TM: Notice that most prophetic episodes are dreams. This supports my point, that we’ve lost connection with a kind of fourth-dimensional perception that for the rest of nature is absolutely a given.
RS: Why do you think it’s a given in the rest of nature?
TM: Because there are many, many cases of this kind of thing. Animals that are put in the pound by the owners who are moving, and then the owners move seven hundred miles and the animal escapes from the pound and it doesn’t return to the ancestral home; it returns to the new apartment in a different city. The monarch butterflies, the homing pigeons, a whole host of mysterious phenomena become utterly transparent and trivial if you simply hypothesize that for them, the future doesn’t have this occluded character that it has for us as a result of our acquiescence in language behavior.
RS: It’s not just a problem in time, it’s a problem in space.
TM: They see themselves at every point in their life, not just the high or low points.
RA: They’re a minute ahead of where they are, so they just go that way.
TM: In other words they can always see their goal from where they are. They navigate through time in the same way that we navigate through space. I mean, if you were a two-dimensional creature, the things that we do, navigating in three-dimensional space, would be absolutely mysterious and generate all kinds of metaphysical speculation and hypotheses. Why should nature imprison itself within a temporal domain? Clearly, for us it’s an artifact of language. We talk about future tenses, past tenses that aren’t descriptive of the future and the past; they create it. That’s why I put in the possible exception of human languages where this is not happening and therefore they are much closer to animal perception. The “mysterious” behavior of Australian aborigines, or the Hopi. These people seem capable of things that to us are like magic, but the magic is all done by knowing what’s going to happen. If they simply imbibe the animal’s understanding, then to them it’s trivial. This is the most elegant explanation, not requiring new, undetected fields, or any of these other somewhat cobbled-together mechanisms.
RS: Just another dimension.
TM: We know it’s there. There’s no debate about that. I’ve always noticed that all the magic done by shamans in aboriginal society, especially the ones that are using psychoactive plants, suddenly becomes not so mysterious if you simply assume that, by perturbing the ordinary brain states and ordinary language states, they let in this hyper-dimensional understanding. Look at what shamans do; they predict weather and they tell the tribe where the game has gone. Both require knowledge of the future. They rarely lose a patient, meaning they know who’s going to make it and who isn’t, so they can refuse all cases destined to be fatal. All these examples of shamanic magic can easily be explained by the simple assumption that they can to some degree perceive the future. Animals operate from this place to begin with. What is the shaman’s strategy for attaining his special knowledge? He becomes like an animal, he is master of animals, he dresses in skins, he growls.
RA: He talks to pigeons.
TM: He talks to the animals, perturbing his brain state with ordeals or drugs or other techniques. The very close association of the shaman to the animal mind suggests that it’s the clue to entering this a-temporal or fourth dimensional perceptual sphere.
RS: In the Christian tradition a principal symbol of the holy spirit—that which gives inspired prophecy, shamanic-type gifts of healing, and intuitions of various kinds—is the pigeon. The first Biblical story of the pigeon is in the story of Noah’s ark, where the pigeon was sent off and came back with the olive twig. Right from the beginning the pigeon is a messenger who can find out things in distant places and return, bringing back the information.
Even if we collide into this wall of history here on Earth, I find it quite incredible that the rest of the solar system is just going to shut up shop and go out of business, let alone the galaxy, let alone the clusters of galaxies.
The historical record is compatible with the idea of an upcoming, amazing, difficult, and creative social transformation in our immediate future.
CHAPTER 5
BETWEEN THE APOCALYPSE AND UTOPIANISM
Ralph Abraham: Our project this morning is to try to see ourselves as a trinity, and to experiment with the idea of connecting with such traditions as are perceived by cultural historians.
There are two particular themes that I want to describe, as two possibilities for understanding ourselves in the historical tradition, and they are utopianism and millenarianism. As understood by cultural historians, utopianism is one of the major currents of the European mind, and not an old one. The concept of the ideal city in the ancient world, most especially the ideal city of Plato’s Republic, could casually be called a utopian fantasy, although Plato tried to actually realize it in the political organization of a particular city, and ended up in jail. According to historians, utopianism begins on a particular day less than 500 years ago. That was the day of publication of Thomas Moore’s book Utopia in 1516. This word utopia is a translation into Latin of the Greek, utopos, meaning nowhere. Its initial chief characteristic is that it was acknowledged to be nowhere. This was a dream not to be made real. It was fiction, having characters and plot and story, presenting various themes of ideal achievement for our culture.
After 1516 this book sold well, and had lots of imitators. There was a huge genre, a body of fictional works, which became the foundation of a utopian trend. Eventually this branched into nonfiction. The idea began to materialize in actual communities that tried to live up to the utopian ideals of some novel or nonfiction work. Riane Eisler’s book The Chalice and the Blade is a perfect example of the nonfiction utopian work. Frank and Francie Manuel produced a book that looks back on the history of Utopianism since 1516. In this 900-page work they catalogued in order of appearance all the authors, works, and communities that started and then failed. The last chapter in the book is entitled “Twilight of Utopia.” They saw the trend ending after 500 years, probably under the influence of our experience in the 1960s, when the hippies of California, Paris, Amsterdam, and other places tried once again to materialize a new utopian ideal in actual practice, even striving for a planetary society based on ideal lines. This attempt completely and totally failed, leading the Manuels to conclude that the utopian literary current had finally dried up and ended.
Nonetheless, since 1979 and the publication of the Manuel book, there have been surges of renewal in the literature. I’ve mentioned Riane Eisler’s book, published in 1987. Another nonfiction work of this type is Rupert’s book The Rebirth of Nature, first published in 1990. Then there’s Terence’s book Food of the Gods, 1992. I think certainly, if Mr. and Mrs. Manuel wrote a revised edition of their book, they would definitely include these authors in their list. My book, Chaos, Gaia, Eros could be considered a kind of chaos utopia. Rupert’s book is a scientific utopia, Terence’s a psychedelic utopia, and Riane Eisler’s a partnership political utopia.
Paul Tillich, writing about this trend in 1951, pointed out the Trinitarian aspect of the utopian genre, harking back to the trinity of the prehistoric Goddesses, manifest in Christianity as the Holy Trinity—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. He said that this particular Trinitarian utopian model was presented long before Thomas Moore in 1516, in the works of Joachim di Fiore in the 12th century.
Let me just read a few words of Tillich’s understanding of the Trinitarian structure of the utopian genre, as I think this will help us to see ourselves in history:
The overwhelming majority of these utopias show a triadic movement. The original actualization, namely actualization of the essence, and then a falling away from this original actualization, namely the present condition. And third, the restoration, as an expectation that what has fallen away from its primordial condition is to be recovered. One of the distinguishing characteristics of this triadic movement is the consciousness on the part of those who use this symbolism, almost without exception, it is im
portant that the lowest point of the falling away has been reached in their time, in the moment in which they themselves live. It is always the last period that gives birth to utopia. Illustrative of this and perhaps also the best formula that has been given for it is Joachim di Fiore’s idea that we live in the age of consummate sinfulness. Also illustrative is Augustine’s idea that the world empires that have come to an end were the last ones—the Great Roman empire, which he as a Roman loved—and that their sole successor is to be the kingdom of God, which is in some measure actualized in the church. But the final actualization will take place only after the close of history. This same idea is found in India, where it is always the last period in which the theologian, speaking of a succession of ages, finds himself. It’s found in Greece, where the stoics speak about the Iron Age as the last and most wicked. It’s in Marxism, where the class struggle running through the whole of history reaches a point where revolutionary changes become inevitable. In the fascistic ideologies, decadence reaches its final stage when counter movement must set in. All of these instances show that the triadic progression is centered on the moment in which the reversal is immediately eminent. This is characteristic of all utopian thought. (Paul Tillich, Political Expectations, p.134)
The other line of thinking we must address is millenarianism, which has roots in the Jewish idea of the Messiah; that there will be a coming of God on earth to rescue humanity from a fatal impasse. In the Christian tradition this evolved into the Apocalypse, described in the New Testament, where there would be a third coming of Christ in a transformational period lasting a thousand years. The idea of the millennium rises not only from the year 1000 or the year 2000, but also the idea of a special period of 1000 years that’s transitional to our final salvation. Salvation is an important aspect of the millennial idea.
The millennial tradition actually begins after the year 1000, when many people were disappointed that the Messiah didn’t arrive. Terence has referred to this three-year period, centered on the year 999, when everything came to a halt. After that time is the beginning of a new millennial hope, the growth of an extensive literature, and an extensive actualization in popular movements. These are always characterized by a prophet, the charismatic leader of a group of people, sometimes very extensive.
There is magisterial work on this movement by Norman Cohn, published in the 1950s, and revised after new discoveries in 1971: The Pursuit of the Millennium. This book is an incredible catalog of prophet after prophet, movement after movement, from the beginning, to the middle, to the end, including literature, analysis, and descriptions of all these movements. Like the utopian movement, this is an artifact of the European mind. It takes place primarily within the context of Christianity, these millenarian groups being without exception heretical, departing from one or another dogmatic aspect of the organized church. Outside of this Christian heretical tendency, they tried to organize communities that epitomized a certain communitarian ideal. Almost invariably they included sexual freedom in reaction to the idea of sin and sexual repression in the Christian tradition.
In Norman Cohn’s revised edition there’s an extensive appendix, which is a translation of virtually all of the extant literature of one particular group, which in the seventeenth century coincided with the rise of science in England. They were very popular in England, and were called the Ranters. Reading about this group in particular brought up certain similarities with our experience in the 1960s, as well as the contemporary movement in which the prophet obviously is Terence.
The utopian structure is triadic. What we had before was good, what we have now is the deepest depression that will ever be seen in human history, and tomorrow the virtues of yesterday will be restored, together with new enhancements, or something that will be even better.
On the other hand, millenarians are dominated by the apocalyptic idea that human history will end at a certain moment with the Eschaton, culminating in some kind of final moment. Certainly two of the most outstanding exponents of this tendency today are Terence and Jose Arguelles, who agree not only on the Eschaton, but also on the date—the year 2012—having arrived at this time schedule following completely different approaches.
Between these two tendencies of the European mind, the Utopian and the Millenarian, there is a certain overlap as well as important differences. Somewhere in the neighborhood of this overlap I think we can see our own trinity in our ten-year history of doing what we’re doing now. If this isn’t too egoistic, considering ourselves in the light of these historical trends, at least we can say that these trends have influenced us, perhaps unconsciously, in coming to the positions that we’ve taken. In case this is so we might want to consider the outcome of other people who were under the influence of these traditions, as they unconsciously responded to these deep runnels in the morphic field of our culture. Here is the context for our self-reflection.
Rupert Sheldrake: This model is very illuminating. It clarifies a lot of things. I can see in myself both tendencies at work. The utopian tendency is something that’s clearly expressed, for example, in socialism. I spent many years as a socialist, believing that there was this primal state of humanity living in brotherhood, followed by the alienation caused by serfdom, the feudal system, the rise of capitalism, the industrial state, imperialism, and so on, following a Marxist analysis. Then the capitalist order is overthrown and one eventually returns to a more primitive, non-alienated state of people living in communities, sharing their goods, and the state withers away. This is the Marxist utopian model, with a millenarian aspect as the revolution ushers in a new age.
I was also influenced by scientific utopianism, having been educated as a scientist. The primary scientific utopia is Sir Francis Bacon’s book New Atlantis, published in 1624. In it he offers the vision of an entirely new order in the world. He portrays a Christian utopia with a scientific priesthood based in a place called Salomon’s House, which is a college that rules an island kingdom. Someone is shipwrecked on the island and they find themselves in this ideal society. Everything is rationally ordered, and research is officially organized by the priesthood of Salomon’s House: they have gardens where they breed plants, they keep animals to study in vivisection experiments, they have wave machines so they can study how to make dams and harbors properly, and they study artificial tides and storms on a small scale through models. They try to develop a universal language. Jonathan Swift satirized this in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels, Voyage to Laputa, where there’s a crazy academy whose members are engaged in preposterous projects, like making sunbeams out of cucumbers.
Anyway, scientific utopianism got built into the idea of technological and scientific progress, which was going to liberate mankind from the bondage of poverty, disease, and slavery to the elements of nature. In fact, it gave rise to the ideology of the modern world: economic development through science and technology.
Then there’s the liberal political utopianism of socialists and liberals who have the idea that you bring about utopia not just through science and technology, but through economic and political reform. I believed all this for a long time, and I think most of us still do, because it’s so deeply ingrained in our culture.
Then there’s the New Age movement, which believes there’ll be a new utopian age brought about through the rediscovery of ancient religious traditions, through the development of human potentials, and through holistic, harmonious ways of doing things. This is another kind of utopianism that has influenced me.
I think Ralph’s right in saying that my own book The Rebirth of Nature is an example of the utopian tradition. The essence of my argument is that in the past people treated nature as alive, and a recognition of the sacredness of nature gave a better way of relating to it than our alienated, mechanistic way of treating nature as a bunch of raw materials to exploit for profit. Restoration of this sense of the life of nature could lead to a new kind of post-mechanistic culture in which human beings would be the mediator of the marriage
of heaven and Earth, bringing human society into right relationship with both.
As for Terence, half of his thinking is utopian, the other half millenarian. The utopian side is the psychedelic revival, with its belief in an ancient society where people had a wonderful time living harmoniously on the Earth, with tremendous visions thanks to psychedelic plants, particularly mushrooms. Then it all went wrong. The climate changed, the Earth dried up, the psychedelic visions became less and less frequent, and a poor substitute took over, namely alcohol. One then plumbs the depths represented by modern society. But the original harmony can be restored by the mass consumption of mushrooms, the smoking of DMT, and other psychedelic activities. Thus dawns the psychedelic utopia.
Ralph’s version is a mathematical utopia, where the great regulative, eternal structures of the mathematical landscape, the fundamental principles reflected in all nature, heavenly and terrestrial, become visible. Not only visible to the high priests of mathematics, but potentially to everyone through the medium of computer modeling. There’s a kind of democratization of gnosis that direct knowledge of fundamentals, which mathematics has had as its guiding light through the centuries and the millennia. This Gnostic seeing behind the scenes becomes commonly available, not only through psychedelic visions, but through computer models which can be shared and entered into by many people.
When we consider what would happen if the millennium were postponed, if it didn’t all happen in 2012, we are forced out of the field of millenarianism into the field of utopianism. Millenarians usually have the end conveniently close—not too close, but close enough so that it could be in our lifetime—2012 is a perfect date from that point of view. According to the millenarian scenario, and according to the Jewish and Christian apocalyptic books, most notably the Revelation of St. John the Divine, with which the Bible ends, the end of history involves appalling plagues, earthquakes, eruptions, and other disasters. Of course it’s only too easy to see all these things coming to bear on our society, leading toward inevitable collapse and catastrophe. The only way out is total, miraculous transformation, the coming of the Messiah, the descent of angelic powers, or, in one of Terence’s versions—he has many ways of imagining this end of history—some kind of collective DMT trip. The apocalypse amounts to a near-death and rebirth experience where we will pass through an appalling time of disturbance, and then emerge into a new realm of being. The apocalyptic tradition doesn’t try to stop things getting worse; it regards this as inevitable. This is the conflict we all find ourselves in. We find ourselves becalmed in the area between the apocalypse and utopianism.
The Evolutionary Mind Page 9
