We are an expression of an
unpredictably creative deterministic system which some of us refer to
as “the universe" and others refer to as “God".
A system has certain characteristics
which are broadly predictable. It is for this reason that we are able
to see laws behind natural phenomena and, to some extent, make
accurate predictions based on those laws. But the direction of
creation is towards greater levels of complexity. This takes place
through a process known as “emergence" and this is not
predictable the first time that it happens. Something truly new is
coming into existence and yet it is still a product of the
functioning of an inevitable system. There is no such thing as
randomness or chance in a connected universe.
To get an idea of how higher levels of
complexity can arise from simple deterministic principles it is worth
looking at the example of fractals. These are patterns generated by
simple mathematical formulae. When mapped out with computer graphics
they reveal wildly complex patterns in which the overall shape is
re-iterated on each level :
Like
a circle in a spiral
Like
a wheel within a wheel
Never
ending or beginning
On
an ever spinning reel
The
Windmills of Your Mind
(Michel Legrand, Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman).
The
relationship between our sun and its planets is close enough to a
steady state for us to make predictions about where another planet
will be in relation to ours at any particular time, but it isn't
really a steady state. Scientists tell us that every year the earth
moves 15 centimetres farther from the sun. This isn't much, but it
shows that the stability of the system is relative not absolute.
Systems
theory reveals that the emergence of a new level of complexity occurs
through the process of a system becoming destabilised. Systems seek
order, and if one kind of order breaks down, then a more complex form
of order has to come into existence. This is not an imposed order but
an order which arises from the expression of natural laws on a higher
level of organisation. Where we see disorder, as we do in our social
system, it is because that system is in the transition phase – it
is in the inevitable state of breakdown which leads to breakthrough –
to emergence into the next level of orderly system.
Another
way to think of the relationship between the predictable and
unpredictable aspects of creation is to imagine a classroom where a
bunch of children are engaged in a creative writing exercise. There
are rules about how they can behave. They are not allowed to fly
paper planes across the room. They are not allowed to get out of
their chairs. They are not allowed to chew gum. So we can make some
predictions about how behaviour in the classroom will look based on
those rules. But we can't predict that Tommy will write a story about
a dragon that likes to eat its own bogies after roasting them in its
fire. This story is an instance of emergence. It is an inevitable
product of the universal system but we don't have the brain capacity
necessary to process all of the information which led to its
expression. We can tell that it is an expression of the intersection
of the historical dragon myth with the “eat your own bogies"
meme popular with little boys, but we could not predict that Tommy
would be the point in the system where this particular manifestation
of this intersection should be expressed at this particular moment
unless we had a complete dynamic map of the social system of which
Tommy is a part. All we could do is to make a probabilistic
prediction that between 5 and 10 school boys will write an essay
about dragons eating their own bogies this year based on the number
of school boys who have done so in each of the previous twenty years.
There
is a tendency, where we can't understand something, to attribute it
to an imaginary being. Primitive peoples who didn't know anything
about the geological structure of the earth attributed volcanic
eruptions to the anger of the volcano god. Today there are many
scientists who carry on this trend by attributing anything they can't
predict to a mythological entity called “randomness". Randomness is the concept that something can happen which is not an
inevitable manifestation of the system within which it takes place.
Our
central symbol for randomness is the throwing of a dice. And it is
from the study of dice throwing which we developed the theory of
probability. We can't predict what number is going to come up when we
throw a dice, but we can predict the likelihood of the spread of
numbers which will come up over a large enough sample. While we can't
predict the outcome of a single dice throw, that doesn't mean it is
not deterministic in its nature and thus theoretically predictable.
How the dice lands depends on such factors as its mass, its shape,
how hard and in which direction we throw it and the nature of the
surface on which it falls. We don't have the ability to measure and
assess all of this information with enough accuracy to predict how
the dice will fall, but it is theoretically possible.
Evolution
is often presented as the result of “random" mutations,
rather than a deterministic interaction between members of species
and their environment.
In
physics, proponents of the theories of quantum mechanics claim that
the behaviour of subatomic particles is evidence of randomness
because it can't be predicted even though we can detect probable
trends. Sounds a bit like our problem with dice. And this was Albert
Einstein's attitude to quantum mechanics – “God doesn't play
with dice." Einstein, like myself, did not believe in a personal
God, but in the pantheistic conception of God as a way of referring
to the integrated nature of the creative universal system.
The
belief that we live in a probabilistic rather than deterministic
universe has led to much absurdity, such as the idea that an infinite
number of alternate universes exist parallel to each other and that
anything which we can imagine must have happened in at least one of
them. This denies the relationships between things. How could there
be a universe in which there are people who breath water but in which
there is no water? I can imagine that well enough to write down the
concept, but it can't exist in reality because it wouldn't work. If
we want to understand the universe in which we live we have to
understand its connectedness and thus its inevitability. It's no good
me asking myself : “What would it have been like if I'd been
born in China?" because someone born in China could not be me. I
could only have been born at the precise place and time at which I
was born, because even the slightest variation, as chaos theory shows
us, changes the whole system.
Another
expression of the probabilistic world view is the idea that, if you
could train an infinite number of chimpanzees to type and then waited
an infinite amount of time, one of them would type the complete works
of Shakespeare1.
This would not happen. It is a complete misunderstanding of how
things come into existence. Shakespeare's plays were an expression of
the system which could only occur at the position of the system known
as “Shakespeare". No-one else could have written the plays
and Shakespeare could not have written Finnegan's Wake or Twilight.
They could only be written by James Joyce and Stephanie Meyer
respectively. Each is an expression which requires the knowledge and
influences unique to those individuals. Even assuming we could teach
chimpanzees to type, they would not type keys probabilistically. An
infinite number of chimpanzees might all just thump their fingers on
the keyboard in a similar way, which would not produce the variety
necessary to accidentally produce a novel or play. What would most
likely happen is that they would quickly get bored and jam up the
typewriter mechanism with their own faeces. The products of one level
of complexity cannot be produced by an entity on a lower level of
complexity. The same does not apply in reverse. Stephanie Meyer could
quite easily jam up a typewriter with her own faeces should she so
choose.
What
about the concept of “free will"? If we are part of a
deterministic system, then does this mean that free will is an
illusion? Yes. But we can better understand this when we recognise
that it is also an oxymoron. And to understand why we need to look at
the nature of freedom.
The
best analogy for deterministic freedom is that of a water molecule
travelling down a river to the sea. The molecule moves freely. There
are no impediments to block its path. But that path is determined by
the movement of the other molecules around it in response to the
environment of the riverbank which determines the course of the flow.
It's behaviour is determined but not determined in the way that a
wind-up robot's behaviour is determined by its mechanism.
We
human's are capable of acts of will, but these acts are the product
of cultural influences which come from outside ourselves. We can't be
other than an expression of the system. So what do we mean by will?
The will is the active aspect of the ego. The ego is our sense of our
self as a discreet entity. It is constructed of our beliefs. When we
act on the basis of our beliefs, that is will. But we do not chose
our beliefs, they are a crystallisation of prevalent ideas which come
together within us in the only way they could. When our beliefs
change it is because we have come in contact with other ideas outside
of ourselves which have overridden the preceding ones. Of course, in
each individual case it is too complex a process to fully break down
and analyse and it is always in flux.
At
the heart of any act of will is a lack of acceptance of something.
There is something with which we do not feel satisfied and so our
will drives us to seek to change it. This might be something as
simple as washing the dishes or as complex as seeking a cure for
cancer. But it is only an act of will if there is resistance. If I
want to wash the dishes, then doing so is an act of free expression.
But if I'm feeling lazy I have to will myself to do them. And if we
are trying to change something in our environment will will only be
required if that something is resistant to change, which is more often the case if we are working against the grain so to speak.
The
central characteristic of will is the experience of a relative loss
of freedom. The thought behind an act of will is the thought that we have to do
something - that we have no alternative. The mountaineer must climb
the mountain. The boxer must fight the fight. By contrast the state
of freedom is like being a guest at a party where we could kiss the
hostess, stand on our head or piss in the punchbowl, among many other
possibilities. Such behaviour is not goal-orientated in the way that
an act of will is, but whatever we do will be an inevitable
expression of the universal system in the place we inhabit. So if
someone pisses in the punchbowl, blame the perversity of the
universe.
We
may think that will is necessary in order that anything get done. No
good just sitting around accepting everything. But acceptance is the
basis for love and love desires to help and to understand. Love can
be the basis for discovery and problem solving. In science love would
inspire us to find understanding and work with nature to solve our
problems, whereas will inspires us to try to solve problems by
changing nature without fully understanding it first. It is the
wilful approach to science and technology which has led scientists to
misinterpret data in order to support their prejudices and has
encouraged our technological development to be at the expense of our
ecological life-support systems. The alternative, accepting what is
and responding to it in the way which comes naturally to us, will
lead to better results.
One
way to picture our situation is that we are all cast adrift upon a
stormy sea, each in a fragile little boat. The boat is our ego and we
need it because the sea is so stormy. Were the sea calm we would swim
in it happily. The
sea on which we are cast adrift is the schizophrenic mind of God.
What emerged in the jump from the other primates to humans was mind
as we conceive it. Chimpanzees have the ability to reason on a very
basic level, but human intelligence is to chimpanzee intelligence as
the fractal is to the mathematical formula which leads to it. A
period of disorder accompanies emergence. In the case of human
intelligence the root of the disorder was a split in perception which
led to the concepts of Good and Evil. This acted like a virus
splitting our perception of the world and ourselves in such a way that
everything became divided into warring factions. But this was a
problem which would begin slowly and then increase exponentially up
until the present.
In
the beginning we experienced ourselves as an expression of the
natural system. This was true as a species (expressed in such myths
as that of Adam and Eve) and in our individual lives (as an infant we
have to learn the difference between “me" and “not
me"). We lived in God. But the idea that it is meaningful to
split the world into Good and Evil caused a disharmony which
alienated us from this sense of connectedness. We were “cast out
of the Garden of Eden". With the invention of language our mind
became a collective mind in the sense that each of us is like a
synapse and words and the concepts which are expressed through their varying combinations are the impulses travelling through those synapses.
We have, as Carl Jung discovered, a collective unconscious. We soak
up cultural material without even being aware of it and our
subconscious associates this material in ways determined by the flow
of different trends within the social system. Now, with television
and the internet, the subconscious of each individual is more complex
than it was in Jung's day, but the deepest trends are the most
universal – the patterns which lie at the heart of the complexity –
the formula that produced the fractal.
In
science fiction we have the idea of alien species with a “hive
mind". We have such a mind and always have had, but it is a
schizophrenic hive mind, it is perpetually at war with itself. And
this is why we need our lifeboats – our egos – to stay afloat in
the maelstrom. I once thought that, even in a state of psychological
freedom we would still need our ego in order to self-manage, but this
isn't true. We don't need to experience ourselves as separate
entities in order to do what we need to do. Our body is made up of
separate cells each doing what is required for the maintenance of the
whole. But this is only possible if our “hive mind" is not
divided against itself and thus deranged. As long as that is the case
we need our ego to keep afloat. Many of us have been thrown from our
boats by the violence of the storms and come face to face with the
reality of the divided mind of humanity in a way which caused us to
be labelled “insane" by those still safely in their boats
and many have been lost at sea, i.e. committed suicide.
The
development of the ego is symbolised in the story of Noah and the
ark. When it became clear that living on dry land (remaining
psychologically connected to the living system) was becoming
impossible due to our internally divided state, and that we would
thus become separated from that state by the sea of our growing
conceptual consciousness, we developed the individual ego. In Noah's
Ark were stored all of the complimentary pairings into which our
dualistic conciousness had split things – male and female of every
animal. In time the complimentary pairings produced by the dualistic
split in our consciousness would become warring factions in many
instances.
This
analogy also appears in the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne :
And
Jesus was a sailor
When
he walked upon the water
And
he spent a long time watching
From
his lonely wooden tower
And
when he knew for certain
Only
drowning men could see him
He
said “All men will be sailors then
Until
the sea shall free them"
So
our egos have been necessary, but the downside is that they separate
us from the ability to perceive unfiltered reality. The ego is a
structure of distorted beliefs about reality. It is a form of
alienation from reality. If we are going to stay in our boat we have
to twist our perception of reality in such a way that it doesn't
challenge those distorted beliefs. This is why physicists will look
at the behaviour of subatomic particles and see something that “proves" the existence of randomness. Because to think down
the honest pathway of the inevitable unfolding of all things is to
follow a pathway of thought that leads inexorably to the dissolution
of one's own ego. Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to
die. And, yet, the death of the ego is the way to heaven once we have
an understanding, as we now do, which can cure the virus of dualism,
reconcile the warring factions and bring peace and sanity to our “hive mind" – the mind of God.
The
dissolution of our egos into the mind of God is what was predicted by
Jesus was “the Kingdom of Heaven" and “the coming of
the Son of Man". The term “Son of Man" acknowledges
that the next level of emergence is generated by the one which comes
before. So unified humanity is the offspring of divided humanity.
Now
before this would occur Jesus prophesied that the shit would really
hit the fan. The key concept here is given in the passage which
begins at Matthew 24:15 : “So when you see standing in the holy
place 'the abomination that causes desolation' spoken of through the
prophet Daniel – let the reader understand – then let those who
are in Judea flee to the mountains... How dreadful it will be in
those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers..."
What
is “the abomination that causes desolation"? We can see
that it is idealism. The original virus which contaminated humanity
was the false perception that it is meaningful or beneficial to think
of some things as Good and some things as Evil and to use our will to
try to compel ourselves to pursue the former and avoid the latter. To
be fully wedded to this false perception is to be an idealist.
So
what is all this about “the abomination" being put “in
the holy place"? Since we can see that an accurate understanding
of reality is one which acknowledges the larger whole of which each
person or thing is an expression we can see that how truthful
something or someone is is dependant on how whole (i.e. undivided)
they are and thus the degree to which they can acknowledge their
connection to the whole. Our word for this is “holy". We
have begun to acknowledge this idea in a non-mystical way with our
concepts of “holistic medicine" and “the holistic
paradigm for science".
In
1988, an Australian biologist by the name of Jeremy Griffith
published a book called Free : The End of the Human Condition – The
Biological Reason Why Humans Have Had to Be Individual, Competitive,
Egocentric & Aggressive. He said that the book, which he spent 13
years writing, “grew out of my desperate need to reconcile my
extreme idealism with reality". He presented it as an holistic
understanding of the human condition. Central
to his explanation is the concept that our conscience, that part of
us which tells us what is good, is part of our genetic programming,
and that our competitive, egocentric and aggressive behaviour has
been an unavoidable rebellion against the oppressive criticism with
which that programming responded to our experiments in the use of our
newly found intelligence for self-management. He appears to believe that this “knowledge" will itself bring about a reconciliation of all
of the conflicts in the world. The problem is that his “defence
for humanity" is no defence because our conscience, for those of
us who have one, is a part of our ego. In effect then Griffith's
books are an unconscious attempt on his part to will his idealism
onto the rest of us by presenting it as liberating holistic
knowledge. And they are a brilliant attempt because they contain so
many of the ideas which would be needed for a genuine liberating
understanding but assembled the wrong way and presented with an
emphasis on confronting us about our “non-ideal" behaviour.
Of course the number of people who've read Griffith's books, or even
heard of him, is limited, but all ideas, especially about really
important topics, leak out into general awareness. Many in Australia
who never read any of his books would have seen him on daytime
television at one stage defending his idea that sex is “an
attack on innocence". (from Free : “Men invented sex, as in
'fucking' or destroying, as distinct from the act of procreation.
What was being 'fucked' or destroyed was women's innocence.")
Griffith
gives his own interpretation of the prophesy in his 2003 book A
Species in Denial : “...when Christ was unmasking the lie of
pseudo-idealism he used the deadly accurate description offered by
the Old Testament prophet Daniel, 'the abomination that causes
desolation'." So what does he mean by “pseudo-idealism"?
Later in the book he says : “One of the problems to be overcome
in introducing these denial-free understandings is that there have
been so many 'false prophets' promoting artificial, pseudo forms of
ideality that the whole business of bringing ideality to the world has been extremely discredited. These false forms of ideality, such as the New Age Movement, Environmentalism, Feminism,
the Politically Correct Deconstructionist Movement, The Peace
Movement, are such superficially satisfying forms of idealism to live
through that when the real ideality arrives, namely the reconciling
understanding of the human condition, people actually prefer the
non-confronting, false forms of ideality... These false or pseudo
forms of ideality are extremely seductive because they give people
relief from the horror of their corrupted state by allowing them to
feel good about themselves without having to confront their corrupted
state. In a world where people are rapidly becoming more corrupted
and in need of relief from their condition, pseudo-idealism has
become a plague. In fact it has gained such a foothold that it now
threatens to control the world and lead it to a totally
non-confronting, truthless state of oblivion. Pseudo-idealism is
the 'Antichrist' because it is at base anti-truth, opposed to the
truth which Christ so wholly represented." Here we have a
classic example of paranoia, a false prophet with an oppressive
dishonest dogma seeing those who pursue other approaches to
addressing the problems of the world as the ones who are deluded and
dangerous – that is, he sees in them a projection of the truth he
can't face about himself. A Prophet in Denial would have been a more
appropriate title for the book.
 |
| Glossy insert used to promote A Species in Denial in Australian newspapers |
So
idealism dressed up as holism is what Jesus and Daniel where on about
when they talked about the “abomination that causes desolation"
being “in the holy place". And this was the peak point of
the danger and destruction which grew out of that original concept of
Good and Evil. But this is how systems work. Everything is inevitable
and everything is necessary. Only by having the key problem
crystallised into its most potent form could it be studied and the
real cure found. But it has been a harsh ride for us all. I included
the passage about pregnant women and nursing mothers, because one of
Griffith's key beliefs is that babies are born with a genetically
coded expectation of finding an ideal world and the protection of
their innocence depends on being sheltered from contact with the
non-ideal nature of the world. This concept puts a lot of pressure on
mothers, but it shouldn't, because it is bullshit. The only idealists
in the world are neurotic adults. What children most need is for we
adults to stop worrying so much. So this prevalent concept, of which
Griffith's expression is simply the most extreme, is itself harmful
to the welfare of children. It is the generator of a negative
feedback loop which causes depression for both mothers and
eventually, when they reach adolescence, their children.
Just
as these toxic ideas about Good and Evil have sowed division and
conflict, so a clear understanding which heals the split will spread
out through the mind of God and our ego boats will inevitably
dissolve and free us into the bliss of Heaven on Earth. There is
nothing to do but do what comes naturally. Acts of will are no longer
useful.
The
rise of the “Kingdom of Heaven" is something which will
happen both within us and around us as the divisions which have
characterised our existence heal. When emergence takes place
unexpected patterns are revealed. We wouldn't expect water vapour to
form into beautiful snowflakes. In the same way we will witness
seemingly miraculous coincidences, a phenomena which Jung labelled
synchronicity and described as an “acausal connecting
principle". Another example of an acausal connecting principle
is gravity. “Ah," you may say, "but gravity causes
apples to fall from trees." But it doesn't. Gravity doesn't
cause anything to do anything, it only shapes the way in which it
does it. The word “cause" is defined as : “A person or
thing that gives rise to an action, phenomenon, or condition."
Gravity doesn't “give rise" to the fall of the apple,
whatever dis-attaches it from the tree does. So synchronicity is like
gravity, it doesn't make anything happen and it is invisible, but we
will be able to know it by the way that it shapes the healing of
humanity.
1For
the sake of simplicity I will assume that William Shakespeare
actually wrote the plays attributed to him, something which is
disputed by some.
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