CHAPTER ONE
The Birth of the Modern Mind
Planetary democracy does not yet exist, but our global civilization is already preparing a place for it … Only in this setting can the mutuality and commonality of the human race be newly created, with reverence and gratitude for that which transcends each of us singly, and all of us together. The authority of a world democratic order simply cannot be built on anything else but the revitalized authority of the universe.
Vaclav Havel, 1994, in a speech at Stanford University
We must close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing … a wakefulness that is the birthright of us all, though few put it to use.
Plotinus
In many ways the Western Renaissance, beginning in the 14th century, was the birthing of the ‘modern’ mind. The Renaissance placed into being a manifesto for a birth of the new human self – it called for an unlimited creative mind and an explorative free will. Pico della Mirandola’s Oration On The Dignity Of Man (1486) proclaimed this by saying:
We have set thee at the world’s center that thou mayest from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made thee neither of heaven nor of Earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. 1
This hubris announced a new form of human being; one that would be ‘dynamic creative, multidimensional, protean, unfinished, self-defining and self-creating, infinitely aspiring, set apart from the whole, overseeing the rest of the world with unique sovereignty, centrally poised in the last moments of the old cosmology to bring forth and enter into the new’.2
Within a single generation of this proclamation, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael had given to the world splendours of High Renaissance work and the mark of the modern mind. Yet these achievements were only the openers … within this birthing phase Columbus sailed westwards to reach the Americas; Vasco da Gama sailed eastwards to reach India; the Magellan expedition circumnavigated the watery globe; Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses on the All Saints’ Church doors that brought about the Protestant Reformation; and Copernicus spurred the scientific revolution with his heliocentric theory. Shortly after, the Italian Dominican friar/astronomer Giordano Bruno went further than Copernicus’s revelations to declare that the universe was an infinity of stars; many suns spinning through the heavens (for which he was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600).
These courageous acts of inspiration were, at the time, often credited as being divinely inspired, for they all sought to open up God’s mysteries and to exalt the majesty of creation. In other words, they were seen as spiritual epiphanies and exalted moments. The science of the Renaissance mind was deeply imbued with a spiritual wonder and, it must be admitted, with an over-zealous religious hunger. The point, however, was that many of these discoveries were approached with awe, as an infant gazing out upon its new unfolding world. Yet, like a scolded infant, many of these ‘inspired’ revelations were cast aside by the religious, intellectual and general minds of the day. For, what the Renaissance mind sought was a new type of reasoning; one that went beyond the senses, moved out beyond the confines of rigid faith, and accepted with penetrating logic the new mechanisms of a far more vast, ornately designed universe. The implications went beyond the religious/spiritual, cultural, political – they were cosmological. As such, what the new rational Renaissance mind brought into being was a metaphysical shift; a shift that placed the mind of humanity into a new position vis-à-vis the cosmos. Our infant species was permitted to arrange the ornaments of its growth and to learn to crawl through self-exploration.
Similarly, in England, Shakespeare was writing what was to become recognized as some of the world’s greatest literature, and Francis Bacon was formulating the new empiricism of the scientific method. All these incredible emergent acts sought to thrust the human infant mind into a radically new and exuberant relationship with the cosmos, heavens and Nature that irreversibly transformed humanity’s mental universe.
The human mind has been grasping ever since in creative – and destructive – spurts, as the fruits of rational exploration have served to strengthen the notion that humankind has the responsibility to surge forwards, pushing against the boundaries of perceived thought and knowledge; forever probing the limits of the physical universe through an equally physical lens: the human mind. Yet the course of this seeking has also served to diminish, in ever incremental steps, the meta aspect of the journey, giving increasing rein to the physical portion. This developmental bias has opened up new and revolutionary wonders for our species and for our process of cultural evolution; yet it has simultaneously opened the doors to a world where dominance, control, possession, competition, profit and power have become accepted paradigms for the mighty few and their aspiring masses. This is exactly the paradox that underlies the growth of Western civilization.
Whilst a great deal of Western science, knowledge and architecture has been well documented to have originated from Arabian sources, the present world owes its incumbent paradox to the rational mind that leapt forth from the swaddling clothes of the Renaissance spurt. It can be said that the modern world was born from the seedbed of the Renaissance, which was flourishing in the latter half of the 15th century and continues to live on. From this inception we have derived our educational infrastructures and knowledge base that has, within the final stages of our species infancy, produced what began as the epoch of electronics (the Technological Age). Each cyclic epoch influences the next, and so our developed technological societies (or ‘technocultures’) have been birthed on the back of a rational drive to know – and thus conquer.
Our present accelerating Technological Age (see Chapter Two) may itself be a cyclic phase of growth that will influence the next seeded stage. Indeed, this book indicates this hypothesis to be the case: that immersed through our technologies we may be forced into a ‘shock transition’ – here referred to as an initiation rite – in order to develop into species adolescence and into an age of increased empathy and connectedness. However, in the meantime we find ourselves in a world of increasing sensory impacts, distracting stimulants and fragmentary impulses.
As wave after wave of influences carry our young species further along the evolutionary path, we inevitably experience throes of pain as well as bouts of joy. Many of these influences and impacts may necessarily be out of our control, yet the onus is on us to learn how to be resilient and adapt to change. This does not have to mean forcing change by combating ourselves against the world – an act of gigantic human hubris – but by accepting the nature of change and undergoing collective initiation (rites of passage) into an era where we are more attuned to the needs of our symbiotic existence. We are now required to learn new modalities of co-existence: to learn how to learn rather than believe, with our rational minds, that we already know what we need to know. Yet this imperative to learn how to learn – or to re-learn – will first have to deal with some issues of humanity’s collective psyche. It appears that underneath our polished and self-accomplished exterior lie some fermenting contradictions. From an objective position it could be said that, as a species, we are clearly insane – or perhaps schizophrenic.
On the one hand, we congratulate ourselves on our sense of amazing progress, having bootstrapped ourselves up from the dark and primitive days of hunter-gathering to the sheen of technological wonder. We have, it seems, single-handedly developed the high capacities of human reason, ingenuity and ethical principles. It is the archetypal heroic journey, the struggle to survive all odds and to arrive at accomplishment. Through these trials, and errors, our species’ modern mind has emerged. Progress has been validated, and history is our proof: the only way to go is forwards. However, within our collective psyche also exists an underlying thread of guilt. Surely, somewhere along the path, we left something behind; something incredible and without which we have endlessly suffered. It is this constant hum within us of incompleteness, disconnection and disharmony. In other words, we have fallen down – the classic scriptural ‘Fall of Man’, initiated with a rebellion against our original state and a break from harmony with Nature. We reneged on our duty as custodians of the Earth, and in doing so sacrificed our sense of the sacred and interconnectedness with our planet. From this we ingeniously took on board Francis Bacon’s empiricist admonition to wrench Nature’s secrets from her; and the rational mind became paramount in the ‘desacralization’ of the world. As historian Richard Tarnas rightly noted:
This development has coincided with an increasingly destructive human exploitation of nature, the devastation of traditional indigenous cultures, and an increasingly unhappy state of the human soul, which experiences itself as ever more isolated, shallow, and unfulfilled … The nadir of this fall is seen as the present time of planetary ecological disaster, moral disorientation, and spiritual emptiness, which is the direct consequence of human hubris as embodied above all in the structure and spirit of the modern Western mind and ego.3
The modern mind thus served to sever its ties with a unified and harmonic world. The human subject became the prime mover in world affairs; probing, prodding and wrestling with Nature’s secrets in a bid to fuel advancement. This displacement from the world has resulted in humanity viewing the environment as a laboratory in which to experiment. Here the subject is divorced from object; matter creates consciousness; and consciousness impacts upon matter in order to deliver up ‘meaning’. And with meaning projected externally the modern person is expected – or left – to forge and extract a sense of personal fulfilment.
This positioning is a far cry from the notion of a primal mind that not only infused the understanding of many of our ancestors but which also thrives today within indigenous communities. This primal mind senses significance embedded within the physical world; within the ebbs and flows of Nature; and within all interactions and relationships. This permeable relationship erodes boundaries and constructs a fellowship between the forces that are present upon the Earth, be they animal, vegetable, or mineral. This integrative mode of consciousness and life has sadly given way, in much of the modern world, to a mental construct that forces the external world to submit. Our hubris (now our collective responsibility) has constructed a worldview that sees the moral, ethical and conscious sensibility of humanity as the central pivots upon which the Earth spins. We have anthropomorphized our impulses, our religious ideals, whilst demystifying the universe into what are knowable facts. What we seek is less about integration and more about gaining control over our environment(s).
Further, these environmental playing fields are considered to be mechanistic, impersonal and unconscious. With our Cartesian and Newtonian tools we seek to know, calculate, predict and shape the world in which we find ourselves. In doing so we have constructed a rational cosmos in which we instinctively sense a loss, a displacement. Yet this inherent sense of loss has been wriggling its way through our individual and collective unconscious; and manifesting externally as so many incongruous acts of earthly mismanagement. Again citing Tarnas:
… the West has played the central role in bringing about a subtly growing and seemingly inexorable crisis on our planet, a crisis of multidimensional complexity: ecological, political, social, economic, intellectual, psychological, spiritual. To say our global civilization is becoming dysfunctional scarcely conveys the gravity of the situation.4
This grave situation has shown clearly (for those with eyes to see) that our infantile species must quickly pass through a global form of initiation – a rite of passage – into a more mature stage if we are to continue our symbiotic relationship with Earth. Our disconnection has only served to push us to find fulfilment and meaning within our material toys and distractions, further dislocating the human being from a nurturing relationship with the cosmos.
As such, our ‘sentient’ species continues to strive forwards within a vacuum. The consensus ideologies/beliefs that masquerade as our intelligence-gathering tools have placed modern humanity into a paradoxical schizoid relationship with our actions. On the one hand, our modern mind acts as if it is alone in the universe, and as if our actions could not possibly have other than terrestrial consequences. In other words, Earth is a bubble and we have no responsibility beyond this. The community of humankind, in this view, is alone, acts within a cosmic vacuum and has limited capacity. Yet on the other side of this we manifest arrogance over our collective ability to influence, direct, manage and control the natural systems of our planet. In cosmic terms we show a rare form of humility (or is it ignorance?), whilst terrestrially we display an unbelievable degree of delusion over our ability to act, enforce and direct Nature’s affairs.
This paradoxical state of our modern mind has put us in a disharmonious relationship with both the micro and the macro environments of which we are an intrinsic part. The macro has become for us a mindless and soulless conglomerate of energy, mass and matter; whilst the micro is now the bio-building-blocks for experimentation and forced mutation. Whilst there is an acknowledgement that our environments are malleable and in flux, this is seen from a position of duality rather than unity. The human species suffers disenchantment by excluding itself from a creative, dynamic and sustaining integral cosmos.
A central argument in this book is that instead of attempting to direct our way out of the present crisis by trying to maintain our present model(s), we should rather be adapting to the changing environmental circumstances. As explained in the Gaia theory, the Earth is a living body, which moves both through her own cycles and also within larger cosmic cycles. As I outlined in New Consciousness for a New World there are grand evolutionary cycles that celestial bodies move through, solar and galactic, that inevitably affect terrestrial conditions. It is highly likely, then, that what we are presently experiencing in regard to Earth are manifestations of grand movements, influences and impacts that show up as erratic weather patterns, geological upheavals and changing cycles. In other words, throughout grand evolutionary time the Earth undergoes changes. And so must we.
Yet it is not as simple as us just riding on the back of Earth changes. As a species we have inherited, developed and/or grown into a mindset that creates its own problems, and which is contributing to the disharmonious state of affairs. Due to the deep schism between humanity and Nature, and our ‘desacralization’ of the world, we have raped and plundered our environmental resources upon an exponential scale. The complexity of our urbanized nations and competing empires has created global tentacles that require ever increasing amounts of finite energy. This is also a key issue: the question of energy. Everything is energy, whether it is matter, molecules, bodies or brains. And on this planet we have a totally misconstrued notion of energy resource, storage and use – not only physical energy but also mental, emotional and spiritual energies too. As such, we have tied ourselves into an energy-intensive mode of industrial expansion and cultural evolution that is incompatible with the energy sources at our disposal. The result, if we do not change our mode of existence, will be a mad-dog race to grab the last drop of oil and natural gas reserves whilst our energy-dependent societies reverse into contraction and eventually collapse.
Our working premise, so far, has been to shape the world into a pattern that suits us (the so-called dominant sentient species). As a species we have come to believe that it is our role to terra-form the Earth into a habitat that most suits us. In this way we have sought to impose our will upon the majesty of natural forces that have been billions of years in the making – the age of the Earth has been scientifically determined to be 4.54 billion years. This egoistic manner of thinking has brought us to a critical threshold; one where many overly urbanized and complex societies are teetering at the edge of disequilibrium. The development of advanced technological society (our modern technocultures) has also delivered the human being into a state, or place, of extreme isolation and alienation from the creative cosmos.
A reconnection with this integral living world requires a mode of resilience rather than resistance. By this I refer to intelligently adapting to an ongoing cyclical changing world rather than terra-forming a world to adapt to us. In this way, we require the attributes of resilience to a changing mode of life, over and above attempts to reinforce our perceived preferred patterns of life. The shift from reinforcement to resilience may just be a part of the monumental psychophysical transformation necessary to manage our global initiation from an infant species into an adolescent one.
If we undergo a transformation only upon the physical level then we will be entering our formative future years with the same mentality that has contributed to our present imbalance and cosmological alienation. The birth of the Western mind, although crucial for a spurt in cultural and scientific evolution, reached a plateau before the Industrial Revolution had fully risen. The rationality of being able to analyse the working parts of the world around us enabled us to more fully utilize our energy resources. As will be discussed in more detail in later chapters, the issue of energy is crucial to our human future(s). However, energy can be present in both physical and psychic forms, and just as energy can have varying forms of concentration (crude oil – refined oil), so too can psychic energy possess varying levels of potency. The paradigmatic forms of knowledge that each epoch stores, utilizes and transmits are a marker of its essence and the impetus through which cultural evolution operates. By way of offering a brief framework for the vessels that have consecutively transmitted cultural knowledge I cite the following three phases:
• Mythological
• Renaissance-Enlightenment
• Modernity
N.B. French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard refers respectively to these three stages as: Traditional; the Enlightenment and Scientific Knowledge; and Postmodernism.
* * *
The mythological stage, the longest running of all our stages and still in use, includes myth, folklore, magic, mystery, occult, religious and ritual components as transmitters/carriers of knowledge, information and artefact. These elements are fundamental to most societies and have served to maintain a continuity of collective knowledge, including codes of order and behaviour. For a great deal of time the custodians of these forms of transmission, linked as they are to magic rituals and religious practices, have been shamans, priests, mystics, spiritual hierarchies and, in later times, religious institutions. Therefore, the general masses had only limited access to such knowledge in relation to their capacity and need.
To some degree, as is always inevitable within human cultures, aspects of power, domination and control crept into these lines of transmission. Institutionalized religious bodies, for example, have made great attempts to dispel practices of direct revelation in order to maintain a strict top-level hierarchy of information control. This can be seen in operation during the Inquisition in general, and crusades such as the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars in particular. This form of cultural knowledge was gradually supplanted (through struggle and time) by the rise in individual scientific enquiry that was at the heart of the Renaissance.
Renaissance-Enlightenment
As alluded to earlier, the epiphany of ‘divinely inspired’ scientific discoveries were strongly resisted by religious authority. Yet the power of scientific thought and reasoning gradually won over as a legitimate means of opening up humanity’s place within the cosmos. This Age of Enlightenment spurred, predominantly in the West, an intellectual, scientific and cultural life that took reason (scientific empiricism) as the legitimate mode of knowledge verification. The Renaissance-Enlightenment phase brought forward science as the new legitimizing source of truth. Thus, the transmission of knowledge was shifted from myth, parables and teaching stories into theories, observations and treatises. The new custodian was no longer the priest or the shaman, but the scientist, the person of rational argument and logical intent. Despite the ongoing struggle between religion and rationality – science and spirituality – the endeavours of scientific enquiry were able to afford Western civilization at least its means to utilize available energy sources (steam, coal, oil) that brought into being the Industrial Revolution and the modern era.
Modernity
Modernity is that name given to the phase of cultural growth (again originally associated with the Western world) that marked the shift from predominant agrarianism towards industrial nation-states and the rise of capitalism. Modernity saw the development of increasingly complex social institutions that have been instrumental in regulating social life through increased forms of rational control (see Chapter Two). This mode of knowledge transmission has relied heavily upon technological evolution, tied closely with economic/financial (market economy); political (democracy); and military (territorial/colonial) institutions. Because of this now vast, technically complex web of modern, largely elitist, institutions – where political, economic and military policies are closely intertwined – it has been referred to as the military–industrial complex (MIC). This term was first publicly popularized by the then President of the United States Dwight D Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation on 17 January 1961:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
N.B. The full text of this speech is publically available and can easily be found online.
Some recent commentators now see global media corporations as comprising a part of modernity’s megalithic institutions for the transmission of present forms of knowledge. The vast, complex, institutional relations that now permeate our current stage of modernity are often criticized as operating as power-knowledge-based disciplinary regimes and regulating bodies (see the work of French sociologist and philosopher Michel Foucault). It is little wonder then that modernity has come under heavy criticism for having developed into a corrupt and soulless age; one that corresponds to our cosmic estrangement and alienation from our environments. The epoch that brought humanity into the early stages of planetization (globalization) has been unable, so far, to develop the accompanying – and necessary – psychic presence required to establish a balanced countermeasure to cultural progress. This is one of the primary reasons, I argue here, that this current epoch of transitional change is so crucial to the future of how our species evolves in relation to planet Earth. It may be that a global initiatory experience will be thrust upon us as a means to push us collectively from our infancy into adolescence.
It would be an achingly lost opportunity if modernity – with its rationalized modern mind – were to refuse the great spiritual adventure that now lies ahead in our evolutionary species-planet unfolding. And it would be a tragedy if the modern mind, in its confused madness, were to deny such a possibility and potential future. As philosopher and scholar Jacob Needleman stated:
The esoteric is the heart of civilization. And should the outward forms of a human civilization become totally unable to contain and adapt the energies of great spiritual teachings, then that civilization has ceased to serve its function in the universe.5
The modern mind of humanity will always be on a learning curve; the journey will never be completed. Some cultures are more aware of the subtleties, the dynamic interrelations, between humankind and the environment. The present stage of modernity with its push for corporate globalization, for international structures of power, regulation and knowledge control, is but the latest offering of a world mythology that is being pressed upon the majority of minds by the actions of the influential few. Below are other sets of mythologies that may be equally valid:
Analogy One
Imagine insects with a life span of two weeks, and then imagine further that they are trying to build up a science about the nature of time and history. Clearly, they cannot build a model on the basis of a few days in summer. So let us endow them with a language and a culture through which they can pass on their knowledge to future generations. Summer passes, then autumn; finally it is winter. The winter insects are a whole new breed, and they perfect a new and revolutionary science on the basis of the ‘hard facts’ of their perceptions of snow. As for the myths and legends of summer: certainly the intelligent insects are not going to believe the superstitions of their primitive ancestors.
Analogy Two
Imagine a vehicle as large as a planet that began a voyage an aeon ago. After generations of voyaging, the mechanics lose all sense of who they are and where they are going. They begin to grow unhappy with their condition and say that the notion that they are on a journey in an enormous vehicle is a myth put forth by the ruling class to disguise its oppression of the mechanical class. There is a revolution and the captain is killed. Elated by their triumph, the mechanics proclaim the dictatorship of the proletariat and destroy the captain’s log, which contains, they claim, nothing but the lies of the old ruling class.
Analogy Three
Imagine that you have just discovered a civilization as small as a DNA molecule. You want to establish contact, but since your dimensions prevent you from entering the same space-time envelope, you must search for other means of communication. From observing the civilization closely, you find that there is an informational class that seems to carry messages back and forth amongst parts of the society, and you observe further that these messengers are actually enzymes of a structure that is isomorphic to one of your own patterns of information. Since you cannot talk directly to the members of the civilization, you decide to talk through a patterning of the bits of information the enzymes carry back and forth. Unfortunately, the very act of trying to pattern an enzyme alters its structure so that a part of your own message is always shifted. It seems that the only time the enzymes are able to carry a high proportion of your own message is when their civilizational structure is either breaking apart or just about to come together again. Fascinated by the problem, you choose your opening and closing epochs carefully and begin to carry on an extended conversation with the civilization.6
The development of the collective modern mind of humanity is somewhat like this extended conversation: information is able to penetrate our world and be ‘picked-up’ at varying intervals by certain minds, which then catalyses a period of accelerated growth. The cells (individuals) of the global body (human civilization) are asked to work with these intervening mythologies. However, we may wish to consider carefully the type of mythologies we choose to live by.
We can possibly see a correspondence between this process and Walter Miller Jnr’s acclaimed novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. The book begins at a time 600 years after a global nuclear war has destroyed 20th-century civilization. In the aftermath, those who survive are vehemently opposed to the ‘modern culture’ of knowledge and technology which they consider to have been responsible for the weaponry and war. Radiated tribal mutants, wandering survivors, communities and religious institutions (Abbeys) remain scattered over the wasteland. One day a monk retrieves, with the help of a wandering beggar, an old scrap of paper: the remains of a blueprint from a 20th-century engineer. The text is delivered to a local Abbey where it becomes idolized as sacred, copied, worshipped, blessed by the then Pope, and exalted to divine relic. The engineer (Leibowitz) is canonized, and the new mythology becomes the guiding manuscript. Finally, one of the monks manages to make a dynamo from Leibowitz’s blueprint ... skip 600 years into the future and the Abbey has been completely modernized during The Age of Light, and space has been colonized. Yet soon war breaks out again, despite the religious guidance of St Leibowitz, patron saint of electricians …
What we may gain from this insightful story is that, in any age, institutionalized knowledge might very well be perpetuated by outworn dogmas that are no longer understood nor of any developmental value. Further, if they maintain a fossilized religious/spiritual impulse, alongside an overly materialistic, technological civilization, then the consequences for humanity are both potentially disastrous and destructive.
As mentioned earlier, there is a notion that the modern mind suffers from the pull of contrary mythological impulses: these being ‘progress’ and the ‘fallen state’ (the cycle of death and rebirth). On the one hand we sense that it is our responsibility to forge forwards upon a developmental path towards betterment, achievement and what we may consider as ‘success’. At the same time, however, a collective feeling of incompleteness and longing remains deep within us. It may well be this security/insecurity state that lies unconsciously behind the project of Western modernity. As Tarnas reminds us:
What individuals and psychologists have long been doing has now become the collective responsibility of our culture: to make the unconscious conscious. And for a civilization, to a crucial extent, history is the great unconscious – history not so much as the external chronology of political and military milestones, but as the interior history of a civilization: that unfolding drama evidenced in a culture’s evolving cosmology, its philosophy and science, its religious consciousness, its art, its myths.7
It is the interior history that maps out our potential future(s) – an internal drama that shifts amongst the myths, cosmology and religious/spiritual consciousness. The transition that human life on planet Earth now finds itself a part of is a psychophysical transmutation; that is, of physically adapting to a changing environment whilst simultaneously adopting regenerative and developmental myths that correspond to the new needs.
In the next chapter I will explore how our present myths have succeeded in placing developed nations – and the modern mind – within the rational grip of a Technological Age.