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Louis
Sarno was born in 1954, in Newark, New Jersey. He was an
aspiring science fiction writer, and he spent ten years
of his early adulthood in Europe, working a variety of jobs,
from farmhand in Scotland to English tutor and carpenter
in Amsterdam. Then, one day, while listening to the radio
in Amsterdam, he heard a very unusual kind of music on the
radio.
He didn't know what the music was, other than that it was
vocal, and in a non-Western language -- but he knew it was
something essential. It hit a space deep within him, hinting
at the possibility of a life profoundly richer more satisfying
than the one he was living. This music, the radio announcer
said, was from an obscure tribe in Africa -- a tribe of
pygmies, no less.
So Louis decided he had to go to the people who made this
music. He began corresponding with Colin Turnbull, an anthropologist
who had lived among of the Mbuti pygmies in the 1950's,
and had continued to study and write about them in the decades
since. Turnbull offered to give him an audio-tape of introduction
to his Mbuti friends, introducing him as Turnbull's brother.
But Louis decided the Mbuti had been over-studied -- their
culture was no longer pure. He wanted a pure and untouched
culture, a culture filled to the brim with the spirit he
had heard in that music. Finally he decided he would go
and live among the Ba-Benjelle, in the Central African Republic.
Because their homeland was far off any of the highways leading
across Africa, they had been little touched by Western society.
Lacking funds for a round-trip ticket to Africa, he bought
a one-way ticket, leaving him about $500 for expenses. And
away he went -- on a gutsy, one-way quest for a more fulfilling
way of experiencing the world.
Arriving in Africa, he found it wasn't easy getting permission
to visit the homeland of the Ba-Benjelle, but he finally
managed to get a permit, on the grounds that he wanted to
tape the pygmies' music. But what Louis found when he finally
arrived there was somewhat disappointing. Far from a collection
of noble savages, living the life of the spirit and soul
in the forest, carried away by their music, what he found
was a tribe in a state of spiritual and financial poverty,
living in run-down huts in a village, doing low-paid dirty
work for other Africans from nearby villages, and addicted
to alcohol and cigarettes. Furthermore, they had little
interest in their new visitor from the West, except insofar
as it was possible to get money or cigarettes out of him.
A weaker soul might have turned around and gone back home.
But Louis braved the dirt and disease, at one point having
hundreds of tiny worms dug out of the soles of his feet
with a knife. Once he had spent all his money, the Ba-Benjelle
began bringing him their own food. They began performing
music, and allowing him to record it -- the women sang beautifully,
and some of the men were excellent musicians. Finally, the
tribe decided it was time to go into the forest, and they
allowed him to go with them.
In the forest, he found, everything was different. No one
bothered to smoke or drink -- the men were focused on hunting,
and the women on gathering food. Hunting was done by dragging
huge nets through the forest, and goading animals to run
into the nets. Honey was found by climbing to the tops of
tall trees and knocking down honeycombs. The music sounded
ever more beautiful in the forest -- and when the tribe
danced to their music, sometimes the leaves on the ground
would get up and dance through the air along with them.
These were the forest spirits, eternal partners of the Ba-Benjelle
in travels through the rainforest.
Amazingly, Louis noted, the Ba-Benjelle had totally different
personalities in the forest than in the village. It wasn't
just that they were nicer, or in better moods in the forest
than in the village -- it was more specific than that. Someone
who was outgoing and boisterous in the village might be
quiet and thoughtful in the forest. Or, on the other hand,
someone who was shy and awkward and out of sorts in the
village, might come into his own in the forest, emerging
as a natural leader and a master of events. In general,
neuroses that existed in the village disappeared in the
forest. The forest lifestyle was more immediate and violent,
more gripping on a moment-by-moment basis, and thus less
conducive to personal neurosis. In the forest, the Ba-Benjelle
were too concerned with interacting with the forest and
each other to get wrapped up in their own problems.
Louis loved it in the forest, and he was distressed when,
after a period of months, they returned to the village.
Why, he wondered, would they forsake this perfect, natural,
harmonious existence, in exchange for a life of poverty,
a life on the lowest rung of the economic ladder in one
of the poorest countries in the world? He tried to explain
to them that, by raising their children in the village instead
of the forest, they were losing their traditional forest
skills, and watering down their culture and spirituality.
However, he found that they had no sense of the progressive
evolution or dissipation of a culture. Instead of viewing
time as linear and progressive, they seemed to view it as
spherical. Events radiated out from a center, which was
the soul of the tribe, of the forest. The linear order of
events in time was irrelevant: past, present and future
stood side by side in a space of deeper relationship. It
was not that the Ba-Benjelle were stupid, were unable to
reason about causes and effects, or to predict the likely
future outcome of a series of events. It was that they did
not care to think this way: such thoughts did not come naturally
to them, were not deeply meaningful. Louis had to accept
that the Ba-Benjelle's short-sightedness about their own
destiny was part and parcel of the soulfulness, primality
and oneness of nature that had drawn him to them in the
first place.
In spite of his strangeness, the Ba-Benjelle accepted Louis
as one of their own, and allowed him to record their music
on his portable tape recorder (some of these tapes are now
available for purchase online, under the title Echoes
from the Forest; I believe they’re out of print,
but it’s not hard to find a used copy online). Whether
he lives with them still at this moment, I don’t know.
When I first Louis Sarno's story, in his book Song of
the Forest, I was intrigued and impressed. The book
touched some deep, quiet parts of my mind, parts that I
all too rarely acknowledged to myself. I realized that I,
too, in dark adventurous moments, had sometimes dreamed
of running away from civilized society, of escaping into
the forest to live in the manner of my ancestors. And I
realized that Louis Sarno and I, in harboring these late-night
thoughts, were manifesting some pretty universal feelings.
After all, who among us has never felt the alienation and
emptiness of modern life? Who has not felt, in a self-searching,
angstful, funky mood, that all this vast social and technological
apparatus we have built up around us is just a way of distracting
ourselves from the ultimate emptiness of our lives? What
thinking person has not speculated to him or herself, at
least once, that the reason we make ourselves so busy doing
one thing after another is precisely because we
don't want to have to stop and reflect on how unhappy we
are? Louis Sarno felt these feelings more intensely and
more frequently than most of us, and he also had far more
guts than the average person: he saw the possibility of
an alternative, and he followed up on it. He took dramatic
action. In doing so, he improved his own life -- not materially,
but personally, psychologically and spiritually. And he
also learned a great deal, and gave the world a gift of
numerous recordings of beautiful music, music that otherwise
might have vanished forever, unheard outside the forests
of central Africa.
The book started me thinking: what is this "emptiness
within" anyway ... this emptiness, this alienation
which Louis Sarno felt, and which motivated him to flee
Europe, the bastion of Western civilization, for the Central
African forest? What his story told me, in a dramatic and
irrefutable way, was something most striking indeed: that
this emptiness within is actually an emptiness without.
The reason we modern people tend to feel an emptiness within
is that we are looking within for sometthing that does not
belong there -- for something that belongs outside, in the
external world.
The Ba-Benjelle did not have a superior, happy, harmonious
state of mind in the village. They had this state of mind
-- the state of mind embodied in their music, which had
drawn Louis Sarno to them in the first place -- in the forest.
They did not distinguish their forest state of mind from
the forest itself, and from the forest spirits that caused
leaves to dance to their music. They had no "emptiness
within" in the forest, because they were filled up
with force, power and spirituality from without -- and not
from some mysterious, vague, incorporeal Supreme Being,
but rather from the dynamic, visceral forest all around
them. Their individual personalities were not important
or even real, except in the context of interaction with
the greater physical/spiritual world.
In all these respects, the Ba-Benjelle are not atypical
of Stone Age cultures -- similar stories could be told about,
say, the natives of the Brazilian Amazon, or the Australian
aboriginals. Today, we are almost fanatically focused on
the individual mind -- but this focus is in no way humanly
"natural." Until the emergence of civilization,
over the last few thousand years, the individual mind was
simply not considered separate from the physical or spiritual
realms. The holistic view of mind is what we inherited from
the animal kingdom, it is what evolved in our brains, and
is still wired there, to a large extent. The individualist
view of mind is a product of cultural rather than biological
evolution.
Indeed, we can see the imposition of the individualist view
of mind very clearly, in the modern school system. To what
great lengths do we go to get our children to understand
their minds as separate! We test children individually,
over and over, forcing them to "think for themselves"
rather than together with their friends. We exalt reading
and mathematics -- the construction of imaginary worlds
inside the head -- over carrying out actions in the world
with other people. We carry out instruction in artificial
environments -- schools -- forcing children to ignore their
senses and use their imaginations -- inner simulacra of
senses -- instead. Field trips, in which students get to
experience environments relating to the things they're learning
about at school, are viewed by many teachers and parents
as distractions. The attitude is: "Who needs to actually
sense things, to interact with things, to do
or be things? It's enough just to organize information
within one's mind!" What children want, based on their
biology, is embodied experience -- learning that occurs
within an absorbing environment. But this is not what our
culture wants them to want, because our culture requires
adults who are absorbed within inner worlds of one kind
or another. The main thing we are teaching our children
in school, besides obedience and conformity, is how to construct
inner worlds taking the place of the outer world.
In the primal world-view of the Ba-Benjelle and the young
child, mind is just a part of a continuum of being. Some
aspects of this view of mind, like forest spirits or ghosts
or dragons, seem quaint, funny or dangerous. Certainly,
we have achieved a lot of remarkable things by understanding
the mind as a separate entity -- all of modern science and
literature must be attributed to the individualist, separatist,
objectivist stance. But even so, as Louis Sarno realized
in a very visceral way, something has been lost. Side by
side with the supernaturalistic features, the pre-scientific,
holistic view of mind contains a deep understanding of the
interconnection of mental systems.
For example, in recent decades, the science of psychology
has made a great deal of progress toward comprehending the
complexity of mind. It has discovered that memories are
created rather than simply recalled; that perceptions of
reality depend drastically on emotional, cognitive and social
factors; that brain systems are intimately interconnected
with other body systems, like the immune and endocrine system.
All of these advanced resarch results are actually implicit
in the primitive, holistic point of view. Shamans from "primitive"
tribes have a firmer practical grasp of the relation between
perception, reality and memory than modern psychologists;
and with their array of herbal medicines, they have a more
useful understanding of the interconnection of body and
mind systems as well. The knowledge implicit in the holistic,
pre-scientific view of mind is not easily translatable into
the language of science; but then the knowledge gained by
scientists is not easily translated into the language of
the Ba-Benjelle, either. The two views of the universe are
complementary.
I’ve
distinguished two ways of looking at the mind -- the Stone
Age, Ba-Benjelle-ish way, in which mind is interconnected
with physical and spiritual reality; and the modern way,
in which the individual thinking mind is a thing apart.
Actually, though, this binary distinction is only the coarsest
way of viewing the evolution of the intuitive concept of
mind over human history. There are many ways to refine the
picture, and look at more microscopic distinctions between
different perspectives on mind as they have appeared on
the historical scene. One way to do this was given by the
mid-century cultural theorist Jean Gebser, who identified
four stages of consciousness in human history: the archaic,
the magic, the mythic and the mental. Each of his "stages
of consciousness" is a certain view of the mind, a
certain way of perceiving and constructing the relation
between the mind and the world.
Gebser was an integrative interdisciplinary theorist of
a type that is not so popular these days. Like Kant, Nietzsche,
Plato, Sartre, Hegel and many others lesser-known, he sought
an overall understanding of the world. His entryway was
history and anthropology, but the implications of his ideas
far transcend any particular academic field.
He was born in Posen, Germany in 1905, and like most Germans
of his generation, the trajectory of his life was structured
by World War II. In 1931 he left Germany in disgust with
the Nazis and took up residence in Spain, where he wrote
poetry (Poesias de al Tarde, 1936) and began to develop
his innovative theoretical ideas, but in 1936 he fled to
Paris, where he took advantage of the artistic community
that had accreted around Picasso and Malraux. When Paris
fell in 1939 he escaped to Switzerland, where he completed
his masterwork, Ursprung und Gegenwart (1949/53),
which finally appeared in English as The Ever-Present
Origin in 1985 by Ohio University Press. There is no
deeper and more comprehensive study of the psychology of
the world’s past and present cultures. In Gebser’s
hands, culture is not a collection of facts, it is a mixture
of stages and modes of consciousness. Consciousness and
the diversity of cultures are keys for understanding each
other.
The archaic stage is truly prehistoric consciousness --
consciousness as it was before tools, language, and other
such modern inventions separated us from the physical world.
It is, in essence, the animal's view of the world: a mode
of being focused almost entirely on reactions to external,
physical events. There is no model of the mind here: what
we would call mental functions are simply parts of the world-system.
Connections within the organism are not distinguished from
connections between the organism and the outside world.
Everything is one; perceptions of the world and the instinct
to survive in it are the same. Behavior is driven by the
sense-organs. Evolved to be embedded in particular environments,
one is automatically parts of an integral, complex, evolving
ecosystem.
The emergence of mind from instinct into magical consciousness
wrests man from his physical world. Now, in order to survive,
mind must act upon the world, in calculated ways. He becomes
conscious of his individuality, his needs and how to fill
them by identifying objects in his environment and how they
may be used to promote his well-being. Tools are developed,
and the mind learns to identify its own state. However,
these tools are still used within a general pattern of being
established by the outside world. The natural world is the
context, and man is acting autonomously within this context,
connected with this context in numerous obvious and subtle
ways.
The magical stage is a state of mind that retains the feeling
of unity contained in archaic consciousness, but adds on
a feeling of practical separateness. In the magical world-view,
mind is separate from universe, but is continually joined
with universe by subtle magical connections. Gebser identifies
magical consciousness with the world-view of cavemen; he
observes it in the semiotics of Paleolithic cave paintings.
The traditional forest consciousness of the Ba-Benjelle
represents a kind of "late magical" consciousness.
While vastly more sophisticated than cavemen, the BaBanzele
clearly do have a magical view of the world. They do not
conceive of themselves as precisely identical to the forest,
the physical/spiritual world, but they experience themselves
as constantly coupled with this world -- coupled by their
own intuitions and feelings, and by magical manifestations
like the forest spirits.
In practical terms, magical consciousness corresponds to
the invention of sophisticated tools, and the development
of complex kinship structures. These innovations are supported
by creative methodologies for recognizing and forming patterns.
Though it can at times be intelligent and creative, the
archaic mind is mainly concerned with filling in abstract
forms provided by instinct with particular details. The
magical mind, on the other hand, experiments with abstract
forms, fills them in with details based on the particular
situation, and then modifies the abstract forms accordingly.
It has definite mechanisms for creating new abstract structures.
This is a major step forward.
Magical consciousness, like archaic consciousness, is focused
outward. The turning-inward occurs with Gebser's next stage,
mythic consciousness. With the mythic state of mind, the
human mind discovers its own depths: it finds a richness
of inner structures reflective of, but quite distinct from,
the structures it perceives in the outer world. It constructs
its own structures to mirror and complement the structures
of the external world -- something unnecessary in magical
consciousness, where the basic unity of mental and physical
structures is consciously and continually acknowledged.
It builds naturally toward mental consciousness, in which
the inner world breaks free of the outside world altogether,
and the essence of being is equated with interior process,
reasoning, conscious thought.
In the mythical stage, mind is occupied not only with acting
on the world to attain certain outcomes, but with recognizing
patterns in outcomes of different activities and properties
of physical forms, in a more abstract sense. The patterns
are separated from the particular situation in which they
arose, leading to symbolism -- to objects that represent
states of the world, and changes therein. With symbolism,
we have cause and effect, language, concepts of time and
space, good and evil. More complex social organizations
are formed as land is farmed, animals domesticated, labor
divided. Harnessing his understanding of state and action,
physical cause and effect, man creates simple machines to
extend his physical capabilities -- to minimize effort,
time, and space. And out of language and machinery, the
roots of science and mathematics and literature are laid.
Here, symbolism is still focused on the external world.
Mathematics is geometric or arithmetic, referring directly
to real-world shapes or quantities of real-world objects.
Science pertains mainly to readily observable phenomena
-- not to, say, black holes in distant parts of the universe,
or particles so tiny as to be not only unseeable but sometimes
even unmeasurable. Literary narrative, even when dealing
with gods and the like, follows the flow of events of human
life, rather than setting up its own order having nothing
to do with reality. But the fact that this is symbolism
pertaining to the world, rather than actions carried out
within the world, is important. It is a change of focus
from without to within.
Finally, the mentalistic attitude is exemplified by Descartes'
"I think, therefore, I am." Mental consciousness
places the self in the head, rather than in the heart. It
thus
distances the self from the body, from the pulse of physical
being-in-the- world. This is where we are now, and where
we have been, in the Western world, for the past few thousand
years. Mentalistic consciousness goes one step after the
other, and rigidly separates past from present, and present
from future. The spherical, lateral temporality of the magical
stage is relegated to small children, insane people, and
inspired artists.
With the mentalistic stage, a host of new phenomena arise.
We have relativity -- mind differentiating itself in relation
to its objects, seeking to know itself, grasping toward
meaning, perspective, and knowledge as ends in themselves,
irrespective of outer-world significance. We have mathematics
developed into an abstract system, capable of symbolizing
ideas completely unreachable by the senses -- the fourth,
fifth and n'th dimensions; electromagnetic fields; infinitely
small and infinitely large quantities; etc. etc. We have
reflexivity, the mind becoming self-conscious, as its processes
become its objects.
The succession of these stages, according to Gebser, is
not a matter of new stages replacing old ones, but rather
of new stages growing on top of old ones. Each of us is
archaic, magical, mythical and mentalistic, at different
times and in different ways. Usually, however, it is the
most recently evolved view of mind that has the most power,
and assumes the governing role. The Ba-Benjelle as they
exist today present an interesting study of the transition
from one stage of consciousness to another -- they plainly
alternated between a magical view of mind and world, while
in the forest, and a mythical/mental view while in the village.
Religion is a good example with which to think about these
different stages of consciousness, these different ways
of conceiving and experiencing the mind. The everyday spirituality
of the Ba-Benjelle is magical; on the other hand, religions
as we know them today are a transplantation of this everyday
magical spirituality into the mythic and mental domains.
They are combinations of the magical, mythic and the mental.
It is their magical and mythic elements which renders religion
so confusing and apparently absurd to the scientific mind
-- and it is these same elements which render it so emotionally
appealing to the overall human organism. Indeed, it might
be argued that the main function of religion in today's
society is to feed the magical and mythic consciousness
within all of us.
The spirits of Stone Age people, like the forest spirits
of the Ba-Benjelle, were tied in with elements of nature.
They were symbolic concretizations of the natural world,
of which human minds and bodies were implicitly assumed
to be part. Even in the mythic frame of mind, the nature-religion
connection was still prominent: Yah-weh, the Jewish God
and the root of the Christian God, was originally a corn
god! Today, however, the connection exists only in watered-down
symbolic form, in the form of rituals whose meanings no
one really understands anymore. For instance, the Hindu
prohibition on killing cows ties in with the ecological
importance of cow dung in India. The Balinese tradition
of sacrificing fruit to the gods in temples and outside
homes has an ecological purpose: to attract ants (spirits?)
to places other than inside homes. These religious customs
originated at a time when harmony with nature and harmony
and God were more nearly the same thing -- but now they
are anachronisms, continuing primarily on the basis of momentum.
In spite of odd proclamations like the Gnostic Jesus's "split
a stick and I am there," the center of contemporary
religion is not in the direct, magical relation with the
outside world -- it is in the mind, in the abstract symbols,
word and rituals used to elicit spiritual feelings. We pray
in churches -- artificial, logical constructions, built
according to vocabularies and grammars -- we do not pray
as systems coupled with an outside, living world.
Philosophy goes one step further than religion, and attempts
to transplant magical consciousness's feeling of global
understanding and relatedness into the purely mental realm.
But it has far less potency than religion -- only in a small
percentage of individuals does it resonate as deeply as
non-intellectual spiritual practice and belief. These unusual
individuals, these "exceptions who prove the rule,"
tend to be atypically intellectual people, in whose minds
mental activity has penetrated so deeply as to assumed mythic
and magical roles (the authors of this book count themselves
in this category!). The general impotence of philosophy
as opposed to religion is proof of the human power and necessity
of religions's mythic and magical aspects. Religion is the
paradigm case of a multilayered construction, an entity
that bridges all the different structures of consciousness,
the different perspectives on mind and world.
Gebser's
categorization system is a powerful one, I like it well
enough – but needless to say, I don’t believe
it has any absolute, dogmatic value. All systems of categories
are merely tools for understanding: they encompass a certain
amount of order, and leave other things out, and Gebser's
is no exception. Just as Gebser's four stages enlarge the
original dichotomy of Stone Age versus modern, with which
we began, so it is possible to expand Gebser's stages into
a yet finer gradation of modes of consciousness, views of
mind. One interesting way to do this is via the concept
of mirroring or reflexivity, according to which successives
stage in the development of mind can be viewed as earlier
stages reflected into themselves.
The birth of the magical state is the initial act of mirroring.
Initially, in the archaic state of consciousness, nothing
is divided: the world is One. But then the mind, with its
sense-organs reflecting the world, becomes separate from
the world. In a primordial act of mental reflexivity, it
becomes a world within a world. Insstead of just creatively
recognizing patterns in the world, the mind is self-consciously
creating an inner world which is a sort of oversimplified
simulacrum of the outer world. The archaic mind also simulates
the outer world and creatively recognizes pattern in the
outer world, so mere intelligence is not the difference
between the archaic and magical stages. The difference is
simply the drawing of the boundary, the line between inside
and outside, and the classification of the passage of causation
from inside to outside as magical. This act of boundary-drawing
is important, because it provides the "distance"
needed in order to make calculations, to reason. By decoupling
its dynamics to some extent from the dynamics of the environment,
the mind's dynamics become free to pursue their own trajectories,
and they find new places that they could never have found
in the old coupled system. They can follow one step to another
to another without interruption from the outside world,
and in this way they can create things like axes and boats
and cultures. But in gaining these new trajectories of reason,
they also lose some of the trajectories of interaction that
they previously followed, emergently with the dynamic environment.
The magical state of mind contains a boundary, distinguishing
the world from the world-within-a-world called mind. It
is the result of a single reflexive movement. The next reflexive
movement, the mirroring of the mind/world dichotomy within
mind, results in the emergence of language. Language is
a result of mind conceptualizing the distinction between
mind and world, and applying the tools it previously used
to deal with the external world, to deal with itself. Instead
of merely recognizing patterns in the outside world, and
calculatedly creating patterns in the outside world, it
is recognizing and creating patterns in its own structure
and dynamics. Its internal dynamics are de-coupling into
two systems: the inner observer and the inner observed.
The inner observer, looking at the inner observed, is understanding
what it sees, and constructing forms -- now mental, not
physical forms -- representing its observations. These forms
are linguistic structures. But as with the initial reflection
that moved archaic consciousness into magical consciousness,
there is a cost to this decoupling. The price is paid in
harmony, unity, coherence. Many sophisticated patterns are
gained, but some very simple patterns, some simple symmetries,
are lost.
When it first emerged, human language was not considered
as distinct from the sounds by which animals communicate
with one another, and the sounds with which nonliving phenomena
(thunder, water, etc.) communicate with living beings. Even
today, in pre-scientific cultures -- not only Stone Age
cultures, but relatively more advanced cultures like the
American Indians or the New Zealand Maori -- "talking
to animals" is a commonplace notion. At the same time
as spirituality pulled away from living nature, developing
into interior, mythic systems, human language become interiorized
as well, became considered as distinct from the multiple
languages of the natural world. In these ways and others,
our perception of the natural world changed: no longer was
it part of a living continuum, along with us. Rather, it
was dead and out there while we were alive and in here.
We can see this transition in language, in religion, and
virtually everywhere else: we can even see it in literature.
Consider, for example, the fact that in Homer, characters
do not have inner thoughts; they hear voices from the gods.
From the spirits, who are often associated with natural
forces, e.g. Neptune, the god of the sea. But in later Greek
literature, representing full-fledged civilization, the
voices had moved inside. The locus of pattern-formation
had moved within. Julian Jayne’s The Origin of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
is one interpretation of this event, which I find interesting,
although I don’t entirely agree with him.
In fact, the evolution of language and symbolism had a lot
to do with the emergence of religion out of magic, and into
philosophy. The two evolutions occurred at the same time,
and in no small measure helped each other along. Both had
to do with the reflection of the dichotomy between inner
and outer world into an inner dichotomy, a division
of the inner world mirroring the original division between
inner and outer. Religion is a conscious, concerted formation
occurring within the mind, corresponding to what, in the
magical mindset, was simply a mode of interaction between
the mind and the world.
Next in the sequence of reflections, following on the creation
of language, we have the creation of machinery. Tools exist
in the archaic state of mind, though only coming into their
own in the magical state, but machinery is a different story.
Machinery needs language because it is, in essence, a language.
It is a language whose words are tools. Engineering, no
matter how primitive, is a grammar of tools: it is a collection
of rules telling what kinds of tools should be fit together
in what ways, to provide effective structures. With the
evolution of machinery, we have a reflection into the external
world, to accompany the reflection into the internal world
that gave rise to language. The mind/world dichotomy becomes
manifest in reality, as the calculated pattern-recognition
and formation of the magical mindset is used to control,
not relations between the organism and the outside, nor
relations between different inner forms, but relations between
parts of the outside world.
Then, with the advent of higher-level rationality, true
abstract thought, we have yet another reflection: we have
language itself reflected inwardly, now playing the role
that the world plays with regard to machinery. Advanced
reason is, in fact, a machine for fitting together and producing
linguistic forms. Logic itself is a form of language; so
is science; so is mathematics. Instead of an inner world
containing a simulacrum of the mind/world dichotomy, we
have an inner world containing a dichotomy between an outer
world and a mind/world dichotomy. Things become perverted,
convoluted, complex -- and astoundingly creative. We have
a world within a world within a world -- a nesting of mirrors
three levels deep.
The hierarchy of reflections is just a more detailed form
of the observation that first occurred to me when reading
Song of the Forest: that the inner, mental world
of modern Western civilization is a result of turning the
original magical, animistic world-view outside-in. The mind
is going to perceive a complex, living network, a web of
subtle, dynamic pattern -- if it didn't, it wouldn't be
a mind. If it doesn't perceive this web in the outside,
natural world, it's going to perceive this web within itself.
The complexity and life is going to be there, even if reflected
within itself two, three or a dozen times. It can be complicated,
but it cannot be extinguished, without extinguishing mind
itself.
Louis Sarno felt, intuitively, that the modern, mentalistic
system -- with nature viewed as largely dead (we can no
longer talk with animals or skies or waterfalls!), and the
inner world alive and flourishing -- was intrinsically less
healthy than the old, magical system. And it is not hard
to see the roots of this feeling. After all, our individual
inner worlds are largely mutually incommunicable -- whereas
in the old system, where one's life was largely focused
outside in nature, there was intrinsic communicability between
humans , as a consequence of the focus on the common system
in which humans were mentally embedded. Our linguistic formations
become more and more ornate, attempting to overcome this
communication barrier that we have created by moving the
focus of human complexity from nature to the inner mind.
But ultimately we do not succeed. Our religions become reduced
to empty symbolisms, linguistic formalisms, incantations.
Our deepest personal experiences become almost impossible
to communicate, because they too are focused on our own
inner worlds, rather than on the shared substrate of external,
natural reality.
However, not many of us are willing to do what Louis Sarno
did, and return to a semi-Stone Age way of life, in hopes
of regaining some of the magic of the magical state of consciousness.
Instead, we keep pushing ahead, progressing further and
further into our linguistic, mechanical, scientific, rational
world. The question is, where are we getting in this way?
Are we getting somewhere valuable, important, deeply fulfilling?
Or are we simply moving further and further away from the
core of our being, disappearing into a tinier and tinier
fraction of the universe, a mirror within a mirror within
a mirror within a mirror....
Gebser himself was an optimist. He felt that there was a
fifth stage of consciousness, one that he called the Integral
stage -- a return to holism, to the oneness of archaic consciousness,
but without sacrificing the advances made by the magical,
mythical and mental stages. Numerous "new age"
philosophers have made claims similar to Gebser's, in recent
decades. Terrence McKenna, for example, has proposed that
a dramatic transformation in human consciousness is going
to occur in the year 2012, at the end of the Mayan calendar.
A new age is upon us, it is said -- an age of postmodern
science, collective consciousness, and near-universal harmony!
Everything will be beautiful and surreal.
This is a wonderful vision, but it has far more hope than
substance to it, and it is disturbingly reminiscent of the
exultations of Christian fanatics 1000 years ago, as the
millenary anniversary of the birth of Christ approached.
Perhaps simply believing a new age is upon us will make
it come true -- but it didn't work for the Anabaptists of
1000 A.D.! While Gebser was clearly fixed in the mental
mode of being, most of the modern new agers seem to feel
more affinity for the mythic and magical states of mind.
New age culture also seems to gravitate towards a Stone-Age-ish
spherical notion of time, in which the succession of events
is viewed as unimportant -- a view of time that is admirable
in some respects, but is perhaps not optimal for making
temporal predictions!
It is easy to be skeptical of these proclamations of a new
and better mode of consciousness to come. Such proclamations
ring of falsity, of ideological salesmanship. Sardonic retorts
are in no short supply. It is a curious fact, however, that
in recent years, a number of quite rational, mentally-oriented
people have come to make statements very similar to those
of the "crazy" new-age millenarians. I am, in
fact, one of these people. I believe that the emergence
of advanced biotech and computer technology is going to
catapult humanity into a new phase of consciousness, essentially
identical to what Gebser spoke of as the fifth, Integral
stage. Intelligent computer networks will be a
higher stage of consciousness, but they will not be separate
from us -- they will induce us to move into a higher stage
of consciousness as well. Advanced biotechnology will be
one of the major factors catalyzing this fusion.
This is an extremely gutsy statement, and it is not one
that I make lightly. Eccentric and maniacally poetic as
I can be sometimes, I’m basically a scientist, and
I realize that making such statements will not do much good
for my short-term credibility among my scientific colleagues.
However, I am willing to take that risk, because of the
obvious importance of what I am saying. If this is true,
if computer and biotech really do have the ability to push
us to the Integral stage of awareness, then this is something
that everyone should know about -- and it is something that
should structure our actions, should guide our lives as
we build our future world. It means that Louis Sarno's bold
action, while apparently good for him at the particular
time he took it, is probably not the right direction for
humanity as a whole. Even if we could do it, there would
be no point in our moving back to the magical state of mind
-- because we are moving forward to something not at all
inferior, something encompassing the magical, mythical,
mental and archaic modes of being in an harmonious and creative
way.
From a certain perspective, of course, computer technology
is the ultimate manifestation of our tendency to withdraw
into our own inner worlds, to avoid contact with nature.
It is also the ultimate alienation of language from nature,
relying as it does on the development of artificial, purely
human languages -- programming languages, communication
protocols, etc. Computers are the first instruments to manipulate
abstractions and simulate processes -- they are windows
through which the mind can examine abstract processes objectively.
Looking through these mechanical windows into our own minds,
we no longer have the need to look at anything else. These
observations are made concrete by my own lifestyle during
the past few years: what do I do all day? I sit inside staring
at computer screens, in carefully controlled and unnatural
environments, using various formal-language-based tools
(programming languages, word processors) to spill out the
complex creations of my seething, self-organizing internal
universe. I use these tools to help me build my private
inner world, and to help me communicate some small aspects
of my private world to the private worlds of others -- for
example, to communicate the thought underlying this sentence
to you.
I myself am pretty comfortable with this computer-heavy
lifestyle. I’m a happy person: not every minute of
every day, but the considerable majority. I work long intense
hours, but I’m not a “workaholic” in the
sense of not being able to enjoy myself apart from work.
I take great pleasure from composing and playing music,
reading, spending time with my wife and children, hiking
in the woods, sports, eating good food, and so forth and
so on. But I’m well aware that my relatively pleasant
existence is largely a consequence of fortunate brain chemistry:
it so happens my neuropsychological cocktail is compatible
with a lifestyle that modern Western society finds acceptable.
This is not the case for everyone. And the majority of people
who find their brain chemistry is not compatible with the
lifestyle modern culture has provided for them, seek solace
in the products of modern pharmacology.
Illegal drug use is stigmatized in mainstream Western society,
and in some cases rightly so – heroin, speed and cocaine,
for instance, are inarguably destructive. No one who has
spent time around junkies, cokeheads, speed freaks or crank
addicts can have much enthusiasm for these drugs: they destroy
peoples’ minds, bodies and lives. On the other hand,
I am a strong advocate of legalizing marijuana and hallucinogens
(mushrooms, LSD), not because I use them regularly (I don’t),
but because I think that in order to justify outlawing something,
the government should have a much stronger reason than is
present in the case of these substances. Excessive marijuana
smoking has bad effects on the lungs and the short-term
memory, but as essentially everyone in my generation or
even my parents’ generation knows, it’s not
really any worse than alcohol. It’s the kind of potentially
mildly destructive habit that, in my view, adult humans
should be allowed to pursue if they so wish. On the other
hand, hallucinogenic drugs are far more psychologically
powerful than marjiuana, but they are not at all physically
addictive and certainly do not cause violent or otherwise
criminal behavior. They have powerful good aspects as well
as potentially destructive aspects attached to them. Nearly
all tribal cultures have used them to good effect, in the
context of shamanic and other rituals. I believe our culture
is making a big mistake by pushing psychedelic experience
into the category of criminal acts.
But though we strongly stigmatize the use of certain psychoactive
substances, people still use these in great numbers, risking
(in the US particularly) absurdly long jail terms in order
to do so. And a decent percentage of the non-illegal-drug-using
population is hooked (physically or psychologically) on
some form of legal psychoactive substance. Prozac and Valium
are just the best known of a huge variety of mood-altering
drugs, prescribed by doctors simply to make people feel
better – to make them better able to tolerate the
frustrating aspects of their lives. The side effects of
these drugs can be severe, certainly worse than those of
pure LSD or properly grown hallucinogenic mushrooms (not
that Prozac/Valium and LSD/mushrooms are in any way psychoactively
similar, it’s just interesting to me to see what society
categorizes as “safe” versus “unsafe”).
The bottom line is, the bureaucratically-structured, tech-dominated-and-enabled
society we’ve created is intolerable by a vast percentage
of the population, without frequent chemical alterations
to their brain state. Pharmacology and computer technology
seem to be interacting in a sick sort of way: the latter
makes life tough for many, and the former modifies the brain
so as to better be able to tolerate it.
But what the future holds is, I believe, a rather different
sort of biotech/computer-tech synergy. For, in the Internet,
we have a system with the same properties that Nature originally
had for us, way back in the Stone Age. It is a complex,
self-organizing web, which generates mysterious patterns
and binds together various people into a common substrate.
It opens up our inner worlds and transforms them into collective
worlds. In a very crude sense we can see this in the psychology
of e-mail -- instead of thinking through an issue myself,
I can dash off e-mails to four or five friends and engage
in a real-time collective thinking process. Even without
virtual reality and biotech-based human-computer hybridization,
there is the clear potential for the weaving-together of
the worldwide network of mutually incommunicable "inner
worlds" into a whole, vibrant system. But with the
capability to genetically engineer human beings so as to
optimize the effectiveness of human-computer interactions
– the sky isn’t anywhere near the limit. Communication
with the Net and with other humans will become part of the
very processes of human thought, feeling and creativity.
Nature, as it receded from us, transformed in our cultural
psyche into spirits and gods, and into inward-focused, linguistic
mind. Then religion faded, and we were left with nothing
but mind, nothing but the rational, inner world, and the
institutional and technological forms it has created. But
then, lo and behold, one of these forms is leading us back
to something with many of the properties of every stage
along the way. The emerging Internet intelligence is at
once a natural environment, a god, and a mind with a complex,
creative inner world. Genetic engineering and bioengineering
will allow us to fully partake of this new communal synergetic
lifeform.
Furthermore, the same archetypal patterns remain in this
new, digital external universe, as in the old, biological
one. The same patterns that structure the natural world,
also occur in our religious symbolism and experience, and
in our mathematics, science, computing and art. These archetypal
patterns, ultimately derived from Nature, recur in the emerging
Internet intelligence -- once again projected into a collective,
communal environment; rather than imprisoned within the
confines of individual heads. In short, the archetypes have
moved from outside in real space, to inside in mental space,
to "outside" in biocyberspace.
In terms of reflections, computing corresponds to the reflection
of rationality into the outside world. The mind/world within
the mind within the mind/world within the mind within the
mind/world, becomes a mind/world within the mind within
the mind/world within the world within the mind/world --
and so forth. The mirror of computation reflects outward,
where the mirror of rationality reflected in. And finally,
in the intelligent Internet, the ground of the "physical
world" itself is replaced by a reflection of the rational-mind/computation
dichotomy. Mind replicates itself in an interconnected global
network of computers atop the world's storehouse of knowledge
and ideas, thus maximizing its food supply, the individual
mind, and the information it creates. The dichotomies in
thought promulgated by culture, geography, perspective,
are synthesized away. The mind, transformed by its interaction
with the global mind, approaches its evolutionary potential
in its current form.
Biotechnology is critical here, for an obvious reason: As
human organisms, we are sensorially attuned to genuine,
external nature; not to "Internet nature." And
so, even if the latter is to become just as complex and
multitextured as us, it will not match us as well. Every
aspect of our body is attuned to the natural environment,
not the Intelligent internet. Thus one concludes that, in
a sense, Louis Sarno may be right: while a future Internet-based
human society may be healthier than the current system,
based on individual, incommunicable inner worlds, it still
will not possess the basic health and integrity of Stone
Age culture, or of animal life ... unless the radical changes
to come are pushed in the right direction…
When first thinking this issue through I came up with two
possible solutions:
1) the body is shed or transformed, and replaced with a
form more harmonious with the new Nature/God/Mind that we
have created.
2) The global brain is brought into harmony with Gaia, the
mind of nature itself – so that nature, man and the
Intelligent Internet are all fused as one
Option 2 had me thinking in rather grandiose terms, about
nanotech bacteria, diffused into the atmosphere, communicating
with real bacteria as well as with computer controllers,
creating a link between Gaia and internet intelligence.
Now there’s a global brain deserving of the
name!
When I posted these thoughts to the Global Brain Discussion
Group (in June 2000), however, Francis Heylighen brought
me a bit closer to reality. As he noted,
There is a third, more short-term and more practical
possibility, which is that the Internet evolves to fit
our inborn characteristics. All evolution is co-evolution:
systems mutually adapt. People will adapt to some degree
to the new Internet environment, but the Internet will
adapt even faster to the people that use it. Just because
the Internet is intrinsically much more flexible than
our hard-wired instincts and proclivities, it will find
a way of presenting itself that matches those proclivities.
This has happened countless times in the evolution
of computer interfaces. For example, the GUI that became
popular with the Mac was based on the idea that people
don't understand things by reading long lists of file
names, but by moving and manipulating objects. Thus, files
were represented by icons that you could drag and drop
to move them from one directory to another. 3D, virtual
reality, as e.g. imagined by Gibson in his original "cyberspace"
vision, is another obvious way to make a complex information
space match better with our inborn capacities to reason
in three dimensional space. "Emotional" agents,
that respond to our moods, or show simple emotions, is
another one of these new interface paradigms that tries
to fit our evolutionary psychology.
I don't say that all these interface tricks will succeed,
or even that they are necessary to have a good grasp of
the Internet, but they are definitely undergoing a fast
evolution and competition in order to find interfaces
that are better adapted to our brain.
His
point is a good one – insightful and down-to-earth;
typically high-quality Heylighen. However, to achieve what
I'm thinking of would take more than a new UI for PC's as
they exist today; it would require computing "interfaces"
to be much more thoroughly integrated into natural human
life. Interacting with the Net needs to not be something
you do while sitting on your ass staring at a machine, but
something you can do while floating in a lake or walking
under the trees or sitting in the livingroom or the yard
chatting with your friends. Ubiquitous computing, if done
properly has this potential. In fact, it has a strong potential
to bring us closer to nature, in our daily lives, than our
current industrial-revolution-based technology permits.
Ultimately, though, I don’t believe any moderately
enhanced version of Francis’s modest, conservative
vision is going to carry the day. In Eliezer’s terms,
Francis’s vision is SL1, perhaps minorly verging on
SL2. I think it doesn’t go far enough. Sure, ubiquitous
computing will happen, it will be wonderful. But creative
biotech will happen too. Genetic engineering and bioengineering,
implemented cooperatively, will make us capable of interfacing
directly with data on a Siberian webserver while swimming
in a lake in the Costa Rican mountains, or flashing interesting
5-dimensional movie clips to our lover, brain-to-brain,
in the middle of the sex act. Scary, exciting, or fascinating
– all of the above I suppose. But this is where science
is pointing us, and to doubt this without solid reasons
is to blind oneself to reality.
We are thus led from the frontiers of consciousness to the
frontiers of engineering: the creation of digital bodies
and the re-engineering of biological bodies. Things become,
not only stranger than anyone previously imagined, but stranger
than anyone could have previously imagined. Even
I don't pretend to see where it is all going to lead --
except to guess that it is going to be wonderful, and beyond
any mode of conscious experience that we have encountered
up to this time. The world will indeed become beautiful
and surreal, and though I’m a little bit wary of possible
future disasters, all in all I can't wait to see it.
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