We learn from the new cosmology that the world view that leads to a plundering of the environment and a denial of spirituality in favour of addictions and consumerism has its origins in accepting the metaphor of the machine for understanding our world. For a couple of examples of this extensive literature, see Sally Goerner’s “ After The Clockwork Universe” (Goerner 2001), or Chris Clarke’s “Living in Connection” (Clarke 2002a). Recognizing the fallacy of the this machine metaphor liberates us to consider more generous and more wonderful conceptualisations that give new meaning to human life as active participants in the great and continuing work of creation.
We need this inspiring vision to give us courage to face the challenges to justice both for people, non human creatures and the natural world that we face on every side; to meet them with joy and love, not guilt and fear. To do this, I suggest, we need a new way of understanding the person to complement and complete this vision; a New Human Story, to go with the New Cosmology. We need a new story that will liberate us from the outdated anthropocentric cult of the individual that we have inherited from the Renaissance. I believe that contemporary psychology offers us such a model, based on a new understanding of the person that is emerging from decades of detailed experimentation in cognitive science. In this article, I will outline that model (which I have written about elsewhere already, e.g. Clarke 2001, Clarke 2002). I will start by leading very rough and ready trot through the way we humans have made sense of ourselves, and the implications of these different understandings. In this, I am laying myself wide open to objections that I am misrepresenting the cultures I describe; never mind – here goes.
First, why is it useful to look back over the way in which people have made sense of themselves over the ages? Because, I suggest, the “story” we make of the universe around us helps us to define our place in the order of things, and therefore our value systems, and the same goes for our understanding of the human being. Many assumptions that have been embedded in our culture over centuries go to build up our picture of the human being, and these tend to be accepted as fact – in the same way that Newton’s picture was accepted as fact, before Einstein and Bohr and company came along.
In the culture of indigenous peoples, individuals understood themselves in intimate relationship with the physical environment which sustained them, and in close relationship with the non human creatures among whom they lived, and on whom they depended for survival. The cosmologies of the aboriginal peoples of Australia and America are just two illustrations of this. The idea of totem or power animals show how the non human creatures were accepted as embedded deep in the human psyche, clothed in numinous significance. This cosmology leads to a respectful relationship with the natural world, hence the borrowing from such cultures by Creation Spirituality/Greenspirit.
The development of civilization is accompanied by the intoxicating discovery of the power of reason. The great Greek philosophers are obvious examples. Socrates/Plato illustrates well the aspiration that human society was perfectible, if only people would defer to reason. In the 12th century renaissance, the medieval universities revelled in that intoxication for a period. The famous medieval scholar, Abelard is an interesting illustration of this. His book, entitled “Sic et Non” is based on the view that all can be settled by disputation. However, he is perhaps more famous or infamous for his tragic love entanglement with Heloise. The application of reason to more practical problems also yielded dividends. The Romans provide an example of a technologically sophisticated society that used intelligence to achieve remarkable feats of engineering and create a comfortable lifestyle, unmatched until the invention of central heating and modern plumbing. It is no wonder that analytical thought went to people’s heads in these societies. What interests me is that it did not produce Plato’s perfect republic, or even a sustainable Roman state.
Outside of the universities, the model of the person in the middle ages was not that of the lonely intellectual. Economically people tended to operate in co-operative units, like the feudal village, or the craft guild. The feudal village put the communal good ( and the sustaining of the lord and his armed men) before individual enterprise, so that land was periodically redistributed in order that each family would have enough to sustain itself and yield a surplus. In this type of agriculture, the relationship with the land and the livestock (who shared living quarters with the humans) was close. The relationship with God, mediated by saints, many of whom could be traced to the place based gods and goddesses of the old religion, was also immediate. The high value placed on religion at that time can be seen in the resources devoted to building cathedrals, and the commitment of the society to support people whose life was dedicated to prayer and worship in the many convents and nunneries.
The renaissance and reformation constituted a sustained and successful attack on the general medieval model of the human being. I will pass over the forces that helped to bring this about – plague, greater accessibility of classical culture etc. The result is the model that we take for granted, and which underpins the success of modern science, technology and capitalism – and the failures of these developments. In summary, the intoxication with the intellect and technology returns, coupled with a glorification of the individual and a denigration of the spiritual. The end result of this ideology is the triumph of global capitalism that we see today. This model of the person offers consumption as purpose in life for the average human being in the favoured West, and our shopping malls are our equivalent of the medieval cathedral. The slave cast that sustains this is conveniently hidden in distant countries, and the accompanying degradation to the environment is represented as unavoidable. If you don’t believe me, see Naomi Klein’s “No Logo” (Klein 2000).
As well as the elusive nature of utopia, the refusal of the spiritual yearning in human beings to lie down and die, interests me. The religion of triumphant individualism stresses personal piety and purity, and downplays the numinous. It is then deserted in droves as boring and irrelevant. The consumers of the West seek new religions in the exotic holiday destinations that their lifestyle offers, or pursue the spiritual thrills offered by such phenomena as crop circles and flying saucers. In line with the dominant model of the human being, these spiritualities tend to be centred on the development of the individual, with ideals of perfectibility and rejection of the material. The pursuit of enlightenment and the higher evolution of the human species are examples of this way of viewing spirituality. The shadow side of such (harmless?) preoccupations are the loss of the social moral dimension that is normally part of a religion, and elitism and exclusivism.
I suggest that we needs a better model of the person and the human relation to the divine than this impoverished inheritance. I will first pick up two points I flagged up in the preceding narrative ; the failure of utopia to emerge and the persistence of spirituality. I am going to suggest a way of making sense of these observations through the idea that the human being does not work properly as a lonely individual, but only as part of a web of connection, and that this is built deeply into our make up. This argument links closely Chris Clarke’s (my husband, so no coincidence) in “Living in Connection.” (Clarke 2002a). The web of connection obviously starts with all the important people in our lives, but extends outwards, upwards, downwards and beyond – to other humans on the planet; to our ancestors and those who will come after us; to the non human creatures and the earth; to the ultimate – God, Goddess, great spirit – whatever nomenclature takes your fancy. In the midst of this infinitely extended web, the human being, whether operating alone or with others in political action, performs a more or less successful balancing act – hence the failure to attain utopia. However, the intimate connection with the stars and beyond gives us that yearning for numinosity which ensures that spirituality lives on, however impoverished its cultural context.
As a psychologist working in mental health, as well as a member of the human race, I was aware of the fragility of the human psyche. The idea of a wobbly balance and a crack in the human make up made a lot of sense to me. I was therefore excited when I came across a model of information processing that both revealed the source of the crack and a way of understanding the inescapable nature of spirituality. The snag is that the said model is so complicated that people to do not immediately grasp its significance. It is an idea that has not yet sunk in. I consider that that significance is truly staggering, and have made it my business to find accessible ways of getting it across. Like Bruce and the spider, I do not always succeed – so I am here going to try again.
What follows is a pop version of the model of thinking you can find in Teasdale and Barnard’s book (1993). Detailed cognitive experimentation suggests that the human mind works by different bits (subsystems) passing information from one to another and copying it in the process. In this way, each subsystem has its own memory. Different systems operate with different coding, for instance, verbal, visual, auditory. There are higher order systems that translate these codings, and integrate the information. The crucial feature of this model is that there are not one but two meaning making systems at the apex. The verbally coded propositional subsystem gives us the analytically sophisticated individual that our culture has perhaps mistaken for the whole. However, the wealth of sensory information from the outside world, integrated with the body and its arousal system is gathered together by the implicational subsystem, which looks after our relatedness, both with others and with ourselves. The implicational subsystem is on the lookout for information about threat and value in relation to the self – we are, after all, social primates, and where we stand at any one time in the social hierarchy is crucial for our well being, if not, normally, for our survival. We experience “where we stand” in the form of our current emotion, be it happy contentment, vague apprehension or seething anger.
We are unaware of this “crack” between our two main subsystems because they work seamlessly together most of the time, passing information between them, so that we can simultaneously take the emotional temperature and make an accurate estimate in any situation. This starts to break down in states of very high and very low arousal. To be human is to know what it is like to be in a flap, and unable to think clearly – because the body has switched to action mode in response to perceived threat, and fine grained thought goes out the window. In our dreams, and on falling asleep, we enter another dimension where logic is totally absent. The application of certain spiritual disciplines, or certain substances, can effect this decoupling between the two subsystems in waking life, so affording a different quality of experience where the sense of individuality becomes distorted or merged into the whole.
I would argue that the implicational subsystem, which is the older part of our makeup, that we share with our non human ancestors, regulates our relatedness, and so the web of connection mentioned earlier. It is porous to other beings: studies in group process, and the therapeutic concept of transference illustrate the subtle blending of people in relationship. I suggest that this extends to non human creatures – our tribal ancestors, as well as pet owners, are aware of this; and beyond or within to the earth and God, Goddess etc. Further, this relationship is reciprocal (idea stolen from Cognitive Analytic Therapy – Ryle 1995). The quality of our relationship with important others, including the earth and the non human creatures helps to create us. For instance, where we treat the earth, non human creatures, or vulnerable peoples with exploitation and contempt, this eats away at our own integrity, and our unavoidable involvement in a society which does this is a continuous sore deep within our being. In line with Greenspirit thinking, we are created at the same time as we create.
This model says quite a lot about human beings: that they are inherently unstable taken in isolation; that they are continually in flux and subject to the moral quality of their relationships, for instance. It also offers a way of understanding spirituality which makes it integral to the experience of being human. To return to the subsystems, I hypothesize that we encounter a “spiritual” quality of experience when the implicational subsystem is in the ascendant, but without the dominance of self focused emotions. This allows a state of being in relation with the whole, whether mediated by, say, an experience of nature, or a more abstract experience of God or the ultimate. This experience is generally received as ecstatic and awe inspiring in the short term. Because it implies loss of the ability to get one’s bearings in a grounded fashion, it is not a good state to spend too long in. I like to use the term “transliminal” to describe this state, as it is free of the baggage of other descriptors (mystical, psychotic etc.) The ability to pass both ways across the threshold (or “limen”) determines the difference between a beautiful experience and a nightmare world where there are no boundaries and therefore no safety.
I have attempted here to explain a number of phenomena that have always interested me about people: proneness to breakdown as well as the fascination of the spiritual and the obstinate imperfection of our institutions, political and other. In doing so, I have stuck closely to theories that come from information processing. These processing systems link the various bits of the brain that we know govern different functions, so that it is obvious that the propositional subsystem will utilize circuits from the neocortex, whereas older and deeper brain regions such as the limbic system and amygdala will be more important for the implicational subsystem. Because of the complexity of the connections (and because of bias in what I know about), I am not grounding my claims in neuroscience, only cognitive science.
Among the far reaching implications of the model I am presenting, is the notion that there is a horizon beyond which science in its exactitude will not reach. Analytical certainty is the domain of the propositional subsystem; art and the spirit of the implicational. These represent two ways of knowing accessible to human beings, each with its own logic. Science deals in “either – or”; religion and art in paradox and “both – and”. Both are great sources of knowledge and wisdom, but each is incomplete – because as an instrument of apprehension, we are incomplete. In the same way that dancing a new theorem in physics would be an inefficient (but delightful) means of exact communication, so building complex and exact theories of spiritual reality are necessarily speculative. There is no way of verifying them, or deciding between them, so that they are artistic rather than scientific. Possibly their function is to assuage our human anxiety when faced with the vast mystery of what we can never fully know, but which fills our world with wonder.
I am here attempting to offer an understanding of the human being,
in relation to the whole. My hope is that this insight into the human
mind from cognitive science can inject a little humility into our
understanding of ourselves, and our place in the order of things, in
relation to the earth, the non human creatures, those who come after us
– not forgetting God etc. I consider it is time for us to move beyond
the arrogance of the renaissance man and his (pronoun deliberately
chosen) claim of dominance over the natural world. He has achieved much
in terms of technology, security and comfort for the privileged – but
at a cost that could cost us our beautiful home, the earth, and destroy
the habitat of those other beings with whom we share it. As more and
more wars are waged to secure the raw materials needed to maintain our
reckless lifestyle, we need a new vision and a new direction. The
logical arguments about global warming and loss of diversity are not
enough. People hear them, and emotionally shut off from them. We need
to harness the power of the transliminal and the numinous if we are to
escape from the blind alley down which we are heading.
Clarke CJS & I (2001)The primacy of connectivity, Network. The Scientific and Medical Network Review, 76, 4 - 6, 2001
Clarke, I. (2002)Is there anything there? The problem of Spirituality considered, The Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy, 2, 261-266, 2002. (Special issue: "Taking Spirituality Seriously" Ed. I. Clarke.)
Clarke, C.J.S. (2002a) Living in Connection. Greenspirit books.
Goerner, S.J. (2001) After The Clockwork Universe. Edinborough: Floris Books. Klein, N. (2000) No Logo. Flamingo.
Ryle, A. (1995) Cognitive Analytic Therapy. Chichester: Wiley.
Teasdale, J. & Barnard P. (1993) Affect, Cognition and Change. Hove: LEA 5