NINE
DARWIN II
Death and the Evolution of the Mind
Following Darwin’s second and greatest work, The Descent of Man (850 pages of fine print, on which Darwin spent the latter part of his life, and which has been radically ignored), we find that evolution indeed moves to go beyond even the “ultimate” limitation and unyielding barrier—death, and our fear of it. We can further plot out the nature of that barrier of fear and the kind of mutation-selectivity involved in moving beyond it—an extension of the evolutionary process which took a bit of groundwork.
“Darwin II” (The Descent of Man) explains how those forces of mutation, selectivity, and survival of the fittest, which can account for the myriad variations of species on our Earth, cannot alone account for the appearance of the human species. According to Darwin’s second offering, we were brought about by the “higher agencies of love and altruism,” rather than simply being the fittest and surviving our predecessors.
David Loye brought this ignored aspect of Darwin to our attention in his excellent little book, Darwin’s Lost Theory of Love. Consider as well such random items as Darwin’s essays on “Selectivity in Relation to Sex,” “Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” and other writings and essays that reflect his involvement with the thoughts of Ernest Haeckel, Lamarck, Goethe, and other biologists and minds of his time.
Consider these most telling items to which Darwin refers in his last work: “aiding the weak to survive . . . the instinct of sympathy . . . the noblest part of our Nature. . . .” Where in these words can we find justification for the tooth-and-claw, Neo-Darwinian jungle mentality that swept the academic-scientific scene in the late nineteenth century and is still rampant today, if in ever-new cloaks or disguises? These guises justify the ever-mounting travesties and demonic actions we witness daily, sanctified, in effect, through the growth and power of materialistic-technological science, capitalism, colonialism, and the ongoing domination and destruction of culture after culture. Here in this Neo-Darwinism is the very dark mind-set that paves the way for the mounting wars, death, and destruction dominating the twentieth century and poisoning the Earth today.
Humankind, through millennia of the Darwinian function of “higher agencies,” with its “noblest instinct of sympathy,” developed an awareness beyond that of any animal, a self-awareness leading to an intelligence lying at a light-year disconnect from anything that had come before. In turn, this self-aware intelligence led to a new function that is not physical, and thus not directly accountable to physical constraints such as death.
In this way, evolution, as revealed by Darwin, has struggled to bring about our ever-evolving human mind. Emerging out of evolution’s matrix of body-heart-brain, we are continually being led to a higher evolutionary capacity, one that is able to go beyond ever-greater limitations and constraints, opening to ever-new matrices or sources and capacities. Mind (and here “mind” and “soul” are a tangled knot) is designed by evolution to move beyond ever-greater stages, just as the infant rises to toddler, to child, to adolescent, and so on, simply by living life to its fullest. No wonder the cultural forces of darkness recognized by Rudolf Steiner now mount in even greater opposition to our true nature bestowed millennia ago.
Mind Emergent
Mind as an emergent process has risen along with a field-effect, which mind automatically attracts to itself by its new capacities and passions, and to which mind is attracted by such passionate pursuits and quests. Such related fields will be drawn through “resonant” attraction—like attracting like. Mind thus brings about or gathers to itself fields of possibility that serve as matrix for that ever-expanding mind to draw on in reciprocal fashion, as it does with body-brain and heart. These new, nonphysical matrices are fields of potential that lie—or can lead— beyond strictly physical process. In like order, physical life both belongs to and brings about a continual supply of new materials, new fields, and new transcendent minds, in strange-loop, mirroring fashion.
Bohm, Sheldrake, and the Field Phenomenon
To further explore the nature of fields and how they participate in the evolution of mind, consider the “field perspectives” of physicist David Bohm and biologist Rupert Sheldrake, whose conversations in the 1980s were often facilitated by the philosopher Renee Weber.1
Bohm brought to these conversations his concept of active information. This view holds that information passes back and forth between an electron and its environment-field, in a mind-like interplay that impacts both the activity of the electron and the form of the field it operates within—an ongoing dance that clearly echoes the strange-loop phenomenon. Furthermore, Bohm’s view assumed that in some fundamental sense the electron only appeared to be separate from its field; in actuality, the electron was a pulse arising from the field itself. Bohm proposed that this field-electron dynamic was applicable at many levels of reality, including the human being and the fields of influence the human being generates. Similarly, Fritjof Capra noted that in quantum physics we never end with things, or the safe round solid objects sought by the materialists, but only connections, influences, forces. Or, as I have insisted in my previous books, all there is, is relationship.
Sheldrake’s scheme consists of the twin concepts of morphogenetic fields and morphic resonance. A morphogenetic field is an information structure that lies outside of space and time but acts within these to give form and structure to three-dimensional phenomena. The embryogenesis of a horse, for example, is understood to be informed by a morphogenetic field specific to that type of horse. In some sense all horses of that type—past, present, and future—are connected by this field. Morphic resonance is the means by which a particular horse and its corresponding field “communicate,” and is responsible for the ongoing continuity of that type of horse, as well as novel alterations and further creative development.
For our current purposes, note that both the concept of a nonlocal field of information-meaning and the notion of formal resonance (in which similarity of form or vibration enables communication between apparently disparate elements) contribute to our use of the term mind-field.
Mind-Fields
Resonating and Mirroring
Mind-fields, as we shall use the term, are aggregations taking place through resonance between events—events of a like enough order tend to aggregate as a “field” of that order. Resonance is a form of relationship, in some cases indicating some shared origin or destination of two events of some like order. Neuroscientist Paul MacLean points out that the brain’s hundred billion cells function by resonance, not by the matching and sorting of facts like a super encyclopedia. “Mental” fields, being non-local and non–temporal-spatial potentials, lie outside any substantive, concrete referent (and for that reason have long been dismissed by materialists). While “field” in this sense is a handy term for various actions or states of mind, such a field has no localization. Fieldeffect is, like gravity, a verb, not a noun; a process or procedure, not a product; an aggregate of potential as in a storage battery; a hypothetical grouping of related actions and/or possibilities for action.
The focus of our concern lies with this nonphysical field-effect, which is both necessary to and brought about by our emerging-evolving mind. Common logic would suggest that the evolution of mind (evolution being, again, the urge to move beyond limitation and constraint) is brought about and then spurred on by the mirroring of that mind’s own evolutionary growth with its increasing awareness of its mortality. Mortality is always looming as a kind of super-constraint and limitation—bringing an ongoing “spiraling gyre,” as creative-evolution proves to be.
(Some traditions consider such a “nonphysical matrix-field-effect,” as needed by such expanding-evolving mind, to be pre-existent, coming before mind, or even evolution, as in a “Cloud Nine” fancy. From this perspective, such field, suitable to be mind or soul’s matrix when its body goes, is generally considered to have been created by “superior forces” of some metaphysical nature, laid out for us to discover and occupy if we pursue it arduously enough and deserve it sufficiently. For our purposes, however, mind and the “matrix-field” to which mind must relate to sustain itself are a mirroring phenomenon, each giving rise to the other as a response to evolutionary pressures to move beyond limitation and constraint. While such a Darwinian viewpoint as outlined here does not rule out superior forces pulling strings behind the scene, it makes such hypothetical add-ons simply unnecessary.)
All of this is to suggest that generations of this growing awareness of death, and the continual longing by our species to move beyond it, set up and feed into such a “field” of possibility. The field itself thus grows through a continual reciprocal action between mind and its longing to realize—make real—its imagery for moving beyond its own boundaries.
Anything capable of being believed is an image of truth . . .
WILLIAM BLAKE
Marghanita Laski, in her book Ecstasy,2 investigated the phenomenon referred to as the Eureka! experience, occurring liberally in the physical sciences, the arts, and religious-philosophical pursuits. The Eureka! experience suggests that if mind centers on some “image of truth” with sufficiently passionate longing, attention, and perseverance, the mirroring effect of creation can and may bring the empty category imaged into a manifestation or concretizing of that image, contributing to the “content” of such field of potential itself. This, as in all evolutionary processes, is subject to the stochastic-selective element underlying all emerging process.
Laski documents Sir William Hamilton’s 1843 discovery of his famous quaternion theory, a precursor of modern vector analysis that demonstrated the mathematical argument for a fourth dimension of space (thus the term quaternion). Hamilton had conceived of such a possibility as a quaternion function in math and had spent years trying, with no success, to solve the particular mathematical enigma involved. His wife reported that, time and again, he would grow discouraged, vowing to pursue the matter no further, only to return to it from a new angle.
Finally, after fifteen years of roller-coaster pursuit, Hamilton seemed to have truly quit, vowing to waste no more of his life on his passion. Shortly thereafter, he asked his wife to accompany him on a walk to a meeting at the Royal Irish Academy. As they crossed a little footbridge into Dublin, Hamilton’s mind no longer chewing away over the quaternion enigma and finally at peace, the answer arrived. It came as a flash of insight, the entire theory presented in highly symbolic fashion in a split-second, “out of mind”—whereupon he carved the preliminary formula into the very stone of the bridge upon which he and his wife were walking. Hamilton reported that he knew in that moment of “absent mindedness” the complexity of the insight given him was such that another fifteen years might be needed to translate that initial symbolic web into fully rationalized mathematical terms.
August Kekulé, the famous Belgian chemist, had worked at great length on the problem of chemical structure, a problem he was determined to resolve, to no avail. One day, wearied with his efforts and frustration, he retired for a bit of nap in his easy chair at the fireplace. As he drifted into a reverie there appeared directly in front of him a clear image of a snake with its tail in its mouth, forming a peculiar circle. It flashed into view and disappeared as quickly, but Kekulé saw in this strange image the long-sought answer to his problem. A lengthy struggle was required, however, to translate this answer into the necessary chemical language. Out of this struggle emerged his famous theory of the Benzene Ring, foundation of modern chemistry.
At a reception given in his honor by the scientific community, Kekulé was questioned concerning how such a complex, esoteric, and uniquely original discovery had occurred. “Gentlemen,” he responded, “we should dream more often.” Kekulé’s famous response has brought many a challenge from hard-line materialists and Neo-Darwinists who try to debunk any suggestion of a “psychic-spiritual” or nonsubstantive element involved in “true science”—as the Benzene Ring surely was.
Laski’s Formula
Laski’s list of such events is long and rich, particularly when we consider the religious, philosophic, and esoteric elements she detailed at length. This Eureka phenomenon involves creation itself, endlessly open, beyond any specific type of creative result involved. We tend to heed only those creations which are concrete, visible, useful, and commonly shared, but the process-function involved has no boundaries, limitations, or selective requirements. In summary form, Laski’s outline for this process is as follows. First, there is the passionate pursuit in asking the question—staking out the end-goal of some burning issue or desire that a person determines to accomplish, discover or experience, and sets out with will and determination to bring about at all costs.
Second comes a “gathering of the materials” as assumed will be needed by the answer or conclusion, and which generally have some resonance with the nature of the topic or end-goal. Such pursuit takes place on many levels, consciously or unconsciously, and may go on for years, with an exhilarating sense of discovery along the way. Third comes a “plateau” period, wherein all possibilities seem exhausted, leaving a period of stagnation. The luster of the unknown dimmed and dull, most people tend to quit at this point. One may, however, suddenly think of some angle left unexplored, some possibility that might yet yield the treasure, and off we go again. Fourth comes the dark night itself. The seeker “bottoms out” and truly quits. At this point, the goal no longer entertained as even a possibility, the answer may arrive—or still may not, this being a stochastic realm. Idling about, thinking of nothing, the answer may arrive unbidden, filling the vacuum of thought in a single flash—an answer, which may have never been seen by anyone before, since not existent until “translated” into the common domain.
And here, in this casual mention of “translation,” we find both the fifth step in Laski’s formula and yet another hurdle to our common logic. Always, in a true Eureka experience of this sort, bringing something new into our world, the answer arrives in symbolic form, which must be translated into the common domain, or the language of that discipline related to the asking of the question. It never arrives “spelled out” in laborious fashion. Nonetheless, mathematical breakthroughs come to mathematicians, since only they have the background to ask the triggering question, to recognize the significance of the symbols involved when the answer arrives, and the materials and strength of mind needed to translate those symbols so that others might share in them. (To me, Kekulé’s snake would be a sign only of hallucination or alcohol.)
Moments of Emptied Mind
The recipients of such enlightening revelations insist, however, that they were not thinking of the issue—or thinking of anything at all—when the answer arrived; all claim that the answer arrived in a single flash of insight, never “piecemeal,” was highly symbolic in nature, requiring strenuous and often very lengthy translation to put it into the language of the discipline involved, and that they, the recipient, had nothing to do with the answer itself or its arrival. All attest that the answer arriving was radically different from any of their expectations and was purely gratuitous—a gift given.
In each of the cases known, this recipient’s claim to a gratuitous gift-given has brought a chorus of vigorous denial from the academic-scientific world right down to our day, in spite of the high-caliber minds involved, and despite the stunning greatness and novelty of the discoveries made. The receiver of the Eureka! is doubted concerning his own experience, and all but called a liar or self-deluded by the skeptics. To academic science a Eureka! could only be a discovery of a pre-existent hard-core fact in the material world-out-there, if it is applicable to science and thus valid. That “mind” is involved in a creative movement over and above mind itself is just not acceptable, while ironically most major sciences themselves rest on and arise from a number of related Eureka breakthroughs.
Equally ignored by conventional thought is the odd fact that such Eureka answers are neither a composite nor a synthesis of all the “materials” gathered in the quest for that answer. The answer is generally at a radical discontinuity with the known materials of the discipline involved, and equally different from any of the discoveries or “facts” gathered by the recipient along the way. One wonders, that being the case, why the long search for the answer was necessary, if none of its “gatherings” had any relation to the final result. And, for that matter, how the “facts” gathered, though not part of the answer given, were nevertheless recognized as significant to the general realm of that answer, or were pointers toward it.
And in that question lies another of these valuable insights to be gained from this phenomenon: the issue of resonance—that major function by which the brain works and fields form. The brain-mind involved must have a rich, resonant field into which the answer can arrive and be tended, rather as well-tended soil for a seed given to flourish, even though all ordinary brain activities must be suspended at the point of Eureka!-arrival itself, leaving only that resonance prevailing.
Fields as Creative Process
Fields of potential are not only active forces or intelligences within their own domain, they are also creative forces. Why would the mind of a Eureka “recipient” have to be suspended or empty for its own answer to present itself? And why would the answer have to be so obscure and symbolic? It seems the mind, commonly defined as personal, was not in and of itself the cauldron of creativity forging the revelation. The recipients’ insistence that they had nothing to do with the revelation or its arrival—common to all such Eureka reports—need not be explained away or attributed to false modesty. Though this is surely true at the individual or personal level of awareness, the whole event is a cosmological-ontological function well beyond the personal, even as it embraces all minds and much more.
In each case, the personal field of mind fed into a commonly held or universal field of like order, one over and above any individual mind-brain, yet obviously in some sense the product of that individual mind and others in the field. The very fields of mathematics (in Hamilton’s case) or chemistry (in Kekulé’s case) are themselves the cumulative result of the work of all mathematicians and biologists now and in the past. We create fields even as we interact with fields. We speak of going into the field of medicine or the field of architecture or the field of engineering, but field in this academic regard concerns shared social activities, and denotes an aggregate of intelligent energy and potential.
Such a field as experienced in Eureka! events has no inherent localization; it localizes according to whatever mind is interacting with it. There is no field of medicine without doctors, while no doctor is that field. All is reciprocal. Field-effect is universal and personal. It is a process, a dynamic, generative aggregate of intelligent potential. Fields of knowledge such as mathematics, physics, music, and so on are in a continual flux of arrangement and rearrangement brought about by the constant input of materials from people studying and employing the fields as well as those unconsciously interacting with them. In the case of chemistry, all those generations of students, professionals, amateurs, career scientists, and lonely thinkers, mulling over the mystery of chemical structure, fed into the field that led to Kekulé’s Eureka! experience. There is only reciprocal action between mind or minds and fields.
Because of this, any field contributor might automatically be in line as a possible target for receiving some symbolic answer or Eureka! discovery brought about by and within that field. The one stipulation seems to be that an individual mind must be idle, vacant, or inactive at the precise instant of the field’s creative action. Out of the ferment of a field of potential interacting with many individual minds, one of those minds may, by chance, be struck by the lightning generated in that particular field. Without a resonant mind to receive a field’s creative invention of the moment, nothing could happen in either field or mind. Creativity lies in the reciprocal relation between individual and field. (Here we find an example of Darwin’s random mutation and selectivity in its truest cosmic application.)
When Lightning Strikes
Electricity generates in cloud activity and gathers into aggregates of electrical force, moving from cloud to cloud, acting as attractor in each, until a saturation point is reached in such an aggregate. This collection then literally “seeks out” a like resonance on the surface of the Earth below.
Meanwhile, on that Earth surface, electricity gathers at specific points, and likewise moves through resonance to attract and gather together with similar electrical charges in that local terrain. You may feel your hair tingling should such a surge move through your terrain, gathering forces so to speak. When that gathering together is of sufficient size and power, it seeks out a resonant energy of like order in the sky above.
When that aggregate in the clouds moves into close enough proximity to the Earth charge for the resonances to be sensed, the Earth-aggregate, which is far smaller and less powerful, gathers its entire force and, seeking out the highest point of the surrounding terrain (hopefully not some upright body such as yours or mine), literally “leaps up” to attract the far greater and more powerful electrical cloud above. The greater charge above then fuses with the ground charge and follows it down, walloping full force the point from which that weaker ground charge made its bid-for-union.
We might note how this scientific account (drawn from National Geographic) seems to make near-sentient characters of a supposedly non-sentient force, which should be a strong pointer toward our previous discussion of the related series of holonomic torus fields of heart fusing with Earth and thus with Sun. Our current notions of sentiency may be a bit too localized within our own personal frame, and may in actuality be more universal than accepted heretofore.
“Mechanical Excellence Is the Vehicle of Genius,” claimed William Blake
As Found in Mozart’s “Round Volume of Sound”
In Marcia Davenport’s biography of Mozart, she relates that in his late mature stage of composition, a commission for a new work of music—such as a symphony, concerto, or quartet—might be given him at a time he was too busy to attend it. Mozart would put the new project on hold; tuck it away in the back of his mind, so to speak, in order to concentrate his energies on his present works. Often, however, the new work commissioned and “put on hold” would, in some odd moment, break into his awareness right in front of him, unbidden, as a visual-auditory “round volume of sound” (reportedly Mozart’s words).
This “round volume” contained, in its instant of appearance, the entire proposed work in its completeness—every sound, phrase, section, nuance, shading, dynamic, and instrumentation present in a pristine perfection. And all in that single instant that yet could spell out in linear time the auditory manifestation. When he spoke of this happening more often as he matured, his account led to the myth that attributed his genius to his being but an amanuensis of the Muse, who took no part in the actual creation of such works other than this “secretarial role.” “But nobody knows,” Mozart lamented, “how hard I have to work” to translate this instant flash into the torrent of notes that must be spelled out in ink on paper in order for the “round volume” to be played by others and take its part in the musical world. This translation was no easier or harder than ordinary composing, both of which required the labor of getting such expression from mind to pen and paper. Both were processes of the same mind, and a clear example of Mozart’s “mechanical excellence,” ever ready to serve his genius when it came.
The similarity of this with other Eureka experiences is obvious. These are field-effects residing, we might say, in that field of all fields, the “akashic record” or “astral realm” (as you please). But bear in mind that the snake of Kekulé’s vision became an integral part of our very concrete scientific-technological world, and each of Mozart’s hard-earned Eurekas is another masterpiece in music’s rich history.
As a final clincher and bonus here, this Mozart field-and-mind process took place when I was in graduate school, through a professor of musical esthetics (whose course was a fascinating journey through various branches of philosophy). This professor was also an active concert pianist, frequently away in travel-concert performances. He spoke to us of a particular Mozart sonata he considered the most esthetically perfect artwork ever created, and easily his favorite of all music, in all forms.
For one of his concerts he had chosen this sonata for his presentation, feeling, he said, near-humility at being the instrument of its recreation. Just before beginning to play, he leaned back for a moment to immerse himself fully in the work, his love for it filling him. And at that moment there appeared right before him a “round volume of sound”—his own words—with every note and phrase in its most pristine purity and power, the sonata sounding in its linear time, all in a fraction of a second. This was, he said to us students, the greatest moment of his life, its summation and highest point. At which point he began the performance, which proved to be the greatest playing of his life, a point of perfection he had never known nor quite gained again. (He had not read Marcia Davenport nor heard of Mozart’s account.)
My point here is simple: that creation of a sonata, originally an interaction between Mozart and the field of music, was permanently within that non–temporal-spatial field from that point forward, ever ready, perhaps, to be activated by a person with the right resonance, clarity, and ability to be absorbed into that “field of reception.” And— no small item—able to be “breathed by it” and thus “translate” a potential state into actuality. Mozart’s “round volume” was Mozart’s own genius expressing itself, his “mechanical perfection” having provided for and then making way for that genius. When my professor activated Mozart’s sonata, breathing it into life again, he may well have breathed the spirit of Mozart himself back into our world-awareness for and as that episode. And how do we know but that in every replay of one of Mozart’s great gifts to us, he himself takes part? (I must confess that having attended Robert Sardello’s remarkable course called “Caritos, the Honoring and Care of the Dead,” this notion, which had long lay in the back of my own mind, seemed concretized and validated.)
Innate Field Resonance in Childhood
In the mid-1970s, Harvard University’s Burton White published a milestone in child development, The First Three Years. He and his staff had found a scant 3 percent of American children brilliant and happy. This fortunate 3 percent came from a variety of social-racial backgrounds, but were noted to have one common, exceptional characteristic: these children spent an inordinate amount of time in blank, open-eyed staring, doing nothing at all. Anyone bothering to look squarely into those open eyes might declare “nobody is home.” Today, any number of dysfunctional labels might be laid on such a child, with various modifications of such behavior undertaken, from therapy and drugs to coercion and punishment. Fortunately, as it was, they were left alone.
Jean Piaget, the Swiss biologist turned child psychologist, referred to children in this early pre-logical state as “children of the dream.” Given nurturing, security, and the privilege of being let alone, their main occupation was daydreaming and playing, lots of each producing brilliance and happiness thereafter.
Rudolf Steiner referred to three- to seven-year-olds as “etheric children,” one foot in the world shared with us, the other in the etheric world. (Eastern philosophy speaks of the subtle realm, while physicist David Bohm might refer to the “implicate order.”) Around age seven, these etheric children, ready or not, undergo a rude shifting into the “real world” of us logical adults, their inner world and its creative imagination generally—but not always—lost to a playless world of grim necessity, schooling, and full enculturation.
Consider how anything similar to this open-eyed staring trait in children seriously disturbs today’s parents, caretakers, teachers, and the culture at large, who consider such “withdrawn” behavior pathological, perverse, or anti-social. “Don’t just stand there, do something!!” A great treasure is at stake in these pre-logical years, generally lost in such restrictive constraints and arbitrary “doing something” to conform to a destructive cultural pattern.
Field Resonance in Indigenous Cultures
I have known two Australians (European descended and educated)—one a medical doctor, the other a university professor—who were adopted into one of the few surviving Aboriginal groups still living in traditional ways. The university lady remained eight years living in “walkabout” with her totem family, into which she had been adopted (or “married,” as that family spoke of it, not quite the sexual union we might envision). From our long conversations I got at least a dim grasp of the great gap between the lived states of the two cultures, Aboriginal and white Australian.
She claimed that none of our Western anthropologists studying the Australian Aborigines (not even Levi-Strauss or Laurens van der Post, whose works I had long admired) had any vague idea of what the real world of those native people was, for such a world was simply closed to our European senses-five; it takes some strenuous “doing” for Westerners to drop enough of their own mind-set to hook up with, or open to, that other-perceptual world. Nonetheless, there apparently have been a number of real cases of Western minds opening to the Aboriginal Dreamtime, although the people involved are generally quiet about it, since the gap between the worlds is too great to span through explanation. Personal exploration is essential in such circumstances, and I envy those who have had it.
For our current purposes, there are perhaps a few tentative observations we can make. Through a rigorous upbringing and training in a practice followed for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of generations, the Aborigines have built up a powerful field-effect. Each initiate living the Dreamtime contributes to and strengthens that field as they live it. Traditional Aborigines have developed a balanced intelligence, which moves naturally between their Dreamtime (akin to Steiner’s “ethericdreaming”?) and the practicalities of everyday living.
As with the brilliant-happy three-percent Burton White found, some of the Aborigines apparently spend a great deal of time in open-eyed, blank staring, so oblivious to the outside world that flies crawl unmolested across their open eyes. To an observer, it can seems that “nobody is home” there either, at such times, which may give us some hint of why our children drift into realms of reverie on some level, given the chance. We have no idea what the rewards of such reverie might be for an adult trained in such ways from birth, and probably never will know. As Robert Wolff laments in his book Original Wisdom, concerning his many years of interaction with aboriginal people of the Malaysian rain forest, we have no idea what we have lost.
Surely the Australian Aborigines are but one of a host of global indigenous cultures whose “original wisdom” and access to intelligent mind-fields is either already lost or severely at risk. The question for us becomes: Is it too late to recognize, in nonromantic fashion, the value of such original wisdom? Few Westerners will have the opportunity to formally participate in the “old ways,” but serious reflection on the deeper meaning of these ways may play a role in the evolution of mind as we are speaking of it here.
The Double-Edged Sword
In sharp contrast to mind-fields accessed in the “old ways” are many of the charged and potent fields generated in our contemporary milieu. Darwin once wrote that any action repeated long enough can become a habit, and any habit repeated long enough can become the equivalent of a genetic trait or inherent field-effect within us. Howard Gardner’s proposal of our major intelligences having become generic and inheritable may well be laid at the feet of this tendency defined by Darwin. Thus the possibility of a current “fad” becoming a cultural habit and possibly, over time, a species-wide field-effect picked up and carried genetically, is but an extension of this tendency.
Far more sobering is the obvious conclusion that negative “fields” of emotion sweeping a people (as discussed in previous chapters), gaining momentum and strength generation by generation, might well become repetitive and finally inherent within a cultural pattern of behavior. Inherent intelligences and abilities active from birth might well need but a bare trace of some habitual-become-potential-trait for such a trace to act as an attractor, through which these field-effects fill in related content. Through ordinary reciprocal functions between individual and society, such a trace would grow into a full function as we grow and mature.
All such functions reflect field-effects inherent within our structures of knowledge and resulting worldviews, whether they be positive and life-affirming or negative and destructive. Such field-effects can enter into creation itself, and show that to some unknowable and immeasurable extent we are an inherent part of the reciprocal action of creator and creation. As we “loose on Earth we loose in heaven”—which may or may not then “rain on just and unjust alike.”
Questing Creates Its Answering
And so we come full circle, faced not only with the inevitability of personal death, but also with the looming prospect of death on a much larger scale. What we are suggesting here is that human life, confronted with the apparently insoluble problem of death early on, nevertheless, in its striving to transcend or “move beyond” even this constraint, has now brought about the necessary potentials for achieving such goal, although hardly in a direct, miraculous wave-of-wand, but rather, indirectly through natural process. In typical strange-loop form, the question— ever more pressing in light of our pan-global destructive potential—is entering into the creating of its answer, with the answer entering into and continually clarifying the nature of the passionate quest itself, mirror to mirror. In this way self as brain-mind has entered into the evolution of self-as-heart.
Matrix Shifts
Thus, we can see the preliminary outlines of an evolving shift of matrices from tangible body-brain-heart concreteness to the nontangible “abstractions”*1 of a non–temporal-spatial field of mind. Bear in mind, however, that our original matrix of tangible primary survival systems, instinctual and strongly entrenched in every cell of our body, is always in this body as part of its maintenance system, and will be until deathdo-us-part. This new “non–temporal-spatial state” takes time and extensive development to establish, not being an overnight quickie operation.
Generally this development of a more advanced evolutionary system boils down to a conflict between that most primary structure of our old “reptilian” hind-brain and the open-ended potentials within our latest evolutionary brain, the prefrontal cortex. And here we arrive at a paradox: for mind-as-emergent to “escape” and move beyond these ancient survival instincts, it must fully accept and embrace the concept of death itself.
Everything in our culture is designed to avoid such a head-on collision through hypothetical escape hatches, by which we can maintain our illusions of bodily immortality. The issue we face is going beyond instinct (the fear of death), and then moving into that very unknown state of mind our instinct guards against. Such movement is the full and nonnegotiable acceptance of death, without hidden aces up the sleeve as sold by culture. To give up the notion of survival is equivalent to giving up one’s life for greater life, as a wise man once put it, and such an illogical and contradictory notion proves to be a biological observation, not a religious one.
Further, as a cautionary note here, in this emergent process of mind will be found those same ironclad issues of stochastic profusion and narrow selectivity found throughout evolution. That same wise sage observed that “Many are called but few chosen,” which involves far more ontological aspects of selectivity than religious aspects. This stochastic aspect centers around mind becoming fully emergent from its original matrix—a process dependent on having created a sufficient matrix to move into—as in Laski’s Eureka events where a matrix itself forms by the nature of our question and movement toward its answer.
Only a fully developed mind can contribute to and so become, in its turn, the matrix for further evolutionary states. Emerging out of a fully emergent process itself, like an abstraction—or “extraction”—out of abstractions, mind can then move beyond any and all known physical functions and their restrictions. This, of logical necessity, includes the phenomenon of death, wherein further and even more complex movements extracting or abstracting out of abstractions are involved.
When poet Blake said that “Anything capable of being believed is an image of truth,” he did not imply that some belief is the truth as such, or even necessarily “true.” But the capacity to create such images and even believe in them is the way we are “made in the image of God,” even, as with any strange loop, the way we make God in our own image, both images being necessary. In such imaging, being the way by which all our vast creativity unfolds, some creative efforts indeed become true, even on a broad consensual level. Imagination—creating images of possibility—is the stuff of life and its creative evolution, and part of what our human story is all about. (Our failure, therefore, to foster imagination in children is a fatal error for humanity as a whole, threatening to undermine the very creative potentials we are exploring here.)
Evolution’s Work-in-Progress
So this species-wide development of a mind capable of recognizing personal death and then going beyond it has taken time to establish as a possible field of potential. Mind, as self-awareness, must now further develop the capacity to imagine and project beyond its present physical “embeddedment.” If the resulting imaginal state is entertained over time, it can set up a strange loop, mirroring between image and its object, beginning early on, which is in process today. The issue lies in creating a matrix stable enough for the mind to reciprocally interact with and achieve a stable-state within itself, which is rather like the stability of heart’s torus—such stabilization also being an intentional-imaginal process. This stabilization is of course one particular aspect of the imaginal dynamic involved in grasping and realizing the related series of holonomic torus fields of heart fusing with Earth and thus with Sun. In such imaginal activity we may discover that our notions of sentiency are a bit too localized within our own personal frame of reference, opening the prospect of a more universal sentience than accepted heretofore. In this we have, as well, a near perfect example of what Rudolf Steiner claimed was our mind’s role with heart, and heart’s “next level of evolution.”
Finally here, I would first call attention to the overall capacities activated and exercised through Robert Sardello’s and Cheryl Sanders-Sardello’s School of Contemplative and Spiritual Psychology, and, second, I would again call attention to the sober fact that Nature operates by profusion and selectivity, and of necessity the selectivity grows more stringent the more complex the process involved. Constraint and limitation, like the horizon, always lie right beyond. So, that “many are called but few chosen” is not a dictate from some hell-dealing judge or loving arbiter on Cloud Nine, but simply the way this creative cosmos is set up.