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Louis Sarno was born in 1954, in Newark, New Jersey. He was an aspiring science fiction writer, and he spent ten years of his early adulthood in Europe, working a variety of jobs, from farmhand in Scotland to English tutor and carpenter in Amsterdam. Then, one day, while listening to the radio in Amsterdam, he heard a very unusual kind of music on the radio.
He didn't know what the music was, other than that it was vocal, and in a non-Western language -- but he knew it was something essential. It hit a space deep within him, hinting at the possibility of a life profoundly richer more satisfying than the one he was living. This music, the radio announcer said, was from an obscure tribe in Africa -- a tribe of pygmies, no less.
So Louis decided he had to go to the people who made this music. He began corresponding with Colin Turnbull, an anthropologist who had lived among of the Mbuti pygmies in the 1950's, and had continued to study and write about them in the decades since. Turnbull offered to give him an audio-tape of introduction to his Mbuti friends, introducing him as Turnbull's brother. But Louis decided the Mbuti had been over-studied -- their culture was no longer pure. He wanted a pure and untouched culture, a culture filled to the brim with the spirit he had heard in that music. Finally he decided he would go and live among the Ba-Benjelle, in the Central African Republic. Because their homeland was far off any of the highways leading across Africa, they had been little touched by Western society. Lacking funds for a round-trip ticket to Africa, he bought a one-way ticket, leaving him about $500 for expenses. And away he went -- on a gutsy, one-way quest for a more fulfilling way of experiencing the world.
Arriving in Africa, he found it wasn't easy getting permission to visit the homeland of the Ba-Benjelle, but he finally managed to get a permit, on the grounds that he wanted to tape the pygmies' music. But what Louis found when he finally arrived there was somewhat disappointing. Far from a collection of noble savages, living the life of the spirit and soul in the forest, carried away by their music, what he found was a tribe in a state of spiritual and financial poverty, living in run-down huts in a village, doing low-paid dirty work for other Africans from nearby villages, and addicted to alcohol and cigarettes. Furthermore, they had little interest in their new visitor from the West, except insofar as it was possible to get money or cigarettes out of him.
A weaker soul might have turned around and gone back home. But Louis braved the dirt and disease, at one point having hundreds of tiny worms dug out of the soles of his feet with a knife. Once he had spent all his money, the Ba-Benjelle began bringing him their own food. They began performing music, and allowing him to record it -- the women sang beautifully, and some of the men were excellent musicians. Finally, the tribe decided it was time to go into the forest, and they allowed him to go with them.
In the forest, he found, everything was different. No one bothered to smoke or drink -- the men were focused on hunting, and the women on gathering food. Hunting was done by dragging huge nets through the forest, and goading animals to run into the nets. Honey was found by climbing to the tops of tall trees and knocking down honeycombs. The music sounded ever more beautiful in the forest -- and when the tribe danced to their music, sometimes the leaves on the ground would get up and dance through the air along with them. These were the forest spirits, eternal partners of the Ba-Benjelle in travels through the rainforest.
Amazingly, Louis noted, the Ba-Benjelle had totally different personalities in the forest than in the village. It wasn't just that they were nicer, or in better moods in the forest than in the village -- it was more specific than that. Someone who was outgoing and boisterous in the village might be quiet and thoughtful in the forest. Or, on the other hand, someone who was shy and awkward and out of sorts in the village, might come into his own in the forest, emerging as a natural leader and a master of events. In general, neuroses that existed in the village disappeared in the forest. The forest lifestyle was more immediate and violent, more gripping on a moment-by-moment basis, and thus less conducive to personal neurosis. In the forest, the Ba-Benjelle were too concerned with interacting with the forest and each other to get wrapped up in their own problems.
Louis loved it in the forest, and he was distressed when, after a period of months, they returned to the village. Why, he wondered, would they forsake this perfect, natural, harmonious existence, in exchange for a life of poverty, a life on the lowest rung of the economic ladder in one of the poorest countries in the world? He tried to explain to them that, by raising their children in the village instead of the forest, they were losing their traditional forest skills, and watering down their culture and spirituality. However, he found that they had no sense of the progressive evolution or dissipation of a culture. Instead of viewing time as linear and progressive, they seemed to view it as spherical. Events radiated out from a center, which was the soul of the tribe, of the forest. The linear order of events in time was irrelevant: past, present and future stood side by side in a space of deeper relationship. It was not that the Ba-Benjelle were stupid, were unable to reason about causes and effects, or to predict the likely future outcome of a series of events. It was that they did not care to think this way: such thoughts did not come naturally to them, were not deeply meaningful. Louis had to accept that the Ba-Benjelle's short-sightedness about their own destiny was part and parcel of the soulfulness, primality and oneness of nature that had drawn him to them in the first place.
In spite of his strangeness, the Ba-Benjelle accepted Louis as one of their own, and allowed him to record their music on his portable tape recorder (some of these tapes are now available for purchase online, under the title Echoes from the Forest; I believe they’re out of print, but it’s not hard to find a used copy online). Whether he lives with them still at this moment, I don’t know.
When I first Louis Sarno's story, in his book Song of the Forest, I was intrigued and impressed. The book touched some deep, quiet parts of my mind, parts that I all too rarely acknowledged to myself. I realized that I, too, in dark adventurous moments, had sometimes dreamed of running away from civilized society, of escaping into the forest to live in the manner of my ancestors. And I realized that Louis Sarno and I, in harboring these late-night thoughts, were manifesting some pretty universal feelings.
After all, who among us has never felt the alienation and emptiness of modern life? Who has not felt, in a self-searching, angstful, funky mood, that all this vast social and technological apparatus we have built up around us is just a way of distracting ourselves from the ultimate emptiness of our lives? What thinking person has not speculated to him or herself, at least once, that the reason we make ourselves so busy doing one thing after another is precisely because we don't want to have to stop and reflect on how unhappy we are? Louis Sarno felt these feelings more intensely and more frequently than most of us, and he also had far more guts than the average person: he saw the possibility of an alternative, and he followed up on it. He took dramatic action. In doing so, he improved his own life -- not materially, but personally, psychologically and spiritually. And he also learned a great deal, and gave the world a gift of numerous recordings of beautiful music, music that otherwise might have vanished forever, unheard outside the forests of central Africa.
The book started me thinking: what is this "emptiness within" anyway ... this emptiness, this alienation which Louis Sarno felt, and which motivated him to flee Europe, the bastion of Western civilization, for the Central African forest? What his story told me, in a dramatic and irrefutable way, was something most striking indeed: that this emptiness within is actually an emptiness without. The reason we modern people tend to feel an emptiness within is that we are looking within for sometthing that does not belong there -- for something that belongs outside, in the external world.
The Ba-Benjelle did not have a superior, happy, harmonious state of mind in the village. They had this state of mind -- the state of mind embodied in their music, which had drawn Louis Sarno to them in the first place -- in the forest. They did not distinguish their forest state of mind from the forest itself, and from the forest spirits that caused leaves to dance to their music. They had no "emptiness within" in the forest, because they were filled up with force, power and spirituality from without -- and not from some mysterious, vague, incorporeal Supreme Being, but rather from the dynamic, visceral forest all around them. Their individual personalities were not important or even real, except in the context of interaction with the greater physical/spiritual world.
In all these respects, the Ba-Benjelle are not atypical of Stone Age cultures -- similar stories could be told about, say, the natives of the Brazilian Amazon, or the Australian aboriginals. Today, we are almost fanatically focused on the individual mind -- but this focus is in no way humanly "natural." Until the emergence of civilization, over the last few thousand years, the individual mind was simply not considered separate from the physical or spiritual realms. The holistic view of mind is what we inherited from the animal kingdom, it is what evolved in our brains, and is still wired there, to a large extent. The individualist view of mind is a product of cultural rather than biological evolution.
Indeed, we can see the imposition of the individualist view of mind very clearly, in the modern school system. To what great lengths do we go to get our children to understand their minds as separate! We test children individually, over and over, forcing them to "think for themselves" rather than together with their friends. We exalt reading and mathematics -- the construction of imaginary worlds inside the head -- over carrying out actions in the world with other people. We carry out instruction in artificial environments -- schools -- forcing children to ignore their senses and use their imaginations -- inner simulacra of senses -- instead. Field trips, in which students get to experience environments relating to the things they're learning about at school, are viewed by many teachers and parents as distractions. The attitude is: "Who needs to actually sense things, to interact with things, to do or be things? It's enough just to organize information within one's mind!" What children want, based on their biology, is embodied experience -- learning that occurs within an absorbing environment. But this is not what our culture wants them to want, because our culture requires adults who are absorbed within inner worlds of one kind or another. The main thing we are teaching our children in school, besides obedience and conformity, is how to construct inner worlds taking the place of the outer world.
In the primal world-view of the Ba-Benjelle and the young child, mind is just a part of a continuum of being. Some aspects of this view of mind, like forest spirits or ghosts or dragons, seem quaint, funny or dangerous. Certainly, we have achieved a lot of remarkable things by understanding the mind as a separate entity -- all of modern science and literature must be attributed to the individualist, separatist, objectivist stance. But even so, as Louis Sarno realized in a very visceral way, something has been lost. Side by side with the supernaturalistic features, the pre-scientific, holistic view of mind contains a deep understanding of the interconnection of mental systems.
For example, in recent decades, the science of psychology has made a great deal of progress toward comprehending the complexity of mind. It has discovered that memories are created rather than simply recalled; that perceptions of reality depend drastically on emotional, cognitive and social factors; that brain systems are intimately interconnected with other body systems, like the immune and endocrine system. All of these advanced resarch results are actually implicit in the primitive, holistic point of view. Shamans from "primitive" tribes have a firmer practical grasp of the relation between perception, reality and memory than modern psychologists; and with their array of herbal medicines, they have a more useful understanding of the interconnection of body and mind systems as well. The knowledge implicit in the holistic, pre-scientific view of mind is not easily translatable into the language of science; but then the knowledge gained by scientists is not easily translated into the language of the Ba-Benjelle, either. The two views of the universe are complementary.
I’ve distinguished two ways of looking at the mind -- the Stone Age, Ba-Benjelle-ish way, in which mind is interconnected with physical and spiritual reality; and the modern way, in which the individual thinking mind is a thing apart. Actually, though, this binary distinction is only the coarsest way of viewing the evolution of the intuitive concept of mind over human history. There are many ways to refine the picture, and look at more microscopic distinctions between different perspectives on mind as they have appeared on the historical scene. One way to do this was given by the mid-century cultural theorist Jean Gebser, who identified four stages of consciousness in human history: the archaic, the magic, the mythic and the mental. Each of his "stages of consciousness" is a certain view of the mind, a certain way of perceiving and constructing the relation between the mind and the world.
Gebser was an integrative interdisciplinary theorist of a type that is not so popular these days. Like Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, Sartre, Hegel and many others lesser-known, he sought an overall understanding of the world. His entryway was history and anthropology, but the implications of his ideas far transcend any particular academic field.
He was born in Posen, Germany in 1905, and like most Germans of his generation, the trajectory of his life was structured by World War II. In 1931 he left Germany in disgust with the Nazis and took up residence in Spain, where he wrote poetry (Poesias de al Tarde, 1936) and began to develop his innovative theoretical ideas, but in 1936 he fled to Paris, where he took advantage of the artistic community that had accreted around Picasso and Malraux. When Paris fell in 1939 he escaped to Switzerland, where he completed his masterwork, Ursprung und Gegenwart (1949/53), which finally appeared in English as The Ever-Present Origin in 1985 by Ohio University Press. There is no deeper and more comprehensive study of the psychology of the world’s past and present cultures. In Gebser’s hands, culture is not a collection of facts, it is a mixture of stages and modes of consciousness. Consciousness and the diversity of cultures are keys for understanding each other.
The archaic stage is truly prehistoric consciousness -- consciousness as it was before tools, language, and other such modern inventions separated us from the physical world. It is, in essence, the animal's view of the world: a mode of being focused almost entirely on reactions to external, physical events. There is no model of the mind here: what we would call mental functions are simply parts of the world-system. Connections within the organism are not distinguished from connections between the organism and the outside world. Everything is one; perceptions of the world and the instinct to survive in it are the same. Behavior is driven by the sense-organs. Evolved to be embedded in particular environments, one is automatically parts of an integral, complex, evolving ecosystem.
The emergence of mind from instinct into magical consciousness wrests man from his physical world. Now, in order to survive, mind must act upon the world, in calculated ways. He becomes conscious of his individuality, his needs and how to fill them by identifying objects in his environment and how they may be used to promote his well-being. Tools are developed, and the mind learns to identify its own state. However, these tools are still used within a general pattern of being established by the outside world. The natural world is the context, and man is acting autonomously within this context, connected with this context in numerous obvious and subtle ways.
The magical stage is a state of mind that retains the feeling of unity contained in archaic consciousness, but adds on a feeling of practical separateness. In the magical world-view, mind is separate from universe, but is continually joined with universe by subtle magical connections. Gebser identifies magical consciousness with the world-view of cavemen; he observes it in the semiotics of Paleolithic cave paintings. The traditional forest consciousness of the Ba-Benjelle represents a kind of "late magical" consciousness. While vastly more sophisticated than cavemen, the BaBanzele clearly do have a magical view of the world. They do not conceive of themselves as precisely identical to the forest, the physical/spiritual world, but they experience themselves as constantly coupled with this world -- coupled by their own intuitions and feelings, and by magical manifestations like the forest spirits.
In practical terms, magical consciousness corresponds to the invention of sophisticated tools, and the development of complex kinship structures. These innovations are supported by creative methodologies for recognizing and forming patterns. Though it can at times be intelligent and creative, the archaic mind is mainly concerned with filling in abstract forms provided by instinct with particular details. The magical mind, on the other hand, experiments with abstract forms, fills them in with details based on the particular situation, and then modifies the abstract forms accordingly. It has definite mechanisms for creating new abstract structures. This is a major step forward.
Magical consciousness, like archaic consciousness, is focused outward. The turning-inward occurs with Gebser's next stage, mythic consciousness. With the mythic state of mind, the human mind discovers its own depths: it finds a richness of inner structures reflective of, but quite distinct from, the structures it perceives in the outer world. It constructs its own structures to mirror and complement the structures of the external world -- something unnecessary in magical consciousness, where the basic unity of mental and physical structures is consciously and continually acknowledged.
It builds naturally toward mental consciousness, in which the inner world breaks free of the outside world altogether, and the essence of being is equated with interior process, reasoning, conscious thought.
In the mythical stage, mind is occupied not only with acting on the world to attain certain outcomes, but with recognizing patterns in outcomes of different activities and properties of physical forms, in a more abstract sense. The patterns are separated from the particular situation in which they arose, leading to symbolism -- to objects that represent states of the world, and changes therein. With symbolism, we have cause and effect, language, concepts of time and space, good and evil. More complex social organizations are formed as land is farmed, animals domesticated, labor divided. Harnessing his understanding of state and action, physical cause and effect, man creates simple machines to extend his physical capabilities -- to minimize effort, time, and space. And out of language and machinery, the roots of science and mathematics and literature are laid.
Here, symbolism is still focused on the external world. Mathematics is geometric or arithmetic, referring directly to real-world shapes or quantities of real-world objects. Science pertains mainly to readily observable phenomena -- not to, say, black holes in distant parts of the universe, or particles so tiny as to be not only unseeable but sometimes even unmeasurable. Literary narrative, even when dealing with gods and the like, follows the flow of events of human life, rather than setting up its own order having nothing to do with reality. But the fact that this is symbolism pertaining to the world, rather than actions carried out within the world, is important. It is a change of focus from without to within.
Finally, the mentalistic attitude is exemplified by Descartes' "I think, therefore, I am." Mental consciousness places the self in the head, rather than in the heart. It thus
distances the self from the body, from the pulse of physical being-in-the- world. This is where we are now, and where we have been, in the Western world, for the past few thousand years. Mentalistic consciousness goes one step after the other, and rigidly separates past from present, and present from future. The spherical, lateral temporality of the magical stage is relegated to small children, insane people, and inspired artists.
With the mentalistic stage, a host of new phenomena arise. We have relativity -- mind differentiating itself in relation to its objects, seeking to know itself, grasping toward meaning, perspective, and knowledge as ends in themselves, irrespective of outer-world significance. We have mathematics developed into an abstract system, capable of symbolizing ideas completely unreachable by the senses -- the fourth, fifth and n'th dimensions; electromagnetic fields; infinitely small and infinitely large quantities; etc. etc. We have reflexivity, the mind becoming self-conscious, as its processes become its objects.
The succession of these stages, according to Gebser, is not a matter of new stages replacing old ones, but rather of new stages growing on top of old ones. Each of us is archaic, magical, mythical and mentalistic, at different times and in different ways. Usually, however, it is the most recently evolved view of mind that has the most power, and assumes the governing role. The Ba-Benjelle as they exist today present an interesting study of the transition from one stage of consciousness to another -- they plainly alternated between a magical view of mind and world, while in the forest, and a mythical/mental view while in the village.
Religion is a good example with which to think about these different stages of consciousness, these different ways of conceiving and experiencing the mind. The everyday spirituality of the Ba-Benjelle is magical; on the other hand, religions as we know them today are a transplantation of this everyday magical spirituality into the mythic and mental domains. They are combinations of the magical, mythic and the mental. It is their magical and mythic elements which renders religion so confusing and apparently absurd to the scientific mind -- and it is these same elements which render it so emotionally appealing to the overall human organism. Indeed, it might be argued that the main function of religion in today's society is to feed the magical and mythic consciousness within all of us.
The spirits of Stone Age people, like the forest spirits of the Ba-Benjelle, were tied in with elements of nature. They were symbolic concretizations of the natural world, of which human minds and bodies were implicitly assumed to be part. Even in the mythic frame of mind, the nature-religion connection was still prominent: Yah-weh, the Jewish God and the root of the Christian God, was originally a corn god! Today, however, the connection exists only in watered-down symbolic form, in the form of rituals whose meanings no one really understands anymore. For instance, the Hindu prohibition on killing cows ties in with the ecological importance of cow dung in India. The Balinese tradition of sacrificing fruit to the gods in temples and outside homes has an ecological purpose: to attract ants (spirits?) to places other than inside homes. These religious customs originated at a time when harmony with nature and harmony and God were more nearly the same thing -- but now they are anachronisms, continuing primarily on the basis of momentum. In spite of odd proclamations like the Gnostic Jesus's "split a stick and I am there," the center of contemporary religion is not in the direct, magical relation with the outside world -- it is in the mind, in the abstract symbols, word and rituals used to elicit spiritual feelings. We pray in churches -- artificial, logical constructions, built according to vocabularies and grammars -- we do not pray as systems coupled with an outside, living world.
Philosophy goes one step further than religion, and attempts to transplant magical consciousness's feeling of global understanding and relatedness into the purely mental realm. But it has far less potency than religion -- only in a small percentage of individuals does it resonate as deeply as non-intellectual spiritual practice and belief. These unusual individuals, these "exceptions who prove the rule," tend to be atypically intellectual people, in whose minds mental activity has penetrated so deeply as to assumed mythic and magical roles (the authors of this book count themselves in this category!). The general impotence of philosophy as opposed to religion is proof of the human power and necessity of religions's mythic and magical aspects. Religion is the paradigm case of a multilayered construction, an entity that bridges all the different structures of consciousness, the different perspectives on mind and world.
Gebser's categorization system is a powerful one, I like it well enough – but needless to say, I don’t believe it has any absolute, dogmatic value. All systems of categories are merely tools for understanding: they encompass a certain amount of order, and leave other things out, and Gebser's is no exception. Just as Gebser's four stages enlarge the original dichotomy of Stone Age versus modern, with which we began, so it is possible to expand Gebser's stages into a yet finer gradation of modes of consciousness, views of mind. One interesting way to do this is via the concept of mirroring or reflexivity, according to which successives stage in the development of mind can be viewed as earlier stages reflected into themselves.
The birth of the magical state is the initial act of mirroring. Initially, in the archaic state of consciousness, nothing is divided: the world is One. But then the mind, with its sense-organs reflecting the world, becomes separate from the world. In a primordial act of mental reflexivity, it becomes a world within a world. Insstead of just creatively recognizing patterns in the world, the mind is self-consciously creating an inner world which is a sort of oversimplified simulacrum of the outer world. The archaic mind also simulates the outer world and creatively recognizes pattern in the outer world, so mere intelligence is not the difference between the archaic and magical stages. The difference is simply the drawing of the boundary, the line between inside and outside, and the classification of the passage of causation from inside to outside as magical. This act of boundary-drawing is important, because it provides the "distance" needed in order to make calculations, to reason. By decoupling its dynamics to some extent from the dynamics of the environment, the mind's dynamics become free to pursue their own trajectories, and they find new places that they could never have found in the old coupled system. They can follow one step to another to another without interruption from the outside world, and in this way they can create things like axes and boats and cultures. But in gaining these new trajectories of reason, they also lose some of the trajectories of interaction that they previously followed, emergently with the dynamic environment.
The magical state of mind contains a boundary, distinguishing the world from the world-within-a-world called mind. It is the result of a single reflexive movement. The next reflexive movement, the mirroring of the mind/world dichotomy within mind, results in the emergence of language. Language is a result of mind conceptualizing the distinction between mind and world, and applying the tools it previously used to deal with the external world, to deal with itself. Instead of merely recognizing patterns in the outside world, and calculatedly creating patterns in the outside world, it is recognizing and creating patterns in its own structure and dynamics. Its internal dynamics are de-coupling into two systems: the inner observer and the inner observed. The inner observer, looking at the inner observed, is understanding what it sees, and constructing forms -- now mental, not physical forms -- representing its observations. These forms are linguistic structures. But as with the initial reflection that moved archaic consciousness into magical consciousness, there is a cost to this decoupling. The price is paid in harmony, unity, coherence. Many sophisticated patterns are gained, but some very simple patterns, some simple symmetries, are lost.
When it first emerged, human language was not considered as distinct from the sounds by which animals communicate with one another, and the sounds with which nonliving phenomena (thunder, water, etc.) communicate with living beings. Even today, in pre-scientific cultures -- not only Stone Age cultures, but relatively more advanced cultures like the American Indians or the New Zealand Maori -- "talking to animals" is a commonplace notion. At the same time as spirituality pulled away from living nature, developing into interior, mythic systems, human language become interiorized as well, became considered as distinct from the multiple languages of the natural world. In these ways and others, our perception of the natural world changed: no longer was it part of a living continuum, along with us. Rather, it was dead and out there while we were alive and in here.
We can see this transition in language, in religion, and virtually everywhere else: we can even see it in literature. Consider, for example, the fact that in Homer, characters do not have inner thoughts; they hear voices from the gods. From the spirits, who are often associated with natural forces, e.g. Neptune, the god of the sea. But in later Greek literature, representing full-fledged civilization, the voices had moved inside. The locus of pattern-formation had moved within. Julian Jayne’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is one interpretation of this event, which I find interesting, although I don’t entirely agree with him.
In fact, the evolution of language and symbolism had a lot to do with the emergence of religion out of magic, and into philosophy. The two evolutions occurred at the same time, and in no small measure helped each other along. Both had to do with the reflection of the dichotomy between inner and outer world into an inner dichotomy, a division of the inner world mirroring the original division between inner and outer. Religion is a conscious, concerted formation occurring within the mind, corresponding to what, in the magical mindset, was simply a mode of interaction between the mind and the world.
Next in the sequence of reflections, following on the creation of language, we have the creation of machinery. Tools exist in the archaic state of mind, though only coming into their own in the magical state, but machinery is a different story. Machinery needs language because it is, in essence, a language. It is a language whose words are tools. Engineering, no matter how primitive, is a grammar of tools: it is a collection of rules telling what kinds of tools should be fit together in what ways, to provide effective structures. With the evolution of machinery, we have a reflection into the external world, to accompany the reflection into the internal world that gave rise to language. The mind/world dichotomy becomes manifest in reality, as the calculated pattern-recognition and formation of the magical mindset is used to control, not relations between the organism and the outside, nor relations between different inner forms, but relations between parts of the outside world.
Then, with the advent of higher-level rationality, true abstract thought, we have yet another reflection: we have language itself reflected inwardly, now playing the role that the world plays with regard to machinery. Advanced reason is, in fact, a machine for fitting together and producing linguistic forms. Logic itself is a form of language; so is science; so is mathematics. Instead of an inner world containing a simulacrum of the mind/world dichotomy, we have an inner world containing a dichotomy between an outer world and a mind/world dichotomy. Things become perverted, convoluted, complex -- and astoundingly creative. We have a world within a world within a world -- a nesting of mirrors three levels deep.
The hierarchy of reflections is just a more detailed form of the observation that first occurred to me when reading Song of the Forest: that the inner, mental world of modern Western civilization is a result of turning the original magical, animistic world-view outside-in. The mind is going to perceive a complex, living network, a web of subtle, dynamic pattern -- if it didn't, it wouldn't be a mind. If it doesn't perceive this web in the outside, natural world, it's going to perceive this web within itself. The complexity and life is going to be there, even if reflected within itself two, three or a dozen times. It can be complicated, but it cannot be extinguished, without extinguishing mind itself.
Louis Sarno felt, intuitively, that the modern, mentalistic system -- with nature viewed as largely dead (we can no longer talk with animals or skies or waterfalls!), and the inner world alive and flourishing -- was intrinsically less healthy than the old, magical system. And it is not hard to see the roots of this feeling. After all, our individual inner worlds are largely mutually incommunicable -- whereas in the old system, where one's life was largely focused outside in nature, there was intrinsic communicability between humans , as a consequence of the focus on the common system in which humans were mentally embedded. Our linguistic formations become more and more ornate, attempting to overcome this communication barrier that we have created by moving the focus of human complexity from nature to the inner mind. But ultimately we do not succeed. Our religions become reduced to empty symbolisms, linguistic formalisms, incantations. Our deepest personal experiences become almost impossible to communicate, because they too are focused on our own inner worlds, rather than on the shared substrate of external, natural reality.
However, not many of us are willing to do what Louis Sarno did, and return to a semi-Stone Age way of life, in hopes of regaining some of the magic of the magical state of consciousness. Instead, we keep pushing ahead, progressing further and further into our linguistic, mechanical, scientific, rational world. The question is, where are we getting in this way? Are we getting somewhere valuable, important, deeply fulfilling? Or are we simply moving further and further away from the core of our being, disappearing into a tinier and tinier fraction of the universe, a mirror within a mirror within a mirror within a mirror....
Gebser himself was an optimist. He felt that there was a fifth stage of consciousness, one that he called the Integral stage -- a return to holism, to the oneness of archaic consciousness, but without sacrificing the advances made by the magical, mythical and mental stages. Numerous "new age" philosophers have made claims similar to Gebser's, in recent decades. Terrence McKenna, for example, has proposed that a dramatic transformation in human consciousness is going to occur in the year 2012, at the end of the Mayan calendar. A new age is upon us, it is said -- an age of postmodern science, collective consciousness, and near-universal harmony! Everything will be beautiful and surreal.
This is a wonderful vision, but it has far more hope than substance to it, and it is disturbingly reminiscent of the exultations of Christian fanatics 1000 years ago, as the millenary anniversary of the birth of Christ approached. Perhaps simply believing a new age is upon us will make it come true -- but it didn't work for the Anabaptists of 1000 A.D.! While Gebser was clearly fixed in the mental mode of being, most of the modern new agers seem to feel more affinity for the mythic and magical states of mind. New age culture also seems to gravitate towards a Stone-Age-ish spherical notion of time, in which the succession of events is viewed as unimportant -- a view of time that is admirable in some respects, but is perhaps not optimal for making temporal predictions!
It is easy to be skeptical of these proclamations of a new and better mode of consciousness to come. Such proclamations ring of falsity, of ideological salesmanship. Sardonic retorts are in no short supply. It is a curious fact, however, that in recent years, a number of quite rational, mentally-oriented people have come to make statements very similar to those of the "crazy" new-age millenarians. I am, in fact, one of these people. I believe that the emergence of advanced biotech and computer technology is going to catapult humanity into a new phase of consciousness, essentially identical to what Gebser spoke of as the fifth, Integral stage. Intelligent computer networks will be a higher stage of consciousness, but they will not be separate from us -- they will induce us to move into a higher stage of consciousness as well. Advanced biotechnology will be one of the major factors catalyzing this fusion.
This is an extremely gutsy statement, and it is not one that I make lightly. Eccentric and maniacally poetic as I can be sometimes, I’m basically a scientist, and I realize that making such statements will not do much good for my short-term credibility among my scientific colleagues. However, I am willing to take that risk, because of the obvious importance of what I am saying. If this is true, if computer and biotech really do have the ability to push us to the Integral stage of awareness, then this is something that everyone should know about -- and it is something that should structure our actions, should guide our lives as we build our future world. It means that Louis Sarno's bold action, while apparently good for him at the particular time he took it, is probably not the right direction for humanity as a whole. Even if we could do it, there would be no point in our moving back to the magical state of mind -- because we are moving forward to something not at all inferior, something encompassing the magical, mythical, mental and archaic modes of being in an harmonious and creative way.
From a certain perspective, of course, computer technology is the ultimate manifestation of our tendency to withdraw into our own inner worlds, to avoid contact with nature. It is also the ultimate alienation of language from nature, relying as it does on the development of artificial, purely human languages -- programming languages, communication protocols, etc. Computers are the first instruments to manipulate abstractions and simulate processes -- they are windows through which the mind can examine abstract processes objectively. Looking through these mechanical windows into our own minds, we no longer have the need to look at anything else. These observations are made concrete by my own lifestyle during the past few years: what do I do all day? I sit inside staring at computer screens, in carefully controlled and unnatural environments, using various formal-language-based tools (programming languages, word processors) to spill out the complex creations of my seething, self-organizing internal universe. I use these tools to help me build my private inner world, and to help me communicate some small aspects of my private world to the private worlds of others -- for example, to communicate the thought underlying this sentence to you.
I myself am pretty comfortable with this computer-heavy lifestyle. I’m a happy person: not every minute of every day, but the considerable majority. I work long intense hours, but I’m not a “workaholic” in the sense of not being able to enjoy myself apart from work. I take great pleasure from composing and playing music, reading, spending time with my wife and children, hiking in the woods, sports, eating good food, and so forth and so on. But I’m well aware that my relatively pleasant existence is largely a consequence of fortunate brain chemistry: it so happens my neuropsychological cocktail is compatible with a lifestyle that modern Western society finds acceptable. This is not the case for everyone. And the majority of people who find their brain chemistry is not compatible with the lifestyle modern culture has provided for them, seek solace in the products of modern pharmacology.
Illegal drug use is stigmatized in mainstream Western society, and in some cases rightly so – heroin, speed and cocaine, for instance, are inarguably destructive. No one who has spent time around junkies, cokeheads, speed freaks or crank addicts can have much enthusiasm for these drugs: they destroy peoples’ minds, bodies and lives. On the other hand, I am a strong advocate of legalizing marijuana and hallucinogens (mushrooms, LSD), not because I use them regularly (I don’t), but because I think that in order to justify outlawing something, the government should have a much stronger reason than is present in the case of these substances. Excessive marijuana smoking has bad effects on the lungs and the short-term memory, but as essentially everyone in my generation or even my parents’ generation knows, it’s not really any worse than alcohol. It’s the kind of potentially mildly destructive habit that, in my view, adult humans should be allowed to pursue if they so wish. On the other hand, hallucinogenic drugs are far more psychologically powerful than marjiuana, but they are not at all physically addictive and certainly do not cause violent or otherwise criminal behavior. They have powerful good aspects as well as potentially destructive aspects attached to them. Nearly all tribal cultures have used them to good effect, in the context of shamanic and other rituals. I believe our culture is making a big mistake by pushing psychedelic experience into the category of criminal acts.
But though we strongly stigmatize the use of certain psychoactive substances, people still use these in great numbers, risking (in the US particularly) absurdly long jail terms in order to do so. And a decent percentage of the non-illegal-drug-using population is hooked (physically or psychologically) on some form of legal psychoactive substance. Prozac and Valium are just the best known of a huge variety of mood-altering drugs, prescribed by doctors simply to make people feel better – to make them better able to tolerate the frustrating aspects of their lives. The side effects of these drugs can be severe, certainly worse than those of pure LSD or properly grown hallucinogenic mushrooms (not that Prozac/Valium and LSD/mushrooms are in any way psychoactively similar, it’s just interesting to me to see what society categorizes as “safe” versus “unsafe”). The bottom line is, the bureaucratically-structured, tech-dominated-and-enabled society we’ve created is intolerable by a vast percentage of the population, without frequent chemical alterations to their brain state. Pharmacology and computer technology seem to be interacting in a sick sort of way: the latter makes life tough for many, and the former modifies the brain so as to better be able to tolerate it.
But what the future holds is, I believe, a rather different sort of biotech/computer-tech synergy. For, in the Internet, we have a system with the same properties that Nature originally had for us, way back in the Stone Age. It is a complex, self-organizing web, which generates mysterious patterns and binds together various people into a common substrate. It opens up our inner worlds and transforms them into collective worlds. In a very crude sense we can see this in the psychology of e-mail -- instead of thinking through an issue myself, I can dash off e-mails to four or five friends and engage in a real-time collective thinking process. Even without virtual reality and biotech-based human-computer hybridization, there is the clear potential for the weaving-together of the worldwide network of mutually incommunicable "inner worlds" into a whole, vibrant system. But with the capability to genetically engineer human beings so as to optimize the effectiveness of human-computer interactions – the sky isn’t anywhere near the limit. Communication with the Net and with other humans will become part of the very processes of human thought, feeling and creativity.
Nature, as it receded from us, transformed in our cultural psyche into spirits and gods, and into inward-focused, linguistic mind. Then religion faded, and we were left with nothing but mind, nothing but the rational, inner world, and the institutional and technological forms it has created. But then, lo and behold, one of these forms is leading us back to something with many of the properties of every stage along the way. The emerging Internet intelligence is at once a natural environment, a god, and a mind with a complex, creative inner world. Genetic engineering and bioengineering will allow us to fully partake of this new communal synergetic lifeform.
Furthermore, the same archetypal patterns remain in this new, digital external universe, as in the old, biological one. The same patterns that structure the natural world, also occur in our religious symbolism and experience, and in our mathematics, science, computing and art. These archetypal patterns, ultimately derived from Nature, recur in the emerging Internet intelligence -- once again projected into a collective, communal environment; rather than imprisoned within the confines of individual heads. In short, the archetypes have moved from outside in real space, to inside in mental space, to "outside" in biocyberspace.
In terms of reflections, computing corresponds to the reflection of rationality into the outside world. The mind/world within the mind within the mind/world within the mind within the mind/world, becomes a mind/world within the mind within the mind/world within the world within the mind/world -- and so forth. The mirror of computation reflects outward, where the mirror of rationality reflected in. And finally, in the intelligent Internet, the ground of the "physical world" itself is replaced by a reflection of the rational-mind/computation dichotomy. Mind replicates itself in an interconnected global network of computers atop the world's storehouse of knowledge and ideas, thus maximizing its food supply, the individual mind, and the information it creates. The dichotomies in thought promulgated by culture, geography, perspective, are synthesized away. The mind, transformed by its interaction with the global mind, approaches its evolutionary potential in its current form.
Biotechnology is critical here, for an obvious reason: As human organisms, we are sensorially attuned to genuine, external nature; not to "Internet nature." And so, even if the latter is to become just as complex and multitextured as us, it will not match us as well. Every aspect of our body is attuned to the natural environment, not the Intelligent internet. Thus one concludes that, in a sense, Louis Sarno may be right: while a future Internet-based human society may be healthier than the current system, based on individual, incommunicable inner worlds, it still will not possess the basic health and integrity of Stone Age culture, or of animal life ... unless the radical changes to come are pushed in the right direction…
When first thinking this issue through I came up with two possible solutions:
1) the body is shed or transformed, and replaced with a form more harmonious with the new Nature/God/Mind that we have created.
2) The global brain is brought into harmony with Gaia, the mind of nature itself – so that nature, man and the Intelligent Internet are all fused as one
Option 2 had me thinking in rather grandiose terms, about nanotech bacteria, diffused into the atmosphere, communicating with real bacteria as well as with computer controllers, creating a link between Gaia and internet intelligence. Now there’s a global brain deserving of the name!
When I posted these thoughts to the Global Brain Discussion Group (in June 2000), however, Francis Heylighen brought me a bit closer to reality. As he noted,
There is a third, more short-term and more practical possibility, which is that the Internet evolves to fit our inborn characteristics. All evolution is co-evolution: systems mutually adapt. People will adapt to some degree to the new Internet environment, but the Internet will adapt even faster to the people that use it. Just because the Internet is intrinsically much more flexible than our hard-wired instincts and proclivities, it will find a way of presenting itself that matches those proclivities.
This has happened countless times in the evolution of computer interfaces. For example, the GUI that became popular with the Mac was based on the idea that people don't understand things by reading long lists of file names, but by moving and manipulating objects. Thus, files were represented by icons that you could drag and drop to move them from one directory to another. 3D, virtual reality, as e.g. imagined by Gibson in his original "cyberspace" vision, is another obvious way to make a complex information space match better with our inborn capacities to reason in three dimensional space. "Emotional" agents, that respond to our moods, or show simple emotions, is another one of these new interface paradigms that tries to fit our evolutionary psychology.
I don't say that all these interface tricks will succeed, or even that they are necessary to have a good grasp of the Internet, but they are definitely undergoing a fast evolution and competition in order to find interfaces that are better adapted to our brain.
His point is a good one – insightful and down-to-earth; typically high-quality Heylighen. However, to achieve what I'm thinking of would take more than a new UI for PC's as they exist today; it would require computing "interfaces" to be much more thoroughly integrated into natural human life. Interacting with the Net needs to not be something you do while sitting on your ass staring at a machine, but something you can do while floating in a lake or walking under the trees or sitting in the livingroom or the yard chatting with your friends. Ubiquitous computing, if done properly has this potential. In fact, it has a strong potential to bring us closer to nature, in our daily lives, than our current industrial-revolution-based technology permits.
Ultimately, though, I don’t believe any moderately enhanced version of Francis’s modest, conservative vision is going to carry the day. In Eliezer’s terms, Francis’s vision is SL1, perhaps minorly verging on SL2. I think it doesn’t go far enough. Sure, ubiquitous computing will happen, it will be wonderful. But creative biotech will happen too. Genetic engineering and bioengineering, implemented cooperatively, will make us capable of interfacing directly with data on a Siberian webserver while swimming in a lake in the Costa Rican mountains, or flashing interesting 5-dimensional movie clips to our lover, brain-to-brain, in the middle of the sex act. Scary, exciting, or fascinating – all of the above I suppose. But this is where science is pointing us, and to doubt this without solid reasons is to blind oneself to reality.
We are thus led from the frontiers of consciousness to the frontiers of engineering: the creation of digital bodies and the re-engineering of biological bodies. Things become, not only stranger than anyone previously imagined, but stranger than anyone could have previously imagined. Even I don't pretend to see where it is all going to lead -- except to guess that it is going to be wonderful, and beyond any mode of conscious experience that we have encountered up to this time. The world will indeed become beautiful and surreal, and though I’m a little bit wary of possible future disasters, all in all I can't wait to see it.
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