|
|
."..to induce, as a preliminary to judgment, soul-searching and self-assessment...We have noted the elitist character of the sannyas movement, but of the above uses of this tactic, the first is the only other one that applies, and this cannot be dismissed as a mere tactic:
...as an explanation for assorted ills, real, imagined or anticipated...
...to intimidate people, to play upon their guilt, break down resistance and extort trust...
...as an instrument for creating a self-styled elite of the 'saved' as opposed to the mass of the 'damned'" (228)
"As we have noted, apocalyptic hysteria can perform a functional role, imparting a governing myth to an epoch...Certainly it has done so in the past...But we cannot afford to let it become the governing myth of our epoch, because...humanity is perfectly capable of creating its own apocalypse...If the hysteria of American fundamentalism is allowed to become a self-fulfilling prophecy...the result could well be, quite literally, the end of the world." (274)There are many indications of a coming catastrophe. To begin with, there are the very real problems associated with industrialization and overcrowding of the planet, the so-called ecological problems. In addition, there is the nuclear spectre which, although it has receded into the background, remains a burdening presence. Third, there is the perception of anarchy and chaos attributed to the so-called "moral breakdown" of traditional institutions like the family and the church. To these we can then add the innumerable predictions of disaster coming from traditional and new religions alike. In some cases, these predictions are obvious power tactics, as with the now notorious Aum Shinrikyo in Japan, and in others, as with the Branch Davidians, they did become self-fulfilling prophecies. Despite the apparent particularity of these two catastrophic movements, however, apocalyptic concerns cannot be dismissed out of hand. The urgency persists.
There is something mythical about how people await a savior or avatar, and how they expect a cosmic reckoning in their lifetimes. That this myth can be played on apparently does not diminish its power, because time and again doomsday prophecies are discredited, and with each new one that arises, the same fear grips the heart, the same gnawing question: "Is it true this time?" This fear seems especially justified when the prophecy is rationalized by or perceived as caused by science.
The fears of global nuclear holocaust that clouded the sixties provided the context for The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, essentially a modern fundamentalist interpretation of the revelations of St. John the Divine. When the fears of the prospect of nuclear confrontation subsided somewhat, they were superseded by equally terrifying visions of ecological or natural disaster. For instance, in the late seventies, fear of "The Big One," the catastrophic earthquake that was supposed to make history of California, arose as predictions of worldwide disaster like We Are the Earthquake Generation, by Dr. Jeffery Goodman hit the bookstores.
As a matter of personal record, I remember that Rajneesh, or his personal secretary Sheela, appealed to the earthquake fears of California sannyasins by amplifying predictions of "The Big One," thereby convincing them to move immediately to the commune in Oregon. After leaving the commune, I moved to California and personally lived in mortal fear of a major earthquake until I experienced one firsthand in Santa Cruz, California, and then more recently near Kobe, Japan. Frightening and catastrophic they were, but not apocalyptic. However, this is not to say that another, bigger one, is yet to happen. The recent string of big earthquakes around the "Ring of Fire" may have been foreseen by Goodman, but this part of the earth's crust is no stranger to devastating tremblors.
Occultism has witnessed a revival in this chaotic period in civilization, when the power of the Catholic Church is waning. In this climate, the prophecies of Nostradamus, the medieval French seer, which are written in deliberately obscure verse, are the subject of renewed interest, as are the ancient practices of tarot , astrology, alchemy, numerology and other related sciences, for these are what was popularly meant by the word before the Age of Rationality. Some of the earliest contributors to our modern cosmological view were also versed in the occult sciences. Kepler, for instance, was greatly intrigued by numerological relationships between the planets, and Copernicus had a "mystical reverence for the sun" (Sheldrake 48). In our own time, Ronald Reagan (not a scientist), who once mused publicly that perhaps the apocalypse would come in this generation, is reported to have changed his California address to avoid the number 666 (Davies 95). Hitler was influenced by occult groups from the so-called Order of the New Templars, in the teachings of which "one finds a militant hostility to Christianity and an insistence on old Germanic paganism" (Baigent, et al. 197)
Occult, or mystical, knowledge, hidden for centuries by secret societies, becoming public - this is another extraordinary sign of our times. There is an analogy in the non-Christian world, and that is the breaking open of Tibet by the Chinese in the 1950's. Tibet, because of its inaccessibility, had long been a storehouse for secret knowledge expressed in the language of Vajraiyana Buddhism, an amalgamation of Buddhist teachings and the ancient Tibetan Bon tradition. Because of the incursion of the Chinese, regrettable as it is for the fate of Tibetan culture, the keepers of that knowledge have been scattered across the globe, and former secrets are being disseminated far and wide. Rajneesh taught Tibetan techniques, and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was one of the founders of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Lama Suryadas, a prominent teacher whose title confirms initiation into the Tibetan tradition, was not even born in Tibet. He is American.
Of all the occult traditions, Freemasonry is most germane to our discussion. It is allegedly a major repository for specific teachings and traditions that are said to pre-date the cataclysm of 4000 BC. It was condemned as paganism by the Catholic Church, but one wonders why this is so. If Freemasonry is based on rational principles, as Noone claims it is, it cannot be too much at variance with the ideals of the church, which are based on the same principles. In fact many modern Catholics belong to the Order of Freemasonry. We are told by Noone that the origins of the secrecy of the order are basically political. In the early 14th century, King Phillip IV of France and Pope Clement V incarcerated, tortured and burned Jacques de Molai, Grand Master of the Templars, in order, according to Noone, to acquire the wealth the Order had accumulated since its inception in 1118 AD. To effect this latter objective, accusations concerning various satanic and pagan practices engaged in by Freemasons were circulated, and the Order accordingly went underground (Noone 278), where it remained throughout much of the last millennium.
Freemasonry is particularly relevant to the history of the United States, which was founded by freemasons (like George Washington), had sixteen presidents who were freemasons, has Masonic ideals written into its constitution and even displays a Masonic image and Masonic slogans on its currency. This may be perceived as one reason for the secretive behavior of its government - not necessarily the elected officials - but, the people Mary Pinchot enigmatically alludes to in Leary's Flashbacks when she says "the guys who really run things in Washington" (130). However, the tradition of a secret society, or cabal, conducting clandestine operations affecting the fate of the world is a common one with deep mythological roots. Baigent et al . have said:
"The archetype of the cabal plays a particularly important role in Western society. It appears wherever modern man seeks to find a clandestine operation, for good or ill - in the Mafia, in Freemasonry..., in governments and political parties..."Of course, I am not suggesting the political affairs of the post-Hiroshima era are not under human control. But what of the underlying differences of this age that we have mentioned, in particular the widening incidence of experiential supra-rationality and the underlying and pervasive sense of urgency? Can a case be made that these are humanly controllable? I think quite the opposite. They are significators of something outside human control which is taking precedence over human affairs. Yet this something is not non-human. Rather, it arises at the very core of the human being. In fact, what may be changing is the very matrix in which human life exists - the planet Earth.
"Obviously, the cabal can be perceived as sinister, or laudable, or both...If one happens to be 'on the opposite side' (of the cabal),...it then caters to one's paranoia - and paranoia about cabals and conspiracies has become one of the psychological and cultural fashions of our age...."
"And yet, even if the cabal is perceived as hostile, there is, often, still an element of reassurance in it. Why? In part because it is more consoling to think that complications and upheavals in human affairs, at last, are created by human beings rather than by factors beyond human control" (231- 32).
"The more one reflects, with the help of all that science, philosophy and religion can teach us, each in its own field, the more one comes to realize that the world should not be likened to a bunch of elements artificially held together but rather to some organic system animated by a broad movement of development which is proper to itself." (Hymn 93)Teilhard's use of the word "system" presages the development of systems theory into a credible model of the planetary organism of which he speaks, called Gaia by James Lovelock. General systems theory is a non-reductionist formulation of the rules by which complex bodies interact. It arose in several places at once in the 1920's, although the name of von Bertalanffy, a biologist, is often mentioned when speaking of its beginnings. It arose because of the need to have a framework which "eluded the mechanistic model of reality" (Macy 70), a need that was most apparent when studying living organisms. Without going into the principles of general systems theory, or cybernetics (the study of self-regulating systems) we may say that Lovelock applied them to his planetological observations and concluded that the Earth was a living system within the meaning of cybernetics, in other words, an organism. He also suggested that human beings might constitute the Gaian nervous system (Gaia 147). We intimated rather obliquely above in connection with the melting of the Antarctic ice cap that Gaia might now be functioning through human activity to avert another Ice Age. Lovelock considered this very possibility in Gaia:
."..although another Ice Age might be a disaster for us, it would be a relatively minor affair for Gaia. However, if we accept our role as an integral part of Gaia, our discomfort is hers and the threat of glaciation is shared as a common danger. One possible course of action within our industrial capacity would be the manufacture and release to the atmosphere of a large quantity of chlorofluroarbons." (147-48)Something like this may in fact be happening, but if it is, it appears to be absent the conscious human intent Lovelock implies. It would be very difficult to assert that the present carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have been planned. Quite the opposite seems to be the case. The current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which are responsible for global warming are condemned strenuously by environmentalists the world over. Not everyone is comfortable with the conception of the earth as a living organism. Jim Margulis, a microbiologist who worked with Lovelock on the development of the Gaia hypothesis, is one. Sheldrake has noted that a major reason for such discomfort is that it leads to a new animism:
."..it involves a radical shift in point of view from the man-centered world of humanism to a recognition that we all depend on the providence of Gaia....Needless to say, this animism is at variance with rational, human-centered conceptions of the world that continue to be very powerful and to which the allegiance of the political establishment is sworn.
...The strong form ( of the Gaian anthropic principle) recognizes that Gaia herself is purposeful and that her purposes are reflected in the evolutionary process... (it) raises the difficult question about the purposive organizing principle, traditionally regarded as the soul, or spirit, of the earth." (157- 58)
In this century, concurrent with the development of sophisticated field theories in physics, the concept of the field has been applied to the individual development and social interactions of living organisms, in which context it is called a morphic field. The existence in nature of some kind of non-physical interconnectedness, or field, arose in the consideration of the behavior of termites in colonies. These were observed by the South-African naturalist Eugene Marais and reported in The Soul of the White Ant. Marais concluded that such colonies should be regarded as organisms in their own right. In one observation of the "group soul" of the colony (which Sheldrake proposes ought to be called the morphic field), he destroyed part of the outer casing of the termitary, then introduced a barrier through which it was impossible for the termites to have any physical communication. Termites on both sides of the barrier proceeded to patch the breach, and when he removed the barrier, he found that both sides matched, and it was a simple thing for the termites to finish the job. Among other observations that indicate the existence of group soul, he noted the well known fact that if you kill the queen, the rest of the termites become aimless and the colony dies.
Many biologists have found morphic fields useful in explaining the developmental processes of living organisms. There is some difficulty in conceptualizing just what a morphic field is, however, and the discussions are not unlike discussions about the nature of the soul. Do these fields really exist in some mathematical Platonic ideality, or is the concept merely utilitarian, putting a name on a process of more complexity than we have the capacity to describe? Sheldrake has proposed a third alternative:
"According to the hypothesis of formative causation, they are a new kind of field so far unknown to physics with an intrinsically evolutionary nature. The fields of a given species, such as the giraffe, have evolved; they are inherited by present giraffes from previous giraffes. They contain a kind of collective memory on which each member of the species draws and to which it in turn contributes. The formative activity of the fields is not determined by timeless mathematical laws - although the fields can to some extent be modeled mathematically - but by the actual forms taken up by previous members of the species. The more often a pattern of development is repeated, the more probable it is that it will be followed again. The fields are the means by which the habits of the species are built up, maintained, and inherited." (110)To take our analogy of Gaia as embryonic organism further, we state that in this analogy the Gaian morphic field must be more than the sum total of individual or species fields contained within Gaia. Furthermore, none of the individual species fields within Gaia can be independent. They must all be part of the Gaian field. In other words, the Gaian field is a system, a totum and a quantum. The human morphic field, and in this usage of the word, we mean the same thing as Marais did by "group soul," is unique among species fields because it forms the noosphere. Gaia with human life is qualitatively different than Gaia without it. In the words of Lovelock, Gaia is, through human life, "awake and aware of herself" (Gaia 148).
In consideration of predictions of impending disaster that will decimate the human population, one relevant question might be: "Why would Gaia self-destruct?" The framing of current environmental issues in a form that asserts that humans are "doing something" to Gaia (expressed in "Save the Earth" type slogans) is surely an anthropocentric attitude that implies a separation between human life and Gaian life. It is the negative form of the scientific attitude supported by the Bible, championed by Bacon and elaborated in various humanistic philosophies that man is superior to the rest of nature and must subjugate it to survive. Even this attitude, however, repulsive as it appears to deep ecologists today, must have had its place within the Gaian context since it resulted in the deployment of the noosphere. Indeed, Teilhard postulates that the quantum nature of the Gaian field (and by this we mean the energetic wholeness of the Gaian field) is responsible for the observation that as new forms rise to ascendancy, older forms die out, as if there is no more energy to devote to the old forms (Phenomenon 277). This is not to downplay the serious ecological issues facing us, but only to suggest that they need no longer be approached in a humanistic manner. It is time for human beings to recover their proper perspective as a part, and not necessarily the most important part, of the Gaian field.
If Gaia is truly an organism, and is truly developing, it is possible that at this moment she is passing through a difficult, perhaps critical, growth phase. This would have obvious consequences for the individual and species morphic fields on her, including our own. Sheldrake places a great emphasis on habit in the formation of morphic fields. Allowing this, I propose that they are important during periods of relative stability in Gaia's own development, which may be momentary to her, but eonic to us. In periods of instability, other factors come into play. If the present epoch is one of such instability, then the acceleration of technology that has culminated with, among other things, the first extra-terrestrial humans would have to qualify as one of these other factors. There is no historical precedent for views of Gaia from another planet, nor is there any history in which there has been an atomic bomb (at least no recorded history). These events signify a change in the human morphic field, a change foretold by intellectual developments of the last three centuries, but now, since Hiroshima, a matter of experience.
Society is quickly changing to incorporate irrational and mystifying behavior patterns that were relatively rare in the pre-Hiroshima, rational world. Channeling, UFO encounters, shamanism and meditation are becoming commonplace. Ram Dass said in 1988:
"Up until the 1960s, the primary containers of spirituality and ethical constraints in our culture were organized religions. These institutions motivated people to ethical behavior through fear and internalized superego. The mediator between you and God was the priest. And what the 1960s did, through the use of psychedelics initially, was blow that whole system apart. That era once again made the relationship to God a direct experience of the individual....The last fifty years have seen humanity on a pilgrimage back to the roots of experience on this planet. This is the real meaning of the process of dehypnotherapy taught at the Rajneesh ashram. The coming-into-existence of the very new has engendered a re-awakening of the very old. This may be just the metaphor we need to apply to the perception of increased earth movements and volcanic activity that are so frightening. The awakening of the whole is a total process, to use Rajneesh's terminology, one in which we are involved as an intrinsic part of the Gaian field. Hence our awakening is the awakening of Gaia. It does not have to be a cause for apocalyptic fear, and this is said with all due respect to the many thousands of earthquake victims of the last few decades. It could instead be a cause for apocalyptic celebration and cosmic gratefulness for the gift of intelligence to be able to perceive this awakening in process, and the gift of life to be able to participate in it.
."..it is interesting how mainstream th(e)se ideas have gotten in the twenty-five years since that time" (Promises and Pitfalls of the Spritual Path. qtd. in Grof and Grof, 174-75)
We might finish this essay with the observation that new neural patterns are at this very moment being forged in every individual alive, re-imprinting of the most basic habitual patterns. One way this is occurring is through isolated discovery, invention and implementation of meditation and therapeutic techniques, to be sure, but individual breakthroughs are spread far and wide through the neural circuitry of electronic media, as well as through the increasingly sophisticated Gaian morphic field. Humanity is metamorphosing, and no one is leading this process, nor can anyone who is alive choose not to participate in it. We have tried to make a minimal case that the process is planetary in scope, but speculation aside, we need only look around us, and inside ourselves, to see a great process happening. It is my considered opinion that there is no need to belong to a special group, nor engage in any special activity in order to further this process. The great awakening of our time cannot, in the nature of what I believe it to be, leave anyone behind.
The post-Hiroshima world is qualitatively different from any preceding period in history. The detonation of the atom bomb signaled the beginning of a period of mutation of the human species and possibly of the planet. The mutation of the human being is a mutation of the nervous system, involving development of pathways that are supra-rational. Pioneers of this process, Timothy Leary and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) were overpowered by their interactions with the sciento-religio-political establishment of Western society, and were discredited. It has been the aim of this paper to begin rectification of this situation.
The developments of modern physics signified an awareness of the beginnings of the process of mutation, but not a complete understanding of it. This is not possible within the framework of rational science, and in recognition of this fact, scientific explanations are becoming indeterministic and non-causal. As a result of this, God is increasingly a topic for scientific discussion.
The speed and intensity of the process of mutation are such that there is a general feeling of urgency that is interpreted by many as an impending catastrophe. This catastrophe need not be interpreted as confrontational, nor even as a catastrophe. It may instead be interpreted as a quickening in the growth processes of a planetary organism. With this as a governing paradigm, it is possible to eschew the destructive ideological polarization between rational and irrational approaches to science and religion. This would probably involve adoption of a non-humanistic attitude towards life on earth which would not only be more healthy for the planet, but would allow us to stop fearing and possibly even welcome the inevitable unpredictable changes that will affect human life.
I now pass the metaphorical pipe with the traditional words: "I have spoken."