Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  ‌Reading God’s Dreams: Cosmogony and Science

  Still, fate, immortality, and eternal punishment all seem to be ideas conceived to be socially useful. Two equally great but apparently useless thoughts, which we can look at in turn, seem to have issued from the same circles of professional intellectuals: the idea that the world is illusory, and the very notion that animates this book: the idea of the creative power of thought – an outcome of thinkers’ perhaps self-interested respect for thinking.

  It is one thing to realize that some perceptions are illusory, as – according to chapter 1 – Ice Age thinkers did; another to suspect that the whole world of experience is an illusion. A spiritual world in which matter is a mirage is one of the oldest and most insistent innovations of Indian thought. In the Upanishads and the ancient hymns that appear in the Rigveda, the realm of the senses is illusory: or, more exactly, the distinction between illusion and reality is misleading. The world is Brahman’s dream: creation resembled a falling asleep. Sense organs can tell us nothing that is true. Speech is deceptive, since it relies on lips and tongues and ganglions; only the inarticulacy that later mystics call the dark night of the soul is real. Thought is untrustworthy, because it happens in or, at least, passes through the body. Most feelings are false, because nerves and guts register them. Truth can be glimpsed only in purely spiritual visions, or in kinds of emotions that do not have any physically registered feeling, such as selfless love and unspecific sadness.72

  We are in the world, whether illusory or not. Except as an encouragement to inertia, the doctrine of all-pervading illusion therefore seems unlikely to have practical effects. Few people believe it. The suspicion, however, that it might be true is never wholly absent. It changes the way some people feel. It encourages mysticism and asceticism; it divides religions: Christian ‘Gnostics’ and a long series of successor heresies espoused it, provoking schisms, persecutions, and crusades. It alienates some thinkers from science and secularism.

  It takes, of course, an intellectual or an idiot to perceive the deceptive power of thought. Its creative power, however, seems plausible to everybody once someone clever enough to notice it points it out. Everyday experience shows that thought is powerful as a stimulus to action. ‘What is swifter than the wind?’ the Mahabharata asks. ‘The mind is swifter than the wind. What is more numerous than blades of grass? Thoughts are more numerous.’73 The ‘imagination’ I credited with creative power in the first chapter of this book is or does a kind of thinking. The search for ways of harnessing thought power for action at a distance – trying to change things or bring them into being by thinking about them, or altering the world by concentrating on it – has inspired lots of efforts, most of them probably chimerical: positive thinking, willpower, transcendental meditation, and telepathy are among the examples. But how much creativity is thought capable of?

  Thinkers in ancient Egypt and India seem to have been the first to see it as the starting point of creation – the power that brought everything else into being. A doctrine known as the Memphite Theology appears in an Egyptian document in the British Museum.74 Although the surviving text dates only from about 700 bce, its account of creation was allegedly thousands of years old when it was recorded: Ptah, chaos personified but endowed with the power of thought, ‘gave birth to the gods’. He used his ‘heart’ – what we should call the mind, the throne of thought – to conceive the plan and his ‘tongue’ to realize it. ‘Indeed’, says the text, ‘all the divine order really came into being through what the heart thought and the tongue commanded.’75 The power of utterance was already familiar, but the priority of thought over utterance – creation by thought alone – is not found in any earlier known text. The Mundaka, one of the earliest and surely one of the most poetic of the Upanishads, which may go back to the late second millennium bce, may mean something similar when it represents the world as an emission from Brahman – the one who is real, infinite, and eternal – like sparks from a flame or ‘as a spider extrudes and weaves its thread, as the hairs sprout from a living body, so from that which is imperishable arises all that appears’.76 Yet, attractive as it is, the idea of thought as creative of everything else is hard to make sense of. Something to think about or to think with – such as a mind and words – should surely be a prerequisite.77

  In some ways, the professional intellectuals of the period covered in this chapter seem to have broached many philosophical or proto-philosophical problems – or, at least, they recorded them for the first time – while pondering a lot of new political and social thought. Yet, compared with later periods, the total output of ideas seems disappointingly small. Between the invention of agriculture and the collapse or transformation of the great farming civilizations that generated most of the evidence we have examined, something like eight or nine millennia unrolled. If we compare the ideas first conceived or recorded in that period with the tally of the next millennium, which is the subject of the next chapter, the turnover seems relatively torpid and timid. For little-understood reasons, the thinkers were remarkably retrospective, traditional, and static – even stagnant in their ideas. Perhaps the ecological fragility of early agriculture made them cautious, concentrating thinkers’ minds on conservative strategies; but that explanation seems unsatisfactory, because Egypt and China included ecologically divergent regions and therefore acquired a measure of immunity from environmental disaster. Perhaps external threats induced defensive, restrictive mentalities: Egyptian and Mesopotamian states were often at loggerheads, and all the sedentary civilizations had to contend with the cupidity of the ‘barbarian’ peoples on their frontiers. But conflict and competition usually promote new thinking. In any case, we shall only have the measure of the conservatism of early agrarian minds if we move on to the era that followed and see how much more productive it was.

  ‌Chapter 4

  The Great Sages

  The First Named Thinkers

  It was a bad time for civilization: in the late second millennium bce a protracted climacteric – or ‘crisis’, in the contested argot of historians and archaeologists – afflicted regions that had formerly buzzed with new ideas. Still-mysterious catastrophes slowed or severed progress. Centralized economies, formerly controlled from palace labyrinths, vanished. Long-range trade faltered or ruptured. Settlements emptied. Monuments tumbled, sometimes to survive only in memories, like the walls of Troy and the labyrinth of Knossos, or in ruins, like the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, to inspire distant successors.

  Natural disasters played a part. In the Indus valley, changing hydrography turned cities to dust. In Crete, volcanic ash and layers of bare pumice buried them. Traumatic migrations, which threatened Egypt with destruction, obliterated states in Anatolia and the Levant, sometimes with stunning suddenness: when the city-state of Ugarit in Syria was about to fall, never to be reoccupied, urgent, unfinished messages begged for seaborne reinforcements. No one knows where the migrants came from, but the sense of threat seems to have been very widespread. At Pylos in southern Greece, scenes of combat with skin-clad savages are painted on the walls of one of many shattered palaces. In Turkmenia, on the northern flank of the Iranian plateau, pastoralists overran fortified settlements where workshops in bronze and gold had once flourished.

  Fortunes varied, of course. In China, around the beginning of the first millennium bce, the Shang state, which had united the Yellow and Yangtze River valleys, dissolved, without, it seems, impairing the continuity of Chinese civilization: competition among warring courts actually multiplied the opportunities of royal sponsorship for wise men and literate officials. In Egypt the state survived but the new millennium was culturally and intellectually arid compared with what had gone before. In other affected regions, ‘dark ages’ of varying duration followed. In Greece and India, the art of writing was forgotten and had to be reinvented from scratch after a lapse of hundreds of years. As usual, when wars strike and states struggle, technological progress accelerated – hotter furnaces and harder, sh
arper weapons and tools. But there were no traceable innovations in ideas.

  Revival, when and if it happened, was often in new places and among new peoples, after a long interval. Indian civilization, for instance, was displaced far from the Indus. Around the middle of the first millennium bce logic, creative literature, mathematics, and speculative science re-emerged in the Ganges valley. At the margins of the Greek world, civilization crystallized in islands and offshoots around the Ionian Sea. In Persia the region of Fars, remote and previously inert, played the corresponding role.

  The circumstances were inauspicious; but they made a fresh start possible. While the old civilizations lasted, they invested in continuity and the status quo. When they collapsed, their heirs could look ahead, and welcome novelty. Crisis and climacteric always prompt thinking about solutions. In the long run, as empires fragmented, new states favoured new intellectual cadres. Political contenders needed propagandists, arbiters, and envoys. Opportunities for professional training grew as states tried to educate their way out of disaster. In consequence, the first millennium before Christ was an age of schools and sages.

  ‌An Overview of the Age

  In earlier periods, ideas arose anonymously. If pegged to a name, it was that of a god. By contrast, new ideas in the first millennium bce were often the work of (or attributed to) famed individuals. Prophets and holy men emerged from ascetic lives to become authors or inspirers of sacred texts. Charismatic leaders shared visions and usually tried to impose them on everyone else. Professional intellectuals taught courses to candidates for public office or literate careers. Some of them sought the patronage of rulers or positions as political advisers.

  They anticipated and influenced the way we think now. After all the technical and material progress of the last two thousand years, we still depend on the thought of a distant era, to which we have added surprisingly little. Probably no more than a dozen subsequent ideas compare, in their power to change the world, with those of the six centuries or so before the death of Christ. The sages scraped the grooves of logic and science in which we still live. They raised problems of human nature that still preoccupy us, and proposed solutions we still alternately deploy and discard. They founded religions of enduring power. Zoroastrianism, which still has devotees, appeared at an uncertain date probably in the first half of the millennium. Judaism and Christianity provided the teachings that later became the basis of Islam: about a third of the world’s population today belongs to the ‘Abrahamic’ tradition the three religions comprise. Jainism and Buddhism were among other innovations of the age, as were most of the texts that furnished Hinduism with scriptures. In the sixth century bce Confucius formulated teachings on politics and ethics that continue to influence the world. Taoism can be traced to around the turn of the fifth and fourth centuries bce. In the same period, the achievements in science and philosophy of China’s ‘Hundred Schools’ and of the Nyaya school of philosophers in India paralleled those of Greek sages. The whole of Western philosophy since the classical age of Athens is popularly apostrophized as ‘footnotes to Plato’. Most of us still follow the rules for straight thinking that his pupil, Aristotle, devised.

  If some of the people of the period seem instantly intelligible to us, it is because we think as they did, with the tools they bequeathed, the skills they developed, and the ideas they aired. But facts about their lives and circumstances are elusive. Heroic teachers inspired awestruck reverence that occludes them from our view. Followers recast them as supermen or even gods, and strew legends and lore across their reputations. To understand their work and why it proved so impactful, we have to begin by reconstructing the context: the means – networks, routes, links, texts – that communicated ideas and sometimes changed them along the way. We can then turn to sketching the formulators of the key ideas and, in turn, to their religious and secular wisdom and their moral and political nostrums.

  ‌The Eurasian Links

  India, South-West Asia, China, and Greece were widely separated regions which produced comparable thinking about similar issues. More than mere coincidence was at work. People across Eurasia had access to each other’s ideas.1 Genius pullulates when intellectuals gather in institutions of education and research, where they can talk to each other. The broader the forum, the better. When cultures are in dialogue, ideas seem to breed, enriching each other and generating new thinking. That is why the central belt of the world – the densely populated arc of civilizations that stretched, with interruptions, across Eurasia – throbbed with so much genius in the millennium before Christ: contacts put its cultures in touch with one another.

  The availability of written texts surely helped.2 Many sages were indifferent or hostile to written teaching. The name of the Upanishads, which means something like ‘the seat close to the master’, recalls a time when wisdom, too holy and too worthy of memorization to be confided to writing, passed by word of mouth. Christ, as far as we know, wrote nothing, except words he traced in the dirt with his finger, to be dispelled by the wind. Only after the lapse of centuries were Buddhists driven to compile a supposedly ungarbled version of the teaching of the founder. Demand for quick-fix manuals arose, as it still does, from competition between gurus. All-purpose holy books, which purportedly contained all the truth the faithful needed, were among the consequences.

  Supposedly divine revelations need human amanuenses. All scriptures are selected by tradition, modified by transmission, warped in translation, and misunderstood in reading. That they are or could be the unalloyed words of gods, ‘inscribed’, as the Bible says of the Ten Commandments, ‘by the finger of God’, must be a metaphor or a lie. They bring blights as well as blessings. Protestants of the Reformation thought they could replace the authority of the Church with the authority of Scripture, but demons lurk between the lines and pages of the Bible, waiting for someone to open the book. To a rational, sensible reader, supposedly sacred texts can only be decoded tentatively, at the cost of enormous investment in scholarship. Anti-intellectual, literal-minded interpretations fuel fundamentalist movements, often with violent effects. Renegades, terrorists, tyrants, imperialists, and self-proclaimed messiahs abuse the texts. False prophets sanctify their own perverse readings of them. Yet some scriptures have been extraordinarily successful. We now take for granted the idea that writing is a suitable medium for sacred messages. Would-be gurus sell their wisdom as ‘how-to’ manuals. The great texts – the Upanishads, the Buddhist sutras, the Bible, and the later Qur’an – offer awe-inspiring guidance. They have become the basis of the religious beliefs and ritual lives of most people. They have deeply influenced the moral ideas even of those who reject religion. Other religions imitate them.

  Texts cannot cross chasms on their own. They have to be carried. The sages’ ideas spread around Eurasia along routes that bore Chinese silks to Athens, and to burial sites in what are now Hungary and Germany around the mid-first millennium bce. Trade, diplomacy, war, and wandering took people far from home and brought networks into being. From about the third century of the millennium navigators and merchants carried narratives of Buddhahood to seekers of enlightenment around the shores of maritime Asia, where piloting a ship ‘by knowledge of the stars’ was deemed a godlike gift. In the tales, the Buddha protected sailors from goblin-seductresses in Sri Lanka. He rewarded a pious explorer with an unsinkable vessel. A guardian-deity saved shipwreck victims who piously combined commerce with pilgrimage or who ‘worshipped their parents’.3 Similar legends in Persian sources include the story of Jamshid, the shipbuilder-king who crossed oceans ‘from region to region with great speed’.4

  Behind such stories were accounts of genuine voyages of the mid-millennium, such as the naval mission that Darius I of Persia sent around Arabia from the northern tip of the Red Sea to the mouth of the Indus, or the commerce of what Greek merchants called the ‘Erythraean Sea’, from which they brought home frankincense, myrrh, and cassia (Arabia’s ersatz cinnamon). Seaports for the Indian Ocean trade lined
Arabia’s shores. Thaj, protected by stone walls more than a mile and a half in circumference and fifteen feet thick, served as a good place to warehouse imports, such as the gold, rubies, and pearls that adorned a buried princess towards the end of the period. At Gerrha, merchants unloaded Indian manufactures. From a life-story engraved on a stone coffin of the third century bce, we know that a merchant from Ma’in supplied Egyptian temples with incense.5

  The regularity of the monsoonal wind system made the long seafaring, sea-daring tradition of the Indian Ocean possible. Above the equator, northeasterlies prevail until winter ends; air then warms and rises, sucking the wind toward the Asian landmass from the south and west. Seafarers can therefore be confident of a fair wind out and a fair wind home. Strange as it may seem to modern yachtsmen who love the breeze at their backs, most of history’s maritime explorers have headed into the wind, in order to improve their chances of getting home. A monsoonal system frees navigators for adventure.

  Compared with land routes, the sea always carries goods faster, more cheaply, and in greater variety and quantity. But long-range commerce, including that across Eurasia in antiquity, has always started on a small scale, with goods of high value, and limited bulk traded through markets and middlemen. So the land routes that traversed great stretches of the landmass also played a part in creating the networks of the first millennium bce, bringing people from different cultures together, facilitating the flow of ideas, and transmitting the goods and artworks that changed taste and influenced lifestyles. When Alexander the Great marched along the Persian royal road as far as India, he was following established trade routes. The colonies he scattered as he went became emporia of ideas. Bactria was one of them. In about 139 bce Zhang Qian went there as an ambassador from China. When he saw Chinese cloth on sale and ‘asked how they obtained these things, the people told him their merchants bought them in India’. From the time of his mission, ‘specimens of strange things began to arrive’ in China ‘from every direction’.6 By the end of the millennium, Chinese manufactures flowed from the Caspian to the Black Sea, and into gold-rich kingdoms at the western end of the Eurasian steppe.