave if they are to be rewarded by God’s grace and not punished by his wrath.

He is indeed hanging his condemnation of religion as a positive redemptive influence almost exclusively on the hook of a particular religion’s interpretation of Genesis. I suspect there is a rope around the throat of his argument here. He feels that he can now locate our redemption in that same physical nature he is convinced that religion is revolted by (page 349):

After deconstructing Kant’s categorical imperative, Schopenhauer offers a detailed description of moral behaviour that he argues is embedded in the very sinew of human nature – with the qualification that it needs to be brought out and nurtured by society if it is to be fully realised. He argues that “compassion” is at the core of human nature.

Is Being Embodied Enough?

Robert Wright

However, in my view, and I suspect in the view of many members of many religions throughout the world, there is no need to make his leap of logic and deny a transcendent realm in order to explain why human beings can be compassionate. Even evolutionary theory – for example in the thinking of Robert Wright and Michael McCullough – plainly discerns how the development of empathy is wired into our brains and selected for in successful cultures.

Robert Wright sees this in evolutionary terms. In his book The Evolution of God, he discusses how the expansion of the moral imagination (page 428) can ‘bring us closer to moral truth.’

His line of argument will not appeal to everyone: it’s probably too materialistic for many religious people and too sympathetic to religion for many materialists. He states:

The moral imagination was ‘designed’ by natural selection . . . . . to help us cement fruitfully peaceful relations when they’re available.

He is aware that this sounds like a glorified pursuit of self-interest, similar to one of Rifkin’s reservations about the Golden Rule. He argues, though, that it leads beyond that (pages 428-429):

The expansion of the moral imagination forces us to see the interior of more and more other people for what the interior of other people is – namely remarkably like our own interior.

Michael McCullough in his exploration of our dual potential for revenge and forgiveness, Beyond Revenge, sees them as hard –wired (page 132):

Revenge and forgiveness… are conditioned adaptations – they’re context sensitive. Whether we’re motivated to seek revenge or to forgive depends on who does the harming, as well as on the advantages and disadvantages associated with both of these options.

Empathy, also hard-wired, plays its part in determining what will happen (page 148):

One of the best ways to take all the fun out of revenge, and promote forgiveness instead, is to make people feel empathy for the people who’ve harmed them. In 1997, my colleagues and I showed that when people experience empathy for a transgressor, it’s difficult to maintain a vengeful attitude. Instead, forgiveness often emerges. . . . When you feel empathic toward someone, your willingness to retaliate goes way down.

This material potential may be a necessary condition for empathy to grow further in our increasingly global civilisation. Even if religion is not the enemy, 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.

He nonetheless builds an ideal of interconnectedness as far as possible in these purely material terms. He sees civilisation as having a key role in realising this potential (page 362):

While we are all born with a predisposition to experience empathic distress, this core aspect of our being only develops into true empathic consciousness by the continuous struggle of differentiation and integration in civilisation. Far from squelching the empathic impulse, it is the dynamics of unfolding civilisation that is the fertile ground for its development and for human transcendence.

He wheels out the atheist’s favourite philosopher to administer what he hopes will be the kiss of death to any hope of the transcendent (page 382):

Nietzsche went after both the theologians and the rationalists, saying that it was time to give up the illusion that there exists something called “absolute spirituality” or “pure reason.”

Nietzsche argued that there is ‘only a perspective “knowing”. . .’ I won’t rehearse here all the thinking that has been done to confirm that, while it is true that all I have is my perspective, it does not mean that we have proved there is no transcendent realm. I’ve explored this, for example, in the sequence of posts on William James, whose point of view is succinctly captured by Paul Jerome Croce in his masterly Science & Religion in the Era of William James (page 222):

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.

Absence of evidence therefore would not be evidence of absence, but in any case there is a wealth of evidence Rifkin is choosing to ignore here, as we have briefly touched upon above.

I realise that just as it is impossible for Rifkin conclusively to prove that any hope of empathic rescue from our current predicament must come from our material nature because that is all there is, 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.

That though is what I believe.

When I was a child my father asked me to imagine what it would be like if a man stood with each of his feet in a bucket, grabbed the handles and tried to lift himself off the ground. In my view, all the evidence so far points to our being in a similar predicament: I find it impossible to believe we can mobilise what would be the necessary level of vision, self-sacrifice and sustained co-ordinated action over centuries to turn round our descent into self-destruction and climb back from the brink of extinction by our own unaided efforts.

Amit Goswami (for source of image see link)

A Ground of Being

In any case, whatever you think about that point, I feel there is even more convincing evidence that we do not have to rely only on ourselves. There is a transcendent dimension or foundation to reality and we can learn to draw upon its powers. In religion-neutral language we can speak of a ground of being, inherently conscious, inherently loving, inherently wise, that we can learn to connect to.

Amit Goswami, the physicist, in an interview about his book, The Self-Aware Universe, confirms the mystic insight and vividly conveys his sense of it:

So then one time — and this is where the breakthrough happened — my wife and I were in Ventura, California and a mystic friend, Joel Morwood, came down from Los Angeles, and we all went to hear Krishnamurti. And Krishnamurti, of course, is extremely impressive, a very great mystic. So we heard him and then we came back home. We had dinner and we were talking, and I was giving Joel a spiel about my latest ideas of the quantum theory of consciousness and Joel just challenged me. He said, “Can consciousness be explained?” And I tried to wriggle my way through that but he wouldn’t listen. He said, “You are putting on scientific blinders. You don’t realize that consciousness is the ground of all being.” He didn’t use that particular word, but he said something like, “There is nothing but God.”

And something flipped inside of me which I cannot quite explain. This is the ultimate cognition, that I had at that very moment. There was a complete about-turn in my psyche and I just realized that consciousness is the ground of all being. I remember staying up that night, looking at the sky and having a real mystical feeling about what the world is, and the complete conviction that this is the way the world is, this is the way that reality is, and one can do science. You see, the prevalent notion — even among people like David Bohm — was, “How can you ever do science without assuming that there is reality and material and all this? How can you do science if you let consciousness do things which are ‘arbitrary’?” But I became completely convinced — there has not been a shred of doubt ever since — that one can do science on this basis.

And he is not the only scientist to have reported such an experience (see link).

There are those who feel that this can be done as an individual through meditation without drawing upon any spiritual tradition or organised religion. I certainly agree that we can move a long way forwards in this way, but for me there is a distinction between the profound insights granted to the Founders of the great world faiths, no matter how far the followers may have strayed from the original path, and those insights a mystic can achieve.

To explain this clearly we need to start from the idea stated in the quotation at the head of this post. The Founders of the great world religions are like stainless Mirrors in which we can see reflected what is the closest approximation to the reality of God that we are capable of apprehending.

However, our hearts, which are, as a friend once expressed it, the experience of our soul in consciousness, are also mirrors which we can polish until they reflect as perfectly as we are able, but not as perfectly as a Messenger of God, the Sun of Reality if we choose to point them in that direction.

We therefore have two responsibilities: the first is to polish or rather burnish the steel of our heart’s mirror (it’s not a modern mirror!) so it can reflect more faithfully and, the second is to turn it towards the Sun of Truth. If we turn it in worship towards lesser gods it will become tarnished again (Bahá’u’lláh – from The Seven Valleys – page 21):

A pure heart is as a mirror; cleanse it with the burnish of love and severance from all save God, that the true sun may shine within it and the eternal morning dawn. Then wilt thou clearly see the meaning of “Neither doth My earth nor My heaven contain Me, but the heart of My faithful servant containeth Me.”

That, it seems to me, defines the difference between a mystic and a Messenger of God. Each Messenger of God has given us guidance appropriate to the time in which we live that will enable us to perfect our heart, as far as we are able, and perfect our world – rebuild our civilization if you like.

The Universal House of Justice, the central body of the Bahá’í Faith, has already unpacked very clearly what this must mean to us (see my earlier post on Working for a Divine Arkitect). When the arc of buildings on Mount Carmel were complete, 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)

While Bahá’ís have a model for how this task might be accomplished, it is not a task for Bahá’ís alone. It would be impossible. All people of good will across the planet need to play their part according to their sense of what is required of them.

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 we 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.

Rifkin has done his best in this impressive book to suggest one possible path towards a secure future. Those who follow his line of thinking and put it into practice will surely do some good. They could do so much more, it seems to me, if they had faith in an effectively benign power higher than the planet we are seeking to save and which needs our urgent help.

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Book Review – ‘Living in a Mindful Universe’ (7/7): Revisiting Other Themes

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. 

I’ve ended up spending more time than I expected going over Living in a Mindful Universe. This is partly to be explained by the strength of the resonance for me of its central idea – that, as Amit Goswami expresses it ‘consciousness is the ground of all being.’ But there is a bit more to it than that. Alexander and Newell also touch on various other themes and ideas that are also of concern to me. So, in this final post of this sequence I’m going to flag them up without going into too much detail.

Stepping Stones

First there is the idea that suffering is far from being a meaningless torment. I’ve recently visited this idea in my review of Nineteen, Adam Robarts’ moving memoir of his family’s experience of his son Haydn’s dying of cancer.

The idea that there is much of value to be derived from painful challenges bookends his pages. Almost at the very beginning he writes:[1]

There is a Chinese proverb that says, “He who tastes the most bitter is the greatest of men.” In other words, only by withstanding the hardest of hardships can you hope to rise to greatness. After years of observation in China, I will generalize and say that this concept is a deeply ingrained aspect of life within Eastern societies. In contrast, Western societies seek to avoid pain and suffering wherever possible. The primary goal is to seek pleasure.

And almost at the end he writes:[2]

Looking back on my life before Haydn’s journey of suffering, it feels to me that I lived in a relatively unconscious or semiconscious state. This journey became a real wake-up call—to notice more, love more, be more conscious of the bounties that are raining down upon every one of us at every moment.

Alexander and Newell are more or less on the same page:[3] ‘Life continues to present challenges that helped me to grow. As I do this, I become more aligned with my higher self and more authentic to my true nature, as can we all.’

They also use the same term as Shoghi Effendi employs:[4] ‘Life lessons are stepping-stones that can be accomplished in an individual life, leading toward the grander lessons.’ And here is Shoghi Effendi’s explanation:[5] ‘We Bahá’ís can always, with the aid of Bahá’u’lláh, Who is ever ready to strengthen and assist us, turn our stumbling blocks into stepping stones.’ And Alexander and Newell use the term more than once:[6] ‘We can all come to see the hardships in life, illness, and injury as the stepping-stones on which our souls can grow and ascend toward that oneness with the Divine.’

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in Paris Talks endorses this idea, it seems to me, using a different metaphor:[7]

 The mind and spirit of man advance when he is tried by suffering. The more the ground is ploughed the better the seed will grow, the better the harvest will be. Just as the plough furrows the earth deeply, purifying it of weeds and thistles, so suffering and tribulation free man from the petty affairs of this worldly life until he arrives at a state of complete detachment. His attitude in this world will be that of divine happiness.

The close correspondence between Alexander and Newell’s take on this and what we find in Nineteen is unmistakable:[8]

I often encountered parents who are grieving the loss of a child. Most often, no matter how far along they are in the grief process, these parents tell me their child seemed to have immense strength in the face of imminent death – in fact, they often report the child to be the greatest pillar strength holding the family together around such a tragic loss.

And all this matters if humanity is collectively going to arise to the challenges that currently confront us (page 631):

Just as each person’s soul grows through the hurdles and challenges of life, humanity is meant to face these challenges together, all to catalyse our growth to unprecedented levels. . . As more of us come to know that truly we are all eternal spiritual beings, the world will become far more harmonious and peaceful.

Health & Nature

I’ll just mention briefly the book’s emphasis on the importance of the spiritual in both taking care of our health and enhancing our sense of the value of nature, before moving on in slightly more detail to the issue of reincarnation.

Alexander and Newell see spiritual approaches as an essential component of recovery:[9]

When the fundamental problem is one that’s more deeply spiritual, it needs spiritual addressing, not only biochemical. While medication might be necessary in some cases, exploring the benefits of some sort of spiritual practice is a must.

Faith in the process of healing is crucial, in their view:[10]

Belief is cited as the first of six steps to healing – the belief that one can be healed. . .  [T]his is the underlying power of any treatment and . . . suggests that ultimately all healing might be attributable to the mind, whether through conventional western medicine or through alternative approaches.

So, the spiritual, in their view, is not to be discounted:[11] ‘I have come to see that any true vision of health must include not only the physical, mental, and emotional realms, but, most importantly, the spiritual.’

And as for nature, they are on the same page as Karen Armstrong in her book Sacred Nature. Alexander quotes Karen Newell as describing nature as a pathway to the truth:[12]

“We can all learn valuable lessons from nature. Nature is an expression of God, or, if you prefer, of the creative force and intelligence in the universe. Since we are created by the same power as nature, we can use nature as a mirror in which to reflect on truths about ourselves.”

Reincarnation:

I’m not going to make a meal of this as I have blogged about this more than once.

I don’t quite get Alexander and Newell’s take on this when they describe reincarnation as[13] ‘the best way to reconcile the omniscient, omnipresent, and infinitely loving deity’ with ‘the suffering of innocent beings allowed in our world, especially children and animals.’ From my point of view the idea of recompense or redress in the afterlife is at least as good if not better.

I accept that there is experiential evidence that supports the idea of reincarnation including the idea of in-between lives planning:[14]

Among other things, this body of data suggests that we actively plan each of our lifetimes, including choosing our parents and physical bodies, and selecting the challenges (such as illness and injury) and gifts that will most effectively teach us that which we came here to learn.

This is of course not the same as karma:[15]

This was not the kind of instant karma, “eye for an eye,” or punishment from a judgemental God . . . this was a decision made by her soul in order to learn from direct experience in the life she was currently leading.

This body of experiential evidence I also acknowledge includes such data as:[16]

. . . stored emotions or feelings carried over from our previous experience . . . that are triggered by experiences in our current life. . . . . When we experience something, whether it’s from a previous life or this life, we form certain beliefs. These beliefs are often related to problems and thus are typically self sabotaging.

Various considerations, over and above the fact that the Bahá’í Faith very much teaches that we do not reincarnate, counts against its literal reality. My doubts predated my decision to choose the Bahá’í Faith as my spiritual path.

First of all, for now at least, there is my basic scepticism about a literal interpretation of all accounts of spiritual experiences including the reincarnation data. There is something genuinely happening that needs explanation, but I am concerned that settling on any existing interpretation of the facts is fraught with difficulties.

I very much do not want to upset anyone who is a believer in reincarnation. In fact, Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, whose teachings I am attempting to follow, advised that ‘we should try and avoid controversial issues . . . if possible.’ However, this is an issue that keeps bouncing across my consciousness and has done so again in this book.

It seems to me that all that we have to go on when it comes to verbal descriptions of transpersonal experiences is basically metaphor. As an NDE contact of Bruce Greyson’s described, the process of conveying such experiences, it’s like trying ‘to draw an odour using crayons.’

This is partly why one of my most important mantra is John Donne’s advice: ‘Doubt wisely.’

William James brilliantly expressed a crucial truth:[17]

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.

I cannot know for sure that what I believe I know is truth. Almost nothing is what it seems. I am also aware that an aversion to the idea of any kind of return to material life may be rooted in my traumatic early experiences of hospitalisation.

So, nothing that I say on this issue is said dogmatically. It’s just how I see this matter at this moment.

For Donne’s poem see link lines 76-82

I understand the wealth of evidence that exists as Mishlove points out:[18]

 The most solid reincarnation evidence comes from the totality of the 2,500 cases in the database, instead of from the strength of particular cases.

In spite of a wealth of evidence, there are other considerations in addition to the dangers of taking descriptions literally. I have explored a lot of the evidence and am aware that we need to find at adequate explanation for it, rather than dismiss it out of hand.

I really welcomed Mishlove’s model:[19]

Archetypal synchronistic resonance is, to my knowledge, the most sophisticated, published alternative to reincarnation. However, in my foreword to James Matlock’s book, Signs of Reincarnation, I acknowledge that reincarnation is a more fitting explanation than archetypal synchronistic resonance regarding data from children. The patterns in the reincarnation data, which I will discuss next, are too strong to ignore.

. . . Recollection is first person, not as if children were watching someone else in a movie. They feel as if their consciousness is continuous with the earlier lifetime they recall.

I was disappointed at his backtrack and for reasons that I’ve explored on my blog before (see Link) I felt that it was not totally convincing.

As I explained there, Matlock’s perspective did not change my mind, but I respect his careful review of the most convincing evidence and his preference for letting the evidence shape the theory not the theory warp the evidence.

He summarises his basic position near the end of the book by stating:[20]

The workings of reincarnation are often presumed to lie in metaphysical obscurity. In reality, as I have tried to show, the process is probably fairly simple, at least in outline. The stream of consciousness that animates a body during life continues into death, and persists through death, until it becomes associated with (possesses) another body, generally one not yet born. The consciousness stream is composed of both subliminal and supraliminal strata, the former bearing memories and various traits we may subsume under the heading of personality, the latter representing conscious awareness. Once in possession of its new body, the reincarnating mind customises it by adding behavioural and physical effects through psychokinetic operations on its genome, brain, and underlying physiology. At the level of conscious awareness, there is a reset, as the mind begins to interact with its new body and brain. Amnesia sets in, the subconscious blocking conscious memory of the past in what it considers to be its own best interests. The influence of the past is expressed behaviourally, however, and at times the subconscious permits memories to erupt into conscious awareness.

I thanked him also for pointing me in the direction of another model that seems at first sight to map more closely onto my own perspective:[21]

The [Archetypal Synchronistic Resonance – Mishlove & Engender 2007] model emphasises the hidden nexus of meaning underlying seemingly disparate events and may have some utility in explaining unverified past-life memories, past-life regression, and past-life readings that tap into a client’s mind if these relate to deep psychological processes and psychic connections between people rather than to the memory of previous lives.

Matlock feels this model is inadequate to explain ‘solved reincarnation cases.’

The middle paragraphs of the second of two posts on reincarnation show how closely my sense of the matter corresponds to the clause in bold.

Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, in their excellent book Past Lives, have a whole section on this very issue. They refer to[22]  . . . the ‘Cosmic Memory Bank.’ They describe ‘field theories’ and refer to Rupert Sheldrake’s idea of ‘morphic resonance.’ They add:[23]

If memories (information) are held in this way they would exist independently of the brain and therefore be accessible to another brain which ‘resonated’ with them.’

A model along these lines is still my preference, even though Mishlove is clearly a convert[24] to reincarnation, and even though I’ve ploughed through some of Stevenson’s work and Matlock’s sophisticated theory as well.

For now, suffice it so say that I cannot see quite why the strong sense of affinity between a deceased consciousness and a newly generated one that the Fenwicks describe could not psychically impact upon a developing foetus just as strongly as a migrating soul in itself might do. The only data that needs some explanation are the experiences people report of a soul in transit visiting them to declare where they intend to be reborn. Given that communications from a spiritual realm tend to be experienced in ways that are influenced by culture and explanations of them should seldom be taken literally, that may not blast a hole in my hoped for theory below its waterline.

I think that’s more than enough.

Coda

Despite the reincarnation caveat, I hope this sequence conveys that I have found Eben Alexander and Karen Newell’s book deeply engaging as well as immensely helpful to me in making my sense of the spiritual dimension more coherent. I have no hesitation in a strongly recommending it to anyone who wants or needs to explore this area more fully.

As I think I mentioned earlier, reading their book has been rather like visiting a spiritual optician. It tested my mind’s sight, gave me a prescription for a new and improved lens for my heart, which has greatly enhanced my ability to see many spiritual truths more clearly.

References

[1]. Nineteen – page 25.

[2]. Op. cit. – page 200.

[3]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 397.

[4]. Op. cit. – page 507.

[5]. Light of Divine Guidance (Vol. 1) – page 149.

[6]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 625.

[7]. Paris Talks – page 178.

[8]. Living in a Mindful Universe – page 553.

[9]. Op. cit. – pages 543-44.

[10]. Op. cit. – page 587.

[11]. Op. cit. – page 595.

[12]. Op. cit. – page 604.

[13]. Op. cit. – page 479 – my emphasis.

[14]. Op. cit. – page 493.

[15]. Op. cit. – page 497.

[16]. Op. cit. – page 506.

[17]. David C. Lamberth William James and the metaphysics of experience – page 222.

[18]. Beyond the Brain – page 33.

[19]. Op. cit. – page 34.

[20]. Op. cit. – page 258.

[21]. Op. cit. – page 233 (my emphasis).

[22]. Past Lives – page 278.

[23]. Op. cit. – page 279.

[24]. Beyond the Brain – page xiv.

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Back to Woolf: Streams or Trains of Consciousness

Given that my examination of Middlemarch is triggering me to look at how our interior is represented in writing it seems only appropriate to take another look at this post on Virginia Woolf.

Almost four years ago I wrote a sequence of posts, republished in January this year, focusing partly on how consciousness might be captured in writing. I was particularly interested in Virginia Woolf’s efforts to do so. I asked myself ‘Did Woolf succeed in capturing consciousness?’

At that point I had only read To the Lighthouse to the end and was only halfway through The Waves. I referred to my diary entries to help me answer my question.

Within the first 30 pages of To the Lighthouse, I was writing ‘there are already intriguing hints about Virginia Woolf‘s experience of consciousness, eg[1] ‘to follow her thought was like following your voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one’s pencil… all of this danced up and down like a company of gnats… in Lilly’s mind.’

There were ‘many places where she achieves the almost impossible. She transitions from inscape to inscape.’ I gave an example I won’t quote here as it’s available in the Woolf sequence.

It seems to me that she picks up skilfully on how one character sees another in a different way from that in which the person sees themselves. Where the truth lies is for the reader to decide.

I was getting completely carried away by this stage and wrote: ‘She is so astonishingly good at creating a convincing simulation of consciousness in To the Lighthouse. It’s as though I can experience some of her characters more clearly and completely then I experience aspects of myself.’

So, it was rather weird, when I was cherry picking my way through Angus Fletcher’s recent book, Wonderworks, to find myself gaining unexpected insights into how Woolf reached the point of setting herself such a huge challenge.

His aim in this book is to examine how literature satisfies deep psychological needs and how our increased understanding of the workings of the brain is helping understand the neurological substrate of that satisfaction. You’ll be relieved to know that my focus here is not going to be on the psychobabble.

Also I will have to wrench his insights not only out of their neurological context but also out of the sequence he reveals them in. Sorry about that, Angus, but it was your mistake to encourage me to read the chapters in any order according to my main interests: you wrote:[2] ‘the chapters are interconnected but independent, like books on the shelf.… if you like to be surprised, you can browse out of order.’ So I did, with your permission, though I’d probably have done so anyway.

I ended up leaping about from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, via Jane Austen to Woolf, Proust and Joyce, not in that order though. He goes from Jane Austen though Woolf to Hamlet. Confused already? Don’t worry. It’s going to get worse.

Let’s start with Hamlet. Fletcher pins down what’s so new and fascinating about his monologues. He comes on stage and voices ‘two different inner perspectives’.[3] It’s ‘dialogue and monologue’ combined. I’m sure you’ve guessed where he was going. It’s a soliloquy: ‘[Shakespeare’s] new speech invention of a dialogic monologue is the soliloquy, a verbal dramatization of a character’s inner conflict.’

I’d got a grip on part of that though probably didn’t appreciate how novel it was.

I picked up that the soliloquy had an impact on her. Though she mentioned him only rarely in her work, journals and letters, Shakespeare was a key influence upon her. Amongst other things he was the master of the soliloquy. This is not the same exactly as Woolf was attempting, but it may have been the soil in which her plan had its roots.

The main difference is that Shakespeare’s words were to be performed on stage and, while soliloquies were designed to give the audience an insight into a character’s mind that could not otherwise be conveyed, they were not attempting to reproduce exactly the contents of the character’s consciousness – not even in Hamlet, where the protagonist is famous for his introspection. Most of his soliloquies serve to open for the audience an illuminating window on his vacillation and his feelings about that. We see the tugging to and fro within his mind. It’s definitely a step towards Woolf’s destination and would almost certainly have influenced her, whether consciously or not.

Fletcher unpacks what he feels is the full significance of making this move and progressing from there to the novel:[4]

. . . this self-awareness hack… would become the most distinctive feature of modern literature. In the ancient days before Hamlet, we would have felt for Achilles…; but from now on, we would identify with Jane Eyre …

As he puts it:[5]

Thus it was that the novels upgraded the soliloquy by accident. Their authors didn’t craft a new literary mechanism to insert into Hamlet; they simply deleted the stage and the persons upon it.… By eliminating the physical element that disrupted the soliloquy’s identification effect, the novel added via abstraction.

He quotes Charles Lamb’s experience of reading rather than watching  a Shakespeare play to illustrate his basic point: “While we read [the play], we see not [the character], but we are [the character], – we are in his mind.”

Jane Austen, as I have discussed already on this blog, shifted the novel up a gear. Fletcher terms her method[6] ‘free indirect discourse’: I use the term free indirect speech. What she, followed by, amongst others Ford Madox Ford, attempted to do was to narrate her novel always through the eyes of one of her characters, rather than in her own voice.

I used a short quote from Austen’s Emma to illustrate her skill and give an example of her typical tone. Emma’s disastrous plan to link the low-born Harriet to the aspiring clergyman on the rise is being incubated precipitously and with no sense of its limitations in Emma’s mind:

Mr. Elton was the very person fixed on by Emma for driving the young farmer out of Harriet’s head. She thought it would be an excellent match; and only too palpably desirable, natural, and probable, for her to have much merit in planning it. She feared it was what every body else must think of and predict. It was not likely, however, that any body should have equalled her in the date of the plan, as it had entered her brain during the very first evening of Harriet’s coming to Hartfield. The longer she considered it, the greater was her sense of its expediency. Mr. Elton’s situation was most suitable, quite the gentleman himself, and without low connexions; at the same time, not of any family that could fairly object to the doubtful birth of Harriet. He had a comfortable home for her, and Emma imagined a very sufficient income; for though the vicarage of Highbury was not large, he was known to have some independent property; and she thought very highly of him as a good-humoured, well-meaning, respectable young man, without any deficiency of useful understanding or knowledge of the world.

Fletcher admits that the embryo of this can be found in the poetry of Horace, and it’s the foetus in Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. Austen took it to a far higher level:[7]

Austen became the first author to deploy free indirect discourse in a romance novel. . . .She gentled the free indirect discourse, making it feel less like a broad satiric caricature and more like a character’s unique inner disclosures.

Even more interestingly, Fletcher unpacks how Woolf’s reactions to the work of Proust and Joyce helped her achieve something quite revolutionary. His points eluded me at the time of writing my previous sequence of posts, but make complete sense, seem completely obvious now and deepen my understanding of her achievement.

He begins by looking at another favourite author of mine William James, whose influence on Woolf failed to register with me before. She came to share James’ belief[8] in ‘the stream of consciousness.’ Consciousness is not a ‘chain’ of ideas or a ‘train’ of thought. Consciousness in his view ‘is nothing jointed; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.’

Fletcher then pins down her problems with Proust and Joyce, authors who have also captured my interest in the past.

She loved the way Proust captured the stream, but there was a catch for her:[9] ‘Proust’s style still limits our brain’s experience of “free water” in one crucial way: it confines us to a single mind.’

Joyce didn’t have that particular problem, but his approach was a lot less appealing to her even so. He ‘leaps between minds’[10] but ‘because Ulysses lacks the connections between ideas that makes consciousness into a fluid stream, it arrives instead as a series of jolting railway cars.’ That jarred with her.

Then came the light bulb insight.

The combination of strengths and weaknesses in their approaches[11] ‘made her realise that if a novel combined the stream feeling of Proust with the multiple minds of Joyce, it would unite . . . a calm state of neural flow [with an] experience of mental freedom.’ This became the object of her ambition.

In her first attempt, Mrs Dalloway[12] ‘[s]he leaps many more times than Joyce had ever leapt in Ulysses  – and into many more mental streams.’

I drew heavily in my previous sequence on Julia Briggs’ biography of Virginia Woolf, which focuses on her inner life. In Mrs Dalloway Woolf uses the technique of interior monologue.[13] We see inside the minds of her two main characters. A previous work Jacob’s Room[14] ‘had alerted her to a problem created by interior monologue – that it risked producing a series of self-absorbed, non-interactive characters.’ Mrs Dalloway, on the other hand, ‘is centrally concerned with the relationship between the individual and the group.’ As she moved forward in To the Lighthouse[15] ‘she wanted to re-create the constant changes of feeling that pass through human beings as rapidly as clouds or notes of music, changes ironed out in most conventional fiction.’

I’m grateful to Fletcher for expanding my understanding of Woolf’s progress to this critical point. It’s tempting for me to suppose that I find Woolf’s novels so satisfying because, in her efforts to capture consciousness, she turns her prose into poetry, and as I have already indicated in my sequence on Charlotte Mew, when music, narrative and psychology combine I’m hooked.

References:

[1]. To the Lighthouse – page  28.
[2]. Wonderworks – page 28.
[3]. Ibid. – page  291.
[4]. Ibid. – page 294.
[5]. Ibid. – page 297.
[6]. Ibid. – page 175.
[7]. Ibid. – pages 178-79.
[8]. Ibid. – pages 259-60.
[9]. Ibid. – page 265.
[10]. Ibid. – page 264.
[11]. Ibid. – page 266.
[12]. Ibid. – page 268.
[13]. Virginia Woolf: an inner life – page 132.
[14]. Ibid. – page 133.
[15]. Ibid. – page 164.

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Parliament of Selves (14/18): Wasting Time (b)

‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me . . .’

(Richard II Act 5, Scene 5, line 49)

I am in between switching my focus from one Eliot (Thomas Stearns) to another (George). I need more time to ponder on why Middlemarch, her masterpiece, resonates so much more strongly with me than The Waste Land. Given that George Eliot is praised for the skill with which she conveys the consciousness within, it seems appropriate to republish this sequence which is a fictional attempt to project my inscape into words. 

After what seemed an interminable silence, I just have to say something else.

‘I’m not trying to minimise the problem with global heating. It’s an international emergency, I know that. I think we all do. But it is not the only issue. Genuine consciousness changing is far wider and goes far deeper than the consciousness-raising involved in the climate situation.’

‘Where’s this going exactly?’ Indie interjects. ‘Are we just going to be finding excuses for doing nothing?’

Fred comes to my rescue.

‘We’re very good as a species at focusing on one thing at a time with a narrow band of attention. That got us through the stone-age fine, when our main concerns were not getting eaten or wiped out by a neighbouring tribe, but it’s not so great when you are dealing with a wide range of complex and toxic problems stretching over a globally connected society. Plastics, potentially genocidal prejudice, a competitive ideology based on a distorted Darwinism preaching a divisive and misguided doctrine of the survival of the fittest . . .’

Emma groans out loud. Chris is nodding. Fred is oblivious, sitting at the back of the classroom on the right hand side, staring out of the window at the rain spattering against the tall glass.

‘. . . rampant consumerism and greed for profit fuelling an unbridled and unsustainable exploitation of the earth’s resources, extreme inequality, treatment resistant bacteria, as well as the climate crisis, to name but a few of the most obvious. And I can’t list the ones we don’t know.’

‘Have you quite finished now?’ Indie and Emma moan in unison, ‘or do you need another hour?’

Though I resonate to Fred’s line of argument, what he has said seems only to exaggerate the divide.

I hesitantly wade in again, from the doorway I first entered 53 years ago. My struggle with the lower sixth, when I eventually found where they were, is nothing compared with this.

‘Maybe we have to dig deeper still, much deeper than any of us have dug so far.’

‘What do you mean exactly?’ Chris queries, probably feeling that none of us could ever possibly have dug deeper than he has.

‘Well, first of all, I don’t think any of us, including me, is wise enough to know what’s best.’

‘But most of us think we need to be more active,’ Indie feels.

‘Half of the six of you, to be fair,’ I correct her.

Emma scowls.

I try again.

‘Look, the whole point is that even when we put our heads together we can’t agree what to do. We’ve got another stand off. Carrying on arguing, with feelings running so high, will never get an agreement on what’s best to do.’

‘We’re stuck then, I guess,’ Bill shouts from the back corner, his expression darker than the cloud outside. ‘But at least I can carry on writing poems, while Chris meditates and Fred learns more about the brain.’

‘That’s all right for you three but it’s not all right for the rest of us,’ Peat says. ‘Mum’s really upset and so is Auntie Emmie.’

‘That’s the problem,’ I respond. ‘We’re each seeing only a part of what’s wrong and so can just suggest a remedy that works for that bit only. We need to work out how to get closer to the whole truth. And, the way I see it, there’s going to be only one way to do that, given consulting together at our current level of understanding is getting us nowhere. We all have to step back from our attachment to the person we think we are.’

‘Sorry,’ Bill, leaping to his feet, jumps in. The desk rattles as he does so. ‘I know who I am. I’m a poet who loves nature. Nothing’s going to change that.’

‘And I know who I am as well,’ agrees Emma. ‘I’m an activist – always have been, always will be.’

‘I agree,’ comes the chorus from Indie and Peat.

Not surprisingly Chris and Fred seem to be taking a different line, with Fred speaking first.

‘I know about sub-personalities and I know that’s what we are. But that doesn’t mean, Pete, that you are not who you think you are. This isn’t going to break the block.’

Chris raises a hand in the air, asking for a moment’s silence. There is quiet for a moment.

He wades in, ‘Most meditative traditions contain some sense that a self of any kind is an illusion. I’m inclined to agree. So, yes, we could all be illusions, including you, Pete. The problem is that this doesn’t mean there is a real self of some kind we can tap into, which is where I suspect you are heading. Whatever self we discover apart from us, is going to be another illusion, believe me. We’ve been down that road twice already since this process started, and, with all due respect neither Peat nor Indie can claim beyond a shadow of doubt that they are the true self you seem to be looking for.’

I can see I’ve got a tough job ahead of me. Just as we couldn’t agree on what to do when the argument started, we’re not going to agree any time soon on this issue either.

I accept we can all get a long way by using all sorts of creative techniques to enhance our understanding. Dreams for one thing. The sand dream I was having when they barged in was a case in point. It flagged up the issue of how we use our time.

Reading and writing, perhaps especially poetry, are important others. My recent encounter with Machado’s blessed illusion poem is a good example of the fruits of those activities. Quoting the last few lines of my attempted translation illustrates how tricky the next stage of our development is going to be:

Will tomorrow’s dreams, to heal my heart,
again be blessed, with radiant sunlight
this time, hotter than the warmest hearth?

If that should happen, there’ll be no doubt,
in my mind at least – my heart does hold
within it, at its deepest point, what
feels the closest we can reach to God.

How am I going to explain the next step to them, something I don’t fully understand and I’m not sure I completely believe is possible for us? I could build on our hearticulture plan, but that didn’t carry everyone with it anyway, which is why it hasn’t got very far as yet.

While I was lost in thought just now they were all just staring at me in frustration, or at least that what it looks like now I’ve surfaced again. If anyone did speak I didn’t hear them.

I need to find some common ground, not just between them and me but among them as well. This story may not have a happy ending.

‘Do we all agree,’ I ask, ‘that we would like to achieve two things at the very least – one is to understand ourselves better and the other is to do as much as we can to make this world a better place?’

There are murmurs and half-hearted nods suggesting general agreement, with an undercurrent of suspicion. Bill is inspecting the bike shed through the rain-splattered window again.

‘OK. So, don’t pounce on me straightaway but, to explain where I’m heading right now I’ll have to use two words not all of you like.’

The stirrings of discontent begin to rise.

‘Let me guess,’ says Emma. ‘Reflection is one of those words.’

I nod.

She grimaces, looking across Peat at Indie. ‘We bloody knew this’d come up again, didn’t we?’

Peat looks confused. Indie whispers an explanation to him.

‘Look,’ I pleaded. ‘Can we strike a bargain here? The three of you are passionate about combatting the climate crisis. Did I use the right word there, by the way?’

‘It’ll do,’ Indie smiles, probably aware I’d learned the word from Fred.

‘Well, you claim I’m doing nothing, but that’s not quite true. I have been vegetarian since the late 70s and now I’m cutting down on dairy and trying to become vegan. Most of the science suggests that this is the single most important thing any individual can do, more effective than just flying less for those like me who don’t fly much, or giving up the car when you hardly drive at all. So, I’m asking the three of you in particular for whom this is so important, meet me halfway. At least think about working on our ability to reflect and learning to tune into our heart at the deepest level – that’s the second part.’

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

‘Nice move, Pete,’ grins Fred, ever the pragmatist. ‘You know you can drag the rest of us on board more easily. You know what? I’ve been thinking that we can treat it like an experiment. It’ll be hard to test properly for whether it’s working, because how will we know for sure that what we do has helped us get closer to the truth. Remember William James – you can discover the truth, but you can never know for sure that you have done so.’

Chris also looks reasonably pleased though Bill looks a bit glum still.

‘How is this going to help me break through my writer’s block?’

‘If what we finally plan to do works,’ offers Chris, trying to be helpful, ‘surely your poems will start flowing again because they come from the heart, don’t they, and we’re going to try and connect to that more strongly. I may distrust this true self stuff, but I have experienced how tuning in more deeply to what is going on beneath the surface of consciousness produces unexpected insights which our conscious mind cannot usually access. You’d go along with that as well, Fred, wouldn’t you?’

Fred nods in agreement. ‘You bet. It’s happened to me a lot as well. And there’s a lot of evidence to support this in the literature.’

Bill looks a bit happier.

‘So, where does this leave us?’ I ask, moving to stand near Fred at the front of the class. It makes me slightly nervous because of the memories it brings back of disruptive teenage lads muttering with each other, or fidgeting inside their desks instead of listening, and possibly planning their next unsettling move.

‘Are we all on board with at least an experiment to see where this gets us?’

While Chris and Fred have been working on Bill, Indie and Emma have been helping Peat keep up with the arguments put forward.

Indie nudges Peat. ‘Go on, love. Don’t be scared. Say what you want to say.’

‘I am glad you’re going vegan, sir.’ He’s obviously got a bit carried away with the classroom situation. ‘I think we all are. I hope we’ll be able to do more than that in the end though. For now, I’ll agree to try this experiment. But how long are we going to do this before we decide whether it’s going to work or not? We haven’t got forever.’

He looks nervous but speaks clearly.

‘I’m not sure, Peat. The experiment won’t mean we do nothing, remember that. I’ll be blogging and networking. I’m sure Bill’s poems will help people focus on important issues, and Fred’s reading and Chris’ meditation are both going to help as well. And what you three feel about climate change — sorry! crisis — is going to still influence us all in that we do, write and say. The experiment will be a crucial focus for all of us, though. Because we will not be doing it full time, and because we’re not experts in what we are going to try and test out I think we’ll need to give it at least six months before we review. Would that be OK.’

Peat looks at Emma and Indie, checking out their expressions, before nodding his agreement.

‘That’s good,’ enthuses Chris, moving to sit in the front row. ‘So, what’s the exact plan then?’

‘I think we’ll have to work out the details after we’ve all given it some more thought. The key component will be using reflection, in the strong sense of the word, involving withdrawing our identifications not just from our thoughts and feelings, but even from our sense of who we are, so we can tune in more strongly to the depths of our being. I think we will also have to build in a pause button to press when we catch ourselves reacting automatically, particularly when we’re under pressure or in social situations. And in addition to learning how to remain more deeply grounded, we’ll need to find words to catch the insights that we find. This might mean we need to dig up the right images to do that with, rather than relying on ordinary prose. That should suit you, Bill!’

He doesn’t hear me. He has taken his notebook out at the back of the class and is scribbling something down as he mutters to himself – it’s about being as lonely as a clown, if I heard him right.

‘There’s always one,’ I find myself thinking.

I start to draw a diagram on the blackboard to try and explain how all these factors relate to one another. It doesn’t seem to work and I give up after a few boxes and arrows.

‘Shall we leave it a month to ponder on and then come back together again?’ I ask. ‘We’ve all got more thinking to do before we can make a clear plan.’

‘That makes sense,’ Fred agrees. ‘This is going to be really tricky.’

The walls of the classroom and the faces of my parliament of selves begin to fade as the need for a visit to the toilet takes control. Even in my dozy state I realise I’ve got some serious thinking to do about an issue that matters a lot to my waking self.

References:

For the first and last post in the original Parliament of Selves sequence see links.

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