“And yet I deem that there are powers
Which of themselves our minds impress
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.” Wordsworth
The religious tend to cling to the apparent solidity of our three dimensional, physical world, despite proclaiming fervently that it was created ex-nihilo, into time by a creator who is timeless.
The atheist clings to the apparent solidity of our three dimensional world, believing fervently that this is all there is, and that it evolved in time from random simplicity to complex order, until consciousness appeared leaving man in charge of his own destiny.
Yet under an electron microscope, the apparent solidity of our three dimensional universe dissolves – and what seems solid reveals itself to be a timeless dance of waves of interference patterns vibrating on different frequencies in inter-reacting dimensions.
In contemporary, techno- dominant societies we have divorced ourselves from this underlying timeless and transcending reality; we cling to what is solid and sensible, believing we can discover it’s secrets by studying it objectively. In so doing, we are like timid invitees to a great dance, sitting at the side, watching the intricate, unfolding movements on the dance floor, whilst seeking to photograph a single frame of a moment’s movement – and then trying to create a crude, mechanistic imitation of it.
We ignore our own deepest scientific and mystical insights, namely that, though we sit at the side of the dance floor watching, that very timeless, vibrating light energy holds our own physical bodies together. We are not separate entities – disembodied fixed points. We are made up of waves of energy expressed in three dimensions. .
Thus the religious and atheist have much in common – an obsession with linear time, in the physical world, a denial of the fantastic implications of quantum/hologram reality, and fear – fear of it’s dynamic, ever creating impact. Both would deny the reality of this existential fear.
The religious construct theological, mental defences of dogma and doctrine, warring amongst themselves as to the intellectual (and as they would see it), spiritual purity of each’s revelation – in an attempt to make sense of the traumatic uncertainties of their time between life and death.
The atheist also creates an over arching frame- work of evolutionary belief for much the same reasons, except that the notion of progress is substituted for salvation, and as things develop technically, so it is hoped, man will relinquish his underlying neanderthal nature, and eventually become truly objective and enlightened.
Thus belief in evolution is no less rigid then belief in creationism – both limit themselves by their attachment to a linear sense of time in a physical world of three dimensions. (The religious may believe in another dimension, heaven, but this heavenly dimension is usually conceived as being, for all practical purposes, entirely separate from this world; heaven is believed to be ‘up there’ rather than in, through and from there’.)
In practice, the acceptance of both the religious and evolutionary views of physical reality, ignore a fundamental, universal law (alluded to earlier), namely that everything and everyone is dancing and differentiating. Thus, no two snowflakes, grains of sand, people, clones, or any religious or political ideology can ever be the same. At some deep level, .even if our brains pretend to be aloof and objective, the dance of life through three dimensional matter continues, ever creating differences in everything. Thus the gods laugh, when men seek to build rigid Babel structures of belief and empire.
But men and women do not always experience themselves in the three dimensions of time. Two obvious examples of this sense of timelessness will suffice – sleep and dreams and deep creativity. The first is obvious, the second calls for comment.
When we are truly absorbed in a creative act, we are unaware of time passing, At this deep level of creative listening and picture-thinking, ideas arise from the intimate energy of the inner quantum dance, to blow like a breeze through the roots, trunk, branches and leaves of our three dimensional beings – and then we write, paint or compose etc, unconscious of time’s limitations. In so doing we feel fulfilled, that we have expressed something new; and it is new, because it has been expressed through our own unique resonation of our life’s deepest experience. In creating we are recreated (recreation) and in the process of creating from this deepest of levels, we mature and can become more human (e).
Deep within our beings all of us, whether we be religious, agnostic or atheist, feel a profound sense of longing to find meaning and happiness. This longing permeates the existential fear of death – of being no longer related to the physical world.
Real faith, as distinct from faith in a religion or political ideology, emerges as we abandon the time- bound world of things and man-made systems, for the timeless, ever creating kingdom that dances deep within ourselves.
Here lies the strength to accept, moment by moment the hurts and joys of life, and to create something new out of them. This is the way of the fool and the way of the child.
It is the way of the child, who cannot but trust the parent; Children must express themselves, make mistakes and learn, in order to grow by rooting themselves in their emotional environment and culture. It is the way of the fool, who laughs at those who are fixated on accumulating wealth, power, status and personal gratification at the expense of others, and their own personal, creative fulfilment. The fool knows that the pursuit of these things is illusion, and a waste of a life of laughter, true friendship, personal growth and freedom.
Both the child and the fool know something of the inner dance of deep reality, As D H Lawrence observed “When the child asks ‘why is the grass green?’, he is not asking for an explanation; what he really is calling for is for us to revel in the greenness with him – but we begin to prate about chlorophyll .“
Why then are we afraid of the apparent madness of the ever- creating, renewing and changing dance deep within ourselves? Is it because we are afraid of losing control? Is it because we are afraid that others will think us mad? Yet the most lasting expressions of any culture by the greatest poets, artists, sculptures, musicians, mystics, etc are reverenced. Often as not, these are the very people, who in their own lifetimes are caustically dismissed, persecuted or crucified by the prevailing orthodoxy of their day.
Often it is only when such ‘mad creators’ are dead that their works impact in time, and the new orthodoxy embraces them to preserve what they have expressed – set up university courses to study them, or to add insult to injury, raise statues in their honour. Such men and women had the courage to express their difference. The majority are afraid to do so, and bow the knee before whatever religious or political orthodoxy they are born into, and in it’s name, are party to whatever crimes it commits.
However, one person’s sense of time can be different from another, depending on the emotional climate in which they grow up in, and the level of anxiety that they feel – perhaps through genetic inheritance.
Certainly, the time-demands of the prevailing culture will encourage conformity to its expectations of duty, but underneath, the metabolic rate will be at variance in its willingness or ability to respond. Thus, a sensitive person subject to bullying or abusive parenting, will in adulthood, tend to swing between independence and servile acceptance of another’s response to the pace of life. The former is like a novice swimmer floundering in the river of time, clinging to any bit of flotsam or jetsam for support. Yet paradoxically, such a person is often in touch with the deeper, creative dance inside themselves, precisely because to survive, they have had to reach down into those depths.
Today’s wired up world of ever increasing production and consumption presents the hungry soul that seeks to be a truly creative, humane being, with huge pressures to conform to it’s targets and expectations.
Consider first a pre-industrial society where daily life revolves around light and darkness, the patterns of the seasons, and its celebratory festivals of dancing, feasting and singing. It is a talking/listening culture where people are reliant on the natural world and each other, and tends to look to the past for inspiration. Fear of the unknown, of the extraordinary breaking in to upset the rhythms of such a society, breeds fear and superstition – and fear must be resisted or exorcized by ritual or sacrifice.
In such a society, people are more intuitive and instinctive than those living in contemporary western society.
Any reflective thinking is mediated through the society’s oral/aural historical narrative, its legends and beliefs. However, the underlying dominant feature of such a pre-industrial society is the cyclical rhythms of time permeating the natural order and their own bodies.
With the invention of the clock, these natural rhythms of nature and the human body began to be measured in more and more precise ways, and industrialisation made it possible for the introduction of whole new orders of measuring time e.g.: clocking on and off, timetabled travel, etc. Slowly, and then with increasing urgency, new ‘artificial’ measurements of time arose, ones that inexorably began to divorce themselves from the natural rhythms and cycles of the human body and the planet i.e., the mechanism began to dominate the organism – the speeding brain to dominate the heart – inspiration to be eclipsed by calculation.
As individual machines have become more sophiscated and web-connected, and knowledge has proliferated in the service of the great goal of progress through increasing production and consumption, the worth and status of the individual has come to be measured by their ability to process more and more of the torrent of new information pouring through their brain. Inevitably, this leads to a great void opening up between the deeper rhythms and cycles of the human organism, and the racing brain – which seeks to fill it with noise and busyness.
This is increasingly apparent in this age of the internet, where it seems that fewer and fewer people feel able to take the time to sink into the silent, deeper rhythms of time, and above all, the timeless dimension beyond, and allow those creative and re-creating rhythms to find expression. The young, in particular, are giving little time for day dreaming and imagining e.g., to go and build a den in the woods; Safer to keep them under surveillance inside, studying, playing computer games, watching TV, texting each other, in a parentless, virtual world through which each individual child must needs find their own way.
If consciousness is a tree, than more and more people, particularly the young (who have grown up knowing little else but an instantly, accessible, inter-connected world) are only twittering and tweeting in the leaves – responding to every rumour carried on every breeze as it russels through them. They are now little conscious of the main branches, let alone the trunk or their silent roots reaching down into the ground of their being, from which true re-creative life arises. As Nicholas Carr says in his book The Shallows – How the internet is changing the way we think – “once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words; now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet-ski.”
It is not just words that are being emptied of deeper, emotional content and meaning. As the brain speeds over and through the restless waves of information, there is felt a growing need to record the images and experiences, however, mundane, of lives lived in a focused, linear way. Increasingly, many live behind a camera, videoing and photographing, like tourists following an itinerary of life – instead of taking time to experience the life in themselves, in others, and in nature.
To illustrate this, I will use the analogy of the motorway driver and the rambler.
Vehicles stream down the increasingly congested lanes of the motorway, each often occupied by a single driver trying to get from A to B as quickly as possible. The radio blasts music, news and information. The driver’s brain concentrates on the road, but also on the future situation he must deal with when he arrives. If he can arrive quicker, he can do more.
Speeding along, he does not notice the rambler walking a bridle path nearby. The rambler is not imposing his own thoughts and frustrations on the world around him. He is not staring ahead down a mental tunnel, thinking about what he will do when he arrives. On the contrary, he is not imposing his thoughts onto his environment at all. He is letting the natural world around him impress itself upon him. So he hears the willow warbler, sees it flittering in the branches, and the changing patterns and shadows of colour over the fields and woods as the clouds drift in and out of the sunlight. His body relaxes, in tune with the deeper silence and songs of his own nature and the natural world in which he is intimately involved, Unlike the motorway driver, whose consciousness is focused in his brain, like a culverted watercourse, the rambler’s consciousness is unfocused, a deep, meandering river.
“What is this life if full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?” W H Davies
“For townsfolk have no time to grow
They have no time to waste.” Banjo Patterson
Our present age had been called the Age of Communication: it is not. It is the Age of Information Exchange – and information exchange is not communication, which in spirit and in semantics, is akin to community and communion. The later is what lovers and poets do best ‘with sighs too deep for words.’ At its deepest level, true communication is true art, and needs few words or acts to express itself. Deep talks to deep in vivid emotional pictures from a timeless, creative present, rather than in strings of emotionally empty words that must needs be constantly scrutinised to ascertain what is meant or not meant. The communication transmitted via the communion of two friends or lovers is far deeper, far more instantly understood than a thousand emails or information disclosures about oneself on Face book. As the saying goes – “It is not the words you say, but the sound you make,’ and it is the dynamic depth and quality of our transpersonal relationships that help us grow, and which bring us contentment and meaning.
So what conclusions can we draw when we compare our time-enslaved, techno-consumer society today, with the underlying, deeper reality of timelessness that mystics and modern physicists describe?
The first is that although we can “soar in intellectual flight to understand the furtherest light”, or instantly access the global web in our search for knowledge or information – emotionally, we are much more limited.
Secondly, we must face the fact that we are ‘batting on a bum wicket’, Clean water, medical and agricultural scientific advances have given rise to a rapidly increasingly population (7 billion today, 9 billion by 2020). Can the planet sustain such numbers, particularly as the poor majority seek the lifestyle of the rich, western minority?
All cultural and economic life depends on the fertility of the land and availably of water, and technology, on the availability of natural resources. However, much we are driven to increase our standard of living by dissecting our natural environment in order to produce further profit making technologies (as if the planet were a 3 dimensional mechanism rather than a living, multi-level organism), it is a delusion to think that we can do this indefinitely.
There are limits to growth.
Thirdly, the more we impose ourselves and our mechanistic systems on nature, the more she will fight back e.g. new strains of MRSA appear in hospitals despite the efforts of pharmaceutical companies to manufacture new anti-bodies. I.e the more we divorce ourselves from nature, the weaker we become, and the more we sacrifice our deeper levels of being to compete in the rat-race of doing and accumulating, the more we feel dis-ease. It affects us emotionally, mentally and physically; and in separating ourselves from these deeper levels of being, we also separate ourselves from the earth herself, seeing her and the myriad other life- forms, as mere resources to be exploited, rather than as contributing partners in the greater welfare and healing of both. As Wordsworth put it
“Our meddling intellects
Misshape the beauteous forms of things
We murder to dissect.”
Fourthly, the more our consciousness is focused in our brains at the expense of our bodies and deeper levels of being, the quicker time seems to pass, as we feel compelled to process more and more information that has been emptied of deeper, emotional content and relationship. The linear lanes of the motorway stretch ahead, but they are becoming more and more congested. and speed and efficiently is diminishing. Sitting alone in our vehicle, we grow more and more frustrated. Will I have time?
Will I be late? Why don’t I feel closer to others despite the technology available to me? Why do I feel so alienated from nature? Let me illustrate the above feelings with the following:-
A) In the 1920’s, a wise Chinese professor was giving a lecture in an American university, when the door burst open, and a student announced breathlessly – ‘Sir, Sir, a Finnish runner has just reduced the world 1500 m record by 4 seconds!’ – To which the professor responded –‘and what is the honourable gentlemen going to do with this time he has saved?’
B) The theologian Paul Tillich, was sitting under a tree with a world famous biologist. Suddenly, the biologist leapt to his feet and declared ‘I don’t know anything about this tree’ Tillich was amazed; after all, if this famous biologist knows nothing about the tree, who does? ‘You don’t understand’, the biologist continued, ‘I can no longer feel this tree for itself.’
Lastly, if we decide that the rat-race is making us more and more unhappy, leaving us with less and less control over our own time-tabled lives; if, when we look at the wider world and witness the destructive and potentially catastrophic effects that our money- worshipping, oil- powered economy is having on our oceans, land and atmosphere, is there any escape, any more satisfying, and less destructive life style we could adopt?
The common mantra expressed by politicians in an unholy alliance with global corporations, is that ‘there is no alternative ‘. The religious too, often acquiesce to this view e.g. man has been given dominion over the earth. This view is utterly false. Men and women are stewards of the earth and her resources, to tend and care for it like gardeners. Imbued with the same light-creating energy, they are not a species that is alien to all others.
Thus, the way to escape is firstly, to acknowledge our own contributing role in the vain attempt to build an alien civilisation, and secondly, to seek ‘to live more simply, that others (which includes all species) may simply live’.
But if I ‘drop out’, how will I live, and what will others think of me?
‘The only wild horses left today
Are in ourselves
Let go the reins
And trust.’
Each of us is bigger and far deeper than we think we are, but we will only realise this when we find the faith to abandon our self- destroying, linear and lonely path, and seek the timeless, eternally creative kingdom deep within, and beyond ourselves. Here lies the source of healing power both for ourselves and the planet.
Jeremy Bell 2nd July 2011
Suggested reading
The Tao of Physics – Fritjof Capra
Quantum Theology – Diarmuid O’Murchu