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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
5 0 September 2016
CULTURE
W
e think of ourselves as unique,
and so we are, but defining indi-
viduality is problematic. Ninety
percent of a person’s cells –
mostly bacteria – are not their
own while those cells with our distinct genetic
codes only last up to ten years.
In terms of consciousness this poses ques-
tions such as: where is memory located if cells
in the brain degenerate along with the rest of
an atrophying body? Is it possible that morphic
fields containing recollections lie beyond our-
selves – like data stored in a cloud – as Rupert
Sheldrake has proposed? Is this close to the
elusive idea of soul that scientific rationalism
considers impossible?
In 'The Science Delusion' (2012) and other
works Sheldrake (who has a PhD from Cam
-
bridge and is the author of numerous articles in
peer-reviewed scientific journals) argues for his
hypothesis of morphic resonance employing a
scientific methodology, albeit not to the satis-
faction of many sceptics including his nemesis
Richard Dawkins. Dawkins’ 'The Selfish Gene'
(1976) remains a classic exposition of neo-Dar-
winian genetics. His persuasive argument is
that the battle for survival is at the level of the
gene which conveniently uses the replicator,
our bodies or that of another species, for its
purposes.
But even within the field of genetics the neo-
Darwinian consensus is cast in doubt by the
new era of Epigenetics that suggests genetic
codes are altered by the use of certain faculties
by an organism over the course of its life. Appar-
ently the child of a practising musician enjoys
a musical predisposition beyond any genetic
inheritance. It goes to shows how mistaken it is
for any age to assume its reigning ideas are
impregnable.
Nevertheless this should not provide an
excuse for abandoning measured analysis or
the quest for elusive truths notwithstanding the
limitations of human minds. Scientific method-
ology yields extraordinary results but we must
be careful to avoid new dogmas. It could also
be that there is wisdom in ideas now considered
obsolete.
Faced with our own mortality and that of
those around us, many of us entertain the pos-
sibility of an afterlife, a phantom echo from a
person’s life on earth, and possibly a unifying
principle, or One, conventionally called God.
But scientific rationality argues it is only possi-
ble for minds (or souls) to outlive bodies
through ideas and artefacts, or as memes in the
rather obtuse description of Richard Dawkins,
and mostly dismisses the idea of a unifying
principle. And make no mistake the arguments
adduced by scientific rationality are
compelling.
But a consequence of accepting this approach
of scientific rationalism is moral ambivalence.
For example, although science shows the effect
of human activities on planet Earth there is no
discourse within it to offer a way of prescribing
our behaviour, it is simply descriptive. Moreo-
ver per Dawkins, if it is a case of elements
within us competing for expression it is hardly
possible to invest them with any moral
sensibility.
Within the framework of a supersensible
world redemptive possibilities seem to arise: if
souls exist beyond bodies this appears to
impose moral obligations as we could be com-
pelled to endure the consequences of our
actions for an eternity. The idea of a unifying
principle also suggests that truth can be arrived
at through the exercise of intellect.
This concept is domesticated by religions
through ideas such as sin and karma but we
need not accept the tenets of a particular reli-
gion in order to accept the possibility of Oneness
and immortality. Let us consider evidence of
those possibilities then, especially through the
lens of art, which need not succumb to the
dogma of a particular organised religion.
Our own WB Yeats, perhaps the foremost
English-language poet of the twentieth century
and certainly the greatest Romantic, held ideas
anathematic to the intellectual culture of his
day, and perhaps even more antipathetic to
those of our own time. But what might be dis-
missed as superstition, far from holding him
back, liberated an artistic imagination engen-
dering verse of truly magical quality that he
attributed to presences beyond himself.
If Yeats had simply expressed his ideas in
philosophical terms they would easily be dis-
missed but through the beauty of their poetic
form they are more acceptable to the wider soci-
ety. Passively or otherwise this poetry is still a
conduit for notions adopted by most school
children, inculcating what many would normally
dismiss as obscurantist notions about faery
Oceanic
Consciousness
If our genes represent science,
our poetry represents our humanity
by Frank Armstrong
Neo-Darwinian consensus
is cast in doubt by the new
era of Epigenetics that
suggests genetic codes are
altered by the use of certain
faculties by an organism
over the course of its life
September 2016 5 1
realms and spirits. And who would dare remove
such perfectly crafted verse as Yeats’ from the
school syllabus?
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
In an article entitled 'Magic' written in 1901
he set out his beliefs:
“I believe in the practice and philosophy of
what we have agreed to call, in what I must call
the evocation of spirits, though I do not know
what they are, in the power of creating magical
illusions, in our visions of truth in the depths of
the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe
in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been
handed down from early times, and been the
foundations of nearly all magical practices”.
He identifies these principles as:
“1. That the borders of our mind are ever shift-
ing, and that many minds can flow into one
another, as it were, and create or reveal a
single mind, a single energy.
2. That the borders of our memories are as shift-
ing, and that our memories are part of one
great memory, the memory of Nature
herself.
3. That this great mind can be evoked by
symbols”.
Yeats comes from a tradition in Western
thought that stretches back to Pythagoras and
Plato which has been the philosophical basis of
Christianity also. The statements, or revela-
tions, of the itinerant preacher known as Jesus
Christ as recorded in the New Testament do not
contain sophisticated explanations for the ori-
gins of the world, or even arguably, prescriptions
for the formation of a just society on earth, so
forcefully articulated in Hellenic philosophy.
Especially via St Augustine, Plato’s ideas
were absorbed by the early Church. Of course
Christianity became a tool of oppression par-
ticularly linked to its adoption by the Roman
Empire under the Emperor Constantine. But this
does not detract from the central idea of treat-
ing thy neighbour as thyself contained within
the corpus of Christianity that made a powerful
contribution to human fellowship, not least on
the question of slavery which began to disap-
pear from Europe after the spread of
Christianity.
Indeed the Italian Marxist director Pier Paolo
Pasolini wrote and directed a film called 'The
Gospel According to Matthew’ (1964) which
exclusively relies on words from that gospel
including: “it is easier for a camel to go through
the idea of a needle than for a rich man to enter
the kingdom of heaven”, an idea ignored
through most of the Catholic Church’s history
and in most Protestant churches that equated
time with money.
The moral collapse of Christianity is
expressed by William Blake in one of his 'Songs
of Experience':
The Garden of Love
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their
rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
Notwithstanding the tyranny of the Church,
the idea that we may encounter knowledge
greater than our own, and perhaps persevere
beyond a material form, still offers a form of lib-
eration from the limitations of the gene and
promises access to higher knowledge. The Neo-
platonist philosopher Plotinus (d. c 270 CE)
argued that: “those who are inspired and pos-
sessed have knowledge to the extent that they
know that there is something greater than
themselves in themselves – even if they do not
know what it is …”.
Plotinus, like Yeats, laid out his most persua-
sive arguments by analogy or through symbols.
Art, rather than philosophy, better evokes
those symbols.
Plato himself began life as a poet and Jesus
Christ is described as one by Percy Shelley in
his 'Defence of Poetry' where he described his
kind as the unacknowledged legislators of the
world.
It has been through an elusive faith that
mystics and visionaries have developed many
of the great advances in human thought. Of
course they may not always channel positive
forces: what passes for the supersensible world
appears to have its fair share of diabolic forces
as have been attested to through the ages.
Plotinus describes the existence of souls by
analogy with our perception of physical beauty
in another: “when a face sometimes appears
beautiful and sometimes not, though the pro-
portion remains the same, would we not have
to say that beauty is other than the proportion
and that the proportion is beautiful because of
something other than itself”. The appeal we
find in another seems to reside in something
beyond physical matter as: “when a good man
sees in the fresh face of youth a trace of the
virtue that is in harmony with the truth that is
inside himself”. It is perhaps for this reason that
romantic love may arrive as a form of revelation
that creates a spiritual awakening as Dante
found when he encountered Beatrice.
Since the Enlightenment and especially
Charles Darwin’s 'Origins of the Species', the
idea of a supersensible world has progressively
fallen into disrepute at least in the West. Of
course religions have endured but in many
cases these have been as defenders of tradition
and conformity, their exoteric state. Nonethe-
less, the shock of the encounter of a secular
Western civilisation with Political Islam partly
flows from the dismissal by an overwhelmingly
secular intelligentsia of an ideology predicated
on prophetic revelation. Many Western
Superstition, far from
holding Yeats back, liberated
an artistic imagination
engendering verse of truly
magical quality
Scientific rationality
argues it is only
possible for minds (or
souls) to outlive bodies
through ideas and
artefacts, or as memes
5 2 September 2016
intellectuals cannot fail to con-
ceive as backward any movement
with a religious underpinning,
assuming a common intellectual
trajectory towards their own
dominant scientific rationalism.
Western civilisation also
encountered another even older
spiritual tradition, especially
during the 1960s, in Buddhism and
other Eastern religions. But their
influence has, thus far, been rela
-
tively superficial. This is perhaps
because many of the forms are culturally
distant and advocates bypassed a slow
movement to enlightenment in favour of power-
ful mind-altering drugs, especially LSD in doses
often ten-times as powerful as are commonly
consumed today.
In his remarkable analysis of the cultural con-
text and influence of the songs of the Beatles
'Revolution in the Head' (1994) the great cul-
tural historian Ian MacDonald identifies some
of the trends:
“Though framed into terms of sexual libera-
tion and scaffolded by religious ideas imported
from the Orient, the central shift of the counter-
culture was drugs, and one drug above all:
d-lysergic acid diethylamide 25, or LSD. Synthe-
sised in 1938 by a Swiss chemist looking for a
cure for migraine, LSD is a powerful hallucino-
gen whose function is temporarily to dismiss
the brain’s neural concierge, leaving the mind
to cope as it can with sensory information
which meanwhile enters without prior arrange-
ment – an uncensored experience of reality
which profoundly alters one’s outlook on it.
The LSD view of life took the form of a smiling
non-judgmentalism which saw ‘straight’ think-
ing, including political opinion across the board
from extreme Left to Right, as basically insane.
To those enlightened by the drug, all human
problems and divisions were issues, not of sub-
stance, but of perception. With LSD, humanity
could transcend its ‘primitive state of neurotic
irresponsibility’ and, realising the oneness of
all creation, proceed directly to utopia”.
He continues:
“Using it, normal people were able to move
directly to the state of ‘oceanic consciousness’
achieved by a mystic only after of years of prep-
aration and many intervening stages of growing
self-awareness – as a result of which most of
them not unnaturally concluded that reality was
a chaos of dancing energies without meaning
or purpose. There being no way to evaluate
such a phenomenon, all one could do was ‘dig’
it. Hence at the heart of the counterculture was
a moral vacuum: not God, but The Void”.
McDonald argues that: “the Sixties inaugu-
rated a post-religious age in which neither
Jesus nor Marx is of interest to a society now
functioning mostly below the level of the
rational mind in an emotional/physical dimen-
sion of personal appetite and private
insecurity.” This he argues was the precursor
to the New Right that has degenerated into the
Tea Party, Donald Trump and now Brexit:
“What mass society unconsciously began in
the Sixties, Thatcher and Reagan raised to the
level of ideology in the Eighties: the complete
materialistic individualisation – and total frag-
mentation – of Western society”.
The signs of this McDonald said are found in
the degeneration of artistic forms:
“While the instantaneous/simultaneous
mentality introduced by the Sixties suited new
idioms like pop and television (mainly because
substantially created by them), it had a less
benign effect on older established forms. Clas-
sical music, once an art of expression, became
a pseudo-scientific, quasi-architectural craft of
technique whose principles of design, opaque
to the ear, were appreciable only by examining
the ‘blueprint’ of the score. Similarly the rapid
succession of conceptual coups in the world of
painting and sculpture, so novel at the time,
turned out to be merely the end of modernism
and, as such, the dying fall of Western art.
Overtaken by the ‘artistic discourse’ of post-
modernism, art became as literary as
post-Wagnerian classical music was visual,
producing the arid paradox of paintings to
listen to and music to look at. Shorn of their
content, art, music, and literature degenerated
by increasingly inconsequential
stages from art about art, to jokes
about art, and finally to jokes about
art about art”.
All healthy human beings appear
to have a capacity for intellectual
engagement of a kind that leads to
a perception of a supersensible
world beyond a material self. It
seems a profound mistake therefore
to dismiss esoteric ideas when we see
the power of myth, fable and art to raise
the human spirit. The challenge seems to
be how we should control a tendency for
power to accumulate in law-making institutions
that arise to implement the collective will. Indi-
vidual autonomy should be retained where any
spirituality is envisioned: church and state are
toxic for one another.
The “oceanic consciousness” that emerged
in the 1960s thus appears to be a lie and we are
left with a civilisation floundering. Lonely, iso-
lated and passive, in the estimation of Erich
Fromm, most human beings see little point in
doing anything that will improve the world
around them, taking refuge instead in satisfac-
tion-through-consumption and sexual
dalliance.
This all matters because human beings are
on the brink of a series of environmental cata-
strophies and the discourse of science,
complete with statistics and charts, is insuffi-
cient to instigate meaningful change in the way
people live and relate to the world around them.
The ideas of the preacher Jesus Christ about
human wealth remain relevant. But human
beings in the Anthropocene must look beyond
themselves and develop a genuinely ‘oceanic
consciousness’ where we see all our connec-
tions to a wider whole including all the animals
and plants we share the planet with, not above
them but among them. That so many of the cells
in our body are not our own is suggestive of our
interdependence.
The challenge of envisioning a supersensible
world is not beyond our capacities and in so
imagining perhaps we bring it into being. That
this is an enormous challenge is readily admit-
ted by anyone who has struggled with the
question of faith, but simply to dismiss it is
insufficient. It should be read on its own terms,
not through the prism of, or in competition with,
scientific rationality. A progressive develop-
ment would be for us to restore the sublimity of
form in our artistic fields, from architecture to
poetry.
By accepting the presence of magic in our
lives, however difficult this is to fathom, per-
haps we can summon the responses to the
challenges we confront in the Anthropocene
age. In so doing we might learn to recognise the
significance of the fact that we as individuals
are part of a wider constellation.
If Yeats had simply
expressed his ideas in
philosophical terms they
would easily be dismissed
but through the beauty of
their poetic form they are
more acceptable to the
wider society
CULTURE
