Quest Magazine

Originally printed in the September - October 2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation:O'Grady, John P. "Clouding." Quest  90.5 (SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2002):164-169.

By John P. O'Grady

The ability to recognize kinship is a god. That at least was the ancient wisdom, and it still holds true today. "I know you!" A bright idea. Love at first sight. A letter from a long lost friend. An old photograph found in an antique shop that proves to be an exact likeness to your mother, your child, or yourself. Like being drawn unto like. Kinship. All of these are epiphanies or theophanies, each one tender as a bolt of lightning.

Etymology suggests that the atheist is not the one who refuses belief in the divine, but the one who has been abandoned by the gods. The atheist is the archetypal lonely guy. I've known a few of them in my day, and I've observed that while the divine may sometimes forsake an individual, sooner or later a blessed—or terrifying—reunion takes place: the lonely guy falls in love. It may be with a person, but just as dramatically it might be with an idea, or what lies behind the idea. In any case, when the forlorn one is unexpectedly visited by a passion, life suddenly becomes head-in-the-clouds.

Traditionally, clouds are symbolic of things indeterminate. Composed of air and water, their essential nature can be attributed to neither element but arises in an obscuring of the two, a betwixt-and-between phenomenon, not unlike human beings, those nebulous creatures, who themselves seem caught between realms, floating along between the shimmering horizons of birth and death, here and there, earth and heaven. Buddhist psychology refers to the aggregate of what we call personality as "the five clouds of entanglement."

But if we are clouds, we are also luminous. Xenophanes, writing at the dawn of Western philosophy, tells us that the stars are actually clouds "ignited by motion," kindled in their rising and extinguished in their setting, like coals. The sun too is a burning cloud, and as with the stars, each day it's a different cloud that is set ablaze, for no two suns are the same, though they share in the same flaring grandeur—and this goes on forever because the world is imperishable, without beginning and without end. Herein hovers a magnificent hope: entangled clouds that we are, sooner or later in our driftings we're bound to catch fire, become a star or maybe even a sun, and not just for fifteen minutes but for a whole day or night. Every soul is combustible.

In 1939 the International Commission for the Study of Clouds published a manual on how to observe these objects that Shelley once called "nurslings of the sky." Before telling someone how to look for something, it is prudent to state clearly what is being looked for. Thus the International Commission tells us, in language a little less elevated than Shelley's, that a cloud is an atmospheric event consisting of "minute particles of liquid water or ice, or of both, suspended in the free air and usually not touching the ground." It's the "not touching the ground" part that sparks my interest.

The Pythagoreans spoke of a mysterious "Counter-Earth," a sort of shadow world that occupies the orbit exactly opposite to the Earth, so it's always behind the sun, hidden from our view. I like to imagine this Counter-Earth as a place where each of us has a provocative counter-self who lives a colorful counter-life amid a vibrant counter-culture, an existence that is not really opposite to the one we enjoy or suffer here, but rather is entirely other to it, much as our dream lives are not opposite but other to our waking lives. Though our memory of it may be sketchy, we visit this Counter-Earth every night. Perhaps clouds are its allegory, opening a correspondence between the two worlds. In this sense, each cloud ought to be received like a love letter—or a ransom note—from beyond, endlessly unfolding across the sky.

Another cloud book that recently came into my hands cautions its reader: "At first glance a cloudy sky may appear chaotic, but the perceptive observer will discern some semblance of order, the existence of recognizable patterns." Things up there in the sky are not what they seem, say the scientists, and this resonates nicely with what various occult traditions have been fond of saying for millennia: "As above, so below." It is regrettable that the International Commission's manual offers no additional speculations in this regard.

Knowledgeable authorities in the past, however, were less hesitant to enter these darkling realms. The druids, for instance, are reported to have practiced a form of cloud divination. When a king or queen wanted a glimpse of the future, the druid was dispatched to the summit of a nearby hill or mountain to consult the clouds, much as the augurs in ancient Rome gleaned insight by watching the flight of birds. Before that, Moses climbed to the top of a mountain to converse with God, God who would only meet him under the cover of a thick cloud: "And the glory of the Lord rested on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days." And coming down to us from fourteenth-century England is a book of mystical instruction titled The Cloud of Unknowing. I like to think of it as a manual on how to observe the weather of the mind. "When I say darkness," the anonymous author explains, "I mean thereby a lack of knowing. . . . And for this reason it is not called a cloud of the air, but a cloud of unknowing, that is between thee and thy God." He also offers this salty advice to those who would plunge into such obscurities: "Short prayer pierces heaven."

We human beings remain fascinated by clouds, perhaps even more so today than in earlier times, because in their shape-shifting inexactitude, their openness to the world, clouds seem so entirely other to our rock-solid world of property rights, scientific and historical "facts," fixed identities, and the politics that go with them. "I'm a Republican!" "I'm a Feminist!" "I'm an environmentalist!" "I'm an anti-globalization Anarchist!" What's in a name? Wrong question. Better to ask, What's outside of a name? What you'll find there is nothing but clouds, free and easy wandering. One of my favorite Zen koans contains the line, "I am not a human being!"—a gentle reminder of the clouds where of each of us is composed.

Nevertheless, we persevere in our efforts to pierce heaven, now preferring telescopes to prayers. Contemporary cosmologists would lead us by the eye down their long tunnel and through their thick lens to the very heart of the universe, which is revealed not as the still point of old, but as a noisy "Big Bang." Contemplation replaced by a fireworks display. Yet, we are estranged from our very selves. Who among us can penetrate even the little secret of our own shifting moods, those storms of passion that characterize our most ordinary affections? "From day to day," writes Emerson, "the capital facts of human life are hidden from our eyes. Suddenly the mist rolls up, and reveals them, and we think how much good time is gone, that might have been saved, had any hint of these things been shown."

Consider that holy logic-chopper, Thomas Aquinas, who devoted his life to composing his multi-volume magnum opus, the Summa Theologica, regarded by many as the most important of all Christian theological works. It garnered for him a well-deserved renown, but no entry into that heaven he so diligently stormed with his intellect; instead, attainment came near the end, unexpectedly and without effort. The story goes that, just a few months before his death, Aquinas was celebrating a mass when suddenly he had a mystical experience. After that he gave up any further work on his Summa; he quit writing altogether. When somebody asked him why, he replied: "All that I have written seems to me like straw compared with what has now been revealed to me." It's often the case that what we so desperately long for is nearer to the heart than the heart is to itself.

When I was in graduate school studying literature I came up with an idea that, had I pursued it, would have made me a rich man. Instead, I spent all my time on poetry, which is why now I write essays like this just to pay for the groceries. But anyway, it occurred to me that, given the American consumer's insatiable desire to lay claim upon the intangible—everything from acquiring a stock portfolio to owning a "piece of the Rock"—why not give them the ultimate pie-in-the-sky delusion, why not offer them an opportunity to buy and sell clouds? Allow me to explain.

At the time, I was living in Maine. My plan was to wait for one of those bright August afternoons that occur on days after a powerful cold front has moved through, a day when the sky is filled with those fluffy cumulus clouds, the sort Daisy Faye wanted to push Jay Gatsby around in, clouds clearly detached from one another and sharply delineated, each insisting upon its own individuality (if only for a moment), the kind that John Muir lamented were "hopelessly unsketchable and untellable."

But not un-photograph-able.

That was my plan—to take pictures of individual clouds, for each one to print up an elegantly lettered deed of title on parchment, and then put them up for sale. A typical deed would read something like this: "Witnesseth, that in consideration of Ten Dollars ($10.00), in hand paid, the receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged, the said grantor does hereby grant and convey, sell and confirm unto said grantee and to his or her heirs and assigns, all that certain piece or parcel of cloud situated, at 1:18 p.m. on the Eleventh of August, Year of Our Lord 1983, in the sky above Pemetic Mountain in the County of Hancock, State of Maine." One caveat, one encumbrance let us say, on this transaction: while each deed would confer full title to a particular cloud, and specify the exact time and location it was last seen, the burden of again locating said cloud rests entirely upon the buyer. That's why every deed would be accompanied by a photograph of the cloud—at least then the buyer would have a clear image of what it is he's looking for, and a place to start. Thus he's already two steps ahead of most idealists.

Consider this cloud scheme my contribution toward keeping the nation's economy on track. We all want to own a piece of the American Dream, but given a country with an ever-increasing population and a "limited resource" of land, comparatively few will be able to own real estate, but everyone can have title to un-real estate—we can all be cloud-owners! Poverty, says Plato, is not a function of small property but of immense desires. So give them clouds! People could even assign names to their cloud property, much as the wealthy do for their estates: "Sunnybank," "Olana," "Onteora." The sky's the limit when it comes to the number of clouds that can be put on the market. They are not, at least in many parts of the globe, a limited resource, they can't be used up, and the world keeps making more. In this sense, clouds are a lot like kisses: you can keep giving them away but they never run out.

My plan was to open a little Un-Real Estate office down on Cottage Street in Bar Harbor. "Cloud Nine" would be its name. Instead of pictures of houses posted in my storefront window, there would be clouds. Had my life not taken a very different course, and had the success of this business been anywhere near commensurate with my dreams for it, franchises would have spread out quickly, and today you'd be looking at a Cloud Nine Un-Real Estate office there in your town. Instead, you have Wal-Mart, and an awful lot of undeeded property floating by in the sky.

Alas, I wasn't the first to come up with the idea of capturing clouds on film. Late in his life, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz started making photographs of clouds. By all accounts, his illustrious career seemed to be winding down by 1915, but then something happened to reawaken his creativity. These days, art historians argue that this rejuvenation was a result of aesthetic insight gleaned from the work and ideas of Picasso, the Cubists, and other modern European artists. But I'm guessing it had more to do with Georgia O'Keeffe. The two met in 1916, and not long after that they became lovers. "She is much more extraordinary than even I had believed," Stieglitz wrote, in his modest way, to a friend in 1918. "In fact I don't believe there ever has been anything like her—Mind and feeling very clear—spontaneous—& uncannily beautiful—absolutely living every pulse beat." These are the words of a man whose mind is socked-in with the clouds of Cupid. Stieglitz, no doubt, had that ability to recognize kinship—even in the fog—and he acted on it, though it cost him a marriage of twenty-five years.

Over the next decade he generated an extended serial portrait of O'Keeffe. Many of these images, which seem almost Tantric in intention, depict O'Keeffe in various stages of undress as well as fully nude. In these photographs, Stieglitz—who was fond of saying that he made love through his camera—was not only challenging the taboos of his day against public displays of sexuality, but also intimating dark possibilities of nature-magic and rank fertility. After all, he had been reading Freud, who proclaimed the human body is on the one hand sacred, consecrated, and a veritable temple, while on the other "uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, and unclean." Talk about a Counter-Earth! O'Keeffe's lean and taut body affected the aging Stieglitz mightily. "When I look at her," he confesses in another letter, "I feel like a criminal.—I with my rickety old carcass [he was a quarter century older than O'Keeffe] & my spirit being tried beyond words."

It was right on the heels of making these erotically charged photographs of O'Keeffe (not to mention other women) that Stieglitz turned his peculiar form of lovemaking toward the clouds. The same creative energy (call it "libido") that he had lavished upon making photographs of the female body was now released skyward, like a bunch of doves. In a 1923 letter describing his new work to the novelist Sherwood Anderson, Stieglitz comes off sounding like a lickerish adolescent, admitting almost boastfully that "after many days of passionate working—Clouding!—I stopped. I had to catch my breath."

In all fairness to him, it should be remembered that Stieglitz always talked this way when it came to his art. Late in life, looking back on a long career, he reflected: "It's difficult to understand today the passion and intensity I poured into Photography in those early years. I spent hours, days, weeks and months. Photography had become a matter of life and death." Freud called this kind of thing sublimation, "the instinct's directing itself towards an aim other than, and remote from, that of sexual gratification." Perhaps, but such claims are always dubious. The psychologist's words smack of a clinical interiority, just a little too walled-in from the vast Outside that was the subject of Stieglitz's art. More in the spirit of these photographs, it might be said that the sky was the only place ample enough to contain a vision as grandiose, and as lonesome, as his; after all, he was an artist, one of those personalities, to borrow the words of the International Commission for the Study of Clouds, "suspended in the free air and usually not touching the ground." Or, as Horace puts it, "I shall not die, my sublimations will exalt me to the stars."

Perhaps this is the way of all true artists. They're just like the old druids and Moses and maybe anybody who is madly, passionately in love: poking around up there in the sky, looking for something beyond reach, calling out to it and hoping it responds, so that, should it draw near, they can pounce on it. There's a certain impossibility in all these endeavors—to fix the future, to behold a god in all its splendor, to capture nature in its bare reality, to embrace the loved one forever. Isn't it the case that all who reach for the sky are bound to come home empty handed? "What can poor mortals say about clouds?" lamented John Muir.

Dorothy Norman reports that not long before he died Stieglitz was asked what is the perfect photograph? He responded by spinning a fantasy in which he himself had just taken that perfect photograph, and was now holding the glass negative in his hands, reveling in his accomplishment. "It is exactly what I wanted!" the artist exclaims. But suddenly the glass slips from his hands and shatters on the floor. "I will be dead," Stieglitz concludes sadly, "and no one will ever have seen the picture nor know what it was." The moral of the story seems to be that there is no place for perfection in this world, a view consonant with Plato's famous assertion that no sensible person would try to express their grandest thoughts—those thunderheads of the mind—in a form that is unchangeable.

In this regard too I think of the great artist-ornithologist John J. Audubon, blasting away with his rifle at his beloved American birds soaring in the limitless sky, that he might bag a few ideal examples of each species and immortalize them in his art. Yet, when all the birds were shot and all the drawings complete, each specimen splendidly depicted across the immense pages of his glorious books, did old John J., suffering the dementia of his last years, "his mind all in ruins," cast a now hazy marksman-artist eye upward through the bird-free sky and gaze longingly upon those high and companionable clouds, the only things now remaining between himself and heaven?

John P. O'Grady is the author of Grave Goods: Essays of a Peculiar Nature (University of Utah Press, 2001). After a stint in northwestern Pennsylvania, he has returned to the western mountains, where he is working on a new book and watching clouds.

Originally printed in the September - October 2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: de Quincey, Christian. "Stories Matter, Matter Stories." Quest  90.5 (SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2002):177-181.

By Christian de Quincey

Are rocks conscious? Do animals or plants have souls? Have you ever wondered whether worms or insects might feel pain or pleasure? Can trees feel anything at all? Ever wondered where in the great unfolding of evolution consciousness first appeared?

If questions like these intrigue you, you are in good company, because they touch on the deepest mystery in modern philosophy, science, and spirituality: How are minds and bodies related?

How does consciousness fit into the physical world? These are not just idle musings of philosophers. How we answer such questions can dramatically affect the way we live our lives, how we treat the world of nature and other people, and even how we relate to our own bodies. If we are to feel at home in the cosmos, to be open to the full inflowing and outpouring of its profound creativity, if we are not to feel isolated and alienated from the full symphony of cosmic matter—both as distant as the far horizon of time and as near as the flesh of our own bodies—we need a new cosmology story. We need a new way to envision our relationship to the full panorama of the crawling, burrowing, swimming, gliding, flying, circulating, flowing, rooted, and embedded Earth. We need to be and to feel differently, as well as to think and believe differently.

Why? Well, listen to this from Bertrand Russell, one of the most respected and influential philosophers of our time:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

This may be the most terrifying story ever told—nevertheless, it is the one we are born into. It expresses the terrible poetry of a meaningless universe, rolling along entropic channels of chance, blind and without purpose, sometimes accidentally throwing up the magnificence and beauty of natural and human creations, but inevitably destined to pull all our glories asunder and leave no trace, no indication that we ever lived, that our lonely planet once bristled and buzzed with colorful life and reached out to the stars. It is all for nothing.

Such is the plot and substance of modern science boiled down to its bare essentials, a legacy from the founders of the modern worldview, such as Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, and Darwin.

Even if we have faith in a deeper spiritual dimension, somewhere in our nested system of beliefs that old story lurks, ready to rob our visions and our dreams, our loves and our passions of any meaning, of any validity beyond the scripted directions of a blind, unconscious, purposeless plot maker. If something in our experience stirs and reacts to this with disbelief, even with a question, it is surely worth paying attention to because the possibility that that story is wrong or incomplete has far-reaching consequences.

What if that sweeping materialist vision leaves something out? What if there is something other than an "accidental collocation of atoms" at work in the universe? What if, for instance, the experience or consciousness that contemplated the world and discovered the atoms was itself real? What if the ability of "collocated atoms" to purposefully turn around and direct their gaze to reflect on themselves was more than "accidental"? What if consciousness participates in the way the world works? What if consciousness can dance with the atoms and give them form and direction? What if the atoms themselves choreograph their own dance? What then?

In this article and in my new book Radical Nature, I explore an alternative story—one where the atoms do choreograph their own dance—a worldview that tells us consciousness matters and that matter is conscious.

Deserts of Meaning

Each year it is becoming clearer that our society's profound reliance on the authority of scientific knowledge and its applications in technology is inadequate for resolving the growing crises we face as communities and as individuals. Besides environmental problems of global proportions, our science and technology appear helpless in the face of burgeoning populations, with attendant international crises of poverty and hunger. Our societies are stressed with internal pressures of social, racial, and economic unrest, and with external pressures fueled by excesses of governmental, military, and corporate policies that impact across national boundaries creating economic and biological havoc and, in extreme situations, wastelands and deserts.

These deserts are not only environmental, such as the destruction of the planet's dwindling rainforests and marsh lands; there are also existential deserts—deserts of the spirit, of the soul, and of the mind. Deserts of meaning. It is precisely this aspect of the global crisis that calls out for a rigorous and inspired philosophy of mind and a true science of consciousness.

We begin the twenty-first century living on a planet dominated by a technological society based on science, and we live with a science based on a materialistic paradigm. We live, in other words, in a world lacking any firm grounding in meaning, in values, in purposes or goals. With few exceptions, the goals and "purposes" that do exist within our social institutions have no metaphysical foundation. They emerge, for the most part, as expressions of an economic philosophy based on a materialistic metaphysics that denies any foundation to goals, purposes, and values—other than biologically driven urges or the relativity of social power plays. Our religious and artistic traditions have attempted to fill the gap, but increasingly succumb to a social preference for scientific knowledge as the final authority on how we should govern our lives.

But it is precisely the wisdom of meaning, of value, of experience that our societies need in order to balance the knowledge of physical science and the obsessive push for technological progress. I'm proposing a profound reexamination of our basic narrative premise—our culture's "guiding story" or cosmology—to see what alternative story (or stories) science and philosophy might tell.

The Problem in a Nutshell

We humans are not so special. Yet often we think we are. Human specialness lies at the core of our civilization's dominant stories. In the grand narratives we tell ourselves trying to make some sense that we are here at all—in our cosmologies, in our scientific and religious worldviews—humans,typically, are the central characters.

For the most part, neither mainstream science nor conventional religion recognizes that humans are not essentially different from the rest of nature. Both regard matter and the world of nature as "dumb." Both assert that human beings are somehow special and stand apart from nature because, they say, only human beings—or at least creatures with brains and nervous systems—have consciousness or souls.

On the one hand, according to science, human consciousness "emerged" from dead, insentient matter. Nature itself is without any intrinsic meaning, value, or purpose because it has no consciousness. For science, there is no spirit in nature. Humans are thus at odds with the rest of the world: We are intelligent, nature is dumb. By an accident of nature, we are special.

On the other hand, for many forms of religion we are special by divine fiat. God gave us souls so that we may survive and transcend the inevitable corruption of the flesh. Human consciousness, spirit, or soul is separate from the physical body, and the path to meaning and salvation is through prayer to a remote, transcendent God. Attention is focused elsewhere, either toward the heavens or toward priests, rabbis, or mullahs.

However, science may be seriously mistaken when it asserts that consciousness is a product of complex brains and that the rest of vital nature is a product of mindless, purposeless, unfeeling evolution. We may not be so special.

And as for religion, the path to the sacred may not be through priests or churches. In my experience, the sacred is all around us in nature—for example, in watching a sunset, playing with animals, walking through a forest or on a beach, swimming in the ocean, climbing a mountain, planting flowers or vegetables, filling our lungs with fresh air, smelling the mulch of rich nourishing soil, dancing through crackling autumn leaves, embracing a loved one, or holding the hand of a dying parent. The most direct way to God, I believe, is through touching and feeling the Earth and its inhabitants—being open to the expression of spirit in the most ordinary, as well as in the most awesome, events of daily life. The way to meaning in our lives is by reconnecting with the world of nature—through exuberant participation or through the stillness of meditation, just being present and listening. And when we do so, we hear, we feel, and we learn: We are not alone—we are not uniquely special.

Nature is sacred, inherently divine. As the ancient philosopher Thales said, "Nature is full of gods."Today, we might say it is full of God, full of spirit, full of consciousness. Nature literally carries the wisdom of the world, a symphony of relationships between all its forms. Nature constantly "speaks"to us, and feels and responds to our stories. Simply breathing in rhythm with the world around us can be a potent form of prayer. We can open our hearts and pray to the "god of small things," for God lives in pebbles and stones, in plants and insects, in the cells of our bodies, in molecules and in atoms. And by connecting with the God of small things, we can discover this is the same as "the god of all things," great or small. Yes, God is in the heavens, but God is also in the finest grain of sand.

In the religion of nature—of a natural God—priests become shamans, the whole Earth becomes our church, and the vast cosmos our cathedral. In nature spirituality, the role of "priests" is not to be an intermediary between Heaven and Earth. Rather, they are guides teaching us to listen to the sacred language of nature—helping us open our minds and bodies to the messages rippling through the world of plants and animals, rocks and wind, oceans and forests, mountains and deserts, back yards and front porches.

In this view, all of nature, all bodies—from atoms to humans—tingle with the spark of spirit. But this is an uncommon view, called "panpsychism," presenting a radical and controversial account of the relationship between bodies and minds, between matter and soul. True, the nature of mind or consciousness remains a deep mystery for science and philosophy. But success at healing the mind-body split so characteristic of our age depends, I believe, more on a revised understanding of the nature of matter.

Bruno and the Story of Matter

For most of Western history, the notion of matter was derived either from Plato's dualism, where matter was imperfect and corrupt (common to mystical and religious traditions such as Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Christianity), or from Aristotle, who described matter as intrinsically passive, wholly dependent on extrinsic form to give it shape and dynamic (the view that underlies so much of modern science). For nearly two millennia, the Western world, and for the most part this meant Christendom, had adhered to Aristotle's model of the cosmos, with the Earth, and therefore humankind, positioned at the center of the universe. This picture well suited Church doctrine about the relationship between nature, humanity, and God—a relationship that required the services of priests and bishops to intervene in the hierarchy between the divine and the mundane.

Only with the sixteenth-century arrival of Giordano Bruno do we get a view of matter that offers an alternative to the dualisms of Plato and Aristotle. A generation or so before Bruno, Copernicus had shocked the Church establishment by overturning Aristotle's model, replacing it with a sun-centered cosmology. But Bruno, an excommunicated Dominican monk, was even more radical, and declared that not even the sun was at the center of the universe. "There is no center," he said; the universe is acentric.

Copernicus was severely reprimanded for daring to overturn Aristotle and the geocentric model. By withholding publication of his ideas, Copernicus saved his skin from the horrors of the Holy Inquisition. However, Bruno, for his outrageous defiance of Church authority, was unceremoniously marched half-naked to the stake and burned alive in Rome, on February 17, 1600. Although Bruno's insistence on the truth of his acentric cosmology was most likely the main reason for the Church's extreme ire, his conception of the nature of matter was equally revolutionary, and equally subversive of Church authority.

Whereas Aristotle's matter was passive and inert—without quality or quantity—Bruno's matter was intrinsically active and self-informing. Form, the dynamic capacity for action and formation, was itself an intrinsic quality of matter, Bruno taught. His metaphysic, therefore, presented a thoroughly monistic view of the cosmos as composed of "intelligent matter," which he called mater-materia ("matter mattering," matter as the creative "womb" or "matrix" of all forms). This notion of "intelligent matter" is radically at odds with the dominant modern view.

With Bruno, therefore, we have a view of matter in which it is "animated" by its own intrinsic and essential soul. But Bruno's "soul of matter" is far from the dualist's "ghost in the machine," a "something added" to matter to make it alive. In Descartes' account, biological matter in humans is animated by God injecting an alien soul. Bruno's matter, by contrast, is naturally organic and ensouled, and is itself intrinsically intelligent. In modern jargon, we might say that Bruno's matter is "autopoietic," self-organizing.

A New View of Mind and Matter

In this new (and very ancient) view, mind is neither outside nor inside matter, but is part of the very essence of matter—interior to its being. Mind, consciousness, or soul is that which is responsible for matter's ability to become what it is—what Aristotle called entelechy (pronounced "en-tel-e-ky").

This idea is out of favor in modern scientific and philosophical circles, where it is believed to be a throwback to prescientific cosmologies. However, I want to draw attention to entelechy because the idea fits so well when we begin to focus on the implications of the mind-body relation for practical human affairs—such as illness and health, and personal destiny. A worldview that acknowledges that meaning and purpose are in-trinsic to the very fabric of nature inevitably confronts the question: "How do we fit in?" How do individual human purposes fit in with the consciousness and purpose of nature or the cosmos itself? If consciousness goes all the way down—if my consciousness is rooted ultimately in the deeper or higher consciousness of reality itself—what might be the relationship between my personal consciousness and the transpersonal "Cosmic I"? Can I reconcile my belief and experience of free will with the idea that some larger or deeper purpose is guiding or directing us? What meaning do we give to free will if human acts of volition are individualized expressions of some greater creative impulse?

The idea of entelechy was revived earlier this century by philosophers and scientists, such as Hans Dreisch, to indicate a nonmechanistic vital force that urges an organism to self-fulfillment. Henri Bergson proposed a similar notion with élan vital, which he saw as a creative force pulsing through evolution, and responsible for the purposeful drives in all evolving organisms. Teilhard de Chardin also spoke of the "within" of things, a sort of psychic, subjective complement to the external forms and energy of atoms, cells, plants, and animals.

These later thinkers recognized that the conventional Darwinian view of evolution as the result of blind matter in motion (the mechanism of chance mutations in DNA) and external natural selection was inadequate to the task of explaining how evolution produces new species or how an individual organism develops its particular unique form from its single fertilized seed cell. Faced with such mysteries, philosophers, biologists, and psychologists have sought for alternative explanations to the dogmatism of mechanism and matter. It seems as if something else may be at work in evolution and in the unfolding of our personal lives. It is the entelechy of an acorn, for example, to be an oak tree; it is the entelechy of a baby to be a grown-up human being; it is every individual's entelechy to be uniquely who he or she is.

In his dream work with clients, Jungian analyst Edward Whitmont recognized the presence of entelechy shaping the forms that arise in a person's psyche (images and symbols) and soma (bodily illnesses and injuries). For Whitmont, entelechy complements and augments the current preference in Western philosophy, science, and medicine for purely physical determinism. The conventional notion of "determinism" reduces all life processes—including the operations of our psyches—to mechanistic causes. Such a science reduces us to little more than complex thinking machines, automatons—"accidental collocations of atoms" with no free will, no power to exercise choice against the random winds of fate.

In contrast, entelechy combines the sense of a "given" purpose with the sense of a freedom to resist or accept the unfolding of our unique purpose. We are not blindly driven or determined. Yet it is as if we were each dealt a specific hand of cards, and our task in life—Whitmont calls it our life's "drama"—is to exercise our consciousness in how we "play" our hand. It invites the image of sailing a ship: The movement of the ship is constrained by its particular bulk, by the turbulence of the waves, by the ocean currents, and by the caprice of the winds—yet as captain and crew of our own ships (our self-consciousness blending with our unique entelechy or essence), we do have choice and power in the unfolding of our destiny. We must blow with the winds of fate; nevertheless, we have the option for what Buckminster Fuller called "trim tabbing": making slight adjustments to the rudder that can result in major shifts of direction.

Working with his clients, Whitmont acknowledged that the dynamics of illness and healing (both psychological and somatic) are expressions of our inherent entelechy, our individual pulse of purpose informing us that we may be off-course and calling our attention to the need for a course correction, some adjustment in the forms of our life's "drama."

Ontologically, soma and psyche are all one reality—body and mind invariably go together. They go together not as two separate modes of being that mysteriously interact; they go together in the sense that body is implicit in mind, and vice versa. Physicist David Bohm expressed a similar idea when he spoke of phenomenal, explicate reality enfolded or implicit in the universal "holomovement" of the implicate order. As embodied beings, we experience both explicate body and implicate mind. And when we attempt to express (make explicit) this experience, we invariably introduce a conceptual dualism: We speak of body and mind as if they were separate and distinct. The mind-body problem arises only when we conflate this conceptual and linguistic dualism with an ontological dualism of substance.

As human beings, we are grounded in our bodies; they are our vehicles for the practical business of getting on with living. We are embodied beings. But our bodies are not separate from our consciousness; they are the media through which we experience our being-in-the-world, through which we experience ourselves and the world. Of course, this in no way implies that our bodies or brains generate consciousness, as various forms of materialism claim. On the contrary, our bodies are particular expressions of the entelechy—the intrinsic organizing principle—that we happen to be.

Listening to Nature's Story

Given this radical view of the relationship between mind and body, between consciousness and matter, the implications for philosophy and science are far reaching. In Radical Nature, I trace the lineage of the idea that the cosmos itself is, literally, the unfolding of a great story. The evolution of galaxies, stars, and planets, and everything that populates them is nothing less than the intrinsic narrative and great adventure of matter—of matter that feels, matter with a divine purpose. Matter really is adventurous, and evolution is its unfolding epic drama. And, as the bard said, we, too, must play our part.

I think we need a broader view of who we are, where we come from, and how we fit into the world. We need a new story beyond the usual dogmas of science and religion. We need a story where humanity is at home in nature—a story that reconnects us to the Earth, and to the wider cosmos. We need a story where human consciousness is not a stranger in the world but is simply a natural part of a world that itself tingles with spirit to its deepest roots—all the way down. We need a story where the flesh of the Earth—the entire world of matter—is recognized to be sentient and intelligent.

The simple fact is that we are conscious, intelligent beings embedded in an intelligent world. We are conscious beings because we arise from a world that is itself conscious all the way down. We live in a world brim-full of consciousness, brim-full with meaning and messages for us. But our ears no longer hear. We, most of us, no longer listen. For us, the stones have fallen silent.

We need to learn to listen again to the messages in nature, to let its deep meaning nourish us. We need to learn to feel our kinship with the vast, natural world—with the rooted folk, with the crawling,burrowing, flying, running, hopping, swimming, climbing folk. We need to be open to the deep intelligence of the world. We need to recognize the sacredness of nature. And we begin by acknowledging that matter itself—the very "stuff" of the world, whether here on Earth or elsewhere in the cosmos—tingles with consciousness, sparkles with spirit. Not just human brains, but all the cells in our bodies pulse with purpose and intelligence—and so it is in all the cells of all the other creatures, and in the molecules in those cells, in the atoms in those molecules, in the electrons and protons in the atoms, in the quarks or quanta or superstrings or whatever lies at the root of the world of matter. Wherever there is matter, there is some kind of mind.

References

• Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

• Russell, Bertrand. "A Free Man's Worship." In The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell 1903-1959, ed. R. E. Egner and L. D. Dennon. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961.

• Whitmont, Edward. The Alchemy of Healing: Psyche and Soma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1994.
  
  

Christian de Quincey, PhD, is managing editor of IONS Review, a professor of Consciousness Studies at John F. Kennedy University, and an international speaker on consciousness, spirituality, and philosophy of mind at conferences and workshops in the United States and Europe. This article is adapted from his new book Radical Nature: Rediscovering the Soul of Matter (Invisible Cities Press, 2002), which is available through IONS' Website at www.amazon.com . Samples of his work on consciousness and cosmology are available on his Website, www.deepspirit.com . This article is reprinted with permission of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and originally appeared in IONS Review, no. 60 (June-August 2002). Further information is available at www.noetic.org .

Originally printed in the September - October 2003 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Bland, Betty. "Paying Attention." Quest  91.5 (SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2003):162-163.

By Betty Bland

Most of us have heard about the formation of a pearl in an oyster by an irritant such as a grain of sand. From this example, an analogy is often drawn for our own lives, in which the traumas of life can be the irritants that bring about the formation of the pearls of spirit within our own beings.

The pain and suffering of life, or dukka, as mentioned in Buddhist teachings, is not a favorite subject. We don't like to think of what Shakespeare called the "uses of adversity" (in Midsummer Night's Dream) until we find ourselves in a painful situation. Then, as we cast about for rhyme or reason, we might use the pearl analogy to find some comfort. ("This medicine tastes so terrible it is bound to be good for me.") More often, however, we tend to use this analogy when comforting others rather than applying such insight to our own difficulties.

Ah, there's the rub. It is no fun to sit with the pain with full attention; yet sitting with the problem, paying close attention to the experience and its associations with our past is the necessary elixir. When we have problems, we might do any of several things. We can pretend there is nothing wrong, but by doing so we shut out our awareness, creating a reservoir of unrecognized anguish that either explodes in our relationships with others or results in the inward implosion of depression. Or instead of blocking, we can end up obsessing over the situation, continuously rehashing and strengthening its hold on ourselves.

One of the heart's first impulses is to clamp tightly shut against the irritation. Defensive walls go up; offensive, prickly behavior blocks out all who might support us emotionally or be a mirror through which we might gain insight. Like an earthworm reacting to a salty fingertip, the heart retreats quickly into its recesses of heavy darkness rather than facing the possibility of being brought out into the light of conscious attention. Now, for an earthworm that is a healthy fight/flight reflex, but for us two-leggeds of complex psychological nature, whose souls long for the sun, it is a tragic reaction resulting in a continuation of pain and counterproductive behavior.

An essential element in our spiritual growth is finding a way to open the shell around our hearts—but not just any opening. The trick is to open to the light of intuition—through calm,dispassionate observation, rather than staying caught in the whirlwind of our emotional reactions. In this process we have to be careful to look with a quietly intuitive perception that allows us to see things as they really are. All too often we might mistakenly view our remembering, rehashing, and reminding others as attempts to open ourselves to clarity and awareness. But these patterns are the very substance of the tightly shut shell within which we go around and around, thinking we must be making progress.

Equally imprisoning is the pretense that there is no pain and no shell. We can say, grimacing through gritted teeth, "Everything is rosy. Can't you see me smiling?" Very often we might not realize what this line of defense does to ourselves and to others. We might even feel quite proud of ourselves that we are such cheerful martyrs! Yet this tactic not only locks that shell down tightly, it also makes that carefully crafted shell invisible to ourselves so that we are oblivious to the hurt our reactions inflicted on others.

Have you ever had a bad day that you just wanted to be able to discuss with a friend? You didn't want them to climb mountains or slay dragons for you, but you just wanted them to pay attention to you with a sympathetic ear. In so doing, they were actually supporting you as you began processing the event and its implications in your life.

Although it is as familiar as our breathing, consciousness has many complexities. The ordinary waking consciousness in which most of us function is the level where the irritations begin and continue to grow. On the other hand, at a deeper level of our consciousness resides the watcher within, our inner or higher self. This is the level of the attention payer, the healer, the pearl maker.

The only way to open our shell is to relax our tight grip and allow it to open from within. Instead of running from the difficulty, or continuously inflicting grief upon ourselves and others, we can stop, take a deep breath, and say to ourselves, "There must be a better way." In that moment of inquiry lies the beginning of hope. Something from the depths of our being, which has been watching and waiting all along, responds with hope and assurance. At first it is only a glimmer, but with attention it will grow. Focused awareness can ferret out those seeds of distress and heal them with clear insight.

Little by little we can learn to trust the presence of this light as we walk through the inevitable difficulties. We don't have to shut ourselves tightly up, obsessively repeat the scenario, or pretend that nothing is wrong. We can look into the difficulties until they yield a great blessing of insight. Through every difficulty we can find a tool or key that will enable us to open the door to the deeper parts of ourselves where our true nature, a reflection of the divine, abides.

As it is said in the little spiritual guidebook At The Feet Of The Master, written by Krishnamurti when he was quite young:

You must trust yourself. You say you know yourself too well? If you feel so, you do not know yourself; you only know the weak outer husk, which has fallen often into the mire. But you—the real you—you are a spark of God's own fire, and God, who is Almighty, is in you, and because of that there is nothing that you cannot do if you will. (p. 55)

With this kind of confidence, we are able to relax our anxious minds and doubting hearts enough to allow our shells of defense to begin to open, and then to fall away altogether. The source of healing was there all along and it was only our own insecurity that kept our consciousness shut too tightly to find it. Focused awareness will gradually transform our world and our perceptions of it into an iridescent beauty. Because we dare to face a problem rather than close it out, our insight can create understanding and compassion. Our discomfort will become a pearl of blessing.

May our pearls shine for the benefit of all.

By Dr. Gabriele Strohschen

Originally printed in the SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2005 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Strohschen, Gabriele. "The Three Objects: From Questions to Commitments." Quest  93.5 (SEPTERMBER-OCTOBER 2005):186-187

To form a nucleus of universal brotherhood without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color
To encourage the comparative study of religion, philosophy, and science
To explore the unexplained laws of nature and the latent powers in man

A child of survivors of World War II, I grew up in an environment that held more questions than answers. Mine was a child's world that saw the aftermath of violence and hate. I saw parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts struggle with physical and psychological damage—saw them struggle against hegemonic oppression imposed by individuals and countries with ethnocentric and expansionist goals.

Once, my family members had been children or young adults who simply accepted what they were taught. They followed their leaders. They had swallowed their country's propaganda without asking questions. They did not question its greed for power, its quest for forced territorial acquisition, its desire for riches, its need for self-aggrandizement, or the self-righteousness of its leaders. They did not think deeply about matters that were, after all, the province of the government—until circumstances finally forced them to do so. The horrors of war, their own imprisonment, and the facts that emerged after the fall of the Third Reich brought them questions that they continue to deal with in their adult years.

As a child in 1950s' Germany, I, too, lived with these questions. They shaped my beliefs and values. My family—most German families—lived in poverty in a post-war and cold-war world. Around us we witnessed assassinations, political unrest, the building of walls, and the division of the world into East and West. In school, I learned about the atrocities of war in a matter-of-fact, historical context. We children learned what our elders had created. But we also began to question truth.

Coming of age during the era of revolts and protests in Europe and abroad (i.e. the 1960's), I witnessed the leadership of individuals who risked, and often lost, their lives in the pursuit of peace and love for humankind. My heroes were Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesus, and far less famous local figures like Ms. Rapp and Mr. Geiger. Ms. Rapp was a Lutheran social worker who led my Girl Scout troop, not an easy task given our rebelliousness and her physical restrictions due to childhood polio. Mr. Geiger was the minister of the church I attended. He had lost his left arm in a war injury.

Ms. Rapp and Mr. Geiger spoke of peace, compassion, and lifelong learning as the ways to make an impact on our world. They made sure their actions matched their words. In this way, they instilled in us a sense of urgency about creating community by, with, and for others. Most importantly, perhaps, they continued to question. They encouraged us to do what we wanted to do anyway: question authority for authority's sake. My memory of their work still beckons me to look beneath surfaces. It reminds me that multiple realities exist.

My early experiences fostered an intuitive pursuit of truth, but when I found the Theosophical Society I also found a way to express my feelings—through the three objects of the Theosophical Society:

• To from a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color
• To encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science
• To investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man.

I remember first reading those words in 1994, when I had moved to Wheaton and was pursuing doctoral studies in education at Northern Illinois University. One day as I was driving by the Theosophical Society headquarters in Wheaton, I noticed that the Society's street address, 1926 (Main Street), was the same as my father's birth year. I decided to pull in the drive and visit. Entering the front offices, I met a kind woman named Edith—which is my middle name. These colliding coincidences startled me, but they were more than matched by something else, something deeper. Looking around, I confided, "Edith, this place has a feeling of familiarity to me."

"Of course, it has," she said. "You've come home."

Edith was right. Over time, I joined a study group in Chicago and met many others who also had "come home."

As I began my career in this country, my convictions remained firmly grounded in respect and love for my fellow and sister human beings. I did not discard what I'd been implicitly taught by my family and community, nor what I'd been explicitly taught by Ms. Rapp and Mr. Geiger. When I began my work in adult education, I pledged to study and learn with others in ways that support going forth in community, each of us sharing the gifts we are given. The three objects of Theosophy, which put into words the origins of my educational credo, were essential to my scholarship, my community service, my teaching, and my work at the university. They continue to be essential to this day.

Today, I am regarded as an expert and a leader in my field. I do not—will not— see myself that way. I know I am simply one of God's children, put on earth to learn with others to make ours a world we can live in, mindfully, peacefully, and imbued with spirit. It can be risky in the rather political environment of the academy to state professional and educational goals in the context of personal development. However, I do not see life as dichotomized into personal and vocational categories. I see my life and work as an interdependent way of being, with passion and compassion.

My own teaching and learning is shaped by the belief in interdependency of everyone in this world, and this is strengthened by the study of theosophy. If we are to create a "better world" for everyone, then our critically examined values must form the foundation from which we act and serve. If I am to contribute in any particular setting, I'd better be open to learning with—and from—peers and students as well as colleagues and "superiors." I must continue to be open to growth. Therefore, I have an obligation to myself to engage in reflection, research, study, and dialogue with my sister and fellow human beings. The three objects of the Theosophical Society keep me grounded. They provide the standard against which I measure my scholarship, my community service, my teaching and learning—and my personal growth.

Dr. Gabriele Strohschen is Assistant Professor and Director for the Graduate Programs for the School for New Learning at DePaul University in Chicago. She also works closely with community-based organizations serving women and immigrants in the Latino communities of Chicago.