The Evolutionary Mind

by Rupert Sheldrake

  RS: In some circles this is known as the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Theological attempts to deal with this problem have led to a variety of models where you have the idea that the ultimate is not an undifferentiated unity but rather a pattern of relationships. In the Taoist model you have the Yin and the Yang with a kind of fractal boundary between them. The circle containing the two is the whole that unifies them. In the model of the Holy Trinity, the Father is the source of the Word and the Spirit. The underlying metaphor is speaking. The spirit is the breath on which the word can happen, as you breathe out. The spoken word is a pattern of vibrations and harmonics that’s probably some kind of fractal pattern in time. It would be hard to say which is the breath and which are the sounds, and how you can separate the vibration from the sounds. This would seem to be the kind of model, in another form, that you have in mind. The unity comes from the sense of interrelationship and common source.

  All these models of an ultimate unity are models of a relationship which something holds together. The hidden agenda behind your fractal model is that although you can’t see unity within them, the hidden unity behind it all is the mathematics governing the fractals. For most mathematicians, these mathematical structures exist in some kind of Platonic realm beyond space and time, even if it’s only in the imagination of mathematicians. There’s some kind of hidden unity containing the diversity, and somehow generating it. I would say the unity is implicit in any mathematical model in the hidden mathematical object behind the manifested pattern.

  RA: My point is not so much about the multiplicity or unity. I agree that everything is unified at some level. The point is more about the boundaries. If you have a dynamical system with different basins and they have fractal boundaries then, as a matter of fact, no matter how you perceive it, no matter what experiment you do, you will perceive unity. When you don’t perceive unity, it is in the pathological case where you’ve erected an iron curtain. If you have iron curtains, then unity essentially has been defeated by the disease of dischaos. Therefore, when we see this in nature, in history, in social systems, in ourselves, we have to beware of these iron curtains, because they create an unnecessarily multiple situation.

  Here we’ve expressed a yearning for a peaceful state beyond language. If you practice chanting, meditations and so on, then you are intentionally increasing the fractality of the boundaries, and therefore the integration of the parts into a unity. If unity is your goal, then you have to examine the fractal width of all your boundaries, and guard against boundaries that are too thin.

  RS: How do you fractalize your boundaries? Can you give a personal example?

  RA: In the emerging science of neural nets this is called annealing. One thing you can do is take a psychedelic. Another thing you can do is go to a culture that’s really different from your own and stay there for seven years on a farm or something. If you have a mate of any gender, you’re certainly in a more chaotic situation. These two-person units definitely have diseases, and few of them survive these days. I’m making a suggestion here as to what’s the trouble, and I’m suggesting a strategy, a kind of a therapeutic technique. People are trying out this idea, by the way, for therapy in relationships.

  RS: Can you give an example of how the fractalization of boundaries would work therapeutically in a relationship?

  RA: First of all there’s a diagnostic phase, in which the therapist is trained in chaos theory instead of Freudian theory. When a boundary has been detected with a pathologically low dimension or thickness, a therapy is devised especially for it, consisting of some carefully safeguarded experiments in violating the boundary, or mixing boundaries. One common strategy involves play in a sandbox. You’ve seen this. The therapist’s office has all these toys that return the client to preverbal mode of expression. I’m not a therapist, but I think an advancing theory is helpful in devising therapies.

  In the United States people are getting together in small groups for self-therapy, because they feel that a therapist not having multiple personality dischaos has no idea really what’s going on. These groups studying chaos theory have devised a kind of therapeutic psychodrama, which they write, direct, and perform in public, in cities around the United States. There’s a network of these that base their approach on my paper on multiple personality dischaos. I can give you a report next year on how these experiments work out. Some therapists believe that they may be fatal and that I should be imprisoned, but the patients themselves are very enthusiastic. They’re really having a wonderful time. Depression is a really serious condition. If a therapy was devised that cured bipolar personality dischaos without drugs, a lot of people would be helped.

  TM: Given what you’ve said about the goals of this therapy, wouldn’t it just be simpler to give these people psychedelics?

  RA: I’ve personally had good results with psychedelics, but I’m not sure everyone would. It would be nice if we had several alternative strategies, some of which could be done on a Sunday evening, where you still feel okay about going to work on Monday morning. Like vitamin pills.

  TM: Since you’ve had such good luck with psychedelics, why are you so reluctant to advocate it?

  RA: I have been advocating, or at least if not advocating, confessing in public that for me there have been very good results with psychedelics. I’ve quite recently had a certain amount of hostile mail and telephone calls; even people coming to the university to hasten my demise. They seem to think that psychedelics are drugs. There’s also the aspect of legality, where many people are in jail with 20, 30 and 40-year jail sentences. I think that the atmosphere of paranoia in the world today might even make psychedelics much less effective as medicine for dischaos.

  TM: If the paranoia and legal barriers were removed, it sounds like you’re advocating something fairly close to what Salvador Roquet’s school settled into.

  RA: I don’t know Salvador Roquet.

  TM: He was a much-regarded psychotherapist who worked in Mexico for many years, who treated people and trained therapists with psychedelics. Then he showed them Auschwitz footage and very highly charged emotional material, the idea being to reduce them to an absolutely basic jelly of dissolved boundaries.

  RA: It sounds disgusting.

  TM: I agree. I’m trying to find out how what you’re advocating is different.

  RA: It takes only very subtle medicine to decrease rigid walls. Even the very idea of it may be enough, as a matter of fact. That’s the therapy idea. Once consciousness is adjusted so that sensitivity to your own process actually observes these things and considers them undesirable, they automatically begin to disappear under the self-created action of one’s own psyche. After all, nature is playing a part, and mathematical necessity reveals itself in the Milky Way, the sandy beach, and the human psyche as well. There’s a tendency toward help. These diseases of rigid barriers, like other diseases, exist primarily in the rejection of the cure, and the cure can be found within. One has to realize that when people suffer this disease, which is essentially universal, it’s inherited from a culture that has the disease itself. The cure consists of identifying the difficulty as essentially a cultural pattern, and then disowning it by becoming more of an expatriate of our own culture. That’s why visiting another culture and living there for a few months or years is sometimes enough to liberate people from rigid patterns.

  TM: This comes very close to the nineteenth century prescription for most emotional difficulties of a few months at the seashore, in Italy preferably. In both cases you want to establish a new environmental attitude through distance from cultural values, either achieved through journeys with drugs or journeys to foreign lands.

  RA: A walk in the woods is perhaps all it takes.

  TM: It’s a search for perspective, achieved by distancing.

  RA: A kind of mathematical perspective. Our culture has suffered this particular disease over a mere span of 6,000 years. That’s all we have to recover from.

  TM: The particular disease being bou
ndary anxiety?

  RA: Patriarchal, monotheistic, hierarchical, misunderstood...

  TM: Constipated, linear...

  RS: Is there any culture that has managed to avoid dischaos?

  RA: I think so, but I don’t have direct experience of aboriginal cultures. The culture we live in has by now covered the entire globe, and the exceptions are near to extinction. Anthropologists used to study wild tribes before they were contacted by the civilizations now dominating the entire sphere. Unfortunately, civilization arrived in the form of these anthropologists, and this was the kiss of death for those cultures.

  TM: This is a theme near and dear to me. Certainly, in living Amazon cultures, one of the hardest things for a “civilized” person to put up with is the fact that there are no boundaries. Everybody lives in a grand house without walls. Defecation, sexuality, death, domestic hassling, disciplining of children, everything goes on in the presence of everyone else and no one from age 6 to 90 feels any constraint whatsoever about making comments, suggestions, and offering free advice. It’s a hard thing to embrace, even with the knowledge that it’s going to be good for you.

  RA: There are degrees of boundaries. I think the permeability of boundaries is important, and our culture has devoted excess attention to the walled fortress, necessitated by the violence some people would associate with the patriarchy. For whatever reason there’s been a necessity of Bauhaus concrete walls around the town, locks on the doors and houses, electronic motion detectors, video cameras at the bank card machine, and so on. Perhaps, as there’s an increase of complexity in our culture, as we approach the Eschaton, there’s an accompanying decrease as fractality actually vanishes at an alarming rate. This is what’s meant by “the death of nature.”

  RS: Ralph, when I last visited your house in Santa Cruz, I noticed a rigid, straight fence dividing your property from your undesirable neighbors, who have motorcycle scrambles on their land and make a terrible noise.

  RA: Boys with guns, that’s right.

  RS: What we need here is a new product, the fractal fence, which would go down very well in California, some kind of fractal boundary, instead of old style posts with barbed wire.

  RA: Mazes where people can get lost if they try to pass.

  RS: Except that, with the slightest gust of wind or unpredicted chaotic event, these motorcycles would suddenly zoom past your front door.

  The actual sky is something of which most people are abysmally ignorant. In most traditional cultures people could recognize the stars. Mariners, shepherds, and ordinary people knew the basic constellations in the sky, and the planets.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE HEAVENS

  Rupert Sheldrake: A recovery of the sense of the life of nature is going on for a variety of reasons in a variety of ways; through the archaic revival, the Gaia hypothesis, deep ecology and the ecology movement in general. As I have shown in my book The Rebirth of Nature, science itself is pointing us in the direction of a recovery of the sense of the life of nature. It is, I think, happening all around us.

  There’s a further step I think we need to take, beyond seeing the natural world as alive, namely seeing it as sacred. In the past the heavens were sacred and so was the earth, especially the sacred places that were the focuses of power, recognized in every land by every culture. They were recognized by American Indians in America, by Europeans, both pre-Christian and Christian, by Australian Aborigines, by Africans, by Jews in the Holy Land. In all cultures people related to this sense of the sacredness of the land and the earth through journeying to places of power, in pilgrimage. Pilgrimage was suppressed for the first time in human history by the Protestant reformers in Northern Europe during the Reformation, creating a void that led to a desacralization of nature. The sense of the sacred became focused entirely on man. Religion was centered on the drama of fall and redemption played out between man and God. Nature had nothing to do with it except as a kind of backdrop, or the means for people enriching themselves, becoming prosperous as a sign of God’s grace and providence.

  The English couldn’t bear this void caused by the suppression of pilgrimage, and within a few generations had invented tourism, which is best seen as a form of secularized pilgrimage. I believe a paradigm shift from tourism back to pilgrimage could go a long way to help resacralize the earth. Another way in which the natural world was sacralized was through seasonal festivals. Not just individuals but the whole community participated in festivals that marked the changing seasons of the earth—the solstices, the equinoxes, and the festivals which the Christian world has inherited from pagan roots such as Christmas and Easter.

  What I want to talk about now is resacralizing the heavens, and this involves going considerably further than anyone I know has yet gone.

  Before the seventeenth century, when people used the word “heaven,” they were referring both to the sky and to the abode of God, the angels and the blessed. Since the seventeenth century the sky has been secularized and the heavens are now considered simply the domain of astronomy. Heaven, the abode of the angels, God and the blessed, is considered some kind of psychological or spiritual state that has nothing whatever to do with the actual sky. Heaven isn’t located out there; it’s located in our persons in some way, or else in some spiritual realm utterly disconnected from the sky. We’ve grown so used to this. For example, if you suggest to Christians that when they say “Our Father who art in heaven,” that this implies that God is located in the sky, they very rapidly become embarrassed by the suggestion and brush it aside as some kind of childish naivete. Yet, when Jesus first told people about that prayer and when people prayed to God in heaven, they were not thinking that the sky was totally irrelevant, or that the abode of God was in some kind of purely subjective realm. They saw the two as related. I think it’s important to recover that sense of relationship between heaven in the traditional sense and the actual sky that we see.

  We now have a view of the cosmos as a kind of developing organism. I think it’s perfectly possible to think of the stars and galaxies and solar systems through the rest of the universe as having a life and intelligence of their own. In this way we can recover a sense of the life of the heavens, and presumably of an intelligence within the heavens, related perhaps to the traditional view of angels in some way.

  There’s also the question of the heavenly state which, in various traditions, is imagined in all sorts of ways. Christians and Muslims believe in the existence of heaven; I suppose Jews do too, although they’re awfully vague and elusive when it comes to saying exactly what it is. The cartoon image of angels sitting on clouds playing harps gives us several indications: one, that it’s dynamic, since clouds move; secondly, that it’s not confined to normal laws of gravity—-otherwise the angel would sink through them; and thirdly, that it involves some kind of musical or vibratory nature. Among the different images of heaven, I’ve been very struck by Terence’s descriptions of the state of mind induced by DMT (dimethyl tryptamine). This and perhaps other psychoactive substances can produce a state that in many ways resembles the state of heavenly bliss portrayed in religious literature.

  I reject the idea of inner and outer in its usual sense. We’re the victims of a humanistic culture that tells us that the whole of the external world is mere unconscious matter in motion, the province of the natural sciences. By contrast, religion, psychology and art are to do with the inner world, which implicitly is supposed to reside somewhere inside our brains and hence to decay when our brains decay. Heaven would in that case be something that you might enter through mystical states while you’re alive, or drug states; certainly not somewhere you go when you die. I think the idea that inner states are actually inside our bodies is one of the false dichotomies set up by materialistic assumptions. I think that when we look around us, our minds are reaching out to fill the room or the place in which we are, and when we look at the stars, in some sense our mind reaches out to touch them. Although it’s an inner perception to do with our psychology,
the inner is actually outer as well. Therefore I take seriously the idea that heavenly states might be located at places other than inside our cerebral cortex or inside our bodies.

  The vast majority of modern people know almost nothing about the heavens. Lots of people have books showing pictures of the earth from space, and children are given fantasy books about space travel. My own children, I am sad to say, learn more about the heavens from pictures of space ships than from looking at the sky. The actual sky is something of which most people are abysmally ignorant. In most traditional cultures people could recognize the stars. Mariners, shepherds, and ordinary people knew the basic constellations in the sky, and the planets.