Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Spring 2017 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation:  Smoley, Richard, "The Mystery of the Seven Seals" Quest 105:2 (Spring 2017) pg. 30-34

By Richard Smoley

Until baptism . . . fate is true. But afterward the astrologers are no longer correct.
                                                                        —Excerpta e Theodoto, 78.

The New Testament is probably the most widely read book in the world. And yet it is also a book that is mysterious and not fully understood. In some cases, this is because what the churches teach today no longer corresponds with what the New Testament says. This is the case with the nature and person of Jesus. (See my article, “The Strange Identity of Jesus Christ,” in Quest, fall 2015.) In other instances, it is not so much that the teaching has been changed, but that it has been lost completely.

This is true of the early Christian view of cosmology. It is peppered throughout the New Testament but has been completely overlooked or forgotten. The result is that many parts of the text are baffling or incomprehensible today.

Here’s one example—the angels. Today angels are golden-haired beauties who save you from car wrecks. There is even a magazine, Angels on Earth, that is devoted to printing readers’ experiences of encounters with angels. It has a circulation in the hundreds of thousands.

But in the first century AD it was not so. Here is a curious fact: in the New Testament, the apostle Paul never speaks of angels in a favorable way. Examples: “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, . . . shall be able to separate us from the love of God” (Romans 8:38–39; biblical quotations are from the King James Version). “For I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were appointed to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men” (1 Corinthians 4:9; emphasis added in both passages).

In both examples, the angels are not friends of humanity but barriers to God.

To understand the implications of this fact, it might be best to begin with the cosmological worldview that was current in the first century CE. It is based on the seven planets as known at that time: the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. They were believed to revolve around the earth, each in its own crystalline sphere. Beyond these was the realm of the fixed stars, and beyond that, God himself.

In English the word heaven has two meanings, one having to do with the physical sky (usually in the plural form heavens), the other having to do with the spiritual realm. The ancient Greek word ouranós had a similar dual sense. The heavens above, including the spheres of the planets, were regarded both as physical space and as a spiritual dimension.

It’s difficult for us today to understand this worldview. Although we do think of heaven in the spiritual sense as being “up there,” we understand it as a metaphor only. The realms of the physical planets and stars in outer space, to our minds, have no spiritual component.

In antiquity it was not so. The physical heavens were identified with the levels through which the soul had to ascend after death. These levels, and the planets associated with them, were, as often as not, viewed as a series of gates that blocked the soul from its ascent to its true home.

Each of these planets had a vice associated with it, which is where we get the concept of the seven deadly sins. The soul could only ascend if it shed these vices. The process is described in the Poimandres, a treatise that makes up part of the Corpus Hermeticum or “Hermetic body” of writings, generally dated to the early centuries of the Common Era:

The human being rushes up through the cosmic framework, at the first zone [the moon] surrendering the energy of increase and decrease; at the second [Mercury] evil machination, a device now inactive; at the third [Venus] the illusion of longing, now inactive; at the fourth [the sun] the ruler’s arrogance, now inactive; at the fifth [Mars] unholy presumption and daring recklessness; at the sixth [Jupiter] the evil impulses that come from wealth, now inactive; and at the seventh [Saturn] the deceit that lies in ambush. (Poimandres, 1.25)

Each of these seven spheres was also ruled by a planetary archon, who could be viewed as an angel or as a god.

The New Testament also taught that these planetary spheres were ruled by corrupt forces. The epistle to the Ephesians, according to most scholars, was not written by Paul, but it is close to his thought. It says: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in [heavenly] places.” (Ephesians 6:12. The word “heavenly,” in the King James Version, appears in a note. But it is closer to the Greek epouraníois than is the reading in the main text, “high places.”) This verse makes it clear that the “principalities” and “powers” were not the Roman emperors, but “spiritual forces of evil.” Paul himself in Romans 8:38–39 (quoted above) uses more or less identical terms in the same way.

Let’s go ahead 500 years, to the single most important Christian work on angelology: the Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite.[*] He lists orders, or “choirs,” of angels, each class having a different name. Two of these are the “Principalities” and “Powers.” Pseudo-Dionysius’s system was taken up by Dante in his Divine Comedy, among others.

Notice the change here. For Paul and the author of Ephesians, writing in the first century, the “principalities” and “powers” are among the forces of “wickedness in heavenly places.” For Pseudo-Dionysius, writing 500 years later, they are honorable members of the heavenly hierarchy.

It would be an intricate task to show when and how this change came about. For our purposes, it’s enough to know that it did come about. Thus the mainstream Christian view of the angels as unilaterally benevolent simply does not go back to the earliest times of the faith.

In fact, among the early Christians—at any rate among the ones who wrote the New Testament—there was a widespread belief that the celestial realms were occupied by evil forces. The struggle of the Christian was to rise above them, to contend with them, and possibly to defeat them.

This theme too appears throughout the New Testament. In Luke 10:18 we find a mystifying verse. It appears in this context: Jesus has sent out seventy disciples to preach his message. They return “with joy, saying, Lord, even the devils are subject to us through thy name.” Jesus replies: “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.”

A similar idea appears in John 12:31: “Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out.”

The upshot of all these details is clear: the authors of the New Testament believed that somehow Satan and the forces of “spiritual wickedness” had ensconced themselves in the celestial spheres, and that it was the task of Christ (and his followers) to cast them down. The verse from Luke quoted above makes it sound as if this has already happened: the verses from Paul and Ephesians suggest that the struggle was still going on.

To understand this picture more fully, we will have to turn the most enigmatic book of the Bible: Revelation.

A diagram from Pryse’s Apocalypse Unsealed illustrating the seven chakras along the spine, and their connections with symbols in Revelation. Pryse uses isopsephy (Greek numerology) to identify some of the key figures and symbols in the text. [*] Dionysius the Areopagite is a figure mentioned in Acts 17:34 as a contemporary of Paul. This work is attributed to him, but was very likely written 500 years later, in the sixth century CE. Hence the author, otherwise unknown, is often called “Pseudo-Dionysius.”

Revelation has a grip on the Western imagination like no other work. In Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak wrote, “All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St. John.” Its images and themes have long since soaked into the popular imagination: the Beast, the Whore of Babylon, the number 666, the Four Horsemen. Nonetheless, very few have managed to pull its narrative together and explain it in terms that might have made sense to its original audience in the first century CE.

But it is possible to do this in light of the ideas I have sketched out above.

To begin with, a very brief sketch of this enigmatic book: John—traditionally associated with Jesus’s “beloved disciple,” although he probably did not write it—has a vision of the “Son of man” among seven golden candlesticks, which represent seven churches, all of them in Asia Minor. The messages are unenthusiastic at best: to the one in Ephesus, for example, he says, “I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love” (Revelation 2:4).

Then John has a vision of heaven, where he sees “seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.” A book with seven seals is presented, and these seals are opened, each revealing some new and terrible manifestation: the renowned Four Horsemen, “a great earthquake,” and cosmic cataclysm: “The stars of heaven fell unto the earth . . . And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together” (Revelation 6:12–14).

When these are completed, seven angels sound seven trumpets, with similar tribulations: a star named Wormwood falls upon the waters of the earth, “and the third part of the waters became wormwood: and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter” (Revelation 8:11).

Finally, the climactic moment arrives: “And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon: and the dragon fought and his angels. . . . And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him” (Revelation 12:7, 9).

The images in Revelation have been used so often, and in so many ways, that certain facts have become obscured. In the first place, the vision does not have to do with some imagined end of the world in the immeasurably remote future. It is something that the prophet sees as happening in his own time.

In the second place, we may wonder why the number seven is repeated and emphasized to an almost maniacal degree. In the light of what we’ve already seen, the reason becomes clear: it has to do with the realms of the seven planets. They have been inhabited by corrupt forces, including evil angels. The opening of the seven seals and the blast of the seven trumpets culminate in a war in which all of them, led by Satan, are cast down from the heavens onto the earth. Revelation appears to be describing a great purge of the cosmic realms that, the prophet believes, has been initiated by Christ, “the Son of man,” “the Lamb.” (Remember the line from Luke in which Jesus says he sees Satan falling “as lightning” from heaven.)

At this point the action switches to earth. Then ensues “the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters.” She sits on “a scarlet-coloured beast, . . . having seven heads.” The text explains, “The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth” (Revelation 17:3, 9). The identification of this woman and beast are obvious: it is Rome, which was built on seven hills. It has “seven kings. Five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space.” If we identify them with the Roman emperors, the first five are Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, who was overthrown in 68. By this reckoning Galba would be the sixth, although he reigned for only seven months. This takes us up to 69 CE, known as “the year of the four emperors,” because four emperors followed one another in quick succession. The prophet believes that there will be another, but that he will not be around long, and that he will be the last. The prophet was partly right. Galba was followed by Otho, who ruled for a mere three months, but Otho was far from the last. The line of Roman emperors continued on for centuries.

If this is actually what John has in mind, we find ourselves in the midst of the Jewish War (66–73 CE), in which the Jews revolted against Rome. It would seem that the prophet is writing around this time, and he expects it to usher in the Last Judgment, which will end in a final battle with the result that “Babylon the great is fallen” (Revelation 18:2). After that, the prophet sees “a new heaven, and a new earth, and the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven” (Revelation 21:1–2).

If this is what the prophet foresaw, he was wrong. The Jews were crushed. The Temple in Jerusalem was sacked and Judea itself partly depopulated. Rome, the “great whore,” was not overthrown, and celestial forces did not descend to destroy it. The Roman Empire continued to last for centuries. The Last Judgment did not occur. Nor did the world end.

An illustration from James Morgan Pryse’s Apocalypse Unsealed, connecting the seven gods (and planets) with seven levels in man. Pryse also associates each of the seven Greek vowels with these levels.

In any event, we can sum up the action of Revelation as follows: Christ, the Lamb, is slain and resurrected. He ascends into heaven and purges the seven heavens of evil influences, led by Satan. They are cast down to earth, and are embodied in the Roman Empire, which itself will be crushed by heavenly forces led by the Lamb, culminating in a new world.

I can’t claim to understand the entire symbolism of Revelation, which is profound and multilayered, but I am willing to say that this, at least in part, is what is going on here. Nevertheless, we still face one major question. Why and how did the heavenly realms come to be infested with evil influences?

One answer appears in the passage from the Poimandres that I quoted above. Here the planetary zones seem to be identified with evil propensities. Could the Hermetic texts—of which the Poimandres is a part—be the sources of this doctrine of “spiritual wickedness in heavenly places”? Or could both the texts and this doctrine have come out of the same stream?

It is possible. Scholar Brian Copenhaver observes that the Hermetic texts “can be understood as responses to the same milieu, the very complex Greco-Egyptian culture of Ptolemaic, Roman, and early Christian times”—meaning the long period between the fourth century BCE and the second century CE. This was also the milieu in which Christianity arose. One may have influenced the other, or they may both derive their ideas from a common source.

The Poimandres does not portray these cosmic forces as inherently evil. When the cosmic man is created, it is said that the seven “governors”—of the planets, that is—“loved the man, and each gave a share of his own order.” But man, like Narcissus, fell in love with his image in the natural world, and fell. Thus his nature is twofold: immortal, given by God, and mortal, born of his infatuation with matter. He is in bondage to things over which he should be master. The qualities that the “governors” gave him become vices that he has to overcome.

The Hebrew Bible hints of similar things. Over and over we encounter entities called “the host of heaven” or “the sons of God.” Here is one example. The prophet Micaiah says, “I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left” (1 Kings 22:19). In this passage, the host of heaven is part of Yahweh’s heavenly court, and thus part of the cosmic order.

But here is another verse. It is a warning given to the children of Israel by Moses, “lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the Lord thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven” (Deuteronomy 4:9).

In fact many references in the Hebrew Bible to the “host of heaven” amount to warnings against worshipping them, or condemnations for having done so.

The host of heaven plays an ambiguous role in the Hebrew Bible. Again these beings—personifications of the stars and the planets and the signs of the zodiac—are not necessarily evil; they are part of the celestial court. At the same time there is a strong temptation to worship them that is repeatedly and vehemently denounced. As in the Poimandres, man is not meant to worship the seven heavenly “governors” or to be subject to them.

The ascent portrayed in the Poimandres has to do with the fate of the soul after death. The ascent through the spheres happens to the virtuous, those who obey this divine dictum: “Let him <who> is mindful recognize that he is immortal, that desire is the cause of death, and let him recognize all that exists.” (The bracketed insertion is the translator’s.) Salvation here comes from gnosis: insight into one’s own true nature and estate. One who lacks such insight, “the one who loved the body that came from the error of desire goes on in darkness, errant, suffering sensibly the effects of death.”

But there is another thread that we need to take up at this point. It is initiation. As is often said, initiation is a kind of death and rebirth. On the simplest level, this has to do with a death to one’s former life and a birth to a new, higher life. But there is more to it than that. In a famous passage, Cicero, the great Roman statesman and philosopher, writes about initiations into the mysteries: “So in very truth we have learned from them the beginnings of life, and have gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope” (Cicero, Laws 2.14.36; my emphasis).

This theme keeps appearing around the ancient mysteries. They have to do with death, not merely in a symbolic sense, but in a highly practical one. In some way they prepare the candidate for death; they make the process that he undergoes in the afterlife easier and more assured of success. It seems likely to me that the pagan mysteries had more than a little to do with this process. The mysteries of Mithras in fact took place in seven stages of initiation, which were very likely connected to the seven planets.

We then turn back to the epigraph of this article, a quotation from the Excerpta e Theodoto (“Excerpts from Theodotus,” a Gnostic figure from the second century CE): “Until baptism . . . fate is valid. But afterward the astrologers are no longer correct.” Christian baptism, viewed esoterically, raises the candidate up beyond the levels of the seven planets, which rule fate. The initiate is free from the influence of the planets and thus from fate.

This passage also emphasizes that liberation is not merely due to a rite but is the result of gnosis. It goes on to say: “It is not only the cleansing that is liberating, but the knowledge [gnosis] of who we were, and what we have become, where we were or where we have been thrown, where we hasten, what we are cleansed of, what birth is and what rebirth is” (Excerpta e Theodoto, 78; my translation).

Thus, at least for some early Christians, baptism was correlated with a liberating ascent through the realms of the planets, whose associated vices had been made inoperative. The initiate reaches a level of consciousness and being that is above the domain of the planets.

The Theosophist who examined these questions most thoroughly was James Morgan Pryse (1859–1942), an associate of both H.P. Blavatsky and William Q. Judge. In 1910 he published The Apocalypse Unsealed, an esoteric interpretation of Revelation. For Pryse, Revelation is about initiation—indeed he translates the Greek word apokálupsis as “initiation.” Here too initiation is a liberation from the spheres of the seven planets. They are embodied in us as the seven chakras, which he connects with the seven principal ganglia of the nervous system (Pryse, 16–18; see illustration). Initiation is an ascent through these spheres of the planets—again, the chakras. The famous beast whose number is 666 is not Nero but, numerologically, hē phrēn, the lower mind, centered in the heart (Pryse, 26).

Certainly much of this teaching has been obscured over the centuries. A typical Christian today would be unlikely to recognize it. The view of the planetary spheres as benign completely supplanted this older view, and then the idea of the spheres was abandoned altogether.

But did any fragment of this early teaching survive in later Christianity? Yes, it did—in a curious form. Eastern Orthodox teaching refers to “aerial tollhouses” that the soul must pass through while ascending after death.

Seraphim Rose, a twentieth-century American Orthodox monk, writes, “The particular place which the demons inhabit in this fallen world, and the place where the newly-departing souls of men encounter them—is the air” (emphasis Rose’s). He quotes a liturgy written by John Damascene in the eighth century: “When my soul shall be about to be released from the bond with the flesh, intercede for me, O Sovereign Lady [i.e., the Virgin] . . . that I might pass unhindered through the princes of darkness standing in the air.”

The metaphor of aerial tollhouses is in fact used. Another passage from John Damascene: “O Virgin, in the hour of my death rescue me from the hands of the demons, and the judgment, and the accusation, and the frightful testing, and the bitter toll-houses.” At each tollhouse, the soul is presented with all the sins it has committed of that kind: lying, envy, fornication, and so on. If it is found guilty of any of these sins, it is cast down to hell. If it is innocent, it is permitted to ascend.

These ideas clearly go back a long way. A nineteenth-century historian of theology, Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow, writes: “Such an uninterrupted, constant, and universal usage in the Church of the teaching of the toll-houses, especially among the teachers of the 4th century, indisputably testifies that it was handed down to them from the teachers of the preceding centuries and is founded on apostolic tradition.”

The resemblance between these ideas and those in the Poimandres is striking. One could cite other parallels, such as the seven hekhalot (palaces) of heaven mentioned in the early Kabbalah. Even the later Kabbalah often hints that the angels—including the good ones—are not necessarily the friends of man.

It would be foolish, I think, to argue that all these teachings are exactly the same, or were so in antiquity. Then as now, there was a panoply of religions and beliefs and cults, and it would be useless to try to show that their doctrines were identical. Nevertheless, the resemblances are unmistakable.

From a broader perspective, we can see the theme of man trying to situate himself in the cosmos. He looks up at the sky and sees the stars and planets and feels some connection with them. But what sort of connection? Are these entities hostile, beneficent, indifferent? And what of the unseen realms that, however dimly, each of us knows to exist?

The questions multiply. The picture of the seven planetary realms no longer fits in with astronomy, and yet one senses that it remains profoundly true. We may have to wait till death—or initiation—to find out more.

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Sources

Copenhaver, Brian P. Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and an Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

“James Morgan Pryse,” Theosophy Wiki; http://theosophy.wiki/w-en/index.php?title=James_Morgan_Pryse; accessed Jan. 4, 2017.

Pryse, James Morgan. The Apocalypse Unsealed. 4th ed. Los Angeles: John M. Pryse, 1931.

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Celestial Hierarchy. http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeII/CelestialHierarchy.html; accessed Feb. 26, 2016.

Rose, Seraphim. The Soul after Death. Platina, Calif.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1980.

Richard Smoley’s latest book is How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible. An earlier version of this article appeared in New Dawn magazine.

 

 

 

 

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Printed in the Spring 2017 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation:  Chowang, Orgyen, "The First Aspect of Realization: Who We Really Are" Quest 105.2 (Spring 2017): pg. 25-29

By Orgyen Chowang

So far, we have explained how our mental events, discontent, negative emotions, distorted perceptions and ego result from our losing touch with our Pristine Mind. We talked about how our ordinary mind developed from our primordial fear. Now we can discuss the solution to all these problems—uncovering, or realizing, our Pristine Mind. By rediscovering our Pristine Mind, we can know who we really are, without mental distortions, with a healthy sense of self. So now we can begin the treatment for the discontent, the negative thoughts, and the misperceptions of our ordinary mind.

Calming the Mind

On a cloudy day, when all we can see are clouds, we cannot see the blue sky because the clouds obscure our view. Yet the luminous, beautiful, and boundless sky is always there.

As we have described, in the same way, if our mind is busy, chaotic, confused, or agitated, we cannot see our natural state of mind. Under these circumstances, we don’t realize that behind these thoughts and other mental events, our mind is calm, beautiful, boundless, and fearless. We do not realize that this is who we really are.

Mental events are like the clouds in the sky. If our mind is constantly churning with mental events—thoughts and emotions, beliefs, and habits—it is impossible to experience the mind’s natural pristine state. For that, our mind must be calm and our view of the mind must be uncluttered by transitory, but insistent mental events.

Even if we appreciate the importance of calming the mind, however, we will not be able to do that unless we know how to meditate properly. When our mind is cloudy, we cannot access Pristine Mind. But when our mind is clear, with the help of meditation we have the opportunity to realize who we really are. With that realization our life changes in a way that we never imagined possible.

You may be skeptical about this claim at first. Many people have a hard time even believing in the possibility of such a thing as Pristine Mind. Instead, they think that all there is, is the mind they know already, their ordinary mind. The reason for this is simple: they have never meditated, or they have not meditated properly, so they don’t have any other way of understanding their mind. But when they start Pristine Mind meditation, their ordinary thoughts subside and Pristine Mind appears—and then confidence in the reality of Pristine Mind is born.

So our first step is to learn the proper way to meditate. We have to know the appropriate technique, and we need to apply it properly to calm our thoughts and experience our mind in its pristine condition. Our attention is always directed to the external world. Now is the time to look within. Only then can we begin to realize the true nature of our mind.

Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava says:

If you want to go sightseeing, try touring your own clear, mirrorlike mind instead.

The Runway to Pristine Mind

What technique can we use to effectively start our journey to realizing our natural, pristine state?

The clearest instructions for doing this come from Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava, the main architect of the Pristine Mind teachings. Guru Rinpoche has given us the essential opening instructions for practicing Pristine Mind meditation in four steps:

Don’t follow the past.
Don’t anticipate the future.
Remain in the present moment.
Leave your mind alone.

We must understand these instructions. They are designed to help us stay in the present moment. Some other forms of meditation teachings say that remaining in the present moment is the ultimate objective of meditation. However, the present moment itself is not ultimate reality, ultimate truth, or the ultimate goal of Pristine Mind meditation. Nor is it what I mean when I refer to our fundamental nature. Instead, being in the present moment, with our mind calm and relaxed, simply creates the right conditions to begin to connect with our Pristine Mind.

We can think of abiding in the present moment as the “runway” to Pristine Mind. To fly an airplane into the sky, we need to take off from a runway. The present moment is the runway from which we take off to enter into our natural state of mind. But it is important to understand that remaining in the present moment just by itself is no more like being in Pristine Mind than sitting on the runway is like flying.

When I first began to travel by plane, it was very unfamiliar. I had never been on an airplane before. The plane needed to accelerate to a certain speed on the runway before it could take off. Then it would begin to rise into the sky. This was a new experience for me. I felt a little bit anxious and uncomfortable, especially during those first few minutes after takeoff when there is often a little turbulence. It felt very unnatural and strange to me. No one could move around or use their electronic devices. Everyone needed to keep their seat belt on.

After a while, however, when the plane arrived at its cruising altitude, people took off their seat belts and moved about. The flight attendants began to serve refreshments, and we discovered that we could then relax and enjoy the flight.

It is like this when we meditate. For someone who has never meditated before, who has never rested their mind, it can be a similarly unnatural experience. We may initially feel anxious or claustrophobic. We have a restless energy that makes it hard to remain in the present moment.

When we first start to meditate, the mind is pulled back by the heavy weight and number of thoughts and emotions that fill our mind and preoccupy us. There is significant agitation while the mind continues to be caught up in these mental events.

Initially, we go through all sorts of turbulence that makes it hard to remain present. We cannot rest our mind, because we have to go through that turbulence for a few minutes, just like on an airplane. As with the plane taking off, however, if we try to remain present, there is turbulence only for the first five to ten minutes. In time, our internal experience changes. Our initial agitation subsides, we relax, and we abide in our increasingly comfortable and more natural state. We gradually remain more and more in the present as the mind calms down. Eventually, we arrive at our internal cruising altitude, and we, too, can “relax and enjoy the flight.”

This is the difficulty many people feel when they first meditate. They often feel quite discouraged. However, this kind of initial experience is absolutely normal and does not mean that we are failing at meditation. Nor does it mean we are not benefiting from what we are doing. If we keep practicing, soon we will find that the turbulence passes, just as it does on the airplane, until we reach our more comfortable cruising altitude.

Guided Meditation: The Realization of Pristine Mind

Let’s go through a guided exercise showing how to actually start meditating.

Preparation. To prepare to follow the four steps given by Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava, begin by relaxing your body, speech, and mind.

To relax your body, sit somewhere comfortable, such as on a chair or a cushion on the floor. Make sure your body is comfortable and at ease, not tense or awkward. You don’t have to try to maintain an unfamiliar, stiff position.

Next, relax your speech by allowing yourself to be quiet. Just relax into silence. Breathe naturally. Don’t force, control, or regulate your breathing.

Next, relax your mind. This is the most important part of this preparation. Your mind must be relaxed and present. This does not mean it should be passive and dull. Instead, it should be aware and alert. Keep your eyes open. Don’t shut out what you see, hear, or think, but don’t pay attention to those things either; just be natural in your keen awareness of your mind. In Pristine Mind meditation there’s no need to shut anything out. This gets easier as it gets familiar, like learning to ride a bicycle.

Step one. The first step, after this initial preparation, is don’t follow the past. Do not get caught up in thoughts, memories, or images of your past, regardless of whether they occurred minutes ago or years ago. Bring your mind fully into this present moment. Focusing on and following past events empowers the thoughts and emotions that disturb us. By not focusing on the past, we can quickly dissolve many of these disruptive thoughts. They slowly disappear from our perception.

Our mind has many outer layers of such thoughts, emotions, and other mental events that obscure our Pristine Mind. If we are going to fully realize the truth of our fundamental nature, we must stop following thoughts of the past. If we follow them, we are simply creating more mental events that lead us further away from realization of our Pristine Mind. Paying no attention to our mental events and not creating new ones is the first step in dismantling the layers of mental events that cover our Pristine Mind.

Step two. The second step is don’t anticipate the future. Remind yourself that now is not the time to pursue, plan, or follow any thoughts, feelings, or imaginings of the future. Do not begin wondering or speculating about what will happen. That is just another way to invite mental events. Instead, just stay alert in the present.

At this moment, then, while you are meditating, your mind is neither in the past nor in the future. It is not held hostage by mental events based on memories of the past or projections of the future. That means the mind is clearer and calmer. You have dismantled more and more of those layers of mental events that block your Pristine Mind, and, as a result, more of your Pristine Mind is slowly exposed to your view and realization.

Step three. When you are not in the past and not in the future, then the next step is stay in the present moment. Just be present. There is nothing to do but vibrantly experience your mind. The question is not what to do. Your mind is just being natural and aware. Just let your mind be natural in this way. Just as water is just water, and blue sky is just blue sky, your mind is just what it is, remaining in the present moment.

It is important to note here, however, that being in the present itself is not a passive and lifeless process. It is not simply “spacing out.” That will do little good. Instead, it is an active and dynamic process, not unlike the airplane going down the runway and taking off. In the beginning it requires some effort. As you move into your meditative cruising altitude, it is more tranquil, but still vibrant.

Apart from this, you do not need to do anything but be who you are.

Water does not have to try to be water. It does not have to try to be calm, clear, and liquid. Water is innately still, clear, and calm. That is what water is. The blue sky does not have to do anything but just be the blue sky. The sky does not panic when the clouds are gone; it just remains the blue sky. Similarly, when thoughts and emotions subside, you do not need to panic. You do not need to wonder what you should do. You just need to allow your mind to be what it naturally is. Simply experience your awareness. Observe only the clarity of your mind. Nothing else is necessary.

Step four. Finally, Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava says, leave your mind alone.

You don’t have to expend effort pushing thoughts of the past or future out of your mind in order to remain in the present. You don’t have to drive thoughts out of your mind and grasp at the present moment. Instead, just let all those thoughts melt away, leave your mind alone, and the present moment will be there for you. You will gradually feel a lightening up. Your thoughts will fall away, as if you are rising into air. Your thoughts will settle like sand in a glass of water.

If you meditate properly and are able to leave your mind alone, all ordinary thoughts will subside because your mental events cannot survive without your attention on them. How can they survive? Your current thoughts and emotions originated from your attention to the past and the future. Now that you are no longer paying attention to the past or the future, the thoughts and emotions naturally dissolve.

We know that clouds cannot exist without the presence of certain circumstances. If no such necessary conditions are present, then clouds cannot continue to exist. They just vanish. They are gone. Similarly, if there are no supportive conditions for thoughts or emotions, then they, too, just vanish. When clouds dissolve or disappear, only blue sky is left.

The spacious blue sky of our mind has always been present, but it has not been visible, because there are so many clouds of mental events obscuring it. As mental events dissolve, our Pristine Mind naturally emerges. This is our fundamental nature. This is the ultimate reality. This is the true nature of our mind.

When we experience Pristine Mind, we are more ourselves, our mind is more natural, and that state is less obscured and less disrupted by mental events that cloud our view. When we are in that condition, we see our naked mind without the clothing of mental events.

In facilitating that increasingly clear view of our mind, this meditation leads us to “realization”—a realization of what our mind truly is and who we really are.

Once thoughts and emotions subside, we are left with the experience of Pristine Mind. You need to experience it for yourself. And this meditation is the way to accomplish that.

When you have meditated for a while, you can check for yourself. Is your experience more pristine, calm, and clear? Does it feel boundless? Is it “flawless awareness”? Is it free from distortions? Is it an untainted state?

Experiencing your mind directly in such a way is experiencing your fundamental nature. Everything that you need to understand is explained clearly right there in that experience.

If you understand and know who you are in this state, then you will experience the most amazing and beautiful thing.

The mind is like a blue sky, fundamentally; eventually you will discover that.
The mind is flawless; eventually you will experience that.
The mind is pristine, pure; eventually you will directly enter that.
oThis is the most wonderful thing that will ever happen in your life.

You realize or recognize your true state of mind, your normal, natural, unfabricated state of mind. Perceiving or experiencing your true nature is called realization. The more you meditate, the more this experience will unfold. As Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava says:

The mind’s own awareness is naturally brilliant, like the sun.
To see for yourself if this is true, look into your own mind.
Your pristine awareness is continuous, like a river.
To see for yourself if this is true, look into your own mind.
The various events of mind cannot be found, like wind in space.
To see for yourself if this is true, look into your own mind.
Whatever you perceive is your own projection, like your reflection in a mirror.
To see for yourself if this is true, look into your own mind.
Your thoughts naturally occur and naturally dissipate, like clouds in the sky.
To see for yourself if this is true, look into your own mind.
This is just the beginning, but it is very, very important. The entire path to full awakening, or enlightenment, starts here.

When we stay in Pristine Mind meditation for twenty to thirty minutes, or longer, we are on the path to experiencing that fundamental mind, not the ordinary mind full of mental events. We are coming face to face with the fundamental, natural state of mind that is otherwise obscured by the mental events that usually preoccupy us and consume all of our attention. We must not just understand this intellectually, but we must actually perceive that pristine state and experience this state of flawless awareness for ourselves, face to face.

As we attain this realization, we see our awareness without layers of distortion. We recognize, “My mind is innately flawless. I never saw that before.” It’s like seeing the sky without clouds and saying, “Oh, I see. The sky is blue.” It’s not an intellectual concept—it’s experiential. We have that kind of experience. We see that our mind is pristine.

This kind of realization in meditation is the key that opens the door to enlightenment. It all starts here.

Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava says:

If you recognize your own innate pristine awareness,
You will surely attain enlightenment.

With our increasing understanding and steady practice of meditation, we will find that when our mind is cloudy or irritable, we can return to our calm, pristine state instead of following our mental events, and then all mental events will dissolve. With more and more experience, whenever we feel agitation, sadness, or stress, we can just return to this pristine state. Whenever we are anxious or afraid, we just return to this state.

When we come back to this state and we remain in pristine awareness, our negative experiences vanish. This pristine state becomes our normal experience. We can dissolve those uncomfortable experiences at any time. As our practice grows, this becomes our new normal experience. At any time, we can access Pristine Mind merely by relaxing ourselves—not following the past, not anticipating the future, staying in the present moment, and leaving our mind alone. Of course, when we are not in formal meditation, we need to deal with our everyday circumstances. But more and more, we will be able to maintain our awareness while doing so.

Reconnecting with our true state of mind is the most important, most precious, most valuable, and most liberating experience in the world. This recognition determines everything that is to come. Not knowing, realizing, or recognizing our true nature leaves us confused and at the mercy of our thoughts and emotions. Being aware of our own fundamental nature leads us to the happiness and liberation of enlightenment. If we want to free ourselves from the experiences of mental events, primordial fear, and ego, we take the most important step toward that freedom by experiencing the realization of Pristine Mind.

Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava says:

How ironic that we have not recognized something that has
been with us for so long.
How ironic that even though it’s as clear and brilliant as the sun,
it is something so few people ever see.
How amazing that no matter how much happiness or suffering
we experience, our Pristine Mind never changes.

Realization is the recognition of our Pristine Mind. When we experience realization of our natural state of mind, that connection to our Pristine Mind is restored. With realization, ordinary thoughts and emotions diminish, our fear gradually dissolves, and our sense of self becomes healthier and more robust. Eventually we recognize that remaining in Pristine Mind is the essential solution to all of our problems in life.

All these improvements come from our realizing our Pristine Mind. From this first realization, the journey to liberation begins and the distortions of our ordinary mind lessen and lessen. What unfolds is the path to enlightenment.

It is important to understand, however, that our ordinary mind and the unhealthy ego that often controls it do not easily give up their power to dictate our thoughts and perceptions. As a result, some people may resist the very idea of realization because of their own beliefs or the belief systems or “conventional wisdom” that they have accepted as true. They may even make improbable claims based on their own thoughts, opinions, and beliefs, and try to convince others that what they believe is true for everyone. Established religious systems, for example, have their own belief systems. They often want their own views to be accepted as true by everyone.

Once you have experienced Pristine Mind, you do not have to blindly accept either your own current set of beliefs or others’ opinions and judgments about what is true or not true. Instead, you will see for yourself what is true. When your thoughts and emotions vanish, when you perceive the actual nature of your mind, then no one’s opinions, judgments, or views are involved. That direct perception is called realizing who you really are. It is realizing your own natural state of mind, the way your mind has always been.

In meditation, we are realizing the nature of our own true consciousness. When our thoughts and our belief systems subside and fall away, then we have access to the person we really are.

A question I am sometimes asked is, “How can we take care of our daily lives if we are focusing only on the present moment, and not on the past or the future?” During meditation, we don’t entertain these thoughts. Afterward, of course, we attend to the practical issues of life, which necessarily require planning for future contingencies and considering past events. When we cook, we cook; when we drive, we drive; and when we meditate, we meditate.

A beginning meditator may not experience Pristine Mind immediately. This is because a beginner may be unable to remain in the present moment and to leave the mind alone. These are the most important things to do when meditating: to remain in the present moment and to leave the mind alone. This takes practice. When you find your mind wandering into thoughts about the past or future, just bring your attention back to present awareness. The more you do this, the better you will get at it. Then your Pristine Mind will appear naturally.

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Orgyen Chowang Rinpoche is a meditation master in the Nyingma lineage of the Buddhist tradition. His primary teacher was Jigme Phuntsok Rinpoche, a Dzogchen master from the twentieth century.

From Our Pristine Mind by Orgyen Chowang Rinpoche © 2016 by Orgyen Chowang. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boulder, Colorado. www.shambhala.com

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Printed in the Spring 2017 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation:  Hagen, Steve, "The Mysterious Disappearance of the World Out There" Quest 105.2 (Spring 2017): pg. 18-24

 

By Steve Hagen

Science is the religion of our time. Much of what we assume of reality, our Weltanschauung, has been shaped by the general view that is em­braced by most scientists today. Often called “realism,” it is a “substan­tialist” view. This scientific realism, according to physicist James Cushing, “requires roughly at a minimum that our scientific theories are to be taken as giving us literally true descriptions of the world.” Yet all conceptual thought—all theory, concept and belief—leads inevitably to contradictions. Indeed, some scientists themselves view scientific realism as suspect. Physicist Asher Peres, for example, reaches the conclusion that “any attempt to inject realism in physical theory is bound to lead to inconsistencies.”

In this discussion we’ll examine what we believe we know. We’ll ques­tion the view of scientific realism and test its foundations. We’ll find that it’s not merely this system that is without foundation, but all belief systems. In the process, we shall gain a radically different perspective on some of our most profound problems of reality.

We’ll see that the problem isn’t merely some logical limitation or in-built defect in our methods. We will see that we do not find a conceptual ground to experience at all, for the same reason flat-earthers do not find an edge to the earth: because there is none. We’ll see that what “ground” we can find is utterly nonconceptual.

Most of our effort, our thought, our habits, our desires, our culture and our education is designed to suspend us in conceptual thought. Below we’ll attempt to break through conceptual thought.

Science as a System of Belief

Scientists are in the business of knowing. As physicist Johann Rafelski put it, “Science is about knowing. It’s not about believing.” Science, we say, is not a belief system, but rather a methodical search for knowledge. Science is a way of going about the world in search of what can be es­tablished as “justifiably true”—which is how contemporary philoso­phers define knowledge.

Our modern definition of knowledge, however, as “justified true belief” was dealt a serious blow in 1963, when Edmund Gettier showed that one can have a justified true belief and yet not know what one be­lieves. His argument runs like this: say a man believes there is a sheep in a field, but it is actually a dog that he’s mistaken for a sheep. Yet, as it turns out, there actually is a sheep in the field, but it remains unseen by the man. The three criteria for knowledge (belief, justification, and truth) appear to have been met, yet we cannot say that this person ac­tually knows there is a sheep in the field, since his “knowledge” is based on having mistaken a dog for a sheep.

Since the arrival of the “Gettier problem,” as it has been called, others have put forth new ideas of adding yet a fourth criterion—e.g., that knowledge is a “nondefective” or an “indefeasible,” justified, true belief. But, as we’ll soon see, adding this fourth criterion does not get us any closer to knowledge or certitude. Indeed, piling up criteria turns out to be utterly futile.

As it’s commonly practiced, science is our attempt to arrive at con­cepts that yield greater and greater doubt-resistance—that is, concepts that come with stronger and stronger justification. Science gets in there and examines the world, carefully and in great detail. No theorizing is taken on faith; every theory is put to the test. The irrational beliefs of scientists, and their biased attachments to pet theories and projects, shouldn’t have many deleterious effects in the end, for everything is open to peer review. The effects of human weakness and folly get ironed out over time. In short, science is honest work done in the open. Any­one can repeat an experiment and verify or reject what the experiment purported to prove.

Clearly, science has been humanity’s one great attempt to get to the bottom of things. And so, we tell ourselves, we can put our faith in sci­ence. The conclusions—concepts—we arrive at through the scientific method come only after slow, hard, thorough research, yet even then we maintain that all is subject to being overthrown by further research and information. What more can we do than this?

Science is the predominant belief system today. Even those of us who possess very little knowledge in science still treat it somewhat as a religion. As a society we put our faith in and make use of the “mir­acles” of science. For the most part, we believe that the beliefs scientists hold about the universe are indeed justified and true. And it’s our sci­entists to whom we typically turn for answers, explanations, and wis­dom, much as people in earlier cultures turned to shamans, village elders, and medicine men.

At the same time, however, we are aware that our scientific beliefs are subject to change and modifications as the result of future research and discoveries. This is rather curious. We seem to be willing to accept what science tells us—and equally willing to accept that what we have so easily accepted may turn out to be false! In short, we accept science only as a belief system, never as a source of truth, knowledge or cer­titude. (Of course, it’s rare that a whole platform in scientific theory is dismantled. Usually only a few planks get replaced or removed or turned around.)

We’ve managed to convince ourselves to accept a system that can yield only a “maybe” at its best. As it was put in Skeptical Inquirer magazine by Lys Ann Shore, “The quest for absolute certainty must be recognized as alien to the scientific attitude, since scientific knowledge is fallible, tentative, and open to revision and modification.”

We no longer believe our science is about the search for truth. And so, because relative knowledge is all that science (or any belief system) is capable of dealing with, relative knowledge is all that science ever finds. And it’s all we’ve come to expect is possible. Though science astounds us in how precisely it has allowed us to define and manipulate the phys­ical world, when it comes to enlightening humankind on ultimate truth and reality, it fails. In the end, science is not capable of providing cer­titude. And this is fine, as long as we don’t conclude that certitude is therefore impossible.

Even so, science is in the business of acquiring knowledge—that is, justified beliefs. Yet science rests upon an unfounded belief. Science, not by necessity but by common assent, rests upon the enormous com­monsense assumption that an external world is really “out there.” As we shall see, we cannot assume this without rushing headlong into paradox.

The Religion of Science

In his book The World within the World, astronomer John Barrow ob­served that “the practice of science . . . rests upon a number of presuppo­sitions about the nature of reality. We usually take them for granted.” He lists nine of these presuppositions:

    1. There exists an external world which is external to our minds, and which is the unique source of all our sensations.
    2. This external world is ultimately rational. “A” and “not A” cannot be true simultaneously.
    3. The world can be analyzed locally without destroying its essen­tial structure.
    4. The elementary entities do not possess what we call free will.
    5. The separation of events from our perception of them is a harm­less simplification.
    6. Nature possesses regularities, and these are predictable in some sense.
    7. Space and time exist.
    8. The world can be described by mathematics.
    9. These presuppositions hold in an identical fashion everywhere and everywhen.

For good measure, I’ll add a tenth: “A thing is what it is.” This, of course, is the law of identity: a thing is identical with itself and implies itself.
Barrow says that the presuppositions of science “enable us to proceed most effectively from simple experience of the world to knowledge of the world.” But this is precisely how we confuse belief with knowledge! As Barrow’s statement reveals, we have already missed what bare attention provides as base experience, and replaced it with a set of beliefs (what he calls presumptions).
Most scientists, and indeed most people, believe there’s a great deal behind these propositions. As science writer Martin Gardner puts it:

The hypothesis that there is an external world, not dependent on human mind, made of something, is so obviously useful and so strongly confirmed by experience down through the ages that we can say without exaggerating that it is better confirmed than any other empirical hypothesis.

It is not difficult to find others who agree. Mathematician Morris Kline, for example, has written that, despite the denials, qualifications, and reservations of certain philosophers,

Physicists and mathematicians do believe that there is an exter­nal world. They would argue that even if all human beings were suddenly wiped out, the external world or physical world would continue to exist. When a tree crashes to the ground in a forest, a sound is created even if no one is there to hear it. We have five senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell—and each of these constantly receives messages from this external world. Whether or not our sensations are reliable, we do receive them from some external source.

The observation is repeated ad nauseam: mathematician John Casti referred to a straw poll taken recently in a small university’s department of physics, where ten out of the eleven members of the faculty “claimed that what they were describing with their symbols and equations was objective reality. As one of them remarked, ‘Otherwise, what’s the use?’” Similarly, when Copernicus replaced the earth with the sun as the center of the solar system, he believed he was offering a description of how things “really are.” This has been the dominant attitude of sci­entists ever since. Physicist and author Nick Herbert, who has superbly and insightfully presented the bizarre realities that seem to lie behind the “phaneron” (the phenomenal world), has argued that, unlike some philosophers, but like ordinary people, “physicists cannot deny the ev­idence of their senses. The indubitable reality of measurement results is a solid rock on which to found an empirical science, or from which to launch speculative voyages into deep reality.”

I could go on citing such comments, but clearly belief in an objective reality and an external world is a central tenet of modern scientific faith.

But such a belief is not a very solid rock, I’m afraid. Gardner believes that no one “except a madman or a professional metaphysician” would doubt such a belief. But I would argue that an empiricist fully attending to what is provided by perception alone would doubt it, and I would have us doubt it here.

Oddly enough, after declaring that only a madman or a metaphysi­cian would doubt an external world, Gardner adds that this hypothesis says “nothing about the essential nature of the external world; only that something lurks behind the phaneron to preserve its complex regular­ities.” But what is this lurking something and why is it there at all? Or more appropriately, what is it doing “out there”? Like Bertrand Russell, who said that for him the great mystery is why there is something as opposed to nothing, we do feel something’s “out there.”

For Bishop George Berkeley, the something “out there” is the mind of God. For materialists (“substantialists”), the something is an objective reality. But to one who attends fully to what is given in experience and not to thought constructs—in other words, to a pure empiricist—there’s no ground to support the notion that there’s a regulating “behind” to the phaneron. There’s not even ground to support the idea that there’s any substance to the phaneron’s “front”! I’ll say more about this shortly.

The power and validity of science would seem to arise from the ap­parent fact that it relies on empiricism and indubitable mathematical deduction. But the fact is that science rests not upon any such solid ground at all, but upon presumptions that, by their very nature as pre­sumptions, must harbor doubt, and upon deductive reasoning that must remain uncertain so long as these presumptions are rooted in the metaphysical and not in the empirical. Science thus rests upon nothing solid, but merely examines and assists in an endless series of furniture rearrangements in a room. Science, as it’s currently practiced, will never lead us to glimpse the nature of the room itself.

Furthermore, scientists must believe in an external world, simply be­cause it’s the task of the scientist to measure, test, and observe the world “out there” so that conclusions about reality (or at least about phenom­ena) may be drawn. In other words, without a belief in an external world, science itself cannot proceed—or so, at least, it would appear.

Here It Is, but What Is It?

I do not mean to argue that an external world is not “out there”—nor am I arguing the converse. I am simply suggesting that the existence or denial of an external world are in fact propositions we cannot make with any validity. In fact, I intend to demonstrate that the question of the existence versus the nonexistence of an external world is meaningless—much as questions regarding the edge of the earth have been rendered meaningless.

I’m not the first to come to this conclusion. Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and theologian, thought that no accurate model of reality was possible. Kierkegaard, however, felt that reality contained a fundamental ambiguity or paradox that would forever block our vision of truth. I am suggesting, however, that what appears as a fundamental ambiguity or paradox does not block our vision of truth, but, rather, leads directly to it. Indeed, to abandon our pursuit of truth simply be­cause no model can be made is to give up precisely when the first glim­mer of truth is present.

Let’s look at the phenomenal world. The realness of there being any­thing “behind” phenomena is questionable. If we read the writings of such philosophers as Berkeley, Locke, and Hume, we have to consider that what we are aware of, when we think we are observing a world “out there” apart from ourselves, is nothing more than our sensations. As Berkeley pointed out, if there were an external world, we should never be able to know it; and if there were not, then we should have the same reasons as now to think that there is one. As we have already discussed, this observation cannot lead us to any solid ground—but it does indi­cate the need for us to leave our belief (in either an external world or the lack of one) suspended.

Nevertheless, something—phenomena, at least—is there. Something is moving our senses—or so it seems. But what is it?

This question—“what is it?”—arises with the appearance of something—that is, with any mind object. It generally goes unnoticed, though, because we’re so quick to conceptualize experience and explain it to ourselves in familiar terms. The “what is it?” aspect of experience, however, often becomes noticeable when we see something (the mind object) from an odd angle, or in dim light, or under some unusual cir­cumstance—or when what we see is simply unfamiliar. For an instant (or, in rare cases, for several seconds) after we first make out an object in our mind, we do not know what it is, or what to call it, or how to re­spond to it. In that instant of awareness prior to recognition, we may feel uneasiness or even outright distress. We then struggle to reframe bare perception into familiar terms once again, hoping to scratch the “what is it?” itch in our mind. Thus we easily buy into some definition or label (“that’s a banana squash”). Once this occurs, our attention to our object, and to what is actually taking place, diminishes greatly.

We have not really adequately answered the question of “what is it?” We have merely answered the question “how do we conceive of it?” or “what do we call it?” Some deeper question remains. And if we continue to scrutinize our mind object, sooner or later the question will reappear. In fact, if we just persist in strictly observing things, however they hap­pen to appear, the question “what is it?” invariably recurs—a persistent and troubling uncertainty. We never arrive at anything solid.

For example, if I say, “Here, in this cup, is water,” you may ask, “What is water?” We could end our discussion at this point if you were to just take a drink. But as scientists we might wish to point out, “Water is hy­drogen and oxygen.” (This would not be an answer we could give on the basis of having drunk some, of course—that is, on the basis of direct experience. We can obtain this answer only after we have conceptual­ized and analyzed the water very carefully.)

Thus by using scientific methods it seems we can discover what water is “made of.” With confidence we say, “What is really in this cup is hy­drogen and oxygen, combined and transformed into this unique sub­stance we call ‘water.’”

But the questions continue. What is hydrogen? What is oxygen? And so we look again, using scientific methods, and say, “Hydrogen is an el­ement made of atoms, each consisting of a single proton and a single electron.” But still the questions remain: what are atoms? What are pro­tons and electrons?

It seems that we’ve started on a never-ending regression. At no time do we ever really get to the other end of the question “what is water?” We can name the mind object, even break it down and name its parts, but we still don’t really answer the question. In the end, water (or any­thing else) is just like the banana squash I encountered in the farmers’ market (which at first I could not identify). We can discover what it is called, but we can never really say—or know—what “it” is. Yet, paradoxically, we can experience what’s going on. We can drink the water.

When we look “out there” for the answer to “what is it?” we find endless regression. We can only point to some other thing (or set of things) and say, “it is this” (or “it is like this”). But try as we will, we can never gather all of what “it” is together into one place to reveal what it truly is.

In fact, phenomenal reality always presents itself in human con­sciousness in the form of “here it is” and “what is it?” I’ll henceforth refer to these two aspects of phenomena as this and what. Here’s the cup (this), but what is it (what)?

What can be more accurately thought of as pure interrogative. It’s a state of mind often depicted in the comics as a question mark appearing over the head of some bewildered character. It’s the fragile state of mind I had when I happened across the banana squash at the farmers’ market. It’s a state of mind we will inevitably come to if we persistently an­alyze the phenomenal world.

It’s this what aspect of phenomena that our commonsense view of the world typically overlooks. (In fact, common sense demands that we overlook this aspect of reality.) But it’s also this very aspect that deter­mines that science cannot reveal absolute truth, for science can never truly answer “what is it?” It can only answer “what is it called?” and, superficially, “what is it made of?”

If we try to ignore this troublesome what aspect and examine the presumed external world in detail, and if we go far enough in our in­quiry, we’ll discover that we can’t get a conceptual handle on things. Rather, we’ll find that the what aspect will appear to us in at least three ways: first, an objective world can’t be discerned from what is sub­jective; second, this presumed substantial, external, physical world will eventually appear devoid of all substantiality; and, finally, the only truth revealed through the study of an external world is merely relative.

Let’s look at these three points more closely. You may note that, as we consider these, the distinction between mental and physical phe­nomena will become considerably less clear.

An Objective World Cannot Be Discerned from What Is Subjective

A cup of coffee sits on my desk in front of me. From five or ten feet away, I can see the cup very clearly. I can hear and feel it as well, if I snap my finger against its rim. When I include a relatively large part of the world that surrounds the cup—the air, the light, my finger, my eyes and ears, the desk beneath the cup, the room in which the cup appears, etc.—I can discern “cup” quite easily.

But suppose that you and I, using scientific instruments, move in closer for a better look. When we do this, we quickly lose the “cup of coffee.” First we see just a ceramic wall. Examining more closely, we find merely a lot of rapidly moving molecules. At this point we are no longer viewing anything that we may rightfully call a “cup.” Our object has now become a collection of molecules.

Once we’re in close enough to “observe” the cup’s atoms, we start to notice that something very strange is happening. The atoms, which we say “make up the cup,” seem to be losing many of the properties we at­tribute to everyday, commonsense, physical entities such as cups, clouds, planets, and people. Atoms seem to have less definite positions in space, for example. They seem, rather, to be somewhat fuzzy or in­determinate.

If we get in close enough to view our object on the level of the sub­atomic particle, we find that these very minuscule bits of matter (can we call it matter at this point? If we cannot, then where did the matter go?) simply do not have qualities such as position, or momentum, or size, or velocity, or any number of other such physical attributes.

At this point, we have not only not answered the question “what is a cup of coffee?” but we have ended up posing several others: “What are molecules?” “What are atoms?” “What are subatomic particles?”

Furthermore, the closer we look at some of these things, the more bewildering they become. An electron’s position, for example, is not something that really exists—until we look for it. Electrons have specific locations only when someone is looking, it seems. Until we looked for it, the electron didn’t possess anything that we would commonly call a position. On the other hand, if we look for its position and nail it down—to a general area, anyway—it seems that, by virtue of our know­ing its position, we’ve now forfeited the possibility of knowing much about its momentum. And if we choose to look for an electron’s mo­mentum rather than its position, we would be able to measure that mo­mentum, but we would discover that the electron doesn’t seem to have a position! This is what physicists refer to as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It’s an essential ingredient of physical reality.

This is precisely the sort of thing science finds when it takes a close look at phenomena. Without the consciousness of an observer, the stuff underlying this physical reality does not seem to exist. Only when we look for something does it appear to leap into existence—and, at the same moment, what we do not look for cannot be said to exist.

We tacitly assume that reality only presents us with this (our object of consciousness). But we don’t know what to make of a reality where things are instead weirdly blended with, or take their identity from, what they are not.

No matter how we slice it, this is physical reality at close range. Sub­jectivity, it seems, enters the “objective” world at a very profound level.

The Insubstantiality of the Physical World

The second reality we discover, when we attempt to put to rest the what aspect of objects through a careful study of the material world, is that substantiality disappears. When we drink coffee from a cup we naturally assume the cup is “there.” We say it’s “substantial.” But what are we talk­ing about? What does it mean to be substantial?

We say the cup is made of atoms, which in turn are made of sub­atomic particles. Yet if we take two subatomic particles—say, protons— and smash them together at extremely high speeds, we find that the two original colliding particles fly apart, along with two new additional particles. The two new particles didn’t exist anywhere in time or in space before the collision. Physicists have done this repeatedly, with the same results every time. One physicist said it would be like smashing two watches together, but in addition to the expected wheels, springs, gears and cases flying apart, we also find two new, completely whole watches among the wreckage!

What’s going on here? Where did these new bits of matter come from? Out of nothing? Perhaps so—but first we notice that these new particles came from the reduction in speed of the original two particles. In other words, the new particles were created from motion.

This is very interesting, because it doesn’t support our everyday, com­monsense view of things. How substantial is matter—the book you’re reading now, or the hand that holds it—if it can be created from some­thing as apparently insubstantial as motion?

Astrophysicists tell us that motion is an expression of energy, and that the energy of the physical universe is of two kinds. There’s positive energy, such as the energy that is locked up in matter. This is the energy we release when we set off nuclear bombs. It is also the kind of energy generated by the sun. But there is also a negative form of energy—we call it “gravity.” It so happens that the amount of positive energy in the universe is equal to the amount of negative energy in the universe—that is, the total amount of energy in the universe adds up to zero. If we could gather all the mass energy in the universe into one place, it would amount to zero too.

Just how “substantial” is this stuff that is made from motion and en­ergy, and that adds up to zero? Modern philosophy and mathematics have not been able to put away the inherent contradiction in the idea of motion discovered by the Eleatics, the ancient Greek philosophers who noted more than twenty centuries ago that a thing can move nei­ther where it is nor where it is not. Instead, they regarded reality as without motion and unchanging—but this seems a bit extreme, consid­ering that change is evident everywhere we look.

This argument has always reminded me of those who say that “all is one,” even in the face of firsthand evidence that we live in a world of abundant multiplicity. As we shall see, our problem with motion is a psychological one. Anyone who has ever seen a movie can attest to the fact that “apparent motion” looks and feels like what we might other­wise call “real motion.” Yet a movie is nothing more than a rapid series of still photos. “We’re not really seeing moving pictures,” we say.

The simple point I want to make here is that there are serious obsta­cles to overcome before we may attribute any substantiality to the phys­ical world. Even G.E. Moore, the great champion of material realism, finally conceded in the end that he could not answer the skeptics’ doubts about the existence of materiality. Indeed, no one has satisfac­torily answered the skeptics to this day.

The Phenomenal World Reveals Only Relative Truths

Finally, in our effort to exhaust the what aspect of reality, we will dis­cover that by examining the external world, we can arrive only at rela­tive truths—that nothing is certain.

Let’s consider yet another view of my cup. The cup sits upon my desk. But how can it be without a great deal of other stuff surrounding it— and, thus, defining it? At the very least, my cup needs to be surrounded by space. Furthermore, in order that we may experience this cup, we have to be situated away from it. If this were not the case with our ob­jects, then we might not find anything ludicrous about an artist who sells plain white canvases that supposedly depict polar bears eating marshmallows in a snowstorm.

Our objects can be only in a dynamic relation with “other.” Once we package up a small portion of the universe in concept—whether it be a physical or a purely mental object (e.g., an idea)—the only way we can actually have our object is in contrast to what it is not.

But “what-it-is-not” is necessarily an aspect of our object’s actual identity—and, as we shall see, this aspect necessarily involves the rest of the universe.

In conceiving any object, then, we isolate and set it apart from what it is not. Therefore, any “truth” found in such a concept could be only relative and provisional at best. Like a wave sloshing within a basin, or like an endless process of arranging and rearranging furniture within a room, relative truths replace themselves over and over, with (and to) no end. In other words, such truths will not satisfy the deep need of the heart. They are not real truth, and they do not provide us with certitude.

The fact apparent to direct experience is that any theory (or concept), even a “theory of everything” (as scientists have dubbed some of their theories), necessarily leaves the what aspect of existence unresolved. What is the universe? What are atoms? What are subatomic particles? What is a person? What are life and death? What is reality? What is anything? As my Zen teacher used to put it, “Whatever you think is delusion.” Whatever conceptual answer we come up with is relative at best, and is never absolute truth.

Mind Is Moving

The great mathematician John von Neumann concluded that “from a strictly logical point of view, only the presence of consciousness can solve the measurement problem” and “the world is not objectively real but depends on the mind of the observer.”

Our problem of not being able to see what’s going on occurs partly from holding to the commonsense belief in the primacy of matter over mind, of an external world “out there” over perception. But if we insist on the primacy of matter over mind, we will eventually be led to intractable problems.

For example, in his book Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, J.S. Bell observed:

The most simple and natural . . . [way] in which quantum mechanics can be presented is called . . . “wave mechanics.” What is it that “waves” in wave mechanics? In the case of water waves it is the surface of the water that waves. With sound waves the pressure of the air oscillates. Light also was held to be a wave motion in clas­sical physics. We were already a little vague about what was waving in that case . . . and even about whether the question made sense. In the case of the waves of wave mechanics we have no idea of what is waving . . . and do not ask the question.

It was physicist Louis de Broglie who first realized that not only that were waves particles (bits of matter), but particles were also waves. As Nick Herbert wrote in Quantum Reality:

New quantum facts destroy the once sharp distinction between matter and field. With two magic quantum phrases we can . . . [turn] matter into field and vice versa. It’s beginning to look as if every­thing is made of one substance—call it “quantumstuff ”—which combines particle and wave at once in a peculiar quantum style all its own.

The world is one substance. As satisfying as this discovery may be to philosophers, it is profoundly distressing to physicists as long as they do not understand the nature of that substance. For if quantumstuff is all there is and you don’t understand quantumstuff, your ignorance is complete.

Distressing, yes. For starters, if everything is one, how do we explain the seemingly self-evident fact of multiplicity? What is this combination with a “peculiar style all its own,” anyway? There’s a Zen story about two monks arguing over a flag that they see waving in the breeze. One monk said, “It’s the flag that’s moving!”

The other monk replied, “No, no. It’s the wind that moves!” Wishing to get to the bottom of this question, they carried on in this way, back and forth.

When their teacher passed by and heard the monks quarreling, he said, “Mind is moving.” What is this mind the teacher referred to?

For those of us who would agree with the definition that the mind is what the brain does (a commonly accepted definition of “mind” today), consider how the brain is made of atoms, made of subatomic particles, made of—what? Motion? Energy? And what are motion and energy made of? What is the material world?

One of the central problems in quantum physics today is how it is possible for an arrangement of atoms to support consciousness (that is, how it can constitute a “measuring device”). But why the foregone con­clusion that consciousness requires atoms? Does it make any sense to suppose that consciousness is constituted of atoms at all? According to scientists, the world remains in a state of superimposed possibilities until a measurement is made, thus determining which possibility is ac­tual. The act of taking a measurement collapses a potential into an actual. And what is the act of taking a measurement? It’s conception itself. Measurement is an apparent alteration of mind— an alteration that opens the door to uncertainty and probability.

What is known as “measurement” is a function of consciousness that collapses perceived reality into conceptual reality, into mind objects.

We can devise a theory of everything and say, “This is reality,” “This is truth.” Or we can even say, “Mind is moving—that’s the truth, believe it.” But our explanations don’t cut it. It’s only consciousness itself that cuts reality—literally.

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Sources

Barrow, John D. The World within the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Bell, J.S. “Six Possible Worlds of Quantum Mechanics.” In Bell, ed., Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Casti, John L. Paradigms Lost. New York: William Morrow, 1989.

Cushing, James T. “A Background Essay.” In James T. Cushing and Ernan McMullin, eds., Philosophical Consequences of Quantum Theory. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989.

Gardner, Martin. The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener. New York: William Morrow, 1983.

Herbert, Nick. Quantum Reality. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1985.

Kline, Morris. Mathematics and the Search for Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Shore, Lys Ann. “Skepticism in the Light of Scientific Literacy,” Skeptical Inquirer 15, no. 1 (fall 1990).

This article is reproduced from Why the World Doesn’t Seem to Make Sense, by Steve Hagen, with permission of Sentient Publications, LLC. (An earlier version was published as How the World Can Be the Way It Is: An Inquiry for the New Millennium into Science, Philosophy, and Perception, Quest Books, 1995.) Steve Hagen is the founder and head teacher of the Dharma Field Zen Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His books include Buddhism Plain and Simple (Broadway, 1998).

Steve Hagen is the founder and head teacher of the Dharma Field Zen Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His Books inclued Buddhism Plain and Simple (Broadway, 19998)

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Printed in the Spring 2017issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Lachman, Gary, "If Consciousness Is Evolving, Why Aren’t Things Getting Better?" Quest 105.2 (Spring 2017): pg. 13-17

By Gary Lachman

When people ask me what I write about, I have a few standard replies, but one answer that covers most of my work is “the evolution of consciousness.” Of course in most cases this only leads to more questions, the most common of which are “How can you say that consciousness is evolving?” or “Really? What evidence do you have for its evolution?” Or, as the title of this article has it, “If consciousness is evolving, why aren’t things getting better?”

That things aren’t getting better is taken as obvious, and if serious consideration of the idea of an evolution of consciousness depended on arguing that, to the contrary, they were, then I’d have to agree that any such speculation would be doomed from the start. By things of course we mean the state of the world, civilization, society. In multiple ways the world faces challenges today that, as the cliché goes, are unprecedented. Every day the news media reports a variety of crises. It seems that we are, and have been for some time, experiencing what the historian Arnold Toynbee called a civilization’s “time of troubles.” So it is not surprising that some people are surprised when I speak of an evolution of consciousness.

Fortunately, the evolution of consciousness does not depend on the state of things being better or worse. It does not depend on the state of things at all—quite the contrary. Consciousness, its evolution, and the world in which it finds itself, are of course linked. They are not separate, watertight realities. But I don’t believe we will find evidence for an evolution of consciousness on the news, or in the latest headlines or tweets, or on Facebook or other social media.

I believe that even if all the evidence available announced the imminent collapse of Western civilization, this would not necessarily mean that consciousness doesn’t evolve, merely that we had not grasped the meaning of its evolution. Consciousness can evolve and things can get worse—or better. The one is not a gauge of the other. Changes in consciousness may bring about changes in society that we consider beneficial. Or they can precipitate upheavals that throw everything into chaos. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead remarked that “the major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur” (Whitehead, 88). As Whitehead suggests, what is wreckage for some may be the raw material for new creation for others.

Here I want to distinguish between the evolution of consciousness and what we can call “progress” or “social change” or “world betterment.” This is aimed at making the world a better place, which most intelligent people in some way desire, even if they are often unsure about how to do it. The other is a recognizable change in the shape and character of consciousness itself. As I’ve tried to show in some of my books, this kind of change in consciousness can, I believe, be traced throughout our history. We can say that the latter is about the form or kind of consciousness prevalent at a particular time and the change from this to another dominant kind of consciousness. The other, we can say, is about what the people experiencing this consciousness did with it. The first is the way in which consciousness experiences the world. The second is made up of the ideas, thoughts, concepts, and beliefs held by this consciousness.

The idea of making the world a better place is of relatively recent origin—say from the 1700s on. This makes it a very modern idea, one predicated on the recognition of human agency as a real force at work in the world. Although we now assume this and really question it only when faced with some insurmountable obstacle, it was not always the case. With few exceptions, for centuries men and women simply accepted things-as-they-were with an unquestioning endurance, just as they accepted the weather or as an animal acquiesces in its fate. The idea that human beings were able to take action and change their circumstances rather than merely suffering them is itself, I believe, a product of a change in consciousness that took place around the seventeenth century. This shift endowed humanity with greater freedom and control over its destiny, but, precisely because of this, also confronted it with perhaps its most daunting challenge.

There are many different approaches to the idea of an evolution of consciousness. Even if we start a history of this idea with the beginning of the twentieth century—as I do in my book A Secret History of Consciousness—the number of different versions we get is considerable. I start my history at around 1900 because by this time the idea of evolution itself had taken hold of the Western imagination. (I should point out that the kind of evolution I am speaking about isn’t Darwinian, although Darwin’s version was the best-known.) It was also around this time that people began to use the term consciousness to talk about our inner, subjective worlds. What we call consciousness today would have been called “mind” or “spirit” at an earlier time. And while “mind” and “spirit” are resistant to the kind of scientific study that characterizes our time—and which has often led some scientists to consider them unreal—consciousness, as something more abstract, seems more amenable to it. At least scientists find it less awkward to say they are studying consciousness than to say they are studying spirit.

A quick run-through of some exponents of an idea of an evolution of consciousness gives us quite a few names. Here we find, in no particular order, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, one of the founders of Theosophy; R.M. Bucke, author of Cosmic Consciousness; the Christian palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo; the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy; the philosopher Henri Bergson; the playwright Bernard Shaw; the biologist Julian Huxley; the Egyptologist René Schwaller de Lubicz; the spiritual philosopher Ken Wilber; the existential philosopher Colin Wilson; Samuel Butler, of Erewhon fame; and the esoteric philosopher P.D. Ouspensky, among many others.

Some of the versions presented by these people are similar to each other, some are complementary, and some are radically different. These figures include scientists, philosophers, esoteric teachers, and writers; some have a religious background, some do not. Thus the idea of an evolution of consciousness is not the property of one or two thinkers, and neither science nor philosophy nor mysticism has any monopoly on it. It appeals to a variety of minds—all of whom, though, appreciate its dynamic character, the emphasis on growth, development, becoming rather than being. Two proponents of an evolution of consciousness whose ideas I have found especially fruitful are the philosopher of language Owen Barfield (1898–1997) and the cultural philosopher Jean Gebser (1905–73).

Barfield spelled out his ideas in a series of books, History in English Words, Poetic Diction, and Saving the Appearances being probably the best-known. He came to the idea of an evolution of consciousness—which he defines as “the concept of man’s self-consciousness as a process in time”— through a study of language, specifically poetry, which, strangely enough, is the same way that Gebser came to it (Barfield, Romanticism, 189). While reading his favorite poets, the Romantics, Barfield noticed something. He saw that the delight he found in reading their lyric poetry was the effect of a change in his consciousness that it produced. It somehow made his consciousness more “alive.” This was the effect of the poets’ using figurative language, that is, metaphor, especially the metaphors they used to speak of their souls, their inner worlds, their feelings and emotions. So, for example, in “Ode to the West Wind,” a favorite of Barfield’s, Percy Bysshe Shelley asks the wind to “make me thy lyre, even as the forest is.” Shelley wants the wind to blow through his soul as it does through the trees, and the inspiration it will bring is like the rustling of the leaves.

As Barfield said, there was something more to these metaphors than “merely reading and enjoying” them: “One could somehow dwell on them.” They altered the way in which he saw the world; it became “a profounder and a more meaningful place when seen through eyes that had been reading poetry.” Poetry, he found, “had the power to change one’s consciousness a little” (Barfield, Origin of Language, 3).

Barfield later came to see that a similar change in consciousness occurred when he looked at language from earlier times. This language was not intended to have a poetic effect. It just seemed to have it. Like poetry, this earlier language was much more figurative, much more metaphorical than our modern language. Barfield saw that the further we go back in history, the more figurative language seems, the more metaphorical and poetic. This was the argument of his first book, History in English Words. As we move closer to the present, language becomes less metaphorical and more literal.

For example, according to several dictionaries, our word electricity means “a form of energy,” which is rather abstract. But electricity derives from the Greek ēlektron, which to the ancient Greeks meant “amber.” This is because, when rubbed with fur, amber produces what we call static electricity. To the ancient Greeks this phenomenon had a lively, less abstract character, because their ēlektron was related to ēlektor, which meant “gleaming” or “the beaming sun.” So for our bare term denoting a form of energy, the Greeks, it seemed, used a more pictorial language (Barfield, History in English Words, 17).

We seem to have moved from what the literary philosopher Erich Heller called “the age of poetry” to “the age of prose.” Many metaphors that at an earlier time seemed fresh and vital either have become clichés or have become so worn down by use—a metaphor itself—that we no longer notice them and accept them without thinking as figures of speech.

Barfield concluded that while poetry may transform consciousness because it purposefully strives to do this—each individual poet using his imagination to create the effect—early language about the most ordinary things did the same thing, not because it went out of its way to do it, but because this consciousness was in the character of the language itself. Rather than accept that people of, say, the Middle Ages or ancient Greece were all remarkably poetic, he concluded that their language had this living quality because the world it spoke of was that way for them. It was an age of poetry not because everyone was a poet, but because, as Heller writes, it was an age in which “poetry was not merely written but, as it were, lived . . . The poetic comprehension of life,” Heller goes on, “was at that time not a matter of the poetic imagination at work in the minds of a few chosen individuals, of artists . . . but was ‘natural,’ a matter of fact, of ways of thinking and feeling shared by the whole community” (Heller, 3).

Barfield saw that the change from an age of poetry to one of prose meant a change in the way people saw the world, and this meant a change in their consciousness. Earlier language is much more alive than ours because the people speaking it saw a world that was much more alive than ours, which meant for Barfield that their consciousness presented the world that way. Barfield’s term for this living character of perceiving is participation. For him, the language of an earlier time is livelier than ours because the people of that time somehow participated in the life of the world around them in a way that we now only experience occasionally. They were somehow aware of the inside of things, of the inner life of nature, in a way that our more prosaic consciousness, which concerns itself simply with the surface of things, isn’t. Our consciousness is different from that of the people who spoke this earlier language. It has changed, shifted, moved, or evolved from that state to our own.

We can, though, get flashes of this “inside.” It can happen, as it did with Barfield, through poetry—the other arts can also do it—or it can happen through certain mind-altering substances. Even something as simple as wine can do it, hence the longstanding association of poetry with the fruit of the vine.

Jean Gebser came to a similar conclusion through reading the work of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke in the early 1930s (Barfield himself began writing in the late 1920s). For Gebser, Rilke’s use of language suggested that in the twentieth century a shift had happened in Western consciousness. If Barfield and Heller recognized a shift from an age of poetry to one of prose—a shift from an age of living, metaphorical language to a more literal, matter-of-fact one—Gebser saw that this prosaic way of seeing the world was itself starting to change and that the stable, common-sense vision that it presented was beginning to break down.

In Rilke’s use of language, and in many other forms of human expression at the time, Gebser saw a movement away from the sequential, logical form of consciousness—a characteristic of plodding, prosaic thinking—and toward a kind of simultaneity. Rather than one-thing-following-another in a nice, orderly, steplike fashion, Gebser saw that in Rilke and in other writers and artists—Proust, James Joyce, Picasso—and scientists—Einstein, Max Planck—what was emerging was a kind of vision of “everythingallatonce,” a world in which past, present, and future were not as stable as they had been. Gebser spoke of this as an “irruption of time,” which he saw as the overall consequence of a new “structure of consciousness” that, he argued, was appearing in the West. Our own digital age, which prides itself on simultaneity and instant availability, may give us pause to consider Gebser’s idea.

Gebser’s magnum opus, The Ever-Present Origin—originally published in 1949 but not translated into English until 1984—charts in great detail the cultural evidence for what he calls the different “mutations of consciousness” that the human mind has gone through from prehistoric times until our own.

Like Barfield, Gebser believed that consciousness evolved, although he preferred the term “mutation” to “evolution,” to avoid the nineteenth-century notions of progress associated with evolution. I don’t have space to go through the different structures of consciousness Gebser depicts; an interested reader can find an outline of them in my book A Secret History of Consciousness. Here it is enough to say that Gebser believed that this irruption of time was both the result and the agent of what he called the “breakdown of the mental-rational structure.”

Gebser’s “mental-rational” structure of consciousness is much like the kind of consciousness that Barfield and Heller recognized in the age of prose. Barfield and Heller knew that these shifts take place over long stretches of time, and that the passing of the age of poetry into that of prose began in the distant past, perhaps during what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, the period around 500 BC that saw the start of Western philosophy and its peculiar focus on logical reasoning and rational explanation. Both Barfield and Gebser agreed that this trend reached an apogee in the early seventeenth century with the rise of what we have come to call science. Science, we can say, is the epitome of the age of prose. In order to succeed, it had to denude the world of its mythological, mythopoetic character. Science works because it treats the world as a dead object, not a living being, as our earlier, more metaphorical consciousness had. It sees the world as a machine, subject to rigid mechanical laws, not something in which we participate.

Earlier I remarked that the change in consciousness in the seventeenth century gave humanity greater freedom and control of its destiny, but also confronted it with perhaps its greatest challenge. The rise of science marks this change precisely. Certainly the world has changed more in the four centuries following this revolution than in the millennia that preceded it. To enumerate all the benefits that have come from the development of science and its offshoot, technology, would be tedious. We see them all around us, from space probes voyaging beyond our solar system to the latest breakthroughs in medicine. We live today in ways that kings of old could not imagine. So the change in Western consciousness at the beginning of the seventeenth century did, it seems, make things better.

Yet this change also led to many of the challenges facing us in our “time of troubles.” The loss of our sense of participation in the world allows us to detach from it and observe it impersonally—the essence of science—but it has also left us, as the novelist Walker Percy said, “lost in the cosmos.”

Gebser believes something similar. The mental-rational consciousness structure is the furthest removed from what he calls “Origin,” the ever-present source of consciousness itself. Our radical break with it began in the early fourteenth century; one sign of this, he argues, is the discovery of perspective in art, which marks a change from the flat, tapestrylike perception of the Middle Ages to what became our own “space age,” a vision of infinity extending in all directions. This shift enabled man to stand on his own, to confront the world with his own intelligence and will. The computer I am using to write this essay is one result of this shift. But Gebser would agree with Walker Percy that it also led to our existential angst in the face of a mute universe that seems oblivious to us.

Blaise Pascal, one of the great mathematical minds of the seventeenth century, and also a deeply religious one, recognized this early on. In his Pensées, a collection of notes found after his death, Pascal had written about the new model of the universe arising from the nascent science: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” But today Pascal’s terror has dwindled to a numb acquiescence in the notion that the universe is meaningless. The respected astrophysicist Steven Weinberg dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s when he announced in his book The First Three Minutes that “the more the universe seems comprehensible the more it also seems pointless.”

So we have a change in consciousness that resulted in many things getting better, but which has also landed us with the greatest challenge humanity has faced: overcoming the passive nihilism that has become our accepted way of understanding ourselves and the world.

Barfield and Gebser believed that consciousness continues to evolve or mutate and that we today are involved in this process. Both believe that the meaninglessness behind our cultural and social malaise can be overcome, and that there are signs of another change in consciousness—one that will somehow allow us to reconnect with our source while at the same time maintaining the independent, free, creative consciousness that was the reason we lost touch with it in the first place. The loss of what Barfield calls “original participation,” resulting in our modern, alienated consciousness, can be seen as a fall, but Barfield would say it was a necessary one. Human consciousness needed that separation in order to individuate into its own independent “I.” Now the aim is to achieve final participation, a conscious grasp and understanding of participation instead of our earlier, unconscious immersion in it. This can be achieved, Barfield believes, through a certain effort of the imagination, akin to the change in consciousness he felt when reading poetry. In essence it is a way of seeing the world figuratively, as alive, as a kind of metaphor to be grasped rather than an object to be used. Unlike original participation, this is something we must bring our will and attention to; it requires effort on our part. It is an evolution we bring about, not one that happens to us. Barfield himself found the deepest insight into this process in the work of Rudolf Steiner, but we may read Barfield with profit without having to agree.

Gebser believed that the breakdown of the mental-rational structure was necessary for the next structure of consciousness to appear. He called it the integral structure, because it integrated all the previous structures and completed the unfolding of Origin. Gebser’s vocabulary is difficult, and his descriptions of the integral structure of consciousness require much effort to grasp; but as Barfield recognized while reading poetry, the attention directed at this kind of consciousness can itself induce a glimpse of it. Gebser speaks of a fundamental change from our current “perspectival” consciousness to an “aperspectival” one, a shift from a linear, utilitarian, ego-based view to a holistic, contemplative, ego-free one. What Gebser meant by “ego-free” was not that we lose our egos, as some forms of mysticism suggest, but that we are no longer limited to them. Our perspective is broadened to include much wider horizons. We achieve a bird’s-eye view; we see from above, and not just what is smack in front of us. We get the big picture, not just the close-up.

Gebser and Barfield knew that such a change in consciousness is not passive and that the people in whom it stirs must make the effort to bring it about. Neither of the two believed in any millenarian singularity—some event that will trigger the shift and change things overnight. Gebser believed that such notions were illusions. “Let us not deceive ourselves,” he wrote. “The world will not become much better, merely a little different, and perhaps more appreciative of the things that really matter” (quoted in Feuerstein, 166). The work of actualizing consciousness remains, whether things get better or not.

My own belief is that any new consciousness will emerge first in individuals, and for them it may be as much a burden as a blessing. They will have glimpses of what others do not, and will be driven by needs others find absurd. They will be what Colin Wilson calls Outsiders, people who see too deep and too much, where most others are near-sighted. Until they understand who they are, they will be misfits, but if consciousness has a future, it depends on them.

Space will not allow me to say more. I encourage readers to go to Barfield and Gebser themselves or, for an overview of their work, my own books, where you will find their ideas discussed along with those of other thinkers who are confronting the same problems. I can say with some assurance that if you do, you will find more evidence for an evolution of consciousness there than you will on the evening news.

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Sources

Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. West Stockbridge, Mass.: Lindisfarne, 1985.
———. Owen Barfield and the Origin of Language. Spring Valley, N.Y.: St. George Publications, 1976. Lecture.
———. Romanticism Comes of Age. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986.
Feuerstein, Georg. Structures of Consciousness. Lower Lake, Calif.: Integral Publishing, 1987.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1959.

Gary Lachman, a longtime Quest contributor, is the author of twenty books on the links between consciousness, culture, and the Western esoteric tradition, most recently Beyond the Robot: The Life and World of Colin Wilson. He can be reached at www.garylachman.co.uk.

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